Review: This Life Is in Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family’s Heartbreak by Melissa Coleman

Opening lines of the book:

“We must have asked our neighbor Helen to read our hands that day. Her own hands were the color of onion skins, darkened with liver spots, and ever in motion.”

Why I read it:

I’m interested in memoirs about women who grew up outside the mainstream.

What it’s about:

In the late 1960s, inspired by Helen and Scott Nearing’s book, Living the Good Life, Melissa Coleman’s parents bought land on the coast of Maine from the Nearings, built their own home and cleared the land so they could farm it. This Life Is in Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family’s Heartbreak is a memoir about the 10 years Melissa and her family spent on the farm and how a tragic accident ended their dream.

My thoughts:

I have such mixed feelings about this book that it’s hard for me to sort them neatly into “what I liked” and “what I didn’t like” (or even express them very coherently). On the one hand, This Life Is in Your Hands is, for the most part, a beautifully written and heart-wrenching story of a family trying to live their dream and the terrible toll it took on them. On the other hand, there were several elements of the book that didn’t really work for me.

For starters, since the tragedy at the heart of this memoir happened when the author was quite young, I expected the book to focus on the aftermath of this event, rather than mostly lead up to it, as was the case. This was not a problem in and of itself; however, it did mean that much of this “memoir” was actually based on other people’s memories, as Coleman was too young to recall many of the details of her early life. (The story in fact begins before she’s born.) And perhaps because of that, I found the beginning of the book quite confusing: Coleman flits back and forth in time to set the scene for her tale, from her parents’ decision to move back to the land, to her very early years, to her parents’ childhoods and back again (with a few other back-and-forths for good measure). However, once she has established the background for her story, she tells the rest of it in mostly chronological order and I found myself engrossed in her book.

Little did I know when I picked up this memoir that Coleman’s father, Eliot Coleman, is one of the pioneers of the modern organic movement. As someone who is a big proponent of organic food, I was fascinated by this glimpse into the movement’s beginnings. Some of Eliot Coleman’s ideas were totally new to me, such as that “The role of insects with plants is like the role of wolves with deer and caribou: to eliminate the unhealthy and unfit” (p. 66)—in other words, if your plants are healthy, they will not attract pests.

Occasionally, the foreshadowing in the book fell flat: it felt like Coleman was hinting at stories that she then never really told. For example, she says “The Nearings would prove, like most mentors, to have clay feet, and their ideas fallible, but their achievements will always be an extraordinary example of the power of determination and effort” (p. 57). I expected her to say more about this, but the Nearings are actually fairly peripheral to this story. She also hints several times that her parents’ health issues were exacerbated by their vegetarian diet, but never elaborates, which, as a vegetarian, drove me crazy!

However, the book is also filled with beautiful passages that testify to the joys as well as the sorrows of the way of life Coleman’s parents embraced. For example:

Heidi and I were always outside, naked and barefoot, dancing on the blanket of apple blossoms, skipping along wooded paths, catching frogs at the pond, eating strawberries and peas from the vine, and running from the black twist of garter snakes in the grass. We lay in the shade under the ash tree, gazing up at the crown of leaves and listening to the sounds of the farm—birds calling, goats bleating, chattering of customers at the farm stand, and whispers of tree talk.

When you focused on the leaves fluttering in the dappled light, they vibrated and shimmered into one, becoming a million tiny particles. You felt a shift inside, and you began to vibrate too, on the same frequency as everything else. All secrets were there, all truths, all knowledge. You had to scan with your heart to find what you were seeking. It might no be spoken in words, it might be hidden in rhyme, in song, in images. You knew the tree and the earth were the same as you, made of particles, like you, come together in a different form. You loved it all as you loved yourself (p. 4).

And here’s another of my favourite passages:

However, one morning, as I lay in my bunk, the good feeling returned. It hadn’t come in a while and I was afraid I would scare it away because you can’t feel the good feeling and be aware of it at the same time. I was thinking about the way light creates the shapes of things, when suddenly I felt it, like a smooth stone in my mouth. My body dissolved its boundaries and became part of all things. Just as suddenly the feeling was gone, and I was me again, lying in my bunk as the ache of reality returned. [. . .]

The floorboards creaked as Mama drifted into the kitchen. From above in the bunk she looked soft in the light, her face still open from sleep, not closed up like during the day.

“Mama.”

“Ummmm?”

“Do you ever get the good feeling when you first wake up in the morning?”

“The good feeling?”

“Yeah, like a smooth stone in your mouth?”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“Like warm light surrounding your body.”

“That sounds nice.”

“Do you get that?”

“Not recently.” (pp. 292-293). 

Although I didn’t love this book, I’m glad I read it. If you want to learn more about the birth of the modern organic movement from the perspective of one family who became icons of this way of life, This Life Is in Your Hands is certainly a worthwhile read. I would also recommend it, with reservations, to anyone interested in farming memoirs.

Thank you to Harper Perennial for sending me this book to review.

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This Life Is in Your Hands is on blog tour with TLC Book Tours this month. Visit these blogs for other reviews:

Jenn’s Bookshelves • Tina Reviews • Sidewalk Shoes • The House of the Seven Tails • A Bookish Way of Life (DNF) • Amused by Books • Literature and a Lens • Book Club Classics! • Veronica M.D. • BookNAround

Other reviews:

5 Minutes for Books • A Good Stopping Point (DNF) • At Home with Books • BermudaOnion’s Weblog • My Books. My Life. • Progressive Pioneer • Sophisticated Dorkiness • The 3 R’s Blog

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Brogan’s Review: The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Quest by Aminatta Forna

This is the second of two reviews by my sister Brogan that I’m posting during my vacation...

Whenever my grandfather arrived he seemed to materialize out of nowhere. Although I’m sure he must have carried his clothes in a bundle, he never appeared to have anything resembling luggage. And when he walked into the compound there was no evidence of the means of transportation he had taken, no bush taxi disappearing in a whirl of dust, no car or bus. Not even a bicycle. He looked as though he had just come from the end of the road instead of Magburaka, where he lived, a whole day’s travel away. By necessity, since there were no telephones and no mail service to speak of, he arrived unannounced and would stay for a few days or sometimes a few weeks.

[. . .]

Pa Roke wore mukay, pointed leather shoes, that men used as slippers with the back trodden down. He would slip them off and cross his bare feet at the ankle. Likewise my father took off his sandals. This signaled the beginning of their sessions. They talked for hours together in Temne, who knows what about, since I couldn’t understand a word they said. (pp. 50-51)

Some books just take you away, out of your day-to-day world and into a world of different colours and events than anything you know. Even though the subject matter is difficult, The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Quest by Aminatta Forna was one of those books for me. Forna tells the true story of her father, Mohamed Sorie Forna, who was executed in 1974 in his native Sierra Leone. He was a prominent former Minister of Finance of the country, part of its first democratically elected, post-independence government in the late sixties. Forna was 10 when she lost her father, and much of the book is devoted to her vivid memories of him before he was taken as well as of her childhood in Africa (mostly in Sierra Leone) and Great Britain (mostly in Scotland).

The book goes back and forth in space and time, but Sierra Leone is its real anchor, and the stories of Forna’s life there are the ones that really felt like they transported me to a different, yet not alien, reality. I loved the scene where Forna and Milik, the cook, discuss storytelling and conventions of storytelling (morals of the story are quite different in African stories), and when Forna can’t figure out why the story Milik has just told doesn’t meet with her European sensibilities, he says, by way of ending the conversation: “You wouldn’t go back to find a devil. Just like you wouldn’t buy a dead chicken.” Some months later, Aminatta tells her grandmother in Scotland she shouldn’t buy dead chickens, and her grandmother, a little startled, asks, “Whatever makes you say that, dearie? You don’t think I’m going to kill it myself, do you?” (pp. 134-135). The cultural reference points are so different that it makes perfect sense not to buy a dead chicken in Sierra Leone, but what else would you do in Aberdeen? Because Sierra Leone is her homeland, Forna doesn’t turn it into exotica, neither romanticizing it nor condescending to it in any way.

The story itself is multi-layered. It’s a political story, of a man who was a doctor and became a politician for all the right reasons, who was eventually executed by the very prime minister who made him part of the government. It’s a personal story, of a girl whose father was taken from her without explanation and without his resistance, a child whose life already included being part of three different family configurations—along with her two siblings, she lived with her parents while they were together, then with her mother in Scotland, and then with her father and stepmother in Freetown, Sierra Leone. It’s a story about culture, about multi-generational, non-nuclear, sometimes polygamist family structures, and the Africa of ordinary people. And finally, it’s a story of government corruption, the whys and wherefores of the execution of 15 men, the botched trial, the motivations of those who lied and created lies to serve their own purposes.

The one aspect that detracted from my enjoyment of this book was when Forna applies her journalist’s dedication to tracking down all those involved in her father’s trial. I just could not keep track of the many many witnesses she interviewed, nor of their exact relationship to the story. I sympathized with her need to be thorough and her need for a moral evaluation of the players (what did they do, and were they sorry about it?), but at a certain point I just couldn’t follow them all anymore.

I wondered if I would even be able to read this book, because the mere words Sierra Leone inspire a shudder in me, given my knowledge of the recent atrocities during the civil war in that country. However, I actually think my capacity to read about such events has been increased by reading The Devil That Danced, and I’m not sure there’s an entirely rational reason why, other than the opening of the heart that happened to me while reading this book. For one thing, I now feel like I care about this country in a different way, and for another, Forna’s description of her trip back to Sierra Leone during the war and of a couple she met then who are both war amputees made the horrors of war come down to a more individual, more compassionate level.
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Other reviews:

GhanaWeb • The life and times of a Heather
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Review and Giveaway: The Glimpse Traveler by Marianne Boruch

Opening lines of the book:

“There’s rain and there’s rain. Maybe there’s a difference at the edge of a continent.”

Why I read it:

I was born in 1970, a year before Boruch went on the road trip she chronicles in The Glimpse Traveler. I was curious to get my own glimpse into the American counterculture of the 70s.

What it’s about:

It’s a Thursday, almost spring, in 1971, when 20-year-old University of Illinois student Marianne Boruch meets Frances, a 21-year-old widow, who’s about to embark on a hitchhiking trip to California. Frances casually invites Boruch to tag along. The Glimpse Traveler recounts that memorable road trip.

What worked:

I always find it hard to review books I love, and The Glimpse Traveler is one of my favourites this year. What Marianne Boruch has done in this memoir is nothing short of extraordinary: nearly 40 years after the fact, she has managed to recreate a road trip—and a time period—so wholly that I felt like I was there, in the car (or van), speeding west and drinking in the sights with Boruch’s younger self. It helps that Boruch is a bit of an observer on this trip, which is driven by Frances’ search for answers; the reader can easily identify with her.

Although the title of the book refers to glimpses, there’s nothing choppy about this memoir—in fact I’m astonished that Boruch could remember so much of this road trip so many years later. The memoir’s short chapters drew me in, and Boruch’s occasional tangents only added to the magic of her story. As Boruch says, “Certain moments open and you fall right in, sucked back to some previous elsewhere” (p. 136). This is what she succeeds in doing in this memoir: taking the reader back with her to a moment in her personal history—it’s hard to believe this road trip lasted only nine days—while at the same time giving us a vivid glimpse into a pivotal time in American history.

On a side note, I was absurdly pleased that this book connected me to another of my recent reads, Fire Monks by Colleen Morton Busch (read my review), by mentioning the wildfires that devastated California in 2008. (Boruch and Frances visited Big Sur and stayed with painter Emil White, whose house was miraculously spared from the flames years later.)

What didn’t work:

There was nothing in The Glimpse Traveler that didn’t work: Boruch’s narrative is pitch-perfect throughout this spellbinding tale.
 
Favourite quote:

“Outside it would gradually turn to wheat and grazing land, to full-blown prairie, not simply land wrenched by sweat and axe from its woods. Because hadn’t it always been like this, endless and pretty much treeless? I knew those fields would eventually give way, rolling on and out to mountains I’d heard of, to this thing, the sea, only a word to someone of my land-locked childhood but the dazed, bluest eye of it, multiplied way past eight zillion times.

“That something sharp and tangled caught in me: what to call it exactly? We kept going, into day two’s long afternoon. Forgive me: I’m cutting ahead to that place for a moment, to us waiting for ride number whatever-it-was, dropped there a good long time by this time, midway through Nebraska. Was it the stillness of old wheat cut down to its jagged quick or that distant line of maple and ash? Was it the darkening sense of all those truly hard crossings and betrayals a century before? Our own waiting—not exactly legendary, its little half-teaspoon of not-quite-misery, three hours now, our hope for the flash of a car, that someone going in the right direction was generous. But it did something, to time.” (pp. 16-17)

Final thoughts:

I highly recommend this thoughtful memoir set in a turbulent period of American history.

Thank you to Indiana University Press for sending me this book to review.
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Other review: Sophisticated Dorkiness

You can also read reviews on the Indiana University Press site.

Author interview: Indiana University Press blog

Excerpt of the book: The Glimpse Traveler
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Would you like to win a copy of The Glimpse Traveler? Indiana University Press has generously offered to send autographed books to two of my readers. The giveaway is open to U.S. and Canadian residents only (no P.O. boxes). I will accept entries until 11:59 PM Eastern Time on Monday, August 29.

If you are a follower or subscriber, please let me know and I will give you another entry.

Make sure you provide me with a way of getting in touch with you. Entries without a blog link or email address will be disqualified.

THIS GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED.
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Review: Wishing for Snow: A Memoir by Minrose Gwin

Opening lines of the book:

“I am the daughter of the woman who wrote this poem. My mother was born in the July heat of a Mississippi summer in 1921.”

Why I read it:

I’m a big fan of memoirs, and I was curious to see how the author’s mother went from being a “cheerful, perceptive young girl” to a mother with a serious mental illness.

What it’s about:

In Wishing for Snow: A Memoir, Minrose Gwin becomes the archivist of her mother’s life, sifting through old papers, diaries, letters, scrapbooks, clippings, cards, pictures and poems to find the woman she never knew. Erin Taylor Clayton Pitner, was, as Gwin puts it, a “crazy mother”: erratic, violent and unable to nurture her children. But she was also a poet, and, as Gwin discovered when reading her mother’s childhood diary, she had once been a perceptive child with a bright future. Wishing for Snow is Gwin’s attempt to come to terms with her mother’s downward spiral into darkness.

What worked:

Wishing for Snow has an unconventional structure: Gwin doesn’t tell her story chronologically or with flashbacks, but instead circles around and around, approaching her mother’s life from multiple angles and interspersing her narrative with Erin Taylor’s poems and diary entries as well as lists, letters, recipes and song lyrics. Although this circling structure might sound repetitive, it never felt that way: instead, it gave the memoir a sense of immediacy and poignancy. Memory, after all, is not linear. Gwin writes with a poet’s sensibility, weaving together the disparate pieces of her mother’s life while reflecting on her own childhood and the impact her mother’s mental illness had on her. I especially appreciated that she included so many of her mother’s poems in this memoir: at times, they made me wonder if, had she been born under a luckier star, Erin Clayton Pitner might have become a household name.

What didn’t work:

At the beginning of the book, Gwin goes through her mother’s family history, which I found quite confusing, in part because many of the relatives are described but not named. Because I’m interested in such things, I sketched out Erin Taylor’s family tree going back two generations on her mother’s side and even then I couldn’t make sense of it. Gwin clearly tells us that her mother’s maternal grandmother had seven children, but her mother seems to have five aunts and two uncles on that side of the family (which adds up to eight children, if you include Erin Taylor’s mother!).
 
Favourite quote:

“After a few nights, I begin to dream that [the pillows from Mama’s sofa, which have been discarded in the storage shed,] are unhappy. They want to be dry-cleaned. They want to come inside and lie on my couch. They are thinking they can toast themselves in front of the fire and look out the window. They are wanting us to rest our heads on them and take dreamy naps on hot summer afternoons, or throw them at each other in fun.

“One night I dream that they are climbing over the lawn mower and working the lock to the shed. The next day I gather them up fast and throw them in the garbage can. For days I picture them there, wounded by this unseemly treatment, like cousins who knock at the door and are turned away for no good reason.

“At 8:17 on Tuesday morning I am watching from behind my curtain for the garbage truck to round the bend in my street. I fully expect that there will be some accident, a spillage, and the pillows will make their getaway. Then, the clank of the truck making the bend and, before I can take a deep breath, the garbage men have picked them up and thrown them into the back of the truck. This, I feel, is a miracle of vast proportion.” (p. 6)

Final thoughts:

Wishing for Snow is not always an easy read, nor does it offer easy answers, but it is a moving and unforgettable tribute to a talented poet and difficult mother.

Thank you to Harper Perennial for sending me this book to review.
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Wishing for Snow is on blog tour with TLC Book Tours in July and August. Visit these other blogs for reviews:

Cozy Little House • Reviews by Lola • Knowing the Difference • Lisa’s Yarns • Natty Michelle • Good Girl Gone Redneck • Ted Lehmann’s Bluegrass, Books, and Brainstorms

Recommended review: Lit Endeavors (also part of the TLC Book Tour)
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Review: Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide by Linda Gray Sexton

I’ve literally been agonizing over this review for months now; it’s time to put it out there, even though I still don’t feel like I’ve quite gotten it “right”...

Opening lines of the book:

“Sometimes, even my bones resonate with the melodies of my childhood.

Ebullience and depression; love and warmth; the frightening separations and the joyous, if fragile, reunions. This is how I come to remember, simply because the old rhythms will always reverberate, always remain.”

Why I read it:

Years ago, when I was in my teens and early twenties, I was obsessed with the lives of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, two of the earliest (and most famous) confessional poets. I read everything I could find about both of them, which in Anne Sexton’s case included her daughter Linda Gray Sexton’s first memoir Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton and at least two of her novels. So I was thrilled to be offered a review copy of Linda’s second memoir, Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide. (Some of you may also remember that I looked everywhere for this memoir at BEA least year.)

What it’s about:

As Linda says in the preface to Half in Love, her first memoir “focused on coming to terms with [her] mother’s life,” while in this book she comes to terms with her mother’s death—at the same time confronting her “own struggle with depression, bipolar illness, and [her] family’s history of successful suicides” (p. xii). As determined as Linda was not to subject her children to what she’d endured as a child—after repeated suicide attempts, Anne Sexton succeeded in taking her own life in 1974 when Linda was 21—when she reached the age her mother was when she died, Linda found herself sliding inexorably into a deep depression that led to her first suicide attempt in 1997. Half in Love is a frank and unflinching portrait of the next decade of Linda’s life as she deals with depression, nearly constant migraines, suicide attempts and cutting.

What worked:

One of the most important messages in this book is that the belief that love should be enough to overcome suicidal tendencies contributes to the passing on of a legacy of suicide: “This misperception traumatizes those who experience the loss of someone close (certain that if they had only been more worthy, their friend or family member would have loved them enough to bear the suffering), and it also becomes an obstacle for those who survive the attempt to end their own lives” (because they feel guilty and ashamed that they didn’t love their families enough not to try to commit suicide, which only adds to their suffering) (pp. 215-216). As Linda points out “it was not a question of pain versus love; in this equation the two different levels of sensation were never in competition because they were as different as a skateboard and a Mack truck” (p. 215). After reading Linda’s memoir, I almost feel like this should be obvious; yet the idea that suicidal people are selfish is widespread and deeply entrenched.

What didn’t work:

I’ve been having a hard time writing this review because much as I believe this memoir is important given how prevalent (and misunderstood) suicide is in North America,* I didn’t really like Linda’s writing style. The images she uses often fell flat or were jarring: suicide “came up from behind and took [her] in a bear hug” (p. 5); when she tries to kill herself for the first time, she “was ready to make music with the keyboard of [her] wrist” (p. 7); and when the police come to save her, they “came to [her] in a roll of thunder” (p. 9). And although she describes each cutting incident and suicide attempt in great detail, she doesn’t provide much insight into her healing process. Instead she writes vague things like: “My medications were in balance, my therapy was stellar, and my moods grew more and more stable” (p. 273).

Final thoughts:

As I was writing this review, I couldn’t help but think of a recent blog post by memoirist Dani Shapiro entitled “On Writing for the Right Reasons,” in which she quotes from an Ann Beattie short story about a writer: “He had tried to write for the wrong reason: to exorcise demons instead of trying to court them.” I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Linda is writing for the wrong reasons; however, I did get the impression that she is still exorcising her demons through her writing. This unfortunately left me feeling that I got too many details and not enough insight into her experience and recovery.

Thank you to Counterpoint Press for sending me this book for review.

*In the U.S., someone commits suicide every seventeen minutes, according to the statistics Linda provides at the end of her book.
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Half in Love was on blog tour with TLC Book Tours in January and February. Visit these other blogs for reviews:

Savvy Verse & Wit • Life in Review • Regular Rumination • Book Club Classics! • Necromancy Never Pays • Colloquium • Rundpinne • Boarding in My Forties • The Bookworm • In the Next Room • Red Headed Book Child • Suko’s Notebook

Other reviews: The Divining Wand • The New York Times

Guest posts: Colloquium • She Is Too Fond of Books • In the Next Room

Author interview: Savvy Verse & Wit
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Review: Devotion: A Memoir by Dani Shapiro

1. As I read Devotion: A Memoir by Dani Shapiro, I felt as if I had been waiting for this book, as if somehow Shapiro’s story was meant for me. On the surface, this is a strange notion, as Shapiro and I have little in common: I didn’t grow up in a deeply religious family, my parents are both alive, I don’t have a son who almost died as an infant (in fact, I have no children), I’m not a novelist or memoirist, I didn’t move out of Brooklyn after 9/11 to a farmhouse in Connecticut, I don’t have an impossibly difficult relationship with my mother as Shapiro had with hers. And yet, so many times I found myself nodding yes yes yes in recognition as I read this book.

“I was always racing. I couldn’t settle down. . . . I often felt a sense of tremendous urgency, as if there was a whip at my back. I was fleeing something—but what?” (p. 2)

2. “Anxious, fearful, lonely, resentful, depressed—troubled by a powerful and, some would say, deeply irreverent sense of futility” (p. 11), Shapiro decides to “climb all the way inside the questions and see what was there” (p. 12). Exploring the Orthodox Jewish traditions she grew up with, along with yoga and meditation, she seeks a middle ground between her very religious childhood and her rejection of faith as a young woman.

“Could I find and hold on to a deeper truth than the whir and strum of my daily life, which seemed designed to ensure that some day I would wake up—after the years of packed lunches and piano practice and rushed dinners—and wonder where it had all gone?” (p. 16)

3. Told in 102 short chapters or vignettes, Devotion chronicles Shapiro’s spiritual journey. Sometimes these vignettes are stories, sometimes they are barely more than single moments, flashes of the present, “moments of being,” but each is a piece of the puzzle, a stone in the stream. Inspiring, brave, funny, open-hearted and wise, Devotion invites the reader to follow Shapiro on an incredibly personal journey that will likely resonate with anyone who is searching for meaning in their own lives.

“Yogis use a beautiful Sanskrit word, samskara, to describe the knots of energy that are locked in the hips, the heart, the jaw, the lungs. Each knot tells a story—a narrative rich with emotional detail. Release a samskara and you release that story. Release your stories, and suddenly there is more room to breathe, to feel, to experience the world.” (pp. 16-17)

4. Devotion is a primer, a light shining ahead of me on the path, an inspiration to my own journey through doubt. I highly recommend it. I know I will read it again and again.*

Thank you to Harper Collins for sending me this book to review.

*I’ve already read this book in its entirety twice (and dipped in and out of it as well).
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Devotion is on blog tour with TLC Book Tours in February and March. Visit these other blogs for reviews:

Kelly’s Lucky You! • Book Club Classics! • {Mis}Adventures of an Army Wife • Books Lists Life • nomadreader • Coffee and a Book Chick • Colloquium • The 3 R’s: Reading, ’Riting, and Randomness • Books in the City • English Major’s Junk Food • The House of the Seven Tails • Boarding in my Forties • Man of La Book • Chefdruck Musings

Other reviews:

A Design So Vast • Beth Kephart Books • Between the Covers • catching days • Coffees & Commutes • MostlyFiction Book Reviews • Smilin’ Buddha Cabaret • The Daily Grind of a Work at Home Mom

Interviews with the author: BookPage • Linus’s Blanket • Shambala SunSpace

Read more Devotion-style vignettes: Devotion blog

The author is also available and very enthusiastic about doing Skype chats with book clubs.
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“I had stepped into a stream and was now being carried
along by an unfamiliar, powerful current.”
(Devotion, p. 29)

Reading Devotion inspired me to create the Stream of Suggestions Reading Challenge. This is my first review for this challenge.
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Review: Lonely: Learning to Live with Solitude by Emily White

Lonely: Learning to Live with Solitude by Emily White chronicles White’s own battle with loneliness in her mid-thirties and provides an extensive overview of current research on loneliness, including interviews White conducted with lonely people who contacted her through her blog. Lonely is a portrait of loneliness written by someone who has experienced chronic loneliness, but it’s not a straight memoir, nor is it about “learning to live with solitude.”*

I initially found myself having a strong negative reaction to White’s personal story. In chapter 1 (called “Premonition”), White recounts how she reread the diaries she wrote at 19 in which she predicted “a life lived at a distance from everyone else” for herself (p. 17). She offers this as evidence of some sort of uncanny ability on the part of her younger self to see into the future, “as though . . . a sort of chronological porthole opened up, and I was able to catch glimpses of what my future would hold” (pp. 17-18). Her conclusion irritated me: surely it was obvious that this was a self-fulfilling prophecy! Her dismissal of yoga classes and meditation retreats as “time alone . . . commodified into something that can be bought” (p. 55) also raised my hackles. I confess I found myself feeling judgemental and impatient—and this despite the fact that I have some experience with chronic loneliness myself.

However, when White starts to investigate loneliness in an attempt to come to grips with what’s happening to her, my feelings about this book shifted and I started to feel more compassion for her story. White makes a convincing case for the fact that under the “right” circumstances anyone can become lonely, that the stereotype we have of the lonely as needy and desperate and unattractive (or worse, dangerous) is in fact not founded on reality, that loneliness is something quite different from depression and that it deserves to be studied and treated in its own right.

Although White spends a chapter defining and discussing the terms associated with loneliness, her focus is very much on loneliness as a result of isolation (which is what she experienced) and not so much on loneliness that results from not feeling connected even when you are with people (which is more the type of loneliness I’ve experienced). In addition, although she is an introvert, she barely mentions the possibility that introverts and extroverts might have different experiences of loneliness. As an introvert, my relationship to solitude/loneliness feels complicated: on the one hand, like everyone else, I need to connect with people, but on the other hand, I also need time alone—and certain types of social interactions generally don’t work for me. I would venture to guess that, at least some of the time, I feel lonely when I’m with people because I’m in a not-introvert-friendly situation. But White doesn’t seem to make that distinction: for example, her story of going on a bike trip in the hope of becoming “gregarious, embedded, fearless” (p. 159) sounds like a nightmare to an introvert—it’s no wonder the trip was a disaster. White, however, attributes the failure of this strategy solely to her loneliness, and not to introversion. More than once, it seemed to me that her discussion of loneliness could have been informed and enriched by looking at it through the lens of introversion/extroversion.

So much of the research White examines was interesting and thought-provoking and sometimes scary—I wished I had someone to discuss it with right away, especially as I wasn’t always sure I agreed with White’s conclusions. Despite the issues I had with Lonely, it makes for fascinating reading and is certainly an important book: if you have any interest at all in loneliness, I recommend reading it.

Thank you to Harper Perennial for sending me this book to review.

*The book’s original title was Lonely: A Memoir—unfortunately, neither of the subtitles is very accurate.
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Lonely: Learning to Live with Solitude was on blog tour with TLC Book Tours in January and February. Visit these other blogs for reviews:

The House of the Seven Tails • Sophisticated Dorkiness • Silver & Grace • BookNAround • Confessions of a Bookaholic • Lisa’s Yarns • In the Next Room • Sara’s Organized Chaos • A Certain Bent Appeal

Other reviews:

BookPage • Bust Magazine (spoiler alert!) • S. Krishna’s Books

Guest post: In the Next Room
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Review: What I Thought I Knew by Alice Eve Cohen

What I Thought I Knew by Alice Eve Cohen tells an extraordinary story: after being infertile and on hormone replacement therapy since the age of 30, forty-four-year-old Cohen begins experiencing mysterious symptoms that lead her to suspect she has cancer. Doctors can’t figure out what’s wrong with her for months until an emergency CAT scan finally reveals the truth: Cohen is six months pregnant. Cohen is a playwright and solo theatre artist with an adoptive daughter and a wonderful fiancé who is 10 years her junior. Being pregnant at that point in her life was definitely not part of her plan. (And what I’ve mentioned so far is just the tip of the iceberg of craziness that is this pregnancy.) What I Thought I Knew is an engrossing read—once I started the book, I didn’t want to put it down. Cohen structures her memoir much like a play—it’s written in three acts, which are in turn divided into multiple scenes—and this gives the story both immediacy and power. Throughout the book she also makes lists of what she knows, which only serve to highlight how much in fact she doesn’t know about what’s going on. Still, her dark humour and wit only worked to a point—they occasionally felt forced to me, like she was trying too hard. In contrast, my favourite parts of the book were the solo theatre sections, which deal with the one class she continued to teach throughout this period. Cohen writes the story of her student Dani Athena with a quiet thoughtfulness that I wished she had applied more often to her own story, which instead builds to a near-hysterical pitch. Nevertheless, I admire Cohen for being so honest and upfront about what she went through during this very difficult period of her life. Her story is definitely one that deserves to be heard.

What I Thought I Knew won the Elle Magazine Literary Grand Prix for Nonfiction in 2009.

Thank you to BookSparks PR and Penguin USA for sending me this book to review.
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BookSparks PR organized a blog tour of What I Thought I Knew from October to December:

Reviews:

Entertainment Realm • Always with a Book • 5 Minutes for Books • The Book Chick • My Book Views • Reading at the Beach • Chocolate Reality • Luxury Reading (spoiler alert!) • Bookfan • cindyREADS • Bless Their Hearts Mom • Teresa’s Reading Corner • Booking Mama (spoiler alert!) • Schlough’s Bookshelf Review • Books and Needlepoint • Sharon’s Garden of Book Reviews (spoiler alert!) • All about {n} • The Divining Wand • Rundpinne • Chick Lit Central • Bermudaonion’s Weblog • BookNAround (review & interview) • Book Addiction • ’Til We Read Again • A Bookworm’s World (review & guest post) • Books, Movies & Chinese Food • Crazy for Books • Bookhounds • At Home with Books • Everyday I Write the Book (spoiler alert!) • Books and Movies • Bookin’ with Bingo (review & interview)

Guest posts:

Parking Lot Confessional • My Book Views • Reading at the Beach • Chocolate Reality • Luxury Reading • Bless Their Hearts Mom • Book End Babes • Booking Mama • Books and Needlepoint • The Eclectic Reader (interview & giveaway) • Lori’s Reading Corner • The Page 99 Test

Interviews with the author:

AuthorScoop • mom logic • Chocolate Reality • Teresa’s Reading Corner • The Divining Wand • Chick Lit Central

Other reviews: Shhh I’m Reading • Of Books and Reading

Excerpt from the book: The New York Times
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Review: Not That Kind of Girl: A Memoir by Carlene Bauer

Not That Kind of Girl by Carlene Bauer is a memoir of a young woman raised in evangelical churches who decides in high school that she wants to grow up to be a writer and live in New York. Torn between her ambition and her love of God, she struggles to stay true to herself and figure out what she really believes.

I wanted to love this book—and did love parts of it—but mostly I found it hard-going, like reading Sylvia Plath’s journals or Virginia Woolf’s novels. I generally enjoy introspective writing, but I found Bauer maddeningly cryptic at times—more than once I had to reread a passage to try to understand what was actually happening (and rereading didn’t always help). Sometimes, the images Bauer paints are luminous and evocative, as when she describes the boys her sister’s friends dated: “They seemed to me like khaki-clad redwoods with girls curled up like ferns, or foxes, against their sturdy bark. There might be whole forests of them somewhere” (p. 52). However, many of her references sailed over my head (and made me feel woefully unread). For example, she says of a boy she had a crush on: “In the end [he] might be the type who’d leave girls like me up in a barn loft with a suitcase of unwanted Bibles and a bum leg with no way to get down” (p. 57). This was clearly a reference to something, but I had no idea what. (I looked it up—it appears she’s referring to a Flannery O’Connor story, “Good Country People.”) I also found that most of her friends seemed fairly interchangeable, and I had trouble keeping the men straight. (Who was Tom? Did I forget or does she not bother to tell us?) At one point she spends seven pages working up to the moment when she meets a particular man at a party, only to run through their entire relationship in less than two pages. It ends with him saying he will woo her until she marries him; by the next paragraph, he has met someone else who wants to get married immediately. I was left feeling like I was missing something. I was frustrated too that Bauer spent so long talking about and thinking about the fact that she didn’t drink and was a virgin, and then suddenly she’s drinking and having sex, and what made the difference? Her loss of faith, in the end, is nearly as inexplicable to me.

On the other hand, there are passages in Not That Kind of Girl that shine: her crank against normal girls (“To describe someone as a normal girl was our lowest blow” [p. 53]); her identification with Sylvia Plath; the moment when her story with Caroline ends; the revelation she has in her cubicle when God speaks to her through the words of Iris Murdoch. One of my favourite passages is when she describes her childhood experience of libraries (while reflecting on the loneliness she currently feels at not being able to share her love of books with the man she cares about):

“I’d kneel on the carpet to look through the books on bottom shelves, creeping around the aisles, a calm growing inside me as the pile of books on the floor grew taller—a calm like that of church, but better than church, because here I was free to roam and circle back among possibilities, to choose and reject as I like. . . . And then coming out in the sun to my mother in the car, keeping all that I’d thought to myself— . . . was it silly to visit the juvenile section to make sure the books I’d checked out years ago were still there, taking them down off the shelves to feel the grain of the mid-century paper, run my fingers over the grooves of the ink-and-pen illustrations, and sniff them the way you’d sniff a baby’s head when I thought no one was looking? And then back to our house, which had only one bookshelf, filled with study guides to the Bible and the unread biographies I’d given my parents, and up to my bedroom to splay myself out under some author’s spell until dinner.” (pp. 252-253)

That Bauer is a talented writer is undeniable, and I’m curious to see what she writes next, but I can’t say I recommend this book.

Thank you to Harper Perennial for sending me this book to review.
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Not That Kind of Girl is on blog tour with TLC Book Tours in July and August. Visit these other blogs for reviews:

Literate Housewife • Capricious Reader • The Book Nest • Drey’s Library • As Usual, I Need More Bookshelves • Knowing the Difference • Bookshipper • Life in Pink • Suko’s Notebook • A Fair Substitute for Heaven • A Certain Bent Appeal • my books. my life. • Sara’s Organized Chaos

Other reviews:

Book Reporter • Little Pink Book • Religion Dispatches • Scathing Reviews, Bitchy People (a positive review, despite the name of the blog)

Interview with the author: More Intelligent Life
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Brogan’s Review: A Year Without “Made in China”: One Family’s True Life Adventure in the Global Economy by Sara Bongiorni

I’m at Book Expo America in New York City all this week, but here’s another review from my sister Brogan:

I picked up A Year Without “Made in China”: One Family’s True Life Adventure in the Global Economy by Sara Bongiorni for possibly selfish reasons. Because I’m pregnant and thus purchasing (mostly second-hand, but nevertheless purchasing) an entire wardrobe for the very short-term usage of a few months’ wear, I have been feeling vaguely self-indulgent lately. So when I saw this book I thought it might provide me with specific reasons not to purchase Chinese goods—things I no doubt already know but wouldn’t mind being reminded of—ranging from China’s human rights record to worker safety abuses to the relative environmental costs of transporting goods halfway around the world for the use of North American consumers. I even thought Bongiorni might give me a few tips as to how best to do this, not referencing individual companies, but just providing a sort of feel-good sense of the advantages of buying from smaller shops, engaging local merchants in conversation and so on. However, I have to say my primary reaction to this book was disappointment, eventually bleeding into downright annoyance.

Bongiorni is a business journalist, who decides one Christmas holiday to boycott all Chinese goods for a year. She has two small children—aged one and four—and her partner Kevin is also brought on board. Strangely, although at various times she reaches for the reasons she is doing this, she never actually endorses any, other than it being “an experiment” “to see if it can be done,” along with some vague statements about globalization.

Because her boycott has no ideological roots, buying items made anywhere-but-China is deemed acceptable. It is not clear to me why she’s so excited about Cambodian pants or children’s trinkets made in Thailand—how different are the stories of those countries compared to the Chinese one in terms of worker exploitation and loss of local (American) jobs? In addition, she’s so scared of offending people by her boycott that she actively eliminates opportunities to talk about it to other people, thus defeating the point, ultimately, of a boycott, which is to effect change through widespread consumer reaction. And she’s constantly reassuring herself that when the year is over she can go back to buying whatever she wants, which again seems completely self-defeating.

Without enough of a reason for a boycott, Bongiorni struggles to stick with it, and it becomes difficult to sympathize with her long whines and self-pitying tirades about how she can’t find the presents her kids really want. On the other hand, for anyone not that sympathetic to such an idea in the first place, one wonders why they would even be interested in reading about such a silly exercise. Bongiorni tries to be funny but at the expense of any real depth, which ultimately makes her appear self-indulgent, even as she is attempting to do something decidedly un-self-indulgent, namely sacrifice convenience in an attempt to explore a non-mainstream approach to shopping. Because there is so little intention behind her boycott, the whole idea comes off as being about her.

Bongiorni does mention a couple of interesting things, like that items made in the USA (or other countries) often have Chinese component parts, and that in some cases the manufacturers can no longer get those component parts from anywhere else. She also makes interesting connections with people from a variety of demographic backgrounds who support the idea of boycotting Chinese goods.

However, what drove me right around the bend was her approach to parenting, which seemed to focus on buying her kids toys as her primary way of relating to them. She feels an incredible amount of guilt at not buying her son (the four-year-old) every Chinese-made trinket he desires, and bribes him—her words—with Danish-made Lego to assuage his tears when they come into conflict over it in the store. She actually discusses the question of whether she is causing him to “suffer” by not indulging his every plastic Chinese craving. In a world where children suffer so many real ills, it feels offensive to have this consumerist attitude broadcast with so little thought.

What seems particularly strange is that Bongiorno consistently confuses China-the-country with China-the-people and China-the-economic-superpower. She traces an oral history of a Chinese ancestor in her family, and then claims she feels like she’s disowning this part of herself by boycotting Chinese-made items. She also says “the idea of swearing off Chinese products forever feels like holding a perpetual grudge against 1.3 billion people” (p. 215)—which is clearly a misunderstanding of the purposes and dynamics of a boycott.

It’s possible that I’m humourless—but I really don’t think so. In fact, I really wanted to like this book. I would even say that if Bongiorno had sat down and taken the time to write this book with heart and intellectual rigour, she could have written a good book. I had the distinct impression that she was more intelligent than she let herself appear, out of a sense of hesitation to be seen as too political or serious, which possibly explains my level of aggravation with this book. I’d say give this one a miss.
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Other reviews:

Devourer of Books • Duffbert’s Random Musings • Lost Laowai • Lotus Reads • Ruby Red Books • The Novel Word • Written in the Stars

Interview with the author: The Great American Apparel Diet
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Review: The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin

One day, while sitting on a bus, Gretchen Rubin had an epiphany of sorts: she was, as she put it, “in danger of wasting [her] life.” This moment made her realize two things: she wasn’t as happy as she could be and her life wasn’t going to change unless she did something about it. Thus was born the idea behind The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun. Inspired by Benjamin Franklin, Rubin designed a Resolutions Chart and decided to tackle a different subject every month for a year. She also came up with a list of Twelve Commandments and a goofier list of what she calls the Secrets of Adulthood.

I’ve struggled with reviewing this book for quite a while now because, quite simply, it wasn’t what I expected. I thought it was going to be more of a memoir and less of a self-help book. And I’m having trouble deciding whether my disappointment with the book stems mainly from the fact that it didn’t meet my expectations or whether Rubin’s approach weakened the impact of the book regardless of my expectations. (But maybe that distinction is moot, and I should just quit waffling and tell you what I thought...)

One of Rubin’s Commandments and one of her Secrets of Adulthood really hit home for me (and they are complementary concepts). Her first commandment is “Be Gretchen” (or be yourself), which is self-evident perhaps and yet sometimes so easy to forget. (An aside to give you an idea of where I’m coming from: When I was in high school, my mother’s best friend gave me a poster for my birthday that said: “I may not be perfectly wise, perfectly witty or perfectly wonderful, but I’m always perfectly me.” I dutifully tacked the poster to my wall but felt taunted daily by its message. As a “brainy” and socially awkward teen—and still sometimes to this day—I often felt like I didn’t know who “me” was, and I certainly didn’t feel I had the level of acceptance I needed to be “perfectly me.”) The variation on this theme that’s one of Rubin’s Secrets of Adulthood is “What’s fun for other people may not be fun for you—and vice versa.” Again, this seems obvious and yet as an introvert, I often forget this piece of wisdom and think there’s something wrong with me when I dread the party that supposed to be so much fun or would rather spend hours in a second-hand bookstore instead of hanging out in the pub.

Much of Rubin’s research on happiness is fascinating and her advice is pretty spot-on; this book did get me thinking about ways I can work towards my own happiness (and was in part the inspiration behind my 40/40 Challenge). However, I felt frustrated with how self-conscious The Happiness Project is: it always felt like Rubin was too aware of her readers; her stories seemed too pat, too constructed somehow. I wanted her to dig deeper and get messier, to share more. I was annoyed that she quoted so extensively from people’s comments on her blog (some of the quotes are pages long) instead of including more details about her struggles to follow through with her happiness project. I guess in the end I didn’t identify with her enough: it seemed like the distance she had to travel from status quo to happy (or happier) was too short—and too easy—for her approach to apply to my own life.

Thank you to Harper Collins for sending me this book to review.
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Other reviews:

5 Minutes for Mom • A Patchwork of Books • A Reader’s Respite • Ariel Gore • A Striped Armchair (scroll down for review) • Bibliophile by the Sea • Books on the Brain • Chew & Digest Books • Erin Reads • Hope Is the Word • Lesa’s Book Critiques • Living Artfully • Pop Culture Junkie • Ruly • S. Krishna’s Books • Sophisticated Dorkiness • The Book Chick • unclutterer
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Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love by Myron Uhlberg (Brogan’s review)

Here is my sister Brogan’s second review...

I actually picked Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love by Myron Uhlberg off the library shelf (where I work)—which, despite my occupation, is a rare way for me to come across a new book to read, especially one that flies to the top of my to-be-read pile. I was attracted to it because years ago I read and loved Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World by Leah Hager Cohen, which is also about the hearing child of two deaf parents.* Hands of My Father is the story of Myron Uhlberg, born in 1933 in New York City. He tells his unusual story of being the eldest born to two deaf parents, and as such, as soon as he began to speak, he began to interpret for them.

The parts I loved most about this book were when he focused most intensely on his parents’ story, and their struggle, given the prejudices of the day. The history of New York in the 30s and 40s was filtered through this other lens of deaf-versus-hearing world, and the hearing world comes across as cruel and intolerant (people assume his parents are mentally impaired).

At about the midpoint of the book, there seemed to be a lull, where Uhlberg filled in the gaps with various remembrances of his life and boyhood, which felt self-indulgent and frankly a little boring. The strength of the story was in the relationships within the family, the tangle of responsibility and love, the pressures of interpretation. (I wondered if this was unfair of me, to be less interested in the son than in the parents, but I still think this was a weakness in the text, where the narrative felt adrift and didn’t pick up until a couple of chapters later.)

I also thought the book focused quite heavily on Uhlberg’s relationship with his father and left me with questions about his relationship with his mother. Did she not interact with the public world in ways that required her son to interpret for her? It’s not that she isn’t present—her storytelling is vivid and intimate, as reported by Uhlberg.

Overall, I thought Hands of My Father was worth reading for its insight into another world, for its love. One of the most touching stories in it was when Uhlberg described a serious accident his father had. When they returned from hospital, his mother flung herself into her husband’s arms:

As young as I was, I understood what her reaction meant: she had not, after all, lost her only partner in silence in this alien hearing world. And even at that early age the thought came to me: What would it be like if one of them died and the other had to go on living? How would they endure the loss?

I knew deep down that in some way I had aged this day, and that I now understood the isolated world of my deaf father and mother as I never had before. (p.194)

In this way, the book is as much the love story between Uhlberg’s parents as it is anything else. It’s a beautiful and moving story, for the most part delicately told.

*I recommend that book, too.

Visit these blogs for other reviews:
Adventures in Motherhood • Blogging for a Good Book • Life Is a Patchwork Quilt • mango missives • Tales from a Teaching Mama

Review: The Impostor’s Daughter: A True Memoir by Laurie Sandell

The Impostor’s Daughter: A True Memoir by Laurie Sandell is a graphic memoir chronicling the author’s journey out of the maze of her family’s myths. The family’s main mythmaker is Sandell’s dad, a larger-than-life man who claims, among other things, to have written position papers for Kissinger, to be a friend of the pope and to have been awarded a Purple Heart in Vietnam. I don’t have much experience reading graphic novels or memoirs, so I wasn’t sure what to expect from this one. One of the blurbs on the back of the book warns: “Don’t pick up The Impostor’s Daughter if you have an urgent looming deadline. You’ll start reading and then keep reading till you reach the last page . . .” Of course, I didn’t listen to A.J. Jacobs: I peeked at the book the day I received it and was instantly hooked. When I finished it several hours later, I realized that most of the afternoon had gone by—luckily, I didn’t have any urgent deadlines! I started reading it again that evening, savouring it more slowly over the next couple of days and paying more attention, on my second read, to Sandell’s delightful art. Despite her unorthodox childhood, her “unsavory experiences” (her words) in her twenties and her glamorous job interviewing Hollywood celebrities, Sandell comes across as very down-to-earth—someone I could relate to. By turns funny and heartbreaking, her memoir is both engrossing and inspiring. I loved the fact that she incorporated several drawings she had done as a child into the narrative and also included a “group photo” of all the Hollywood stars she’d interviewed. I highly recommend this wonderful memoir.

Check out Sandell’s website for examples of her art, but don’t read the article she wrote about her dad for Esquire before reading this memoir unless you’re OK with major spoilers.

Recommended review: Life... with Books (because it’s a graphic review!)

Other reviews:

At Home with Books • Bookfoolery and Babble • BookNAround • Books and Cooks • Chick with Books • English Major’s Narrative • Foreign Circus Library • I’m Booking It • Lindy Reads and Reviews • Love, Laughter, and a Touch of Insanity • nomadreader • Nonsuch Book • Sophisticated Dorkiness • things mean a lot

Hachette has generously agreed to sponsor a giveaway of five copies of this book on my blog! Come back tomorrow for all the details.

Thank you to Hachette for sending me this book to review.