A Stage for Diplomas; A Stage for Knives
The amphitheater seats over four thousand people. It wasn’t full, but there was a big crowd…I was seated at stage right. The audience applauded generously. I remember raising a hand to acknowledge the applause. Then, in the corner of my right eye–the last thing my eye would ever see–I saw the man in black running toward me down the right-hand side of the seating area. Black clothes. Black mask…I didn’t try to run. I was transfixed (p.6).
Salman Rushdie, Knife
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“No ceiling fans!” I muttered sadly to Mark.
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We had parked the car at the far back of a parking lot, parked on the grass because the lots were so crowded, and wended our way across the street. We moved with a slow crowd: parents and grandparents, kids in scarlet graduation gowns, moms with toddlers and backpacks and babes in arms. Like one sluggish organism, we waited for the traffic cop to stop oncoming cars, and then we surged across the street into Chautauqua Institution.
It was hot that night, and I wore a dressy acket—a light jacket, but still, one too warm for this 90-degree weather. I carried a big purse, too, and, “Oh, SHIT,” I muttered, seeing the signs that said only bags six inches big or smaller would be allowed into the Institute. I pulled my huge bag up over my shoulder, squished it against my side, and hoped my total lack of menace was obvious.
I understood why security needed to be tight, though,—the attack on Salman Rushdie happened only two years ago.
We made our way at a crawl through the Institution’s Victorian neighborhoods, and we finally reached the amphitheater, where ushers handed us programs and we spotted Matt and Julie and the seats they saved for us.
We hugged our son and his wife, sat down, realized the programs made perfect fans, and spotted Kaelyn in her scarlet cap and gown, waving large and wide from the top level. The Jamestown High School seniors were being organized there and lined up.
We were there to witness our youngest grandchild’s high school graduation.
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We are not strangers to Chautauqua’s amphitheater. For many years, we lived in Mayville, New York, only three miles away from the Institution. On Sundays, when there was no entry fee, we would often drive over.
I loved the bookstore there, and the library.
First Matt, and then James when he was old enough, loved the amphitheater. On Sundays they could run up on the stage. Mark and I would sit reasonably far back in the pew-like seats, and one or the other of the boys would perform. They had an audience of two, but I think that, in their mind’s eye, the seats were filled with cheering fans.
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The seats were filled for Kaelyn’s graduation, too, and the majestic ceremony began right at 7:00. There was music and there were presentations to special mentors; each co-officer in the class (there were, I think, 12 co-officers) had a speaking role. The superintendent spoke, the principal spoke, and the keynote speaker, a retiring English and communications teacher,—she spoke, too. Between speakers a student choir sang and and a student band played.
Valedictorians spoke. Co-presidents spoke. The class of 2024 presented a a gift to their high school. Co-historians spoke; behind them a slide show (“Look! There’s Kaelyn!”) scrolled.
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Salman Rushdie was scheduled to speak on August 12, 2022, on the same stage at that same amphitheater. He had been there once before, maybe ten years earlier, so he was familiar with the stately wooden homes of Chautauqua Institution. He had met some of the silver-haired denizens of the place, innocent aging hippie types, people so comfortable in that safe milieu they seldom locked their doors. Chautauqua Institution seemed like a pretty safe place—a good place, in fact, for the discussion Rushdie would take part in.
It was a discussion about keeping writers safe.
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On August 10, 2022, Rushdie had a horrible nightmare. He dreamt that he was attacked by a gladiator in a Roman amphitheater. The gladiator had a spear. The author woke up, panicked.
He felt a foreboding, but, Rushdie writes, he didn’t believe in omens or portents. He did know, though, that people were counting on him. He didn’t really want to be at Chautauqua, wasn’t excited about this presentation, but he was committed. He knew he had to go.
I know this because the book I brought to read the weekend of Kaelyn’s graduation was Rushdie’s memoir, Knife. He subtitled his book, Meditations After an Attempted Murder.
And here we were, looking at the same stage, sweating through a joyous celebration, fanning ourselves as we waited for the moment when Kaelyn would climb the steps to the stage and receive the faux leather folder with its little note that her actual diploma would arrived in the mail in a month or so.
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The sun began to go down; cool breezes sidled around our faces. We stopped our incessant fanning, and the red-robed seniors began their trips down to the stage. It was all managed beautifully; rows of seniors—there were about 250 kids in Kaelyn’s class,— snaked past each other to line up on either side of the stage. Each held a card with their name; they handed the card to a co-vice president, and, well-practiced, those class officers read the name just as a student on the other side accepted the diploma case and shook a board member’s hand.
Many students took that momentous trip across the gleaming wood, and then finally, it was Kaelyn’s turn, and we jumped up and cheered, and she grinned.
Later, after each student had made the trek, and after they went to sit above and behind the stage, the commencement wrapped up, and the graduates screamed and cheered and threw their mortar boards in the air.
And the crowd shifted and heaved as families went in search of their graduates.
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Rushdie, on that August day in 2022, was seated on stage with his friend Henry Reese, who was to moderate the talk. Hadi Matar rushed the stage before the discussion could begin; he rushed the stage and wielded a knife, and, in the span of about 27 seconds, he almost killed Rushdie. He was inspired, I guess, by a fatwa imposed by the Ayotollah Khomeini in 1989.
That fatwa enjoined Muslims to kill the author because of his book, The Satanic Verses, which centered around passages in the Qu’ran.
Apparently Matar, who admired the Ayatollah, had read only a few pages of Rushdie’s work, but he decided the author was a bad man. ‘Disingenuous,’ Matar called Rushdie, and after seeing a tweet that said he’d be at Chautauqua, he decided to go there and carry out the fatwa.
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Henry Reese and the people in the audience did not, at first, realize what was happening when Matar rushed on stage and began stabbing Salman Rushdie, who put up his left hand in defense. Matar stabbed that hand, severing tendons; he stabbed Rushdie twice, deeply, in his neck, and then in his chest, and in his thigh. He stabbed Rushdie on the left side of his mouth, on his forehead, and in his left eye so deeply that the optic nerve was severed.
That damage happened within seconds. And then Reese, who was in his mid-seventies, jumped up to help his friend, tackling the 24-year-old attacker. Audience members rushed the stage and piled on top of the would-be assassin, disarming him.
And Rushdie clung tenuously to life. It was a miracle, some said, that he survived at all.
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Knife is a gripping story about attack and survival. I had never read any of Rushdie’s other books, but this one, with our close geographical ties, and with its sadly current tale of sudden violence, seemed important to read and digest.
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Matar’s attack was witnessed by thousands of people, yet he pled innocent. He refused any kind of plea deal, and it appears he’ll go to trial in September.
Rushdie, blind in one eye and bearing scars from his attack and his long, harrowing recovery from it, will testify, as will Henry Reese.
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After the graduation, we made our way to Kaelyn, took pictures with her, leaned elbows on the stage, laid our programs on the edge of it, set our purses and bags there,—there on the stage where joyful hours just unfolded; there on the stage where an author survived a deadly attack.
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How, I wonder, do I process that—a place of wonder now, a place of horror not all that long ago? Celebration and desolation collide, brewed on the same shining planks of wood.
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Salman Rushdie’s Knife is definitely worth a read, whether you’ve sat in front of the stage at the Chautauqua Amphitheater or not…
Where Did You GO?
My mother, after her first baby died, wrote out a poem by James Fenimore Cooper. The baby—a toddler, really; Sharon was 18 months old—was a girl, and the poem was “He Is Not Dead.”
Mom changed all the pronouns from ‘he’ to ‘she,’ and she tucked the pages, starkly written in her flowing Palmer script, into Sharon’s baby book. As a young child, I would unfold the pages and read in fascination. The poem, amended by my mother, ended like this:
And you—oh you, who the wildest yearn,
For the old-time step, and the glad return,
Think of her faring on, as dear
In the love of There as the love of Here.
Think of her still as the same, I say.
She is not dead—she is just away.
(See poetry.com for the complete poem.)
My child-mind struggled to comprehend that, the whole concept of a missing older sister. (How would life have been different if she had not died?) And, if she is just away, where, exactly, is THAT?
Overlying all that, like transparencies, were the teachings I was learning in the Catholic school—teachings about Jesus dying and rising on the third day. His resurrection, I learned, made it possible for all who believed in Him to rise, too. Jesus, our teachers told us, had vanquished death.
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I am thinking of that this weekend because, in that weird confluence of words that often happens, I just read two books where bereft people go seeking the ones they lost. This was Easter weekend, when the possibility of dying but rising again settles right in front of me.
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Minnesotan Leif Enger, the author of I Cheerfully Refuse, was a reporter for public radio before the runaway success of his first book, Peace Like a River. His following books were bestsellers, too, and his work has won many, many prestigious awards.
I Cheerfully Refuse caught my eye because Lark, married to our protagonist Rainey, owns a bookstore. I’m kind of collecting bookstore stories.
I Cheerfully Refuse is also a dystopia, set in the latter part of this century, when the climate battle was been largely lost, and the United States has devolved into a sort of anarchy. On either coast, the wealthy few (other people call them ‘astronauts’) live their best lives, while rank and file citizens struggle to get by. Within this, though, Lark and Rainey have carved out a warm, rich life together. Lark has her books, Rainey has his music, and they create a capacious, expansive space within that for each other.
But that’s the start of the story, and things soon change. Lark lets a nervously thin young man stay in their attic flat; he gives her a book she’s been looking for for years, but he brings more trouble than it’s worth.
In fact, Lark is killed during a planned invasion of her home, when the authorities are looking for the anxious young man and what he has stolen from the prison ship he fled. Rainey comes home and finds Lark, one bare foot sticking out into the doorway, oddly still.
And his life becomes unmoored, completely. Lark was his lodestar, and now he has no compass.
So here is what Rainey does: he goes looking for his beloved. Not really a sailor, he readies an old boat someone left him anyway, stocks it with supplies, and heads out onto Lake Superior. This is a not a lake, he reminds us; although it’s freshwater, it is a sea. And this body of water is sentient, with feelings and whims and nasty bits of mischief that trip up the unwary traveler.
Rainey has to get to a place on the Lake, though,—a place called the Slates. He and Lark traveled there once, and Lark believed she met the author of the book she’d been looking for.
The only thing was, Rainey lets us know, that the author had been dead, when he and Lark visited the Slates, for several years.
Rainey knows his love is dead, but he believes, too, that maybe he’s wrong, or maybe he just doesn’t understand. So he sets a course for the Slates because, he believes, if Lark was going to show up anywhere, it would be there.
The inland sea, the powers that be, the men who search for what that boarder had stolen,—all of these conspire to make Rainey’s search an epic trek. I won’t tell you if he finds Lark at the end of the story; the truth of the book is in this: when someone we love dies, we go looking for them.
Especially if there’s unfinished business between us.
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When my mother died, I searched for some kind of message, some sort of resolution to our turbulent relationship. One of her nurses told me, at the funeral, that she had to tell me, someday, something my mother told her. It was about me, and it was important, but now was not the time.
The time never came; I didn’t know how to contact the nurse, and I moved out of town within a year or two. The message was never received. For a long time that drive to find out propelled me, but the years rubbed off its urgency.
Still, today, I really would like to know what that message was. I wish I had had the determination to find out before it was too late. That nurse, I think, may now herself be dead.
If we can’t find the person who died, maybe we can find the message they left us…
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One of the online book groups I belong to recommended an author named Rebecca Serle. (Serle writes books and television scripts, and lives, according to her website– https://www.rebeccaserle.com/– in Los Angeles. Her work, too, has won its share of awards.) Her newest book, One Italian Summer, was particularly lauded. I reserved it at the library; I picked it up just after finishing I Cheerfully Refuse. And—isn’t it funny?—One Italian Summer and I Cheerfully Refuse have much the same theme.
In Serle’s book, Katy, the protagonist, has just buried her mother, Carol. Carol had been her whole life—although Katy was married, her mother was her best friend, her confidante, her advisor. Her lodestar.
Carol’s death was not sudden; she died of cancer. Katy knew that death was coming, but she was still adrift.
After the funeral, Katy decides to take the trip she and Carol had planned—to visit Positano, an Italian village where Carol had spent a summer during what Katy thinks are the carefree years—the time before Carol fell in love with Katie’s father and settled down.
So Katy packs her bags, leaves the husband she’s no longer sure she wants to be married to, and goes to Positano, looking for her mother.
Katy doesn’t believe she’ll actually find her mother there, but she hopes that the place, so beloved by Carol, will tell her more about the woman whose loss has wrenched her life.
But Katy DOES meet Carol—Carol before Katy really knew her, Carol when she was young and full of dreams.
Katy searches for the person she’s lost to death, and Katy, unbelievably, finds her.
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All of this swirls on Easter weekend, on a day when resurrection questions are foremost in many minds. What happens when we die? Are we still…somewhere? Can we still touch THIS world? Can those we’ve left behind somehow find us?
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It comforted my mother to think that Sharon was There, still as loving and loved a wee one as when she lived Here,—comforted her so much that she copied out Riley’s poem and folded and unfolded it many, many times.
Rainey and Katie searched for that comfort, too.
Christian churches teach that comfort.
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Where are you? we wonder when a loved one dies. If it’s true that energy cannot be destroyed, then the energy that made up the heart and soul of that essential person—well, it must be somewhere. I Cheerfully Refuse and One Italian Summer explore the search that some people undertake, trying to figure out just where the beloved has gone.
Who Are the Monsters in Your Neighborhood?
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My son James is done with Harry Potter and the universe JK Rowlings created. He can’t, he says, get by the comments Rawlings made about sex and gender…about how menstruation is the definer of womanhood, which means, in Jim’s and many other people’s estimation, that Rowlings thinks trans women are not ‘real’ women.
I have been kind of past Harry Potter, too. Oh, I remember a time when dear ones came to visit for a weekend, and I kept slipping off to the bathroom upstairs. I did that so often my visitors were concerned.
“Is everything…err…okay?” one asked, and I smiled, trying to look wan and brave.
I wasn’t sick, though; the new Harry Potter had arrived in yesterday’s mail. I wanted to spend good time with those beloved guests, but the siren song of that book was compelling. So every couple of hours, I would excuse myself, smuggle the book into the bathroom, and read a chapter or two.
It was like the Harry Potter series shaped an arc in my life: I had to read each book, ascending the rising side, sliding swiftly down the descendant. And now that’s over and done.
For Jim, it’s more than just being finished because a series has ended: he’s done with anything Rowlings-related because of the comments she made. He is so serious about it that I go online to find out what exactly it WAS that Rowlings said, and I find myself agreeing with Jim: her remarks were—I hope not intentionally, but intentions don’t change reality—at the very least, deeply unkind. And realizing that, the glamor of her work seeps away.
Her books are still on my shelves, but they are no longer the tomes I’d choose to re-read were I stuck at home in, say, a snowstorm with no new reading material. Do I want to keep them any more?
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And then, just last night, I went downstairs to get something from the little refrigerator which stands at the entrance to Jim’s man-cave. There, on the edge of Jim’s desk was a boxed set of Cosby Show seasons.
Ack! COSBY! I had a deep, unhappy reaction. Bill Cosby was America’s father until it turned out he was America’s rapist. I felt betrayed by Cosby, and I cannot bring myself to watch that show.
For Jim, though, this art transcends the artist. He knows what Cosby was imprisoned for; he knows it and finds it unconscionable. But the world created in that series beckons to him. It’s a place of warmth and acceptance, even when people have warts and flaws. It’s a land where humor reigns and people with differences are safe and accepted.
He does NOT see Cosby’s real life transgressions as minor ‘warts and flaws’; he detests them.
But still, the Cosby Show fills a void or answers a call somewhere in Jim.
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I come upstairs and start cleaning off the kitchen counter, and I realize the Mr. Roger’s theme is bouncing around in the boney cavern. Only, instead of PEOPLE, I am hearing, “Who are the monsters in your neighborhood? In your neighborhood? Oh, tell me, who are the monsters in your neighborhood…in your neighborhood today?”
If my neighborhood includes the books I read and the art I view and the shows I watch, then Bill Cosby is one of those monsters.
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What should we do when our favorite artists turn out to be monsters?
Is turning our back on their art the right (is it the only) thing to do?
Claire Dederer explores this question in Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma.
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Dederer writes of people like Cosby and Rowlings; she writes about Picasso and Michael Jackson, Ernest Hemingway and Roman Polanski, too. Can we still, she asks, love Wagner’s music knowing he was a rabid anti-Semite?
Does being a ‘genius’ give an artist a license to behave in horrific ways?
The monstrousness of certain male artists often shows itself in violence, violence often directed against women or children. Picasso paints his lover with a burn on her face, Dederer writes; that burn is where the artist, in a rage, put his cigarette out on her cheek, and went on, unabashed, to use her as a subject for a painting.
Last year I read a new Hemingway biography, and I have no way, now, of reading a Hemingway book without confronting the cruelty he dealt to the women in his life.
Roman Polanski flees the United States after raping a 12-year-old girl. Can I watch a Polanski work without being tainted?
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I was fascinated, in my college days, by images of a ghost baby in some of Mark Twain’s works. Twain and Livy had an infant son when they lived in Buffalo, New York. The baby cried constantly, and no one could sleep or work. Twain wrapped the squawking baby up one frigid Buffalo night, and he took his son out for a long ride in the carriage.
The baby did stop crying, but, when he arrived home, Twain realized the blankets had come undone and the little boy was half frozen. He wrapped him back up and ran into the house.
In the weeks that followed, the tiny scrap of humanity developed pneumonia, and then he died. Twain was sure that he had killed his son.
And then, those ghost baby images in his writing!
But my professor chided me, vehemently. You CAN’T use an author’s biography to critique his work, he said. You have to separate the person and the art.
I can’t separate them, though, and all these years later, I still think that respected professor is wrong.
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Dederer suggests in her book that, while male artists are monsters by dint of violence or imposition, women artists are monsters because they neglect or abandon their children. Sylvia Plath is the ultimate example,—putting her babies to sleep in the adjoining room (a blanket firmly rolled up and placed by their bedroom door, to be sure, keeping the fumes out) as she turned on the gas and put her head in the oven.
What about Doris Lessing? Or Charlotte Perkins Gilman? Or Anne Sexton?
Women who marry and have children must always choose, Dederer says. “What the artist or writer or musician needs is time. And what the family needs is time. This conflict is not necessarily solvable.”
But some women leave the children—all or some of the children—behind in pursuit of their art. Are they driven geniuses? Are other great artists, other less driven geniuses, subsumed by their family obligations every day, depriving us of art that would stretch the boundaries of our worlds?
“If you are an artist and you always, always put your children’s needs first, eventually your own need will make itself heard and you will wonder, What would I have made in those lost years? You will wonder, Am I too late?”
That thought—that it’s too late — is thoroughly chilling.
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Monsters did not give me one definitive answer about how to react to the art made by monstrous people, but it gave me ways to grapple with the issue. Reading Monsters expanded my boundaries, and, in it, Dederer also mentioned and quoted several writers. She made me want to explore their work, and now I have some of their books waiting in my TBR pile.
A book that makes me think, AND one that leads me to new written voices…that’s a winner. I heartily recommend Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma.
What Happened to Gwendolen and Niven: Thinking about Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson
[Please don’t read if you haven’t finished the book! And DO read the book; it’s a rich tapestry of a tale!]
Image from Penguin Random House
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“‘No,’ Niven said. ‘If you think about it you won’t come with me.’ He stood up abruptly and held out his hand to her. And there they must remain, suspended between coming and going for ever.” (p.386)
No, no, no, NO. Gwendolyn and Niven can’t just stay there suspended in time.
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Everyone else gets an ending. Maddox and Oakes end, certainly. Frobisher, too—not a stellar outcome for the police force, really.
The Ingrams get a Florence back. Freda, smart and nimble, leads a smart and nimble life.
What Nellie fears finally comes to pass. And Ramsay meets his window. Kitty—poor, neglected Kitty,–finds herself a bar stool and sits there until she dies. Edith has an appointment with a WWII bomb. And Shirley and Betty marry their lords…and divorce them too.
It is not fair, not at all, that we don’t know what happened to Gwendolyn and Niven. I guess we have to, each of us, craft our own ending for those two.
So here’s the way I see it.
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Niven was drawn to Gwendolyn from the first. Besides being utterly attractive, Gwendolyn was smart, honest, compassionate, and unconventional. And she had been through his war; she didn’t have questions for him. She didn’t wonder what it was like.
She knew.
And Gwendolyn, despite her warm feelings for Frobisher—well, she was drawn to Niven, too, even more firmly. Niven was the antithesis of the loathed Mr. Pollock. Niven was not hidebound; he didn’t value women lightly. He was not at all averse to bending the rules. And he was good looking, too, and smart and funny, forthright and direct.
They both loved dogs, for heaven’s sakes. And, while they were both willing to step outside the bounds of propriety, a life in the shadow world of London’s crime didn’t really suit either one of them; it didn’t suit them at all.
Of course, ultimately, Gwendolyn agreed to go away with Niven. They holed up for a couple of days, thinking about it, and then, exercising their collective formidable powers of organization and decisiveness, they acted. Traveling as David and Wendy Warrender, each with a dog on a leash, they strolled happily up the gangplank of a luxury liner. They were headed to the United States of America.
They had papers proving they were who they said they were.
They had the funds they needed to start new lives.
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They settled in a little industrial city with high-culture pretensions, and they opened a bookstore. ‘Wendy’ knew books, and ‘David’ was well-read. And David knew all about running a successful business.
They were among the first to offer a coffee shop within the sprawling bookstore itself. They had speakers come in. They created book clubs. Their bookstore was a success from Day One.
With their lovely British accents and their polished veneers, the Warrenders were sought after in their small city. The citizens took them right into their hearts. Wendy and David went to many swank affairs, and once a month they reciprocated with cocktails at their city house.
They had a country house, too, and there, they were not so social. Once they had hired Merry Pennyworth, their ultra-reliable store manager, they spent at least two weekends a month at the country place, where they walked the dogs, lit fires, read books, and ate delicious meals.
Wendy was not a bad cook, but David surprised them both by becoming an accomplished one. Being together in the kitchen was one of their joys.
They never had children. In later years, they became published authors. Wendy wrote the kind of poetry that had readers in full-out decoder mode. (When she says ‘the jewels,’ what kind of treasures does she really mean? What does the recurring image of the Sphinx signify? Why do the women in her poems live in rooms that are overwhelmingly pink? College English instructors loved Wendy’s poetry, and many a student wrote papers in their classes, papers with titles like, “Three Levels of Metaphor in the Poetry of Wendy Warrender.”)
David, on the other hand, wrote a novel about the high life in London after World War I. While people loved the book—-it climbed to number four on the New York Times bestseller list, –‘serious’ critics smiled condescendingly.
“It’s an entertaining little read,” they basically said, “but the characters and settings are too exaggerated to be true. It’s clear that Mr. Warrender is a dedicated bookseller with a great imagination.”
And Wendy and David read the reviews and laughed.
“If only,” they said to each other. “If only they knew the truth of it.”
They never had children, but Merry did, and David and Wendy became kind of surrogate grandparents to her twins.
They stayed in touch with no one from their old lives. Sometimes at night, one or the other would bolt awake, victim of a nightmare that had put them back in the trenches and triage units of World War One.
They spent their lives together, and they never tired of each other’s company. They voluntarily entered nursing care in their late eighties. David died first, at 91, with Wendy holding his hand.
Wendy took one trip after that, to Niagara Falls with one of the twins. She emptied David’s ashes into the torrent. The twin promised to do the same for Wendy when her time came.
It did, a scant year later.
Devoted until the end, Niven and Gwendolyn nonetheless never married.
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Well, anyway; that’s what I think happened. What do you think they did?
If You Give a Box a Book…
My son James and I are now in charge of making sure our neighborhood Little Free Library is stocked with books that might light people’s faces, draw them to open those plexiglas doors and pull out a book and say, “Yes! I am taking this home!”
We like this volunteer gig.
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There’s a park around the corner and down the street a ways from my home, a park on the site of an old, beloved school that drew crying crowds the day the wrecking ball swung to take it out. I usually walk through that park on my daily walk, and one day, I was delighted to find that the local library system had installed a Little Free Library right next to my favorite path.
I watched that library every day, and, by the end of the first week, it was clear that some family, some kids, some readers, were loving it. I’d stop and neaten up the books, which had gotten tumbled by eager hands (the best kind of mess). Often, the pickings were slim until the library staff could find time to swing by and replenish things.
James and I decided to contribute three books each at the beginning of every month. James concentrated on Redwall books by Brain Jacques; he put the first three volumes in the little library, and they disappeared within three days. I ordered personal favorites—books like The Phantom Tollbooth, No Jumping on the Bed, Mike Mulligan and the Steam Shovel.
Those disappeared, too, and James and I were pumped up; when someone loves the books you offer or recommend, it’s a good, good feeling. I took a kind of on-line poll: what books would be good to contribute? Wonderful respnses inspired me to order books by Kevin Henkes, Roald Dahl, Dr. Seuss, Louisa May Alcott, L.M. Montgomery.
The books we added kept disappearing.
Then things slowed down over the winter holidays. I’d walk by to see the LFF was packed,—too full, really. It was hard to pull a book out. It was hard to see what was there.
And the book-taking, maybe because of weather and time of year, ground to a halt.
I would see that the same books were still there, week after week, and it made me a little sad.
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Then the outreach coordinator at the Library sent out a plea for people who’d volunteer to oversee a Little Free Library, and James and I said, “Please, please, pick us for our neighborhood book hub!”
And we were lucky: they did.
Now we have a crate of books from the library; now we can clean out the LFF, make sure books are easily accessible, note when books linger sadly and should, perhaps, be pulled out. (Maybe, we think, someone at one of the OTHER Free Libraries would very much like just that book. Maybe we can trade it in for something that might catch readers’ eyes HERE.)
Now we can see what’s available for stocking, and we can order some books to supplement– books we loved, things we hope other people might love too.
Being the Little Free Library caretakers—-well, this is a wonderful volunteer gig.
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Jess Metcalf, in Poppy Alexander’s The Littlest Library, feels much the same way. Jess has not had an easy time: her beloved grandmother, Mimi, died of cancer just a few short months before the book begins. And Jess lost her job in her local library due to thinning budgets, and, in England at the time the novel is set, there are few library jobs to be had.
But Jess, a careful, measured person, a thirty-year-old woman who knows it is quite possible that life is getting ready to deal out a devastating blow, does something completely out of character: she buys a cottage she discovers in a little village and she moves there. It’s a leap of faith: the cottage needs work; Jess has only enough savings to last for, maybe, six months, and she knows nothing about the village or its people.
But this feels RIGHT, and, maybe for the first time in her life, she acts purely on impulse.
And one of the deals with the house is this: the new owner has to maintain the red telephone box (think Dr. Who’s Tardis) out front. She is not allowed to remove it or disguise it; she must find a purpose for the structure, beloved by its former owner.
With the help of the village council, a grumpy (but hunky) shelf-building neighbor, and a community whose lending library had, sadly, closed, Jess stocks the phone box with her grandma’s beloved books. Soon she has to spend part of each day restocking the shelves; readers are reading. And people stop to talk with her about books; she makes new friends; she—of course she does!—-falls in love.
But the real ping of emotion, for me, is the joy Jess feels when one of her borrowers finds a book that they love.
I had just read two engrossing but exhausting books—books that featured different kinds of brutality and misuse of power; reading The Littlest Library was kind of a joyful palate cleanser.
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And I think it’s true, what Poppy Alexander suggests: for book lovers, there’s a rare fine satisfaction in recommending a book and then learning that the recommendee got the book, loved the book, and turned around to tell others they really HAVE to read this: It’s SO good!!!
That feeling, I think, is maybe why people (at least a generation or two ago) decided to become librarians. And there are images of librarians in literature who are just those people: the ones whose, really see a borrower, a child, in particular. They note about what the child likes to explore; they pull a book off the shelf, and they gently suggest the young searcher take it home to read.
And the child does, and the reading swings a door open, ignites an interest, and soon they are back at the librarian’s desk, back and eager, asking, “What’s next?”
I love reading stories like that, stories where those librarians connect with those readers.
Oh, the joy of turning someone on to a wonderful read, and the joy, too, of reading about that satisfying ‘click.’
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There’s a flip side to risking a recommendation, too, of course. There’s the chance that the person I tell about the book will not be interested. There’s a chance they’ll read a book I cherish and say, “Meh.” There’s a chance that I will be tremendously disappointed that the words that lifted me up and transported me to other worlds, to another way of thinking, are just kind of annoying potholes on that other person’s reading journey.
It’s a chancy business, recommending a book. (I see this on social media book lovers’ groups all the time. People will ask for book recommendations, and an excited soul will respond with a title they loved. And invariably someone will comment, “Seriously? You liked THAT? I was so bored I quit on page three.”
And I can hear the whooshing as the happiness balloon deflates and flaps limply to the muddy ground.)
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A Little Free Library is a chance to suggest a book without being overbearing about it—saying, sort of, “Here are a bunch a of choices. What looks good to YOU?”
And Jess’s little library…she doesn’t tell people what to read. Oh, she’ll help them if they say, “I loved Jane Eyre. What should I read next?” But mostly she lets them find their own way, their own book, and she waits a little breathlessly to hear how they liked it.
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The Littlest Library is a feel-good book. I knew, not far in, what was, inevitably, going to happen, but it was fun getting to that conclusion, seeing Jess grow as she confronts obstacles, seeing her make good decisions and solidify firm new friendships. At the risk of hearing, “Seriously?!?” I strongly recommend it to anyone who needs a joyful little read—especially if that anyone knows how wonderful it feels to find out a recommended book became a loved book.
When Power Runs Amok
But what should you fear? You are an old courtier. You know everything. Used widely, widely shared, knowledge may protect you.
The words of Thomas Cromwell to Francis Bryan in Bring Up the Bodies
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In a brutal world, people scramble for whatever power they can find.
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Anne Boleyn has plotted and schemed with great success: she is the second wife of Henry the VIII, replacing Katharine, whom Henry repudiated. The marriage between Henry and Anne, in 1533, broke England away from the church of Rome; this was the only way Henry could put Katharine aside and marry again.
But Anne, like Katharine, seemed unable to give Henry a son and heir. Her only living child was a daughter, Elizabeth. And Anne was accustomed to the court, to its intrigue and power struggles, and she plied her skills.
Did she cuckold the King? Did she commit treasonous by planning a marriage, one to take place after his death? Did she sleep with her lutist, her former fiancé, two noble lords who loved her deeply? Did she mock her husband’s virility in the presence of many?
The evidence either way—guilt or innocence—is sketchy and frail, but by 1535, Jane Seymour’s contrasting purity had caught and held the eye of the King.
And things snowballed: there were official accusations and a sort of kangaroo trial; four men lost their heads for suspicion of trifling with the Queen, and the Queen was executed on May 19, 1536. Her reign had lasted a mere three years.
Quickly, quietly, then, Henry married Jane Seymour. (Queenship wouldn’t last long for Jane, either; in giving her husband an heir, she sacrificed her life.)
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I woke up, chilled, at three in the morning, the night I finished Hillary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies. Imagine that young Queen, in her rooms in the Tower, spending the night. Imagine knowing that the next day, an expert swordsman (sent for, specially from France; this was Henry’s gift, his concession, to the wife he would kill) would lop off her head.
Anne made jokes about how easy it would be: her neck was very thin, after all. I think of her sitting in the dark night, knowing what was coming, knowing that, by herself, she could not escape. Did she hope for rescue?
Did she accept the brutal facts of the world she inhabited?
It’s a story of governmental power that is wielded, and it is a story of the people who got in its way.
The four men who died, accused of inappropriate relations with the Queen—were they guilty? Mantel has Thomas Cromwell say maybe not. But they are guilty of SOMETHING, he adds.
And Cromwell was a smart, smart, man; he knew how to use his position as a trusted councilor to remove those who would stand in his way. He had the knowledge; he understood the King, knew how his mind worked.
Cromwell wielded his knowing to cement his own power.
And the crowds gravitated to him: they were thrilled to hate Anne, to question her purity, to call out for her death.
Give the people a common enemy, that’s the thing.
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Bring Up the Bodies haunted my dark night hours; it may not have been the best idea to follow that reading up with Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts. Ng’s story takes place now, or near to now, a little in the future, maybe. And the powerbrokers in that United States have given the people, terrified and stricken by a crippling economic crisis, a convenient common enemy: China.
And also, by extension, they should look with suspicion on their Asian-American neighbors, whether their roots are in China, or Korea, or Japan. Or the Philippines! Whatever!
Watch out for each other, say the signs posted everywhere. Report on each other is what they mean. People who ‘look Asian’ are unprotected victims of individual attacks. Some die. Most retreat into a shuttered life, working hard not to draw any attention to themselves at all.
But there’s worse brutality in this society. The violence against persons is bad enough, but if the government has suspicions about parents, they do something even worse: they take their children away.
Our Missing Hearts has a hero who is not technically guilty either, not at first: Margaret Miu’s words were never intended to be subversive. But a young protester happens on them, applies them to the disappearance of children, which is happening to many families. “Our missing hearts,” the young woman calls those children, after a line in Margaret Miu’s poem.
The young protester is murdered, and Margaret, mother of Bird, wife of Ethan, is so vilified in the press that finally she has to leave. Which is better, she and Ethan reason, than having their son taken away from both of them. If Margaret leaves, if Ethan seems to repudiate her, perhaps he can raise their boy.
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Margaret is, though, guilty of knowledge. She sets out, after her leaving, to find the stories of all those families who’ve been ripped apart. She makes the right connections to do that; what she finds shatters her heart, just as leaving her own family did.
The library is a powerful symbol in Ng’s book. I remembered a quote from Michael Moore while I read Our Missing Hearts, a quote that goes like this: “[Librarians] are subversive. You think they’re just sitting there at the desk, all quiet and everything. They’re like plotting the revolution, man. I wouldn’t mess with them.”
Libraries and revolution are connected here. And Bird will start with a librarian on his quest to find his mother.
In the afterward to this dystopian novel, Ng talks about the sad reality of taking children away form parents as a means of control—a practice we don’t have to dig far into history to unearth.
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I finished Our Missing Hearts last night, as a storm whipped up, as winds howled, as temperatures dropped. Again, I was chilled, inside and out.
Both books chill with their depiction of power misused; one is historical fiction, the other , a cautionary tale.And both are great, engaging reads.
Locked Rooms and Those Who Hold the Keys
“Nothing,” says Nelson, “is like it is in the books.”
—–Elly Griffiths, The Locked Room
This post is also published on Catching My Drift.
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Locked rooms.
I am thinking of them because I just finished a book with exactly that name. I am thinking of them because the clouds are darkening, huddling closer: I am glad I took an early walk, because I’ll need to get my hourly steps inside the house this rainy morning. Weather-locked?
I am thinking of them because another mystery I just read—and I wish I could remember which one that was—mentioned medieval anchorites.
I am wrestling with the concept of locked rooms—physically locked rooms, and emotionally locked rooms. I am coming to terms with the fact that sometimes we choose to lock ourselves into isolating places.
I am wondering if that’s maybe a human reaction to certain sorts of trauma.
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I can’t remember now how I happened on the Elly Griffiths mysteries; my friend Wendy reads them, too, so maybe she recommended Griffiths’ Ruth Galloway series. Or I might have learned about them in a Facebook book forum, checked them out and really enjoyed them, and then I might have encouraged Wendy to read them too. At any rate, last year I pre-ordered the fourteenth book in the series, The Locked Room.
And last week, it arrived.
I had been perilously close to that nerve-wracking uncertain place: the place where there’s no next book warming up, flexing its pitching arm, in the bullpen. Imagine: waking up one day and realizing the last book is done and THERE IS NO BOOK WAITING. It would be kind of like walking across a steep gully on a narrow bridge with no railings.
So I went to the library; I picked up the book I had on reserve, and while I was there, I browsed. I came home with four books. And that very day a thoughtful friend sent me a book in the mail.
And the very next day, another thoughtful friend left a book on my desk at work.
Suddenly the danger of booklessness was blessedly, richly, gone.
I spread the books out, considered, and then stacked them up so my reading adventures would be varied. I had non-fiction and fiction, I had memoir and mystery; I had some light summer reads and I had some hefty tomes. I had books by authors I know and love, and I had books by authors whose writing I want to explore.
I stacked them up so a tough, muscular, non-fiction read would be followed by a frothy palate cleanser, and then I’d read a murder mystery, for example. I committed to reading them in the order stacked.
When The Locked Room arrived, I was reading—and enjoying—Olga Dies Dreaming, by Xochitl Gonzalez. (It occurs to me that Gonzalez’s characters had their own locked rooms, but that’s a musing for another day.)
I try very hard not to let the books on the TBR pile distract me from my current read. So I savored Olga Dies Dreaming, which had some nicely unexpected parts to its ending.
Then I jumped Elly Griffith’s The Locked Room to the top of the stack and dove right in.
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Elly Griffith is a prolific mystery novelist; she has a couple of series and some stand-alone novels, and she’s won prestigious awards for her writing. I like all of her books, but I am particularly fond of Ruth Galloway, an amateur detective protagonist. Ruth has a doctorate in archaeology; she teaches at a small fictional British college; and she lives in an odd little house-cottage by the sea in Norfolk.
She was unmarried when I met her in the first book; she is unmarried still, but she has had serious relationships between book one and now. The most important is with police officer/detective Harry Nelson, who fathered Ruth’s daughter, Kate. Ruth, who tells us she is plump and un-glamorous, asks nothing of Nelson, who is married with grown daughters and a late-in-life son with his wife, Michelle. But clearly Ruth and Nelson love each other; they try to bury that fact, but the tension infuses all the mysteries Ruth helps to solve.
The Locked Room is set during the pandemic lockdown in Britain, and Griffiths plays with the concept of the locked room mystery.
There is a victim, we realize from the first, imprisoned in a locked room. Her captor brings her very light snacks, kindly removes her waste, and slides a packet of pills to her. Softly, slyly, he coaxes the victim to consider taking ALL the pills, to kill herself. And, locked in the dreadful dark, his words begin to make a terrible kind of sense.
The police investigate a series of seeming suicides, but something doesn’t quite add up for Nelson. Then one body is found, an overdose victim, neatly arrayed in her bedroom.
But the bedroom door is locked from the outside.
And there is the pandemic, and the lockdown, which begins very close to the beginning of this book. Ruth and Kate struggle with on-line education; Kate, in the sixth year at school, has been looking forward to dances and field trips and moving up ceremonies. Ruth, who loves interacting with her students, especially taking them on digs, finds that teaching via Zoom is not nearly as rewarding.
The government tells them they may take two walks a day. Ruth struggles to figure out shopping.
The lockdown feels like a locked room. Many of us can relate.
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The book’s ending satisfies; it also offers a tantalizing cliff-hanger. And it sent me to the internet, to find out more about locked room mysteries.
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Gigi Pandian (“Locked Room Mysteries: A Beginner’s Guide,” on crimereads.com) says that locked room mysteries are making a comeback. Pandian says she has been ‘a locked room mystery nerd’ for decades.
She defines the genre for me; there are a few permutations. A locked room mystery could be exactly what it sounds like: a crime takes place in a room that’s locked from the inside. It’s set up so that no one, seemingly, could have entered or left the space. It’s impossible! But the mystery writer guides us to a conclusion that, finally, makes perfect sense.
Pandian says a variation is the impossible crime genre. Apparently there’s no solution to the crime that’s been committed. Of course, though, by the ending of the story or book, the intrepid sleuth has figured out how it all happened, and the solution is both clever and rational.
And then, Pandian says, there is the ‘closed circle’ mystery. In this form, there are a limited number of possible villains. A small group of guests, for instance, is marooned at a gloomy country estate. The horrific weather insures no one arrives or leaves.
And then one of the guests is killed. The murderer MUST (right???) be one of the characters we’ve met. But who? And why?
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And, in “The Locked Room,” an article by PJ Bergen (the locked room.com), I learn that Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is not only credited with being the first modern detective story. It also popularized the locked room mystery genre. Poe writes about two women, brutally assaulted and killed, in an apartment locked from the inside. How could a killer have entered, struck, and left?
C. Auguste Dupin, Poe’s hero detective, figures it out.
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The concept of the locked room mystery may have been inspired by real life people, who, in late medieval times, voluntarily had themselves locked in a room with no exit or entrance. These folks were called anchorites, and they were not ordained clergy or nuns, but they sacrificed their freedom for spiritual reasons.
I find an article called “Medieval Anchorites: Experts at Self-Isolation,” on ancient-origins.net.
It tells me that women chose to become anchorites, predominantly, although there were some men who embraced the life. They withdrew from society; most commonly, they were walled up in a room attached to a church. There was no way to get out, but there was a slot for meals to come in, for waste to go out.
Once immured in this way, the anchorites could devote their life to prayer, to a religious form of life, without taking vows. Oddly, the isolation granted the anchorites a kind of celebrity. Visitors would come to talk with them, to get advice, to ask for intercessary prayer. The church was usually at the center of the village; so the anchorite was at the center of village life.
The self-isolation was seen as a selfless sacrifice; there was even a guidebook for female anchorites called Ancrene Wisse. You’ll be giving up comfort and community, the guidebook acknowledged, but your prayer will benefit others.
Julian of Norwich is a famous anchorite example. She wrote, “Christ did not say, ‘You shall not be perturbed, you shall not be troubled, you shall not be distressed,’ but he said, ‘You shall not be overcome.’”
Being an anchorite was HARD. Julian of Norwich acknowledged that; the guidebook did, too. It advised ways to adjust. Keep busy, it instructed. A routine is essential.
Some anchorites didn’t make it; they went mad and had to be excavated from their isolation. But others lived long lives in their confined spaces, which could be as small as a cell, or could have two stories and several rooms. But still. We all know what it’s like to feel confined to our homes. Imagine choosing that for life.
Talk about a mystery.
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But maybe there is something very human, very vulnerable, in the desire to be confined in a small space with little hope of rescue. Barring lockdowns and prisons, those spaces may be more cerebral than physical these days.
Take, for instance, addiction—addiction to any number of things that keep a person within a closed circuit. The irony here is that the enclosing addiction may, at first, have been seen as liberation.
“…people who become addicted,” writes Dr. Elizabeth Hartley (in “Understanding Addiction and What it Feels Like to be Addicted”), “may always have felt apart, different, isolated, and alone.” The first experience of a drug, an alcohol high, a gambling win, a sexual experience, makes the person feel alive, included, and worthwhile. That feeling of inclusion often leads to extended indulgence, which leads, tragically, to total separation, to physical and mental damage. The person with addiction is now more isolated from others, and very much more in danger.
We look in from the outside, wondering, Why don’t they QUIT? But the person suffering addiction is in a locked room.
We wonder, too, why abuse victims don’t leave. An article (“Why Domestic Violence Victims Don’t Leave”) on domestic violence.org, says, “…they feel isolated and trapped.” Not only their own safety, but the safety of their children, pets, and extended family could be in jeopardy if the victim escapes. “Gripping fear” keeps them in the relationship.
And society creates barriers, too: economic realities, religious strictures about the sanctity of marriage, the stigma of being abused.
Domestic violence victims inhabit their own special kinds of locked rooms.
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People we see every day may be locked in, too. Those who experienced shame over and over as children may be paralyzed. “People who live with shame are less likely to take healthy risks” (5 Ways Shame Can Shape Your Life, clear view treatment.com)
It’s safer to just stay where one is, in the old house, the old job, the old relationship. Think of what could happen if one ventures out…
Shame, depression, anxiety, fear…all can be jailers keeping people in their locked rooms. It’s ironic that our own internal voices may be more confining than the actual walls that locked us in—-something many of us experienced during the pandemic.
I remember reading a college psych class about poor rats, who, locked in for so long, that when the door is opened, they stay in their confining space. Those rats need to have the knowledge of (and desire for) freedom brought home to them again.
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At the risk, though, of spoiling Elly Griffith’s new book, I have to say that happy endings are possible. Recovery is possible. Rescue is possible. Counseling is a key that opens many rusty doors.
So maybe locked room mysteries are so fascinating because we know—or we dread knowing—what it’s like to be the victim isolated in that confined space. The books often end well, and that reminds us that our stories can end well too—that keys exist to open many kinds of doors. Sometimes, we look down, surprised, discovering that key is firmly gripped in our own hand. Like lab rats, we have to make ourselves choose to go out the door.
The Sames and the Differents; the Details; the Voice
Similarities and differences. That’s what I want to ponder what I read memoirs—where does my experience parallel theirs, and where does it diverge? And the details the writer shares to draw the picture the words conjure; what a writer chooses to tell says a whole awful lot. All of that and, then of course, the voice.
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I’ve been reading memoirs a lot lately.
For instance: This is Getting Old by Susan Moon.
Susan Moon is a Zen Buddhist practitioner; I respect that, even while I don’t fully understand what it entails. Her philosophy is not a concrete point of contact for me, but her age, when she wrote Getting Old, is. Her age then was, in fact, just about the same age I am now, having just finished reading the book.
At one point, Moon notes, “I have come to the point of diminishing returns as far as sitting cross-legged goes.” I was trying to sit in a sort of cross-legged position as my nicely gray cohort stretched and cooled down after my Tuesday strength and core class just this morning.
It didn’t work out so well; I was much better off sitting with the heels of my sneakers softly touching, trying to press my knees to the floor (which didn’t quite work either.)
Remember gracefully falling into a cross-legged seat on a random floor, at a party maybe, or at a friend’s, just kind of flowing there?
Yeah, I know. That was a LONG time ago. But I’m grateful for the movement I can do and still enjoy.
Susan Moon’s writing brings all that to my surface.
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Moon also writes about the death of her mother and the birth of her grandchild. These are events I know, too, although my events, of course, are not the same as hers.
But Moon writes, “As I experience some of what my mother went through as she grew old, I sympathize with her in a new way.” I read that, and I think, exactly. There are days I wish I could pick up the phone and call my mother and say, “When did THIS start happening for YOU? And how did you deal with that?”
Then I realize that I have now lived more than two years longer than my mother, who’s been gone almost 35 years—she left us before her youngest grandchildren, and any of her great grandchildren, were born. (That makes me sad: my mother was a tentative parent, but, as a grandparent, she came fully into her own. I wish the kids who came later, my son Jim included, could have known her in that role.)
When Moon writes about a grandchild’s birth, I think about when Kaelyn came into our lives. (A round faced baby with dandelion fluff hair, she wriggled right into her grandpa’s heart, making herself completely comfortable. There has never been a reason for her to leave that cozy space; he likes having her there.) To see Kaelyn’s dad, my stepson Matt, holding her…well, these are special, particular people, but that, I think is a universal, coming-of-granding moment: to see the child you’ve raised being tender and amazed holding their own precious little life.
Susan Moon’s words made me remember, made me ponder, all of that.
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Then I read a couple of books by Mary Laura Philpott; I had never heard her name until I read about her on a couple of reliable book sites. A successor to Nora Ephron, one said, and I thought, Oh, I’ll check THAT out.
Turns out that age is NOT something Mary Laura and I have in common. She is closer in age, and in the ages of her children, to my niece Meg and her family. Like Meg,–and, I reluctantly admit, like me—Mary Laura is unabashedly Type A…a little bit (!) driven; a little bit (😊) perfectionistic. Often when I read memoirs, I am struck and sort of shushed by the gentle, quiet, self-awareness of the writer, whom I think must be calmly introspective, and unlikely to, say, stay up until midnight making sure the house is clean so that tomorrow, when the cleaner comes, she won’t think we always live like pigs.
Mary Laura writes about the roots of resentment, and I think, Yes: exactly right. “I agreed to do this for you, and you were supposed to do the same for me,” she laments in an essay called “The Swing.” She is remembering playing with her brother, and her explosive reaction when he violated what she thought were the ironclad terms of their sharing agreement.
I read that, and I think that so often I believe that an agreement is in place, but the perception is one-sided…and that side is my side alone. So I really can’t complain, can’t appeal the decision, and because everything has been so unspoken, the resentment must be submerged too.
Which makes it not less real but much more toxic.
Philpott writes about the discovery of her son’s potentially debilitating condition. It’s a physical thing, and her hopeful book notes that the family works with doctors, and they get it, pretty swiftly, under some kind of control. I did not have that exact experience, but in the slow unravelling of my son James’s autism, there were many of the same recognitions, fears, and uncertainties.
So Philpott may be younger; she may live in a different part of the country; her experience of marriage and parenting may not be exactly like mine.
But reading Moon, and reading Philpott, I encounter shared threads. And as they untangle THEIR threads, I am better able to follow mine.
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So I read memoir, I think for two opposite things: I read to find out what it’s like to live life in a different kind of way. And I read to figure out how other people handle the same situations I face.
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One of the reasons this is on my mind is because I have had the unique and wonderful opportunity to edit a former student’s memoir. Jason was my student when I first started teaching—he was a middle schooler; I taught a composite of things—gym, art, maybe an English class here and there. He has gone on to be a poet; he has at least four books published, several of which grace my shelves.
His poetry weaves and delves; it is honest, unpretentious, immediate, moving, and, very often, brilliant.
So I was excited and honored when he asked me if I would edit his memoir.
And it is a beautiful memoir: it is Jason’s story within the story of his mother, and how she lived and how she died. Jason was born with multiple birth defects; he has handled his physical challenges so well, and succeeded in so many ways (succeeded more, in fact, than many of us who don’t share the kinds of challenges he’s smacked into, head-on) that it is hard to look in from the outside and see just what that meant to his life, to his family, to, ultimately, the person who both pushed him forward and held him close: his mother.
I do not know, for instance, how to live with an ostomy; reading Jason’s story, I get a glimmer of understanding. But I do know how much it costs to deviate from the life everyone expected one to live—how taking big chances and making big moves can jeopardize the fragile status quo of things—including relationships a person thinks will be rock solid forever and a day.
And I do know that the heartache and unlooked for joy in raising a child with a disability are little understood. And in Jason’s book, too, there is the long, slow loss of a mother. I’ve experienced that, too.
The differences are there, and the similarities ping. When Jason stops revising, and I stop editing (it is maybe not the best of things for two perfectionists to collaborate), I know that his book will find the right publisher. And then I will give you title and author’s name and urge you to read something that has opened up worlds to me and affirmed my experience at the same time.
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I’ve gotten so excited about memoirs that when I see one on the ‘New’ shelf at the library, I tend to indiscriminately says, “Yes! Yes!” and take that book out and bring it home.
And I have found that there are some memoirs I do NOT want to read.
I was excited about a young writer’s memoir; she had a really fresh angle; I jumped her book ahead of others on the TBR stack and settled in. And the first thing she told me was that she seriously considered prostitution as a way to meet money woes, which seriously set my priggish back up.
I had to give myself quite a talking to. “In the first place,” I said to me, “she didn’t do it. And you are not she; she is not you; you’re reading to learn.”
So I plugged on until the scene in which the author described the pus she squeezed from blackheads on her nose, and how several of her thus-filled kleenex littered the surface of her dresser.
Learning about this did not stretch me, change me, or illumine me, and I took the book back to that library that night.
There can be, I now surmise, such a thing as TOO MUCH SHARING in a memoir.
The rich details a writer chooses to get her point across…those make or break the reading experience for me.
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I also don’t want to read a memoir to be impressed. I started a celebrity memoir; the book jacket mentioned its soaring prose. And the words were definitely carefully chosen, but they were chosen to impress—impress with their erudition; impress with their description of elite, rarely encountered pastimes; and impress with that, “Gosh! This person’s life is soooooo much more interesting/enlightened/intellectual than mine.”
I took that book back too: I couldn’t find the recognition points, and the differences did not come with bridges.
I want to hear a voice, when I read a memoir, that reaches in,–as an old friend’s voice might when, reunited after, say, forty years, we start to talk…and, within the first two minutes, all the strangeness peels away, and we just understand each other.
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Maybe reading memoir now is a function of age; having lived this long, it’s fascinating to see how other people navigated passages I’ve been through. (I am old enough to have been through quite a few passages.) So many voices call to me, and the field provides rich reading.
Maybe publishers are offering more memoirs these days, and there’s just, at this particular point in time, more memoirs to choose from.
And maybe both. The why of it may not be so important; I just know that, when the similarities and differences are there in just the right balance, when the writer shares those bits and scraps of a life that coalesce into a concrete picture in the bony caverns of my mind, and when the voice is fresh and speaks directly to my understanding—well, then, a memoir is what I want to be reading.
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Tonight, having cleansed my palate with a beachy murder mystery, I’m going to start Delia Ephron’s Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life. I like the sound of that second chance, and the reviews I’ve read promise a good read.
Have you read it? Did it speak to you?
Buddy Books: Ethel Rosenberg
This summer, my ability to absorb words came roaring back.
Oh, I read during the pandemic’s quarantined days, read voraciously, read like reading kept me afloat. But it was a time when I had to plod through things that I thought I SHOULD read.
I would learn of a new book, say, in the New York Times Book Review. I’d think to myself, “That’s important. That’s something I ought to be reading about.”
And I would request it from the library, along with a stack of murder mysteries and historical novels about women’s roles in World War II.
I would pick up a sack full of books delivered to my car by a masked library staffer in the library parking lot, and I would take those books home. And I would read the SHOULD book, but only because I felt like I had to, like I needed to inject some fiber into my reading.
The topic might be compelling, the writing vivid, but I slogged through the should-book, forcing myself to read a chapter a day, then rewarding myself with a dive into the fiction.
Over the winter, I read maybe three should-books, and probably fifty light, fun novels.
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But then the vaccines came, and Delta had not yet arrived, and the world opened up a little. And that crack, that splice between the heavy metal doors that had been guarding our egress,—well, that not only let me go into stores, attend events, and take a short trip or two. It also opened my brain, which seemed to have pulled in its curiosity feelers and hunkered down itself when COVID quarantined us.
I started writing down titles of books that just sounded fascinating—books I’d hear about in reviews, in online book discussions, from friends and family.
I’d browse the now open library shelves—the New Books, and the venerable stacks.
We’d reward ourselves for work well done with trips to our favorite bookstores, and I would buy books there.
And mostly, I read all those books that came to me.
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And here’s a funny thing I’ve just been appreciating: some of the books fell into a pattern, or a symbiosis. I’d read a non-fiction book on a topic, and I’d see a compelling review for a novel centered on just the same thing. And when I read the fiction, I would see that my empathy and understanding were expanded. I had the facts, but I could also imagine the emotion, the setting, the characters who peopled the story.
Two books on the same topic. Buddy books, I’m starting to call them.
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My first experience of buddy books started with Francine Prose’s Vixen. Francine Prose is an author I have been meaning to read. In fact, I had found a copy of her Household Saints at a book sale, and it hovers around the top of my TBR pile; it hovered there, sadly forlorn, all through the quarantine.
But I was looking forward to reading it, and then I read about her new novel, Vixen, in the Times Book Review, and I thought, “Well, why not start my Francine Prose experience there?”
So I requested Vixen at the library, and I read a novel based on Ethel Rosenberg’s true story.
The ‘vixen’ in the novel is Esther Rosenstein, a curvaceous temptress and the main character in a really bad novel that our protagonist, Simon Putnam, is supposed to rescue—rescue enough that it’s publishable and it, in turn, can rescue the failing publishing company that Simon works for.
Esther is Ethel Rosenberg, thinly veiled, but in the fictional world, the character is a sumptuously seductive femme fatale.
Poor Simon. His livelihood depends on his success with the novel. And the novel is not only god-awful BAD, its story is god-awful repellent.
Simon spent the evening of the Rosenbergs’ execution (June 19, 1953) sitting with his parents, glued to the radio, listening while last-minute appeals were denied and the Rosenbergs, finally, were led, Julius first and then Ethel, to their electric chair deaths.
Simon’s mother knew Ethel when they were both girls, and, in Simon’s house, the executions were considered a travesty.
So Simon is faced with ethical dilemmas and horrible writing; Prose sets that scenario amidst some very real history.
The strange story of a cut Jello box used to confirm identity or carry messages between spies, the photo of the Rosenbergs entwined in a desperate embrace, the horrible details about Ethel’s death (Julius died quickly; Ethel did not) that Prose offers are verified in Anne Sebba’s Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy.
Sebba’s Ethel is no temptress, but she is a bright, talented, complex woman, and a devoted mother. And her guilt—her role as a dangerous spy—is far from certain. Julius was pretty much confirmed to have been carrying secrets for the Russians.
Ethel’s brother and his wife…they too were pretty much undeniably spies. Ethel’s sister-in-law, though, never spent a day in jail. Ethel’s brother turned on his sister and her husband. It was mostly based on his testimony, the testimony of an admitted spy, that the Rosenbergs were put to death.
Sebba’s biography was as taut and gripping as well-crafted fiction. Reading the two books back-to-back chilled me. I couldn’t avoid imagining Ethel writing that last letter to her beloved boys, and then walking that last walk to her death. I pictured her hugging the matron who’d been kind to her. The matron was supposed to be a witness to her death, but, after the embrace, she could not stay and watch a woman who’d become a friend die.
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I ran the courtroom proceedings Sebba reported by my husband, a lawyer and history buff. He was not too familiar with the Rosenbergs’ story (“Wasn’t she the real brains behind the whole thing?” he asked. “I thought I remembered reading that.”), but he wasn’t surprised at what passed for justice, even in the highest courts in the land, in 1953. There was hysteria then; “Communist” was a damning title, and Ethel and Julius were, admittedly, members of a communist group as young people. From there, it was just a short step to innuendo and false testimony.
The idea of Ethel as the brains behind the treachery was part of the official propaganda, according to Sebba. Sebba’s arguments were convincing to me; at the least, the chance that a woman innocent of any and all charges of spying was put to death is very, very real.
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I enjoyed each book. Vixen and Ethel Rosenberg were fascinating reads, time spent well. And read back-to-back, they created a bigger space, a fuller picture, than if I’d just read one.
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Since reading Vixen and Ethel Rosenberg, I have, without planning, read through two more sets of ‘buddy books,’—fiction and non-fiction volumes that illuminate and enlarge on the same event or issue or idea. I like the pairings so much that I will search out buddies for future books I read, blowing out limiting walls on my understanding.
And I’m hoping for a healthy fall and winter, seasons where the energy to reading challenging books isn’t crushed under a return to pandemic protocols and the need for comfort rather than provocation.
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And I hope words are charming you today; I hope you are happy and well.
A Nose in a Book 