Book #120: The Widower's Tale: A Novel

Title: The Widower's Tale: A Novel
Author: Julia Glass

I loved Julia Glass's novel The Three Junes and also enjoyed The Whole World Over, so I expected to like The Widower's Tale. It didn't disappoint. It's true that Percy, the 70-year-old protagonist of the novel is crotchety and fussy and incredibly set in his ways when the story opens (and the narrator reads Percy's parts with a British accent, even though he's originally from New Jersey and has spent most of his life in the Boston area-- perhaps the retired Harvard librarian is channeling Madonna?). Gradually, as we see Percy through the eyes of the other people in his life (his grandson, Robert, his daughters, and Sarah, his first girlfriend since the death of his wife 30 years earlier), we start to like him. Actually, I think we start to like Percy more not only because we get past the prickly exterior but because Percy changes over the course of the story. He begins to realize that people (yes, even himself) can be forgiven for their mistakes and sins and can even find the capacity to love again.  I liked the way that the story was not just about Percy, but also about Robert, Sarah, Percy's daughters Trudy and Clover, Clover's work colleague Ira, and even the Guatemalan gardener who works on the house next door.

One of the downfalls of the book is that it tends to reveal what I assume are Glass's own prejudices. When Sarah is diagnosed with breast cancer, Glass spends many pages talking about the problems of the uninsured. Entire chapters are devoted to the plight of the gardener's immigration status, vigilante environmentalists, and the discrimination Ira encounters in his job as a gay preschool teacher take over other chapters. At times parts of the book (mainly those dealing with the residents of Matlock and the parents of the preschool teachers) felt like satire, but I'm not sure that they were.

Despite the many perspectives and the tirades, Glass does a great job of wrapping up the story-- not too tidily, but entirely satisfyingly.

Book #119: This is What I Did

Title: This is What I Did
Author: Ann Dee Ellis

I really, really wanted to love This is What I Did. Ann Dee Ellis teaches Creative Writing at BYU and writes for Throwing Up Words, a blog that I really like about writing for the young adult audience. I did like the book, but I didn't love it as much as I was hoping to.  

There are a lot of things I admire about the book-- I like the way that Ellis tackles a difficult subject (the main character, Logan, witnesses a vicious attack on two children by one of the kids' fathers, and he doesn't do anything about it, even when the son retaliates and appears to kill his dad), I like the secondary characters (like Laurel, one of the few people who isn't afraid of Logan at his new school), and I like the way that Logan has to work through the problems that are eating at him. I also like the way that Ellis incorporates things like email messages into her text.

If you look at the cover art for This is What I Did, you see a simple line drawing of a boy on a solid background. It's spare, and so is Ellis's prose. I can't figure out if I didn't like the spareness of the prose-- the way that everything Logan says or thinks feels like it's been wrestled out of him, or if it was just the way that the other kids were so cruel to Logan (he's bullied by the kids in his scout troop, the kids at school, and basically the kids everywhere). I do think it's a story worth reading, and one that I may give to my preteen boy, who I feel may end up dealing with more than his own share of bullies someday. I think he'll like the story, and I like it too, I just think I'd like it better if it were more richly detailed and fleshed out.

Book #118: I Just Lately Started Buying Wings

Title: I Just Lately Started Buying Wings: Missives from the Other Side of Silence
Author: Kim Dana Kupperman

I read I Just Lately Started Buying Wings for my creative nonfiction seminar, and Kim Kupperman came to my class to talk about her book and lead us through some writing exercises. She even read our essays and gave us some feedback.

I Just Lately Started Buying Wings is a series of essays about Kupperman's life, and many center on her relationships with her parents, who divorced shortly after she was born, and engaged in a decade-long custody battle over her. I think there are people who have interesting things happen to and are able to tell a good story because of those unusual life experiences, and there are other people who life relatively common lives and manage to bring life to mundane things (if I ever make it as a writer, I'll fall into the latter category-- I live an entirely boring, calm, and happy life). Kupperman has a story to tell-- the story of a mother who was plagued by mental and physical illnesses and didn't seem able to put aside her own selfishness in order to do what was best for her young daughter, the story of a father who married so many times and seemed ultimately concerned with winning, and the story of the daughter who grew up somewhat scathed from her experiences with these parents.

Kupperman tells her story beautifully. Although the book was meant as a series of essays, and there are essays that deal only tangentially with the central parent-child story, I felt most engaged with the book when reading the essays that dealt with this experience directly. The book wasn't a memoir, but it almost felt like it should have been.

Book #117: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Title: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Author: Sherman Alexie

I've read a bunch of short stories by Sherman Alexie and knew enough about him to know that he's considered one of the preeminent writers of our day. And even though I've read a lot, I still seem to harbor a prejudice that "serious" writers can't be fun. But The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is really fun, and also so sweet and touching that I found myself sobbing into my treadmill several mornings in a row. 

The book tells the story of Arnold "Junior" Spirit's ninth-grade year. He's lived his whole life on a Spokane Indian reservation in Washington state, attracting bullies because hydrocephalus as an infant left him with a larger, more fragile skull than the other boys his age. When he unexpectedly chooses to leave the rez to attend high school in a neighboring town, he encounters challenges that he couldn't have fathomed when his life was defined by the borders of the reservation. While some of his challenges are the universal to growing up (a grandparent's death, friend troubles, discovering girls) other problems are related to life on the reservation (the untimely deaths of other characters, poverty, prejudice, etc...). Alexie does a fantastic job narrating the story, and I felt completely won over by Junior by the end of the novel.

Book #116: The Twisted Sisterhood: Unraveling the Dark Legacy of Female Friendships

Title: The Twisted Sisterhood: Unraveling the Dark Legacy of Female Friendships
Author: Kelly Valen

I published this review back at fMh in October.

Kelly Valen’s book The Twisted Sisterhood: Unraveling the Dark Legacy of Female Friendships hits stores tomorrow. A few months ago, Kelly approached me about reviewing her book for fMh, because fMh played a small role in inspiring her to write it. In December 2007 Valen, an attorney and mother of four, wrote an article for the New York Times about running into a former sorority sister in a California Gymboree. Two decades earlier, Valen was date raped at a fraternity party, and this woman was instrumental in getting the sisterhood to band together against Valen. When they met again, the woman apologized for her behavior, but for Valen the encounter dredged up all the feelings that she’d tried to lock away after that experience as an eighteen-year-old when “I withdrew socially and pretended it didn’t matter. I hid under my Sony Walkman, hit the books and donned a defensive armor of sarcasm and cynicism. And I gave up on female camaraderie.”

The article spawned discussion all over the blogosphere, including this post by ECS. In the wake of the discussion, Valen felt both beaten up and empowered, and she decided to explore the themes she laid out in the article in a book. In all honesty, I wasn’t chomping at the bit to read the book (I’m a little busy these days with school and teaching and being a mom to four little kids) so I sat down yesterday intending to skim it, but I found that a simple skimming was impossible. Yes, there are lots of books out there about girls being uncivil and bratty and downright mean to other girls (Reviving Ophelia, Queen Bees and Wannabees, and Odd Girl Out, to name a few) but fewer that deal with the same issues in grown women. In researching the book, Valen interviewed over 3000 women, and found that a shocking 84% of the women felt significantly damaged from their experiences with other women. These damaging experiences sometimes came one on one, but more often when groups of women or girls ganged up on someone. She writes about women who avoided book clubs and Mommy and Me groups, because those groups felt like an extension of junior high school cliques, where women were constantly being sized up and compared.

Maybe I’m lacking in emotional intelligence, but I have a hard time recalling experiences from my past that have left me feeling significantly damaged. Yes, I was bullied by a girl in elementary school (who mixed foods on my lunch tray and then forced me to eat them), and I often knew that other girls were talking about me behind my back in junior high. My best friend as a child bossed me around. My first female boss out of college had an inner circle of “cool girls” who got promoted, and I wasn’t among them. But I had either a healthy sense of self-esteem, or a great mother, or an ability to forget, because none of these experiences in my young life have given me a lasting sense of self-doubt. I’ve stayed home from book club because there were good things on tv or because I’d already read that book, but never because I was nervous about facing a cadre of snippy women (although I have seen women feel very threatened when the topics of our discussions have veered from books).

Valen’s book did help me see times in my life when I wasn’t as nice to other women in my sisterhood as I should have been. Times when I’ve judged another woman’s parenting style or her food choices or her clothing. And because I’ve done (and sometimes continue to do) those things, Valen would argue that it puts my girls at risk for perpetuating the twisted sisterhood that exists among women, where we want to be friends, but we can’t help competing with and judging each other.

I felt that the sections in Valen’s book where she talks about a mother’s responsibility (she is a mother to three girls, ages 15, 10 and 10) were the ones that made me squirm the most, the ones that made me analyze my own mothering. And that’s exactly her point. In the second half of the book, I felt almost as if I were reading a book by Julie Beck, not in the sense that she was talking about religious issues, but in the sense that Valen feels it’s a moral responsibility for mothers to teach their daughters how to navigate the complicated waters of building positive relationships with other women. She says:
“This book offers up a tall order of issues, but possibly its greatest contribution would be to inspire more mothers to meaningfully commit themselves to raising a more compassionate, inclusive, and integrated generation of girls, and to give them the tools to define and feel good about themselves, and to help them protect and nurture that rather than look to others for self-worth and happiness.” (152-153)”

My own daughters are eight and three. I feel lucky to be exploring these issues while they’re relatively young. My older daughter, in fourth grade, already comes home from school stressing about various friendships. I talk through the problems with her, trying to help her see how she can be nice, try to stay above the fray, and still not jeopardize friendships, but it’s hard. I often wonder if I’m doing enough. Valen might say I’m not. She says, “One school counselor told me point-blank she thinks that not only are most mothers not engaged enough, ‘most of us are failing our daughters miserably. It’s a lucky girl who has a good enough mother.’” While Valen talks about some programs that mothers and daughters can engage in together, I gleaned from the book that in order to teach our daughters well, we have to be the example of women who aren’t catty and backbiting, who don’t compare ourselves to others, who don’t avoid the company of women who we feel inferior to. She also says, “I’ve come to crave a new default mode for my daughters and for me, one in which females a priori tend toward openness and propping one another up versus dressing each other down” (177).

Valen also engages in a lengthy discussion of feminism, and talks about how many younger women feel that feminism doesn’t apply to them. It’s another interesting conversation, but it felt a little bit far from the issue that seems closest to Valen’s heart– the responsibility mothers have to raise a generation of daughters who are smarter, kinder, and more self-assured than they were, and the mothers just might find themselves possessing those characteristics themselves in the process.

Book #115: Great House: A Novel

Title: Great House: A Novel
Author: Nicole Krauss

I've noticed that I tend to read a lot of novels that have the ": A Novel" designation as part of their titles. Sometimes I think "well, duh, of course this is a novel," and at other times, like with Great House, I think that adding ": A Novel" helps dumb readers like me figure out exactly what Krauss wants to accomplish.

After that introduction, you probably think that I wasn't a fan of Great House, and that couldn't be further from the truth. It's just that Krauss's novel starts out as what appears to be a series of fairly unrelated short stories from five or six different perspectives. After a hundred pages or so, it becomes evident that a massive writing desk appears in many of the stories, and eventually, as characters reappear and become intertwined in successive stories, the story begins to take shape as a novel. But it's not a linear story from a single perspective.

That said, Krauss does a wonderful job of creating complex, flawed characters that readers still want to follow even if they're not especially likable. It seems that almost everyone who comes into contact with the mythical desk in the story has serious emotional baggage of one kind or another. And although I didn't realize it until the story was almost over, the characters are all Jewish, and the desk was stolen from one character's childhood home at the beginning of the Holocaust.

Here's where I feel like the story came up lacking-- in a chapter near the end of the story (probably in the last few pages, although I listened to an audio version of the story and finished it more than a month ago, so my memory might not be the best), Krauss ties the story together by bringing in the idea of a Great House, where Jewish authors collect stories that represent the fragmented experiences of Jews in the diaspora. While I think that idea might resonate for Jewish readers, it felt to me like too much "telling" at the very end-- Krauss did a beautiful job "showing" throughout, that bringing in the analogy at the end felt like unnecessary moralizing. Still, a beautiful book, beautifully read too, and I'm very glad I read it.

When you think, in theory, that going back to grad school sounds fun...

Remember this post. My day today.

5:45 Alarm goes off. Although sleep was elusive anyway; Eddie had a headache and decided to medicate by watching football on our giant bedroom tv, lighting up the whole room like the sun at noonday.
6:00 On the treadmill. Too tired and sore for a tempo run, so I pound out 8 miles while listening to This American Life's Petty Tyrant. Fantasize about becoming a petty tyrant myself.
7:00 Open shades, empty dishwasher, strip a bed, convince a child to actually practice the piano instead of just sitting on the bench half-asleep, gather laundry, make two pans of brownies and a batch of pudding for trifle, make some beds, rouse some kids. You know, the usual.
7:42 Jump in the shower for my morning beauty routine.
7:50 Jump in the car to take Annie to French (the first of four trips to her school today).
8:10 Home. Scriptures, prayers, throw Bryce's lunch at him and send him out the door.
8:15 Maren to school. She wants me to do it, even though her father is willing and just sitting there, surfing the internets.
8:25 Home. Read two papers. I got 19 8-page research papers in class yesterday and they need to be handed back in conferences tomorrow; I also have to read six graduate seminar papers for workshop tomorrow.
9:05 Drop Isaac (who had the day off) at a friend's house. Run back to Annie's school
9:15 Teach Annie's class about Gary Schmidt and take them through a writing exercise.
10:00 Home. Assemble trifle while talking to Mom on the phone. Change laundry loads. Read a few more papers. Swear at the computer, which keeps freezing up.
11:15 Pick Maren up at school with the intention of taking her to dance class. Bag dance class when she starts to cry.
11:20 Home again. Lunch for Maren and me. More papers. A drink for Maren More papers. Another drink for Maren.
12:30 Isaac home; his friend and the friend's little sister stay to play. I finally get some reading done without interruption.
2:00 Friends go home; interruptions resume. Isaac manages to eat a whole can of pringles and a pint of raspberries while I'm not looking. Starts complaining of a stomachache. More reading.
3:30 Bryce home. Take off to pick up Annie at school. Drive her to used ski shop. Glare at her while she cries because the used skis and ski boots aren't pretty. Promise to cover skis with pretty stickers instead.
4:15 Swing by car wash. They kept our car seat when we had the car washed the other day and I have to retrieve it. I get some guy in trouble and don't really care.
4:40 Drop Isaac in the driveway (he's going to the BYU basketball game with Ed) and back out to go to Annie's Parent-Teacher Conference and book fair with the girls.
5:00 Drop by Great Harvest to buy bread for tomorrow's dinner. Sneak in Baskin Robbins to let Annie redeem the free scoop coupon she got at her conference.
5:20 Home. Pick up. Throw chicken nuggets at the kids.
5:40 Parent Teacher Conference for Bryce at the other elementary school
6:00 Second book fair of the day
6:20 Isaac's parent teacher conference
6:40 Home in time to give Maren a sniff, proclaim her clean enough, and stick her in jammies. Read her the new book she got at the fair.
7:00 Watch a movie with the big kids while reading the last nine papers of the day. Two are on how movies and video games will permanently damage my kids; try not to feel too guilty.
9:30 Finish the last paper. The house is a disaster. Do the dishes. Yell at Bryce for spilling milk. Send him to bed mad at me.
9:45 Blog about it all.

Do it all over tomorrow.

Book #114: Sh*t My Dad Says

Title: Sh*t My Dad Says
Author: Justin Halpern

I should have gone to Stake Conference this morning. Maren has a raging case of pinkeye and an earache, and the other kids all complained of various (imagined?) maladies, so rather than drag all four of them for what would undoubtedly be two painful hours of struggle in the primary room (Eddie was working), I decided to stay at home in bed and read this book.

If you're squeamish about bad language, this isn't the book for you. It's a hilarious read, but the majority of the humor derives from Halpern's father, Sam, saying completely foul and inappropriate things to his son, in a totally loving way. That probably doesn't sound like it makes a lot of sense or that it could be funny, but trust me, it is.

Book #113: Glimpse

Title: Glimpse
Author: Carol Lynch Williams

Of all the books I read for the Whitney Awards this year, Carol Lynch Williams's The Chosen One was my favorite. I loved the way it was a book intended for young readers, but it dealt with hard issues and didn't talk down to an audience. I loved that Kyra, the protagonist, was strong, sympathetic, and imperfect. I loved the way Williams captured the sense of place in that novel.

Carol Lynch Williams is coming to my Young Adult novel workshop on Tuesday, and since I loved The Chosen One so much, I decided to read Glimpse. All of the elements I appreciated in The Chosen One are also present in Glimpse. This isn't a book for readers who don't want to read about hard things-- the book opens with Hope's sister Liz attempting suicide, and we later learn that she tried to kill herself because the girls' mother, a prostitute, had been selling Liz to the men who came to the house.

Although the book is 496 pages long, I was able to read this book in a single sitting, in the bathtub, all before the water grew cold. The length is deceptive, since each page of the book looks like a poem, with two or three words on a line. I'm not sure why Williams chose this format, but it works well. She chose her words with such care that the story felt rich and fully drawn, despite the spareness of her prose. We've been talking in class about how most authors can cut their word count by 30 or 40%, and it seems like Williams was able to do that to an extreme level. I'm eager to hear her talk about her process of writing it on Tuesday.

Book #112: Leaping: Revelations and Epiphanies

Title: Leaping: Revelations and Epiphanies
Author: Brian Doyle

Essayist Brian Doyle is coming to BYU this week and he'll be visiting my Creative Nonfiction graduate seminar. In preparation for his visit, our class read Leaping: Revelations and Epiphanies, a collection of musings, mainly on faith and fatherhood, but also (strangely enough) about 9/11.

One thing that I admire about Doyle's work (aside from his marvelous prose) is the way that he manages to write about his faith. He's a devout Catholic, and his religion infuses most of what he writes. In that way, he's similar to many of the Mormon writers I've encountered, who feel that they can't write essays about subjects that are close to their hearts without talking about religion. While Leaping was published by Loyola Press (Loyola is a Catholic University) and is now out of print, it doesn't feel that it was written for an exclusively Catholic audience. As a Mormon trying to write, I feel torn between writing for a Mormon audience, talking about things like Fast and Testimony meeting and Youth Conference without needing to explain them, and writing for a wider audience, where many of the small details about my culture will require explanation. I like that Doyle doesn't make excuses for being a man of faith, and seems to feel that his faith adds to his humanism rather than detracting from it.

I wish I could keep myself from harping on this, but the way Doyle doesn't use commas between lists of adjectives drives me crazy. If I were a more generous spirit I'd learn to understand his motivations, or at least appreciate his differences.