MostlyFiction Book Reviews » Memoir We Love to Read! Wed, 14 May 2014 13:06:32 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.3 LEVELS OF LIFE by Julian Barnes /2014/levels-of-life-by-julian-barnes/ /2014/levels-of-life-by-julian-barnes/#comments Mon, 10 Feb 2014 13:24:38 +0000 /?p=21890 Book Quote:

“You put together two things that have not been put together before; and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Pilâtre de Rozier, the first man to ascend in a fire balloon, also planned to be the first to fly the Channel from France to England. To this end he constructed a new kind of aerostat, with a hydrogen balloon on top, to give greater lift, and a fire balloon beneath, to give better control. He put these two things together, and on the 15th of June 1785, when the winds seemed favourable, he made his ascent from the Pas-de-Calais. The brave new contraption rose swiftly, but before it had even reached the coastline, flame appeared at the top of the hydrogen balloon, and the whole, hopeful aerostat, now looking to one observer like a heavenly gas lamp, fell to earth, killing both pilot and co-pilot.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  FEB 10, 2014)

Julian Barnes’ memoir of grief for the death of his wife Pat Kavanagh in 2008 after a thirty-year relationship, must be one of the most moving tributes ever paid to a loved one, but also the most oblique. So let’s start with something simple, a photograph. Look up the title in the Daily Mail of London, partly for the marvelously-titled review “Lifted by Love, Grounded by Grief” by Craig Brown, but mostly for the photograph that accompanies it. Julian is seated. Pat stands behind him, her arms around his shoulders, her chin resting on the crown of his head. Her love is obvious, she whom Barnes refers to as “The heart of my life; the life of my heart.” But equally striking is the unusual vertical composition. Pat, who on the ground was a small woman beside the gangling Barnes, here appears above him, like a guardian angel reaching down.

Which is relevant, because Barnes’ book is about verticality, about love and loss, and incidentally about photography. The first of its three sections, “The Sin of Height,” is essentially an essay. It begins with three ascents by balloon: the English adventurer Colonel Fred Burnaby in 1882, the French actress Sarah Bernhardt in 1876, and a French entrepreneur named Félix Tournachon in 1863. Tournachon was to become one of the most famous early photographers under the name Nadar; it was he who took the iconic photographs of Bernhardt, and it was in his studio in 1874 that the first Impressionist exhibition was held. Barnes’ second section, “On the Level,” is typical of many of his short stories (and also longer works such as Flaubert’s Parrot and Arthur & George), starting off from fact and developing it in the imagination. In this case, his subject is the passionate affair between Fred Burnaby and Sarah Bernhardt in the mid-1870’s, the remarkable openness of the actress with the soldier (on the level, indeed), and its inevitable end. All the way through these sixty-plus pages, you can see the author conjuring examples of daring and discovery, love and loss, and creating a language of metaphor with which to describe it.

My assumption was that in the third and longest part, “The Loss of Depth,” he would apply these things directly to his wife, giving us a portrait of her more intimate and revealing even than those Nadar took of “the divine Sarah.” But no, he does almost exactly the opposite; in photographic language again, what he gives us is the negative, leaving it for us to develop. Almost immediately, he plunges into a description of grief, the constant reminders of things no longer shared, the intolerable intrusion of friends with euphemistic circumlocutions or bracing suggestions, or worse still avoidance of the subject altogether. Pat (whom he never names except in the dedication) is present only in the spaces she has left in his heart; one of the things that turns him away from thoughts of suicide is the knowledge that he retains the mould of her memory; without him, that too would be lost. He comes back, to a degree, through art: through the discovery of opera, through reading, and above all through writing. As you read on, you see him using links to the earlier sections, a phrase here, an idea there, and you think: “Ah, now he is going to pull it all together, and himself too.” But it is never as easy as that. Barnes has great skill, but also the daring to leave doors open and loose ends untied; I am sure that “closure” is one of those words he hates. And that is fine, because this strange asymmetrical hybrid is Barnes’ tribute to a love that will never end, and probably the best book he has ever written.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 82 readers
PUBLISHER: Knopf (September 24, 2013)
REVIEWER: Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Julian Barnes
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

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]]> /2014/levels-of-life-by-julian-barnes/feed/ 0 WHAT I TALK ABOUT WHEN I TALK ABOUT RUNNING by Haruki Murakami /2011/what-i-talk-about-when-i-talk-about-running-by-haruki-murakami/ /2011/what-i-talk-about-when-i-talk-about-running-by-haruki-murakami/#comments Sun, 23 Oct 2011 23:06:17 +0000 /?p=21773 Book Quote:

“People sometimes sneer at those who run every day, claiming they’ll go to any length to live longer. But I don’t think that’s the reason people run. Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest. If you’re going to while away the years, it’s far better to live them with clear goals and fully alive than in a fog, and I believe running helps you do that. Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life – and for me, for writing as well. I believe many runners would agree.”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (OCT 23, 2011)

In his running journal-cum-memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, titled in obvious homage to Raymond Carver, Haruki Murakami claims that “people basically become runners because they’re meant to” –I know exactly what he means. Runners are different; if only for the fact they think nothing of doubling up socks to run in 20-degree weather while incredulous spouses look on; they brave downpours for the bliss of having paths to themselves; they passionately debate the relative merits of Body Glide vs. Vaseline, bare feet vs. high-tech shoes, real food vs. GU gels. Runners know it’s possible, even enjoyable, to be alone for hours, pushing themselves “to acquire a void” and these quirks of temperament are often enough to form a bond with other distance runners.

Last winter, here in New York, I only cancelled one scheduled run due to the weather which meant I was out in Central Park in rain and hail and snow, passing the same brave souls every day. On a bitterly bleak run, a smile or a nod of acknowledgment was enough to warm those December mornings. On the flipside, summer arrived and I was then having difficulty acclimatizing myself to the heat, and on a particular arduous day, when day’s high was nearing 100F, an older gentleman and fellow runner, passed me with an encouraging shout: “You’re going to do more than finish; you’re going to win.” The kindness of this stranger brought a smile to my face, and although when I run my first marathon here in New York in November, I’ll be far behind the winners, I will be among a group of very special people taking over the streets: runners.

To those who can relate to the above: I highly recommend this book. To fans of Murakami, or those generally interested in writer’s biographies, I have to be more reserved.

Although Murakami describes himself as a mid-pack runner, somewhere between the “energetic ones . . .slicing through the air like they had robbers at their heels” and the “overweight” ones “[huffing] and [puffing], their eyes half-closed, their shoulders slumped like this was the last thing in the world they wanted to be doing,” he is, by most standards, an accomplished runner. After taking up running in 1982, at the age of 33, Murakami has run, on average, one marathon a year – bringing his total to 23 in 2005 when he wrote most of the book. He has also completed a 62-mile ultra-marathon (his time: 11 hours, 42 minutes), a wonderful account of which is included in the book, and six triathlons. Murakami has also been fortunate enough to run races that are on many runners’ bucket lists– Boston, New York, Honolulu, Athens – and an excerpt of an article he wrote chronicling his re-creation of the first marathon, from Athens to Marathon (aptly enough, Murakami’s first marathon), is as inspiring as it is harrowing – I got thirsty just reading it.

But this is first and foremost a runner’s journal. Chapters are structured as discrete journal entries, most dated between 2005 and 2006 – the ultramarathon entry is dated 1997; the excerpted Athens article is from 1983. Consequently, the style is casual, conversational, and for those used to Murakami’s subtly layered narratives, the looseness of the prose might be disappointing. However, perhaps the biggest problem with the book is the lack of focus on Murakami, the writer.

To be fair, Murakami readily admits, this is a book about what “running has meant to [him] as a person” rather than a writer’s memoir. But while, Murakami draws parallels between the “focus” and “endurance” required by both runners and writers, and says that “most of what [he knows] about writing [he’s] learned through running everyday,” I couldn’t help but feel that while he was able to write honestly about his failures as an athlete and the limitations of his aging body (Murakami is 62), he was less candid in describing his life as a writer. Such creative descriptions of his struggles as a runner (at one point he likens his mind to Danton and Robespierre and his body to the rebellious Revolutionary Tribunal) only whetted my appetite for similar descriptions of his struggles as a writer.

Lest you think I’m a sadist, let me clarify. Murakami tells of his experience interviewing the former Olympian, Toshihiko Seko. Murakami asked Seko if he ever experienced days when he just didn’t feel like running. Seko ,“in a voice that made it abundantly clear how stupid he thought the question was, replied, ‘Of course. All the time!’ ” What Murakami was trying to discover with his inane question was “whether, despite beings worlds apart in terms of strength, the amount we can exercise and motivation, when we lace up our running shoes early in the morning we feel exactly the same way” and concluded that “In the final analysis we’re all same [sic].” I wanted Murakami to ask a similarly inane question of himself about his writing, because I, as an aspiring novelist, would too like to know if in the final analysis, we’re all the same.

That is why writers read writers’ biographies. We look for personality quirks or life experiences we can identify with. We’re comforted by tales of hardship and rejection, hoping that if we persevere, our day, too will come. Murakami started running around the time he started writing, at the age of 32. As the owner of a jazz bar, he worked long hours. Without any previous literary ambitions, he remembers the exact moment he first had the idea to write a novel: around 1:30pm April 1, 1978. He was at Jingu Stadium watching a baseball game, when the thought struck him: “You know what? I could try writing a novel.” From that day on, he wrote at the kitchen table after he got home from the bar until he got sleepy. This first novel, published as Hear The Wind Sing won a literary contest and started Murakami on his career as a writer. Eventually, Murakami sold his bar, and took the plunge to writing full-time, devoting himself to writing more serious novels.

The trouble is: Murakami’s breezy accounting of his career path reads as glib after the detailed accounts of how salt caked his body in Athens, or of how his feet swelled so much he had to switch his shoes for a bigger size during the ultra-marathon. Writing is as a difficult as distance running, and for all his well-deserved literary success, Murakami has also experienced the literary equivalent of aching legs, slowing times, and embarrassing disqualifications. It’s unfortunate that he chose not share them.
While I suspect it will mostly appeal to runners, far be it for me to discourage people from picking up this book. While Murakami admits that he is not out to proselytize on the physical and psychological benefits of running, “still, some might read this book and say, ‘Hey, I’m going to give running a try,’ and then discover that they enjoy it. And of course that would be a beautiful thing.” A beautiful thing, indeed.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 189 readers
PUBLISHER: Vintage; Reprint edition (August 11, 2009)
REVIEWER: Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Haruki Murakami
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

 

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]]> /2011/what-i-talk-about-when-i-talk-about-running-by-haruki-murakami/feed/ 1 LET’S TAKE THE LONG WAY HOME by Gail Caldwell /2011/lets-take-the-long-way-home-by-gail-caldwell/ /2011/lets-take-the-long-way-home-by-gail-caldwell/#comments Wed, 24 Aug 2011 13:27:49 +0000 /?p=20305 Book Quote:

“It’s taken me years to understand that dying doesn’t end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur and epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of another’s lives until not death, but distance, does us part – time and space and the heart’s weariness are the blander executions of the human connection.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  AUG 24, 2011)

Let’s Take The Long Way Home is, at its core, a love story. It’s a story of how a close connection with a friend can ground us and provide us with a life worth living. And it’s a story that any woman who has ever had a friend who is like a sister – I count myself among those fortunate women – will understand in a heartbeat.

Gail Caldwell, the Pulitzer Prize winning author, met Caroline Knapp, also a writer, over their mutual love of their dogs. Ms. Caldwell writes, “Finding Caroline was like placing a personal ad for an imaginary friend, then having her show up at your door funnier and better than you had conceived.”

Both women – about a decade apart in age – are passionate about writing and their dogs and have successfully dealt with alcohol addiction that knocked them to their knees. “We had a lot of dreams, some of them silly, all part of the private code shared by people who plan to be around for the luxuries of time,” Ms. Caldwell shares.

Quickly, Gail and Caroline and their two dogs become a “pack of four.” They are both self-described moody introverts who prefer the company of dogs. Yet, “…we gave each other wide berth – it was far easier, we learned over the years, to be kind to the other than to ourselves.” As they grow closer, Gail and Caroline learn that nurturance and strength “were each the lesser without the other.”

It is almost inconceivable that this close friendship would ever end, but Caroline is a smoker and at 42, she learns she has stage 4 lung cancer. Her death comes quickly, in a matter of weeks. Gail Caldwell reflects, “Death is a divorce nobody asked for; to live through it is to find a way to disengage form what you thought you couldn’t stand to lose.” And later: “Caroline’s death had left me with a great and terrible gift: how to live in a world where loss, some of it unbearable, is as common as dust or moonlight.” Eventually, she comes to realize “…we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.”

This memoir is poignant, authentic, unflinching, and genuine – never manipulative or sudsy. In addition to the profound look at an extraordinary friendship, it also focuses on “inter-species” love – between two fiercely private and self-reliant woman and their incredible dogs. The rich and moving portrayal of Gail Caldwell’s Samoyed, Clementine, will be entirely familiar to those of us who have shared our lives with four-legged “fur babies;” love in any guise is still love.

This eloquent book ends up being a celebration of life in all its complexities – including love, friendship, devotion, and grief. As Gail Caldwell writes, “The real trick is to let life, with all its ordinary missteps and regrets, be consistently more mysterious and alluring than its end.”

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 87 readers
PUBLISHER: Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (August 9, 2011)
REVIEWER: Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Interview with Gail Caldwell
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

By Gail Caldwell:

By her friend Caroline Knapp:

]]> /2011/lets-take-the-long-way-home-by-gail-caldwell/feed/ 0 ALTHOUGH OF COURSE YOU END UP BECOMING YOURSELF by David Lipsky /2011/although-of-course-you-end-up-becoming-yourself-by-david-lipsky/ /2011/although-of-course-you-end-up-becoming-yourself-by-david-lipsky/#comments Wed, 20 Jul 2011 13:13:29 +0000 /?p=19271 Book Quote:

“What I mean is that a lot of stuff that I thought were weaknesses of mine turned out to be strengths. And one of them is that I am not, I’m not a particularly exceptional person. I think I’m a really good reader, and I’ve got a good ear. And I’m willing to work really really hard. But I’m more or less a regular person. – David Foster Wallace”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (JUL 20, 2011)

There is that question we asked one another in college: Who in history, if you could meet and talk to whomever you wished, would you select? Depending on orientation and background the answers are all over the place: Jesus is a regular; Buddha, and other spiritual luminaries frequently show up. Second tier options, Nietzsche, Thoreau (personal favorite), St. Francis. No surprises there. Aside from a small collection of history’s heavyweights, answers are typically–and sophomorically–idiosyncratic. (More recently, at a dinner party that included a bunch young adults, one answer was, oddly, Jeff Buckley.) I wouldn’t easily toss aside posterity’s world-making worthies, but if I were so inclined, I’d turn to the great creative artists. Shakespeare certainly would be a contender. Homer too. Rimbaud would be fun over a couple of beers. Joyce was a good singer, I understand. I’m sure he’d light up a room. Reading Lipsky’s book, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, reads like a contemporary answer to the “who would you choose” hypothesis. Wallace is gone now, but what if you could just spend a few days with him, even a few hours? What was the man like, really? By his work, he will be remembered. But what of the man?

In March 1996 David Lipsky was assigned to interview David Foster Wallace by Rolling Stone Magazine. Wallace was coming off a book tour, promoting his ground-breaking–and best-selling– tome, Infinite Jest. Wallace, uncharacteristically, agrees to the interview. It will span several days, with Lipsky riding along with Wallace to book readings, NPR interviews, coffee-shop breaks, pit-stops and dog walks. Lipsky writes of Wallace in the introduction, “David had a caffeine social gift: He was charmingly, vividly, overwhelmingly awake–he acted on other people like a slug of coffee–so they’re the five most sleepless days I ever spent with anyone.” The book reads accordingly. Wallace is a brilliant raconteur, breathlessly intelligent, informed, thoughtful and entertaining in that way we once thought we’d be, after we got out of college.

The premise is simple: Ride around with Wallace for five days, tape recorder running and ask him questions. This is the raw stuff of Lipsky’s journalism, though it a properly massaged transcription. For example, on smoking pot: “I stopped smoking pot–I think I stopped smoking pot right about the time I got out of grad school. You know, it wasn’t any kind of big decision. I just, it wasn’t shutting the system down anymore. It was just making the system, it was just making the system more unpleasant to be part of. My own system.” On watching T.V.: “I also, there’s the–like the thing that’s killed it recently for me, is the channel-surfing thing. Is because, I always have this terrible fear that there’s something even better on, somewhere else. And so I will spend all this time kind of skating up and down the channel system. And not be able to get all that immersed in any one thing.” The book is raw in that stream-of-consciousness way.

The project was shelved and Lipsky never wrote the article. Now, fast-forward a dozen years to the height of the David Foster Wallace posthumous creative industrial complex and someone thinks: Hey, what about those Lipsky’s tapes with Wallace? Surely there is a buck or two to be made there! That is the cynical dark-side opinion one might suspiciously hold of this endeavor. That is, here lies yet another exploitive American money-making scheme, cashing out on a brilliant dead writer’s extemporaneous ramblings. But there are two sides to this coin. The good news, setting aside this reader’s apprehension to slink through the graveyard, is that the rambling is brilliant, insightful, funny and, most of all, human. Magnificently human, that is, if one might be capable of being human on the scale of the magnificent. And as if the writer’s works themselves where not sufficient evidence, we now have Lipsky’s record. Let there be little doubt, David Foster Wallace had the capacity to be magnificently human. That is, I think, at the core of what draws so many legions of readers. His brilliance was tempered through the filter of his humanity. Here in Lipsky’s ride-along, we enjoy the genius–and the man.

For example, here Wallace, sipping on a Diet Pepsi, lays out his simple belief on art: “I have this–here’s this thing where it’s going to sound sappy to you. I have this unbelievably like a five-year-old’s belief that art is just absolutely magic….And that good art can do things that nothing else in the solar system can do. And that the good stuff will survive, and get read, and that in the great winnowing process, the shit will sink and the good stuff will rise.”

Or cultural survival: “At some point, at some point I think, this generation’s gonna reach a level of pain, or a level of exhaustion with the standard, you know….There’s the drug therapy, there’s the sex therapy, there’s the success therapy. You know, if I could just achieve X by age X, then something magically…Y’know? That we’re gonna find out, as all generations do, that it’s not like that.”

There is a terribly sad and poignant scene Lipsky shares in the afterword. Wallace’s condition has deteriorated. His depression medication has lost its punch and he is reeling. He calls his parents and they come to visit. The story, as a family member shared it with Lipsky, is that “one afternoon before they left, David was very upset. His mother sat on the floor beside him. ‘I just rubbed his arm. He said he was glad I was his mom. I told him it was an honor.’” It sounds blithely naive, but reading this book gave me a feeling of being honored as well, a sense that the man had carved out a bit of time for me. By the end of the book my cynicism had evaporated and I was grateful for this record and the insights it contains.

On a practical note, Becoming Yourself is a good David Foster Wallace reader companion. The copy I read was loaned to me by a friend who has never read his fiction, though she aspires to. Her copy was underlined and dog-eared. It will serve her well once she dives into the works. She will have a foundation of understanding the currents that carry his narrative. Conversely, I’ve read his fiction and coming to the book after that experience, I found it illuminating. It underscored what I found in the readings and nicely dove-tailed into the universes he had so carefully constructed. For the stand-alone experience, that is, the reader who has not read Wallace and has no intention of doing so, the book provides a worthwhile and insightful peek into the world of a modern creative genius.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 45 readers
PUBLISHER: Broadway; 1 edition (April 13, 2010)
REVIEWER: Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on David Lipsky
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

Nonfiction:

]]> /2011/although-of-course-you-end-up-becoming-yourself-by-david-lipsky/feed/ 0 SAY HER NAME by Francisco Goldman /2011/say-her-name-by-francisco-goldman/ /2011/say-her-name-by-francisco-goldman/#comments Thu, 07 Apr 2011 21:23:56 +0000 /?p=17241 Book Quote:

“Hold her tight, if you have her; hold her tight, I thought, that’s my advice to all the living. Breathe her in, put your nose in her hair, breathe her in deeply. Say her name. It will always be her name. Not even death can steal it. Same alive as dead, always Aura Estrada.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (APR 07, 2011)

Grief is, by and large, a private and intimate thing. We utter a few platitudes and then turn away in discomfort from who are laid bare by their grief. And emotionally, we begin to withdraw.

Francisco Goldman shatters those boundaries in his devastating book Say Her Name, forcing the reader to pay witness to the exquisite and blinding pain of a nearly unbearable loss. He positions the reader as a voyeur in a most intimate sadness, revealing the most basic nuances and details and the most complex ramifications of the loss of someone dear. And in the process, he captures our attention, rather like Samuel Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, until the reader is literally as fascinated and transfixed with Aura Estrada – Francisco Goldman’s young and doomed wife – as he himself is. It is a masterful achievement, hard to read, hard to pull oneself away from.

The barebones of his story are these: Francisco Goldman married a much younger would-be writer named Aura, who gives every indication of literary greatness. They revel in their marriage for two short years, but right before their second anniversary, Aura breaks her neck while body surfing and dies the next day. Francisco is raw with grief, which is exacerbated by Aura’s passionately devoted and controlling mother Juanita, who blames him for the tragedy. Although he is completely innocent, he blames himself and spirals downward, visualizing himself as “…a hard hollow rectangle filled with tepid blank air. An empty rectangle with sides of slate or lead…”

Brick by brick, Francisco builds a literary altar to the vibrant and exuberant woman he married. And at the same time, he lays naked his own grief at her loss: “Little did I suspect…that I would ever learn what it was like to feel swallowed up by my own sobbing, grief sucking me like marrow from a bone.” And later: “Every day a ghostly train. Every day the ruin of the day that was supposed to have been. Every second on the clock clicking forward, anything I do or see or think, all of it made of ashes and charred shards, the ruins of the future.”

Hungry to keep Aura alive, Francisco takes us back to Aura’s past, to her complex relationship with her overbearing mother and her yearning for the father who left when she was only four years old (setting her on a course to look for a father replacement). He showcases various writings that Aura created in her advanced studies at Columbia and under the tutelage of two famous authors (revealed in bios to be Peter Carey and Colum McCann) for her MFA program. He paints a word picture of Aura as a young girl, a daughter, a wife, and a writer on the cusp of potential greatness.

And in order to keep himself sane, he channels his grief into his art, documenting their time together and Aura’s extraordinary life: “This is why we need beauty to illuminate even what has most broken…Not to help us transcend or transform it into something, but first and foremost to help us see it.”

At its core, Say Her Name is not “another grief book;” rather, it’s a love story, a tribute to Aura, a universal narrative of what happens when one loved one survives another. It is, I suspect, a novel that Francisco Goldman did not choose to write, but had to write. It is a wrenching and eloquent tale of remembrance, a refusal to give death its victory.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 28 readers
PUBLISHER: Grove Press (April 5, 2011)
REVIEWER: Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Francisco GoldmanWikipedia page on Francisco Goldman
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman

A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Legend of a Suicide by David Vann

Widow: Stories by Michelle Latiolois


Bibliography:

Nonfiction:

]]> /2011/say-her-name-by-francisco-goldman/feed/ 0 A VOICE FROM OLD NEW YORK by Louis Auchincloss /2011/a-voice-from-old-new-york-by-louis-auchincloss/ /2011/a-voice-from-old-new-york-by-louis-auchincloss/#comments Wed, 12 Jan 2011 14:34:31 +0000 /?p=15391 Book Quote:

“Of course, like most men, I judged women by my mother. As the wife of a prosperous lawyer, she had two nurses to care for four minor children, a cook for her meals, a waitress to serve them, a chambermaid to clean the house, and a chauffeur to drive her. Her days were thus free for some not very taxing charity work, lunches with friends at her club, matinees or concerts, visits to museums.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett  (JAN 12, 2011)

Born in 1917 to a prominent New York City family – all eight great-grandparents were natives and resided within blocks of each other – Auchincloss belonged to an insular, elite group that, over the course of his 92 years, furnished him with material for some 60 books. This memoir, completed shortly before his death a year ago, was his last.

“In the 1920s and ‘30s there existed indubitably, however hard to define, a social structure called ‘society’ that regarded itself as just that. These persons resided on the East Side of Manhattan (never west except below Fifty-ninth Street) as far south as Union Square and as far north as Ninety-sixth Street. The members (if that is the word; it doesn’t seem quite right) were largely Protestants of Anglo-Saxon origin. (Note that Catholics and nonpracticing Jews were not always excluded if rich enough.) The men were apt to be in business, finance, or law, sometimes in medicine, rarely in the church and almost never in politics. Franklin Roosevelt was an exception and not a popular one either.”

Like his novels, this anecdotal book is spare and eminently quotable. His affection for old friends and kin does not blind him to their faults, though he is never gratuitously witty at the expense of others. The person he’s hardest on is himself – revealing transgressions and peculiarities that he could have excluded (childhood kleptomania, an act of vandalism, sexual terrors).

Short chapters recall the dowagers, socialites and husbands who loomed large in his young life, summers in Bar Harbor and Long Island, and pure misery at Groton (of which it was said there was no snobbishness because the boys all came from the same background). His urge to write blossomed at Yale but an early disappointment steered him into law, where he made a career, though writing soon became more important. He touches on issues of cowardice and courage while reviewing his WWII days in the Navy but never delves too deeply into emotional issues, allowing his anecdotes to lead.

His father and sister were subject to bouts of debilitating depression, though this was not bruited about, and his brilliant, empathetic mother, Priscilla, had a blind spot where her children were concerned. This was not an indulgent blind spot. Auchincloss remembers one of her friends who had benefited from his mother’s sage advice saying, “ ‘I was lucky not to be related to your mother, for her mind doesn’t work as well with her own family.’ “ This quote is paraphrased again near the end of the book: “Thank God I wasn’t your mother’s child! I’d never have gone to her then for advice.”

Priscilla expected her children to fail and therefore steered them into safe, respectable lives, convincing one brother to give up music for medicine and trying her best to discourage Louis from writing. “She believed that the world needed second- and even third-rate lawyers, doctors, dentists, etc., but that it had no need of artists and writers except the very best, of whom I would certainly not be one.”

Auchincloss noted at an early age that women had freer lives than men. Men went to work and handled the finances, women handled everything else – and they had servants for most of it. “Men accepted this division eagerly, thinking that they had won, as did women, with more reason.”  Yet he also wonders if his mother’s disparagement of her children’s dreams stemmed from frustration of her own sublimated ambitions. Several of the spirited women he most admired in childhood came to a sad alcoholic end (although this was also true of some of the men).

At a dinner shortly after he’d published his novel, Sybil, he sat beside a young Jackie Bouvier who was engaged to a decent fellow named Husted. “ ‘Oh, you’ve written my life,’ she told me. ‘Sybil Bouvier, Sybil Husted. Respectable, middle-class, moderately well off. Accepted everywhere. Decent and dull.’ “ But a week later the Husted engagement was off, and the rest is history.

This anecdote is one of the best, but, with his mastery of the pithy story, Auchincloss produces other delightful gems from his intimate circle of bold-face names. At hated Groton alone, every one of his 28 fellow graduates went on to prominence, including a couple of ambassadors, an assistant secretary of state and presidential advisor, a secretary of the army, several CEOs and a couple of bank presidents. And after the war, he met a different class of people at The White Horse Tavern, where writers like Norman Mailer congregated. Not that he felt as comfortable in those more bohemian circles. “A registered Republican who was also listed in the Social Register was something of a duck-billed platypus to them.”

This is an affectionate tip of the hat to a bygone world (though class and privilege is ever with us) and will be heartily enjoyed by fans of Auchincloss’ novels and those interested in early 20th century New York “society.”

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 12 readers
PUBLISHER: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (December 2, 2010)
REVIEWER: Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Louis Auchincloss
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

East Side Story

The Scarlett Letters

Bibliography:

Short Story Collections:

Biographies and other writings:

*This is a complicated bibliography and certainly contains errors and incompleteness.

]]> /2011/a-voice-from-old-new-york-by-louis-auchincloss/feed/ 0 MENTOR: A MEMOIR by Tom Grimes /2010/mentor-by-tom-grimes/ /2010/mentor-by-tom-grimes/#comments Sun, 01 Aug 2010 17:15:24 +0000 /?p=10878 Book Quote:

“I hadn’t expected to write this book, but, in a way, our memoirs form bookends. His about childhood, adolescence, and a lost father, mine about writing, teaching, and a father found. Our story has come full circle. The story’s meaning mystifies me, yet if Frank were alive he’d agree that neither of us would choose to live in a world that was unmarked by the passage of time, and anything other than inscrutable.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn (AUG 1, 2010)

Writer, teacher, and philanthropist, Tom Grimes, wrote this memoir about his friendship with Frank Conroy and his struggles with writing and publishing. Grimes opens his narrative in 1980’s Key West, where he’s striving to write publishable work while earning money as a waiter. After applying to the Iowa Writing Workshop MFA program, he heard Frank Conroy speak at a seminar in Florida. Later, he approached him offstage with enthusiastic questions about writing and the workshop. Conroy, who had recently become Director at Iowa, dismissed him. He ambled right past Tom to talk to a friend, waving him off that his chances of acceptance were slim to zip (in so many words). His confidence punctured, Tom went home to tear up—really, he gutted—Conroy’s celebrated memoir, Stop-Time. He tossed it in the garbage and wiped his hands of Frank Conroy.

During the subsequent interval of furious emotions–getting rejected by various schools, being frustrated with his job–Tom received a phone call. It was from Conroy, who had no clue that he was speaking to someone he had snubbed. He wouldn’t have even remembered the encounter. Frank spoke to him in his hoarse, cigarette-laden voice, saying that he loved his manuscript (Grimes’ unfinished novel) and that he has been accepted into the Iowa program. Grimes was ecstatic. He and his wife, Jody, and their two cats, moved to the Midwest to begin the journey of his mentorship and friendship with Conroy.

Conroy took Tom under his wing, which caused jealousy in some of Tom’s classmates. There are some hilarious and horrifying examples of how this played out in the classroom. Frank believed in Tom’s talent and mentored him closely. Eventually, their relationship became more like a father-son bond. Although Conroy was often inexplicable, with a deadpan affect and wooly exterior, he was exuberant about Tom’s writing and ambition. He had given him a job teaching freshmen (Tom turned down scholarship money in lieu of real work), and, by increments, invited him into his life.

Grimes and Conroy had things in common. They grew up with an absent father; they wrote to secure a center of gravity. Moreover, they shared an emotional hemorrhage into the dark side of their minds. Grimes’ description of losing his grip and his personal dislocation with reality was nothing short of riveting. Frank’s Stop-Time memoir describes his repeated attempts to kill himself, without success.

Also, they were impassioned teachers and had a knack for organizing others to raise money, as well as culling collaboration on anthologies and projects. Grimes was instrumental in saving Katherine Anne Porter’s childhood home in Kyle, Texas. He directs the MFA program at Texas State University (in San Marcos, Texas), which is just minutes away. In persuading others to become part of the project, he helped get the funds to restore her home and use it for visiting writers to the University. As an Austin resident, I remember when the press released the decision to save her house. Conroy was well loved by writers and trustees alike, and he was adept at obtaining endowments for the facility and scholarships for students. Grimes related that Conroy flew to Austin to be at a dying James Michener’s bedside. In a lesser man, it would have seemed repugnantly opportunistic. But Conroy did just about everything with aplomb.

What is so touching about this memoir is the candid honesty of the narrative. Grimes isn’t afraid to reveal his awkwardness, his rejections, and his missteps. He keeps a fluid balance between light and heavy without tipping into a confessional mode. He confides with a generally natural ease, describing how his relationship with Conroy made it difficult for him to separate from his need for Frank’s approval. When one of Grimes’ novels failed to succeed, it took him years to realize that his confidence in it had been Frank’s confidence all along.

“I hadn’t been able to separate my need for Frank’s affection from my need to look at my novel as objectively as possible. Which is why it’s taken me twenty years to understand that our unexpected friendship, rather than my novel, was the real work of art.”

This is a commendable memoir for budding writers, also. There are teachable moments on the art and craft of writing, a peek at the editing process, and a gaping look at the vicissitudes of the publishing houses.

Occasionally, the narrative is too earnest or overripe. Tom’s trip home to his family after a tragic event was a bit self-conscious and overwritten. The incident speaks for itself, and required no additional melodrama. However, the impact of such an incident and the difficulty coping with mental illness in family members was poignant. I comprehended that Grimes may have some difficulty with the more gruesome autobiographical memories.

There are beautiful nuggets, especially about Tom’s relationship with writing, even more so than his relationship with Frank Conroy.

“Every day I face a blank page, knowing that the majority of the words I commit to the page will be wrong… But for me writing is a necessity. I exist in sentences. I forget my sense of failure. I forget time. I forget ageing. I forget that one day I’ll die. Revising sentences is an act of hope, and connecting with a reader is the only leap of faith I’ll ever take.”

I was unacquainted with Tom Grimes before I read his memoir. I won’t forget him easily, though. He made himself transparent and known; he connected with this reader in intimate, echoing ways. Additionally, he invited us into one of the most important relationships in his life, to his deeply touching bond with the enigmatic Frank Conroy. His humanity and his heart form a moving testament to his story. It is a memoir of friendship, faith, time, teaching, writing and reaching out to others.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 12 readers
PUBLISHER: Tin House Books; 1st edition (August 1, 2010)
REVIEWER: Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Tom Grimes
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and ExcerptWikipedia page on Frank Conroy
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: More on the writing life:Off the Page by Carole Burns

The Making of a Story by Alice LaPlante

13 Ways of Looking at the Novel by Jane Smiley

Bibliography:

Nonfiction:

]]> /2010/mentor-by-tom-grimes/feed/ 0 ZEN AND NOW by Mark Richardson /2010/zen-and-now-by-mark-richardson/ /2010/zen-and-now-by-mark-richardson/#comments Sat, 19 Jun 2010 22:47:08 +0000 /?p=10209 Book Quote:

“It’s the same thing in life, says Pirsig. Take the time to decide what you want; then take the extra time to make it happen according to your own terms. Slow down. Always remember that the real motorcycle that you’re actually working on is the cycle called Yourself.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (JUN 19, 2010)

Equal parts road trip, biography, philosophy and travelogue, Zen and Now: On the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is an entertaining, educational and illuminating look at an American literary phenomenon and its creator.

In 1974 Robert Pirsig published Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The book was Pirsig’s attempt to articulate his “philosophy of Quality.” He posited that the inherent tension of modern life was a result of conflict created between different ways of looking at the world. There is the romantic approach, that is the “being in the moment” approach; and there is the classic approach, that of rational analysis. Pirsig’s narrator, fashioned after the author, suggests that in classic philosophy a division was made between these two ways of looking at the world. In antiquity, it was necessary, but for moderns it causes frustration and tension. He builds a philosophy around the pursuit of “Quality” to address this using a cross country motorcycle trip with his son and friends as framework. It is not necessary to be familiar with Zen and the Art to appreciate Richardson’s book. It is highly entertaining in it’s own right. But certainly it would be lacking if the reader has no inkling of the references.

Of equal import is a passing familiarity with Pirsig the man. Pirsig and his 170 I.Q. permeate both books like a heavy fog. He was a troubled yet brilliant man and eventually was institutionalized and subjected, forcibly, to electroshock treatment. The treatment erased a personality Pirsig dubbed Phaedrus, after a character in a Plato dialogue. Zen and the Art is also Pirsig’s attempt to come to grips with the shadow soul Phaedrus. Phaedrus comes and goes in Pirsig’s book, but is always lurking. Sadly, it was Phaedrus to whom Pirsig’s youngest son Chris clung as father, not Robert. As a result, Chris, who rode with his father throughout the trip captured in Zen and the Art, struggles with the loss of a father he loved, while wrestling with his own tenuous grasp on reality. Tragically, Chris was murdered outside the San Francisco Zen center two years later.

This is the world Richardson sets out, on the cusp of his 42nd birthday, to trace. Richardson is not a philosopher or academic. He is a journalist, specifically he writes about cars and motorcycles for The Toronto Star. Nor is his idea–to follow Pirsig’s route on a motorcycle–all that unique. We learn in Zen and Now of a generation of “Pirsig’s pilgrims” seeking enlightenment, or something akin it, on their cycles with the open road before them. Richardson is everyman to Pirsig’s singularity. He seems affable and accessible while Pirsig is distant and sullen. In common they share a love of the open road on a motorcycle and a modern, suburban angst. Both books continue a long tradition of truth seeking on the long stretch of highway.

Feeling lonesome–Richardson has two young boys and wife–and dreading the route through the mountains, Richardson wonders, “Why am I doing this, again? Not so sure now. To discover something? To relate more directly to the book that inspired me? To see some of the sights that Pirsig so eloquently described in his spare narrative? To get away from the wife and kids?” His questions are rhetorical, but hint at his reservations, nonetheless. He does not come across as a hard-core “seeker,” a true Pirsig pilgrim. That is refreshing, frankly. Again, his approach to the project stands in stark juxtaposition to Pirsig’s hellbent determination. A hundred pages or so later, Richardson comes back to the question. “I’ve just wanted the opportunity for so long now to devote time and effort to something without the phone ringing or rushing to get the boys to soccer practice. To do something for the pleasure of it without having to justify it first to my equally stressed-out wife. To sit and think….” Haven’t we all checked this box on occasion?

So sit and think he does. Though less thinking, it seems, than sitting. Outfitted on a 1985 Suzuki DR600, complete with GPS device (programed with Pirsig road-side highlights) and “Butt Buffer” gel seat pad upon with to do his sitting, Richardson sets out along Pirsig’s route from Minnesota to San Francisco, where he plans to celebrate his 42nd birthday. Richardson is a gear guy. He likes talking about bikes, about tires and breaks and clutches. And he seems a born curious traveler, which is the perfect companion for the armchair traveler. (I was reminded on more than one occasion of Paul Theroux, and his wonderful idiosyncratic travel books.) Along the way he stops at Pirsig stops, meets locals, as well as a few remaining original Pirsig characters. When he fills his gas tank, he goes to pains to try to find the same station Pirsig used. It’s fun to follow along. Richardson is affable and engaging, the physical ground he is covering is beautiful and dramatic, and the personal ground–middle-aged guy on a motorcycle roadtrip–is enlightening and thought provoking. Woven throughout is a pedestrian look at Pirsig’s philosophy. “A big part of the message of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance can be boiled down to a truism: if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. Pirsig would spend hours considering a problem and its solution–how to fix a motorcycle, how to build a workbench drawer–and I so wish I had the time in my own life to devote to such satisfying pursuits. But I don’t.”

Don’t expect great insights here. Early on, Richardson tells us there are ample sources to turn to if you are feeling scholarly. Yet, his writing about Zen and the Art is refreshingly simple and accessible. We are fortunate that he found the time to carve out this adventure.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 14 readers
PUBLISHER: Vintage (September 8, 2009)
REVIEWER: Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Mark Richardson
EXTRAS: Excerpt

Wikipedia page on Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

How to Live, Or a Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell

Bibliography:

By Robert Pirsig:

]]> /2010/zen-and-now-by-mark-richardson/feed/ 0 ONE MORE THEORY ABOUT HAPPINESS by Paul Guest /2010/one-more-theory-about-happiness-by-paul-guest/ /2010/one-more-theory-about-happiness-by-paul-guest/#comments Sat, 08 May 2010 00:57:22 +0000 /?p=9311 Book Quote:

“It was terrifying to no longer be a patient. To no longer be in rehabilitation. In recovery. Unspoken, but quietly feared, was the assessment, by doctors, by nurses, and therapists, that you had reached an endpoint in this process. That your rehabilitation had come to its expiration date. That nothing more could be done. What awaited was the rest of your life.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (MAY 7, 2010)

This gripping memoir is an homage to resiliency, strength and courage. It is written by Paul Guest, now 27, who had a cataclysmic accident when he was 12-years-old. While riding his teacher’s old 10-speed bicycle, which had no brakes, he crashed and broke his neck. Since that day he has been confined to a wheelchair, a quadriplegic.

Paul is a poet and this book is written in a straight-forward, no-nonsense manner. The memoirs’s themes are tough and some of the book is painfully difficult to read. However, he is at no time maudlin and the poetics of his words cry out from the page. This is a man who knows his vocation, who was born to write. “The first poem I ever wrote came to me like an accident of the mind. A blip, noise that had no apparrent cause.” Paul was “thinking of nothing particularly literary, watching the sky and the visible world happen outside the window, when he began to hear in his head the rhythms of language, the propulsive patterns of a poem, and though he had no idea why, it was suddenly imperative that he write it down.” “There was no doubt, none, that he had stumbled on to something essential about himself, who he was and who he might become, and all around him the future seemed to crackle like a storm. This is what I am supposed to do, he thought. After that moment, he never doubted it.”

Paul’s journey to self-discovery begins when he is twelve years old. He is graduating from sixth grade and is invited over to his favorite teacher’s house. She gives him a reading test which he is able to ace from beginning to end. He is in the gifted program and is obviously verbally gifted well beyond his years. His teacher loans him a very old bicycle, so old that it is covered with cobwebs. Paul knows the brakes don’t work but figures he can steer the bicycle to safety when the time comes. However, when the time comes, Paul lands in a drainage ditch with the third and fourth vertebrae of of his neck broken. The treatment he received at the time of the accident was not state of the art and may even have made his situation worse.

He spends months in an Atlanta rehabilitation facility undergoing extensive and painful therapies and surgeries. He is able to remain in rehab until he reaches the point where they feel that he will no longer make any improvement. This comes sooner than Paul would like. He is released to his home where his wheel chair is too wide to fit into the bathroom and he has to be carried by his mother. His pride is in shambles. He lies naked a lot of times for washings, examinations, changing of urine bags, etc. Though his family is tender with him, Paul feels remote and “other.” In the rehab center he felt like one of the others, as though he fit in. “Disability isn’t so much about the loss of control as it is about the transferral of it. From yourself to someone else, to loved ones, strangers. To devices.”

Paul begins to regain some sensation in his body, most at chest level or above. These sensations don’t improve his movement or control over his body. However, some of these sensations are very painful and he also suffers from very painful leg spasms, especially at night. He talks candidly about his fears. “You enter this place. And you wait. For your body, for your nervous system, for the manifold nerves which comprise it, to do something, to do anything, for your faithless skin to pebble with gooseflesh in a draft of cold air, for one muscle out of the six hundred gone slack to convulse back to life, for the most desperate fears within you to recede. And whatever it is you fear, and all of it is elemental, whether you’ll walk again or dress yourself or eat without help, make love, all these fears are not assuaged by your time here. Those fears are systematically stoked.”

Paul thinks a lot about who he is now and who he once was. “Luck beyond luck gilded me. If I couldn’t lift my arms, I could breathe. I could see. I could move more of my body than any diagnosis could have ever sanely promised. Great grief filled me up, I seemed to breathe it but what freed me was this: if my arms never worked again, never dressed myself, if I depended on others to do these things for the rest of my life, I no longer had to be, or even could be, who I once was. What I once was, I was broken. And new.” It is this sense of newness that propels Paul. Despite pain, isolation, and loneliness he finishes high school, then college and manages to get a Master of Fine Arts in poetry. Using a mouthpiece to type, we writes out his beautiful mesmerizing poems one at a time. We take for granted that if we want to write about something in the middle of the night we can reach for our pencils, pens, pad, or computers and go at it. This isn’t the case for Paul. He can’t reach for pen and paper, computer, or any aids for his writing. He must wait for morning and, because of this, he has lost many poems.

He is blessed with a supportive family who help him individuate and reach his potential. They offer kind support without enabling. Paul is pushed, like a baby bird, out of the nest, and he learns to fly. He flies to all kinds of adventures, some of which we share with him smiling, and others that require kleenex. When he has his first book of poetry published, when he makes his closest friends, when he is able to be intimate with the woman he loves, we cheer for him. When he’s mugged in an elevator while he is helpless to do anything to fight back, we are angry at his perpetrator and sad beyond measure at Paul’s plight. We share his feelings of harassment at his job in Tuscaloosa and wish we could give his supervisor a piece of our minds. When his day caretaker brings his Romanian father in to try an old world remedy for Paul’s twisted ankle, we hold our breaths because it requires setting fire to Paul’s skin. Oh my God!!!

Paul talks eloquently about the first poem he ever wrote and his rush home to write it. Along the way he worries whether the automatic doors to his apartment will work, whether the elevator is broken down, are the chair lifts in the buses functional. All those things that able-bodied people take for granted can create huge and, sometimes, insurmountable challenges for Paul.

Paul has an ebullient curiosity about the world, an energy to explore his surroundings and the spirit of a poet. His resilience is a lesson to us all. He perseveres and he creates beauty and loveliness from his world. He is a person of sensitivity and empathy, watching others for signs into their souls. This book is not meant to be an “inspirational” book or a religious book. It is a book about a man who, despite great odds, goes on to make a quality life for himself, drawn from the creative spirit within him that calls out to him for expression. Paul Guest must be an amazing man. He certainly is a wonderful writer.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 15 readers
PUBLISHER: Ecco (May 4, 2010)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Paul Guest
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Quadriplegics in fiction:

Bibliography:

Poetry

]]> /2010/one-more-theory-about-happiness-by-paul-guest/feed/ 0 HURRY DOWN SUNSHINE by Michael Greenberg /2010/hurry-down-sunshine-by-michael-greenberg/ /2010/hurry-down-sunshine-by-michael-greenberg/#comments Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:19:42 +0000 /?p=7865 Book Quote:

“On July 5, 1996, my daughter was struck mad. She was fifteen and her crack-up marked a turning point in both our lives. ‘I feel like I’m traveling and traveling with nowhere to go back to,’ she said in a burst of lucidity while hurtling away toward some place I could not dream or imagine. I wanted to grab her and bring her back, but there was no turning back. Suddenly every point of connection between us had vanished.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (FEB 17, 2010)

Michael Greenberg’s brilliant and mesmerizing memoir of his daughter’s madness is a poignant and terrifying book about the depths and peaks of mania and the desperate struggle that a loved one will go to in order to bring someone back from the world of psychosis.

When Greenberg’s daughter, Sally, first becomes psychotic, he thinks it is more her creativity than anything else. He is slow to recognize her manic state. But then, who would first assume that someone they love has gone to a place of madness. “But how does one tell the difference between Plato’s “divine madness” and gibberish? Between enthousiasmos (literally, to be inspired by a god) and lunacy? Between the prophet and the “medically mad.”

A long journey ensues for Sally and her familiy: hospitalization, horrendous psycho-pharmacological interventions, psychiatric care, day hospitals, regimens for behavioral therapy and behavioral contracts. The medications make her weary and unable to concentrate. She becomes sluggish and unlike her quick and creative self. Her father decides to try the medication to get an idea of what it is doing to Sally. He says, “It begins to hit me – – in waves. I feel dizzy and far away, as if I am about to fall from a great height but my feet are nailed to the edge of the precipice, so that the rush of the fall itself is indefinitely deferred. The air feels watery and thick, until finally I am neck-deep in a swamp through which it is possible to move only with the greatest of effort, and then only a few feet at a time.” Such is the state that his daughter is in with the medicine. Without it, however, she is mad.

Her identity becomes obscured. Who is this beloved daughter? How did she get to the state she is in? “I keep asking myself the obvious question, the helpless question. How did this happen? And why? One has cancer or AIDS, but one is schizophrenic, one is manic depressive, as if they were innate attributes of being, part of the human spectrum, no more curable than one’s temperament or the color of one’s eyes.” The author struggles with how to view his beloved Sally, how to separate her from her disease, how to separate himself from her disease.

The book is peopled by interesting characters. There is Steve, the author’s mentally ill brother for whom he is caretaker. There is a family of Hasidic Jews in the Psychiatric unit, looking over and caring for one of their own. There is the author’s wife, a dancer and choreographer who loves Sally very much. There is Sally’s biological mother, the author’s ex-wife, who is paralyzed with fear at Sally’s illness and first hopes that some homeopathic remedies will make a difference. There is the author’s well-dressed and lovely mother who searches her past to assure the author that Sally is not, absolutely is not, like his brother Steve.

Sally eventually reaches an equilibrium of recovery and remission from her manic depression. She is able to return to school though she is fearful and reticent about her history as a “mental patient.” The story has no happy ending, as the disease does not just disappear. It may hide for a while but it is ever present. Sally has a lifetime of heavy-duty medications and psychiatric interventions in order for her to maintain a semblance of normalcy. She is forever in the grips of the mental health system, a system not always user friendly to families and loved ones.

The author paints a realistic and painful picture of what mental illness in a family can do to the victim and her loved ones. It is a powerful picture, one that is not soon to be forgotten. Anyone who has every dealt with mental illness or has an interest in it will be enriched by this book. It is a must-read for any person who loves someone who is mentally ill or is touched by mental illness in any way. This means all of us.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 99 readers
PUBLISHER: Vintage; Reprint edition (September 8, 2009)
REVIEWER: Hurry Down Sunshine
AMAZON PAGE: Hurry Down Sunshine: A Father’s Story of Love and Madness
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Michael Greenberg
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Another book on the schizophrenia:

And in fiction:

Bibliography:

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