Tag Archives: memoir

GNF 5 – Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes by Mary and Bryan Talbot

By Lu Posted in Books, comic, review Tagged , , , , , , 5 Replies

Something that has helped me find new comics to read this month has been really paying attention to the publishers and imprints. After reading and loving Friends With Boys, I immediately requested a bunch of new titles from First Second, the Macmillan imprint that publishes the book. If you’re at a loss for what to read next with comics, look at who published your favorite graphic novel or one you’re particularly interested in and look at their backlist. You’re bound to find books either by the same artists or with similar art and storytelling styles. I think the publishing industry has a long way to go before there’s imprint recognition in the general public. I know that I for one never paid much attention to imprints or publishing houses before I started working in publishing. But I think publisher recognition is more prevalent in comics. Think DC vs. Marvel. Starting with this post, I’m going to start including all the imprints/publishers on here, in case you want to keep track, too.

dotter cover

Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes by Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot (Dark Horse, 2012)

I had no idea what Dotter of her Father’s Eyes was about before I started reading, but for some reason it definitely wasn’t what I expected. Author Mary Talbot tells the story of her childhood with a distracted, angry father, who also happened to be a Joycean scholar. She parallels the story of her life with the life of Lucia Joyce, James Joyce’s daughter who lived a tragic life.

Mary, within the comic, points out that there aren’t many similarities between her life and Lucia’s. Instead, the parallels are more general. Their stories are about what it is like to grow up as a woman. Lucia fought for independence and freedom as a dancer in 1920s Paris. She suffered a hateful mother who didn’t see the worth in anything she was doing, a father who adored her, but wouldn’t stand up for her and her career, and the lost love of Samuel Beckett. Her parents forced her to leave Paris with them right as her career was beginning to take off and she never regained momentum. Eventually the stress from losing her career and the anger she harbored made her lose control. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia and committed. She lived in a mental institution until she died at age 75.

Mary’s father was distant, distracted, and very short-tempered. Mary seemed to always make him mad, even when she wasn’t exactly sure what she had done to deserve it. When Mary becomes unexpectedly pregnant as a young woman, she marries the child’s father, because she doesn’t see any other way.

Mary and Lucia are both constrained by their societies and their families. Their lives are in deep contrast to the lives of their successful fathers, but also in contrast to each other. Lucia has a life that she wants to lead and she has some success at it, but her family never supports her. Mary never feels like she’s given as much freedom as her brothers and she is always painfully scrutinized by her father.

The difference is the end of their stories: Lucia’s story is tragic. Though I imagine the comic simplifies her downfall somewhat, she never recovers from the few months she was forced to leave Paris. Her dance career is ruined, Beckett calls off their relationship, and Lucia feels like she has nothing left. We know, however, that Mary changes her life. She is no longer married to the man she marries at the end of the comic. She has made a name for herself as a writer. Her father eventually respects her and her decisions, though she never sees him as warm or charming, the way some of his colleagues do.

I liked the art and the simple color distinctions between Mary’s story and Lucia’s story. I also loved the little interjections from Mary about her husband’s art. Whenever he got something wrong, she would point it out, but he didn’t redraw the pictures. It showed their collaboration process, but I thought it was also an interesting commentary on the way we tell stories and how other people perceive them. The inconsistencies are small. Mary really only corrects her husband’s art twice, but I think it was effective to leave them in there with only Mary’s commentary.

I liked this comic a lot. It taught me something about Lucia and I think the parallels between Mary and Lucia’s story are there. It makes sense to tell them together, a fact I think surprised the character-Mary in some ways.

Thirty Days with My Father by Christal Presley

By Lu Posted in Books, review Tagged , , 2 Replies

Thirty Days with My Father: Finding Peace from Wartime PTSD is a brave memoir. Christal’s father suffers from PTSD and so, consequently, does Christal. She was diagnosed with it as a young adult and, once she left home for college, couldn’t bear to be around her father, the cause of so many of her traumatic memories. Her mother always insisted that she pray for her father and that her father was a good man, but Vietnam made him this way. That was true, but the psychological effects of having to keep such a terrible secret have repercussions throughout Christal’s life. Thirty Days With My Father is Christal’s attempt to finally get to know her father and understand him and maybe heal a little herself along the way.

I can’t imagine the strength it must have taken to put to paper the horrific memories that Christal and her father share. Both of them share very personal memories, whether it is through Christal’s own journal, which features memories of her childhood, or her father’s memories, which she records through their conversations. While PTSD is a disorder that we are coming to understand, especially for war veterans, I think that it is less known that the children of PTSD victims can eventually show signs of the disorder themselves.

In the years between when Christal left her family and she began the thirty day project, her father did a lot of healing. He found solace in music and playing music for other people. He was more comfortable in social situations. Christal finds, through her conversations, a man that she didn’t know but one that she recognized, because she sees so much of herself in him. Christal shows the evolution of their new relationship so well.

Structurally, this memoir isn’t perfect. The inclusion of the journal entries, memories that Presley recounts during the project, felt disjointed. I would have preferred a more fluid memoir that maybe wasn’t divided by day. But structural concerns aside, I feel like I really got to know Christal and her father and witness their changing relationship.

Thirty Days With My Father is not always easy to read, nor should it be. Both Christal and her father have harrowing memories to come to terms with. It is an important work on PTSD, especially for veterans and their children.

TLC Book Tours kindly provided me with a review copy of Thirty Days With My Father. You can find out more information about this tour, including other stops, here. 

Saturday Personal Readathon

By Lu Posted in Books, Readathon Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 4 Replies

Today, I’d like to escape this world with a few good books. It’s been a while since I’ve just sat down on a Saturday afternoon and read, so that’s what I’m going to do.

Michael and I might go see Spiderman later today, but between now and the time I go to bed, I will be sitting on my couch and reading. I already spent most of the morning reading With My Body by Nikki Gemmell. I’m also reading Wild by Cheryl Strayed and The Chameleon Couch by Yusef Komunyakaa. Also on the list to read today: Hicksville by Dylan Horrocks, The Girl of Fire and Thorns by Rae Carson and more poetry

With My Body by Nikki Gemmell - When Harper Perennial pitched this book to me, I wasn’t really looking for a well-written alternative to 50 Shades of Grey, but the enthusiasm of the person from Harper who sent the email really convinced me. It’s written in the second person, which is usually something I despise, but I am actually loving it. I’m about 200 pages in.

After finishing – I ended up writing so much about this title, I decided to save it for another post. I liked it, but it wasn’t perfect. Now! On to Hicksville.

Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology by Eric Brende

By Lu Posted in Books, review Tagged , , , , 8 Replies

This book came at a perfect time for me. You see, I’ve been a little obsessed lately with the idea of living on a self-sustainable farm. I like city life, but I miss wide open spaces. I want to be able to garden and raise animals and be as reliant on myself and the food I can grow. This is something that I’d like to do sometime in the future, but right now, I’m content to read about other people making the plunge, like Eric Brende and his wife.

Eric Brende is a highly educated man (he has degrees from three universities, including MIT) who, one day, realized that he was relying too much on technology and it was actually hindering his life instead of helping it. To complete his graduate work, he decided to join a Mennonite-like community in an undisclosed location for 18 months to see what it was like and if people who lived without technology really are better off. He married his girlfriend and rented a small cottage in a closed-off, modern technology-free town.

Let’s get this out of the way: Eric Brende is opinionated and he can come across as bit of an ass. Though he brings it up once or twice, he rarely addresses how the community felt about him being an outsider studying their actions. He invaded their life to learn about self-sustainability, but also to finish his graduate work. He began the project with the intention of writing a book and it seemed a little disingenuous. I wonder how many of the people he lived with really knew what he was doing? Do they know he’s written a book about them and their lives? Does it matter? He’s self-righteous and not shy about blaming all our modern troubles on television, the internet and cars in that order.

Here’s the thing: I don’t think those opinions are necessarily radical or offensive. They’re not, but he presents them in such a way that they are indisputable. TV is always damaging. Nothing good can come of the internet. Your car will kill you, or at the very least, make you die faster. He never acknowledges the good that can come out of having a television, the internet, and cars. Good television shows are as engrossing, stimulating, and interesting as a well-written novel. The internet is a wealthy source of community and education. While I understand that stress from driving can make your blood pressure rise (trust me, I’ve commuted in two of the worst cities for commuting… I get it), it’s also good to have a car around sometimes.

Ignoring his opinions about everything from religion to technology to relationships to gender roles, I thoroughly enjoyed Better Off. I was intrigued by the “Minimite” culture and I was interested in learning about their relationship with technology and outsiders. Their community is strict about a lot of things, but it was kind of hard to figure out some of their reasoning. They disapproved of bicycles, but I never really understood why. My favorite parts of this book were actually the parts when Brende described how he and his wife survived without technology. The physiological changes were fascinating, including adjustments to extreme temperatures in the summer and the natural circadian rhythm that occurs when you don’t rely on electrical lights. I loved his descriptions of simple household tasks, like canning and farming and barn raising. The community that develops when you rely on each other was also fascinating to witness, though I’m not entirely sure how closely Brende really got to the members of the community or how accurate his descriptions really were.

Better Off is lucky. I’m fascinated by this topic right now, so I’m being rather lenient; I’m not sure I would have liked this book much at all if I hadn’t been so intrigued by its subject matter. Apart from Brende’s absolute stance on technology, the storytelling and writing is clunky and confusing throughout most of this book. When Brende is on, he’s on, but his narrative felt strung together and disconnected. It was chronological, but other than that not very coherently organized. It was difficult to keep the people straight and I was sometimes confused by the narrative. I often felt like I had missed something, but I would go back and reread and find I had read everything there. One thing that bothered me the most was the way he discussed his wife. I’m sure they have a very loving relationship, but it would feel like he would forget he had a wife for dozens of pages and then his editor would remind him to talk about her a little bit. She was definitely secondary in this story and I would have liked to see a little bit more of her perspective throughout.

I wonder how much of what they learned during those 18 months applies to their lives now. They talk about their current lives a little bit, but not much. They don’t have a television. They do have a car, they just don’t drive it very often. They do have electricity. They make their own soap. Brende drives a rickshaw. Over all, I think Better Off succeeds in taking the whole quest/goal memoir to a new level. It’s very difficult to join Mennonite/Amish/Anabaptist communities with any kind of success and Brende did it, more or less respectfully. Whether or not I agreed with him on all of his opinions, he certainly practiced what he preached for those 18 months and it made for an interesting, if not a terribly well-written, memoir.

Wanderlust by Elisabeth Eaves

By Lu Posted in Books Tagged , , , , 8 Replies

Wanlderlust is Elisabeth Eaves’s travel memoir that spans her teenage years to her late twenties. She first becomes obsessed by travel after a boyfriend saves up and travels the world with no commitments. Jealous, she begins planning to do something similar. Through study abroad, an internship with the State Department and her own travels, Eaves honestly details what it is like to travel alone as a woman. Unfortunately, Eaves’s memoir left me confused and uncomfortable, frustrated and disappointed, when I really wanted to enjoy this memoir.

I respect Elisabeth Eaves’s honesty, but I’m flabbergasted as to why every trip she takes is either because of a man or results in a man. She talks about finding herself, but all she finds is another man to sleep with, or perhaps, fall in love with. Why is this the particular structure she chose for her story? Did it really have to be that way? You can’t tell me that she couldn’t have described her travels outside of the context of getting, losing or lusting after a man. To top it all off, she described other women so disdainfully. And maybe it wouldn’t bother me so much if Eaves weren’t such a good writer. I wanted to keep reading Wanderlust, because it is written beautifully, but I found myself angry and even offended at her descriptions.

There were times when Eaves really examined what it is like to be a girl traveling alone and that is when I truly appreciated her. “I craved total freedom, and I envied the boys because I thought they could have it. But there was a way in which, as a girl, I could act free but never quite get there in my head. However many expectations I escaped and constraints I threw off, there would always be that nagging caution at the back of my mind that said I’d better lock the door, ” she explains. That is what I wanted, acknowledge what it is like to be a girl traveling alone, but to go beyond that, to write about what it is like to be Elisabeth Eaves traveling alone. Instead, I came across understanding little about her and the places she visited and more about how many men she slept with. I want to make clear that my problem is not with how many men she slept with or the fact that she slept with men, but that it became central to her memoir, apart from her travels. The subtitle of her book is “A Love Affair with Five Continents”, but the reality becomes “Love Affairs in Five Continents”.

When Eaves abandons this pretense, and writes just about travel or just about where she is or about how she is feeling, I loved her best. I can almost overlook the rest just for those pure moments of excellent travel writing. I understand exactly what Ash is saying in her own review of this novel, the fact that Eaves acknowledges her faults, acknowledges what she does with this book, almost makes it easier to read. At the same time, though, I just don’t understand the structure. Once again, I find myself wondering if this is a fault of how the book is marketed. It’s billed as a travel memoir and travel writing, but is it really? Or is it a memoir of love, relationships and travel. If it had been sold to me as that, I very well may have enjoyed this.

Giveaway: If your interested in finding out for yourself if you could connect with Eaves and her storytelling style, I have one copy of Wanderlust to give away. All you have to do is leave a comment on this post. I’ll announce the winner in one week! 

Thanks to TLC Book Tours for providing me with a copy of this book to review. You can find out more about the tour here. 

Thoughts Without Cigarettes by Oscar Hijuelos

By Lu Posted in Books, review Tagged , , , , , , , 4 Replies

Though I’ve never read any of Oscar Hijuelos’s fiction (not for lack of wanting to… I’ve always been interested in Hijuelos, it just hasn’t happened yet), I was deeply intrigued by his memoir Thoughts Without Cigarettes.  Hijuelos moved to the United States when he was just a young boy and Thoughts Without Cigarettes chronicles his life from before his birth, when his parents met, to his struggle for success as an adult and fiction writer. Though I have never read any of Hijuelos’s fiction, it’s clear to see through this memoir how fabulous of a writer he is. Some of my very favorite parts were in the beginning when he was talking about his visit to Cuba as a young boy. He gets across that dreamy reality that is a childhood memory so well.

A lot of times it feels as though you are reading fiction or even poetry, Hijuelos just has a talent for describing every day things with beautiful language that makes it seem unreal or better than reality. That’s not a complaint or a bad thing at all, in fact I love reading memoirs like this. Like I said in my post about Breaking Up with God, everyone has a story to tell, it’s just about how well you tell it. Hijuelos has a pretty remarkable story and he tells it brilliantly. When Hijuelos moves on from telling the story of his childhood this dreamy quality disappears a little bit, but rightfully so.

My biggest complaint is that this book is long, probably longer than a memoir needs to be and there certainly were parts that interested me more than others. It’s a difficult book to get into because the amount of detail, but I recommend picking up this book for an interesting story about finding your place in between two cultures, writing, and family.

Thanks to TLC Book Tours for sending me a copy of this book to review! 

Breaking Up With God: A Love Story by Sarah Sentilles

By Lu Posted in Books, review Tagged , , , , , 12 Replies

I accidentally double booked tours today! If you are here for the Thoughts Without Cigarettes post, check back later this afternoon. I want to spread out the posts to give them both the attention they deserve.

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I love memoirs. I believe that every person has a story to tell, the only question is if you can tell it well. I don’t hold much to the idea that a memoir should only be for someone who has had a truly remarkable life. Honestly, I believe any life is interesting. I know that there are plenty of people out there who disagree with this, but I have an insatiable curiosity for other perspectives and other people’s lives.

Breaking Up With God is the kind of religious memoir that I was hoping The View From the Back Pew would be. Originally very faithful, to the point of attending seminary school, Sentilles eventually cannot square the God she grew up with, a decidedly man-in-the-sky who punishes and rewards image, with the feminist perspective she has gained in seminary school.

Sentilles covers a lot of ground here, laying her entire life out on the table for us to see. It almost reads like a confession sometimes, with Sentilles revealing that she had anorexia and an abusive relationship before she left college. Later she goes on to talk about becoming a feminist and also a vegetarian, a supporter of gay marriage and a social activist.

I think Sentilles’s story is interesting and worth hearing. Her journey from a religious scholar to completely unsure in her beliefs is something that I relate to. So the question remains: how well is Sentilles’s story told? As I said, it’s confessional in nature, almost like an internal monologue, which ultimately makes sense. She is sharing an incredibly personal journey with us, but one that she had made a career of making public. In a way, Sentilles is accomplishing exactly what she went to seminary school to do, to minister, though admittedly a significantly different type of preaching than she imagined.

At times I thought the narration to be a little disorganized, and if I’m honest, sometimes melodramatic. But at the same time, much of this story takes place when Sentilles is a teenager and young adult. She reflects that age very well, where every decision you make seems like the most difficult and you’re never sure of yourself, even if it is frustrating to read sometimes.

Overall, I enjoyed this memoir. I learned about theology and at the same time got to see the transition and journey that Sentilles makes. I think that’s a successful memoir, even if the writing is not perfect and at times it drifts into melodrama.

So go read this!: now | tomorrow | next week | next month | next year | when you’ve read everything else

Thanks to TLC Book Tours for sending me this book to read and review! For more information about the tour, please go to this link. 

Mini Reviews!

By Lu Posted in Books, review Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 9 Replies

Friends, it is April. April is always busy. Couple that with starting a job in June, interviewing for internships, moving in May (and then preparing to move AGAIN in August), I am behind on the book reviews. That is because I am still reading (to escape my too-busy life), but not finding time to get my thoughts in a coherent blog post. I try and it sounds like I don’t know what a sentence is or how an intelligent person puts them together. The answer? Mini reviews! My blogging self might dislike me for this later, but my reading self will be much happier after I post this.

Solo by Rana Dasgupta

This book really deserves its own post, but I have let it sit and linger for too long. I have a hard time writing long posts a few weeks after reading a book. I like to write my reviews as soon as I finish reading the book. Then I like to let that review sit a week or so to make sure I still feel the same way. THEN I post the review. Unfortunately with Solo, I just don’t know that I’m going to really be able to do the book the justice it deserves so long after I read it the first time.

Let me put it this way, I loved Solo so much, that I immediately ordered Dasgupta’s only other novel Tokyo Cancelled. Solo is the story of Ulrich, a Bulgarian man at the end of his life. When he was younger, he was full of ambition, but life got in the way and he eventually ended up caring for his aging mother until her death and never becoming the musician or chemist that he dreamed of. The first half of the novel is the story of his life that some people would consider a failure. It is also the story of Bulgaria, from the years before WWII to the years of communism. It is a sad story, but one that is wonderful to read about. Dasgupta is a gifted storyteller and writes beautiful prose that I just couldn’t resist.

What elevates Solo as truly unique is the second half of the book when we leave Ulrich’s real world and enter the world he imagines. There are new characters, though if you read carefully you can see the links between the two worlds. I don’t want to give anything away, but please read this book!

So go read this!: now | tomorrow | next week | next month | next year | when you’ve read everything else

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

I really didn’t expect to love The Awakening as much as I did. I have a sort of informal book club with a friend of mine and he wanted to read a classic, so this is the one I suggested. I expected to really be disgusted with Edna and her plight, but actually I was so surprised how much I supported her. Beyond the plot, Chopin is a wonderful writer. There were so many passages that I marked just because they were beautiful.

My friend didn’t love it as much, but I think I convinced him of its merits in the end. Turn of the century US literature always surprises me with how much I love it and how relevant it can feel. I want to explore this era and read more books published then. Any suggestions?

So go read this!: now | tomorrow | next week | next month | next year | when you’ve read everything else

The  Autobiography of an Execution by David Dow

This is the book that changed my mind. I used to be on the fence about the death penalty, leaning towards being opposed to it, but still not sure. Thanks to David Dow, I am absolutely, 100% opposed to it. I heard David Dow on NPR and I never wanted him to stop talking about his experiences as a death row lawyer. The same was true for his memoir, The Autobiography of an Execution. I can see why some people would not like this book. Dow is not always the most likable guy and he doesn’t really claim to be an amazing writer. But he writes exactly as he speaks and I like the way he speaks, so I could look over a lot of that. Also, it’s a memoir, not a non-fiction book about the execution process. Dow has already written a lot of those and you can read them, this is his personal experiences and emotions as a death row lawyer.

So go read this!: now | tomorrow | next week | next month | next year | when you’ve read everything else

Black Juice by Margo Lanagan

This is another one that I would easily be able to write an entire post about. I loved it. The first story was absolutely amazing and then every story after that (with the exception of only one or two) were equally amazing. I don’t know that I have ever read a short story collection this beautiful and strange. I read and liked Tender Morsels, but I did not love it as many people do. This I loved unambiguously. It is amazing and I want everyone to be reading it. I also learned something that I already knew but had forgotten: fantasy short stories are so good. I almost like it better than full length fantasy.

To top it all off, I had a complete fan girl moment. I tweeted something along the lines of how weird and wonderful it must be to live in Margo Lanagan’s mind. And then this happened:

What. That is amazing. Thank you, Twitter, for making things like this happen.

So go read this!: now | tomorrow | next week | next month | next year | when you’ve read everything else

The Wilder Life by Wendy McClure

By Lu Posted in Books, review Tagged , , , , , , , , , , 11 Replies


The more nonfiction I read, the more I notice the amount of books, many of them published in the last ten years or so, that combine nonfiction with memoir. They are books that take an investigative topic, such as Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life, and then adds the aspects of the memoir. It’s a compelling format, but sometimes I think it works better than others. In The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of  Little House on the Prairie, I think McClure’s book is a good example of how it can work, there are also times when I wasn’t entirely convinced.

Writing a review of a memoir is always difficult. If you don’t like a memoir, does that mean you don’t like a person? Of course not, but sometimes it feels like you are reviewing a person’s life rather than an author’s book. I want to make it clear that for the most part, I really enjoyed The Wilder Life and what McClure did with the premise, but the ending felt rushed and some of the connections McClure made to her personal life were tenuous. I wanted more reflection about where her journey had taken her, rather than a tidy wrap-up at the end.

One day, when her father and mother are cleaning out their house, McClure rediscovers her childhood favorites: the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. She rereads them and finds herself obsessed with the books and living “the Wilder life”. She peruses message boards, does research, purchases a butter churn. She wants to find any facet of prairie life that she can in the modern world, so she decides to visit all of the existing Wilder museums and homesteads.

As someone who read the books as a child, but was not obsessed with them, it was fun to read about someone who was. I understood completely this kind of obsession. There’s one moment when McClure says she “felt like a fan girl”. I wanted to sit her down and say “Honey, you are a fan girl. Let that flag fly.” And for the most part, she does. McClure is funny, she is intelligent and she asks all the questions you would want someone analyzing the Little House books in 2011 to ask. For example, she asks if Laura is a feminist. She asks if Laura is racist. She examines the questions of poverty and homesteading and anything you would want to know about prairie life.

Beyond that, she also provides and extensive bibliography. If there is anything you could possibly want to know about Laura Ingalls Wilder, her family or her history, you can be sure that McClure has already read it for you. Anywhere you could possibly want to go to learn about Laura, McClure has been there. And she has talked about it in an entirely honest way. Not all Laura exhibits are created equal and McClure is honest about that.

I really liked living in McClure’s world. She’s a candid narrator and I’d love to meet her one day and talk about what it means to be a fan. I feel like Wendy McClure and Melissa Anelli would really get along. I’m certainly happy to have found McClure and her writing and will be picking up her memoir I’m Not the New Me, so if that’s not a recommendation for The Wilder Life,  I’m not sure what is.

So go read this!:  now| tomorrow | next week | next month | next year | when you’ve exhausted your TBR

Do you have a review of The Wilder Life? Link to it in the comments and I’ll add it here.

Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide by Linda Gray Sexton

By Lu Posted in Books, Poetry, review Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 7 Replies

I was approached by TLC Book Tours to review Half In Love by Linda Gray Sexton because I write a lot of posts about poetry (thanks to Serena at Savvy Verse & Wit for recommending me).  Even so, I hadn’t read much poetry by Anne Sexton and my knowledge of the Sexton family history was minimal.  I went into this book knowing next to nothing except the title and I just have to tell you up front that this book floored me.  It has  done what all good books should – changed my perspective.

Linda Gray Sexton grew up watching her mother’s multiple suicide attempts until she finally succeeded when Linda was in college.  Linda makes a pact with her sister and she promises her own children later in life that she will never be like her mother.  But the legacy of suicide and her depression ends up being too much for Linda and she eventually tries to commit suicide three times before finally getting the help she needs.

Even though this is a memoir, Half in Love often reads like poetry. Linda Gray Sexton  writes beautifully and honestly. I don’t know that I’ve  ever encountered a more honest memoir. This is a book that not only served as a way to heal for Linda, but as a way to change the way people think about suicide and depression. This is a view from the inside out and it is remarkable.

Depression is a disease that affects everyone, not just the one who suffers from it, but everyone they are close to as well. Unfortunately, the most common reaction seems to be frustration and anger.   I have had those thoughts, I will admit it. But I never will again. Linda Gray Sexton has changed that for me. I can say now that I have a broader perspective on depression and suicide than I did before. Half in Love is beautifully written, heartbreakingly honest and an invaluable as a resource for everyone who has experienced depression or who knows someone who is suffering from depression.

This is a memoir, not a scientific non-fiction book. Linda Gray Sexton does not include many facts about depression or suicide, but instead focuses solely on her own experiences.  She documents how this disease was and is for her. Reading this memoir made me eager to learn more about the more scientific and medical/psychological facts about depression. Memoirs like this, and like Losing My Mind by Thomas DeBaggio are so important because it’s so difficult for someone who has not experienced a psychological disease to understand what it is like to be under the power of one. How many times did I get frustrated and angry with my great-grandmother for her Alzheimer’s instead of being understanding? Too many.

Favorite quotes:

“Unconsciously, my mother had bequeathed to me two entirely unique legacies, and they were inextricably and mysteriously entwined: the compulsion to create with words, as well as the compulsion to stare down into the abyss of suicide. Both compulsions have been with me for as long as I can remember.” (23)

“Just as [my mother] interlaced fragile words of poetry among the sweet and spicy, so did she weave stories into the very texture of our lives. A story here, an image there: she built her tales out of daily ordinary events to which she gave no less weight than the tale of a daughter’s maturation, or an elegy for her parents, or a villanelle cooked up in Robert Lowell’s class. These were often the topics that her poetry introduced to the reading public [...].

As a child I had watched the way she made her illness into a career. The love and the attention her disease brought to her were plain to see. Once depression became subject matter, she began to write about it more and more openly in her poetry. It even won her praise and respect and to me that somehow felt unfair. The aspect of public acclamation confused me. Though I hated her insanity, she was coining this shameful aspect of the illness and eventually she would be able to support herself financially upon it. Sadly, I realized that I wanted to be able to rise up someday and spin the straw of my own misery into gold, just the way my mother did. Sadly, I also realized I wanted none of it.” (47)

“I’d thought I could pick the sort of mother I would be, as simply as I might pluck events or holidays from a river of experience. I’d thought I could consciously choose the foundation on which I would build the style of my mothering. I’d thought that decisiveness and self-control were the ways we shaped our futures; if those futures were handed down from generation to generation, then to succeed at changing them was still within reach with the application of a little bit of effort. It didn’t occur to me then that there was some secret code in both learned behavior and genetic, biological expression that was embedded within us. I could not see that these two factors might actually govern what I did, and what kind of mother I would be, regardless of how I strove to aim at a particular vision of myself in this role. I began to discover, slowly, that it was not a question of pure willpower.” (67)

“The belief that love can conquer immense pain in the life of the ordinary person is another way in which the legacy of suicide continues to be handed down generation to generation, damaging all family members.  This misperception traumatizes those who experience the loss of someone close (certain that if they had only been more worthy, their friend or family member would have loved them enough to bear the suffering), and it also becomes an obstacle for those who survive the attempt to end their own lives. I would guess that even now my father and my sister must still suppress some rage at this idea in a private, silent way: they are angry that my mother did not care enough to put them and their feelings first. It became an issue of love, when really, it should have been seen as a barometer of pain. Despite my former fantasies about dedication and worthiness, I now believe that by committing suicide, my mother simply bowed out from under the hurt in her life.” (216)

This memoir is important, it’s beautiful, but it is often difficult to read because it can be so upsetting. I hope that won’t deter many people from reading this important memoir.

So go read  this!: now | tomorrow | next week | next month | next year | when you’ve exhausted your TBR

Thanks to TLC Book Tours for sending me a copy of this book to review.

2010, what a wonderful year!*

By Lu Posted in Books, Life Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 21 Replies

*for reading that is!

2010 seems like the longest year of my life. When I look back to what I was reading at the beginning of the year, I can’t believe that that was still 2010.  You mean I only read Anne of Green Gables this year?!  I only just read and fell in love with Blankets in 2010? That wasn’t last year? Are you sure?

Blogging has had its share of ups and downs this year, but I’m pleased to be ending the year on a strong note, with only more hopes for more excellent reading and blogging in 2011.  Over the past few days I have gone back and reread a lot of my posts from the early days of Regular Rumination and I think that my little blog and I have really come into our own over the last few months.

In terms of reading, there have certainly been some hits and some misses, but for the most part, I would say that my reading of 2010 was great.  So here we are, the 2010 Regular Rumination Awards.  These are the books that struck me as particularly wonderful, that still stick with me all these months later, that I think you should be reading to make your 2011 as excellent a reading year as my 2010 was.

To avoid this just being a normal old top ten list, I’ve added made-up superlatives.

The book that was so good, I had to reread it immediately

Is anyone surprised by this choice?  When I read Blankets back on the 2 of January, I was blown away.  When I turned the last page, I went back and started it all over again.  I stayed up until the wee hours of the night rereading and reliving the relationship between Craig and Raina – in fact, I’m pretty sure I’d like to name a future daughter Raina.

What makes Blankets the best graphic novel I read this year?  The drawings absolutely took my breath away, but so did the story.  Thompson weaves together the story of his relationship with his brother and family with the story of his first love.  It’s heartbreaking and beautiful and changed the way I read graphic novels forever.  I can’t wait for Thompson’s newest, Habibi, to be released.

Honorable mention: On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

Best Precocious Child Narrator

This book was a total surprise.  I don’t even know how it came into my hands, other than the fact that we all know I’m enticed by a blue cover with adorable pictures on it.  What I wasn’t expecting was one of the most intelligent, endearing middle-grade fiction books I have ever read.  Bapu is Anu’s grandfather and one day, while they are out walking, he collapses.  What follows is Anu’s journey to find his grandfather again after he has passed away.  This book with simultaneously crush your heart and heal it again.  Anu has such great friends and such a great family and such wonderful insights that somehow never seem out of place coming from such a young person.  I want everyone to read this book, it is wonderful.  It deals with such heavy topics, but is also so funny.

Honorable Mention: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

Most Underrated Book By A Book Blog Darling

This is a book that I don’t think I ever expected to end up on this list, but here it is: Flight by Sherman Alexie.  Alexie has had his fair share of coverage on a lot of book blogs, especially for his most recent foray into YA with The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.  I loved that book, but this one is better.  Most critics didn’t like it, but I say, they are crazy.  This book is great.

Zits, our narrator, is a homeless and poor Indian boy who, in a fit of desperation, decides to blow up a bank.  Instead of dying when the bomb goes off, he is transported back in time to inhabit some famous historical figures.  Yes, the premise is different, but that is why I loved it so much.  I couldn’t get enough of it.  If I had one complaint it would be that this book is too short.  Probably one of the best compliments you can give a book, now that I think about it.

Honorable Mention: A Circle of Quiet by Madeleine L’Engle

Best Book Worth All the Hype

Look, this doesn’t necessarily mean that Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen, is my favorite book of 2010, BUT it is a book that I think is worth the hype it received.  Is Franzen the greatest American novelist? Um, no, but he is a great US novelist.  This book so perfectly captures a specific time in our history and has made me even more eager to pick up The Corrections, Franzen’s first novel.  Maybe that will make my list next year?

Honorable Mention: A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick

Best Book I Want To Put in the Hand of Every Girl/Woman I Know

It was tough to choose between the two Robin Brande books I read this year, Fat Cat and Evolution, Me and Other Freaks of Nature, and while I thought Mena was such an amazing role model and the combination of religion and science in Freaks of Nature was brilliant, I had to pick Cat.  Maybe it’s because I saw a little bit (okay, a lot) of myself in Cat.  I wish Cat was real so we could be best friends.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, I cannot wait for Brande’s next book, because I know it will be amazing.  It’s as simple as that.  Not enough people are reading these books.  Why aren’t you reading these books?  Hmmm?  Why?

Honorable Mention: Evolution, Me and Other Freaks of Nature by Robin Brande and Reading Women: How the Great Book of Feminism Changed My Life by Stephanie Staal
Best Memoir in a Year Full of Excellent Memoirs

 

I read so many great memoirs this year that I didn’t even get a chance to review them all and going back to pick my favorite was difficult.  I finally decided on Flyaway by Suzie Gilbert because it’s just so unique and I learned so much.  Gilbert is a wild bird rehabber and her journey is just so interesting and full of humor.  I dare you to read Gilbert’s memoir and not be charmed.

Honorable mention: Harry, a History by Melissa Anelli

Biggest Disappointment

I don’t think Great House by Nicole Krauss is a bad book, but I had such high expectation for it and it floundered under those expectations.  I don’t know if that’s my fault or the fault of the book.  It was such an even book that it was even more disappointing.  There was real greatness here, but it was ruined (for me) by the inconsistencies.

Honorable Mention: The Maze Runner by James Dashner

But let’s end this on a happy note…

Favorite Classic of 2010

Mrs. Dalloway is beautiful and contains easily some of the most amazing writing… ever.  I would have quoted the entire book if I could have.  I’m so glad the Woolf In Winter readalong made me read it, because I loved it.

Honorable  Mention: Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery (a very close second!)

2010 was a great year for reading, but here’s to hoping 2011 is even better!  Happy New Year, everyone!  I’ll see you next year, lolol.

A Circle of Quiet by Madeleine L’Engle

By Lu Posted in Books, review Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 8 Replies

Is it too repetitive to tell you that A Wrinkle in Time changed my life?  It opened up the world for me, both the world of literature and my life.  I was camping, with my parents, right before my sister was born, and I remember trying to explain to my mother what A Wrinkle in Time was like.  She is not a reader and I think she was baffled, but she nodded and smiled as I described to her what it was like to be in Meg’s world.  I want to read everything she has written, but I don’t ever want to run out.  Slowly I’m reading her books that I’ve never read.

In any case, when I found myself wandering around a used bookstore a few weeks ago and I found a large portion of the shelf devoted to Madeleine L’Engle books, I purchased almost their entire stock.  Included were the first two books of The Crosswicks Journals, A Circle of Quiet being the first one.

This book was like sitting down with Madeleine L’Engle and having a conversation.  She talked about everything, from society, to her past and present life with her husband and children, to sex and marriage, to religion.  She states very plainly at the beginning of the memoir, “I will undoubtedly contradict myself, and that I will mean both things” (32) and I took that to heart throughout the reading, because L’Engle often contradicts herself or believes contradictory things, but she never apologizes for it.  And reminds us that “an acceptance of contradiction is no excuse for fuzzy thinking.  We do have to use our minds as far as they will  take us, yet acknowledging that they cannot take us all the way” (32).

The Crosswicks Journals are a series of memoirs that begin with A Circle of Quiet, detailing several summers at the Crosswicks cottage, Madeleine and her husband Hugh’s summer home.  L’Engle repeatedly discusses ontology, something I admit I had to look up:

thephilosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations (from Wikipedia).

In that sense A Circle of Quiet is an ontological study of L’Engle herself, by herself.  If that sounds self-indulgent, maybe it would be if L’Engle’s thoughts weren’t so interesting.  She has an opinion about everything, and I would be lying if I said I agreed with absolutely everything she wrote about.  I don’t, but I never doubt that if I’d had the chance, we could have had a lively debate with no hard feelings.  I was very interested, as I imagine many readers are, of L’Engle’s religious beliefs.  Unlike other authors, say CS Lewis, who have a distinct doctrine in their texts, L’Engle’s books always had an air of religion, but nothing explicit.  And frankly, if you’re looking for some direct answers, most of L’Engle’s contradictions are when she talks about religion.  But I kind of liked that, because who really has all the answers about something so big as religion or religious beliefs?  If someone says they do, I have to admit, I’m not going to believe them.

Madeleine gives advice throughout the memoir, on everything from relationships and raising children to writing.  I treasured especially her advice to writers, young and old, experienced and inexperienced.  Some of my favorites:

Inspiration does not always precede the act of writing; it often follows it.  I go to my typewriter with reluctance; I check the ribbon; I check my black felt pens; I polish my collection of spectacles; finally I start to put words, almost any words, down on paper.

Usually, then, the words themselves will start to flow; they push me, rather than vice versa. (162)

Why do you write for children?’  My immediate response to this question is, ‘I don’t.’  Of course I don’t.  I don’t suppose most children’s writers do.  But the kids won’t let me off this easily.

If you want to raise my blood pressure, suggest that writers turn to writing children’s books because it’s easier than writing for grownups; so they write children’s books because they can’t make it in the adult field.

If it’s not good enough for adults, it’s not good enough for children.  If a book is going to be marketed for children does not interest me, a grownup, then I am dishonoring the children for whom the book is intended and I am dishonoring books.  And words. (198)

This book was published in the 70s and the world has undoubtedly changed a lot since then.  L’Engle made some predictions for the future and I would love to be able to hear her reactions in relation to those predictions and how the world actually turned out.  I wish I could have known L’Engle.  I wish I had written her a letter when I was that 9 or 10 year old girl whose whole  world changed when she read one slim book.  But this memoir is as close as I’m going to get and I guess I will have to be satisfied with that.  At least I still have two more to read…

A few more favorite quotes:

The language of logical argument, of proofs, is the language of the limited self we know and can manipulate.  But the language of parable and poetry, of storytelling, moves from the imprisoned language of the provable into the freed language of what I must, for lack of another word, continue to call faith. (194)

Probably my favorite passage from the entire book:

During one dinner, Alan mentioned that men who feel  that it is not God who is dead, as some theologians were then saying, but language that is dead.  If language is to be revived or, like the phoenix, born of its own ashes, then violence must be done to it.

This seemed to me to be a distinct threat.  If language is dead, so is my profession.  How can one write books in a dead language?  And what did he mean by “doing violence to language”?  I began to argue heatedly, and in the midst of my own argument I began to see that doing violence to language means precisely the opposite of what I thought it meant.  To do violence to language, in the sense in which he used the phrase, is not to use long words, or strange orders of words, or even to do anything unusual at all with the words in which we attempt to communicate.  It means really speaking to each other, destroying platitudes and jargon and all the safe cushions of small talk with which we insulate ourselves; not being afraid to talk about the things we don’t talk about, the ultimate things that really matter.  It means turning again to the words that affirm meaning, reason, unity, that teach responsible rather than selfish love.  And sometimes, doing violence to language means not using it at all, not being afraid of being silent together, of being silent alone.  Then, through thunderous silence, we may be able to hear a still, small voice, and words will be born anew. (133)

So go read this!: now | tomorrow | next week | next month | next year | when you’ve exhausted your TBR pile

Rebecca Reads also wrote a post about A Circle of Quiet.  Did you?  Let me know in the comments and I’ll add your post here.