The sub-title of this book is ‘LIFE ON A CULT TV SHOW WHILE ALSO IN AN ACTUAL CULT,’ which pretty much sums it up. If you watched ONE TREE HILL in the early 2000s, you will know this lady. Her story of how she got sucked into the cult is very compelling, because she really talks you through how gradual it is. I guess the point is, no one wakes up and decides ‘today I’ll join a cult.’ It really teaches you to be on your guard. I think the primary point they pushed was for her to not listen to herself, and her own judgement, but rather to god/the cult leader/her doubts. Once you have conceded that your opinion is unimportant, you are basically 90% of the way there. This poor woman had her life really wrecked. She talks about how she decided to be public – not just in the book, but in daily life – about being in a cult, and about how embarrassed she is that hers was not even one of the big, weird cults. She’s ashamed to have to say there was no KoolAid or judgement day. It was just a small, Bible-based group. But it did the business anyway. And it’s still out there in Idaho, ruining people’s lives.
Category: memoir
WILD by Cheryl Strayed
For some reason I thought this was going to be kind of cheesy – maybe because it was made into a movie that was marketed as ‘inspiring’? – but in fact I did find it kind of inspiring.
It tells the true story of a woman in her 20s whose life has spiralled since her mother’s death, with divorce, heroin usage, and etc. She therefore decides to walk thousands of miles along the Pacific Crest Trail, which goes up the West Coast of the US, from Mexico to Canada. She is ill prepared; she does not try out her pack before she begins, and once there finds out she cannot even lift it off the floor. She gets stronger as she goes along, losing 6 of her 10 toenails to the trail. She comes across coyotes, elks, and bears multiple times. She is threatened with sexual assault, but only the once, which is I think surprisingly good going for 3 months on your own, even if it is in the wilderness.
I was especially struck by how distant the 1990s felt. She does not have a phone, which seemed to me incredibly and impossibly lonely. I don’t know this surprises me so much: I was an adult before I had a phone myself, and I don’t remember being lonely without it.
I guess there is some deep evolutionary drive behind the long walk, because so many human societies have sanctioned it with the idea of a pilgrimage. It was interesting to read this very personal, spontaneous version of this idea, and to see how, toenails aside, it helped this lady get a handle on her life.
LITTLE BASTARDS by Mildred Kadish
Here is a book about growing up on an Iowa farm in the Great Depression. The New York Times put this on its notable books list of 2007 (I’m going in order from 2000 through those lists, truly I am desperate for something to read), but myself I had to quit half way through. Essentially the author tells us about all the cooking and cleaning and farming stuff that happened on a farm in the 1930s. You’d think it would be interesting: but no. Though I will include this snippet:
“When one of us kids received a scratch, cut, or puncture, we didn’t run to the house to be taken care of. Nobody would have been interested. We just went to the barn or the corncrib, found a spiderweb, and wrapped the stretchy filament around the wound.”
Yikes. There’s given children independence and then there is germs.
PRAIRIE FIRES: THE AMERICAN DREAMS OF LAURA INGALLS WILDER by Caroline Fraser
Here is a life of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE. First thing I’m going to say is, there’s a lot of encouragement here for late bloomers. She wrote that book, and the six others, all in her 60s, with little previous writing experience. What I found particularly interesting was that they are all – to some extent, and the extent is quite contested – auto-biographical stories, covering her life up to about age 20. She wrote the books in part to make money, and in part because she was driven to.
She had a real yearning to keep her parents and her childhood alive. It was so bad that at night she often could not sleep, because the memories were coming back to her so thick and fast. I guess it makes sense, as you get older, this desire to make it all mean something. I find it quite touching, that apparently today you can go to various museums and see things like ‘Pa’s fiddle,’ and ‘Carrie’s sampler.’ How incredible: this low income, rural woman of the early 1900s has managed to immortalize her ordinary family.
I think one reason she felt such a need to hold onto the past was down to how quickly it was changing in her own lifetime. Her father was one of those who went out to ‘settle’ the West, so she had a front row seat to what that meant for the native Americans, and lived to see the prairies ploughed under and highways built. I knew that frontier life was hard, and that very few settlers managed to stay on the land for the five years needed to ‘claim’ it. But what astounded me was to learn that even in the early 1900s the government meterologists warned repeatedly that the prairies were too dry for small scale farming, and that only cattle would really work. But the railways still pushed this dream on people. It is just wild to think of the myth of the noble frontiersman and include in that the fact that he was basically being snookered by big business. Wilder’s family had a terrible time. If it was not droughts, it was locusts (as many as a trillion individuals in one particular swam). And once they had ploughed up the prairie, and taken the top soil that took thousands of years to develop, then there came the dust. Apparently carts would go past with ‘In god we trusted in Kansas we busted,’ on the side, and ‘shack-whacky’ was a well known term for the mental health crises that were common in this difficult environment. The only real solution was co-operative irrigation and government bailouts, which is yet another layer to the myth of the frontier.
I can’t even get into her daughter, who was another whole topic, an early journalist who travelled the world, a depressive, and eventually a anti-Semitic libertarian. A great book, it made me think about a ton of different topics.
AN HONEST WOMAN: A MEMOIR OF LOVE AND SEX WORK by Charlotte Shane
Here is some non-fiction about being a sex worker. What I really can’t get is the cover: it’s a sexy pair of female lips. What? Who agreed to this image, which to me at least is both cheesy and reductive?
For a book all about the author’s experience, I felt I learnt curiously little about the author. For example, it’s not clear why she gets into ‘full service,’ For a relatively well-off, well-educated person, it’s an unusual career choice, being simultaneously high-risk and repetitive, but we don’t hear too much about it. Mostly, she seems to have enjoyed the validation of being sexually desired by so many.
Another example is her relationship with her main client, who was about half her income. She tells us a lot about him, including that she would not have spent time with him for free ‘either platonically or sexually,’ but still, she is greatly upset by his death.
Of most interest to me was her time in high school. She becomes enamoured of a group of kids at neighbouring school, and especially of the boys:
“My objective as a teenagers was to find the boys, to link up with them because they were the party, they were the event. Years passed, and the objective stayed the same, with the focus shifted to sanction my own creativity: find boys to make a band, find boys to make a movie – find boys because they’d supply the verbs that would propel my life. It wasn’t just that they were necessary for sex or romance, though they were for me. More than that, they were the only means of getting at all that life has to offer. . . . A woman’s life is fundamentally inert, no matter how busy or accomplished a woman might be because that the nature of an object, even important or well travelled objects like the Hope Diamond or the Olympic Torch . . . I could fling myself into a situation like a skydiver jumping from a plane, but in my mind, I couldn’t forment the situation on my own . . .”
Unpleasantly, I sort of recognize this problem from my own adolescence, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it described so clearly before.
THE ROAD TO NAB END by William Woodruff
It is rare, at least in English, to find a book written by someone who grew up really poor. And it’s very rare for that book to be pre-1950. Off the top of my head, I can think of LARKRISE TO CANDLEFORD and MY FIRST THIRTY YEARS and that’s about it. THE ROAD TO NAB END is one such. It’s a memoir of a childhood in the early 1900s in Blackburn. I had never heard of this Blackburn, but it was apparently a key starting point of the Industrial Revolution, especially in clothing manufacture. Unfortunately for the author, the Revolution was running out of steam as he arrived, and his family were at the sharp end of it. Try this:
“I think the damp worried me more than the cold. There was nothing to stop it rising through the flagstones that covered the floor . . . The washing hanging from the ceiling didn’t help either. The cold was sometimes so severe it made us forget the damp.”
“All meals were our favourite meals,” he says at one point, a sentence I have thought of often in my revoltingly privileged life of restaurants and ‘standards’ about food.
What makes it especially sad is that his parents moved to America in about 1910, and then, in a tragically poor piece of decision-making driven by homesickness, came back again, just in time for the father to be drafted into WWI and clothing manufacture to move to America. Here is his grandma, when challenged about moving to the US:
“And don’t give me that old buck about love of country. That kind of talk is for toffs. You keep the country, I’ll take the money. Frankly, I don’t care whether God saves our gracious king or not. I’m tired of the whole rotten lot.”
She certainly never came back, and ended her life rich and comfortable.
The presence of the WWI veterans is a particularly sad part of this book. One lies babbling in a bed in the front garden of the house across the street for twenty years, presumably from shell shock or a head injury.
It’s a clear, straightforward re-telling of a tough childhood, and it made me grateful for my cushy adulthood.
SEVENTEEN by Joe Gibson
A memoir by a man who at 17 was groomed by his female teacher into a sexual relationship. He does a fantastic, horrifying job of telling it very much from the perspective of his 17-year old self – how wonderful he found her, how frightened he was of her, and etc. It must have been very hard to do, because from any adult perspective you can tell she is a strange and manipulative woman, delighted to find someone who will follow her creepy script for romance. You can tell the author shares this adult perspective, as the post-script takes us to him at 35. The detailed story ends at his prom, but then he tells us that he ends up getting married to her in his first year of University (in his home town, because ‘you can’t go to Oxford,’ she tells him, because then we’ll be separated); and having a baby in his second year; and another baby in his fourth. Once he is capable of earning a wage, she never works again. He hates his job and she convinces him it is his duty to stay with it. Though he does not talk too much about it, the book absolutely aches with regret for the young years he lost. What is particularly sad is how clear he makes it that many people – including people in the power structure of the school – who knew what was happening and ignored it, because it was inconvenient for them for it to be happening. A complete heartbreaker of a story.
SMALL FRY by Lisa Brennan-Jobs
To say this is a memoir by the daughter of Steve Jobs does the book a disservice. It certainly is that, and you do learn some scuttle-butt about Steve Jobs (who does seem to be a really weird guy), but what is mostly interesting is the very real, detailed effort to re-create a specific childhood.
It is a real mystery of the memoir form how any life – no matter how foreign – told with enough specificity, becomes relatable. This specific child was born to a pair of hig school sweethearts. The mother decides to keep her, and is a loving parent, but also struggles very much with what she has given up in doing so. The father eventually accepts paternity after a DNA test, and agrees child support amounts just days before a little computer company he founded goes public, making him a multi-millionaire.
This makes it sound like a bitter book, but it’s not really. I enjoyed it.
ADVENTURES IN MASHONALAND by Rose Blennerhassett and Lucy Sleeman
Clearly I did not really understand what total ballers some Victorian woman were. This book is the first-person account of some young nurses who decided to come to Mashonaland in the 1890s, and it is some hair-raising stuff. I thought they were all at home wearing corsets and having vapours, but apparently not.
This was when Florence Nightingale had made nursing acceptable for Victorian women, and what I got from this book is that girls who wanted out grabbed this opportunity with both hands. In this case, the nurses are asked to go to Mashonaland when there is no road or train, and after various efforts by boat, (and being abandoned by the Bishop), they get tired of waiting and decide to walk – from Beira! Here is a discussion with the various men telling them not to try it:
No women he had known had ever walked in Africa; even men found it trying, and sometimes died on the way. We told our excellent advisors that we could only die once, and that dying was just as disagreeabale in a room as on the veldt. If women had never walked in Africa there was no reason why they should not begin
It’s an extraordinary walk, and when they get there the hospital is hardly a hut. They spend two years dealing with ‘fever’ (I assume malaria?), and with all kinds of other wild problems, lions, etc. One of them finds someone to marry. I liked this line:
Africa is the land of the unforeseen. . . ‘Questions,’ ‘wars,’ ‘difficulties’ spring up at an instant’s notice.
So true still today, though we call them ‘challenges.’ So tough are the conditions that when the next batch of nurses arrive to take over (a road having been built) half of them turn around and go back to Beira!
An amazing story of people leading big crazy lives against the odds.
COLD CREMATORIUM by Jozsef Debreczeni
Here is a really stomach-churning account of the Nazi death camps. It is written by a Hungarian journalist, who brings his professional eye to describing how he survived. I was amazed it is not more famous. The Introduction tells me this is because it has only recently been translated from the Hungarian. The book begins with the author, Jozsef Debreczeni, being captured in June 1944. Arriving at the first of the camps, the old, young, and female are separated out to the left. Then the Nazis say that those on the left will get to ride in a truck up the hill, so anyone who feels they cannot walk up the hill should also go to the left. Debreczeni nearly takes the offer, but is fortunate to hear an existing prisoner whisper to him to stay. Of course all those on the left go directly to be gassed.
Those on the right go on to hard labour, which is pretty horrifying, but not nearly so bad as what happens when he is somehow sent on to a hospital camp. Here he lies naked, 2-3 to a bunk, in huge dormitories with almost nothing to eat, and with no one clearing up the sewage, so it is ankle deep at all times. They do hear news of the front, so they understand that the Nazis have lost, but the question is if they can stay alive long enough for the Russians to get to them. When the Red Army appears with sausages and throws it on his bed I felt like weeping.
One thing that really surprised me in this story was his account of how much of the camp order – and how much of the decisions on who and how to deprive of food – was made by fellow prisoners. Apparently the Nazis created a hierarchy, and those prisoners at the top were, in his view, quite merciless to those below. They loom as much larger villains than their actual captors. Once the Nazi soldiers decide to run away, what is interesting is the prisoner hierarchy run away too, and while none are caught in the author’s camp, in others they were hanged by the other prisoners.