Tag: USA

EAT PRAY LOVE by Elizabeth Gilbert

I don’t know why this bestseller has such a terrible reputation. I quite enjoyed it. It is a memoir of a woman whose marriage, and then affair that ended that marriage, both explode spectacularly. She decides to heal herself by going on a year long holiday. What is really impressive about this is she sells a book proposal about this and so funds it upfront.

It is maybe a little obvious that this book was written off the back of a book proposal, and not one for a very sophisticated audience. She plans to travel to three countries: Italy, to explore pleasure: India, to explore religion; and Indonesia to explore balance (?). I’m amazed in 2006 someone could with a straight-face describe whole countries as representing things, but here we are, and it was a bestseller. Let us just be grateful she did not get around to Africa.

I was very interested by her time in the Indian ashram, and her sincere attempts to meditate for hours every day. I try for ten minutes and that is tough enough. I liked this as an explanation of silent retreats:

The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendance emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras (I’m a failure . . . I’m lonely . . . I’m a failure . . I’m lonely . . ) and we become monuments to them. To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating mantras.

Now I just need to find a way to fund my holidays with book proposals.

MY FATHER’S DIET by Adrian Nathan West

I bought this book because Andrew Martin (whose book EARLY WORK I adore) recommended it. I can see why he likes it. I liked it too. But I can’t say I really understand it.

It is written from the perspective of a college aged man, who tells us about his father’s efforts, after a divorce, to win a bodybuilding competition. That’s it: that’s what it’s about. A really detailed account of watching his fat, 55 year old father engage in this probably impossible undertaking.

Some readers might think the father a sort of pathetic figure (and indeed the Guardian review thinks this book is about failure), but I did not. I rather admired him. At least he was out there, taking the big swings. The son, on the other hand, mostly sits in his room and tries to skate through college doing the least work possible. He’s a classic narrator of the modern novel, directionless and annoying. Go to therapy already! Or become a drug addict. Enter a body building competition.

I did really admire the super careful use of language in this book. It must have taken huge work. There were many moments when I stopped to admire the specificity of the writing. One time he mentions ‘a procession of eighteen wheelers entering and exiting the pale radiance of a service station.’ Pale radiance! I love it

EILEEN by Otessa Moshfegh

It is often a mistake to read a second book by an author you enjoy, because you start to be able to see their tricks. Such is the case with EILEEN. I enjoyed it, and I especially enjoyed her deeply unpleasant female narrator, but I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t just read MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION, which has the same ingredients but done better.

But who cares, I guess. As long as something is still fun. Most of this book is about the many ways the main character is unhappy, and how much she makes it worse for herself. Eventually, she makes a friend at work. This sounds like a positive development but in fact it ends in murder.

One thing I did not especially like was the inclusion of child abuse. Not that this can never be written about, of course it can, but in this case it seemed to me a little too much of a plot device – as if it was included just to ramp up the tension – which I did not think was needed, or earned. Eileen was capable of murder without anywhere near that much motivation.

REVOLUTIONARY ROAD by Richard Yates

I always heard this book was about an unhappy marriage. In reality, it’s about the importance of legal abortion. It tells the story of a young man in 1950s America of whom everyone expects great things, himself included. He is not too sure what these things are, and certainly doesn’t work on anything in particular, and so ends up long-term in an office job he started as a stop gap. So far, this is pretty much the story of 50% of humanity.

In this case it gets really out of hand because his girlfriend gets pregnant. She wants to abort but he makes a big production about it so she doesn’t. They move to the suburbs, which they both regard as a sign of failure. Then she has another child. She tries to convince him to move to Europe, and begin the life they dreamed of (she will work while he becomes great). He is terrified at being given the chance to actually live the life he talks about so much, and so when she becomes pregnant again, and obviously wants to abort as that will end their plans, he talks her out of it again. They don’t move to Europe, their marriage implodes, and this poor woman tries to give herself an abortion at home. She dies. I can only say one more time: THANK YOU FEMINISM.

Side point, please enjoy this description, a warning to us all:

Howard Givings looked older than sixty seven. His whole adult life had been spent as a minor official of the seventh largest life insurance company in the world, and now in retirement it seemed that the years of office tedium had marked him as vividly as old seafaring men are marked by wind and sun.

THE RUIN OF ALL WITCHES by Malcolm Gaskill

This is a fantastically interesting recreation of a single witch trial in 1651. I am amazed the kind of records exist that enable this level of detailed understanding of individuals so long ago. The trial was of a married couple. The husband had a temper, and was always telling people how he would ‘get even’ with them. This was not smart in a time when people were living in tiny villages, barely scraping a living, and absolutely buck-wild about religion. Meanwhile his wife was exhausted with having babies, resentful of being asked to bring in the maize while also looking after the kids, and seems to have had some kind of breakdown. It all gets out of control from there. Horses buck, ghostly children walk, imaginary dogs appear, and a meat pudding splits in two (a clear sign, apparently).

What I got from this book is that you should 100% not worry at all about anything that you cannot see and touch. It is sobering to see how recognizable these people are, with their problems (e.g., I am sick of these kids), and how very sincerely they really did all believe in imaginary dogs. It makes me wonder what imaginary dogs I am worrying about.

Side bar: I also learnt how incredibly ballsy these early migrants were. The main woman got abandoned by her husband and walked twenty miles with no money to Bristol to get herself on a ship to the ‘new world.’ Can you imagine the courage.

I’M GLAD MY MOM DIED by Jeanette McCurdy

Here is a memoir that makes you think that being a child star is really as bad as it looks. McCurdy’s mother is a super aggressive stage mother who pushes her daughter into acting and is phenomenally, creepily controlling. Example: she gives her breast AND VAGINAL exams in the shower until she is sixteen.

She gains some independence from her mother but has a drinking problem and both anorexia and bulimia. The anorexia she regards as the more sophisticated and desirable disease, but the bulimia eventually wins out. The most horrifying part is when she starts vomiting in a airplane toilet and a couple of teeth come out.

Every page of this book reads as being earned. McCurdy has clearly gone the incredibly hard miles in therapy. The voice is stark, direct, and simple, in a way you only achieve when you have cut out everything that’s not true. It’s also hilarious. I have nothing but admiration.

MY FIRST THIRTY YEARS by Gertrude Beasley

Get ready for how this memoir begins:

Thirty years ago, I lay in the womb of a woman, conceived in a sexual act of rape, being carried during the prenatal period by an unwilling and rebellious mother, finally bursting from the womb only to be tormented in a family whose members I despised or pitied, and brought into association with people whom I should never have chosen.

If first paragraph not enough, let’s go to the second one:

Sometimes I wish that, as I lay in the womb, a pink soft embryo, I had somehow thought, breathed or moved and wrought destruction to the woman who bore me, and her eight miserable children who preceded me, and the four round-faced mediocrities who came after me, and her husband, a monstrously cruel, Christ-like, and handsome man with an animal’s appetite for begetting children.

BOOM. This lady born very poor in Texas in 1892, and only wrote this one book, a memoir of her life up to age 30. It is a story of titanic will power, courage and rage. It’s also possibly the only book in English I can think of, other than LARKRISE TO CANDLEFORD, written by a poor woman born in the nineteenth century.

It;s is an account of what Gertrude calls her family’s “horryifying and disgusting domestic relations,” where her mother sleeps with a shovel to fight her father off, so she can stop having children. Gertrude is raped by all three of her elder brothers, who also have sex with the cows. Her mother comments: “I was just scared nearly to death before that old cow’s calf come . . ” .

She is the only one of her 12 siblings to make it through high school, and she goes on to University in Chicago. As she put it: “I was getting jollier and jollier and going to the devil as fast as I could go.” The books ends with her contracted as a journalist to go to Japan. It’s an uplifting story about triumph against unimaginable odds. However, on reading the Introduction, I found out she didn’t in fact triumph. The book is banned – apparently you can’t just say exactly how things actually are – and a few years later she is put in an insane asylum, at a time when that was a common thing to do to troublesome women. It does not seem at all likely she was insane. Just belligerent, and with good reason. She dies there thirty years later.

That’s it ladies: these are giants on whose shoulders we stand. I’m so glad she got out this one short book on her life, and on her astonishing achievements, before the patriarchy closed her down.

SELECTED STORIES by Dorothy Parker

Surprisingly feminist set of short stories, written in the 1930s. Not so fun as I thought they would be. I thought Parker was supposed to be a comic author but in fact these are acidic and rather sad, and deal with difficult subjects (like really difficult, like backstreet abortions), almost as if being female in the 1930s was not always all that easy.

GIOVANNI’S ROOM by James Baldwin

Here is a completely searing 149 pages about the consequences of cowardice. A young American man meets a young American woman in Paris. He then meets an Italian waiter who he greatly, greatly prefers. It is the 1940s and he has spent many years trying to convince himself he is straight. Then he meets the waiter, Giovanni, and that’s all over: they move in together the first night. The agonizing that ensues is just horrifying. Baldwin is an AMAZING WRITER. Lets enjoy this conversation with his father, after a car accident:

“You’re going to be on your back for awhile but when you come home, while you’re lying around the house, we’ll talk, huh? And try to figure out what the hell we’re going to do with you when you get on your feet, OK?”

“OK,” I said.

For I understood, at the bottom of my heart, that we had never talked, that now we never would. I understood that he must never know this.

Eventually the American beaks the waiter’s heart, and his own, by deciding he can’t face what constituted gay life at that time. It was sad, but then try this, his last big speech to the waiter:

What kind of life can two men have together, anyway? All this love you talk about – isn’t it just that you want to be made to feel strong? You want to go out and be the labourer and bring home the money and you want me to stay here and wash the dishes and cook the food and clean this miserable little closet of a room . . and be your little girl. That’s what you want. That’s what you mean that’s all you mean when you say you love me. You say I want to kill you. What do you think you’ve been doing to me?

It’s interesting how clearly men knew how really bad patriachy was. This was a huge personal cost to the man, but he was willing to do it: anything, anything, rather than be female. I get it.