I AM MALALA

 

I Am Malala, Malala Yousafzai, Little Brown and Company, 2013, 270 pp

This reading group pick turned out to be better than I expected. In case you missed it, MalalaYousafzai, aka The Girl Who Stood Up For Education and Was Shot By the Taliban, made headlines around the world after she was shot and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014.

Her story is uplifting. Since she was a small girl, she loved to read and write, she loved school, and was encouraged by her father, a Pakistani advocate for education of both boys and girls. Hers and her father's outspoken presence in Pakistan drew the attention of the Taliban who eventually sent a young gunman to shoot her down while she was riding home from school in October, 2012. She lived through horrific medical procedures and recovered thanks to international outcry and support.

I learned from a child's POV what it was like growing up in Pakistan from 1997 to 2012. Still to this day she is not welcome in her country. Due to her transfer to Great Britain while she was fighting for her life, due to skillful surgeons and doctors, she recovered. She has continued to work for education, especially for women.

The book was co-written with British journalist Christina Lamb. It reads smoothly and I felt it captured Malala's childhood voice nicely. She was only 15 when she was shot. Her recovery took two years including several operations and extended physiotherapy.

Now anytime I feel angry about the lack of rights and opportunities for girls and women around the world, I think of Malala and what she endured. Apparently it is all a matter of enduring.

AS YOU WERE

 As You Were, David Tromblay, Dzanc Books, 2021, 236 pp

This memoir was the February 2021 selection of the Nervous Breakdown Book Club. It is a searing and tough read.

David Tromblay grew up outside Duluth, MN, son of a Native American father and a woman too young to be a mother. David's mother ran away from his father's abuse, ultimately dropping her two kids off at their paternal grandmother's because she could not afford to raise them by herself. 

But grandma was just another link in the chain. Ripped from her tribal home and sent to one of those boarding schools where they practiced a brutal form of conversion therapy designed to turn Native American children into White people, she has no other parenting skills than strict, abusive discipline.

As soon as David is old enough, he enlists in the military and serves successive re-enlistments. It is no more and no less dangerous than his childhood, even in Afghanistan or Iraq. It is all he knows about survival.

When he finally leaves the military, broken in body and mind, he finds his spirit and a way to live through writing. What a writer he is! The memoir is written in second person, a way to distance himself from himself. It works brilliantly.

If you are triggered by violence, especially towards children, I would not fault you at all for skipping As You Were.

I have a few thoughts I would like to mention. For many years I have been reading both history and historical fiction by authors from all over the world and set in places all around the globe. The through line to it all is violence, struggles for power, feuds, genocides, etc. 

Another through line is love, faith in a higher power, the benefits of literacy, education and the arts. All of this is part of being human. 

What I learned from David Tromblay, and not for the first time, is that while our bodies can be weak and vulnerable, our spirits are tough. I never tire of reading just about any kind of story. Trauma can be found anywhere from the home to the streets to the battlefield, even within the natural world. It takes a certain equation of toughness and compassion to get us through.

THIS IS THE NIGHT OUR HOUSE WILL CATCH FIRE

 This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire, Nick Flynn, W W Norton & Co, 2020, 275 pp

The other day when I reviewed The Good Family Fitzgerald, I mentioned that I intended to finish reading and reviewing the remaining 2020 selections of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club by the end of the year. I have finished reading the 5 books in this little challenge but with only two days left in December, I may find it even more challenging to fit in all the reviews. 

But first, a bit of a rant. I saw in the news recently that Bertlesmann, the international media conglomerate, who already owns Penguin Random House (itself already a conglomerate of all kinds of formerly independent publishing houses) is now going after Simon & Schuster. While we all realize that publishing is a business and thus must make money/profits, don't you think it feels like all these mergers into one mega corporation presents risks to the diversity of books that reach us? 

So I had the thought that the little indie publishers around the country and the world are going to have to take up the mantle that takes chances on new writers, on experimental writers, even genre writers, that have been choked out of mainstream publishing. I urge you to pay attention to the publishers of the books you read, the books that become bestsellers, have huge marketing budgets, etc, etc. If by chance you feel a sort of stifling sameness about some of these books, I want to point out that my subscription to The Nervous Breakdown Book Club has brought me many novels that are sometimes unusual, sometimes experimental but are almost always excellent reads by little known authors.

This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire is one of those books. It was the August pick, the fourth memoir by Nick Flynn and its publisher, W W Norton, is still privately owned. 

The style is what I would call experimental, short pieces arranged in such a way that brings together the traumatic events of the author's childhood, how he has coped with those events in both self-destructive and constructive ways, how he has figured out his adult relationships and how to live up to his responsibilities. 

The writing is full of contradictions: sadness and humor; insight and unawareness; real and imaginary memories. Because Flynn seems aware of these contradictions, I believed him.

The best parts for me were when he got into how he saw his environment as a kid. Those parts are excellent renditions of how kids try to make sense of what the adults around them are doing.

I also listened to his interview on the Otherppl podcast where I learned about his writing process and found useful ideas and approaches to writing memoir. Flynn teaches writing and it was almost like taking a class from him. If any of you are attempting that tricky descent into your past, I recommend both the book and the interview.

I truly admire people who attempt to raise their consciousness. To me, that is the most important task in life and is the road to developing our potentials as human beings. 

ALICE PAUL, CLAIMING POWER

Alice Paul, Claiming Power, J D Zahinser & Amelia R Fry, Oxford University Press, 2014, 702 pp

Embarrassing as it is, I had never heard of Alice Paul before. I read this for the October meeting of The Bookie Babes reading group. It was tough getting through the book but I don't regret the time spent. Now I know that Alice Paul was the key person who got American women the right to vote in every state by pushing until the 19th Amendment was passed, ratified and adopted on August 26, 1920.

Alice Paul was born and raised Quaker in New Jersey. The book covers her entire life, her thirst for knowledge, her struggle for equal rights for women, and the incredibly strong purpose she found within herself.

Due to a dry, scholarly tone, the book was at time dull, but I am forever grateful to my reading group for choosing to read it as well as to J D Zahniser and Amelia R Fry for all their hard work to ensure the full story got told.

I knew about Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. It took 80 years for what they and many, many other women started to become Constitutional Law. To paraphrase Ruth Bader Ginsburg, if you change the law you change society. Changing laws is a long hard process. Ask any woman, any person of color, any immigrant.

Still, injustice and inequality can be put right as long as we who see the need for change do not give up, as long as we recognize how slowly that change comes and how many setbacks need to be overcome.

I will never be as focused, as brave, as full of purpose as Alice Paul was, but I have gotten to know another role model and heroine to inspire me and keep me on my own path.

Since finishing the book, I have watched the feature film, Iron Jawed Angels. It was OK but had I not read this book, the movie would have had much less impact. Hilary Swank portrayed Alice Paul as a little too fluffy. The book give you all sides of her. Like any human being, she had many sides. Her strengths outweighed her weaknesses so definitively that she was able to channel the work of perhaps millions of women who have fought for our rights.

If you can take it, I urge you, whether you are male or female or anywhere on that spectrum to read this book.

HOW TO WRITE AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL

How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, Alexander Chee, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018, 380 pp

 I have wanted to read this book ever since it was published. Now, thanks to The Tiny Book Club, I have. Because I had read with great pleasure Chee's 2016 novel, The Queen of the Night, I knew he was a wonderful writer. Now I know how he became one.

In a series of autobiographical essays, collected and revised, he tells a great deal of his life story, including his family background, his education, his writing teachers and his first forays into publishing. These essays just sing with story and humor and emotion. 

For me, both the boon and the conundrum coming from my reading the book, were how it caused me to examine my own approach to writing. I won't go into all the soul searching and changes Mr Chee put me through, because it was personal in a way I could only try to convey to my reading group members, one a published poet and the other a highly educated reader.

If you are a writer at any stage of becoming or growth, I highly recommend the book, not so much for learning the craft or the business of writing but for how to BE a writer. It is one of the best I have read and I have read plenty.

IN THE COUNTRY OF WOMEN

 

 

 In the Country of Women, Susan Straight, Catapult, 2019, 358 pp

 Susan Straight is another one of my favorite authors. I have read all of her seven novels. This book is a memoir that almost reads like a novel.

She is a petite blonde whose novels feature an extended Black family in Rio Seco, CA (her fictional name for Riverside.) Many years ago when I read her first novel, I've Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots, I along with others wondered what gave her the right to explore so deeply the life of a Black single mother.

Soon we learned that Susan Straight married into a Black family. In the Country of Women tells how she met and fell in love with her husband, how she grew up relatively poor with a Swiss immigrant mother, how she learned to read at the age of three, and how she became a writer shortly after she learned to read.

When she met Dwayne Sims, she found a huge extended family who accepted her unconditionally (after making sure she could cook.) Dwayne's mother provided the warmth that Susan's own mother was too embittered by life to give to her daughter.

I have a special affinity for girls who grow up reading every book they can get their hands on and then go on to write their own. Though Susan Straight is a decade younger than I, as kids we read all the same books!

Once she became an in-law to the Sims family and once she took a writing class with James Baldwin at Amherst College, she determined to research the history of both her family and the Sims. She also had three daughters with Dwayne and wanted to give them particularly the stories of all the strong women who came from Europe and the American south to California. Women who overcame incredible hardships and did whatever was needed to provide for and protect their children.

Hence the title: In the Country of Women. It is a beautiful, deeply emotional yet somehow lighthearted memoir. It is a gift to the world in which she proclaims the triumphs for which most women are left unthanked and unrecognized.

Most of all, it is a tribute to family, to taking care of your own as well as welcoming in those who are uncared for. It is full of hope. 

JAMES BALDWIN: A BIOGRAPHY

James Baldwin: A Biography, David Leeming, Alfred A Knopf, 1994, 388 pp

 

This is one of the best author biographies I have ever read. If I love or admire an author, and there is a biography available, I like to read it. Often I follow the author's life as I read their works. I did that with John Steinbeck and discovered that I enjoyed learning what was going on in his life as he wrote each novel.

 

I was going to follow that plan with James Baldwin but I got so involved with his personal story that I could not stop. David Leeming's way of revealing Baldwin is respectful and sensitive. He traces the man's development from an impoverished Harlem kid, son of a preacher, through the lucky breaks that gave him chances to build on his natural intelligence and improve his writing skills as well as figure out his sexual orientation and his place in the world. From all of that experience he became one of the leading Black writers of the 20th century.

 

Authors are not always "nice" people leading steady, secure lives. They are often driven by certain demons and James Baldwin was no exception. He suffered emotionally, he blazed with righteousness in many public situations, and I feel he created one of the most profound understandings of race relations in America ever.

 

I have read four of Baldwin's novels so far: Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, Another Country, and If Beale Street Could Talk. Reading the biography was like taking a class from a really great professor. It deepened my understanding of those novels, both as to how he came to write them and some of the literary aspects I had either missed or not fully grasped.

 

David Leeming is a professor of literature. He was also a close friend of Baldwin's from 1961 until the author's death in 1988. Baldwin authorized Leeming to write his biography and left all his papers to him.

 

Now I look forward to reading the rest of James Baldwin's novels, stories and essay collections while having this book as a resource. I especially liked learning about Baldwin's relationships with Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and many other civil rights leaders, through which I got an excellent overview of the Black race's ongoing fight for freedom. That was James Baldwin's fight, his life and his obsession.

A MOVEABLE FEAST

A Moveable Feast, The Restored Edition, Ernest Hemingway, Scribner, 1964/2009, 225 pp

 

I have a mixed relationship with Ernest Hemingway. I have only read four of his novels. For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) was my favorite and I liked The Sun Also Rises (1926) pretty well. Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) was a bit misogynistic and repetitive for me. The Old Man and the Sea (1952) won a Pulitzer Prize, is revered by critics, literature professors and other serious readers. I was underwhelmed by a story that told an eternal tale about life being tough with the only fun being hunting/overcoming the elements.

 

I have also read Paula Hawkins's The Paris Wife, in which she paints him as a cold-hearted, self-involved womanizer. So why should I take this guy seriously?

A Moveable Feast is another book loved by Hemingway fans but when it came up on my 1964 list I was going to blow it off. I am glad I didn't.

It is a memoir, published posthumously after the author's suicide in 1961. His working title had been "The Paris Sketches," written between 1957 and 1959. He was looking back on his early years as a writer in Paris during the 1920s.

When Hemingway died his publishers at Scribner were still awaiting an introduction and the final chapter. So A Moveable Feast as it was originally published in 1964 was compiled by editors. I read the later "Restored Edition" with omitted material reinserted by Patrick Hemingway, a son from one of the author's four wives, and Sean Hemingway, a grandson.

Who knows what Ernest himself really wanted in the book? He opted out by ending his own life.

I am glad I read it though because I got at least a version of Hemingway's own and how he felt about those years. He had regrets about his treatment of all his wives, admitting that he was deficient as a husband. He includes what to me are revealing accounts of his friendships and acquaintances in the Paris years: Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach (founder of Shakespeare and Company Bookstore), Ford Maddox Ford, Ezra Pound, F Scott Fitzgerald and others. 

He goes into detail about his writing process in those years and the many, many books he read. It was easier to live in poverty then, he thought. Well, I feel that way about the late 1960s. It is always easier to live in poverty when one is young, in love, and not yet a parent. 

 

But I saw that he and his first wife Hadley were quite in love, even though he did use her as a bed partner, a secretary and almost a servant. They had fun skiing in the Alps back when there were no chair lifts. Hemingway believed that climbing up those mountains made one's legs so strong that you could not possibly break them skiing down!

I am still not sure I trust the man but reading A Moveable Feast reminded me that behind or inside every artist is just a human being with weaknesses, foibles, self-doubts, and mistakes made. Most people merely live the best they can (or don't.) Artists rise above all that and produce lasting creations that attempt to make sense of it for the rest of us.

LONG LIVE THE TRIBE OF FATHERLESS GIRLS

Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, T Kira Madden, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019, 304 pp

 

In her debut, a memoir, T Kira Madden relates a childhood full of loneliness and confusion but also so much love that it did not destroy her. Reading the book I was aware of it being carefully crafted with the most beautiful language she could create. Without self pity she revealed emotions that both fit her age as she grew while tinging them with the insights she gained from looking back as a grown woman.

 

I don't want to say more. I knew maybe too much from listening to her interview on the Otherppl podcast before reading her book. So much that I was in doubt about getting into it. As it turned out her style of compiling incidents into vignettes both short and long was a perfect blend of the wonder and the horror of childhood.

Not once did I feel emotionally manipulated nor was I overcome by what she exposes. Perhaps if I knew her personally or was a relative I would have. Instead my heart went out to her. She seems to have come to a place in life free of recrimination. She did mention therapy in her interview, but she clearly never stopped loving either of her parents.

If you decide to read the book, perhaps you will have some of the thoughts and speculations I had concerning this paradox: how some people have had fine, almost idyllic childhoods and grew up to have bad lives while some lived through bad troubles and grew up to find themselves and create good lives. I suppose we are all somewhere on that particular spectrum. It behooves us all to live with tolerance for others, especially our parents and our children.

INHERITANCE

Inheritance, Dani Shapiro, Alfred A Knopf, 2019, 252 pp

 

Partial Summary From Goodreads: 

The acclaimed and beloved author of Hourglass now gives us a new memoir about identity, paternity, and family secrets—a real-time exploration of the staggering discovery she recently made about her father, and her struggle to piece together the hidden story of her own life.

 

In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had whimsically submitted her DNA for analysis, Dani Shapiro received the stunning news that her father was not her biological father. She woke up one morning and her entire history—the life she had lived—crumbled beneath her.

 

My Review:

I was not as blown away by this memoir as most readers seem to have been. It was my first time reading Dani Shapiro and I don't guess we have much in common as far as worldview and emotional concerns go. That is alright. It happens to me with real live people I meet as well.

 

I was fascinated to learn some history about artificial insemination. In the 1950s it was as messed up as any other aspect of reproduction, sex, and the effects of all that on women. Dani Shapiro's mother, as portrayed in the book, made me think of the wife in John Williams's Stoner.

 

The more fraught subject for me is the intersection of genealogy, genetic engineering and eugenics. Richard Powers took that on in his 2009 novel Generosity. I just don't trust the human race and our science in a world that still has atomic arsenals, active White Supremacists and Fascism, to do anything but harm with genetic engineering.

 

Aside from the writing, which I found a bit weak and sometimes overwrought, Dani Shapiro did enlist my sympathies as she described her childhood, her deep feelings of not fitting in to her Jewish family, and her confusions about her relationship with her father. I could not predict how I would have reacted to the news she got or how I would have dealt with it.

 

Thus the book was not a waste of my reading time. It left me with empathy for people in my life who had to search for their birth parents. I used to feel so out of place in my family while growing up that I wondered if I had been adopted and they just hadn't told me yet.   

A VERY EASY DEATH

A Very Easy Death, Simone de Beauvoir, G P Putnam's Sons, 1966, 106 pp (originally published in France by Libraire Gallimard, 1964, translated from the French by Patrick O'Brian)

 

Have you ever spent the last days of your mother's life by her side? I have. This memoir of that experience by my much read and much admired Simone de Beauvoir hit me hard but not unpleasantly.

 

In the first volume of de Beauvoir's memoirs, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, written when she was in her forties, covered the first 23 years of her life. Her experiences and insights helped me understand my relationship with my mother. We both fought against our mothers' protective and restraining methods of raising a girl.

Simone's mother fell dangerously ill in 1963 when Simone was 55 years old. Her mother went to hospital, nursing home and finally into hospice care when inoperable cancer was found. Mine had two major strokes from which she could not regain enough strength to care for herself and eventually passed away 10 years ago, also in hospice though not due to cancer. She declined any sort of life support and my sisters and I honored her wishes. I was with her everyday for 3 months, the last 5 weeks of which I was her primary caregiver at her home.

Reading A Very Easy Death was like going through it all again: my mom's bewilderment at being so reduced, watching over her in the hospital and rehab facility where some bad things happened with doctors, nurses and techs, then feeling I had failed to save her when she finally passed. 

However, the other thing I shared with Simone is a coming to peace with who my mother was and understanding her so much more deeply. We were no longer at odds in those final months, a huge gift to both of us. 

Simone de Beauvoir is a brilliant writer. She made the concerns, the exasperations, the humorous moments, the grief and relief, so real. This book captures the details, the essence of that passage in life with complete honesty. I know it is honest because I have been there.

I wish I had had this book with me in 2009.

DUST TRACKS ON A ROAD

Dust Tracks on a Road, Zora Neale Hurston, J B Lippincott, 1942, 308 pp

 

This was my second time reading the incredible Zora Neale Hurston's autobiography. I first read it in 2003 as part of the 1942 list for My Big Fat Reading Project. This time I read it for a reading group. I loved it both times.

 

Hurston was at the height of her career in 1942. She had published several novels including Their Eyes Were Watching God and she was riding high as one of the few female authors among the Harlem Renaissance phenomenon. Little did she know that her life was about to change and the world was going to leave her in the dust tracks. It was not until Alice Walker resurrected her writing in 1975 that she started to be read again. 

Zora Neale Hurston had a burning desire for story. She read her way out of poverty and seemed to find people who wanted to help her along all through her teenage and adult years. She never rejected that help whether it came from Black or white people, but made the most of it.

Her life was not easy but her spirit was one of tremendous buoyancy, allowing her to bounce back, reinvent, find friends and never dwell on her troubles. This comes across in her writing which is insouciant and rambunctious. My troubles have been nothing in comparison but I have been blessed with that trait of bouncing back, so I felt a kinship with this woman throughout both readings.

I suppose due in part to the increased awareness and discussion about racism still being such a trouble in our country, reading the book this time I noticed her views on all that even more. Those views were so balanced with heart and humor. I understood how much her studies, her travels and her experiences contributed to her understanding of people in general.

If you have never read Dust Tracks on a Road, I recommend it. If you have, let me know how you felt about it. The Bookie Babes all felt positive towards it. Somehow our deep and long discussion did not leave us feeling discouraged or helpless but in a sort of awe about human beings. Seventy-seven years later Zora Neale Hurston reached through time and did that to us.

THE PASSAGE OF POWER

The Passage of Power, The Years of Lyndon Johnson Book 4, Robert A Caro, Alfred A Knopf, 2012, 605 pp

 

I have been reading Robert Caro's four extensive volumes about the life of Lyndon B Johnson over the past two years. The experience has been a master class in politics, power, the workings of the House of Representatives and the Senate, the interaction between the Executive and Legislative Branches, and 20th century history up to 1964.

 

The Passage of Power begins with LBJ, still in his role as the most powerful Senate leader possibly ever, trying to decide if he will run for President in the 1960 election. Because he waffled for too long, he did not get the nomination but was asked to be running mate for John F Kennedy. Becoming a vice president under JFK was a huge descent in influence and an almost complete loss of power. 

Then JFK was assassinated and in the space of a few hours, LBJ was in the position he had dreamed of and schemed to reach for most of his life. The next chapters cover his first hours, days, and months filling this new role. That part was as exciting as the parts in Book 3, Master of the Senate, when he achieved his power there and gave that body a 20th century makeover.

The final section covers how he used his Senate leader experience to get passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

I came of political age in the mid 60s at the height of protests against the Vietnam War. My opinion of this man was formed and largely colored by what happened in those years. My friends and I purely hated him. I am glad I took the time to read so much about him. He was deeply flawed but now I am aware of how much influence he had during his presidency and how much change he brought about.

I understand him now as quite a Machiavellian figure whose strengths could overcome his weaknesses. Robert Caro is still writing the final volume but I want to read it immediately. At the end of The Passage of Power, Caro makes it clear that he feels LBJ held his baser instincts in check long enough to get much positive legislation passed but that his momentum and that of our country would be lost because of Vietnam.

I realize that many people do not have the time to read almost 3000 pages about one POTUS, but anyone who does will learn much about politics and the role of government in America. Having read these books, I feel smarter, more able to parse the news, make sense of what is happening today, and hopefully make the best use of my right to vote, a right for which so many women before me have fought.

EDUCATED

Educated, Tara Westover, Random House, 2018, 329 pp

 

I have read quite a number of books, both novels and memoirs, about Mormons. This is one those, in memoir form, and is pretty much the best one so far.

 

Breaking the bonds from a cult is always tough. Tara Westover's main magic key was education. I happen to believe that is the best method, though when someone is raised in such a circumstance there are family ties to deal with as well. Those ties double the emotional and psychological trauma.

Tara Westover has written an excellent book with honesty and heart. It was grueling to read about all that she went through as a child with her parents and her siblings. She used the strengths she had to reach for any opportunity to get away and build a life that suited her. 

I felt she may have had to evade some aspects of her family life and her subsequent hurdles after leaving. I thought she did so out of respect for her family or, as one of the reading group members said, for legal reasons. She is a canny writer though and gets her points across, letting us read between the lines.

PILLAR OF FIRE

Pillar of Fire, America in the King Years, 1963-1965, Taylor Branch, Simon & Schuster, 1998, 613 pp

 

First of all a health update: I am much better! Almost back to normal in fact. Thanks for all the well wishes.

 

*****

I spent 11 weeks reading Taylor Branch's second volume of a biography centered on Martin Luther King, Jr. Checking back in my reading log, I was surprised that it has been about four years since I read Volume I, Parting the Waters. During those years I read the first three volumes of Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon B Johnson. These two biographical feats dovetail perfectly, especially in Pillar of Fire, because the two men became inextricably entwined in the history of mid-20th century America.

Though I can only read these tomes at a rate of 10 pages a day, so dense are they with persons and events, I am thrilled to be experiencing what I was hoping to find by taking history in college. Especially in what I consider very trying times these days, learning all this history about my country (and much of it was just as trying) gives me courage and hope in some ways while it also has me laughing helplessly at how absurd it all is.

Pillar of Fire focuses intently on the entire Civil Rights Movement during 1963-1965, so it about much more than MLK himself. The movement in those years had become fractured into numerous groups and organizations, much of the time unaligned and full of conflict. Taylor Branch follows all of this on an almost day by day basis. The continuous actions of non-violent protest in the South, the friction between King and Malcolm X, the entry of white college students and ministers from the North and West, and the riots in Northern Cities are all covered in great detail.

President John F Kennedy was assassinated before he could manage to get much done for racial equality. Lyndon B Johnson in his first years as President did get the Civil Rights Bill through Congress. However the KKK kept on bombing churches and killing Black people, getting away with it in the courts of the South. 

Thanks to J Edgar Hoover and his obsessions, LBJ could not find a way to provide Federal support for integration despite his new law. He also had the growing situation of Vietnam to deal with. That left King and all the other civil rights leaders to carry on basically without backup.

What struck me hardest as I read was how long and hard it can be to bring about social change, how tirelessly all those thousands of people kept at trying to make the law a reality and getting Blacks the right to vote.

Ten years after Rosa Park's refusal to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, segregation was still the everyday practice in the South. Malcolm X was assassinated. By 1968 Martin Luther King would be too. Today, Black Americans are still at the mercy of brutality, poverty, and incarceration in what we are told is "our great nation." Over 150 year have passed since we freed our slaves, on paper.

So, next up for me is Robert Caro's The Passage of Power, the parallel story of LBJ's years 1958-1964. Another 605 pages. Then one more volume about MLK. Then, God willing, the final LBJ volume from Caro. I sure hope he is able to finish it.

THE YEARS

The Years, Annie Ernaux, Seven Stories Press, 2017, 231 pp (originally published by Editions Gallimard, Paris, France, 2008; translated from the French by Allison L Strayer.)

 

I read this because it is a memoir. I read memoirs and autobiographies as aids to the book I am writing, either a memoir or an autobiography depending on which day you ask. When I first heard about The Years, I learned that this acclaimed French writer covers her life against a background of social and political French life, comparing and relating her passages to those events. I am attempting a similar feat.

Unlike myself, Annie Ernaux is exemplary in her brevity. She manages to compress 1941 to 2006 into just a bit over 200 pages. Reading the book was like watching a newsreel, barreling through her upbringing, her schooling and her adult life, complete with the major news, the literature, music, movies and changing styles and mores.

At times she is remembering her world by looking outside herself, other times by recalling her emotions and observations. Since I have never lived in France, many of the cultural bits were outside my experience. That problem was eased by the fact that we have both been through these changes simply by living in the world during almost the same decades.

She often mentions Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre, and other French authors I have read, making me feel more at home. I have read from those authors about the German occupation during WWII, the resistance, the Algerian War, the involvement of French intellectuals and youth with socialism and communism. New to me though was what has happened in France from the 1970s on.

The book was a great boost to my own writing project. Unless other readers are interested in mid 20th century French life, it might be less interesting. If you have visited France over the years though, it is an inside look into changes you may have noticed.

Just as I was reading it, The Years was included on the long list for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize, another bonus for book nerds.

 

 

BECOMING

Becoming, Michelle Obama, Crown, 2018, 421 pp

 

 

THE SUNDAY FAMILY READ

 

 

I have not bought too many hardcovers this year (more than I planned but not too many) but I bought this one. It is the best political memoir I have ever read, because it is by a female and because this female is an outstanding human being!

 

This is the story of her whole life so far, so it is actually a mid-life autobiography. To learn about the factors that went into making one your heroines is an astonishing experience. I loved how much she lets you in to her heart, mind, and personality.

What is it really like to be First Lady? Well, you will learn that in this book. Any novelist who plans to write a fictionalized First Lady should read this for research.

What is it like to be married to the endlessly hopeful, always reading, never tiring Barack Obama? It is not easy, as you could imagine, but she loves him so much!

What is it like to raise two daughters for eight years in the White House? A challenge and she met it with her usual grace and humor. What a cool mom!

I think what I loved most though was reading about her worries, her insecurities, her obsessions. I bet she even played them down some, because come on, a Black woman in her position?

"When they go low, we go high." Channeling Martin Luther King, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison and every long-suffering, long-loving Black mother who lives to make sure her children grow up, make a life, realize some dreams. As far as I am concerned that statement is the first commandment for making positive change. Michelle Obama's story is a handbook for how it is done.

I admit I spend far too much time on toxic Twitter. I can't stop, no matter how riled up and anxious I get. Becoming was like the ultimate anti-anxiety, anti-depressant. I don't take those in pill form, I get that effect from reading about heroic people who truly effect change. I was reminded that this time we are having now, this too shall pass. I was reminded that we were set an example of what leadership looks like, what patriotism looks like, what social justice looks like, by two people with all their perfect imperfections who actually give way more than a f*#k about our country and the world.

Becoming is an incredible achievement. Just read it!

 

 

(Becoming is available in hardcover on the shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

CAMUS, A ROMANCE

Camus, A Romance, Elizabeth Hawes, Grove Press, 2009, 289 pp

 

 

During the course of My Big Fat Reading Project I have read the three novels Albert Camus published during his life: The Plague, The Stranger, The Fall. I did not read them in order and all I really knew about him is that my father revered him. I wanted to know more.

 

Albert Camus also wrote plays and essays. He came to fame in the 1940s in Paris where he was initially close with Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1957. Three years later he died in an automobile accident. Each of his novels left a big impression on me.

I bought this biography when it was first published but never got around to reading it. Now that I am writing about 1960 in my own autobiography I decided the time had come.

Camus, A Romance is unique as biographies go because Elizabeth Hawes weaves in a memoir of her own. She covers her first infatuation with Camus's writing when she was a college student. She also recounts her journey, her research and her experiences in writing the book over nine years.

Naturally I learned much about the man, his times, his triumphs and his troubles. I discovered for myself why his novels had moved me so profoundly. Best of all I found the political philosophy that most closely aligns with my own. 

I closed the book wishing we had someone these days to explicate so well what is going on. Lacking that, even from the grave this man brought me understandings I needed. He has much to say about terrorism and its causes. It was apt that I finished the book on September 11.

(Camus, A Romance is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE SOUND OF GRAVEL

The Sound of Gravel, Ruth Wariner, Flatiron Books, 2015, 336 pp

 

 

This memoir was the January, 2016 selection of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club. The author grew up in a polygamist Mormon family. I listened to her interview on the Otherppl Podcast back in 2016 and wasn't sure I wanted to read another "I escaped from a cult" book.

 

I have read stories about Mormons before and become aware that the fundamentalist sector of that religion is truly a cult, that the polygamy is pretty wacked, and that for its members having kids is more important than caring for or raising them. 

The preaching in Ruth's childhood church was that "God will punish the wicked by destroying the world and that women can only ascend to Heaven by entering into polygamous marriages and giving birth to as many children as possible." (Quoted from the book cover flap.)

It is all quite gruesome but Ruth Wariner is a good writer. She loved her mother, she hated her step-father, she did her best to protect her siblings. When she finally broke away she took as many of those siblings as were left with her and made a good life for all of them. She does not whine, she is not a victim. She is a bright, smart survivor filled with a positive approach to life. In the interview I learned that it took quite some therapy to get there but she did.

I have had my own brushes with cults so whenever I read a book like this, I ponder about how many "cults" can be found in life, both religious and societal. Keeping one's mind and spirit free is possibly life's biggest challenge. It has been the reading of books, both fiction and non-fiction, that saved me.

(The Sound of Gravel is available in both hardcover and paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

IN THE DARKROOM

In the Darkroom, Susan Faludi, Henry Holt and Company, 2016, 417 pp

 

 

Susan Faludi has been has an award winning journalist, has written an acclaimed nonfiction work, Backlash, and is an all around intelligent woman. I knew the name but not much else. Thanks to my reading group, The Bookie Babes, I have now read her.

 

In the Darkroom is part memoir, part inquiry into the meaning of identity, part Hungarian history. Some of the reading group members found it overstuffed and I can't disagree. I also however found it moving as a memoir, thoughtful as to gender identity, and informative on Hungarian history.

Susan Faludi had an unhappy childhood, thanks to her father. He was moody, overbearing, and violent at times. He left her and her mother when Susan was a teen, leaving her with harbored resentment, grievances and hurt for many years. When she learned that he had undergone sex reassignment surgery at the age of 76, she began an investigation into his life. Though her father had been a successful photographer for the fashion and magazine industry in New York, he had returned to Budapest, Hungary, the city of his birth. Though the parent and daughter had maintained a relationship and correspondence, it was strained to say the least.

Many visits to Hungary ensued. Susan took a dual role as daughter and investigative reporter and gradually brought the hidden life of her now female father into view, much the way he had developed pictures in his darkroom. During those visits, it was most unsettling to read sentences like, "My father, she..." Also interesting to learn that Hungarian has no gender specific pronouns!

Though the story contains many emotions, the underlying theme is tragedy due to the horrific circumstances of the senior Faludi's childhood in Hungary under the Nazis and then under Communism. Even to this day the country is a political mess and antisemitism is rife. Susan's father was born Jewish but learned to survive by subterfuge and the ability to assume different identities.

The book is necessarily in part a study of the transgender phenomenon primarily through the views of psychiatry and medicine. I found that the least convincing aspect of the story. Her research seemed well done but came across as dry theories, not all of them credible to me. When she finally wove the whole tapestry together, the issues of identity, gender, war, loss and survival as played out in the life of one Jewish man who chose to become a woman, it developed into a deeply moving and personal story. 

Take a chance on a book, as we say in the Bookie Babes.

(In the Darkroom is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)