Like so many of Patricia Polacco’s picture books, this is a warm story about a significant time in her own childhood. The narrative opens with young TLike so many of Patricia Polacco’s picture books, this is a warm story about a significant time in her own childhood. The narrative opens with young Trisha taking a final tractor ride with Grampa, carefully avoiding areas in the fields where thatchers nest with their hatchlings. Trisha’s bubbie has recently died and Grampa has sold the farm. He will move to Indiana to live with relatives. The farm has also been home to Trisha, her brother Richie, and her mother, so it’s hard to leave all the farm animals and the natural world for Battle Creek, Michigan, where their mother has taken a teaching position. Grampa reassures Trisha that there will be birds in the city. He’s right: there’s a robin’s nest right outside her bedroom window in the old coach house they’re renting from an older lady. There’s also a library not far away, where Trisha discovers books that feature the paintings of famous artists, confirming for her that this is exactly the work she wants to do.
Trisha is taken under the wing of a nurturing librarian, Mrs. Creavy who secretively takes her high, high, high up in the palatial building to see the special John James Audubon collection. The grade-one nature walks that Trisha’s teacher, Miss Bice, has regularly taken the class on, the viewing of Audubon’s works, and Tricia’s own love of birds lead her to suggest that birds should be their class’s theme for parents’ night. Her classmates wholeheartedly agree and insist that Trisha’s drawings of birds should be featured. Mrs. Creavy visits the joyfully decorated “bird-santuary” room, full of the children’s avian art. An official accompanies her, and Tricia receives a special honour. (view spoiler)[The Michigan state chairman of the Audubon bird clubs of America declares her the first member of the school’s bird club. Her classmates will all be members, too. (hide spoiler)]
Polacco’s narrative mentions her struggle with reading, and in her afterword she explains that only years later did she discover that she had dyslexia, dysnomia (an impaired ability to recall words, names, and objects), as well as dysgraphia (a neurological disorder of written expression characterized by problems with fine motor skills and writing ability in general). The sadness of being academically behind her classmates is communicated in the book, but the greater message of warm, encouraging, loving adults who nurtured her curiosity and talents shines bright.
Thanks to my GR friend Lisa for making me aware of this book....more
This is an intense, introspective, and even claustrophobic work, and evidently an autobiographical one. For Archipelago Books, its publisher, it is anThis is an intense, introspective, and even claustrophobic work, and evidently an autobiographical one. For Archipelago Books, its publisher, it is an “uncategorized” title—not definitively fiction or autobiography. The subject matter is painful. In it the unnamed narrator, a writer, addresses her sensitive, intelligent husband (also unnamed)—a successful publisher who once aspired to be an artist. He is dying of pancreatic cancer.
Their relationship has not been a long one—four years. They married only the previous summer, in August 2019. After his diagnosis, the narrator’s partner wanted to affirm their love in a formal union. In this man, the writer had, for the first time, found home and a sense of belonging. She had also moved from Oslo to Milan. One of the questions for her now is how she will continue without him. Her main preoccupation, however, is with her husband’s unwillingness or inability to acknowledge that he is dying. The writer has always believed herself to be a person committed to the truth—facing it head-on—yet she finds she cannot broach the subject with him. His doctors also do not. (view spoiler)[Their philosophy is that if the patient is not asking questions, they do not supply information that could deprive him of hope. The oncologist comments that the narrator too has not been seeking clarification. (hide spoiler)]
For close to two years, since her partner began to experience concerning symptoms, the writer has been unable to write. She rereads a notebook entry from months before in which she observed: “It’s as if the writing in me has withdrawn — tactfully, almost — not wanting to bother me in these times.” After a trip to a book fair in Guadalajara, Mexico, she feels a return of life energy and purpose, recognizing that the novel she has begun—this novel, Ti Amo, now before the reader—“is the life I live on the inside and it fetches things up from different times and separate layers that I often don’t realize need to meet, so that I can be with them, the way you might sit on the edge of a bed in the evening and hold the hand of a child, just being there, for the novel possesses an insight so much deeper than my own, and because it’s in touch with this very life force itself, it knows so much better than I do where the wave of each new novel is going to take me. But since . . . you [the husband] became ill, it’s been completely impossible for me to write . . . your coming meant that I moved forward, I came home. But now you’re going to die, you, who allowed me at last to find that home with you, and how am I going to move forward from that, here and now?”
During the pandemic, I read a short piece by a retired doctor whose wife had recently died (not from the virus). He noted that during the course of her final illness, she had not wanted to speak about her death. In the end she thanked him for “letting her go gently.” It occurs to me that people have their own way of leaving this life. It can be hard work to let go. Sometimes a lot of talking about “the truth” is not the path for everyone. You can know things in your own time and your own way. Doing a lot of talking isn’t everyone’s way.
In a piece of occasionally self-indulgent and overly long autobiographical fiction, Sheila Heti explores the question of whether or not to have childrIn a piece of occasionally self-indulgent and overly long autobiographical fiction, Sheila Heti explores the question of whether or not to have children. Her unnamed narrator, like Heti herself, is a Toronto writer approaching forty with a loudly ticking biological clock. All the central character’s friends are reproducing, and she feels a degree of abandonment by them as they surrender to the biological imperative she resists. Her boyfriend, Miles, who himself fathered a child when young, is supportive of whatever decision she comes to. He is of the opinion that a person can’t be both a great artist and a great parent. He is also somewhat contemptuous of the haughty superiority of those who have reproduced and fulfilled the social contract. Parenthood is the biggest scam of all, he observes at one point: Yes, it’s “a lot of hard work, but I don’t see why it’s supposed to be so virtuous to do work you created for yourself out of purely your own self-interest.”
I sometimes grew weary of the protagonist’s frequent recounting of dreams and lengthy transcriptions of her oracular coin tossing episodes. (She regularly flipped three coins to gain answers to hard questions about her own destiny.) Her seemingly endless moods, tears, and ruminations about her fights with her boyfriend also didn’t sit so well after a while. While I can’t exactly say I was a fan of Miles—and could have managed quite well without some of the more intimate details of the couple’s life—I did understand his occasional exasperation with all the crying and his need to escape the apartment in order to clear his head. There really are too many pages given to “relationship” issues and female insecurity in this novel, which reads mostly like an essay/personal memoir hybrid but sometimes a little too much like an extended piece of journal therapy. Having said that, I do think that by the end of the book, Heti has provided considerable context for her narrator’s dilemma, mostly by exploring the trauma in the history of the character’s Hungarian Jewish family.
The reader is informed that the narrator’s (paternal) great-grandparents died in the Holocaust. And even though her orphaned maternal grandmother, Magda, managed to survive the death camps, marrying the son of a woman she tended to there, she still failed to realize her dreams. A bright, determined woman who pursued first a high-school, then a university education as a mature student, Magda had ambitious plans for a law career. These were dashed by her husband’s illicit business practices. She would die in her early fifties of an distinctly female malady: uterine cancer. Her daughter, the narrator’s mother, has also been plagued by unhappiness. A workaholic pathologist whose primary relationship in life was always with her mother, she is incapable of moving out of intense grief over the loss of that parent. Having immigrated to Canada as a young married woman, she is debilitated by guilt about leaving her ailing mother in the old country. Overwork provides a certain respite, however.
The narrator learned early in life that the women in her family have defined themselves primarily through work, not through motherhood. There is a history, here, of chafing against societal and educational constraints on women. In light of all this—the unavailable, often tearful, clearly clinically depressed mother; the emphasis (by the women who came before her) on making something of one’s life— the introspective narrator’s ambivalence about childbearing makes complete sense. She recalls that as a child she wanted to grow up to be like her mother, who had left the family home and taken her own apartment so that she could focus, free of all distraction, on her medical studies. As an adult, the narrator intuits that creative work, not motherhood, is the answer for her, as well. Early on in the book, she speculates that her work has the potential to mend the generational sadness: “If I am a good enough writer, perhaps I can stop her [my mother] from crying. Perhaps I can figure out why she is crying, and why I cry, too, and I can heal us both with my words.”
As Heti’s book draws to a conclusion, her protagonist seeks medical help for her ongoing emotional distress, which threatens to destroy her relationship. Interestingly, psychoactive drugs lift the oppressive pall of self-absorption. The “shaking, jittering problem of living,” the ambivalence and internal circular arguments about whether or not to have a child abate. “This is me returning,” she writes, “This is me coming back from an interior that I did not know was so intense.” There seems to be some suggestion here that much of the sturm und drang is due to biology: endogenous depression and distressing hormonal fluctuations. The narrator visits her now-retired mother, who has relocated to a spacious, airy home, apparently on the British Columbia Coast. There, in a bathroom cabinet, she discovers a prescription bottle of antidepressants, and sees that she and her mother have had similar struggles. Her mother also admits that motherhood was not the most important part of her life—something the narrator is now ripe to accept given her own ambivalence about bearing a child, when a life of the mind—and the “expanse of freedom” it affords—is what she herself values most.
Yes, Motherhood is overtly an exploration of the question of whether or not to have a child. Finishing it, though, I felt it was just as much an exploration of maternal legacy—in this case, the carrying forward of sadness and familial values about the importance of stimulating or creative work. In the end, the narrator understands and owns what she stated much earlier in the book: “To transform the greyish and muddy landscape of my mind into a solid and concrete thing, utterly apart from me”—not a baby, but a book—“was my only hope.”...more
An engrossing read about a tubercular single mother's love for her daughter and commitment to her child's escape from poverty through education. Some An engrossing read about a tubercular single mother's love for her daughter and commitment to her child's escape from poverty through education. Some idiomatic use of English and cultural references as well as occasionally fuzzy writing made a few early parts of the novel challenging. However, once I was a third of the way into the book, I found it hard to put down. Worthwhile....more
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