There are some Statues that I love more than the rest. The Woman carrying a Beehive is one. Another - perhaps the Statue that I love above all othe
There are some Statues that I love more than the rest. The Woman carrying a Beehive is one. Another - perhaps the Statue that I love above all others - stands at a Door between the Fifth and Fourth North-Western Halls. It is Statue of a Faun, a creature half-man and half-goat, with a head of exuberant curls. He smiles slightly and presses his forefinger to his lips. I have always felt that he meant to tell me something or perhaps to warn me of something: Quiet! he seems to say. Be careful! But what danger there could possibly be I have never known.
It's best to read this book with as little foreknowledge as possible. In fact, I think that most attempts to describe it, or analyse it, will just be confusing and off-putting. It's a unique reading experience and maybe that's all you need to know. It has an endearing narrator; it is mysterious; it is a puzzle without one solution; it has psychological depth.
It won't be for everyone, but I think that most readers who give it a chance - who just commit themselves to a fictional world without the usual rules or conventions - will find it strangely beautiful and affecting. ...more
The question that inspired this book is: How do we continue to glow when the lights turn out?
Author Julia Baird bookends this compendium of memoir/natThe question that inspired this book is: How do we continue to glow when the lights turn out?
Author Julia Baird bookends this compendium of memoir/nature writing/inspirational messaging by referring to her experience of swimming in the ocean. She swims for exercise, for emotional support, for a connection with nature and for a transcendent experience. Her 'wild' oceanic swimming is also something of quest because she is always seeking out phosphorescence in the ocean depths. Both literally and metaphorically, she is on a constant hunt for moments of light.
Throughout the book, Baird touches on the fact that she has had a rare abdominal cancer which has recurred three times. Each bout has necessitated a complicated surgery and extensive recovery time. She is open about the fact that this book became a project to focus on during her recovery from cancer, and in some ways the book reads a bit like a 'life work' with one part self-help and another part inspiration. (She even includes a letter to her daughter, and a newspaper column she wrote for her son.) The contents of the book range from her own personal experiences (with education, work, friendship, motherhood, etc) to her research interests. Although the book has this one overarching theme - looking for the points of life which sustain us and make our life worthwhile - it has a rather loose organisation at times. It's an accumulation of many different folders of interest, ranging from the experience of astronauts to Baird's struggles to reconcile her Christian faith with the conversation Anglican Church she grew up in.
Baird's own life and work experience is enough to warrant a book, but she buttresses her own experiences with the stories of other people, too. Indeed, the book is liberally peppered with quotations, poems and the observations of the famous and the interesting. I found most of the chapters absorbing, and worthwhile, but the varied nature of the book means that it didn't really leave a deep impression in my mind: more like flotsam and jetsam floating about.
We need the plants, the land, the natural world; we actually physically need it. I’m convinced it’s part of the answer to why your health was so mu
We need the plants, the land, the natural world; we actually physically need it. I’m convinced it’s part of the answer to why your health was so much better while we were walking. It has to be.
I think it seems to be a bit of a mid-life theme. Lots of us find we have to go back to the beginning of our life in order to start again. Back to where we grew up, or where we were happiest. To a time before things went wrong. I see it like pressing the reset button.
Often, after I finish a book, I immediately go back to the beginning of it. It seems to settle the entire book in my mind. The first chapter of this book is definitely a case in point. Titled ‘Gone to Earth’, author Raynor Winn compares herself to a badger retreating to her sett: in this case, the tent that she had slept in all the months that she and her husband Moth had been walking the South West Coast Path. Months after triumphantly completing that challenge, she and Moth have settled into village life in Polruan, Cornwall. Moth is attending university, but Ray is floundering: worried about her husband’s deteriorating health, worried about the future, and feeling both claustrophobic and lost within the confines of village life.
It’s definitely a companion book - and of course, sequel - to The Salt Path, but it has an entirely different tone. Melancholy, inward-looking, backward-glancing: Ray repeatedly compares herself to a shy, scared child who hides behind sofas. She begins writing the manuscript of what will become her celebrated book as a way to connect with Moth (and herself) again. She is terrified of Moth losing the memories that are so precious to her. Of course, the loss of Moth’s memory is the tip of the iceberg: what really frightens her is the thought of losing Moss entirely.
At the beginning of the book, Ray’s mother has to go into hospital and Ray goes through a bedside vigil. She is there to witness the end of her mother’s life - to make the necessary decisions about interventions - and it stirs up memories from the past, and the farming life she grew up with, and the more frightening emotional reckoning which is looming in her future.
I think that most people who will read this book will do so because they love The Salt Path. This book doesn’t have the same impact, partly because it is so much more about the author’s internal drama than her inspiring journey. Even when she recounts the amazing success of her first book, the reader has a sense of her ambivalence - not just about publicly airing her story, but also because of the challenge of speaking in front of other people. The book ends with another long walk - this time in Iceland - but I felt the story was far more bogged down in fear than elevated by awe. I don’t mean that in a judgmental way, because I would certainly have felt the same, but I feel like the author’s capacity for joy and awe was blunted in this book.
In a way, this book is a reminder that life continues to be a huge challenge - even when a person does manage to turn her life around, experience the kindness of strangers, and write a best-selling book in the process. The revelation, if there is one, is that nature - being part of the natural world - is the necessary thing: for Moth’s physical health, for Ray’s mental health. Everything about Ray’s back story reinforces this truth, this awareness. She also manages to connect ideas about farming and land management with her past and present story, and at the end of the book she and Moth have established themselves in a tenant farming experiment.
It’s a moving book, and I think it will still resonate with many readers - but I don’t think it will inspire and linger in the mind in the same way as The Salt Path....more
I said Patrick. 'I'm the worst person in the world.' 'No you're not.' His hand came down in a fist and he hit the arm of the sofa. 'You're
4.5 stars
I said Patrick. 'I'm the worst person in the world.' 'No you're not.' His hand came down in a fist and he hit the arm of the sofa. 'You're not the best person in the world either, which is what you really think. You're the same as everybody else. But that's harder for you, isn't it. You'd rather be one or the other. The idea you might be ordinary is unbearable.' I did not dispute him. Only said, I'm sorry it was fucking awful. 'Some of the time.' He sighed and picked up the journal again and let it fall open anywhere. 'Most of the time it was amazing. You made me so happy, Martha. You have no idea. You have no idea how good it was. That's the part I'm finding hardest to deal with. That you were oblivious to everything that was good about it. You couldn't see it.' I told Patrick I could now.
In the 'Bonus Content' of my 'Waterstones Exclusive Signed Edition' of Sorrow and Bliss, author Meg Mason goes into some detail - an 'apologia' even - for the fact that she has written a book about mental illness (and its huge impact on familial relationships) without being an expert on the subject. She suggests that she created her protagonist Martha instinctively - not so much from a point of academic and board-certified expertise, but from a lifetime's experience of being interested in first-hand female accounts of struggles with mental health.
This book is a series of 'comic bits' which eventually piece themselves together and make up a story of how generations of mental health - controversially unnamed in the book - have impacted a family of women. Martha is a third-generation sufferer of depression, amongst other things, and her story begins at the point at which she has seemingly managed to destroy her 8 year marriage to Patrick - her long-suffering, devoted husband.
Martha's story is, in many ways, about unfulfilled potential - whether it be in the arena of career, motherhood or marriage. Although the book is told from her point-of-view, she manages to be both open and opaque - not just with the readers, but also, one eventually concludes, with herself. Her suffering is vividly conveyed, as is the frustration of knowing and loving her. By the end of the novel, Martha is no doubt that her family (even the most supportive members of it) are finding her both selfish and narcissistic. Martha's story then becomes a question of possibility: as in, is it possible to stop being so trapped by one's own mental illness? Or, as Martha phrases it: Is it possible to stop being 'hopeless'?
There are many wonderful characters in Sorrow and Bliss, including its sharp-tongued protagonist. Martha's sister Ingrid and her parents are particular stand-outs, and these characterisations definitely add a lot to the pleasure of reading this book.
The tone and voice feel very of-the-moment contemporary in the same way that the first Bridget Jones's Diary book did. I can't imagine this book being written even 10 years ago, and that is partly because of the approach to the subject matter, but also because the writing style seems to be shaped by the contemporary shorthand of memes and emojis. It was a fast-paced unputdownable read that seems somewhat glib and jokey at first, but deepens considerably as it develops as a story. The end was satisfying, and even though I was hooked from the first page, I was surprised by how much impact this book had on me. ...more
Some books are a pleasure to read, not necessarily because of the plot, but because of the voice and writing style. For me, this is definitel2.5 stars
Some books are a pleasure to read, not necessarily because of the plot, but because of the voice and writing style. For me, this is definitely not one of those books. I bought the book for its Cornwall setting, but neither the subject matter nor the writing style brought me pleasure. It's an easy enough read in terms of the language and short chapters, but I had to force myself through it. I found the subject matter quite grim, to be honest, but the grimness wasn't totally the problem. I just couldn't really believe in it.
I was interested in what I thought was the premise: a 19 year old girl wants to protect her patch of Cornish coastline from the encroachment of tourists (she refers to them as 'emmets'). It's a big issue in Cornwall, the poorest county in England. On one hand, the economy depends on tourism, but the pressures of tourism brings plenty of problems, too. Second home owners (absentee for much of the year) drive the property prices up so locals cannot afford housing - an issue that is touched on in the book, although that hasn't been the case for Melody Janie's family. (They own a house, a caravan and a cafe.) Tourists come for the beautiful natural landscape, but then they clutter it up in both senses of the word. They despoil it. Melody Janie's family have made their living running a cafe (the Cafy) for the benefit of tourists - mostly walkers on the coastal path - but for Melody Janie, at least, their customers represent a threat to her privacy.
I am interested in this problem, but it's actually just a side-note in the book. Indeed, it's almost a red herring - or at least a dead end. The real issue in the book is mental illness. At the very beginning of the book we learn that Melodie Janie is alone. She has an uneasy 'friendship' with another loner - a somewhat dubious character with a sweet dog - but except for the occasional visits from an old school friend, she is alone. The plot of the book gradually unravels the mystery of what has happened to Melodie Jane's family. To say much more would spoil the plot, but it turns out that Melodie Jane is not the most reliable of narrators.
The portrayal of mental illness in this book may be very well-done, but as mentioned before, I had a lot of trouble believing in the characters. There was something about the heaping of tragedies that I found very wearisome, although it wasn't nearly as intense as, say, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, and I found that book very affecting. Perhaps my mood has been more to blame than the book, but it was certainly a flat reading experience for me.. ...more
I feel compelled to write an unashamedly personal review for this book. Usually I conform to the 'no spoilers' rule, but i**spoiler alert** 3.75 stars
I feel compelled to write an unashamedly personal review for this book. Usually I conform to the 'no spoilers' rule, but in this case, I don't want to be bothered to be coy about the book's content. I should think the majority of readers are well-aware that Sylvia Plath's only novel has many semi-autobiographical details and shadows her own suicide attempt and stay in a mental hospital. But assuming that some readers do come to this novel fresh and innocent of its content, I will signpost that spoilers are ahead.
Like many young women, I first read this book when I was 17 or 18. Although I did not identify with the protagonist's depression or subsequent suicide, I certainly did identify with her anxieties about the future and her compulsion towards over-achievement. Although this book does take the reader off the deep edge of mental health, it is in many respects a classic 'coming of age' story. Some of the pressures on young women are different, it being set in the 1950s, but certain themes will be resonant for every generation.
The story begins in the summer before Esther's senior year at Smith. (Is Smith actually named in the book? I can't recall now, but Smith College was certainly the famously academic 'Seven Sisters' Ivy League school that Plath herself attended.) Along with 11 other young women, Esther Greenwood has won a month-long internship at a women's magazine in New York City. This is one of the many autobiographical details in the novel, and in Plath's case, the magazine was Mademoiselle and the hotel she was staying at was the Barbizon. In this book, it is called the 'Amazon' - a nice play on the original word, which of course also takes in the Ancient Greek meaning of a race of strong, warrior-like women. One of the things I particularly like about this novel is the atmosphere of 1950s New York City and the culture which offers opportunities to women with one hand while limiting and undermining them with the other.
This hotel - the Amazon - was for women only, and they were mostly girls my age with wealthy parents who wanted to be sure their daughters would be living where men couldn't get at them and deceive them; and they were all going to posh secretarial schools like Katy Gibbs, where they had to wear hats and stockings and gloves to class, or they had just graduated from places like Katy Gibbs and were secretaries to executives and junior executives and simply hanging around in New York waiting to get married to some career man or other.
Esther is in thrall to Doreen, one of the other girls who has decided to bunk off from her responsibilities and grab every other kind of experience that New York City has to offer. (This mostly consists of going out with older men and drinking and smoking too much.) Her other 'friend' is Betsy, a bouncy and wholesome Midwesterner who appeals to the more dutiful aspect of Esther's nature. In the first chapter of the book this dichotomy is set up: Esther doesn't know who or what to be, and she wants simultaneously to be all things. She wants to gorge herself on everything that life has to be offer, but she's just becoming aware that she might not be up to it.
I'm not sure when the term 'Imposter Syndrome' entered the modern lexicon, but I'm fairly certain that most switched-on 21 year old women are aware of it. My daughters (23 and 27) and all of their friends speak the language of mental health very proficiently. It occurred to me, rereading this book, that part of what Esther is suffering from is Imposter Syndrome. For years she has been the classic over-achiever that has not failed at anything; now she is crushingly aware of all of her 'dreadful inadequacies' and more than anything she is afraid of being found out.
The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought of it. The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.
The book really divides into two halves, with each half depicting a different mental state and a somewhat different writing style. In the first half of the book, when Esther is in New York City, her tone reminds me of other writers from the era - Jack Kerouac, for example.
I lay in that tub on the seventeenths floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near on to an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again. I don't believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water.
In the second half of the novel, this jauntier tone becomes more muffled and flatter - appropriately so, as for the most part Esther is in a mental asylum. I think that Esther's emotions and fears are still real and relevant enough, but this novel definitely reads like a 'period piece' when it comes to the mental health treatment. Esther is given electroshock treatment and insulin shots; although she does have psychiatrists, the 'talking therapy' seems to be banal and utterly unhelpful. She gradually gets 'better' - I hesitate to use the term 'recovers' - but says of herself: "all I could see were question marks". Of course, few readers will be able to read Esther's story without being all too aware of the ending of Sylvia Plath's story. Esther doesn't die, but another character named Joan does. Like Esther, Joan is high-achieving 'big wheel' at Smith. She seems to copy-cat Sylvia's suicide attempt, and then later at the asylum they are almost in competition as to who moves more quickly through the reward system for 'getting better'. Esther finds her inimical, though; there is no empathy or real sisterhood between them. It did make me wonder if Joan is meant to be Esther's shadow self in some way.
I would definitely classify this as one of those books that is more rewarding to discuss than to actually read. It's still an important book, I think - still a canonical text for women on the cusp of adulthood - but I'm not sure it translates well for the middle-aged reader. It depicts an intensity of self-awareness that is, perhaps, particularly adolescent; some people may never grow out of it, but for most of us that intensity diminishes as we grow older and spread our worries onto a far larger canvas than ourselves.
At its base, this is not a book about beauty, but about reality. It is about noticing what's going on, and living it. That's what the natu
4.5 stars
At its base, this is not a book about beauty, but about reality. It is about noticing what's going on, and living it. That's what the natural world does: it carries on surviving. Sometimes it flourishes - lays on fat, garlands itself in leaves, makes abundant honey - and sometimes it pares back to the very basics of existence in order to keep living. It doesn't do this once, resentfully, assuming that one day it will get things right and everything will smooth out. It winters in cycles, again and again, forever and ever. For plants and animals, winter is part of the job. The same is true for humans.
Near the very end of this book, the author confesses that when she had conceptualised writing about 'winter' (and the physical/emotional/philosophical state of 'wintering'), she had intended on visiting 'exotic' locations and interviewing people who struggled with and survived 'extreme' winter. I suspect she was referring to temperature, and not winter in its more metaphorical sense. But then, as she admits ruefully, 'life happened': bad health, unhappiness, career shifts, money worries, depression, insecurity. At these nadirs - and there is no escaping them, which is the entire point of this book - a form of hunkering down and hibernation is required. Life has to be pared back to the minimum. We enter survival mode - which can be brutal, or comforting and cosseting. This survival mode, this paring back to essentials, is what the author broadly describes as 'wintering'.
I read this book in January, during the long Coronavirus year of 2020/2021. At the time of writing, London has been in Lockdown for nearly three months with no end in sight. A 'best-case scenario' (that I read in The Times today) suggests we might start emerging from Lockdown in May. Truly, there is the sense of hunkering down, or hibernation, of survival mode. It is frightening to think of the uncertain future, and yet there are times when the future is almost all I can think of. It is very tempting to get into the mindset of: when Lockdown is over, I can begin to (travel), (have fun), (see friends), experience life again. As this book reminds us, life is now. Life is only ever in this moment.
I like this author very much for her vulnerability and honesty. Although this book covers wintering topics related to sociology, myth, nature writing, science and literature, at nearly all times this is a work of memoir. She offers up her own experience - including moments of frailty and mental anguish - to expound on her topic.
Something which will definitely stick with me is a reference to the philosopher Alan Watts and his book The Wisdom of Insecurity.
Watts makes a case that always convinces me, but which I always seem to forget: that life is, by nature, uncontrollable. That we should stop trying to finalise our comfort and security somehow, and instead find a radical acceptance of the endless, unpredictable change that is the very essence of this life.
This struck me as an important thought to hold in my mind, but what really resonated was the author's admission that she can never hold onto this thought for very long. She has to learn it over and over again. As do I. As do most of us, I suspect.
I don't know if I would be particularly drawn to this book in summer - not just the actual season, but also in the sense of when life is going well - but it was absolutely 'the right book at the right time' in January 2021. ...more
In the biography Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, author Ruth Franklin describes Hangsamanas:
"a weird, rich brew of autobiography an
In the biography Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, author Ruth Franklin describes Hangsamanas:
"a weird, rich brew of autobiography and fantasy, combining elements of Jackson's unhappy years at the University of Rochester, the social culture of Bennington College, her marriage to Hyman, and literary allusions ranging from Alice in Wonderland to Victorian pornography; even Emma's crack-up went into the mix."
It's both obvious, and not obvious at all, what is going on in this story. Simply, it is about 17 year old Natalie Haines and her first semester at an exclusive and experimental girls' college in New England. (Natalie's college is obviously, albeit satirically, based on Bennington College in Vermont - where Jackson's husband Stanley Hyman taught for many years.) Natalie struggles to make friends, and her loneliness becomes more and more pronounced as the story develops. A not atypical 'freshman' experience. What is atypical, though, is the very cracked lens that Natalie is looking through. This novel is not told in the first-person, but we experience Natalie's 'story' as she experiences it. We have no information, or context, other than Natalie's frame-of-mind. Natalie does not seem to have a firm grasp on reality, and thus neither does the reader. There are several key scenes, and even one important character, that may or may not be real. There are hints that Natalie is far beyond what might typically be described as an 'unreliable narrator', and yet the book is an oddly intimate glimpse into a fragile mind that is in the process of fragmenting.
From the beginning of the novel, Natalie has an alternative 'script' running through her head. In the emotionally claustrophobic but highly charged atmosphere of her family home, Natalie responds to her parents with the bare minimum of language; but meanwhile, she has a dialogue going on in her head as if she is being constantly interrogated by a detective. Natalie's father is an academic, an English professor, and a man who is in love with the sound of his voice. He is schooling Natalie to be a writer, and we do not know to what extent she shares that ambition for herself. We do know, though, that Natalie is always enacting a drama in her mind - one that is far more real to her than her engagement with others. There is detachment and splitting from the beginning, and the alienation she experiences at her college only exacerbates what is clearly already there.
Natalie heard the back of her mind gibbering obscenities, and thought for a mad moment that she might be saying them aloud and not realising.
This novel was published in 1951, and like the drama series Mad Men, Jackson's writing is having none of the nostalgic 'Happy Days' pastel coloration of the 1950s in America. This a dark, post-war America marked by paranoia, the pressure of conformity, sexism and the constant escapist appeal of martinis and cigarettes. Natalie's first experience with alcohol results in a suggested sexual tryst - not so much described as darkly hinted at. Her second experience with alcohol occurs with a run-in with a faculty wife, 21 year old Elizabeth Langford, who has dropped out of college to marry her professor. These two outcasts form a very tentative friendship, but neither can be a lifeboat for the other. They speak of death together, but how much adolescent drama, how much boredom and ennui, how much anger is mixed up in their solipsistic sharing?
Elizabeth: I want to die. Natalie: We all want to die, I suppose, from the minute that we're born.
Franklin notes that the most typical criticism of the book was it was 'simply too obscure'. I think that any reader will grasp the main point of it, but some of the more symbolic passages or references are more easily understood if one understands the meaning of the language she uses - whether it is personal, or something to do with mythology or Tarot cards. (Tarot cards play an important role in the final 'act' of the novel). Franklin explains that 'The Hanged Man' tarot card is 'the most mystical of all the cards' and symbolises a 'life in suspension'. At the end of the novel, Natalie will cross a bridge - and I think the journey she takes can be interpreted as either the progress from innocence to experience or even (perhaps also) from madness to lucidity. I hesitate, when it comes to Shirley Jackson's writing, to insist on what is delusion and what is reality. Her very original interpretations of the world always walk a fine line between the two.
3.5 stars A compromise between the quality of the writing and the very mixed pleasure of the experience...more
A fourteen-year old boy should never have to ask the questions Who is my mother? and Who are my family? These were not easy questions to formulate
A fourteen-year old boy should never have to ask the questions Who is my mother? and Who are my family? These were not easy questions to formulate in the mind or the mouth because the question comes with others . . . What did I do to deserve this?
This memoir is poet Lemn Sissay's fact-finding mission into his own past. In 2015, after a 'thirty-year campaign' to be allowed to see his own records, Sissay finally discovers how and why he became a ward of the State and the official record of his nearly 18 years 'in care'. At all times, the word 'care' is ironic - as Sissay finds the system the antithesis of caring. The account ends with Sissay's 'release' into state-assisted housing: a flat on a housing development called Poet's Corner. 21 Cowper Avenue: an auspicious address for a young man who had already begun writing poetry as a way to make sense of his feelings and flesh out his identity.
Sissay relies heavily on original documents (both from his social worker and others) to chart his 'progress' (rather, descent) through the fostering system. His own memories and self-analysis run alongside these official reports; sometimes he offers personal reminiscences to fill in the blanks of the official reports, sometimes he offers explanations or contradictions. His poetry (a quatrain at the beginning of each chapter) punctuates the narrative and becomes an allusive reference to his emotions.
It's a jarring, unsettling read - and a terrible indictment of the cruel system which Sissay calls The Authority. The cruelty begins when Sissay is taken away from his mother - a young Ethiopian woman who had come to England to attend a Bible College. Although she returns to Ethiopia after the birth, she tries on more than one occasion to trace and reclaim her son. The Authority denies access to her, and prefers to leave Lemn (called Norman at this point) with his foster family. Shockingly, when Sissay is 12, his foster parents - who he has always thought of his family - decide to send him back into care. For the next six years, as becomes increasingly angry and depressed, he becomes trapped in a vicious cycle: minor infractions of behaviour result in increasingly uncaring, degrading and even violent care settings. His final 'home', the Wood End Assessment Centre, is basically just a form a imprisonment.
There were two sort of child-inmates: young people on remand (awaiting court appearances) and young people in care. It was a technical difference because we were all treated like charged criminals. I was under surveillance twenty-four hours a day. {...} Anyone who stepped out of line was beaten.
In addition to all of this, Sissay is struggling with being black in an overwhelmingly white (and often overtly racist) Lancashire. His skin colour is just another aspect of his otherness. His exploration of his racial difference is a story that runs parallel to his childhood in the foster care system.
This is a life story with a happy ending because Lemn Sissay grows up to become not just a successful writer but an activist in the field of 'care and 'care leavers'. After reading his story, though, one cannot help but think what a miracle it is that he salvaged something so empowering from a childhood that consistently denied him love and support....more
I received a copy of this book at a publishing event (thank you, 4th Estate Books) before it was actually published (April 2019) but it has taken me aI received a copy of this book at a publishing event (thank you, 4th Estate Books) before it was actually published (April 2019) but it has taken me a while to get around to it. The first reason for my delay is that my 25 year old daughter nabbed it off of my ‘to read’ book pile and kept it for quite a while. (She’s a big fan of Elizabeth Day’s podcast of the same name; she’s also a big fan of what her generation calls learning to ‘live your best life’.) The second reason is that I’m not as inclined to either podcasts or ‘self-help’ books, and it wasn’t until one of my neighbours (a GP) recommended a particular episode of the How to Fail podcast to me that I became motivated enough to read it.
In many senses this is a memoir - as the subtitle of the book helpfully points out. Day organises her chapters into ‘life events’ so general that nearly all of us will experience a great many if not most of them. (One of the exceptions is the ‘How to Fail at Babies’ chapter which details Day’s struggles with infertility and miscarriage. This is actually one of the most moving chapters in the book, and a great service to this area of women’s experience.) Day does punctuate each chapter with experiences from some of her early interviewees on the podcast; for the most part, though, she uses her own life and struggles as illustration. As she points out, she is an educated and rather privileged professional middle-class person and many of her struggles and ‘failures’ reflect that. I think that the people who will most respond to and possibly benefit from this book are those women whose life experiences most closely parallel Day’s own. It’s also a book which, inevitably, will ‘speak’ to women more than men. Within those confines, though, Day does her best to be vulnerable and open about her insecurities and the mental attitudes which have held her back and caused her unhappiness. She is clearly someone who can do a stellar job at putting a good ‘front’ on, and she is a somewhat intimidatingly accomplished and disciplined women in her early 40s. Her honesty about how her striving for perfection hindered her in work and relationships was the most valuable aspect of this book for me.
She makes two important points over and over. The first is that we can only be clearer about what we want in life when we truly know ourselves. Even ‘success’ doesn’t feel like success if it is ‘not congruent with who you really are.’ The second point is that being brave enough to be vulnerable is what lets us truly connect with other people.
When, later in life, I was in bad relationships, my propensity was to stick it out and to think I was at fault. I found it difficult to shape my thoughts or to vocalise them, so accustomed was I to not speaking the language of selfhood.
If you don’t say what you need, it’s much harder for people to give it to you. And when you’ve trying to be perfect, you’re not being truthful about your own imperfections.
I chose these quotes because they spoke to me, but reading them over, I do think they might give the wrong impression of this book. Although Day speaks highly about her own experiences with therapy, this book is written in a confiding, anecdotal style and only occasionally employs ‘therapeutic language’. ...more
It seems like Queenie has been ubiquitous in London for at least the last six months. It’s been nominated for almost every possible literary and booksIt seems like Queenie has been ubiquitous in London for at least the last six months. It’s been nominated for almost every possible literary and bookseller award and the eye-catching book cover in different colours really jumps out in bookshop displays. I’m reading it as part of the Women’s Prize 2020 longlist along with my daughter. Like Queenie, the titular narrator of this book, she is 25 years old and lives in south London.
For the first third of the book I felt that I wasn’t the right reader for it - unlike my daughter, who had rated it highly. It has a strong voice, and is certainly easy to read, but there was just too much casual sex and 20ish friendship banter for my taste. The book begins with Queenie’s breakup from her three year relationship with Tom - and the next few chapters deal with a series of bad choices as Queenie seems to go into self-destructive mode. It felt like rom-com territory, laced with more misery than humour. I did enjoy the details of Queenie’s London culture, though - the Jamaican grandparents, her eccentric Aunt Maggie and her best friend Kyazike.
As the story progresses, as Queenie’s life deteriorates and she has to move in with her grandparents, the reader begins to realise that Queenie’s behaviour is rooted in all kinds of unresolved past damage. Some of it is specific to her family and their culture, and some of it has to do with being a black woman. As she tells her therapist, “us black girls, we’re always meant to know our place.” Gradually, the story develops into something far more nuanced and politicised - and the author is excellent at showing how stereotypes and assumptions and expectations (some well-meaning and some just insulting and obnoxious) dictate (or at least inflect) so many of Queenie’s relationships with other people. These are not just white attitudes to black people, although that dynamic does tend to dominate.
The London that Queenie lives in is recognisably multicultural, and her own circle of close friends includes a white co-worker (Darcy) and a Jewish north Londoner from her university years (Cassandra). The novel doesn’t deal so much with overt racism as the small but persistent damaging cuts that Queenie experiences every day. (In one particularly effective scene, Queenie visits the Brockley Lido - on advice from her therapist - and is definitely made to feel that she ‘doesn’t fit in’ there.) The most consistent racism Queenie experiences is an intrusive form of over-sexualisation, and the author shows us how ‘wearing’ that is for Queenie, day in and day out, but also how it aggravates her deepest insecurities about not being lovable.
There are many people in the world - and this novel features some of them - who either deny that the #blacklivesmatter movement is necessary or seem to find it personally offensive. We all go through life being incredibly judgmental, taking umbrage at small perceived slights and not giving the benefit of the doubt to other people - partly because we cannot see what they are suffering, and partly because we cannot understand where they are coming from. This is, of course, why literature is such a vital tool for the development of empathy. I’m delighted that Queenie has been such a popular novel because it demonstrates, so ably, why it is important that we have novels with a wide range of voices....more
Matthew Walker, neuroscientist and sleep researcher, makes a very solid case for the vital importance of getting ‘a good night’s sleep’. Whe4.5 stars
Matthew Walker, neuroscientist and sleep researcher, makes a very solid case for the vital importance of getting ‘a good night’s sleep’. Whether it’s our physical, mental or emotional health, apparently inadequate sleep impacts it in ways that are damaging, both in the short-term and more cumulatively. Conversely, proper sleep - 8 hours of a mix of REM and NREM sleep, for most people - is healing for both brain and body.
Walker does a good job of making the scientific research into sleep very accessible for the layperson. Although constant references to experiments means this can sometimes be an exacting and slow read, he writes with clarity and leavens his subject matter with humour. Unfortunately, just like sleeping pills - (you should be avoiding them, reader) - there is a worrying side-effect to reading this book: ANXIETY! So convincing is Walker that I felt slightly freaked out by all the years I haven’t slept well - not to mention a new low grade worry about all of the other people (especially drivers and doctors) who aren’t sleeping well and who are currently careening around the world in a compromised state.
Although he concludes the book with some suggestions about the ways in which schools, work places, hospitals and car manufacturers can facilitate sleep - and save both money and lives - it does feel overwhelming to think of how much change needs to take place for most human beings in first world countries to be operating at optimum energy and concentration levels.
His tips for sleeping well are already fairly well-known, I suspect, but including the following: a regular sleep routine, a cool and dark bedroom, the avoidance of alcohol and food and caffeine near bedtime, and no LED light. Put your phone away, in other words. ...more
3.5 stars - a compromise between not liking this book very much (2.5) but finding it remarkably adept at conveying the protagonist’s utter misery (4.53.5 stars - a compromise between not liking this book very much (2.5) but finding it remarkably adept at conveying the protagonist’s utter misery (4.5 at least).
This book plunges the reader straight into protagonist’s unsettled, uneasy mind. Mrs. Armitage - as she is referred to for the entire novel, as if her marital status has completely supplanted all other forms of personal identity - is meeting with her psychiatrist for the first time. The opening salvo:
’Well, I said, ‘I will try. I honestly will try to be honest with you, although I suppose really what you’ve more interested in is my not being honest, if you see what I mean.’
Mrs. Armitage is in the psychiatrist’s chair because she is depressed and she cannot stop weeping. In an admirably compressed way, the protagonist fills in some of the salient details of her life: the rather dull, middle-class upbringing, the early marriage, the domestic chaos (several husbands, lots of children) during the unsettled and penurious war years, and finally 13 years of marriage to Jake Armitage. In the course of their marriage, Jake has gone from being an eager-to-please younger husband to a successful writer/producer who sleeps around. His wife has gone from being a person at the centre of a busy, all-consuming domestic life to being someone who feels superfluous to her own life. As if to underscore that superfluity, she spends most of the course of the novel removed in some way from her home, as it continues to function without her.
In the Penguin Modern Classics edition, Daphne Merkin contends that the novel’s concerns - ’The essential differences between men and women when it comes to matters of love and sex, the loneliness at the heart of life that can’t be assuaged by marriage or children’ - are still as relevant as when the novel was published (1962). I’m not entirely sure that is true. In some ways, the novel does read like a period piece; but what it certainly does well is convey the bitterness of a couple who still feel emotionally bonded, but whose bonds have mostly become negative ones: fear, anger, resentment and jealousy. One of the (many) harrowing scenes in the novel, and one I won’t forget quickly, consists of Mrs. Armitage attempting to force her husband into being honest about his duplicity, and his slippery side-stepping, with alternating admissions and denials.
Another arresting scene is the one between Mrs. Armitage and Giles, one of her ex-husbands. When he describes the wife and mother that he knew, with her ’great, energetic conviction that kept us all bouncing like ping-pong balls on an air-jet‘, he is describing a Mrs. Armitage unrecognisable both to herself and to the reader. It shows how much she has lost her way; how utterly lost and hollow she has become. With neither the role of wife or mother bringing her any sense of purpose or comfort, Mrs. Armitage is grasping for any sense of self at all.
It’s all pretty miserable to read, but I did admire how cleverly and completely she involved me (as reader) in her nervous breakdown....more
Atwood begins this novel with a meditation on time:
But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of l
Atwood begins this novel with a meditation on time:
But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another. You don’t look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.
This story is very much about how events/people in the past continue to haunt us as much as they have shaped us. I reread this book after first reading it in the spring of 1989 - the year I graduated from college. Margaret Atwood came to my university in Texas for a lecture/reading and I met her at a reception. She was aloof, intimidating - petite, but with a hawk-like profile. She signed my First Edition: “For Beth - Best wishes, Margaret Atwood” and my name made her say, “Ah, like Beth in Little Women, and I felt a bit ashamed to be associated with the weakling character who dies. I remember, vividly, all of these things. For the next 30 years I have said, many times, that this is my favourite Margaret Atwood book. And I suppose in some sense it still is, although I have not read all of her work - especially some of the more recent forays into dystopia. It’s also a painful, troubling book to read - and while I know exactly why I identified with it at age 22, I realise that my feelings about female friendship have changed and gradually grown more positive over time. The pained feelings of adolescence have softened and my memories have dulled; at least I think that is the case. The novel argues otherwise.
This is a ‘realistic’ work of fiction - so detailed, so visceral, so believable that it is tempting to think the author is writing from her own experience. And yet there is more than a hint of the dystopic in the atmosphere of the book, much more so than I remembered. The narrator of the book is Elaine, a woman on the cusp of 50. Having first read this book at the age of 22, it’s strange to realise that I’m now older than this mid-life narrator. As with many ‘contemporary’ books, the sections of the book set in the 1980s now feel a bit dated, while the parts which were always historical feel less altered by the passage of time that I’ve experienced as a reader.
As a child, Elaine and her family traipsed around the northern wilds of Ontario, while the Second World War was going on elsewhere, so her scientist father could do research on caterpillars and other insect life. This detail feels significant in several ways. Despite the emotional freight of this novel, there is also an odd, almost clinical, detachment. Elaine has been raised with the scientific method. She can draw the exoskeleton of an insect in precise detail, but for her the world of emotions, of arbitrary human behaviour, is mysterious and treacherous. As an adult, she ‘traps’ and pins down the memories which haunt her and turns them into symbolic art. When the war ends, her family ‘settles’ in Toronto and her father goes to work at the university there. Throughout Elaine’s childhood, her father is the matter-of-fact voice of environmental doom and gloom - predicting not just decline, but inevitable destruction of the world. Dinner conversation invariably touches on the relentless destruction of the environment. Despite the seeming stability of her nuclear family of four (an older brother called Stephen rounds things out), the 1950s post-war world of Elaine’s childhood isn’t cosy at all. It’s shabby and judgmental; it’s full of discomforts; the season always seems to be winter.
As an adult, Elaine returns to her hometown of Toronto for a major show of her work. When Elaine tells the reader that she hates the city of Toronto - “I’ve hated it so long I can hardly remember feeling any other way about it” - it sets off alarm bells. A shiver of apprehension. She is loudly signalling, not just hinting, that something very damaging happened in Toronto.
This book is about the lasting damage that childhood bullying can do; there is nothing innocent or innocuous about it. But Atwood isn’t interested in boxing her characters into the neat categories of ‘bully’ and ‘victim’. Instead, she analyses the complex metamorphosis that both the bully and victim undergo - each absorbing the other. While I didn’t ‘enjoy’ it in the way I remembered, it remained a reading experience of incredible power. ...more
There’s a point in life - perhaps it arrives at different times for different people, but certainly most of us must experience it by middle-age - whenThere’s a point in life - perhaps it arrives at different times for different people, but certainly most of us must experience it by middle-age - when time seems to speed up: another summer gone by again, and surely it’s not Christmas already? And perhaps as the experiences and memories pile up, the past seems always to be with us - and it becomes increasingly difficult to just live in the present moment.
When this story begins, the protagonist Mona (‘Desdemona’) is on the eve of turning 60. She lives in an English seaside town and she owns a small shop which sells her handmade dolls. (This is the second book I’ve read this year where the main character is a doll-maker - the first being An American Marriage. In this book, though, Mona’s occupation has a very special significance in the story.). Although Mona obviously has friends in the community, she seems lonely. Chapters which hearken back to the past quickly establish that Mona is Irish, an only child, and that her mother died when she was young. A flirtation with a neighbour seems promising, but her initial worries seem to do with losing her only other staff (a young woman who takes care of all of the administrative side of the business) and with not having any plans for her upcoming birthday.
As the story begins to unfold, more chapters about Mona’s past become interleaved between the chapters dealing with the present. The narrative follows Mona’s early days in England, when she comes to Birmingham to find some work and adventure, and where she falls in love with her husband William. After an initial period of happiness, their marriage is hit by a double tragedy - and the reader gradually learns about how the past still intrudes and makes itself felt in Mona’s life.
I don’t think many people get to the age of 60 without sadnesses, and losses of some kind, but this book is about a life that has been very directly haunted by the past - and is at a turning point of moving forward. It’s an unexpectedly moving story, and the straightforward writing style makes for an engrossing and fast read. 3.75 stars...more
”He had just wanted to be normal, to conceal the parts of himself that he found shameful and confusing. It was Marianne who had shown him oth4.5 stars
”He had just wanted to be normal, to conceal the parts of himself that he found shameful and confusing. It was Marianne who had shown him other things were possible. Life was different after that; maybe he had never understood how different it was.”
I hadn’t intended on reading this book. I felt somewhat ‘meh’ about Rooney’s first novel, Conversations with Friends, and although I thought it was accomplished, the characters and tone didn’t speak to me.
Again, Rooney is writing about her own age group - and an age group I don’t particularly expect to identify with, although I have read (and enjoyed) a fair amount of YA fiction. Marianne and Connell are not even adults when the story begins, and yet this is no way a ‘young adult’ book. We meet these characters in their final year of school (2011) and then in periodic instalments throughout their shared university years at Trinity College, Dublin (concluding in 2015, on the cusp of their graduation). Marianne and Connell have a relationship carried out in fits and starts. They are damaged in different ways, and also in some similar ways; what draws them together is also what causes confusion, misunderstanding and inadvertent pain. They come from different social classes, and Rooney is really adept and subtle about showing how that impacts their respective ‘social status’ (ie, popularity) as it seesaws back and forth and also their own individual sense of power and security.
I guess you could describe this story as a flawed modern romance between ‘star-crossed lovers’ and yet it reads like something totally fresh - and deeply real but entirely unromantic. Rooney’s narrative style is minimalistic and could even be described as detached; she eschews emotionally manipulative language, and she favours simple, unadorned syntax. But somehow, and I don’t know quite how she does it, this book brims with pain and moments of deeply felt emotion. With her understated style, she creates an emotional intensity that touched me to my core. All the ‘hype’ about this young writer is for real....more
”OH, SLEEP. nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of ”OH, SLEEP. nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness. I was not a narcoleptic - I never fell asleep when I didn’t want to. I was more of somniac. A somnophile. I’d always loved sleeping. It was one thing my mother and I had enjoyed doing together when I was a child.”
The cover of this book lured me in. I will freely admit that. The ‘Portrait of a Young Woman in White’ (attributed to the Circle of Jacques-Louis David) - with its woeful expression and sheer Regency gown - suggested something slightly subversive to me, but what I found was entirely unexpected. In fact, there was nothing at all ‘classical’ about this novel. It was ‘contemporary’ with a capital C: set in New York City, during the year leading up to 9/11, littered with references to the sops and superficial consolations of modern life, and obsessed with ennui, anomie and emotional numbness.
The protagonist, unnamed, is a 26 year old woman - tall, blonde, as ‘pretty’ as a model, independently rich, in possession of a stunning wardrobe - in other words, she possesses all the qualities and attributes that presumably lead to the state of happiness. But set against these physical and material advantages, she has been recently orphaned and she is essentially alone. She has one useless boyfriend, Trevor: the very image of a ‘banker wanker’ and total narcissist. She has a crazy psychiatrist called Dr. Tuttle, who dispenses nonsense and huge quantities of pharmaceutical drugs with irreverent irresponsibility, and she has a university friend called Reva who describes herself as “a New York three” and is the epitome of all the emotional neediness and superficiality that the narrator wants to escape from. Recently fired from her job - which is basically just being a model-like assistant at an art gallery - the narrator decides that the answer to her unhappiness (or rather, the inability to feel much of anything at all) is to sleep as much as possible for a year. She is hoping for a cellular reboot that will somehow end up in transformation.
Unfortunately, I have a powerful imagination for vivid descriptions of physical abuse of the body. I felt slightly sick as the author so ably described drug-induced lethargy and black-outs and the starvations (and conversely junk food and alcohol abuses) of the narrator and her friend Reva. Reva is a raving bulimic (surely the most first-world disease) and the graphic (and often cruelly funny) descriptions of binging and vomiting were gross and carwreck-compelling at the same time. It was a strangely disgusting and arresting reading experience, but I never at any point wanted to abandon this book. I became part of the narrator’s delirium, and I definitely wanted to read on and find out what happened to her. The author, with much wit and knowingingness, skewers every aspect of a contemporary life based on status symbols and emotional emptiness. Education is just another status symbol - the narrator and her friend have gone to Columbia, the narrator’s dead father is a professor - but not seen as any practical aid to getting through life. The narrator’s obsessive consumption of junk television was arguably both a symptom of her general malaise and the most American sort of opiate.
I’ve marked so many examples which capture the cruel (and sometimes wacky) humour of the book, but this ‘conversation’ between the narrator and her psychiatrist certainly gives the general tone:
”’Do you have a family history of nonbinary paradigms?” When I explained for the third time that both my parents had died, that my mother had killed herself, Dr. Tuttle unscrewed the cap of her value-size bottle of Adrian, twirled around in her chair, tilted her head back so that she was looking at me upside down, and started sniffing. ‘I’m listening,’ she said. ‘It’s allergies, and now I’m hooked on this nasal spray. Please continue. Your parents and dead, and . . . ‘“...more
I read this book with a fluctuating mixture of interest/disinterest and admiration/alienation, and it’s taken a couple of days to really digest what II read this book with a fluctuating mixture of interest/disinterest and admiration/alienation, and it’s taken a couple of days to really digest what I thought about it on the whole.
This morning, as I was skimming my Lit Hub Weekly update, I came across a Buzzfeed article by Rachel Krantz titled “15 Books for People Questioning the Idea of ‘Happily Ever After’”. One of the books mentioned in the article was titled The Smart Girls’ Guide to Polyamory: Everything You Need to Know About Open Relationships, Non-Monogamy, and Alternative Love by Dedeker Winston. I immediately thought about Conversations with Friends; in fact, I think you could probably use Winston’s title as a litmus test for how interested you might be in the ‘conversations’ to be found in Rooney’s oh-so-very contemporary novel. From ‘smart’ to ‘alternative love’, it pretty much covers it all.
In the Afterword section of my edition, there was a “A Conversation with Sally Rooney” piece in which said author hopes that her novel might provide a defence, of sorts, for the “possibility of love”. This is definitely (and defiantly) not any traditional treatment of the love story, though. Instead, the reader is offered a hyper-aware (in both an intellectual and emotional sense) protagonist who is searching for emotional connections - although she would be loath to admit that - and finding them in liminal spaces. I wouldn’t typically use the word ‘liminal’ in a book review, but this is that kind of book.
Frances is a 21 year old university student who writes poetry which is then ‘performed’ with Bobbi (her closest friend and former lover). Through this spoken word poetry double act, the two young women have attracted the attention of Melissa - a 30ish writer and photographer who wants to feature them in an article for a literary website. In the process of getting to know Melissa, Frances and Bobbi are introduced to her husband Nick - a good-looking actor with some (not immediately obvious) mental health problems. This is not so much a love triangle, as a quadrangle with uneven sides to it. Frances’s side of the story is by far the biggest, although each of the four characters has a key role to play. Frances spends much of the novel oscillating between her friendship/love with Bobbi and her conflicted love affair with Nick, and if the novel comes to any conclusions on the subject, they definitely weigh in on the side of fluidity and polyamory.
Conversations with Friends was Rooney’s debut novel; published in 2017, it was swiftly followed by this year’s publication of Normal People. Rooney has been called (according to The Guardian) a “Salinger for the Snapchat generation” and there is no denying that her voice is very much of the cultural current moment (at least if that moment has been shaped by a lot of exposure to literary criticism and urban cool). I felt, as I was reading it, that it would very much appeal (both because of its style and its concerns) to my 24 year old daughter. I have read many a coming-of-age story aimed at much younger readers - including Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, which is arguably quite dated now - without feeling ‘I’m just too old for this kind of thing’. But with this book, no matter how much I tried to admire it - and there is much to admire in it - I couldn’t help but feel that Rooney’s voice just didn’t speak to me. And yes, it made me feel old.
Thanks to Crown Publishing and Hogarth Books for a free copy of this book....more
This is a memoir which reads, especially in the first half, like fiction. When I thought it was a fictional story, I had some criticisms about the ‘stThis is a memoir which reads, especially in the first half, like fiction. When I thought it was a fictional story, I had some criticisms about the ‘storyline’ - but when I realised it was actually a very raw and relentless look at the mental processes of a young girl with severe OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) the way I was evaluating the book really altered.
Kudos to author Lily Bailey for being brave enough to construct (or reconstruct) what it was like to be her: a young girl with severe OCD. When I read the (also excellent) young adult novel Am I Normal Yet? by Holly Bourne, I did a lot of supplementary reading about OCD - a mental disorder which is misunderstood by many (if not most) people. Perhaps of all of the mental health problems it is most likely to be trivialised by our language and misapplication of the term. For instance, people who are inclined to be a bit rigid about tidiness and order will often describe themselves as having ‘OCD’. After reading this book, I think that so many readers will adjust their thinking (and corresponding empathy) on the subject.
Bailey begins her ‘story’ in early childhood. There are a lot of interviews of Bailey, both in print and on YouTube, and one of the points she makes about her own OCD is that it manifested itself in earliest childhood as this other voice in her head. Many children have an imaginary playmate, but Bailey had a negative voice, a malignant twin of her psyche, who was constantly implanting the idea that there was something ‘bad’ about her. Her terrible fears about her own badness, and unlikability, could only be semi-neutralised by an obsessive adherence to certain routines and mantra-like phrases. By the time that Bailey reaches adolescence, spent in a boarding school with high academic standards, she is nearly crippled by the relentless and time-consuming routines which she feels like she ‘needs’ to keep herself in check.
Although Bailey begins getting help for her OCD in adolescence, there is also a lot of resistance to the form this help takes: not just from herself, but also from her family. I suspect that it is not unusual. Her reliance on medication and a helpful therapist are both presented with a certain degree of ambivalence. It is only when she goes completely off the rails in university that she really begins to properly commit to her own treatment, and even then she is very honest about the ‘two steps forward, one step back’ progress of that treatment. When the book ends, Bailey is in her early 20s and just embarking on her first proper job and adult relationship. Like all 23 years olds, she is feeling her way - but being honest about her OCD, and finding a support group of fellow sufferers, is presented as being key to her health and progress.
It’s quite a gruelling read in many ways - this is certainly no pleasure or comfort read - but it is so effective at giving the reader a strong sense of what it actually feels like to have OCD. For everyone who tends to be dismissive about mental health disorders, it will be an eye-opening, mental-awakening book. ...more
At age sixteen, and with no formal education whatsoever, Tara Westover managed to get an ACT score high enough to earn her a place at Brigham Young UnAt age sixteen, and with no formal education whatsoever, Tara Westover managed to get an ACT score high enough to earn her a place at Brigham Young University. During her first semester - as recounted in this brilliant, disturbing, almost unbelievable memoir - she brought a class to a stunned and hushed halt when she asked what the word ‘Holocaust’ meant. Later, during a study abroad program at Cambridge University, one of the her professors chortles that meeting Westover is like ‘stepping into Shaw’s Pygmalion’. But, and this is an important but: the point of this book is not that Westover enters formal and ‘elite’ education as some kind of tabula rasa, a blank slate of a young woman - although perhaps that is all very true in one sense - but rather that she has already been ‘educated’ (ie, culturally programmed) in a variety of ways, just not in ways that are particularly helpful for living in the ‘mainstream’ world. The author’s journey is not just about being educated in the sense of being able to earn a PhD from one of the most prestigious universities in the world, although it’s easy to fixate on that (awe-inspiring) aspect of it. The real education of Tara Westover, though, is her long and painful process of deprograming herself from a childhood of cultural conditioning. Far more difficult than mastering algebra is the battle Westover undergoes for intellectual self-mastery: in other words, how she learns how to differentiate between the truths she was raised with and her own instincts and hard-fought knowledge.
I was dimly aware that people like Westover’s family live in the United States, but I tended to dismiss them as a sort of lunatic fringe if I thought of them at all. Westover certainly brings her family to unignorably vivid life, though, and I will never be able to claim ignorance of their particular mindset again. Her parents belong to a particularly strict offshoot of the Mormon faith which exists in a permanent state of anxiety about the imminent end of the world. Westover never uses the word ‘prepper’, but there is quite a bit of description of the lengths her father goes to in order to ‘prepare’ for his family’s survival in case of major disruption or apocalypse (environmental, political or ‘end-of-days’). A generalised distrust of the government, which leads to specific rejections of the public school system, modern medicine and pharmaceuticals, means that Westover was raised without a birth certificate, without immunisations, without dental care and without any education other that what she learned from her midwife mother or could cobble together along with the help of some of her older siblings. In the eye of this storm is a (literally) crazy father with a Messianic belief in his own powers and unfailing discernment of God’s will.
I thought that The Glass Castle was the ultimate memoir for dangerous and negligent parenting, but Westover has managed to swipe that unwanted crown. This is an extremely frightening book to read, and at times it made me feel emotionally overwhelmed and undeniably angry. The repressive sexual politics that Westover, and the other women in her world, are subjected to made me feel like the 20th century never even happened. How did she endure it, much less escape from or master it? While an entire generation of American children were being ‘helicopter parented’ to within an inch of their lives, Westover somehow manages to build up a stony heart and thick enough skin to survive her own childhood. I can only conclude that along with much else, Westover inherited the gift of her father’s own self-belief. Her story is hard to believe, but her skill at relating it - and her cogent self-analysis - makes this an unforgettable memoir. It’s sure to be one of my stand-out reads of the year. ...more
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