i picked this book up on the first day of april, thinking it would be a fine way to celebrate the start of national poetrWhat is grief? Is this grief?
i picked this book up on the first day of april, thinking it would be a fine way to celebrate the start of national poetry month.
turns out, it was a fine way to celebrate april fool's day, because this is not a poetry collection.
i don't know why i assumed this was poetry. i have read five other books by stuart ross, and only two of them have been poetry, but his prose always seems filtered through a poetic sensibility, emphasizing cadence and imagery and even the way he lays it out on the page is verse-shaped:
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or maybe that's all just the rationalization of an april fool.
i also don't know why i thought it was such a great idea to read a book about grief so close to my own personal grief-anniversary, but decisions were made, tears were shed, and here we are.
this book is short enough that it can be read in one little sitting, but that's not to say it ought to be read that way—quite the contrary.
it's sad and beautiful and meditative, and it needs time to work its way into your soft little feeling bits, the way sand niggles at an oysterbody with, "why are you crying? why are you crying?" until the oyster suffocates all that emotional shit into an impenetrable pearl and gets on with its life.
not a great analogy, but a decent life lesson.
anyway, grief. death has taken a lot of stuart ross' people: family, friends, mentors, dogs, and even though writers are meant to take all the universal experiences of life and distill them into art, stu has some emotional roadblocks when it comes to the experience of grief.
the premise of this collection of...essays? prose poetry? thoughts? is that stuart ross—the affable canadian vegetarian poet—has an unusual writer-tic: whenever his work skews too close to something uncomfortable or "heavy," a hamburger is sure to find its way into the mix.
here, hamburgers are code for grief, and, as he tries—repeatedly—to wrap words around his "enormous accumulation of loss," inevitably he veers off into a hamburgery tangent.
It may be that I have grieved and grieved, but I did not recognize it because I don't know what grief is. I have felt pain in my chest and at the same time an unfulfillable longing. Tears have trickled down my cheeks. I am a man of sixty-one and tears often trickle down my cheeks. I sob and curse.
I don't know if this is anger or frustration or sadness. I don't know if it is sadness, the degree of sadness that reaches the depths that people identify as "grief."
Do you like pickles on your hamburger? Mayo? I've got some grainy mustard in the fridge. Pull up a chair.
it should be jarring, the incongruous image of a hamburger defusing the emotional tension with comic relief, pulling back to keep grief at arm's length, but once you internalize the subtext, the hamburgers become, somehow, even more emotionally resonant.
this collection is a series of digressive memories, ruminations, anecdotes, but they keep coming back to hamburgers, and he keeps finding clever and affecting ways to talk about grief without talking about grief.
in one piece, he revisits a poem he wrote nearly two decades ago, whose narrator is a hamburger. he's going through and critiquing it and it isn't until the closing lines that he remembers what the poem is about.
It's the only thing I've ever written about 9/11. And it is jam-packed with hamburgers.
but it's not all hamburgers and suppressing the painful examinations of loss, it's also full of wisdom:
Michael, I worry that I am too tired from grieving to grieve for you too.
But at the same time, I don't even know if I have grieved. I still can't figure out exactly what grieving is. Maybe because it's a thing that doesn't seem to ever end. If I grieved right, wouldn't it end? If it's a constant state, isn't it just living?
reading this while feeling hyper-vulnerable by my own calendar-reminder of loss was therapeutic and reassuring, and it left me feeling a little scoured afterwards.
for someone who isn't sure they've ever truly experienced grief, this book pulsates with it.
in these pages, we are confronted by the unexpected pathos in a stapler. i think the first time i cried whilst reading this book was the last sentence of page 18. it's not even a sad line—it wraps up an almost entirely factual piece about c.s. lewis, but it's the buildup to that line, the tonal shock as ross shifts the reader back into the place where his grief lives with five emphatically neutral words that could have been taken from lewis' wikipedia page, but are—when contextually connected to what seemed like a non sequitur on the previous page—absolutely fucking devastating.
i mean, but that's grief, innit? you're going about your life, doing something completely ordinary, when suddenly something resonates, twanging a memory or a mood, and you're caught off guard and left absolutely walloped.
there are several interstitial bits in-between the longer pieces—poems (his own and others'—take THAT, poetry month! i have honored you after all!), fragments of song lyrics or the last words of famous people with the word "hamburger" inserted somewhere, and, in an admirably determined stalling tactic (game recognizes game/staller recognizes staller), searching for the word "hamburger" in other people's work.
To search for a single word in a physical book is time-consuming. If you recall the particular word, you may remember that it appeared, for example, in the top third of a left-hand page somewhere in the first half of the book. But with electronic books, you can just do a search.
The word hamburger does not appear in A Grief Observed.
The word burger does not appear in A Grief Observed.
C.S. Lewis does not veer from his subject matter; he does not hide or evade. There are no hamburgers, culinary or metaphorical, in his book A Grief Observed.
As I write these words, I wonder when I will turn unflinchingly to my own grief in this book. That is the particular corner I am trying to paint myself into. But I worry that I may be too clever for myself. Or too weak.
it's the kind of book you can pick up and revisit—and i already have—rereading a passage here and there. it's moving, elegiac, and deeply sad, but it's also a comfort, and i hope that writing it was a comfort to him, too.
This book feels like one big hamburger. My intention was to make myself face things I don't think I've succeeding in facing...I want to force myself to come to terms. That's what I'm trying to do here.
i've never read anything by sally hepworth before, although The Mother-in-Law has been recommended to me by several people. despite their impassioned i've never read anything by sally hepworth before, although The Mother-in-Law has been recommended to me by several people. despite their impassioned "you need to read this!" beseechments, i never felt any urgency to pick it up. it seemed like it would probably be fine—middlebrow domestic suspense, maybe a decent twist, but there wasn't anything about it that struck me as special.
but hell, i've misjudged a book before.
if this hadn't shown up at my house in a box FAR too big to ignore, i probably wouldn't have picked this one up, either, but since i can be easily bought off with a trowel, i dug in (chortle), and i wound up having a great time with it! the mystery elements were fairly predictable*, but i absolutely loved fern, and there was much more depth and nuance to her character than i'd expected, as well as more humor and some genuinely moving moments.
plotstuff: fern and rose are twins, but they are as different as two strangers who got off an elevator on the same floor, and hepworth reinforces their differences with how she shapes their alternating POVs: fern's is a standard, although digressive, first-person narrative, while rose's version of events is relayed through a series of journal entries.
fern has sensory-processing difficulties; she is hypersensitive to touch, and when faced with crowds of people, excessive or sudden noises or lights, she becomes overwhelmed into a sort of panic attack. she's also neurodivergent, which can make the interacting-with-patrons part of her job as a librarian a little precarious, but also very funny. and for me—neurotypical but small-talk averse and impatient with imprecise queries, wincingly familiar. additional fern-and-karen samesies are that we are both excellent at the readers' advisory parts of our jobs and both suspicious of/confounded by the computers-and-printers aspect.
not a spoiler, just a delightful but overlong passage you may or may not choose to read.
...it takes me several seconds to register the woman with pointy coral fingernails who has appeared at the desk, clutching a stack of books against her hip. I roll my ergonomic chair slightly to the right so I can still see the children...but distractingly, the woman moves with me, huffing and fidgeting and, finally, clearing her throat. Finally, she clicks her fingernails against the desk. "Excuse me."
"Excuse me," I repeat, rolling the statement around in my head. It feels unlikely that she is actually asking to be excused. After all, patrons are free to come and go as they please in the library, they don't have to ask for the privilege. It's possible, I suppose, that she's asking to be excused for impoliteness, but as I didn't hear her belch or fart, that also seems improbable. As such, I conclude she has employed the odd social custom of asking to be excused as a means of getting a person's attention. I open my mouth to tell her that she has my attention, but people are so impatient nowadays and she cuts me off before I can speak.
"Do you work here?" she asks rudely.
Sometimes the people in this library can be surprisingly dense. For heaven's sake, why would I be sitting behind the desk—wearing a name badge!—if I didn't work here? That said, I acknowledge that I don't fit the stereotypical mold of a librarian. For a start, at twenty-eight, I'm younger than the average librarian (forty-five, according to Librarian's Digest) and I dress more fashionably and colorfully than the majority of my peers—I'm partial to soft, bright T-shirts, sparkly sneakers, and long skirts or overalls emblazoned with rainbows or unicorns. I wear my hair in two braids, which I loop into a bun above each ear (not a reference to Princess Leia, though I do wonder if she found the style as practical as I do for keeping long hair out of your face when you are a woman with things to do). And, yet, I am most definitely a librarian.
"Are you going to serve me, young lady?" the woman demands.
"Would you like me to serve you?" I ask patiently. I don't point out that she could have saved herself a lot of time by simply asking to be served.
The woman's eyes boggle. "Why do you think I'm standing here?"
"There are an infinite number of reasons," I reply. "You are, as you may have noticed, directly adjacent to the water fountain, which is a high-traffic area for the library. You might be using the desk to shuffle documents on your way over to the photocopier. You may be admiring the Monet print on the wall behind me—something I do several times a day. You may have paused on your way to the door to tie your shoelace, or to double-check if that person over in the nonfiction section is your ex-boyfriend. You might, as I was before you came along, be enjoying Linda's wonderful rendition of 'The Three Little Pigs'—"
I have more examples, many many more, but I am cut off by Gayle, who approaches the desk hurriedly. "May I help you there?"
although fern's sensory sensitivities make her life challenging, she has developed routines and strategies to manage them and she has rose to help her through any tricky situations that may arise.
rose is an efficient, take-charge kind of woman, married with a successful career as an interior designer, but she always makes time for fern—they have dinner together several times a week, and she involves herself in every detail of fern's life. rose established herself as fern's protector when they were children, even before their mother overdosed, and she is the only person who knows fern's darkest secret and the reason she needs to be protected from herself.
because of this secret, fern has always gratefully deferred to rose for guidance, and her side of the story is liberally sprinkled with rose's advice and opinions, like so:
I try to avoid conversations about things other than books, although I'll occasionally indulge Gayle in a conversation about her garden or her grandchildren, because Rose says it's polite to do this with people who we like.
when rose's desire for a baby is thwarted by her own biology, fern decides she owes it to her sister to conceive one for her. she meets a man 'named' wally who understands and shares some of her idiosyncrasies, and as their relationship develops into more than just a means to a procreational end, rose becomes a bit territorialconcerned with fern's newfound independence from her, and wally has his own concerns about the sisters' relationship.
fern may have difficulty with everyday social cues, but she nails the complexities of sororal dynamics:
Sisterly relationships are so strange in this way. The way I can be mad at Rose but still want to please her. Be terrified of her and also want to run to her. Hate her and love her, both at the same time. Maybe when it comes to sisters, boundaries are always a little bit blurry. Blurred boundaries, I think, are what sisters do best.
anywhooooo, this is a much longer review than i meant to write when i sat down, and very few people are bothering to read this far so i guess this is a private enough place to confess that i had myself one of those rare misty moments during the scene where fern is riding the bus to the clinic and sits in the pregnant-passenger seat. not a full-on cry, but since it's so rare for me to even get that tight-throat pre-cry feeling when reading, i'm gonna fib a bit and put it on my "books that made me cry" shelf and hope that this is the beginning of a whole new me; a me who is able to be moved to tears (and, more importantly, to be SCARED) by books like everybody else.
an observation interesting to no one:
between this one, the murderbot series, and The Maid, i've read quite a little cluster of books lately whose main characters, for various reasons, struggle with human interactions: navigating social cues, wrestling with idiom or subtext, defaulting to literalism, developing coping mechanisms—putting so much effort into understanding and being understood. and either authors are getting better (more sensitive and thoughtful) about writing these kinds of characters, or i'm losing my curmudgeonly edge, because in the past, these character types came off annoyingly twee and inauthentic, and yet these recent few have not rubbed me the wrong way at all. bonus points for lessons in how to human better:
Asking questions is a tactic I use when small talk is required—it makes you appear interested while simultaneously putting all the effort of the conversation on the other party.
on it.
additional observation interesting to no one:
if you read this book or the spoiler passage i laboriously typed out, you will know that sartorially, fern is rita:
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in conclusion, hepworth's cover designer is phoning it in.
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tl;dr—sisters. secrets. schemes
* REAL SPOILER (view spoiler)[i mean, sheesh—they're twins—they always make one evil at the twin factory, so no surprise there! (: (hide spoiler)]
“I’m here to remember—all that I have been and all that I will never be again.”
this is self-reckoning at its finest.
here i am finally reviewing a book“I’m here to remember—all that I have been and all that I will never be again.”
this is self-reckoning at its finest.
here i am finally reviewing a book i read more than six months ago with the warning that because i read it six months ago, it’s going to be a review by someone with a sorta hazy memory of the book, trying to recall what i was thinking about, and what impression this one thing made on me way back before the world changed so much, but which i need to write in order to check off a “finally did that” box on the mental “to-do” list that keeps me up nights, self-recriminating.
which are all interlocking pieces contributing to an oddly appropriate mindset in which to review this particular book about the past, memory, shifting social mores, and a life reflected upon and pinned down in its most treasured and regrettable moments as an 84-year-old man sits alone in a bar and drinks a toast to five people who profoundly affected him, each drink accompanied by a nostalgic stream of memories chewed down to their gristle.
to me, it was crystal clear what this book was from its very first pages, but i’ve been told some readers were surprised by the ending, so behind the screen it goes: (view spoiler)[this book is the clear-eyed farewell observance of a man about to kill himself. it is a less-acerbic Millard Salter's Last Day, a less-distractible A Man Called Ove(hide spoiler)]
it is a lovely book through and through—poignant and meditative and grounded by a deftly realized character; gruff and tender and flawed, coming to terms with a long life’s choices relayed in that quintessentially irish blend of funny and sad—i’m interrupting this review to toast The Last Days of Rabbit Hayes; an emotional if not thematic cognate to this book that far more people should read, okay? back to this book now—and it’s a remarkable debut; fast-paced without being flimsy, rueful and melancholy without being emotionally manipulative, unflashy and effective and excellent.
There was a love but of the Irish kind, reserved and embarrassed by its own humanity.
if you're looking for a sad that's not, like, a news sad, here's a book for mood.
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IS THIS A GOOD BOOK TO READ WHEN YOU'RE ALREADY DEPRESSED JK TOO LATE
“This is weird, Madison. You want me to raise your husband’s fire children.”
i won this through the gr giveaways but i didn’t read it right away—choosi“This is weird, Madison. You want me to raise your husband’s fire children.��
i won this through the gr giveaways but i didn’t read it right away—choosing instead to read ARCs of books that were coming out before this one, then delaying it further for my horror-only october bookplan. i thought i had plenty of time before it pubbed because i saw this on the side of the ARC:
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and misunderstood it to mean it was pubbing on the 19th of november instead of in november 2019. which i now realize is a monday—wait, no it's not but ANYWAY THE POINT IS i put off reading it and the book came out before i began reading it and the joke’s on me because i liked this so much more than most of the books i read while i wasn’t reading this one.
THIS BOOK IS SO GOOD
before this, i’d only read one other book by him, Perfect Little World. i liked it fine, with some reservations, which was probably another reason i dragged my feet in favor of books i thought would be more slam-dunks in my heart.
but this one—good lord, i couldn’t read it fast enough; it grabbed me right from the start, and i never put it down without feeling a little tug of regret that i had to go do other things. i am someone who folds over pages in my books when lines are pleasing or memorable, and i was already a-folding by page two. all of it—the characters, the story, the conflict, it is brisk and funny and warm and wise and heartpunchy; it’s a perfect book about imperfect people; of love and family and responsibility, and you better believe i cried. <— and that? that is a thing that just doesn’t happen.
i’d been drawn to this one initially because spontaneous human combustion is rad, even if this is not quite SHC, because the h’s that are c-ing spontaneously are physically unharmed by the experience; they’re just two little kids who burst into flames when they have temper tantrums.
"How are they still alive?" I asked.
"It doesn't hurt them at all," she said, shrugging to highlight how dumbfounded she was. "They just get really red, like a bad sunburn, but they're not hurt."
"What about their clothes?" I asked.
"I'm still figuring this out, Lillian," she said. "I guess their clothes burn off."
"So they're just these naked kids on fire?"
"I think so. So you can understand why we're worried."
which is all very striking an image, but it is so much more than the novelty of that situation. quick aside: i was at the bookstore the other day and this little girl was just LOSING HER MIND and through all the shrieking and wailing and snot and tears, all i could think was “welp, at least she isn’t on fire.”
the “children on fire” angle is the hook, but at its heart, it is about lillian—a woman trapped in the smallness of her own life after her chance to rise up out of her working-poor upbringing was stolen from her by the betrayal of a friend. as a teenager, lillian worked her ass off to win a scholarship to an elite boarding school where she met her roommate madison billings—a wealthy girl with just as much weirdness to her as lillian. the two became close friends and teammates—basketball phenoms who were inseparable until madison got into trouble, her father paid off lillian’s mother for lillian to take the fall, and lillian was expelled and sent back to her hometown in disgrace. the bribe money—meant to be put aside for lillian's college tuition—was instead quickly spent by her mother on her own comforts. without the challenges and opportunities of the rich-kid school, without the possibility of a college education, lillian just sorta sunk into herself and stopped trying.
Everything was so easy, and nobody cared, and I lost interest…I started to care less about the future. I cared more about making the present tolerable. And time passed. And that was my life.
fifteen years later, lillian is twenty-eight years old and still right where she started: she's been living in her mother’s attic, plodding through long aimless years of smoking pot, living paycheck to paycheck, defeated and angry but still in madison’s thrall; maintaining a periodic correspondence-based friendship with her—madison’s letters filled with tales of one cushioned success after another; the ease of wealth enabling a charmed life only getting more charmed as she grows older.
when madison writes to lillian, asking for her help, lillian doesn’t hesitate: I tried to think of a time when I hadn’t done what Madison had asked me to do. That time did not exist.
what madison needs from lillian is her loyalty and discretion; to take care of—and keep out of sight—her husband’s children from a previous marriage; ten-year-old twins bessie and roland who have just lost their mother and are afflicted with this unseemly fiery rage. madison’s senator husband jasper is in the running for secretary of state and flaming children would disrupt their picture-perfect family image: a beautiful, wealthy couple with a young son of their own who doesn’t burst into flames.
despite having zero training or experience with children, much less with “fire children,” lillian accepts the position and becomes their governess and sorta-jailor, which puts her once more in madison’s charismatic orbit—living on the grounds of their sprawling estate in tennessee, doing her best to keep the twins calm, extinguishing them when necessary, and sensing in them kindred spirits, an affinity unexpectedly kindling (heh) her unexplored maternal instincts.
Maybe that’s what children were, a desperate need that opened you up even if you didn’t want it.
the children have been uprooted and are full of raw emotional pain; grieving their mother, resentful of their sudden displacement, their long-absent father and his pretty young wife, their pampered half-brother, and this stranger being paid to care for them. the situation is not ideal, but the three soon find their footing and begin to form their own outsider version of a family, their trust built through honesty and candor, and lillian’s transition from reluctant foster parent into fierce mother bear is beautifully written.
They were me, unloved...and I was going to make sure that they got what they needed. They would scratch and kick me, and I was going to scratch and kick anyone who tried to touch them.
i feel like i could go on and on about this book, typing out lines from the oh-so-many folded-over pages, and all the ways in which lillian’s situation—of squandered promise and self-disgust; feeling defeated and giving up, the anger, frustration, and shame of poverty—was so horribly relatable to me as i was reading it that i just wanted to howl.
Because I kept fucking up, because it seemed so hard not to fuck up, I lived a life where I had less than what I desired. So instead of wanting more, sometimes I just made myself want even less. Sometimes I made myself believe that I wanted nothing, not even food or air. And if I wanted nothing, I’d just turn into a ghost. And that would be the end of it.
And there were these two kids, and they burst into flames.
And I had known them for less than a week; I didn’t know them at all. And I wanted to burst into flames, too. I thought, How wonderful would it be to have everyone stand at a respectful distance?
this.
the book simply crackles. it is all flames and fire and emotional damage but it is also hope and purpose and human connection, and even though i am not typically an emotional reader, this one got me right in the feels. i'm sorry i didn't read it the moment it fell into my little hands, but i'm extremely glad i won a copy, because i probably wouldn't have read it anytime soon without the guilt-prod i feel every time i win or accept a free book. maybe this glowing review will be your prod. if not, maybe this overlong quote'll do it, the single best description of the oncreep of love i have ever read:
Sometimes, when the kids were invested in something, when they didn’t look entirely blasted by how shitty their lives had been, I’d try to truly look at them. Of course, they both had those bright green eyes, like you’d see on the cover of a bad fantasy novel where the hero can turn into some kind of bird of prey. But they were not attractive children, the rest of their faces soft and undefined. They looked ratty. I hadn’t even tried to fix their cult haircuts. I feared that fixing them would only make the kids more plain. They had round little bellies, way past the point when you’d expect a kid to lose it. Their teeth were just crooked enough that you could tell they hadn’t been handled with care. And yet. And yet.
When Bessie managed to get the layup to bank perfectly off the backboard, her eyes got crazy; she started vibrating. When Roland watched you do anything, even open a can of peaches, he looked like he was cheering you on at mile marker nineteen of your marathon. When Roland put his fingers in my mouth in the middle of the night, when Bessie kicked me in the liver and made me startle awake, I did not hate them. No matter what happened after this, when the kids moved into the mansion with Jasper and Madison and Timothy, no one would ever think that they were really a part of that immaculate family. They would always, kind of, belong to me. I had never wanted kids, because I had never wanted a man to give me a kid. The thought of it, gross; the expectation of it. But if a hole in the sky opened up and two weird children fell to earth, smashing into the ground like asteroids, then that was something I could care for. If it gleamed like it was radiating danger, I’d hold it. I would.
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i missed out on this at BEA, but i won it through goodreads - hooray!
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and it came with a squishy flame-shaped stress thingie.
i added this book to my to-read list back when i heard about it, but it was one of those wobbly to-read intentions - the plan was to wait for it to be released and check out the reviews on here before committing one way or another. in general, books whose blurbs gush about how "moving" the story is and gleefully relate how many tissues you will need to get through it are not a selling point for me. books that are "heartbreaking" never break my heart because it's hard for me to sustain emotional connections with the books i read. i can identify where the sad beats are, but they unfortunately don't work on me, and since so many of these supposedly emotionally draining books are about dogs, i was concerned that this would be just one more schmaltzy, emotionally manipulative addition to the dog p.o.v. movement* where everyone has a good cry but me.
but this book is not *just* a tearjerker, and it mostly stays on the good side of cutesy. it's about a man named ted and a dog named lily and the octopus that threatens the boundless ocean of their love for each other. stupid octopus.
it's pretty much a page-four reveal, but i'm not going to go into more detail about that.
but i will say that lily is an absolute delight, and ted's - well, not a delight, but he's very sympathetic, and his love for lily is so raw and fierce that you're just as likely to choke up at the happy-sweet parts as the sad ones. like i said, i can identify where humans will experience emotions even if i don't feel them myself.
and yet - wonder of all wonders - this book did indeed give me a tear. on the subway, on my way home to my own little beastie-cat, i sprung a leak and i felt one warm droplet escape my eyeball, and it made me so happy! which is totally backwards, i know, but it's a relief to know it's not that i'm broken; but that authors just aren't trying hard enough to reach me. There you are, said my eyeball.
it's a sweet book, but not a flimsy one. it's not perfect, but it's much less self-indulgently twee than i'd feared, and it's as funny as it is sad, which is a nice balance for a book about grieving to strike. i say go for it, even if the thought of entertainment marketed as tearjerkers makes you feel bored inside. because you never know - it might be the day your own plumbing breaks down!
"That is a suitcase. I have to put my things in it so I can travel."
"Great. I'm already in it, so you're ready to go!"
"Sadly, I can't have you in it. It's for my clothes and shoes and shaving kit."
"Why can't I be in it? I am one of your things!"
I sat down beside the suitcase and scratched the back of her head, between her ears. "You are, in fact, my most treasured thing." She raised her nose in the air and squinted her eyes. "But you're going to stay nearby and have an adventure of your own."
Lily looked at me with her soulful, almond-shaped eyes. "We're going on different adventures?"
this was my final book of 2015, which i read on new year's eve because my book-ocd required me to end my reading challenge on an even number. 279 is ugly and jaggedy, 280 is soft and huggable.
and i'm looking at these noble old pooches with their whitened muzzles
and the year is ticking out its final hours and i'm sitting there quietly drinking booze and reading these stories by the dogs' owners reminiscing about their long journeys together over the years; their dog's temperaments, where they were rescued, and how their faithful friends are slowing down now with age, AND I GOT ALL MISTY!!!
and i don't know why!! i don't even have a dog right now, old or otherwise, and my cat is immortal and will never age a day and is going be my special girl forever, but regardless, i was all AWWWWW OLD DOGS!!! drip drip leak
fulfilling my 2019 goal to read (at least) one book each month that has been digitally moldering, unread, on my NOOK for years andHAPPY PRIDE MONTH!!
fulfilling my 2019 goal to read (at least) one book each month that has been digitally moldering, unread, on my NOOK for years and years and years.
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one of the benefits of letting a book ripen on your NOOK for years and years and years is that you forget what the book is about and why you wanted to read it in the first place. you just know that february is a short month and you’ve set this NOOK-goal for yourself and as you find yourself getting closer to the end of the month, you panic and decide to read the first YA book you see because at least you know it will be fast.
all you really remember is that this is supposed to be sad, and it is immediately clear it's gonna have suicide themes, but you shrug, knowing that books just don't make you cry, ever, and your life has been more affected by suicide than many people's, so no damn book is gonna push you over the edge into weepytown because that earth is scorched, son. and you were right. none of the suicide stuff comes close to making you cry.
but that one page, towards the end? yeah, that broke through your defenses, causing some sustained eyeleak on the 7 train. and you loved feeling like an empathic reader for once.
this book's a few years old, and there are some hints to the book's tricks in the comparisons made by other reviews and the book's own synopsis. but some of us didn't bother to (re)read any of those before diving into this book, and weeeeeee were completely caught off-guard once that blindfold was lifted. and it was awesome.
to switch pronouns ONE MORE TIME, that turn happened while i was crossing the street, reading this, and i fullstopped directly in the middle of queens boulevard and said "ohhhhhhhhhhhh DAMN!"
that complete "didn't see it coming" shock is as delightful to me as a book that makes me cry, although it is much less rare. i'm not sure there has been a book, before now, that has done both to me. no spoilers from me, just genuine pleasure at what i thought was gonna be a throwaway read just to meet my goals and instead turned out to be a magnificent heartpunching story.
this book is the chinese water torture* of sad and eventually, it will break you down.
and you will love it.
*unless that's one of those things we don't say anymore? in which case, replace with some imaginary game called "sad, sadder, saddest."
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yes, friends, there were tears. even a shriveled old heart like mine can still sometimes feel.
it's easily one of the best contemporary family dramas i have ever read, and i have read more than a few.
ng's prose isthis book is absolutely perfect.
it's easily one of the best contemporary family dramas i have ever read, and i have read more than a few.
ng's prose is outstanding, and her characters are vibrant, completely three-dimensional, and the way their stories knot up in each other is superb.
it opens with the death of sixteen-year-old lydia, the beloved middle child of marilyn and james lee. marilyn and james are a mixed-race chinese/caucasian couple living in a small town in ohio in the seventies, where such relationships were still extremely uncommon. in the united states, anti-miscegenation laws were only declared to be unconstitutional by the supreme court in 1967, which is a little mind-boggling, but there it is.
race plays a role in the conflict(s) of the novel, but it's just one component in what is really a story of family dynamics.
How had it begun? Like everything: with mothers and fathers. Because of Lydia's mother and father, because of her mother's and father's mothers and fathers…Because more than anything, her mother had wanted to stand out; because more than anything, her father had wanted to blend in. Because those things had been impossible.
marilyn grew up in virginia, the daughter of a home economics teacher who always wore gloves outside the house and whose greatest dream for her daughter was to meet a lot of wonderful Harvard men. marilyn has more ambitious plans - with her scholarship to radcliffe, her ultimate goal is med school, and she excels in her physics and chemistry classes, enduring the condescension of her all-male classmates (which is confusing to me, because in 1955, radcliffe was still an all-female school, as far as i know), in order to achieve her real objective - to end up nothing like her mother.
Late at night, bent over her textbooks while her roommate wound curlers into her hair and patted cold cream onto her cheeks and went to bed, Marilyn sipped double-strength tea and kept awake by picturing herself in a white doctor's coat, laying a cool hand against a feverish forehead, touching a stethoscope to a patient's chest. It was the furthest thing she could imagine from her mother's life, where sewing a neat hem was a laudable accomplishment and removing beet stains from a blouse was cause for celebration. Instead she would blunt pain and stanch bleeding and set bones. She would save lives. Yet in the end it happened just as her mother predicted: she met a man.
the man is james lee - fourth-year graduate student and marilyn's teacher for "The Cowboy in American Culture," who is, in the terminology of the day, an Oriental, specifically a Chinaman. after the very first class, marilyn goes to his office and kisses him. and from then on, they're together. which abruptness seems a little out of left-field, but it makes sense somehow. for her part, she thinks He understands. What it's like to be different. and he does. and his attraction to her comes from the completely opposite direction: because she had blended in so perfectly, because she had seemed so completely and utterly at home.
KILLS. ME.
james' father had emigrated to america under a false name, after a ban had been placed on chinese immigrants. james was born in america but he always felt alien. at best a novelty, at worst the object of ridicule and casual racism. self-taught and trying to shed the stain of the immigrant; the shame of being the son of a janitor and a lunch lady, eating his mother's dumplings in a sea of privileged white faces, james had always been aiming for assimilation. lonely, friendless, unathletic, james has felt "other" his whole life. until america - in the shape of a blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman, accepts him - marries him despite the protestations of her mother.
this is probably too much detail tl;dr and all, but i am just so gobsmacked with how perfectly ng has set this family up to be doomed. this is thomas hardy-level cause and effect intricacy. and i'm not going to give too much away, this is just backstory - the real meat hasn't even been served up yet.
quickly, quickly, because there's still so much more to celebrate: they have three children, the first of which, nathan, effectively ends marilyn's career dreams. lydia is the middle child, dead on page one; the daughter each parent has hung their own missed opportunities upon - her father wants her to make friends, to be popular as he never was, and her mother wants her to have the academic success and career she gave up for her family. and then there's hannah. the youngest; an afterthought, frequently overlooked even when she is in the same room, but the keenest observer, and the only one able to see the big picture.
so the story is manyfold - finding out how lydia ended up at the bottom of a lake - and you will - this isn't one of those ambiguous endings, but although she is the center of the narrative, by the time all is revealed it almost doesn't matter. this book is more about character. where the idea of "family" is a character all its own. it's about the pressures put on children by parents, children wanting to please, parents making assumptions, siblings caught between jealousy and sympathy, infidelity and sacrifice, the poison of the american dream, racial identity, and what happens to a family after their lynchpin is removed.
everything about this book kicked my ass. each and every character had a story that was profound and devastating and i cried like a kitten on fire. which is very rare and always a delicious surprise.
the more i think about this book, the more i love it. so many tiny moments that splintered into my feeling bits. such quiet, understated scenes that are haunting me still.
i cannot believe this is her first book. and i cannot wait for the next one.
i don't laugh at books much. don't get me wrong, i am not averse to the emotion humans call "happiness." sometimes i will find myself smiling at an amusing book. i have been known to chuckle, even. but this book ripped out my funny bone and started tickling me with it. not only did i LOL, i was crying with laughter by page four. PAGE FOUR! i even took a picture of my laughter-tears as proof which i intended to use in this review, but then i figured the internet had enough pictures of me already, so that one will just be for me.
but i will tell you that page four was not the end of my laughter-response. this book made me indescribably happy, much more than the typical "messy art autobiography" you find cluttering up the humor section. along withLet's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir, this is a book that finally understands what it's going to take to make me laugh.
for example, every single time she drew a dog, i fell in love a little. these are among the best dog drawings ever.
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if that's not a perfect trip into the mind of a dog, i don't know what is.
one more:
[image] [image] [image] [image][image] [image]
holy hell, but that's comedy gold.
there are other, non-dog-related treasures; in particular the "god of cake" story and the goose story, but i will leave you to discover those for yourself. i know i have said in other reviews of internet-sensations-turned-book that i was glad to learn of the blog or site or whatever through the book, but i never actually visited them after my revelation, even if i really enjoyed the book. maybe once or twice, but then i would get distracted by other things and never follow through. but with this one, i am going to do the unprecedented. are you ready? for those of you who know me and my allergy to "doing new things" or even "doing things like normal, modern people do" like owning a cellphone, this is going to blow your minds. i am going to "follow" a blog, as the kids say. and there. i have just done it. i think. i don't know what all these buttons mean, but i am fairly confident that i have just joined the ranks of the modern world. brrrr, it's chilly. speaking of chilly, i will leave you with allie brosh's take on a dog in the snow:
all i did while reading this book is cry. in the middle of penn station for hours. in the receiving room at work. in the subway. atutterly destroyed.
all i did while reading this book is cry. in the middle of penn station for hours. in the receiving room at work. in the subway. at home. tears. everywhere. i am going to have to buy the copy i borrowed from work because my tears got on a couple of pages.
it is unprecedented.
and it doesn't hurt that i have been blue for a couple of months now, but it also doesn't help that this woman knows how punch you in the heart in a variety of ways with stealth and precision.
because it's not that bad things happen to the characters. please - as a thomas hardy veteran, you can't get me that way. and it's not a nicholas sparks teenagers kissing in the rain kind of awwwww crying. i am not that way inclined.
it's the little things. details. a slow build where you become sewn to the characters - conjoined at their hearts and then with a single line of uncommonly pure emotional vérité she will just slice at those stitches and cast you adrift and you won't even see it coming. she's like an emotion-ninja. or a sniper. she's something ferocious and beautiful that is coming to get you.
and again marchetta is exploding the scope of the YA novel. when one of the two main characters is a woman in her forties experiencing her first pregnancy with a painful baby-daddy situation and giant bloody handfuls of family drama swirling all over, i just wonder what the teens are going to make of it. these aren't relatable high-school relationships; there are layers of betrayal and heartbreak and years of built-up hopes and letdowns crudding up the lives of these characters. and it's not that teens can't understand the emotions, it just strange to me to keep writing these books that have such a broad market and audience and publishing them as teen fiction, thus cutting the audience in half.
the other central character is nineteen; the nephew of the pregnant woman, with his own woes, and the family woes the two of them share. his concerns are more universal than a potentially single-mom late-in-fertility pregnancy situation, but they are still very complicated and more than your run of the mill teen angst.
it is gutting.
and it didn't start out that way. i had to reread the first three pages a few times because it is a confusing mass of characters' relationships to each other, like in the bible. eventually i gave up and said, "i'm sure this will make more sense as the story progresses, à la jellicoe road." and it did. it does. but for awhile, i was floundering and wondering "who are these people?? i thought reading saving francesca first would be all i needed to understand this one!!"
but pssst - i liked this one a lot more than saving francesca. i really liked s.f., it had a million moments where i felt touched or saddened or more human somehow, but this one lives up to the skill and promise of jellicoe road which is jaw-droppingly good stuff. this one has some teensy things that i didn't love (all of the original song lyrics, for example, really made my skin crawl) but there is such a strength and a confidence to her writing, and the balls on her to talk politics - australian politics, to an audience that, in america at least, is going to be utterly perplexed. (quick: american teens - you have twenty seconds to tell me where east timor is)
for all of it, i recommend her to you. but particularly for what she does best - the long fuse, the slow burn, and then not one big firecracker at the end, but a string of small explosions in the heart that eventually wear you down into a teary-eyed blob of emotional helplessness. bitch.
this book took me by surprise. this is another mcnally jackson find, and one which a certain tomato tried to talk me out of adding to my already-too-bthis book took me by surprise. this is another mcnally jackson find, and one which a certain tomato tried to talk me out of adding to my already-too-big stack, but i assured her it was only $8.95, and that is practically free! and i am really glad i bought it, because i can't order it into the store, and it was a sweet and simple story that may or may not have made my eyes leak a little.
but i may have just had tired eyes from all the annotating i had to do.
nah, i will own up. i cried ONE native-american-confronting-litterbugs tear. i did. it is such a small book, there isn't much room for a ton of content, but the characters, their relationship, the puzzle-piece way their quirks fit together - it is very affecting.
i myself am a maker of lists. i have at least seven different notebooks whose purposes blur together, but each one has a different mood, and causes distinctly differently-toned lists to emerge. crazy?? a little. i am not as listy as johns is in this book (that is not a typo), but i do feel better if i can look at a list: of groceries, of books to get, of things to do, of people to email... it makes my manic life more manageable. this is something of a cautionary tale for me, but it also has that "independent movie starring joseph-gordon levitt" feel to it which is cheeky and sweet and quite moving.
i can't even get close to reviewing this book. ("well, who asked you to?," they sneer) i can't but i feel like i have to. i have been putting it off fi can't even get close to reviewing this book. ("well, who asked you to?," they sneer) i can't but i feel like i have to. i have been putting it off for a really long time now but i think i have to get it over with once and for all. this review done, i am going to wash my hands of all complicated human emotions because this week has been far too full of mourning and apprehension and second-guessing and worry. after this, i am pure cylon and you can all go to hell with your feelings.
after this review, of course...
this book will probably make you cry. i don't know you, and i don't care how emotionally hardened you think you are, because i'm pretty sure it will make you cry. i don't know what it is in particular about it that makes it more shattering than other books that deal with death - i remained dry-eyed throughout "don't go where i cant follow", i never get emotionally invested enough in movies to be a movie-crier (although, like jen, i totally leaked at 'up') but there's something extra in this - some sort of drug blended in with the ink which causes heightened emotions upon contact. even reading other people's reviews of it had me a little emotional (especially the ones i was directly or indirectly responsible for, reading-wise). it is a powerful little piece of work.
don't read this book if you have ever lost anyone. don't read this book if you have ever felt culpable in anyone's death. don't read this book if you know anyone who has ever lost someone or had an emotion or a family or ever been confused or frustrated or was unsure where the "you" was in relation to someone else. don't read this book when you are already sad. don't read this book when you are happy. i mean, read this book - please read this book. but be aware.
so even though i had heard the podcasts (through alternate technology), reading this book caused me to laugh so hard that tears fell onto the book in so even though i had heard the podcasts (through alternate technology), reading this book caused me to laugh so hard that tears fell onto the book in little plips. bless this man....more
this book made me so sad when i was a little girl. spoiler alert - the dinosaurs?? they go extinct at the end and it's wicked sad 'cuz they're all skethis book made me so sad when i was a little girl. spoiler alert - the dinosaurs?? they go extinct at the end and it's wicked sad 'cuz they're all skeletal and just lying there like things that were once badass and are now dead. and it made me cry.
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