Happy birthday

Happy birthday, me. I am 35. Shudder. I've decided to blog another year of reading, only this one will have a theme. My absolute favourite books to read are memoirs by women. Famous women, non-famous women, ones I like, ones I don't, the whole gamut. So, I'm doing a whole year where that's all I read.
I'm going to sneak in two early entrants that I read last week. Firstly, Forever Today by Deborah Wearing. Here is the outline: Deborah, then a young PR employee at London department store John Lewis joins the staff choir and falls in love with the conductor, Clive Wearing, a conductor and music producer for the BBC who is quite a bit older than her. They get married and about a year later he gets a virus that turns out to be herpes simplex which then infects his brain very, very badly. He has encephalitis and huge amounts of brain damage (apparently there are literal holes in his brain tissue) with the resulting effect that he has the worst case of amnesia ever recorded. His memory is about 20 or 30 seconds in total. Every 30 seconds he 'wakes up' confused, convinced that he's been in a coma that has lasted years and years. The only thing he can remember is Deborah, and music. She advocates and cares for him. She divorced and then remarried him some years later and it's all fascinating and horrifying.

I also read Body Lengths by Leisel Jones (and ghostwriter). It was extracted in the weekend Herald a month or so ago, which is why I picked it up. Insanely talented and dedicated swimmer, an Olympian at age 15, wins a million medals but then also gets depressed and tries to kill herself at high altitude training camp. I guess it's just interesting to hear her say that she thought things would be different when she won a gold medal; her friends would like her more, her boyfriend wouldn't cheat on her, she'd finally be happy with her body. Then she wins the gold and everything's the same. I think for some years I also lived my life as if I was waiting for one special thing to happen, and then everything would finally be good and I could actually start living. I try not to do that anymore. Me and Leisel.

I happened to read Body Lengths in the same few days as I read These Things Happen by Greg Fleet. It occurs to me that there are several points in that book where Fleety, a bald junkie with none of this own teeth left, reflects on his looks and decides that he's quite ok. No model, but you know, fine, he's good enough, never had a problem with the ladies. Meanwhile Leisel, tall, blonde, athletic, with 8 Olympic gold medals tried to kill herself because her coaches thought she was fat. Men, what's your self esteem secret? Oh yeah. Patriarchy.

Onwards to a years of other women's lives.

10. Girl Walks Into A Bar by Rachel Dratch

Girl Walks Into a Bar is the book length answer to the questions ‘Why aren’t you on 30 Rock anymore?’ And ‘Aren’t you a bit old to have a baby’? It reads like Rachel Dratch wrote it one weekend. It reads like the first draft of Bossypants. As the bigger star, Tina Fey would have had access to better editing and marketing, but this book is really crappy. Also, Bossypants has the advantage of being the book length answer to the questions ‘OMG how did you come up with 30 Rock? I love that show!’ And ‘OMG your baby is so cute, are you going to have another one??’

I can’t believe that Rachel Dratch believes in stupid shit like The Secret, or ‘visioning’ or psychics. I wish I didn’t know. I can’t believe she was 44 when she had her baby. I guess I really don’t care. Her boyfriend sounds fine, and bit yuck. I can’t believe she lives in a one bedroom apartment. But I am going to look on YouTube for the clip of it being made over into a shared nursery by Nate Berkus. I really can’t believe that she would censor the work fuck, to look like ‘f**k’ in her own book. That just puts so must distance between the book and the reader, and makes her sound ridiculously prudish, and also slightly desperate to please her sort of yuck boyfriend, who she reveals doesn’t like ladies swearing.

This is going to signal the end of memoirville for a while. Rachel, you broke me.

9. Some Assembly Required by Anne Lamott

Was I going to read a nice chuncky fiction next? Maybe. Did I instead read another memoir by a woman in a creative field? Why, yes I did. Fancy! Let’s proceed.

Perhaps Anne and I live too separate lives for me to feel connected to this book. She’s a white person with dreads who attends a basement church (I think it’s a basement church). Me, no. I judge white people with dreads and those who attend basement churches.

Like others, it seems, I can’t believe the baby boy from Operating Instructions is a grown(ish) man. There was a tantalising glimpse into the intervening years in the description that he "shut down and pulled so far away as a teenager that sometimes I could not find him". That glimpse is the stuff my nightmares are made of. Now he at 19, has a girlfriend and a baby.

I admire Anne’s capacity to accept and love, and her obvious pride in her family. I admire her honesty and insight into her worst behaviours- the manipulation stemming from fear of abandonment. But I just don’t connect. When her son- with a weeks old baby- says he’s going to follow some Buddhists (white Buddhists) he met on the street to their dodgy suburban ashram, her response is, “ok, me too!”. I suppose that if you perceive your other option as being losing your son to some Buddhists he met on the street, perhaps you would follow too, but­­­­­ what about just saying “that’s nice, sweetie”, and waiting right here in your house? What about saying, “uh, no, you have a weeks old baby”? And how does she reconcile this neverending indulgence of her son with her mean-spirited judgement of the son’s girlfriend’s body? She hates the girlfriends "gigantic" nursing breasts, and they frequency with which they appear. She makes constant references to the poor new mother's weight gain.

I should overlook the little digs as honest reflections of how hard it is to and rise above and grow over life’s slings and arrows, but I just can’t. Or can I? I’ll try. She’s trying. We’re all trying. We’re all in this together. Whether we feel connected or not.

________________

Surprise! I read 30 pages of my designated fiction read The Peppered Moth by Margaret Drabble, and then abandoned it when I impulse-bought a memoir by Rachel Dratch and read it all in three nights. So look out (ha ha ha!) for Rachel in my next instalment and Margaret Drabble in… maybe never.

8. Me of the Never Never by Fiona O'Loughlin

Apparently my thing is comedy memoirs by women. Easily the best part of this book was the description of her childhood in Warooka, SA. It sounded fascinating and almost romantic to have a small town filled with siblings and cousins and neighbours' kids all tearing around with little supervision, but she said realistically, it was stifling and boring and the most exciting thing was the very occasional visitor.

Yes, she grew up to be an alcoholic, but that was dealt with so summarily in the final chapter that it might as well have not been part of the book. I want drunkenness right throughout your story! Entertain me with your misery!

Took me about three sleepy nights to read. On to more challenging stuff, I hope.

7. The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Oh wow, this is great book. But look, it won the Pulitzer Prize, so you already knew that right off the cover! The characters in The Marriage Plot are so real and detailed. The depth of the world Eugenides has created reminds me of Freedom by Jonathan Franzen; so clear and intriguing. I'm going to bet I'm not the first one to make that observation- I came across both these books first as extracts published in the New Yorker. Both times a chapter was published that described a character so fascinating and lucidly described that I was completely hooked and counted down the months til publication of the whole book. In the case of Freedom it was the opening chapter about Patty Berglund. In the case of The Marriage Plot, the chapter about Mitchell Grammaticus in India.

My only issue with this book is that I ultimately felt that the treatment of Leonard was unfair. I felt like his story just stopped... meanly. His mental illness didn't deserve such casting-off. It was a coincidence that on Sunday I was listening to Common Knowledge on Radio National and they were discussing novel endings. The panel seemed to think that the ending of the Marriage Plot was outstandingly good. I thought it was one of the weaker parts. It just... ended. The end. I thought it was a good example of Kafka's idea- referenced in this article from the New York Review of Books that the panel on Common Knowledge was discussing- that beyond a certain point a writer might decide to finish his or her novel at any moment, with any sentence; it really was an arbitrary question, like where to cut a piece of string.

But such good characters.

6. Half Empty by David Rakoff

I bought and read this book on my Kindle, so I had no idea what the cover looked like until ten seconds ago when I did an image search. It would have really coloured my opinion of the writing if I had. Badly.

Due to my ongoing love affair with This American Life (six years and counting!) I have read a huge number of books by TAL contributors. Everything by David Sedaris. Everything by Sarah Vowell. Everything by Dan Savage. Curtis Sittenfield. Mike Birbiglia. Anne Lammott. Sandra Tsing-Loh. Chuck Klosterman. I have read at least one book by each of them. I seek TAL-adjacent essays, podcasts, blogs, short stories, journalism, and movies whenever I can. I've seen at least six TAL speaking tour show things. Um, what was the point of this detour? Oh yeah, I was ready to love this book.

And I did! David Rakoff is amusingly self-loathing. "Beloved by all and yet loved by none" might be one of the most savage (self) put-downs I've ever heard, and as a piece of personal insight, maybe up there with another Rakoff bon-mot I heard, live on tour in 2007, on his agreement, via the US citizenship pledge, to take up arms against the enemy: this is grass soup. If we get to the point where 45 year old asking-and-telling gay Canadian New York Jews are required to join the army, we are well beyond fucked. Might as well be a recipe for delicious grass soup during a famine.

(I would like to circle back here, and point out once again how completely awful Marieke Hardy is when in relief against a really funny, really revealing author)

This book makes me think I almost want therapy now, just to see if I have hidden depths. I bet I don't. I think I have hidden shallows. But I do have "issues", and hoping that I might one day be as wise and honest about myself as David Rakoff is in this book is a pretty high commendation.

Trying to read some fiction next, but I'm mostly in a "flicking though" stage. That's where I just read and re-read chapters from old faves, magazines, or various makeup, fashion and parenting guidebook type things I have lying around the house. But since I'm working on a project (this!) I'll try and snap out of it.

5. Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11 by Joan Didion

I wanted to read more Joan Didion, and this is all they had at my local library last week. It's more of a book-lette, however. A slim 60-ish pages, set out with generous margins. I've read longer articles in the New Yorker.

So, America has hardened and become more conservative and insular since September 11, 2001. "Fixed ideas"- the politicization and co-opting of nationalism, the suppression of dissent- are common place and suffocating. Well, I think I knew that. That it's so obvious now perhaps speaks to the foresight of this book, which was published in early 2003.

But I was really reading this book just to see how JD writes. She writes well. That's the answer. I was transfixed by this really short, inconsequential description of her activities on a book tour:

"You fly into one city or another, you do half an hour on local NPR, you do a few minutes on drive time radio, you do an "event", a talk or a reading or an onstage discussion. You sign books, you take questions from the audience. You go back to the hotel, order a club sandwich from room service and leave a 5AM call with the desk, so that in the morning you can go back to the airport and fly to the next city"

It's hard for me to pinpoint what I like so much about that. Is it the monotonous run-on sentences that evoke the tour itself? No, I think it's the intimacy that exists within the phrase "a 5AM call with the desk". We don't need further description of the desk. We know the desk. We know "the desk". We are there. On tour. Serious writers. Bored by hotels.

I had to Google the essay she reads an extract from on tour, the one about "the shining and perishable dream itself." The essay is "Goodbye to All That" from 1967 and it's perfect. Short enough that you can read it here.

Please read it.

3. Blue Nights by Joan Didion

Well. Ok. Blue Nights. I don't think I have any thing to say about Blue Nights that wasn't said by Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic. Or any thing to say about Caitlin Flanagan said that wasn't said by Heather Havrilesky on Book Forum.

It's hard to agree with Caitlin Flanagan. But she is so on point with her comments about the Didion cliché style in this book: "her sentences and her rhythms and her tics are clichés because we know them so well" (that's me quoting Flanagan quoting Katie Roiphe.) And it is now that I come to the big reveal... I didn't know that this cliché method of writing was Joan Didion. Exactly what I was writing about with Marieke Hardy, that statacco rhythm imbuing everyday objects and actions with expansive meaning, that's Didion. She invented that. In the sixties. I can't believe I didn't recognise that before. One of her best known quotes is from The White Album, which was published in 1979 and demonstrates this perfectly "“The music was not 1968 rock but the kind of jazz people used to have on their record players when everyone who believed in the Family of Man bought Scandinavian stainless steel flatware and voted for Adlai Stevenson".

The style that was driving me crazy so much in You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead, was driving me so crazy because it's a style that has has been repeated and weakened for 45 years now. Everyone does it. Especially women writers. And the point is to demonstrate that insight that into the everyday that makes people special. Marike Hardy is nothing but a Bi-Lo version of Joan Didion. And I'm pretty sure that when a past winner of Miss Country NSW on ABC 702 this weekend described the moment of her win by remembering the weight of the crown upon her head, it's because Joan Didion "remembered the cool of the crystals on her neck" at her eighth grade graduation.

I'm sorry, Joan Didion, that I ascribed your formidable and original style to "fashion blogs". And I'm sorry that to me it was a cliché before it was an inspiration. I do love what you do and I am going to read more Didion books this year.

Hey, guess what showed up on page 4 of The Uncoupling by Meg Wolitzer, which is next on my list? A sex scene, described as "all bone and tendon and indifference and regret". Joan, girl, you are everywhere.

2. What I Did by Christopher Wakling.

This book is fairly uninteresting. Can you read the white type above the title? That's really enough. The point of the book is to sympathise with the Dad, but I never do. I know it's meant to be a sort of, parents are human, we make mistakes, we've all been there, could've been me etc. But just no. No, this could never have been me. Not because I can't imagine the initial smack, but because I can't imagine every selfish, thoughtless act that follows, each of which prolong the misery. The consequences of the smack are not out the Dad's control, he actively makes self-centered, anti-child decisions that worsen the situation. The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas worked this theme with a lot more sympathy, humour and detail. Room by Emma Donoghue used the voice of the child narrator with a lot more subtlety and craft.

This week I also read Bossypants by Tina Fey. I'm not counting it because it's a re-read. I just wanted to compare it to Marieke Hardy. There is a gulf between them. Tina Fey is confessional and funny and seriously likeable where Hardy is overshare-y, pretentious and irritating. I love that on parenting, Tina and I independently came up with the theory that the best way to say no to drugs is to stick with beer. And that she gives voice to the mind-bending revelation that every one has once they become a mother, that once upon a time, your own mother mothered you.

There are a couple of bits I don't love, however. Her chapter about breastfeeding voices this really common complaint that I just don't understand at all. That there is this really well-populated, self-righteous, cruel breastfeeding lobby comprised of holier-than-thou breastfeeders who harrass non-breastfeeders and make them feel bad. I have breastfed two babies in the exact crunchy, well-educated American environs she describes (she says Brooklyn and Hollywood, I'll offer Cambridge, Massachusetts and the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C.) and have simply never encountered this. I knew women who breastfed on demand and on schedule, for a few weeks or for several years, with pumps and bottles or with boobs out all the time. (ETA: Holy hell, I totally forgot that I regularly went to a playgroup where women cross nursed each others' babies . I did not participate). I also knew women who formula fed from the start, in tandem with breastmilk or not, and those who started formula after a period of breastfeeding. Reasons for not breastfeeding included that it hurt, it wasn't productive, it wasn't convenient at work or at home, or simply "I wanted my body back". I talked about breasts and breastfeeding a lot during the first year of each of my child's life. In that time I never had or heard a single conversation between mothers that wasn't supportive and understanding of whatever feeding choice a mother had made or thrust upon her. Breastfeeding was certainly encouraged but if it wasn't happening, c'est la vie. I think Tina Fey is setting up a dynamic of mothers attacking mothers that doesn't exist. And I think she's doing it because she personally is insecure about formula feeding her baby.

I know how that goes because I, too, am insecure about baby stuff! I think there's a really logical parallel between breastfeeding and vaginally birthing a child. Both activities are on the decline in rich, educated countries, despite both being hugely advantageous for mother and child and much more achievable than the rates of participation would suggest. Both suffer from myths as to the level of difficulty involved, and both have this bad rap for being supported by superior, indifferent bitches. I had two caesareans (sob!) and I'm hugely insecure about this. I almost actively tried to encounter the mean-girl vaginal birth lobby. I joined ICAN, I met doulas and midwives, I talked in a self-flagellating manner about my children's births all the damn time. I was never met with the kind of dismissive show-off-y-ness or aggressive attacks that Tina Fey describes. I don't want to say that it never happens, because I know better than to deny a woman's own descriptions of her life, but for real, it just cannot be that common. I cannot extrapolate from Tina's experience to the wider world, and I'm here to present a counter narrative. In fact, I think that by presenting her experience in general terms- that "Teat Nazis" "brag endlessly" and "grill you about your choices" (See that! She's writing in the second person! That means it didn't just happen to her, it will happen to you!)- she's doing women a disservice. No, not about the breastfeeding! I mean dragging out this idea that women attack each other all the time. Boo! I'm so sick of that.

At best, it happened to Tina, and she thought it happened to everyone. In which, I'm sorry you feel that way, TF. At worst, it didn't happen to her or she knows it doesn't happen to everyone, but she thought it would be funny to include examples of women being bitches over a dumb, girly thing like boozfeeding. Maybe a bit of both. Scenario A, plus she thought it would be funny? I give up.

Ok, onwards and upwards. I've got Meg Wolitzer and Joan Didion on the horizon. Can't wait!

1. You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead by Marike Hardy.

I think my project in 2012 will be to record all the books I read in a year. I've always wanted to do that. I think I'll do it here. I was going to do it on Facebook, but I think that might piss people off. I burned through a lot of Facebook social capital last year harassing people to vote for some baby photos in a competition. Sorry, world. This way, I can also write a little something (if I so choose) about my book as well.

Over Christmas I read Gimme Shelter by Mary Elizabeth Williams and The Secret Life of France by Lucy Wadham, but I can't quite remember if I finished in them in the new year, or earlier.

The first book I definitely started and finished in 2012 was You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead by Marike Hardy. It was not great. She's a pretty hacky, clichéd writer, and her stories just irritated me so much. She has a habit of frequently using two sentence structures that I really dislike. One is so describe something, usually a person or group of people doing something, by writing a short sentence that includes two, sort of, typical but unconnected actions, viz, her friends as uncaring stoners: "We opened another beer and turned our backs to the water" (p 240). The other is to describe something (usually a person) by saying they are "all" something, viz, herself as a fourteen year old: "all hotpants and teetering teenage platform shoes" (p 88); her muso mates: "all skinny denim and Beatle boots from Rocco" (p 233); a young footballer: "all stick arms and milky-spindle legs" (p 84).

Look, here's both kinds together! The Fitzroy Lions: "They moved as a pack, all fleshy arrogance and pride. They slapped each other's arses and spat on the grass" (p 83).

That second one is used fairly frequently in blogs- especially fashion blogs- as a short hand way of creating an impression of a person or style, which I get under the pressure of online writing. But jeez, it annoys me in edited, published work. I think I first encountered it in Maggie Alderson's column for the Herald a bit over ten years ago.

Mostly I disliked YBSWID because of my irritation with the character of Marieke Hardy. The chapter where she described three years as a groupie for the band Dallas Crane ("The Bubble") was the worst. I just kept wanting to say "how OLD are you?" It is not cute to be a groupie in your thirties. A little googling leads me to believe the end of the Bubble was about 2007. Maybe 2009. And she was born in 1976. So she was maybe aged 31 or 33 by the end? Either way, far too bloody old. That behaviour is for 20 year olds. Stop being sad.

Her front cover coy side-eye, miserable little boudoir pics in the back cover, and that dreadful, cultivated "fun-feminist" ironic stripper thing she's doing I also find very grim and unappealing.

Or maybe I'm just a grumpy old square with no idea of how to live a bohemian life. A grumpy old square who probably shouldn't read from the "blogs into books" genre.

Let me try something marginally more serious next time. I should warn however, that if anyone ever reads this, I promise to be honest, and if you think of me as a smart person, you will be astounded at the crap I read.

Voices

On Tuesday I am giving a presentation to my class on In A Different Voice, by Carol Gilligan. It's a great book. I find it really helpful for thinking about exclusion and privilege and meaning and truth and so on and so on. And I'm really not that into psychology- it just makes sense to me. But I know in my class there is this one guy, this awful, stupid dickface prick who's going to heckle my presentation and downplay the importance of what I'm saying and he's going to say that when Gilligan focuses on women's voices THAT'S SEXIST and that when she describes relational thinking as equal to hierarchical thinking IT'S ACTUALLY LESS DEVELOPED or we wouldn't see it in children and uneducated people. Fuck this dude for ruining the mental process of presenting a great text. I'm so pissed off that I have to consider his reaction when planning my discussion. And I'm equally pissed off that in the written thingy I have to go with it, I have spent what I consider to be disproportionate time emphasizing that men can think relationally, too. Seriously, can women not have one single fucking thing to themselves? To quote Lizzie Skurnik: "I am quietly outraged at how apparently it is against the law to not talk specifically about boys and what they might need/enjoy/prosper from for five seconds."


Note to reader: I have noticed that you have a particular weakness for Young Adult novels. Particularly the adventures of Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden. You really, really should read Lizzie Skurnik's book Shelf Discovery and the archive of her columns for Jezebel. Ignore how ug-mo Jezebel looks these days. Columns are at the right.