14. Be Less Crazy About Your Body by Megan Dietz

This a fun, short little book that could have been a very long article on The Hairpin, from whence it was recommended. She's right. We do need to be less crazy about our bodies. You know how it goes: if you're focused on dieting you won't be available to fight bigger fights (rudimentary Googling does not lead me to the source of this theory- or at least it's most quoted form). Also it's boring. And we should all wear vintage swimmers. 

13. Mia Culpa by Mia Freedman

Exactly what you would expect from a collation of Mia Freedman's columns from the Sunday Daily Telegraph. Rambling. Reductionist. Somewhat charming. I have a good deal of affection for Mia Freedman. She actively calls herself a feminist, and does feminist things in an incredibly anti-feminist industry. She's open about her life- which, have I mentioned? I crave the minutiae of other women's lives. I loved the part in Mamamia- her autobiography- where she described sneaking out of work at 5.30pm by pretending to take a mobile phone call while walking into the lift. I mean, I didn't love that she had to do that, I love that she told us she had to do that. 

On another topic, the point of this project was to record what I read in book form in a year. This was surely the worst year to ever do that, as the vast, vast bulk of my reading now occurs online. I read for hours a day online. I have an extensive Google Reader that I like to clear each day (highlights: everything from The Awl team) and every day I read a couple of articles from the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Guardian, the Washington Post and even CNN, Business Insider, the Economist, and Time. I diligently read my New Yorker every week. Why does none of this count but Mia Culpa does, because it's between two covers? Because those were the parameters I set on this project, and they were wrong. 

12. Double Time by Jane Roper

Blah, blah, another lady and her babies memoir. I started reading Jane Roper's blog Baby Squared in May 2007, the month she started writing, and the month my baby girl was born. I kept reading because one of her twins, Clio, seems to have a similar personality to my daughter. Perfectionist, somewhat anxious, precocious in some aspects and immature in others, extremely emotional and prone to breakdowns if things don't go her way. But improving! Jane and her family at the time lived around the corner from us in Cambridge, MA. We have since moved. Far away. It's been good to have a buddy along the baby-raising way, even if her focus areas (twins, depression) just kind of don't apply to me, and even if she's my 'buddy' only in my head.

I feel like I had read nearly all of this book via Jane's blog over the years, but it was still enjoyable to have it all connected. And I again, I just thirst for the details of other women's lives. The minutiae, the hours and minutes, and most of all, the parts where they lose their shit at their kids, so I feel like I'm not alone.

11. An Exact Replica of A Figment of My Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken

This book. Oh god, this book. I was on the verge of tears the entire time I was reading. My whole face felt like the the watery text on the cover.

Her baby dies. She writes about it. Perfectly.

I came to this book via wonderful blogger, Nicole Cliffe at The Hairpin. She often writes a listilce-y thing Really Good Books About...  So great. I have a full Kindle.

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.