Summer Books (Already!)

After a glut of strange reading choices this winter, I've finally found some nice footing. At one point, I had a book of intricate knitting patterns, a generic instructional on interior decorating, exercises for pregnant woman, and dozens of birthing books I had no intention of reading all crowding the corner of my desk.  It was sad, not because there was anything wrong with the books themselves, but because my days felt unfocused without the driving pleasure of being attached to one.

For some reason - I guess it's because lilacs are blooming - I started craving summer books: characters puzzling through their lives while gazing at the water, sunburns and sandy toes and sweaty, tinkling cocktails on porches at the end of the day.  When I happened upon Summer People, a debut novel by Brian Groh, on one of Tim's bookshelves, I dove right in.
 

I mean, give me a book with oars on its cover and the promise of snobby New Englanders from the perspective of an outsider, and I might just be your friend for life.  This particular water-front story, about an aspiring graphic novelist who takes care of an ailing woman one summer in Maine, was full of humor, strong, clean prose, and genuinely surprising twists.

I also read Sweetbitter, by Stephanie Danler, which was seriously addictive.  The prose is electric and the story, about a young woman who moves to New York City and gets a job in a high-end restaurant, is about her education in both love and life, and takes readers along on her discovery of how much flavor exists in both palate and mind (and body) when she gives herself the chance to explore it.  Usually I'm annoyed by narratives of excess, especially when driven by young characters who keep ignoring their inner compass, but the intelligence behind this novel felt like a serious anchor, and I frankly wanted the sentences to never, ever end. 

Similarly, I read a new novel called Marlena, written by Julie Buntin, which I discovered through Twitter somehow.  I think it caught my attention because parts of it are set in northern Michigan.  I put it on my list because Buntin's writing is so clear and unflinching.  This piece about her mother's reaction to the mom character in Marlena took my breath away. 

 
Marlena is another story about a young woman testing her limits of self-control, this time as a fifteen-year old whose newly divorced mom moves back to the place she grew up, taking her adolescent children with her, where they are exposed to people who cook meth, deal drugs, and worse. 

The main character's best friend, Marlena, is a girl whose family life is less than ideal, and this basically drives her to grossly self-destructive behavior.  But it's the narrator's thoughts on her friend's behavior which ultimately kept me reading, and while I'm not sorry to have read a book about teenagers behaving badly (whatever that means), I do struggle with narratives about experimenting with drugs or playing adult in ways young characters aren't emotionally ready for, because I personally want to hold space for a different way of growing up.

I don't know if my middle grade years are a gold standard for kids: there were plenty of hours spent reading terrible books like The Babysitter's Club while eating too many Pecan Sandies at my parent's kitchen table.  I can recall doing strange Jane Fonda-like exercises while watching Saturday Night Live and Arsenio Hall on my basement floor when I was in sixth and seventh and eighth grade.  These are not things that make a great person.  Even though I had a few very close friends, I tended to choose solitary activities like walking in the woods and suntanning to the point of exhaustion, and by the time I got to high school where I went to for-reals parties where parents were out of town, and I started dating seriously, the hours I still watched movies by myself became some of my fondest memories later. 

Give me a blanket, a sinky couch, and a Brad Pitt movie, and I will calm like a swaddled babe, still. (These days it's probably more a Billy Crudup or Mark Ruffalo movie, to be honest.)  This might be a privileged perspective, but I don't feel like self-destruction is as necessary to learning who you are in the world as our culture may believe.  I mean, of course, we're all going to do dumb crap and no one can be in tune with themselves at every second of every day, especially a young person figuring out who to trust and who they want to be, but I appreciated the eventually sober take in Buntin's book about the chaos and loss of those adolescent days, because I believe in sanity and healthy boundaries for everyone: adults, children, and everyone in-between. 

Speaking of sanity, we celebrated Samantha's third birthday with a day at the beach and ice cream because the kid eschews cake.  After a day of reading library books on our stoop and playing under the sun, she fell asleep in one of her presents (which isn't as funny as it sounds because it was a shirt).  The next day, we were all so sleepy and worn out, Samantha and I spent the day in pjs.  She built "nests" out of blankets around the house and read books to herself while I cooked various meals.

It was heaven.

Finally, we've been Red Boxing it because Tim and I are both 102 inside and can't deal with things like cable or Netflix. The Great British Bake Off, however, is seriously rearranging my mind about Netflix, which we once had at the end of grad school and then went away for the summer, carting an overdue DVD around national parks for three months because we cannot be trusted.

About a month ago, Tim rented Manchester By the Sea and then fell asleep on the couch leaving me to sob sob sob, all by myself.  While I don't agree with some of the writing in Manchester, and this article about Casey Affleck disturbs me - as I think it should disturb all of us, I loved the technical skill of the director and could watch footage from a camera positioned on dark, cold water all day long.  (See also: Olive Kitteridge.)  

The real gem for me, though, has been 20th Century Women, which was directed by Mike Mills, who wrote and directed Beginners, starring Christopher Plumber and Ewan McGregor.  Tim thinks McGregor is only as good as the director he works with, something I hadn't really considered before, but might be true.  Thoughts there?  Actually, it was either my husband who said that or my movies-podcast partner, Lukis.  Is it bad that I can't remember which?  It's okay, I think.  They're friends and either one of them could have said it.

I knew nothing about 20th Century Women before Tim brought it home - are you getting a picture of my life yet, where Tim goes out for things and I lie in a hammock being waved with palm fronds? - and was delighted to see Billy Crudup in it because Billy Crudup is my woobie. 

Annette Bening is also high on my list of actors I would watch eat cereal or read a book or wash a car, and while Greta Gerwig can go either way for me, I really admire the writing in 20th Century Women and appreciated her character by the end.  The actor who most impressed me was perhaps Elle Fanning who is, what, eight years old now?  Just kidding, she's nineteen.  I last saw her in Sophia Coppola's truly perplexing Somewhere (which felt an awful lot like nowhere, didn't it?) and was pleased to see her with tons of lines and complexity in this film.

I'll spare you the podcast jag I've been on, except to say that I found S-Town truly mesmerizing and wasn't too conflicted while listening to it.  Missing Richard Simmons, on the other hand, feels underdeveloped, gimmicky, and sometimes just plain rude.  (I also can't get over how many trips the creator of MRS takes that result in no material.  What kind of budget were they on?)

Happy Spring, people!  I'm off to hang half a dozen boat oars around my bedroom walls.  Just kidding.  (Mostly.)  I'd probably do it if sleeping under solid oak clubs weren't such a hazard.  Then again, there's a whole blank wall facing the bed right now.  Hmm...   
XOXO

Take This Waltz

I stayed up late watching Take This Waltz last week, the movie directed by Canadian director and actress Sarah Polley about a young woman at a crossroads in her cozy life.  I not-so-secretly love this movie. Because its tone is overwhelmingly melancholy, I have to be in the right mood for it, but it has a stunningly bright color palette and some smoking hot scenes that make my tongue go dry.  I do struggle with some of its essential takeaways, however, like:

• life has a “gap” in it that you can’t really fill
• monogamy will always iron itself out to boredom and disconnection in the end
• switching partners will never help you escape yourself

Okay, those first and last points I do agree with, but I am consistently disappointed in the script’s efforts to put forward that middle one.  It seems to want to ruin a very hot love affair by (spoiler alert!) moving the couple in together at the end, showing them speaking different languages of domesticity that read like, Woops! Those two might not make it, after all.  I always want to re-write the ending, and re-cast the main female character as a woman who knows what she’s doing, a woman who doesn’t use baby talk to show her feelings, a woman choosing her future deliberately.

But no matter how much I want to change the ending of the movie, I will still be casting the male lead, Luke Kirby, in all my daydreams about life and boardwalk afternoons forever and ever amen.

Speaking of boardwalk afternoons, I appreciate how much the movie is a love letter to the city of Toronto.  As Polley herself said in one of the extra featurettes about the film: Toronto doesn’t think of itself as sexy but she thinks of it this way, and she wanted this movie to reflect her feelings about it. 

She also said she doesn’t want viewers to know how they feel about the main character’s decisions in the movie, like whether or not to leave her husband.  This feels right to me – this is a movie that never settles on one path or solution, which feels like something I can get behind, as both a consumer of fiction and also a participant in life. 

In this Brainpickings article, Susuan Sontag is quoted as saying: “A writer ought not to be an opinion-machine . . . The job of the writer is to make us see the world as it is, full of many different claims and parts and experiences.”

She also says: “The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions… Furnishing opinions, even correct opinions — whenever asked — cheapens what novelists and poets do best, which is to sponsor reflectiveness, to pursue complexity.”

This last thought feels so important to my internal life right now, which until recently was feeling utterly battered by the news cycle. I don’t really have more to say about that, but let’s just say for most of the winter I was glued to headlines and Twitter.  This sort of behavior is a departure for me, but I feel a real call to be as informed as possible lately, so I’m mostly going with it.  In this Sun interview, which a friend sent me, “radical priest” Matthew Fox has this to say about being awake and aware in the world today:

“The mystic in us is the lover. The mystic says yes. But the prophet in us is the warrior, and the warrior says, ‘No, this is unjust. No, this is suffering that we can work to relieve.’ That’s the rhythm of the mystic and the prophet, the lover and the warrior. It’s not enough to be one or the other. Pancho Ramos Stierle, who worked with the Occupy movement in Oakland, has said that it’s time for the contemplatives to become active and the activists to become contemplative. This moment in history calls for a dance between the two.”

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit.  I’m seeing it in the people around me: fiery people learning how to care for themselves, patient people becoming more active. 

There’s so much more I could say about this, but lately I find myself feeling quiet about so many things, just soaking in my life.  It’s probably fitting, because I’m four and a half months pregnant with our second child.  I’m so tired and internally busy that I don’t have the energy for much outward expansion. 

That’s why I’ve been absent here this winter.  I’ve been reading and watching movies and cooking and sleeping.  Not much of it sticks with me right now.  I feel both utterly present and also in sort of a tectonic fog, where many things in my life are either underground or at rest.  I’m fine with that but it doesn’t make for many zippy posts.   

This is how I spent my whole first trimester, on the couch or bed with a pack of crackers.

If I’m slow to post from now until the fall, it’s because I’m in the kitchen listening to Dr. Dog, or on the couch reading 90’s decorating books, or in bed wondering if it’s late enough to turn out the light.  One of the surprising and blessed constants for me these days is yoga, and I’m still working on creative projects.  But most days, I’m wading through the callings: a walk, a podcast, a recipe, with one amazing kiddo inviting me to read the same four books over and over or play orange Playdough with her.  Tim bought Samantha a little basketball and the two of them have designed a game where the hoop is a wicker basket that sheds fibers all over the living room.  It’s all very rich, and somewhat mundane, a word our culture doesn’t have a lot of room for.  But truthfully, I rather like it like that: daily, sweet, and monumental only over the long haul.

XOXOXO
Kara

P.S. Tim and I watched the movie Loving the other night, and it was so moving.  Jeff Nichols has directed Mud, Take Shelter, and Midnight Special, all of which I thoroughly enjoyed, mostly because of the magnetically intense actor Michael Shannon, so we gave this one a shot.  Loving takes a little time to really start but the story of an interracial couple marrying in 1958 and enduring midnight raids and jail sentences in their state of Alabama is so incredibly important.  Here’s a great article about the movie, which details the couple’s long road to the Supreme Court to defend their marriage, a legal case that made anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional in the U.S.

P.P.S. I know many people would disagree with me on this, but after reading the book Joni Mitchell: In Her Own Words, which I wrote about here, I have a hard time putting Leonard Cohen, who wrote the song "Take This Waltz," on a pedestal.  Admittedly, there are plenty of Leonard Cohen pedestals in the world already, so who will mourn the loss of one, but every time I hear the line "Oh, I want you, I want you, I want you/ On a chair with a dead magazine," I want to scream.  It reminds me of high-end fashion advertisements of mannequin-like women stuffed into garbage cans, half-dead women in space-age makeup holding a purse or a pair of sunglasses with their legs bent at weird angles: fantasy devoid of movement, objectification supreme.  No thanks, Leonard! 

Under Cover

Oh hi.  I've been meaning to write (starts everything I've written over the past 2.5 years).  I've been composing missives in my head for weeks now, wanting at first to relate everything to the election, and then wanting to simply survive life since the election, which is basically what I've been doing.  Sleeping, reading, and raising Samantha have been the orders of each day.  Finding the energy to break beyond barriers of basic self-care unfortunately hasn't been on the table. 

And I'm kind of okay with that, except I've been wanting to share some photos of our days with you, and some thoughts on someone I've never had many thoughts on before: Bruce Springsteen.

 

I spent the month of October trundling through Springsteen's enormous memoir (that's what she said?) Born to Run, which is pretty and generous, honest and sparkly.  I enjoyed it for the same reasons I sometimes enjoy his songs - their lyricism - although to be honest I don't think I've really considered his music or his songwriting enough.  In fact, I was struck while reading how many of his famous albums came out before I was even alive.  I think of both Born In the USA and Born to Run as radio albums of my youth, but the first came out when I was six, and I wasn't even born for the second. 

This is all to say, other than his long-standing reputation as a concert powerhouse, I haven't paid the man a whole lot of attention or thought.  I never went through a Bruce phase unless you count the Bruce Hornsby phase I'm still in. 

The fact that I made it through all 528 pages of Born to Run is a testament to Springsteen's gifts as a writer.  In addition to his editor's willingness to let the man wheel poetically on about the block he grew up on, the nearby radio tower, his mother ("She goes to work, she does not miss a day, she is never sick, she is never down, she never complains.  Work does not appear to be a burden for her but a source of great energy and pleasure"), his father, the tree in his front yard, the drives his family took for entertainment, and the early days of building his bands, I appreciated his utter candor about his mental health.  He writes vaguely about strains of mental illness running through his extended family and in depth about habits his father exhibited which scared him, and traces the emotional terrain he faced while writing and recording every album, while touring or taking breaks. 

I was therefore disturbed to read a New York Times review in which the writer is dismayed to find out a rock hero takes Klonopin.  Anyone with the most cursory experience making art would understand, I thought, the ups and downs of a creative life.  And anyone who drives himself as hard as Bruce Springsteen has driven himself and his band is bound to come against the frequent companions to raging glory: terror and depression.

It bothered me that this was a writer's takeaway, both because it seems shallow, not to mention inhumane, to want our heroes to not be real people with real problems, but also because Bruce talked about it all so vulnerably.  To takeaway, what a bummer that people have bummers, from a book spanning a creative workhorse's entire life, seemed seriously beside the point. 

 

Sometimes Born to Run made me miss Warren Zanes writing about Tom Petty in his book Petty: The Biography, because it's hard to be good at talking about your successes and Springsteen is a mortal like the rest of us.  Some recaps of touring days and recording breakthroughs were the stuff of journal pages, but mostly I appreciated his perspective as a thinking, feeling human being, like when he talks about hearing himself sing on tape. He writes:

"When you first hear yourself on professional recording tape, you want to crawl, in a cold sweat, from the room.  You always sound better inside your head and in your dreams than you do in the cold light of the play-back room.  There, the way you truly sound initially lands on you like a five-hundred pound weight...Tape and film have no interest in the carefully protected delusions you've constructed to get through your day."

I think about that last line a few times a week, the carefully protected delusions we construct to get through our days.  (I am grateful for many of them.)

And as I made the final push to finish the book one lovely weekend spent with Tim's parents, I found myself bawling over the final chapters, in which Springsteen explores family life and his wife Patti Scialfa's leadership in their house.  I especially remember a section where she teaches him how to shape up and be there for his kids when they are little, instead of sleeping through their breakfasts because he was up late working.  I'm chokinig up writing about it right now, in fact.  I've written about this before.  I like family narratives.  They puncture the intellectual shields I wrap around my heart and help me see the hot mush I'm carrying inside. 

 

There is so much more to say but I don't have the heart for lengthy discourse right now.  I'm keeping low to the ground but here is something I think about every day:

"If there is to be peace in the world, there must be peace in the nations. If there is to be peace in the nations, there must be peace in the cities. If there is to be peace in the cities, there must be peace between neighbors. If there is to be peace between neighbors, there must be peace in the home. If there is to be peace in the home, there must be peace in the heart." 

- Lao Tzu

M.L. Titsky

When I was in high school, I got somewhat of a reputation among close friends as being game for tagging along on almost any errand that needed to happen.  Gas? A card for your grandma? A pizza you're going to pick up for your family now?  Sure.

If your car was running and the radio was on, I was down. 

I'd like to blame this part of my personality for being willing to read so many things my friend Amelia suggests.  Not unlike that time Tim's eyes lit up when I started reading Freedom, these books add texture to our friendship, and keep us in a shared conversation I absolutely cherish. 

Source: this fascinatingly angry review.

It's possible I would have heard about Shrill by Lindy West if Amelia hadn't urged me to read it, but I'm not sure I would have actually gone to the trouble of doing so, for no other reason than it at first came across to me as somewhat of a "humor" book. The chances of me making it past page four of a humor book are actually lower than me making it through a duck hunt. 

That's a lie.  I've never been on a duck hunt and I'm sure I've finished a humor book, but if so I've repressed it.

Shrill, however, while making me laugh a lot, and being in somewhat of a conversational tone that could be mistaken for glib, easy prose, is full of articulate, somewhat painstaking arguments, and I really did enjoy it. 

Lindy West is perhaps best known for her online writing for Jezebel and The Guardian, but aside from seeing her name in some reviews before this book, I didn't think I had any experience with her.  Then, writing this, I realized she wrote a piece about Jonathan Franzen's response to writing about race, an article I admired and also chafed at when I first read it. 

Lindy West.  Source: announcement of her Stranger Genius Award in Literature

I also realized, while reading her book, that she was probably blipping across my radar screen more than I knew, when she described her involvement in the national discussion around Daniel Tosh's disturbing, dismissive, aggressive rape jokes at one of his shows. 

Without going into all the details of that incident and its rippling reactions that folded backlashes into backlashes, let's just say that, in her book at least, West takes credit for speaking up against this kind of behavior in what has, for a long time, been a boys club of comedy.  Here's a write-up of the initial incident, and here's West's report on people's response to her taking to task comedy's permissiveness regarding certain dangerous remarks in the name of not censoring anyone. 

What I admire most about all of this is how at the center of her narrative West remains.  I happen to really like Twitter, and I get a lot of my news from various online news outlets in addition to our quaint paper that arrives on the porch in an un-quaint manner (thwack!) three times a week, bringing me precious Parade magazine articles about actors I'd long forgotten, pages of comics, and the delicacy that is The Bargain Corner (people hocking complete junk for anywhere from $2-$300 with the greatest descriptions ever: "lawyer diorama," "leather coat: fuschia"). 

These days, with so much information coming at every angle on every screen, scandals like ones involving quasi-famous people can feel a little nebulous, and occasionally trumped-up on slow news days.  But for someone like West who works so directly in the outlets generating these articles, what floats across my screen is how she pays her rent, and her recall of those hazy-to-me stories amounts to what, in my world would look like: "First I sent that email, then I wrote that grocery list, then I got dressed, and now here we are!" Whereas it looks like one big internet dust cloud from my daughter's bed where I am scrolling my feed as I put her down for a nap, it's literally all in a day's work for this woman.

Lindy West shrilling out.  Source: her website

Granted, many of these news items we read now feel offensively non-newsy, click-baity, or just plain gossippy: Jezebel is (was?) a sister site to Gawker, after all.  I'm not here to debate how effective West is or was at moving the cultural needle, although from her point of view, she has been successful at bringing much needed attention to issues like fat-shaming, abortion-shaming, and rape culture in our country. 

What I marvel at is how explicit and unapologetic and direct she is about all of this.  Some of the book read to me as: "This bad thing happened, I attacked it in X, Y, and Z ways, and then this sort-of better thing that's not quite a full resolution but is a foot in the right direction happened."  She's saying this all very publicly, in a book where some of her publicity photos show her holding a bullhorn, and I find that remarkable. I don't even draw those lines through my successes in my journal at night. 

Also, to her credit, she seems extremely aware of her movements.  At one point in her book, when talking about the body image recovery she underwent after discovering "fat-positive" tags online which she started "furtively clicking like a Mormon teen looking at Internet porn" she writes:

"Studies have shown that visual exposure to certain body types actually change people's perception of those bodies - in other words, looking at pictures of fat people makes you like fat people more. (Eternal reminder: Representation matters.)"

Lindy West.  Source: this article that talks about a feud that fascinated me in her book, Shrill. 

In the first section of the book, she addresses her body image problems as a child which she describes getting over in a humorous list so laden with peculiar turns of phrase I didn't always know what was going on.  But I soon settled into her prose and some of my favorite parts of the book were the personal ones.

I got a pretty big kick out of her mother, especially.  Of her parents, she writes:

"Dad was the entertainer, but I'm funny because of my mom.  She has a nurse's ease with gallows humor, sarcastic and dry....When I was little, a neighbor opened a small temping agency called Multitask and, in an early stab at guerilla marketing, purchased a vanity plate that read, 'MLTITSK.' Around the house, my mom called him 'M.L. Titsky.' Later, just 'Mr. Titsky.'  Empirically, that's a great riff."

I've already covered the anti-gallows-humor kind of mom I am very lucky to have, but I would definitely like to spend time in a house with the mom who comes up with that joke. 

"No" Is My Spirit Animal

"Like dancers, none of us gets over that figure we see in the practice mirrors: ourselves.  Choosing your twin gives you that reflection forever - or as long as it lasts.  Perhaps SL will leave me for one reason or another, but he will never go away: I see myself in him and he in me, except that for him our twinship is essentially private and silent.  So how do I justify putting our we-ness out in the world by writing about it?  I can't.  It's something I've always done; SL accepts this in me: half living life so I can get down to really living it by writing about it.  I wrote about my first kiss more fully than I lived it.  I wouldn't know what I looked like in relation to SL, my twin, if I didn't describe in on the page."

- Hilton Als in "Tristes Tropiques"

One of my friends recently "taught" the Michael Jackson essay in White Girls, a 2013 book with one of the greatest covers I've seen in a long time: serious and dramatic and artistic all at once.  When she told me she was reading the book, it made me want to revisit it.  I had already tried my hand at White Girls once but was, admittedly, put off by my background knowledge of Als as the theater critic for The New Yorker, a magazine my southern identity brushes up against forceably with uncomfortable results. 

Remembering the electric, down-in-the-depths-of-the-library-stacks feeling I had while reading John Jeremiah Sullivan's Pulphead made me want to give White Girls another try. 

Als' prose has its own weight and rhythm.  I like this description of his work, from Literary Hub ("Als is a master of consideration, rarely grasping for conclusions and instead commenting on the state of things with his deep knowledge of cultural theory, always rebounding with a very-Hilton, remarkably reflective mood").  Once I committed to White Girls, my whole being felt taken through a pipeline to some velvety, synapse-rearranging place where I became slightly smarter for the hours I was in his hands.  Then I basically lost that connection once the book was closed and all I could remember was: I had to think hard reading that.  

But I loved that quote:  "It's something I've always done...half living life so I can get down to really living it by writing about it," and I remembered it for weeks after reading it.  The older I get, the more writing is one of the few things that makes any sense to me.  Reading, writing, making food and eating it, and spending time with my family are some of the only activities I have the bandwidth for right now, in addition to basic exercise and fresh air.  It took a long while to get to acceptance of that fact.  Once I did, though, once I realized that all the activities that used to make me happy, like drawing or going to yoga class or watching movie, were actually somewhat of a burden if I insisted on them too much as a mother, life got really simple.  At the same time, some force of internal life started to expand, breathing in the new space. 

No, No, No, No has become my internal mantra over the past two years, as I've adjusted to raising a child and the presence, and surrender, that requires. 

"No" is my spirit animal, drawing a deep line in the sand around me that I find very comforting right now.  Inside that line, there's a lot of room for whatever I want to put there.  It took becoming a mother to take myself seriously enough to put up those healthy fences, a fact I don't love but it's also okay. 

Hilton Als.
(Source: Interview)

In a wondrous essay about Eminem called "White Noise," discussing the lyrics to "Kim" from The Marshal Mathers LP, Als writes:

"The operative word here is 'look.' Given Mathers' background where all eyes were turned on Mom as she made scenes, could Mathers feel he was real?  That he existed? Moms and bullies sucked all the air out of the room.  In order to be heard, he did what born writers do: he learned to listen - to himself, and to others, to stories."

The lines that connect my life with Eminem's are so far apart there's probably some planetary term to describe them as bodies that will never orbit in the same stratosphere.  I wasn't bullied, I wasn't harassed, and my mom is such a delightful person many of my friends at one time or another have joked she should move in with them and be there every day when they wake up.  However, I love that idea: Born writers learn to listen: to themselves, and to others, and to stories. 

To that I say: Amen. 

A Whole Art

Over the summer, I read a piece in Garden & Gun by Alexandra Styron, daughter of William Styron who was the author of Sophie’s Choice, Lie Down in Darkness, and The Confessions of Nat Turner.  About Styron senior’s devotion to a special type of Virginia ham he prepared, the article was called, of all things, “My Father’s Ham.”  It was accompanied by an antique-y looking photo of a curing room that I wasn’t ready to explore because I associate whole sides of ham with Thanksgiving and Christmas and it was June, July, finally August.  

After several rounds with the issue, hiding it intermittently from Samantha who is obsessed with a recurring Caribbean ad inside its first pages, I finally got around to reading the piece and something about its tone haunted me. 

Then, earlier this fall, while reading the new anthology Every Father’s Daughter: 24 Women Writers Remember Their Fathers, I came across an exquisite essay by Alexandra Styron, an excerpt from her book Reading My Father. Suddenly, I wanted to read every.single.thing I could by her.  Now.  

I feel embarrassed that I haven’t read any William Styron and in fact was only dimly aware of some of his highly lauded work. A friend of mine from college once told me Sophie’s Choice was her favorite book ever, but warned me that it would basically destroy me with sadness.  If you can imagine, I didn’t dive right into reading it. 

What I loved about Styron’s essay in Every Father’s Daughter, though, and wanted more of, was her relationship to the man who labored successfully as a writer but was distant, tempestuous, and sometimes downright scary as a father.  I didn’t want to know about these details for the whiffs of scandal they might provide in the story of a famous family, but rather because in her writing, Styron is such a compelling narrator, especially as a child.  Reading her essay, I felt so much for her. I wanted to be closer and hear what she had to say. 

In her book Reading My Father, she writes:

“Until 1985, my father’s tempestuous spirit ruled our family’s private life as surely as his eminence defined the more public one…(If there was a golden rule in our house when I was growing up, it was, unequivocally, “Don’t ask Daddy about his work.”) First and foremost, my father was a novelist. ‘A high priest at the altar of fiction,’ as Carlos Fuentes describes him, he consecrated himself to the Novel….With a kind of sacred devotion, he kept at it, maintaining his belief in the narrative powers of a great story – and he suffered accordingly in the process.”

She also writes:

“Descendants of the so-called Lost Generation, my father and his crowd, including Norman Mailer, James Jones, and Irwin Shaw, embraced their roles as Big Male Writers.  For years they perpetuated, without apology, the cliché of the gifted, hard-drinking, bellicose writer that gave so much of twentieth-century-literature a muscular, glamorous aura.”

And while I loved the education about this particular time in American literary history (you better believe I ate up confirmation that Norman Mailer was every bit of the nut I thought he was), what I came away with more than anything was a sensory experience of what it was like to be a little girl in that environment.  The Styrons lived in Connecticut but had an open, interactive communication line to New York City where her parents kept an apartment and where the family spent holidays being led in carols by Leonard Bernstein at his apartment.  I don’t have an excess of glamour in my life but I did grow up in Connecticut in a town that was heavily influenced by New York City, a place we frequented when I was growing up.  No matter what was happening in the narrative, it was comforting for me to imagine the homes, the weather, the horses, the sweaters and button-down shirts of rural, yet urbane Connecticut, and to hear about all of it from someone as trustworthy and present a narrator as Styron ends up being in her memoir.

She writes about her shock that her mother knew about a child of good family friend, Arthur Miller, a child who was institutionalized and never talked about:

“Until 2003, when Martin Gottfried wrote about Daniel in a biography of Arthur, there was no public reference to him anywhere, including Arthur’s six-hundred-plus-page autobiography, Timebends.  That my parents were complicit in the conspiracy of silence troubled me long after I had begun to make some sense of it.  It affirmed my suspicion that here, among all these people who traded in great truths, keeping secrets was still the coin of the realm.  And that one could spend a lifetime examining the human heart but remain personally, confoundingly, unexamined.  If you were good enough at the former, the world would always forgive you the latter.”

In case it sounds like this book is full of dirt on her father and his friends, I think the better thing to say is, at times it reminded me of Susan Cheever’s meticulous portrait of the Transcendentalist community in Concord, Massachusetts in her wonderful book American Bloomsbury, about Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Louise May Alcott, although it is also, of course, a highly personal account of growing up with a famous artist father. 

True to its title, Reading My Father is mostly about William Styron and his family, but in writing about him, Alexandra paints a portrait of a fascinating, destructive, highly masculinized time in American letters, and does so with expert research, as well as a flawless tone:

“The archives at Duke went a long way toward bringing my father back for me.  He came alive in all that paper, the medium in which he lived most purely.  I was utterly charmed by the soldier writing home to his father.  I communed with the funny and profane young writer abroad.  And I ached with maternal sorrow for the grieving boy who couldn’t shed well-earned tears.  All those words irrigated the arid soil that was my past.  Up sprung life in fresh stalks.  Voice, flesh, smell.”

Throughout the book, Styron takes a long, hard look at her father’s recurring depression, a subject which I feel personally unqualified to discuss at length, because everyone’s emotional terrain is deeply personal, and also because I am not a medical expert.

I do have some experience in the upkeep of mental wellness, however, which for me includes tenets of nutrition, meditation, yoga, and creative expression, as well as any and every type of therapy you could want: massage, talk, girlfriends, art, baking, decorating, exercise, yada yada.  While reading about Styron senior’s battles with mental illness, I was several times reminded of something I read in Joni Mitchell: In Her Own Words, a book I previously wrote about here.

Speaking about the vulnerability being an artist requires, and the blues that can swoop in on anyone at any point in their life, Mitchell says:

“There comes a point where you just kind of bleed onto the pages….Maybe it’s best to face your inner self in your teens when your body’s strong….In other cultures, that would be called a shamanic conversion.  In this culture, it would be called a nervous breakdown.  Your nerves are on fire.  Since we’re not a shamanic people, we don’t realize that sharper senses are coming in.”

Later in the book Mitchell says:

“In retrospect, I’ve learned that depression is necessary for growth….You couldn’t be a novelist without sensitivity, without a sense of detail.  And you can’t be deep without sensitivity.  And emotionality, God, without emotionality in the arts, it’s merely intellectual.  It’s boring, except to an intellectual.  If you’re trying to make a whole art, you really need all of those things.”

I love that phrase: a whole art.  I put about seven sticky notes next to that graph when I read it and then drove around for days wondering how the title of Wilco’s album The Whole Love plays into that phrase.

If you listen to this Dear Sugar episode, you’ll hear India Arie talk about her take on this very topic of breakdown and breakthrough.  She says:

“The truth is, it wasn’t that I came to a point of realizing that I wasn’t living my truth, it’s that I came to a point where I couldn’t ignore it anymore.  And that’s the point, that you feel something different than what you’re living.  You feel the rub, and I always felt the rub.  I always felt it all along, but then it got to a point where I kept having health issues and ulcers and skin eruptions and I finally just had a breakdown.  And I still went on for a few moments after having a breakdown.  Now in hindsight I look at it as my personality and my soul separating so that my soul could say “No” to these people [managers, her business team, etc.].  But at the time it just felt like a nervous breakdown.”

Finally, there’s a somewhat amazing interview with Paul Simon on World Café in which he says something only Paul Simon could say about David Bowie: that he might not have been a terrific songwriter but rather he was a great performer.  He also talks about how the drum sound was recorded in the song “The Boxer,” and plays some new songs including “Wristband” which I found to be a pretty powerful song, particularly for this time in our history where so many longstanding systemic oppressions are coming to light in our culture.

That is all, my friends.  Thank you for taking a small trip down Connecticut lane with me. If you are aching for a few more female voices in your life right now, I highly recommend Reading My Father or even Every Father’s Daughter, which I’m only halfway through but which won me over right away with its introduction by Philip Lopate, because I would read a grocery list written by Philip Lopate.  Before having a child, I didn’t quite “get” anthologies.  They felt contrived and random to me.  Now that my days are sometimes scrambled and life is a chaotic (whole) mess, I’m coming around.  Anthologies now feel like cocktail parties introducing me to voices I haven’t heard before, like Melora Wolff, who stole the show for me in Every Father’s Daughter, or parties reuniting me with beloveds like Ann Hood, whom I wish would move into my house and wear cozy slippers and cook soups while reading aloud to me from whatever she wants.


(All drawings by Tim, as requested by Samantha)

Subscribe via email