Four Bleak Books

Four of the books I have written about in the past two weeks have depicted some of the hardest, saddest, most depressing childhoods and young adulthoods that I have read about for a while, along with, in some cases, the wrenching lifelong consequences of such childhoods. Two of the books -- Alison Bechdel’s “Are You My Mother?” and Jeanette Winterson’s “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” -- are memoirs; two of them -- Lisa Vice’s “Reckless Driver” and David Vann’s “Dirt” -- are novels. Vann has -- as I wrote in my post about “Dirt” -- said in interviews that the main character is based on himself, but exaggerated; I cannot say how much of “Reckless Driver” is based on Vice’s own childhood, but certain biographical facts suggest that at least some of the story may be drawn, at least indirectly, from the author’s own experiences. In all four cases, the parents are abusive and neglectful. These books focus in particular on the mother characters and their shortcomings. Although the biggest villain in “Reckless Driver” is the father, even the mother in that novel is neglectful. Three of the books write of violence in the family; although the exception, Bechdel’s book, doesn’t focus on physical violence, there is a kind of verbal and emotional abuse inflicted on the young Alison by her mother. All four of these books are important and well written; I am glad they were written, although it must have been painful for the authors to do so. Perhaps the power of words, of verbal and literary expression, was the mitigating factor for them. As for readers: Reading these books is also painful, but it is important that writers write (whether in memoir or fiction) about such experiences, even the most terrible ones, as they are part of life and we need to know about them. If we have had such experiences ourselves, this may be healing to know others understand; if we have not, it is important for us to understand them. That said, I must say that these four books read within such a short time period provided an unusually concentrated dose of bleakness; I am thankful for the small notes of hope in three of the four books (all but “Dirt”).

"Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal?", by Jeanette Winterson

I somehow have never read (or at least don’t remember reading!) Jeanette Winterson’s famous novel “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit,” nor any of her other work, although I have been aware of it for years. One day a couple of months ago on my way to work I was listening to a PBS-type talk show and heard her talking about her new memoir, “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” (Grove, 2011); something about the topic and about her persona as it came across on the radio made me decide to read this book. What a deeply sad story of a terribly unhappy childhood it is, and yet what creativity and, eventually, fulfillment and happiness have come out of it. Winterson’s voice is engaging even as she tells of the crazy religiosity (her religion itself was not necessarily the problem, or only part of the problem, but her beliefs and applications of those beliefs were) and mental imbalance of her adoptive mother, and her father’s apparent inability to stand up against the mother and her cruel treatment of the child Jeanette. When her mother found that Jeanette was lesbian, she saw it as a terrible sin and could not accept it. Somehow, amazingly, Winterson has found the right tone to tell her story: readers are very aware of the awfulness of her childhood, and of the despair, depression, and even violence that followed in her adult life as a consequence, yet we are also aware of an irrepressible resilience that keeps Winterson afloat and allows her to leave home at 16, find ways to survive on her own, study at Oxford, become a writer and even, after many bad relationships, enter and sustain a loving partnership with the psychoanalyst Susie Orbach. The climax of the story is her finally deciding to look for her birth mother, and after much trouble and many struggles with the British bureaucracy as well as with her own doubts and hesitations, achieving success and a qualified sense of resolution. A strong theme throughout the memoir is the inspiring, life-giving, healing power of words and books. Although her mother thought non-religious books were sinful, the young Jeanette hid books under her mattress; when her mother discovered and burned them (yes, burned them!), Winterson started memorizing literature. Not having had a loving or secure home, she found that “books, for me, are a home…Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space. There is warmth there too – a hearth” (p. 61). This is a wonderful and very apt expression of one of the great aspects of books. At Oxford, where she could read as much as she wanted, she felt that “the more I read, the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper sympathies. I felt less isolated….Literature is common ground” (p. 144). Another theme is that a few caring adults who reached out to the author -- a friend’s mother, a librarian, a teacher -- made a big difference in her life. This memoir is highly recommended.

"Are You My Mother?", by Alison Bechdel

In 2006, Alison Bechdel, writer and artist of the comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out for,” published the book “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic,” a bestselling graphic memoir about growing up in a funeral home and, especially, about her closeted homosexual and eventually suicidal father. The drawings in the book are intricate and the family story wrenching; Bechdel’s stance is to be completely candid, yet thoughtful and considerate of her family, and throughout, to try to figure out what it all means. Now this author has published a sort of companion graphic memoir focusing this time on her mother: “Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama” (Houghton Mifflin, 2012). Bechdel was and is close to her mother, speaking with her on the phone almost every day, yet feels that they have never understood each other. She feels she has never had her mother’s full attention and unstinting love. For example, her mother decided when the child Alison was seven years old that she was too old to be hugged. Bechdel explores their relationship through the years, cutting back and forth in time. She writes of her own writing and relationships, her lesbian identity, and her long years in therapy. She uses the ideas of the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, as well as the writings of Virginia Woolf and Adrienne Rich, to help her understand her relationship with her mother. The book is complex and rich; the reader’s eyes are attracted to the drawings and to the words at the same time, and one truly needs to slow down to take it all in. It seems there would be a danger with this kind of material of the writer seeming solipsistic, but the persona of the writer is so patently open and eager to learn that one does not feel her work is self-indulgent. And despite the mother’s obvious lack of true connection and understanding, one has to feel sorry for her too because of her long difficult marriage, and the thwarting of her own dreams of being an actor and a poet. She does in fact act in small local productions, and starts writing poetry again in her later years, and we are happy to see her having these outlets. Somehow, despite all the problems and history between them, and despite Bechdel’s having to accept that her mother will probably never truly understand her or deeply connect with her, the two come to a sort of accommodation and continued conversation and relationship.

Struggling to Read about Life at Its Worst

Until this year, David Vann has been for a few years on the faculty of the MFA Program at the university where I teach, the University of San Francisco. Although he openly states that he has had a difficult family history, and a hard time at certain points in his life, his writing has finally gotten recognition in the past few years, including critical acclaim, several prestigious prizes in the U.S. and in Europe, and excellent sales. I don't know Vann at all well, but have conversed with him a couple of times at writing retreats and on campus, and he is -- as other faculty colleagues agree -- a charming, friendly, cheerful person. Yet he has obviously used his books to grapple with pain, violence, and disturbance in his past. Normally readers should not assume connections between an author's work and his life, but in this case Vann has been open about these connections, although fictionalized and transformed by his imagination and talent. His books are all about difficult, depressing topics, including suicide; there have been five suicides in his own extended family. I have read many reviews of the work of this prolific writer, and tried and failed -- because of the difficult subject matter -- to read “Caribou Island” and “Legend of a Suicide.” With the publication of his latest book, I determined to try again, and have now just finished reading his novel “Dirt” (Harper, 2012). According to an interview with the USF Magazine (Summer 2012), the story is “drawn from Vann’s mother’s side of the family…Vann doesn’t just air family secrets; he exaggerates them, creating something that looks like his own history, only more shameful and scandalous. Galen [the main character], Vann said, is…the worst possible version of himself.” The other main characters are Galen’s mother, grandmother, aunt, and cousin. It becomes clear that although there is love among at least some of them, there is also hatred, deep simmering resentment, secrets, and violence, both in their family history and in the present. Sartre’s famous line about hell’s being other people kept going through my mind. Galen, 22 years old, bulimic, and obviously disturbed, is living with his mother near Sacramento, California, attempting to practice his own version of New Age beliefs. The triteness but believability of Galen’s taking his direction from “Siddhartha” and “The Prophet” mixes with the rising awareness of the reader that this character is going off the rails. The events of the book are at first low key although ominous, and then build slowly and in torturous detail to a horrific conclusion. The last 120 pages of this 258-page book are excruciating to read. Once I could see what was happening, I was tempted to stop reading, but forced myself to continue. Vann is a master of showing how curdled family history can rot away the emotions and even sanity of its members. His writing and his control of his story are most admirable, but reading this book is beyond painful. I wish David Vann the best, and predict he will become even more well known than he already is, but at this point I doubt I will be reading more of his work. I fully admit this is because of my own limitations rather than any shortcomings of his brilliant writing.

Embarrassing Book Covers

Have you ever been embarrassed by the cover of a book you were reading? I am not a prude, but I am sometimes too self-conscious about what others think, and I have occasionally felt like hiding or obscuring the cover of a book I have been reading in public. When I took “Marriage: A Duet: Two Novellas,” by Anne Taylor Fleming, off the little pile of books I had brought along on a recent trip, ready to read it in an airport and on a plane, I was reminded that the cover consists of two painted Renaissance-style naked figures with only carefully placed fig leaves adorning them. Very artistic, not at all prurient. And the novel itself is very literary. I had to laugh at myself, but I noticed that I was keeping the book flat (rather than holding it in the air) when I was reading it, and turning it over when I closed and put it down, all in order to avoid displaying the cover. I knew this was silly of me, especially in this world full of far more revealing images; besides, no one else was even looking at me and what I was reading, or would care. It is the curse of self-consciousness, something that I can't seem to completely shake. The book, by the way, is about infidelity. One of the novellas tells the story of male infidelity and the aftermath and longterm consequences on the characters’ marriage. The other novella, about a different couple, tells of female infidelity and its effects on the husband in the story. Both novellas are well written and realistic and very readable, and the characters and their behavior are very believable.

"A Passionate Man," by Joanna Trollope

When I found out a couple of days before that I would be spending most of the day yesterday in a hospital waiting room while my husband was prepared for, had, and recovered from a medical procedure, I knew I would need the distraction of a book that was enjoyable but not too demanding. Otherwise I would just sit and stew with worry, and/or watch too much random bad television. I had recently picked up at a library sale Joanna Trollope’s “A Passionate Man” (Berkley, 1990), and on looking through my book pile, I decided this novel would be a suitable companion for my day at the hospital. (It turned out that I could wait in the hospital room rather than the waiting room.) Trollope, a descendant of Anthony Trollope, is one of the writers I mentioned in my 2/8/10 post about “middlebrow” literature. Over the years I have read several of her novels, and they have been reliably entertaining and quite well written. They are usually about middle-to-upper-middle-class characters in contemporary England, but somehow -- and I am sure this is purposeful -- they retain an aura of an earlier period in British life. The novels are clearly aimed at female readers, and contain just a tiny whiff of upscale romance novels. They are primarily about relationships, love, and families, and the main characters are generally women who are not-young-but-youngish-to-early-middle-aged. This novel, “A Passionate Man,” tells of Liza and Archie, a seemingly very happy couple in their late thirties, very much in love, living in a charming village, with three children, whose relationship is suddenly torn by emotional crises they undergo separately and together. Their marriage suddenly seems at risk. The problem with the book is that the crisis is too abrupt, with little build-up given, so it is not very believable. Other complications are thrown in: Archie’s relationship with his widowed father is so close that Liza feels left out; Archie can’t accept his father’s new marriage after all these years alone; one of the young couple’s children is very unhappy at boarding school; there is a local dust-up regarding a developer’s building houses on the field next to Archie’s and Liza’s house. There is a somewhat shocking development, which I won’t reveal here, but it seems too sudden and artificial a development as well. Somehow there just isn’t enough “there” there in this novel. But I am grateful to the book for helping to distract me from my worry yesterday, so I won’t complain too much about its shortcomings. Most important, my husband’s medical procedure went well, and he came home from the hospital today. That puts everything else in perspective.

"Have I Read This Book Before?": Discovering the Answer

After I wrote yesterday’s post on not remembering if I had already read Sue Miller’s 1993 novel, “For Love,” the question nagged at me, and I couldn’t resist taking the time to flip back through my “books read” notebook. Sure enough, I found that I had in fact read “For Love” in 1994. I have resigned myself to this kind of forgetting, and rationalize that it is because of the many years I have been reading and the many books I have read. Also reassuring is to hear that my friends have the same experience, so I am not alone in this. While I was looking through my list notebook, I ran across titles of some other books I had forgotten reading, as well as many that I well remembered. I was reminded too of some of my reading habits, such as going on “binges” of certain authors, or countries’ authors, and such as re-reading old favorites many times over the years. I am glad I have kept this list all these years; it helps me remember, and it gives me pleasure to revisit past reading.