"Dear Girls," by Ali Wong

Honest, raunchy, outrageous, feminist, fearless, relatable and very, very funny are among the adjectives that describe Ali Wong’s book, “Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets & Advice for Living Your Best Life” (Random House, 2019). Framed as an extended letter to her two young daughters, it is actually a sort of memoir, with plenty of commentary mixed in. Wong is becoming an increasingly well-known comedian, with her television specials “Baby Cobra” and “Hard Knock Wife,” and actress, with the movie “Always Be My Maybe,” and of course with her live stand-up shows around the country. In this book, she writes of her loving but nontraditional (in some ways) Chinese/Vietnamese/American/San Franciscan family, of her education, her dating and sex life, her married life, her life on stage, her opinions about women’s lives, and much more. A frequent reaction of audiences, and now of readers is “Wow, you can’t say that! (but I am glad you did!)"; she has no fear of discussing body parts and processes, no matter how intimate, messy, or “forbidden-to-talk-about.” Wong is all about breaking barriers and taboos, but always in a way that seems natural and nonjudgmental. Another equally common reaction of readers is being touched by the love underlying so much of what Wong writes about. I of course love the San Francisco setting of Wong’s growing up years (although she now lives in Los Angeles, for career reasons). Wong is very good at exploring/explaining cultural/ethnic/class/gender differences, always with humor and (sometimes slightly, but only slightly, barbed) affection. It happens that she went to the same high school that my daughter did, and they knew each other fairly well there. My daughter has gone to some of Wong’s shows in local clubs, and attests that they are hilariously wonderful. I haven’t seen the shows, but I did see the movie “Always Be My Maybe,” which is funny, touching, and terrific...as is this book.

"Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father," by Alysia Abbott

“Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father” (Norton, 2013), by Alysia Abbott, is a very San Francisco story. The author writes of, after her mother died in an accident when Alysia was two years old, living with her gay poet/writer/journalist/editor father Steve Abbott in the Haight Ashbury section of San Francisco. While her father was becoming involved in the (intersecting) literary and gay and activist scenes in the San Francisco of the 1970s and 1980s, Alysia was very close to him but also hid her father’s gayness from her friends. Tragically, as was far too common in the early 1980s, when Alysia was a young adult, Steve contracted AIDS and eventually died of it. This is a sad yet loving and life-affirming memoir of an unusual (especially for that time period) upbringing. While not being afraid to be critical of some aspects of her father’s parenting, the author writes with great affection for him and great appreciation of all he did for her in difficult and sometimes lonely circumstances as a single gay dad at a time before this situation was common. Besides being a poignant memoir, this book portrays an important and vibrant time in the life of the city of San Francisco: the political, social, and literary movements of the times. Although I was only very tangentially involved in these movements (mostly as an onlooker), I well remember the changes in the city at the time. The university where I taught then and still teach is only a few blocks from the Haight, and the LGBT movement was growing and becoming more public at around the same time as the women’s/feminist movement that was (and still is!) so important to me. I went to some readings and other literary and political events involving San Francisco writers at the time, including some of the beat era. "Fairyland" actually mentions my university, and at least two of its faculty members whom I knew (one a well-known poet); Steve Abbott taught writing there for a few years, but I did not know him. The memoir also mentions the memorable occasion, which I attended, when Alan Ginsberg did a dramatic (at times scatological) reading in front of a packed audience at the Jesuit university; I still remember the mixture of laughter and applause on the part of some in the audience and a kind of stunned silence on the part of others. And of course I knew, as everyone in San Francisco did, some people (almost all gay men) who suffered from and then died of AIDS. I also knew a few admirable doctors and nurses who worked with HIV/AIDS patients despite concerns about possible contagion. Additionally, I knew a few HIV-positive men who lived long enough to benefit from new treatments that kept them alive and relatively healthy for decades more, many into the present. An educator friend of mine falls into this category, and is still teaching at another institution in the Bay Area; he recently posted on social media, on the occasion of a "big" birthday, that he never thought he would reach his current age. Steve Abbott, like far too many of his contemporaries, died a couple of years too soon to benefit from these treatments. His daughter’s memoir of his life honors him and brings him to life for readers.

"March Sisters: On Life, Death, and Little Women"

I, like so many girls and women, read and adored Louisa May Alcott’s novel “Little Women” when I was a child and many times afterward; I also taught the book in women’s literature classes. I was, upon re-reading the novel as an adult, a little put off by how didactic it was about its moral lessons. But I know Alcott felt that, at that time, she had to include such lessons. In any case, this is a novel that continues to be read and discussed and analyzed and celebrated and filmed. (A new film version, directed by Greta Gerwig and with a cast of stars including Saiorse Ronan, Emma Watson, and Meryl Streep, is due out on Christmas Day of this year, and of course I look forward to seeing it.) A new book, “March Sisters: On Life, Death, and Little Women” (Library of America Special Publication, 2019), features four new essays by four well-known contemporary writers on the four sisters in “Little Women.” Each writer focuses on one of the sisters of whom she is a fan, and on the writer’s own relationship to that sister (because we know that we do have relationships with certain fictional characters, almost as if they were “real” people in our lives). Each writer gives us a “fresh” take on “her” character. The authors sometimes also compare or contrast the characters with the originals, Alcott and her sisters, on whom they were loosely based. Kate Bolick writes about Meg; Jenny Zhang discusses Jo; Carmen Maria Machado gives her illuminating view of Beth; and Jane Smiley provides an original, feminist perspective on Amy. Each author has clearly had a long, deep, and personal connection to the novel, and each is generous in sharing her own related experiences. I found all four essays bracing and occasionally provocative, in the sense that they made me think at least a little differently about the four characters, and indeed about the novel itself, not to mention about Alcott. This book will be of interest to anyone who has read, enjoyed, even loved the novel, and perhaps especially to anyone who has thought about which sister is their own role model.

"Olive, Again," by Elizabeth Strout

Olive is back! I, along with -- I am sure -- her many fans, am thrilled. Both Elizabeth Strout’s novel “Olive Kitteridge” (2008 – was it really so long ago?) and her cranky, eccentric, yet ultimately heartwarming (in a good, not saccharine, way) character Olive, are vivid, quirky and compelling. And then there was the excellent 2014 HBO mini-series, with its perfect casting of Frances McDormand as Olive. Now we Olive fans have Strout’s new novel, “Olive, Again” (Random House, 2019), and it is as good as or better than the original novel. It is a sequel in that it follows Olive’s life about ten years after the end of the earlier novel. Olive, now a widow, and Jack Dennison (also a character in the earlier novel) become friendly and eventually marry; much of the novel is about their happy, loving, yet often uneasy marriage (nothing is easy with Olive). There are also scenes showing the complex, fraught relationship that Olive and her only child Christopher (and his wife and children) share. Various other events ensue, and we see Olive having to face the often-difficult realities of aging, a major theme in this novel. As with the first novel, there are many chapters focused on the stories of others in her community (small-town Maine), in some of which Olive is an important character and in others of which she is only peripherally involved or even barely mentioned. Some of the stories include people we remember from the first novel, such as neighbors and former students from her long-ago teaching days. Some might find this focus on other characters for pages at a time distracting, but other readers probably agree with me that these stories are fascinating in their own right, and also help to create a whole world that provides context for Olive’s story. But the intense center of the novel remains the character of Olive herself, who practically jumps off the page in the way she keeps the reader’s attention. We keep wondering what will happen next, and what she will think and say next. The central situation and theme of the novel, as mentioned above, is the process of aging, and its effects on one’s life, health, emotions, connections, and more. The author does not hold back on portraying the painful, humiliating, frightening aspects of loss, illness, and decreased autonomy that so often accompany aging. The details of some of Olive’s experiences (e.g., with the reactions of others around her, with hospitals and medical personnel, with changes in housing, and with declining independence), strike me as just right (in some cases echoing what I observed in my late mother’s last years, although my mother’s personality was far, far more positive than Olive’s). Strout also, however, allows the aging Olive occasional flashes of epiphany and of unexpected and fleeting but real happiness. Olive is both a unique character and a universal character. Highly recommended.

I Have a Bone to Pick with Andre Aciman

Andre Aciman, the author of the novels “Call Me by Your Name” (2007) and “Find Me” (2019), among other books, believes that Virginia Woolf’s novel “Mrs. Dalloway” is “an overrated novel that I don’t find particularly gripping or interesting. I’m not even sure it’s well written” (New York Times Book Review “By the Book” interview, November 3, 2019). REALLY??? Of course everyone has the right to her or his own preferences in literature. But to go as far as to say this brilliant, breakthrough novel is overrated and not necessarily well written? I strongly suspect that this is at least partly a gendered opinion, based on the facts that the main character is a woman, that the novel takes place in one seemingly ordinary day(the much-maligned "domestic fiction," which is usually written by women, but when written by men, is much more laudatorily received) and that much of the novel takes place in the mind and memory of that woman. The added fact that the main event of Mrs. Dalloway’s day is a party may also be partly the object of Aciman’s disdain. Woolf’s prose is known for its experimental-but-still-true-to-realism quality. And although the main character is from a time past, and from an upper-class life, these facts in no way undermine the essential consciousness and preoccupations and inevitable realities of her life, and of the lives of many women (and, for that matter, some men). I understand that Aciman has written novels that, among other things, speak to and about the lives of gay men, and this is a good thing. But it does not excuse his almost contemptuous dismissal of one of the great novels of the twentieth century and indeed, of all time. Perhaps it adds context to note that in the same interview, Aciman also expressed disdain for “Anna Karenina,” stating that Tolstoy’s writing is “[e]pic, panoramic and gushy, but ultimately simple” and that the novel “did not change me.” One could take this as evidence of Aciman’s equal-opportunity scorning of great writers. However, note that in the NYT interview he only favorably mentions (with the exception of Djuna Barnes’ novel “Nightwood") male writers, including Dostoyevsky, Pascal, Racine, John le Carre, Joyce, Eliot, and Gogol. I had recently been considering reading Aciman’s new novel, “Find Me,” but after his diss of “Mrs. Dalloway,” I don’t think I will. (That’ll show him, right?)

"Middle England," by Jonathan Coe

As readers of this blog may remember, I love “big,” sprawling nineteenth-century novels. Occasionally a contemporary British novel promises some of the same pleasures as those earlier novels provide. Jonathan Coe’s new novel, “Middle England” (Knopf, 2018), seemed that it might be one of these. Yet I hesitated about whether to read it, perhaps because according to descriptions and reviews I read, it seemed to be very much about politics, and in particular about Brexit. I of course am interested in these topics, but I usually don’t prefer novels in which politics are the main focus. I decided to read a chapter or two and see how I felt. Well, you can see what’s coming here: I was immediately drawn into the novel, and finished this 429-page book in a few days. The reason I found it so compelling was its masterful blend of the main characters’ stories, its description of English politics and culture in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, and its portrayal of how England has changed – and in some cases, not changed – over the past few decades. I know that I have a romanticized view of England in some ways, but I know too that my view is unrealistic in many ways. Another reason for my enjoying this novel is that I am always drawn to descriptions of the English countryside (remembering my own wonderful train rides through that countryside at its most idyllic), as well as of London (of course I love London!). Of interest was that the novel took place in several places: London, Birmingham, several smaller cities and towns, and the countryside, giving a wider view of England than many London-centered novels do. Although not as masterful as the novels of George Eliot or Charles Dickens (but that is a very high bar!), this novel is a worthy if lesser successor. The novel also, obviously purposely, shows how changes in the British public and British politics are related to similar changes in the United States. But I can’t end this post without going back to the characters in the novel. They are mainly, although not only, a group of friends in their forties and their families and associates. They are of all age and genders, and several ethnicities and races (although mostly white) and social classes (although mostly the upper middle class, educated class). There are fascinating family and marital relationships, as well as generational conflicts. The characters’ stances on Brexit, and on immigrants, are often dividing lines among them, but dividing lines that reflect more basic differences, even between husband and wife and between parent and child. The story lines are well drawn, and the writing itself is excellent. I am glad I read this novel about my beloved (you may remember my Anglophile leanings) but troubled England.

"Modern Love"

“Modern Love: True Stories of Love, Loss, and Redemption” (Broadway Books, 2019) is a revised, updated version of a 2007 book also titled “Modern Love.” That book in turn is a collection of true stories from the New York Times column of the same name. These stories are written by readers, not New York Times writers, and are chosen from among thousands that are submitted. The definition of modern love includes many varieties of love: between lovers, between spouses, between parents and children, and more. Likewise, the stories cover many stages of love, including the search for love, failed love, successful love, unexpected love, thwarted love, interrupted love, late-in-life love, and others. The stories are short, powerful, evocative, poignant, funny, sad, sometimes whimsical…in other words, they are like life itself, which of course is what makes them so appealing to readers. There is now a television show based on this column, also called “Modern Love." I read both the 2007 and the 2019 versions of the book, watched the first season of the television show, and enjoyed all three very much.