"Stray," by Stephanie Danler

I have often, and most recently in the past three months or so, posted here about memoirs of women writers who have dealt with extremely difficult, even traumatic, childhoods and sometimes adulthoods as well. I have just read another such memoir: “Stray” (Knopf, 2020), by Stephanie Danler. Danler is the author of the bestselling novel “Sweetbitter” (about which I posted on 6/8/16), which is about a young woman training in New York City to be a professional in the world of fine dining; although “Sweetbitter” is a novel, it is at least somewhat based on the author’s own experiences. But “Stray” covers a much wider and deeper range of Danler’s difficult life, especially her extremely damaged parents. She, along with her sister, has been greatly scarred by these parents, and has a love/hate relationship (although that oversimplifies her feelings) with each of them. Both are alcoholic and drug-addicted, although they – especially her father after he leaves the family – live an upper middle class life. They both, especially her mother, have extreme health problems, at least partly related to their substance abuse. Fortunately, Danler has other relatives – grandparents and an aunt – who provide more “normal” support and affection. And she has some successes in her own life, both personal and professional. But her own damage causes her to have unhealthy relationships with charming but difficult, unavailable men, including the married lover she calls the “Monster.” This is a harrowing story, with so much pain involved. I don’t want to give any spoilers, but I will just say that her years of therapy and work on herself do help, and do allow her to live a better life by the end of the time period of the memoir.

"Recollections of My Nonexistence," by Rebecca Solnit

The unique writer and activist Rebecca Solnit has just published a fascinating memoir, “Recollections of My Nonexistence” (Viking, 2020). I especially enjoyed her loving and detailed tribute to San Francisco, where she has lived most of her adult life, as have I. In addition, she is a highly original, thoughtful, and inspiring thinker and writer. She has written numerous books and articles. I have always particularly appreciated her attention to gender and feminism, a major topic interwoven throughout this current book. But I have also appreciated and learned from her dedication to engaging with ideas about “nature and landscape and gender and the American West” (p. 146). Solnit always has an original take on a topic, and always makes connections among ideas and experiences in ways that are not obvious. I have read two of her previous books (see my posts of 3/18/11 and 9/10/14 - the latter about the book titled "Men Explain Things To Me," the inspiration for the phrase "mansplaining") as well as many of her essays, and have heard her speak and even briefly met and chatted with her after a talk she gave at my university a few years ago; she is a compelling speaker. She definitely deserves the title of “public intellectual,” although as I write this, I realize that the term is most often by far used about men rather than women, and that the term has certain pompous associations. Still, I want to apply the term to Solnit, meaning it in the best sense of the phrase, and in my very small way, attempting to rescue the term from negative connotations and from sexism.

"Everything is Under Control: A Memoir with Recipes," by Phyllis Grant

Phyllis Grant’s “Everything is Under Control: A Memoir with Recipes” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020) is a small book, and each chapter is made up of a short series of short (usually one to four sentences each) vignettes. This is an unusual but quite effective technique. Grant writes of her life as a dancer at Juilliard, then a chef at prestigious restaurants in New York, then a wife and mother in Berkeley, California. She also writes of her grandparents and her parents, especially her mother. She is candid and generous in writing about problems she has dealt with in her life, especially that of postpartum depression. There is joy too, most notably the joys of family and parenting, and the joys of gathering, creating and eating good food (about which she writes with detailed, vivid appreciation). The last 30 pages of this short book (232 small pages) are given to recipes. As someone who loves going to good restaurants, and who appreciates her husband’s excellent cooking, but seldom cooks herself, I must admit I more or less skipped over this last section. However, rather surprisingly, in this pandemic stay-at-home era I have started occasionally cooking again (as I used to in the early years of my marriage and of raising my daughter). Perhaps one of these days I will try, despite their somewhat complicated nature, some of Grant’s recipes.

"The House of Deep Water," by Jeni McFarland

I admit I was first drawn to “The House of Deep Water” (Putnam, 2020), the debut novel by Jeni McFarland, because it is set in Michigan, where I lived for some years as a high school and college student (many years ago!), and where I continued to visit family and friends for many years after. (I have posted here about going to my late parents’ Michigan lake cottage many summers even long after I had moved to California, and the joys of choosing the books to take for the plane and for reading by the lakeside.) The setting of this novel, in a small town near Kalamazoo, is not anywhere I had lived, but I had been to Kalamazoo and knew people from that area. And there are a few references to Michigan life. But as it turns out, this aspect is not emphasized in the book. Of interest, though, are the social class aspects of the story; social class is a topic I have addressed in my academic research and writing. The small town where the story is set, River Bend, is mostly working class, with residents struggling to get and keep jobs and to make enough money to survive. Within that context, the main focus of the novel is on the complicated relationships among various members of two extended, multi-generational families. One family is white and one is mostly black. But race is only a minor focus. The novel is about the tangles and the troubled yet supportive interconnections among the members of the families. The spine of the story is the return to River Bend by three women family members who were eager to leave the town some years ago, but who are now, separately, either drawn or driven back by their current life circumstances. We learn to know three generations of each of the two main families mentioned above. I was very grateful for the family tree chart at the beginning of the book, and I referred back to it many times while reading. The characters are vividly portrayed. Everyone knows everyone else’s business; even the secrets are often not very secret. The characters are all complex, with various perspectives and quirks; the author isn’t afraid to show some of the characters in a bad light, and yet shows their redeeming qualities as well. There is a fair amount of infidelity within their small circles, and some competition for the attention of one of the characters, Steve, which even the author is puzzled by, as he is unprepossessing (except in a sort of smarmy way), dishonest, often drunk, and completely unreliable. A lot of plot happens; there is constant moving back and forth between the present and the past. In fact, the past is always present in these characters’ lives.

"Actress," by Anne Enright

I first “discovered” Irish writer Anne Enright when I read her wonderful 2007 novel “The Gathering” (before I started this blog, or I would have definitely posted about it!). I went on to read more of her books, most notably the 2015 novel “The Green Road” (which I posted about here on 7/3/15). Enright has become one of the preeminent Irish writers today, and was appointed the inaugural national laureate for fiction in 2015. Her writing is about relationships, sex, marriage, and families, with the emphasis on the perspectives of women. She has been clear about her experiences of misogyny in Ireland and in particular in the literary world. Her writing is fresh, sharp, crisp, original, and compelling. So when I heard about her new novel, “Actress” (W.W. Norton, 2020), I was excited, and bought a copy as soon as possible. This is an indelible portrait of two women: the actress Katherine O’Dell and her daughter Norah. The story is told mostly from the perspective of Norah, who constantly struggles to figure out who her mother is, what her secrets are, and what her inner world is like. There is great love between them, but also much misunderstanding, semi-estrangement at times, and profound mystery. Katherine is intensely gifted but also insecure, both idolized and underestimated, even mocked at times. She suffers as so many actresses have over the years with losing parts and attention as she got older. She seems, much of the time, to be performing her life, as much as she performs on stage. Norah, of course, has her own life, her own needs, her own secrets. It is both an honor and a burden for her to be the keeper of her mother’s legacy. This is a book that pulls the reader in, with its dense exploration of the mother-daughter connection, the life of a performer, the context of Ireland, and the secrets all the characters carry. Enright never disappoints; I consider her one of the great writers of our day.

Happy Birthday to my Friend and Fellow Reader B.!

I treasure friends with whom I can talk about books. One of my very good friends, “B.,” is also one of my very best fellow devotees to books and reading. I have mentioned her in this blog a couple of times over the years. Besides, or rather as an important part of, being very good friends for years and years (and years!), we have shared so much in the world of books. We have talked about what we have read and are reading, we have given each other books, we have exchanged articles and clippings, we have recommended books to each other, and we have shared book news. I have learned so much from her, as she is deeply educated and grounded in the world of English literature. As she has been slightly downsizing the contents of her apartment in recent years, she has given me some beautiful and meaningful books from her collection, books which I will always treasure for themselves and because they are from her. Most of all, we have shared the joy and delight of the world of books. We both get excited about Jane Austen! George Eliot! Virginia Woolf! Barbara Pym! And so many, many more writers and books. Thank you, B., for all those conversations and all the ways we share our love of books and reading. I am writing today because I want to pay tribute to this very special friend on her very special “big” birthday. Happy, happy birthday, dear friend, with much appreciation and love!

Two Memoirs Driven by Family Secrets: "Miss Aluminum" and "The Escape Artist"

I have just read two memoirs whose driving force is the family secrets that the two memoirists’ lives were built on, and the massively dysfunctional families that they each grew up in. The novelist Susanna Moore has had a fascinating and successful life as an actress, model, and – especially – a writer. Her life has been glamorous in many ways, and this memoir – “Miss Aluminum” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020) is full of stories of famous movie stars, directors, writers, and others she has known and in some cases had romantic and/or sexual relationships with. But throughout, she is deeply negatively affected by questions about her mother’s death, and by the bad experiences she had with her stepmother, among other difficulties in her childhood. Fortunately, she also had some very kind people in her life who helped her along the way. Lawyer and writer Helen Fremont’s memoir, “The Escape Artist” (Gallery Books, 2020) is also dominated by family secrets and family dysfunction: the secrets her parents keep from her about their background in Europe during World War II, the secrets her mother keeps from her father, and the secrets her sister Lara and she keep from each other. There is great love in the family, but the love is almost always overshadowed by the intensity of the dysfunction, and by the various psychological problems each of the four members of this sad nuclear family experience, most dramatically and frighteningly in the case of Lara. Both of these memoirs are extremely readable and compelling. And it is encouraging that both of the authors seem to have prevailed and eventually “graduated” to a calmer and better life than their troubled and turbulent backgrounds would predict. On a personal note, reading such memoirs about such difficult lives makes me more grateful than ever for having had the great gift of a calm, happy childhood with wonderful, loving parents. That is not to say that everything was perfect, for them or for me, but any bumps in the road were very, very minor compared to the ones these two writers and their families experienced.