A Personal Note: On the Profound Consolations of Books

First, as an introduction to the main topic of this post, I want to do something I have not done before on this blog: to re-post one of my earlier posts on this blog. Posted here on 12/26/16, it is still very meaningful to me: "I loved seeing Susan Chira’s short piece, “The Comforts of Jane,” in the Christmas Day 2016 issue of The New York Times Book Review. She writes there of how in a difficult, painful, and stress-filled time (“when the life of someone I loved was hanging in the balance”), she “turned to reading for solace,” and found the perfect book to (re)read was Jane Austen’s novel “Pride and Prejudice.” She says that because she already knew the plot, she “could savor the language, satire and repartee, the cutting observations…Austen was irresistible.” She adds, “I wanted escape, but I needed moral resonance.” She goes on to describe all the reasons that this beloved novel was the perfect consolation and companion during the crisis she was living through. Fortunately her story ended well, as “life righted itself.” She, like most Austen devotees, including me, continues to re-read Austen’s novels, and always remembers “how grateful I remain for the comfort I found in her pages.” Regular readers of this blog know how central Austen’s novels have been to my own reading life, so you will understand how I definitely appreciated and connected to Chira’s story." Now I have had particular occasion to need consolations, after the illness and death of my beloved husband in late 2021. My greatest consolations have been good memories and the loving support of my family and friends. In addition, in the days-in-days-out of these harshly changed days, months, and years, one of the consolations I can most rely on is reading, especially novels and memoirs. They are almost a medicine, as well as a welcome distraction, a source of absorption, a pleasure, a support. In short, my longtime friends, books, are a reliable and ever-available source of consolation, one that I lean on more than ever, and one for which I am tremendously grateful.

"Getting to Know Death: A Meditation," by Gail Godwin

For decades, I have read, admired, learned from, and enjoyed Gail Godwin's contemplative, psychologically insightful novels (the best known of which is probably "The Odd Woman"), most of them well before I began this blog in 2010. However, I did write here about the most recent one, "Flora," on 6/7/13. I also wrote a post about Godwin's useful and revealing "Publishing: A Writer's Memoir" (8/22/15). Her very recent book, "Getting to Know Death" (Bloomsbury, 2024), is short (172 pages) but intense, describing her experiences with and feelings about age, serious illnesses and injuries (including, most prominently and frighteningly, her recent fall that caused a broken neck, and her ensuing long and difficult period of recovery), the deaths of people close to her (including her husband), and, now in her mid-eighties, the prospect of her own death. Although the author is candid and courageous in dealing with all of these difficult events, the book is less depressing that this description might suggest. It is not exactly "inspirational" either, but is matter of fact, thoughtful, and life affirming. It is divided into many short chapters, some on her personal history, some expressing doubts about her own ability to keep writing, some meditating on death, some reproducing or creating letters to and from the author, some quoting other authors, and a few unclassifiable pieces of writing. I wasn't sure how I would feel about this book, with its sensitive and difficult topics, or whether I would even want to finish it, but because of my admiration of Godwin, and because once I started reading it I was drawn in, I continued to the end, and am glad I did so.

RIP Paul Auster

“And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is.”. Paul Auster Author, Screenwriter and Film Director 1947- 2024

"Life Span," by Molly Giles

I am of course drawn to writing set in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live. For a while I have vaguely known of the Bay Area writer and writing professor (at San Francisco State University and elsewhere), Molly Giles, but had read little of her work. Her newest book, titled "Life Span: Impressions of a Lifetime Spent Crossing and Recrossing the Golden Gate Bridge" (WTAW Press, 2024) caught my attention, partly because crossing the Golden Gate Bridge several times a week has for decades been part of my life too. I raced through this book with much interest. The book is a sort of memoir in episodes. There is one entry for every year, beginning in 1945 when Giles was three years old, and continuing until 2023. Entries range from one to four pages, and each is an evocative vignette. Giles always wanted to be a writer, and although she has published several books and many stories, it has been an uphill battle for her, often discouraging, yet clearly fulfilling. The other main strand or theme explored in this book is that of her relationships with family over the decades. She had a somewhat fraught relationship with her parents; she has also had a series of partners who all disappoint her in many ways (although her current partner seems better than the rest). It is somewhat painful to see how she continues to be attracted to one difficult and unreliable man after another. Her relationship with her daughters is also at times fraught, but within the usual mother-daughter range, and improving with time; these daughters are the sources of real joy in her life. Although I was not initially drawn to the idea of depicting a life through these mini-narratives, I found the structure and story quite compelling. And even though (or partly because?) Giles is open, sometimes painfully so, about her own shortcomings, insecurities, and mistakes, I found myself both admiring and liking her, as well as the book. I will look for more of her work.

RIP Edna O'Brien

The Irish writer Edna O'Brien died 7/27/24 at the age of 93. Her fiction focused on women's lives and feelings, about which she wrote with passion. Her writing was sometimes controversial, especially in Ireland, because of its frankness about women's sexuality and love affairs. Her first book, "Country Girls" (1960), for example, was initially banned in Ireland. As Hillel Italie wrote for the Associated Press after O'Brien's death, "Few so concretely and poetically challenged Ireland's religious, sexual and gender boundaries. Few wrote so fiercely, so sensually about loneliness, rebellion, desire and persecution." Nevertheless, O'Brien's writing was prolific, very popular, and prize-winning.

"The Paris Novel," by Ruth Reichl

I have devoured (forgive food/book reference) food critic Ruth Reichl's several memoirs and other writings (See for example my post of 6/1/19 on her memoir "Save Me the Plums."). I have now just finished her absolutely enchanting new novel, "The Paris Novel" (Random House, 2024), and I loved its exquisite focus on the city of Paris, high fashion, and, especially, amazing and delicious French food. Stella lives in New York, leading a rather constrained life as a copy editor living on her own, but when her mother (with whom she has not been close) dies and leaves her money with instructions, surprisingly, for her to go to Paris, she does so. There she meets fascinating people and has magical adventures in the famous bookstore Shakespeare and Company, in several art museums, in a high fashion dress shop, in explorations of various parts of Paris and nearby towns, including beautiful houses and hotels and markets, and most of all, in a series of restaurants. It turns out that Stella has a hitherto undiscovered profound understanding of and appreciation of fine cooking and food, and one of the best parts of the novel is the mouth-watering descriptions of her experiencing the sense-filled and at the same time ethereal pleasures of fine French food. The story is full of interesting characters, and Stella herself blossoms as her world opens up. She has two quests, and -- not exactly a spoiler -- she achieves both. So okay, the novel is a kind of romantic fantasy, even a modern fairy tale, but it also includes some (not too heavy-handed) allusions to issues of identity, family, and other serious concerns. So this delicious (I couldn't resist...) novel is light yet substantive and meaningful in some ways, and an absolute delight to read.

RIP Ellen Gilchrist

I recently ran across a mention of the author Ellen Gilchrist and, in particular, of her short story collection "In the Land of Dreamy Dreams" (Little, Brown, 1981), and I remembered how much I had liked this book and others of Gilchrist's in the past, but had not thought about her work for years, perhaps decades. I immediately requested the above book at my local library. Then I went online to remind myself about her life and her books, and to my surprise, I saw that she had died in January of this year at the age of 88. I was surprised not to have heard this news, although I soon found that she had received obituaries in the New York Times and elsewhere that I had somehow missed. She was well-known in the 1980s especially, but less so in recent years. She was a National Book Award winner with a distinctive voice, often from the viewpoint of upper-class Southern women, but in unpredictable ways. Gilchrist, who was a Mississippi native and later lived in Arkansas, with a familiarity with New Orleans, often drew on her own life experiences, and was known for her "wry and poignant prose," as the Washington Post put it after her death. Interestingly, in college she studied under Eudora Welty. Gilchrist's characters were sometimes eccentric, seemingly free from certain societal constrictions (allowed to be so, it must be said, because of class privilege), yet still a part of the world of those constrictions. Her 26 books -- novels, stories, and essays -- often included recurring characters. I did reread "In the Land of Dreamy Dreams," and was glad to have revisited the world portrayed by Ellen Gilchrist. Perhaps I will soon reread her other most well-known work, "Victory in Japan" (1984) as well.