Because We Are Bad: OCD and a Girl Lost in Thought by Lily Bailey
“For as long as I could remember, I wasn’t me, I was we.” Lily Bailey, a British writer and model, had a sort of imaginary friend while she was growing up, but instead of a comforting presence it was a critical voice pushing her to be ultra-conscious of how her behavior appeared to others. She couldn’t stop thinking about how she might be perceived – everything from body odor to inadvertently acting snobby or selfish. Every imagined transgression was tallied up and given a letter abbreviation to remember it by. It got to the point that after any length of time spent around other people she’d have to retreat to write down and mull over her inventory of errors.
This went on for years at boarding school until Bailey was finally diagnosed with severe Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. As she explained to her mother, “I make lists in my head of everything I’ve done that might be wrong. Then I repeat them over and over again and analyse them. I have to be perfect. I feel like if I do this enough, then one day I will be.” But diagnosis was not the end to the struggle; far from it. Despite Prozac and CBT, Bailey later landed in a psychiatric unit. She captures her inpatient stay at Chesbury Hospital with great verve, recalling the chorus of the other patients’ voices and the different nurses’ strategies.
Because We Are Bad tracks Bailey’s life up until age 20, by which time she had moved past the worst of her mental health crisis and was making encouraging strides in her personal and professional life. There’s a bit of a pat ending; I thought the book would probably benefit from more hindsight – it had a small release in 2016, when Bailey was 24, and is now being given a full-blown re-release. However, like Elizabeth Wurtzel and Zack McDermott, Bailey gives a vivid sense of what it’s like to feel your mind working against you. Her recreation of childhood and the first-person plural sections are especially strong. I can recommend this to anyone who’s interested in learning more about OCD and mental health issues in general.
My rating:
Because We Are Bad: OCD and a Girl Lost in Thought is published by Canbury Press today, March 15th. It will be published by Harper Collins US in April. My thanks to publicist Emma Finnigan for the review copy.
Some Early Recommendations for 2018
I took some time out this December to start reading the 2018 releases I was most looking forward to. In early January I’ll preview another 25 or 30 titles I’m interested in, but for now here are eight books coming out in the first half of next year that I can heartily recommend, with ~130-word mini reviews to give you a taste of them. (These are in alphabetical order by author, with the publication details noted beneath the title.)
Because We Are Bad: OCD and a Girl Lost in Thought by Lily Bailey
[Coming on March 15th from Canbury Press (UK) and on April 3rd from Harper Collins US]
“For as long as I could remember, I wasn’t me, I was we.” Lily Bailey had a sort of imaginary friend while she was growing up, but instead of a comforting presence it was a critical voice pushing her to be ultra-conscious of how her behavior appeared to others. This went on for years until she was finally diagnosed with severe Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Despite Prozac and CBT, she later landed in a psychiatric unit. She captures this inpatient stay with great verve, recalling the chorus of other patients’ voices and different nurses’ strategies. This memoir tracks Bailey’s life up until age 20, but her recreation of childhood and the first-person plural sections are the strongest. I’d recommend this to readers interested in learning more about OCD and mental health issues in general. (Full blog review scheduled for March 15th.)
The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin
[Coming on January 9th from Tinder Press (UK) / G.P. Putnam’s (USA)]
Summer 1969: four young siblings escape a sweltering New York City morning by visiting a fortune teller who can tell you the day you’ll die. In the decades that follow, they have to decide what to do with this advance knowledge: will it spur them to live courageous lives, or drive them to desperation? This compelling family story lives up to the hype. I can imagine how much fun Benjamin had researching and writing it as she’s able to explore four distinct worlds: Daniel, a military doctor, examines Iraq War recruits; Klara becomes a magician in Las Vegas; Varya researches aging via primate studies; and Simon is a dancer in San Francisco. The settings, time periods, and career paths are so diverse that you get four novels’ worth of interesting background. (See my full review at The Bookbag.) 
Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved by Kate Bowler
[Coming on February 6th from Random House (USA)]
This was the 2018 title I was most looking forward to reading. It combines two of my niche interests: medical (especially cancer) memoirs, and the prosperity gospel, which I grew up with in the church my parents attend in America. An assistant professor at Duke Divinity School, Bowler was fascinated by the idea that you can claim God’s blessings, financial and otherwise, as a reward for righteous behavior and generosity to the church. But if she’d been tempted to set store by this notion, that certainty was permanently fractured when she was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer in her mid-thirties. Bowler writes tenderly about suffering and surrender, about living in the moment with her husband and son while being uncertain of the future. Her writing reminds me of Anne Lamott’s and Nina Riggs’s.
The Reading Cure: How Books Restored My Appetite by Laura Freeman
[Coming on February 22nd from Weidenfeld & Nicolson (UK)]
A memoir with food, medical and literary themes and a bibliotherapy-affirming title – this debut ticks lots of boxes for me. As a teenager, Freeman suffered from anorexia. This is not an anorexia memoir, though; instead, it’s about the lifelong joy of reading and how books have helped her haltingly recover the joy of eating. Her voracious reading took in the whole of Charles Dickens’s oeuvre, war writers like Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves (boiled eggs and cocoa); travel writers Laurie Lee and Patrick Leigh Fermor and their enthusiastic acceptance of whatever food came their way on treks; and rediscovered children’s classics from The Secret Garden through to the Harry Potter series. This is about comfort reading as much as it is about rediscovering comfort eating, and it delicately balances optimism with reality. (Full blog review scheduled for February 1st.)
Everything Here Is Beautiful by Mira T. Lee
[Coming on January 16th from Pamela Dorman Books (USA)]
Lucia Bok has been many people: a globe-trotting Chinese-American journalist, a shopkeeper’s wife in New York City, an illegal immigrant’s girlfriend, and a mother making the best of primitive conditions in Ecuador. Her schizophrenia means she throws herself wholeheartedly into each role but, as her mind turns against her, eventually finds herself unable to cope. We hear from Lucia herself as well as her older sister, ex-husband and boyfriend – in both first-person and third-person passages – over the course of 25 years to get an intimate picture of how mental illness strains families and how blame gets parceled out. Lucia’s first-person narration was most effective for me: “I take only one kind of medication now. They adjust the dosage. Sometimes I still slosh around, dense and slushy like a watermelon; other times I’m flat, defizzed.”
Junk by Tommy Pico
[Coming on May 8th from Tin House Books (USA)]
Junk food, junk shops, junk mail; junk as in random stuff; junk as in genitals. These are the major elements of Pico’s run-on, stream-of-consciousness poem, the third in his Teebs trilogy (after IRL and Nature Poem). The overarching theme is being a homosexual Native American in Brooklyn. You might think of Pico as a latter-day Ginsberg. His text-speak and sexual explicitness might ordinarily be off-putting for me, but there’s something about Pico’s voice that I really like. He vacillates between flippant and heartfelt in a way that seems to capture something about the modern condition.
Sample lines:
“the lights go low across the / multiplex Temple of // canoodling and Junk food”
“Haven’t figured out how to be NDN and not have / suspicion coursing thru me like cortisol”
Indecent by Corinne Sullivan
[Coming on March 6th from St. Martin’s Press (USA)]
Expect a cross between Prep (Curtis Sittenfeld) and Notes on a Scandal (Zoe Heller). Imogene Abney, 22, is an apprentice teacher at Vandenberg School for Boys in New York State. She’s young and pretty enough to be met with innuendo and disrespect from her high school charges; she’s insecure enough about her acne to feel rejected by other apprentices. But Adam Kipling, who goes by “Kip,” seems different from any of the other people she’s thrown together with at Vandenberg. A fourth-year student, he’s only five years younger than she is, and he really seems to appreciate her for who she is. Their relationship proceeds apace, but nothing stays a secret for long around here. Being in Imogene’s head can feel a little claustrophobic because of her obsessions, but this is a racy, pacey read.
From Mother to Mother by Émilie Vast
[Coming on March 20th from Charlesbridge Publishing (USA)]
This sweet, simple picture book for very young children (it will actually be a board book, though I read it as an e-book) was originally published in French. Based on Russian nesting dolls, it introduces the idea of ancestry, specifically multiple generations of women. I imagine a mother with a child sitting on her knee. Holding this book in one hand and a photo album in the other, she points to all the family members who have passed down life and love. Each two-page spread has a different color motif and incorporates flora and fauna on the design of the doll.
I’m also currently partway through, and enjoying, Educated by Tara Westover [Coming on February 20th from Random House (USA) and February 22nd from Hutchinson (UK)], a striking memoir about being raised off grid in Idaho as the youngest of seven children of religious/survivalist parents – and never going to a proper school.
Coming tomorrow (my last post of the year): Some year-end statistics and 2018 reading goals.
Four Recommended September Releases
Here are four enjoyable books due out this month that I was lucky enough to read early. The first two are memoirs that are linked by a strong theme of mothers and children, though one has a primary topic of mental illness; the third is a quirky bibliomemoir partially written in letters; and the last is an elegant poetry collection. I’ve pulled 150–200-word extracts from my full reviews and hope you’ll be tempted by one or more of these.
Gorilla and the Bird: A Memoir of Madness and a Mother’s Love, by Zack McDermott
(Coming from Little, Brown [USA] and Piatkus [UK] on the 26th)
As a public defender in New York City, Zack McDermott worked with seemingly crazy people every day at Legal Aid, little knowing that he was on his way to a psychotic break himself. Soon he’d covered the walls of his apartment with marker scrawl and fully taken on his stand-up comedian persona, Myles. Convinced that he was in a Truman Show-style reality show, he ended up half-naked and crying on a subway platform. That’s when police showed up to take him to Bellevue mental hospital.
McDermott takes readers on a wild tour through his life: from growing up with a no-good drug addict father and a Superwoman high school teacher mother in Wichita, Kansas “a baloney sandwich throw from the trailer park” to finally getting medication and developing strategies that would keep his bipolar disorder under control. His sense of pace and ear for dialogue are terrific. Despite the vivid Cuckoo’s Nest-style settings, this book is downright funny where others might turn the subject matter achingly sad. It’s a wonderful memoir and should attract readers who don’t normally read nonfiction. (An explanatory note: “Gorilla” is McDermott’s nickname and “The Bird” is his mother’s; she’s the real hero of this book.)
My rating:
Landslide: True Stories, by Minna Zallman Proctor
(Coming from Catapult on the 19th)
This gorgeous set of autobiographical essays circles through some of the overarching themes of Proctor’s life: losing her mother, a composer – but only after three bouts with cancer over 15 years; the importance Italy had for both of them, including years spent in Tuscany and her work as a translator; a love for the work of Muriel Spark; their loose connection to Judaism; and the relentless and arbitrary nature of time. She ponders the stories she heard from her mother, and the ones she now tells her children. “We all have totemic stories. The way we choose them—and then choose to tell them—is more important ultimately than the actual events.” Proctor provides a fine model of how to write non-linear memoir that gets to the essence of what matters in life.
Another favorite line:
“I was never good at making stuff up; I’m much more interested in parsing the density, inanity, confusion, and occasional brilliance of life around me.”
My rating:
Dear Fahrenheit 451: Love and Heartbreak in the Stacks, by Annie Spence
(Coming from Flatiron Books on the 26th, and in the UK on Oct. 13th)
Dear Annie Spence,
You’re on your way to being the next Nancy Pearl, girlie. Your book recommendations are amazeballs! How have you read so many books I’ve never even heard of?! Thanks to you I’ve added 13 books to my TBR when I’m desperately trying to cull it. Argh!
Anyway, gotta be honest here: I wasn’t digging the snarky, sweary style of the letter section of your book. True, it’s super clever how you use the epistolary format for so many different purposes – to say sayonara to books weeded from your public library’s stock, declare undying love for The Virgin Suicides and other faves, express mixed feelings about books you abandoned or didn’t get the appeal of, etc. – but, I dunno, the chatty, between-girlfriends style was irking me.
But then I got to Part II, where you channel Ms. Pearl and the authors of The Novel Cure with these original suggestions for themed and paired reading. Here’s books to read after making various excuses for not joining a social event, recommended sci-fi and doorstoppers (aka “Worth the Weight”), etc. I freakin’ loved it.
When’s your full-length Book Lust-style thematic recommendations guide coming out??
Happy reading until then!
Bookish Beck
My rating:
Panicle, by Gillian Sze
(Coming from ECW Press on the 19th)
Gillian Sze is a Montreal poet with five collections to her name. Panicle contains many responses to films, photographs, and other poems, including some classical Chinese verse. Travel and relationships are recurring sources of inspiration, and scenes are often described as if they are being captured by a camera. There are a number of prose paragraphs, including the “Sound No. 1–5” series. As lovely as the writing is, I found few individual poems to latch onto. Two favorites were “Nocturne,” which opens “When I can’t sleep I think of the lupines that grow in the country, their specific palette, a mix of disregard and generosity” [the line breaks are unclear in my Kindle book], and “Dawning.” My favorite lines were “memory is a wicker chair that creaks in the wind” (from “To the Photographer in the Countryside”) and “I age / as it is typically done: slowly / unconsciously / surprisingly” (from the title poem).
My rating:
In case you’re curious, here are some September releases I can’t recommend quite as highly, with links to my Goodreads reviews:
- bone by Yrsa Daley-Ward [poetry]
- Afterglow (a Dog Memoir) by Eileen Myles
- George and Lizzie by Nancy Pearl
Have you read any September releases that you would recommend? Which of these appeal to you?
Some Accidental Thematic Overlaps in My Recent Reading
Five of the books I’ve read recently (most of them while traveling to and from the States) have shared an overarching theme of loss, with mental illness, alcoholism, suicide, and dogs as subsidiary topics running through two or more of them. I hadn’t deliberately chosen these books for their commonalities, so it was uncanny to see the same elements keep popping up. I wanted to come up with some kind of impressively complex Venn diagram to show off these unexpected connections but couldn’t quite manage it, so you’ll have to imagine it instead.
Mental Illness
The Archivist by Martha Cooley
Matthias Lane is the archivist of the Mason Room, a university collection of rare books and literary papers. One of its treasures is a set of letters that passed between T.S. Eliot and his friend Emily Hale (held at Princeton in real life). Matt is haunted by memories of his late wife, Judith, a poet incarcerated in a mental hospital for over five years. A reckoning comes for Matt when he’s approached by Roberta Spire, a graduate student determined to view the Eliot–Hale letters even though they’re legally sealed until 2020. The more time Matt spends with Roberta, the more similarities start to arise between her and Judith; and between his situation and Eliot’s when the latter also put his wife away in a mental hospital. The novel asks what we owe the dead: whether we conform to their wishes or make our own decisions.
The Summer without Men by Siri Hustvedt
Thirty years on, poet Mia Fredricksen’s husband Boris asks her for a pause in their marriage so he can explore his feelings for his young French lab assistant. First things first: Mia goes crazy and ends up in a mental hospital for a short time. But then she sucks it up and goes back to her Minnesota hometown to teach poetry writing to teen girls for a summer, getting sucked into a bullying drama. This is a capable if not groundbreaking story of the shifts that occur in a long marriage and the strange things we all do as we face down the possibility of death. There are also wry comments about the unappreciated talents of the female artist. However, compared to the other two novels I’ve read from Hustvedt, this seemed feeble. Still, a quick and enjoyable enough read.
The Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst
A delicious debut novel intellectual enough to bypass labels like ‘women’s fiction’ and ‘mystery’. One thing that sets it apart is how successfully Parkhurst writes from the perspective of a male narrator, Paul Iverson, who’s been knocked for six by the sudden death of his wife Lexy, a mask designer. While he was at the university where he teaches linguistics, she climbed to the top of the apple tree in their backyard and – what? fell? or jumped? The only ‘witness’ was their Rhodesian Ridgeback, Lorelei; in his grief Paul uses his sabbatical to research efforts to teach dogs to communicate, hoping one day Lorelei might tell all. Woven through are scenes from Paul and Lexy’s courtship and marriage; though Lexy occasionally struggled with her mental health, their dialogue is fun and zippy, like you might hear on The Gilmore Girls.
Suicide
The Archivist by Martha Cooley & The Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst
Alcoholism
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller
A classic memoir that conjures up all the sights, sounds, smells and feelings of Africa on the cusp of a colonial to postcolonial transition. Fuller’s family were struggling tobacco and cattle farmers in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Malawi and Zambia. She had absorbed the notion that white people were there to benevolently shepherd the natives, but came to question it when she met Africans for herself. While giving a sense of the continent’s political shifts, she mostly focuses on her own family: the four-person circus that was Bobo (that’s her), Van (older sister Vanessa), Dad, and Mum (an occasionally hospitalized manic-depressive alcoholic who lost three children) – not to mention an ever-changing menagerie of horses, dogs and other pets. This really takes you away to another place and time, as the best memoirs do, and the plentiful black-and-white photos are a great addition.
Let’s Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell
If you loved Ann Patchett’s Truth and Beauty, pick this up immediately. It’s a similar story of best friends: one who dies and one who survives. Caldwell’s best friend was Caroline Knapp (author of Drinking: A Love Story, among other nonfiction), whom she met via puppy ownership in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They were both single and childless, full-time authors with a history of alcoholism. Besides long walks with their dogs, they loved swimming and rowing together. In 2002 Caroline was diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer, inoperable and already metastasized. Despite all their proactive optimism, she was dead a matter of weeks later. In this moving and accessible short memoir, Caldwell drifts through her past, their friendship, Caroline’s illness, and the years of grief that followed the loss of Caroline and then her beloved Samoyed, Clementine, sharing what she learned about bereavement.
Dogs
The Dogs of Babel, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight & Let’s Take the Long Way Home
Do you ever find coincidental thematic connections in your reading?
Review: How Saints Die by Carmen Marcus
“A story is like a net: you have to make your own; you have to throw the loops just right; you have to be careful what gets in and what gets out, what you catch and what you keep.”
Ten-year-old Ellie Fleck isn’t like the other children in her North Yorkshire town. The daughter of Pete, a grizzled fisherman, and Kate, an Irish Catholic woman who’s in a mental hospital after a presumed suicide attempt, Ellie was raised on stories of selkies and martyrdoms. Superstition infuses her daily life, making her afraid of pool trips with her classmates – it’s bad luck for fishermen to learn to swim – and leading her to expect her dead grandmother’s soul to waft in through an open window on Halloween night.
What with bullies’ beatings and her teacher Mr. Lockwood’s disapproval, it’s no wonder Ellie misses lots of school, going sea-coaling with her father or running off to the coast alone instead. But with Christmas approaching and Kate due home from the hospital, Ellie’s absences warrant an official visit. Social worker May Fletcher, the mother of Ellie’s new friend Fletch, is also concerned about Ellie’s home life. “How Saints Die,” Ellie and Fletch’s gruesome skit performed as an addendum to the school Nativity play, seems like proof that something is seriously wrong.
This is performance poet Carmen Marcus’s debut novel; from what I can tell it seems partially autobiographical. It powerfully conveys the pull of the sea and the isolation of an unconventional 1980s childhood. The dreamy, hypnotic prose alternates passages from Ellie’s perspective with shorter chapters from the points of view of the adults in her life, including her father, busybody neighbor Mrs. Forster, and May Fletcher. Marcus is equally skilled at the almost stream-of-consciousness passages describing Ellie’s trips to the sea and at humorous one-line descriptions:
Sand and salt in the cut, stinging. Her dad would know what to do. She wants him here, now, to show her. Without him the beach takes her up entirely, the shushshush of the sea and the coarse cackle of the waders at the waters-edge, creakcrackcreakcrackyawyaw; the wind tugging at the shell of her ear. All of it pulling, nipping, cutting at her – snipsnipsnip – and now blood, her edges ragged and wet.
Mrs Forster always smells faintly sweet and acidic like old Christmas cake.
– What are sins?
– They’re like germs but in your thoughts.
It’s easy to get lost in Ellie’s supernatural world of spirits and sea wolves, while the occasional outsider views make it clear just how dangerous some of her notions could be. Like Paula Cocozza’s How to Be Human, this sets up an intriguing contrast between magic realism and madness. The language is full of transformations and fairy tale tropes. I was reminded at times of Amy Sackville’s Orkney and Fiona Melrose’s Midwinter. Although there is perhaps one perilous situation too many at the climax and the resolution is a bit drawn out (and there is also less punctuation than I would like), this is still a strong and absorbing first novel and one I fully expect to see on next year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist.
My rating:
How Saints Die is published in the UK today, July 13th, by Harvill Secker. My thanks to Louise Court for sending a free copy for review.
Mini Reviews Roundup for the Summer
Here’s a quick look at some of the book reviews I’ve had published elsewhere on the web over the past few months, with a taster so you can decide whether to read more by clicking on the link. These are all 4-star reads I can highly recommend.
The Bookbag
Trio
by Sue Gee: Sue Gee’s tenth novel is a sensitive portrait of life’s transience and the things that give us purpose. In the late 1930s, a widowed history teacher in Northumberland finds a new lease on life when he falls for one of the members of a local trio of musicians. My favorite passages of the book are descriptive ones, often comprised of short, evocative phrases; I also loved the banter between the musicians. The novel has a reasonably simple plot. We delve into the past to discover each main character’s backstory and some unexpected romantic entanglements, but in the 1930s storyline there aren’t a lot of subplots to distract from the main action. I was reminded in places of Downton Abbey: the grand hall and its village surroundings, the build-up to war, the characters you come to love and cheer for. [Thanks to Elle for piquing my interest in this one.]
How to Set a Fire and Why
by Jesse Ball: Lucia Stanton is a cynical 14-year-old misfit who lives with her elderly aunt in a garage. At first she only supports the idea of arson, but events draw her into getting personally involved. This is one of those fairly rare novels that stand out immediately for the first-person voice. Lucia reminded me of Holden Caulfield or of Mim Malone from David Arnold’s Mosquitoland. She’s like a cynical philosopher. For as heartbreaking as her family history is, she was always either making me laugh or impressing me with her wisdom. Although this is his sixth novel, I hadn’t heard much about Jesse Ball prior to picking it up. His skill at creating the interior world of a troubled 14-year-old girl leads me to believe that the rest of his work would be well worth a look.
BookBrowse
[Non-subscribers can read excerpts of my reviews]
Imagine Me Gone
by Adam Haslett: Mental illness plagues two generations of an Anglo-American family in Haslett’s moving second novel. Narration duties are split between the five members: father John, mother Margaret, and siblings Alec, Michael, and Celia. By giving each main character a first-person voice, Haslett offers readers a full picture of how mental illness takes a toll not only on sufferers but also on those who love and care for them. John’s descriptions of what mental illness is like are among the most striking passages in the book. Michael’s sections are wonderfully humorous, a nice counterbalance to some of the aching sadness. The multiple points of view fit together beautifully in this four-decade family symphony, although I sometimes felt that Celia was one main character too many – her story doesn’t contribute very much to the whole. A powerful read for fans of family stories.
Dinner with Edward
by Isabel Vincent: In this heartwarming memoir, a journalist tells how friendship with an elderly gentleman rekindled her appetite for life. New to NYC and with a faltering marriage, Isabel received an unusual request from her friend Valerie: Would she look in on Valerie’s father, Edward? In his nineties, he’d recently been widowed and Valerie was worried about him losing the will to live. If he could have a guest to cook for and entertain, it might give him a new sense of purpose. As it turned out, it was a transformative friendship for the author as much as for Edward. Each chapter opens with a mouth-watering menu. Although Edward is now deceased, when we see him for the final time, he is still alive and well. This is a nice way to leave things – rather than with a funeral, which might have altered the overall tone.
Nudge
Ruby
by Cynthia Bond: When Ruby Bell returns to Liberty Township, her east Texas hometown, in 1964, her fellow black folk turn her into a victim of derision. The churchgoing men of the town get the idea that they can use her body however they want. In part this is because her mental health is deteriorating, and the more she struggles to stifle traumatic memories the stranger she acts. The only one who continues to see Ruby as a human being rather than a demon or a subhuman object is Ephram Jennings. I found their relationship, reminiscent of that between Sethe and Paul D. in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, very touching. The novel moves fluidly between the past and present to give all of the central characters’ backstories – most of them unremittingly tragic. As difficult as some of the later scenes are to take, you feel entranced into continuing because of the touches of magic realism. Out of the darkness Bond weaves enchanting language and scenes. I highly recommend this to fans of Ayana Mathis’s The Twelve Tribes of Hattie and Angela Flournoy’s The Turner House.
The Hatred of Poetry
by Ben Lerner: This fluid essay asks how poetry navigates between the personal and the universal. Socrates famously wanted to ban poets, fearing poetry might be turned to revolutionary purposes. Lerner wonders whether poetry still has a political role. Whitman’s goal was to create a new American verse style. But was it realistic for him to think that he could speak for everyone? The same might be asked about the poets who read at presidential inaugurations. Can different races and genders speak to and for each other, or is it only white males who are assumed to be able to pronounce on humanity’s behalf? Those are some of the questions addressed in this conversational yet unabashedly highbrow essay. Lerner’s points of reference range from Keats and Dickinson to Claudia Rankine, with ample quotations and astute commentary.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Before the Fall
by Noah Hawley: The key is in the title: perhaps playing on the theological implications of “the Fall” and Scott and JJ’s “salvation” from a plane crash, the novel toggles between build-up and aftermath. Disasters bring disparate people together to make superb fictional setups. Crucially, Hawley doesn’t make the mistake of conflating characters under easy labels like “victims” and “survivors.” Instead, he renders them all individuals with complete backstories. Some of their potted histories are relevant, while others throw up red herrings in the ensuing enquiry. Readers’ task is to weigh up what is happenstance and what is destiny. This lies somewhere on the continuum between crime and literary fiction; if it’s not quite Jonathan Franzen, nor is it Robert Ludlum. It’s a pretty much ideal summer vacation read – though you might think twice about taking it on a plane.
Reviews Roundup, August–September
One of my goals with this blog is to have one convenient place where I can gather together all my writing that has appeared in disparate online locations. To that end, once a month I’ll provide links to all the book reviews I’ve published elsewhere, with a rating (below each description) and a short taster so you can decide whether to click to read more. A couple of exceptions: I won’t point out my Kirkus Indie or BlueInk reviews since I don’t get a byline.
The Bookbag
Dandelion Angel by C.B. Calico (& interview): This was inspired by a non-fiction work, Understanding the Borderline Mother by Christine Ann Lawson. The four mother/daughter relationships in this Germany-set novel – all marked to some extent by dysfunction, physical and/or verbal abuse, and borderline personality disorder – are based on Lawson’s metaphorical classifications: the hermit, the queen, the waif, and the witch. Looping back through her four storylines in three complete cycles, Calico shows how mental illness is rooted in childhood experiences and can go on to affect a whole family.
The Last Pilot by Benjamin Johncock: Cinematic descriptions of the California desert setting plus excellent characters and dialogue enliven this debut novel about a fictional test pilot and his family troubles during America’s Space Race. Johncock is British, but you can tell he’s taken inspiration from stories about the dawn of the astronaut age. If I allowed myself small points of criticism, I would say that it’s a challenge to accept the passage of time in the final 50 pages, and that a keen interest in astronauts is probably a boon to keep readers going through the test flight portions, which to me were less compelling than the domestic drama of Jim, Grace and Florence.
Home Is Burning by Dan Marshall: At age 25, Dan Marshall went home to Salt Lake City to care for a father with ALS and a mother with leukemia. He and his four hapless siblings (a Sedaris-like clan) approached caregiving with sarcasm and dirty humor. Gleefully foul-mouthed, his memoir lacks introspective depth. He hardly ventures deeper than initial descriptions like “My gay brother, Greg” and “My adopted Native American sister, Michelle.” And even when his sentiments about his father are sincere, they are conveyed via what sound like clichés: “I wanted my poor dad to get better, not worse.” But to my surprise, Marshall made me cry in the end.
Of Orcas and Men by David Neiwert: Inspired by personal sightings near his home in Seattle, Neiwert set out to learn everything he could about orcas. The result is a thorough study of whales’ behavior and interactions with humanity from native mythology through modern-day aquarium shows. Some specialist interest would probably be helpful to those attempting this book, although there are plenty of black-and-white photographs to keep even casual readers interested. “Recovering our humanity may be the real gift of the orcas, what they can teach us. It’s our choice whether to listen.”
BookBrowse
This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! by Jonathan Evison [a subscription service, but an excerpt is available for free]: A widow in her seventies relives the ups and downs of her life while on an Alaskan cruise to scatter her husband’s ashes. Chapters alternate between a third-person account of the cruise and a second-person survey of Harriet’s past, delivered in the format of TV’s This Is Your Life. The narration is fresh and effective because the gradual revelations undermine Harriet’s elderly persona in such surprising ways. She is an out-of-the-ordinary but believable protagonist who, like all of us, has a mixture of victories and disappointments behind her. This is a charming novel about learning to reckon with the past.
Speak by Louisa Hall [subscription service, but the full text of my review will be available for free during the week starting September 25th as part of Editor’s Choice]: Hall interweaves disparate time periods and voices to track the development of artificial intelligence. The fact that all six narratives are in different documentary formats – memoirs, letters, the transcript of a dialogue, a diary, and so on – means they are easy to distinguish. One might argue that two of them (Alan Turing’s letters and Mary’s shipboard diary) are unnecessary, and yet these are by far the most enjoyable. They prove Hall has an aptitude for historical fiction, a genre she might choose to pursue in the future. A remarkable book interrogating how the languages we converse in and the stories we tell make us human.
BookTrib
You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman: Think of Alexandra Kleeman as an heir to Dave Eggers and Douglas Coupland, with a hefty dollop of Margaret Atwood thrown in. Her first novel is a full-on postmodern satire bursting with biting commentary on consumerism and conformity. Television and shopping are the twin symbolic pillars of a book about the commodification of the body. In a culture of self-alienation where we buy things we don’t need, have no idea where food comes from and desperately keep up the façade of normalcy, Kleeman’s is a fresh voice advocating the true sanity of individuality. Don’t miss her incredible debut.
Foreword Reviews
Conflict Communication by Rory Miller: Based on “ConCom,” the police verbal de-escalation program Miller developed with Marc MacYoung, this book aims to introduce readers to more conscious methods of verbal communication that will sidestep instinctive reactions and promote peaceful solutions. The advice is practical and intuitive, yet picks up on tiny details that most people would not notice. Concise, helpful, and well-organized, this is strongly recommended for readers interested in the psychology of violence and improving communication skills.
Detained by Brian Rees: Rees intersperses witty e-mail updates from his tours of Iraq and Afghanistan with clued-in commentary about war tactics, terrorism, Islam, and the benefits of transcendental meditation (TM) for soldiers with PTSD. The mixture of formats and topics generally works well, though the spiritual material deserves its own book. There’s no denying Rees’s expertise, and his fluid writing keeps the pages turning. This could make a fascinating companion volume for fans of recent war fiction such as The Yellow Birds, Redeployment, and War of the Encyclopaedists.
Talk to Me of Love by Julia Anne Bernhardt: The poems in Bernhardt’s first collection range from erotic to spiritual as they investigate love in all its forms. Repetition, rhyme, and mantras produce hypnotic sonic effects and support the central message of the epigraph: “God is in the detail.” The everyday and the eternal mix here. This well-structured collection celebrates different types of love through meditative verse. The themes’ strength is enough to recommend it to readers of Jo Shapcott and Julia Copus.
The Hidden Treasure of Dutch Buffalo Creek by Jackson Badgenoone: Otherworldly ghost writers (the “Neverborn”) compose biographies for ordinary people in this playfully metafictional novel. James is a strong central character whose memories from the 1950s through the present give a sense of history’s sweep, while vivid descriptive language enlivens the settings. Although well written, the book as a whole is an unusual amalgam of spiritualism, historical nostalgia, and technology. James’s story might have been better told as a simple coming-of-age novel with flashbacks.
Nudge
Common Ground by Rob Cowen: An unassuming patch of edge-land outside Harrogate is Cowen’s nature paradise, providing him with wildlife encounters and imaginative scenarios. Essentially, what Cowen does is give profiles of the edge-land’s inhabitants: animal and human, himself included. For instance, he creates an account of the life and death of a fox; elsewhere, he crafts a first-person narrative by a deer being hunted in medieval times. These fictions emulating Watership Down or Tarka the Otter, though well written, are out of place. When the book avoids melodramatic anthropomorphizing, it is very beautiful indeed.
We Love This Book
Where My Heart Used to Beat by Sebastian Faulks: In Faulks’s thirteenth novel, his trademark themes of war, love and memory coalesce through the story of a middle-aged psychiatrist discovering the truth about his father’s death. Reminiscent of Birdsong as well as John Fowles’s The Magus and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, this does not have the power of Faulks’s previous work but is a capable study of how war stories and love stories translate into personal history. [A few extra thoughts at Goodreads.]
I also post reviews of most of my casual reading and skimming on Goodreads.
How to Write a Novel by Melanie Sumner: Our would-be novelist is Aris (short for Aristotle) Thibodeau, 12.5 years old and as precocious as Flavia de Luce. Diane is her single mother, and Max her downright weird younger brother. Using Write a Novel in 30 Days!, Aris is turning her family’s life story into fiction. In some ways they are very out of place here in Kanuga, Georgia. The child’s wry look at family dysfunction reminded me of Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾. I would probably read something else from Sumner, so long as it wasn’t quite as silly and YA geared as this.
The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr: I would recommend this to anyone who reads and/or secretly wants to write memoirs; for the latter group, there is a wealth of practical advice here, on topics such as choosing the right carnal details (not sexual – or not only sexual – but physicality generally), correcting your facts and misconceptions, figuring out a structure, and settling on your voice. Along the way Karr discusses a number of favorite memoirs in detail, sometimes even line by line: Wild by Cheryl Strayed, Stop-Time by Pat Conroy, A Childhood by Harry Crews, Maya Angelou’s books, Speak, Memory by Nabokov, and so on.
Emblems of the Passing World: Poems after Photographs by August Sander by Adam Kirsch: A charming mix of historical photographs (1910s–1950s Germany) and poems. Kirsch uses his poetry to bring these one-dimensional figures to life, imagining the stories behind their generic titles (“Office Worker” or “Farming Family”) and sometimes slyly questioning the political and status connotations of such designations. One of my favorites was “Student of Philosophy.” This book could draw people whose interests usually run more to nonfiction – especially social history – into giving poetry a try. Releases November 17th.
Browsings by Michael Dirda: Dirda wrote this pleasant set of bibliophilic essays for the American Scholar website in 2012–13. He’s the American equivalent of the UK’s John Sutherland: an extremely well-read doyen of the classics with a special love for Victorian and Edwardian genre fiction, often as revived by small presses and specialist societies. At times Dirda’s interests can be a bit obscure for the average reader, and some of the essays feel redundant. Still, it’s easy to relate to his addictive book purchasing and hoarding.
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: I read this on the train to Manchester, appropriate reading when approaching one of the UK’s biggest centers of Victorian industry and the place where Marx and Engels met to discuss ideas in the mid-1840s. Like Darwin’s Origin of Species, another seminal Victorian text, this has so many familiar lines and wonderful metaphors that have entered into common discourse that I simply assumed it was composed in English. My eyes glaze over at politics or economics, so I valued this more for its language than for its ideas. Part II, “Proletarians and Communists,” is the most focused part if you want to sample it.
Number 11 by Jonathan Coe: This is a funny and mildly disturbing state-of-England and coming-of-age novel. I’d only read one previous book by Coe, Expo 58; this is a better example of his usual pattern: multiple, loosely linked storylines. Here the theme is the absurdity of modern culture, encompassing many aspects: unjust wars, the excesses of the uber-rich, the obsession with celebrity, and suspicion and exclusion of those who are different from us. The number 11 keeps popping up, too. My favorite parts were a Survivor-type reality television show and a laughably over-the-top prize ceremony banquet. Releases November 11th.
My Family and Other Superheroes by Jonathan Edwards: Edwards displays his proud Welsh heritage with poems reflecting on his family tree and the country’s landscape. One of my favorites was “View of Valleys Village from a Hill,” in which the narrator, with a God’s-eye view of his family, envisions messing around with them. The witty “In John F. Kennedy International Airport” imagines that Wales has been abolished and recreated in miniature in a small Kansas museum (a bit like Julian Barnes’s England, England).
The Whole & Rain-domed Universe by Colette Bryce: Many of these poems are about the author’s Irish family inheritance, both literal and figurative, as in “Heritance”: “From her? Resilience. Generosity. / A teacher’s gravitas. / Irish stew. A sense / of the ridiculous. High ceilings.” I loved the first line of “Signature” – “When I finally gave up and became my mother.” It’s particularly nice how enjambment often makes the thought go just that one line beyond what you expect. I’d read more from Bryce.
Reviews Roundup, July–August
One of my goals with this blog is to have one convenient place where I can gather together all my writing that has appeared in disparate online locations. To that end, once a month I’ll provide links to all the book reviews I’ve published elsewhere, with a rating (below each description) and a short taster so you can decide whether to click to read more. A couple of exceptions: I won’t point out my Kirkus Indie or BlueInk reviews since I don’t get a byline.
The Bookbag
The Past by Tessa Hadley: Four adult siblings gather at their grandfather’s Devon vicarage for one last summer holiday before the house is sold. Their interactions, past and present, skirt the edges of tragedy and show the secrets and psychological intricacies any family harbors. Hadley writes beautifully subtle stories of English family life. Here she channels Elizabeth Bowen with a setup borrowed from The House in Paris: the novel is divided into three parts, titled “The Present,” “The Past,” and “The Present.” That structure allows for a deeper look at what the house and a neighboring cottage have meant to the central family. Hadley writes great descriptive prose and has such insight into family dynamics. Releases September 3rd.
Between Gods by Alison Pick: At a time of transition – preparing for her wedding and finishing her first novel, set during the Holocaust – the author decided to convert to Judaism, the faith of her father’s Czech family. There are so many things going on in this sensitive and engrossing memoir: depression, her family’s Holocaust history, her conversion, career struggles, moving to Toronto, adjusting to marriage, and then pregnancy and motherhood following soon after – leading full circle to a time of postpartum depression. That said, this book is exactly what you want from a memoir: it vividly depicts a time of tremendous change, after which the subject is still somehow the same person, or perhaps more herself than ever.
BookBrowse
Villa America by Liza Klaussmann [the full text of my review is available for free this week as part of Editor’s Choice]: In her second novel, Klaussmann explores the glittering, tragic lives of Gerald and Sara Murphy, real-life models for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. The book is slow to start with, with the first third unnecessarily devoted to Gerald’s and Sara’s childhoods and courtship. It is not until the Murphys are established in France and receive visits from fellow artists that the book really comes to life. It is easy to see why the Murphys attracted hangers-on. Yet beneath the façade of glamour, there is real sadness and struggle. Gerald’s uncertain sexuality is a tacit issue between him and Sara, and sickness strikes the family with cruel precision. The novel set up a beautiful contrast between happiness and tragedy.
Foreword Reviews
Stop the Diet, I Want to Get Off! by Lisa Tillinger Johansen: Yo-yo dieters and newbies alike should pick up Johansen’s witty book before wasting any time, money, or heartache on ineffective fad diets. Surveying diets old and new in a conversational style, Johansen gives the merits and dangers of each and suggests realistic principles for healthy eating and exercise. She bases her advice on solid facts, but cannily avoids the dry, scientific tone some experts might use. Instead, she uses chatty, informal language and personal stories to enliven her writing.
The Year of Necessary Lies by Kris Radish: Radish’s tenth novel highlights women’s role in the Audubon Society campaign to eradicate feathers from ladies’ hats. Her fictional heroine, Julia Briton, is a composite portrait of the many courageous women who stood up to plume hunters and the fashion industry alike in the early years of the twentieth century. “I did not simply want to survive, but to live with great passion and to do something that made a difference in the world,” Julia declares. Recommended for fans of Sue Monk Kidd’s The Invention of Wings.
Nudge
Now and at the Hour of Our Death by Susana Moreira Marques: In 2011 Marques, a freelance journalist, spent five months visiting the dying through a Portuguese home palliative care project. The resulting book falls into two parts: “Travel Notes about Death,” one-line aphorisms and several-paragraph anecdotes; and “Portraits,” case studies and interview transcripts from three families facing the death of a loved one. The lack of a straightforward narrative and the minimal presence of the author mean that the book overall feels disjointed. Nonetheless, it is a thought-provoking look at hospice services and emotions surrounding death. Releases September 3rd.
Caught by Lisa Moore: A classic cat-and-mouse story in which a Canadian drug smuggler escapes from prison to score another load of marijuana from Colombia. Moore paints Slaney and Hearn as “modern-day folk heroes,” and her writing elevates what could have been a plain crime story into real literature. From the title onwards, the book is heavy with foreshadowing as Moore exploits the dramatic irony that readers know the police have a sting operation trailing Slaney the whole way. Indeed, the most remarkable thing about the novel is how it maintains tension even though the outcome seems inevitable. “The best stories … we’ve known the end from the beginning.” To my surprise, Caught is not just a good old-fashioned adventure story, but also has the epic, tragic weight of Homer’s Odyssey.
Field Notes from the Edge by Paul Evans: A book full of unexpected nuggets of information and inspiration: in addition to the travel notes and field observations, Evans (who writes a Guardian country diary from Wenlock Edge, Shropshire) incorporates personal anecdote, folk songs, myths and scientific advances. His central idea is that we have lost our connection with nature due to fear – “ecophobia,” the opposite of which is E.O. Wilson’s “biophilia.” How do we overcome that fear? Mostly by doing just what Evans does: spending time in nature, finding beauty and developing an affinity for particular places and species.
Shiny New Books
The Ecliptic by Benjamin Wood: Portmantle is a mysterious artists’ retreat center on a Turkish island. Our narrator, Elspeth Conroy (aka Knell), is a Scottish painter who came to Portmantle in 1962 after some struggles with mental illness. The first third of the novel is tremendously gripping and Gothic. The core of the book, nearly 200 pages, is a flashback to Elspeth’s life before. At last, after what feels like too long a digression, we come full circle back to Portmantle. I didn’t warm to The Ecliptic quite as much as I did to Wood’s debut, The Bellwether Revivals. Still, it’s really interesting to see how he alternates between realism and surrealism here. The parts that feel most real and immediate and the parts that are illusory are difficult to distinguish between. An odd, melancholy, shape-shifting novel.
We Love This Book
Beneath the Bonfire by Nickolas Butler: Ten tales of moral complexity in America’s gritty heartland. Fire and recreational drugs are powerful forces linking these Wisconsin-set stories. Opener “The Chainsaw Soirée” sets the tone by describing a failed utopia reminiscent of Lauren Groff’s Arcadia. The stand-out is “Morels,” in which three stoned friends go foraging for mushrooms in their dying rural community. The title’s similarity to “morals” is no coincidence: when the trio are involved in a hit-and-run they have to decide what to stand for. Unsentimental but lyrically composed, these stories will appeal to fans of Ron Rash.
Among the Ten Thousand Things by Julia Pierpoint: Pierpont’s ambitiously structured debut novel explores how infidelity affects a whole New York City family. In short sections of matter-of-fact statements Pierpont gives a what-happened-next for each of the characters over the next decade or so. But “it’s the between-time that lasted,” Pierpoint argues as she returns to that summer of revelations for a closer look. The climactic events of the holiday contrast childhood innocence and adulthood; when you’re on the cusp, certain experiences can push you over the brink from one to the other. This offbeat take on the dysfunctional family novel should interest fans of Nicole Krauss or Rebecca Dinerstein (The Sunlit Night). [Few extra thoughts at Goodreads.]
I also post reviews of most of my casual reading and skimming on Goodreads.
F: A Novel by Daniel Kehlmann: What does F stand for? Faith, finances, fraud, forgery, family and Fate all play a role in Kehlmann’s fourth novel available in English translation. F is also for the Friedlands: Arthur the unreliable patriarch; Martin, a portly Catholic priest who doesn’t believe in God; and his twin half-brothers, Eric and Ivan, a mentally ill businessman and a homosexual painter who forges his mentor’s masterworks. Reading this brilliant, funny spoof on the traditional family saga is like puzzling out a Rubik’s Cube: it is a multi-faceted narrative with many meanings that only become clear the deeper you go. (Full review in September/October 2015 issue of Third Way magazine.)
Mrs. Engels by Gavin McCrea: I generally love Victorian-set historical fiction and books about famous wives, so I was surprised by how little I liked this novel about Lizzie Burns, the illiterate, working-class Irish woman who was Frederick Engels’ longtime partner. The novel flits between 1870–1, when Lizzie and Frederick were newly arrived in London and involved in helping the poor and Franco-Prussian War refugees, and their earlier years in Manchester. Lizzie is a no-nonsense first-person narrator, and her coarse, questionably grammatical speech fits with her background. Unfortunately, I never warmed to Lizzie or felt that she was giving a truly intimate look at her own life. This novel had such potential to bring an exciting, revolutionary time to life, but it never fulfilled its promise for me. Releases in the States on October 13th.
Rank by Aaron McCollough: Some nice alliteration and pleasant imagery of flora, fauna and musical instruments. However, I struggled to find any overarching meaning in these run-on poems. In fact, I could not tell you what a single one of them is actually about. Story is just as important as sound in poetry, I feel, and in that respect this collection was lacking. Releases September 1st.
Trout’s Lie by Percival Everett: “The line of time / Is past. / The line folds back, / Splits. / Two lines now, future, present. The past / Is a circle of / Abstraction, regret.” There is a lot of repetition and wordplay in these poems. The title piece uses a line in Italian from Dante – translating to “in the middle of our life’s path” – that forms another recurring theme: being stuck between times or between options and having to decide which way to go. These read quickly, with the run-on phrases flowing naturally from topic to topic. I’m not sure this was the best introduction to a prolific author I’d never heard of; I’ll have to look into his other work. Releases October 15th.
Bandersnatch by Erika Morrison: This is Christian self-help, an ideal read for fans of Glennon Doyle Melton and Rob Bell. The title, a creature from Lewis Carroll’s imagination, is Morrison’s shorthand for a troublemaker. She argues that as Christians we should be following Jesus down the road of “positive nonconformity”: taking an avant-garde approach to life, turning ordinary moments into divine opportunities through spiritual alchemy, taking an interest in the least of these with kingdom anthropology, and making the everyday trials of marriage and parenthood our works of art. I liked the book best when Morrison illustrated her points with stories from her own life. Overall I found the book repetitive, and the language can definitely be hippy-dippy in places. Releases October 6th.
Family Values by Wendy Cope: Cope mostly uses recognizable forms (villanelles, sonnets, etc.): this is interesting to see in contemporary poetry, but requires a whole lot of rhyming, most of it rather twee (e.g. “tuppence/comeuppance”), which gives the whole collection the feeling of being written for children. My two favorites were “Lissadell,” about a vacation to Ireland, and “Haiku,” perfect in its simplicity:
A perfect white wine
is sharp, sweet and cold as this:
birdsong in winter.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 