Citizen Reader

A memoir for the Anglophiles.

It hasn't been all doom and gloom around here as far as nonfiction reading is concerned. In the last few weeks there have been several bright spots in my reading, and one of them was Michael Frayn's memoir My Father's Fortune: A Life.

Frayn is a British playwright and novelist, although I have never read any of his plays or novels. In fact, why I requested this book from the library on one of my regular browses through the new nonfiction releases in the catalog, I'll never know. I think I was aware he's British, and so, of course, I might be interested in his book.

Frayn recounts the life of his father, Tom Frayn, from birth to death. (Making this a blend of biography and memoir, although the majority of the book is told from Frayn's point of view as a child growing up in his father's household.) And he does a really nice job of showing how even the ordinary life of a British salesman and father, is anything but ordinary.

My favorite parts of the book actually came in the beginning, with Frayn describing his father's life as the beloved baby of the family, growing up among family members who were all either completely or almost completely deaf. The circumstances in which his father grew up certainly gave me pause:

 "My grandparents' house had four rooms, apart from the kitchen, and according to the 1901 census there were two other couples also living there. Presumably each of these couples occupied one of the rooms. So my grandparents and their four teenage children must have been living in the two remaining rooms. Two adults and four adolescents in two rooms--and all ten residents, presumably, sharing the kitchen...And now here's the new baby chucking his food under the table and screaming his lungs out, with his nappies being boiled on the copper...In the morning everyone trying to get their breakfast, and hot water for shaving, and their clothes pressed and ready for work.* All of them wanting the one lavatory, which at that time was presumably a privy in the back garden." (pp. 13-14.)

Really. Just PICTURE all that. It is a credit to Frayn's writing that he makes it easy to picture.

And the whole book is like that. It's a great picture of life in Great Britain, life in the lower middle class trying to cling to respectability, life as a child in England during World War II, and life as a family member in any number of relationships (as father, as son, as nephew, etc.). It's a great book, and I had to stop several times while I was reading it and just savor it. That, to me, is one of the marks of a very fine book indeed.

*Boiling nappies on the stove AND still having to press your clothes. Christ, I can barely make it in life even with disposable diapers and wrinkle-free shirts. People were made of sterner stuff then.

Motherhood discovered.

I learned this while reading Catherine Harper's memoir A Double Life: Discovering Motherhood: if I even want to entertain the thought of ever trying to have another baby, I have to stop reading books about pregnancy and childbirth RIGHT NOW.

There aren't any gory details in Harper's account, which is a very thoughtful and readable memoir about the experience of having a baby and becoming a mother. (It's also the winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize, which I've never heard of, but hey, it's good to know; and is published by one of my favorite publishers, the University of Nebraska Press/Bison Books.) The bulk of the narrative involves Harper's coping with the changes pregnancy makes to a woman's body, then there's a lengthy chapter on her labor experience, and she concludes with some insights about learning to care for and raise her new daughter. However, the two parts that really made this book stand out (in my opinion) were the very beginning and the very end. In her first few chapters, Harper describes how even the decision to try to become pregnant changes your relationship dynamic (in other books this is either the entire focus of the book, as there are many books in which couples struggle with infertility, or is ignored if the narrative starts with the author's experience of being pregnant). But her concluding chapter really makes the book special:

"After playgroup that morning, after I had sat in that basement--which up to that point had been a fulfilling, companionable place to spend a few social hours--after I had listened to the endless litany of where Cheerios were on sale, what brand of diapers worked better on which gender, how many activities a particular nine-month old baby could accomplish in one day, how expertly another's 'swimming' lessons were going, why one mother took such pride in not finding the time to shower, or how another hadn't put her baby down for a nap ever...after the storm of all that nothing, I found myself undone...

My friends from pregnancy had all returned to work or moved out of the city. I was alone, and I understood for the first time, with absolute clarity, why women went mad...

...I understood more specifically that what was hard about mothering my baby wasn't really the sleeplessness, the poop, the spit-up, the mess at mealtimes, the carrying, or the soothing. Nor was it her generally noisy, demanding nature. These things were challenging but in the end they were the simplest things about having a child. What finally unwound me was the repetitive, isolated nature of these chores. I did the same things, over and over and over. I did them alone, without company or conversation. Once they were done, they had to be done again. And when I went out to be with other mothers, we talked about nothing else..." (pp. 213-214.)

Please excuse the lengthy quoting, but I wanted to give a flavor of how great Harper is at discussing (to my mind, anyway) one of the greatest challenges of motherhood: how to be interested in and raise children without talking and thinking ONLY about children. It's a nuanced point, and it's not made very often. Kudos to Harper for making it here.

The cool customer strikes again.

You know I am a Joan Didion fan.

So of course I have been waiting for her latest memoir, Blue Nights, for some time. And, as much as you can't be disappointed by the terribly sad story of a mother losing her only daughter when said daughter is only 39 years old (and little more than a year after the same author lost her husband), I was not disappointed.

Didion won the National Book Award for her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, which was about the death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, and her grief in its aftermath. It's one of my favorite books of all time, and in it, she tells the concurrent story of the health struggles of their adopted daughter, Quintana Roo, who entered the hospital with pneumonia shortly before Dunne's death, and would eventually spend nearly two years in and out of hospital intensive care units with increasingly severe health problems. Quintana died in 2005, and in this memoir Didion revives her most powerful memories about her, while circling around the topic of her own aging and increasing frailty.

The title of this post comes from a line in The Year of Magical Thinking, when one of the medical personnel at the hospital where Dunne was taken and eventually pronounced dead describes her as a "cool customer." This is, in fact, what I love about Didion: even at her saddest, when dealing with the most personal and devastating of losses, she is never, ever sentimental. By this I don't mean that she doesn't care. Anything but. Consider this anecdote, a memory of Quintana walking to school when they lived in California, told from both John's and Joan's point of view (actually, this is a bit of a cheat, since it's the text John wrote down from his wedding toast to Quintana, but it's Didion who saved the text and has decided where to put it in her story):

"So I'd [John] take Q to school, and she'd walk down this steep hill. All the kids wore uniforms--Quintana wore a plaid jumper and a white sweater, and her hair--she was a towhead in that Malibu sun--her hair was in a a ponytail. I would watch her disappear down that hill, the Pacific a great big blue background, and it was as beautiful as anything I'd ever seen. So I said to Joan, 'You got to see this, babe.' The next morning Joan came with us, and when she saw Q disappear down that hill she began to cry." (p. 29.)

I love everything about that story. I love how it shows the depth of love for Quintana that both her parents had, but how their reactions to her beauty and the beauty of the situation differed. At the risk of sounding sexist, I think that right there is the essence of the difference between the experience of being a father and of being a mother.*

The next part I'll quote IS Didion's writing, about the title of the book:

"In certain latitudes there comes a span of time approaching and following the summer solstice, some weeks in all, when the twilights turn long and blue...During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. AS the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone. This book is called 'Blue Nights' because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days, the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning." (p. 4.)

It's a beautiful book. I've done a horrible job of describing it, but you can read some much better reviews of it here and here. You should also know that it's a short read, but a draining one: don't read it when you're already emotionally fragile (I did, and it led to some crying, which I try to avoid now, because it makes my eyes so tired the next day).

 *I could explore this subject endlessly but this post is already too long.

Still not quite the service memoir I'm looking for.

I always had this dream of writing a memoir about working service jobs for the bulk of my career, and how my twenty-five years in the profession (I started young, selling veggies at my parents' farm market stand) had one overwhelming result: I now hate people.*

But it turns out it's work to write a memoir, so it remains a dream. In the meantime, I keep searching for the type of service memoir I always wanted to write. During my search, I've read a lot of books that didn't particularly turn me on: Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, Caitlin Kelly's Malled, etc. About the best one I've found so far has been Debra Ginsberg's superlative Waiting: The True Confessions of a Waitress. I would highly recommend that one.

The latest entry in this field is Anna Sam's Checkout Girl: A Life Behind the Register, which has been translated from the French. Evidently, if the cover can be believed, it's an international bestseller. And although it was a fun, quick read, it wasn't quite what I wanted either. Sam makes the point, well, that one can indeed be well-educated and still end up working as a checkout girl; she's got advanced degrees and she works in a supermarket. Anyone who's worked behind a service counter will find a lot to chuckle at here: making sure your register "cashes out" correctly; people talking on their cell phones while you wait on them; devious customers finding new ways to cut in line; spotting shoplifters; etc.

But one of my favorite anecdotes was this one, about being used as a cautionary tale:

"When you hear a mother tell her child as she points her finger at you, 'You see, darling, if you don't work hard at school, you'll become a cashier like the lady,' there's nothing to stop you from explaining that it's not a profession for stupid people, that you'd rather do this than be unemployed, and that you actually have a good degree...

Well, I have news for all those ignorant, self-righteous parents out there: it's been a long time since a degree guaranteed a dream job. Today's graduates sometimes have no choice but to do less skilled work. Dear parents, thank you for reducing our profession to a warning! Wake up: this is a new century." (p. 104.)

I found that funny and scary. So yes, this one was kind of fun. But I think it suffers a little bit in translation, and it wasn't quite what I had in mind. But still a book that might make you chuckle if you've ever stood behind a cash register.

*This is actually the chicken-or-egg question of my life: Have I always hated people, or did waiting on them so early make me hate them? It's a thinker.

I'm starting to think it might just be me.

This week I had two books home that were both by women, and were supposed to be somewhat humorous.

The first, Valerie Frankel's It's Hard Not to Hate You, is a collection of essays about Frankel's belief that the hatred she's been suppressing for years might have expressed itself in cancerous cells that were found in her colon (and the discovery of a health problem that meant she was at risk for many gynecological cancers as well). She bases this on a line she enjoyed in Woody Allen's movie Manhattan: "I can't express anger. That's my problem. I internalize everything. I just grow a tumor instead."

Because Frankel decided early on not to show people when she was angry or bothered (stemming from young adult memories of putting on weight and taking grief for it at school), she starts to think it'd be healthier to let her anger out, which is what her essays here are about. Here she is, talking to her doctor:

"'As I was saying, when I'm expecting a check from a magazine and it's alte, I want to punch in the mailbox. When I email my editor about it and she doesn't reply, I want to throw my computer out the window.'

'I see.'

'I even hate my cats. They clawed my lilac to death. I raised it from a tiny shoot. I really loved that bush,' I said wistfully.

He nodded, made a note in his chart, and said, 'I'd also strongly urge you to find a way to reduce stress.'

Doctor's orders: The hate in me just had to come out." (p. 18.)

The first few chapters were all right; but it wasn't quite what I wanted.*

The other book was Laurie Notaro's It Looked Different on the Model: Epic Tales of Impending Shame and Infamy, which is another collection of essays. Notaro's known as a humorous author, but I've never been able to see it, and this book was no different. They're both bestselling authors, but along with Tina Fey, Laurie Notaro and Jen Lancaster make up my trinity of Totally Unfunny Women. But it must just be me; other people keep buying their books.

*Mr. CR wasn't as opposed to this book as I was. He looked it over and thought it was better than some other essay books by women that I've had home. But Mr. CR does not, to my mind, properly appreciate Hollis Gillespie, so I don't know how seriously I can take his opinion on this one.

The road to hell as paved with good intentions.

I really struggled with what to title today's post. "What a fucking waste"? "War is just so completely stupid"? "Finally a war book that points out the military shit is largely beside the point"? Read Peter Van Buren's spectacularly depressing memoir We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, and you'll see why it would have made me think all of those things.

Van Buren was a State Department worker who was sent to Iraq to head up an ePRT--an "embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team." He lived there for a year, and details, in short chapters that can be read whenever you have a spare few minutes, a multitude of the stupid things he saw while there. He hits all the high points of our illustrious American liberation in Iraq: how we knocked out sewage and water treatment and electricity plants without ever building them up again; how we dropped our little Green Zone headquarters right on top of Saddam's old headquarters, nicely illustrating the whole ordeal was just a regime change, and not for the better ("Conveniently for Iraqis, the overlords might have changed but the address had not. The place you went to visit political prisoners who opposed Saddam was still the place you went to look for relatives who opposed the Americans"--p. 155); how we spent millions and billions of dollars on less than nothing, with State Dept. and military types alone handing it out willy-nilly, with no research or follow-up, simply to meet their own made-up objectives. Christ. Consider:

"Kids were always hanging around everywhere; few attended school in rural areas, and those who did went only half days because boys and girls were not allowed to go to class together as they had been under the mostly secular Saddam regime. The new Islamic Iraq we midwifed in 2003 couldn't afford to double the number of schools, so it was girls in the mornings and boys in the afternoons." (p. 83.)

That bit annoyed me but it was actually pretty innocuous; there are much more damning chapters about agriculture specialists who didn't know anything about agriculture, military types who were looking for any kind of activity that included women so they could just throw money at it and hit their "making the lives of women better" objectives, and constant, constant waste. It's an eye-opening read, if you can stand it.

Even the word "mooncup" makes me shudder.

I honestly don't know why I read the entire book The Moneyless Man: A Year of Freeconomic Living, by Mark Boyle.

This entire "living frugal/living without money" genre is one that I never particularly enjoy, but yet I can't stop reading them anyway. I think subconsciously I'm looking for money-saving tips that don't have anything to do with extreme couponing. I already try to spend as little money as possible (I spent the entire summer babying my one pair of shorts along, sometimes hand-washing them, so they didn't develop big holes and I could make them last through the summer), but I do not like couponing.

Unfortunately this book was an extreme version of its kind. Boyle spent a year living in the UK with absolutely no money--living in a trailer, creating his own power/electricity, using a woodstove, biking or hitching anywhere he needed to go, and doing everything he could to get the word out about moneyless living. I guess it wasn't a boring read--I did make it through the whole thing--but I can't say I really enjoyed it. There's a lot of this sort of thing:

"...if I wanted bread, I was going to have to come up with a new solution. And I did. I decided that although I loved bread, it would have to be a treat. Instead, I would sprout the grains. This means sprinkling a layer of rye grains along a couple of stacked, perforated trays and rinsing them with water twice a day until they sprout. This only takes five minutes and so is much less effort, for more nutritional gain, than making bread. Although not quite so pleasing to taste and smell!" (p. 28.)

Oh brother. It's all I can do to get through the day even when I just buy my bread like a sucker.* Experiments like this are just too extreme for me, I'll admit it. But I have to give the guy credit for trying something a little different with his life, and for writing the book about it.

*I also wouldn't be much good as a moneyless woman. Here's what Boyle has to say on certain, ahem, feminine needs: "For coping with periods without money, there is an obvious solution that even I know about: a mooncup. This is a rubber cup, which the user inserts in her vagina to collect the menstrual flow. It's held in place over the cervix by suction." (p. 180.) At the risk of sounding twelve, I've got only two words in response to that idea: icky poo.

100 Best-ish Nonfiction Titles: Autobiography/Memoir

A word about the heading: I was going to go with "100 Nonfiction Titles You Might Actually Have a Shot At Reading" or "100 Nonfiction Titles You Might Want to Take a Whack At," but those are both too long. So "100 Best-ish Nonfiction Titles" it is.

Here's the titles Time selected for their Autobiography/Memoir "best titles of all time":

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
Black Boy by Richard Wright
Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown
Maus by Art Spiegelman
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin
On Writing by Stephen King
Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

Now, to be fair, I haven't read quite a few of these titles, so I can't really disagree with them. (The titles I have read are in bold.) And of course Time magazine has to list all the very serious, critically acclaimed titles. I won't repeat any of the titles, although I would like to list the Dave Eggers book; and of course titles like Maus and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings are important for format and subject matter. But what is with the Bill Bryson book? That should be in a Travel category, I think. And I totally disagree with the Barack Obama title--and NOT because he's been a huge presidential disappointment (although he has)--but because it was too long and fairly standard coming-of-age fare.

Anyway, I digress. Here's my list:

Warriors Don't Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock's Central High, Melba Pattillo Beals. Unbelievable account of Little Rock, Ark., school integration in 1957. I am not interested in American history, particularly of the 20th century, but this book made me want to learn more about civil rights.

Lucky, Alice Sebold. During her freshman year at Syracuse University, Sebold was brutally raped, an experience she recounts in heartreading detail in her memoir--in the first chapter, mind you. This book is not for the faint of heart but I promise you you've never read anything like it. 

Waiting: The True Confessions of a Waitress, Debra Ginsberg. People are going to argue with me on this one, and say it's slight. Nothing doing. Ginsberg perfectly marries multiple memoir formats: working life, coming of age, love and parenting, self-discovery. And she does it in an economical 320 pages.

Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain. Oh, Anthony, I do love you. The smoking! The swearing! The cooking! The rock 'n roll world of restaurants! This is one of the rare memoirs that sold well and really deserved all the hype it got. And if you've never read anything by Bourdain, this is a good place to start.

A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean. I know. You're going to tell me this one's fiction. I don't care. If it was published today, it would be marketed as memoir--Maclean recounts a story that hews pretty closely to the real details of his life. And he worked on it for years and years--getting each sentence just perfect. It shows.

Just Kids, Patti Smith. I've reviewed this one, here. A memoir that drops you in another time and place and makes you FEEL the unmistakable pulls of art, love, and youth--even against the grittiest of backdrops.

Somewhere Towards the End, Diana Athill. Athill's one of the most underappreciated memoir writers we have. This memoir on aging is bittersweet without really being bitter or sweet--how did she do that?

The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion. Didion's a prose master and her subject--the unexpected death of her husband and the serious illnesses suffered by her daughter immediately afteward--leaves the reader wondering just how one woman had the ability to be overwhelmed by sorrow while still describing it in incisive detail.

84, Charing Cross Road, Helene Hanff. Okay, it's a collection of letters, not memoir. Close enough! Everyone who loves books and reading (or who loves feisty women, or who loves England, etc.) should read this slim volume of correspondence between a feisty book-loving New Yorker and a very proper bookseller in London.

Made in Detroit, Paul Clemens. A perfect coming-of-age memoir, combined with an elegy for a dying city and way of life.

Population: 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time, Michael Perry. Perry's beautiful book of stories about his return home to live in northern Wisconsin and become an EMT in his home community is funny, sad, beautiful, and completely honest.

Okay, that's only eleven titles, to the Time list's twelve. I'm reserving a spot because I know there's at least one title I've forgotten.

So, what do you think? Tell me yes or no on my choices, and feel free to list some of your own!

How I read a book about yoga, without reading any of the yoga bits.

It's a bit embarrassing to note that I did read Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses, but that I pretty much skipped all the bits that had to do with yoga.

Which, of course, made it faster to read, as the book is really about yoga and Dederer's journey of self-discovery through its practice and discipline. She details her life, marriage, family relationships, and parenting experiences, all set against the backdrop of her native Seattle, but primarily she describes the yoga classes she attends, the poses she seeks to master, and how yoga helped her make sense of her life for more than a decade. She also intersperses stories of her own childhood (a unique one: her mother left her father for another man, but her parents never got a divorce) in 1973.

So what did I read, if I skipped the biggest chunks of the narrative? Well, I cherry-picked it for Dederer's marriage and parenting stories, which were delightfully meaty. When she had her first child, more than ten years ago, "attachment parenting" was the big trend in Seattle: everyone around her was co-sleeping (babies and parents together in one bed), buying organic, and wearing their babies in various slings, as strollers put children at too much of a distance from their parents. Although I am too lazy to do any of those things (I wouldn't give up the stroller for love or money), I still recognized Dederer's feeling that she's a bit of a parenting impostor in a land of other much more driven "perfect mommies." Consider her take on weaning her daughter a bit earlier than is usually accepted in perfect mommy circles:

"Lucy wasn't yet ten months, and I wasn't supposed to quit nursing until at least a year. If you think this sounds like a frivolous dilemma, or not worth losing sleep over, then that just goes to show you were not a new mother in a liberal enclave at the end of the last century.* While I debated whether or not to wean her (and Bruce, my husband, feigned interest), the inevitable occurred. My back went out...so I weaned her.

Now that I've been doing yoga for ten years, I'm tempted to say something wise, such as: I was ready to wean and my body made the decision for me. But back then I didn't believe in that kind of crap. Instead, I paddled around in a complicated gumbo of guilt and relieve. I claimed to feel cheated of my full, god-given, federally mandated year of nursing. I apologized to my husband for my subpar performance. I told my friends: Oh, no! I can't nurse the baby. Inside, I secretly exulted..." (p. 7.)

I found that entertaining. I also found her take on child-rearing in the 1970s fascinating; she makes a big deal out of the feminist movement and how women went to work instead of staying home, as well as how divorce changed American family dynamics. I am a child of the 70s but my experience is directly opposed to hers: although my mother worked on the farm she was also our full-time caregiver. She was also not a fan of "feminism," my mother, although she actually is kind of a feminist.** So, weirdly, this book helped me understand why I often feel kind of out of step with others from my generation.

My other favorite quote from this book came during a story of the author's friend Lisa, who left her husband and four children, and whose experience Dederer sought to understand:

"Lisa followed the first thing that gave her the right to be: wifedom, motherhood. And now she wanted out. When the first thing no longer works, you have to get away from it somehow. You need something to set you free. And everyone knows that in order to leave a marriage, in order to change a family, you need a disaster.

Not the kind of disaster that just falls from nowhere onto your head, like a cartoon Acme anvil. Not a huge disaster, maybe more of a mini-disaster. The kind of disaster you have to build with your own hands. (Like you have to do everything else in this goddamn family.) You have to blow up the palace where you're the queen." (p. 213.)

Come on: "Like you have to do everything else in this goddamn family." That's a good line. I defy any married woman to tell me otherwise. So yeah. I can't tell you if this book was any good because of the actual yoga writing, but women who've been at all puzzled about marriage and children might find something to like here nonetheless.

*Or now. People feel really strongly that you should breastfeed for at least a year. Oh, and it's totally natural and easy, and you are bad at womanhood if you suggest otherwise.

**She did, after all, give me the greatest gift any woman can give her daughter: the confidence to know that I was (and am) loved, and I didn't need attention from boys to give my life purpose. That made high school a lot easier.

Finally, a readable book on reading.

Susan Hill's memoir of a year spent reading, Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home, was so great that I only allowed myself one chapter of it per day, to make it last. It was the book equivalent of a box of chocolate truffles.

Hill is a British author who specializes in ghost and detective stories (her novel The Woman In Black has been made into a film, starring Daniel Radcliffe, of Harry Potter fame, that will open in 2012), but she's clearly very widely read and seems to know or at least have met everyone who's anyone in the British publishing scene. In this memoir, she moves through her own house and bookshelves, explaining why she finds certain books the places she does, and the experiences she relives in revisiting and re-reading them.

Normally these books don't do a whole lot for me. But this one was so wonderful, so straightforward, so imbued with a love for books and reading that I found myself wanting to run right out and get everything she suggests. I also happen to agree with Ms. Hill on her attitude toward the printed book:

 "It ain't broke: the book, that is. I know because I just went round the house looking for something to read, and on the way I reassured myself that as the book ain't broke around here, I do not propose to fix it with an electronic reader. Yes, let's use the whole word. Let's tell it like it is. Electronic reader. Something monotonous-looking and made of plastic, is grey and has a screen...I will stick to paper and print and pages for reading books. If it ain't broke. Of course, someone wants to persuade us that it is so that they can sell us their device. 'Twas ever thus." (p. 76.)

Awesome.

But the real genius of her book is in her descriptions of the books she has read and loved: she makes you want to read each and every last one of them. I found a lot of great authors who I already love referenced (she's got a great Penelope Fitzgerald story), and Hill also introduced me to other writers I now want to read. And in addition to recommending specific authors, she also makes a grand case just for READING:

"But if the books I have read have helped to form me, then probably nobody else who ever lived has read exactly the same books, all the same books and only the same books, as me. So just as my genes and the soul within me make me uniquely me, so I have the unique sum of the books I have read. I am my literary DNA...

All through the house, the books are murmuring, turning over in sleep like pebbles on the shoreline as the tide recedes." (p. 202.)

Awesome. Just awesome.

Guest Review: Blood, Bones, and Butter

A while back a very nice CR reader named Susan Kennedy emailed me and asked if I ever planned to review the book Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, by Gabrielle Hamilton. She had just finished and loved it, and wanted to know what I thought of it.

I was touched by her very nice email, so it broke my heart to tell her I had indeed started the book, read maybe a chapter, but had gotten bored and decided I wouldn't be finishing (or reviewing) it. But then we had a great idea: she'd read the book, and I wondered why she'd liked it. So why not have this conversation on the blog? She graciously acquiesced, so below you'll see my questions about the book (in bold) and her answers.

1. In a sentence or two, could you summarize what this book was about?

A chef grows up in kitchens. She learns about life from her French mother, her work experience in varied kitchens in NYC and beyond, and finally with the opening of her own restaurant.

2. What did you like about it?

I liked the vivid and almost fantastical storytelling.  I could smell and hear and taste things she described with humor and honesty.  I listened to the story as an audio book so perhaps this kept my attention better as Gabrielle read the story herself. I particularly enjoyed her account of the writing group in grad school and the Italy stories.  I hated the abrupt ending – seems like she holds something back for another book.

3. Do you typically seek out "foodie" books, or how did you find this title?

I spotted it on a NY Times bestseller list and gave it a try.  I read foodie books if an expose label fits.  As a home cook, I tend to read more recipes than foodie lit.  Let’s see.  Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential cracked my Top Ten list.  Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma educated me.  Foodie books like Julie and Julia that are more fluffy do not interest me much.  Anything that can be described as “slice of life” gets a chance.

4. Would you recommend it to other readers or book groups? Why or why not?

I recommend it for a book club.  It takes you on a tour of various kitchen environments and the lifestyle that group showcases.  It offers many topics to discuss like what is marriage/motherhood/success to the author?  She leaves a few major points unanswered.  For example, how does a lesbian in the 21st century NYC marry a straight man?  She breezes over her relationship with her father and siblings.  Maybe she left them out for the sake of the kitchen theme or perhaps privacy.

5. What are you reading now?

Behind the Palace Doors.  It’s about the British royals from Henry VIII forward.  I tend to be in more than one book at a time.  I am halfway through The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which had to go back to the library as it was overdue.  Naturally it is a popular book here in Baltimore.

Many, many thanks to reader Susan Kennedy, and her willingness to share her thoughts on this book. Now, I've got to go get the British royals one she just referenced.

You will need to eat chocolate while reading this book.

Something lighter today than the books I've been discussing lately...

Recently I read Frances Park's and Ginger Park's memoir Chocolate Chocolate: A True Story of Two Sisters, Tons of Treats, and the Little Shop That Could, about how they started a candy store in Washington D.C. in the 1980s, financed largely by a small legacy left them by their father (who died a too-early death). This was an okay book, although I didn't stick any bookmarks in it--there weren't that many memorable passages. The appeal of this book is not so much in the sisters' writing skills (although they do have skill; they've written numerous and well-reviewed books for kids) as it is in the setting of their story: their shop, Chocolate Chocolate.

The book opens (in 1983) with the sisters scouting locations for their new shop, and then attending the International Summer Fancy Food and Confection Show to find chocolate suppliers. From there they move on to dealing with the contractor who builds out the space they've rented--or, more accurately, the contractor who cocks up the job of building out the space they've rented. They have a rocky start, but over the years they settle into their groove, put together a group of loyal and regular shoppers, and deal with their own personal life ups and downs.

Each chapter is titled with the name of a different type of chocolate, and the book is rich with candy (and customers of candy) descriptions. I almost made it all the way through, but by the time I hit page 200 I gave in, walked to Walgreens with CRjr, and bought a 3 Musketeers bar. (The big one.) I later consumed it (inhaled it) while finishing the book, and it was a very enjoyable experience.

This is a nice fluffy summer read (see? some nonfiction can be considered "beach reading") but don't read it if you're on a diet.

Rainbow Pie, part 2.

So, with all the caveats out of the way, why did I find Joe Bageant's Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir so fascinating?

Well, first, because Bageant describes a world so like my own. His first chapters describe his youth growing up near his extended family and their farm in Virginia, and how his grandparents ("Pap" and "Maw") were very can-do people. I too grew up on a farm and know people who knew how to do things (and regularly did them) like raising one's own animals, hunting, butchering, raising gardens, canning food, and fixing and maintaining all the farm machinery.* So a lot of that--the missing it and not missing it, which Bageant displays, I can relate to.**

But I also like Bageant because he takes me out of my comfort area. I'm a Northern girl, and there are often things about the American South (culture, history, how anyone can stand the climate) that I don't understand. Bageant makes that world more clear for me. And he does it as a person whose ideology I respond to almost as instinctively as I often respond to Wendell Berry's.

On politics: "Today he [a Republican neighbor] would be even rarer, because he was a Republican with the common wisdom to understanding something that no Republican has ever grasped since: he realized that any wealth he might acquire in life was due not only to his own efforts, but also to the efforts of all other men combined--men who built the roads that hauled his merchandise; men who laid rail track, grew crops, drilled wells, and undertook all the other earthly labors that make society possible." (p. 52.)

On what to do now: "Ok. I'll say it so you won't have to. There ain't no goin' backwards. We certainly can't all take up horse farming or go to sowing lespedeza hay and oats. Of course not.

But the underlying theme here is loss, and that loss poses some big questions. It is at all possible to regain a meaningful, positive, and satisfying expression of character while working in such a monolithic, non-human scale of 'production'? Anybody else feel like America is just one big workhouse, with time off to shit, shower, and shop? Or is it just me?" (p. 69.)

On community: "A community with no memory of its dead is no real community, because it has no human connectivity grounded in time--just interaction. It's merely a location populated by disassociated beings. A community's inherited memory from its dead provides its spiritual and moral animation, its posterity. This is because we are humans, not aggregations of marketing or employment demographics, and are more than just a bunch of people who happen to be in the same place at the same time." (p. 111.)

I could go on and on. But I really just think you should read it. I really do. Even with its many issues. (I think Bageant should have included more family stories and a bit less class warfare discussion; some of it's uncomfortable; he concludes without providing much in the way of suggestions for change; etc.) Read it and feel free to complain to me about any of those issues, but also tell me what you THOUGHT about it. I want to know.

NOTE: Re-reading these reviews I notice I've done a terrible job of explaining why I both loved this book (and Bageant) and am conflicted about it. If you just watch this brief video of him talking (please note it's not really suitable for work), I think you'll see his anger and understand my conflict. My question after that is, how, Joe? How do you try to educate and help people? People who may or may not want education and help?

*I don't know how to do any of these things, although if forced, I could maybe plant, maintain, and harvest a garden. But it would be a half-assed garden and would mostly be eaten by bugs and bunnies, and if I had to work in it when it was much warmer than 70 degrees out I would be swearing a lot.

**These were also not people who believed in government "handouts." "Pap may have been a Democrat, but he felt free to cuss either party and its candidates with equal fervor, if he was in the mood. He didn't like Coolidge, and, though he voted for FDR twice, he was leery of parts of Roosevelt's New Deal. Particularly Social Security. He could not grasp how a man could get money in the mail at the end of the month if he had not worked during the month...After he died, a shoebox of uncashed Social Security checks was found under his bed." (pp. 35-36.) That is SO something my grandpa might have done.

Oh, Joe Bageant, I miss you.

The other memoir that blew me away this past month, along with Patti Smith's spectacular Just Kids, was Joe Bageant's Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir. I have, count them, no fewer than seven bookmarks stuck in this one, waiting to remind me of some of the most interesting bits.

I spoke about Bageant a while back, when he died at the untimely age of 64. He was the author of the nonfiction title Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War, in which he explored the issues of what he calls the "white underclass," and, more broadly, class issues in America in general.

This book is more a mix of personal memoir and an extended (and sometimes very angry) diatribe about class issues in this country, particularly as they apply to poor white people. Bageant should know--he grew up in a working class family that became steadily a poor working class family due to lack of jobs, health issues, and other setbacks. One cannot read Bageant without being constantly aware of the conflict in his life: this is a man who loved his grandparents' home farm, who believes people should know something about how to fix and make things in their lives, and yet also left his home region for work, travel, and, as he did from little on, to read and learn.*

The difficult fact of the matter is that I think everyone should read this book, and any book group worth their salt should discuss it. But I honestly don't know if I can tell you to do that. For one thing, there is a part early on about Bageant's Uncle Nelson, born with birth defects that affected his development and left him (as Bageant describes) childlike his entire life, that is difficult to read and accept. (I'm not going to tell you what it is because if you DO choose to read this book, I think you have to read it in context.) Secondly, Bageant does sometimes use the "n" word (in regards to race), although he only uses it when discussing its use in his surroundings while he was growing up. Personally I feel the word here is not abused, and that we're really never going to get anywhere talking about race issues until people can be honest about where and how such words are or were used--but that is a personal feeling and I know that many people can't abide the word in print AT ALL. If you're one of these people, this is not the book for you.

There: I got the tough bits out of the way first. More on what I found interesting in a future post.

*As I type this I realize how sad it is that those things are often felt in "conflict." Why isn't it possible to stay where you grew up, know how do do some work with your hands, read a bit, and still be able to make a living?

Just Kids, part 2.

Yesterday I was so busy talking about my crush on Patti Smith, developed after reading her memoir Just Kids, that I didn't even get to talk about the love story/friendship at the heart of the book; that is, her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe.

The story(ies) of how they met indicate, from the start, the sort of fated friendship they were bound to share (as well as illustrating what a small town late-1960s New York City seemed to be). When Smith first moved to New York City, with no money,* she went in search of some friends of hers who attended the Pratt Institute for art, but when she arrived at their address, she found they had moved. Instead she met someone else who would become hugely influential to her: Mapplethorpe.

"I walked into the room. On a simple iron bed, a boy was sleeping. He was pale and slim with masses of dark curls, lying bare-chested with strands of beads around his neck. I stood there. He opened his eyes and smiled." (p. 25.)

A bit later, after Smith found a job in Brentano's (where they also must have sold crafts and jewelry), that same boy came in and used a credit slip (he had a job at a different Brentano's) to buy Smith's favorite necklace on display. And not long after that, when Smith was on a date with a bookstore customer whose motives she didn't trust, she happened to see Mapplethorpe nearby and used him to make good her escape:

"It was as if a small portal of future opened, and out stepped the boy from Brooklyn who had chosen the Persian necklace, like an answer to a teenage prayer. I immediately recognized his slightly bowlegged gait and his tousled curls. He was dressed in dungarees and a sheepskin vest. Around his neck hung strands of beaded necklaces, a hippie shepherd boy. I ran up to him and grabbed his arm.

'Hello, do you remember me?'

'Of course,' he smiled.

'I need help,' I blurted. 'Will you pretend you're my boyfriend?'

'Sure,' he said, as if he wasn't surprised by my sudden appearance..." (p. 38.)

I'm sorry, but that, my friends, is a relationship that was meant to be. Three chance encounters across Brooklyn and Manhattan? Of course, their entire love affair doesn't stay that idyllic. But you've got to read this book: what these two did for art, the people they met (particularly while living at the Chelsea Hotel), the way they loved each other--take your pick. It felt like about four great books in one.

*Have I said how much I love Patti Smith? Check out this sense of adventure: "At twenty years old, I boarded the bus. I wore my dungarees, black turtleneck, and the old gray raincoat I had bought in Camden. My small suitcase, yellow-and-red plaid, held some drawing pencils, a notebook, Illuminations, a few pieces of clothing, and pictures of my siblings. I was superstitious. Today was a Monday; I was born on a Monday. It was a good day to arrive in New York City. No one expected me. Everything awaited me." (p. 25.)

Gotta re-read me some Laura Ingalls Wilder.

As previously mentioned, last week I found myself reading books by authors I'd read before (and enjoyed). Author Wendy McClure won me over a few years back with her weight-loss memoir titled I'm Not the New Me, so I thought I'd try her new book, a memoir/travelogue titled The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie. After explaining her childhood fascination with the Little House books and all things Laura Ingalls, McClure further describes her multiple trips to visit historic sites and tourist traps centering on the Ingalls mythos.

McClure is a children's book editor, and perhaps the most fun thing about this book is her obvious love for her source material.* Periodically she references parts of the Little House series that she particularly enjoyed (or is a bit dismayed by, in retrospect, particularly when it comes to the portrayals of American Indians), and how those parts really fired her imagination. Anyone who has ever remembered a beloved book (or series) from childhood will identify with her nostalgia, particularly those who read and loved the Little House books.

But also fun are her descriptions of many of the Ingalls historical sites, including the little house in the big woods at Pepin (Wisconsin), her Minnesota home "on the banks of Plum Creek," and the house in Missouri where she eventually settled with her husband Almanzo and their daughter Rose. Much of McClure's writing is also augmented with biographical tidbits from a wealth of biographies and scholarly works on Laura and her family--she clearly did her homework, which gives the story some nice heft.

But perhaps my favorite part of this memoir is how she shared her reading and travels with her partner, Chris. She did a nice job of working in his commentary, like when they discussed Farmer Boy, which, as it focused on Almanzo, was never one of McClure's favorite books in the series. But Chris liked it and told her why:

"'This book rules. This kid has the best life ever. There's a doughnut jar in the kitchen.' 'The doughnut jar really is cool,' I admitted. 'In his right hand he held a doughnut, and in his left hand two cookies,' Chris said. I knew he was reading from the book. 'He took a bite of doughnut AND THEN a bite of cookie.' He was quoting the birthday scene, where Almanzo gets to stay home from school and go sledding and wander through the kitchen double-fisting baked goods. 'That is some bad-ass action right there,' Chris said." (p. 304.)

This one was a fun read for summer. (Nonfiction beach reading, anyone?) Thoughtful but not too heavy. And it's definitely left me with the desire to read the Little House series. (I loved the part where Almanzo got to stay home for his birthday too.)

*"It's just how reading the Little House books was for me as a kid. They gave me the uncanny sense that I'd experienced everything she had, that I had nearly drowned in the same flooded creek, endured the grasshopper plague of 1875, and lived through the Hard Winter. It's a classic childhood delusion, I know, and in my typically dippy way I tended to believe that the fantasy was mine alone..." (p. 2.)

Some old favorite authors with new books.

Last week seemed to be the week for reading new books by nonfiction authors I've previously enjoyed. First up: Catherine Friend.

I first came across Friend when I read her memoir Hit by a Farm: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Barn, about she and her girlfriend's experiences starting a working farm. Friend's partner, Melissa, was really the one with the interest in farming, so Catherine often just seemed along for the ride. (To which I can relate: I grew up on a farm but would have to be coerced--strongly coerced, say, by a world financial meltdown or apocalypse of some kind--to return to the farm.) That was a fun memoir. I also enjoyed her follow-up, The Compassionate Carnivore, which was a great book about eating meat while still like animals, and which made a strong argument for simply making better choices about the meat you eat (and paying attention to how and where it is raised). In that respect it was about a million times better than Jonathan Safran Foer's pointless Eating Animals.

So when I saw her new title, Sheepish: Two Women, Fifty Sheep, and Enough Wool to Save the Planet, I was excited to read it. This one, like her previous books, offers short chapters and a wealth of funny stories, but I struggled to find the cohesive story arc in this one. This is rare, as I am not normally a nonfiction reader who needs a lot of story.* It's divided into five different parts, with Friend chatting variously about the latest farm adventures (including a fascinating chapter about sheep getting pregnant at the wrong time of year); menopausal difficulties; some struggles in her relationship with Melissa; and an appreciation for the farm, the sheep, and particularly their wool. She shares some interesting tidbits about wool, its history, and its properties, but I must confess she lost me on her knitting chapters. Knitting for me is a lot like gardening: It seems like a good hobby and I feel like I should be interested in it, but at the end of the day, knitting comes in at about #434 on the list of things I want to learn how to do in my life, somewhere below curling my eyebrows but above sewing in general.

It was a fun**, quick read, but if you're looking for something more cohesive I'd start with any of Friend's earlier books.

*This is why it annoys me when nonfiction read for recreation is referred to as "narrative nonfiction"--just because something isn't a how-to, doesn't necessarily make it "narrative." But people need labels. I understand.

**It starts with a zap, literally, as Friend describes a young couple's tour of her farm and their reaction to the electric fence: "...the man looks down at the smooth wire running from post to post. 'Is this electric?' I nod. There's a yellow sign hanging from the top wire about thirty feet away. The sign says, 'Warning: Electric Fence...' He can't take his eyes off the fence. 'Would it hurt?' The guy's wife rolls her eyes. 'Honey, don't touch the fence.'" Of course he touches the fence. As a wife who probably (too frequently) rolls her eyes, I got a charge out of that one. Pun intended.

How convenient is a convenience store without smokes?

The second book about retail/service last week was Ben Ryder Howe's My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store.

This one got a lot of pre-publication buzz, and a lot of good reviews, so I thought, hey, why not? Sounds good. A guy (who happens to be an editor at the Paris Review) agrees to help purchase a convenience store with his wife in New York City that they can give to her hard-working Korean parents, in order to "pay them back" for all the sacrifices they made immigrating to America. They'll help work in the store, too, the whole family will make it a success, they'll get their investment back, and they'll move out of his wife's parents' house and start a family of their own.

SPOILER ALERT: This is not how things work out.

Instead, the convenience store/deli nearly does kill them, starting with Howe's redoubtable mother-in-law. Howe weaves a tale of mishaps and bad luck, and if the stress from running a convenience store in Brooklyn (early on his mother-in-law Kay gives up the dream of owning a fancier deli, with a cash-cow lunchtime buffet steam table, in Manhattan*) isn't bad enough, he also witnesses the end of an era at The Paris Review as he and his colleagues try valiantly to make it more "professional" without stepping on George Plimpton's toes (and especially so in his absence, after his death).

And he does weave a fairly good tale. I started it at night, and then stayed up a bit later than usual to read it (fun in itself, as it's been a while since I've found something, anything, I really wanted to KEEP reading) and ended up blowing through 250 pages, so it's an easy read. And I really felt for him, as I can't imagine trying to serve the types of people he describes serving. It was, in its own way, an interesting look at a type of store I've (mercifully) never had to work in.

But this was another nonfiction book in which topics were raised and then never resolved. There is the incident, for example, where, when the deli/store is already struggling, Howe is seduced by a fancy groceries catalog into buying more than a thousand dollars' worth of upscale foodstuffs. There's some reference to his wife asking him if he placed an order that large, but that's pretty much all that's ever said about it. Now, me, when I hear about $1500 in fancy groceries bought for a convenience store which is mainly known for its sale of beers and lottery tickets, I kind of want to know what happened to those groceries. Did they sell? How fancy were they? Did his wife and mother-in-law ever chew him out for spending so much money when they were already hard up? 

At another point the family is faced with losing their license to sell cigarettes (for one violation for selling cigarettes to someone underage), so they voluntarily stop selling them. I ask you: what kind of convenience store owner thinks they're going to be able to keep the business going without selling cigarettes?

So there you have it: two books on retail/service, and neither of them fantastic reads. I'll have to give up on the subject for a while and wait for something better to come along.

*Howe's writing about the steam table and his mother-in-law is some of the most fun writing in the whole book, and it comes on pages 3-4: "My mother-in-law, Kay, the Mike Tyson of Korean grandmothers, wants a deli with a steam table, one of those stainless steel, cafeteria-style salad bars that heat the food to just below the temperature that kills bacteria--the zone in which bacteria thrive. She wants to serve food that is either sticky and sweet, or too salty, or somehow all of the above, and that roasts in the dusty air of New York City all day, while roiling crowds examine it at close distance--pushing it around, sampling it, breathing on it. Kay's reason for wanting a deli of this kind is that steam tables bring in a lot of money..." What's really sad is how much that paragraph makes me want to take another trip to New York City.

Retail (non)therapy.

So what's the subject I'm strangely fascinated by?

It's retail. Or, as a close second, food service. I will read anything about the retail environment, even fiction, which is how I found myself with Caitlin Kelly's journalistic memoir titled Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail.

Since the majority of my working life has been spent in jobs where I waited on people, I'm always fascinated to read other people's takes on that subject, and about the service environment in general. One of my favorite nonfiction reads is Paco Underhill's Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping--Updated and Revised for the Internet, the Global Consumer, and Beyond, which is a fascinating exploration of how people shop (I read the previous edition, so I may have to check this one out again). In Kelly's book, her take on shopping is a bit more personal: she spent more than two years working in a North Face store.

In a way, this is one of those "year in the life" books; Kelly took the retail job purely to supplement her journalism income and worked only two shifts a week (eventually downsizing to one shift). That's part of the problem here. Normally I enjoy these types of books, regardless of whether they're memoirs or investigative titles (this one is a mix of both), but this one feels phoned in. And I'm sorry, but if your entire service experience is comprised of two shifts (and then one) per week for a couple of years, you have not been a true service worker. Work a few service jobs at the same time, which is invariably what you have to do to make any money, and then come back and talk to me.

Kelly's day job is as a journalist, and she freely admits she got the job just to help supplement her paycheck and to get out of the apartment a couple of times a week. All I can say is: ho-hum. I was no huge fan of Barbara Ehrenreich's similar (but full-time, and more muckraking) title Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, but at least Babs gave it more of a college try than this author.*

The writing wasn't terrible, but a lot of times I felt I wasn't getting the whole story. This is the story she tells of how she was hired: "The money, of course, was sobering, stunningly low. It was less than I had earned as a teenage lifeguard in the 1970s--$9 an hour for part-timers, $11 for full-time, with no commission or bonus, but with a healthy discout on company products. And I would have to pay $8 just to park in the mall's lot for my shift--in effect losing the first hour of my labor. I asked for $11 an hour, working two days a week, Tuesdays from one to nine p.m. and Wednesdays during the day..." (pp. 16-17).

Huh? Never have I worked a service job where I didn't just take the pay they were offering. Are you telling me I could have asked for more? Does that work? Well, we'll never know, because Kelly never finished that story, so I never learned how her boss responded to that request. She also periodically alludes to challenging customers, but she never really describes any of her encounters with either scary or demeaning members of the public (and trust me, there's plenty of them around).

So yes, due to its subject matter, I read the whole thing. But did I enjoy it? Not really.

*By the way, a REALLY good title of this type ("I worked a shitty job to see what it was like") is Gabriel Thompson's Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won't Do.

Women in Finance (Books) Week: Stereotypes Abound

One of my least favorite "tricks" listed in personal finance books for saving money is to "cut out buying your daily latte."

Pretty much everybody says it, and it makes me nuts every time. I don't know what kind of glamorous life these personal finance writers think I'm living, but I can assure you it doesn't include daily lattes.

In today's entry in Women in Finance (Books) Week, we have the latte issue right up front in the title: Nancy Trejos's Hot (Broke) Messes: How to Have Your Latte and Drink It Too. Trejos is a personal finance columnist for The Washington Post, which is amazing, because this woman has no idea how to handle money:

"In January 2005, when I was twenty-eight, I bought an overpriced condo during the height of the real estate boom with my then-boyfriend, later my fiance, and then had to sell it at a loss two years later after we broke up. When I turned thirty, I bought a Volkswagen Beetle that I really couldn't afford because I got sick of my old car and wanted to drive around in something cute...After another bad breakup in April 2007, I blew all sorts of cash on a crazy trip through California..." (p. 6.)

Now, I don't really care what this woman does in her personal life or with her money. But she is a PERSONAL FINANCE COLUMNIST for The Washington Post? How does something like that happen?

This book is also hot pink.

This book is basic in the extreme: use your credit card responsibly, live within your means, be smarter with how you handle your money, especially in relationships, etc. It's really more of a memoir (she also details her experiences working with a financial planner) than a how-to, and unless you really need an introduction to how to control your finances, there will be nothing here for you. And, of course, there's this really annoying bit on page 197, when Trejos is well into (supposedly) taking back control of her finances:

"Over coffee at Starbucks one morning, Christine [her financial planner] and I reviewed my contributions..."

Well, as long as it was coffee, and not a latte.