Citizen Reader

Roll me up and smoke me when I die.

Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die: Musings from the Road
by Willie Nelson

You know, Willie Nelson is just a fun person with whom to spend some time.

And that's exactly what you feel like you're doing when you read Nelson's autobiographical collection Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die: Musings from the Road. The book is truly that--musings--but meatier than you might realize at first. It includes excerpts from Nelson's writings while on the road, interspersed with commentary from family and band members, and friends. Subjects range from Farm Aid to guns to writing music to jokes (of which there are very many good ones here, although some are a bit raunchier than others). I'd quote one here but I think it's more fun to read them in Willie's book.

One of my favorite things to learn about Willie came from his son Micah (whose illustrations are also featured throughout the book): "there has never been any pressure from him to be anything but a decent person" (p. 75.) That seemed about right, and I hope it is something CRjr might be able to say about me some day.

If you enjoy Nelson's music, I think you'll enjoy this book too. (I think you might even enjoy it if you're not a fan of his music--he's just that likable.) Although I guess I would not suggest it to people who are not fans of casual marijuana use. It's also a particularly nice laid-back little read if you are GOING CRAZY FROM CABIN FEVER, which I would guess just about everyone in Wisconsin (and perhaps in other parts? are you having an early or late spring where you are?) is by now.

Have I maxed out on memoirs?

Drinking with Men: A Memoir
by Rosie Schaap

Over the course of the past month I've slowly been munching my way through Rosie Schaap's well-received memoir Drinking with Men: A Memoir.

I never really got to the point where I had to keep reading it, but for a while it seems I haven't been finding much at the library and I couldn't find much other nonfiction around the house I was interested in, so when I needed to read, I'd just go back to it and read another chapter. I don't know why, really. It's not a bad book, and it's certainly not bad as far as memoirs (which can, I find, vary widely in quality) go. Feeling pretty ambivalent about it both during and after reading it has left me with just the one question:

Am I done reading memoirs?

Could be. For a long time I read a lot of them. For a long time a lot of them have been published. But for whatever reasons, it's also been a long time since I found one that really lit me up.

This is all not really fair to Schaap's book. There's nothing earth-shattering here, but the author seems to know her way around a sentence and is also likable enough, although I almost didn't make it past her early chapters, wherein she described dropping out of high school and following the Grateful Dead around.* In later chapters she settles into a nice pattern of describing bars she has loved and the drinking companions (almost exclusively male) whom she has loved within them. Perhaps one reason it left me cold-ish was because her descriptions of the bars themselves are much more vivid and loving than her descriptions, really, of her drinking companions (which even include a man whose friendship affected her life very deeply). I really do think "Bars I've Loved" would have been a more accurate, if not a catchier, title.

There's some insight into her friendships with men, and with bar culture, but it wasn't quite what I was looking for. I have my own history of getting along well with guys**, which is a painful history, because once you become an old married lady with a kid, guy friends are impossible to come by. I miss them and rather thought this memoir would have more to say on the actual dynamics of such friendships, but it didn't. Perhaps when I find a memoir that does that I'll have found one that once again makes me want to read more memoirs.

*Here she is describing her experiences following the Dead around: "We were mostly decent if slightly wayward kids who, for a variety of reasons, needed to leave the people who had raised us and who, many of us felt, had failed to understand us, and make a family of our own...We drank and danced, bartered bootlegs, got high and hung out, lived in vans and slept in cars under piles of stripy Mexican blankets in need of a good washing; we gave one another scabies and sometimes worse, and sometimes money, and often pot, and really whatever we had, sold trinkets and tofu stew, and for the most part, though not always, looked after one another." (p. 29.) It's vivid writing, but just the thought of getting scabies and sleeping in cars with strangers, oh my lord, it is NOT for me.

**A guy friend in high school once told me that gossiping and eating candy with me made him feel like he was back in fifth grade again, in the best possible way (we had a total joke class called "Media Film" together, we just shared candy and talked through the entire semester while ostensibly watching and critiquing movies). I still think it's one of the nicest things anyone's ever said to me.

Being a woman is complicated.

I laid on the couch last week for quite some time and wondered if I should write about Caitlin Moran's How to Be a Woman here.

No fooling. Now, granted, we are in a run of somewhat craptacular February weather here in Wisconsin, and cabin fever and the blahs have set in in a big way, but normally I do have slightly more exciting things to do than lay around on the couch and think about blogging. But there you have it. You'll see why I was giving this one some thought in just a bit.

Moran's a popular columnist and critic in Great Britain, and I know I saw this book on a number of "buzz books"-type lists last year, so I picked it up. It is exactly what the title proclaims it to be--a very handy guide to womanhood punctuated by stories from Moran's own sometimes funny, mostly cringe-worthy journey to adult womanhood. Most of the early chapters ("I Start Bleeding!" "I Become Furry!" "I Don't Know What to Call My Breasts!") in particular focus on her childhood, being raised in a large, poor family. And I don't mean American 1980s poor, where you grew up without cable. I mean poor, where she had to wear her mother's hand-me-down underwear as a teenager.*

How to Be a Woman
by Caitlin Moran

I started the book not too interested, but somewhere in the middle I started getting a real charge out of it. Perhaps it's because she seems so sensible--she'd like to see some porn where the women are actually enjoying themselves, for a change; it's ridiculous to shave off all of your pubic hair because that's the going style and because men (evidently fed by quantities of hair-free porn? I confess my knowledge of porn is not extensive) demand it; spending tens of thousands of dollars on your wedding and expecting it to be the best day of your life are both ridiculous. These are all thoughts I can get behind, and for the most part, she's funny while making these points, such as this one, about pubic hair waxing:

"I can't believe we've got to a point where it's basically costing us money to have a vagina. They're making us pay for maintenance and upkeep of our lulus, like they're a communal garden. It's a stealth tax. Muff excised. This is money we should be spending on THE ELECTRICITY BILL and CHEESE and BERETS." (p. 46.)

The line directly before that one is "Can you imagine if we asked men to put up with this shit? They'd laugh you out the window before you got halfway through the first sentence." I think she's really on to something there.

She even changed my thoughts a bit on strip clubs. Now, for most of my adult life, I have not been all that bothered by strip clubs. I have largely been of the "maybe it's actually an okay-paying job for some women" persuasion. My only really strong feeling about them has been that men should only be allowed in with five-dollar bills (or better yet, tens or twenties) and no change should be given for anything. But with paragraphs like this Moran might start winning me over to her point of view on them:

"Strip clubs let everyone down. Men and women approach their very worst here. There's no self-expression or joy in these joints--no springboard to self-discovery, or adventure, like any decent night out involving men, women, alcohol, and taking your clothes off. Why do so many people have a gut reaction against strip clubs? Because, inside them, no one's having fun.

Instead, people are expressing needs (to earn money, to see a woman's skin) in pretty much the most depressing way possible...

And the men--oh, are you any gentler or happier? You cannot put your hand on your heart and say--as the music starts up, and she moves toward you--that you have kind feelings toward these women. No man who ever cared for or anted to impress a woman made her stand in front of him and take her knickers off to earn cab fare home...Between 60 and 80 percent of strippers come from a background of sexual abuse. This place is a mess, a horrible mess. Every dance, every private booth, is a small unhappiness, an ugly impoliteness: the bastard child of misogyny and commerce." (pp. 163-164.)

By this point in the book I'm thinking, huh, this woman is actually making a lot of sense. On a lot of topics.

So why did I end up laying on the couch wondering if I had the energy to talk about this book? Well, I skipped ahead to the chapter titled "Abortion." And here's the crux of the matter--and a SPOILER. Read on only if you want to find out what happens in that chapter.

Well, Moran has an abortion, to end an unplanned third pregnancy conceived in her marriage. She's pretty matter of fact about it all, explaining that she just could not take on a third child, and then describing the procedure. She concludes the chapter by saying that, for her, it was an action with only good consequences.

And that's where I hit the ground in this book with a big thud. I can't help it. I am and always will be anti-abortion.** I'm not going to get into the whys and wherefores of this, and I'm not going to say I don't empathize with Moran's feelings. Trust me, I only have the one CRjr and I can UNDERSTAND how one or more kids saps your energy. But still. It's just a deal-breaker for me and it always will be.

So where are we left?

With an overly long blog post, I realize. But I thought, what the hell, what good is a book blog if we can't talk about every aspect of how we react to books? I'm not sorry I read this one. Did the last chapter I read ruin some of my enjoyment of the early chapters, during which I was feeling almost frighteningly simpatico with the author? Well, sure. But I'm going to take this as an important reminder about nonfiction specifically (because the author is often telling you exactly how THEY feel, without filtering it through fiction) and books in general: they are a conversation. They don't always end how you think they will. And a lot of times you will feel the shock of recognition, of love, even, with their authors, but then eventually you'll realize, sadly, that this relationship is not for you. Doesn't make either of you bad people. Doesn't mean I won't meet other people who I think will really enjoy this book, and I will tell them about it in positive terms. But it also doesn't mean I'll feel compelled to read her next book, either.

Sorry to unload all of that on you. Next time I face this dilemma of whether or not to bore you with an overlong post on a book I'm conflicted about, I'll decide against, I promise.

*I realize there are still more heinous scales of poverty, but come on. To most of us, having to wear our mother's worn-out hand-me-down underwear would be more than poor enough for us, thank you.

**You can see why I've always been conflicted about voting. Once a co-worker asked me why I don't vote, and I said, "I'm anti-war and anti-abortion. For whom should I vote?" And she said, "Huh. That IS a tough one."

A little bit of perspective goes a long way.

Always Put in a Recipe and Other Tips for Living from Iowa's Best-Known Homemaker
by Evelyn Birkby

Where I live got more than 18 inches of snow today.

That's right. Just today. Because one of my phobias is driving in snow (and worrying about those I love driving in snow), you can imagine this was a bit upsetting. But a book I'm reading gave me a little perspective.

The book in question is Evelyn Birkby's Always Put in a Recipe and Other Tips for Living from Iowa's Best-Known Homemaker, published by the University of Iowa Press. It's a compilation of newspaper columns written over the past sixty years by Birkby, who is lauded on the cover as "Iowa's best-known homemaker." The columns range in topic from Birkby's marriage to her husband Robert, their years in farming, the raising of their children, their vacations, involvement in boy scouts, and many other subjects. The part that gave me perspective was the chapter in which she discussed living through winters in less-than-cozy homes:

"The small white house was uninsulated, and when the temperature got down to freezing in the winter, frost formed on the inside of the windows...when chill winds blew tenaciously through the walls of the house and up from under the floor boards.

I remember using the playpen to provide a warm place for the children. I put a blanket on the bottom of the pen, which was about four inches above the floor. Then I hung another blanket on three sides. I placed the pen with the fourth side open toward the oil burning stove in the living room -- the only heat source in our house. The children would get inside the playpen to read, color, play with their toys, and stay warm." (p. 66.)

Holy crap. Our sixty-year-old house isn't the warmest thing in the world, but we don't have breezes coming up between the floor boards, for the love of pete.

It's really a pretty interesting book. Birkby is nothing if not upbeat* and the stories range from tragic to mundane to heartwarming. If you know any readers who like "cozier" nonfiction, particularly with a rural bent, they might really enjoy this.**

*For some reason this book tickled me this week--I must have been in the right mood. In real life optimistic and wholesome people who "never say die" tend to make me a bit uneasy.

**Although it's not a perfect book. It would be better if the columns included the date they were first published; sometimes the date can be figured out from the context, but it would be easier if it was just there. I also think it might benefit from an index.

Year of Learning Dangerously

The Year of Learning Dangerously: Adventures in Homeschooling
by Quinn Cummings

Earlier this past summer I was having a hard time finding any nonfiction I wanted to finish. So when I stumbled across Quinn Cummings's homeschooling memoir The Year of Learning Dangerously, I was pleased not only to start it and enjoy it, but to finish it as well.

I found it to be a really fun little book, which didn't set out to be any big manifesto, but rather Cummings's thoughtful consideration of her year spent homeschooling her daughter Alice. Cummings decided to homeschool Alice after her daughter proved too successful at gaming her teachers, convincing them she didn't know how to do long division so they wouldn't then go on to teach her anything harder.

Cummings does offer a brief history of the American homeschooling movement and includes a chapter on the most frequent challenge to homeschoolers (but what about the socialization?). She also spends some time investigating a wide variety of homeschooling methods, including "unschooling."

This is not really a how-to book or even a serious philosophical consideration of homeschooling, but it is a very enjoyable memoir. I really, really enjoyed the author's voice--smart, questioning, funny, but still kind of no-nonsense. This is how she describes a moment at the unschooling convention she attends:

"That morning, one of the speakers had told us that human beings come from one of two places: fear or love. If those were the only sources of human motivation, I knew where I got my mail. But in my case, I swear fear and love are joined at the hip: I love you so deeply that I fear all the possible things that might happen to you." (p.83.)

And her thoughts on the ever-present "socialization" question are the best. In the following paragraph she describes a moment at her daughter's co-ed water-polo game, as she watched all the boys in the pool keep the ball away from the girls:

"All of a sudden someone bellowed, 'That is some seriously sexist shit!' From the number of parents suddenly staring in my direction, I was led to understand the bellower was me. 'Sorry,' I whispered to no one in particular and attempted to shrink under a towel. Alice continued with water polo for another month, but that night marked the beginning of the end. The next time she asked to quit, I let her. Which circles back to the question, 'What about socialization?' I guess the most accurate answer would have to be: Alice is doing quite well. I could use some work." (pp 135-136.)

Good stuff. There's an ever-increasing number of homeschooling memoirs out there, but this one's a keeper.

God bless Rachel Cusk.

I am a big fan of Rachel Cusk.

She's better known as a novelist (although she's somewhat notorious for her earlier memoir on parenting, titled A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother), but I've never read any of her novels. I really, really enjoyed A Life's Work, largely, I'll admit, for its contrarian viewpoint, so when I heard her new book, Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation, was coming out, I was very excited to read it.* I was pumped when it finally came in for me at the library, and as it clocks in at a mere 146 pages, I thought I'd be able to fly through it. This was not the case.

Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation
by Rachel Cusk

The first time I started it, for some reason, I had a very hard time keeping track of what she was saying in the first chapter. The second time I started it, I was in Door County enjoying a very nice mini-vacation with my family and my brother's family, and it just wasn't the right atmosphere in which to read this book. The third time I started it, I found it really interesting, and re-read the first chapter so I made sure to get it all. And the fourth time I started it (starting with the second chapter), I couldn't put it down, and I made CRjr look at his own books for a while in the afternoon so I could keep reading it ("Mom's reading her book, why don't you just look at the pictures in your animal book? Please?" Child neglect, thy name is CR.)

There's no way for this not to be a sad memoir. It is about the breaking up of a marriage, with all that entails: fights and disagreements and the destruction of shared history with one's ex; worries about the children and how they are taking the new living situations; the messiness of trying to move forward with new and different relationships. It is, unfortunately, not a great book. (And here's two reviews explaining why it is not, better than I ever could.)

But to me Rachel Cusk is never strongest in the aggregate. I love her for the brief shining moments of insight, the lines she gets totally right. These are a few of them:

"To act as a mother, I had to suspend my own character, which had evolved on a diet of male values...I was aware, in those early days, that my behaviour was strange to the people who knew me well. It was as though I had been brainwashed, taken over by a cult religion. I had gone away--I couldn't be reached on the usual number. And yet this cult, motherhood, was not a place where I could actually live. It reflected nothing about me: its literature and practices, its values, its codes of conduct, its aesthetic were not mine. It was generic too: like any cult, it demanded a complete surrender of identity to belong to it. So for a while I didn't belong anywhere." (p. 19.) This is in the opening chapter on the early days of marriage and parenthood and the sorting out of roles, with a discussion of her childhood adoption of her father's ways and more "male" values of seeking individual success and financial security.

"Pain is strong and huge and relentless, and 'normality'--that was the word he used, wasn't it?--normality is the fine balance life achieves in the absence of disruption, is the blank register of events and their aftermath, slowly re-stitching and reparing itself after a pebble has been thrown in. Normality is capable of resisting nothing and can outlive almost anything." (p. 31.) This is perhaps the clearest description of pain and the absence of pain that I've ever read.

"Later, at the train station before she leaves, my sister says to me: you have to learn to hide what you feel from the children. They will feel what they think you feel. They are only reflections of you.

I don't believe that, I say." (p. 72.) I don't know how I feel about this. I'd like to discuss it in a book group or something, actually.

So there you have it. A disjointed review of a book I found to be somewhat disjointed. It may have been hard to understand in bits; it may not have divulged as much actual information about why a marriage ends as I might have wished; and at the end of the day Cusk is not the sort of author I wish I could call up and ask some questions. But I'm still not sorry I read it. Not at all.

*Although I was not happy to hear she was having marital troubles. No fun for spouses, and definitely no fun for the kids.

Gotta love a guy who sucks at girls.

I haven't found a whole lot of good humor or "light" books this past summer or fall. As previously noted, I blame the election. (For everything, not just a boring nonfiction publishing cycle.) But one book I did read and enjoy last month was Justin Halpern's short and funny memoir I Suck At Girls.

I Suck at Girls
by Justin Halpern

You may know Halpern better as the author of the Twitter feed (and book, and short-lived TV show, starring William Shatner) Sh*t My Dad Says. I still don't understand Twitter (and never will, it's starting to look like), and I didn't think that book was all that funny. So I wasn't expecting much from this one.*

It's a short memoir in vignettes, of Halpern's completely addled attempts at connecting with girls. He opens the book with describing his first crush, in the second grade, on a little girl named Kerry. How did he express his devotion? He drew a picture of her, and then drew a yellow dog in the air above her, taking a poop on her head, and for his big finish, drew in a thought bubble that showed her with the thought bubble "I like it."**

And things only went downhill from there for Halpern in the girl department. You'll just have to read the book to find out how (although there's some upbeat stories as well).

If you have read and enjoyed Halpern's first book, rest assured there's lots more sh*t his dad says in this one, too. In fact, my favorite parts of the book pretty much all involved his father. Consider this little exchange, when Halpern is describing how, when he was little, he woke up early in the morning after a scary dream, went to the kitchen for a drink, and was frightened by his father, who was also up:

"I shrieked like a frightened monkey and jumped back, crashing into the bookcase behind me. As my eyes adjusted I realized that the shadow was my dad, sitting in total darkness in the La-Z-Boy chair that faced the windows to our backyard.

'Jesus H. Christ. Calm down, son. What the hell is wrong with you?'

'I had a freaky dream,' I said, trying to catch my breath. 'What are you doing?'

'I'm sitting in the dark drinking a hot toddy. What the hell does it look like?'

'Why are you doing that right now? It's the middle of the night.'

'Well, contrary to popular fucking belief, I enjoy a little time to myself, so I wake up early so I can have it. Clearly I'm going to have to start waking up earlier." (p. 33.)

I enjoyed that a lot. And oh yeah, be warned: there's swearing in the book (quite a lot of it, whenever Halpern's dad is around), in case you don't care for that kind of thing.

*Low expectations: always the secret to happiness!

**This vignette was one of the more amusing, with Halpern's parents getting called into school to discuss this incident and his father, a very practical doctor, being more worried about the "basic physics" tenets Halpern was ignoring by drawing the dog floating in midair over Kerry.

Fifty shades of filthy (but genuinely arousing).*

Oh, oh, oh, I almost forgot! How could I forget?

I read the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy over the summer. For those of you who have not heard of this phenomenon, Fifty Shades of Grey is the first book in a trilogy that has singled-handedly made the "BDSM erotic" subgenre the latest hot, hot, hot publishing category. The author of the books, E.L. James, is a British woman who is now quite wealthy (and good on her, I say).

Fifty Shades of Grey (Fifty Shades Trilogy #1)
by E. L. James

These books started life as Twilight fan fiction, but James reworked the story, making her set of lovers slightly older than the Twilight protagonists and by taking out the vampire stuff. So what you're left with is a woman in her early twenties, Anastasia Steele, and the slightly older, mysterious, and handsome millionaire Christian Grey, who, it turns out, has some serious issues stemming from his hard-knock childhood (being raised by his crack-whore mother--his phrase, not mine--and her pimp). When not making millions and looking hot, Christian busies himself looking for "submissives"--partners who will indulge him in his BDSM (BDSM stands for bondage/discipline, dominance/submission, and masochism) lifestyle and needs.

A complete plot synopsis can be had elsewhere, but of course I couldn't read these books and not comment on them. I'll say this: there's naughty bits about every two pages, so you don't have to bother with a lot of plot, if that's what you like in your erotica. The other hilarious thing about these books is how they are COMPLETE fantasy, and I emphatically don't mean the naughty bits. Throughout the three books, Ana and Christian do very little besides make out, worry about if they've upset the other person (mainly Ana worrying about upsetting Christian, which does get a little old), drive, fly, and otherwise travel around; buy and wear expensive clothes to a variety of fabulous functions; and oh yeah, every now and then meet up with friends for wine (again, this is Ana). Periodically Ana goes to her job at a publishing house (and I do mean periodically--it takes time to be the girlfriend of a millionaire who wants you to be submissive, after all), where she starts out as some sort of assistant to an editor and (SPOILER ALERT) eventually ends up running the company.** 

Christian also takes care of making sure Ana eats (she tends not to when she's stressed), buys her closets full of clothes, and has a doctor that makes house calls for her to get her birth control shots (oh, and he also has a lovely housekeeper/cook who waits on her as well). Like I said: complete and utter fantasy. I know at least partly why women are loving these books, and it's not all the sexy bits. Who doesn't fantasize about having all the demands of real life (work, housework, family bullshit, doctor visits, etc.) effortlessly met? All WHILE having a lot of mind-blowing sex?

I really, really, REALLY enjoyed the books. But, I'll admit, more for the good laugh than for the titillation. And if you want to continue your good time, ask every woman you know if they've read these books. I spent all summer asking this question...and every woman I met had! It's unbelievable. And all a lot of fun. (For the best time of all, watch the 3 Grannies review on YouTube. It is emphatically not suitable for work, but it is hilarious, and one of the grannies refers to women in their 30s as "young women," which made me very happy.)

*And this is a line from The Simpsons, when an old lady who employs Bart for housework tells him not to interrupt her while she's "watching her stories." As she settles in to watch her soaps in her rocking chair, she says, "Filthy...but genuinely arousing!"

**Now that's the kind of job I need! Show up a few hours a week, and then be put in charge.

Catching up: Shirley Jackson, part 2.

The beginning of the summer found me blown away by Shirley Jackson.

As noted here yesterday, Jackson is perhaps best known for her short story "The Lottery." I've read that, and although I remember liking it okay back in high school, I couldn't remember much about it. But when I found Jackson's humorous collection of vignettes about raising her kids, Life Among the Savages, I became completely fascinated by her. So much so that I checked out the only biography I could find about her, Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson, by Judy Oppenheimer (published in 1989).

Reading that biography was quite a trip, I'll tell you. Jackson was an interesting personality from the start, but I thought the story really took off when it examined both her writing life and her marriage. She married a man she met in college, who was a literary critic, and taught at Bennington College in Vermont (near which they lived). In addition to having and looking after their four kids, and still writing prolifically herself, she also had to look after her very needy husband Stanley.* I forget the details now, but the book is full of ridiculous stories like Shirley having to stop whatever she was doing in the house and run to sharpen Stanley's pencils whenever he needed.

It's also a trip reading a biography from 1989. Is it really so long ago? It got the job done, and I can't rightly remember what took me by surprise about the book, but the author seemed to offer a great deal of conjecture and amateur psychoanalysis of her subject. Biographies I've read in recent years seem to be a lot better, leading me to believe perhaps we are in a golden age for biography? Anyone else have an opinion on this?

In addition to simply being fascinated by Jackson, I'll never forget the experience of reading this biography. I read it when I was having a slight health blip, and one day when I was feeling particularly lousy, Mr. CR took CRjr to the park for me and for an hour or so I just lazed about in bed, reading about Shirley Jackson and eating a Hershey bar (my condition was not one that precluded me from having chocolate, mercifully). For whatever reason, the whole experience made me feel very warmly about Shirley Jackson. Interesting how people think reading is entirely passive, and yet many of my very strong and visceral physical memories include books and reading. Do you find this to be true as well?

*She lived intensely, but she didn't live long, the poor thing: she died in 1965 at age 48.

Bringing up Bebe

Sorry: a quick administrative note. I'm getting hit with all sorts of stupid automated comments that are somehow making it through the spam filter, so I've had to enable comment moderation for the time being. Hopefully when these comments dry up I'll be able to take that back off. In the meantime, please comment away and I'll moderate and add your comments as soon as I can!

In honor of Mother's Day coming up, I think I'll just post about parenting books all week. The last one I read was one that's getting lots of press-- Pamela Druckerman's Bringing Up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting. (I originally got it from the library because I saw the author on the Today show, actually wearing a beret, which seemed so ridiculous it almost made me like her.)

Druckerman relates the tale of her whirlwind romance and marriage, and how she eventually found herself in Paris, raising a baby girl (and later, twin boys). Her account is chronological: the account of her love affair, the experience of giving birth in France, breastfeeding, getting her baby to sleep through the night, and so on. Along the way she describes how the French method of child-rearing differs from the American; for example, most French women don't breastfeed, but yet they manage to get their babies to sleep through the night much earlier than American parents. Of course French parents pay much more attention to the food their children eat, and they also tend to send their children to daycares (state-funded, mind you) much earlier, and to try and instill more independence in them. Druckerman also noted that children in France seem much more self-sufficient and well-behaved, meaning that French parents can all get together, along with their kids, and still maintain an adult conversation at the same time.

It's not nearly as annoying a book as you might think; it's actually quite interesting in parts. (I was particularly blown away that French mothers receive both abdominal/core and pelvic rehabilitation therapy services after birth--now THAT's a good idea. Or you could, as my oh-so-helpful OB/GYN suggested, "just do some crunches." Thanks for all the high-level tips, doc.) But the fact of the matter is, as my sister would say, you raise your kids like the parents around you do. I can just see if you tried to give up breastfeeding in America, or have coffee* with other mothers and chat with them about adult things rather than all of you just following your toddlers around and attempting to teach them how to share with each other.

I read the whole thing, and it was okay. But unless I move to Paris (and the attention Druckerman says everyone pays to their appearance in Paris pretty much assures me I will never bother to visit Paris, much less live there) there wasn't much for me to learn or use here.

Reviews: New York Times; NPR

*Or have coffee at all, when you're pregnant or breastfeeding. You monster!

A less than titillating travel read.

I was underwhelmed by Denis Lipman's A Yank Back to England: The Prodigal Tourist Returns.

Mr. CR, continuing his surprising trend of reading some of the same nonfiction that I am, concurred in this evaluation.

Lipman, originally from England, weaves a tale of several years' worth of visits back to his home country to visit his parents (with his wife and daughter in tow). He's the son of two Cockney East-Enders who are getting on in years, which makes for some generational (and cultural) tensions between them and Lipman's new family.

In addition to visiting his parents, Lipman also details their week-long stays in a variety of lodgings and cottages, and the day trips they take to various small towns, churches, and other off-the-beaten-trail attractions in (primarily) the southern part of England.

The trips frequently start in Lipman's hometown of Dagenham, a suburb of east London, where he starts be describing his parents' place: "In the States, where cold and hot water come gently together, mixing is not required. In my parents' house, the hot water faucet spat liquid that could produce third degree burns on contact. By contrast, the cold faucet pumped out ice water that could congeal a slashed artery in a matter of seconds. The only way to survive the plumbing was to mix...Probably another reason why the English are innately patient at supermarket checkouts, long suffering when waiting for hospital appointments, and very good at waiting for buses. Our Job-like forbearance is tested from the moment we wake up. The English who do not possess this kind of fortitude, like me, tend to emigrate." (p. 6.)

I know. I should have chosen a quote where he's describing some of the places they visit to give you a feel for his writing. But honestly? I didn't bookmark anything and I couldn't find anything that stood out when I flipped back through the book. They do travel through a lot of places you might not read about in more urban travelogues or guides: Chartwell, Aldeburgh, Barking, Rattlesden, Lavenham, Saffron Walden, Woolpit, Romney Marsh, Rye, etc. But none of it seemed all that interesting or well-written, and I mainly stuck with it because, of course, I am constitutionally unable to put down books about Great Britain. But for your less dedicated Anglophile reader? Meh.

Fiction interlude: John Green

I am sneezing all over the place today, and I am blaming John Green for it.

Did he give me the cold? Of course not. Was he responsible for me staying up way too late last week reading his new book The Fault in Our Stars?* Why, yes, as the author, he was. So because I didn't get enough sleep, my immune system was compromised, and now I have the mother of all colds.**

Luckily, Green's latest novel is about two teenagers who have cancer, so I'll say this: it puts my case of the sniffles in perspective. I won't bother with a plot synopsis; as with a lot of fiction (with the exception of thrillers and mysteries) the plot really isn't the point here. What is the point is that John Green can write a book about two teenagers with cancer who fall in love (even though one of them fights it) that somehow isn't a) melodramatic dreck, a la Jodi Picoult***, and b) makes you cry but then ends up leaving you feel somehow more hopeful than sad.

Is it is characters? Are they so intelligent, so imperfect and yet so charming, that you feel better just thinking that somewhere, somehow, teenagers who are this interesting and well-read (although preferably not suffering from cancer) really do exist? Or is it his prose?

"The only redeeming facet of Support Group was this kid named Isaac, a long-faced, skinny guy with straight blond hair swept over one eye.

And his eyes were the problem. He had some fantastically improbable eye cancer. One eye had been cut out when he was a kid, and now he wore the kind of thick glasses that made his eyes (both the real one and the glass one) preternaturally huge, like his whole head was basically just this fake eye and this real eye staring at you. From what I could gather on the rare occasions when Isaac shared with the group, a recurrence had placed his remaining eye in peril.

Isaac and I communicated almost exclusively through sighs. Each time someone discussed anticancer diets or snorting ground-up shark fin or whatever, he'd glance over at me and sigh ever so slightly. I'd shake my head microscopically and exhale in response." (p. 6.)

There's nothing fancy there but man, does it flow. It flows like that for 300 pages, so easy and pleasurable to read that you feel it would be almost churlish to stop. So you don't.

I really liked it. And it did leave me wondering, are there smart, kind, well-read teenagers still out there? Preferably ones without cancer? I wasn't able to find a whole lot of them when I WAS a teenager (although I did find a few, bless them) so it makes me wonder.

*Although in all fairness, I was really up because CRjr had a cold, and once I heard his congested breathing it got me worrying about fevers, influenza, etc. So I was really just kind of glad to have the Green book to at least give me something to do while I couldn't sleep.

**I'm fine. It's actually a very run-of-the-mill cold. I'm just being the mother of all babies about it.

***This book includes a jacket blurb from Jodi Picoult, which annoys me, but I suppose they're trying for adult women readers, even though the book is marketed as YA.

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.

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.

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.)