Thank God; I was worried I was starting to like everything.
24 February 2014
It has been a very good year for me, fiction- and nonfiction-wise. By which I mean I have been enjoying reading almost everything I have brought home (although some titles do get home and back from the library without me having read a page of them; you just run out of time). I was starting to worry, in fact, that I was becoming some sort of easygoing, non-judgmental, easy-to-please reader.
And then I started the book Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm.
I only got about 45 pages into this one, so no, I probably didn't give it a real fair test, but I am done reading it. It's a woman's memoir of going through a divorce, amicably share custody of her three sons with her ex, and trying to keep a farm running through all of it. To be even more fair, I should point out that I really had no reason to expect this book to appeal to me: I only got OFF a farm when I was eighteen, and I never, ever want to go back, and I don't even want to think about divorce and trying to raise children separately (it's exhausting to try and do it together, after all).
Why did I check this book out? Well, when I read Emily Matchar's Homeward Bound, she listed a bunch of "back to the farm"/homemaker memoirs, and this was among them; I don't read a lot of these types of memoirs, but for some reason I thought I would give one a try. It quickly became apparent, however, that this was not going to be a memoir for me:
"They're all mine now, and this is how I will raise my boys: on cheerful summer days and well water and BB guns and horseback riding and dirt. Because I'm claiming our whole country life, the one I've been dreaming of and planning out and working for since I was a little girl.
Last night the full moon hung low and close, like a glistening teardrop on the earth's dark eye, threatening to spill. It didn't, though, and neither did I. A month is a bill cycle, a mortgage cycle, and may become a child-support cycle, but a month is also a moon phase and a growing phase. Our financial lives, our emotional lives, and our cosmic lives are irrevocably intertwined." (p. 13.)
Yeah, cosmic lives. When I start seeing phrases like "cosmic lives," I'm pretty much done with a book.