Before anything else, both of these authors have tremendous passion for the work. Though Emezi’s memoir ranges widely through years of their life and numerous places they’ve lived, the constant in good years and bad is their (sometimes single-minded) commitment to their art:

People can say a lot about me, but everyone knows the work is my beginning. I work myself like it’s a madness and maybe it is. It’s how I world-bend: it is my hammer, my heated metal, my anvil, my forge, my weapon.

(And yes, as you can see, Emezi’s writing continues to be truly gorgeous.)

In an early chapter of Dear Senthuran, Emezi says that they are going to describe the spell they have cast to achieve the success they’ve achieved. The spell is to believe in themself and keep doing the work, and when they achieve one of their dreams, they set a new dream and work like hell to achieve it. They make full use of the flexibility of the word “work”: “work” as an action verb for the effort and drive they put into creation; “work” as a noun that describes the product of their creativity; “the work” to encompass both.

Prescod-Weinstein similarly radiates her love for the work that she does. I have to admit that I…. had a harder time understanding some of what she was talking about (extremely science) versus what Emezi is talking about (litrature and mental illness and relationships). Surprise! I do not 1000% understand theoretical cosmology and astrophysics. Who knew! The first half of The Disordered Cosmos covers Prescod-Weinstein’s work and the questions she’s trying to answer, and they are about ten miles above my head. I read this portion of the book feeling more like I was weaving a brand new net than capturing knowledge in a pre-existing net.

But! What’s very clear, both in the early parts of the book where Prescod-Weinstein is talking about science, and in the second half where she’s talking about the profession, is how much Prescod-Weinstein loves her field. Even when I didn’t understand the science, her devotion to and enthusiasm about it shone through every word.

I still like math and the potential it holds to help us craft a compelling cosmological tale. I still think the times table is a miraculous thing, thirty years after I first learned it. I still love that we can use math to understand and describe the history of the universe itself. And I want little children of every shade, gender identity, sex identity, ethnicity, sexual orientation, romantic orientation, (dis)ability, and religion to have access to that cosmos, to have fun with it, to find joy in it…. Access to a dark night sky — to see and be inspired by the universe as it really is — should be a human right, not a luxury for the chosen few.

Perhaps in part by virtue of being marginalized in their chosen fields, Emezi and Prescod-Weinstein are both keenly aware of the importance of different modes of knowing. For Emezi, this centers very much on their physical body and spiritual essence. They identify as ọgbanje, a kind of Igbo trickster spirit that is born into the body of a human child. They feel particularly close to the world of spirits and gods; at times closer, it seems, to that world than to our physical world, where they are read through lenses that do not pertain to them. At times this way of knowing themself can lead to an instrumentalizing view of other people that I found hard to read, in part because I often struggle with the genre of memoir and the way it (perhaps necessarily; certainly often) transforms the people in the writer’s life into side characters in the writer’s story, rather than full protagonists of their own. For instance, in a story they tell about traveling home and being taken to the shrine of the deity Ala:

Back at my human father’s clinic, the pastor exulted over how the day had gone. “God opened the way for us,” he said. “We encountered no problems! I am sure that our purpose was to speak about Jesus to that woman.” I remember marveling at his vision of the story. These four men — my father, the red neighbor, the pastor, the contact — they had all been moved by my deitymother, pawns in a mission they were completely unaware of, thinking they were serving their God when really they were carrying out Ala’s will. The contact had kicked up a fuss when it was time to pay him, emphasizing over and over again that he wouldn’t usually do anything like this, he was a Christian, he didn’t like these fetish things.

I thought, What else could my mother do for me if I asked? Who else could she move, so smoothly that they would have no idea they were even being used?

A theme throughout The Disordered Cosmos is the validity of traditional and indigenous forms of knowledge, which Prescod-Weinstein asserts ferociously from within a field that resists any kind of knowing that doesn’t come through white Western male intellectual history. She uses the example of the Native Hawaiians who have, for years, resisted observatories that have been placed on Mauna Kea, without regard for the indigenous traditions that hold that land sacred. When she was offered an opportunity at a year-long job at Mauna Kea that would have positioned her to get into a good PhD program, counterbalancing her mediocre grades that came as a result of the structural challenges faced by many marginalized folks at universities, Prescod-Weinstein turned it down in solidarity with the Native Hawaiian protestors. Her recognition that other modes of knowing than her own are valid–indeed vital!–and her pursuit of that truth at the expense of her career prospects are examples I hope to always carry with me and aspire to.

Regrettably, trauma has played all too large a role in the lives of both these authors. Prescod-Weinstein speaks with eloquent rage about her own rape by a more senior person in her field, and the lasting damage that experience has wrought on her career and her psyche.

I want to have the power to eject this memory: to force it far, far away from me. By that I mean I would like to have the power to eject this memory into the nuclear inferno that is our sun. The sun is, effectively, a series of nuclear explosions, mostly converting hydrogen into helium. Better this memory blow up inside the sun than inside of me. But this memory is written on my body so instead I have to trace the lines of force that are available to me. I look to see what work is possible. For years, I had nightlong knife fights where I was the only person present.

Emezi is often oblique about their trauma, but they are explicit about its impacts: dysphoria, chronic pain, recurring suicidal ideation. Dear Senthuran is grandiose at times, and at other times it speaks of so much pain that it is very nearly self-annihilating. But it’s clear that Emezi is claiming the space to be grandiose in ways that have rarely been tolerated by people like them–Black, trans, immigrant–though white straight men are given all the latitude in the world to self-mythologize.

In the dark of night, my demons don’t tell me I’m worthless. They tell me I am too powerful, that no one will ever want me for it, that I don’t deserve love or happy endings because I chose too much, I ate too much of the world, I refused to starve and as punishment, I will be starved.

Dear Senthuran (I keep writing Death Senthuran, which feels apt) and The Disordered Cosmos remind the reading public (I hope) of the fact that society’s exclusionary structures come at a cost: the cost of people who did not, like Emezi and Prescod-Weinstein, have the luck and the wherewithal to keep working and writing in their fields. The cost is disproportionately borne by those for whom the system was not made, but in the end, everyone within the system is the poorer for it.

The post It’s the Wanting to Know That Makes Us Matter appeared first on Reading the End.

I expected Sounds Like Titanic to feel weird-culty-religion-ish, not just because I wanted to preserve my rule, but because I love to read about bizarre personalities and the people in their orbit that they manage to convince their behavior is normal. Hindman is doing something different, however. Sounds Like Titanic is not about the eccentricity of the Composer, who actually is — weirdly normal? Apart from the ongoing fraud he perpetrates at a wide range of shopping malls, plazas, and concert venues across America?

Instead, Hindman has come to talk about artifice. As a native of Appalachia, she is unprepared for the financial realities of the Ivy League school she attends. Not only does she not have the money to pay her tuition, resulting in her selling dozens of her eggs, but she has never before come into contact with the genre of rich people who attend Columbia.

Let us now speak of the children of the American suburbs, a group with its own culture and subcultures, a species as foreign to you as wild chimpanzees, their hometown neighborhoods so stratified and gated and segregated that the kids who lived in million-dollars houses rarely mingled with the kids who lived in $800,000 houses.

She’s exploring the nature of reality in ways that I find particularly fascinating. What is wealth? What is a girl? What is a talented violinist? The thing that seems true in one context twists away from truth in another. Yes, they are really playing the music at these concerts, albeit in front of microphones that are turned off, and drowned out by the CD that’s playing behind them. Yes, she is very talented at the violin in her Appalachian home. Yes, her family is comfortably off. Yes, she’s a girl.

For the most enraging aspect of life in the body isn’t that you aren’t skinny or sexy enough, it’s that life in the body causes you to be dismissed as silly and shallow and stupid in a way that boys who are equally silly and shallow and stupid are not. Playing classical music on the violin provides a corrective: The violin is serious. Classical music is serious. An understanding of classical music — something adults say they wish they knew more about but don’t — gives a girl weight in a world that wants her to be weightless, gives her substance in a culture that asks her to be insubstantial. And this, it turns out, is the reeyell gift: It is almost as if, by attaching a violin to your body, you can become a dude.

If I was a scootch disappointed not to get more antics from the Composer — this is not really an antics book, it turns out — I was wonderfully surprised by the slippery complexity of Hindman’s prose and thinking. Sounds Like Titanic made me reconsider memoir, in the best ways.

Note: I received an electronic copy of this book for review from the publisher. This has not impacted the contents of my review.

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“Mines are hidden in cake tins and biscuit tins.” He showed us. The tins were bright and promising, with pictures of roses painted on their sides, or small children with rosy cheeks  in old-fashioned winter clothes running behind snow-covered trees, or butter-soft shortbread with cherry-heart centers. “Would any of you open this tin?”

A few of us raised our hands eagerly.

“Children like you open the tins and get blown to pieces.”

We greedy, stupid few quickly sat on our hands again.

Damn this book is good. Alexandra Fuller writes about growing up as the daughter of a white farming family in what was then Rhodesia, in the midst of the political upheaval that would lead country after country in the former British Empire to fight for and declare their independence. Her childhood is marked by personal upheavals as well: the family moves from place to place as circumstances dictate, three of her siblings die in infancy (one — her beloved and prayed-for sister Olivia — drowns in a duck pond when little Alexandra was supposed to be watching her), and her mother is deeply depressed and frequently drunk. Actually they are all frequently drunk, including Alexandra and her sister.

Memoirs that don’t feel the need to editorialize = winners. Here is an incomplete list of things that Alexandra Fuller discusses in Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight but does not feel the need to editorialize about:

• The casual racism of her parents, sister, and younger self (“We fought to keep one country in Africa white-run,” says her mother to a guest, “just one country.”)
• Her own and her sister’s sexual assault by family friends (“Vanessa tried to tell Mum and Dad what had happened and they said ‘Don’t exaggerate'”)
• Her mother’s not-uncommon breakdowns, the result of long-undiagnosed bipolar disorder (“Mum is swaying and singing. She has put the record back on from the beginning. It’s the background music to her nervous breakdown. Dad serves up the food. He says, ‘Sit up straight. Mouth closed when you chew.'”)
• The training she receives in weapons handling (“Vanessa and I, like all the kids over the age of five in our valley, have to learn how to load an FN rifle magazine, strip and clean all the guns in our house, and, ultimately, shoot-to-kill”) and emergency medicine (“I know how to find a vein and administer a drip, but I am only allowed to do this if All the Grown-ups Are Dead”)
• The violent deaths, violent regime changes, and violent wars that punctuate her childhood but do not discourage her family from living in Africa (“We cheer when we hear the faint, stomach-echoing thump of a mine detonating. Either an African or a baboon has been wounded or killed.”)

All of this is appalling to various degrees (apart from the weapons and medicine training; that is just sensible), but Fuller is perfectly matter-of-fact about it. I appreciate that. I do not need her to take a tone of pearl-clutching dismay when she talks about her past self’s unquestioned racism, or the wars her family were constantly trying to keep at the edges of. I can clutch my own pearls, thank you.

I did clutch my pearls a bit about Fuller’s hair-raising portrayal of her family life. Was this signed off on by all parties? I’m not so concerned about her parents, but I would like to be reassured that Vanessa signed off on Fuller’s public recounting of the time Vanessa was sexually assaulted by a baby-sitter.

If all this has made Don’t Let’s Go the Dogs Tonight sound unspeakably grim, it’s my failure, not Fuller’s. Her gift is to tell the worst of her stories in a tone that’s humorous without being flip, unsurprised without being cynical, heart-breaking without being self-pitying. Just a really, really, really good book. I couldn’t have been more crazy about the writing. I’m excited to pick up Fuller’s other memoirish book, Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness, which is about her mother.

(Y’all, I am on a roll. My last four books have all been four-star reads. Do you think my next five will all be five stars? That would be a lovely treat for me, wouldn’t it?)

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(Yes, I like spreadsheets. Sue me.)

Anyway, Marbles, by Ellen Forney (affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository), was the very first book added to my new TBR spreadsheet, and I have already read it, although it is only February. I feel like such an efficient reader now! I may make a habit of it. Maybe once a month, I’ll make it that I have to fish or cut bait on the oldest book currently sitting on my TBR spreadsheet. That could be a good way of keeping things currentish while also giving myself a joyous feeling of accomplishment.

Marbles is a memoir of Ellen Forney’s diagnosis with bipolar disorder and her subsequent struggles to understand and manage it. Ana recommended it in a comics round-up post last year, and what caught my eye in the review was this:

Part of me was afraid Marbles was going to be yet another exercise in romanticising mental health issues in the name of ~art~. … But as it turns out, Marbles is very much an exploration of all the reasons why this idea is uncomfortable, and that was what made it such an interesting read for me.

Hooray! Like Ana, I’m unhappy with the notion of Art and Madness They Be Linked — or, more specifically, I’m unhappy with the notion that Sylvia Plath would never have produced such brilliant work if she’d been on Xanax. (Sylvia Plath is here synecdoche for all mentally ill artists in the history of ever.) Forney wonderfully takes on these ideas from all sides in Marbles. When she’s first diagnosed, part of her feels proud: She is a crazy artist! They didn’t have medication and why should she? And part of her feels confident: Manic Ellen can organize everything to make life easy for Future Depressed Ellen.

(I sympathize with that so much! I am always trying to do things that will help out Future Jenny. It’s impossible to know what Future Jenny will have on her plate, you know? Best to take care of it now. I paid $50 into my 2014 taxes when I paid my 2013 taxes. Oh, also, I have already filed my taxes BOOM I am the responsiblest of citizens.)

But when she hits a depressive episode, she finds that it is far less manageable than she expected/remembered. (“My head was a cage of frantic rats” is an experience from my life.) So she dives into the fun and exciting world of psychotropic pharmaceuticals. I loved Forney for discussing the ups and downs of medicating with such honesty and humor: She acknowledges that life on the meds is difficult, but life off of them was becoming impossible. Taking them isn’t a perfect fix. There are side effects, which require additional medications; some meds work badly for her, and some don’t work at all. It’s a frustrating, messy, exhausting struggle to finally reach a balance that works.

Though Forney talks a lot about art and madness, she wonderfully doesn’t draw any broad conclusions, concluding instead that there aren’t broad conclusions to draw. For all her early fears that medication would destroy her creativity, she ultimately realizes that achieving balance with her bipolar disorder enables her to continue being creative. She knows this is true of her, not of everybody, and takes pains to say that different creative people respond differently to mental illness and differently to treatment.

So I liked that. I like it when someone is willing to look at a hard question and give the (potentially) unsatisfying answer, It depends.

I also wanted to mention something else about the diagnosis scene that interested me. Forney’s therapist takes out the DSM-IV and reads through the symptoms of bipolar disorder. Forney recognizes herself in every single one of them, and she thinks this:

My own brilliant, unique personality was neatly outlined right there, in that inanimate stack of paper. My personality reflected a disorder, shared by a group of people.

I was very struck by that. I’ve struggled with depression since high school, and when I’m on a downswing, it helps to read the DSM-IV’s list of symptoms, or take the Beck Depression Inventory. It frames all the things I hate about myself as a disease, not something intrinsic to me; it must be terribly sad and difficult to feel that everything you like about yourself is really just your disease.

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Nasreen was a student in a creative writing course Lasdun taught, and they corresponded by email for some time after. Nasreen’s emails became increasingly frequent and obsessive, and at length, abusive. She gradually escalated her behavior from sending abusive emails to Lasdun to sending abusive emails about him to his professional contacts: his agent, his publisher, universities with which he was or had been affiliated, etc. Though Lasdun went to the police and even to the FBI to try and get her to stop, nobody was able to help.

As sometimes happens, writing notes for this review led to my talking myself out of the book. Lasdun spends about half the book discussing the events, and the other half trying to find a context for them. This is okay when he sticks to literary context — he is, after all, a literature guy — but becomes dramatically less interesting when he tries to relate Nasreen and her behavior to his travels in Israel/Palestine.

Because really what draws you about this sort of story is the mechanics of the outlandish: Here occurs an improbable event X, and now what is it like, what are its practical effects? It’s like becoming obsessed with her back even though you don’t want to be; it’s like finding yourself a boring conversationalist because all you can think and talk about is this insane behavior that you didn’t ask for and can’t escape from. Give Me Everything You Have is at its best when Lasdun sticks to this.

Here is what I truly cannot understand about Lasdun’s attempts to contextualize Nasreen: He doesn’t read about stalkers. Or if he does, and if he finds out anything interesting, he does not relay it to the reader. He tries to understand Nasreen by looking at the conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians, but he does not try to understand her by looking at research into other people who do the exact thing Nasreen is currently doing. Or perhaps he did try to understand her this way and found it not applicable to his own situation and so did not write about it?

Obviously it is not down to me to tell Lasdun what sort of book to write, what sort of response to have to his stalker. He does not have to read research about stalkers if he doesn’t want to. But for all of his woe and self-recrimination, there is an unpleasant odor of indignation and injured dignity and that couldn’t (surely) (right? you would think?) survive the reading of a couple of papers about how stalkers behave and why and how they escalate. Lasdun is aware of his privileged position in relation to Nasreen, and says so, but it’s not at all clear that he’s aware of how privileged he is in relation to the great majority of victims of stalking, and the book suffers from the missing context.

Cover report: Variations on a theme, and the British cover does it better.

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Cover report: Same cover in England and America. I like it!

To begin with the good things about The Imposter’s Daughter (affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository): It’s a fascinating portrayal of the way Sandell’s father’s dishonesty permeated her life. As a little girl, Sandell is told that she’s her father’s favorite, and you can see that she’s subconsciously fighting hard to hang onto that designation. She sits at his feet and listens to his stories, always trying to get him to keep talking–a habit that serves her well when she gets a job as a celebrity interviewer. But as happy as little Laurie’s relationship with her father appears to be, her cartoons from the time (reproduced in the book) make it obvious that she knew more than she knew she knew.

Sandell is funny and insightful, and she doesn’t spare herself any more than she spares her father. Her years of listening to crazy stories from her father have given her a wonderful taste for the absurd, and it comes out in the writing and the art.

She also addresses head-on the concern that I always bring up when I’m reviewing family memoirs, which is her family’s response to what she’s doing. Prior to writing this book, Sandell published an anonymous article that discussed her father’s insane lies and the effect they had on her. Her father was predictably outraged, cutting off contact with Sandell, and her mother and sisters were angry too. Rather than engaging with Sandell about what she had found out, they clearly wished that she would just stop talking about it. Sandell includes these reactions in The Imposter’s Daughter, which didn’t alleviate my discomfort with the Family Memoir as a genre (it’s not alleviate-able — Family Memoirs are an uncomfortable genre), but at least acknowledged the inevitability of its presence. I couldn’t help wondering what a piece of life writing by Sandell’s mother or sisters would look like: How do they tell their father’s story to themselves? Or do they steer clear of it in their minds, as Sandell seems to think?

For all the positives, though, The Imposter’s Daughter ends up feeling more like a therapy session than like a story that needed to be told. Jennifer Finney Boylan, whose book She’s Not There I am going to read and review later this month (I hope), was born to write stories; she can take four disparate events in her life and weave them into something that feels like a narrative. Sandell doesn’t have the same gift. There is urgency in The Imposter’s Daughter: you can see that it is important that Sandell have some medium to insist upon her own reality when her whole life has been predicated on this other, not-real reality. But that insistence isn’t the story Sandell spends most of her time on, and the book suffers for it.

The post Review: The Imposter’s Daughter, Laurie Sandell appeared first on Reading the End.

I dunno.  My feelings were mixed.  I liked reading about Streatfeild’s becoming a writer.  At first when she decided to settle down and write for a living, she was always getting calls and dashing off to meet friends and do jolly things; so she decided to stay in her nightdress every morning so that she couldn’t go out even if she wanted to, until she’d finished her writing for the day.  And I was, as ever, intrigued by Streatfeild’s depiction of the changing role of class in British society during the World Wars.  Vicky’s mother could be said to be living in reduced circumstances after the death of her husband, but she persists in thinking of herself as “carriage people”.  There is this squirm-inducing scene when Vicky’s mother is living in lodgings kept by two women who were once a cook and a housemaid, and Mrs. Strangeway treats them as if they are her hired help.  “So funny,” she tells Victoria, “they like to be called Miss Baines and Miss Cook….I’m afraid I’m always forgetting about the ‘Miss’ and wanting to call them just Baines and Cook.”  Oh, and she refers to Vicky as “Miss Vicky” when she’s talking to them.  Yup, she does.

HOWEVER.  This book felt like a collection of anecdotes – not always good ones – the kind of autobiography people write when they do not really know what sort of a story they are telling.  Streatfeild talks about her service during the war, her initial disinterest in writing for children, and it’s not that any one of these aspects is uninteresting in itself.  But there’s no underlying order to them.  Streatfeild is intent on remarking on every single thing her past self did that she now realizes was immature, ignorant, self-indulgent, or otherwise unworthy of praise, and that gets old, as well.  Altogether, not her best effort.

On to happier things!

World War II.  Not actually happy at all, but bear with me.  When I was at the university library for the first time the other day, I checked out one of Juliet Gardiner’s books.  I think I read about her for the first time at Elaine’s blog, and since I am mad for social histories, and mad for Britain during World War II, I got out Gardiner’s Wartime.  Y’ALL.  This book is amazing.  I may not review it for ages and ages because it’s massively thick.  It’s so thick that if it were a sandwich, I wouldn’t be able to take a bite out of it.  But it’s wonderful!  She’s drawn from dozens of different accounts, so that you can see every event through numerous eyes.  I am not even two chapters in, and I already have the biggest book-crush on Juliet Gardiner.

The post Review: Beyond the Vicarage, Noel Streatfeild appeared first on Reading the End.

That’s not really the plot though.  Gilbert is in a serious long-term relationship with Felipe from Eat Pray Love, and neither of them wants marriage.  Felipe gets told by immigration he can’t keep coming back into the country for ninety days and then leaving, ninety days and then leaving, and if he wants to stay, he should just marry Liz Gilbert.  And then she spends the year reading all about marriage.

I find this endearing because I expect that’s exactly what I would do.  In fact that’s what I do do.  When I feel suspicious of something, I go a-hunting for things to read about it.  In a-hunting down the facts in the case of De Profundis, I discovered Oscar Wilde was a screaming over-dramatizer.  In a-hunting down the facts about the oral polio vaccine, I discovered the only correlation between it and AIDS was geographical (like, the places that had medical facilities giving out the oral polio vaccine were the same places where AIDS was getting diagnosed more frequently).  In a-hunting down the facts about free speech as it applies to corporations – I am still looking into that actually.  It is very complicated and makes me feel stupid but I will persist because if Justice Stevens (my favorite Justice, y’all, because he is old and extremely brilliant and he wears a bow-tie) feels it is worth a ninety-page dissent, then I suspect it is worth a ninety-page dissent.

(Yes, I have a favorite Supreme Court Justice.  DEAL WITH IT.)

(That last thing, DEAL WITH IT, that was a Better Off Ted reference.  Any of y’all watch Better Off Ted?  Will anyone besides me miss it when it inevitably gets cancelled?)

Gilbert writes about speaking to wives in other countries, as well as to the wives in her own family, about their experiences of marriage.  She writes about the strain on her relationship with Felipe as a result of their being in limbo.  (She wants to travel to Cambodia, and he wants to settle somewhere and have a coffeepot.  I am totally with him.)  Although this book is not as full of action as Eat Pray Love, Gilbert’s wry wit is still in evidence.  She’s a little bit crazy, but she knows that she is crazy, and in what ways, which is nearly as good as not being crazy in the first place.  Plus? She doesn’t talk trash about her family.  Hurrah!

If I had one complaint, it would be that there is not enough of Gilbert talking to people.  She is good at capturing voices, just like John Berendt, and she should do it more frequently.  Indeed all the time.  If I were in charge of the world, that’s what would happen.

Read for the Women Unbound Challenge.

Other reviews:

Confessions of a Book Hoarder
Book Addiction

Let me know if I missed yours!

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