I'm trying very hard to make an honest list of the hundred writers who have most influenced me. And that's just generally influenced me, not influenced me as a writer--though that's one way I've been influenced, certainly.
First I brainstormed, then I looked at my bookshelves at home and at school. Then I brainstormed some more. I know there are a lot of writers who have been important to me over the years whose books aren't represented in my collection anymore: Alice Walker, for example, or E. Annie Proulx. Tom Robbins and Erica Jong. I'm trying to remember who meant so much to me. As usual, this is at least partly related to teaching. I taught middle school for four years, and now teach high school English. Right now I'm still brainstorming, but I also want to code the list with when the book was/became important to me, and to some degree, how it was important. Neil Gaiman, for instance, is primarily significant to me because I learned a lot about teaching literature from reading Coraline with my sixth graders in Brooklyn. I didn't expect my students to love the book as much as I did; I thought it would seem too foreign, but it reached them, it transcended some social differences and they connected with it and we used it to really study literature in a meaningful way, talking about symbols and analyzing the characters and the structure of the book in a way that made me proud--of myself as a teacher, but more of my students.
e early literacy
es elementary school
ms middle school
hs high school
c college
20 20’s
s Syracuse
30 30’s
t teaching
Early literacy is when most of the picture book authors became important to me, but this is a blurred category for me. I'm not sure it's separate from elementary school. Rather, I think there's mostly overlap. Erica Jong is tagged hs, because I didn't really read her after that. Beckett is hs and c, and maybe also ms. Some of these I can't remember exactly. But I'm having fun with it, and chronology is interesting to think about.
So, I have 130 so far, and I've already eliminated some (like I love Ishiguro but honestly, the anonymous author of Go Ask Alice was more influential, and even she might not make the top 100). I think there are also a few big gaps. The last six I thought to add to my list were Robert McCloskey, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, E. Annie Proulx, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Lois Duncan. This suggests that other gaps must exist as well. I've only included three zine writers, and I think I might just leave it at that. I'm not sure any of them will make the top 100--probably just Cindy Crabb who writes Doris, which has been important to me since high school. There aren't many poets--Shel Silverstein, Lucille Clifton (though more for her memoir work), Anne Carson (more for her translations), Dylan Thomas (mostly for Under Milkwood), Yusef Komunyakaa... and there are maybe too many playwrights (including Sophocles, Euripedes, and Aristophanes--but you can't just say "the ancient Greeks," can you? and they were all important--I left Aeschylus out because I didn't care about him so much, but the others were all important in their own ways: Electra and Electra and Medea and Lysistrata...).
At some point, I'll have to figure out how to distinguish between important author and important book. I only ever read Caddie Woodlawn by Carol Ryrie Brink, and Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, but I've read both those books multiple times (I've read Catch-22 at least five or six times since high school, maybe more, and I've probably read Caddie Woodlawn upwards of twenty times, since it was one of the [relatively] few books I owned as a kid, and didn't just get from the library), and they've certainly influenced me and my worldview in multiple ways. Same with Anne Frank.
Ongoing.
Now I'm looking at lists of award-winners. First, the Newberys. Then the Caldecotts. Next, the Nobel Prize list, then National Book Award winners. Which does reflect my evolution as a reader, honestly. And to some degree, what's important. I'm mostly checking the NBA lists for gaps in my own list (also, the NBA website is so stupidly organized--Newberys and Caldecotts, you can skim, but NBA, you have to click on every single year?!).
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
The Mozart Season
It’s so hard to describe that feeling of escape that you get when you really get sucked into reading a book, or writing a story, or when you’re completely focused on dancing and in your body, out of your head—it’s not even a feeling of escape, exactly, it’s a feeling of completely being there. I love Allegra’s description of practicing her violin:
And I love their family friend Deirdre’s explanation of what you have to do if you want to be your own kind of artist, or singer, or dancer, or violinist. I also love Deirdre. She’s one of the characters in this book who makes it more than a children’s book: the crazy family friend, Allegra’s mother’s friend since they were children, who’s gone through some rough times. Allegra’s father, anticipating her visit, says, “Only two more days till we get Deirdre’s Doldrums.” Allegra’s teenage brother says, “Deirdre’s Delirium is more like it.”
But Allegra is at an age when she can appreciate and connect with Deirdre in a different way than ever before. Twelve is like that. They also make a connection through their relationship to music and its importance to them. Deirdre says:
She goes on to explain,
I can't put all the gems in this book into this entry. Anyway, they're better when you read them in the context of it. Allegra and Deirdre make music in the Rose Garden in Washington Park--a kind of music that isn't like their usual violin playing and opera singing. Allegra starts going for late-night bike rides through Laurelhurst Park, until a neighbor sees her and tells on her. She meets a dancer and finds something he's lost. Her best friends come home from their summer camps and visits to family and that good kind of friendship is as essential to this novel as Allegra's twelve-year-old relationships with her mother and father and teenage brother, and their relationships with each other. Allegra's grandmother sends her something very important. And the music is through all of it: free concerts in Laurelhurst Park and Pioneer Square, the gorge, and of course in the music room.
Good novels about art and making art are so few and far between. Novels about children and childhood and the revelations of growing up are all over the place. But those that both children and adults should read, and return to later for the new insights that were there the first time but were buried under the first insights--those novels are much more rare. The Mozart Summer is both, and I had so much fun reading it for the first time. I stopped myself from starting over again at the beginning, immediately. It'll be even better next time if I wait first.
(And did I mention it's set in Portland? So I had that other pleasure of the real picture in my head, a version of the true picture.)
I cleaned up the sandwich mess and went to the music room and practiced. I worked on Kreutzer no. 34, which is a good way to insult yourself if you haven’t worked on it lately. I played it for almost an hour. It can torture your fingers and it’s good for you.
It’s also very useful in distracting you from your problems, because you can’t even think about them while you’re playing it. Kind of like skiing: you keep your mind totally on what you’re doing and give your mental problems a rest. You keep your mind right where your body is. I don’t understand it all totally, but that’s what you do. You keep doing it till you get convinced.
And I love their family friend Deirdre’s explanation of what you have to do if you want to be your own kind of artist, or singer, or dancer, or violinist. I also love Deirdre. She’s one of the characters in this book who makes it more than a children’s book: the crazy family friend, Allegra’s mother’s friend since they were children, who’s gone through some rough times. Allegra’s father, anticipating her visit, says, “Only two more days till we get Deirdre’s Doldrums.” Allegra’s teenage brother says, “Deirdre’s Delirium is more like it.”
But Allegra is at an age when she can appreciate and connect with Deirdre in a different way than ever before. Twelve is like that. They also make a connection through their relationship to music and its importance to them. Deirdre says:
Allegra, here's something about doing music--or painting a picture or anything. When you're doing it, you have to remember everything you've ever learned, and simultaneously forget all of it and do something totally new. Because if you do the first part and not the second, you're making music or art just like everybody else's. It's not your own.
She goes on to explain,
When I lived in Boston, I used to watch the Celtics a lot. They do the same exact thing--when they're at their best. It's the same with your Trail Blazers in Portland. You watch one of those beautiful shots go exploding down through the basket and that's what's going on. That guy has in his memory every basket he's ever shot--and at the same instant he's making up a new one. The divine inspiration of the NBA.
I can't put all the gems in this book into this entry. Anyway, they're better when you read them in the context of it. Allegra and Deirdre make music in the Rose Garden in Washington Park--a kind of music that isn't like their usual violin playing and opera singing. Allegra starts going for late-night bike rides through Laurelhurst Park, until a neighbor sees her and tells on her. She meets a dancer and finds something he's lost. Her best friends come home from their summer camps and visits to family and that good kind of friendship is as essential to this novel as Allegra's twelve-year-old relationships with her mother and father and teenage brother, and their relationships with each other. Allegra's grandmother sends her something very important. And the music is through all of it: free concerts in Laurelhurst Park and Pioneer Square, the gorge, and of course in the music room.
Good novels about art and making art are so few and far between. Novels about children and childhood and the revelations of growing up are all over the place. But those that both children and adults should read, and return to later for the new insights that were there the first time but were buried under the first insights--those novels are much more rare. The Mozart Summer is both, and I had so much fun reading it for the first time. I stopped myself from starting over again at the beginning, immediately. It'll be even better next time if I wait first.
(And did I mention it's set in Portland? So I had that other pleasure of the real picture in my head, a version of the true picture.)
Monday, May 10, 2010
Far from Xanadu
So yeah, put nearly all of Julie Anne Peters' other novels on hold at the library after reading Luna, and of course they all arrived at once. First I picked up By the Time You Read This, I'll Be Dead, but I was like, "No, Elissa, you're not allowed." As you may guess from the title, it's about a very suicidal girl. Suicide is not one of my favorite topics--it's not among most people's favorite topics, but since my dad killed himself when I was nineteen, it's plummeted to the bottom of my list.
I read a little bit, to see if I could handle it. I even flipped to the end, to see if she killed herself. Far as I can tell, it's an ambiguous ending. Regardless, I didn't need to spend the time with Daelyn, in her head. I wasn't about to do that to myself. I don't stop reading a book very often, but I shut this one and returned it to the library after the first couple of chapters. I didn't want it in my house. So number two was RAGE: A Love Story. Queer girl in high school, just barely starting to come out, has a long-standing huge crazy crush on one of the badass dykes at her school, one of the "LesBo Dykes, or Les Beau Dykes"--and things start to happen, but the reader can tell long before Johanna can (or really before Johanna wants to) that the LesBo Dyke, Reeve, is really big trouble. Like, big trouble beyond what that usually means in a teen novel. Really big trouble like physically abusive. Oh and also hottie abusive dyke's brother appears to have Asperger's, her mom's a crackhead, and mom's string of abusive boyfriends also abuse hottie abusive dyke and her brother. I felt like I was reading Go Ask Alice. I quit reading somewhere around when Johanna went to school with a black eye. I couldn't do it.
So then I picked up Far from Xanadu, which an awesome teen librarian friend had said was her favorite of Peters' books. First four words: "After my dad's suicide." First sentence: "After my dad's suicide, the town council decided to remove the bottom portion of the ladder from the Coalton water tower." Mike's drunk of a dad jumped off the water tower in the small Kansas town they live in. But the first scene is her (yeah, Mike's a girl) climbing the water tower, using the ladder she and her best friend hid in the grass at the foot of it, so she can watch the sunrise from the top. "Dad said angels painted the sky at dawn and dusk. Dad was a liar, but I could almost believe him on that one."
I almost took Far from Xanadu back with the other two, but I didn't. It was hard to read, but so good, and so true. Also, there are plenty of books about those crisis moments: hearing the gunshot, finding the body. Dealing with the shock, the breakdown. But this is a book about Mike two years later, still there, still dealing with it. Or not dealing. It's about her rough relationship with her mom, which just gets rougher after her dad dies. About her relationship with her brother, and what they lay on each other or don't lay on each other, the ways they watch each other hurt and can't really reach each other. Besides, in their family, the Szabos, they don't ask for help. As her brother says, "It's not our way."
Far from Xanadu was really hard for me to read. But it's awesome. I'm glad it's in the world. Nice to read a book about grieving someone two years out: Mike is still thinking about her dad all the time, he's fucking up how she's living her life, she's not doing things she wants to do to spite him, blaming him for choices she can't make.
Oh, and Mike is gay. And crushed out on a straight girl. But this isn't a novel about that, not only. She just is that way, and is dealing with it, and it's part of it. Like how it happens in real life.
I'm reminded of how I gave Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret to a student my first year teaching, and when we talked about it, she was telling me how much she loved it, how much she loved all the stuff about religion and figuring out what you believe. I didn't remember any of that. I remembered Margaret getting her period, and wearing a pad on a belt. But Khazanah is Muslim, and she read a different book than the one I read. She read a book about a girl who is very close to her Jewish grandmother, and whose Christian grandparents on the other side disowned her mother when she married a Jew. A girl who has her own private relationship with her own God, and can't figure out how all of it fits together, fits her. Just as many people will read Far from Xanadu as a story about first love, maybe, or home, or the dreams you have for your life--and yeah, family is a big part of it, but oh my god can you believe she...?!?! But to me, it's about a girl who lost her dad in an awful unexpected way that's left her furious and heartbroken, and two years later she's only starting to sort some of it out and take her own life back. But she is sorting it out, and she is moving forward.
I read a little bit, to see if I could handle it. I even flipped to the end, to see if she killed herself. Far as I can tell, it's an ambiguous ending. Regardless, I didn't need to spend the time with Daelyn, in her head. I wasn't about to do that to myself. I don't stop reading a book very often, but I shut this one and returned it to the library after the first couple of chapters. I didn't want it in my house. So number two was RAGE: A Love Story. Queer girl in high school, just barely starting to come out, has a long-standing huge crazy crush on one of the badass dykes at her school, one of the "LesBo Dykes, or Les Beau Dykes"--and things start to happen, but the reader can tell long before Johanna can (or really before Johanna wants to) that the LesBo Dyke, Reeve, is really big trouble. Like, big trouble beyond what that usually means in a teen novel. Really big trouble like physically abusive. Oh and also hottie abusive dyke's brother appears to have Asperger's, her mom's a crackhead, and mom's string of abusive boyfriends also abuse hottie abusive dyke and her brother. I felt like I was reading Go Ask Alice. I quit reading somewhere around when Johanna went to school with a black eye. I couldn't do it.
So then I picked up Far from Xanadu, which an awesome teen librarian friend had said was her favorite of Peters' books. First four words: "After my dad's suicide." First sentence: "After my dad's suicide, the town council decided to remove the bottom portion of the ladder from the Coalton water tower." Mike's drunk of a dad jumped off the water tower in the small Kansas town they live in. But the first scene is her (yeah, Mike's a girl) climbing the water tower, using the ladder she and her best friend hid in the grass at the foot of it, so she can watch the sunrise from the top. "Dad said angels painted the sky at dawn and dusk. Dad was a liar, but I could almost believe him on that one."
I almost took Far from Xanadu back with the other two, but I didn't. It was hard to read, but so good, and so true. Also, there are plenty of books about those crisis moments: hearing the gunshot, finding the body. Dealing with the shock, the breakdown. But this is a book about Mike two years later, still there, still dealing with it. Or not dealing. It's about her rough relationship with her mom, which just gets rougher after her dad dies. About her relationship with her brother, and what they lay on each other or don't lay on each other, the ways they watch each other hurt and can't really reach each other. Besides, in their family, the Szabos, they don't ask for help. As her brother says, "It's not our way."
Far from Xanadu was really hard for me to read. But it's awesome. I'm glad it's in the world. Nice to read a book about grieving someone two years out: Mike is still thinking about her dad all the time, he's fucking up how she's living her life, she's not doing things she wants to do to spite him, blaming him for choices she can't make.
Oh, and Mike is gay. And crushed out on a straight girl. But this isn't a novel about that, not only. She just is that way, and is dealing with it, and it's part of it. Like how it happens in real life.
I'm reminded of how I gave Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret to a student my first year teaching, and when we talked about it, she was telling me how much she loved it, how much she loved all the stuff about religion and figuring out what you believe. I didn't remember any of that. I remembered Margaret getting her period, and wearing a pad on a belt. But Khazanah is Muslim, and she read a different book than the one I read. She read a book about a girl who is very close to her Jewish grandmother, and whose Christian grandparents on the other side disowned her mother when she married a Jew. A girl who has her own private relationship with her own God, and can't figure out how all of it fits together, fits her. Just as many people will read Far from Xanadu as a story about first love, maybe, or home, or the dreams you have for your life--and yeah, family is a big part of it, but oh my god can you believe she...?!?! But to me, it's about a girl who lost her dad in an awful unexpected way that's left her furious and heartbroken, and two years later she's only starting to sort some of it out and take her own life back. But she is sorting it out, and she is moving forward.
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Writers Instead of Writing
I haven't been avoiding writing so much as I've been sucked into a novel that I wanted to finish. And while I was reading it, I knew it could only help my own novel. Luna, by Julie Anne Peters, is a great YA story from the POV of Regan, the younger sister of Luna, a senior in high school who is coming out as trans.
I read this interesting interview with Peters, where she talks about her choice of narrator in Luna and how it was largely because she didn't feel comfortable writing from Luna's POV, not being trans herself.
Somehow I ended up at this interview with Amy Hempel (I will spare you the chain of events), and I liked this bit of advice very much, both as a writer and as a teacher:
Dave: When you teach creative writing, is there one piece of advice that seems to resonate more than others, seems to work, with students?
Hempel: Not so much a piece of advice as a question to keep in mind, which is the most basic of questions: Why are you telling me this? Someone out there will be asking, and you better have a very compelling answer, or reason.
There are people who have been raised by loving parents to believe that the world awaits their every thought and sentence, and I'm not one of them. So I respond to that. Is this essential? The question might be, Is this something only you can say—or, only you can say it this way? Is this going to make anyone's life better, or make anyone's day better? And I don't mean the writer's day.
----
And now I'll go work on my novel. Right after I put all of Peters' other novels on hold at the library. & looks like I'll be revisiting Amy Hempel's collected stories, too. Yay.
I read this interesting interview with Peters, where she talks about her choice of narrator in Luna and how it was largely because she didn't feel comfortable writing from Luna's POV, not being trans herself.
Somehow I ended up at this interview with Amy Hempel (I will spare you the chain of events), and I liked this bit of advice very much, both as a writer and as a teacher:
Dave: When you teach creative writing, is there one piece of advice that seems to resonate more than others, seems to work, with students?
Hempel: Not so much a piece of advice as a question to keep in mind, which is the most basic of questions: Why are you telling me this? Someone out there will be asking, and you better have a very compelling answer, or reason.
There are people who have been raised by loving parents to believe that the world awaits their every thought and sentence, and I'm not one of them. So I respond to that. Is this essential? The question might be, Is this something only you can say—or, only you can say it this way? Is this going to make anyone's life better, or make anyone's day better? And I don't mean the writer's day.
----
And now I'll go work on my novel. Right after I put all of Peters' other novels on hold at the library. & looks like I'll be revisiting Amy Hempel's collected stories, too. Yay.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Portland history and geography: Seventh and Magnolia.
It took me a long time to notice that the sidewalk on the corner in front of my house says MAGNOLIA. It took me about ten months, in fact. But then I noticed it and I got all excited, because that means that before this was Rosa Parks Way, and before it was Portland Boulevard, it was Magnolia. Magnolia something. (They used to stamp the street name into the sidewalk, and Portland preserves these stamps as historical artifact.) So I went to Google, but I couldn't find anything. Well, I found lots of stuff, but not what I was looking for. I found this awesome website all about the Alameda neighborhood, and I found out that there is a very short S.E. Magnolia Street way the hell out off SE Johnson Road, sort of in Portland, but more in Clackamas, past Milwaukie, off 205. But no Magnolia up near here anymore.
But the magic search terms for the information I wanted were "rosa parks way portland boulevard magnolia." Once we found that, we were in the money. It took me to this, which not only lists all the Portland street names, but has so much other random great information that I haven't hardly begun to explore it all. (Go here to explore it yourself--there's a lot of information on the site, and many great links!) But I have learned, so far, that before 1891, my street was just Magnolia, and after 1891 until 1931 it was NE Magnolia STREET. But only from 6th to Durham, which is the part that's my neighborhood that's off the grid. Which makes sense. And makes me so happy. In 1891, a bunch of streets got "annexed to Portland," so starting in 1891 Portland Boulevard went all the way from Willamette Boulevard to Union (now MLK), and from there it was Magnolia from Sixth to Durham, Leland from 13th to 22nd, and North from 29th to 38th. Which must've been about as far as it went. In 1915 they made it N. Portland Blvd, then in 1932 broke it up into N and NE Portland Boulevard, and it went at least as far east as 38th. This map from 1911 shows the city boundary to the north to be Fremont, which is 15-20 blocks south of me. To the east, the map only goes as far as 41st or 42nd Avenue. This fabulous map from 1890 barely shows the east side at all, and it appears that the city limits extend to about 7th and Hawthorne to the southeast, and maybe 14th and C Street to the northeast (C for Couch, perhaps?).
Speaking of maps, and homes, this site is excellent too. I looked up my house and the property taxes, and compared my property taxes for my half-size lot with the property taxes of the much larger houses all around me. Hmph. But I do love the internets. Nice to not only have this information public, but to actually have access to it!
But the magic search terms for the information I wanted were "rosa parks way portland boulevard magnolia." Once we found that, we were in the money. It took me to this, which not only lists all the Portland street names, but has so much other random great information that I haven't hardly begun to explore it all. (Go here to explore it yourself--there's a lot of information on the site, and many great links!) But I have learned, so far, that before 1891, my street was just Magnolia, and after 1891 until 1931 it was NE Magnolia STREET. But only from 6th to Durham, which is the part that's my neighborhood that's off the grid. Which makes sense. And makes me so happy. In 1891, a bunch of streets got "annexed to Portland," so starting in 1891 Portland Boulevard went all the way from Willamette Boulevard to Union (now MLK), and from there it was Magnolia from Sixth to Durham, Leland from 13th to 22nd, and North from 29th to 38th. Which must've been about as far as it went. In 1915 they made it N. Portland Blvd, then in 1932 broke it up into N and NE Portland Boulevard, and it went at least as far east as 38th. This map from 1911 shows the city boundary to the north to be Fremont, which is 15-20 blocks south of me. To the east, the map only goes as far as 41st or 42nd Avenue. This fabulous map from 1890 barely shows the east side at all, and it appears that the city limits extend to about 7th and Hawthorne to the southeast, and maybe 14th and C Street to the northeast (C for Couch, perhaps?).
Speaking of maps, and homes, this site is excellent too. I looked up my house and the property taxes, and compared my property taxes for my half-size lot with the property taxes of the much larger houses all around me. Hmph. But I do love the internets. Nice to not only have this information public, but to actually have access to it!
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
On Facebook and the lack of self-discipline.
Effective today, I am taking a one-week break from Facebook. I'd been contemplating this for a while, irritated with the amount of time that used to go to reading, to writing, to sitting and staring off into space, and which now is spent staring at a small glowing screen when I really don't need to be. Time spent staring at a small glowing screen often isn't time well used, and seeing as how I have a brain tumor, it might be time even less well used.*
As Edan Lepucki points out in her awesome and inspiring essay about quitting Facebook and Twitter, "Ceasing to Exist: Three Months in the Social Media Detox Ward", "The first week of my detox, I realized just how much I’d depended on those sites for community. Aside from the classes I teach a few nights a week, I work from home. Alone. Without my beloved internet family, the silence was frightening." Similarly, as a high school teacher, I am with people all the time, but my time with any kind of peer group is hugely limited. Many days, I have to make a concentrated effort to spend time with people my own age, or I will only interact with high school students. Some days, Facebook is my primary social interaction with people of my generation, with the same cultural interests and frames of reference.
I made zines for a thousand years, from high school until my late 20's, and in many ways, the pithiness of Facebook relates to a lot of what I loved about the zine communities I was part of: themed lists, the quotes from books and songs, snippets of people's days, brief observations, photos random and composed. The way you'd get pieces of other lives, personal and private and also giving you a way in through music and literature and film and art, allowing you to reframe, shift, broaden your own worldview in all kinds of ways. Of course, Facebook doesn't allow for any kind of sustained interaction, though I appreciate the links to articles and sometimes the conversations that come up in responses posted.
But as with zines, there's a lot of junk on Facebook, and it's often just a waste of time. Lepucki notes that while "visiting my favorite websites on a whim to see if there’s something new ... feels a little like Christmas, reaching into my stocking to see if there’s just one more piece of candy hidden in the toe," when it comes to Facebook, "the Christmas stocking is infinite, and infinitely full. There is always another piece of candy to claw at. One piece is delicious, but one begets two, and three, and four, and, okay, five…it’s not long before you’ve made yourself sick." And not long before you realize that all your writing time just got sucked away by looking through photos of the children of people you went to high school with and haven't seen in fifteen years. Granted, there have been discoveries and rediscoveries, friendships renewed and meaningful connections made, but yeah, there's also been a lot of time wasted.
I've also quit posting to my blog, instead composing status updates by the zillions, noticing things and reminding myself to post about them. (I thought this New York Times Magazine blog post about status updates was simultaneously accurate, interesting, and rather disturbing.) But 420 characters isn't always enough. Prose poems, epigrams, and the brief observation can be lovely, but when that turns into your primary medium--well, for one thing, the novel might never get finished.
But see? Day 1, and I've already composed a blog post of six paragraphs, more than the five paragraph minimum I require for student essays. So today the plan is to stay off Facebook for a week, and then perhaps limit myself to weekly visits. Hopefully Megan will be willing to keep changing the password for me. (Given the choice between having to concentrate on a sustained piece of my own writing, and being able to waste time looking at baby photos and playing Lexulous [a Scrabble knockoff] and Word Twist [a Boggle knockoff], I too often lack the self-control to close the browser window and get back to work.)
*Which as I initially wrote that, I meant in terms of waves and rays and that sort of thing, but of course there's also that asshole of a neurosurgeon who, when I asked about life expectancy, told me I was already living on borrowed time, already lucky, since according to him, at that point I'd outlived my life expectancy from the previous tumor (The Great Tumor of 2002, removed summer 2003--this one is The Great Tumor of 2009, ad infinitum [though shrinking thanks to the magic chemo pills!]). But that's another subject. Except it isn't, either.
As Edan Lepucki points out in her awesome and inspiring essay about quitting Facebook and Twitter, "Ceasing to Exist: Three Months in the Social Media Detox Ward", "The first week of my detox, I realized just how much I’d depended on those sites for community. Aside from the classes I teach a few nights a week, I work from home. Alone. Without my beloved internet family, the silence was frightening." Similarly, as a high school teacher, I am with people all the time, but my time with any kind of peer group is hugely limited. Many days, I have to make a concentrated effort to spend time with people my own age, or I will only interact with high school students. Some days, Facebook is my primary social interaction with people of my generation, with the same cultural interests and frames of reference.
I made zines for a thousand years, from high school until my late 20's, and in many ways, the pithiness of Facebook relates to a lot of what I loved about the zine communities I was part of: themed lists, the quotes from books and songs, snippets of people's days, brief observations, photos random and composed. The way you'd get pieces of other lives, personal and private and also giving you a way in through music and literature and film and art, allowing you to reframe, shift, broaden your own worldview in all kinds of ways. Of course, Facebook doesn't allow for any kind of sustained interaction, though I appreciate the links to articles and sometimes the conversations that come up in responses posted.
But as with zines, there's a lot of junk on Facebook, and it's often just a waste of time. Lepucki notes that while "visiting my favorite websites on a whim to see if there’s something new ... feels a little like Christmas, reaching into my stocking to see if there’s just one more piece of candy hidden in the toe," when it comes to Facebook, "the Christmas stocking is infinite, and infinitely full. There is always another piece of candy to claw at. One piece is delicious, but one begets two, and three, and four, and, okay, five…it’s not long before you’ve made yourself sick." And not long before you realize that all your writing time just got sucked away by looking through photos of the children of people you went to high school with and haven't seen in fifteen years. Granted, there have been discoveries and rediscoveries, friendships renewed and meaningful connections made, but yeah, there's also been a lot of time wasted.
I've also quit posting to my blog, instead composing status updates by the zillions, noticing things and reminding myself to post about them. (I thought this New York Times Magazine blog post about status updates was simultaneously accurate, interesting, and rather disturbing.) But 420 characters isn't always enough. Prose poems, epigrams, and the brief observation can be lovely, but when that turns into your primary medium--well, for one thing, the novel might never get finished.
But see? Day 1, and I've already composed a blog post of six paragraphs, more than the five paragraph minimum I require for student essays. So today the plan is to stay off Facebook for a week, and then perhaps limit myself to weekly visits. Hopefully Megan will be willing to keep changing the password for me. (Given the choice between having to concentrate on a sustained piece of my own writing, and being able to waste time looking at baby photos and playing Lexulous [a Scrabble knockoff] and Word Twist [a Boggle knockoff], I too often lack the self-control to close the browser window and get back to work.)
*Which as I initially wrote that, I meant in terms of waves and rays and that sort of thing, but of course there's also that asshole of a neurosurgeon who, when I asked about life expectancy, told me I was already living on borrowed time, already lucky, since according to him, at that point I'd outlived my life expectancy from the previous tumor (The Great Tumor of 2002, removed summer 2003--this one is The Great Tumor of 2009, ad infinitum [though shrinking thanks to the magic chemo pills!]). But that's another subject. Except it isn't, either.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Reading a lot lately...
I have been reading a lot lately. This stretch started with Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs; when I put it on hold at the library shortly after it came out last November, I was number 330 on the hold list. I was excited to read it—I like her writing, her themes, I love her sense of humor—but ugh. I think if someone else had written it, I wouldn’t have finished it. Also, if I hadn’t decided I wanted to write about it, I wouldn’t have finished it. Maybe twenty-five or thirty pages into it, I started reading like a writer—okay, I always read like a writer, I guess, but sometimes I get out of that headspace and more into the story. But I couldn’t get into this story so I was mostly paying attention to what Moore was doing, how she was telling her story, what I liked and what—mostly—felt like it was ringing false (can something ring false? or only true? If it can ring false, this one did.).
The main thing I hated was the narrative voice. This novel is the story of Tassie Keltjin, twenty years old, from “a small farm on the old Perryville Road” in rural Wisconsin, who is in her sophomore year of college in the relatively large, urbane college town of Troy (which is essentially Madison, basically Wisconsin’s only large, urbane college town, where Lorrie Moore has taught since 1984). Sometimes Tassie is very much the provincial young adult away from home for the first time: “Someone had turned on the lights. Someone had led me out of the cave—of Perryville Road. My brain was on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir.” But Tassie’s cultural reference points range from those of a twenty-year-old college student to those of a fifty-something college professor/New Yorker writer, and end up not being very interesting or convincing because of this inconsistency. For example, on page 39, Tassie hears Glenn Gould for the first time, playing Bach in the car of the woman she’s nannying for; by page 190, she is describing the sounds of a party as “like the approaching music of Ravel’s Bolero, some new monotonous melody.” As Geoff Dyer said in The Guardian, "for someone claiming to be 'fresh from childhood,' [Tassie] seems to be lugging around an extra quarter-century of adult life. A couple of times, she remarks on the quirks of 'our generation' the way, for example, that 'everything either "sucked" or was "awesome"' but they're exactly the things that strike people of Moore's age."
But Tassie also doesn’t ring true because this isn’t actually her story. She is on the sidelines of the main—and more compelling and engaging—story of the book, that of Sarah Brink, who hires Tassie to care for her adopted child, Mary-Emma. The story should be Sarah’s but one gets the feeling that Lorrie Moore fought that the whole eleven years she was writing this book. Apparently Moore is the adoptive mother of a mixed-race son, and according to the New York Times, “eight years ago she divorced her husband (no, she doesn’t want to talk about it) and is now raising her son as a single mother.” But it seems to me that if this is the book Moore is writing, she should write it as the book it wants to be. Tassie actually observes that one of the things she learns in college is that "In literature-perhaps as in life-one had to speak not of what the author intended but of what a story intended for itself." I could go on about that but it'll sound like I'm workshopping this novel: "Let the story tell itself, Lorrie!" etc. So enough.
Lorrie Moore’s personal life aside, I thought the child, Mary-Emma, was possibly the most engaging and compelling part of the story, or could have been. But the little girl is out of the book more than fifty pages before it ends, and I had stopped caring long before, though I tried to care. I wanted to understand the relationships Mary-Emma had with Tassie and with Sarah, but that’s hardly a part of the story, and when it is, those relationships are portrayed as very distant. I especially kept trying to figure out the reason for the distance Moore puts between Tassie and the little girl. The mom, Sarah, wouldn’t be a touchy-feely mom anyway, but why don’t Tassie and Mary-Emma have more of a bond? Especially as a former nanny, this baffled and annoyed me. There are moments of closeness between Tassie and Mary-Emma, but maybe they don't have more of a genuine relationship because the child isn’t allowed to be a full character. This could be because Mary-Emma is two years old… but every two-year-old I’ve ever known has been a full character and then some.
But I know that distance is also there because Tassie isn’t really a babysitter, she’s a narrative device to allow us into the lives of this family: distant, weird father; busy, obsessive mother; the biracial kid who was available for adoption, and they wanted a kid, so they took her. And, finally, the parents’ tragic secret. (Which I am not getting into here, for those of you worried about spoilers.)
So since she’s a narrative device, Tassie can conveniently show interest in the boring details she probably wouldn’t have paid any attention to if she was a real person. The most jarring examples of this are when she is babysitting at the weekly meetings for the parents of children “mostly ‘of color,’ as was said by all the adults downstairs, a range of shades from light to dark, though most of the parents downstairs, I noted, were white.” The oddest thing about this book, I thought, was the pages and pages of dialogue transcribed verbatim as supposedly overheard by Tassie at these Wednesday night meetings of the “transracial, biracial, multiracial families Sarah and Edward knew thus far in Troy.” Though Tassie professes interest in the activities of the children, the parents’ “remarks would waft up through two floors, out of interest and earshot for the kids, but if I strained I could hear.” Why would she strain to hear? She’s got awesome kids around, how and why does she sit there and listen to pages and pages of white people talking self-aggrandizing bullshit? She says, “I didn’t know what they were talking about most of the time.” And I still haven't figured out why the hell she would care.
“…institutionalized bigotry can subtly convince you of its rightness. With its absurdity removed, its evil can compel…”
“Of course homework is just a measure of the home! And so the kids of color will always fall behind…”
“I don’t believe in gay culture or white culture or female culture or any of that. It’s just so…”
“Vaughan takes 'Autumn Leaves' and turns it into Finnegans Wake.”*
(All ellipses are Moore’s. Remember, Tassie is eavesdropping from two floors up, and she’s in a room with a bunch of loud little kids. Which I find unbelievable. But yeah.)
I started skimming these conversations, because none of it was important or even relevant to the story, as far as I could tell, and because it was tedious. I don’t remember skimming like this except for The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, the book within the book in 1984. (And actually, the first time I read 1984, in sixth grade, I didn’t even skim it. I just skipped ahead to the end of the book within the book, back to the story.)
And then these parents lose the child, they give her up without a fight, when their tragic secret emerges. The mother makes excuses: “’Edward is not on board.’ . . . ‘Ideally, she should be with black parents.’” And just like that, the child disappears out of all of their lives. Weirdest of all to me, our narrator, Tassie, who has spent months with this child, does not appear to mourn her at all. After Mary-Emma goes away, “For a week I busied myself in a robotic way with tasks, half waiting for the phone to ring—to have it be Sarah or Reynaldo or even more hilariously Mary-Emma, as I missed her.” That’s as close as she comes. But after that week, “one spring day tumbled after another” and Tassie is “reduced. I was barely there.” But this is a kid who was central in her life and there are no specifics mourned? No places she has to avoid? None of those jarring horrible reminders that hit you when you are grieving, when you least expect it? She’s just missed for a week? What the hell is that? Not like this is a sparsely written book, either, spare with its details and metaphors and allusions and puns. No. Just somehow Tassie isn’t a real person, and Mary-Emma isn’t a real person, and so they don’t feel real person stuff about each other. I’ve nannied, and even just moving away from those children and losing them from my daily life, I mourned them for so long. I still think about them. I wanted to care about Tassie losing Mary-Emma, I tried so hard, I knew what it would have felt like-I do know what it feels like-but there wasn’t enough there.
So I finished that damn thing, and then I didn’t want to read anything for a while because it wasn’t fun, but I finally read The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, which has been on my list for months, and I’ve been feeling guilty because I had a copy from the library at the high school where I teach. I’ve had it too long and if I have it, then other people can’t be reading it. Plus I thought a young adult novel might be a nice way to recover from A Gate at the Stairs.
It was awesome. Exactly what I needed. The story of Katniss Everdeen, sixteen years old, and a sixteen that isn’t very far at all from Tassie’s twenty. She lives in District 12 in the nation of Panem, “the country that rose up out of the ashes of a place that was once called North America.” The official telling of their history “lists the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land, the brutal war for what little sustenance remained.” Panem followed, with its “shining Capitol” and the twelve districts, with laws to guarantee peace and, to avoid rebellion, the Hunger Games, in which each district yearly sends one boy and one girl, between twelve and seventeen years of age, to fight to the death. “The last tribute standing wins.” There is violence and intrigue, alliances formed and broken, family and love and tragedy and triumph. It’s awesome. Like I said. It’s also like a reality TV show; the Hunger Games are filmed and all residents are expected to watch the nightly broadcasts. I could go on and on but you should just read it. So engaging and well done, so much fun and so thoughtful, too.
Then I read Gender Blender, by Blake Nelson, which Sharon Levin brought up on the Child Lit listserv when someone asked for books about a girl getting her first period. (Here's a link to a review Levin wrote of it.) Well in Gender Blender, a sixth-grade girl switches bodies with a sixth-grade boy when they’re working on a project about gender differences for health class—and she gets her first period when he is occupying her body! So between that detail and the title, I had to add it to my list. I loved it, and read it in less than a day, ignoring other obligations so I could finish it. One of my favorite things about it is how Tom and Emma get to see the advantages and disadvantages of being a girl or a boy-the way middle school kids treat each other and relate to each other, the cruelties and the alliances among boys, and how those are similar and different to the cruelties and the alliances among girls. Having taught sixth grade for three years, and eighth grade for one, I was impressed by the details.
So then I thought maybe I was ready to tackle When Dad Killed Mom, by Julius Lester, which has also been on my list for a while. I admire Lester very much, and doing research for my own novel I’d asked for suggestions of books about children observing parental abuse, and this one came up. As I’d expected, it is so much about grieving the loss of a parent, which was part of what had kept me from reading it sooner (it was published in 2001). But—yeah, I cried through it, and I loved it so much.
When Dad Killed Mom is told from the alternating points of view of the brother and sister whose mother is killed. Jeremy is in sixth grade, and Jenna is in seventh. He’s a mama’s boy, and she’s a daddy’s girl, and she’s also become a teenager who has started trying to manipulate her mother in some impressively creative and painful ways. When their mother dies, Jeremy and Jenna both have to deal with their grief, their regret, and their feelings towards their father. One thing that rang truest to me was their relationship with each other, so similar in many ways to my relationship with my sister, especially after our father killed himself. Jeremy keeps calling Jenna “turd face” and she keeps calling him “fart breath” because they have to keep doing that, have to keep their relationship casual or at least act like it is, have to take each other for granted, even though they never will again—because at the same time, they are learning to appreciate each other, be grateful for each other, never take the other one for granted. I'd argue that they probably learn to appreciate each other more than they ever would have otherwise, as children or as adults.
Their moments of grief are also painfully, beautifully written, and so accurate, so true. From a section early in the book, from Jeremy’s point of view:
We see Jenna and Jeremy experience so much of that first pain and grief and confusion, and it’s so perfectly and painfully drawn. It sounds like a more sensationalistic book than it is; I read it as a book about grief, a really moving book about loss that rings so true.
Jeremy also says, “I don’t know which is worse: the days I miss her a lot or the days I don’t miss her at all.”
Now I’m reading Side Effects, by Amy Goldman Koss, which our awesome high school librarian just bought. She was showing me, and it has such a great cover. It could be about so many things. But it’s about a fourteen-year-old girl, Izzy, who’s diagnosed with cancer and goes through chemo. She’s bald and cute and miserable and triumphant because she’s a survivor. It’s not a book about someone with cancer who suffers and dies; it’s about someone with cancer who suffers and moves forward.
I’m still reading it, and happy about it, and looking forward to recommending it to people.
It’s always weird, the overlaps in stories. A Gate at the Stairs and When Dad Killed Mom have similar weird family secrets that are revealed in the course of the story and shift the plot hugely. I think it works better in When Dad Killed Mom, though I also think it’s one of the less successful parts of the story. Jeremy in When Dad Killed Mom and Side Effects’ Izzy are both artists, and their drawing keeps them sane when everything else is nuts. Izzy makes a great observation about how her art is private, making such a good point that I’d never really thought about. Her best friend says, “People think drawing is a communication thing. A conversation, not a secret.”
So yeah. Yay reading. And yay young adult literature; notice where the solid and significant and true moments are happening in my reading lately. Anybody who discounts YA lit in favor of adult lit is missing out on some amazing stuff.
*Weirdly, it was an excerpt from one of these guilty-white-parents conversations that Moore chose to read on NPR!
The main thing I hated was the narrative voice. This novel is the story of Tassie Keltjin, twenty years old, from “a small farm on the old Perryville Road” in rural Wisconsin, who is in her sophomore year of college in the relatively large, urbane college town of Troy (which is essentially Madison, basically Wisconsin’s only large, urbane college town, where Lorrie Moore has taught since 1984). Sometimes Tassie is very much the provincial young adult away from home for the first time: “Someone had turned on the lights. Someone had led me out of the cave—of Perryville Road. My brain was on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir.” But Tassie’s cultural reference points range from those of a twenty-year-old college student to those of a fifty-something college professor/New Yorker writer, and end up not being very interesting or convincing because of this inconsistency. For example, on page 39, Tassie hears Glenn Gould for the first time, playing Bach in the car of the woman she’s nannying for; by page 190, she is describing the sounds of a party as “like the approaching music of Ravel’s Bolero, some new monotonous melody.” As Geoff Dyer said in The Guardian, "for someone claiming to be 'fresh from childhood,' [Tassie] seems to be lugging around an extra quarter-century of adult life. A couple of times, she remarks on the quirks of 'our generation' the way, for example, that 'everything either "sucked" or was "awesome"' but they're exactly the things that strike people of Moore's age."
But Tassie also doesn’t ring true because this isn’t actually her story. She is on the sidelines of the main—and more compelling and engaging—story of the book, that of Sarah Brink, who hires Tassie to care for her adopted child, Mary-Emma. The story should be Sarah’s but one gets the feeling that Lorrie Moore fought that the whole eleven years she was writing this book. Apparently Moore is the adoptive mother of a mixed-race son, and according to the New York Times, “eight years ago she divorced her husband (no, she doesn’t want to talk about it) and is now raising her son as a single mother.” But it seems to me that if this is the book Moore is writing, she should write it as the book it wants to be. Tassie actually observes that one of the things she learns in college is that "In literature-perhaps as in life-one had to speak not of what the author intended but of what a story intended for itself." I could go on about that but it'll sound like I'm workshopping this novel: "Let the story tell itself, Lorrie!" etc. So enough.
Lorrie Moore’s personal life aside, I thought the child, Mary-Emma, was possibly the most engaging and compelling part of the story, or could have been. But the little girl is out of the book more than fifty pages before it ends, and I had stopped caring long before, though I tried to care. I wanted to understand the relationships Mary-Emma had with Tassie and with Sarah, but that’s hardly a part of the story, and when it is, those relationships are portrayed as very distant. I especially kept trying to figure out the reason for the distance Moore puts between Tassie and the little girl. The mom, Sarah, wouldn’t be a touchy-feely mom anyway, but why don’t Tassie and Mary-Emma have more of a bond? Especially as a former nanny, this baffled and annoyed me. There are moments of closeness between Tassie and Mary-Emma, but maybe they don't have more of a genuine relationship because the child isn’t allowed to be a full character. This could be because Mary-Emma is two years old… but every two-year-old I’ve ever known has been a full character and then some.
But I know that distance is also there because Tassie isn’t really a babysitter, she’s a narrative device to allow us into the lives of this family: distant, weird father; busy, obsessive mother; the biracial kid who was available for adoption, and they wanted a kid, so they took her. And, finally, the parents’ tragic secret. (Which I am not getting into here, for those of you worried about spoilers.)
So since she’s a narrative device, Tassie can conveniently show interest in the boring details she probably wouldn’t have paid any attention to if she was a real person. The most jarring examples of this are when she is babysitting at the weekly meetings for the parents of children “mostly ‘of color,’ as was said by all the adults downstairs, a range of shades from light to dark, though most of the parents downstairs, I noted, were white.” The oddest thing about this book, I thought, was the pages and pages of dialogue transcribed verbatim as supposedly overheard by Tassie at these Wednesday night meetings of the “transracial, biracial, multiracial families Sarah and Edward knew thus far in Troy.” Though Tassie professes interest in the activities of the children, the parents’ “remarks would waft up through two floors, out of interest and earshot for the kids, but if I strained I could hear.” Why would she strain to hear? She’s got awesome kids around, how and why does she sit there and listen to pages and pages of white people talking self-aggrandizing bullshit? She says, “I didn’t know what they were talking about most of the time.” And I still haven't figured out why the hell she would care.
“…institutionalized bigotry can subtly convince you of its rightness. With its absurdity removed, its evil can compel…”
“Of course homework is just a measure of the home! And so the kids of color will always fall behind…”
“I don’t believe in gay culture or white culture or female culture or any of that. It’s just so…”
“Vaughan takes 'Autumn Leaves' and turns it into Finnegans Wake.”*
(All ellipses are Moore’s. Remember, Tassie is eavesdropping from two floors up, and she’s in a room with a bunch of loud little kids. Which I find unbelievable. But yeah.)
I started skimming these conversations, because none of it was important or even relevant to the story, as far as I could tell, and because it was tedious. I don’t remember skimming like this except for The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, the book within the book in 1984. (And actually, the first time I read 1984, in sixth grade, I didn’t even skim it. I just skipped ahead to the end of the book within the book, back to the story.)
And then these parents lose the child, they give her up without a fight, when their tragic secret emerges. The mother makes excuses: “’Edward is not on board.’ . . . ‘Ideally, she should be with black parents.’” And just like that, the child disappears out of all of their lives. Weirdest of all to me, our narrator, Tassie, who has spent months with this child, does not appear to mourn her at all. After Mary-Emma goes away, “For a week I busied myself in a robotic way with tasks, half waiting for the phone to ring—to have it be Sarah or Reynaldo or even more hilariously Mary-Emma, as I missed her.” That’s as close as she comes. But after that week, “one spring day tumbled after another” and Tassie is “reduced. I was barely there.” But this is a kid who was central in her life and there are no specifics mourned? No places she has to avoid? None of those jarring horrible reminders that hit you when you are grieving, when you least expect it? She’s just missed for a week? What the hell is that? Not like this is a sparsely written book, either, spare with its details and metaphors and allusions and puns. No. Just somehow Tassie isn’t a real person, and Mary-Emma isn’t a real person, and so they don’t feel real person stuff about each other. I’ve nannied, and even just moving away from those children and losing them from my daily life, I mourned them for so long. I still think about them. I wanted to care about Tassie losing Mary-Emma, I tried so hard, I knew what it would have felt like-I do know what it feels like-but there wasn’t enough there.
So I finished that damn thing, and then I didn’t want to read anything for a while because it wasn’t fun, but I finally read The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, which has been on my list for months, and I’ve been feeling guilty because I had a copy from the library at the high school where I teach. I’ve had it too long and if I have it, then other people can’t be reading it. Plus I thought a young adult novel might be a nice way to recover from A Gate at the Stairs.
It was awesome. Exactly what I needed. The story of Katniss Everdeen, sixteen years old, and a sixteen that isn’t very far at all from Tassie’s twenty. She lives in District 12 in the nation of Panem, “the country that rose up out of the ashes of a place that was once called North America.” The official telling of their history “lists the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land, the brutal war for what little sustenance remained.” Panem followed, with its “shining Capitol” and the twelve districts, with laws to guarantee peace and, to avoid rebellion, the Hunger Games, in which each district yearly sends one boy and one girl, between twelve and seventeen years of age, to fight to the death. “The last tribute standing wins.” There is violence and intrigue, alliances formed and broken, family and love and tragedy and triumph. It’s awesome. Like I said. It’s also like a reality TV show; the Hunger Games are filmed and all residents are expected to watch the nightly broadcasts. I could go on and on but you should just read it. So engaging and well done, so much fun and so thoughtful, too.
Then I read Gender Blender, by Blake Nelson, which Sharon Levin brought up on the Child Lit listserv when someone asked for books about a girl getting her first period. (Here's a link to a review Levin wrote of it.) Well in Gender Blender, a sixth-grade girl switches bodies with a sixth-grade boy when they’re working on a project about gender differences for health class—and she gets her first period when he is occupying her body! So between that detail and the title, I had to add it to my list. I loved it, and read it in less than a day, ignoring other obligations so I could finish it. One of my favorite things about it is how Tom and Emma get to see the advantages and disadvantages of being a girl or a boy-the way middle school kids treat each other and relate to each other, the cruelties and the alliances among boys, and how those are similar and different to the cruelties and the alliances among girls. Having taught sixth grade for three years, and eighth grade for one, I was impressed by the details.
So then I thought maybe I was ready to tackle When Dad Killed Mom, by Julius Lester, which has also been on my list for a while. I admire Lester very much, and doing research for my own novel I’d asked for suggestions of books about children observing parental abuse, and this one came up. As I’d expected, it is so much about grieving the loss of a parent, which was part of what had kept me from reading it sooner (it was published in 2001). But—yeah, I cried through it, and I loved it so much.
When Dad Killed Mom is told from the alternating points of view of the brother and sister whose mother is killed. Jeremy is in sixth grade, and Jenna is in seventh. He’s a mama’s boy, and she’s a daddy’s girl, and she’s also become a teenager who has started trying to manipulate her mother in some impressively creative and painful ways. When their mother dies, Jeremy and Jenna both have to deal with their grief, their regret, and their feelings towards their father. One thing that rang truest to me was their relationship with each other, so similar in many ways to my relationship with my sister, especially after our father killed himself. Jeremy keeps calling Jenna “turd face” and she keeps calling him “fart breath” because they have to keep doing that, have to keep their relationship casual or at least act like it is, have to take each other for granted, even though they never will again—because at the same time, they are learning to appreciate each other, be grateful for each other, never take the other one for granted. I'd argue that they probably learn to appreciate each other more than they ever would have otherwise, as children or as adults.
Their moments of grief are also painfully, beautifully written, and so accurate, so true. From a section early in the book, from Jeremy’s point of view:
“Mom?” I call out hesitantly, call out softly, not believing that she won’t answer, not believing that she will never answer, not ever again, and the tears hot as summer rush back into my eyes and spill down my face as I throw myself onto the soft cushions of the couch by the windows, and for the first time, I cry out loud, in sobs that make my chest hurt, cry until my throat feels raw, like it has been cut with a hundred knives.Hard to read. So valuable.
“How are you, Jeremy?” Mrs. Worthing wants to know.
I wish people wouldn’t ask me that. What would they do if I said I hurt so much I feel like I want to die? “Okay,” I respond, because that’s what people want to hear.Jenna makes friends with a boy whose father killed himself six months earlier, who seeks her out because he remembers how alone he felt after his dad died when no one understood. Gregory describes how he felt when he first went back to school and saw his classmates: “it was like I would never ever feel again what they were feeling and they wouldn’t know what I was feeling until one of their parents died, and that might not be for fifty years.”
Jenna says, “That’s just what it’s like. B.T. and A.T. Before Tuesday. After Tuesday. Two different lives almost.”
Gregory says, “And you’ll never be the person you were before last Tuesday and you have no clue who you are now.”Thanks, Julius Lester. I wish I could have read this at nineteen, when the grief and the loss just felt awful and incoherent. Maybe it would’ve helped. It wouldn’t have helped very much, but yeah, that’s what it’s like. And I’m crying again. But it’s okay, because I’m crying for who I was then, and this girl I am now has made the grief a permanent and mostly manageable part of herself. Plus I have a sister, and reading When Dad Killed Mom reminded me again of how lucky I am for Emilyn, how lucky I’ve been this whole time to have someone else who remembers him and knows the hurt the whole way through.
We see Jenna and Jeremy experience so much of that first pain and grief and confusion, and it’s so perfectly and painfully drawn. It sounds like a more sensationalistic book than it is; I read it as a book about grief, a really moving book about loss that rings so true.
Jeremy also says, “I don’t know which is worse: the days I miss her a lot or the days I don’t miss her at all.”
Now I’m reading Side Effects, by Amy Goldman Koss, which our awesome high school librarian just bought. She was showing me, and it has such a great cover. It could be about so many things. But it’s about a fourteen-year-old girl, Izzy, who’s diagnosed with cancer and goes through chemo. She’s bald and cute and miserable and triumphant because she’s a survivor. It’s not a book about someone with cancer who suffers and dies; it’s about someone with cancer who suffers and moves forward.
I’m still reading it, and happy about it, and looking forward to recommending it to people.It’s always weird, the overlaps in stories. A Gate at the Stairs and When Dad Killed Mom have similar weird family secrets that are revealed in the course of the story and shift the plot hugely. I think it works better in When Dad Killed Mom, though I also think it’s one of the less successful parts of the story. Jeremy in When Dad Killed Mom and Side Effects’ Izzy are both artists, and their drawing keeps them sane when everything else is nuts. Izzy makes a great observation about how her art is private, making such a good point that I’d never really thought about. Her best friend says, “People think drawing is a communication thing. A conversation, not a secret.”
Izzy says, “Well, writing’s like that, too, but no one would lean over and read your journal and make comments! Or ask you to tear a page out and give it to them.”
“But drawing shows,” Kay explained. “Plus, everyone, myself included, is insanely jealous of how easy you make it look.”
“Well, everyone, yourself included, is a jerk-wad,” I grumbled.
“Which is why you’ve got to be patient with us,” Kay said.And remember this is not a book about a girl who’s an artist. It’s a book about a girl with cancer. But she’s an artist too, and this absolutely belongs in there. She’s a whole person.
So yeah. Yay reading. And yay young adult literature; notice where the solid and significant and true moments are happening in my reading lately. Anybody who discounts YA lit in favor of adult lit is missing out on some amazing stuff.
*Weirdly, it was an excerpt from one of these guilty-white-parents conversations that Moore chose to read on NPR!
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