The Graphic Truth

If you are a New Yorker reader you're familiar with Roz Chast, the cartoonist whose squiggly-lined drawings manage to make the mundane, the maudlin, or even the misanthropic events of everyday life seem unexpectedly funny. My favorites often involve parents and children, and the ways in which they can drive each other crazy. So I expected that her graphic memoir “Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant” would offer similar enjoyment. And it does. But this book is so much more than that.

Chast's parents George and Elizabeth are an eccentric, mismatched pair, essentially friendless, who have lived in a decidedly untrendy section of Brooklyn for over sixty years. Her father is gentle and kind, but also fearful of everything and ineffectual. Her mother is angry and critical. No surprise that Roz exited as soon as she could. But old age begins to take its toll on both of them, and Roz reluctantly accepts that she has to step in. What follows is the familiar litany of memory loss, emergency room visits, hospital stays, confusion, guilt, financial worries, resistance, anger. As grim as this sound, it is also very, very funny.

If you or anyone you know has dealt with the struggle of aging parents, you will find this story unerringly accurate and brutally candid. Chast does not paint herself as a saint. In fact, her drawings of her angry and frustrated self – bulgy-eyed, teeth-bared, hair crackling - are searing (and hilarious). But her humor and honesty make this a powerful and compelling story.

Looking Back

When I searched for “memoirs” on Amazon I got 226,091 results. Even limiting the search to 2013 produced 21,201 results. It simply isn't possible that there are that many interesting life stories to be told. So I usually avoid them altogether. But Alysia Abbott's Fairyland hit close to home. She was raised by her single father in San Francisco only blocks from where I once lived, and she is less than two years older than my oldest child. But what a different life she led.

The memoir is based mainly on her father Steve's journals, which Alysia discovers after he has died of AIDS in 1992. He was a gay poet and counter culture writer in the post-hippie Haight of the 1970's, and although his love for his daughter is clear, his parenting skills were shaky at best. His journals reveal his desperate desire to maintain his identity as an artist and a gay man, at time when gay liberation was still in its infancy. There were no gay parent role models, and Alicia lived a sometimes lonely and confusing life as she navigated between the structured world of her private school (paid for by her maternal grandparents) and the artistic chaos of her father's bohemian circle.

The understandable narcissism of Alysia's young adulthood collides with Steve's need for her help as the effects of the AIDS virus ravage his health, and Abbott is honest about her ambivalence and resentment. But their love for each other never faltered, and she looks back on the shortcomings of her younger self with honesty and regret.

Abbott's style has a somewhat awkward and sewn-together feel as she tries to combine passages from her father's journals with her own reminiscences. But the novel, written twenty years after her father's death, when she is herself a mother, is a loving tribute to her flawed but devoted father, as well as a nostalgic look at a childhood in fairyland.

How can the deaf understand sound?

Have you ever wondered about deafness? How does one live in a silent world? In Myron Uhlberg's "Hands of My Father", a memoir about growing up the hearing son of two deaf parents, he tries to answer his father's questions about the nature of sound. "Does sound have rhythm? Does it rise and fall like the ocean?" Myron's father Louis expresses himself using his hands, face and body, methods which are just as powerful as speech. But those who cannot understand sign are cut off from much of his communication. Heartbreakingly, this includes Louis' own parents and siblings.

Young Myron, born in 1933, is the bridge between the worlds of the hearing and the deaf, interpreting each to the other as soon as he can speak aloud and sign. He cycles back and forth between adult responsibilities and childhood desires, even being first intermediary for the needs of his infant brother.

This is a sweet, loving story of a family with special challenges and special bonds. The deaf parents have rich and complex interactions but spend their lives isolated from the world outside. Their son takes on huge responsibilities yet his life is immeasurably enhanced by his unique perspective.

Jersey Girl

“There is just something about New Jersey that breeds a certain type of life and by extension, a certain type of person.” This is the opening line of Kristen Buckley’s coming of age memoir, “Tramps Like Us”. Kristen Buckley is a musician, a screen writer and a novelist. She has written a very funny, rather quirky memoir about how she got from the suburbs of New Jersey to the streets of Los Angelus, via New York City.

Kristen Buckley begins the story with the tragic-comedy event of her physician father announcing to his six year old daughter, “Now that that you’re six you don’t need a dad anymore.” Kristen promptly went home to her surviving parent and climbed into bed with her mother and her Korean brother and sister who had been adopted two months earlier.

And so began the odyssey of surviving in New Jersey in “70’s Divorce Hell”. From the exploding septic tank on the sprawling front lawn to the long lost Korean sibling who is rescued by Kristen’s mother, but whose knowledge of English is limited to profane four letter words.

For readers growing up in the seventies and eighties this story will have a certain resonance. But for those of us who didn’t grow up in that era or in New Jersey, this story is just plain fun. Buckley has a wry sense of humor, not to mention what a precocious, wise child she was. It is fun to laugh and commiserate with her and this crazy family as that make their way through a difficult time with a great sense of humor and determination.

By the end of this charming, laugh out loud story you are really routing for a girl who really didn’t care what anybody else thought as she tried to make sense of her wacky life. I love the section where she lists (the) 66 famous people who are from New Jersey. With this story, and Kristen Buckley’s accomplishments, there are now 67!

Going Home

Recently a friend lent me a copy of Rhoda Janzen's memoir Mennonite in a Little Black Dress. It's probably not a book I would have chosen for myself. The title sounded a little cutesie, and a front cover blurb by “Eat, Pray, Love” author Elizabeth Gilbert did make me worry that this was yet another book about a plucky gal finding her bliss. But you know what they say about judging a book by its cover.

It's true, there is an annoying gimmick early in the book, where Janzen presents faux questionnaires to the reader. The choices are too stupid to repeat, and she almost lost me right there. Fortunately this device is soon abandoned and Janzen, a poet and college professor, tells her story in a straightforward and very funny way.

At the age of forty-three she is abandoned by her husband of fifteen years, a brilliant, demanding, bipolar artist who leaves her for a man he met on gay.com. In that same week she is involved in frightening car crash which leaves her with multiple fractures. Broken in body and spirit, she heads for home – a California Mennonite community where her parents still live.

Growing up in a strict Mennonite household, Janzen had a childhood with no TV, slumber parties, card-playing or dancing. Having escaped this rigid environment, she might easily be tempted to make fun of it. And she does amusingly recall her unfashionable clothes (as she grew her mother would sew a strip of whatever fabric she had onto the bottom of her pant legs) and her “shame-based” school lunches brought from home in a navy diaper bag. But she's not a whiner, and she's blessed with a mother whose optimism makes Pollyanna look like Eeyore, and whose enthusiasm for cooking, singing hymns and matchmaking (preferably to Mennonite farmers with tractors) is utterly engaging.

Janzen tackles the paradox that, although her sheltered upbringing may well have caused her to stay in a toxic marriage far too long, her education in the Mennonite virtues of hard work, honesty, respect for family, and responsibility allowed her survive and grow. And the sense of humor she got from her mother didn't hurt either.

O Parakeet of the Lissome Star

That is just one of names that Paul West created for his wife Diane Ackerman as a therapy for his damaged brain following a massive stroke. Ackerman, a prolific writer (The Zoo Keeper’s Wife, A Natural History of the Senses, Cultivating Delights, …) and poet, has chronicled the aftermath of the stroke in a forthcoming memoir One Hundred Names for Love.

It is a remarkable story: of a wife’s devotion to her injured husband – and a very painless way to learn a lot of brain science. West was in his mid-seventies at the time of the stroke and already battling diabetes and heart disease. Immediately after the stroke he could manage only one sound: Mem, mem, mem… Over the next five years Ackerman, assisted by an extraordinary therapist, was tireless in her efforts to help West regain his ability to write and speak coherently. Just reading about the struggles is exhausting. But Ackerman is a poet and the language with which she describes their efforts, their small successes, their setbacks is rich and delightful. Because West was an accomplished writer before the stroke, he is especially frustrated by the simplistic exercises put forth as traditional speech therapy. It is Ackerman, the wife who knows him better than anyone else could, who devises exercises like the One Hundred Names (all of which are recorded at the end of this volume).

The science is fascinating…and fun. Has it ever seemed to you that women talk faster than men? “Women can pronounce words faster than men, and utter more sentences in a given amount of time. Maybe because women use both hemispheres to comb through sounds, while men mainly use the left side. With a richer bounty of connections among neurons and a more thickly wired “corpus callosum” zooming traffic between the two hemispheres, the female brain may be better organized for language. Whatever, the reason, females are less prey to stuttering, dyslexia, autism, and other language problems, including aphasia.” Aphasia is the diagnostic term given to West’s condition.

The book will not be released officially until April. I was fortunate to receive an advance reader’s copy for review from the publisher through Reading Group Choices. I hope that somehow each and every one of the caregivers of Gabrielle Giffords, but especially her husband, will receive and read this book. The importance of having a primary caregiver deeply invested in the success of the outcome cannot be overestimated. I hope that none of us has to face such a daunting task – but the odds are that some of us will. This book will give hope and comfort.

Checking Back In

Guilty: I haven’t been blogging.

But I have been reading. I just didn’t seem to have the energy to get my thoughts together. But here are some of the books that I have read during this period and can recommend:

Let’s Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell. This is a memoir about the friendship between two older women that ended all too abruptly with the death of one from cancer. That is not a spoiler. These two women have more than the usual bonds: Same profession, new puppies, recovered from addiction, complicated relationships with their fathers, and a love of an athletic pursuit. Most of us are not so lucky. But women readers especially will appreciate (and envy) their discovery of each other – without any of the sexual intimacy that seems to be presumed among two single women friends.

Searching for Tamsen Donner by Gabrielle Burton. Another memoir. For a book that I really liked, it took me over a month to read and I’m not sure why. Burton is married and has five daughters (just like Tamsen Donner). One summer Burton takes her family on a road trip to recreate the journey of the Donner party. This memoir is part journal of that trip, part history of the Donner party and part record of Burton’s struggles to balance her ambition as a writer and her sense of responsibility as a mother. The history of the Donner party is fascinating. I had always thought that the stories of cannibalism were just conjecture – not so. Tamsen Donner managed to write a few letters during the journey which have been preserved; but her journal was never found. Burton tries to reimagine the thoughts and feelings of Tamsen Donner.

The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein. Fiction. If someone had told me that I could ever take an interest in professional race car driving, I would never have believed it. But for most readers, I think, that part of this book is just tangential. It’s more about the dog. The entire book is told from the dog’s point of view – which raises some interesting questions, such as: What does a dog see when the dog is in front of a television? There is a lot about race car driving and some good philosophy. “The car goes where the eyes go” works for both.

Related articles

• Dr. Irene S. Levine: A Conversation with Gail Caldwell: On the loss of a close friend (huffingtonpost.com)

A Powerful Story

Sometimes a story is so powerful that it haunts you long after you've finished reading it. That's the way I feel about the memoir Burning Horses: A Hungarian Life Turned Upside Down. The author Agatha Hoff assumes the voice of her mother Éva Leopold Badics to tell her moving story. Éva was born to an aristocratic family in Szekszárd, a small town in southern Hungary, in 1905. Her grandfather was Jewish but she was raised Catholic. She had an idyllic childhood filled with piano lessons, party dresses, and carefree vacations.  She met her husband, a graduate student named Jóska Badics, at a dance, and for their wedding in 1926 her parents deeded them a two hundred acre farm southwest of Budapest. The happy couple looked forward to a simple life in the countryside with their two little girls Livia and Agatha.

But World War II changes everything. Éva and Jóska's innocent belief that “it could never happen here” is replaced with the grim reality of life in Budapest under Nazi occupation. The noose begins to tighten around Éva because of her Jewish ancestry, threatening to tear her family apart. No writer of fiction could ever have imagined the ordeals they had to suffer to stay alive, nor could he have created a character as indomitable as Éva. Her experience is simultaneously awe-inspiring and heartbreaking. This is not just a Holocaust story, but also a story of love and perseverance in the face of man's inhumanity, told in clear but poetic prose by a loving daughter.

More Than Just a Game

After reading Cutting for Stone (CFS) (see blog of June 22, 2010) and enjoying it so much, I wanted to read more by Abraham Verhese. Having recently taken up playing the game of tennis, I had no hesitation in choosing his The Tennis Partner. Unlike CFS, The Tennis Partner is Verghese’s memoir of his initial months on the faculty of Texas Tech School of Medicine in El Paso.

Shortly after his arrival there, he discovers that one of his assigned 4th year medical students is a former tennis professional from Australia. Tennis has a particular importance to Verghese. Growing up in Ethiopia in a somewhat dysfunctional family, Verghese found his escape in countless hours spent outside hitting a tennis ball against a wall. He had fantasized about being a great player and throughout his life had kept detailed journals of his own matches and of his heroes in the game. Before he can stop himself he is inviting David Smith, his student, to play.

That is the start of an incredible story and friendship. Smith and Verghese have much in common: their status as foreigners, their dedication to medicine, their love of tennis, and the unhappy circumstances in their personal relationships with girlfriend and spouse respectively. Verghese had intentionally selected a medical school that was not “first tier” so that he would have time to devote to other aspects of his life including his children, his writing and now, unexpectedly, his tennis. At first he worries about having this contact with his student but Verghese and Smith handle the switch in roles on and off the courts without difficulty.

As you would expect if you have read CFS, Verghese includes realistic portraits of life in the hospital and in this Texas town. There is also good instruction in tennis technique and strategy and, dare I say it, life. “Get the ball back over the net just one more time” could be a good strategy for bad times.

It is not giving much away to say that the story ends sadly. The dedication of the book is: “In memory of David Smith, M.D., 1959-1994.” I long ago learned to avoid reading the Library of Congress catalogue information on the copyright page because it could reveal too much about the book in advance. To that I will now have to add: don’t read the book’s dedication until you have finished reading the book.

Of authors who have been successful in writing fiction and memoir, the name Joan Didion comes quickly to mind. Do you know of others?

A Free Trip to Italy

I bet that I am one of the few people left who hadn’t read the book or seen the movie: Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes. It was only because of a comment at a recent book luncheon that I learned that Mayes has a local connection to the San Francisco Bay Area. So after a spate of books about wars, death, disappointment and overall sadness, I needed a “vacation”. With this book in hand I was transported to Italy without the expense or hassle of a 10-hour flight.

For the most part the book is about Mayes’ renovation of an abandoned villa in Tuscany. Her descriptions of nature, the weather and the local food are magical. Who knew this was also a cookbook? There are two sections of mouth-watering recipes: one for summer foods and one for winter. I especially enjoyed the sections of her own vacation travels around Tuscany searching for Etruscan tombs and Roman roads. Has anyone been to the hot waterfall at Saturnina? That alone sounds worth the trip. The terra cotta horses (in Italy now, not China) from the 4th or 3rd century B.C. are another reminder of just how really young our own country is by comparison and how insignificant may be the crises of the moment even as we are disappearing.

I was a little put off by her ruminations comparing the religion of Italy with the “Repent” and “Jesus Saves” culture of her own Southern (USA) upbringing. It was too much for me that this lapsed Methodist/lapsed Episcopalian would install a ceramic Mary with a small cup for holy water (for which she substituted the spring water from her property.) But if you wonder why we call them the “dog days of summer” or why a cappuccino drink is so named, it’s all in here.

Now I feel rested and refreshed – just as I would from a real vacation.

Being Different

Lucy Grealy was an award-winning poet and a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Her close friend and roommate at both Sarah Lawrence College and Iowa was Ann Patchett, author of “Bel Canto”. Lucy Grealy’s memoir “Autobiography of a Face” was published in 1994. Lucy Grealy died in New York City at the age of 39.

When she was nine years old Lucy Grealy collided, in the playground, with another girl hitting their faces into each other. The pain Lucy felt went from a tooth ache, to a fractured jaw, to a dental cyst. The final diagnosis was “Ewing’s sarcoma”, a potentially terminal cancer. Lucy Grealy tells a story of strength and suffering. She endured almost three years of radiation and chemotherapy, driving with her mother from a suburb to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York City five days a week for treatments. What this child endured is difficult to comprehend. When she cried her mother told her to be strong. But she couldn’t figure out how to do that.

She finally returned to school with a third of her jaw removed. The cruelty of children faced with someone who is different is hard to understand. Lucy Grealy states, “It was the pain from that, from feeling ugly, that I always viewed as the great tragedy of my life. The fact that I had cancer seemed minor in comparison.”

She went on to endure over thirty reconstructive procedures on her face before she came to terms with the fact that she was finally whole. The journey was a painful one for Lucy Grealy but one she was able to write about with eloquence and wit. She suffered with huge physical pain, the constant pain of being different and an overall feeling of loneliness and being unlovable. She went on to be a successful poet and writer. This memoir is one that will be very hard to forget. It leaves the reader with feelings of overall sadness that our society has so much difficultly accepting someone, even a child, who looks “different”.

The memoir has a wonderful Afterward by Ann Patchett that gives the reader some insight into the adult Lucy Grealy. Lucy Grealy’s memoir is a great story about finding one's true self when faced with insurmountable adversity.

Saved

Alice Sebold is the well recognized author of the critically acclaimed and popular novel, “Lovely Bones”, which was made into a motion picture this past year.

In 1999, Alice Sebold wrote a memoir about being raped. That book, “Lucky”, tells the incredible story of Sebold’s rape at the age of eighteen on the last day of her freshman year, in a park tunnel, at Syracuse University in New York.

This is not an easy book to read. In the first chapter Alice Sebold describes the gruesome, violent beating and rape in graphic, meticulous detail. Sebold has a mission in this courageous memoir. She wants people to understand exactly what rape means.

In clear and precise, almost journalistic, prose Alice Sebold tells her story. We meet her somewhat distant and dysfunctional family; a mother who suffers from chronic panic attacks, a father who teaches Spanish literature and goes to Spain for long periods of time. It is in this family that Alice Sebold has honed the creative, independent, strong personality that would give her amazing strength and courage as she dealt with the aftermath of her brutal attack.

Once you begin this book it is very difficult to stop reading. In this story, which is both sad and eloquent Alice Sebold displays a great wit and a sarcastic bite which seems amazing for an eighteen year old in this situation. It is as if the reader cannot abandon this courageous girl. When she sees her attacker in the street six months after the attack, she and the reader embark on the harrowing, lonely journey of a legal proceeding. Being presented with a lineup and being cross examined by a ruthless defense attorney are gripping and totally frustrating ordeals. But these encounters and Sebold’s reactions are so important. She clearly describes the ramifications of rape on family members, friends and everyone in her world. What happens to Alice Sebold after the rape is as important as the rape itself. If you didn’t know that this was a true story you may think there are too many coincidences or events, after the rape, that seem contrived. But the coincidences and events did happen in Alice's life, and she took a long and painful journey to be able to finally live a normal, productive life. She tells us, “You save yourself or you remain unsaved”. Alice Sebold found peace in writing this story and she has written an impressive book that tells the truth about prevalent and devastating violence committed against women and how our society treats victims.

Adventure and Inspiration

This memoir Learning to Breathe was recommended to me because it includes a climb to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro in celebration of the author's 40th birthday. I too am hoping to celebrate my birthday by a Kili climb in 2011. But for the author, the climb was her way of demonstrating her recovery from an horrific accident.

Wright is a photo journalist and in early 2000 she was in Laos working on a photographic book about children in developing countries. She was riding in an old bus up a narrow winding road when her bus was broadsided by a logging truck...and she was seated just at the point of impact! She was so convinced of her imminent death that she wrote a goodbye note to her brother and his children.

But obviously she survived - in spite of broken ribs, a collapsed lung filled with blood and fluid, a punctured diaphragm, a lacerated spleen, and a back, pelvis and coccyx that were also broken. Much of the immediate repair work was done without anesthesia. Wright attributes her survival in part to the breathing techniques that she had learned during several Buddhist retreats she had made in Nepal.

When she was well enough to travel, Wright returned to her home in San Francisco to begin the arduous process of learning to walk properly again. It was during this time, when one of her specialists told her that she would no longer be able to continue traveling and working as a photographer, that she issued her challenge: "I'm going to climb Mount Kilimanjaro for my fortieth birthday!" She had just over a year to prove the specialist wrong.

Alison Wright was and is a fearless adventurer. She entertains the reader with many of her pre-accident adventures. Having sustained and recovered from these injuries, she still takes risks that to me are unimaginable: scuba diving, a 709-foot bungee jump in South Africa, white water rafting on class five rapids in Uganda. I loved reading about them all. She has a mindset that is totally foreign to my own. Maybe I'll try to be more adventurous myself now. I look forward to searching out her photographic work.

Childhood Memories

You may know Helene Cooper's name from her byline as a diplomatic correspondent for the New York Times. You may even have seen her on TV news shows like Washington Week. But her memoir The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood tells the story of a childhood far removed from that of a typical American girl.

Cooper was born and raised in Liberia, directly descended on both sides from freed American slaves who immigrated from the United States in the pre-Civil War 1820's to establish a free colony in Africa. As a “Congo”, as the descendants of freed slaves were called, she lived a privileged childhood in a large house outside Monrovia, while the native Liberians, called “Country”, struggled in poverty and worked as servants for the upper class “Congos” like the Coopers.

Her parents adopted a native Liberian named Eunice as a companion for the lonely Helene, and the two lived a childhood that would be familiar to any American girl, with music, clothes, cars, and boys as their primary interests.But in 1989, when Helene was fourteen, native soldiers led by Samuel Doe overthrew the government, killing President Tolbert and executing scores of government members, including Helene's uncle. After a terrifying encounter with the native soldiers who invade their Sugar Beach home, the Coopers fled to America, leaving Eunice behind.

Cooper describes her struggles to fit in as an American student, her determination to become a journalist, including a first job in Rhode Island covering school board and city council meetings for the the Providence Journal , and ultimately a plum assignment to cover the Iraq invasion for the Wall Street Journal. A near-death experience there makes her realize that the war she should be covering was in Liberia, and she returns to her native country, which has been devastated by years of savage warfare.

The book is more than just chronology of Helene's life. It is a warm and tender tribute to the strength of her family, especially her warm and loving father and her indomitable mother. When she returns to Liberian to find her lost adopted sister Eunice, she powerfully reconnects to her childhood and to her native country. This book tells a very personal story, but it is also an amazing window on the Liberia behind the headlines.

Food for Comfort

Kim Sunee has written a memoir of her exciting, sad and complicated life. She tells the story of being abandoned in a Korean marketplace when she was about three years old. She was too young to remember very much, but old enough to have haunting memories. A young American couple stationed in Korea adopted her and brought her home to New Orleans. They later adopted another Korean girl. Kim and her sister grew up in a city (as Kim remembers) with no other Asian children. Kim tells of a childhood of feeling displaced. But the real story began when Kim left New Orleans for college in Florida. From Florida Kim followed a Swedish boyfriend to live in Sweden where she began a life of searching for a feeling of self, and belonging.

“Trail of Crumbs” is a sad story of a young woman who is searching for a past and love. But the most amazing and surprising part of the book is Kim Sunee’s incredible talent as a cook. At the end of many chapters are recipes and throughout the book Kim describes in mouth watering detail the amazing meals she prepared and cooked.

When her relationship with her Swedish boyfriend ended Kim met Olivier Baussen, the French millionaire who founded “L’Occitane” and “Oliviers & Co”, two worldwide companies visible in most every city in the world. The life Kim led in her twenties is one that was defined by world travel, beautiful homes, beautiful clothes and entertaining and cooking for large gatherings at the drop of a hat. The details of the feasts she prepared and the beautiful surroundings in Provence, are a pleasure to read. But Kim Sunee could only be really happy when she was cooking. She was plagued with a "constant need for departure".

What is difficult to read is the story of a young woman who floated through life taking what she could but never knowing what she wanted. She often comes across as an unreliable narrator as she relates how everyone in her life somehow fell short, never giving her what she needed. She seemed to have a talent for hurting the people who have loved and helped her the most. She consistently related the praise of her talents that others lavished on her. But all the amazing things that happened to her, as she traveled the world, all happened before she was thirty. Her story is one that resounds with the comfort one finds in food and cooking. Her recipes that relate to specific places in the book and her descriptions of the food presentations are delightful. This is definitely an interesting, entertaining memoir written by a young woman who has an intriguing story to tell.

Summer Darkness

“On July 5, 1996, my daughter was struck mad”. That is the first sentence of Michael Greenberg's harrowing memoir Hurry Down Sunshine. Greenberg's book chronicles the psychotic break of his fifteen-year-old daughter Sally. He is unsparing in his description of Sally's breakdown and hospitalization, and also of the strains it puts on his relationship with his current wife and his ex-wife, who is Sally's mother, as well as on his own mother and his older son.

Father and daughter are unusually close, so her descent into madness is devastating for Greenberg. Her mania is so extreme that she needs hospitalization and powerful psychotropic drugs to control it. Her family grasps for other explanations. Did she take LSD or Ecstasy? Is it just a teenage phase she's going through? But they all eventually have to come to grips with the reality of her manic depression and its treatment. As any parent would, Greenberg relentlessly and guiltily examines his past for ways he may have contributed to her illness. One day, in effort to understand how Sally feels, he even takes a dose of her meds. He describes how he feels ”as if I have been relegated to a bit part in the drama of my own existence and, moreover, I have missed my cue to step onstage”.

I think that losing a child to mental illness must be a worst nightmare for many parents. All of a sudden the traits that you found quirky or charming or creative become just aspects of the psychosis. Greenberg, a freelance writer by profession, must have taken notes as the events unfolded, because his descriptions are so detailed and crisp. His prose manages to be both unsentimental and heartbreaking. This book is a tough read, not because the writing is unclear but because the story of Sally's 'summer of madness' is so hard to bear. But I recommend it to anyone who wants understand the impact of mental illness on both patient and family.

Escaping Dysfunction

Jeannette Walls was, until recently, a writer for MSNBC.com. What many people did not know, until Jeannette Walls wrote “The Glass Castle”, a memoir of her childhood, was that Ms. Walls came from a nomadic, dysfunctional family. Her parents Rex and Rose Mary Walls were eccentric and shiftless, at best. Rex was a brilliant, charming man who could not hold a job because he had “a little bit of a drinking situation”. Rose Mary, a self proclaimed “excitement addict”, declared that “cooking a meal that would be consumed in fifteen minutes had no appeal when she could make a painting that might last forever”. And paint she did, while her four children had to fend for themselves. When three old Jeannette was attempting to cook hotdogs, her tutu like dress caught fire and she was so severely burned that she spent six weeks in the hospital and received skin grafts.

As the family moved, like nomads, through the southwest desert, Rex Wall promised his children that he would build them the “glass castle” the he had carefully designed and drafted. But as we read about these hapless children, the antics of the parents become infuriating. When Jeannette falls out of the backseat of one of their dilapidated cars the parents don’t even notice or respond to the screams of the other children. Jeannette had to sit on the side of the road, bruised and bloodied, until her parents realized she was missing. The family lands in Arizona in a house that Rose Mary’s mother owns, but when dad loses yet another job and the family is out of money or ideas they decide to return to Rex’s home town. It is the depressed and depressing town of Welch, West Virginia. We quickly understand why Rex never wanted to return. His family is unbelievably dysfunctional and weird. Jeannette and her family lived in a house with no bathroom, no heat and a roof that leaked. But, wherever the Walls children landed, they went to school and they thrived. Returning to Welch leads Rex Walls to drink himself to oblivion. Jeannette and her siblings learned how to survive and made plans to escape.

“The Glass Castle” is a story that proves that children are resilient and that regardless of the circumstances, children love their parents. At times it is very difficult to read about these people who should never have been parents, yet Jeannette Walls is able to write this story with a deep feeling of affection and understanding of her parents. Perhaps she is able to do so because what little they did give to her and her siblings, it was enough to give them the determination to break away from the poverty and dysfunction, and build a future for themselves.

Jeannette Walls has written a very good memoir with wonderful details, humor and pathos. It is a story that will leave you with the good feeling that people can overcome adversity and when they do, you can’t help wanting to cheer for them.

Midwestern Memories

Recently I noticed a title on a bestseller list – Little Heathens:Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression. Since my in-laws Whitie and Becky also lived on an Iowa farm during the Depression I was intrigued. They were older than the author, a young married couple in their twenties rather than children. But the Depression hit them hard. My father-in-law, who had a degree in chemistry, lost his job in a lab when he developed pleurisy due to the lab's poor ventilation system. This was long before OSHA and state disability insurance, so they had to do whatever they could to make ends meet. They returned to Becky's father's farm in Olin, Iowa. We recently found a Household Allowance ledger that Whitie kept during that time. The ledger for May 1933 shows that they earned $14.61 from selling eggs and cream and spent $4.29 on groceries (most of what they ate came from the farm). The Depression left its mark on them for their rest of their lives. They were warm and generous people, but they were definitely thrifty.

Mildred Armstrong Kalish's experiences were even more difficult. She was five years old, the third of four children, when her maternal grandfather banished her father from their lives. His transgression? Even now, 70 years later, she doesn't know. But it left her mother in a precarious position. Kalish's grandparents owned four farms, but they were “land poor”, struggling to pay the taxes and keep the farms running. So Mildred and her family lived and worked from May through December on one of these farms. In January they moved in with their grandparents in the small town of Garrison, since the cold weather made it too difficult to walk to the rural school. In both households the mottoes were the same – “Willful waste makes woeful want” and “If you're looking for a helping hand you'll find one at the end of your arm”.

Kalish's grandparents were “hearty handshake” Methodists, meaning that they didn't consider it appropriate to show affection by hugging, kissing or even touching. When a departing guest exclaimed “Thanks for a great evening. Oh, I do so love you folks”, Kalish's grandmother remarked after the door closed “Well, we like her, too. But there's no need to say so”. They firmly believed in building character in their grandchildren through religion and hard work. But if you think this is a memoir in which the author bemoans her cold harsh childhood you are mistaken. Kalish's memories are not only clear as a bell, they are infused with affection and joy.

She has fond memories of her winters in Garrison but her most powerful stories are about her summers on the farm. There were countless chores and very little money, but her affection for “the high blue sky” of Iowa, for all the sights and smells that filled her childhood days, is present on every page. Not that she gushes – that would be totally out of character. In fact her prose style is ... prosaic – as matter-of-fact and practical as she is. She includes household hints (most involve vinegar, salt, peroxide or baking soda) and recipes for everything from corn oysters to carrot marmalade. Perhaps her most poetic musing concerns...bacon fat. In comparing her own experience to Proust's reminiscence on the madeleine she says that “the closest I come to Proust's experience is the joy that comes over me when I conjure up the taste of a sandwich made of homemade bread spread with smoked bacon drippings, topped with the thinnest slices of crisp red radishes freshly harvested from the garden, and sprinkled over with coarse salt”.

Much of her farm life was spent outdoors, so there are many stories about the farm animals, the vegetable garden, nut gathering, haying, even the hanging out the wash. All these stories are told in her practical Iowan prose, but you can't help but be touched by her description of “the dearest deep-down freshness of a crab apple tree in full bloom”, or the “pagan pleasure” she took in inhaling “the sweet fragrance emanating form the clean body of a colt, calf, lamb, puppy or kitten that had been sleeping on the grass and warmed by the sun”.

Kalish admits at the end of the book that not everyone who experienced a childhood like hers has such happy memories, including her own sister, who refused to discuss their lives in the thirties. But I recently reread my father-in-law's memoir, hand-written near the end of his life. Like Kalish he describes their depression era life in practical language, without a hint of self pity or pessimism. I think he and Becky would have enjoyed this book.

A World of Difference

In November 2001 a young (age 31) Norwegian female journalist arrived in Kabul, Afghanistan. By February 2002 she had made the acquaintance of a prosperous bookseller Sultan Khan and persuaded him to allow her to come to live with his family: 3 generations, 2 wives, 13 people, 4 rooms. This book, The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad, is the author’s account of the three months that she spent in that household and in Kabul in that tumultuous time period.

Although she is fluent in five languages, Seierstad did not speak the particular dialect of the Khan household. Fortunately three of the family spoke English: Sultan, his 17-year-old son Mansur and his 19-year-old sister Leila. As you would expect then, most of the events in the book involve one of these three. The behavior of Sultan and Mansur is infuriating; and the situation of Leila heartbreaking.

The author successfully introduces much of recent Afghan history and culture – the same history and culture that Khaled Hosseini portrays in A Thousand Splendid Suns but this time it is in a non-fiction context. Having read the Hosseini book first, I found it helpful to review the history again. On the cultural side there are the stories of arranged marriages; preference for male children; the roles of women in girlhood, adulthood and old age; the burka; pilgrimage; local justice and tribal warfare. There are some lighter moments but not many. It makes sense that, when a woman is covered literally head to heel, shoes take on a special role and importance! One of the most dispiriting passages describes the restrictions that some of the women place on themselves. Even though education is made available to them after the defeat of the Taliban, many women are unable to accept and embrace their freedom.

One would like to think that in the six years since the period portrayed in the book things have improved. But I heard on the radio this morning that still today in Kabul the residents have electricity for only a few hours every other day. We are so used to rapid change in our world but we start from a much different place. One can only wonder how long it will take for true change to come to that part of the world.