Half in Shade: Family, Photography and Fate by Judith Kitchen

Posted on December 15, 2015 by pagesofjulia

This is a complex one. Judith Kitchen has inherited dusty boxes of old photographs, belonging to her family and stretching back over generations. Some of the black-and-white figures she finds there are labeled, or recognizable to her; but many are strangers. In a series of short pieces – meditations, essays, ramblings, experimental forms – she wonders over these photographs. Sometimes she uses her imagination to tell their stories; sometimes she uses research.

She is also being treated for cancer, and the narrative of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation responds to the history she researches and creates. She plays with concepts. Every photograph has an unseen character, the one behind the camera; who was he or she, what did he or she see? In looking back into time, she can see both more and less than the characters in these pictures. They know one another, they know where they are, and oftentimes Kitchen does not. But she knows what Paris in 1939 has looming over it. She knows what will come.

My reactions to these pieces varied. Kitchen is a poet, and she wanders into a sort of free-form poetry that reminds me of abstract art: I understand that the people around me see and interpret a great deal that is hidden from me. I wonder if I’m not smart enough for the appreciation of this art. I like Kitchen best when she says what she means, playing with language a little along the way. The more abstract she gets, the less I comprehend. I don’t think my mind works the same way hers does.

But I like what she did with the idea of photography, the examination of light and exposure, the questions about how certain confounding photos (like the young woman surrounded by handled objects before a snowy lake) were posed, arranged, intended, carried out. I like what she did with history, and family history, and the uncertainties we have to accept. I love the artistry of this sentence:

The clapboard’s horizontal plane cuts through the outlines of their lives as they stand facing us across the intervening years, chance encounter that will fuse her rough pinked hem, his knot at ease, our own unbridled mysteries.

The homonym of knot, the rhyme of ease and mysteries.

Half in Shade is a complicated thing and contains many different opportunities to delve in. I’m not sure I’m up to it, at least not on my own. I think this is a class someone could teach for a whole semester. Recommended for people who understand and like Faulkner.

Rating: 7 second looks.

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Maximum Shelf: The Sound of Gravel by Ruth Wariner

Posted on December 11, 2015 by pagesofjulia

Maximum Shelf is the weekly Shelf Awareness feature focusing on an upcoming title we love and believe will be a great handselling opportunity for booksellers everywhere. The features are written by our editors and reviewers and the publisher has helped support the issue.

This review was published by Shelf Awareness on November 29, 2015.

sound of gravelIn The Sound of Gravel, Ruth Wariner tells of growing up in a Mormon polygamist colony in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico. Her childhood was filled with sad and shocking hardships, some painfully difficult to read. But Wariner’s tone is never self-pitying, and her love for her mother and siblings imbues a distressing memoir with nuance, and eventual relief.

Ruth’s mother, Kathy, became the fifth wife of Joel LeBaron when she was 17 years old. Joel’s father founded Colonia LeBaron in Mexico because the practice of plural marriage was better tolerated there than in the United States. Ruth was Kathy’s fourth child and Joel’s 39th. He died just three months after Ruth’s birth–murdered by his brother over a conflict about church authority. Kathy remarried a man named Lane and bore another six children with him. Ruth was the eldest nondisabled female child and, over the years, many domestic duties, including childcare, fell to her.

The Sound of Gravel begins with the family history of the LeBarons, whose status as church leaders impressed the young Ruth, and with Kathy’s personal history, as told to her daughter. The earliest scenes Ruth relates from her own memory find her at age five, and introduce her siblings: Audrey, the eldest, with a disability that remained undiagnosed for years and that led to occasional violence against the other children; Matt, a responsible boy; Luke, good-natured but developmentally delayed; and the baby, Aaron. Later the family grows as Meri, Micah, Leah, Elena and Holly are born. Lane, Ruth’s stepfather, promises to complete Kathy’s family’s dwelling and add a showerhead, electricity and other longed-for luxuries, but is slow to do so. Lane’s first wife and her children receive preference as to the basics, in the tradition of the LeBaron church. Ruth dislikes Lane early on, for his failure to support her mother as well as his harsh discipline. From an early age, Ruth sees her mother’s conflicts and jealousies with her sister wives, and worries that plural marriage looks more like misery than the holy state her church teaches it to be.

Ruth grows up quickly as the household swells in size. The family moves around: Kathy leaves Lane after he beats her, and moves to the United States where her parents live, but returns to him. Lane relocates his families as they seek work: they harvest and sell pine nuts in New Mexico, camp out in El Paso, and smuggle undocumented Mexican workers across the border under the children’s makeshift bed in a camper. But Kathy, Ruth and the other children always return to Colonia LeBaron because, Kathy says, “this is where you kids belong.”

The poverty and poor living conditions that come with Kathy’s choices are based on her religion, her devotion to and dependence on Lane, and a belief that the United States is a Babylon “standing between us and our connection to God.” Squeezing a living out of food stamps and Lane’s meager earnings–shared among four wives and an uncounted number of children–means mostly subsisting on beans and rice. The children are pulled out of school in their early teens–Ruth at age 14–because “Mom insisted that it was more important for me to be around to help her take care of the house and the kids.” But the most heartbreaking aspect of Ruth’s childhood is Lane’s sexual abuse, which continues for years even as Ruth repeatedly reports him to her mother. Kathy exhorts Ruth to forgive and move on; but even a town tribunal fails to stop the abuse. The community’s betrayal of its children is an especially disturbing phenomenon in a story filled with the tragedy and woes of day-to-day hardships of poverty, the absence of creature comforts, illness and accidental death.

However, through it all flows Ruth Wariner’s careful, loving portrait of her mother, a woman doing her best with limited options, believing that her church knows best. Despite her profound anger at her mother’s failure to protect her from Lane, Ruth understands that she is loved, and deeply loves her mother in return. “I realized how little she had asked of the world, and how even that had been too much for the world to give.” She reflects that “Mom couldn’t teach me that because she didn’t know herself. She couldn’t show me how to be happy, only how to barely survive.” These and other contemplations establish Ruth as a wise and thoughtful narrator.

The Sound of Gravel is straightforwardly told, in chronological order and with little lyrical adornment. Its power lies in the facts of the story, which is deeply affecting both in its horrors and in its redemptive conclusion. At the end, when Ruth saves herself and her sisters by escaping Colonia LeBaron, she has earned the reader’s sympathy and respect, and an identity beyond that of survivor.

Rating: 8 babies (and counting).

Come back on Monday for my interview with Wariner.

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Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place by Terry Tempest Williams

Posted on December 1, 2015 by pagesofjulia

I am slowly, painfully discovering that my refuge is not found in my mother, my grandmother, or even the birds of Bear River. My refuge exists in my capacity to love. If I can learn to love death then I can begin to find refuge in change.

refugeWhen I read this book, I was continually reminded of the first Terry Tempest Williams book that I loved, as a child: Pieces of White Shell. I knew immediately that I would need to follow this book with a reread of that one. For me, Refuge is the more personal, more intimate, more grown-up and more exacting version of the kinds of things I found in Pieces of White Shell. I think I found this one more difficult, more thought-provoking and challenging; the other was both sparer, and offered clearer, more accessible comforts. Refuge is stripped, exposed pain. If there are balms for its wounds, they are more complex. Pieces of White Shell is metaphorical, symbolic, spiritual, seeking wisdom and humbly finding some of it; Refuge is bared emotions and loss. It is many birds. Each chapter is headed by the name of a bird – burrowing owls, killdeer, sanderlings, avocets and stilts, on and on – and by a level of Great Salt Lake.

Over the years in which the story of Refuge takes place, Great Salt Lake rises beyond its usual depths and boundaries. I learned in this reading that this Lake is shallow and covers a great area; therefore a few feet of rise can cover miles, and cause great destruction. Terry Tempest Williams saw her mother die of cancer as she saw her beloved Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge overtaken by saltwater, the birds displaced and many of them lost. In Refuge, she meditates on both losses and the relationship between them, how the Refuge offers refuge to her and to her mother, how they are linked – birds and women (clearly presaging her later When Women Were Birds), people and place (Terry’s Mormon family with the Great Basin and Utah), the cancer that runs in her family (“the clan of one-breasted women”) and their home (neighboring nuclear test sites).

Refuge involves nature, of course, and Terry educates us with precision about the birds she loves. It involves people, and society, and our interactions. It is beautifully written, with poetry, and with liberal gaps in which the reader may draw her own connections. Terry has an imaginative and generously interpretive mind, more so than mine.

The cancer process is not unlike the creative process. Ideas emerge slowly, quietly, invisibly at first. They are most often abnormal thoughts, thoughts that disrupt the quotidian, the accustomed. They divide and multiply, become invasive. With time, they congeal, consolidate, and make themselves conscious. An ideas surfaces and demands total attention. I take it from my body and give it away.

She finds wisdom in the world, as her mother and grandmother did; and of course, centrally, she finds refuge, which is not quite to say recovery or redemption, although those arguments can be made.

Terry Tempest Williams is a lovely writer. The story of her mother’s life and death, their relationship, and the difficulties and beauty of letting go, are all well accompanied by the pain and beauty of the migratory birds of the Great Basin that Terry knows well.

Rating: 7 phalaropes.

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Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir by Susanne Antonetta

Posted on November 9, 2015 by pagesofjulia

Body Toxic is a striking book, both in the story it has to tell and in the manner in which it’s told. I am impressed, and challenged. It’s complicated.

body toxicSusanne Antonetta grew up in New Jersey, in the Pine Barrens region, a bogland unique in several senses: culturally isolated, and environmentally contaminated on a shocking, unimaginable scale. She and other members of her family have suffered from a list of medical complaints: asthma, endometriosis, a double uterus, growths on the liver, allergies, tumors and cysts, sterility, seizures, manic depression, various cancers; an extremely rare quadruple pregnancy that ended in miscarriage. The families she is descended from include Italian immigrants and those from Barbados, who nevertheless self-identify as English. Both sides of her family exhibit a predilection for silence, non-communication or the glossing over of undesirable details. The legacies Antonetta has inherited, then, are many and complex: cultural (in terms of countries of origin, and the culture of the New Jersey Pine Barrens, and immediate family cultures), environmental and medical (oh, the prodigious and horrifying list), and psychological (mental illness and perspective on the world). Oh, and Susanne Antonetta is not her real name, but an “alter ego”: “I’ve used five or six different pseudonyms in my life. The name I’m using now is not my name but the name of a recovered female relative, a lost woman, and as a recovered woman she’s just a skeleton that must be fleshed out by the same process of fantasizing and filling in that I resist.” Indeed, identity – multiple identities, our attempts to define ourselves and others’ attempts to define us – is another theme throughout.

And that is the complexity of this book, that so much is going on. The story is itself obviously gripping, and brimming with evocative and provocative anecdote. Indeed, Antonetta tells us, “I wrote a piece about the miscarriage and an editor sent it back, calling it ‘raw.’ He suggested I lose the death or the multiple pregnancy, or both… The poem of this body is a bad poem, trite.” The enormous irony, of course, being that she can’t “lose” the death or the multiple pregnancy, or countless other maladies, complaints. All this material aside, though, Body Toxic shines entirely for another reason too: the writing is bold and nuanced, presses and pulls back, reflecting a little the manic depression (or, these days, bipolar disorder) that also waxes and wanes throughout Antonetta’s story. It is, of course, poetic: the author is an acclaimed poet as well, under the name Suzanne Paola.

There are so many threads. Business and government disposed of chemical and radiation waste in Antonetta’s childhood beaches and bogs, through a combination of ignorant, unethical and criminal irresponsibility. (Thus Rachel Carson is named by comparison.) Antonetta’s extended family makes a series of decisions about how to live in this environment, in which they were underinformed but also trusting, stubborn, or willfully ignored the signs. (They mostly still won’t talk about the negative effects.) The family incubates a sexist tradition, favoring the eldest, male grandchild, repeatedly reminding Antonetta explicitly and implicitly of her “place.” She explores her identity as woman: “I spent a lot of my eleventh and twelfth years pining for my menstruation to begin. I can’t remember why”; and later in her inability to reproduce, and what this means for the family at large. (When her family visits relatives back in the Italian community of her father’s origin, his cousin tells him, “You have big children, but I have grandchildren.” There is an implied failure there, which Antonetta ascribes to environmental poisoning, but the family seems to ascribe to Antonetta herself.) There is the fallibility of memory, a theme so common to memoir but one I never tire of, because it – like memory – is different in each interpretation: each memoirist has something new to say. In this case, Antonetta did a lot of drugs, presumably compounding the muddiness of some of her early memories; luckily she was an avid journaler, which allows her to interrogate those documents, artifacts of a young woman she barely knows, itself an interesting and fruitful technique. And then there are all those identities. I love the idea of her father constantly referencing “my daughter” when speaking to her: she finally lets his declarations about that daughter stand, having realized that her father’s daughter is a different person from herself.

I could keep going. This was the challenge and the allure of this book, and the reason I will not quickly forget it: many threads, many layers, told in an ever-evolving voice, ebbing and flowing. The meandering structure made me work to pull it all together, but it was worth it.

I am taking a writing class from the author (under another name, that of the poet, Suzanne Paola) in the coming months, which is why I came to this book in the first place, and now I am both more excited than ever, and intimidated. I recommend Body Toxic for a reading experience to get lost in; for a richly fertile field of topics for discussion with family, book clubs, community groups; for the study of craft; and for the story it (quite disturbingly) tells about the New Jersey Pine Barrens, immigrant experiences, and one woman’s outlandish life.

Rating: 8 newspaper clippings.

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We Were Brothers by Barry Moser

Posted on October 15, 2015 by pagesofjulia

This reflective memoir of brotherhood, the evils of racism and sibling spats is as finely illustrated as it is well told, and will please diverse readers.

we were brothers

Book designer and illustrator Barry Moser and his brother, Tommy, grew up in the Tennessee country surrounding Chattanooga in the Jim Crow era. As boys, they were never close, and shared more physical conflict than anything else. As men, they grew further apart, disagreeing about everything from food to politics, as Barry renounced the racism they were raised with and Tommy did not. Only near the very end of Tommy’s life did they begin to communicate meaningfully and build the beginning of a relationship that would be cut short. We Were Brothers is Barry’s memoir of regret and remembrance.

The story of these two young men, and the times in which they lived, is plainly depicted. Moser’s narrative tone is straightforward in its observations from the perspective of small children, but the wisdom of the older man shines quietly through. For example, he wonders at his mother’s friendship with a black neighbor, who was accepted in many ways almost as family, but still expected to act differently in front of certain company; the family’s ingrained racism is inexplicable in this context, but never questioned. The young boys have a playmate who is black: he is mistreated in ways that do not resonate with the childhood Barry, but in adulthood he cannot remember that boy without tears.

After many disagreements and fistfights, the brothers go their separate ways, with Tommy joining the military while Barry went to college. Barry came to view the anti-Vietnam War movement with sympathy, reassessed his family’s racist views and left the South, while Tommy stayed. In his late 50s, Barry takes a phone call from his estranged brother that ends in racial epithets. Barry hangs up on Tommy, and their discord appears permanent. But then they begin writing letters, in which each man shares his hurts and disappointments. The first few letters, reproduced in the book, seem promising of a new era of openness, understanding and allowance for past mistakes. And then Tommy dies.

Moser’s deceptively simple story is accompanied by his own extraordinarily lovely drawings of the characters and places in question, so that the reader gains a visual glimpse into the people he evokes. We Were Brothers skillfully displays an introspective quality as the older man looks back with regret over a relationship he never had, and with appreciation for one briefly shared. Moser’s understated style only reinforces that musing tone. In the end, even as the painful brotherhood he recalls echoes the evils of a racist time and place, Moser’s calmly gentle, elegiac storytelling voice paints a picture that is loving as well as remorseful.

This review originally ran in the October 6, 2015 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 wished-for letters.

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Maximum Shelf: Home is Burning by Dan Marshall

Posted on September 16, 2015 by pagesofjulia

Maximum Shelf is the weekly Shelf Awareness feature focusing on an upcoming title we love and believe will be a great handselling opportunity for booksellers everywhere. The features are written by our editors and reviewers and the publisher has helped support the issue.

This review was published by Shelf Awareness on September 2, 2015.

home is burningDan Marshall’s life was pretty heavy on privilege. A self-described spoiled white kid with money, he grew up in Salt Lake City and then graduated from UC Berkeley, and was busy enjoying his first real job in Los Angeles and his first real girlfriend, Abby. His family–mom, dad and four siblings–wasn’t perfect, but they were happy, loving and shared a strong if quirky sense of humor, based on fart jokes and four-letter words. His mother had had “terminal” cancer well managed for nearly 15 years. Then came the phone call, while Dan was on vacation with Abby, announcing that his capable, marathon-running father had been diagnosed with something called ALS.

ALS stands for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. It’s a terminal neurodegenerative disease that kills off motor neurons, eventually depriving the person affected of the ability to move his own limbs, eat, speak, and breathe. Dan was slow to accept the gravity of the diagnosis, but under pressure from the family, after several months, he takes a leave of absence from his job to move home at age 25 to help out around the house. Home Is Burning is his memoir of caring for two terminally ill parents at once while dealing with a houseful of rowdy siblings with problems of their own. His story is unavoidably terribly sad, but peppered with sex, drugs both prescribed and recreational, copious foul language, lots of alcohol, and deep and abiding love, the Marshall family saga is surprisingly sweet and funny as well.

Although Dan describes them as spoiled and rich, the Marshalls have had their fair share of misfortunes, from mother Debi’s cancer diagnosis and years of chemotherapy treatments to cerebral palsy and Asperger’s syndrome among the children. The eldest sibling, Tiffany, who took over some parenting duties as a teenager when Debi was sick, had become an overachiever apparently teetering at the edge of a nervous breakdown. Greg was a successful college student in Chicago, enjoying his freedom after finally coming out of the closet. Still in high school were Chelsea, a socially awkward ballerina and serious student, and Michelle, a budding alcoholic in a disturbing relationship with her soccer coach. Dan was the second child, and the last to move back to Salt Lake City for their father Bob’s remaining time, which would more likely be measured in months than years.

Dan lingered in the denial stage of the grief process. With the whole family, he’d watched Bob run his last marathon in Boston, in a time nearly twice that which he’d run to qualify. But when Dan moves home, he is dismayed to see how much his father has already deteriorated. With Tiffany living nearby but on her own, “the little girls” still in high school, and Debi inconveniently faced with her toughest round of chemo treatments yet, the bulk of Bob’s caregiving duties falls to Dan and Greg. Together they help him bathe and use the bathroom as he loses the use of his arms. They feed him through his gastrointestinal tube, and take him for walks in a wheelchair as his legs lose their strength. They hook him up periodically to his BiPAP (bilevel positive airway pressure) machine, which helps push air through his lungs. Bob chooses to delay his tracheotomy surgery–which would attach him to a respirator for the rest of his days, and quite possibly end his ability to speak–to attend his own mother’s funeral; but the ill-advised delay ends with a rush to the hospital when his breathing fails, and the procedure takes place under emergency conditions. Happily, Bob retains his speech.

For all Dan and Greg’s love and good intentions, their caregiving is sometimes alarmingly poor: Bob is dropped on the floor, his respirator tubes cracked and broken. He might be considered lucky to survive his family’s care. The household begins to fall apart: Michelle passes out in her own vomit with increasing frequency as the cats pee all over their three-story home, which has been pulled apart by construction to install an elevator and widen doorways. Dan begins drinking more heavily; Abby breaks up with him; Greg takes a full-time job, putting more pressure on Dan; Debi’s behavior grows ever more erratic, with the mental effects of her chemotherapy, her distress at losing her husband, and a new addiction to pain pills. Dan’s outlook and storytelling throughout these mounting stressors is singular. He is remarkably candid about his frustrations and resentments: he loves his father enormously, calling him his buddy, his pal, his road map through life, and describing the effortless quality time shared and advice given–but he is angry to have his own social freedoms curtailed.

The tone of Dan’s writing in this painful period, however, is astonishingly funny, loving, even lighthearted. As he moves back and forth between agony, grief and anger, he displays a fun-loving, off-color, morbid sense of humor and an almost apologetically sweet expression of love for his entire imperfect family and especially their hero, their rock, Bob. Dan interjects his narrative with fantasies in which Debi’s hair grows back, Chelsea doesn’t giggle inappropriately at looming death, Michelle doesn’t marry her soccer coach, Bob stands up and takes himself to the toilet and goes for a good long run in the mountains.

Many stories have been written about terminal illnesses, degrading deaths, and families in grief; but the loving portraits painted here of outrageous and colorful characters joking in the face of ugliness may be unique. As Bob approaches his final chapter, readers will certainly cry, but they will laugh as well. Home Is Burning is a strangely packaged gift: love and pain, death and life, sex jokes, fart jokes and plenty of booze make up an extraordinarily heartwarming love letter from “a sad dude with a big heart who really loves his dad.” In its sad ending there is unlikely joy.

Rating: 9 brimming glasses of wine.

Come back tomorrow for my interview with Marshall.

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All Over But the Shoutin’ by Rick Bragg

Posted on September 10, 2015 by pagesofjulia

all overRick Bragg’s first book is a memoir of his own life, his upbringing and the road to a successful journalism career with the New York Times, complete even with a Pulitzer. It’s also the story of his family: his father, almost completely absent from Bragg’s life and from the book; his mother, the driving force of grace and hard work and love; his brothers; his people from poor rural Alabama. It’s a beautiful book, humbly honest, piercingly devoted to Momma, and redolent with smells and tastes and sights and sounds. As a way of honoring those he wants to remember and honor – centrally his mother – I think it’s devastatingly effective. It’s also a fine piece of writing, triumphantly fine, and a fascinating story.

People are often driven, with a book like this that is so securely rooted in such a unique place, to make statements about whether it could have been born of any other place. Me, I don’t feel up for that argument. But if Bragg’s skill had come out of Pennsylvania, he would at least have written a very different book.

I loved learning about and learning to love the place Bragg is from – northeastern Alabama – and I appreciate his understanding of nuance, of complicated feelings, of the possibility for both ugly legacies and beautiful virtues coming from the same place.

I found it interesting, and it kept his story from being unrelievedly gorgeous or unrelievedly painful, in a book so filled with “living and dying and that fragile, shivering place in between,” that he is able simultaneously to show that he has lived a charmed life. This was a new concept to me, of such good and ill luck coming in the same breath. For instance, when Bragg became national correspondent in the South, to the New York Times:

It was a marriage so perfect, in my mind’s eye, that I was almost surprised when I got a cold, or stubbed my toe, or got a parking ticket, because such things do not belong in dreams.

Momma used to drag her middle son, who she called Ricky, up and down the rows of cotton on her sack as she picked. He increased the weight of the load she bore, but she loved him, and his brothers, and she did for them as best she could, and this is the story, among other things, of Bragg doing his best by her in return. It’s a deeply sweet story, and although sometimes gruffly told, he never takes that tone when writing about her.

Bragg’s father, on the other hand, was an alcoholic abuser who left his family defenseless repeatedly and apparently without compunction. He was also a traumatized war veteran who on his deathbed gave his son a touching gift and a story. I said earlier that he’s mostly absent throughout, but his shadow is there.

I can’t do this book justice. It’s too good. Go see for yourself.

Rating: 10 assumptions tested.

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guest review: All the Wrong Places by Philip Connors, from Tassava

Posted on September 7, 2015 by pagesofjulia

My buddy Tassava read both of Philip Connors’s books after I did, and he loved both, as I did. He had a different final conclusion, however. Here is the beginning of his review of the second, All the Wrong Places.
wrong places

Last year, Julia had recommended that I read Connors’ first book, Fire Season, a long essay on his work at a lookout in a fire tower in a huge wilderness area in New Mexico. Both a reflection on a solitary endeavor and a historical and philosophical examination of the nature of wildness, Fire Season is exceptionally good, and well worth the time of anyone who enjoys memoir or nature writing.

All the Wrong Places is a kind of prequel to Fire Season, a partial explanation of why Connors abandoned a good life and career in New York City for the isolation and inwardness of the fire tower. In brief, the second book is the story of Connors’ efforts to understand how his older brother, Dan, came to commit suicide, more or less out of the blue.

…You can read the rest of Tassava’s review here. And, my review of same.

Thanks, Tassava, for your contribution.

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The Kiss by Kathryn Harrison

Posted on July 6, 2015 by pagesofjulia

kissThe Kiss came recommended as a powerfully told memoir, the artful representation of a shocking story that does not rely upon its sensational nature to make an impact, but showcases the author’s craft. All this is true, and I am left feeling very impressed and somewhat reeling, from both the story itself and the writing.

Kathryn Harrison was raised by her mother’s parents, her mother an on-and-off presence in her life who never gives her the love she longs for. She meets her father only twice while she is growing up; his third visit, when she has just turned 20, marks the beginning of a new stage. When he kisses her goodbye at the airport, the air goes electric, and they begin an incestuous affair that will last years and cause the rest of her life to wither. Their relationship is obsessive and controlling: in other words, awfully unhealthy, even if they were not father and daughter; and it will damage her forever.

Clearly there is shock value, and the potential for merely prurient appeal. But Harrison does not let the salacious subject matter carry her book. She examines her troubled childhood, her need for love, her search for herself, and sees in hindsight the way she was preyed upon. Her father is a preacher, who argues that God wants them to be together sexually.

I never question his sanity; although I will come to the point where it is less painful to regard my father as crazy than to conclude that he has been so canny in judgment of my character and its frailties that he knows exactly what language to use, what noose of words to cast around my neck.

She studies her story, and muses on it, and the result is a work of craft, not of voyeurism.

It is still disturbing, make no mistake. You will shiver and flinch, because she doesn’t turn away from the ugly bits – and they don’t all involve her father; there is also the one with the kittens, and the scene in which Harrison’s unloving mother takes her to a doctor to have her hymen broken with medical implements. (Seriously.) But it is also, strangely, beautiful. As a writer, I am here to take notes and see how she does this thing: tells this horrifying story with grace and insight and art. I don’t really understand it, although I hope to.

Rating: 8 photographs.

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Bobby Wonderful: An Imperfect Son Buries His Parents by Bob Morris

Posted on July 2, 2015 by pagesofjulia

A son’s memoir of love and endings, despite his shortcomings and mistakes.

bobby wonderful

Bob Morris (Assisted Loving; Crispin the Terrible) loved his parents very much, even if he was not always the ideal son. His older brother, Jeff, played that role; Bob was less reliable.

When his mother died, her last garbled word was his name: Bobby. As his father died several years later, he cried out: “Wonderful!” As Morris relives and reconsiders those difficult experiences–caring for each of his parents (more or less), witnessing and helping to make decisions about the ends their lives–he pairs those final words to make the title of his searingly candid memoir, Bobby Wonderful.

Morris is on a much-needed vacation in Scotland, tasting whiskies and forgetting his cares, when he gets the call to come home for his mother’s last days. His first reaction is resentment; the scarf he brings her as a souvenir is a knockoff of the first one he considered. Still, he was there, with Jeff. In the years that follow, Morris helps his father learn to date again and encourages his independence, in part because Morris is busy trying to enjoy his own life. When his father attempts suicide, though, Morris is forced to face uncomfortable questions about his father’s end-of-life wishes, his own devotion and what it means to be a good son.

Morris’s struggles are sensitively told, deeply moving and highly relevant in a world where more and more people face situations like his. Bobby Wonderful is a gift of a book: an often funny but also perfectly serious contemplation of living and dying well.

This review originally ran in the June 12, 2015 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 7 performances.

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