A Woman on the Edge of Time: A Son Investigates His Trailblazing Mother’s Young Suicide by Jeremy Gavron

Posted on September 30, 2016 by pagesofjulia

The legacy of a mother and her suicide reveals the story of both a woman and a social movement.

woman on the edge

Jeremy Gavron grew up with the faintest of impressions of his mother, who died when he was four years old, in 1965. He didn’t know that her death was a suicide until he was 16, and only decades later did he embark upon an exploration of her life and reasons for ending it. A Woman on the Edge of Time is a record of his examination and tentative conclusions.

Gavron’s mother, Hannah, is a tantalizing character. A talented, magnetic youth, she excelled in acting, equestrian sports and poetry; had an affair with the headmaster of her boarding school; married at 18; earned a doctorate in sociology while raising two young sons; and wrote a feminist text that would be published shortly after her death. In an echo of Sylvia Plath’s suicide two years earlier, she gassed herself in a flat just one street over from Plath’s. And, like Ted Hughes, Gavron’s father all but erased her presence from the lives of her two children.

In chasing this shadowy figure, Gavron corresponds and visits with Hannah’s friends, colleagues and family, and studies letters, diaries and photographs left behind. Along the way, the reader is exposed to English cultural history, particularly in Gavron’s investigations of Hannah’s book The Captive Wife, a qualitative study of young homebound mothers. As he concludes, there can be no thorough comprehension of a suicide or of a mother he doesn’t remember. A Woman on the Edge of Time ends with Gavron’s attempted “narrative verdict,” which though incomplete does offer him some closure.

This review originally ran in the September 23, 2016 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Rating: 7 gurns.

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Origins of the Universe and What It All Means by Carole Firstman

Posted on August 25, 2016 by pagesofjulia

This reflective memoir examines an odd and estranged father through the lens of his scientific expertise.

origins of the universe

Carole Firstman’s ruminative memoir tracks a strained relationship with her eccentric but gifted father. The ambitious title, Origins of the Universe and What It All Means, is entirely appropriate: it is a direct and repeated quotation from her father, a research biologist obsessed with finding meaning in an enormous and confounding world.

Firstman suspects her father is on the autism spectrum, which might explain some of the social awkwardness, emotional detachment and unrepentant self-centeredness that characterizes Bruce and his parenting strategies–like moving his 19-year-old bride and their newborn daughter, Carole, into a tent in the backyard, because the baby’s crying disturbed his work. Despite such shocking details, Firstman gives a nuanced portrayal of an intelligent, lonely man capable of rare displays of concern. Weaving evolutionary theory, hard science and metaphysical origin stories with personal memoir, Firstman takes a contemplative tone. She is concerned with questions of linked causality (think the butterfly effect–except with scorpions, Bruce’s area of specialty) and what exactly she may have inherited from him. For example, she puts the same obsessive language in her own mouth that she does in Bruce’s, hinting that the Asperger-like symptoms she ascribes to him may tease at her, too. Firstman’s mother appears almost parenthetically, but at its heart this memoir is about what is inherited from and owed to one’s parents.

Origins contains unusual elements, including diagrams, mock lesson plans and footnotes, alongside Firstman’s self-questioning narrative. Despite its broad scope, this essentially human story handles “a conundrum of attachment and detachment” with sensitivity and rigor.

This review originally ran in the August 12, 2016 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Rating: 7 ounces of formaldehyde.

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movie: Being Flynn (2012)

Posted on June 16, 2016 by pagesofjulia

being flynnI’m super glad I got to watch this movie version of a book I recently admired, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. First of all, let me say that Being Flynn captured the book better than most adaptations do. Not perfect, of course, and not exactly the same, but they never are because books aren’t movies.

This one was an interesting experiment, though, because the book involved so much theatre – meaning scenes that were constructed like scenes from a play or movie. Being Flynn took perhaps less advantage of that feature of the book than might be expected. But then again, what works as theatre-on-the-page doesn’t necessarily translate to Hollywood movie-making. Let’s see if I can explain myself…

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (a title the New York Times finds “too pungent and profane” to print, whew!) is made up of a collage of different forms. One chapter is a list; one chapter is a long, stream-of-consciousness prose poem; another is a stageplay. Some are “straight” prose but with attention paid to setting and framing, and the drama of performance. Certainly, in the life of Jonathan Flynn, performance is a central question: he doesn’t want his audience to perceive him as homeless, as a loser; he is always reminding whoever will listen that he’s a great writer, and it seems he believes it, himself. The formal play of the book does not translate well to the screen, in part because moviegoers aren’t interested in playfulness in print. The differences between the two media are often at the heart of why books don’t adapt well into movies, or why book lovers resent the film’s adaptation.

Here, the movie wisely relinquishes some of the book’s form, and goes instead for story and feeling. Roger Ebert and the Times review linked above agree that the film ends with ambivalence, fails to commit to an outcome; but they seem to find this a negative, where I found it simply faithfulness to the true story that the book and film are both based on. Jonathan Flynn’s life was ambivalence and ambiguity, and that life wasn’t yet over when the film was produced. As Nick Flynn writes at the back of my copy of the book, “My father’s not dead yet, so there’s always still the chance the Nobel committee will call.” If the movie fails to wrap up, I say, that’s life. Til it wraps.

Robert De Niro as Jonathan Flynn worked out really well; I thought De Niro made a remarkably convincing crazy-or-genius homeless man. Paul Dano as Nick Flynn worked, for me, equally well. Ebert finds Dano “distant and mystifying,” but again, this feels true to the character as I came to know him through my reading. I wonder if it’s relevant that Ebert does not seem to have read the book (“by all accounts, the memoir is a powerful piece of work”). Maybe I just have a soft spot for Dano because I liked him so much in Little Miss Sunshine, and he looks so much like my good buddy Jerko.

I really enjoyed that the movie snuck in a scrap of that prose-poem chapter “same again” that I loved so much. I thought the spirit of the story and the noncommital, troubled, on-again-off-again nature of the father-son relationship was well portrayed. The question of whether the son is the father was perhaps a little heavy-handed in this version (as De Niro repeatedly yells “you are me!”), but it is one of the questions at the heart of the book. In short, this was a more faithful movie-based-on-book than I’d hoped for. I enjoyed it, but maybe my recent guided reading of the book helped me along.

Rating: 8 ice creams.

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Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn

Posted on May 27, 2016 by pagesofjulia

another bullshitI read Another Bullshit Night in Suck City for class, and I’m glad: glad I read it, and glad I had a class to guide me through it. I think I got more out of it this way. It would have been a little opaque to me on my own.

Nick Flynn’s father Jonathan was mostly absent in his son’s youth, although sort of a towering absence. Nick met the father he scarcely knew when Nick was working at a homeless shelter in Boston, where Jonathan became a client. This is Nick’s memoir of his father’s troubled, mysterious life and ugly effects on those around him – his wives and children – and Nick’s search for answers. (If this sounds familiar to you, you may have seen the movie made from this story, Being Flynn, which starred Robert De Niro but didn’t do terribly well.)

As illuminated by my professor, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City pulls heavily from the themes and style of absurdist theatre and theatre generally. Nearly every chapter involves some form of stage setting, awareness of audience, or other element of performance. King Lear and Beckett’s Endgame are particularly present. I know almost nothing about absurdist theatre, and would certainly have missed this subtext without help; and it really did help me to see some of what Flynn was up to.

It is an unusually, but very carefully composed book. Chapters vary in format. Some are written as short plays; some take different hermit crab forms. One of my favorites is a list of “thirteen random facts.” An illustration or two and one very important diagram come in. Despite the differences in form, there is a fairly straightforward narrative at work: the life of a father as seen (therefore, in pieces) by his son, and the life of the son, at first as it applies to the father’s story but in bursts beyond as well. This narrative is not strictly chronological, but any disjoints in its telling only reflect the way it was lived, the way information about Jonathan came to Nick, in dribs and drabs and jolts.

Readers new to the varied forms Flynn uses may find them a little distracting, but I don’t think they’ll pose a real challenge. The scrapbook-feel echoes the subject matter, echoes real life. And despite looking at a glance like it was thrown together – indeed, like real life – there is extraordinary artistry and intention at play here. Look for recurrent images throughout, like the donut, and the life raft, which sometimes takes the donut-echoing shape of a lifesaver. Look for theatricality, framed stages, costumes and sets. And the question of caring about appearances, or designing appearances.

Obviously, Nick Flynn tells painful and personal stories in this book, raising some of the classic questions of the memoir genre: how much to share, how much is too much, and what reader response is appropriate. Flynn struggles with these questions, especially in the final section called “aftermath (one year later): questions often asked, and some possible answers.” I was reminded of a Bernard Cooper essay I read – I believe it is titled “Marketing Memory,” from The Business of Memory, a collection edited by Charles Baxter. It dealt with Cooper’s surprise at reader reactions, and his inability to control what those readers take away from his work, and what they are curious about. It might seem like some of these issues are obvious ones, but there’s no accounting for people, always and in all directions, and the possibilities fascinate me.

I found this a brave, complex and moving book, and I recommend it. For a little taste, here is the obituary written for Jonathan Flynn, nearly ten years after the book’s publication. As Brevity notes, it is unattributed but presumably written by Nick.

I look forward to finding time for a reread, for further study.

Rating: 9 circles.

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The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father by Kao Kalia Yang

Posted on May 25, 2016 by pagesofjulia

In celebrating a father’s traditional Hmong song poetry, this memoir records the painful history of a loving family and a people.

song poet

In The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir, Kao Kalia Yang related her family’s immigrant experience. With The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father, she focuses on the life and art of Bee Yang: “my father raps, jazzes, and sings the blues when he dwells in the landscape of tradition Hmong song poetry.” The storytelling and emotional communication of that art form was a defining element of Bee’s contribution to his family and his culture, from their home in Laos to a refugee camp in Thailand and, finally, in the United States. When his mother died, Bee stopped singing, and Yang considers the significance of that silence as well.

As its title suggests, The Song Poet is lyrical and beautifully composed, with themes of loss and love, realistic and raw, but enriched by gentle metaphor. It is divided into “Side A” and “Side B,” the first told in Bee’s first-person perspective and the second in Yang’s. These points of view offer immersion in a Hmong culture that values family, and shares a complex system of spiritual celebrations and a way of life centered on the day-to-day necessity of growing and harvesting food. War and violence drive the family to Minnesota, where Bee and his wife do hard, dangerous labor, and are poorly equipped culturally to battle racism and exploitation. But they retain their reverence of family and tradition. The Song Poet is a message of love and thanks to a father who sacrificed for his children’s future, and a memorial to his art.

This review originally ran in the May 17, 2016 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Rating: 8 flip-flops.

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A Distant Heartbeat: A War, a Disappearance, and a Family’s Secrets by Eunice Lipton

Posted on April 21, 2016 by pagesofjulia

An inquisitive memoir investigates the author’s uncle, who was killed in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War.

distant heartbeat

Eunice Lipton grew up with an awareness of her uncle Dave that was specific and conflicted in emotional tone, and vague in points of fact. She knew he’d been in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, and killed in action when he was 22. His brother Phil says, “Dave died for something. He was somebody.” His brother Louis, the author’s father, says he died for nothing. The author’s mother says he was the nicest man she ever knew. A Distant Heartbeat asks: Who was Dave Lipton? Why did this respectful son lie, tell his parents he would be working at a hotel in the Catskills, and then go to Spain? What does his story have to offer history?

Dave Lipton (formerly Lifshitz) was a Latvian Jewish immigrant, immersed in leftist youth politics in 1930s New York City. Surrounded by peers whose convictions mirrored his, Dave was one of very few to join that foreign war. His niece, born after his death, grew up with only scraps of his life and death: the repeated refrains of family members–died for nothing, died for something–and a few photos discovered in her childhood. She speaks to surviving veterans and friends of Dave, travels to an International Brigades reunion in Spain, studies letters and archival photographs. She finds more questions: What is the nature and cause of familial betrayal? Who was Dave’s mystery companion? In the end, Lipton’s research and musings offer only fleeting conclusions about family and principles, in a precise, elegiac journey through history, family tensions and human drama.

This review originally ran in the April 8, 2016 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Rating: 7 photographs.

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Alligator Candy by David Kushner

Posted on April 11, 2016 by pagesofjulia

This tender, intimate memoir probes the childhood murder of the author’s older brother.

alligator candy

On a Sunday afternoon in 1973, 11-year-old Jon Kushner rode his bike through the woods to the 7-Eleven. His four-year-old brother, David, had asked for one kind of candy in particular. Jon’s family never saw him alive again. Journalist David Kushner still struggles to fathom his brother’s murder and his family’s experience; Alligator Candy is his memoir of investigation and connection.

Kushner lovingly portrays his hippie parents, eldest brother and Jon, who struggled with an auditory deficit disorder and was known for his compassion. Their community in Tampa, Fla., included activists and academics, and emphasized freedom and the outdoors. It was perfectly natural for a boy to ride alone through the woods. Jon’s murder presaged an end to the “ability of kids to simply get on their bikes and go,” as one family friend put it.

Alligator Candy explores how a family and community survive loss. The twin terrors of not knowing fully what happened versus knowing the horrific details of exactly what was done to Jon comprise only two reasons that this is a painful story. However, Kushner can also be funny, and he skillfully captures a child’s innocent curiosity, even in loss. He writes so simply, but this is deceptive. Alligator Candy is sensitive, insightful and understated.

Forty years later, Kushner (Bones of Marianna; Masters of Doom) still struggles with grief, isolation and guilt. In writing Alligator Candy, however, he discovers certain details of his brother’s case for the first time, begins to comprehend his family’s coping methods and, finally, achieves a long-sought connection with Jon.

This review originally ran in the March 25, 2016 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Rating: 7 pieces of gum.

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Every Last Tie: The Story of the Unabomber and His Family by David Kaczynski

Posted on February 15, 2016 by pagesofjulia

David Kaczynski’s contemplation of his brother’s life and crimes is sensitive and skillfully composed, with broad appeal.

every last tie

David Kaczynski is a poet, a former English teacher, an impassioned opponent of the death penalty and the younger brother of Ted Kaczynski, better known to the world as the Unabomber. In Every Last Tie, he contemplates “loving memories and painful outcomes,” hoping to illuminate his brother’s and his own experiences.

Some of David’s message involves correcting misconceptions. For example, he says it was not his heroism but his wife Linda’s compassionate and principled actions that identified the Unabomber. He relates the process of recognizing Ted’s voice in the Unabomber’s manifesto: Linda’s concern, David’s denial, the careful considerations they conducted together and the final decision–betrayal of his brother or betrayal of yet more innocent lives. David often contemplates such difficult questions as how to explain Ted Kaczynski’s illness and actions, coming from a family that David portrays as caring, close and committed to education and integrity. He characterizes Ted as a loving older brother increasingly withdrawn from society, a tortured genius and, finally, a mentally ill man David no longer understands. The decision to identify his brother still prickles. “Ted’s cruelty stigmatizes my good name; but my reputation for goodness comes at his expense. Like all contrived opposites, we reinforce one another.”

Every Last Tie is beautifully written, searingly honest, in no way the sensational tell-all it might have been, but a careful exercise–sometimes emotional, sometimes intellectual–in self-examination. David clearly wants to pile praise on his beloved parents, but chooses to consider their complexities, seeking truth over comfort. The result contains a certain amount of psychological analysis (especially in a thorough afterword by James L. Knoll IV, a forensic psychiatrist who has both studied Ted Kaczynski’s case and come to know David well), but the book is also a meditation on notions of family, “the premise that a brother shows you who you are–and who you are not.” David struggles to reconcile the brother he loved and the serial killer he turned in, but does not belabor the point, choosing instead to remember and share what he knows, and acknowledge the mystery. Knoll’s afterword makes a more pointed criticism of the United States’ “nonsystem” of mental health care.

This slim, intriguing book is the story of a family whose two sons lead different lives. David Kaczynski’s voice is quietly thoughtful, and his writing is lovely; he ranges from family anecdote to psychological puzzle to philosophical musing while retaining an even tone. Every Last Tie is both a straightforward story and a complex consideration of an extremely difficult one.

This review originally ran in the January 26, 2016 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 letters.

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The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth by Karen Branan

Posted on February 8, 2016 by pagesofjulia

A journalist’s research uncovers her own family history and connections to a horrifying hate crime.

family tree

In researching her family history in the little town of Hamilton, Ga., investigative journalist Karen Branan was surprised to find connections to a 1912 lynching. A nephew of her great-grandfather, the sheriff, was murdered. Days later, a local mob killed three black men and a black woman. Branan digs deeper, expecting to find her forebears innocent of violence. The evidence is far more complex in The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth.

In a town where nearly everyone has been related by blood or marriage for generations, Branan’s family variously turned a blind eye to the murders, or directly participated. She finds herself related not only to the white mob, but to at least one of the black victims as well. Every new piece of information complicates the story and startles her further, until she has to address her most basic understanding of the world. “I began this journey believing myself to be an unflinching investigative reporter and a nonracist,” Branan writes, but must confront a bias in favor of her own family. Admirably, she examines herself and the preconceptions she brings, even to the pursuit of racial justice.

The Family Tree offers an in-depth study of the history of Southern race relations, particularly in Georgia. The narrative of the lynching is told thrillingly, the background more dryly, but it is Branan’s personal perspective and soul-searching that makes this history insightful, relevant and memorable.

This review originally ran in the January 19, 2016 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Rating: 6 liaisons.

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The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (audio)

Posted on February 2, 2016 by pagesofjulia

I said I was laying off the audiobooks, because my present life & schedule don’t allow for enough listening time. But then I picked up another, and another. Among other things, I’ve hurt my knee again and am back in the gym. But you’re not here to hear about my knee.

year of magical thinkingI’m so glad I tuned into The Year of Magical Thinking. It’s not a feel-good story: it tracks the year in Joan Didion’s life following her husband’s death, and maps her experience with grief. It’s almost New Year’s, and Joan and husband John have been visiting their daughter in the hospital, where she is unconscious with a life-threatening case of pneumonia and septic shock. On December 30, 2003, he collapses at the dinner table, is rushed to the hospital and pronounced dead that night. John is John Gregory Dunne, also an accomplished writer, and their lifestyle has always kept them very close: working from home, together, consulting on every aspect of their lives, from work, food, family and world events to the most insignificant details. Didion is of course, obviously, shocked and unmoored. During the year that follows she experiences different types of grief, shock and bafflement. This book is a little like a diary of that time, which it charts chronologically, ending one year and one day after John’s death.

Along the way, she nimbly weaves in the research she performs on related subjects within psychology, medicine and anthropology: research on grief, on cultural relationships with death and dying, and on medical issues, as she tries to understand when, how and why John died. This last is a surprisingly opaque question, covering the time between his collapse and the doctor’s pronouncement about an hour and a half later. What had been done in the interim? What could have been done? She examines the reports of the ambulance team, the nurses and the ER doctor.

And to compound the complicated and tragic story, daughter Quintana spends most of this year in and out of hospitals, near death on multiple occasions. What we know, although Didion at the time of writing does not, is that Quintana died within the year after the book’s timeline closes. Her later memoir, Blue Nights, covers that personal loss. I haven’t read that one – yet.

The difficulty of this book, then, is obvious: it is filled with sad stuff. Didion is a deft and clever writer, though. We see more than a little joy, although much of it is remembered. We see a strong family, and we see good times. The entwining of personal experience (past and present) and research is beautifully done. Didion uses repeated phrases to draw her reader along the book’s line, to tie everything together. It’s a lovely piece of work, although I did have to turn away when I had a particularly bad day. The subject matter is what it is.

My one criticism is that Didion fails to recognize and acknowledge a certain privilege: that her life is set against the Ritz, the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu, the fancy home in Malibu, Chanel, Brooks Brothers, an endless parade of the food, clothing, and scenery of her choice and at her command. This privilege, compounded by her failure to acknowledge it (is it possible she is unaware?), distanced me from her. She is both a fine writer and a complex and sympathetic person; it is my instinct to identify with her, and that is where this memoir shines; but that effect is lessened by her experience of the world to which she is apparently blind. Near the end, she describes a difficulty early in her marriage, when she and John had made a $50,000 down payment on a house in an L.A. suburb but hadn’t yet sold their home in Malibu: where would the money come from? They go to a luxury resort in Hawaii to think it out, then find that the Malibu home has an acceptable offer. She does speak briefly to the irony of the Hawaiian brainstorming session. We could call this a partial exception to my complaint. The episode still comes off a little tone-deaf, though.

This is a fairly small criticism. Because of this privileged position, Didion lost a few degrees of identification with her reader. On the whole, though, she is a sympathetic and fully realized character. Her story is shocking but true; it is beautifully structured and well written, and I will definitely read more Didion.

Barbara Caruso’s narration felt spot-on to me.

Rating: 7 leis.

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