books

It was a great honor to have my work included in Stephanie Sprenger and Jessica Smock’s first anthology, The HerStories Project: Women Explore the Joy, Pain, and Power of Female Friendship.  Friendship is an important subject to me (as evidence, my archives for that topic), and I loved the book, which touched on so many facets of female friendship.

Stephanie and Jessica have just published their second book, My Other Ex: Women’s True Stories of Losing and Leaving Friends, which is focused on one particularly complicated, thorny, and emotional of these facets.  The book unpacks the myriad experiences of friendship’s end.

These paragraphs, from Jessica Smock’s introduction to the book, provide a succinct and compelling summary of the project’s important goal:

“There is so much good, so much power, so much love, in female friendships. But there is also a dark side of pain and loss. And surrounding that dark side, there is often silence. Women feel that there is no language to talk about their feelings. There is shame, the haunting feeling that the loss of a friendship is a reflection of our own worth or capacity to be loved.

This book, we hope, is a step toward breaking that silence. We as women need to recognize the scars of lost friendships and make it okay to talk about them. And we must also teach our daughters how to manage conflict and emotion without resorting to these forms of indirect aggression that cause deep pain with no visible wounds. The life cycle is long, and many friendships will not last. Yet the end of something once powerful and important will bring sadness and grief, feelings that deserve to be acknowledged.”

I think the experience of losing a close friendship is a universal one.  I’ve certainly been through it.  I’ve felt deep heartache, profound guilt, and lingering loss that has stayed with me for a long, long time.  My female friendshpis are vitally important to me and the few occasions that I’ve seen one die have caused me real pain.

I love, too, what Jessica says too about helping our daughters develop the tools to both navigate friendships (many do not, in my opinion, need to end) and to honor their loss if it happens.  To celebrate the importance and life-enhancing value of female friendship while acknowledging that not all relationships last a lifetime.  I hope you will check out My Other Ex, which is full of richly layered and beautifully told personal stories.

I’m also happy to share that Jessica and Stephanie’s next collaboration is a book called Mothering Through the Darkness: Stories of Postpartum Struggle.  They are open for submissions through December 1 and I hope some of you will consider sharing a story.  Postpartum struggle (what a wonderful way to describe what can be a kaleidoscope of experiences) is a topic very dear to my heart, and I’m really excited to read this next book.  I’m also hugely honored that Jessica and Stephanie asked me to join an esteemed panel of judges for the submissions.

The first thing I do when I’m in someone home for the first time (or even not for the first time) is look at their bookshelves.  I can spend a long, long (probably a socially-unacceptably long) amount of time browsing the books they keep, display, and, presumably, love.  I think there is a tremendous amount we can learn from others by what books they have in their living rooms.

It’s connected to this belief, I think, that I love the rise of the shelfie.  I’ve shared a few of my own, recently and last summer (my Woolf and thesis section, and my poetry shelf).  I’ve captured the bookshelves at my parents’ house on the shore.  I have many, many more bookshelves to photograph and suspect I’ll keep doing that.  I’m often charmed by the random assortments of books that wind up together on a shelf.

Last year we had our first floor repainted and as part of that project I had to empty out our built-in bookcase and then reassemble it.  It was great fun to revisit all those books, and to decide who should sit next to whom on the shelf.  Ann Lamott next to Annie Dillard.  Classics all lined up together, their broken-in spines speaking of how carefully I read them way back in college.  A small section of anthologies I’ve had work published in.

I think often of the famous Cicero quote that  “a room without books is like a body without a soul.”  I agree entirely.  I read hard-copy books and always have, but I watch the world shifting slowly but irrevocably towards e-readers around me.  One of the primary questions I have about this is what will people put in their bookshelves, in a world without paper books?  Another quote comes to mind, this one Anna Quindlen’s: “I would be most content if my children grew up ot be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.”  On this dimension I know I would please Quindlen greatly.  I come by it honestly: my childhood was spent tripping over stacks of books and to this day my father likes to crack that “home is where you keep the books.”  A fun family outing for us is a trip to a used bookstore.

For now, I’m sticking with paper.  And I’m still, endlessly fascinated by looking at bookshelves, in my house and in those of others.  What are some of your favorite bookshelves?

Last week I read Nina’s excellent review of her favorite books of 2014. It made me want to write my own. I realize I’ve mentioned several of these books before, but here they are in one place. I highly recommend her picks (some of which are mine, too!) and am eager to hear what you’ve been reading.

We are just past the midpoint of 2014, and here are my favorite books of the year so far:

All the Light We Cannot See – Anthony Doerr. I’m reviewing this for Great New Books in a couple of weeks so I will save most of my commentary, but suffice it to say that Doerr’s book has a firm place in my favorite novels of all time.  Probably top three.  All the Light is that spectacular. I can’t stop thinking of the book’s glorious imagery and can’t recommend it highly enough.

10% Happier – Dan Harris. This is a rare book that both Matt and I adored. Dan’s story is honest, open, convincing, inspiring, funny. I already meditated somewhat regularly, and now I do it with more conviction and commitment. This is a marvelous book.

Euphoria – Lily King.  I could barely put down King’s compelling story of anthropologists in the jungle of New Guinea.  She draws three characters I couldn’t stop thinking about and touches on themes of identity, feminism, love, subjectivity, and power.  I loved this book.

Americanah– Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.  This book came highly recommended by some of the readers I most highly esteem (I’m looking at you, Lacy) and it did not disappoint.  Americanah is a rich, sprawling saga about otherness and true love, about all the ways that we can be from a place and yet not feel at home, about what America really means.

Love Life – Rob Lowe.  I picked up Lowe’s latest memoir after reading his guttingly powerful essay on Salon about taking his son to college.  The book is similarly moving, and running through it is an intensely familiar sense of the bittersweetness of parenting and life itself.  Beautiful.

Eleanor & Park – Rainbow Rowell.  I’d heard so much about this book, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  Rowell’s protagonists are fully-felt, deeply-human misfits who are as surprised to find connection in each other as we are.  Nina loved this one too, and her review is wonderful.

In the Body of the World – Eve Ensler.  Ensler’s illness narrative is difficult to read but a compelling page-turner at the same time.  She draws stark parallels between her own female body and the world at large, in so doing crafts a powerful love letter to this dramatic, painful, human, joyful life.

Paradise in Plain Sight – Karen Maezen Miller.  I loved Hand Wash Cold, so was eager to read Maezen’s new book.  She didn’t disappoint: the memoir is full of the plainspoken but deeply resonant writing I now associate with Maezen.  While I’m not a gardener myself, I found myself gladly following her through her own yard, and ultimately coming to see, with her gentle but firm guidance, that paradise truly is right here at my own feet.

Homesick and Happy– Michael Thompson.  I’m a longtime and devoted Thompson fan, and this book hit on a theme that has been central to my sense of myself as a parent from the very beginning.  Helping our children let go, and move away from us, is our most essential parenting task.  Camp is one way that we can help them do this.  Perhaps he was preaching to the choir, since I’m a firm believer in sleepaway camp, but Thompson’s book reminded me of what this endeavor is all about it.  It made me cry  more than once.

Crossing to Safety – Wallace Stegner.  I just re-read this for the fourth time, for my new book club.  It’s the only book that I have ever read four times.  And it just keeps getting better.  This time I was struck by the masterful way that Stegner shifts in and out of the first person as he tells the story. 

What are you reading now and what have you loved lately?  I would love your recommendations as I have some plane flights and downtime ahead!

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