books

I couldn’t wait to read Courtney Sullivan’s new novel, The Engagements, which comes out June 12th.  I was fortunate enough to read it recently (for disclosure, we share an agent, and I was given an advance copy.  The views expressed here are absolutely my own).

The Engagements opens in 1947, late at night, as Frances, an advertising copywriter, works on the DeBeers account.  A master procrastinator, she’s left coming up with a new, catchy slogan until the last minute.  Right before she goes to sleep, she comes up with “a diamond is forever.”

The rest of The Engagements demonstrates the veracity of this single line, the importance of which belies the casual way in which it was born.  The book traces five particular couples, in five distinctive voices: we have Frances’ stories and four very different marriages. The stories, each distinctive and unforgettable, wind together into a hopeful song of life, love, and family.  About three quarters of the way through the book a character observes that “in life you could only connect the pieces after they’d been put in motion,” which serves to underline the ways in which the connections between The Engagements‘ various pieces and narrators reveal themselves slowly.

In 1972 we meet Evelyn and Gerald, who are coping with their son’s desertion of his wife and two small children in the name of a new love.  They represent long marriage, the relationship that unfolds after many solid, seemingly placid years together.  The complicated, scandal-tinged beginnings of Evelyn and Gerald’s union are only revealed later in the book.

In 1987 we are introduced to James and Sheila, who live in a Boston suburb with their two sons.  James’ work as an ambulance medic, which often takes him into Cambridge and Harvard Square, offered me some laugh-out-loud moments of recognition of my neighborhood.  As their story unfolds, we see that James and Sheila’s lives of quiet desperation are shot through with a strand of real and enduring love.

Delphine’s story opens in 2003, as she is methodically and comprehensively destroying her fiance’s apartment.  In flashbacks we trace the arc of this engagement, and its genesis in the ashes of her first marriage.  Dephine’s is the most obviously sorrowful story in the book, but even so it comes to a redemptive conclusion.

Kate and Dan, who we encounter in 2012, are The Engagements‘ modern couple: they are unmarried, and their story revolves around the gay marriage of Kate’s cousin Jeffrey.  In their scenes, however, as untethered as they are to the traditional world in which the book begins, we witness deep commitment and love, whether or not marked by the presence of diamonds.

Individually, each marriage is multi-faceted, honest, full of both flaws and beauty –  not unlike a diamond.  Collectively, they show us that even when things go badly, even in times of heartbreak and sorrow, people persevere, family bonds endure, and love lasts despite all odds. The diamonds are both figuratively and, we understand at the end, literally forever.

And then there is Frances, whose story opens The Engagements.  She hovers over the book, the single person who created the world’s powerful association between diamonds and eternal love.  She recognizes the “irony of her situation … a bachelor girl whose greatest talent so far was for convincing couples to get engaged.”

The Engagements is a rollicking, entertaining read and a thought-provoking one too.  Several of the characters’ voices have stayed in my head, and even days after putting it down I am left with a sturdy, hopeful sense of the fundamental goodwill of people and the abiding power of love.  I highly, highly recommend Courtney’s book and am certain it will be one of this summer’s big hits.  Order it now to be sure your copy arrives in early June!

Anyone who’s been reading here for a bit knows how passionately I loved Launa’s account of her family’s year in France, Wherever Launa Goes.  Imagine my delight, then, when I received her book, which tells the story of what she discovered in her year away from home.  I don’t think it’s giving anything away to say that what she found there was nothing less than herself.  Home Away: A Year of Misapprehensions, Transformations, and Rose at Lunch is every bit as wonderful as I expected.  Actually, it’s more wonderful.  Because, you know, it’s a book.

I’m thrilled to offer a giveaway copy of this marvelous book to a reader.  Just leave a comment and I will choose a winner on Sunday.  Just as I loved Launa’s blog, I love this book.  Launa’s voice is lyrical and funny at the same time, and she has achieved the holy grail of memoir, which is to take something deeply personal and make it powerfully universal.  Home Away is, in the end, Launa’s love letter to her husband and daughters.  Sometimes it takes going far away to realize the value of what is right in front of us.  Some of the tenderest parts of Home Away, in opinion, could have happened anywhere on the globe: they are beautiful evocations of the relationship between husband and wife, between mother and daughter, between sisters.

I’m happy to share a short excerpt from Home Away: A Year of Misapprehensions, Transformations, and Rose at Lunch.  It was extremely hard for me to choose what to post here, because I love so many passages from this book.  Read it: I know you’ll love it too!  And leave a comment here, and I’ll pick a winner on Sunday!!

from Home Away, chapter 1:

So, on a sunny day in June nearly two decades ago, my stability-craving heart pledged itself to Bill’s adventurous one.  We made our promises in the firm grasp of a series of big ideas about about one another, the most important of which was that we were opposites who belonged together.

We promised all the usual have-and-hold, sickness-and-health, forsaking-all-others business, of course, but we added a few pledges of our own.  Knowing our proclivity to want to do different things at the same time, we promised to live our lives in the same place(s).  We foresaw the tortured negotiations it would require for us to decide whose job or school or flight of fancy would take precedence, and naively decided to take turns.  In our marriage, nobody would compromise any more than anybody else.

We also decided that we would inspire one another to bigger and better contributions to the world.  In retrospect, I have come to understand just how insane that particular vow must have sounded to the older-and-wiser married people witnessing our ceremony: “I promise not to make your life easy, but to make it meaningful,” we actually said aloud, beamingly pleased with ourselves and one another.

Another vow we wrote went something like this: “I promise to be married to you every day of our lives.”  Through this promise, we would recognize each day as a choice, not the default, and thus never feel trapped, and never take our marriage for granted.  We would grow and change together, creating in each day of our marriage yet another opportunity to say, “I do.”  We chose a forever made of days.

And finally, we promised that someday, when we had children, we would live overseas, recapitulating the trip that launched a thousand stories.  This last promise was entirely Bill’s idea, and I only agreed because the promise had the word “children” in it.  The whole living overseas part I would deal with later.  Much, much later, and only if he forced the issue.

Sometimes, with love, you hold a little something back without admitting it, even to yourself.

…..

“Bill, I’ve had it with this stability I keep clinging so hard to.”

“You and me both.” We had talked hundreds of times on this point, always in circles.  He had no way of knowing what I was about to say.

“It just keeps not working like I thought it all would.”

“Yeah.  Why is that?” He rolled towards me, and pulled me close.

“I don’t know.  But I wanted to ask you something.  Remember how we promised that someday we would live overseas?  And then I kept pretending I hadn’t really promised that?”

“Yeah.” His voice was quiet, but I had his attention.

“A year from now, Abigail will be finishing first grade.  She will know how to read and write.  Grace will be finishing fourth grade, and not yet in middle school.  The girls aren’t too young, and they’re not yet too old.  I will have finished five years at my job, and the school will be in solid shape so I can pass it on to the next head of school with a good conscience.”

Even while busting out, I had to have a careful plan.

“Let’s quit our jobs, rent out our house, and go.  I think it’s time.”

He looked at me as though I had just thrown him a winning lottery ticket.  And a pony, and a beer.

His eyes widened, and then he pulled me close and squeezed me tight. “I knew if I waited long enough, someday you’d say that.  I’ll take care of everything.  You can trust me.”

I should have known just how fast and loose I was playing with the future by even whispering Bill’s sacred word: travel.  Once he had the green light, his idea of taking care of things meant he would spring ahead, dragging the rest of us behind him like noisy tin cans bumping on the highway.  With a new adventure to motivate him, he was suddenly filled with an enthusiasm that had escaped him in his every day life.

But here’s the thing: while I had only wanted to leave where I was, he was dying to go somewhere else, and those two impulses had surprisingly little in common.  I wanted to step out of my life, but he wanted to be in Rome.  Or Bulgaria.  Australia came up.  Northern Africa.  Iceland.  Mars.

Soon enough, and for only the flimsiest of reasons, his somewhere became southern France.

We moved for the experience of spending a year away from our two-kid, two-job, too-chaotic New York life, but we were still utterly divided about what we were searching for there.  Would we find the adventure Bill had lost?  Or the stability I so craved?  Did we even know that each of our searches imperiled the other’s?

“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board,” Zora Neale Hurston began Their Eyes were Watching God.  Our marriage vows had focused our eyes on one distant ship.  When it floated into port, we discovered that neither of us could find quite what we had expected packed into the hold.

When we started planning our year in France, we gazed together at another distance ship.  Our wishes would be on board that one, we were sure.

See? Isn’t Launa wonderful? Leave a comment here to win Home Away: A Year of Misapprehensions, Transformations, and Rose at Lunch.

I was hesitant to review Emily Rapp’s beautiful memoir, The Still Point of the Turning World, because I worried that writing about how I related to her story would trivialize what she experienced.

But the book haunted me.  I couldn’t turn around, interact with my children, or look out the window without thinking of Emily and Ronan.  And I decided that I wanted to at least try to express how powerful a book Rapp has written, with a deep bow and clear statement of tremendous humility about an experience that I can’t even come close to knowing.

The Still Point of the Turning World is about mothering a terminally-ill toddler. I know several people who say they can’t bear to read it, because of the subject matter.

But the thing is, The Still Point of the Turning World is really about how to live a life.

In prose that is clear and sometimes unflinchingly stark, Rapp tells the story of her son’s tragic diagnosis and of the months that follow.  Every chapter has an epigraph, and that is only one way in which this book is strewn with references to literature.  Over and over again Rapp cites phrases from poetry, prose, and nonfiction, religious and secular, modern and ancient.  With these quotations she demonstrates both the depth of her own knowledge and the ways in which the written word can support us in times of anguish.

Rapp quoted many lines I know and love.  As I read, I had Yeats’ The Second Coming so powerfully in my mind that I tweeted that I couldn’t get the falcon and the falconer out of my head.  I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that two hours later, still reading The Still Point of the Turning World, I got to a passage where Rapp refers to that very poem, to the center not being able to hold, to things falling apart.  She weaves references to literature through her story, making manifest her belief in “the power of stories to make life cohere, to create a necessary order around us, [which] can, in turn, help us fully live.”

Perhaps the single biggest criticism I receive of my writing is that it’s sad.  This is where I worry that I’m skirting the line of disrespect; I intend no comparison whatsoever between my life and Emily Rapp’s.  But it is true that my writing – and my living, by the way – is suffused with a sense of loss, with a very real sorrow about time’s passage.  I can’t get past that feeling, much as I wish I could.  As I read The Still Point of the Turning World I finally understood why.  When I read this sentence, I gasped, underlined, and proceeded to read it again a hundred times: “rendering loss is a way of honoring life.”

Yes.  That is a truth that beats in my veins as surely as my own blood.  It is the story I can’t stop telling.

Rapp asserts the irrevocable omnipresence of loss and grief, and perhaps more importantly, the writer’s role in our human experience of it:

This is precisely why grief, like love and any other foundational, deceptively simple human emotion or state of being, is the terrain of artists.  And it is a writer’s even more specific job to give voice to loss in whatever ways she can, to give shape to this unspeakable, impermeable reality beneath all other realities.

In Ronan, Rapp meets her greatest teacher.  He doesn’t experience his own life as tragic or as doomed.  It is simply what it is.  As Rapp describes their day to day routines, their walks on the arroyo path and his sitting in his bouncer chair, we see the calm intimacy that fills even these deep, jagged lacunas of grief.  Whole scenes in the book bear witness to the fact that “there existed within this helpless, frantic sadness exquisite moments of pristine happiness and an almost-perfect peace.”  Ronan embodies “that rare, raw enchanting experience that many of us render impossible because we analyze and criticize and categorize what we see and think and feel: wonder,” and his pure, without-agenda engagement in this world is a revelation and an example.

Even though life with Ronan is full of hurt, anger, and pain, it is also beautiful.  When Rapp says that in mothering Ronan she learned about “the joys and costs of refusing to look away” I found myself emboldened, inspired, enormously moved.  The Still Point of the Turning World closes with Rapp concluding that Buddhism, which “instructs its followers to be at ease, always, with not knowing, with uncertainty,” may be the belief system that resonates with her the most.  Life is uncertain, we inadvertently brush up against the gossamer border between this world and another every day, and all we have is this bounty and barrenness spread before us.  Of course I can’t imagine with how many more orders of magnitude having a terminally ill child brings this truth home, but I do know it is true for all of us.

There is heartbreak and deep, unthinkable, apocalyptic sorrow at the heart of The Still Point of the Turning World.  But believe me when I tell you this is one of the most life-affirming books I have ever read.  It tells me what I’ve always known, but in words more passionate, eloquent, and convincing than I’ve ever had.  It tells me the three words that are the only tattoo I would ever get: be here now.