books

Dear Money

I loved Martha’ McPhee’s Dear Money. The book’s voice is funny and smart, its observations nuanced and searing. Martha’s thoughtful commentary is both right on the money (as it were) and somewhat scary.  There is so much in Dear Money that made me smile with wry identification, so many details that rang true from both the deliberately non-flashy Maine coastal life and from the deliberately oh-so-flashy Manhattan finance world.

As I ran this weekend in Marion, down streets whose houses are so familiar as to be almost like people, standing silently around the borders of my memories, I found myself thinking yet again of the Maine house at the center of Dear Money’s narrative. One Marion house in particular always strikes me when I run, a large, beautiful house, the line of whose chimneys and eaves against the hydrangea blue sky I can see with my eyes closed. As this house floated into my vision, again, I thought of how Dear Money is simultaneously a love letter to a house and a piece of piercing commentary on what houses became during the frothy finance era of 2004-2007.

Houses – and this one house in Maine in particular – are at the very heart of Dear Money. They represent what, after the turn of the century, the American public decided it was owed. A house is shorthand for the rich destiny to which the average person so stubbornly determined they deserved. The house in Maine also stands for the characters’ most cherished dreams of how their lives will look.

Dear Money is ultimately about the interplay between creativity and material success, the deep longing for and fascination with that those in each world have for the other, of the inevitable and somewhat depressing impossibility of mingling the two. India Palmer, the protagonist, becomes a bond trader basically on a dare, walking away from a life as a published and critically, if not commercially, successful novelist. She trades places, basically, with the husband of a couple with whom she and her husband are close. These two friends walk into each others’ worlds and Martha traces, with telling detail and devastating honesty, the ways that this ripples throughout both of their lives.

As I thought about this review I kept hearing the CSNY song “Change Partners” in my head, imagining the ways that some people dance with the same muse or calling their whole lives, and other switch, and wondering about the reasoning behind and the ramifications of that switch. Perhaps, as someone with a foot in both of the worlds that Martha so unerringly describes, I am especially moved by this novel.

Fascinating character populate Dear Money. There are the two couples at the center of the story, but the extended ecosystem is beautifully rendered as well, with colleagues and peers from the worlds of both literature and finance stepping in and out of the story. India and her husband Theodor enjoy a realistic and truly solid marriage, and the ways in which they are jarringly similar to and yet widely different from their friends Will and Emma. Win Johns, the aptly-named svengali who transforms India’s life, is entertaining and believable even in his over-the-top-ness.

I loved Dear Money. It’s one of those novels into which you can fall headfirst and languish, utterly absorbed in its story and world. Martha’s observations, though tinged with cynicism, always felt warm-hearted to me, informed by an abiding faith in the basic goodness of people. The book’s conclusion, as I understand it, is that people are complicated, various, and profoundly driven by what they want most fiercely. Martha resists simple categorizations of right and wrong or good and bad. It is her ability to pull off such a textured depiction of a world that has often been rendered in black and white that I am most impressed by. There is no easy answer and no obvious high road. There is, instead, a world populated by confused and dreamy people, paddling desperately, not sure if they are moving forward or back.

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress

I laughed. I cried. It was better than Cats.

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress is one of the funniest and wisest books that I’ve read in a long, long time. Rhoda Janzen is simply hilariously funny. I have rarely laughed out loud as often during a book as I did with this one. At the same time, Rhoda is almost blindingly intelligent (I haven’t looked up this many words since The Geography of Love), achingly full of empathy, and hugely self-aware, but in a not-at-all-arrogant way.

Rhoda’s tough year spent recovering from botched surgery with a catheter and a urine bag strapped to her leg was just the prelude to the really, really bad week that kicks off the action of her memoir. Her husband of 15 tumultuous years leaves her for a man (Bob) that he met on gay.com, and she is in a car accident that leaves her with serious injuries. In response to these world-shattering events, Rhoda moves home to California and moves in with her Mennonite parents.

I think my favorite thing about Rhoda’s memoir is the delicate way she points out the incongruities and hilarities of the religious community of her childhood while also clearly honoring them. There is no disrespect in her descriptions, which is quite a feat given how much humor she finds. The tales of her mother’s uncanny and unselfconscious public bodily commentary and the detailed descriptions of the peculiarities of traditional Mennonite food are downright hysterical. And yet these – and so many more laugh-out-loud stories – are told in a loving, respectful way.

Rhoda’s stories of her interval at home are interwoven with reflections and memories from her childhood. Her family is full of characters both entertaining and endearing; I particularly loved her steady, serene, practical sister, Hannah. The shorthand the sisters share, full of private references and the deep intimacy of a common and unique childhood, reminds me of the way that Hilary can say to me, eyebrow cocked, “ADC? Q Kamir? The Happy Hallwegers?” and make me burst instantly into the laughter of keen recognition.

I can’t recommend Mennonite in a Little Black Dress enough. Rhoda’s voice alone is reason to start this book. Tonight. I absolutely adored spending time with her. I want to be her friend! The memoir is also deeply moving. It is a testament to the strength of Rhoda’s spirit that she overcomes crises that would crush the average person with both her sense of humor and steadfast faith in the essential good of the world intact. As she sinks into the comfort of her family’s embrace, realizing the ways that her life has irrevocably ruptured, Rhoda opens to an awareness of the great unknown of the universe. This is, of course, a universal experience, I think, and one for tales of which which most of us have a huge appetite. Only a masterful writer, thinker, and person like Rhoda Janzen can have me laughing uproariously on one page and on the very next reduce me to tears with sentences like this:

…I suddenly felt destiny as a mighty and perplexing force, an inexorable current that sweeps us off into new channels… And how sad it suddenly seemed to be buffeted by the powerful currents to which we had yielded our lives. So many years had passed. My childhood, my early friendships, my long marriage, all seemed to hang from an invisible thread, like the papery wasps’ nest outside my study window. I had watched the lake winds swinging and tipping it, expecting it to go down, but it never did. Memory swayed like that next – hidden but present, fragile yet strong, attached by an unseen force to perpetual motion.

I loved Mennonite in a Little Black Dress. I will be hearing Rhoda’s keen observations, shot through with her trademark humility and intelligence, in my head for a very long time. Her memoir is a rare thing: a book that really makes you laugh and that really makes you think at the same time.

The stack

My stack is out of control. I am hoping that this holiday weekend affords some serious reading time. I am always fascinated by what other people read, so thought I’d share the titles that are piled on my bedside table right now. I think what people read is a very good snapshot of what it is that fascinates and moves them.

Our Town – Thornton Wilder
Little Bee – Chris Cleve
The Spectator Bird – Wallace Stegner
For the Time Being – Annie Dillard
Inventing the Truth: the Art and Craft of Memoir – William Zinsser
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight – Alexandra Fuller
The End of the Alphabet – C S Richardson
Half the Sky – Nicholas Kristof
Reviving Ophelia – Mary Pipher
Happiness – Thich Nhat Hahn
The Wishing Year – Noelle Oxenhandler
When Things Fall Apart – Pema Chodron
The Cloister Walk – Kathleen Norris
The Unfolding Now – A H Almaas

I’d love to know what you’re reading.

YES!

The time has come … (I keep hearing, in my head, “the walrus said, to talk of many things…”) But the time has come. It’s here. Life After Yes debuts today and I whole-heartedly encourage you to order it. It’s been such a pleasure and an honor to live this process a little bit, vicariously, through Aidan. I read snippets of the book as she revised it, listening to Coldplay, at Starbucks. I saw the cover before it was final. And, finally, last week I got to hold it in my hands. And read it. And revel in it.

Life After Yes is, first and foremost, an absolute pleasure to read. I gulped it down in two sittings. Aidan’s characters are human and likeable, despite their real and visible flaws. The dialog is real, the descriptions of New York vivid, the particular moment in life recognizable to all who’ve been through it.

But Life After Yes also dares to ask some big questions. The book is, in my view, about two main things: about the ways that loss echoes through our lives, crippling and humbling us in ways we cannot anticipate, and about the various crutches and devices we use to keep ourselves from embracing life, from saying, wholeheartedly, YES.

The book’s protagonist, Quinn, lives in the shadow of her father’s unexpected death on 9/11. This is particularly poignant because any reader of Aidan’s blog knows that she lost her father very recently. It gives me shivers to think that Aidan wrote this novel before her father was sick, as though her subconscious was prodding her to work through this particular life passage in advance of needing its wisdom. Quinn’s fiance, Sage, also struggles with a deep loss. The way that Quinn and Sage and others around them (in particular, each of their mothers) reckon with the ramifications of these deaths forms the beating heart of the book.

Quinn’s story is also about the myriad ways that we hide from true and honest engagement in our lives. Aidan explores thoughtfully all the various tools that people use to numb themselves, to avoid really looking at the core of who they are and what they have chosen. There is alcohol, there is empty flirtation and sex, there is betrayal, there is plain old denial. We watch Quinn realize the futility of all of these crutches, and ultimately we see the beauty and joy that is possible when we overcome the human instinct to hide from ourselves. Part of this process for Quinn is also about letting go of her need to follow the yellow brick road, the path of great adulation and achievement. I relate to this keenly, and particularly loved the passage where Quinn begins to trust her inner compass:

Something clicks. I’ve spent my whole life stockpiling reasons – for why I should go to law school, or become a litigator, or become a wife. Maybe some things don’t need justification to be right. Maybe instinct is the best measure.

There are other themes in Life After Yes. Quinn’s maturation into herself is integral to the plot, and we watch her dreams of how her life would be confront the reality of how it actually is with results that are sometimes bitter, sometimes beautiful. Life After Yes is also a love letter to New York, and Aidan’s abiding love of the city she grew up in and still calls home radiates from every page. The law firm where Quinn works illustrates the alternative universe some professions inhabit, where a very different morality passes for normal and where people are so good at their facades that they can lose sight of their actual selves.

I loved Life After Yes. This book is fun to read and also full of provocative questions and lingering meaning. I can’t imagine a more compelling combination. I am proud of my friend and very honored to have been able to read this book. I heartily encourage you to do so as well. You can buy it here.

The Geography of Love

I read Glenda Burgess’s exquisite memoir, The Geography of Love a couple of weeks ago, reading it voraciously in two sittings, unable to put the beautiful volume down.  Glenda makes me believe in soul mates.

Given my own fixation with maps and geography, with all the tools that we use, concrete and ineffable, to guide our way through life, I was predisposed to love this book. I did not, however, expect the completeness with which I’d tumble into Glenda’s world, that I’d be so completely seduced by her voice. She knocked me over twice in her first chapter alone, first with “And while the question of God himself frames the universe, the great mysteries exist in the human heart unsolved,” which echoes my growing awareness that beyond the questions there are more questions. And her description of her life before meeting her husband is a far more eloquent and lyrical summary of exactly what it is I write about so clumsily, all the time:

Eventually, I constructed a layered exoskeleton, a coral reef instead of a life. The structure was there, but the essence was missing.

It is a rare book that sends me to the dictionary almost once a chapter. An even rarer one that does so in an elegant, unforced way. This book did both. Glenda’s prose is never showy or flamboyant. It is simply elegant, intelligent, and full of metaphors that seem to spring from a deep intuition.

The Geography of Love is, most of all, a love story. Glenda describes falling in love with Ken, and taking a chance on a life together despite some red flags in his history that might send a more cautious woman running (twice widowed, he was a suspect in his second wife’s murder). Her narrative is interspersed with reflections on faith, meaning, and the soul. There are many sentences that made my breath catch in my throat, sentences that glitter like gems, that put into the perfect words, in the perfect order, things deep in my heart. For example: “How do you know a heart? The life only tells the journey.”

The story that Glenda tells of her life with Ken and their two children is evocative and personal. The bulk of the book traces Ken’s illness with cancer, his deteriorating health and their movement as a family towards his death. Glenda seems certain that Ken is her destiny, that her path was always meant to lead to him (“In every way, he was my true home, my center of gravity.”) At the same time, she evinces raw reverence in the face of life’s great mystery, circles around the essential unknown at the heart of the human experience. In her very first chapter, those five pages that are as beautiful as any prose I’ve read in a long time, she talks about “quintessence: the essence of a thing in its purest and most concentrated form … Quintessence, like faith, remains unproven: a deductive belief.” Certainty and the unknown, tangled inextricably together.

Interleaved into this story of an ordinary life and an uncommonly strong love are Glenda’s reflections on the great currents of feeling and belief that I think run through all of us. She accomplishes what is surely the highest aspiration of memoir: taking a deeply personal story and telling it in a way that examines and explicates universal emotions and experiences.

The scene of Ken’s death, which happens at home and in Glenda’s presence, is among the most powerful I’ve ever read. She writes of watching – feeling – his soul leave his body. She is suffused with grace as she sits with the body of the man who has become the geography of her life, of her love. Her courage and humanity in sharing this scene, this most private of moments, awes me. The book ends with Glenda moving towards the “formal feeling” that Emily Dickinson said came after great pain. Even in her grief, she continues to respect the forces beyond our control and understanding that shape our lives, and her gratitude for what she shared with Ken clearly overwhelms the pain of her loss.

This is a gorgeous, lucid, moving book. It is sad but also profoundly hopeful. For me, the most enduring of Glenda’s messages is that in abandoning ourselves to – even embracing – all that we cannot know, we may find peace and comfort. The Geography of Love is the story of two human beings, whole and flawed and full of love, and of the path they walked together. It hints at the path that lies ahead for the one who survives, and, even, at the path ahead for the one that dies.

Life distills in the elements of chaos and chance. Vagary, arcane and capricious, hints at destiny and confounds God, adumbrates the fragile human landscape.