books

By the Book

I love the New York Times By the Book column, which appears in the Sunday Book Review.  A friend and fellow passionate reader recently shared one with me with the note that it would be awfully hard to answer the questions.  Then I thought: this would be fun to try.  The questions vary slightly week to week, but the gist is the same. I’d love to hear your responses to these questions, too, if you are so moved!

What books are currently on your night stand?

Final Jeopardy by Linda Fairstein (I am in a difficult work period, and not much reading is happening)
The Givenness of Things by Marilynne Robinson (these essays by possibly my favorite writer are dense, beautiful, and too smart for me; I’m dipping in and out)
The Book of Awakening by Mark Nepo (permanently on my bedside table)

What’s the last great book you read?

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi (I wrote about it here)

What genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid?

I love memoir, poetry, and some fiction.  I almost never read historical fiction (which is part of why I was somewhat resistant to  All the Light We Cannot See – which I eventually adored).

What’s the last book that made you laugh?

 Yes Please by Amy Poehler.

What’s the last book that made you cry?

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi.

What’s your favorite poem?

The Real Work by Wendell Berry.

Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Your favorite antihero or villain?

Hero/heroine: Albus Dumbledore and Harry Potter (Harry Potter), Lyra Belaqua (His Dark Materials Trilogy), Eve (Paradise Lost), Charity Lang (Crossing to Safety).
Villain is harder.  Nobody comes to mind.

What kind of reader were you as a child? What authors and books stick most in your mind?

I was an avid reader, devouring lots of books of all kinds of genres.  I remember loving the pantheon of great female heroines in that stage of books: Meg Murry in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, Harriet in Louise FitzHugh’s Harriet the Spy, Karana in Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins.

I also loved Bridge to Terabithia.  I am absolutely certain that I would have been a passionate fan of Harry Potter and his world if it had existed when I was a child.

If you had to name one book that made you who you are today, what would it be?

This is very hard to answer, but I think I would cite the work of the three poets on whom I wrote my senior thesis in college: Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, and Maxine Kumin.  That year was the first time I dove into what would become a central theme of my life, the intersection of motherhood and creativity and the ways in which they both enrich and detract from each other.

What author living or dead would you most like to meet, and what would you like to know?

I wish I had known Oliver Sacks and Paul Kalanithi, and I would love to meet Atul Gawande and Abraham Verghese.  I am fascinated by the doctor-writers, and by both spheres in which they live their lives (and, as many people know, I wish I was a doctor).

Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

I’m ashamed to admit this, but I just could not get into Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend.  I really wanted to.  I really tried.  So many people whose book recommendations to me are infallible suggested I read it.  It simply did not hook me.  I’m sorry!

Whom would you want to write your life story?

Katrina Kenison.  Nobody shows the way ordinary life shimmers with meaning the way she does.

What do you plan to read next?

My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout and Why We Write About Ourselves: Twenty Memoirists on Why They Expose Themselves (and Others) in the Name of Literature by Meredith Maran.

I’d love to hear your answers to these!

The Ramblers

index

I was thrilled to read an advance copy of my friend Aidan Donnelley Rowley’s The Ramblers, and I’m even more delighted to jump on the table in support of this book.

It. Is. So. Wonderful.

I read The Ramblers in one delicious gulp last fall and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about (or texting Aidan about) the characters since.  The three protagonists, Clio an ornithologist who carries deep scars from growing up with a mentally ill mother, her best friend from Yale, Smith, who comes from one of New York’s “perfect” and hugely wealthy families and is recovering from the sudden end of the engagement that she thought would begin her own happily ever after, and Tate, a college classmates of theirs who has returned to New York in the wake of his marriage ending and his company’s highly lucrative sale.

Clio, Smith, and Tate tell their stories in interwoven chapters and their lives are both absolutely their own and inextricably connected.  Each chapter opens with an epigraph, a practice I love in books.  The first voice we hear is Clio’s, and the use of Charles Darwin’s words, “if we expect to suffer, we are anxious,” sets the stage for a book that is by turns about anxiety and fear, discomfort and adaptation, where we come from and where we’re going.

We learn early on that Clio’s mother was bipolar.  This fact is at the complicated knot at the center of Clio’s life, and her relationships with her boyfriend and her father both exist in its shadow.  Her work studying the adaptation of birds, her discomfort really letting her older boyfriend know her, and her passionate attachment to the Ramble, a section of Central Park from which the book takes its name, are all important threads that run throughthe book.

Smith, so structured and fond of order that she runs her own company which helps people declutter and organize their lives, has recently faced the most disorienting disruption she could have imagined. Her fiance, with whom she had planned and envisioned her future, walked away suddenly.  In the wake of this loss Smith is working to determine to find her footing in a life that looks nothing like she imagined.

Tate, a photographer with a soulful love of poetry, recently sold an app that he founded with a friend for $40 million dollars.  His wife also decided that their marriage was over.  He has returned to New York after this abrupt turn of events and is, in many ways like Smith, trying to determine what he truly wants to do now.

Clio is the central character of The Ramblers.  All three central protagonists are compelling, but for me it was Clio’s themes that formed the book’s animating core.  Her mother haunts the narrative, and we hear her voice in the form of a letter towards the end.  In their own ways, though, all three characters struggle to define themselves apart from strong family legacies.  Clio’s mother’s bipolar is the clearest example of this, but both Smith and Tate also wrestle with where they’re from.

This is the way it works.  No one emerges from childhood totally unscathed.  You do the best you can.  And, if you are lucky, you find someone to do the best you can with.

All three of the main characters are, we see clearly, ramblers.  Towards the end of the book, in a Clio’s notes on a walk in the Ramble, she muses “Maybe that is the point after all?  To be lost?”  Clio, Smith, and Tate are all in their thirties, true adults, and all three reckon with this reality.  It’s time to make personal and professional decisions, and the questions that Clio, Smith, and Tate face beat through the book like a pulse.

Who am I?  Who do I love?  What do I want to do with my life?  Who do I want to do it with?

I can’t recommend The Ramblers more highly: the book is gorgeously written, deeply moving, and stays with you long after you finish it.

the dying are the ones who have the most to teach us about life

I had a feeling that Paul Kalanithi’s memoir, When Breath Becomes Air, would be a powerful read.  In fact I called it a “once in a decade” book, before I even read it.  I wasn’t wrong.

I don’t think there’s a lot I can say to augment the rhapsodic reviews this book has rightly received, but I still wanted to add my voice to the loud chorus of people celebrating Kalanithi’s courage, his unflinching gaze, his poetic prose, his incredibly powerful first and last book.  This book is unforgettable.

There are so many things about When Breath Becomes Air that I loved, so many sentences I underlined, so many points where I cried.  Kalanithi was both a doctor and a lover of literature, and that particular combination is one of my very favorite to read (Verghese, Sacks, and Gawande are giants in my life, and Kalanithi belongs in their company).  Kalanithi sought to understand the boundary between life and death, and the ways that the irrefutable presence of the latter shapes the former.   In his own words: “Neurosurgery attracted me as much for its intertwining of brain and consciousness as for its intertwining of life and death.”  The book is one man’s meditation on this intertwining truth, which abruptly transitions for him from an abstract fascination to a brutal reality.

Though he was a profoundly gifted physician, it seems to me that Kalanithi’s soul was one of a writer, and a reader.  “Literature not only illuminated another’s experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection,” he writes early in a book dotted with quotes and references to books as wide ranging as T.S. Eliot and Thomas Browne.

One of my favorite passages in When Breath Becomes Air is Kalanithi’s musings on the inadequacy of scientific thought to really capture the “existential, visceral nature of human life.”  This reminded me of my writing about growing up in the space between my father’s faith in the rational mind and his abiding awe of the ineffable.  “No system of though can contain the fullness of the human experience,” writes Kalanithi, and I found myself nodding.  Indeed.  It cannot.  So much of writing – all of it? – is a writer’s attempt to capture his or her own experience, don’t you think?  We scratch on the glass, we grasp at something as it drifts through our hands, we try, as best as we can, to say: this is what life is for me, and maybe that will help you know what it is for you.

When Breath Becomes Air is short and reads quickly.  When I was most of the way through, I took Whit to a hockey game.  I walked out of the rink and felt the world had shifted.  Literally something was different in the air I walked through; it was crisper, clearer, more defined.  Kalanithi’s story rang in my head as I walked to the car to get something I’d forgotten.  The best books do this, of course: they change our experience of living in the world.

Lucy Kalanithi, Paul’s widow, wrote the afterword that concludes the book.  She writes a heartbreaking, beautiful account of Paul’s final days, and I read those pages through floods of tears.  She also asserts that Paul “found poetry more comforting than Scripture,” which is resonant for me.  Her last sentences are clear, sharp, strong, and perfect:

“For much of his life, Paul wondered about death – and whether he could face it with integrity.  In the end, the answer was yes.  I was his wife and a witness.”

Read this book.  It will shine a light on your life.  I promise you it will.

Saying yes

Years ago I wrote about not understanding what people meant when they called their children their greatest teachers.  And then I wrote about suddenly getting what that means.  I wrote about that on Karen’s beautiful blog.  And Grace and Whit are still teaching me things, over and over again.  Most recently, the lesson was about the difference between saying no and saying yes.

I read Shonda Rhimes’ Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person at the end of last year and it made me think.  A lot.  I fretted: was I just saying no to things too much?  I talked about this reaction, and this question, with Grace and Whit.  Maybe I needed to start saying yes to social engagements more, to going out?  What did they think?  Was I saying no too much?

They looked at me in abject horror.  I stared back, surprised by their reaction.  “What?”

“No.”  Grace said firmly, shaking her head.

“Mummy,” Whit interjected.  “You aren’t saying no to things.  Don’t think of it like that.  You’re saying yes to us.”

And once again, I was reminded of that when I stared into these two faces.  Grace, olive skin, brown eyed, her features angular and lean and those of a young woman now, and Whit, blue eyed, fair, blond.  I looked at their two cleft chins, just like mine, the planes of their faces as familiar as my own.

Right.

I’m saying yes to them.  Yes, I am.  And to writing, and reading, and sleeping, and the things I’ve chosen as my priorities.  But most of all, I’m saying yes to them.  To Grace and Whit.

What are you saying yes to, these days, this new year?

Brave Enough

IMG_6403

I’ve been a quote collector since May 23, 1985 (I was 10).  Interestingly, May 23 is Matt’s birthday.  A coincidence that I began my very first quote book (the one on top) on that day, years and years before I knew my future husband?  Perhaps, perhaps not.

IMG_6404

I opened Cheryl Strayed’s new book, Brave Enough, and was in tears by page four.  Infinite thanks to the peerless Liz Egan for sending me an advance copy (have you read Liz’s gorgeous first novel, A Window Opens?  YOU MUST). In the introduction to Brave Enough, Strayed mentions that her own passionate quote habit began with a line from Madeleine L’Engle’s A Ring of Endless Light (a quote that I assure you lives in that top book): “Maybe you have to know darkness before you can appreciate the light.”  She then goes on to refer to a long first-time labor and Ram Dass’s seminal exhortation to be here now, a phrase I’ve often described as the tattoo I would get if I ever got a tattoo.

By the time the brief introduction was over, I knew I was in the company of my people.  I mean, I guess I knew that already, and part of Cheryl Strayed’s immense power is her ability to resonate like that with so, so many readers.  But still.  I loved this book.  She says that “quotes, at their core, almost always shout Yes!” and asserts that Brave Enough “aims to be a book of yes.”

And oh, is it.  Spoiler alert if you’re on my holiday gift-giving list: this book is getting ordered in bulk and going under a lot of trees.  It’s inspiring and reassuring and comforting and lovely.  I laughed and I cried reading the short, powerful quotes on Brave Enough’s pages.  I wish it was twice as long, but of course the fact that Strayed has culled her extensive repertoire of quotable writing to these few gems is part of what makes it glitter so fiercely.

It is hard to pick favorites, but here are some of the short passages that spoke most directly to me.  I hope you’ll buy and read Brave Enough, a book which reminds us of the power of words.  I can’t recommend it highly enough.

****

When you recognize that you will thrive not in spite of your losses and sorrow, but because of them, that you would not have chosen the things that happened in your life, but you are grateful for them, that you will hold the empty bowls eternally in your hands, but you also have the capacity to fill them?  The word for that is healing.

Acceptance has everything to do with simplicity, with witting in the ordinary place, with bearing witness to the plain facts of our lives, with not just starting at the essential, but ending up there.  Acceptance speaks in the gentlest voice.  It commands only that we acknowledge what’s true.

Trust that all you’ve learned was worth learning, no matter what answer you have or do not have about what practical use it is in your life.  Let whatever mysterious starlight that guided you this far guide you onward into the crazy beauty that awaits.