It’s hard for domestic violence victims to see a path to safety, let alone travel it. They have to survive the violence itself, overcome the guilt, shame and alienation it causes, and risk death or injury to escape. They have to secure shelter, food and clothing and navigate a mire of legal proceedings to distance themselves from their abusers. Often with few resources and little hope.
When we think of someone escaping abuse, the red tape of protective orders, divorce, custody, name changes or emancipations aren’t the obstacles that spring to mind. Yet legal services are among the most powerful tools to get—and stay—out of a violent relationship for the long term, says Heather Bellino, executive director of the Texas Advocacy Project. They are crucial to giving victims the space and security they need to forge new, better lives for themselves and their children.
Bellino leads a non-profit law firm that provides these services free of charge to the people who need them most. And she’s on a mission to raise community awareness of the legal side of survival so that victims know where to turn and their supporters are better informed to assist. I toured her office and interviewed her to help spread the word.
Continue reading “Heather Bellino: Ending Domestic Violence”“Crazy Love” by Leslie Morgan Steiner is a personal history of abuse with a social mission of redemption. Steiner recounts a series of harrowing milestones in a relationship gone wrong, illuminating why she and so many others stay with violent partners—and how friends, family, bystanders can help.
Addressing the reader directly, she writes: “If I were brave enough the first time I met you, I’d try to share what torture it is to fall in love with a good man who cannot leave a violent past behind. I’d tell you why I stayed for years, and how I finally confronted someone whose love I valued almost more than my own life. Then maybe the next time you came across a woman in an abusive relationship, instead of asking why anyone stays with a man who beats her, you’d have the empathy and courage to help her on her way.”
By that measure, “Crazy Love” succeeds. Steiner’s straightforward account of four years of abuse would make even the hardest-hearted person more aware of the emotional, physical and financial risks of severing ties with an abuser. And that understanding might spur readers’ responses when lives are on the line.
I know I won’t soon forget the attacks Steiner described. The cold muzzle of a fully loaded Colt .45 bruising her temple. Bits of onion and meat smacking her face and her hands on the steering wheel, remnants of a Big Mac thrown in protest of her driving. Hands choking her as he mouthed the words “I…own…you.”
Beyond the blows and humiliations, I’ll remember Steiner’s loyalty beyond reason and the failure of so many friends, family members and institutions to intervene. It took years of “experiments” in both fighting back and submitting for her to conclude that nothing she did made him hit her and nothing she did (short of leaving) made him stop. I’ll remember how her desperate calls for help were denied by a busy signal at the domestic violence hotline and the prescription for tranquilizers her therapist proffered instead of an evacuation plan.
This account of violent episode after violent episode educates the reader about warning signs and legal remedies, but Steiner’s character–her unique pedigree and persona–instruct as well. I was challenged by her account because she wasn’t particularly likable. Her poor-little-rich-girl tales of self loathing, drug abuse, and anorexia didn’t resonate. I found it hard to care about a character so attached to appearances and her Waspy Ivy League heritage.
When she first meets Conor, her soon-to-be abuser and husband on the subway, she tries to impress the stranger with references to her “high-powered father” and weekend jaunts to Vail. Later, she makes statements like, “my grandfather was the only Harvard senior in the class of 1929 who owned two sports cars.” She takes money from her trust fund to buy her own engagement ring because she doesn’t want the “diamond chip in a cheap gold setting” he’s likely to buy.
My negative reaction to her on the page prompted me to consider the barriers to empathy (and help) that victims of domestic violence encounter in real life. Personality, privilege, poverty [how about adding this, or even more — ?] and so many other factors color our responses to victims. Yet a victim is a victim is a victim, regardless of outsiders’ assessments of their resources or personal failings. And Steiner wasn’t a character. She was a person in desperate need of help.
In this way, “Crazy Love” reminded me that even when it looks like someone has the financial or other resources to leave a bad situation, the victim must be lacking other resources–the conviction, knowledge or support [also confidence?] to break free. Someone can be obnoxious and worthy of help. Someone can be well-connected and in need of support. And our sympathy and intervention shouldn’t be reserved for more perfect victims–people who fit our preconceived ideas about need, suffering, worthiness.
This riveting account of a years-long journey to acknowledge and end an abusive relationship bravely answers the question: Why would a woman stay with a man who hurts and threatens her? It leaves readers to ponder a crucial related question: How can we build the empathy, insight and courage required to help, rather than judge, victims of such violence.
If this post resonates with you, I bet you’ll enjoy my newsletter. I send bookish news and notes out to more than 1,000 readers weekly on Fridays. Sign up here.
It’s a joy to look back at the evolution of Zora’s parties as captured on this blog. On her second birthday, just two short years ago, I declared myself a lover, not a planner, and outlined all the reasons why I didn’t “go all Martha Stewart on the occasion.” Still, I hinted that bigger things might be in store the following year. Turns out, I kept her third birthday party super simple, but went all out for a sendoff on the eve of our move to Austin. Fast-forward to Zora’s 4th birthday last month, and we’re now bonafide party animals.
We invited new schoolmates, neighbors and friends over to our place to celebrate Zora’s big day. I designed the backyard party around the ABCs–animals, books and crafts, that is–and sought the help of Austin’s finest to pull it all off. They didn’t disappoint.
Continue reading “Zora’s 4th Birthday Party”This sensory novel explores heartbreak and home as protagonist Ingrid Palamede navigates a torturous landscape where brawn, swagger and grapes rule. Lush with quirky characters and vivid scenes, “Valley Fever” takes us into the hearts of a close-knit community, a lovably flawed family and a spirited heroine.
Ingrid has no place of her own to seek refuge when her boyfriend dumps her after she’s moved in. She turns first to her sister in L.A., then heads north to her childhood home in Fresno to forget Howard’s character flaws (“his stupid flat stomach” and “the idiot way he brought [her] coffee in bed”). In the city she loves to hate, Ingrid mourns her relationship, pens a genocide comedy and slowly recognizes that her parents are grappling with heartbreaks of their own.
The dialogue is appealingly droll and author Katherine Taylor, thankfully, doesn’t spend much time parsing Ingrid’s interior life in the aftermath of the breakup. There are grapes to pick, after all, and we’re quickly immersed in action on the farm. Ingrid’s dad is a great farmer who has 20,000 acres at risk, hurt by his aversion to business and reliance upon antiquated gentlemen’s agreements. Her mother plays solitaire in worn hotel slippers and “doesn’t even care for the people she likes.” Her godfather Felix, known for his ruthlessness and criminal company (her father excluded), warns: “You think you’ve got more than two friends, you’re fooling yourself.”
Ingrid stumbles, but never shrivels, in the 100-degree heat. It’s a testament to Taylor’s skill in describing the Fresno landscape that Ingrid’s hard-knock education in pricing and negotiations is as memorable for the vineyard backdrop as for Ingrid’s personal development.
Taylor masterfully builds a story to be savored by grounding the enormity of the Palamede family’s challenges in the steady rhythms of daily life. Her research shows in spot-on depictions of the tastes that enliven the community: The hot sweetness of end-grapes picked right from the vine. The perfect bite of prosciutto cured from almond-fed pigs. Vodka poured over table grapes by valley farmers hesitant to drink anything but California wine. In Taylor’s account, even betrayal captures the senses. It tastes like cold-poached Alaskan salmon and smells like cigars and grease.
This is a lovely quick read–well-imagined and well-written. Pair with an old Mondavi, Ingrid’s drink of choice.
If this post resonates with you, I bet you’ll enjoy my newsletter. I regularly send bookish news and notes out to more than 1,000 readers. Sign up here.
Wendy Lesser is the kind of reader who will track down a bootleg version of Haruki Murakami’s “Norwegian Wood” and compare it line by line with the authorized version. The kind of reader who can find a book list “intensely moving, even in its misjudgements.” The kind of re-reader who wishes “Wolf Hall” were twice as long and at its end heads to the Frick Museum to gaze at portraits of its protagonist Thomas Cromwell.
And she is the kind of writer who can spend 200 pages telling you all about her bookish tastes and beliefs without once urging you to agree. Her tone in “Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books” is akin to a chatty hostess ushering you into her impressive library, fingering the spines of treasured books, and detailing the literary pleasures held within. She meanders through the shelves, pausing to recall a beloved passage here, some author backstory there. Sprinkling bon mots all the while.
Reading is not about progressing toward a finish line, any more than life is.
There is nothing shameful about giving up on a book in the middle: that is the exercise of taste.
In the never-ending conversation about what might count as good literature, there are many worse things than being wrong.
Her musings are informed and far-ranging. She explains why the sequels to great novels are often distinctly inferior. Praises 19th century Russians for setting the standard for writer authority and doubts nonfiction authors who fail to hint at their own unreliability. She quips that the TV show “The Wire” attained an air of “literary profundity.” (Surely, the highest compliment from such an inveterate reader.)
She’s generous, insisting that literature comes in all genres: poems, essays, mysteries, even sci fi–really, any form “well-written enough to last through multiple readings, not to mention multiple generations of readers.”
She hazards some guesses as to which contemporary literature might endure, and a quarter of the 100 books that she recommends for pleasure reading were penned by living or recently departed writers–not bad for a list that spans hundreds of years. Still, she devotes the most praise and attention to close readings of works of the white and dead. “The slight, the facile, and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedians and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and James and Conrad,” she explains.
She shares her reading opinions generously, but the account is scarcely personal. She holds her reader-guests at a respectful distance, limiting the conversation to the books, not the life of the reader. In just one odd passage about D.H. Lawrence, she risks personal disclosure. “I know of no book more true than ‘Sons and Lovers,’” she writes. “I would stake my life on its truths about mothers and their sons, young women and their lovers; I have staked my life on them, at key moments of emotional crisis or existential despair.” But she tells us no more about herself, her crises or her despair, quickly returning to thoughts on how Lawrence can browbeat the reader with his opinions and still allow space for them to choose to believe him or not.
Bibliomemoirs like “Tolstoy and the Purple Chair,” in which the author recounts her experiences reading a book a day for a year, and “The Shelf,” in which the author reads the New York Society Library’s LES-LEQ shelf, may feel inorganic and pat, but they provide a structure and narrative drive that “Why I Read” lacks.
And Lesser’s refusal to tell us what the books really mean to her, beyond an appreciation of admired writers’ deftness with character, plot and craft, ultimately prevents it from reaching its own literary ambitions. “A work of commentary or criticism is not necessarily a work of literature, but it can aspire to that condition and be the better for it,” Lesser wrote in the book’s prologue. “I aspire, in this little book, toward the qualities I have admired in novels and poetry, including the compression, the indirection, the inherent connections, the organic shape.”
A better choice would have been to aspire toward the kind of truth and authority she admires so much in 19th century Russian authors. It might have emboldened her to risk something in her writing and imbue quotidian observations of a reading life with the weight of hard-won revelation. As it stands, “Why I Read” is a delightful compilation of bookish insights. But it remains in the realm of scholarly conversation, not literature.
If this post resonates with you, I bet you’ll enjoy my newsletter. I regularly send bookish news and notes out to more than 1,000 readers. Sign up here.
Convincing American women to transform workplaces by voting in family-friendly laws involves no small amount of cajoling—and for good reason. Even after decades of feminist manifestos and women’s empowerment tomes (or perhaps partly because of them), it can feel like an admission of deficiency to clamor for a new world order, like you aren’t Oprah or Hillary or Sheryl enough to win in a man’s world.
That’s why personal growth books like Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” are so seductive. They minimize the fact that the game is rigged, and make women feel like we alone possess the power to fulfill our highest career ambitions. They assert women’s capability and downplay their vulnerability in workplaces and communities that devalue them. We can succeed, the books say, if only we work hard enough, marry the right kind of person, time childbirth optimally or forgo it altogether. If, if, if.
Anne-Marie Slaughter’s “Unfinished Business” does not make this mistake. Rather, it suggests that women have simultaneously taken on too much and too little of the burden of workplace progress — too much personal responsibility and too little collective action. We’ve taken exceptionally accomplished women as proof that we can do it too, when we should be more attuned to the innumerable ways American society is structured to hold most women down. Admirably, Slaughter attempts to outline them all.
“We Americans love self-help,” she writes. “Manuals that tell us to lean in or stand up or climb over others as a way to enhance our personalities, overcome our flaws, and assure our progress speak to a national religion of self-improvement. After all, if it’s only up to us, then change is within our control. It doesn’t depend on organizing or mobilizing others within a political system that many of us see as dysfunctional.”
As Slaughter sees it, individual work ethic is no match for the raft of workplace expectations, social customs and government policies that reinforce women’s (especially mothers’) second-class status at work. Children need their mother! It’s the man’s job to provide! Babies are focus-killers! Not to mention the absence of high-quality and affordable childcare and eldercare and paid family and medical leave — policies that would allow more women (and men) to earn a good wage while also being there for loved ones.
We do women a great disservice when we deflect attention from sweeping workplace and political changes like these that would actually make a difference. This becomes obvious when Slaughter examines women at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder and observes that they hold 62 percent of minimum-wage jobs. Half of single mothers make less than $25,000 a year, working in dead-end jobs with no flexibility or benefits. Motherhood is the single best predictor of impending bankruptcy among middle-class single women.
“It just isn’t plausible that too many women are at the bottom of American society because they are not trying hard enough, are too perfectionist, or lack confidence,” Slaughter writes.
As such, her vision for gender equality looks more like a denser social fabric than a shattered glass ceiling. That is, equality is not attained when women can scale the corporate ladder as high and as fast as men. Rather, equality emerges when our nation appreciates (and compensates) caregiving as much as breadwinning. Higher wages and training for paid caregivers, better enforcement of age discrimination laws, financial and social support for single parents, and greater early education investment are pieces of the care infrastructure she envisions. Another piece is raising our value of the unpaid, but vital, caretaking work of family members.
“The message that a woman’s traditional work of caregiving — anchoring the family by tending to material needs and nourishing minds and souls — is somehow less important than a man’s traditional work of earning an income to support that family and advance his own career is false and harmful,” she writes. “It is the result of a historical bias, an outdated prejudice, a cognitive distortion that is skewing our society and hurting us all.”
Slaughter writes that care (of children, aging parents, etc.) is the crucible that can unite women (and men) across the socioeconomic ladder. She doesn’t offer any specifics on how to build such a diverse coalition and bring about cultural transformation, however. Instead, she gives readers a list of policy ideas and a note to check the book’s endnotes for organizations and campaigns to support.
Robotically, she writes “the specifics of policy proposals on each of these issues differ from state to state and often by party affiliation and political philosophy; a comprehensive catalogue is thus impossible.” There’s a sea of opportunity between the eleven bulleted policy ideas she offers and a “comprehensive catalogue” of policy proposals, and it’s a serious weakness of the book that she doesn’t explore it.
In fact, Slaughter simply urges readers to elect more women to public office, as if that’s a specific policy proposal. “Indeed, given the wide-ranging support from everyday Americans of both parties for more government help for caregivers, it often seems as if our legislators are the only ones who aren’t getting the message,” she writers. “There’s a simple reason for that: we are electing too many men.”
This is a variation on the solution she offered in her much-debated 2012 Atlantic article, “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All,” which inspired this book. The article concluded, “We may need to put a woman in the White House before we are able to change the conditions of the women working at Walmart.”
That idea was in line with an earlier statement in the article: “I am writing for my demographic—highly educated, well-off women who are privileged enough to have choices in the first place…We are the women who could be leading, and who should be equally represented in the leadership ranks.” (Emphasis mine.)
In 2015, though, she’s rightly expanded her view to advocate for all women. Given that progress, it’s a surprise that she still sees electing women as a major catalyst for change, versus a symbol of it. It feels as naive as thinking all would be well with “black America” once President Obama was elected. Legislatures rarely dictate public attitudes; rather, public policy tends to ratify them. Unfinished Business, indeed.
If this post resonates with you, I bet you’ll enjoy my newsletter. I regularly send bookish news and notes out to more than 1,000 readers. Sign up here.
Layered with academic and poetic insights, Maggie Nelson’s memoir “The Argonauts” is a meditation on love, maternity, family, sexuality, and gender. It’s distinguished by a brutally tender chronicling of the physical and hormonal transitions of the author and her partner Harry Dodge, as Nelson undergoes artificial insemination and Dodge navigates a double mastectomy and testosterone injections.
From the first paragraph Nelson establishes that this is not a book for the faint of heart or intellect. In it, she describes the acts that prompt I love you to tumble out of her mouth with her “face smashed against the cement floor of [Harry’s] dank and charming bachelor pad.” It comes as no surprise later in the book when artificial insemination, childbirth, and testosterone injections get similarly graphic treatments.
But this isn’t done to shock, or anyway not merely to shock. With scenes like these, Nelson is grounding the cerebral and emotional trappings of love in the physical ones. She’s arguing that notions of romantic love embrace pleasure seeking in all its perversity and caretaking in all its messiness, too.
The entire book conveys the sense that Nelson is working out a puzzle, trying to express the capaciousness of love in words–blunt tools that are sharpened only when they strike the raw, the guttural, the vulnerable. Sometimes she strikes with a passage from a poet or theorist, set in italics and named in the margin instead of footnotes. Other times, with moving words of her own.
Describing her and Harry’s wedding on the eve of Proposition 8’s halting of “same sex” marriages, she contrasts the public ritual of marriage with the private one of family, which knows no laws. “We let [the vows] stay standard, albeit stripped of pronouns,” she wrote. “The ceremony was rushed, but as we said our vows, we were undone. We wept, besotted with our luck, then gratefully accepted two heart-shaped lollipops with The Hollywood Chapel embossed on their wrappers, rushed to pick up the little guy at daycare before closing, came home and ate chocolate pudding all together in sleeping bags on the porch, looking out over our mountain.”
She builds a world with passages like these that are queer and not, normal and not. She explores the simultaneous insufficiency and pragmatism of labels. Boi. Cis-gendered. Andro-fag. Husband. Mother. The way the meanings change depending on who’s talking. The constant tension between individual experience and categorical ones. The blurred lines of human experience.
In Nelson’s world, a family photo on a mug can prompt a flood of questions.
But what about it is the essence of heteronormativity? That my mother made a mug on a boojie service like Snapfish? That we’re clearly participating, or acquiescing into participating, in a long tradition of families being photographed at holiday time in their holiday best? That my mother made me the mug, in part to indicate that she recognizes and accepts my tribe as family? What about my pregnancy–is that inherently heteronormative? Or is the presumed opposition of queerness and procreation (or, to put a finer edge on it, maternity) more a reactionary embrace of how things have shaken down for queers than the mark of some ontological truth? As more queers have kids, will the presumed opposition simply wither away? Will you miss it?
Is there something inherently queer about pregnancy itself, insofar as it profoundly alters one’s “normal” state, and occasions a radical intimacy with–and radical alienation from–one’s body? How can an experience so profoundly strange and wild and transformative also symbolize or enact the ultimate conformity? Or is this just another disqualification of anything tied too closely to the female animal from the privileged term (in this case, nonconformity, or radicality)? What about the fact that Harry is neither male nor female? I’m special–a two for one, his character Valentine explains in By Hook or By Crook.
This train of writing does not make for easy reading, but it does make for deep reading. The kind where you’re forced to pause, think, rethink, reread, reconsider.
Occasionally, Nelson slips into the jargon of “sodomitical maternity,” “ontological indeterminacy,” and “homonormativity” in ways that distract rather than illuminate. They feel like the poor digestion of old academic papers and presentations within this fresh container of a memoir.
Still, Nelson’s account of two individuals risking connection and forging family against a backdrop of mainstream ignorance and shame is provocative and timely. It offers a compelling contrast to the tidier, mainstream born-in-the-wrong-body trans narrative. The perspective that’s gaining steam with shows like “I Am Jazz” and “I Am Caitlyn,” which seek to “normalize” the transgender experience.
Nelson just doesn’t do “normal.” Nuanced, poetic and irresolute is more her style–and her truth.
If this post resonates with you, I bet you’ll enjoy my newsletter. I regularly send bookish news and notes out to more than 1,000 readers. Sign up here.
“Don’t Let Me Be Lonely” is an evocative exploration of loss. The book of poetry and prose vignettes opens with author Claudia Rankine as a child witnessing her father looking flooded, leaking, breaking, broken. He was grieving his own mother’s death, and Rankine climbed the stairs as far from him as she could, distancing herself from his unfamiliar expression.
“He looked to me like someone understanding his aloneness,” she writes.
The rest of the book ranges over the territory of loneliness–mourning, depression, oppression–with a poet’s flare for imagery and economy. A friend submitting to cancer, safekeeping her death with a do-not-resuscitate sign. Another gazing listlessly at the TV while asking for “the woman who deals in death,” meaning the show Murder, She Wrote. Her sister, a psychiatrist, unable to help herself after her husband and children are killed.
This is challenging terrain, but Rankine navigates it masterfully, evoking sadness, anger, and resignation without belaboring them.
She pierces our illusions with tight analyses of the news of the day, such as a 13-year-old convicted of first degree murder for killing a 6-year-old while play wrestling. “The boy was tried as an adult or he was tried as a dead child,” she writes. “To know and not to understand is perhaps one definition of being a child. Or responsibility is not connected to sense-making, the courts have decided.” This is an unexpected brand of poetry.
Her writing is particularly charged when exploring the visceral, personal experience of grief, disconnection and futility wrought by media depictions of racial violence. She juxtaposes the brutality of police sodomizing Abner Louima with a broken broomstick against the violence of a reporter asking him how it feels to be a rich man after he settles for $8.7 million.
The hybrid prose-lyric-poem form gives Rankine space to both describe and question her experience of news like Amadou Diallo’s senseless death in a hail of bullets. “Sometimes I think it is sentimental, or excessive, certainly not intellectual, or perhaps too naive, too self-wounded to value each life like that, to feel loss to the point of being bent over each time,” she writes.
The opposite, though, is the callousness of President G.W. Bush, unable to recall whether two or three people were convicted for dragging a black man to his death in Texas.
I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recognition that a life can not matter. Or, as there are billions of lives, my sadness is alive alongside the recognition that billions of lives never mattered. I write this without breaking my heart, without bursting into anything. Perhaps this is the real source of my sadness.
The poetry of “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely” is most of all, I suppose, in Rankine’s refusal to argue a point or come to a clear conclusion. In her decided opacity on what to do with the tensions she’s illuminated, revealed in the abundant white space separating passages. And, of course, in the occasional verse.
Define loneliness? Yes. It’s what we can’t do for each other. What do we mean to each other? What does a life mean? Why are we here if not for each other?
Quoting Paul Celan, she concludes the book by likening a poem to a handshake. “The handshake is our decided ritual of both asserting (I am here) and handing over (here) a self to another,” she writes. “Hence the poem is that–Here. I am here.”
It feels like this is her way of saying, my work here is done. I’ve extended my poem, myself. Don’t let me be lonely. Perhaps that’s all we ever get — an extended hand, a call to risk connection.
If this review resonates with you, I bet you’ll enjoy my newsletter. I regularly send bookish news and notes out to more than 1,000 readers. Sign up here.
Danielle Evans’s collection of short stories recasts young-adult angst as heartrending drama, with smart, intriguing characters navigating the unexpectedly treacherous terrain of friendship, sex and family.
Each of its eight stories is powerful in its economy, perfectly tuned domestic tensions, and well-drawn diverse characters. A teen avoids her lunch lady mom, embarrassed by the hairnet cutting a line in her broad, sweaty forehead. A grandmother’s cruel rejection pushes a nine-year-old to the edge. A mother throws herself into Christmas “with an enthusiasm as profound and suspect as that of the department stores.” An Iraq vet flails after discharge, unable to make sense of a world that gives him nail gems and cherry blossoms to thank him for his brutal service.
Evans conjures such crossroads with exceptional skill, placing her young protagonists in scenarios that challenge them to make weighty choices with lifelong repercussions. Even her youngest characters perceive that they’re facing significant moments, though they lack the experience or imagination to grasp that they’re defining, identity-forging ones. That the pursuit of independence, status, visibility, help often comes at great cost.
The tales are melancholy without being melodramatic, and they’re attentive to race, gender and class without being preachy or heavy-handed–a rare feat. Take her depiction of a college dorm room bursting with the vital, competitive energy of young women grappling with their power to bring forth life and the limits of their capacity to nurture it.
“I had a thing inside of me that I could not afford, and Laura had things inside of her that she couldn’t afford not to sell, and on the other end of it there were women spending tens of thousands of dollars to buy them because they felt their own bodies had betrayed them,” she writes of one character’s pregnancy and another’s egg donations. “Any way you looked at it, where there should have been a child, there was a math problem.”
In another story, a father and daughter struggle to connect. He clings to her old photographs and craft projects and imagines her adult life as “an elaborate series of barricades against him.” Meanwhile, she bristles at his concern, worries over the line between self-sufficiency and loneliness, and awakens to her self-centeredness.
“She wondered sometimes if it wasn’t all pretense–if, when she shut her eyes and wished restitution upon the whole wounded parade of humanity, she wasn’t really wishing away the world that created war and illness so that she might have a world in which there was room to feel sorry for herself,” Evans writes. “Every day she felt herself losing things it was unacceptable to mourn.”
Evans’s deftness with such an array of characters heralds a bright future for a tremendous literary talent. She captures the innate drama of young adulthood in ways that move readers and remind them of the good fortune of surviving one’s youth.
If this review resonates with you, I bet you’ll enjoy my newsletter. I regularly send bookish news and notes out to more than 1,000 readers. Sign up here.
Gail Godwin’s “Publishing: A Writer’s Memoir” is a graceful meditation on the author’s years aspiring to publication and her subsequent decades navigating an increasingly cutthroat, capricious industry. Wisdom, perseverance and faith lurk amid the lines of her spare, droll writing, making this an understated yet inspiring read.
Godwin exemplifies a keep-on-keeping-on ethos in sharp contrast to writers like Harper Lee, whose concerns about topping past popularity prevented her from continuing to create new work. From a sales perspective, Godwin’s career peaked in 1982 with the publication of “A Mother and Two Daughters,” which sold more than 1 million copies and was a National Book Award finalist. But she’s still writing today and has published 14 fiction and nonfiction books since.
“Publishing” opens at the University of North Carolina in 1958 with young Godwin presenting five pages of her novel-in-progress to scouts for Alfred A. Knopf. The pages were rejected and Godwin muses: “As I slogged along inside my bubble of failure beneath the Great American Novelist’s ancient trees, it struck me for the first time that I was nothing new, just the latest model of a young person hungry for success, and possibly one of the very many who was not going to make it.”
Of course, the reader knows that Godwin did indeed make it. She went on to publish more than a dozen novels, becoming a National Book Award finalist three times. With a light pen, Godwin uses “Publishing” to offer some insight into how she did it. She highlights deep-seated personal ambition, the role modeling of her writer mother, and the encouragement of teachers and friends. She colors it all with a bit of drama and no shortage of good humor.
The quick read, illustrated with pen and ink drawings by architect Frances Halsband, offers helpful perspective for aspiring writers, all of whom are likely to meet much frustration and rejection along their own publishing paths. The lesson Godwin imparts by sharing her story is that it is how you greet the challenges over the long haul that matters.
For years, Godwin battled insecurity, humiliating failures, and the sense that time was running out on her writing career. Still, she simply kept writing, learning, connecting. “I wrote the next chapter of my remote novel that wouldn’t sell enough copies, and trudged home under the starlit canopy of obscurity,” she wrote of her response to yet another rejection.
She learned this tenacity in part through the example of her mother, who wrote plays during her own studies at Chapel Hill, sold love stories to pulp magazines when rearing Godwin, and wrote novels under a penname while raising three younger children from a later marriage. Some of the most endearing parts of the book feature Godwin and her mother making up stories together, acting out scenes based on people from their church and reading rejection letters her mother received from publishers. They made a duet out of a particularly vexing one:
“Writes like the angels!” (soprano)
“With notes of monstrous tedium!” (alto)
“Merry Christmas to you!” (soprano)
“If you pare the fat!” (alto)
This same sense of levity and steadfastness served Godwin well after she finally won her first book deal in 1968. Her tangled publishing journey since then has included seven different editors and as many publishers, thanks to untimely deaths, industry upheavals, and intractable egos. With great candor, she writes of coming to understand the fear plaguing publishing today and of learning to brace herself for calls announcing the firing of her editor or publisher or both. She also sheds welcome septuagenarian perspective on questions of what’s new and what’s not in today’s publishing environment.
“Publishing as a family business, as a literate, gentlemanly occupation, had already taken on the sepia hues of nostalgia, but the new publishing, whatever that creature would turn out to be, hadn’t reared its head yet,” she writes of the early days of her publishing career. “Not one of the seven houses that wanted to publish ‘A Mother and Two Daughters’–eight, counting Knopf, who reserved the right to match the final bidder–stands by itself today. Six of those bidders are now subsumed into two of the ‘big five’ publishing corporations.”
Throughout “Publishing,” readers can gain a glimpse into the deals, publicity campaigns and industry maneuverings that bring books to the public. One section describes how a book meant to be titled “The Red Nun” wound up with a bodice-ripper-evoking misnomer “Unfinished Desires.” Aspiring writers can take heart at Godwin’s evidence that frustration, rejection and adversity are just a part of the journey–even for some of the most successful writers.
If this review resonates with you, I bet you’ll enjoy my newsletter. I regularly send bookish news and notes out to more than 1,000 readers. Sign up here.
