Posts filed under 'Memoir & Biography'
As a heavy user of the Overdrive audiobook collection, I am always checking the listings for good books to download, and the book The Soloist: A Lost Dream, An Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music, by Steve Lopez, definitely fits the criteria. Part of why I picked this one was because I wanted to read the book before the movie comes out early next year. After reading the book, I am looking forward to seeing the movie to see how Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx handle their roles.
The Soloist is Steve Lopez’s story of his friendship with Nathan Ayers, an African American man, who he sees playing a battered violin on the street on Los Angeles’ Skid Row. Lopez, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, is always searching for topics, and that was his original motivation for befriending Ayers. He quickly discovers that Nathan is a schizophrenic who was at one time a classical bass student at Juilliard. Nathan stays in L.A. because there is a statue of Beethoven there, and therefore, it is where Beethoven lives.
Lopez portrays his involvement with Nathan over a period of a few years. He works hard to improve Nathan’s life and get him off the streets. There are many setbacks, and although Nathan’s quality of life improves, he will remain mentally ill and will have many ups and downs.
There are many moving scenes in this book, many involving music. One of them is when Lopez takes Ayers to a Los Angeles Symphony rehearsal, which leads to one of the players offering him music lessons. On another occasion, they attend a performance featuring Yo Yo Ma, whose time at Juilliard briefly intersected with Nathan Ayers.
Lopez is a skilled and polished writer, who is very familiar with Los Angeles. His description of Skid Row, and the treatment of the mentally ill and the homeless is grim. And this is a story that seems tailor made for the movies. If done right, it should be a very inspirational and worthwhile film with a great soundtrack.
December 30th, 2008
Mary K. - Central
It’s not often that I don’t finish a book. But I put this one down one day and never got back to it. I wanted to like it. I’ve read some of Edwidge Danticat’s fiction and loved her lyrical language and her sense of place. But her family history, Brother, I’m Dying, just didn’t keep my interest, and certainly did not show the same beautiful language of her other books. But maybe you should decide for yourself. It was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography.
Danticat was born in Haiti, right around Duvalier’s time. The country is a mess politically, with people disappearing and being murdered, rank with poverty. Danticat’s dad emigrates to New York when she is 2, followed by her mother, when she is 4. She and her younger brother are left in the care of her Uncle Joseph, a pastor. It ends up being 8 years before she joins her parents. In the meantime, Joseph, a sweet and caring man, loses his voice to throat cancer, and cannot preach to his flock, something he lived for. Danticat becomes his interpreter, helping him on his trips to shops and doctors. But it also makes the separation from her parents much more difficult, since her father would call Joseph and would share much more information with him than with his very young daughter.
Eventually her parents bring her to New York, where she does not feel part of the family she belongs to. She has 2 more brothers, who immediately take to their older siblings. But the long separation has taken an emotional toll.
The story is told in 2 time periods, the past and the near present, when Danticat finds out she is pregnant at about the same time that she finds out her dad is dying from a lung ailment. Her dad is very accepting of his situation and works at preparing his family for the inevitability of his death.
And this is where I stopped. Maybe my expectations were too high for this book. But the emotional distance she felt throughout her life, seemed very apparent in her writing. It seemed as if she was writing a news story in very simple language with very little subjectivity or emotional connection involved. I don’t get it, either, because all the reviews I read rave about it. Maybe if I had hung on, through the total implosion of Haiti and Joseph’s doomed final trip to the United States, it would have resonated more for me. But maybe I also stopped just in time. Reading once again about a country who treats people like chattel (and I’m not mentioning which country here) is just too painful.
December 22nd, 2008
Lisa - Central
At the young age of 18, Beryl Bissell took what she thought would be the final, and most momentous step in her life. When she entered a Poor Claires convent in the late 1950s, she expected to live a long life, but her identity as Beryl had ceased. She would hereafter be known as Sister Mary Beatrix, and her life would be God’s.
In her memoir The Scent of God, Bissell recounts a life that is as much a coming-of-age story as a search for spiritual fulfillment. Raised in typical circumstances by a middlingly devout family, Bissell was drawn to a life of poverty and contemplation by a desire to find deeper meaning in a life given to God. Against her family’s protests, she enters into a life filled with the routine of rising for midnight prayers, raising food for the convent’s needs and trying to achieve a deeper connection with God. But life within the convent walls proves much more difficult in ways that Bissell could not imagine. Hoping to be seen as especially devout, Bissell struggles with anorexia, and develops a fixation on the novice mistress that threatens to distract her from contemplation.
After leaving the monastary to tend to her ailing father in Puerto Rico, Bissell meets Vittorio, a charasmatic priest who stirs her interest. As the changes of Vatican II begin to relax the routine of the Poor Claires, Bissell begins to wonder if living in the world holds greater meaning for her than what she views as her increasingly unsatisfactory experience in the convent. Leaving the order in 1972, Bissell returns to Puerto Rico and Vittorio, ready to begin anew. But life outside of the convent proves to be a greater challenge, testing her faith beyond anything she could have imagined.
The emphasis here is more on how Bissell’s religious search shaped her relationships, rather than a meditiation on her spiritual quest. She shapes her true story almost as a novelist would, recreating dialogue, capturing the atmosphere of her travels in vivid language and creating a sense of suspense when things don’t always go as planned. There isn’t as much insight into her spiritual path–the question of why she wished to become a nun in the first place is never fully revealed. Other former nuns and laymen have gone over this ground somewhat more thoroughly (Karen Armstrong’s The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness and Kathleen Norris’ The Cloister Walk being two good examples). But for a story of a woman coming into her own after a false start, The Scent of God is a gripping account of life’s trials and its ultimate grace.
December 5th, 2008
Katie H.
Anyone who has visited a library or bookstore in the last 10 years knows that memoirs have recently become a publishing phenomenon. Of course memoirs have always been around, but those of you who doubt the recent spike in popularity of this genre need only read Entertainment Weekly magazine’s nearly exhaustive list of memoirs published since 1995. I’ll readily admit that I’m addicted to memoirs: I’ve read everything from the super popular (Angela’s Ashes) to the quirky (Devil in the Details); from the can’t-put-it-down-because-it’s-that-good (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) to the just plain awful (Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood). After a self-imposed three month break from reading memoirs, I finally fell off the wagon and started reading Madness: a Bipolar Life by Marya Hornbacher.
I’ve already read Hornbacher’s previous memoir Wasted about her battle to overcome anorexia and bulimia. Finally, one novel (The Center of Winter) and 10 years later, Hornbacher returns with an emotional yet humorous depiction of her life long struggle with mental illness. All the depressing elements are here: Addiction? Yes, Hornbacher describes her descent into alcoholism and anonymous sex as she self-medicates her mood swings. Body obsession? Yup, not just the aforementioned eating disorders but also self-mutilation in the form of cutting. Manic episodes and depressive states? Check and check. Just when you think it couldn’t get any worse, Hornbacher describes yet another hospitalization in the psychiatric ward.
So what compelled me to continue plowing through the seemingly never ending psychotic episodes and subsequent hospitalizations? For starters it was the glimpse into a disease that I truly don’t understand. Secondly, although Hornbacher comes across as a tad self absorbed (but really, how could you not be in her case?) her writing is witty and articulate. What could have been merely a seriously depressing memoir actually ends on a hopeful note as the author acknowledges that she will always struggle with her illness, but her family and friends (and her love story with her husband) help her through it all. This might not be the book that you’d read curled up by the fireplace over the holidays, but its still worth the time investment.
November 26th, 2008
Mary - Lakeview
“When I think of Queen I remember my whole life” writes Mike Dawson towards the beginning of his rather lengthy semi-autobiographical graphic novel, Freddie & Me : A Coming-of-Age (Bohemian) Rhapsody. And while Mike’s fascination with the band and it’s music flows through the book, it’s clearly in the background while Mike’s life takes center stage. There’s Mike at a young age, watching a video on TV of Freddie Mercury vacuuming in drag while singing “I want to break free,” Mike listening to a cassette with a friend who wonders if there are any more songs with “swear words”, Mike arguing with his younger sister Sarah about the relative merits of Queen versus Wham! (and, eventually, just George Michael), and, of course, young Mike’s solo performance of “Bohemian Rhapsody” during a talent night while the family was on holiday in Wales with his bemused and mortified parents watching from the audience–guaranteed to make you smile. (Check out that cover image for a preview.)
There’s an opening sequence to set up the story, but then the action moves back in time to Mike’s childhood and follows a pretty straight-forward chronological narrative path, with the occasional omniscient cartoonist/narrator breaking through to comment on the subjectivity of the action. The art is all black-and-white which serves the story pretty well since the narrative takes a fairly leisurely pace (some might say it drags a bit, but I’m trying to be charitable). Dawson’s style borders on caricature with some of the images of children, where features seem to be larger than normal, but that’s probably a decent approximation of the disproportion of youth and the coltishness of adolescence. Still, it takes an artist with a pretty strong sense of self to deliberately render his own image with a nose that large.
Mike and his family are originally from England, but when Mike’s father gets a job in the United States, the family eventually moves to join him and settles in New Jersey, where Mike seems to think his British accent will confer instant coolness upon him. Foolish child. By this time, it’s already been announced that Freddie Mercury has AIDS. Mike would seem to be barely old enough to process what this means when he first learns the news. Yet later, when he hears from his mother that Freddie has died, he’s devastated.
Life goes on, of course. Mike plods through his teen years, complete with braces, bad haircut, and (being charitable again) a rather interesting hat. His interests in art and eventually girls begin to fill his time–once he realizes, or is made to realize, that a musical career is probably not the path in life he can succeed on. And I think most of us can remember what a cruel realization that day can bring. Well, some of us can. Anyway. Moving on.
But where does Queen fit in all this? Well, they’re just background music, for the most part. Mike never manages to see the band perform live, although there were a couple of near misses. And he did get to see Brian May perform once. And a musical based on the band that Mike got to enjoy with his mother. Sadly, like most fans, Mike’s meetings with his favorite band are of the imaginary variety. As an artist, he can imagine/depict what it would have been like for him to meet his favorite band– and for the band to meet their biggest fan. He does that once with a quick, imaginary meeting between he and the members of the band backstage.
What Mike eventually seems to realize is that meeting the musicians isn’t the important part of the music–it’s what the music communicates to the listener. Unless you’re witnessing a live performance, that connection between artist and listener is decidedly one-way. And that’s all right too. But Mike provides a role reversal toward the end of the book, when he and his sister Sarah (in a memorable T-shirt) meet George Michael at a book signing and Mike the cartoonist gives his adult sister the ultimate fan’s wish: he creates a fantasy where George Michael, while being chauffeured away from the autograph signing session, remembers a grinning Sarah getting his autograph, and it brings a smile to the face of the world-famous recording star– while the music of Queen plays in the background on the car stereo… and it’s a sweet, sweet moment to belie the lyrics of the song:
“Nothing really matters, anyone can see… Nothing really matters to me.”
Overall, I think the book could have been trimmed considerably. Too many scenes of Mike growing up that might have seemed significant at the time, but don’t really move the story forward or foreshadow any future events. And if you’re looking for a celebration of Queen or Freddie Mercury, you’ll probably feel neither got nearly enough pages devoted to them. Still, for me, that last scene made the whole read worth while.
November 21st, 2008
Dennis - Central
Crisis, Pursued by Disaster, Followed Closely by Catastrophe: A Memoir of Life on the Run is quite the title. And, coincidentally, it is quite the book. The author, Mike O’Connor, is a journalist who has worked for NPR, CBS and The New York Times covering conflicts from Central America to Yugoslavia to Israel and Palestine. He uses his journalistic talents to uncover a mystery that had torn his family apart, one that couldn’t be uncovered until both of his parents died.
About a year after his mother died, O’Connor finally opens a box she had always kept with her. He was hoping the contents held some clues to why his parents would uproot the family, leave almost everything behind, and flee, sometimes in the middle of the night. The first time it happens, O’Connor is 9. Living in Texas, they suddenly go on “vacation” and end up in a tiny village in Mexico, staying in a few rooms in the house of the town’s matriarch. Then suddenly, they go home again. A few years later, back to Mexico, in the same village, this time staying for many years. His dad would return to Texas, sometimes for weeks at a time, sometimes sending money, sometimes not. It gets bad enough that O’Connor, though barely a teen, works on the streets, selling pillows, giving tourist guided tours, and even a little pimping. But dad always comes home, and it is obvious to the reader that he adores his wife and children.
The family has a kind of code. They don’t talk about extended family - the kids meet only one aunt while their parents are alive. They never admit to fleeing - they’re always on an adventure. They don’t talk about the things they left behind. An undercurrent of fear prevents the kids from breaking the code.
But as O’Connor and his siblings get older, they begin to chafe under the family’s unspoken rules. And this wreaks even greater havoc for the family. At one point, to get away, O’Connor hitches with a friend from Mexico to California, hoping to find their fortune, but ends up arrested as a juvenile runaway. His father refuses to come get him for weeks. His sister applies for college loans, and causes yet another flight. The family gets poorer and poorer.
I’ll not ruin the secret, but the truth about this family’s mystery is infuriating. That this family had to endure such insecurity and poverty for so minor a reason made me so mad and sad. This story is riveting, suspenseful and just plain good.
October 22nd, 2008
Lisa - Central
Doris Lessing’s first book since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007 is really two stories in one. The first section of Alfred and Emily is an imaginary tale of her parent’s lives if the First World War had never occurred. In the imagined world of what if: Alfred Taylor and Emily McVeagh were both raised in a small English town. Doris’s father became a prosperous farmer while her mother, Emily, defied her father’s wishes and trained as a nurse in London. Alfred married a local girl and became the father of two boys while Emily entered into an unhappy marriage with a prominent London doctor.
The second part of the book may be familiar to readers of Lessing’s two volume autobiography Under My Skin and Walking in the Shade. It is a nonfiction account (with photographs) of her childhood in Southern Rhodesia ( now Zimbabwe) from the 1920’s through 1940’s. Alfred and Emily actually met during the war when he was a wounded soldier in a London hospital and she was his nurse. Both of them lived with the horror of those years for the rest of their lives. Alfred lost a leg in the war, suffered from post-traumatic stress and had a severe case of diabetes. Emily never really recovered from the countless horrors she saw while treating the wounded and as Doris says in her book: “My mother had no visible scars, no wounds, but she was as much a victim of the war as my poor father.”
Lessings observations throughout both stories include information on class conflicts, the role of women in society as well as the challenges of marriage and parenthood in England and Africa. If you haven’t read the author’s two volume autobiography or even if you have this creative re-telling will appeal.
September 28th, 2008
Lesley - Central
Novelist Haruki Murakami has finished twenty-five marathons, winning none, which I think makes him an authority on running for the rest of us. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is a memoir built on a running log made while training for the New York City Marathon in 2005. It details Murakami’s changing relationship with running as he grows older. Even as his times begin to slide, the inevitable result of aging, he keeps at it, adding triathlons to his schedule to keep things interesting.
It’s a wonderful little book, a great response to the fearful prospect of physical and literary decline. There’s lots of talk about running, but it isn’t the only theme. Murakami talks about owning a jazz club and about his early novels, and about different types of writers-those who blaze brightly and die young, and those who have to reckon with longer careers. The Great Gatsby makes an appearance, and so does Raymond Carver, of course; Murakami is retranslating his stories into Japanese.
My favorite chapter is about when Murakami ran a sixty-two-mile ultramarathon. The process he undergoes as he’s running reminded me the most of his novels, and left him with “runner’s blues” at the end of the race; to me, it sounded a lot like one of those changes that occur in any long-term relationship. You either get through it, or you don’t. Murakami gets through it.
Though Murakami states in the book he doesn’t recommend running to others (he runs simply because it suits him, he says) I am happy to recommend this book to runners and to fans of his other books. You might also check out A Wild Haruki Chase: Reading Murakami Around the World. I think I might reread After Dark.
September 25th, 2008
Jon - Hawthorne
As is turns out, this book is really gay. Gay-positive, anyway. For the most part.
The book is called When I Knew, edited by Robert Trachtenberg and illustrated by Tom Bachtell. It’s a collection of anecdotes and remembrances from gay adults describing their recollections of when they first realized they were gay. Or when others realized they were. Or maybe when they realized others realized they were gay. Most are really short pieces, some no more than a line or two. “I knew I was gay when the most exciting part of my Bar Mitzvah was meeting with the party planner” recalls one. The accompanying photo shows a smiling youth in suit and yarmulke, gazing happily at a buffet table. Another recalls fainting when the evening news announcer said Judy Garland had died– he was nine at the time. Other entries happily recall young boys playing dress-up with mom’s clothes, or playing with dolls.
Yes, there do seem to be more men than women presented here.
Other entries reveal a little more of the painful side of being viewed differently. One eight-year old boy remembers playing hopscotch while his father and a neighbor watch, and overhearing the neighbor say to his father “I think you got a problem.” Another recalls an entry written in blue-ballpoint pen in his seventh-grade yearbook that called him a fairy– how he tried to laugh it off and even showed it to his father whose “stricken countenance told me it certainly wasn’t a joke to him.” In another, longer, remembrance a man recalls his devastation when he realizes that the new husband of his former babysitter thinks of him as a sissy.
Sometimes, not often, their families were the cause of some of that pain. But one moving story makes up for it. A man has given his 95-year-old grandmother a book to read about homosexuality, since he’s uncomfortable discussing the intimate details of his relationships. When he asks if she’s read the book she replies “Yes, and it’s disgusting!” “Disgusting?” he repeats, fearing the worst. “Yes, it’s disgusting. It says that some of the parents don’t love their children anymore.” He cries. Now there’s a grandmother for the ages.
For the squeamish among you, rest assured that the sexual part of gay sexuality isn’t really emphasized here. Most of the stories reflect incidents which occurred at a fairly young age. That may be unfortunate in that many of the incidents might reinforce stereotypes of gay men as effeminate– interested only in looking fabulous and show tunes. So while they come off as non-threatening (and don’t we all hope to come off that way?) they might be dismissed by some readers as one-dimensional rather than fully realized human beings. (And don’t we all hope to come off that way too?)
Reservations aside, it really is a gay-friendly book. It’s heartening to realize that despite the confusion, pain and heartbreak from an earlier part of their life, something brought these individuals the strength to reach a point in their lives where they could have their stories told in such a public manner. And that’s worth celebrating.
September 8th, 2008
Dennis - Central
Mamma Mia! the popular stage musical and now feature film starring Meryl Streep celebrates feminism and sexual liberation in such a playful, entertaining way that many moviegoers might not even think much about it. Meryl’s character cavorts with her middle-aged pals and frets over her daughter finding out that she slept with three different men the summer that her daughter was conceived. Everyone is dancing, everyone ends up happy, no harm done.
In Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity, Kerry Cohen truthfully admits that she slept with dozens more than that number during her teens and early 20s. She is not dancing, it doesn’t make her happy and the harm is irreparable. Craving the attention and security that was lost following the divorce of her parents when she was eleven, she revels in the attention that she receives from both boys and men. At an age when I was still playing with Barbie dolls, Kerry and her friends are sneaking into New York City from their wealthy New Jersey suburb to meet up with boys. By the time she is 14, she is hanging out at NYC clubs and hooking up with complete strangers. Because her crowd is made up of prep school boys and girls, a false sense of security surrounds her. Even after a girl that she recognizes is found strangled in Central Park (see the Preppie Murder) by a boy that she would have gladly gone home with, she doesn’t slow down.
Kerry is taken advantage of again and again, by boys and trusted adult men while desperately trying to achieve intimacy and closeness. Inappropriate and seriously lacking parenting in her life leads her to destructive behavior. After her parents’ divorce, Kerry and her sister are basically left to their own devices. No one knows where they are or what they are up to. Her mother leaves for the Philippines to go to medical school and her father wants to be the cool dad. Not only are cocaine and other drugs readily available in her dad’s dresser drawer, he smokes pot with Kerry and her friends. Both mother and father stoke Kerry’s insecurities when it comes to relationships and much of what she describes is such a cry for help it is heartbreaking.
While STDs and pregnancy scares shake her, it takes therapy to really get her on the right track. Decades later she is still trying to put her life back together and struggles daily to develop and maintain durable relationships. This memoir should be required reading for teen girls and their mothers and would aptly fit into a Psych 101 syllabus.
August 21st, 2008
Molly - Central
Previous Posts
As a heavy user of the Overdrive audiobook collection, I am always checking the listings for good books to download, and the book The Soloist: A Lost Dream, An Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music, by Steve Lopez, definitely fits the criteria. Part of why I picked this one was because I wanted to read the book before the movie comes out early next year. After reading the book, I am looking forward to seeing the movie to see how Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx handle their roles.
