Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl by Carrie Brownstein

At one time, I devoured biographies and memoirs of my favorite actors.  Katherine Hepburn, and Elizabeth Taylor – to name two – seemed to me Hollywood royalty, and I loved them all.  Then I stumbled on a few others, and began to notice a pattern I did not appreciate.  I abandoned those books for years.  I hesitated a little bit, when I saw the release of a memoir by Carrie Brownstein.  In the event you might not be familiar with Carrie, she is the co-star of Portlandia, a clever, avant-garde comedy on the Independent film channel.  Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl reveals her as so much more than the strange characters she plays on the TV show.  Carrie also wrote several books about food and visiting Portland, Oregon

Carrie is also an avid musician, who struggled for many years to form a rock band, and finally succeeded with Sleater-Kinney, her band from 1994 to 2006.  The memoir is a wonderfully written, honest, and thorough review of her struggles to fulfill a dream she had from early childhood.  She never missed an opportunity to entertain family and friends.  Her mother was hospitalized as a result of an eating disorder, and the book opens with Carrie and her sister dealing with her absence.  When Carrie was about 20 years old, her father helped finance a trip to Australia to make a record with a musician the band had discovered on the internet.  If you have never seen Portlandia, you have missed a treat.  The humor involves bizarre, eclectic, and a very funny group of characters, who live and work in Portland.  Her co-star is Fred Armisen, and the two play most of the characters with changes of costume, makeup, and wigs.

The memoir itself is unlike many of the other show-biz bios I have read.  Carrie seems forthright and thorough in her examination of her life, family, and career.  She writes, “There is something freeing in seeing yourself in a new context.  People have no preconceived notion of who you are, and there is a relief in knowing that you can recreate yourself.  When you’re entrenched in a community of people who know you, it’s scary to proclaim wanting to be different and wanting to experiment.  We went to the other side of the world to make our own sound.  Usually this is a methodology you employ as a restart later in your career.  We did it right up front.  We traveled to a foreign country for our first record.  We had to uproot ourselves, not because we were deep into career ruts, or didn’t want to give credit to the places we had come from, but because we had no desire to sound like or emulate anything that had come before” (96).

Carrie continues, “It was an extreme way to start, but I learned later on how hard it can become to unsettle yourself, to trip yourself up, and I think that’s a good place to write from.  It’s important to undermine yourself and create a level of difficulty so the work doesn’t come too easily. […] The stakes should always feel high” (96).

Although she is talking about a rock band, I believe this idea can apply to nearly any creative endeavor.  I must admit I am not a fan of punk nor of indie music, but I do love Portlandia and Carrie Brownstein’s Memoir, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl.  5 Stars

--Chiron, 11/17/15

The Mockingbird Next Door: Life with Harper Lee by Marja Mills

Reading Marja Mills’ memoir of her brief time spent with Nelle Harper Lee has much in common with mining for gold.  The successful prospector must sift through tons of dross to acquire a few nuggets of gold.  I expected much, much more insight into the author of the great, iconic novel, To Kill a Mockingbird.  Instead I got a load of information I found irrelevant, uninteresting, and completely lacking in insight to Harper Lee.

Our book club read the Charles J. Shields’ unauthorized biography of Nelle Lee, Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee a few years ago.  We all thoroughly enjoyed the tantalizingly brief insights into her life.  Lee is widely known as unwilling to give interviews, speak at public functions, or sign copies of her book.  A first edition of TKAM runs to nearly $40,000.  Had Mills’ book not appeared on my club’s reading list, I would have imitated the writer Helene Hanff, who threw a book against the wall, which disappointed her.

Marja Mills was a reporter for The Chicago Tribune.  The Chicago Public Library had chosen To Kill a Mockingbird as the first selection for the “One Book, One Chicago” reading program.  Mills’ editor asked her to travel to Monroeville, Alabama, and see if she could find enough information about the reclusive Harper Lee for a long feature story.

Mills wrote to Nelle’s sister, Alice, and politely asked if she could meet with her.  Alice, and later Nelle, began meeting with Mills, and a friendship gradually emerged.  Mills later moved into the house next door to Alice and Nelle.  The three women shared many of their daily routines.  Sounds great, right?  No.

The first thing that annoyed me was the insertion of Mills into the story.  I detest “new journalism” – ironically pioneered by Truman Capote a close friend of Harper’s when they were children.  Harper assisted Capote in researching his best selling work, In Cold Blood.  Lee detested “new journalism” – according to Mills in the early pages of the memoir.  The Lee sisters were always gracious and patient with Mills and gave her a unique insight into the lives of the two sisters.  The least Mills could have done was remove the tons of dross cluttering up this memoir.

Only available photo of Marja Mills

Secondly, I found the repetitious nature of her writing highly annoying.  After a couple of mentions, I began counting how many times Mills told the reader A.C. Lee – Nelle and Alice’s father – was the model for Atticus Finch.  I counted five times.  I also found her teasing very off-putting.  She would begin a story, then suddenly drop it, as though she was told that particular story was off the record.  She also mentioned a secret fishing hole the sisters enjoyed, but after mentioning how hard it was to find, she gave detailed directions to the spot.  Topping this list of complaints were a couple of chapters devoted solely to Mills personal situation, with only a mention she had to cancel a trip for coffee to a local fast-food restaurant.

Mills could have easily written a biography of Alice Lee, who played an important roll in the life of Nelle and in the friendship Mills was able to develop.  At more than 90 years of age, she continued to work as a lawyer in Monroeville.

My only hope is that Marja Mills has gathered enough information for a complete and authorized biography of Harper Lee, which was given to her on the proviso that the book not be published until after her death.  For all these reasons, Nelle and Alice each get a star for their charm, politeness, and hospitality toward Mills, so that helps Mockingbird Next Door reach 3 stars.

--Chiron, 5/30/15

Something Else: A Memoir by Richard Russo

Richard Russo has been one of my favorite authors for a long time. I started with Straight Man, a comic look at life in the English Department of a rural New England College. As an English Professor, I laughed and cried with tears of joy and sorrow as Russo exposed the peculiarities of my profession. I “knew” many of his characters as colleagues of my own.

Of course, Russo is most well-known for his stories of decaying towns in the rust belt of the U.S. Several of these novels, including, Nobody’s Fool and Empire Falls have been made into successful movies. Empire Falls won two Golden Globes along with other awards and nominations, including a Pulitzer Prize for the author. All these stories are tales of ordinary, hard-working people, who overcome serious difficulties in their struggles through life. Russo’s recently published memoir, Elsewhere sheds a bright light on the origin of many of these characters.

Russo grew up in the mill town of Gloversville, NY, famous for its gloves. As has frequently been the case, the labor was sent overseas and the mills closed. The town was left with poverty, unemployment, and a host of medical problems resulting from working around the chemicals used in tanning the leather and the dust as a by-product of glove making.

Elsewhere focuses on Russo’s mother and their relationship. His father left the family early on, and apparently played only a little role in the young boy’s life. Richard struggled to understand and cope with the mental illness of his mother. He tells this sad story of his mother's illness without becoming maudlin because of the streak of humor underlying it all.

Russo and I are about the same age, and we share a number of interesting coincidences. His youth was filled with books and a wide variety of interests. He even flirted with a career in archaeology. While I was fortunate to grow up in a stable family with no hint of mental difficulties, my life closely parallels Russo’s in a number of respects.

In the “Prologue,” Russo writes,

“What follows in this memoir – I don’t know what else to call it – is a story of intersections: of place and time, of private and public, of linked destinies and flawed devotion. It’s more my mother’s story than mine, but it’s mine, too, because until just a few years ago she was seldom absent from my life. It’s about her character but also about where she grew up, fled from, and returned to again and again, about contradictions she couldn’t resolve and so passed on the me, knowing full well I’d worry them much like a dog worries a bone, gnawing, burying, unearthing, gnawing again, until there’s nothing left but sharp splinters and bleeding gums” (12).

Obviously, I could never hope to explain this heartwarming yarn of growing up in the northeast as well as Russo does here. If you have never read Russo, I think Elsewhere will provide a solid foundation for understanding his novels, and those are a real treat for anyone interested in fine literary fiction. 5 stars

--Chiron, 1/27/13

Mortality by Christopher Hitchens

Mortality, Christopher Hitchens’s essays on his slow walk to death, all have an air of seriousness, of course, but a vein of humor runs through them like a stream of cool water. I read this 104-page gem in a single sitting. The book includes a forward by Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, for whom Hitchens wrote for many years, and an Afterword by his wife, Carol Blue.

According to her, “Hitch” – as his friends and readers affectionately knew him – wrote up until the end. In fact, the main point of the book is about the importance of writing. His greatest fear seemed to be the loss of this ability. During the final stages, speech became almost impossible, but he kept writing away. The last chapter consists of fragments, which “seem to trail off, but in fact were written on his computer in bursts of energy and enthusiasm as he sat in the hospital using his food tray for a desk” (103) as Carol Blue says.

Hitch gave some advice to writing students, which I have shared with my writing classes. He would begin, “by saying that anybody who could talk could also write. Having cheered them up with this easy-to-grasp ladder, I then replaced it with a huge and loathsome snake: ‘How many people in the class, would you say, can talk? I mean really talk?’ This had its duly woeful effect.” He then added this advice: “Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions. … So, this above all: Find your own voice” (50).

He wrote on an incredibly wide variety of topics, but I did not always agree with him, particularly in regard to his support of the Iraq War; however, I always loved his prose, his way with words, his humor, and his evident love of the English language. Mortality is a sad good bye to and from Hitch.

Reading this meditation upon his impending death, inspired me to dig into the recently published mammoth, Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens. At nearly a thousand pages, it contains well over a hundred of his essays. I would rarely sit down and begin reading something like this from cover to cover, so I devised a plan -- an homage -- to Hitch. Starting on Sunday, September 16, 2012, I read one essay every night before bed. It will take more than three months, but that will be my own meditation on the loss of one of the great writers and orators of the 20th and 21st centuries. 5 stars

--Chiron, 9/22/12

Winter Journal by Paul Auster

Through the years, the name Paul Auster would occasionally pop up in interviews, reviews, blogs, and even a half-hearted suggestion from a friend. But none of these sparked any interest in this prolific author. He has written 16 novels, 4 screenplays, 6 works of non-fiction, a volume of poetry, 3 illustrated books, and he has edited 3 anthologies. When I received an advance reader’s edition of his latest work – a memoir, Winter Journal -- from Henry Holt through the early reader’s club of www.LibraryThing.com, I decided it was time to find out what Paul Auster was all about.

Winter Journal appears 30 years after his critically acclaimed memoir, The Invention of Solitude, and, as the cover notes say, “Auster gives us a second unconventional memoir.”

The cover notes further state, Auster writes a “history of his body and its sensations – both pleasurable and painful.” Unconventional is a bit of an understatement. Auster wrote Winter Journal in the second person. Normally, I do not read second person novels. Ever since Jay McInerny’s, Bright Lights, Big City, I have resisted the temptation to read second person works. Auster’s memoir, however, has given me pause – a great, big, eye-opening pause. His narrative is engaging, and drew me almost from the first page, once I got over my “you/your phobia.”

Early on, when Auster examines his young body, he writes,

“…you ask your mother the question all children ask their parents, the standard question about where babies come from, meaning where did you come from, and by what mysterious process did you enter the world as a human being? Your mother’s answer is so abstract, so evasive, so metaphorical that it leaves you utterly confounded. She says: The father plants a seed in the mother, and little by little the baby begins to grow. At this point in your life, the only seeds you are familiar with are the ones that produce flowers and vegetables, the ones that farmers scatter over large fields at planting time to start a new round of crops for harvest in the fall. You instantly see an image in your head: your father dressed as a farmer, a cartoon version of a farmer in blue overalls with a straw hat on his head, and he is walking along with a jaunty, insouciant stride out in some rural nowhere, on his way to plant the seed.” (36).

My mother told me an almost identical story, except that the seed was “planted” beneath the mother’s heart. I had no idea back then my mother was so poetic!

Auster’s Winter Journal becomes a new connection to a favorite author. I already have a copy of The Invention of Solitude. I might even go back and take another look at Jay McInerney’s novel. 5 stars

--Chiron, 9/16/12

Stop-Time by Frank Conroy

This book came to my shelves after I read Mentor: A Memoir by Tom Grimes, reviewed here in March of this year. Frank Conroy was Tom’s Mentor, and Stop-Time was Conroy’s best known work at the time.

The story reminds me of a cross between Holden Caulfield of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Stephen Daedalus of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Young Frank Conroy has quite an interesting childhood, getting himself into a whole assortment of scrapes. He even ends up in Paris – as did Joyce when he graduated from college.

Even the episodes when Frank was a toddler were so absorbing. He was also brutally detailed in telling some of his experiences – his first kiss and his first sexual encounter. He did enough work to get by, but in the end he was accepted at Haverford College on the Philadelphia Main Line. Haverford was, and still is, a quite prestigious school.

At one point he ran away from his home in New York City with only a few dollars. He managed to make it all the way to Baltimore before his money ran out with his resolve to leave home.

One incident sounded right out of the mouth of Jean Shepherd, the great story-teller of Middle America. With a friend, he tries to peep into the window of a girl in the neighborhood. Conroy writes,

“Alone with the scent of flowers trickling down my throat like syrup, I watched the windows. Was that a pair of arms moving behind the blinds? Legs perhaps? An immense stone rolled over in my chest. Good Gog! Was that a thigh? Was that a bare shoulder? Lust exploded inside me, pure, hot lust bathing me like internal sunshine” (127)

Frank was about 12, and they never did a see anything. Illicit cigarettes, skipping school, fooling around with his friends, are all here in wonderful prose. His years at a boarding school, moving back and forth from Florida to New York with his mother, sister, and step-father are all woven together to make an interesting tapestry of life in the late 50s and early 60s.

Stop-Time will have to be ordered, but you will not regret the effort. 5 stars

--Chiron, 6/8/11

Bird Cloud: A Memoir by Annie Proulx

Ordinarily, when I see a book about a person who buys some land and builds a house, my interest doesn’t go much further. However, when the builder is noted author, Annie Proulx, and the house is her dream home in Wyoming, my interest piqued.

Proulx is one of the best novelists and short story writers of the late 20th and into the 21st centuries. Her award-winning novel, The Shipping News and That Old Ace in the Hole are my favorite of her books. I always show my creative writing class a documentary about Ms Proulx writing Ace. It shows them the amount of research and hard, meticulous work that a novelist of Proulx’s stature puts into a new work of fiction. Her short stories, however, represent another whole aspect of her talent. I can honestly say, I have never read a Proulx short story that I did not like.

In Bird Cloud, Proulx tells the story of her family from its French-Canadian roots through to New England. She describes several places she lives, but none of them match her ideal home for reading, research, and writing. She searches Wyoming -- three collections of her short stories are subtitled “Wyoming Stories” – for a perfect plot of land, secluded, but near enough to civilization for food and supplies. She wanted a place where she could have rooms that looked out over the vast prairies nearby and mountains in the distance. Then she launches into a history of the area she selected dating back to the earliest inhabitants several thousand years ago, through to the Native Americans pushed out by white settlers in the 19th century. Then the search began for an architect and construction crew. The delays and pitfalls were frustrating and costly.

Once the house is finished, she takes a detailed inventory of the flora and fauna surrounding her. She has particular interest in birds, and spots several pairs of eagles – bald and golden – along with falcons, hawks, ravens, owls, and myriad song birds. Here, she describes one unique encounter.

“It was a big thrill when I saw a white-faced ibis near the front gate where there was irrigation overflow. The ibis stayed around for weeks. A few days after this sighting I was sitting near the river and saw two herons fly to the bald eagles’ favorite fishing tree. They were too small to be blue herons, and did not really look like little blues. A few minutes with the heron book cleared up the mystery; they were tricolored herons, the first I had ever seen. By the end of the month, American goldfinches were shooting around like tossed gold pieces despite another cold spell” (220).

This conversational style gives her prose a smooth and seamless fluidity that paints a digital-quality image in the mind of the reader. She welcomes me into her world as a expected visitor. This memoir will appeal to those interested in wildlife, because her keen eye for observation reveals much about the fauna of a wilderness area most of us would never visit.

The house is complicated in its orientation, layout, and construction, and I can imagine such a wonderful hideaway for a writer and reader. If you have never read Proulx, start with one of her collections of stories and get a feel for her exquisite view of nature – flora, fauna, and human. 5 stars

--Chiron, 3/8/11

Mentor: A Memoir by Tom Grimes

Mentor is the second book recommended by my good friend, Margaret Hawkins, author of A Year of Cats and Dogs and How to Avoid a Natural Disaster, both reviewed here last year. Grimes’ memoir must be on the shelf of anyone interested in the writing process or writing while trying to hold body and soul together. Tom had an amazingly supportive partner, Jody – that makes all the difference in the world. I can personally attest to the value of spousal support.

In 1988, Tom Grimes wrote 20 hours a week and held down a job as a waiter in a Florida restaurant. A fleeting encounter with Frank Conroy, published novelist and director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, led Tom to apply to Iowa. He was accepted and packed up his family and moved. The memoir revolves around the relationship Tom developed with Frank. He also reveals, in great detail, the agonies, joys, triumphs, and disappointments of the writing life.

The Amazing thing about this book involves an incredible number of passages that reflect closely on my own reading and writing life. For example, he describes his first class with Frank, who began by writing on the board, “meaning, sense, and clarity,” then said, “‘If you don’t have these you don’t have a reader’” (25). Another, “the world is chaos and an artful novel satisfies our human desire for order, or … the novel excavates meaning from the rubble of incomprehension” (55). Frank discusses the “impostor syndrome” with Tom. “You can’t believe good things are happening to you and you’re worried someone will find you’re a fake…Don’t worry, it’ll pass” (121). I have said these, and many other things, to my creative writing classes.

At times, Tom displays a seemingly inexplicable lack of confidence in his writing. But a writer knows and understands. I can relate to that feeling. Agonizing over a poem or a story for hours or days or months only to see someone chop it to bits, or worse, dismiss it out of hand, can have a devastating effect on a writer. Grimes gives the reader a boost and a reminder that beginning writers can never give up – if they are serious about their art.

Only one chapter failed to hold my attention. Chapter Eleven, which relates the story of a play Tom was writing, is written as play dialogue. Beside this minor lapse, I thoroughly enjoyed every other page. This book goes on my reading list for my own creative writing students. 4-3/4 stars

--Chiron, 3/3/11

Truth: Four Stories I Am Finally Old Enough to Tell by Ellen Douglas

Ellen Douglas wrote eight novels when she published this memoir in 1998. As the dust jacket says, “Douglas is the pseudonym for Josephine Haxton, whose family roots extend back to the earliest days in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana. These four tales describe her search for details of her ancestors. Sometimes she meets with talkative relatives who surprise her with some interesting information. Others stonewall her search, because she used the information from previous interviews in her novels and changed some important details.

This work should interest those who enjoy the historical aspects of fiction. Douglas talks about how she could use some people and incidents from her investigation in her next novel. Her meticulous search of records and memories of her family – and those who knew her family – adds a lot of weight to these tales. She readily admits when she will have to fill in gaps.

The most interesting of the four stories – “Julia and Nellie” – tells the history of her paternal grandmother, Nellie, and her friend, Julia, and a cousin, Dunbar (Dunny). Her prose has a soft and gentle quality – musical, enchanting, and absorbing. “I am sure now that I remember my grandmother and Julia—and Dunny, too—on the gallery at The Forest on a long, hot summer afternoon. I recall an embrace and then the two women in intimate, quiet conversation. I hear their soft voices, Julia’s pitched a shade lower than my grandmother’s, the voices, it seems to me now, of ghosts, alive only in my head and only for the time left to me to remember them. I remember the call and response of those voices as I might remember music—the oboe making room for the flute and then meditatively answering—and, like oboe and flute, they speak with deep emotion, but wordlessly.” (81)

One incident in particular eluded her best efforts to uncover details. In 1861, an unknown number of slaves were tortured and whipped, and some were executed, because of a plot to kill slave owners as soon as “Mr. Lincoln and his army” came to Mississippi. Several “gentlemen of the county” served as judges, jury, and executioners. No newspapers reported the event, no record of any burials exist. The only evidence Douglas uncovered involved lists of slaves “interviewed” about the plot.

I most definitely need to track down some of those novels. (5 stars)

--Chiron, 9/26/10

Homer's Odyssey by Gwen Cooper

One of my all-time favorite books is Homer’s Odyssey. Unfortunately, I thought this might be a book about that foundation stone of Western literature. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love cats – I have two now, along with three predecessors now in kitty heaven.

This book is really dull. The prose is stilted and awkward, and I got the point from the “Prologue.”

I was also annoyed by some rather careless errors. For example, there is no evidence whatsoever that the Homer of ancient Greece was blind. Also, Grizzly bears are not black, but rather a variety of shades of brown. These kinds of errors really annoy me. Don’t waste your time. 1 star for a cute cover.

--Chiron, 8/10/10

A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition by Ernest Hemingway

Part One: The Original

I love Paris in the summer, in the spring, and in the winter. Before each and every trip there, I re-read Hemingway’s great work on his years in Paris between the wars. When I heard about the restored edition, I could not wait to compare it to the version I know and love. First, I re-read the original.

This memoir never grows old. Someday I want to spend a long period of time in Paris, and wander through the streets and visit the cafes Hemingway mentions. Some of them I have sat in and watched the boulevardiers pass along with strolling musicians, magicians, and mimes. I always made time to have a drink at Aux du Magots – a favorite hangout of writers, artists, and philosophers. Montmartre, the artist’s quarter, also played a role in his story. I still love this book.

Part Two: The Restored Edition

Two chapters have been moved another two deleted and replaced with another two. Other than that not many changes to the book. A casual reader might barely notice the differences. The additional chapter on F. Scott Fitzgerald added another incident to that tragic life. The chapter entitled “The Education of Mr. Brumby,” Hemingway and Hadley’s son, was interesting, because it revealed something of Hemingway as the doting father.

The best part of the revisions, however, came in a collection of fragments not included in the earlier version. One involved Hemingway’s assignment to follow a young Canadian boxer fighting for the first time in France. Another involved numerous fragments of a preface, which he never finished. The stops and starts and restarts of these show an interesting insight into the process of writing. The introduction provides a history of the manuscript. Apparently, Hemingway worked on this while he was in Paris between the wars, then lost track of it until the late 50s. He was still revising the manuscript when he died in 1961.

As I said, one of my all-time favorites, and the new material hasn’t changed my mind about that. If you plan on visiting Paris, read it on the plane to France. Make some notes and visit some of the places which are still there, visit some new spots, and you can create your own “Moveable Feast.” 5 stars

--Chiron, 11/29/09

His Name Was Donn by Evelyn Sweet-Hurd

--Chiron, 3/16/09