Five Recent Reads

July 23, 2020 ~ Liz Troyer ~ 1 Comment

At the moment, I’m trying to start writing ~for real~ which means working on longer pieces and submitting them to publications. Thom and I have decided to stay in Indianapolis long term, which means I have the environmental stability to really test my writing (i.e. rejection) stamina. It’s daunting, but I’m psyched. (See Thom’s blog for more details.)

I have already sabotaged my writing hours by adopting up a kitten from the Indianapolis Humane Society. I did this approximately one day after I committed to a new, more focused writing plan. Chickpea is a needly little thing, with major keyboard-envy. But she’s also cute and cuddly and livens up our home-office with her kitten antics.

So as I lift Chickpea off my desk for the 20th time this hour and return her to the floor, I thought I’d keep this writing exercise short and sweet. Below are five books I’ve read and enjoyed in the last few months. What’s more, these are all written by women or people of color:

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

Girl, Woman, Other is a great, lengthy, relational novel. Evaristo brings together every kind of non-straight-white-male character imaginable. The book is set in the UK, which I found very fun. The London setting centers on the National Theater on the South Bank of the Thames, which allowed me to reminisce about studying abroad in that very spot five years ago as a junior in college. It’s also interesting to read about the history of the Black community in the UK, insofar as it is similar to and different from the experience of Black citizens of the United States. Particularly after the recent police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others, this novel offered me a way to contemplate race that was new and slightly removed from the current content of Twitter/Instagram/Facebook/etc.

My only criticism of Evaristo’s novel is that I found the flow a bit choppy. My reading was slowed, especially in the first half, by the continual introduction of new characters and new perspectives, and the complete dropping of the previous characters. (Until in the end, that is, when all of the times, places, and people prove to be intertwined, as in one of those ensemble rom-coms from the 2000s.) One might compare the reading experience to driving down a residential road with a stop sign every-other block. Come to a full stop, then rev the engine to get going again. But ultimately, Girl, Woman, Other was worth the reengagement effort. The characters and relationships Evaristo packs into this 400+ pager, with their widely variable racial, socioeconomic, gender, and sexual dynamics are a fascinating study in humanity’s complexity and the spectrums of identity. And frankly, these are the kinds of stories I have not read anywhere else.

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

The Vanishing Half is a recent release — one I had been anticipating ever since I finished Bennett’s debut novel, The Mothers. The novel has a fascinating premise: it’s the 1960s in a fictional light-skinned Black town called Mallard in Louisiana, and a pair of twin girls comes of age. Progressive skin-lightening was a goal of the town’s founders, who established Mallard after they were freed post-Civil War. One twin grows up to live as a Black person, the other leaves her family behind to start a new life passing as white. This creates a rift between the sisters and their offspring, and shows how the ideal of whiteness permeates and causes destruction in all American communities — whether Black, white, or mixed-race. Bennett reveals race for what it is: America’s foundational caste system, and she exposes the system’s relational consequences across decades, cities, and within families.

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

Born a Crime is falls into the same category as Girl, Woman, Other insofar as it provides a slightly removed context in which to understand and examine racism. I’ve found that sometimes its easier for me to see evil clear-eyed when the U.S. is not directly involved. But unlike Evaristo’s novel, Born A Crime is a nonfiction story — Noah’s own. Noah is brilliant, funny, and informative as a narrator of his life and the history of apartheid in South Africa. As a “mixed” person (Black mother, white father) whose existence was technically illegal, Noah did not fit into any of the racial categories where he lived. Consequently, he has a fascinating perspective on how race, culture, and language function to either divide us or to bring us together.

I listened to Born A Crime on audiobook, which turned out to be a great choice. Noah is a wonderful narrator, and the voices he does for his family members, his younger self, and others make the book come to life. He’s both earnest and hilarious. It’s also helpful to hear him read aloud the many South African language phrases that appear throughout his story. (By the way, this is one of those annoying “Audible exclusives” — so you can’t get it from the library on Libby. Annoying, but worth it.)

Such A Fun Age by Kiley Reid

I picked up Such A Fun Age shortly after the Black Lives Matter movement resurged with new vigor, making a promise to myself to read more books by BIPOC (a new acronym for me: Black and Indigenous People of Color).

My favorite thing about Reid’s novel was the main character Emira. She’s about my age, in her mid-20s, and in a similar state of confusion regarding her career, her future, and her ambivalence about seeking the kind of worldly achievement everyone is supposed to want (and everyone else wants for her).

I felt affirmed by her suspicious, measured view of American values, and the genuine fulfillment she finds spending her days babysitting. I also enjoyed Reid’s engagement with the idea of boundaries: between employer and employee, between white woman and Black woman. Alix (the mom, white woman, employer) thinks of Emira as hers; she transgresses boundaries, assumes ownership over Emira’s time, personal life, and decisions, and tries to establish a friendship where there is a pervasive, obvious power imbalance. As someone who has held several assistant jobs in my life, I found Reid’s portrayal of the boss-employee dynamic to ring true, and I was glad to engage with the additional layer a racial power imbalance. Overall, Such A Fun Age is a great read. It’s not as heavy as The Vanishing Half, (the characters seem happier), but it’s just as powerful.

I was able to get Such A Fun Age from the library (I use the Libby app) and read it on my kindle. Often, with popular books or new releases, the Indianapolis Public Library will offer me a 7-day “skip the line” e-book loan shortly after I place a hold. This is my favorite pandemic discovery; an unexpected system that makes it possible for me to actually get new books from the library relatively quickly, and with proper social-distancing.

City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert

I read City of Girls months ago and was surprised at how much I loved it. The novel features an all-women cast of characters whose lives revolve around the 1940s New York City theater scene. There are playwrights, songwriters, costume-designers, and showgirls. Gilbert creates a vivid, exciting picture of this alternative life — one without husbands, kids, catalogs, and midlife depression. Gilbert’s characters are fascinating, well-rounded, creative, and free. As most of the books about women in the late 1800s and early 1900s in end in the bored, miserable protagonist having an affair or committing suicide (looking at you, Kate Chopin and Anna Karenina), it was such a joy to read a novel set in that time that is so full of joy.

***

Chickpea has fallen asleep in the back of my chair, where my lower back leaves a kitten-sized gap. Today I started reading Friends and Strangers by J. Courtney Sullivan, which has a plot suspiciously similar to Such a Fun Age (career woman is lonely and sad, resigned to a new suburban life away from New York City, staying home with with young kids, and tries to befriend babysitter). But I have high hopes, because I’ve loved every single book by Sullivan. Her last one, Saints of All Occasions, was her best novel yet, in my opinion. She writes about women navigating complex lives and relationships (familial relationships, mainly) which never gets old for me. And I’m particularly excited because I bought this book in hardback, after spending about three months exclusively consuming kindle library rentals. It feels good to hold a book again.

Okay, one more Chickpea picture.

*Chickpea takes a ride in Thom’s water bottle sling*.

“Your Move, Chief,” Or Why I Love Memoir

April 30, 2020April 30, 2021 ~ Liz Troyer ~ 5 Comments

My Goodreads data reveals a curious pattern. Over the last three years, more than half of the books I have read have been memoirs. That percentage keeps growing. In 2020 alone, 13 of 17 have been memoirs.

It’s not just me, either. Memoirs have proliferated throughout my lifetime. Readers keep reading them, and more and more writers (and celebrities) are writing them. Most of my recent favorites came from the national bestseller list. These include Educated by Tara Westover, Maid by Stephanie Land, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb, and Untamed by Glennon Doyle.

But why am I reading so many more memoirs than anything else? More than novels, short stories, poetry, or impersonal nonfiction? Am I just extremely nosy?

When I tried to answer these questions for myself last week (yet again fixated on Mary Karr and Glennon Doyle), the first thing that came to mind was the pond scene from Good Will Hunting.

Sean (Robin Williams) has been trying to provide court-ordered therapy to Will Hunting (Matt Damon). In their first meeting, in which Sean attempts to get to know Will, Will deflects and evades every one of Sean’s questions. It ends when Will goes on the offensive and speculates (noticing a painting on the wall of a lone man navigating a fishing boat on a stormy sea) that Sean must have “married the wrong woman.” Switching tactics for their second meeting, Sean takes Will to a park and delivers the following dressing-down:

You got a thing for swans? Is this like a fetish? Something we need to devote some time to? – Will

The gist of the monologue is: Okay sure, Will, you’re extremely smart, good at retaining information, and making connections. But that, my friend, does not a man make.

Sean says:

I can’t learn anything from you I can’t read in some fuckin’ book. Unless you wanna talk about you, who you are. Then I’m fascinated. I’m in.

That’s it, I think. That’s why the memoir genre resonates with me, and why I consume insane numbers of them. I don’t read to educate myself; I read because I’m curious about people.

As Sean conveys to Will in the movie, it requires far more courage to share who you are and how you think than it does to quote or rehash someone else’s idea. Of course, Will knows this intuitively — as he demonstrates in the Harvard Bar scene, before he even meets Sean:

Who we are and how we see is the truest, most interesting thing each of us has to offer. In The Art of Memoir (2015), Mary Karr writes, “Most of us don’t read the landscape so much as we beam it from our eyeballs.” In other words, how we see comes from within; it’s a gift that cannot be stolen, only shared.

The same sentiment is captured in one of the final scenes from A Star is Born. Bobby (Sam Elliot) says to Ally (Lady Gaga): “Jack talked about how music is essentially 12 notes between any octave. . . All any artist can offer the world is how they see those 12 notes.”

Other people’s stories, told well, do not get old. There are as many unique stories out there as there are people. I will happily read every single one of them.

* * *

Importantly, the truth value of a story has nothing to do with the number of shocking events in it. This perception of memoir is actually counterproductive and can tempt writers to falsity. For example, philanthropist Greg Mortenson wrote two bestselling memoirs about how he came to found a nonprofit supporting girls’ education in the Middle East. His first memoir, Three Cups of Tea (2007) was a national bestseller. I read it for a high school theology class circa 2010 and wrote a book report.

Shortly after Mortenson published a sequel, Stones into Schools (2011), investigative reporters, including John Krakauer, found reasons to doubt the veracity of both memoirs. (Read more about it here.) Krakauer ultimately published a book of his findings called Three Cups of Deceit. In any kind of nonfiction writing, readers have to be able to trust the narrator. Otherwise, the whole enterprise collapses. In other words, it does not matter how well you tell the story of getting captured by the Taliban if your readers find out that it never happened. If I had to burn books for fuel, these Mortenson memoirs would be the first to go. After all, who would read Three Cups of Tea now?

A second example of violating the cardinal rule of memoir-writing — that is, truth-telling — came across my desk this week courtesy of Thom:

LOL WHAT THE FUCK

I AM HOWLING pic.twitter.com/sf5DOX4ZmQ
— vm ❊ (@tentwentysixpm) April 28, 2020

Mike Lindell, i.e. the “My Pillow” guy, wrote a memoir titled What Are the Odds?: From Crack Addict to CEO. He boasts “14 near-death experiences,” and a story of “addiction, hope, and divine intervention.”

I don’t want to read Lindell’s book because I already don’t trust him. His promo reveals him to be an unreliable narrator. First, a grammar mistake: “Before this pandemic came upon us, I had already wrote. . . ” Then, he assures the audience that the book includes pictures that “validate” his stories. He concludes, apropos of nothing “By the time you’re done reading my book, you will believe that with God all things are possible.”

In sum, the only thing that really tanks a memoir, in my estimation, is any attempt to cheat the truth. The memoirs that have disappointed me over the years have been ones in which I can sense that I’m not getting the whole story.

This is particularly common (albeit understandable) with celebrity memoirs. Who knows if they even wanted to write the book. They have so little privacy as it is. It’s rare for a celebrity memoir to transcends this limitation. I remember reading Amy Poehler’s memoir, Yes Please, years ago and being disappointed. Even though it had funny moments and interesting stories, she refrained from any major introspection. She basically said “Someone made me write this for money; I would prefer not to talk about my divorce or anything personal,” and moved on to crowd-pleasing SNL anecdotes.

* * *

There is no one-size-fits-all version of the life story. We may arrive at the same central truths, the same 12 notes, but no one sees them in quite the same way as anyone else. Maybe that’s why I keep reading memoir after memoir. “It’s never new and it never gets old,” is how Llewyn Davis defines “folk song” in the Coen Brothers movie Inside Llewyn Davis. The same might be said of memoir, or life-writing.

As Sean says to Will on the park bench:

You’re an orphan, right? Do you think I’d know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are, because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you?

“Does that encapsulate you?” Well, no. I guess not. Mary Karr writes in The Art of Memoir, “Getting used to who you are is a lifelong spiritual struggle.” That is all this is about, really. Your move, chief.

Rachel Cusk’s Search for Truth

January 30, 2020March 19, 2020 ~ Liz Troyer ~ 1 Comment

I discovered Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy (Outline, Transit, Kudos) last June on some news outlet’s summer reading list. Initially, I borrowed the book from the library, but after reading a couple dozen pages and finding passage after passage I wanted to underline, I capitulated to my desire to mark it up and bought a copy.

In the following passage in the first (and arguably best) novel of the trilogy, Outline, Cusk’s narrator describes the nature of Truth in terms of her two children who previously played happily together daily and were now in a constant state of war:

“Their antagonism was in exact proportion to their former harmony, but where the harmony had been timeless and weightless, the antagonism occupied space and time. The intangible became solid, the visionary was embodied, the private became public: when peace becomes war, when love turns to hatred, something is born into the world, a force of pure mortality. . . Each of them wanted more than anything to be declared right, and the other wrong, but it was impossible to assign blame entirely to either of them. And I realized eventually. . . . that it could never be resolved, not so long as the aim was to establish the truth, for there was no single truth any more, that was the point. There was no longer a shared vision, a shared reality even. Each of them saw things now solely from his own perspective: there was only point of view.”

This excerpt represents Cusk’s main project as an author, as I understand it: to search for captial-t Truth in everything. She asks what conditions Truth requires; she deduces its nature by examining those places where it is absent. She asks her readers to not accept stories at face value, but to accept them insofar as they are True.

For example, in Outline, Cusk’s narrator moves through the world as a spectator and offers herself as a listener. After a character has told Cusk’s narrator his or her story — just when the reader has nearly forgotten there was a character-listener at all — Cusk’s narrator will often challenge the story’s facts and conclusions. For example, after a man seated next to Cusk’s narrator on a flight from London to Athens tells her his life story (unprompted), Cusk’s narrator concludes: “I remained dissatisfied by the story of his second marriage. It lacked objectivity; it relied too heavily on extremes, and the moral properties it ascribed to those extremes were often incorrect.”

In her Coventry essays, Cusk is just as rigorous with herself as a storyteller as her narrator in Outline is with others. For example, in the title essay “Coventry,” Cusk investigates her parents’ use of the silent treatment against her, concluding: “My mother and father seem to believe they are inflicting a terrible loss on me by disappearing from my life. They appear to be wielding power, but I’ve come to understand that their silence is the opposite of power. It is in fact failure, their failure to control the story, their failure to control me.”

However, the next paragraph begins, “But perhaps it isn’t like that at all.” Cusk goes on to consider an entirely different take on what the silent treatment might represent by discussing its employment among middle school girls. She writes: “By sending someone to Coventry you are in a sense positing the idea of their annihilation, asking how the world would look without them in it.” In this sense, the perpetrators of the silent treatment aren’t “like desperate people taking the last of their possessions to the pawnshop” realizing “a failure so profound that all they have left to throw at it is the value of their own selves” (as she first postulated) — but rather they use it to wage a psychological battle against their victim, i.e., “If other people pretend you’re not there, how long can you go on believing you exist?” And both of these ideas are offered by Cusk herself, on the same page.

Thus Cusk demonstrates how multiple perspectives on a single subject can be capital-t True. The second understanding does not undo the first, but rather reveals the first to be incomplete. This is what I love about Cusk’s writing. One of the biggest challenges for me, as someone who likes to write, is constant self-doubt and ever-evolving understanding of the world, myself, and the stories that make up both. If I decide upon one version of events and their meaning one day, but the next alter it completely – what do I do with that first understanding? Erase it? But how would I have landed at the second without the first? And now, what about a third perspective that hits me tomorrow? How do I ever write anything at all, if my understanding of the world is always changing – if the shape and color of Truth keeps changing within my grasp?

As a reader and writer, I find Truth not only in how Cusk sees the world, but in how she reveals her thinking and writing process. Her stories all contain a writer’s journey of postulating, doubting, re-forming, doubting again, and landing at what can only ever be temporary conclusions. Rather than begin at the end – with a single idea – she reveals how her thinking process begins, builds, partly undoes itself, then builds again. There is no certainty in any conclusion – only in the joy of the continued search.

One of my favorite examples is Cusk’s sharp vision is her description of Walt Disney World in her essay “Lions on Leashes.” She describes Disney as a “world where wish fulfillment had become a moral good yet whose ultimate desire was to obscure the truth.”

This image of Disney World reminded me of my family’s Make-a-Wish week-long trip there in the summer of 2015. As a Make-a-Wish family, we were put up in a “village” for a week called Give Kids the World with other Make-a-Wish families. To me, a cynical 21-year-old jet-lagged after a semester studying abroad in London, it felt like a Candy Land board come to life — or like that dystopian episode of Sesame Street where Elmo wishes it were Christmas every day. At Give Kids the World, Santa and the Easter Bunny come every day and will even tuck you in at night (unless that idea is terrifying to you – as it was to my brother Michael). A Wish Kid, as well as his or her parents and his or her college-aged siblings, can order free pizza and ice cream at any time of the day, go on free fair rides, eat unlimited amounts of dining hall food (at the Gingerbread Palace), swim in the pool, fish in the ever-stocked pond, etc. Fun all day, every day – at least, of the material variety.

Is this not a life-sized Candy Land? Image from https://www.gktw.org/about/

The confluence of this colorful, material dream-world with the terminally ill kids it housed was shocking, at least to me. As we rode a golf cart from the Welcome Center to our house on the first day, I saw kids on all kinds of medical machinery being wheeled around under giant Disney sculptures by tired-looking parents. Michael seemed to have no idea of anything particularly exciting in these surreal surroundings, but was excited that our family was together. My brother David and I ordered free ice cream and pizza (not things Michael could enjoy, due to his specialized medically-necessary diet), reluctantly interacting with the overly-cheerful volunteers. As Cusk wrote, “wish fulfillment had become a moral good whose ultimate desire was to obscure the truth,” and yet “the truth had stubbornly continued to insist on itself.”

My memory of our week at Give Kids the World has haunted me for a long time. Why did I hate that place so much? Why is my view of the thing so bleak? The rest of my family did not react even close to as strongly as I did. But now my newfound Cuskian understanding of storytelling and searching comforts me. It’s not that the first version of the story (that Give Kids the World sucks and everything is fake) is not true, but that there remains a perspective by which I can drop deeper into the truth – i.e. move towards captial-T truth. Cusk, rather than trying to make the reader question him or herself, works to make the reader comfortable with uncertainty as a necessary part of the journey to truth.

So maybe it was not like that at all. Maybe Give Kids the World is True for the people it was made to serve – terminally and/or chronically ill children. Kids who only see Santa as Santa – even if he’s played by a different leather-skinned retiree every night. Its goal is not to obscure the truth, but to dare to believe entirely in a child’s perspective of it. And perhaps the experience of college-age Make-a-Wish siblings secretly making fun of the place all week long is an added joy of such an earnest commitment. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll write something else tomorrow. As Cusk says, “A desire to write is a desire to live more honestly through language.”

Shrek characters watch from above in the House of Hearts.

A Miss for Patti Smith: My Thoughts on “Year of the Monkey”

November 6, 2019 ~ Liz Troyer ~ Leave a comment

Year of the Monkey is Patti Smith’s third full-length memoir. The book came out last month but the story takes place in 2016. Thom snagged it for me as a birthday present because (a) he knows I love Patti and (b) before we knew each other well, he used to say “Happy Birthday,” instead of “Hi” every time we saw each other, and when I lodged a complaint approximately 4 months in, he switched to “Happy Year of the Monkey.” And now we’re getting married.

I hate to say it, but I didn’t like this one. (Still, it was the perfect birthday present @Thom.) I underlined one good line (to follow), but I had a hard time staying invested and interested.

I deeply enjoyed her previous memoirs Just Kids, M Train, and even Devotion (Why I Write). I also find her photographs and style inspiring and even used to have a prominently displayed poster of her in my apartment. But along the way, I have come across a few of pieces that have not captured me – e.g. most of her music and a lot of her poetry.

So it’s not entirely shocking that a memoir finally fell into the latter category. But first, a few things I did like:

The element of Patti’s memoir style that keeps me coming back is her way of living and thinking like a monk. M Train, for example, was mostly scenes of her walking down the street, drinking vats of 7/11 coffee, strolling back to her house, and watching cable news in bed. She zooms in on these little things, creates a sensory space for the reader, and is not at all anxious or self-conscious. I find these passages relaxing, and almost too weird (too good?) to be true, so I keep reading. An aging, successful artist who takes the same foam cup back to 7/11 every day for 16 oz burnt coffee refills? Puzzling, yet wholesome.

She puts this concept into words halfway through Year of the Monkey: “All is but an intermission, of small and tender consequence.”

It’s the opposite sentiment of Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players;” or the darker Macbeth version: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more.”

In contrast to Billy the Shake’s distressing picture of the pressure on each of us to perform as we move through the world, Patti’s philosophy of life is a major relief. The spiritual isn’t found in creation and achievement, but rather in getting stale M&M’s from a vending machine during Romeo and Juliet’s intermission. She does not spell out what she’s doing here (the above sentence is the closest she comes); instead she just dives in. Her faith in the value of these small moments calls the reader to buy in and see these daily sensory experiences with new reverence.

Yet Patti can’t entirely get away with this attitude towards life, because she’s a career stage performer. She is currently performing live perhaps more than she has in several decades. Now 73 years old, she has become wildly popular among a new generation of young people and is publishing a book every two years. But she doesn’t acknowledge any of this change. In Year of The Monkey, where her late-stage success was presumably most prevalent – she alludes to it least of all, never going further than explaining that she’s in X city because she played a series of concerts there Y days earlier.

Moreover, Patti executes the aforementioned concept (“all is but an intermission, of small and tender consequence”) much better in her earlier memoir, M Train than she does in Year of the Monkey. In this new book, Patti oscillates between dreams and reality in a way that’s hard to track and ultimately not that interesting. For example, one scene opens with her sitting on a porch near a beach in Santa Cruz, looking at the waves, feeling the wind, putting up her sore feet, etc. – but quickly shifts and becomes an imagined conversation with a motel sign and hallucination of thousands of misprinted candy wrappers on the beach. I wished she would not keep introducing the latter element. I find the small moments more affecting without the accompanying visions – probably because that is the less-universal part of being Patti Smith.

Furthermore, to put it crudely, all of the real friends she writes about in the book all have one foot (or both) in the grave. That her world was contained to either small sensory moments alone, or imagined, chronically ill, comatose, and dead companions made the whole reading exercise kind of lonely and sad. I wanted more grounded human interaction – and I know it must exist, because she has a band, living kids, and tons of fans.

Maybe she wants to hold onto the vagabond, bizarre parts of herself by describing dreams and (imagined?) hitchhiking experiences and voices in her head. But I can’t help but think there’s some important element of her life missing from this picture. The narrative almost struck me as dishonest – as if her new audience/platform hasn’t changed her days or thought patterns at all. As if this new life was not perhaps responsible for her increasing loneliness. I think she could add some such reflection without losing her artistic center. In any case, I’ll keep an eye on her because, despite it all, I remain her devoted reader.

~~~

Thanks for reading! I’ve read dozens of books since I last blogged… but not everything inspires a type-athon. I will be writing reviews more regularly now that I’ve got some unstructured time this winter. ❤

Articulating the Infinite: Patti Smith on Why She Writes

March 22, 2018March 22, 2018 ~ Liz Troyer ~ 2 Comments

Patti is back, albeit in brief.

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Devotion (2017) is the second volume in Yale Press’s new “Why I Write,” series, which launched in 2015 to publish the keynote addresses from Yale’s annual literary festival.

Smith’s slim treatise is tripartite. It opens with “How the Mind Works,” an account of a recent journey to Paris on a leg of her book tour. Next comes “Devotion,” a short-story about an ice-skating prodigy in WWII-era Switzerland, which Smith composes during the trip while riding the train from Paris to London. She closes with “A Dream Is Not a Dream,” a reflection on the story she’d written and a wrap of the trip.

Notably, Devotion contains Smith’s first published work of short fiction. Her recent, bestselling memoirs Just Kids (2010) and M Train (2014) are rendered lyrically and contain excerpts of poetry – but they are first and foremost glimpses of Smith’s life as an artist. In Just Kids, Smith writes of young, broke, wishful years in New York City with her dear friend, renowned photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. In M Train, she walks us through a day in the life of her present-day 70-year-old self, who wanders around New York City drinking giant cups of gas station coffee and finding inspiration in relics of artists past. But there’s little to suggest in these memoirs that Smith herself has any history of or interest in writing fiction. Thus Devotion presents something new and even unexpected: a parable about creativity and talent in which neither writing nor Smith herself are the focus.

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As an addition to the “writers on writing” sub-genre, Devotion is a unique offering because it explores the question of why we write, rather how to write. Instead of breaking down her daily routine, sharing tales of early failure, and offering neatly packaged advice (“write shitty first drafts,” “kill your darlings”), Smith explores the origins of creative passion – where it comes from, how it feels, why it captures us.

Through a young figure-skating savant named Eugenia, Smith describes what it feels like to first discover one’s creative calling:

On my fifth birthday [my uncle] took us to an ice pageant. I remember this most of all.

After I saw the skaters I cried for three days and three nights. . . Perhaps I recognized my destiny but was too young to fully comprehend what that meant . . . When I first stepped onto the ice I faltered, not out of fear, but excitement, for something wonderful happened. Everything I needed was revealed to me in a split second, like suddenly knowing all the answers to a difficult test, or the exact route to an impossible destination . . .

Smith’s vision may seem a bit grandiose here – perhaps even unrealistic. For me, it calls to mind the myth of another young prodigy by the name of Will Hunting…

Will: Beethoven, okay. He looked at a piano, and it just made sense to him. He could just play.
Skylar: So what are you saying? You play the piano?
Will: No, not a lick. I mean, I look at a piano, I see a bunch of keys, three pedals, and a box of wood. But Beethoven, Mozart, they saw it, they could just play. I couldn’t paint you a picture, I probably can’t hit the ball out of Fenway, and I can’t play the piano.
Skylar: But you can do my o-chem paper in under an hour.
Will: Right. Well, I mean when it came to stuff like that… I could always just play.

As in any proper parable, these storytellers exaggerate certain details to highlight the point. And the point is not, as one might think, how convenient it would be if things like organic chemistry or pianos immediately made sense.

The key lies in a minor admission Will makes earlier in this exchange. He concedes that he has studied organic chemistry before. “For kicks,” he says. Skylar responds, “Are you mad?”

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That’s the point. See alternate title for Smith’s book: Devotion (Am I Mad?)

So, why does Eugenia skate? Why does Will study organic chemistry in his free time? Why does Patti write?

Smith shows us that the mystery is the reason. In the pursuit of our particular, randomly-given talents and/or passions – whether for ice skating, mathematics, or writing – we encounter Truth. For Eugenia, the ice is a point of divine contact:

I saw it all before me, in an instant that instantly disappeared, yet made it’s mark. I intuited that when I was ready I held the key.

Importantly, the sublime glimpse is no more than that – a glimpse. Finding one’s passion is not a gateway to total, unimpeded understanding. It does, however, contain the promise of understanding, which is enough to sustain a life. Whether one responds as Eugenia, heeding the call and building a daily practice (yet forestalled by the evil forces of the world) — or as Will Hunting, denying the call’s centrality (impeded by shame and unworthiness) — the Truth can’t be unseen.

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Indeed, Smith affirms this answer in the nonfiction, third part of her book, “A Dream is Not a Dream:”

What is the dream? To write something fine, that would be better than I am, and that would justify my trials and indiscretions. To offer proof, through a scramble of words, that God exits.

The dream gives meaning, purpose, and a shape to one’s life. It imparts confidence in one’s unique beauty — in being wanted and loved by the universe. It’s attainment is nothing less than communion with the world (however brief) – which is the ultimate joy.

Smith’s final line: “Why do we write? . . . Because we cannot simply live,” affirms our fundamental condition as seekers. As someone who seeks through writing, the story resonated deeply. As someone who has never committed a creative act on ice, I can’t speak to whether this parable rings true beyond the writing few.

If you want to find out, I’ll mail you my copy.

Anne Lamott’s Latest Falls Short

May 13, 2017May 15, 2017 ~ Liz Troyer ~ 3 Comments

I first discovered Anne Lamott last fall, when I mentioned to my friend, Grace, that I was “getting into Catholic writers again,” like Mary Karr and Thomas Merton. Grace recommended Christian writer Anne Lamott and suggested I start with her recent spiritual memoir, Small Victories (2014).

I liked Lamott immediately. I found her witty tales of growing up among the liberal literati familiar and enlightening, and her story of addiction, recovery, and faith inspiring. I picked up three more of her shorter books: Help Thanks Wow, Stitches, and Bird by Bird. As I continued to enjoy her flippant yet humble storytelling, I pre-ordered her new book, Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy, several months ahead of time (unprecedented).

When the much-anticipated title arrived on April 4, I smiled at it’s salmon-and-silver jacket. Flipping through the purple typeface, I thought “wohoo, Anne is back!”

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Or was she?

After reading the first few pages, I had no memory of what I’d just read. I read and reread the sentences, but they weren’t cohering. Did I need sleep? Coffee? Exercise? Earplugs?

I put the book down. I’d try again later.

To regain confidence in my reading comprehension, I picked up Elif Batuman’s new book The Idiot. My quest was a success – The Idiot is not only intelligible, but one of the best novels I’ve read in the last few years (review to come).

A week later, I opened Hallelujah Anyway again. I started from the beginning, hoping for a fresh start.

Again, I met frustration. It soon became clear that Lamott’s writing – the very same writing I had grown to love and trust in Small Victories, Stitches, and Help Thanks Wow – was at fault. Something had gone terribly wrong.

Take the excerpt on the back cover, for instance:

“I’m not sure I even recognize the ever-presence of mercy anymore, the divine and the human: the messy, crippled, transforming, heartbreaking, lovely, devastating presence of mercy. But I have come to believe that I am starving to death for it, and my world is, too.”

fullsizeoutput_2459 — This should’ve been the first clue.

That is eight adjectives to describe mercy, the majority of which conjure abstract concepts. Anne invites us to “rediscover mercy” via the dictionary.

Sentences like the one above comprise seventy-five percent of the book. Lamott flits from line to line, paragraph to paragraph tacking so many different descriptors to mercy that the word begins to fade out of focus.

“Mercy means radical kindness. . . Mercy brings us to the miracle of apology, given and accepted, to unashamed humility when we have erred or forgotten. . . Mercy, grace, forgiveness and compassion are synonyms, and the approaches we might consider taking when facing a great big mess, especially the great big mess of ourselves – our arrogance, greed, poverty, disease, prejudice.”

fullsizeoutput_2456 — Lamott’s writing does not live up to the promise of its deep purple font.

Lamott gives us too many options. Mercy is a, b, c, and maybe also d; it’s the f and g of h and j. Her sentences feel urgent and unsettled, losing the reader with sharp turns at each comma. I found myself re-reading often, searching for the elusive pearls of Lamott wisdom I had come for. But by the next sentence, Lamott had apparated elsewhere, leaving me sighing with annoyance.

There are moments where Lamott slows down, where glimpses of her former self appear. These are instances in which she approaches mercy anecdotally. For example, Lamott tells the story of her Jesuit priest friend Tom’s experience at an AA meeting in LA, in which a drunk man soils himself walking into the meeting and a team of people help him shower and clean up. She describes retail exhaustion in Zoologie (surely a thinly disguised Anthropologie) in which a salesgirl finds her on a couch and offers a tiny paper cup of water.

Unfortunately, these stories are few and far between. One must trudge through the muck, braving confusion and whiplash:

“Something is at work mending the cut on my hand right now, as if hidden in the skin with atomic knitting needles. Over the years, when it has been in the mood and has its nursing cap on, this something has imperfectly patched up the rifts in my damaged family, the deeper dents in my heart, let alone evil in South Africa, has transformed us from clenched, victimized, and shut down, to taking gulps of fresh air like a baby pinking up.

“Horribly, it does not issue printed schedules.”

As Washington Post contributer Anne Bauer aptly put it in her review: “I’m sorry. What?”

In Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994), Lamott likens writing to hosting. She suggests that readers arrive at one’s pages seeking communion, and it’s the writers’ job to welcome them home. In Hallelujah Anyway, Lamott is a well-meaning but harried host – multi-tasking and inattentive. She’s dodging through rooms greeting newcomers, moving appetizers in and out of the oven, rearranging the shoe pile, looking for a ladder to fix a burnt-out bulb. One wishes she would put it all down, come sit by us on the couch, and do what she does best: tell a story.

Lit by Mary Karr

September 6, 2016September 7, 2016 ~ Liz Troyer ~ Leave a comment

For the first few weeks after reading Lit by Mary Karr, I could not walk into a restroom without thinking of prayer. While struggling to accept the customary Higher Power imperative of her 12-step AA program, Karr reluctantly offers her first prayers on the cold tiles of more than one bathroom. One such prayer closet lies within the same Cambridge “loony bin” (Karr’s term) where poets Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton may too have knelt during their respective stays.

Published in 2010, Lit is the third of Karr’s bestselling memoirs. While The Liar’s Club (1995) and Cherry (2002) delve into the author’s turbulent childhood and teenage years respectively, Lit traces the journey of the adult Mary Karr from low-income college student at a Midwestern LAC to acclaimed poet, memoirist, and professor of creative writing. Lit‘s 386 pages primarily contain Karr’s first marriage and subsequent divorce, her struggle with alcoholism as a young mother – transitioning her journey to sobriety and religious conversion.

Prior to Lit, my personal exploration of Karr’s work was limited to The Liar’s Club and her most recent poetry collection, Sinners Welcome (2009). Yet again, I found Karr’s particular gift to be a profound, pleasantly irreverent voice and a figure skater’s finesse with a sentence. For example, standing in the kitchen, pregnant with her first child, and just having learned that her first poetry book would be published:

“I chew my caramel, satisfied as a brood sow in a mud wallow. Neither good nor ill can reach me.”

While skilled with imagery, Karr also knows how to drop metaphoric fluff to great effect:

“I keep getting drunk. There’s no more interesting way to say it.”

Despite Karr’s engaging wordsmithery, I sometimes found her adult emotional life difficult to access. For example, Karr repeatedly emphasizes that her son, Dev, is the reason she was able to become and remain sober. Dependent-free twenty-two-year-old that I am, I found myself wondering: What do you mean you looked at him and knew you had to stop?

I imagine a collective sigh from mothers around the world as they look wistfully past my genuinely confused face, and offer former Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz’s poetic yet unhelpful description of Notre Dame:

“If you’ve been there, no explanation is necessary. If you haven’t, none is adequate.”

I raise this only because I’ve recently read the mother’s perspective better conveyed. Creative nonfiction writer Maggie Nelson excels in this area in The Argonauts (2015), in which she explores every detail of having a child in a way that challenges and enlightens. After a thorough description of giving birth to her son Iggy, Nelson writes:

“He is perfect, he is right. He has my mouth, incredible. He is my gentle friend. He is on me, screaming.”

There is much to discuss with Nelson – a blog for another time.

Yet I didn’t pick up Lit for Karr’s journey to sobriety, her account of motherhood, or even her story of becoming a professional writer – I picked it up because of one line on her Wikipedia page: “[Lit is] my journey from blackbelt sinner and lifelong agnostic to unlikely Catholic.”

Prior to reading Lit, I mentioned my interest in Karr’s “unlikely Catholicism” to a friend. His response: “This might be what does it: Liz the Catholic.” Despite 16 years of Catholic schooling and a genuine interest in spirituality, I had taken a well-advertised break from Catholicism while in college. As someone who had recently bowed-out (with a bit of sound and fury), I had to know: why would someone choose Catholicism after having no religion for 30+ years?

Flipping through my crinkled copy of Lit, which had been baptized with coffee, I notice that my annotating hand was particularly drawn to passages that confess spiritual reluctance. Karr calls this her”outlaw ethos.” Rather than delving into disagreements with doctrine or skewering corrupt popes, she openly discusses a deep aversion to the basic idea of God.

For example, “I’m trying to start hearing the word God without some reflexive flinch that coughs out the word idiot.”

*Any word on whether kindles are coffee-proof?*

Karr’s hilarious forthrightness about her internal ego battle is the highlight of Lit. In successfully living beyond addiction and igniting spiritual healing, she is particularly accessible for those (like myself) who have become flippant about religion due to various news items, life events, etc. More than ‘we the flippant’ would like to admit, spiritual isolation can be a painfully empty feeling, and it requires a major push to turn around and proceed in the opposite direction. Perhaps surprisingly, it may help to read every possible facetious comment articulated by a well-respected poet.

Following a prayer journey begun in a bathroom, Karr delivers a glimpse of the other side: “The spiritual lens . . . is starting to rewrite the story of my life in the present, and I begin to feel like somebody snatched out of the fire, salvaged, saved.” Karr’s is a narrative worth encountering.

“A Book Blog, Liz?” Let Me Explain

July 24, 2014 ~ Liz Troyer ~ 1 Comment

Throughout the (almost) twenty-one years I have been able to speak, I have confidently asserted a variety of future plans.

“I’m going to be an artist,” my five-year-old self declared to inquiring adults, proffering pictures of family members with potato bodies, toothpick limbs, and impossibly wide smiles.

This was followed by a fifteen year period of “I’m going to be doctor,” which I stubbornly insisted upon despite a variety of red flags (including a very real phobia of puking people).

It was only during my first semester of college as a pre-med student that I recognized my folly, surreptitiously skipping many a chemistry class in order to dedicate my efforts to a required lit seminar: “Shakespeare’s Major Tragedies.”

The moment of recognition went something like this: “Shit. There won’t be any lit classes in med school.”

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As far back as my memory reaches, books have been an essential part of my existence. Even as an illiterate toddler I carried around piles of books and “read” by reciting the story from memory. (Shout out to my dad for putting in long hours reading through the pile as part of my bedtime ritual.)

Evaluating multiculturalism and postmodernism in Sesame Street — Searching for postmodern themes in Sesame Street

I began reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in first grade and finished the final words of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows the summer before eighth grade (the day it came out, obviously). In the interim, I devoured all varieties of fiction, including the timeless stories of Roald Dahl, the tales of the resourceful feminist Nancy Drew, the blatantly Catholic Chronicles of Narnia, the youth-friendly murder mysteries of Marry Higgins Clark, the obligatory Twilight Saga, and anything and everything by resident boy-expert, Meg Cabot.

With less time to read in high school, I prioritized homework from English class over Calculus and packed as much reading into my summers as possible. One summer I spent an entire month on Jane Eyre and felt hugely accomplished as I crossed out the title on my stained and wrinkled “101 classics to read” list. I then immediately turned to the inviting pink jacket of Tina Fey’s Bossypants to decompress.

Now an English major at Notre Dame, my love for books has deepened in the company of brilliant professors, visionary authors, and most of all, talented and thoughtful fellow students. I love every minute of it – okay, except for 4am when I’ve already had 5 coffees and I would rather be talking to people, watching reruns of The Office, or sleeping than railing on Kate Chopin’s misogynistic contemporary critics for 10 double-spaced pages.

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I almost feel physically uncomfortable without a book nearby. I carry books like some people carry miniature purse dogs – a faithful companion for waiting rooms and car rides; a respite from boredom and monotony; a dependable conversation-starter for awkward social moments.

I have a tendency to take my current read to places where I know I’ll never have a chance to open it, like the Starbucks drive-through, my job at Dean Younce Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, and the library cubicle where I’m supposed to be uber-focused on studying for finals. It’s borderline compulsive.

Essentially, this blog is an opportunity to reevaluate, revel in, and share my books. With plans to work in the editing and publishing realm of productive society one day, it will be valuable to practice reviewing books. And though I claim only a nominal understanding of this blogging platform and a limited arsenal of life-experience and material as a twenty-year-old college student, I am giddily excited to start nerding out about books on the internet.