One Day by David Nicholls

My friend HGM loaned me One Day by David Nicholls with the simple comment, "see what you think." Her words might well have been a benediction, the way this book stirred me. See what I think, indeed! I haven't cried in years when reading, but Nicholls' novel reduced me to sobs. Good thing my husband was asleep or he would've wondered who died.

The two main characters, Brits Emma and Dexter, first meet in college in Edinburgh in the late 1980s. She is a pale, cause-committed beauty; he is an aimless adventure-seeking womanizer. Despite their different temperaments, there is a strong click of attraction between the two which slowly evolves into a deep friendship over the years. By years, I mean days, because, as you might guess from the book's title (and the movie due out soon), the author tells this love story one day at a time. From 1988 to 2007, he treats the reader to the events of July 15th, the anniversary of Emma and Dexter's college graduation day.

The pleasure of this novel is watching the maturing process of the characters. Nicholls knows of which he writes--first and foremost, the vagaries of aging; he wisely illustrates the career angst of the twenties, the get-serious thirties, the take-stock forties. Through the decades of friendship and bad romance timing between Dexter and Emma, I was struck by the ups and downs of each life. Dexter seems to be the successful one early on, not so much later. Emma finds her bliss through teaching, and then, writing, but these passions cannot save her from a hunger which claims to cripple them both as she approaches her 5th decade.

One Day is a love story, to be sure. However, I was left with the distinct impression after finishing the book, that love (and all that might follow, sex, marriage, children) isn't really the main idea here at all. In One Day, time, and the friendship it builds, is the chief protagonist. Time builds up and tears down Emma and Dexter, and it is sad, but oh so beautiful, because their connection endures.

Maybe this book slayed me so because I'm a sucker for an unsentimental love story, a rarity. Or maybe it's because in the summer of 1988 I was in Edinburgh on top of Arthur's Seat just like Emma and Dexter. July 15th also happens to be my son's birthday, a touchstone of a day, definitely. All I know is, after I finished Nicholls' novel, my eyes were swollen at work the next day, but there was a smile on my face.

Dead End Gene Pool by Wendy Burden

Summertime reading calls for books with sex or dirty secrets. Dead End Gene Pool by Wendy Burden has plenty of the latter, so delicious that you won't miss the former. A memoir of growing up in a rich offshoot of the Vanderbilt family, Burden's story spares no one in that branch of the tree. Most of her relatives born in the 20th century are pretty worthless in the achievement department: one uncle has OCD, another is mentally challenged and ignored by Burden's grandfather; her brothers have both struggled with severe addiction and careened from lifestyle to lifestyle; her father killed himself, and her mother was an emotionally stunted anorexic alcoholic.

Does not sound fun to read? Oh, but it is! It is book candy, and the reason is Burden's delightfully sardonic writing style. She weaves humor (though it is dark) through her tale, and opens wide the door on the super rich. Her grandmother, though clad in Chanel, continually passes gas (brfffft, a constant refrain in Burden's prose), her Uncle Ham-Ham's repetitive comments ring like a happy Greek chorus through gin-soaked gatherings featuring French cuisine and priceless works of art. Burden even can't resist poking fun at herself: for years she's fascinated by the Addams Family (author Charles Addams is a family friend); and she calls herself "about the ugliest thing anyone ever wrapped a diaper around." Self-deprecating to a fault, Wendy Burden and her wealthy, kooky world absolutely entertained me.

And as dark as her outlook can be, it is rarely mean-spirited. The reader gets the sense that Burden loved her grandparents; with her adult insight, she can now be grateful for the court-ordered visits to their 5th Avenue apartment, a ruling which provided the only stable residence of her childhood. Likewise, she doesn't disparage her privileged upbringing, even though there was plenty of bad stuff served with the good. Burden formed close attachments to servants, relished access to country homes, boats, and art, and traveled widely. These memories are gems for which she is grateful.

The only time Dead End Gene Pool nears nastiness is in Burden's description of her mother, Leslie Hamilton Burden Tobey. In the book, Leslie is the quintessential love with-holder. Absent from her children, she is a social x-ray, courting alcohol and men. (Amazingly, Leslie is also brilliant, graduating from Radcliffe and eventually earning a PhD from Oxford University--all the more amazing an achievement when she seems to exist on raw hamburger and Tab!) The Burden grandparents blame Leslie for their brilliant son's suicide and despise her. Indeed, the reader starts to side with the Burdens regarding this awful woman and her harpiness. Yet, Wendy Burden never lets the reader stray too far into mother hatred. She always tempers her stories with humor: her mother's obsession with tanning is hysterical--a photo in the book showing a dark faced woman with white moons for eyes proves the author's point. Though her mother is a nut, she is a nut with goals. (If perpetual sunburn counts as a goal.)

It is only at the very end of the memoir that Burden reveals a vital piece of information unearthed about her parents' marriage. This revelation softens her (and our) opinion of Leslie Hamilton Burden Tobey. A supreme loss in childbearing must have triggered some sort of sea change in her mother's personality which dominoed to her father's suicide. With this realization, Burden moves toward forgiveness of this strange, sarcastic person--her mother, who always called everyone "Toots."

Wendy Burden's late breaking life reinterpretation is an example of the prime reason I love memoir. The fact that adults can revisit childhood and see it with a mature eye, and maybe, just maybe, discover a new truth, strikes me as something like sorcery. How many of us, after having children, now see selfless acts in the everyday memories of our own mothers? Can't we all see a pattern and purpose in our early lives from our perch of time? Memoir is the adult mind making gold out of straw, finding logic in the chaos. First time out, Burden has proven herself masterful in this genre. Imho, her gene pool is definitely not dead-end.

Little Bee by Chris Cleave

Some readers stay away from sad endings. As my husband says, there's so much sadness in real life, why go looking for it in fiction? True, I cannot argue with that. We all get a taste or more of the tragic in our pilgrimage. But then a novel as well-crafted as Chris Cleave's Little Bee comes along, and I not only swallow sad, I lap it up like honey.

The book was a Christmas gift, and, fellow readers, you know I love free. That's why the gentle warning of my friend that the book was kind of sad didn't deter me. I simply had nothing else to read at the time. (Apparently, this problem disappears once one gets a Kindle--there's always something seemingly better on the virtual shelf.) Later, midway through Cleave's story, I was grateful that I was so hungry for a story that I took a chance. An orphaned teenager calling herself Little Bee has escaped Nigeria and is being detained in in a English refugee center. She is trying to get to the home of a British couple she met two years ago while they were on an ill-fated holiday in her country. Told in alternating voices, the narrative crackles with the contrast between Little Bee's determined humor and British wife and mother Sarah's baffled bravery. Right from the beginning, there is tremendous charm to the story. (Unexpected charm, the reader rejoices, if she was forewarned about the book's sadness.) Witness the friendship between Little Bee and Sarah's son, a Batman-dressed moppet who provides a nice dash of four year old farce. Read Little Bee's spot-on humorous deconstruction of those Brits and, in a larger sense, the civilization of convenience and calm we take for granted. The contrast between these two worlds, close geographically with differing brutality, is at the heart of the novel. Little Bee hungers desperately for Sarah's world, and Sarah is equally wounded by hers.

Thankfully, with contrast comes comparison. We're all more alike than different, Cleave seems to be saying. A white woman in England can mean the world to a black African girl, and she can return the favor. Everyone, no matter where he or she lives, is capable of change and acceptance. The author makes no secret he is personalizing the term "globalization." His meaning encompasses someone like Little Bee finding her way to your front door and asking for kindness.

I am so glad I read this sad book. The charm and little bits of joy peppering its pages far outweighed any gloom. The characters of Little Bee and Sarah are entrenched in my brain now, and when I think of them, it is not with sadness but with joy.

Pardon Me, You're Stepping on my Eyeball by Paul Zindel

The teenage years continue to haunt me literarily. Stuck as I was in a Milwaukee back brace for scoliosis, books were my means of escape. I read a ton of Paul Zindel books from age 13 to 17. Zindel, who died in 2003, was the literary voice of adolescent angst in the 1970s and 80s. The product of a broken marriage, he lived a somewhat rag-tag life with his mother and sister which fueled his plays and, later, his novels. (Zindel's 1964 play The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds won the Pulitzer prize.)

Zindel's characters were usually fringe-type folk: nerds, dysfunctionals, obsessives, and though mostly young, sometimes ranged to the elderly--The Pigman and The Pigman's Legacy had older main characters. The teens consistently had quirky family lives (a hallmark of 1970s YA fiction, it seems) and looked to friends for normalcy and balance. Although I loved everything Zindel wrote through the 80s, the novel that continually pops into my mind now is Pardon Me, You're Stepping on my Eyeball. Just the title was enough for me to grab it from the shelf at my local Paperback Booksmith back in 1979. The plot centers on Edna Shinglebox, a plain quiet girl, whose perenially dateless life is a disappointment to her mother. Marsh Mallow is the school misfit who carries around a raccoon in his pocket. The unlikely two befriend each other and head on a crazy cross-country trip. What strikes me now, reading Zindel's prose, is the delightful hilarity infusing every artfully constructed sentence. There is humor here, and delicious irony, as he simultaneously pot-shoots and pardons the popular kids. The football captain may be a moron, but he's not evil, is he? And the pretty girl is actually really kind. Marsh Mallow is weird but smart, and, well, cute. Not everyone is a stereotype, Zindel suggests. Don't look for either black or white, this or that--most people you will meet in life are a subtle blending of both.

This lesson of living life in the gray in-between is one to relearn. People cannot be defined by political parties or religion, by family background or street addresses. Polite conversations in American living rooms are nearing extinction. Democrats, Republicans, whatever--we're all guilty of shoving an agenda down chit chat's throat. I can't tell you how many times a well-meaning discussion about the weather has turned into a political debate about global warming [or climate change :)] When did polite conversation become a battleground? I'm a mild mannered soul, and even I've found myself trapped in a dialogue quickly turning to lava. So, I've decided to return to one of the lessons I learned very young, the theme of Paul Zindel's and other 1970s children's authors' books: tolerance in your community. Pluralism in your own kitchen. And (sigh, because this will be difficult) minding the gray in-between with your very own children. Listen, nod, and smile: life is more colorful lived in the gray.

What We Have by Amy Boesky

Happy holidays to everyone! I can't believe we're midway through December already. My reading has slowed to a crawl, mostly due to a book called The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. (Are the rumors about Stieg Larsson not actually writing this one true? I'd believe it.) But that's a story for another time.

I did want to take a second to blog about an excellent medical memoir called What We Have: A Family's Inspiring Story about Love, Loss, and Survival by Amy Boesky. Boesky, a literature professor at Boston College, tells the story of her family's battle with gene-linked ovarian and breast cancer. It sounds like a sad book, but it really isn't, mostly due to Boesky's self-deprecating narrative style. She's like a best friend, filling you in on her life, particularly the year 1993-1994 when amazing and significant events occurred. This reader admires her matter-of-fact analysis of her life as a single woman, her good-natured squabbles with her two sisters and mother. The year brings love, marriage, birth, and illness to everyone in her family. It's like life times ten for the Boesky clan. The author endures all, with humor tinged by anxiety (another battle). Time ticks along, and Boesky, retelling the story from a late 2000s vantage point, is able to nudge the reader to see what's important, to take note of what really matters: not illness or death, but the lessons learned from her mother and sisters in 1994. We all have years like these--mine, coincidentally, was 1994 also, the year my mother died. Our 1994s are to be endured and mined for nuggets when we feel strong again. It's good to remember that Boesky titled her book What We Have instead of what we haven't.

Let's Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell

Man oh man, I've been busy lately. Family, work, and all the usual adjustments to such have eaten up a good chunk of my reading time. Have no fear, though, I haven't abandoned my mission to document the best books I've ever read. Though my posts may be few and far between, I'm still here, weighing what belongs and what doesn't.

One book that definitely belongs on this list is Gail Caldwell's memoir of friendship, Let's Take the Long Way Home. Literary critic Caldwell was a great friend of Caroline Knapp, best known for her own memoir, Drinking: A Love Story. The two don't quite hit it off at first, but are later drawn together by a mutual love of dogs and literature. Knapp and Caldwell also share hard-won victories over alcoholism. Both unmarried, independent career women, these two authors become each other's family, as good friends so often do. The stories of them sculling and dog walking together show how the friendship grows into a deep, lasting bond. But Knapp, a lifelong smoker, falls terminally ill with lung cancer, and Caldwell must weather this storm both with her, and, later, without her.

At its heart, this memoir is a love story, because a rich friendship like this one could not be anything but love. Where family fails us, friendship sails in and saves. A good friend brings us food when we're sick, reassures us we're okay, lets us cry on her shoulder. The best female friend is an amalgam of the most desirable traits of mother and father, brother and sister, and, yes, husband. Gail Caldwell pays homage to the wholeness a good friend brings to life.

However, Let's Take the Long Way Home is just as much about grief as friendship. I've never read a more concise, whip-sharp discussion of the grieving process. Caldwell is a good writer, and she brings the full force of her narrative power to analyze the mystery and misery of losing a loved one. I prefer her vignettes to those in Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. Awe permeates Caldwell's prose: praise for Knapp and the life she lived, stunned wonder at her quick death, and thanksgiving over and over again for what they had together. By the memoir's end, the reader gets the sense that Caldwell is moving closer to some sort of understanding of death, an inchoate one to be sure, but an understanding nevertheless.

The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton

It's been a long time since I've felt this way about a book--over thirty years. Let me explain. As I child, I used to pull off a great disappearing act. I'd bury my nose in a book and cease to exist. I was elsewhere, skipping through gardens or prairies or castles. Nothing could find me, not my mother's voice, the phone call of a friend, nothing. I would eventually return home, dazed by the magic of Harriet the Spy or Strawberry Girl. I don't mourn much left behind in childhood, but I do miss what it feels like to visit those books for the first time.

The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton returned that feeling to me. My friend T.L. (like T.M., another reader extraordinaire) hand delivered the book, saying it reminded her of The Time Traveler's Wife. Morton's book is reminiscent of TTW in that it jumps here and there among time periods, points of view, and settings. It is a simpler book than Niffenegger's, however. The reader never gets confused because the fracturing of time and space is handled so deftly. We begin with the story of a little girl hiding on a berthed ship in 1913, minding the rules of the pretty lady who brought her there. Where did the lady go? Who is the child? Right from the start, these mysteries form the central cipher of the novel. Back and forth through decades, the story of Nell, a no-nonsense junk dealer in Australia, unfolds, along with that of her granddaughter Cassandra and a motley crew of others. When Nell dies, Cassandra begins to unravel the mystery of her past: a tiny white suitcase containing the yellowed pages of fairytales starts her off and eventually leads her to a hidden garden on an old estate in Cornwall. The reader learns why this garden, like Nell's birthright, has been obscured for decades.

Obviously, title and plot-wise, Morton's book is an homage to Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Secret Garden, another favorite book (and movie). Also, the very best elements of fairy tale and girl-sleuth are mixed into the story as well, and this melange of secret places and princesses and clues is what returned me to tweenhood. Although no one called us tweens in the late 70s. We were just girls, and if we found a good book, you could just watch us disappear.