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Blood, Bones & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton

17 Apr

When I turned over the last page of Gabrielle Hunter’s debut memoir, Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, I was genuinely devastated. I had thought I had a few pages left. I wasn’t ready for it to end. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye.

This is not to say that the book does not end well or just as it should, rather I had grown accustomed to Hunter’s company and I knew that when the book was finished I was going to miss her. Yeah, she’s not perfect. In fact, she can even be sort of an asshole sometimes, but from page one of this gorgeously written book, filled with honesty and life, I knew that I would love her forever. And I do.

To me there should be another subtitle: motherhood lost and found for within motherhood and food and feeding are intertwined just as they are (or can be) in life. Even when my own mother was emotionally lost to me, she always fed me. In fact, the smells of my own kitchen now are what remind me the most about her. Just as Hamilton describes her relationship with food: all returning back to that first kitchen.

The book begins when Hamilton’s mother and father divorcing, and with Hamilton’s mother moving to Vermont leaving Hamilton rootless and motherless. From there Hamilton rebels, she screws up, until eventually learning to nurture and mother herself and put herself on a path to find her way. In the years before she opens Prune, she works as a caterer and enters an MFA program in Michigan, where she takes a second job working with a woman who will become her cooking mentor. In short, she finds a stand-in mother for a time. And like Hamilton’s own mother, the relationship circles around the cooking, the food.

Finally, it is through her sad marriage that Hamilton meets the uber mother stand in: the Italian matriarch. Though she and her Italian mother-in-law don’t speak the same language, they learn to communicate with each other through cooking. And in the end as Hamilton’s marriage more fully dissolves and as her mother-in-law’s life winds down, Hamilton and her mother-in-law very nearly become one–just as one does with a child in the womb–as finally Hamilton is passed the torch to be the next Mamma.

As for the food: Hamilton should not be mistaken for a foodie. In fact, she would like (paraphrasing) people to just eat and shut up about it. She’s equally ambivalent about celebrity chefdom, even though she sends herself farther down that path with the release of this book.

It’s a terrific book. Filled with humor and exotic locations and hard work and sad times. There’s also a lot of love.

Read it.

Townie, by Andre Dubus III

8 Mar

After she finished reading Andre Dubus III’s new memoir Townie one of my friends called me and asked, “Is this book as good as I think it is or is it just that I grew up around all of these places he writes about?” I told her that while place is certainly important in the book, the book is exactly as good as she thinks it is. And it is.

And so what of this place where my friend, and Dubus, and I now live? This place is the north shore of Massachusetts, once known for its down-in-the-mouth mill and fishing towns bordering the Merrimack river but which is now gentrified and not only a commuter location for those working Boston but also its own happening place to live and work.

Not so in the days when Dubus and my friend were coming up.

Son of a hard-living writer and a hard-working mother, Dubus suffered the same fate of many of us living our childhood in the 60s and 70s when helicopter parents did not exist, that of benign neglect. Our parents meant us no harm; they had grown up in difficult times themselves–many born into the Great Depression or into war. They learned how to survive and that’s what they taught us, mostly by leaving us alone. And that was really okay, actually. Like Dubus, we either learned how to survive and thrive or we didn’t.

You might assume that this book is going to be about what it’s like to be the child of one of the 20th century’s best writers, but in actuality that Dubus’s father was a writer is only a fraction of the tale. At its core this is a story of this son’s redemption and, ultimately, of his awakening. Indeed, some of the most poignant moments within this narrative are when Dubus realizes what he has become (a brute) and what he might become (a murderer) and then, most importantly, what he wants to be and will choose to be (a creator/a husband/a father).

The pivotal scene occurs when instead of heading out to the gym as he would normally do after a day’s hard labor, Dubus makes him self a cup of tea and sits down at his table and writes. In this moment and in this act, he (perhaps unconsciously) saves himself:

I blinked and looked around my tiny rented kitchen, saw things I’d never seen before: the stove leaning to the left, the handle of the fridge covered with dirty masking tape, the chipped paint of the window casing, a missing square of linoleum on the floor under the radiator.

I stood and closed the notebook. I picked up the pencil and set it on top like some kind of marker, a reminder to me of something important I shouldn’t lose.

He does not use writing as therapy, rather he uses it as an act of survival. Of turning the eye outward, so that vision might reflect back inward. For me, this scene was keenly familiar to my own experience in which I, too, picked up the pen as a means of saving myself, of pushing myself away from darkness into the bright glare of awareness.

In fact, so much of the book feels familiar, not because of how I lived and live now but because what Dubus taps into is something common to the human experience: the choices we make that allow us to survive. The choices we make that bring us one more rung up the ladder from merely surviving up to thriving. As such, this book is not about blame or self-pity; it’s about examining the darkness within you so that you might share your own light.

Read it.

Witness, by Curtis Smith

25 Feb

From the beginning, I’d found Witness, a book of exquisitely written essays, deeply moving. The book begins with Smith and his wife grappling with the news that their unborn child has a hole in his heart.

It’s a worst nightmare beginning. But things turn out okay. The child is born. The child thrives. The child teaches the parents so much about themselves. And it is with great tenderness that Smith ferries us through his journey with his son, showing us not just the microcosm of their lives but the macrocosm of our world at large–how all those that will and have done evil were once babies, how all those who are heroic and all those who make bad choices were once babies.

How our own babyhood lives within us still, experienced once again through the lives of our children.

So as I picked up the book late this afternoon, I expected it would end in a lovely way but what I did not expect was the sense of catharsis it would provide me. The title essay, “Witness,” is about the death of Smith’s father and about the importance of father to son, of parent to child:

I understand in my son’s eyes, I am not alloted the luxury of background. A child can’t be asked to comprehend his father’s history; a child’s father is history, an influence so deeply entangled in a child’s own existence that he will take years to separate the two.

I pull my chair closer to my father’s bedside. I am glad I have grown old enough to understand him better–a child of the depression, poor and fatherless, a father himself at nineteen. He gurgles. He twitches in the throes of his final sleep, his history now written and sealed.

I’m confident I can speak for most parents when I say that the second worst thing to losing your child would be to die yourself while your child still needs you. To be an adult and be able to tell your parent they can let go is a gift. And it turns out that it’s a gift both Smith and I share, though I didn’t realize how valuable it had been until this dreary afternoon, reading this essay. So thank you, Curtis Smith.

But lest you think the book ends with sadness, let me tell you no, it does not. Instead, there is a beautiful treat: his son’s first drawing of a man. In that lies all the hope for the future. In that lies the knowledge that someday this boy will be a man standing beside his father, helping him let go.

Just Kids, by Patti Smith

16 Feb

When they had their first joint show, an art critic dubbed it: “The Diary of a Friendship” and that, too, is what one might call Patti Smith’s achingly tender diary of her relationship between her and her beloved friend, Robert Mapplethorpe, Just Kids.

It’s a book that almost defies classification: It’s not really a memoir/autobiography–it’s more an auto-biography. A combination of the one and the other, a bringing together of the two to form one whole, much like the relationship between Smith and Mapplethorpe. You might find yourself wowed by seeing so many of your personal icons walk through the pages, but I’m guessing you will be mostly just deeply touched by the tenderness, the beauty, the youthful desire, mistakes and lucky accidents, love and sadness.

At the core of this book, is the melding together of these two young artists and how they become one and how they became individuals. The most poignant moment of the book for me (other than the end) was when Smith describes the photo shoot for Horses, as she looks at the photo that became her album cover, she encapsulates what seems to be their entire experience together (and brings me to tears in the process):

“Whenever I look at it now, I never see me. I see us.”

It’s a hard book to write about, other than to say the prose is often beautiful, always concise. It’s a book, like the words and music and images of the two artists it is about, that I can’t imagine not loving.

The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls

27 Jul

The Glass Castle: A Memoir The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls

A deeply moving, unforgettable memoir of a truly hard-scrabble life. What I admire most about this book is that Jeannette Walls never paints her family as victims. Nor does she portray her unbearably narcissistic parents as evil (even though it would certainly be easy to do so–her drunken father, her childlike mother. Oh, how I was enraged in the scene where the mother hides the candy bar she’s eating from her starving children!!!). Instead, she shows the world as she saw it growing up: the good, the bad, the hideously ugly.

But mostly this is a book about hope and strength and finding the courage to overcome.

In a nutshell, this book will haunt me for a long time.

A Life’s Work, by Rachel Cusk

10 Jul

When my dear friend Kat came to visit on the day after my son’s first birthday, she brought with her several books, one of which was Rachel Cusk’s brilliant, startling book A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother.

Kat expressed regret that she had not gotten the book to me sooner, but now having read the book, I have to say I think her timing was perfect. I’m not sure my elated, exhausted heart could have stood the revelations this book provided any sooner than now. In short, it is a deeply moving book which may reveal to you the core of your secret heart during that first year of motherhood.

My husband and I don’t typically fight but this year has brought several merciless arguments, many of them ending (or beginning) with my husband saying, “I know how you feel” (and he has every right to believe this as he has been an excellent provider of care for our son and has suffered exhaustion and has experienced the deep love) and with me saying, “No, you don’t.”

I keep trying to explain how I feel to my husband but cannot find the words and it seems I don’t have to now because Rachel Cusk has found them for me. The fear, the loneliness, the exhaustion. The desire to escape, to find the lost self. And above and beyond all, the exquisite, blinding, all-encompassing love for this being who once shared your body and forever more seeks independence, as you seek reconnection.

Simply put, Cusk is fearless in her examination of motherhood.

Here, at the end of the book when Cusk witnesses a new mother with her own mother in a shop, she encapsulates so beautifully, how I feel, or rather, how I have felt:

“She can’t bear something to go unresolved, unfinished, for she fears that nothing will ever be resolved again. She’s trying to keep up, to stay in time, but she’s swimming against a powerful current. I see her steal looks at her mother, brimming with longing and confusion and hurt. After all these years she has discovered her mother’s secret and it is somehow disappointing, a let-down, for she is in those first days of her parturition both mother and child, and the passionate emotion she feels for her vulnerable self finds no reflection in her own mother’s disapproval, her compassionless urge to dispute. Years of human politics have adhered to her mother’s heart: they hang from it like stalectites, like moss. Her own heart is new, raw, frantically pulsing. Will time turn it, too, unfeeling?

The baby cries and cries; and it is all I can do not to lift it from its stroller and hold its small, frightened body close against my chest, hold it and hold it until it stops, so certain am I that it would, that it would know that I knew, and be consoled.”

Cusk is funny, smart. Her views may shock you if you are not used to honesty. At its core, you will probably see what I saw as I read, that this is a woman who deeply loves her children and who understands how we become a mother to the world when we become a mother.

With that, I say thank you very much for writing this book, Rachel Cusk, and thank you very much for giving it to me, Katrina Denza.

Famous Builder, by Paul Lisicky

14 Apr

If I press a book into your hand and beg you to read it, you will know that I am doing so because I love the book and I want to share that love with you. When you examine the beloved book, you will note how many pages I’ve dog eared. The more dog ears, the deeper my love.

Paul Lisicky’s gorgeous, tender book of essays, Famous Builder, has a dog ear about every other page. I loved it that much.

If you start off your book, very first thing, having to spell your name in a classroom–you’ve got me. Right there. Welcome to every first day of my life.

But then if you carry on with wonderful, evocative, empathetic renderings of your family and childhood neighbors and relatives (Mrs. Fox! I picture her as Anne Bancroft playing Mrs. Robinson) and your own place within this world and your own childhood longings (to become a famous builder of all the wondrous and geeky things), you’ve got me even further.

Lisicky pages through his life and opens old wounds and examines them, but never once paints himself or his family the victim. His parents are human beings and he is a son who tries hard and sometimes fails and sometimes lets go. He is a son who yearns, just as they want him to yearn.

While this is partly a book of coming of age, mostly this is a book of home, and what Lisicky (and his brothers) knows is that home is moving away from you just as you know it is there–home could be a department store on its way out or waterfront homes built on dredge and fill or a hotel room.

Home is in the moment:

“I turn back toward the room. If it were mine to do such a thing, I’d secure this moment with the heaviest anchor: Arden taking up all the space he needs; Beau resting a thick paw on Mark’s forearm; Mark touching my leg as I walk by, just to let me know he’s thinking of me.”

A beautiful, touching book. Read it.

Notable Books of the Year

25 Nov

How many of the NYT 100 notable books have you read?

Me: I’m reading Bridge of Sighs, I’ve read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, next up I will read Out Stealing Horses: A Novel.

My own notable books of the year list includes: Famous Fathers and Other Stories and God Is Dead.

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