Irreplaceable, a Novel by Stephen Lovely

Have you signed the organ donor form on the back of your license? I couldn't even tell you if I have or not. I've thought about it many times, but shy away from taking that step when I envision scalpels cutting into my comatose body while my family cries at my bedside. After I write this review, I'm going to go make sure I signed the form because I believe that my useless organs should go to help someone who needs them. But thinking about such a scenario is so hard that I've most likely avoided committing to it until now.

Reading Irreplaceable has spurred me to act. Stephen Lovely's novel, Irreplaceable, takes the reader deep into the aftermath of organ donation. The novel opens with a young woman enjoying a vigorous bike ride, looking forward to getting home to her husband. She never makes it home as she is run over by an SUV at the crest of a hill. Although she was only in the book for a few pages, her vitality as she pumps the pedals of the bike remained with me until the last page.

The rest of the novel follows the lives of everyone the accident touched: Isabel's husband, her mother, but also the family of the woman who received Isabel's heart. Nothing is black and white in Irreplaceable. The grief of Isabel's relatives is counter-balanced by the desperation of Janet's death-sentence if she did not receive that heart.

The situation is so tragic that it is sometimes difficult to keep on reading Irreplaceable. This is a book that really made me think and appreciate my good health. I'm very glad I read it.

Kelly Corrigan, Great Writer, Inspirational Speaker

Tonight I attended an incredibly inspirational event with Kelly Corrigan, author of the Middle Place. I read and reviewed the Middle Place a year ago, before it was so popular, before it was on the NY Times non-fiction bestseller list. I loved the Middle Place. Although the topic sounds grim, a memoir where both the author and her father are battling cancer, the book is actually full of hope and life.

Kelly Corrigan in person is just like she writes. Honest, down to earth, funny and incredibly likeable. She read two chapters from the Middle Place and it made me want to run home and read it all over again. Although I remembered how moved I was by it, I had forgotten how incredibly well written I found it, and how amazing Corrigan is at painting the details.

What I most enjoyed about tonight was hearing about Corrigan's process and how the Middle Place came to be. When she was diagnosed, she started writing essays about her cancer. She shared them online at Circus of Cancer and was encouraged by the response. Her sister in law really pushed her to turn them into a book. Corrigan never thought it would be published, and certainly never imagined that it would reach the NY Times Bestseller list.

I walked up to her after her speech and asked her how she is able to write so honestly, how is she able to put aside her fear of offending people. She answered that the only reason she was able to do it for the first book was that she never thought it would be published and that she's now really struggling with that fear with her second book. She added, "that's why I don't feel like a real writer."

I was amazed that someone who writes so incredibly beautifully, someone whose book has become so popular on its own merit, from word of mouth, can still so clearly be plagued with self-doubt. Her honesty made made me realize that success is within all our grasps, and that even when we're at the top of our game, we'll still feel very vulnerable.

The trick is to start writing, and keep writing. Who knows where it could lead?

Who By Fire by Diana Spechler Book Review

The novel Who By Fire by Diana Spechler is a beautifully told story of a broken family struggling to come to terms with a horrible tragedy from fifteen years earlier. The story is told in three voices: a mother and her grown son and daughter who are all dealing with the abduction of their other sister. Each deals with his or her guilt differently. Bits, the daughter, turned to casual sex at a young age to fill the void of her loss. Ash, the son, jumped into one extreme lifestyle after another until finally deciding to move to Israel to become an Orthodox Jew. Their mother, Ellie, spends her time faulting her children for not being Alanna, her kidnapped daughter.

Although Who By Fire sounds extremely depressing, it is actually a very human book, with a heart-warming message about the endurance of family bonds in the face of adversity. Each chapter is told from a different viewpoint, really giving a great sense of the three main characters and of how complicated love and family can be. I particularly enjoyed the Ash/Asher chapters as I learned so much about life in a yeshiva in Israel. I wasn't surprised to read, after I finished, how much work Spechler had put into researching Yeshiva life as it really showed.

I was completely hooked by Who by Fire from start to finish. I cared deeply about the well-crafted characters and read feverishly to discover whether Ash would remain in Israel and whether this family would heal. I recommend this book if you're interested in learning more about Hassidism and Orthodox Judaism but also if you enjoy books about family.

The Paradoxes of Caring by Joyce Hinnefeld

I just reviewed In Hovering Flight by Joyce Hinnefeld over at Chefdruck Musings. Here is an essay she wrote, entitled Paradoxes of Caring, about her thoughts on the book.
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The Paradoxes of Caring

A brief piece in the November 21 issue of The Week describes my novel In Hovering Flight as, among other things, a consideration of “the paradoxes of caring.” The more I’ve thought about that phrase the more apt it’s come to seem to me.

Addie and Tom, two of the novel’s central characters, care passionately about birds and about the natural world, and also about the work they do in connection with this passion for the environment—Tom as an ornithologist, Addie as a bird artist and, eventually, an environmental activist. They also care deeply about their daughter Scarlet, the book’s other important character. For Tom, there’s a healthy balance and a meaningful connection between his various loves. But for Addie, the people and things she cares about often seem at war with one another. When Scarlet is a baby, Addie finds it nearly impossible to get to her blind in the woods and sketch, much less do any painting. When Scarlet is older and more independent, Addie’s despair over overdevelopment and environmental degradation often pulls her away from her work. Later, her own declining health interferes. So there’s one paradox of caring: for the mother in this book, the various people and things she cares about seem to interfere with this other important thing, her work as an artist.

When I began thinking about what I might say about motherhood and the writing of In Hovering Flight, I thought, initially, that I would write about that term “hovering” in the title. “In hovering flight” is actually a phrase from Roger Tory Peterson’s description of the song of the bobolink in the fifth edition of his Birds of Eastern and Central North America (“Song, in hovering flight and quivering descent, ecstatic and bubbling, starting with low, reedy notes and rollicking upward”); these are lines that Scarlet, who grows up to be a poet, uses when she tries to convince her father that words are necessary to capture the beauty of bird song. But these days the term “hovering” is being used in another context, to refer to the overly protective (and damaging) involvement of so-called “helicopter parents.” In a review in the November 17 New Yorker Joan Acocella discusses several recent books on “the rise of overparenting”—or, “hothouse parenting,” or “death-grip parenting,” or, in Acocella’s terms, “hovering parenting.”

Isn’t it ironic, I imagined writing as I reflected on motherhood and my novel, that that word “hovering” appears in the title of my novel, where I deliberately set out to portray two parents who are the antithesis of smothering, overprotective parents. As an adult, Scarlet sees the debt she owes her parents, who have taught her to love and value her work, however little the world might value it—an important lesson for a young woman who aspires to a life as a poet. She describes a childhood and early adolescence of warmth and freedom, “everything as safe and sure as Eden.” And when she is ready to leave the nest, she flies north, to Maine, with the confidence that, surely, only a child of hands-off, anti-hovering parents like Addie and Tom could possess.

But of course that’s only telling part of the story. Actually, Scarlet leaves home before she has finished school, choosing to spend her last year of high school at the home of her parents’ friend Cora—away from her mother’s despair over her work and over the planet’s decline, and also away from Addie’s increasingly public activism. And here I can see something else in what I was doing, in writing about Scarlet and Addie: I was exploring the possibility that a mother’s passion for her own work, or a mother’s own passions in general, might eventually alienate her from her own child.

My daughter Anna was three when I began working in earnest on In Hovering Flight. She was, in very real ways, my inspiration for the young Scarlet, and my memories of the elation, and also the profound exhaustion, that I felt during her first months were still vivid, and so shaped my writing about Addie’s first months with baby Scarlet. What I didn’t completely own up to in my initial thinking about this piece were the ways in which In Hovering Flight enacts my own personal paradox of caring: for my family (my daughter and husband, and now too my own aging parents), for my teaching, for my work as a writer. The effort to balance all of these is my struggle—and, I know, also my gift—every day. I hope for the ability to hold all of this together as gracefully as writer Scott Russell Sanders, who says in an interview published in the September 2008 Writer’s Chronicle

Like any writer, I struggle to preserve the mental space necessary for creative work. But I’m not willing to abandon the students and others who depend on me, I’m not willing to exploit my friends, and I’m not willing to sacrifice the people I love in order to produce a more nearly perfect book. So I go on struggling to make my imperfect art in the midst of relationships and responsibilities.

The Quakers say that work is love made visible. That’s what I wanted to give to all my characters: work that, for them, is their love, their deep caring—for life, for the planet, for one another—made visible. But I realize now that in having Addie struggle, and at certain points fail, in the effort to resolve the paradoxes of caring, I was being a bit more realistic. When you care that much, and for that many, it isn’t going to be easy—for you or for the ones you love.

Joyce Hinnefeld

Dough - A Book Review

Dough is an entertaining memoir by Mort Zacher about coming to terms with your family's eccentricities. Zachter grew up poor in the shadow of his uncles' Lower East Side bakery. It's only as an adult, when he's settling his uncle's financial affairs before committing him to a hospice, that he discovers they were actually very rich.

Dough opens with a photo essay of the two uncles standing in the bakery, a picture where his mother is tell-talingly missing. The memoir alternates between chapters about the author's youth and adulthood. Zachter comes to terms with his bitterness about his impoverished childhood as the book progresses. He lived in a tiny apartment, sleeping on a banquette with his head touching the refrigerator. A buffet meal at a kosher cafeteria was a major affair for his family. He never understood his family's obsessive hoarding, even at his expense, their only offspring.

Because of the title, I expected Dough to be a food memoir, but I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. I loved learning about life on the Lower East Side, but I also really enjoyed the author's reflections on family life and how expressively he wrote about the process of forgiving his uncles.

Book Review - the Nineteenth Wife by David Ebershoff

When I heard about The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff, I was immediately desperate to get my hands on a copy.  I love historical fiction and have a strange fascination with polygamy and other cults.  As soon as it arrived, I sat down to read it cover to cover.   It did not disappoint.

This novel weaves the stories of two women, both the 19th wives of polygamists, and paints a thorough and captivating portrait of plural marriage from its inception in the 1830s to its current existence with fringe groups.  The first 19th wife is Ann Eliza Young, Brigham Young's wife who divorced him and campaigned tirelessly on the lecture circuit to educate America about polygamy.  She was instrumental in convincing Congress to outlaw the practice and forcing the Mormons to renounce it.  Ebershoff fictionalizes her story but also references diverse original sources to bring to life Brigham Young, Ann Eliza Young, her parents and siblings.  The details about life on the frontier as well as the dialogue are authentic and intriguing. 

The other 19th wife's story is radically different from Ann Eliza Young's, and reveals how far from grace plural marriage has fallen.   It is really a murder mystery tale, told through the eyes of Jordan Scott, the wife's outcast gay son.  He is researching the Mesadale Firsts community (fictional but inspired on communities such as the one led by Warren Jeffs) to free his mother from being unjustly convicted of killing his father.  The contrast between the struggles of the Mormon pioneers with their hand-drawn cart journeys to Utah with the present-day Internet and IM technology used by the men of Mesadale to recruit new wives is striking.  Regardless of the advances of technology, however, the hardships of plural marriage to the wives and children remain unchanged.

Ebershoff condemns the practice thoroughly, but he does a great job of showing the fears and beliefs that drive women to choose being a plural wife.  The chapter when he describes Ann Eliza's parents' struggle with Joseph Smith's commandment to embrace polygamy is especially poignant.  It is her mother who tearfully ends up forcing her husband to take on a second wife, in fear of not being with him in heaven.  Once convinced, the husband fully embraced it, taking on multiple wives, and the ensuing strife destroyed their marriage.

Ann Eliza's character is a little murky, one of the hazards of using such a controversial historical figure.  It is hard to believe that she is much of a victim after three failed marriages under her belt in her life.  She is a good illustration of how high and low you could be in early Mormon culture as well as how much women were forced to rely on their own means to provide for themselves.  

The modern sections of the novel do the best job of showing the true victims of "celestial marriage": the children.  Jordan's descriptions of their home life really illustrates their plight: "We slept in triple-decker bunks; or five to a bed, head to foot; or on the couch, four boys elbowing over three cushions; or on the living room floor, on blankets and pillows, twenty kids laid down like tiles.  Shirts and sweaters in plastic garbage bins labelled by size.  Shoes handed down.  Tennis balls and kickballs handed down from one kid to the next.  The only thing in that house that was all my own, that I never had to share with anyone, was a drawer in my dresser, twelve inches wide by fifteen inches deep...  If you're bad at math, that's 1.25 square feet, which was really more than I needed because I didn't have anything to keep inside."

The novel ends on a mixed note.  The 1800s story concludes with the Latter Day Saints renouncing polygamy.  The current day story concludes with Jordan's mother being freed after another killer confesses, but she elects to return to the compound.  Her fear of hell is stronger than a desire to escape a harsh life as a cast-off widow.  The Nineteenth Wife is a thought-provoking expose of polygamy's evolution in America and its presence today.  It's particularly relevant considering all the recent news coverage, but it's also a wonderfully written and captivating novel.

Miracle

Tonight's Sunday Scribblings prompt is Miracle. It inspired this little fiction tale...

It was going to take a miracle. Nothing short of a miracle would solve the unholy mess that she was in. Jane stared at the screen of her cellphone, wishing desperately that the words picture sent would magically disappear, but she knew that even if she pressed clear and made them disappear, it still wouldn't undo her mistake. Why did Verizon make it so easy to hit send?

She and Brandi had just been messing around, killing time during yet another boring Saturday afternoon in Wichita. They were both broke, having already burned through their monthly allowance: Jane on a killer studded jeans skirt and Brandi on a hot tattoo of cool looking Asian symbols.

They'd decided to go to the mall anyway, it was either that or hanging out in the parking lot at the Circle K. The busy mall was marginally less depressing, even when they couldn't do anything other than window shop. Brandi sometimes stole little things from stores, but Jane never got off on that like Brandi. The last time she'd stole a lip gloss from Rite Aid, she'd felt so guilty about it that she'd actually gone back the next day to put it back. The clerk had stared at her the whole time and she'd almost gotten caught, proof of what a total loser she was, probably the only idiot in the world to get caught returning stolen loot.

They'd ended up in Victoria's Secret, laughing at the skanky lace lingerie displayed in the candy pink store. A snooty saleslady, trying to scare them off, had asked them if they needed any help. Jane had bit her tongue hard to keep from laughing out loud when Brandi had looked her straight in the eyes and asked for her help to pick out something special for the two of them for their wedding night. That snooty lady looked so disgusted but the potential of a commission was too sweet to give in to her homophobic fears.

Jane wasn't too homophobic herself, but she definitely wasn't a lesbian, still she enjoyed a good prank so she went along with Brandi's joke. Next thing she knew, they were naked in a dressing room, putting on matching pink see-through camisoles and posing for the camera. They were laughing so hard that tears were streaming down their faces. It was amazing that they'd been able to even take the picture, but they unfortunately had. Then they took a whole bunch more, pretending to be lesbian lovers. They sat on the floor, among all the discarded outfits, with the frigid and annoyed saleslady right outside the door and reviewed their photoshoot. It was during their next laugh attack that she had hit clicked "yes" to the send to all command.

Now she was going to have a lot of explaining to do at Thanksgiving sitting around the table with her grandmother and her aunts. She would never be able to look her cousins in the face again after they saw that picture. She prayed that no one would be cruel enough to put it out on the Internet or she might actually have to become a lesbian because no guy would ever date her again.