At the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown, my 22 year old daughter moved in with me. I was in a sunny flat near Hampstead Heath in London, and she wasAt the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown, my 22 year old daughter moved in with me. I was in a sunny flat near Hampstead Heath in London, and she was in her fourth year of vet school and living in a shared house with five other students in a boring commuter town in Hertfordshire. She ended up staying with me for 18 months, on and off, and I look back on that time now and think of it as a great gift. Just at the time she was moving away from me - physically and emotionally - I was granted privileged access to her life again. Our lives were intertwined as they hadn’t been, really, since she was a small child and I was the most important person in her life and the undisputed source of food, comfort and company. So when Lara Nelson - the 57 year old protagonist of this novel, and the mother of three young adult daughters - says that “this unparalleled disaster” is also “the happiest time of my life,” I understand exactly what she means.
It’s not that I’m unaware of the suffering and the soon-to-be-more suffering in the world, it’s that I know the suffering exists beside wet grass and a bright blue sky recently scrubbed by rain. The beauty and the suffering are equally true.
The entire narrative of this novel hinges on the pandemic and what it makes possible; in this case, an opportunity for gradual, uninterrupted storytelling. The setting is a cherry orchard in Michigan owned by Lara and Joe Nelson. It has been in the Nelson family for generations, and like all family farms, its history has been a fragile and precarious one. The sweet cherries are ripe and ready for picking, and in this particular season there is only the family of five to do the harvesting.
As a way of passing the time - or rather, the tediously long days picking cherries - Lara begins to tell her daughters the story of her career as an actress. At first the girls are really only interested in their mother’s summer affair with Peter Duke - a man who ends up becoming one of the lead actors of his generation - but as Lara’s story unspools, they begin to realise how little they have actually known or understood about their mother, and, indeed, their father, too.
At first this narrative device seemed a bit artificial to me, but I soon became comfortable with the alternating rhythm between present and past. The book starts off a bit slowly - with a long description of how Lara first became “Emily” (what turns out to be her signature role) in a high school production of Our Town - but after the first 20 or 30 pages I was so engrossed in the book that I finished it within a day. Of course I don’t always have days (or Friday nights) which are entirely free for reading binges, but even so, it’s been a long time since I’ve polished off a novel in one sitting.
I have begun this review by describing how the story resonated with my own pandemic lockdown experience, but I think that there are several other important resonances that many (if not most) readers will identify with. How many children have wondered about their parents’ former lives, but only after it is too late to ask the questions and get the story? How many lives have come to a crucial divergence in terms of “roads” to take, and that choice (to quote Frost) has made all the difference? Lara tells much, if not all, of her own back story to her daughters, and at least some of the suspense and drama is not just in how she gets from up-and-coming actress to mother living on a cherry farm, but also how she ultimately feels about her own story....more
”One reason I’ve hung on to book selling it that it’s progressive - the opposite of writing, pretty much. Eventually all novelists, if they persist
”One reason I’ve hung on to book selling it that it’s progressive - the opposite of writing, pretty much. Eventually all novelists, if they persist too long, get worse. No reason to name names, since no one is spared. Writing great fiction involves some combination of energy and imagination that cannot be energised or realised forever. Strong talents can simply exhaust their gift, and they do.
Book selling, though, being based on acquired knowledge, is progressive. At least, that seems to be the case with the great dealers. The longer they deal and the more they know, the better books they handle.”
I think the love of reading - of books, even - is general enough to not be considered as a specialist subject. This memoir, despite its title, is far more than that, though. McMurtry writes of something far more specialised and rarefied: the life of a dedicated book buyer and seller. Being an antiquarian bookseller - or “bookman,” which is the term that McMurtry prefers - is clearly more of an identity than a profession, although it is that, too. McMurtry became a “book scout” when he was a college student in the 1950s and he remained a dedicated book buyer and seller until his death in 2021. If nothing else, this account of a life dedicated to the book business should convince you that it is a venerable profession - and one that manages to endure despite the many changes in the book selling business (not to mention reading practice) over the years.
Although McMurtry was fairly well-known as a bookseller - at least within the bookstore world - he was much better known as the writer of more than 30 books, at least five of which became successful films. After reading this bookish “memoir,” I was astounded at the energy of the man. In essence, he managed to conduct what most other normal humans would regard to be three separate careers: as a bookseller, as a writer, and not least of all, as a reader. Yes, I would count “reader” as a career of sorts - at least the way that McMurtry did it, and certainly because of the way it enriched and informed his other two professions. Indeed, he claims - in this memoir - that “book selling way mainly a way to finance my reading.”
Although there is something of a narrative arc in the sense that the book’s short anecdotal chapters progress in chronological order, it does mostly consist of vignettes about different books, bookshops, book dealers and book transactions. (I wonder if he kept detailed notes of the above; if not, his memory is formidable!) I would say, therefore, that the book’s contents are highly specialised in terms of interest. In other words, this book is certainly not for everyone. For me, though - also a reader, writer and book buyer, albeit of the most amateurish kind, and a big Larry McMurtry fan to boot - this memoir had a definite charm, and an enjoyable poignance, too.
This memoir was published in 2008, so to read it after McMurtry’s death does rather underline the point he makes at the end of the book when he details all of the defunct bookshops whose collections he absorbed into his own. In fact, as soon as I finished reading this book I started an Internet search on what happened to McMurtry’s own personal library, not to mention his vast professional one, after his death. So much of this book is a story of the ebb and flow of books, as if every reader and book buyer was connected by some great ever-flowing river. If you are the sort of reader who also cares about the provenance of the book - its own personal story, its history and ownership - then perhaps this memoir is for you.
”As workers in an ancient trade we feel, with Whitman, part of all that we have met; and those that we have met in book selling are part of us in the most tangible of ways: their books, though in diminishing numbers (we hope), remain on our shelves.
We feel Booked Up to be a kind of anthology of bookshops past - or, that is, past and ongoing.”
I read this book on the basis of Brene Brown’s recommendation. It was referenced in either Atlas of the Heart or The Gifts of Imperfection. I wasn’t sI read this book on the basis of Brene Brown’s recommendation. It was referenced in either Atlas of the Heart or The Gifts of Imperfection. I wasn’t sure of it at first, and I certainly listened to it in a slow, halting fashion over several months, but I gradually concluded that it had something of value to share with me. If you are a person who is inclined to perfectionism - if you are overly hard on yourself for “mistakes” or less than impeccable behaviour, or if you have a tendency towards negative self-talk -I would urge you to consider the idea of self-compassion.
Neff is an academic at the University of Texas in Austin but this book is grounded as much in personal story-telling as it is in research. At times, I wondered if the book was too rooted in Neff’s own experiences, but over and over again she emphasises that there is no compassion without the idea of common humanity. This awareness, along with self-kindness and mindfulness, are what she identifies as the three core components of self-compassion.
One way I personally rate the value of books I read - particularly nonfiction books - is by how many notes I take on them during the reading process. Most of the notes from this book are “mindfulness” reminders and worth rereading on a regular basis. I offer up a few of them, just to give any potential readers a larger sense of the book’s content:
The key to self-compassion is not to deny suffering but to realise that it is perfectly normal.
Mantra for when negative thinking takes over: This is a moment of suffering. Suffering is a part of life. May I be kind to myself in this moment. May I give myself the compassion I need.
Rumination about the past leads to depression. Rumination about the future leads to anxiety. Thus, the importance of staying in the present moment.
Another statement that I wrote down is this: “Self-compassionate people are more oriented towards personal growth and balance.” It strikes me as being a useful guideline for considering if this book is for you or not. ...more
For years, if asked, I would say that Persuasion was my favourite Jane Austen novel. (In the early days o4.5 stars (The .5 is for sentimental reasons)
For years, if asked, I would say that Persuasion was my favourite Jane Austen novel. (In the early days of Bookstagram, it was a question that got asked a lot.)
There was something about the “second chance at love” story that completely captured my heart, and I appreciated the gentler tone and the underlying melancholy of Austen’s final novel. Of course, there was also Captain Wentworth’s famously romantic letter: “You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope.”
Perhaps I’ve read it too many times, or seen too many film adaptations, but on this latest rereading I felt like some of the juice had been sucked out of this beloved book. It just didn’t work on me the way it had done in the past. It’s clear to me now that the comic (and comic grotesque) characters are really not of the same standard as those in Pride and Prejudice or even Sense and Sensibility. It seems slighter in every way, although I did enjoy the way that Austen inserted her knowledge of the British Navy into the plot - and perhaps even her own wistful longings?
It’s still a lovely book - and an enjoyable comfort read - but I don’t think that I will continue to think of it as the best of Austen’s books. ...more
I’ve been avoiding Joan Didion’s first novel, published when she was 29, for years. I finally succumbed: purchasing it from the City Lights Bookstore I’ve been avoiding Joan Didion’s first novel, published when she was 29, for years. I finally succumbed: purchasing it from the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco because I wanted a book with a California setting.
The blurb on the back claims that the story is a “razor-sharp commentary on the history of California” but I felt that was more than a tad hyperbolic. Yes, the book features land-owners of significant acreage who identify themselves as California pioneers, and yes there are some references to local politics (the book is set outside of Sacramento) and hops growing, but I don’t know that any of these details widened my understanding of California history. If you really want that sort of information, I would recommend Didion’s nonfiction book of essays Where I Was From to you.
More setting and atmosphere than plot, this book features sultry weather, a lot of bourbon drinking, uneasy family relations and the unhappy marriage of Everett and Lily McClellan. The two grew up side by side, not so much childhood companions as unavoidable features of each other’s scenery, due to both land and class. They elope when Lily is only 18, and they spend the rest of their marriage in a sort of mannered marital tango: Lily sleeps with other men, Everett is withdrawn until he becomes powerfully jealous, and neither can even imagine changing or withdrawing from their pattern.
It has the California noir atmosphere of a James Cain novel, and it begins with a murder, but there’s not really much mystery to it. Didion is already a decent stylist in this book, but for me it really lacked something. Lily seems to be based on the author herself - at least I imagined the young Joan Didion from the way she described her female protagonist - but it never seems to get much beyond (or below) the surface of its privileged, miserable characters.
I would recommend it for Didion enthusiasts, especially of the “completist” variety, but I would not put it in the hands of a reader who is new to Didion’s oeuvre. ...more
”You took care of your parent but you didn’t really take care of yourself. You were born with a good brain but you didn’t train it. Then one day yo
”You took care of your parent but you didn’t really take care of yourself. You were born with a good brain but you didn’t train it. Then one day you noticed that you were sixty-two and you and your good brain had spent a lifetime riding around in pickups, not thinking about much. You haven’t been to Egypt. You haven’t been anywhere. What you ended up with was hard work and family life. That’s enough for some people but I don’t think you really feel that it was enough for you, Duane.”
There was a silence.
“People who realise they had the capacity to do more than they’ve done usually feel cheated,” she said. “Even if they mainly have only themselves to blame, they still feel cheated when they come around a curve in the road and start thinking about the end of their life.
I think you feel profoundly cheated, Duane,” she added. Then she stopped.
I’ve not read all of Larry McMurtry’s novels, but I’ve read a large enough sample to feel comfortable in stating that there is never too much distance between the absurd and the profound in his writing. It’s either a skill, or a trait, or a tendency or a flaw of his work - depending on both the reader’s perspective and the balance of each individual book - but it’s something notable and consistent in his fictional point-of-view.
This is one of his more profound books, and all the better for it - at least in my humble opinion. In many ways, it follows the arc of a spiritual journey. I might even describe Duane Moore - a character that McMurtry first established in The Last Picture Show - as a sort of Siddhartha of the Texas Panhandle. He first renounces pickup trucks, and decides to walk everywhere, and his withdrawal from Thalia society and his own chaotic family life follows close on the heels of that initial decision. He engages in fasting and a retreat into the wilderness; he renunciates work and family responsibility; he creates a garden, and he cultivates the garden of his own mind. The entire book is really about Duane’s journey towards self-knowledge, but always lightened or skewed maybe by that characteristic Duane-ish self-deprecation and McMurtry-ish sense of the absurd.
I don’t think it’s necessary to know something of the two preceding Thalia novels - Thalia being the small town based on McMurtry’s own hometown of Archer City - but it is beneficial and probably more emotionally rewarding.
I would also add that it’s not necessary to be looking at the last third of your life when you read this book, but I suspect the book will speak to you more if that is the case.
4.5 stars For me, this novel sits pretty close to the best novels of McMurtry’s significant but admittedly uneven output. ...more
”The sadness of men, once it got into their eyes, affected her a lot, she sort of couldn’t bear it and would usually try and make it go away if the ci”The sadness of men, once it got into their eyes, affected her a lot, she sort of couldn’t bear it and would usually try and make it go away if the circumstances permitted her to, often they didn’t but sometimes they did, it was mainly a desire to kiss their sadness away that had caused her to bring so many of them home, a habit she knew Pepper didn’t appreciate but then Pepper wasn’t even old enough to notice the sadness in men or if she noticed she wasn’t too sympathetic.”
Set in 1980s Las Vegas, the protagonist of this novel is an ageing showgirl named Harmony. Harmony has a 16 year old daughter called Pepper, a gay best friend who is the dresser for the show, an eccentric neighbour named Maude and a history of bad boyfriends. She may not suffer from low self-esteem, but she certainly shows a complete lack of discrimination. Her only ambition seems to have been fulfilled the minute she left Tulsa and got hired on as a Tropicana showgirl.
Harmony is one of life’s natural optimists and she has the ability - some might call it obliviousness or cluelessness - to take both people and life’s challenges as they come. This attitude - along with a reputation for the best legs, breasts and face in Las Vegas - has served her well enough for a while, but her time is about to run out.
McMurtry claimed to have written this book in three weeks and it reads like an unfinished sketch. I read Terms of Endearment just after, and was struck by the notable difference in the quality of the two books. McMurtry is certainly capable of writing a good sentence, so I can only assume that this book’s predilection for comma splices, run-on sentences and sloppy diction was his attempt to capture Harmony’s “voice” - even though the novel is not narrated from a first-person point of view. I’m a huge fan of McMurtry’s work, but this voice never grabbed me.
There could have been an important conflict between Pepper’s rising star and her mother Harmony’s fading one, but the novel just creates the circumstances for the conflict without really exploring it - much less resolving it. It reads like half a story.
Colourful eccentrics are one of McMurtry’s stock-in-trades as a writer, but these are not his most winning or memorable. Perhaps the most interesting is the wealthy photographer who becomes enamoured with Pepper and wishes to marry her, but again, this plot point is introduced but never really developed.
Overall, this novel was a disappointment to me and I feel that 3 stars is an overly generous rating. I wouldn’t bother rereading it, although I would like to know what happens to Pepper. ...more
”It is one of history’s great ironies that one of the main reasons Mexico had encouraged Americans to settle in Texas in the 1820s and 1830s was becau”It is one of history’s great ironies that one of the main reasons Mexico had encouraged Americans to settle in Texas in the 1820s and 1830s was because they wanted a buffer against Comanches, a sort of insurance policy on their borderlands. In that sense, the Alamo, Goliad, San Jacinto, and the birth of the Texas republic were the product of a misguided scheme to stop the Comanches. No one knew this, either. Certainly not settlers like the Parkers who were, in effect, being offered up as meat for Comanche raiders.”
I don’t know if this is still the case, but when I was a child growing up in Texas in the 1970s, the Comanche Indians were still a byword for fierce, bloodthirsty and violent Native Americans. It had only been a hundred years since the Comanches had finally been subdued by the combined forces of the Army, the Texas Rangers and the encroachment of land-seeking settlers. Quanah Parker, the last Comanche leader, was also a household name - as was his mother Cynthia Ann Parker, a white woman who had been kidnapped by Comanche raiders when she was a child.
Author S.C. Gwynne features the fascinating stories of this mother and son pair as the narrative book-ends of this social history. When Cynthia Ann Parker was kidnapped in 1836, the various bands of the Comanches controlled a vast swathe of land (“Comancheria”) which included most of Texas, Oklahoma, parts of New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas. They moved swiftly and aggressively over huge tracts of land and their horsemanship was unmatched. They could seemingly melt away into landscapes that the settlers found both hostile and uninhabitable. Forty years later, the buffalo were gone and even the most remote Comanche hiding places had been discovered. Quanah Parker, the most notable of the last hold-outs, finally agreed to surrender and move his small band of survivors to the Reservation in Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
Colourful, informative and well-balanced, this book fills in the gap of those forty years and explains how the Comanche tribes rose to pre-eminence and were finally conquered. This is not a book of heroes and villains; Gwynne is neither proponent nor apologist for any side of this culture clash. He merely explains, in factually based story-telling, the violent struggle for control and dominion of the southwestern United States.
For me, this book filled in the gaps of some of the stories and legends I grew up with. Truly, this is a must-read for anyone interested in Texas history or the history of plains Indians. ...more
On the day Larry McMurtry died, the River Oaks Theatre on West Gray Street in Houston closed its doors for the last time.
The first sentence of Larry MOn the day Larry McMurtry died, the River Oaks Theatre on West Gray Street in Houston closed its doors for the last time.
The first sentence of Larry McMurtry: A Life felt almost too perfect, too apt, to be true, what with its The Last Picture Show overtones. The coincidence took on even more depth and resonance when biographer Tracy Daugherty revealed that the last film to be shown there was Nomadland. Daugherty points out that this film is a “latter-day Western” - the fictional/historical genre McMurtry was most associated with. Not only does this film and its “austere big-sky emptiness” correspond to the McMurtry settings - both personal and fictional - but it’s more than anything about loss and endless wanderings. Loss and wanderings: they crop up again and again in McMurtry’s work and they also form the pattern of his life, and not surprisingly, this biography.
”I’m drawn to stories of vanishing crafts . . . or trades,” McMurtry once said. “I’ve seen cowboying die, and also bookselling, to a large degree. And those things sadden me.
From the first, in McMurtry’s apprentice stories and poems, loss was the major theme of his writing. He began with elegy and ended there: the land that helped him was the essence of “American bleakness . . . empty socially, intellectually, culturally,” he said. It was a “place of unpeopled horizons.”
I came of age in the 1980s, when McMurtry was probably at the height of his fame - what with the huge successes of the film Terms of Endearment and the book Lonesome Dove. My literary crush got a bit more personal, though, when I moved to Houston to attend graduate school at Rice University in 1991. His book Moving On, inspired by his own graduate student years at Rice, was emotionally influential to me in a way that is indescribable - and it proved to have an enduring, nostalgic pull on my heart. McMurtry described Houston as his “first city;” and although mine was San Antonio, and perhaps also Austin, Houston was the city in which I became an adult.
Like McMurtry, I’m a native Texan who has always had an ambivalent relationship to Texas. We had the same kind of pioneering ancestors, and there’s no real reason - except maybe our bookishness - why we shouldn’t have been as rooted to the place as the majority of its proud inhabitants. Daugherty puts his finger on it when he says “what we think we most want to escape is inescapable.” Even though McMurtry knew many other cities well - for years he lived in Washington DC, and then Tucson, and he often travelled to New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco - he kept circling back to his hometown of Archer City, Texas. He could never hack it for long, but he couldn’t stay away from it either. Although my ties are looser, I’ve noticed that whenever I return to Texas for long periods of time I seem to visit (or revisit) Larry McMurtry’s writing. It feels like he is some kind of spirit of place guide for me.
I insert myself in this “review” in order to underline that I felt so in sync with its subject, so predisposed to be deeply interested in it, that I hardly noticed until I had finished how in sync the biographer Tracy Daugherty is as well. Daugherty was also “born and raised” in Texas and he seems to deeply understand everything about the Larry McMurtry idiom. His writing can go from folksy Texas-style humour to poetic elegy as easily as McMurtry’s does, and his previous biographical work on Texas writers like Donald Barthelme and and Billy Lee Brammer means that he has a richly detailed handle on the McMurtry milieu. I really felt like he “knew” and deeply understood his subject.
I would like to think, though, that this book would be a terrific read for all kinds of McMurtry fans - even the ones who have never sat in the River Oaks Theater or made the pilgrimage to Booked Up in Archer City. It’s fast-paced and full of colourful detail, gossip and anecdote. McMurtry’s restless wanderings and multi-hyphenate occupations - he was not only a writer of fiction, but also a prolific journalist, an Academy Award winning screenplay writer and a lifelong bookseller - meant that he had a foot in most of the entertainment worlds in the US. He knew lots of famous people, and carried on long romantic friendships with many celebrated women - Cybill Shepherd, Susan Sontag, Polly Platt and Diane Keaton, just to name a few. Not to overemphasise that aspect of McMurtry’s life or this biography, but he was an observer to a huge and interesting swathe of the cultural life of 20th century America.
The book-selling is a constant thread, just as it was in McMurtry’s life, but Daugherty wisely intersperses it with the people bit, the personality itself and the work. (McMurtry was famous for his work ethic and wrote 5-10 pages every morning of his life until he was quite ill and old.) Daugherty gives a really good sense of the books - and how they connected to the people and abiding concerns and obsessions of McMurtry’s life - without ever getting bogged down in comprehensive (not to mention boring) exposition.
McMurtry’s life was a rich mix of the high and the low: he was a huge proponent of the great European novels, but also knowledgeable about dime store novels and genre fiction. He loved Dr Peppers and Fritos, but he also had a huge appetite for caviar - which he ate in political salons in DC and fancy New York City restaurants. He could be a curmudgeon and a contrarian, but he was also described as a “merry companion” and a deeply affable man. He thought of himself as a solitary person, but he was deeply connected to many people - most of them women.
Daugherty has a lot of material to work with - there were 40 books, not to mention all of the other creative output - but he keeps it all moving and keeps connecting it back to the source. “Elegiac” is a word that he comes back to often, and although he is relating it to McMurtry’s life and work, it would serve equally well as a tribute to this American man of letters. He ends the book on an elegiac note, using McMurtry’s own words:
”The rules of happiness are as strict as the rules of sorrow; indeed perhaps more strict,” McMurtry had written. “The two states have different densities, I’ve come to think. The lives of happy people are dense with their own doings - crowded, active, thick - urban, I would almost say. But the sorrowing are nomads, on a plain with few landmarks and no boundaries; sorrow’s horizons are vague and its demands few . . . I lived on the plain.”...more
All book ratings have a subjective element to them, but this one is more subjective than most. It’s not so much that I think this is really a five staAll book ratings have a subjective element to them, but this one is more subjective than most. It’s not so much that I think this is really a five star book, but it is a five star book for me. Although I’ve read it at least twice before, those readings have predated my time on Goodreads: the first was, memorably, April in 1991 when I found my copy (now battered, and just barely holding together) at Half Price Books in Rice University Village on my reconnoiter trip to be an English literature student in the graduate school there. It was a lucky find, and even though it was set during the late 1960s - around the time of my birth, and 25 years previous to my own arrival in Houston - it seemed like a sign.
Described by one of its early readers as McMurtry’s “love letter to Rice graduate school,” (Larry McMurtry, Tracy Daugherty), it somehow managed to be romantic and nostalgic and bittersweet and I ate it up. Although the details of the plot might get foggy - after all, this is a 800 page whopper of a book which covers not just the English department at Rice, but marriage, parenthood, a Panhandle ranch, the rodeo circuit, Hollywood, and the counterculture scene of San Francisco, all amidst the turbulent backdrop of the 1960s - I never forget the protagonist Patsy Carpenter and all of her confusions and enthusiasms. I never forget the fact that she loves Tristram Shandy, a notoriously difficult 18th century novel that I also read while at Rice, and I never forget the first paragraph of the novel.
Patsy sat by herself at the beginning of the evening, eating a melted Hershey bar. She had been reading Catch-22 but remembered the Hershey and fished it out of the glove compartment, where it had been all day. It was too melted to be neatly handleable, so she laid the paperback on the car seat and avidly swiped the chocolate off the candy paper with two fingers. When the candy was gone, she dropped the sticky wrappers out the window and licked what was left of the chocolate off her fingers before picking up the book again.
Sometimes she ate casually and read avidly - other times she read casually and ate avidly.
There is a lot of detail in the this book and it doesn’t always or even often serve the plot. It offers what McMurtry himself described as “texture,” and either you are a reader who enjoys the texture of what was eaten, what was read, what was worn, what was listened to, how it all smelled, or you don’t. I do - and the lavish details of what Patsy is eating and reading particularly appeal to me. They make for what I think of a “cozy” atmosphere and they really anchor the setting of the book to a time and place. Perhaps I feel this all more keenly as a displaced Texan who once moved to Houston as an impressionable young woman and fell in love - not once, but twice - and then moved away, but forever remained nostalgic for that young, ripe time. I lived in the same neighbourhood as Patsy and her husband Jim and their best friends Emma and Flap Horton and every street name has resonance for me. The very fact that this time of life couldn’t last, and didn’t, adds to its poignance.
In a Preface to my edition of the novel, Larry McMurtry addresses the controversial fact that his heroine Patsy cries a lot. It’s true that she does cry a lot; her crying is an unignorable constant of the book, and it is sometimes annoying, but it doesn’t make me dislike the character or the book. McMurtry claims that the women in his life, at the time, were always crying and there is no reason to doubt him. I’ve known a few “copiously tearful young women” myself, and one of them is my daughter. Confusion, pain, frustration, anger, an excess of emotion in general - these emotions often find their outlet in tears, especially in young women.
Confusion and frustration are the emotional keynotes of Patsy’s life, although she is - and knows herself to be - fortunate and privileged in many ways. Patsy is an exceptionally bright young woman who often puts her husband Jim and the other male graduate students in the shade with her sharp memory and quick wits, but nothing much is expected of her other than being a young wife and mother and looking highly decorative. At the beginning of the novel she is trailing after her husband and whatever is his latest hobby; by the end, she is in charge of a household which includes her son Davey and her pregnant sister Miri and one feels that she beginning to discover what she might become.
I could write more about the political and social commentary that is in this book - the casual sexism and racism that was inescapable at the time - and perhaps I noticed it all more on this latest reading, but that is not what McMurtry puts in the foreground and that’s not what endures, for me, about the novel. It will forever be a sentimental favourite of mine. ...more
”She felt suddenly overwhelmingly alone, and this was absolutely fine and might only be a problem if you’d been anticipating something else.”
Marni
”She felt suddenly overwhelmingly alone, and this was absolutely fine and might only be a problem if you’d been anticipating something else.”
Marnie, a divorced 38 year old copy editor living in London, is reasonably attractive and funnier than average, but her world has gradually shrunk to the point where old friends have disappeared into marriage, parenthood and the suburbs, and she realises that she hasn’t added a new person to her camera roll in six years.
”But nobody took the lost friends’ places, and now she had revised her vision of the future to one of self-containment and independence, tea from a nice cup, word puzzles on her phone, control of the TV, her books, her bed.”
Michael, a 42 year old secondary school teacher, is neither married nor divorced. As he cannot bear to be in the two-bedroom terraced house abandoned by his wife, he spends a lot of time on long hikes.
”At home he was merely lonely. Stepping outside transformed loneliness to solitude, a far more dignified state because it was his choice. He imagined arriving on the slipway at Robin Hood’s Bay, trim and weather-beaten, dirty but cleansed, purged and transformed in ways he couldn’t quite define.”
Middle-aged romance? I’m here for it, especially with a writer who can write so compellingly (but not pathetically) about loneliness.
Nichols takes two lonely people, pairs them on a coast to coast hike through the Lake District , and then unfurls a plot-line which follows the up-and-down progress of their journey. They go in and out of emotional sync, there are misunderstandings and backtracking and lost chances and tragicomedy and lots of bad meals, and they gradually find themselves - if not exactly in a relationship - then hoping for one.
When Nichols is assessed as a writer, his skill with dialogue is what is always mentioned and praised - and that remains true in this novel, particularly in the case of Marnie, the female protagonist. She has command of the clever banter, but not just as a one-woman show-off. It’s her humour and cleverness which draws Michael out, and we get to observe his responsive progress from stiff pedantry to earnestness to something both more humorous and also more authentic.
”He missed her jokes, of course, and her conversation, the way she’d take a remark and play with it, examine it, hold it up to the light.”
After I finished this book, I spent some time mentally debating why this book would be described (and marketed) as contemporary fiction rather than romance. It does have a romantic/emotional arc to it, it could be described as a love story, but the emphasis is more on character development than emotional satisfaction and some readers may have a problem with that. It takes a long and frustrating while for these travellers to get to their destination and in fact it really IS about the journey....more
I felt rather exhausted after reading this biography of the life of Nancy Cunard. Just as the hectic, feverish world of 1920s Paris devolved3.5 stars
I felt rather exhausted after reading this biography of the life of Nancy Cunard. Just as the hectic, feverish world of 1920s Paris devolved into decadence and then Depression, so did Nancy’s glamorous life drag the reader through various dingy subplots before totally degenerating into a tragic spiral.
The subject’s “likability” really should not be the point, but such was my antipathy to Cunard, that I struggled to be as fascinated (never mind as “bewitched”) with her as her legions of admirers seemed to be. Chaotic, self-destructive, perpetually angry, restless, alcoholic, wildly promiscuous and selfish are just a short-list of the negative traits ascribed to her. Her more redeeming qualities - the generosity, the intelligence, the gift for friendship - were mentioned, but always eclipsed by her other impulses and appetites.
The only child of British aristocrat father and an American heiress mother who became one of the great society hostesses, Cunard was emotionally neglected in ways that no doubt helped form her character. Undoubtedly she was iconoclastic in many ways, and refused to play by the rules that governed the society she grew up in, but she also seemed to retain a peculiarly aristocratic arrogance all of her life. After abandoning London for Paris, Cunard mixed largely with writers, artists, musicians and intellectuals - and although she herself was a published writer, and the founder of a printing press called The Hours - an independent income (from both of her rich parents) meant that could thoroughly inhabit the bohemian 1920s world of Montparnasse and yet not be confined by it. She seemed to move, with imperious confidence, in a world of her own making.
I’ve only just finished the book, but most of the “Love Affairs” - usually with writers, and not lasting more than a year or two - are already half-forgotten. The one truly interesting thing about Nancy Cunard, though - at least to my mind - was her relationship with the African-American musician Henry Crowder. Although Crowder and other black musicians and performers were celebrated in 1920s Paris - and certainly found a refuge there from the overtly racist and segregated United States - it was still a boldly courageous action for a rich white woman to openly embrace an interracial relationship.
Early in the 1920s, Cunard became fascinated by African art and jewellery - her large collection of ivory bracelets were a defining part of her celebrated style - and what perhaps began as a fascination or aesthetic fad did seem to develop into a great passion and crusading cause. By her own estimation, the crowning achievement of her life was an Anthology titled Negro, which seemed to combine history and literature and social commentary, and featured many of the important African-American voices of the time period.
It’s a shame that the politically impassioned Nancy Cunard seemed like a minor character compared to the belligerent drunk, but sadly, all of her accomplishments and talents and relationships were ultimately destroyed by that fatal weakness. She didn’t leave the world any perfect Gatsbyesque novel, like her acquaintance F. Scott Fitzgerald, but she spoiled her life in much the same way. In this way, I suppose she is a fitting “icon” of the Jazz Age. ...more
This hilly region of duck farms and vineyards began to shimmer in my imagination like France’s Last Best Place, a kind of Brigadoon. The unabashedl
This hilly region of duck farms and vineyards began to shimmer in my imagination like France’s Last Best Place, a kind of Brigadoon. The unabashedly rich food, the long meals, the fanatical devotion to tradition, the indomitable joie de vivre - not only did these things intrigue me as a writer, but I began to believe they might be an excellent cure for some ills in my own culinary life.
This was the Gers, the most rural of France’s 101 departments, a place where ducks outnumbered people twenty to one. This was the verdant heart of Gascony.
Even though I have owned a home in the Gers for a few years now, I feel like I have only superficially sampled the local culinary culture in comparison to food writer David McAninch - who takes a deep dive into some of its most cherished rituals, complicated dishes and inner sanctum boozy socialising. I’m considerably less enamoured than McAninch with the large quantities of charcuterie, foie gras and duck fat that typify the Gascon cuisine, and nor do I have the constitution for the epic orgies of eating and drinking that McAninch describes. His descriptive powers are such that I felt overfull just from reading about it, but I did appreciate the privileged glimpse into the Gersoises cuisines _ a word that means “kitchen” in French, but also conveniently describes the food which comes out of those kitchens.
If you have no interest in French gastronomy, I would definitely not recommend this book to you. However, if you do, this is a wonderfully accessible example of one of the lesser-known regions of France. I can confirm, with McAninch, that foie gras is as ubiquitous here as potato chips would be in the United States.
McAninch has a real gift for describing the local inhabitants of Plaisance - the village in the Gers where he lives for 8 months - and his writing is self-deprecatingly humorous and easily digestible. Chapters read like short stories, each of them devoted to a special dish or aspect of the local food culture. I shared several stories from the book with a local Gers friend, and he corroborated the veracity of the author’s findings, even though some of them seemed outlandish to me. (I can definitely live without seeing a pig carved up, but my friend and McAninch highly recommend the experience as “unforgettable.”) My friend’s only quibble was with the inclusion of the rich peasant soup “garbure,” in the book. When I mentioned that I had never heard of it, or seen it on a menu, he sniffed and said that it really belonged to Les Landes (a neighbouring region) and not to the Gers at all. I’m certainly not qualified to comment on the matter, but I did appreciate the inclusion of this - and other - recipes at the end of the book. I might just try “Magret de Canard a l’Armagnac et aux Mures” some day, when my dinner guests are local and not British vegetarians.
In the past year, I’ve read a good many books that focus on issues of emotional and psychological health. Inevitably, there are some “messages” that gIn the past year, I’ve read a good many books that focus on issues of emotional and psychological health. Inevitably, there are some “messages” that get repeated over and over again; not because they are obvious and predictable, but because they have a deep truth to them. They have been borne out by lived experience or what might be described as empirical evidence.
In a large field, I think this book has two things going for it: first, it is organised in a clear way, and supported by equally clear illustrative examples; second, its author has a particularly appealing voice. At the venerable age of 102, and with 80 years of experience as a holistic doctor of medicine, Dr. Gladys McGarey has certainly acquired the gravitas and wisdom to be a life guide.
Although Dr. McGarey is American, and has spent most of her life practicing medicine in Arizona, she grew up in India where her parents were missionary doctors. Her unique perspective directly relates to this experience - not just because she grew up in a culture which didn’t separate the mind, body and spirit, but also because she was influenced by a mother who was completely self-actualised and happy in her own skin.
McGarey on her mother:
I thought about the way she managed to approach every situation with delight and humour. Even when she disagreed with something someone had said, she continued to be curious about the person and consider that perhaps he or she had something else of value to offer. She was wise in the particular way that people with deep self-love are: strong, yet flexible at the same time, like the bolts of soft silk I saw on our family trips to the market.
This book made me think a lot about self-love is, and why I have sometimes struggled with it.
One measure of how much I have liked a book - and learned from it - is how much of it I have highlighted and underlined. I don’t know why I have to remind myself of “truths” over and over again, but I do; and I have left a trail of ink in this book for future reference. ...more
She would like to assemble these multiple images of herself, separate and discordant, thread them together with the story of her existence, startin
She would like to assemble these multiple images of herself, separate and discordant, thread them together with the story of her existence, starting with her birth during World War II up until the present day. Therefore, an existence that is singular but also merged with the movements of a generation. Each time she begins, she meets the same obstacles: how to represent the passage of historical time, the changing of things, ideas, and manners, and the private life of this woman?
I have read and reread this novel, trying to get to grips with it. I didn’t “enjoy” it so much, and it certainly never captivated me in the emotional sense or compelled me with its narrative force, but it did interest me. It was my second Ernaux book; Shame being the first.
The book opens with a collection of images - some very personal, some more collective - that are housed in Ernaux’s mind. Because she is a generation older than I am, and French instead of American, the singularity of these images impressed itself upon me more than the collective aspect of them. What I did identify with, though, is the idea that I have my own private home movie of images that reoccur and are intermittently unspooling - images that have stuck for no particular reason that can be discerned - and that they are alive only as long as I am alive. “Everything will be erased in a second,” says Ernaux, and yet her images at least have been committed to this book.
I am an erratic keeper of journals and diaries, but I have certainly never written much about historical and political events much less pop culture. A large portion of the book is made up of this sort of content, and it’s “interesting” - like watching a documentary is interesting - but it doesn’t feel like anyone’s real emotional life, not even Ernaux’s. It doesn’t feel like content that anyone would actually write about it, unless they are self-consciously recording their own lives for posterity or literary experiment. I occasionally felt some personal interest in these details, but they mostly washed meaninglessly over me. Even though politics - or at least political policy - shapes the background that our lives play out against, can it ever feel anything but external? (To answer my own question: I don’t think so, unless one is unlucky enough to be trapped within a war zone.)
There were moments, though, when Ernaux described an aspect of her experience that chimed with my own and this was where I located the “universality” she seemed to be aiming for.
Ten years before, she lived there with her husband, two teenage sons, and sometimes her mother. She was the hub of a wheel that could not turn without her, the maker of all decisions, from washing the sheets to booking hotels for the holidays. Her husband is far away now, remarried with a new child. Her mother is dead and her sons lives elsewhere. Serenely she notes this dispossession as an inevitable part of her trajectory.
The word “elliptical” comes to mind. Helen Garner leaves an awful lot out of this book: for instance, introductions, segues, exposition, explanation, The word “elliptical” comes to mind. Helen Garner leaves an awful lot out of this book: for instance, introductions, segues, exposition, explanation, important details. And yet, there is enough - easily enough in only 158 uncrowded pages - to make an impact. Garner is definitely of the school of “showing” instead of “telling.”
There are four adults, three children and one on-the-cusp-of-adulthood adolescent. The adults - Dexter, Athena, Elizabeth and Philip - represent two different ways of being in relationship, or perhaps conducting one’s emotional life, but the drama and conflict happens when those drawn lines get entangled.
Dexter and Athena have a home and a family together. The home is messy, damaged and patched - but it has warmth and the comfort of ritual. It doesn’t quite have solidity; the house itself is always threatening to come apart. And it is too open as well; doors never locked, an outside loo, the constant intrusion of the neighbour’s chaotic and angry lives.
In the first paragraph of the novel, Garner describes a photograph of the poet Tennyson’s family group and it seems to act as symbol and foreshadowing both:
Dexter stuck this picture up on the kitchen wall, between the stove and the bathroom door. It is torn and stained, and coated with a sheen of splattered cooking grease. It has been there a long time. It is always peeling off, swinging sideways, dangling by one corner. But always, before it quite falls off the wall, someone saves it, someone sticks it back.
Elizabeth - the friend and roommate of Dexter’s university days - is Athena’s opposite. A stylish career woman, but all hard edges and lack of emotional commitment. She seems to lack moral integrity as well, as embodied in her casual and constant shoplifting. Elizabeth lives in a sort of modern warehouse that is not conducive to any kind of domestic life. When Elizabeth’s much younger sister Vicki comes to live with her, on the death of their mother, Vicki’s incredulous reaction is more revealing than pages of description might be:
There is a TV, a phone on the floor, a bed like a big pink cloud. Where does she cook? Where does she wash herself? Where will I sleep? Everybody needs a bed. There are no walls or rooms.
Unsurprisingly, Vicki gravitates to the emotional and physical force field of Athena and Dexter’s home. At first the attraction seems to be Athena, and it seems natural for VIcki to look for a mother replacement, or at least a more maternal older sister figure. Only after I finished the novel did I realise that Vicki is “playing house” in the role of disruptor; there’s no real tragedy or melodrama in it, though, except for, perhaps, Dexter’s own wounded sense of self.
This is a particularly earthy domestic novel, and the most memorable scene - for me - is the one in which Athena returns to her wrecked house and methodically and doggedly restores it back to order. This is what women are capable of doing, the author seems to say. Imperfect as they may be, mothers are still the fragile glue that that keeps a home (a family) bonded together. ...more
I first read this book in May 2022, not long after it was published, and just as the world was coming out of the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. I wasI first read this book in May 2022, not long after it was published, and just as the world was coming out of the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. I was helping my mother recuperate from brain surgery, and the ideas of “revival” and “courage” were especially appealing and necessary. I was a huge fan of Anne Lamott’s in the 1990s - when her sage, humorous advice on writing and parenting found parallels in my own interests and stage in life - but I lost touch with her ongoing output when I moved to England in 2006. So this book was an Anne Lamott revival for me, and I’ve read it at least three times in the past two years.
The book begins with Lamott’s musings on her late middle-aged marriage - her first marriage, in fact, and thus a significant commitment to trust, hopefulness and courage to make in the “set in one’s ways” 60s. She is self-deprecatingly honest about both the comforts and annoyances of living with your favourite person in the world, and I appreciate the way that she describes the constant battle between the petty, self-protective ego and the larger attempts towards love, acceptance and forgiveness.
Lamott never shies away from revealing her anxieties; indeed, they are the basis of her work. In this book, the things that are keeping her awake at night include global warming, the state of democracy in the US, social inequality, cancer, illness in general, and worries and children, grandchildren and dogs. I suspect that most of us have the majority of these on our worry list, but the whole point is how do we acknowledge and work with (or around) the troubles of modern human existence whilst at the same time not getting bogged down in them? How do we maintain trust, hopefulness and courage? Lamott has some ideas about that, and she shares them through a series of personal anecdotes, aphorisms and stories.
“Stories can be our most reliable medicine,” says Lamott in this book and she beautifully, compassionately and humorously illustrates that. Her books are worth re-reading, for my time and money, because, as she says: “We need the same message over and over again - we have to be reminded of it.”
I have many Anne Lamott quotes in my phone notes and I like to read them from time to time. On the subject of “time,” she writes:
“Forgiveness will take time. Time takes time. I hate this!”
(I hate this, too, Anne - and that’s why I find it such a comfort for you to point that out so I know that I’m not the only impatient one to want healing and want it NOW!)
This particular bit of salty wisdom and Lamott style Christianity kind of sums her up for me:
“The great prayer: Help me not be such an asshole.”
I really cannot think of another writer who is so willing to look at her own flaws and make a story out of them for her fond readers’ edification. ...more
Sylvia had been trying to get back for fifteen years, even since the Beach family had lived there
It was hard not to feel that Paris was the place.
Sylvia had been trying to get back for fifteen years, even since the Beach family had lived there when her father, Sylvester, was the pastor of the American Church in the Latin Quarter and she was a romantic teenager who couldn’t get enough of Balzac or cassoulet. What she remembered most about that time, what she’d carried in her heart when her family had to return to the United States, was the sense that the French capital was brighter than any other city she’d been in or could ever be in.
Like many people, I think that the storied (fabled, legendary) Shakespeare and Company bookshop is one of the best in the world. The location is charming, the book selection is excellent, but it’s that 100 year old history - starting with its first owner, Sylvia Beach and the “Lost Generation” writers who were her friends - which gives it that undeniable cachet and allure. I visited it in May 2024 - one of several visits I’ve made over the decades - and it’s as wonderful as ever. The last time I visited I bought a book about George Whitman, the second owner of the bookshop and the one who really made it what it is today - but on this visit, this book of historical fiction caught my fancy. I love reading “books on location,” so what could be more perfect?
Historical fiction can be a tricky genre to pull off, though, and I’m not sure that this author manages it. I hate to admit it, but I found the book rather dull. I kept asking myself why I felt like I was plodding through it. Was it the characters, the writing style, the pacing? What was missing for me? Even with all of the wonderful source material - James Joyce and the battle to get Ulysses published, Sylvia’s relationship with French bookshop owner and writer Adrienne Monnier, the famous writers that made the bookshop their home - the story really never catches fire. The character of Sylvia Beach dominates the book, but she feels more like an amalgamation of biographical “bits” - the smoking, the migraines, the solicitude to James Joyce, the constant fretting - than a fleshed-out character. I think the book is most thorough when it comes to Sylvia Beach’s complex friend/admirer/patron relationship with James Joyce, but Beach felt shadowy - like a minor character - when she should have been in the foreground as the protagonist. I realise that authors can err in imagining too much, especially when it comes to people whose lives are well-documented, but this felt like an overly cautious “paint by numbers” approach.
Perhaps it was Sylvia herself that was cautious - more of the reserved “librarian” type, rather than someone with “main character energy” - despite her many accomplishments. She is consistently portrayed as rather shy, diffident and lacking in confidence; she worries about not being “enough” for her partner Adrienne. Over and over again, we hear about how hard she works and how little she prioritises her own needs. Is it possible that Sylvia was a bit dull, or should I blame author Kerri Maher for that?
Early in the book, Sylvia is musing about the writers who have most inspired her - Walt Whitman, Kate Chopin, James Joyce - and she wonders how they “do it.” ”How do they reach inside me, put their fist around my very soul, and rattle it in its cage?”
There’s nothing obviously wrong with this book, and yet with so much predisposing me to like it, I just didn’t. Well, not much. I never really felt much of an emotional response to it at all, much less a soul-rattling.
Yesterday I was sitting outside of a cafe by a major London hospital. I was drinking a coffee and waiting for a friend to join me. Directly in front oYesterday I was sitting outside of a cafe by a major London hospital. I was drinking a coffee and waiting for a friend to join me. Directly in front of me were two young American woman - early 20s perhaps - who were beautiful and articulate and breezily confident in a way that led me to infer that they had been raised in privileged circumstances. I was trying to keep my head down and read my book, but unbeknownst to them, the majority of my attention kept being diverted by their conversation.
(Like Annie Ernaux, I’m always aware of the people around me and my head is full of snippets of conversation that I overhear and little moments that I glimpse as I move through my own days.)
My ears tuned in a bit more attentively when they started discussing Brexit. “Do you know anything about Brexit?” the quieter of the two young women asked her companion. She went on to explain what she had learned about its “causes” from a recent article that she had read. What struck me most of all is the manner in which the two women discussed a event which feels like recent and major event to me, but clearly had a less dramatic and far more “historical” (in the sense of distance) meaning for them. It suddenly occurred to me that 8 years have passed since the Brexit vote; not much in my life span, but a significant proportion of their much briefer lives. This small moment - clearly not meant for me, yet impacting me - stayed in my mind all day and sparked an interesting dinner conversation after the event.
In Exteriors, Annie Ernaux breaks away from her usual literary project - recording and analysing her own life - to act as a recording observer of the lives she observes as she goes about her most banal and daily business. She provides snippets of conversation and glimpses of the lives she encounters as she shops, commutes, and otherwise participates in the communal arena of a Parisian suburb.
Some of the snippets are fascinating, and none of them are entirely boring, but it is a debatable point whether this is a worthwhile literary exercise or the most basic sort of nonfiction writing. I think that I could do a credible job of debating on either side of the argument.
I would have liked, overall, more analysis - because it’s really the intersection between the events and Ernaux’s interpretation of them which is the most interesting.
”My reaction confirms a well-known truth: we believe, because we stop using them, that certain words have disappeared, or that poverty has ceased to exist now that we earn a living. Strangely enough, there exists another truth, the exact opposite: when we go to a town we left a long time ago, we imagine that the people there will still be the same, unchanged. Both laws rely on the same misconception of reality, the only reference being oneself: in the first case, we imagine everyone else has lived our life, while in the second, we long to recapture our past identity through people who are frozen in time, whose features are the same as when we last saw them.”...more
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