Texas and stereotypes and women and GAH

Book: How Perfect Is That

Author: Sarah Bird

Published: 2008 (Knopf)

Pages: 302

Strap in, y’all. This is a shouty one.

SARAH BIRD HOW FUCKING DARE YOU. How fucking dare she what? I’M SO GLAD YOU ASKED.

Her social-climbing protagonist bitches about climbing back to the top where she can by $5,000 and lord it over her old frienemies SO MUCH that by Chapter 2, I was actively routing for the IRS to haul her away. (THEY WERE NEVER MENTIONED AGAIN.)

She bitched so much about staying in the old “hippie” college dorm of hers that took her in FOR NO GOOD REASON AT ALL that I was actively routing for them to vote her out in their pretend-suspenseful House Vote of Doom while she sat there batting her fucking eyelashes and handing out fucking brownies so she could stay in the very place that she trashed.

She’s the one that gets everybody else in trouble through her own stupid fucking fault, yet they’re the ones that end up pitching in to her whacky scheme to save her own ass DOING THE EXACT SAME THINGS THAT GOT HER AND THEM SO DEEPLY IN TROUBLE IN THE FIRST PLACE.

AND IT WORKED.

*headdesk*

Unlikable (I mean I really, really hate her) protagonist. Relationships that make Jon and Garfield look like sophisticated colleagues. Leaps of logic that everyone should’ve poked SO MANY GODDAMN HOLES THROUGH, pretending There Is No Other Choice just because the author can’t think of any—all of these things make me angry, all of these things make me hate this book and groan about how many War and Peaces women are going to have to write to get beyond this prototypical “chick lit” that shits on every fun quirky instinct ladywriters have.

But—SARAH BIRD YOU ARE SO MUCH BETTER THAN THIS. Have you COMPLETELY LOST IT since The Yokota Officers’ Club? That remains one of the best, most complex yet typical families I’ve ever read about, with such a unique mouthpiece in Bertie and, more importantly, her younger sister who is a complete bitch yet ENTIRELY SYMPATHETIC AND HUMAN  that there is NO POSSIBLE WAY you wrote like this on accident.

This is a sick joke. I AM VERY DISAPPOINTED IN YOU, SARAH BIRD. DISHONOR ON YOU AND YOUR COW.  

Brothers and sisters

Book: The Sibling Effect: What the Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal About Us

Author: Jeffrey Kluger

Published: 2011 (Riverhead Books)

Pages: 295

At a business dinner the other week, the girl next to me kept saying, “You look really familiar…” until I found out where she works and blurted out, “OH if you work there, you probably know This Guy! I dated his brother for awhile.” (I still can’t hold my wine, okay?) She said she’d always wanted to meet This Guy’s brother because she’d heard they were completely different from each other.

And they WERE. I got a front seat to that shiznit, how even their hair grew in as opposite textures. Being a nosy only kid, I mentally recorded it all with a fascination that possibly prevented me from defending This Guy’s brother as much as I should’ve.

Turns out most of the sibling-ism people talk about have some sort of scientific, statistical basis, although whether or not the results come about because of actual biology or social conventions depends on which trait you’re looking at and when it becomes apparent in the kid’s development stages. First kids and only kids usually ARE worried about, doted on, and expected to make more of themselves because of simple resource allotment; they get first crack at Mom and Dad’s energy and sense of novelty and chance at putting away money for college. This usually DOES create type-A firsties, although this can jump to the girl in an otherwise all-boy family because she usually ends up shouldering the traditional gender role of caretaking unless she’s like ten years younger than everyone else. Behavior influences slide up AND down the line if the sibs are close enough in age.

Just all this cool stuff treated with the proper social science skepticism, sprinkled liberally with personal anecdotes of the author’s life growing up with three brothers and then a couple stepsisters on both sides. Holy shit, do the personal details get better exponentially. Kluger doesn’t bash you over the head with all of his problems at once; he slides them into perfect contexts that took me a beat to realize oh wait, those actually happened TO HIM. He’s so calm about it, but not unemotional.

It’s great! I got enough science to convince me I learned a bunch, with enough personal narration to satisfy the part of my brain that needs visible human figures at all times. A really excellent read. 

Reading Franzen

Book: How to Be Alone

Author: Jonathan Franzen

Published: 2002, 2003 (Picador)

Pages: 306

Franzen’s fiction is brutal. I remember reading The Corrections in—high school? No. Some summer I was home from college. It was a Nancy Carson Library copy, anyway, which meant I was in North Augusta-- and feeling just awful afterwards because I had spent I forget how many hundreds of pages in the presence of these people who were draw with all of their considerable flaws thrown in the glaring spotlight of a family uncoiling. I read Freedom about a year after it came out, too, experiencing the same thing only on an even more epic, and political, scale. Whew. That has been experienced and doesn’t have to be again.

But then I listened to the audio book version of Freedom. Twenty-five CDs for that motherfucker, and I was able to sort through his prose better, to start finding—hearing—the humanity under the surface. It was still hard and cynical, but in a way I could understand and relate to. In a way that made me understand his characters and respect their decisions a little bit more. Plus, this book’s title got my attention because I am terrible at being alone and so are all Franzen’s characters and that’s why they make some of their desperate choices that turn them into people they never planned to be.

So, 254 words into this review, I finally get to the actual essays in the book: They are golden. I came in with the opposite expectations I had for Zadie Smith, and while Franzen kept his authorial distance in his excellent investigative journalism (he goes back so far into the Chicago area post office for a story it’s like he’s doing a root canal), he was really insightful and intimate when he got personal. If he has any fiction written in first person, I want to read that to see if that would bring me into the fold like his essays about his family and his book club feud with Oprah did in this book.

What hit me as odd at the end of each section were the years in which they were written. The ‘90s, man. These essays have kept their flavor long enough for my younger cousins to grow taller than I am. It’s always cool, if a little exhausting, to work through an author like this.   

Naughty teacups

Book: Smut

Author: Alan Bennett

Published: 2010, 2011 (Forelake Ltd.)

Pages: 152

Huh.

That’s what I thought after I read this whole book in one sitting last Saturday when I was bored and depressed and anxious to go SOMEwhere without getting out of my bed. …Sort of my default setting to start a new book. If the book is good, I can breathe again. If the book is bad, I go to sleep at like 7pm to escape it all.

This one was made up of two stories about sex, each at the wee bare minimum of being a novella, both blunter than I thought they would be. Never trust a book jacket, kids. But they were good stories, especially the one about the old lady who earn money through pretending to be sick for medical students and then later taking on renters who suggested she watch them have sex in lieu of them paying rent. It wasn’t her idea to begin with but she ended up liking it, and her transition was about as unadorned as the first clause of this sentence. It was funny and odd and with a nice little setup but none of the faux-innocent sheen I was expecting that would’ve pushed it to unapologetically hilarious. It couldn’t decide whether it wanted me to feel uncomfortable or not.

That definitely colored the story about the young man whose worst kept secret was that he was gay. Everyone knew, even as he married a lady, but nobody told anyone else. Again, the transitions between his lives weren’t handled with any of the sort of delicacy that I imagine would be really important in the actual situations.

Neither of these stories is pure smut meant only for physical gratification, or completely high-minded lit fic that uses sad, desperate sex to teach Lessons About Life and Love. This book got me past my Saturday blues but it kept me unsettled.

…As do the teacups on the cover. I think they’re supposed to be fucking.

Me read more David Sedaris today.

Book: Me Talk Pretty One Day

Author: David Sedaris

Published: 2000 (Back Bay Books)

Pages: 272

My thoughts on David Sedaris will be explained through two recent, unrelated quotes.

“We have his books at the library,” said my boyfriend during a return trip to Barnes and Nobel. (Hello, my name is Melanie, and I’m addicted to ALL OF THE BOOKS.)

But if I buy them, I can keep his words close enough to reach for and curl up in like my college comforter whenever I need them. They are mine to soothe on demand for however long it takes me to wear out the spines, and then again however long it takes the duct tape that repaired the spines to wear out. And then I’ll just have to be extra careful when I get that special kind of depressed that well-written flippant humor can make better.

“Don’t worry so much, okay?” said a friend after we spent a lunch talking about life after college.

It’s good advice. I do anyway, and so does David Sedaris, and he’s so good at making light of it that it makes me laugh at the absurdity of all this worrying while recognizing and appreciating the solemn undertow that’ll drown us all if we think about it too much.

That is why I bought this book and have already devoured it and don’t regret it at all.

Chess press credentials

Book: Endgame: Bobby Fischer’s Remarkable Rise and Fall—from America’s Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness

Author: Frank Brady

Published: 2011 (Crown Publishers)

Pages: 328 (of biography)

All I learned from this book is that Bobby Fischer was kind of a snotty kid who grew up into a definitely obnoxious and for-absolutely-sure paranoid adult who was good at chess but bad with everything else in life. Like literally every other thing that makes a human being function in this world, he was terrible at.

And was he really that great at chess? Before I started reading, my answer would be duh, based on the fact that he’s the only chess player I have ever been able to name. But this record of his professional life whips his wins back and forth in a monotonous list of matches that makes his skills sound like they fluctuated on their own whims. I guess his losses were signs of growth, incredible leaps forward, and then signaled a not-so-slow-and-steady decline as he got older. I’m guessing, though, based on match recaps.

Brady claims he was a very close friend of Fischer’s through both of their lives, but the only time that comes through is when he relates a meeting in a restaurant about something so minor I’ve already forgotten what it was. I appreciate his objectivity in theory, but the worst time to practice discretion this much is when talking about a famous guy with whom you had an inside scoop. These are really bloodless anecdotes for someone claiming to be so close to the subject. I’m not talking about doing a smear job, just something with personal touch and the emotional authority that the chess press didn’t have access to.

Oh yeah, and there’s such a thing as the chess press. I had no idea. But they loved Bobby until he started crying conspiracy really loudly at the USSR and Jewish people. Understandable.

I wanted to meet Bobby Fischer the person and instead I met the chess player who doesn’t understand the concept of “dude, you get paid at least $1 million just for showing up.”

Feminism 101

Book: Reading Women: How the Greatest Books of Feminism Changed My Life


Author: Stephanie Staal


Published: 2011 (PublicAffairs)


Pages: 264


I finished this book about revisited feminism right before I unwrapped a new dress and pulled it on over tights to go over to my boyfriend's house. 

I spent the whole clothes time wondering who, exactly, was I wearing this for? Me? My boyfriend? Because I wanted him to think I looked cute? Because I wanted to look cute for myself? But what if looking cute for myself is subliminal code for looking cute in a way that he and society think look cute, so there's not actually any of me in this decision at all? ...How the hell am I ever supposed to know what's me and what's for him and what's Western societal pressure on the female bits of me?


Reading about feminism always makes me wonder that without giving me any answers. 


This book charts the experiences of a lady who revisits her Fem Text class at Bernard when her professional and family lives are doing that thing where they don't work together. Classic feminist dilemma that--say it with me now--she never thought would happen to her. 


And I loved reading about it. She writes in the perfect deft balance of understated confessional personal narrative and academic research. Her readings make her think about her real life and where she's at now in her real life makes her understand the readings in depths she couldn't get close to when she was a 20-year-old undergraduate immersed in an all-girl's college. And y'all, she's incredibly insightful about the vague, impractical, and hypocritical points of feminism while still being firmly in favor of the movement because, come on. Women are people too. 


She doesn't come to any more solid a conclusion than I ever do, though. She's glad she took the class during a whole new generation of thought, and she's glad it's made her appreciate how hard her life balance is and that it really might be worth it in the end, but she's not changing anything radical in her life because she read Vindication for the Rights of Woman again. I was sort of hoping there'd be an Awesome Gentlelady Who Doesn't Give a Fuck About Gender Roles No Seriously magic formula somewhere in there, but alas. 


Welp. I don't want to end on "alas" because I really liked this book, so I will tell you that after a good boyfriend visit I decided that I do dress for myself first but angle for outside appreciation. At least when I'm going out in public.