My five-year-old granddaughter wrote a book today. Twelve pages, she asked for a stapler to bind the pages together. On the last page she asked, “What you thank?” and drew lines under the question, telling her mom to write either Yes or No whether she liked it, leaving room for additional comments.
I know what she’s getting at. You work on a writing project, say a blog, and you hope first someone will read it, then that they will like what you wrote, preparing yourself as much for a negative response as a positive. A girl after my own heart, my granddaughter just wants feedback.
So, what you thank? Check Yes of No, and then offer some comments.
I had wondered throughout the story about the writer’s ability to recall so much detail of early childhood and to tell the story evenly from that childhood point of view beginning at age three. I had also wondered why a friend had given the book to me, eager for a response, as if anything I had endured could compare. No way.
I recognized the characters Jeannette Walls drew; I had heard firsthand most of the snide, denigrating remarks spoken to or about someone; I did have a similar pillar-to-post, wild ride for about 16 years during the same era in the same three states of my early childhood—Arizona, Nevada and California. But the differences struck me too.
First, she had two parents and I had only my mom after my dad died when I was nine. Secondly, she had three siblings who united with her to make a family that stayed together until one by one, they figured out they could leave. And then the siblings remained close in the sense that their memories bound them to one another in ways that ennobled them, each of them seeking to demonstrate love for their parents despite parental neglect bordering on abuse.
And then, perhaps most important, her dad loved her; he made her feel special.
The things I suffered as a child, I suffered alone. And that made the suffering acute. No reassuring voice from the lower bunk after my sister died the December she turned seven and I turned nine, just three months before my dad was killed. And though Mom tried in fits and starts to make a life for us both, she kept falling deeper into pits of her own tragic and twisted upbringing, or falling off the wagon—another of those expressions all too familiar.
Jeanette Walls did not offer a defense of her parents so much as an explanation of her own survival. When I look back, I expend emotional energy trying to exonerate my mom. Like Jeanette, I know the same self-recrimination for being ashamed of my mother.
Okay, so why did I like this book? It was painful to read. What struck me though was how life prepared the writer to tell the story. Each of Rex and Rose Mary’s four children dealt with their sorrow in different ways. Jeannette did the hard work of remembering.
Writing it out from experience rather than from an unbounded imagination can prove excruciating. I felt her pain.
When I finished the book, I didn’t cry because the writing was so beautiful.
The writing eclipsed the pathos. Her story rose above the perfect metaphor: turbulence in chaos theory.
I believe God is here, there and everywhere.
Books. Can’t read all of them. Can’t part with them either.
I thought as I moved books from my nightstand to the bookshelf, I could say a word about the book itself or its effect on me.
Carolyn Jourdan’s Heart in the Right Place came at the right time to meet my own anxieties about ambition and place. What should a person settle for when it comes to the dreams for which one has spent years preparing? Where exactly should a person settle in terms of all the geographic possibilities? Can a life of service to few people you actually know account for more good than work done on behalf of millions of people you don’t know? Carolyn's story shows how those questions got answered in her life; she left the heady, rarified political environment inside the Beltway and settled back home in the hills of East Tennessee, working as a receptionist in her father’s medical practice. This story highlights both landing in the right place and a person’s right heart.
It’s All Too Much by Peter Walsh walks you through the steps needed not just to declutter your house but also to rid your life of the unnecessary burden of keeping up with all this stuff. “It is not about the stuff … it’s people lives hinge on what they own instead of who they are.” Peter unearths the problem of people’s relationship to their stuff and how it robs them of the life they want to live. It’s all too much to quote, but a couple I repeat every day. “If you don’t start piles they can’t grow” and “Make your bed. You’re not in High School anymore.”
Kate Braestrup tells her story in Here if You Need Me. As a young widow, she went to seminary—an attempt to carry out her husband’s dreams— explaining to those who asked her, “I’m here because Drew isn’t.” Left with four young children after her husband was killed in an automobile accident, she could never have envisioned a career as chaplain to game wardens in Maine. The life-or-death situations she describes, the way her theological education and her own life experience trained her to respond—her ability to empathize with those in crisis—makes a compelling read. Because she declares herself a “Unitarian Universalist,” readers should expect to question some of her surmising about God. But it will remain hard to question her tender heart.
The book most difficult for me to discuss is Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea. I stared at the cover photos of young girls every time I picked up the book, especially into the face of a girl on the back. A fantastic story, yes, everyone should read this book, on the NYT bestseller list for 102 weeks and counting. American Mortenson’s failed ascent of K2—what climbers consider the world’s deadliest mountain—landed Greg in a remote village in Pakistan. Among these Moslem people the bonds of gratitude, respect and friendship resulted in his making a promise to come back to build a school. An extraordinary story both in its vision and panorama of human needs, Mortenson avoids any explanation of what spiritually sustains him. Something more than humanitarian impulse though has to account for the good works, especially life changing for girls. Schools constructed on the other side of the world bear witness to who or what more than why.
Remember, a book is only as good as it is timely.
