Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan

Medical memoirs are a very certain genre. They demand someone with writing skills and the penchant to use them, but even more than that, they demand an illness that the author can recover from and look back upon, or something that takes long enough to progress that there is time to write. As such, they can be powerful looks at illness, mortality, suffering, and living, but I'm suddenly wary of positing them as universal experiences, because they are truly coming out of a very specific experience of illness and/or death.

Given that my parents both died very suddenly and quickly (we had less than two weeks knowing it was coming for my father, less than 48 hours for my mother, and for both of them, the vast majority of that time was spent unconscious and unresponsive. There was no time to collect thoughts, to meditate on sudden mortality, or grapple with the healthcare system. It was, and then it was over.)

This is not to say that people shouldn't write about their experiences of illness - it can be powerful both for the author and the reader. I'm just making an argument that we shouldn't universalize that as an expression of all illness, of all death. It captures a specific kind of experience, but one that is not necessarily reflective of all. It's just all that's ever likely to get published, for very obvious reasons.

Which brings me to Brain on Fire, which falls into "the author was lucky enough to survive" category. She, a New York Post reporter, spent a terrifying month that she doesn't remember, after an initial descent into hallucinations, paranoia, and aggressive behaviour, accompanied by seizures. The seizures were, weirdly, the lucky part, as it got her housed in an epilepsy ward instead of a psychiatric one, and under the attention of neurologists.

Still, it took one particular neurologist to diagnose her with an autoimmune encephalitis that had only been recently recognized as a thing - which, as Cahalan brings up, raises the question of how many psychiatric break diagnoses might be unrecognized autoimmune disorders similar to what she suffered.

This was the part I found most interesting - Cahalan and her parents both refer to this neurologist as her own Dr. House, in that he figured out an answer no one else could. But while it's plain in what she writes, less obviously explored are the ways in which her medical mystery was not solved by medical genius and irascibility and fundamental mistrust of patients - that seems to be have been the treatment she got from everyone who didn't figure out what she had. What set that neurologist apart was not only that he was familiar with the recent literature, but that he was the first one she ran into with good communication skills, who sat and took a full history, who listened instead of judging, who wasn't in a hurry and paid attention.

Yet we keep attributing good medical care to the genius figuring out the puzzle, when this book hinges upon much softer skills - good communication skills. As someone who has spent years helping teach communication skills to medical students, this made me nod my head fervently, and then be disappointed that we kept coming back to the Dr. House metaphor. Because communication skills really can be the difference between good medical care and poor medical care, between an experience that heals and one that adds to wounds. This can happen in ways small and big, and in Brain on Fire, it was in a very big way. So, while her talk of insurance for all is needed and timely, there's the role for communication skills that is present but not quite as much in the forefront of the book.

Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh

I've been wanting to read the book of Hyperbole and a Half for a while. I'd read some of what appears between these pages on her blog, and have always enjoyed them. So I knew that eventually I'd get around to a collection of the old favourites and probably some that I've never seen before, but wasn't sure when. Then my sister pulled it off her shelf and told me to borrow it, in the days immediately after our mother's death. She figured it might be a good diversion.

It took me a while to sit down with this book, for no particular reason, but I finally did. It was, of course, a quick read - I tend to buzz through books with pictures, as much as I think that I should slow down and linger over the illustrations - although with Brosh's drawings, there's not a lot of intricate background detail I'm missing.

Indeed, the roughness is part of the appeal - as she herself appears in her drawings, she's more a child's abstract human than a real one, and yet capable of conveying great amounts of emotions. It's fascinating.

My favourite one (other than the iconic "Clean All The Things!") is the Cake series. I laughed myself silly the first time I read it - the look of absolute determination to die of sugar overload. The vindictiveness when she did get the cake. The way she captures in words and images those moment when a child decides an adult is the enemy.  It just kills me. It perhaps didn't make me laugh as hard as the first time I read it, but I still enjoyed it thoroughly.

There were others I already knew and liked, including the pair of stories about depression that were difficult and powerful explorations of that experience. (Or at least, they seemed that way to me, who has only ever experienced it from the outside.)

And then there were new ones, about the helper dogs, and how both her dogs think (or fail to do so) or letters to herself at various ages, or her mother taking them out for a walk in the woods and trying to hide that they were very, very lost. Brosh as a child misunderstanding what her parents wanted and needed and thus tormenting them more or less accidentally is a common theme.

So is self-judgement, with a couple of stories about how her mind works and resenting the world when it doesn't behave in the manner she unconsciously assumed it should, as well about wanting to be a good person when she has thoughts of doing things that are not so good, and how fear of social judgement is pretty much the only thing that keeps her from doing them. It feels like she's a little hard on herself for having thoughts at all in these sections, but it also feels quite vivid and real, the battle between wanting, thinking, and doing.

As I fully expected, this book was entertaining, and it was not a surprise that I'd probably read between a third and a half of it before on the internet. I certainly don't begrudge her that! Most particularly, it was a welcome break from the general difficulty of the world right now.

They Left Us Everything by Plum Johnson

I think I am harder on memoirs than on other types of books. When I sit down with one, I want the book to justify its own existence, which doesn't happen with a novel. I'm not nearly as on guard against fiction, because fiction could be anything - good or bad, gripping or boring, but somehow it always feels to me that it has a right to be there, even if I don't like it. (Okay, there are a few notable exceptions, but those are books that really pissed me off.)

In contrast, with memoirs, I'm always faintly suspicious - what happened in this person's life to make it worth writing about? Was it more remarkable than most people's lives? Does it capture an experience I've never seen before (without resorting to exoticization)? Is the writing particularly good, or the person particularly perceptive about how their life relates to the greater human condition?

There are a lot of lives in the world, and not everyone is cut out to be a writer. However, not only do a lot of people think they're novelists who can't write worth shit, everyone has a right to shape their own story - but what makes it publishable?

With this cynical attitude, I sat down to read Plum Johnson's They Left Us Everything, a memoir about cleaning out her parents' house in Oakville, Ontario, as well as bits about her relationship with her parents, her brothers, and what she knows or discovers about her parents' marriage.

And it's...okay. I'm not going to be so grumpy as to say it shouldn't be published, but neither am I entirely sure that this is world-shaking. It's a small story, told in a way that doesn't intrude with the prose, and that is both good and bad.

Two things I wondered about: in telling the story of her parents, it feels like she's telling her brothers' stories, too, and that sits oddly. What would they write? This book made me more aware of how stories overlap - my story is not my husband's story, nor my mother's, nor either of my sisters', but they overlap in significant ways, and if I tell mine, am I obscuring theirs? There was something about this book that made me think about how who is writing changes a life.

Particularly since, in this case, she's writing about a shared childhood. It doesn't make her perspective less valid, but it does make me wonder if the brothers who were frequently beaten with a strap have the same feelings of forgiveness for their father as she does, because she confronted her father after he'd been punishing her brothers and told him he was cruel and seen a flash of recognition and he never did it again. She was never hit that way, and has the memory of stopping it and a belief that her father hated doing it. Do her brothers? Can she forgive him on their behalf?

This also falls into the camp of one of those memoirs where things about her family life seem, if not outright abusive (but maybe so), certainly strongly controlling and unduly harsh and erratic. One where you feel like the author would resist the labels that might apply to them, yet the story that is told, it's hard to come away from it with as much affection for her parents in hindsight as she herself musters.

So, this is a memoir, and it's fine. But not a lot more. Perhaps it's just not that I'm at that point in my life, although I have already lost one of my parents, and helped my mother move once.

Yes Please by Amy Poehler

Knowing only her public persona, Amy Poehler is one of those people that you joke you'd like to be friends with. She seems funny, accomplished, friendly, and who knows if any of it is true? Just presume a slightly dialed-down Leslie Knope, showing that we often have trouble differentiating actors from their roles.

I'm as guilty as anyone of this - I love Parks & Rec with a fervent passion, a show with an entire cast just as funny as Poehler is. But then you get to her book, and even though it gets sort of but not entirely personal, that feels like maybe more her own voice. Is the mythological beast Amy Poehler the same as Amy Poehler in real life?

I'm not sure I can answer that question any more now than before, but I can say this - I enjoyed Yes Please a hell of a lot, and it did nothing to dissuade me from my overall impression of Poehler.

There was some trepidation, I confess, in sitting down to read it. I enjoy Tina Fey quite a lot as well, but her Bossypants did not tickle my funnybone. It was enjoyable but slight. I've been told since that it gets much funnier if you listen to the audiobook version, and imagining it in her voice, I can see how it would get much more amusing and even laugh-out-loud funny if I heard her delivery.

Would I have the same experience here? Fortunately not. I didn't find this funnier, but it also didn't feel like it was trying as hard to be funny. The parts I was drawn to were Poehler's look at her time training as an improv actor, her stories about her childhood and university years, her work with the Upright Citizen's Brigade, and of course, the stories about Parks & Rec. (Also loved the stories of moonchasing with her sons.)

Rather than just being sketches about things, this book felt like it was Poehler trying to put her experiences into order, to think back to her childhood and early adulthood, impose some order on it, try to figure out what it meant. It doesn't hurt that she had things like Saturday Night Live to propel her along, a show I've only seen the barest amounts of, but hearing her write about the late nights writing, it sounds like a training ground that might do you in, but might also make you more than you were before.

I particularly enjoyed the chapter on Parks & Rec, where the creator, Mike Schur, annotated what she wrote, giving amusing depth to her more recent memories of the show.

The books steers very clear of parts of her personal life that Poehler obviously does not want to talk about - this is not a "tell-all." Her divorce, in particular, is alluded to a few times, but clearly off the table. There's still a distance between Poehler and her audience, as though she's warning off all those women who think she's her best friend when they don't even know her.

It's intimate in some ways, distant in others, but a book I thoroughly enjoyed reading about projects undertaken with daring and heedless enthusiasm.

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

I came to H is for Hawk looking for commonality. Most of what I knew about it was that it was a memoir about the time after Helen Macdonald's father's death, and that it involved training a hawk. I have absolutely no hawking or falconry experience, but it was not so very long ago (six years) that I lost my own father, and so I expected to find moments that rang true with my experience, that gave me a sense of connection and solidarity in the wake of sharing something terrible with the author.

That's not really what I got, and it strikes me now that both the memoirs I can think of that I've read about reactions after losing a parent (Wild by Cheryl Strayed is the other one) are about rather extreme reactions to that loss. I suppose the way I coped with it wouldn't make a very good book - I didn't hike the Pacific Northwest. I didn't pour all my energy into connecting with a wild animal. I simply cried. A lot. I didn't get much done on my dissertation that year. I still taught, both as a teaching assistant and a lecturer. I delivered my first paper at a history conference. I still hung out with my friends. Most of my life stayed surprisingly and heartbreakingly normal.

There were just a lot of tears mixed in with the normal, moments where grief swept in like a tidal wave and knocked me down. But every time I got back up, and I didn't resort to substances to cope. I didn't lash out at people. And I didn't undertake any crazy projects.

Of course, what I had was the rock of my husband through all of that, a stable place to come back to as often as I needed to, who wrapped me up in his arms and let me cry more times than I can possibly count. That I survived that grief, continue to survive that grief that is much less sharp now, but still surprises me with its sneakiness, is largely because I have him and I have my mother and sisters, and we grew closer in the wake of our loss, not further apart.

I am not saying other people are doing grieving wrong - I'm saying that I was extraordinarily lucky to have as strong and stable a base as I did, to help me get through it. And that what gets published is probably never going to be that story.

So when I read H is for Hawk I didn't recognize myself in it. The ways she dealt with the loss of her father made sense to me intellectually, but not on a visceral level of recognition. She looked for a way to control her life, and in many ways, a way to not be human for a little while, as though to identify so strongly with a wild creature would let her be that creature and not the pain of herself.

I know nothing of taming wild hunting birds, and that was all interesting, as were the ways it was intertwined with a biography of T.E. White, author of The Sword in the Stone and The Once and Future King. It felt like maybe at times it was trying to be too many things, although that perhaps could be something I would identify with - the inability of the mind to stay too long on one topic, the way quiet can feel like inviting pain.

While I never connected emotionally with this book, and recognized little of my own experience in Macdonald's, it was still an interesting read, if only because it is so different, a glimpse into a realm that I never quite entered, and don't know what my own way in would be.

Living With A Wild God by Barbara Ehrenreich

This is definitely not for what I usually sit down to read Barbara Ehrenreich. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it did take me a little while to adapt to what was not a story both personal and researched, relating her experiences to wider domains of thought and study. There's certainly work out there on mystical experiences and the like, but she is not drawing it in and weaving it with her story. This is as close to a straight-up memoir as I've ever seen from her.

I miss that, the strength that she so often has in relating the personal to the theoretical, to drawing on buttloads of research to make engaging and compelling arguments.

However, now that I've said what the book is not, perhaps I should take a look at what it is. It is Barbara Ehrenreich looking back at both her spiritual and ethical development, coming from a family that was staunchly, even fervently, atheist. She's an atheist too, or has been, or sort of.

The sort of enters the picture because, as a teenager, and less frequently since, she's been having experiences that most closely fall under the umbrella of mystical. Without recourse to any material on the topic, as a teenager, it felt close to losing her mind, although Ehrenreich firmly refuses to be medicalized in that manner.

That's the vaguely spiritual part - these were terrifying experiences, inexplicable by what she knew of the world, and persist as unexplained to this day. But that is paired with what might be better termed her philosophical struggles, complete with a remarkably intense bout of solipsism.

This was one of those moments where I stare at the page, amazed. I remember running into solipsism in my last year of high school, playing with the idea for few minutes, then more or less dismissing it. I never had any doubt that people around me were autonomous human beings with their own thoughts and desires. I would attribute a lot of that to my parents, who, early in my life, encouraged me to understand why people did what they did, by constantly asking me why I thought someone had acted in a way that upset me. It drove me crazy then, when I just wanted to be angry, but now it is one of the parenting techniques for which I am most grateful.

It was difficult and interesting to come into someone else's journey towards falling in love with humanity that was so dramatically different from my own. Ehrenreich's story has the solipsism persisting, in one way or another, until her graduate work, when she was suddenly struck by one of her labmates concerns about being sent to Vietnam, causing a breakthrough in seeing people as different, and also as worth fighting for.

In that way, it's about how she comes to identify herself as an activist, to embrace learning and writing about things less easily quantifiable, and in the end, to try to come to grips with those parts of her life that still defy easy explanation. Her conclusions draw on all of these strains in her life, her atheism, science background, social science research, and the experiences which shaped her. It's an interesting read, although at times I did want it to be leavened with research.

But that is not this book.

Fifth Chinese Daughter by Jade Snow Wong

As a memoir, this is fine. It did, however, spark me to sit down and have a conversation with my husband about memoirs and why I generally find them so unsatisfying. There are a few that I think justify the genre, but then there's a lot that just make me shrug my shoulders and not care very much. 

I know it's strange, as I'm getting close to finishing my Ph.D. in history, but I think perhaps that it's because memoir occupies a strange space between two things I love, and because it doesn't really keep the best parts of either, it's dissatisfying. Most memoirs don't have the invention and ability to bring out themes that fiction does, and very few are beautifully written. And yet they lack the roughness of a primary source, the pages and pages you have to read through to get a complete picture. 

So it's not this book. It's that memoirs aren't really my thing. (Well, it is also that this is a memoir written by a 25-year-old, and any time that happens, there's a whole lot of raising of eyebrows. Seriously? At 25? For goodness sake, you've barely lived yet, let alone had the time to sort through your experiences from some remove.)

Fifth Chinese Daughter is written well enough, which is to say that the prose isn't terrible. It's not fantastic either, but it's as serviceable as much of what I read. There's a little niggling voice in the back of my head that tells me that maybe this was published for the exoticism market. Not that that's what the author's trying to do, but it feels like it's what the publisher might have been after.

The inner world of Chinese-Americans in 1930s and 40s! How different! How strange! How exotic! I mean, good on the author for getting published, but again, a memoir at 25? I just keep circling back to it, wondering why this was published, and that market is virtually the only reason I can come up with.

Because the memoir itself is not that exciting. She has some clashes with her parents, but they're not that large. There are times she feels misunderstood, but most people like her and help her and her way through college is made clear by friendly administrators at a women's college, and there's just so little conflict. 

It's a very paced walk through her life, little drama, and although it's well enough written, it really doesn't hold the attention. (Which brings me back around to "at 25? A memoir?")

Jade Snow Wong grows up as the fifth daughter in a family of nine children in San Francisco. Her father runs a small clothing company. He values education, even for his daughters. Jade Snow goes to school. She gets given more responsibility around the home. She learns to question her parents and to try to find some middle ground between Chinese and American philosophies. She wants to go to college. She works, mostly for very nice people, to finance it. She gets a scholarship. She discovers pottery and the joy of working with your hands.

It's all the sort of thing that might denote a good life, it's just not that exciting a book. Books aren't life, and real life is not always that interesting. There's a difference between writing fiction in such a way that it feels real, and writing it down, just as it happened. 

If you like memoirs more than I do, though, you might enjoy this? I'm not sure.

Dry by Augusten Burroughs

I read Running With Scissors, and I don't remember disliking it, but it did feel too much like a story, life with the edges rounded off. It's hard to say why I can think that about a book with the kinds of things that happen in it that do, but it was just a little too people-pleasing, a little too neat, even when the subject matter was difficult.

Dry came up on one of my lists many years later, and I had no particular resistance to reading it. I wasn't falling over myself to do so, but not resistant. Now I've read it, and I'm sitting down to write the review, and I'm not at all sure what I want to say.

I think I liked Dry more than Running with Scissors, but at the same time, there wasn't that gut punch of connection you get with the best memoirs. Then again, I've never struggled with addiction, having always been far too stressed about being out of control of my own body to venture very far into substance-related waters.

Still, this book is not the shapely narrative I expected, both from the first book, and from the shape of the narrative we've come to know through media portrayals of addiction. It felt informative to have that narrative challenged, made messier, made apparent that these are not one-size-fits-all stories of life with addiction.

So yes, this story is a memoir of Burroughs struggle with addiction, primarily alcohol, during his years as a marketing executive. It captures the justifications he told himself, with the reader dragged into that point of view, and only realizing as Burroughs does, the behaviours that are propping him up.

And then it's relatively easy. He goes to rehab, discovers he does have a problem, comes home, and manages to stay sober for a long time without really having to put a ton of effort into it. Almost decides he doesn't need support anymore. (Books like these end up being virtual paeans to AA.) But of course, life doesn't give you long easy stretches very often.

I've kind of run out of things to say. It's a straightforward book in many ways, with a dear friend who is dying of AIDS as the background for all the things he was too scared or too messed up or too drunk to do. Pighead ends up carrying all the regrets, and in many ways, that's what this book is about.

So why do I say I don't think it'll stay with me? I'm not sure. It's interesting, but lacks that next step of a memoir where it really grabbed me, made me think about people and human nature, rather than just the experiences of the author. I think of Jeannette Winterson's Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? and how powerful that book got, and this book feels like the first half of Winterson's memoir, the lead-up to something I'd never read before, dark and powerful. The first half isn't bad. But it's going deeper that gets great.

Breathing for a Living by Laura Rothenberg

I always feel very strange reading this type of book. Like a voyeur, I worry. Wanting to hear about someone else's difficulties with life so I can sit back and sigh and think "wow, that's terrible. Glad I don't have to deal with that!" Illness as entertainment.

On the other hand, if someone has a story to be told, and wants to tell it, does that change things? How would Laura Rothenberg want her story to be received?

And then, how do you judge such a story? If I'm overly critical about someone's account of their terminal illness, well, bully for me. Congratulations. On the other hand, does something get a by?

Luckily, at least, the latter wasn't a problem. I have read at least one account by someone with CF before, when I was a teenager. It read very much like what it was, a teenager's diary. This, while it has a diary feel sometimes, is more accomplished. Rothenberg was a writer with some chops, and is able to look at what she's going through both from the inside, while still having the perspective to think about things more abstractly.

I didn't find the medical details opaque, even though I might not understand every term. They were hard to hear, though, sometimes. That we can go through so much, no, that one person can go through so much.

I'm not sorry I read this when it popped up on one of the many lists I choose books from. I'm still a little uneasy, though. But I am left with one of the two great truths that I discovered during my father's time of dying. (This comes from Niels Bohr, who apparently said: "There are trivial truths and there are great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.")

Our bodies are so strong.
Our bodies are so fragile.

The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1

To tell the truth, I'm not really sure what version of this I read. It was on the kindle I still have on long-term loan from a friend (thanks again, Amy!), and I'm not going to wade through to try to figure out which one exactly it is. I read some of Mark Twain's autobiography.

And it's a lot like being at a family reunion, listening to an interesting but very meandering relative tell you all about his life. And whether that sounds like fun or hell to you may indeed indicate how you'd feel about this book. I would actually enjoy it, and I enjoyed this. Twain, as I am in no way the first to say, can turn a phrase like nobody's business. He's witty, he's caustic, and he has a cat named Lazy who rides around on his shoulder sleeping.

Twain apparently decided that writing a memoir chronologically would be boring to write, and ended up taking as much time to write as it did to live. So he decided to try something different - to dictate on whatever he felt like dictating on on a particular day, and so these stories follow a daisy chain of reminiscences, and as he finishes one, he starts on another, and they are in no way in order.

It's a little strange at time, and sometimes the patter lags, but I love Twain's writing style, and I enjoy hearing his stories, even about when they're about wanting an inventor's nuts in a...what was it? It wasn't a vice. Something similar and painful.

Much of this book is about his deceased daughter Susy, and her own memoir of her father. There's a great deal of a father commenting on his daughter's childhood biography of him, and then spinning yarns.

Also, in this edition, whichever it is, about his friendship with Ulysses S. Grant, and the vagaries of renting a villa in Italy.

Hopefully this will give you an idea of whether or not it is for you. I enjoyed it thoroughly, but I can imagine that it might have irritated others to no end. I look forward to future volumes myself, though.

Prisoner of Tehran by Marina Nemat

How do you review books about trauma? I've been thinking about that a lot the last few days, as I was trying to figure out what I wanted to say about this book, and also the two I read around the same time. I've said the universe sometimes throws me books in clumps? Well, this time it was three about traumatic experiences under authoritarian governments. Two fiction, one non-fiction.

And the non-fiction is probably the hardest to review. When someone is relating their life story about horrific events, as, in this case, the author's story about being arrested in post-revolution Iran, sent to prison, tortured, sentenced to death, having that sentence commuted to life, being pressured into marrying a prison guard to get some semblance of freedom, and so on. It's not an easy story, and I applaud Nemat's ability to get it down on the page.

What about literary value? How do you even assess that in this type of story? In this case, the prose is spare and not particularly descriptive. Maybe that's the only way to get these words on the page - you can relive it, but even for that, there's a limit. So as a literary achievement, it's impossible for me to say good or bad. If it were a novel, I'd critique it more heavily. As a direct expression of trauma, it is a difficult read. And that probably should be the point.

There was some controversy a year or so back, when one of the panelists on "Canada Reads" accused this book of being untruthful, but I just did a google search, and I can't find anything specific about that, no specific accusations or individual claims of untruth. So that judge may have been talking out of her ass, but it raises what is almost always with us with nonfiction these days, particularly memoirs. After James Frey and the Three Cups of Tea controversy, these types of books are under more scrutiny these days, and that has good points and bad points.

But even if there are inaccuracies, which I'm not sure that there are - at least I can't find any records of people picking out specific things - I'm reminded of a story from one of my more theoretical drama classes, "Geographies of Emergency." The prof told us a story about collecting testimonials from Holocaust survivors, and in particular, a story one woman told about Jewish resistance at one of the camps, and her very clear memory of three of the smokestacks blowing up.

Except that we know that only one smokestack blew up at that particular camp. So what do we do with her testimony? It cannot be simply dismissed because, in the middle of trauma, she didn't get every detail exactly right. For one, it is testimony to something that we never think of connected with the horrors of the death camps - active resistance. But yet, obviously, memory is inherently faulty, and those accumulated during trauma even more so.

It's a difficulty I continue to struggle with. But I believe these stories have to be told, and even if some details are wrong (and again, I don't know that any are), that doesn't immediately invalidate a story. Everything has to be assessed for what it is, and with understanding of context and history. I know incredibly little about Iran, and I should know more.

I feel like I've talked less about the book, and more about the thoughts that I had to get out of the way before I could write a review. Somewhere along the way, the two merged. But my final thought is that this is a good book, not a great one. And I think it will have done its job if it causes people to explore more, rather than read one book and stop.

Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela

I've known far too little about Nelson Mandela. I knew who he was, of course, and some of the bare outlines of his life. But I think I'd fallen into knowing little more than what Cornel West, after Mandela's death, called the "Santa-Clausification" of the South African leader. By that, he meant the process of turning Mandela from who he was into a harmless, strangely apolitical grandfatherly figure that could be used as a symbol by left and right alike.

Mandela's autobiography is a welcome corrective to that. Although sometimes the story lags, the arc of his radicalization, the momentum of the ANC, and the developments while he was in prison all fight against an easy depiction of him as a figure in the movement and a person. The continued defense of the movements the ANC's offshoot made towards using violence as a political tool is interesting and challenging.

It is also a very readable account of the various laws that were put in place as the basis of the apartheid system in South Africa, their implications and the ways in which they were carried out, with a parallel story of how the ANC responded to these laws as they were implemented. There are some lovely "gotcha" moments in the government's first ham-handed attempts to suppress dissent and protest, but the story grows more dire as the police and government care less and less about finding reasonable justifications for their actions.

It's a very straightforward narrative, although there are parts where interpersonal conflicts are somewhat glossed over, probably deliberately. It's his prerogative, but it does add distance to the narrative when it comes to the personal. The political, however, is fascinating.

The years in which Mandela was imprisoned take up a huge chunk of the book, and are incisive in their examination of incarceration, the struggles in prison for fair and equal treatment, side excursions into what rights prisoners should have, and how political prisoners in this instance reacted to their circumstances.

At the end, I feel like I know a great deal about the political struggle, and somewhat less about the man. Not that there isn't anything, but there is that reserve and reticence about personal issues. Again, totally his prerogative. Also, his entire life hangs together as a unified arc, and I can't help but wonder if that means that there is some messiness being elided by the smoothing out of his political path into one where his later viewpoints are almost completely harmonized with the ones he held at the beginning of his struggles.

This was an interesting read, although in some areas it raised my curiosity more than it communicated. But as a look at the struggle against apartheid, and a memoir of years spent as a political prisoner, it was fascinating.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

This is, I think, the second book I've read about distance running. I am wondering what my fascination with that is, although truly, I've read both because they came up on various lists. I, myself, am a walker. I love to go for long walks in the morning. Running does not as much appeal.

But then you get Haruki Murakami writing about his life as a runner, and some about his life as a novelist, and it is interesting. And yet, I'm still not entirely sure I get it. I enjoyed reading about this life, but I feel some of the same distance I sometimes perceive in Murakami's novels from his characters, in this case from his own life. It's the gaze of someone looking from very far away and trying to make sense of things. It's something I enjoy quite a bit about his books.

But I'm not sure this one will stick with me as long as some of his novels have.

It is interesting reading about preparation for various marathons, when they've been successful in his eyes (so, in other words, when he considers himself successful), and the inevitable changes that start to occur as you get older, and your marathon times, not to mention everything else, are simply going to take longer. What do you do when you notice that things are simply slowing down, taking longer, taking more effort?

The grappling with mortality through the lens of physical ability is probably the most interesting part of the book, although hearing how he prepares to run triathlons, which he doesn't really seem to like, was also a favourite.

All in all, I'm glad I read this, for the brief glimpses it gave into Murakami and his worldview, but that distance that works in his fiction doesn't work quite so well in a memoir. Maybe I'd get more if I were a runner. He may want "at least he never walked" on his tombstone, but that's the pace I'm entirely happy to take.

Let's Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson

Remember how I've been lamenting my lack of getting American humour? How British humour makes me giggle, but American humour seems to leave me relatively cold? I take it back. I just haven't been reading good enough American humour, if this book is anything to go by. This book had exactly the tone that makes me laugh. You can ask my husband if I've ever giggled more while reading next to him in the living room. I'd be surprised. Sorry, American humour. It is you, unless it's Jenny Lawson. Apparently.

It is very hard to describe this book, other than hilarious. Sometimes the content is horrifying, often it's describing excruciatingly awkward situations. But damn it, it's funny about all of them! I have a soft spot for women who swear this much. It's part of what I liked about Julie and Julia. I identify with foulmouthed women. The hilarity is an amazing side effect.

Why? I don't know. Maybe I'm emotionally still ten. Maybe I just respond to that honesty of swearing a mile a minute when it's appropriate. You know what? Fuck it. I just like swearing.

Lawson apparently had a strange and sometimes traumatizing but not necessarily horrifying childhood, although I can see how some people might perceive it that way. But there's such affection in this book, and love for those strange moments that might have resulted in a need for therapy. We're all fucked up. Sometimes, we can celebrate how we got there.

Also, a raccoon in jammies? Eeeee!

It's of particular note how Lawson writes about mental health issues, and manages to make it very damn funny indeed, while never underplaying or dismissing it. It rings very true, and the ludicrous note that creeps in doesn't undermine how difficult life can be.

Let's see, what else. It may tell you more about me than anything else that when I was telling him Lawson's stories about starting to collect very strange taxidermied animals, my husband's first reaction was to look me in the eye and say very firmly, "No!"

Even when I told him about the little alligator dressed as a pirate. Which, come on! Who wouldn't want that?

He's no fun sometimes. 

Look, I don't know if you'll like this. What strikes me as possibly the funniest book I've ever read may not strike you the same way. But try it anyway. What have you got to lose? At worst, you'll have read about getting your arm stuck in a cow, strange taxidermy, and social anxiety. There's no downside, right?

But I giggled my ass off all the way through this book, sometimes accompanied by gasps. I hope you do the same.

What Is The What by Dave Eggers

I'm having trouble coming up with the right word to describe reading this book. "Enjoyed" is definitely not the right word - although the book is well-written, it's hard to call it enjoyable, nor is it trying to be. Moving? Something seems facile and reductionist about that, to reduce the story to something that affected me briefly, as if it is all about me.

Difficult? Definitely. In content, not style. Urgent?

What is the What is the fictional autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, a Sudanese man who fled the country on foot as a boy, and lived for more than ten years in refugee camps, before emigrating to the United States. It is about him, told in his words, based on hours and hours of interviews with the author, Dave Eggers. It is fictional in that not enough was available to flesh this out through witnesses, documents, sources, and so Eggers decided to tell the story, but to combine characters, to reimagine scenes from Deng's childhood that were sketchy.

This, of course, raises questions of authorship, as the book is written by Eggers, but in the narrative, he tries to remain invisible. I'm not sure how else it could be done, but I did do some research before I wrote this review, because it felt odd. After having read a couple of interviews about the process, about how they weren't initially sure who was going to write the book - whether Eggers was just helping Deng write his own autobiography, or would be writing it himself, I feel more comfortable, as if my comfort was all that matters.

What this is is a story about the importance of stories, of bearing witness, of telling and retelling and retelling stories that must be told. In the book, Deng is telling his story, but he's always telling it to someone in particular. Not necessarily out loud, but it is always addressed to someone. When I took a "Geographies of Emergency" drama course many, many years ago, we talked a lot about trauma, about the possibility of verifying facts absolutely that are acquired through trauma, what we do when memory contrasts with what we "know to have happened." And the feeling that there are stories that must not be forgotten, that must be told and retold. That the telling of stories can be a way to survive.

Where do our obligations come in as listeners? When must we listen, how do we listen, how do we judge the results?

This story is not easy. It is not necessarily enjoyable. But it must be told, and I had to hear it.

Wild by Cheryl Strayed

I arrived at my mother's earlier in the week to visit with her, my Grandmother, and my sisters (in various permutations, as people came and went.) Almost as soon as I got here, Grandma got sick, and we've been taking care of her since then. (Nothing really awful, but everything is hard when you're in your 90s.)

One sister thrust this book at me and demanded that I read it before I left. I got a few chapters in, and looked up at her, and asked why she would make me read this.

Just don't read it in public, she replied. She wasn't referring to the quality. She was referring to the tears.

The first part of Wild was very hard to read, having lost our father almost two years ago. [Note: Three years ago, now] I remember some of these pains, these fears, these days and nights of vigil. I don't recognize other aspects, and I'm glad they are things I escaped. But we were loved by our father just the way Cheryl was by her mother - unconditionally. My mother continues to love us fiercely. I'm lucky to have that. I know that every day.

Cheryl Strayed loses her mother at 22, is divorced by 26, and lost. She decides, with little prep and more will than planning, to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. And she does.

I admired this book for refusing to make neat little narrative bows out of her life and experience. They felt messy and tangled and real, and sometimes things were learned, and sometimes they weren't, and the hard-won truths were not platitudes. Many times, they weren't even laid out in great detail. But after vicariously climbing the trail with Cheryl Strayed, I often felt I knew what they were.

If this was an easy story of how everything was fixed by a summer of walking, and how the open vistas opened her soul, or any other feel-good/mean-nothing crap, I wouldn't have enjoyed this book. But because it is about the experience, rather than fable of how she learned to be whole again, I did.

Life is this messy, and we do rotten things and the universe throws curveballs, and takes more than we can bear to give, and yet, we are. We persist.

(The one thing I didn't like were the back cover blurbs, which try to make this out as that easy-answer-through-physical struggle book I would have hated. Particularly the one about a "bad girl" trying to fix her life. This book embraces complexity far more than that, is brutally honest, and no one in it is simplistic enough to be summed up in two words.)

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

When a memoir starts with a title like that, it's apparent it's not going to be all sweetness and light. Particularly when it's fairly quickly on the table that it is Jeanette Winterson's adoptive mother who said the titular line. With that established, this is obviously not a slight read, slim though the book may be. But more importantly, I felt like it was interesting but not anything more than a fairly straightforward memoir until about halfway through - and then the book was elevated to another level, became something rawer and truer and tougher and more emotional than I had seen so far. It was like the first half was the backstory we needed to understand the second half, but the second half was the book.

And that tells you pretty much nothing at all. So, in a fairly straightforward linear fashion that will capture nothing of the flavour, the book is about Jeanette Winterson's experiences growing up in a household where she had been adopted by a Pentecostal couple. Her adoptive mother was deeply troubled, prone to depression and anxiety, and who definitely never understood her adopted child. Winterson found solace in books, and we'll come back to that in a minute. She finally moves away/is thrown out of the house over her relationships with other girls her age, and, in an extreme long shot, is accepted at Oxford.

The book then jumps forward decades to a point where a relationship has ended, and she sinks into a psychiatric crisis, detailing her experiences through it in terms amazingly stark and poetic at the same time. This goes hand in hand with her journey with her new partner to discover her birth mother, the agonizing process to do so, and the complexity of those meetings when they eventually occur.

And this second half is where the book takes flight. While the early years are interesting, something happens to her prose when she is talking about her bouts of madness, her efforts to put herself back together, to heal a self that was fractured shortly after birth. I really can't explain it, but it's something you should experience.

There are two themes I want to explore more fully. The first is the lifeline that she found literature to be. Winterson is eloquent in combatting the notion that literature is elitist, that it is somehow only for the rich, and not the poor, and that it doesn't matter if the poor have access to good books, that good books are irrelevant to their existence. She makes a strong case that she would not have survived without her access to a library and her juvenile attempt to read all of "literature," A-Z. Coming from a very working-class home, Winterson is, and I am, infuriated by the notion that reading is the sole preserve of the rich.

The other theme is the need for more complex narratives of adoption and reunion than the joyful, tearful, uncomplicated one that seems to permeate our culture. Winterson makes that call directly, and I think it is an important one. When the narrative is that finding a birth mother or father is the end of struggle, of pain, and the start of an uncomplicated relationship, that does a disservice to everyone who does not find it to be so. They are left out of the literature, left out of the representation, and will find no reflection for themselves. And for people already searching for a sense of heritage, simplistic narratives do no one any good. Winterson's efforts to find her birth mother were difficult, and the new relationship hard to navigate.

I had never read any Jeanette Winterson books before this, although I did and do intend to get to them. This memoir is an interesting way of being introduced to her work, and the second half of it convinced me I need to search out her work sooner rather than later.

Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett

I am often at a loss with memoirs. I don't know what I'm expecting out of them, or how really to take them. As they're about lives, they don't conform to narrative conventions, but as they're not histories, they tend to give little of the context I crave. At best, they're someone giving you a glimpse into their life, and that springs vitally from the page. At worst, it feels like reading about a stranger, without enough of the context to understand.

This one falls somewhere in the middle. I feel thoroughly "meh" about Truth and Beauty. I didn't love it, I didn't hate it, I was never eager to get back to it, but I was never loath to pick it up. It's certainly heartfelt, although sometimes it felt like a friend trying to lay claim to her best friend, to make sure all the other friends knew she was the most important. Maybe that's part of the dynamic of the relationship, and if it is, it comes across on the page.

This is the story of Ann Patchett and Lucy Grealey. I know little about either of them - well, I've read one other Ann Patchett, and I really didn't like it, so we were not exactly starting out on the right foot here. They became close friends while struggling through writing programs, and, well, I'd say supported each other through the following years of teaching and struggle and writing fellowships, except that it seems that the support went mostly one way.

Because it feels like Lucy Grealey would be very frustrating to be friends with, if you're expecting friendships to be reciprocal. I've had friends like that, who took all the attention I would give and gave little back, around whose much more intense lives I let myself become absorbed and only realized later how little I was getting out of that relationship. But I pretty much left those behind after high school and decided I wasn't doing that anymore - if I was going to be friends with someone, I wanted there to be give as well as take.

But it doesn't seem like Lucy gave. She had an immense need, and it seemed to have gratified Ann Patchett to be needed that much, and no doubt she was exciting to be around. But you can't save someone with the sheer force of your desire to meet her needs, and propping her up only lasts so long - as it did in this case, with a death.

Would I be more tolerant of this narrative if it didn't have the barest echoes of something I recognize and was very glad to get away from? If the romanticization that can occur after death didn't cast its light over a situation that sounded so frustrating? If people can be friends with people who need so much, more power to them. And Patchett doesn't paper over how difficult Lucy was, but the overwhelming sense is one of having been grateful for being allowed to be needed. It's an interesting study, but either too far or too close to my experience for me to truly enjoy.

Bossypants by Tina Fey

I was expecting more funny.

Having read a small portion of this book online (A Mother's Prayer), and having found that very entertaining, I had high hopes for this book. And I should say, it's not a bad read. It's just not that funny. I laughed out loud maybe once, and smiled a few times more. Most of the jokes fell under the category of fairly amusing. Maybe as a script, it'd be great.

But that isn't to say that this isn't a pleasant read. Her stories are interesting, and I looked forward to picking this up to read a few pages more. It wasn't gripping, but it was enjoyable. On the other hand, it's not going to stay with me. But I wasn't really expecting that anyway.

Does anyone else get unduly excited when you discover you have something in common with someone you admire? (Also known as "Joss Whedon has the same favourite comic book character as me!") I do this all the time. So I was so pleased to read that Tina Fey doesn't drive, and her husband has to do all the long drives, while she sleeps, and is probably trying to remember why he married her in the first place. 'Cause, yeah.

The book picks up after her daughter arrives - suddenly there's a lot more intensity to the writing (and, it sounds, to life as she was experiencing it at that moment.) The chapter on juggling her daughter's third birthday party, Oprah's appearance on 30 Rock and appearing as Sarah Palin on SNL for the first time, all on the same weekend, was probably my favourite. And they included the entire sketch, which is brilliant.

If you're looking for light entertainment, and you like Tina Fey, this is probably worth a read. Just don't expect belly laughs.

However, after having read a couple of reviews from Goodreads friends, I noticed that those who listened to this on audiobook gave it higher ratings than those who just read it, like me. For this one, that may be the way to go.