The Still Point of the Turning World, by Emily Rapp (LentBooks 2013 #6)

As memoirs go, this is one of the most shattering, intense ones I’ve ever read. Given the subject matter, it could hardly be otherwise, though a lesser writer might have made it sentimental or just painful to read. When Emily Rapp’s only son Ronan was a baby, she and her husband learned that Ronan had Tay-Sachs disease, an extremely rare genetic disorder than is always fatal. They were told that over the next couple of years they could expect to see Ronan gradually lose all the developmental ground he’d gained in his first few months of life, and that he would probably die by age three (Ronan did, in fact, die just before the publication of this book).

This is tough material, and Rapp writes from right out of the middle of the experience, completing the book while Ronan’s short life continues and his disease progresses. I made several comments about the memoirs I reviewed last year to the effect that writers write better memoirs when they allow time to put distance between themselves and the experiences they’re writing about, and Rapp herself is well aware that this is generally true, and addresses it directly in the book. While it’s certainly true that she would have written differently about the experience ten years after Ronan’s death (and might yet, I suppose) there’s something about the raw immediacy of this book that’s compelling. As I said, another writer might not have made it work, but Emily Rapp does.

I noticed that in her Acknowledgements one of the fellow writers she thanks is Dani Shapiro, and that interested me because I thought about Shapiro’s Devotion when I was reading The Still Point. Devotion is the story of a mother who believed for months that she was going to lose her infant son, but who ultimately experienced the happy ending we all hope for, in life and in stories. Emily Rapp didn’t get that. Ronan’s condition was exactly what she was told it was, and she was his mother for a few brief years, knowing that it would end all too soon.

It makes for a fascinating meditation on parenthood and on unconditional love. Reading it, I was sobered to realize how much of what I think of as “parenting” has to do with investing in my children’s future, planning for it and trying to prepare them for it. Our approach to parenthood is almost completely future-oriented, even when we feel so crazy in the midst of the parenting trenches that we think we’re only living moment to moment. We’re really not: we’re nagging about homework and trying to cook balanced meals and refereeing sibling quarrels because we believe that someday our children will benefit from all that education and nutrition and discipline.

But what if they couldn’t? What if our children had no future — if all we had with them was the present moment? What would parenting look like then?

This is the question Rapp returns to over and over in this memoir — not to try to teach other parents anything about living in the moment, because most parents’ experiences are in no way comparable, and anyway Rapp (herself a disabled person, having had one foot amputated in childhood and using a prosthetic limb) vigorously rejects the idea that sick and disabled people are put on earth to be living object lessons for the healthy. She is simply telling her story; what conclusions we draw are up to us. The intensity of that story made it possible for me to overlook things that might have irritated me in a more objective writer (mainly her attitude to Christianity: Rapp is a minister’s daughter and former theology student who has since left the Christian faith, which is fine, but her scornful description of adolescent evangelical prayer groups set back-to-back against her uncritical enthusiasm for Reiki “healing” grated a little: can’t she at least see that some people have gotten as much benefit from prayers circles as she’s ever gotten from Reiki, and some people consider both to be equally hokum?). When I brushed up against moments like these I was reminded: this woman is telling her own story, a story that seared and changed her for life. Why should she be objective? She’s not, and I wouldn’t be either.

I’m not going to lie and tell you that The Still Point of the Turning World is an easy book to read, especially if you’re a parent. It’s not. But it is incredibly engrossing and rewarding.

Memoirs of an Addicted Brain, by Marc Lewis (LentBooks 2013 #5)

Well it doesn’t seem like we can ever get through Lent without me reading an addiction memoir, but this one is definitely different, and I think it’s a good difference. Rather than just a person’s story of his journey through drug addiction and out into recovery — engrossing though those can be — this is a story by a neuroscientist who was a drug addict in his youth. Marc Lewis not only narrates the chilling and stupid things he did to his brain and body as a younger man; he analyzes, at each step (first drink; first joint; acid trip; near-death from heroin overdose; relapse…) what’s going on in the chemical-affected brain. Sometimes the neuroscience parts of the book went over my head, though he carefully couches everything in layman’s language and includes diagrams. But for what I was able to understand it was very interesting to see a brain’s-eye view, as it were, of how drug abuse and drug addiction impact the user.

There were a couple of gaps in this book that I wish Lewis had filled in. First of all, he didn’t touch on the question of who becomes an addict, and why. Of all the unhappy fifteen year olds like himself who get drunk and smoke weed, relatively few end up breaking into hospital labs (during their internships!) to steal drugs. I would have liked to know whether Lewis had any insight, from a neuroscience  perspective, as to why he was one of those who did become an addict. Is addiction wired into people’s brains in any way we can understand? Also, I find that while he spends a lot of time talking about his drug use he skates over  his recovery fairly quickly in the closing chapters. While this is a common failing of (some, not all) addiction memoirs, I was  particularly disappointed here that we didn’t learn more about how the brain changes during recovery, and how those patterns that have become so well-worn (and well-documented) can be changed. The book is both interesting and informative, but there were definitely areas where I felt the author could have told us more — not about his own life, which he covers quite well, but about the brain.

Most of Me, by Robyn Levy (LentBooks #2)

During Lent, when I’m reading non-fiction, I like picking up a lot of memoirs, whether or not there’s anything religious about them. Most of Me does not tackle religious questions but it deals with the big issues that religion exists to answer: suffering, pain, death and how to take pleasure in life and relationships with the knowledge that degeneration and death are inevitable.

Robin Levy was a visual artist, writer and broadcaster busy with a career, marriage and a teenage daughter when several years of growing depression led to an unexpected diagnosis: she had Parkinson’s Disease. Only a few months after that diagnosis, while Levy was still adapting to life with a degenerative disease, she was hit with another blow: she also had breast cancer, and ended up needing a mastectomy followed by chemotherapy. Dealing with two such severe health problems at once tested every resource Levy had, yet she emerged from the cancer ordeal and faced her Parkinson’s diagnosis with courage and humour — and a lot of support from family and a great team of friends.

Family is important here: Levy deals with a daughter who is going through the angst of the early teen years (oh how well I know it!!!) while her mother is not well enough to parent in the way she’d like to. Levy’s father was diagnosed with Parkinson’s not long before she was, and her mother also had cancer (I was surprised that after the initial diagnosis, so little attention was given to her mother’s cancer: it seemed quite serious, but was scarcely mentioned again). Friends also feature prominently: anyone going through a serious health crisis should be so lucky as to have friends like Robyn Levy’s.

Many years ago now, I read Anne Lamott’s story of how she wrote her novel Hard Laughter after asking a librarian (when Lamott’s father was diagnosed with a brain tumour) “Where are the funny books about cancer?” and getting an odd look in return. Obviously if she were asking that question today, the librarian would be able to point her to Most of Me, a very funny — and moving — book about cancer … and Parkinson’s … and being human, with all the frailty and fallibility that entails.

Does this Church Make Me Look Fat? by Rhoda Janzen

This is Rhoda Janzen’s sequel to her first memoir, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, and continues the story of the author’s return to faith (first to the Mennonite church of her childhood, then to a Pentecostal church when she begins dating and eventually marries a born-again charismatic.) This story also includes a harrowing bout with breast cancer, about which Janzen said less than I wanted to know. Her trademark style is light, funny and breezy, even when discussing very serious issues — usually this worked for me, but there were times when I wanted a little more depth.

A recurring theme in this book is the need to lay aside intellectual analysis to accept things on faith — whether that be accepting a relationship with a man you love who seems like he’s your polar opposite in every way, accepting that prayer and the laying-on of hands might actually bring healing, or accepting that abstaining from sex before marriage could make your relationship stronger. I appreciated seeing issues of faith — especially conservative Christian faith — being treated with such respect in a mainstream memoir (i.e. not one published by a Christian publisher or targeted at a Christian readership). However, one of the places I wished Janzen would “go deeper” was in exploring the limitations of this attitude. Like Janzen (who is a university English professor) I struggle a lot with reconciling faith and intellect. When she confronts the issue of joining a church that takes Paul’s words about not allowing women to teach or hold authority literally, Janzen’s husband suggests that maybe she is being called to learn rather than teach at this point in her life, and she latches on to that as a wonderful example of how she needs to stop analyzing everything and take things on faith. I couldn’t help wanting to yell at her: “You’re effectively marrying not just this man but his church,” (she gets re-baptized in her husband’s Pentecostal church) “–is this always going to be a good enough answer for you? Accepting things on faith doesn’t mean shutting down your intellect, after all!” I’m sure Rhoda Janzen’s very well aware of that, but it was one of many places in the book where I found her answers a little too easy.

Still, this was an entertaining and in some places thought-provoking memoir, and as I said, I’m very glad to see a story like this on mainstream bookstore shelves rather than confined to the Christian bookstore ghetto.

My Journey, by Leona Glidden Running

Dr. Leona Running has lived an impressive life. She became a scholar of ancient languages and a highly respected professor at the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary at a time when that career path was, to put it mildly, quite unusual for a woman. Though I never met her during the years when I was attending Andrews University and she taught there at the Seminary, I became aware of Dr. Running and her legacy some years later when I was working on a historical novel about Queen Esther and I needed someone to read it over for historical accuracy. I sent it to Dr. Running and she gave me an incredibly thorough and detailed reading and critique, and corrected me on several historical inaccuracies and anachronisms. Now in her 90s, though no longer teaching classes, she remains actively engaged and involved in the world of Biblical studies in the Adventist church, most recently gaining attention by writing General Conference President Ted Wilson “An Open Letter from your Hebrew Teacher” on the subject of women’s ordination, a cause Dr. Running has supported for many years.

In My Journey Dr. Running tells her life story. It’s a very straightforward and not particularly literary telling, but will be of interest not because of style but because of content. Anyone interested in SDA church history, in Biblical studies, and especially in the life of a woman academic in the early- to mid-twentieth century, will benefit from reading this book. Certainly there were times when I was frustrated by the things Running chose to dwell on in detail (whom she visited and stayed with and often what and where they ate on her many journeys around the world, for example) while quickly skipping over topics in which I was more interested, such as a period when what she describes as a “witch-hunt atmosphere” prevailed at the SDA Theological Seminary and she and others felt their jobs were at risk. That gets only a paragraph, when I would have liked to know much more about those controversies!

She gives a little more time and space to the first moves towards ordaining women in ministry in the SDA church in the early 1970s. She relates the fact that in 1970 she was asked by the General Conference to write a paper on the role of women in the church. When a colleague mentioned that he thought the GC was concerned with the question of women’s ordination. Dr. Running, who had never given much thought to the issue before:

“…added a paragraph saying that if God calls a woman to that work, who is to stand in her was? (How naive I was!)”

Running continues with the interesting reflection that most of the scholars who originally proposed opening up the issue of women’s ordination thought it would be a fairly quick and non-controversial process. Forty years later we’re more deeply divided than ever on this issue; I’d like to have read more of Dr. Running’s thoughts on that process and the direction it took.

But these are merely quibbles: it’s her book, not mine, and obviously she recorded the things from a long and eventful life that she thought were worth recording. I’m glad to have this book in my library and particularly honoured to have an autographed copy (given to me by a mutual friend). Leona Glidden Running is an inspiration to me and should be to every Christian woman who refuses to be defined by narrow gender roles.

1982, by Jian Ghomeshi

It’s an interesting choice, to write a memoir so tightly focused on a single slice of time that it’s not just a coming-of-age story but a turning-fifteen story. In 1982 I was turning 17, finishing high school and starting university in St. John’s, while Jian Ghomeshi was finishing Grade 9 and starting Grade 10, crushing on an unattainable girl, adoring David Bowie, and trying to simultaneously stand out and fit in as an Iranian immigrant in whiter-than-white Thornhill, a Toronto suburb. So, my life experience is in some ways, chronologically at least, very close to his, while in other ways very far removed. This meant that for me 1982 had both the benefits of familiarity, particularly in its multitudinous pop culture references, and also the advantage of giving me a peek into a different life.

I find Jian Ghomeshi as a radio personality to be very polarizing: people either love him or hate him. I have always loved him, way back before he was the host of CBC’s Q to when he was in Moxy Fruvous, one of my favourite bands ever. I do sort of understand why some people don’t like his on-air persona though: much as I like him, there’s a feeling sometimes in both his interviewing and his humour that I can only describe as  ”trying too hard.” That same factor is on display in 1982 and sometimes kept me from loving it as much as I wanted to. Often, in this book, Ghomeshi is genuinely very funny; other times his humour just felt like he was trying too hard to be ironic or witty. I could have done without the short lists he compiled in virtually every chapter, as they didn’t add anything fresh or funny to what I’d just read.

Despite the occasional times where the humour fell flat (for me anyway), there was a lot to love about this book. Obviously Ghomeshi could have chosen to write a memoir about his whole life thus far, but while I would have loved reading about Moxy Fruvous, I admire the choice he made in focusing on one year.  I doubt there are few years in anyone’s life as poignant, painful and full of emotion as the year they finish Grade 9 and start Grade 10, so it’s a perfect choice for a book that is primarily about identity, about the ways we fashion and refashion ourselves, sometimes in the image of our idols (like Bowie, in Ghomeshi’s case) and sometimes just in a desperate attempt to be unique. The hopeless crush, which I assume is part of most people’s adolescent experience and is perfectly depicted here, is really a part of that self-making: the shattering love you feel for the person of your dreams when you’re 14 has almost nothing to do with that actual person, and everything to do with who you aspire to be, how you see yourself, and how you want others to see you.

Back Story, by David Mitchell

This book is simply fantastic. It’s the second “celebrity bio” I’ve read this year (for my very low value of “celebrity” which basically means “person who makes me laugh on BBC panel shows”), and like Rob Brydon’s Small Man in a Book, David Mitchell’s Back Story perfectly captures the actor/comedian’s voice and personality as I’ve come to know and love it from TV, and adds a layer of apparently very authentic self-revelation to give some depth to the comic persona. Only, Back Story is much, much funnier (and that’s not to say the Rob’s book isn’t very funny, just that this one is hilarious).

It might not be funny to people who haven’t watched David Mitchell as a regular panelist on Would I Lie to You, or as a guest panelist on many other British quiz shows including my favourite, QI,  or who haven’t seen him in any of his other comic incarnations (as part of the comedy duo Mitchell & Webb, and starring in Peep Show, and regularly ranting on David Mitchell’s Soapbox, which is almost my favourite thing on YouTube). You might need to already have his voice in your head and have a sense of what he refers to as his “tweedy persona,” in order to appreciate mentally hearing that voice throughout the book and finding out how much of that persona is constructed and how much is … well, just David Mitchell. 

Mind you,  you might like his voice so much that you could be like my husband, who, after I had already paid good money for the e-book, insisted on buying the audiobook as well because he wanted to listen to David Mitchell read it. Yes, we bought this book twice in one week. It’s that good. If you’re unfamiliar with David Mitchell’s work, click the link above and watch a few Soapboxes. If you’re as enchanted as I am, go ahead and buy the book. You won’t be sorry.

If you’re still unsure, check out the author’s own endorsement/apology (I hope you’ll note this is the only time I’ve EVER put a video link in a book review!!)

A Year of Biblical Womanhood, by Rachel Held Evans

Having enjoyed her last book, Evolving in Monkey Town, and followed her blog, I was pretty sure I was going to enjoy Rachel Held Evans’s experiment in trying to follow everything the Bible says women should do and be, over the course of a year. And, of course, I did enjoy it very much.

This is, of course, another in the A.J. Jacobean vein of “try something crazy for a year and write about it” books, but it’s driven by a genuine quest for truth. Rather than an outsider’s exploration of Biblical rules and regulations, it’s written from the perspective of a person of faith trying to learn how to understand and apply the Bible to her life. As a young woman growing up in fundamentalist Christian subculture, Rachel Held Evans got lots of very specific messages about the roles and responsibilities God intended for women — in the home, in the church, and in society. Part of her quest was to discover what the Bible actually does say (as opposed to what preachers, Christian writers, etc., claim that it says). The other part was to see how much of it she could actually follow.

There are some predictably funny hijinks, like Rachel attempting to sew a garment, or sleeping in a tent in the yard during her period. Her writing is always witty and easy to read, but the real gems here are Evans’ explorations into the standards the Bible really sets for women. She doesn’t shy away from confronting the “texts of terror” that have been used to justify the oppression of women, but she also attempts to get past ideals of “biblical womanhood” that are really purely cultural — for example, the idea, promoted by many conservative male pastors, that the greatest commandment for women is, “Thou Shalt Not Let Thyself Go.”

Often funny, always thought-provoking, A Year of Biblical Womanhood offers no easy answers. Rather, it invites us into the journey of a woman whose faith, though it has changed over the years, is still the central fact of her life, as she tries to learn what it really means to be a “godly woman.” Her conclusions won’t be appreciated by some readers — there’ll be conservative Christians who disagree with her feminist, egalitarian views, and secular readers who wonder why an intelligent modern woman even bothers to read and apply a collection of ancient texts to her life. But for a reader like me, occupying that same often muddy ground between intelligent skeptic and committed believer that Evans explores so well, this book was a wonderful read.

Devotion, by Dani Shapiro

As you may know by now, memoirs by women about their spiritual journeys are fairly irresistible to me. In all my reading in that genre I’ve always been looking with interest for stories from women writing outside the Christian perspective. I’ve particularly looked for Jewish women’s stories and the only good one I’ve found so far is Miriam’s Kitchen by Elizabeth Erlich, so when I stumbled across Dani Shapiro’s Devotion I knew this was something I’d been waiting for.

Shapiro writes about a spiritual quest that began for her in midlife. She’d been through a lot by that time — an Orthodox upbringing that she’d left behind, the sudden death of her father, estrangement from her mother, her son’s near-fatal illness in the first year of his life, and unsuccessful attempts to have a second child. She and her husband and son moved out of New York City to rural Connecticut in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and it’s in this time of transition that Shapiro begins to explore her own spirituality. This begins with yoga and meditation retreats but inevitably, it seems, leads her back to her Jewish heritage. She realizes that she can be a Jew who practices Buddhist meditation and learns from gurus; she can be a Jew who doubts the existence of a personal God yet still prays, but she can’t not be a Jew.

The chapters are short, the writing vivid, and the organization non-linear — Shapiro jumps back and forth, in her short pieces, from past to present in no discernible pattern, the way the mind does when remembering, when trying to make sense of experience. Which is what she’s trying to: attempting to find or create some meaning that will make sense of who she is and all that’s happened to her. If that process fascinates you as it does me, you will enjoy this memoir.

The Night of the Gun, by David Carr

OK, so we all know I’m a sucker for a good addiction-and-recovery memoir, and this is a good one — journalist David Carr’s story of his disastrous slide into drug addiction, his difficult recovery, and his effort to raise his twin daughters alone while in recovery and also having a brush with cancer. But what raised this far above the run of the mill addiction memoir for me is the way the story is told.

The “night of the gun” referenced in the title is a story from the worst depths of Carr’s drug-using years when, as he recalls it, a good friend of his ended up pulling a gun on him. Except that when he went back years later and talked to his friend about it, his friend remembered the story the other way around — it was Carr who pointed a gun at him. Realizing that his own memory of such a crucial moment in his life could be flawed shook Carr — and made him question the whole project of writing a memoir. Instead of writing his memories, he chose to approach his own past — events now twenty years behind him — like he would a news story he was covering. He used his journalistic skills — interviewing, seeking out primary documents — to uncover his own story. The result was, to me, a fascinating book that said as much about the flaws and limitations of memory and  the way we construct our stories, as it did about addiction and recovery.

I’ve ranted a bit this year about memoirs that were written too soon, too close to the experiences they portray. The passage of time allows you to see events in perspective, but of course, it also blurs memory. Carr doesn’t mention James Frey by name in this but he makes it pretty clear that he thinks A Million Little Pieces and similar memoirs are flat-out lying about the author’s ability to remember events and conversations that not only happened years earlier but happened while they were drunk, high, or in withdrawal. Taking the exact opposite approach, Carr lays out for his readers the fallibility of his own memory and, when his investigative work uncovered conflicting versions of a story, simply places them side by side and admits he can’t be sure exactly how things happened. His portrayal of his own younger self is unflinching, including not just  the “cool” details about using and recovering but also his abuse of his girlfriends during his drug use, and the reasons why the mother of his children still believes that he stole them from her. It’s not always a pretty picture, but it does have the feel of unflinching honesty. For a reader like me who finds memory and storytelling even more fascinating than addiction and recovery, this was a book I found impossible to put down.