CLIMBING OUT OF TRAUMA: JANUARY FIELD NOTES CHOICE

The Field Notes Book Group had its last meeting of 2022 on Saturday, and a good time was had by all involved.  Not only did we discuss our December choice, which was I Capture the Castle (which wasn’t actually read by all the members of the group), but we also had a great discussion of the books we’d read over the past year, and we selected the book for our first meeting of the new year on January 21, 2023.

I personally like having the groups look back over the year’s selections.  As a group leader, I crave any kind of input about the whole selection process, and getting a sense of what kinds of books people like and dislike is really helpful.  While there were a few books people couldn’t remember one way or another, our choices for “favorite” book were all over the place, no one book being everybody’s favorite.  I see this as a healthy sign of the diversity of opinions of the people in our group, and I’m delighted that we had so many books that people loved.

In a pretty close vote, we ended up choosing In the Shadow of the Mountain, by Silvia Vasquez-Lavado.  This memoir is about a woman, ostensibly a brilliant success in Silicon Valley, who was repressing her sexuality, her alcoholism, and her history of sexual abuse.  When she returned home to her family in Peru, everything fell apart for her and the only thing that helped her find herself again was mountain climbing.  She ended up working toward climbing Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world, taking with her a group of fellow sexual abuse survivors.  

Copies of the book have been ordered.  We will be holding the next meeting virtually as well as in person, so if you’re interested in attending virtually, send me an email at nmulligan@thefieldlibrary.org a week before the date of the meeting and I’ll get you the link.

A BEAUTIFUL MEMOIR: THE COST OF LIVING

I’m not big on reading memoirs in general.  Too often I feel as if the writer has had one unusual experience and is making the most of it, and too often I feel the writer is too young to be able to reflect intelligently on their experiences in general.  There are exceptional memoirs, of course: Angela’s Ashes, by Frank McCourt, was brilliant and funny and poignant at the same time, and there have been others that blew me away, but on the whole I tend to steer clear of memoirs as a genre.  

However, I just read a jewel of a memoir, one that reminds me of how good the genre can be in the right hands.  The Cost of Living, by Deborah Levy, is a very short, incredibly well written account of a relatively short period in the writer’s life, brought to vivid life.  It’s the kind of book I read slowly (I am not a slow reader in general, as you might have guessed from all my reviews) because I wanted to savor her language and her way of looking at the world.

The book is about the period right after she and her husband decided to separate, with their children staying with her.  It is not, I hasten to add, one of those stories about how terrible her ex is and what drove her to leave; on the whole, she and her husband seem to have been incredibly adult and mature about their separation and she never badmouths him at all, even to throw a little shade at him after the fact. This by itself is remarkable to me.  Seldom have I encountered a book involving a marital separation where both people are civilized and the focus is not on the wrongs done to the protagonist but on how she finds her way to a new life in a new role in society, but this is one of those books.

Levy is an excellent writer, and now that I’ve read this I’m going to look for her fiction as well (she wrote two Man Booker Prize finalist novels, so  she definitely knows what she’s doing).  She starts the book with an incident she witnessed in which a young woman is telling a story to a man who obviously considers her a minor character in his life and not a major character in her own, or even a person who has her own life (this I am a little sensitized to after reading “Midwestern Girl Is Tired of Appearing in Your Stories”, from Shit Cassandra Saw).  This sets the tone for the book, which is about finding a way to become a major character in your life story when the world around you sees you, at best, as a supporting character.

She describes the place she and her daughters live in after the separation, the shack she uses for her writing (not a she shed by any means but I was a little jealous of it, lack of heat and all), her electric bicycle she uses to travel around London, her friends and acquaintances, and she makes it all real and immediate.  She talks about other writers and their work in a way that makes it clear these are her friends and colleagues even if they’re dead (like Emily Dickinson), and it’s clear she belongs in their company from the way she writes. 

For such a short book (only 134 pages), The Cost of Living is filled with wisdom, lovely insights, beautiful prose and a sense of a real person dealing in a dignified and openhearted way with the world.  I heartily recommend it.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNERS HERE AT THE FIELD LIBRARY

This is the time of year when all the Best Of lists come out, and also a number of the most prestigious awards in the book world, and, lucky you, you can take out the National Book Award Winners in both Nonfiction and Fiction categories right here at The Field Library!

You might not think a novel about a young couple falling in love while they’re both attending a prestigious performing arts high school would be the kind of book to win top awards, but Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi, is the National Book Award winner for 2019, and that’s where the book starts, if not where it ends up. Two freshmen, David and Sarah, both attending a highly competitive performing arts school in 1980’s suburbs, fall passionately in love, their relationship noticed and sometimes interfered with by their friends and their charismatic teacher, Mr. Kingsley.  Things happen, the real world breaks into the rarefied atmosphere of the school, and then we are abruptly dropped into a different situation, years later, with some of the same characters still dealing with the fallout from their time at the school. The perspective shifts in a way that reminds many reviewers of Fates and Furies, and then, just when you think you have an idea of what’s going on, there’s a coda that whiplashes you into yet a third way of looking at events you’ve already seen. The book is about memory, about perspective, about consent and relationships, and power imbalances, and it’s probably the audacious structure of the book that most impressed the National Book Foundation this year.  It’s a bestseller and quite popular, so if it’s not on the shelf when you come in, put it on hold.

The National Book Award for Nonfiction this year goes to The Yellow House, a memoir by Sarah M. Broom of her family and her family’s home in New Orleans. Sarah’s mother bought a shotgun house in New Orleans East in 1961, as the space race was building up and optimism about the future seemed a reasonable response.  Instead, as the family grew to twelve children, the house became more and more dilapidated and the neighborhood around it fell into neglect. While Sarah considered herself the prodigal daughter and left New Orleans, she’d reckoned without the pull of home and family, and even the destruction of Hurricane Katrina, which wiped the Yellow House off the map altogether, couldn’t quench Sarah’s connection to her family’s home.  The book is more than just a story of Sarah’s life and times. It’s also a biography of a hundred years of her family’s history, of one neighborhood in one of America’s most famous cities, and of the effects of class, race and inequality on people trying to get by and survive.  

Check out the National Book Foundation’s choices for the best of the year here at The Field Library. 

MORE THAN A MEMOIR: WORKING

Why should someone read a book about the process of writing biographies, especially if you’ve never read the biographies the author has written?  When the book is Working: Researching, Interviewing and Writing, by Robert Caro, the answer to that question is simple: the book is utterly fascinating, whether you’re a writer or not, whether you’ve ever read his Pulitzer Prize winning biographies of Robert Moses or of Lyndon B. Johnson or not, whether you know anything about him or about his subjects.  As a matter of fact, Working is so well-written, filled with so many fascinating details, that I’m seriously considering actually tackling his massive biographies (the very lengths of which have daunted me in the past).

Caro started out as a reporter on a local New Jersey newspaper and then on Newsweek, and he writes about how those jobs sparked his interest in biography, and how each biography he wrote led to the next.  Winning the respect of his editor on Newsweek, who was originally suspicious of a young reporter who’d graduated from Princeton, by his willingness to dig deep into a political story, Caro learned a principle that would serve him well throughout his career: turn every page. Look at everything, dig deeper, don’t settle for the obvious story or the obvious angle. His nearly obsessive adherence to that rule is the reason his books take so long to write, because his research takes him everywhere, not just through all the archives of famous and less famous people (the Lyndon B. Johnson archives, which he describes vividly, contain millions of documents), but to the places where the subject lived and worked. In the case of Robert Moses, for instance, Caro dug deeply into the reasons why he chose to take certain famers’ lands and skip around the edges of certain rich and connected people’s properties, going to the scene of the expressway and talking to the people who lost their land as a result; he traced down the people who were displaced from one Bronx neighborhood so Moses could build one of his expressways, and he describes those encounters in this book vividly enough that you want to see how he handles these situations in The Power Broker.  When writing his first book about LBJ, Caro and his wife moved into the Hill Country where Johnson was born and raised, to get a sense of what that world was like, to find out how Johnson changed his people’s lives for the better even as a young congressman. 

You can learn, from this book, not only how Caro would work his interviews with various people who were significant in the lives of his subjects, but some tricks of the trade of interviewing in general (you will, for instance, learn the importance of SU in interviewing), how to get people to talk to you, how to nudge them into remembering more details than they might have believed they remembered, how to persuade people to tell the truth, rather than the public story.  I am sure, from reading this, that Caro is an expert interviewer, because he seems to have an infinite capacity for listening and very little ego. 

The book gives a vivid picture of the life of a serious nonfiction writer, from the poverty in which he and his wife lived when he was first researching The Power Broker, to life in the New York Public Library’s research room, to his actual methods of writing the books (longhand? In pencil? Who does that??).

The advantage of reading Working: Researching, Interviewing and Writing is that it’s much shorter than Caro’s prizewinning books, but be warned: it will make you want to dig deeper and maybe even tackle the books themselves.

 

LIFE IN AN AMBULANCE: A THOUSAND NAKED STRANGERS

One of the coolest things about memoirs is that you get to experience a whole different kind of life, vicariously living through something you might never come close to in your normal life, or exposing you to the other side of something you would otherwise take for granted. An excellent example of this is A Thousand Naked Strangers: A Paramedic’s Wild Ride to the Edge and Back, by Kevin Hazzard, about the author’s experiences as first an Emergency Medical Technician and then as a paramedic in the city of Atlanta.  I’m pretty sure at this point in my life that I will never be an EMT or a paramedic, but the author’s fascinating and vivid description of what it’s like riding the ambulance as one of the professionals on the inside instead of one of the sick or injured people strapped to the gurney.

Hazzard isn’t one of those people who always aspired to be a doctor or a paramedic. The way he tells it, he more or less fell into the profession after 9/11 as a way of trying to do good and make a difference with his life.  When he discovered that the necessary course for becoming an EMT was only 8 months and didn’t cost too much, he gave it a try and by so doing, brought himself into a world few of us see (if we’re lucky).

If you’re expecting a lot of gross stories, involving body parts and fluids of various sorts, you will certainly find some of those here, but the author doesn’t treat his job as a freak show, or his experiences as a way of grossing people out.  He tells stories of the people he encounters and treats — the shooting victims, the people involved in terrible accidents, the dog who swallowed a T bone sidewards (not their usual kind of case, as you can imagine) — with sympathy for the human beings involved in the disasters, and also with the kind of sense of humor you’d have to develop in order to survive doing this kind of work day in, day out.  He also demonstrates how much the work affects the people doing it, what the responsibility for life and death feels like, how hard it is to avoid turning into a burnout or a “tourist” and remain engaged and focused on helping people.  Reading this book convinced me there is no way I would have the guts to be able to handle this job even for a month, and it gave me more respect for the EMT’s and paramedics I know, and I’m sure you’ll have the same reaction.  It’s a quick read, but un-put-down-able, funny and gripping and vivid.  For a ride you’ll never forget, try A Thousand Naked Strangers: A Paramedic’s Wild Ride to the Edge and Back.