Catherine Hollis

NonfictionMemoir

Dear Senthuran

Review by Catherine Hollis

In West African Igbo mythology, an ogbanje spirit is a troublesome entity temporarily housed in a human body. Akwaeke Emezi’s stunning debut novel, Freshwater (2018), uses this element of “Igbo ontology” to tell a story of what it’s like to grow up ogbanje, death-haunted and multiple. Subsequently, Emezi has written about identifying as trans and as ogbanje themself—as something other than human.

Emezi’s brilliant Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir develops their ideas about identity and art through a sequence of letters to friends, lovers, students, writers and deities. This book tells of growing up in Aba, Nigeria, witnessing casual violence and injury, and of a childhood shaped by the works of literature brought home by Emezi’s parents. Emezi recounts writing Freshwater, having a breakdown during the ensuing book tour and pursuing surgeries that would free them from a gendered human body. These surgeries, which Emezi accepts as “mutilations,” are how the “spirit customiz[es] the vessel” and have as much to do with being ogbanje as being trans.

Perhaps Emezi’s greatest achievement with this memoir is their insistence on centering Igbo ontology within their story rather than reaching for tired Western metaphors about psychiatric conditions like trauma, PTSD or disassociation. Emezi’s work reminds us that these diagnoses are limiting boxes, shaped by colonialist, racist and sexist assumptions. Dear Senthuran explodes these human limitations by insisting on the imagination’s power to create worlds.

Each letter in Dear Senthuran is hypnotic and poetic, but the letters to Nonso, which read like letters to a student or a “baby writer,” are particularly powerful. These letters discuss “worldbending” with reference to Octavia Butler’s fiction. Writers make worlds exist from nothing—a godlike power available to anyone willing to “face their work.”

In Dear Senthuran, Emezi generously shares both their wounds and their wisdom, offering aspiring writers and artists fresh inspiration for creating new forms of making, loving and being.

In Dear Senthuran, Akwaeke Emezi explodes human limitations by insisting on the imagination’s power to create worlds.
NonfictionEssays

White Magic

Review by Catherine Hollis

White Magic is divine, incantatory, a riddle, an illusion. In Elissa Washuta’s hands, this collection becomes more than the sum of its parts. The subjects of these essays are parts of a bigger story—like a spell with the intention to make whole what has been wounded. Readers of Washuta’s two previous nonfiction books will recognize some of the same terrain, but this collection creates a new narrative, a reckoning with healing and with growing up.

White Magic begins with Washuta's urgent desire to decolonize witchcraft and other spiritual practices. For example, the Native American practice of smudging with white sage has been commodified so thoroughly that sage bundles were recently offered for sale at Sephora. Washuta, who is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe, wishes for “a version of the occult that isn’t built on plunder,” although she doubts whether such a thing exists.

Tapping into her roots, Washuta explores the ecology of the Seattle region through Native mythology, as well as the history of the region’s colonization by white settlers. Multiple essays focus on the legacy of sexual violence against Native women, contextualized through Washuta’s own harrowing experiences. These essays move deftly between the personal, cultural and historical to create resonances across time.

Some of the best essays in White Magic are the most intimate, especially the ones that wrestle with the piercing sorrow of romantic attachment. Why do we love those who cannot love us back—or worse, who might kill us? Under Washuta’s dexterous touch, these questions gain symbolic weight through nuanced excursions into pop culture, from Stevie Nicks and “Twin Peaks” to the video game Red Dead Redemption 2. These subjects might sound disparate, but Washuta’s gift for weaving metaphorical strands across essays creates a strikingly harmonious narrative whole.

White Magic is divine, incantatory, a riddle, an illusion. In Washuta’s hands, this collection becomes more than the sum of its parts.
NonfictionMemoirEssays

Festival Days

Review by Catherine Hollis

Jo Ann Beard’s prose is never more intensely vibrant than when describing death. Her celebrated essay “The Fourth State of Matter,” published in The New Yorker in 1996, depicts the decline of a beloved dog and the end of a marriage before segueing into the horror of a mass shooting at the University of Iowa. Beard’s new collection of essays, Festival Days, shimmers with a similar emotional intensity, especially when evoking the flashes of memory that come to those pausing on the threshold between life and death.

Beard is known as a nonfiction essayist, but her work often reads like suspenseful fiction. Her essay “Werner,” included in this volume, is about a man who jumps from a burning building in New York City. Beard’s narration so completely enters the subjective experience of Werner, clutching his cat under his arm as he contemplates the jump, it feels to the reader like a virtual reality experience. Similarly, Beard’s prose in the essay “Cheri” conforms intimately to the physical and mental experiences of a dying woman.

Allowing her work to exist beyond the labels of fiction or nonfiction, Beard’s metaphorical patterns evince the imaginative truths that underlie her writing. Festival Days is woven from these repeating symbols: the elderly dog, the husband’s betrayal, the friend dying of cancer. In three different essays in this collection, someone falls through a thin sheet of ice into a winter lake. Twice they are rescued; once they are not. These resonances across the essays suggest a greater unity, a story unfolding over a lifetime.

Beard’s literary powers are most evident in the long eponymous essay that concludes this collection. Here, Beard weaves metaphor and memory into a stunning portrait of lifelong friendship, of those relationships that hold us and ground us across the decades, that persist with love even to the final goodbye.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Festival Days is great on audiobook! Read our starred review.

Jo Ann Beard’s masterful essays shimmer with emotional intensity, especially when evoking the flashes of memory that come on the threshold between life and death.
NonfictionLiteratureBiography

Devils, Lusts, and Strange Desires

Review by Catherine Hollis

Patricia Highsmith wrote about obsessive love, hate and murder in a series of psychologically disturbing crime novels. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train (1950), was adapted into a film by Alfred Hitchcock, and her second novel, The Price of Salt (1952), written under a pseudonym, was more recently adapted by Todd Haynes into the award-winning film Carol (2015). The release of Highsmith’s diaries in 2021 will no doubt arouse more interest in her life and psychology—for Highsmith was, by all accounts, a deeply unpleasant person.

Richard Bradford’s Devils, Lusts, and Strange Desires is the third biography of Highsmith to emerge in recent years, and it is by far the most lurid. As is clear from the very first page, which stopped me in my tracks, this is a biography that relishes in the worst that Highsmith thought, said and did. What is unclear, and on this topic Bradford's analysis is very good, is to what extent the murderous impulses recorded in Highsmith’s diaries were “real” or an imaginative rehearsal for her novels. Bradford suggests that Highsmith embedded as many truths, lies and manipulative games in her diaries as she did in her novels, a strategy possibly designed to frustrate future biographers.

Bradford is primarily interested in drawing connections between Highsmith’s personal life and her psychopathic characters, especially the ones in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955). Unfortunately, the effect of this parallelism is that the mid-20th-century closeted world of lesbian relationships (of which Highsmith had many) is portrayed as something out of gay pulp fiction. Highsmith’s love life was a roller coaster of attraction, obsession, alcoholism and trauma, but a more nuanced biography would contextualize this toxic brew within the homophobia and misogyny of the time. This is not that biography. Nonetheless, readers looking to immerse themselves in stories of very bad behavior will enjoy this deadly cocktail.

Richard Bradford’s Devils, Lusts, and Strange Desires is the third biography of Highsmith to emerge in recent years, and it is by far the most lurid. As is clear from the very first page, this is a biography that relishes in the worst that Highsmith thought, said and did.

NonfictionHistoryBlack History

White Fright

Review by Catherine Hollis

America’s current struggle with racist police violence, voter suppression and white supremacy has deep and bloody roots in our national history. In order to understand the divisive United States of today, we must examine how the legacy of slavery and segregation continues to shape our nation. Jane Dailey’s White Fright: The Sexual Panic at the Heart of America’s Racist History contributes to this scholarship through the lens of white anxiety about interracial relationships.

A noted historian of race in America, Dailey grounds this book with a clear narrative voice as she reviews the legal cases that institutionalized segregation in the American South. From Reconstruction after the Civil War to the 1960s civil rights movement, this history has been marked by legal restrictions on interracial sex and marriage occasioned by the sexual panic Dailey terms “white fright,” in a nod to the idea of “white flight.”

Beginning in the late 19th century, voting restrictions such as poll taxes and literacy tests were used in the American South to suppress the African American vote. This allowed for the passage of the so-called Jim Crow laws, legal machinations that institutionalized racial segregation under the false claim of “separate but equal” and were accompanied by white supremacist mob rule and the tragic violence of lynching. Dailey shows how inflammatory narratives of sexual predation underpinned these assaults on Black lives, while also revealing how white women were then held to notions of racial “purity.”

An illuminating contribution to the history of racism in America, White Fright reveals how white anxieties around gender and sexuality shaped the Black experience of social injustice.

In order to understand the divisive United States of today, we must examine how the legacy of slavery and segregation continues to shape our nation. Jane Dailey’s White Fright: The Sexual Panic at the Heart of America’s Racist History contributes to this conversation through the lens of white anxiety about interracial relationships.
NonfictionSocial ScienceHistory

Magic

Review by Catherine Hollis

In Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, From the Ice Age to the Present, Oxford professor of archaeology Chris Gosden treats readers to a history of humanity through the lens of magic. Gosden defines magic as human participation in the universe through ritual and art. From Paleolithic cave art and Egyptian burial practices to 19th-century spiritualism and 20th-century paganism, magical objects and rituals have always been a part of the human experience. Even in cultures guided predominantly by the two other great belief systems, religion and science, magic has often persisted alongside them.

In this beautifully illustrated and written book, Gosden offers an encyclopedic compendium of magical practices across the globe and throughout history. Readers will gain much from the transhistorical perspective Gosden offers. For example, the shamanism practiced on the Eurasian Steppe in 5000 B.C. traveled from Mongolia to Iron Age Western Europe, where it was practiced by the Celts. This history can be traced through the objects found in ancient burial sites and under excavated stone circles, examples of which are reproduced throughout the text.

The global and historical reach of Gosden’s knowledge is astonishing and makes this book an essential reference work. But Gosden has another compelling trick up his sleeve. The book’s humane, urgent conclusion suggests that magic may even offer some clues for surviving our current global climate crisis. Many of the magical rituals and practices discussed here rely on the notion of an animate and sentient natural world. “To be human is to be connected,” Gosden argues. If we can reawaken our sense of connection to the natural world—to trees and animals and oceans—we may be able to encourage more humans to practice living lightly and harmoniously with the world around us.

In Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, From the Ice Age to the Present, Oxford professor of archaeology Chris Gosden treats readers to a history of humanity through the lens of magic. Gosden defines magic as human participation in the universe through ritual and…

NonfictionMemoir

Becoming Duchess Goldblatt

Review by Catherine Hollis

The most venerable resident of Crooked Path, New York, is also its only resident. Duchess Goldblatt, beloved social media presence, award-winning author and sponsor of the Duchess Goldblatt dog (and cat) show, expands her reach beyond 280 characters in her tell-all memoir Becoming Duchess Goldblatt. Well, almost all.

The pseudonymous writer behind the Duchess remains unknown in this memoir, but we might think of her as the Duchess’s ghostwriter. After losing a marriage, a job, a house and a circle of friends, this writer became a vessel for the voice of the Duchess, who was fond of dictating loving tweets in the middle of the night. The Duchess’ wit and charm went on to attract a real community, which includes the singer Lyle Lovett, in the otherwise dismal social media landscape.

Becoming Duchess Goldblatt documents the rise of the Duchess, her friendship with Lyle Lovett and the influence of the writer’s good-hearted father on the Duchess’s kindness and whimsy. As a memoir, the story doesn’t shy away from the darker side of the writer’s life—especially the experience of growing up with an older brother who was mentally ill. It also questions the ethics of memoir, of telling family stories that reveal other people’s secrets or bad behavior. Anonymity allows the writer to tell her story through the Duchess, while also preserving the family’s privacy.

Most importantly though, the Duchess is a light shining in the darkness, a beacon for troubled souls scrolling through their phones in the wee hours of the morning. Her presence has uplifted her human avatar, even as it heartens Her Grace’s ever-growing audience of “loons” and “rascals.” She might be an invention of social media, but—as the Duchess would say—her love is real.

The most venerable resident of Crooked Path, New York, is also its only resident. Duchess Goldblatt, beloved social media presence, award-winning author and sponsor of the Duchess Goldblatt dog (and cat) show, expands her reach beyond 280 characters in her tell-all memoir Becoming Duchess…

NonfictionMemoir

Sigh, Gone

Review by Catherine Hollis

With Sigh, Gone: A Misfit’s Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In, Phuc Tran has written the great punk rock immigrant story. Or should that be the definitive refugee punk rock story? Or a story about how punk rock and great books helped a Vietnamese kid in small-town America fit in by standing out? Whatever order we put the words in, Tran’s book is my pick for the best, the funniest and the most heartfelt memoir of the year.

Currently a high school Latin teacher and a tattoo artist, Tran honed his unique blend of intellectual misfittery in blue-collar Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where his family settled after evacuating Saigon in 1975. Tran and his brother, initially the only Vietnamese kids in school, learned to punch first when dealing with racist bullies on the playground and in the streets. Star Wars, skateboards and punk rock later offered Tran a haven where friendships were formed through shared mixtapes and band T-shirts.

Code-switching between hardcore shows and life at home with his Vietnamese-speaking parents was not easy. With grace and clarity, Tran writes pivotal scenes involving the sometimes violent disconnect between his traumatized refugee parents and their Americanized children—a testament to the sensitivity and balance he brings to his exploration of generational and cultural conflict.

While it might seem ironic, literature and punk subculture equally teach Tran about universal themes like existentialism, displacement, alienation and community. Hilariously, quite a few of Tran’s high school literary choices are occasioned by his love of Morrissey and the Smiths. As someone who also had a poster of Victorian bad boy Oscar Wilde on her high school bedroom wall (next to the Smiths poster), this rings so true as to be uncanny.

Sigh, Gone filters the archetypal high school misfit story through the lens of immigration and assimilation, building it into a larger narrative about the ways music and books can bring us together, even when the larger world threatens to tear us apart.

With Sigh, Gone: A Misfit’s Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In, Phuc Tran has written the great punk rock immigrant story. Or should that be the definitive refugee punk rock story? Or a story about how punk rock and…

NonfictionWomen's HistoryBiography

Free Thinker

Review by Catherine Hollis

Helen Hamilton Gardener, née Alice Chenoweth, may be the most famous suffrage activist you’ve never heard of. Her eventful experiences took her from the Civil War, to life as a so-called “fallen woman,” to a name change and political work in support of women’s issues, culminating in the adoption of the 19th Amendment in 1919. In Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener, historian Kimberly A. Hamlin knits together the many strands of Gardener’s story into a compelling narrative about a woman who advocated tirelessly for the freedom to control her body, money and intellect.

A “fallen woman,” in 19th-century parlance, meant an unmarried woman who’d had any sexual experience whatsoever. Young Alice Chenoweth worked as a teacher, one of the few “respectable” professions open to single women in Cincinnati in the 1870s. She fell afoul of the sexual double standard when she entered into an affair with a married man who claimed to have left his wife. She lost her job because of the relationship; her partner, Charles Smart, did not. The situation prompted her to move to New York with Smart, change her name to Gardener and become a lifelong advocate for women’s independence.

As Helen Hamilton Gardener, she wrote books, gave lectures and became a champion for many women’s issues, including raising the age of consent and obtaining the vote. Gardener became a leader in the women’s suffrage movement, but within this movement, Gardener advocated for the vote to be obtained first by white women. This strategy was intended to gain the support of Southern states, but it cruelly denied an alliance with black women for the universal right to vote. 

With this biography, Hamlin has written a nuanced history of the suffrage movement through the life of a remarkable woman. Gardener wasn’t perfect, but this biography does an excellent job balancing her extraordinary achievements against her cultural blind spots. 

Helen Hamilton Gardener, née Alice Chenoweth, may be the most famous suffrage activist you’ve never heard of. Her eventful experiences took her from the Civil War, to life as a so-called “fallen woman,” to a name change and political work in support of women’s issues,…

NonfictionBiography

The Contender

Review by Catherine Hollis

Mercurial, feline, charismatic, sullen, progressive, brutal: actor Marlon Brando was a knot of contradictions. Passionate about social justice and civil rights, Brando could also treat the many women in his life as disposable. Hailed as a genius for his intense performances in A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront, Brando struggled to retain his interest in acting and refused to play the Hollywood game. Prizewinning Hollywood biographer William J. Mann masterfully captures Brando’s allure, his psychological complexity and the epic arc of his career in The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando. 

Mann interweaves narrative strands from Brando’s traumatic childhood through his professional ascent to build a layered portrait of his ambivalences, rages and sexuality. Why did Brando punch a fellow actor backstage in his early years at the New School’s Dramatic Workshop? A flashback to Brando’s turbulent time in military school suggests possible answers. Similarly, Brando’s fluid sexuality and active sex life (he called himself a “sex addict” long before the term was common currency) is interwoven against childhood scenes with his beloved but neglectful, alcoholic mother. 

The portrait of 1940s New York and Brando’s time at the Dramatic Workshop is particularly fascinating. Mann punctures the myth that Brando was a Method actor (someone trained in the Strasberg method) by showing how pivotal the acting teacher (and Stanislavski disciple) Stella Adler was in Brando’s life and work. Adler not only trained Brando in her technique but also took him into her culturally and intellectually progressive home, opening his eyes to art and politics. Adler’s milieu was the source for Brando’s lifelong political activism.

Subsequent chapters in Brando’s life and work are as carefully and fairly handled. Extensive interviews (with Ellen Adler, Rita Moreno, Elaine Stritch and many others) reveal Brando’s complex and often ambivalent relationships with women, his children and Hollywood. 

From Mann, Brando receives a biography every bit as compelling and powerful as his own stage presence. 

Mercurial, feline, charismatic, sullen, progressive, brutal: actor Marlon Brando was a knot of contradictions. Passionate about social justice and civil rights, Brando could also treat the many women in his life as disposable. Hailed as a genius for his intense performances in A Streetcar Named…

NonfictionMemoirGraphic Memoirs

Commute

Review by Catherine Hollis

With its deceptively simple line drawings, Erin Williams’ Commute illustrates the numerous ways she (and many women) negotiate the presence of sexual threat on a daily basis. Some of these encounters might seem mundane—such as the man who continuously stares at her while sitting too close on the train—but their impact is real. In an otherwise empty train car, such a man is a threat; and while women instinctively know this, men need to learn that this can be a daily experience. Among other things Commute does well, it’s a good education for men about the lived experience of women.

Commute is a graphic (in both senses of the word) memoir. Williams focuses the book on one regular day in her life, the life of a working mom: her 5 a.m. alarm, the commute into Manhattan, the work day, her commute home and time with her baby. The illustrations can be lively and humorous at one moment and shattering the next. They show, in a way words can’t, how creepy it can feel to be stared at. Or how the memories of a teenage sexual assault might play back each and every day, as routine as a morning cup of tea, but far more disturbing.

Through the use of flashbacks, Williams reviews her sexual history, both the assaults and the more ambiguous encounters. Some of the most arresting moments in this memoir concern Williams’ past use of alcohol to pursue bodily disassociation. Her subtle and devastating illustrations reveal the link between sexual assault and alcoholism in visceral detail, and the graphic-memoir format makes these issues accessible to a broad range of readers.

Williams asks hard questions about shame, compliance and desire, both in her own life and in the larger culture. Her story, she says, is the “mundane tragedy of every woman you know.” By sharing it, she adds an eloquent voice to the chorus of stories testifying to the daily experiences of women under patriarchy. Commute is a book that really should be read by everyone.

With its deceptively simple line drawings, Erin Williams’ Commute illustrates the numerous ways she (and many women) negotiate the presence of sexual threat on a daily basis. Some of these encounters might seem mundane—such as the man who continuously stares at her while sitting too…

NonfictionBiography

A Woman of No Importance

Review by Catherine Hollis

Sonia Purnell, the bestselling author of Clementine: The Life of Mrs. Winston Churchill, captures the thrilling story of a female spy in A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II, a groundbreaking biography that reads like a spy thriller. 

Purnell’s subject is Virginia Hall, the daughter of a proper Maryland family, who sought to elude her mother’s social control and embrace her own desire for an adventurous life by applying with the U.S. State Department. But despite superior language skills and test results, Hall found herself stuck in low-level clerical jobs as result of the era’s ingrained sexism.

Hall was stationed as a clerk in Turkey when a hunting accident resulted in the loss of her left leg. Despite near-fatal blood infections and the pain of walking with a prosthetic, Hall later volunteered as an ambulance driver for the French army in 1939. Her bravery and passion for France made her an attractive recruit for Britain’s Special Operations Executive, the secretive spy organization given the nod by Winston Churchill to fight the Nazis through James Bond-style espionage. Embedded in Nazi-occupied France, Hall helped organize the French Resistance in ways so ingenious and suspenseful that her previously untold story has recently been optioned for film. 

Although documentation of the French Resistance movement exists only in fragments, Purnell ably draws on a variety of sources to create a suspenseful, heartbreaking and ultimately triumphant tale of heroism and sacrifice. 

Sonia Purnell, the bestselling author of Clementine: The Life of Mrs. Winston Churchill, captures the thrilling story of a female spy in A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II, a groundbreaking biography that reads like a spy thriller. 

NonfictionMemoir

Never Enough

Review by Catherine Hollis

A timely, educational blend of neuroscience and memoir, Judith Grisel’s Never Enough tackles the devastating problem of addiction. Current statistics speak to a dire state of affairs: Nearly 16 percent of the U.S. population over the age of 12 fits the criteria for substance abuse disorder. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has declared our current opioid epidemic to be a public health emergency. Drawing from her own experience as a recovering drug addict, Grisel is uniquely positioned to study the neuroscience of addiction. She understands both the allure of drugs and the devastation they leave in their wake. Indeed, it seems that the way she has managed to stay sober for over 25 years is to make the study of addiction her life’s work. Now a professor and scientist, Grisel is a compassionate and empathetic guide to the hard science behind drug use.

Chapter by chapter, Grisel examines the effects of different drugs on the human brain: alcohol, marijuana, stimulants, tranquilizers and psychedelics. Unfortunately for users, most of these operate by the “opponent process theory,” the idea that any stimulus to the brain will eventually be neutralized into its opposite. Simply put, the high gives way to the low. The brain adjusts to the dosage, and the withdrawal lasts longer than the desired effect, creating a vicious cycle of dependency and diminishing returns.

How is it that some people can enjoy a drink and stop, while addicts can never have enough of their chosen substances? The answer involves genetics, environmental and social context and significant exposure to drugs, particularly during adolescence as the brain is developing. There are no easy solutions to the problems of addiction, but Grisel suggests that knowledge and kindness can go a long way.

A timely, educational blend of neuroscience and memoir, Judith Grisel’s Never Enough tackles the devastating problem of addiction.

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