Catherine Hollis

NonfictionMemoir

Epiphany among the blisters

Review by Catherine Hollis

A profound and moving pilgrimage through the wilderness of grief, Cheryl Strayed’s Wild is one of the best American memoirs to emerge in years. After the shock of her mother’s unexpected death, 25-year-old Strayed is profoundly lost in the world, her family shattered. In the tradition of Thoreau and Kerouac, she finds herself again by hitting the road, or in this case, through-hiking 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail through California and Oregon.

Painfully funny and honest, Strayed documents the sheer stupidity of her early days on the trail, when her pack weighs upwards of 70 pounds and she fills her camp-stove with the wrong kind of gas. But mile by mile, and toenail by lost toenail, she grows stronger and smarter and lighter as she experiences how the extreme physical suffering of long-distance hiking eases the intense emotional suffering that brought her to it. She realizes that her instinct to walk the PCT was “a primal grab for a cure,” an attempt to create a new self and life from the ruins of the old. This reinvention extends to her new name, “Strayed,” which she chooses because “I had strayed and I was a stray . . . from the wild places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn’t have known before.”

As “Dear Sugar” advice columnist for The Rumpus, Cheryl Strayed is beloved for her compassionate wisdom. With Wild, we now witness the crucible that forged that hard-won knowledge. On the PCT, the loneliness of grief evolves into a visionary state of solitude: “Alone wasn’t a room anymore, but the whole wide world, and now I was alone in that world, occupying it in a way I never had before.” Even so, “trail angels” begin to reveal themselves to her, people who offer water, food or companionship—stations along the lonely way.

Wild is never simply a survival memoir, although it offers up many a thrilling incident—bears, rattlesnakes, dehydration, blisters, weather—to compel the reader’s attention. It is also a guidebook for living in the world, introducing a vibrant new American voice with a deceptively simple message: Go outside and take a hike.

A profound and moving pilgrimage through the wilderness of grief, Cheryl Strayed’s Wild is one of the best American memoirs to emerge in years. After the shock of her mother’s unexpected death, 25-year-old Strayed is profoundly lost in the world, her family shattered. In the…

NonfictionMemoir

Against all odds, laughter

Review by Catherine Hollis

As a PR booker for comedy clubs, Kambri Crews developed the slogan “Life’s Tough. Laugh More.” In her new memoir, Burn Down the Ground, Crews reveals the source of this motto in her hardscrabble childhood in rural Texas with deaf parents. This certainly isn’t a lighthearted story: Crews’ charismatic father, a combination of “Daniel Boone, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ben Franklin, and Elvis Presley all rolled into one,” is a dangerously attractive figure, prone to violent rages when he drinks. His paranoid jealousy turns to abuse against women, a storyline that frames this memoir, which begins with the adult Crews visiting her father in prison, where he is currently serving a 20-year sentence for the attempted murder of a girlfriend. Not funny at all, but sure proof that life’s tough.

The laughter shows up in Crews’ vivid and affectionate depiction of life with two deaf parents (who also happen to be stoner party animals). Crews and her brother, who are both hearing, learn to talk without moving their lips, which allows them to have secret conversations right in front of their parents; Crews wins points with her friends by encouraging them to yell curse words while her father drives the car. Readers interested in the details of growing up as a hearing child within the Deaf community will enjoy anecdotes about Crews’ mother using American Sign Language to sign along with Fleetwood Mac songs or winning the women’s division of the National Deaf Bowling Association.

Burn Down the Ground reads more effectively as a series of sketches than as a fully integrated memoir; the role of Crews’ father’s deafness in his violent behavior is an under-developed but compelling theme. Somewhat like Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club, Burn Down the Ground interweaves the toughness and laughter of an impoverished Texan childhood with Crews’ struggle to both love and acknowledge her father’s criminal violence and her mother’s inability to protect her from it. Her story is a testament to her resilience, and to the power of recognition and forgiveness to heal childhood wounds.

As a PR booker for comedy clubs, Kambri Crews developed the slogan “Life’s Tough. Laugh More.” In her new memoir, Burn Down the Ground, Crews reveals the source of this motto in her hardscrabble childhood in rural Texas with deaf parents. This certainly isn’t a…

NonfictionBiography

Madness and myth in the English court

Review by Catherine Hollis

Historian Julia Fox’s absorbing new dual biography of Katherine of Aragon and her sister Juana, Queen of Castile, gives fans of Showtime’s “The Tudors” an engrossing, star-crossed family history of Henry VIII’s first wife. Epic in scale, Fox’s Sister Queens shows how Katherine and Juana were groomed by their parents, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, for royal marriages and political intrigue.

Using ample primary sources, such as letters Katherine wrote to her father from England, Fox goes behind the scenes to reveal the sisters’ heartbreak and stoicism as they lived out the royal fates allotted to them. Katherine was originally sent from Spain to marry Prince Arthur, Henry’s older brother, but when Arthur died suddenly after a few weeks of marriage, Katherine’s position in the English court—and Spain’s alliance with England—was thrown into question. Seven years of holding firm to her marginalized position finally won her betrothal to Henry VIII—but how much of a victory was it?

Juana’s life story is even more dramatic. Married to Duke Philip of Burgundy—“Philip the Handsome”—Juana became a duchess, with the promise of one day becoming the Holy Roman Empress. An initially passionate attachment to her husband lapsed into bitterness and estrangement due in part to his many affairs, but also due to her violent response to them (she physically attacked one of his mistresses). Known to history as “Juana the Mad,” she may have suffered from mental illness exacerbated by the political machinations of her husband, her father and, later, her son. After Philip’s untimely death, when she refused to be parted from his coffin, the legend of her madness was firmly established. By confining her to convents, both Ferdinand and her son Charles were able to usurp Juana’s political power after her ascension to the Spanish throne following her mother’s death.

Fox examines the myths surrounding Juana and Katherine in light of the historical record, and her biography of the sisters provides a balanced scholarly assessment of such legends as Juana’s attachment to Philip’s corpse. Sister Queens balances history and drama in telling a fascinating story about larger-than-life characters in a dramatic political climate.

Historian Julia Fox’s absorbing new dual biography of Katherine of Aragon and her sister Juana, Queen of Castile, gives fans of Showtime’s “The Tudors” an engrossing, star-crossed family history of Henry VIII’s first wife. Epic in scale, Fox’s Sister Queens shows how Katherine and Juana…

NonfictionMemoir

Will you be my best friend?

Review by Catherine Hollis

Rachel Bertsche is a 20-something freelance writer and editor who, after following her husband to Chicago, found herself in need of a new best friend. Or several of them. So she did the 21st-century thing and started a blog, MWF Seeking BFF, setting herself the task of going on 52 “friend-dates” in a year. One year later, mirabile dictu, she’s found new friends, strengthened her marriage and landed a book contract. We should all be so lucky (or energetic).

Apart from documenting her “year of friendship,” Rachel’s memoir (I feel like we’re on a first-name basis) is also a charming exposition of the latest research on social connections. Anthropological research suggests that humans are capable of maintaining 150 social relationships, so Rachel figures out that she’s got openings for 20 new friends. Although she’s happy in her marriage, and close with her family, these good things are no substitute for real female friendship.

Female friendship, we learn, is characterized by a face-to-face dynamic: Imagine two women sitting across from one another at brunch, chatting. Male friendship is more typically characterized as a side-by-side dynamic: two men sitting on the sofa watching the game. Gender stereotypes aside, this is one explanation for why women happily married to men may still feel lonely; there’s a conversational dynamic potentially missing from their primary relationship. Indeed, recent research shows that married people are as likely as single people to feel socially isolated: A spouse may be a best friend, but we need more than one best friend to feel connected to the world around us.

MWF Seeking BFF reads like an extended personal essay in O: The Oprah Magazine, where Berstche was an editor. It combines personal narrative and social research in an upbeat and approachable manner, and has clearly hit a nerve with female readers in the 25-40 age group, who keenly feel the loss of youthful friendship in the years devoted to building a career and/or a family. If this describes you, I’d recommend reading it at the gym, so you can pass your copy on to the woman at the next elliptical machine. It may be the start of a beautiful friendship.

Rachel Bertsche is a 20-something freelance writer and editor who, after following her husband to Chicago, found herself in need of a new best friend. Or several of them. So she did the 21st-century thing and started a blog, MWF Seeking BFF, setting herself…

NonfictionMysteryMemoir

Remembering a life of crime

Review by Catherine Hollis

Reading Agatha Christie’s autobiography is like sitting down to tea with an especially chatty, good-natured auntie; one would never suspect her of slipping arsenic in your drink. The Queen of Crime, it turns out, was also a gifted and engaging memoirist, and readers who missed out on the 1977 publication of An Autobiography will be delighted with its reissue, timed to celebrate the 120th anniversary of Dame Christie’s birth.

As Christie’s grandson Mathew Prichard notes in his foreword, much of this autobiography focuses on her childhood, a happy and imaginative time that laid the groundwork for her future writing career. Young Agatha was a natural storyteller, creating imaginary friends known as The Kittens, and later inventing The School, a series of stories she spun about a group of schoolgirls. Learning about poisons while working in a pharmaceutical dispensary during the First World War gave Christie the idea for a detective story, which eventually became The Mysterious Affair at Styles, her first published book; witnessing the plight of Belgian refugees in England inspired Christie to make her detective Belgian—and thus Hercule Poirot was born. A marriage to handsome airman Archibald Christie was happy for a time, but Archie, it turns out, couldn’t much bear unhappiness. Agatha’s mother’s death in 1926 led to his affair and her infamous disappearance later that year. Christie doesn’t address the disappearance directly here, but says enough about her mental state to support theories that suggest she’d had a nervous breakdown of sorts.

Funny anecdotes about surfing with Archie in Hawaii and Cape Town (who knew Dame Christie could stand-up surf?), a happy second marriage to archaeologist Max Mallowan and periods spent with him on site in Iraq and Turkey are all fascinating. Christie’s enjoyment of the “indulgence” of memoir writing is apparent on every page of this lovely book, giving it a cheerful tone, as if she’s just turned to face you across the tea table to tell you a story. Packaged with a CD of newly discovered recordings of Christie dictating portions of the book, An Autobiography is essential for both mystery and memoir readers alike.

Reading Agatha Christie’s autobiography is like sitting down to tea with an especially chatty, good-natured auntie; one would never suspect her of slipping arsenic in your drink. The Queen of Crime, it turns out, was also a gifted and engaging memoirist, and readers who missed…
NonfictionBiography

Dickens’ path to greatness

Review by Catherine Hollis

Award-winning biographer Claire Tomalin now turns her attention to Charles Dickens in a substantial new work. Building on her earlier biography of Ellen Ternan—the young actress Dickens left his wife for—Tomalin surveys the broad expanse of Dickens’ life, from his professional successes to his personal failings. The result is an engaging, clear-eyed account of a most complex writer and man.

Tomalin gives each of Dickens’ biographical personae its due: We meet the child-laborer son of a bankrupt father, the energetic and talented young man sketching sympathetic portraits of London workers, the actor and performer, the champion of the poor and finally the writer, dipping his head in cold water to keep working through the night. Dickens’ preternatural energy as an author—seen in his ability to write two novels, The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, simultaneously for monthly serial publication—and his lifelong concern for the underdog brought him acclaim, wealth and enthusiastic readers in both England and America.

Haunted, however, by his lonely and impoverished childhood, Dickens could also drive a hard bargain, alienating friends and publishers in his single-minded pursuit of financial security. And despite claiming that his marriage to Catherine Dickens was unhappy, he nonetheless fathered 10 children in 20 years by her, increasing the domestic and financial stresses he felt so keenly. His attraction to innocent girl-women resulted not only in the creation of impossibly virtuous characters like Little Dorrit, but also in an abiding interest in London prostitutes.

Dickens’ affair with Ternan ultimately tore apart his family and dissolved some of his professional relationships. Tomalin carefully and fairly considers the evidence for the birth and death of an illegitimate child born to the couple, shedding light on a biographical secret that went unspoken for decades. In doing so, she brings the light and dark of Dickens’ personality into focus, the virtue he pursued and the vice that bedeviled him.

Tomalin’s Charles Dickens is a masterful balancing act, presenting the great artist as a fallible human without ever losing sight of the miracle of his literary achievements and the generosity of his spirit.

Award-winning biographer Claire Tomalin now turns her attention to Charles Dickens in a substantial new work. Building on her earlier biography of Ellen Ternan—the young actress Dickens left his wife for—Tomalin surveys the broad expanse of Dickens’ life, from his professional successes to his personal…

NonfictionMemoir

Testimony from under the big tent

Review by Catherine Hollis

Donna Johnson’s sensitive and revelatory Holy Ghost Girl takes its readers under the big revival tent of evangelist David Terrell. Johnson’s mother played organ for Brother Terrell’s traveling circus of a ministry in the 1960s, eventually becoming one of several women to bear his children out of wedlock. On the “sawdust trail” with the last of the old-time tent preachers, Johnson witnessed miraculous healings, speaking in tongues and the casting out of demons. This was a mysterious and surreal world for the little children bundled up in quilts in the back of the tent.

For Johnson and her brother, David Terrell was both stepfather and prophet, a man who kept their mother away from them for months at a time and a preacher with a direct line to God. Johnson offers a harrowing portrait of a childhood on and off the revival road, particularly when she and her brother are left alone for months at a time with a series of unstable caretakers. Long after leaving Terrell’s ministry, Johnson now offers a clear-eyed and compassionate view of her childhood and the man now widely discredited as a cult leader (Terrell eventually served 10 years in jail for tax evasion).

An impressive achievement of perspective and maturity, Holy Ghost Girl follows Johnson out of the Pentecostal movement into the wide world of “hellavision,” books and boys without slamming the door on the mysteries of her youth. Her memoir places David Terrell’s ministry in historical context, showing for example how the tent revivals of the 1950s and ’60s were an early site of integration in the American South. Both personal and social history, Holy Ghost Girl lifts the veil on a controversial sector of American religious experience through a child’s point of view. It is a haunting and memorable book.

Donna Johnson’s sensitive and revelatory Holy Ghost Girl takes its readers under the big revival tent of evangelist David Terrell. Johnson’s mother played organ for Brother Terrell’s traveling circus of a ministry in the 1960s, eventually becoming one of several women to bear his children…

NonfictionMemoir

A family talent for disaster

Review by Catherine Hollis

A memoir is an impression of a life, and how a writer shapes her material often tells us more about her character than it does about the facts. Jeanne Darst’s family life could as easily be tragic as comic, but in Darst’s painfully hilarious Fiction Ruined My Family, comedy wins out every time. A consummate performer, she keeps her readers balanced on a fine line between laughter and tears.

Darst comes from a St. Louis family distinguished for its politicians, writers and alcoholics; when her father gives up politics for writing, the family’s fortunes begin to decline. Darst’s mother, who had been a child equestrian and debutante, takes to her bed with a bottle of whiskey, keeping “a light cry going most of the time” as she laments her lost social prospects. When their father moves the whole family to New York, the four daughters learn to fend for themselves.

Darst’s portrayal of her father is a masterpiece of comic empathy. His rejected novels and devotion to literature make him into a kind of tragic hero, a Don Quixote of freelance writers. From him, Darst absorbs the idea that bad life equals good art, a dysfunctional lesson that she lives out as an impoverished young actor in New York. The funniest parts of this book emerge from Darst hitting bottom again and again as an alcoholic and must be read to be believed. Honestly. Still, it’s hard for Darst to compete with her parents, who “hog all the death and destruction” for themselves. Her mother divorces her father so that she can concentrate on her drinking, and yet the divorce doesn’t take; he continues to look after her until her death, channeling his emotions into an obsession with F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. It doesn’t sound very funny, and it isn’t: Darst’s tone shifts in the later sections of the book, as she describes the squalor her mother lived in, and her own struggle to get sober.

Darst’s memoir is proof that the answer to her ultimate question—can you be funny, creative and sober?—is emphatically yes. Fiction may have ruined Jeanne Darst’s family, but the humor she learned from them as a survival strategy flourishes in this book.

A memoir is an impression of a life, and how a writer shapes her material often tells us more about her character than it does about the facts. Jeanne Darst’s family life could as easily be tragic as comic, but in Darst’s painfully hilarious Fiction…

NonfictionBiography

Into the mystery of Ruess

Review by Catherine Hollis

Cult figure Everett Ruess gained a wider fame after Jon Krakauer’s best-selling Into the Wild identified a number of parallels between Ruess and Chris McCandless, the subject of Krakauer’s book. Both young men were idealistic dreamers, drawn to wilderness solitude, and both disappeared in the wild under mysterious circumstances. Ruess’ body has never been found.

David Roberts’ definitive biography draws a full and sensitive portrait of the quixotic Ruess, who spent four years making increasingly arduous solo treks into the Southwestern canyonlands before disappearing in 1934. While the rest of America suffered under the strictures of the Depression, he scoffed at those who worked for a living, while financing his wilderness trips largely through an allowance from his parents. Ruess grew up in a loving, artistic and possibly over-involved family, and his rebellious claims to independence (bolstered by that allowance) make him sound exactly like the teenager he was, and strengthen his connection to McCandless.

Through the ample quotations from Ruess’ letters and diaries included here, we hear the adorable hubris of this wilderness-loving boy. “I must pack my short life full of interesting events and creative activity,” Ruess writes to his brother, mixing radiant descriptions of the desert alongside stories of throwing boulders off cliffs and chasing after his runaway burros. Roberts’ aim in this biography is to provide a corrective to overly idealized portraits of Ruess, and he does not shy away from discussing Ruess’ looting of Anasazi ruins or his use of a Navajo hogan for firewood. A balanced portrait emerges of a complex figure who—while fascinating—was no saint.

The second half of Finding Everett Ruess reads like a detective novel, as Roberts tracks Ruess’ afterlife through the theories and legends that surround his disappearance. Roberts pursues a lead that takes him and a team of forensic anthropologists to an anomalous ridgetop grave, and seems poised to solve the mystery. His narrative about working with Ruess’ niece and the Navajo family that found the grave provides a suspenseful kick that will keep readers hooked until the very end of the book.

Perfect for a late summer read, this biography will attract many more people to the brief, artistic life of Everett Ruess, and provide compelling fodder for further debate about the many issues raised by his life and death.

Cult figure Everett Ruess gained a wider fame after Jon Krakauer’s best-selling Into the Wild identified a number of parallels between Ruess and Chris McCandless, the subject of Krakauer’s book. Both young men were idealistic dreamers, drawn to wilderness solitude, and both disappeared in the…

NonfictionBiography

Two well-bred gals venture West

Review by Catherine Hollis

Back in the hardscrabble past, our grandparents walked barefoot 10 miles in the snow to get to school on time. Sound like a joke? Not for New Yorker editor Dorothy Wickenden, whose grandmother Dorothy Woodruff, with her best friend Rosamond Underwood, broke trail on horseback in a blizzard to get to their teaching post at the rural one-room schoolhouse in Elkhead, Colorado.

Nothing Daunted tells the delightful true story of how Dorothy and Rosamond, two well-bred Smith College graduates, lit out for the frontier in 1916 to work as schoolteachers rather than do the expected thing and marry. Little did they know that idealistic Ferry Carpenter, the lawyer and rancher who masterminded the building of the Elkhead school, hoped that importing schoolteachers would provide wives for the local ranchers and cowboys. (He requested a photo with each job application.)

Dorothy and Rosamond embrace the hardships of mountain life with irrepressible good humor. One of the first lessons they learn is that wearing spurs on horseback reduces their commute time to school by 15 minutes. Their pupils, the ragtag children of local ranchers and miners, charm and frustrate in equal measure; of maintaining order in the classroom, Dorothy writes, “my boys . . . say such funny things—but they are regular imps of Satan, too.”

Ferry Carpenter is a charismatic figure, a man of all trades drawn to the egalitarian West, able and willing to fill in as a Domestic Science teacher when it becomes clear that neither Dorothy nor Rosamond can cook. Ferry and Bob Perry, the son of a mine owner, engage in a friendly rivalry for the affections of Rosamond, but it’s hard for Ferry to compete after Bob endures a kidnapping and bravely escapes his assailants.

Nothing Daunted began life as a 2009 New Yorker article, after Wickenden fortuitously discovered her grandmother’s Elkhead letters. Scrupulously researched, it is both an entertaining and an edifying read, bringing early 20th-century Colorado to vivid life.

Back in the hardscrabble past, our grandparents walked barefoot 10 miles in the snow to get to school on time. Sound like a joke? Not for New Yorker editor Dorothy Wickenden, whose grandmother Dorothy Woodruff, with her best friend Rosamond Underwood, broke trail on horseback…

LiteratureArts & Culture

Behind a childhood classic

Review by Catherine Hollis

Before Harry Potter came along, Charlotte’s Web was the best-selling children’s book in America. Generations of kids found real magic in Zuckerman’s barn, through young Fern’s relationship with Wilbur the pig and Charlotte the spider. Charlotte’s Web set its talking animals alongside realistic lessons about the cycles of life and death in the barnyard, a naturalism that emerged from author E.B. White’s own farm in Maine and his lifelong fascination with animals.

The Story of Charlotte’s Web, Michael Sims’ slice-of-life biography of E.B. White, focuses on those elements that directly contributed to the creation of Charlotte’s Web. The first section of the book is stunning, an almost novelistic recreation of the child Elwyn’s imaginative world. The youngest of seven children, Elwyn was shy and anxious, happiest when rambling alone in Maine’s lake country or watching chicks hatch in a barn. He was equally drawn to reading and writing about the natural world, becoming a published author at age nine with a poem entitled “To a Mouse.” Sims shows us how Elwyn’s childhood reading, from the animal stories of Ernest Thompson Seton to Don Marquis’ comic verses about Archy and Mehitabel, influenced the writer White would become.

Sims’ imaginative re-enactment of pivotal scenes in White’s life is unconventional yet compelling. A wonderful example of this occurs when 26-year-old Andy (as White was known after college) peruses a magazine stand in Grand Central Station in 1925: Sims vividly details the covers of Film Fun and Time magazine before focusing his lens on Andy’s life-changing purchase of the first issue of The New Yorker. The staging of this scene helps Sims build out the literary and cultural contexts in which Andy becomes a professional writer, grounding the drama in solid historical research.

The adult Andy—successful New Yorker writer, married to editor Katharine White, dividing his time between Manhattan and a farm in Maine—is perhaps not so intriguing as the child Elwyn, until he becomes fascinated with orb weaver spiders, spending two years obsessively studying their habits in preparation for the creation of Charlotte A. Calvatica. Sims deftly handles the writing and publication of Charlotte’s Web, building thumbnail portraits of the legendary children’s book editor Ursula Nordstrom and illustrator Garth Williams. But this biography is at its best in the barnyard, illuminating that “sacred space” E.B. White brought to life in his beloved children’s book.

Before Harry Potter came along, Charlotte’s Web was the best-selling children’s book in America. Generations of kids found real magic in Zuckerman’s barn, through young Fern’s relationship with Wilbur the pig and Charlotte the spider. Charlotte’s Web set its talking animals alongside realistic lessons about…

NonfictionMemoir

Turning to Jane for advice

Review by Catherine Hollis

Equal parts sentimental education and literary guidebook, William Deresiewicz’s enjoyable memoir about coming of age through reading Jane Austen’s novels offers life lessons from which any reader could benefit. Discovering Austen as a callow graduate student, Deresiewicz finds himself surprised and humbled by her intelligence, and ultimately changed forever by her insight into “everything that matters.”

Emma is the tool of his conversion: Reading it for the first time, Deresiewicz finds himself bored and irritated by the endless discussions of card parties and neighborhood matters, identifying with Emma Woodhouse’s disdain for the provincial town of Highbury. But when Emma insults the scatterbrained Miss Bates at a picnic, Deresiewicz has his “a-ha” moment: Emma’s cruelty mirrors his own, and Austen knows it. Therefore, Emma’s lesson in humility must also be his own; both must learn to appreciate the “minute particulars,” those apparently trivial details that make up the fabric of real life.

With Jane Austen as his teacher, Deresiewicz learns from Pride and Prejudice that growing up is a never-ending process; from Mansfield Park that truly listening to other people’s stories is the best way to be helpful to them; and from Persuasion the importance of building a community of friends. Vignettes from Deresiewicz’s life and episodes from Austen’s biography are seamlessly interwoven with discussions of the novels, beautifully illustrating the interdependence of reading, writing and real life. Whether it is the challenge of gaining distance from his overbearing father, the temptations of friendship with wealthy, idle people or the pursuit of for-real adult love, Deresiewicz turns to Jane Austen as a wise and kind, if occasionally tart, teacher/aunt/elder. This is a fresh and appealing take on the coming-of-age memoir, pleasurably demonstrating that books really can change your life.

Deresiewicz is an award-winning literary critic and a former professor of English at Yale University. It is sure proof of his literary talent that A Jane Austen Education is so eminently readable, both substantive and entertaining. I found myself galloping through it, inspired to turn back to Jane Austen myself to see what lessons her novels have for me.

 

RELATED CONTENT
Interview with William Deresiewicz for A Jane Austen Education.

Equal parts sentimental education and literary guidebook, William Deresiewicz’s enjoyable memoir about coming of age through reading Jane Austen’s novels offers life lessons from which any reader could benefit. Discovering Austen as a callow graduate student, Deresiewicz finds himself surprised and humbled by her intelligence,…

NonfictionMemoir

The long, dark nights of grief

Review by Catherine Hollis

Joyce Carol Oates’ intense, raw memoir of her husband’s unexpected death in 2008 provides a compelling window onto the writer’s working life by exposing the gap between “Joyce Carol Oates,” the masterful, prolific American novelist, and Joyce Smith, a wife of 48 years, suddenly widowed.

After Raymond Smith dies of a hospital-acquired staph infection, “the Widow” (as she refers to her new role) must learn to negotiate the world of “death duties”: a funeral home, the will, sympathy cards she can’t bear to read, a ringing telephone she can’t bear to answer and endless crates of Harry & David sympathy gift baskets, a “quantity of trash” that she must roll out to the curb, weeping in February’s icy rain. Retreating to “the nest”—the marriage bed remade into a safe place to grieve—the insomniac Widow tries to lose herself in work and in emails to longtime friends.

This generous memoir gives its readers intimate access to the most abject moments of sorrow, even as it explores the boundary between private and public selves. The solace of work, of inhabiting the role of “Joyce Carol Oates,” helps the Widow get through her days, though she struggles through the long dark nights, when even the cats avoid her. We learn that the Smiths retained a certain “privacy of the soul” in their marriage: Raymond never read Joyce’s many novels, and she never read his single unfinished one. The Widow’s struggle over whether or not to read this abandoned novel prompts uneasy reflections over how well she knew her husband, or how well we might know anyone we deeply love.

There is a breathless, antic quality to Oates’ prose here, an abundance of exclamation marks, dashes and repetitive phrases, stylistic markers that mirror the shock of unanticipated loss and its debilitating physical and psychological repercussions. This gives the memoir a kind of lightness and manic energy that make it a (paradoxically) pleasurable reading experience, and readers will come away grateful for having been granted such an intimate glimpse of a long and happy marriage.

Joyce Carol Oates’ intense, raw memoir of her husband’s unexpected death in 2008 provides a compelling window onto the writer’s working life by exposing the gap between “Joyce Carol Oates,” the masterful, prolific American novelist, and Joyce Smith, a wife of 48 years, suddenly widowed.

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