Linda Stankard

By the early 1970s, the comforting idealism of the ’60s was already morphing into terrifying reality, bombarding a generation of young people with visually convincing scenarios of catastrophe and mayhem. “On every movie screen,” Heather Havrilesky wryly bemoans in the introduction to Disaster Preparedness, “airplanes plummeted to the ground, earthquakes toppled huge cities, and monster sharks ripped teenagers to bloody bits.” The world was obviously a precarious place and conventional methods of self-preservation offered no succor. People who “exited calmly with the crowd . . . were always the ones to perish first. Only a small band of survivors willing to plot out their own escape route and battle their way through untold mishaps had any hope of making it out alive.”

So plot she did. Armed with a dark sense of humor, a toughness nurtured by parents unwilling to feed her fairy tales or “comforting myths” and a stoicism stemming from the seeming indifference of a God disinclined to provide the simplest sign of celestial reassurance, Havrilesky formulated her own plans for any emergency, from nuclear war to the taunting of her preteen peers. Droll, insightful and tenaciously honest, Disaster Preparedness chronicles her roller-coaster journey through the confusion of childhood, the devastation of her parents’ divorce and the angst of a teenager coming of age in the ’80s. “In 1986,” she vividly recalls, “heartbreak drove a canary yellow ’78 Pinto with The Who’s ‘Baba O’Riley’ playing in the tape deck. Heartbreak looked just like Damone from Fast Times at Ridgemont High . . . and quoted Pee Wee Herman liberally, even when he was breaking up with me.”

At times hilarious, at times achingly sincere, Disaster Preparedness delivers a fun-to-read memoir laced with frank self-reflection as our heroine marches toward adulthood, doggedly traversing life’s mountains—loss, shame, regret—and begins the thorny search for love. Fans familiar with Havrilesky’s pointed humor from her work as a staff writer at Salon.com and as a commentator for NPR’s “All Things Considered” will recognize her candid voice and sharp wit, but will also find complexity, depth and tenderness here as she ultimately renders compassionate, loving portraits of her parents, shares her darkest secrets with best-friend intimacy and wrestles gritty optimism from an uncertain world.

“Life goes fast,” Lee Kravitz observes in Unfinished Business: “Click. You are fifteen. Click, click. You are fifty-five. Click, click. You are gone. And so are the people who loved and nurtured you.” Realizing these truths all too clearly when he finds himself out of a job in his mid-fifties and suddenly adrift, Kravitz decides to take a year out of an otherwise workaholic existence and attend to the real currency of life—human relationships.

“All of us have unfinished business,” he writes. “It can be a friend we lost touch with or a mentor we never thanked; it can be a call we meant to make or a pledge we failed to honor. It can be a goal we lost sight of or a spiritual quest we put on hold.” When he makes his conscience-clearing “to do” list, it is long and complicated, and he is uncertain how his long-overdue overtures will be received; among the fractured relationships are a beloved aunt he has neglected for 15 years, a traveling buddy he borrowed $600 from and never paid back and a bereaved friend he never consoled. His inspiring journey of re-connection and redemption takes us to far-flung places—a refugee camp in Kenya, a monastery in California, a bar in Cleveland—and introduces us to a host of kind and kindred spirits from whom he gains strength, insight and encouragement.

In turn, Kravitz encourages us to act, to keep moving forward toward “true human connectedness” despite the demands and pressures of modern life. “The hurdles we face in tackling our unfinished business can seem impossibly high, but the first step in clearing them is usually quite simple: Write an email, or make a phone call. You can never tell when the weight you’ve been shouldering will slip away, leaving you a more complete and loving person.”

It’s the ’70s. Laura Bell graduates from college a pretty and promising young woman, but success nevertheless eludes her. While others eagerly and easily trade in their caps and gowns for careers and cars and families, she feels lost, unsure she knows how to make a grab for life’s proverbial brass ring. Comfortable around horses, drawn to a nomadic life and feeling “alone, unmoored and unworthy,” she believes she can hide her young, uncertain self in the wilderness of Wyoming, out among “the sage and rocks and transient lives of the herders.” She leaves the security of her parental home in Kentucky, takes up residence in a “sheep-wagon parked under the bare-branched cottonwoods of Whistle Creek Ranch,” and hopes for an inviolable escape. But the austere existence of a sheepherder holds surprises. “The isolation,” she writes candidly, “. . . tossed sharp splinters of life straight back up in my face, waking me to the crack of thunder, the smell of rain that hadn’t yet hit the ground.”

Part lyrical remembrance of a deeply intense relationship with nature in a sweepingly majestic landscape, part unswerving self-analysis, Claiming Ground delivers both beauty and unabashed reflection. It follows Bell’s journey down many trails: cattle hand, herder, forest ranger, masseuse. We see her as friend, lover, wife, mother, daughter. We witness her awkward progress in tendering tenderness; her anguish in divorce; her devastation in unspeakable loss; her brave willingness to put her battered heart back out there; her honesty. We admire her fortitude in rugged terrain and understand when she gives her all, “believing that a life can be built by hard work and a home created by sheer force.” We cry when she finds out it isn’t so, but take heart because she perseveres. “Time after time, things come together and they fall apart again,” she explains, “like breathing.”

You will find Claiming Ground in the memoir section, but it is not only a looking back; it is a guidepost to the possibilities ahead—the surprises that await us down our own trails.

Linda Stankard claims her ground in New York and Tennessee.

In her previous memoir, the award-winning Here If You Need Me, Kate Braestrup established herself as a warm, witty and deeply moving writer, revealing how the devastating loss of her husband led her to open her heart in new directions. Following his unfulfilled dream, she threw herself into ministerial training and became a member of the clergy—and a living example of the advice she gives in her new book: “If your heart breaks, let it break open. Love more.”

Fans of her richly enlightening first-person narrative will surely love Marriage and Other Acts of Charity, which continues the story of her life as the backdrop for her observations and meditations as a wife, mother and woman of the cloth. And what a story it is! Braestrup’s memoir reads like a work of fiction: at 17 she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, only to find out after two emotionally torturous years that she didn’t have the disease; in fact, she wasn’t sick at all. And the tales of her ministry with the men who work outdoors in the Maine Warden Service, often in grim circumstances—such as searching for the bodies of a pilot and his 14-year-old daughter—are full of understated pathos.

As Braestrup navigates the uncharted waters of a later-in-life romance and a new marriage, she is also witness to the heartbreak and turmoil that love brings to the fragile human heart, especially when so many “happily-ever-afters” end prematurely in divorce. And, as chaplain, she must also comfort those who are suffering the anguish of irrevocable loss—when death takes a loved one. “Life is short,” she recognizes, “and pain engraves its memories in your flesh.” Still, she believes that “every soul is called to love and serve,” and her advice remains straightforward and simple—love more. “Start with your siblings, or your spouse, or your parents, but don’t stop there. Love whoever needs what you have; love the ones who have been placed in your path.” In Marriage and Other Acts of Charity, with grace and style, Braestrup leads the way.

Linda Stankard is a Realtor in Rockland County, New York.