Richard Munson’s splendid biography of Benjamin Franklin provides an insightful view of the statesman’s lesser known accomplishments in science.

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Lili Anolik’s Didion and Babitz is a freewheeling and engaging narrative about two iconic literary rivals and their world in 1970s Los Angeles.

Crafts, Hobbies & Home, Nonfiction

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Garden Wonderland

With its seamless integration of gardening principles with advanced design ideas, Garden Wonderland is the perfect gift for new gardeners—or anyone in need of a little inspiration.

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Maj. Charles R. Bowery

Interview by Howard Shirley

by Howard Shirley

Military historian Maj. Charles R. Bowery Jr. explores the leadership exhibited by two of history’s greatest generals in Lee ∧ Grant: Profiles in Leadership from the Battlefields of Virginia. A former instructor at West Point, Maj. Bowery traces the progress of Lee and Grant from their early days as young officers to the last great campaign of the Civil War, exploring the styles each brought to the task of leading their armies. From both their successes and failures, Bowery gleans significant lessons for leaders in all walks of life.

BookPage interviewed Bowery via e-mail from Tikrit, Iraq, where he serves as the Operations Officer for the Gunfighters, a U.S. Army AH-64A Apache attack helicopter battalion.

BookPage: Your book, Lee ∧ Grant, ties the generals’ experiences into lessons on leadership and business management. What inspired you to pair military history with business advice? Charles Bowery: When I began this project, I viewed it as a challenge to write a book that combined military history, leadership and management topics into one narrative. I have studied the Civil War my entire life, so this was a golden opportunity to share my love of the subject with a wider audience. Plus, my military career has placed me in a variety of leadership positions, giving me an additional insight. I find a great deal to admire in both Lee and Grant, and I think their successes and failures have much to offer a leader in any endeavor.

Military and business activities have very different goals, methods and measures of success. Where do the military and business arenas differ, and where do they align? The greatest difference is the cost of failure. In the military, daily decisions literally have life-and-death consequences. Moreover, the drastic consequences of military failure tend to make military leaders more risk-averse, less willing to take drastic measures. If a business deal falls through, the sun rises the next day and life goes on.

The greatest similarities between the business and military worlds are their results-based philosophies and their hierarchical structures. A CEO or manager commands or leads employees in similar ways to a military officer. A business or military leader must apply the right mix of leadership styles and methods to get the most out of his or her team in any given situation.

How are you applying the leadership lessons from your book in your own experience as a military leader? One of the personal joys I had in writing Lee ∧ Grant was the time I was able to spend reflecting on my own abilities and shortcomings as a leader. From Robert E. Lee, I gained a much greater appreciation for the value of interpersonal skills to leadership. Many situations, especially in the military, require very direct, do this because I say so types of leadership, but Lee’s interaction with his subordinates shows that even in wartime, the Golden Rule can apply both to leaders and led.

Grant has shown me the value of persistence in all things, and the value of a calm, collected leader in desperate situations. The best example of Grant’s calming influence over his subordinates comes from the Battle of the Wilderness. As the battle wore on, some of his generals became increasingly worried that they would soon be on the receiving end of one of Lee’s famous crushing counterattacks. This worry, combined with the raw savagery of the fighting in the Wilderness, left the entire army on edge. Through it all, observers noted that Grant took the time to effect any necessary changes or enact orders, but otherwise sat on a stump near his headquarters and whittled a stick as reports came in. Worry and paranoia can become infectious, but so can rock-steady leadership. You present Lee and Grant as making both positive leadership decisions and equally significant errors. How have you seen similar decisions, both good and bad, emerge in leaders today, or even in your own efforts? The biggest leadership shortcoming I see is micromanagement, especially when time is short or in pressure situations. Even capable leaders often feel that the only way to get something done quickly or well is to do it themselves. Micromanagement stifles initiative, eliminates the possibility of outside the box ideas, and can increase the pressure on a superior to unmanageable levels. Grant encountered this problem in the Overland Campaign, as he exerted growing control over the minute tactical movements of General George Meade’s Army of the Potomac. In doing so, Grant created rifts in the Union Army’s high command that never healed. At times, both Lee and Grant demonstrated an overconfidence that left them open to disaster.

Near the end of the book you write, If one could combine the leadership qualities of [Lee and Grant] into one entity, the organization that that person led would simply be unstoppable. Who today combines these leadership qualities, and how? Since the millennium, two figures stand out to me as examples of transformational leadership: Steve Jobs of Apple Computer and Gen. (Ret.) Eric Shinseki. Over the past decade, Jobs has transformed the Apple brand into a trendsetter in every area of personal productivity and information technology. When my wife and I bought our first Apple in 1996, the company was floundering. The introduction of the iMac¨ in the late 1990s started the regeneration of the brand, and Jobs determined to keep Apple in both the hardware and software businesses. From there, Jobs kept improving and innovating, and the iPod¨ became the vehicle that propelled Apple to the top of the technology heap. It would have been easy for Jobs to scale back or get out of the business altogether, but he stuck with his vision and proved that it could work.

As the 34th Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army from 1999 to 2003, General Shinseki overcame decades of institutional inertia and initiated a much-needed transformation of United States Army operations and training. During preparations for Operation Iraqi Freedom, Shinseki spoke with absolute candor about troop requirements and stood by his beliefs in the face of great pressure to renounce them. Subsequent events have shown that his argument had merit.

Military historian Maj. Charles R. Bowery Jr. explores the leadership exhibited by two of history's greatest generals in Lee ∧ Grant: Profiles in Leadership from the Battlefields of Virginia. A former instructor at West Point, Maj. Bowery traces the progress of Lee and Grant…

Ernestine Bradley

by Edward Morris

History, Women's History

Women's History History

Gail Collins

Interview by Eliza Borné

by Eliza Borné

It is hard to disagree with the weight of this statement from New York Times op-ed writer Gail Collins: “The conviction that women’s place was in the home, that they were weaker than men and weren’t really up to life in the public world . . . were beliefs that had existed for thousands of years, and they were shattered in my lifetime. That thought still knocks me out.”

In When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, Collins explores this period of time when “long-held patterns of behavior and beliefs got upended so suddenly.” The book is a follow up to America’s Women, Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines, Collins’ acclaimed work from 2003. The subject of American women—specifically, their struggles and broken barriers—is natural for Collins. She became the first female editorial page editor at the New York Times in 2001.

When Everything Changed provides a sweeping, fascinating look at modern women in our country. Filled with facts, court cases and legislation, the book is rich with personal anecdotes. Collins and her researchers interviewed more than 100 women for this history, and for many contemporary readers, their findings will be startling and sometimes heartbreaking.

The book begins with the story of 28-year-old secretary Lois Rabinowitz. In 1960, Lois went to traffic court to pay her boss’ speeding ticket. The judge had a fit when he saw Lois’ outfit: “neatly pressed slacks and a blouse.” In an outburst, he said, “Do you appreciate you’re in a courtroom in slacks?” Lois’ husband had to pay the ticket; the judge had thrown her out of the court for wearing pants. In her interview with BookPage, Collins recounts other outrageous stories she encountered: “the NASA official who said the idea of a woman in space made him sick to his stomach or the public high school in Iowa where the boys’ tennis team practiced on the school courts and the girls had to play on the driveway, jumping out of the way to avoid getting run over.”

Although the women who went through these ordeals could have turned bitter and angry, Collins says a lot of her interview subjects “looked back on these things with amusement . . . they see them as the artifacts of a long-departed world.”

She continues: “Others were sort of bemused that it never occurred to them to object when they were told that—of course—a woman would have to work twice as hard as a man to get ahead in the Justice Department. Or that—of course—Newsweek only hired women to be researchers, not writers. That was fascinating, because some of the people telling me this were among the feistiest and most outspoken women I know.”

For readers enticed by the book’s title, the big question will be when—and why—“everything changed” for American women.

“The law banning discrimination against women in employment was really what triggered everything,” says Collins. “That was added to the Civil Rights Act [in 1964] as a kind of joke/diversionary tactic by a Southern Congressman who would have preferred to kill the whole bill. And then the women were smart enough to jump on the opportunity to get it pushed through.” That Congressman was Howard Smith of Virginia, who at 80 years old hoped the addition of “sex” to Title VII would delay the passage of Civil Rights, rather than advance the position of women.

“Our happiness is all wound up in the happiness of our husbands and sons and brothers,” Collins says. “It’s harder for us to form a united front, and in American history, the points at which women have advanced have been the ones in which other discriminated-against groups were leading the way.”

A young woman during the 1960s, Collins says that even she was “totally fixated on civil rights . . . the women issue really didn’t register for a long time.” By the 1970s—when the National Organization for Women had been around for a few years; when women had gained widespread access to the Pill; when female students began to apply to medical, law, dental and business schools in “large numbers”—the issue had started to register.

“By the 1970s, my friends and I were completely confident that we were going to change the world,” she says. “It actually never occurred to me that by the 21st century there would be any problems left. I would have been shocked if you’d told me in 1979 that 30 years down the line, there wouldn’t be daycare centers in every office building, or that it wouldn’t be totally common for husbands to be the chief caregiver for the children.”

In spite of that disappointment, Collins admits, “I don’t think we had any real conception of what it would be like if young women had the same expectations and ambitions as young men. We thought we did, but it’s way better than we imagined.”

It may be a history book, but When Everything Changed reads like a page-turning saga, a race through the years to learn how we got here today, when “there was no speculation about whether [President Obama’s administration] would include any women in the most powerful posts because it was inconceivable that it would not.”

One of the strongest themes toward the end of When Everything Changed is that of women struggling to achieve a balance in their lives—waking up at 4 a.m. to bake cookies before going to work; doing twice as much housework as their husbands even when both spouses work.

“The ceiling is cracking all the time, but the rate of progress has slowed considerably,” Collins says. “If you ask me for one reason, I’d say it’s the work-family divide. For women to balance their jobs with childrearing is our one big, fat continuing challenge, and it leaches out into so many other things—including why women still make so much less money on average than men do,” she says. “If we only have 17 women in the Senate, it’s partly because women with children normally don’t start political careers until after the kids are in their teens, so they get a much later start climbing the ladder. And if the percentage of women lawyers who make partner in big firms isn’t budging, it’s mainly because those companies demand an extraordinary commitment of time and energy to get to the top.”

Be that as it may, Collins has never seen the history of American women “as malevolent-men-crushing-pathetic-women’s-souls.” She recognizes that women’s struggles were not “just the product of one sex,” and she seems proud and optimistic in the final pages of When Everything Changed. She writes, “American women had shattered the ancient traditions that deprived them of independence and power and the right to have adventures of their own, and done it so thoroughly that few women under 30 had any real concept that things had ever been different.”

And though Collins acknowledges that “there will always be people who look at change and see a problem,” the end of her book will make many readers swell with pride—it features updates on the lives of the interview subjects featured in the book, many of whom went on to break barriers for many years. The story their lives helped write—of American women from the 1960s to today—is inspiring and compelling. Collins explains why in one obvious and poignant sentence: “Our story is particularly compelling because it’s about us.”

Gene Wilder

by Pat H. Broeske

History

History

David McCullough

Interview by Edward Morris

by Edward Morris

The reader that David McCullough imagines peering over his shoulder as he crafts his meticulously researched histories and biographies is the person he happens to be writing about at the time, whether it’s John Adams, Harry Truman or some anonymous soldier in a long-forgotten battle. “This has been true of everything I’ve written,” the 71-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner tells BookPage from his home on Martha’s Vineyard. “I try to write a book so that if they could read it, they would say, yes, he got it.”

McCullough’s ghostly audience this time around would include the American rebels, British regulars and their leaders who clashed with each other during the second year of the Revolutionary War. The book is titled simply 1776. It begins with the siege of Boston, an American triumph; continues through the struggles for New York in which the British forces prevailed; and ends with the American resurgence in the wintry frays at Trenton and Princeton, New Jersey.

McCullough chose to focus on 1776 “because that was the low point of our fortunes, not just in the war, but, I think one can say, in the whole history of the country. The prospects of there even being a United States of America were never more bleak. Also, it was the year of the Declaration of Independence. When I was writing the John Adams biography and trying to understand everything that was going on in Philadelphia that summer of 1776, I realized, perhaps more than I had before, that all they were doing there was theoretical and that the Declaration itself would have been nothing but words on paper had it not been for the people out fighting the war. Everything depended on them.”

While much of McCullough’s account is involved in showing how the reluctant George Washington developed into an effective military leader, it is just as attentive to the importance of lower-ranking officers and foot soldiers on both sides of the conflict.

“I think too little has been written about the British in the Revolutionary War,” he says. “A lot of what happened with those in the British army and those who were trying to manage the war in London has not been fairly understood.” To understand it better, McCullough traveled to London and pored through such primary sources of the period as letters, diaries, newspapers and magazines.

“I tried to soak up [the British magazines] if only for the vocabulary,” he says. “I [didn’t] want to be influenced by what other historians are writing now. I respect what they’re doing, and I read much of it. But I’m finding my way into that other time and into the lives of those other people through material that came from that other time and from those other people.”

McCullough was determined to give the much-maligned King George III his due. The monarch’s initial response to the American rebellion, he shows, was measured, cautious and hopeful for a peaceful resolution. Moreover, the king was a man of considerable taste and talent. “I went to see an exhibit of [his] collection of art,” says McCullough, “which included his own paintings, which are wonderful. I had simply read that he was interested in art, but when you see what he actually did himself mostly architectural drawings they’re superb.” The fact that Britain lost the war and that the king went insane many years later, McCullough thinks, helped to make George such an object of derision.

Equally diligent in researching American particulars, McCullough says he followed the path of the rebel army from Boston all the way south. “That’s also the fun of the work,” he observes. “Very often I will write the chapter, at least the first draft, before I go to look at [the actual scene] to see how closely I’ve come to getting it right. And always always there are certain things that are different from what I thought. For example, Fort Washington, which is a big part of the story. When you say it’s up above the Hudson River it is, but when you go there, it is really up above the Hudson River. You understand why [the Americans] thought it was impregnable. I felt it. I don’t think you can know anything unless you feel it. I thought, My god! If I had a fort up here, I would know damn well it could hold out. Nobody could come up those cliffs. Of course, they did.”

Tales of American courage and fortitude abound in 1776, but McCullough also presents the rebel army’s deficiencies. “Obviously, there were a lot of people who just couldn’t take it and [who] thought it was hopeless and more than anybody should be asked to do. And so they deserted by the thousands or, when their enlistment was up, they went home by the thousands. They all weren’t heroes by any means.” In addition, he points out, thousands of colonials remained loyal to the crown: “It wasn’t just a theoretic displeasure with the Revolution. They were really against it and willing to fight against it.”

Calling it the most important war in our history, McCullough says he thinks Americans tend to overlook the Revolution for one simple reason: there are no photographs of it. “We see photographs of the people in the Civil War and photographs of the carnage at Antietam and Gettysburg in Matthew Brady’s photographs. We can identify with that. Those are real people. But the people of the Revolution are so often pictured in our minds because of paintings we’ve seen as characters in a costume pageant. There’s something not quite fully real about them. And the other thing people think is that the loss of life was relatively small. Well, by 20th-century terms, of course, it was very small. But in proportion to the size of population at the time, it was enormous. If we lost a comparable number of Americans in a war today as we lost in the Revolution, we would lose about three million people.”

McCullough says it took him about four years to research and write 1776. At the moment, he has no other books in the works. “I’m trying to calm myself,” he says with a chuckle.

Edward Morris is a writer in Nashville.

Steven Johnson

by Edward Morris

Memoir

Memoir

James Frey

Interview by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

James Frey has never been shy about his towering literary ambition. Since he burst onto the scene in 2003 with A Million Little Pieces, the best-selling, highly charged memoir dissecting his recovery from drug and alcohol addiction, Frey has ruffled feathers and raised temperatures by saying things like:

"When I decided I wanted to be a writer, I didn’t get into it to be a guy who sold 15 books and got a review in the local paper. I’m in this to be one of the great writers of my time."

What is often left out of the accounts of Frey’s supposed overreaching is what he usually says next: "I don’t say that I am one of the great writers, which I think is an important distinction. But that’s the ambition, for sure. I want to be read in 75 years."

Whether Frey’s new book, My Friend Leonard, will be read in 75 years is, of course, impossible to say. But it will certainly be read – widely read – this year. While somewhat different in tone from Pieces (there is more humor and less rage, for example) My Friend Leonard is just as compelling as the first book, with the same electrifying narrative energy, stylistic daring and atmosphere of emotional risk.

My Friend Leonard takes up about where Pieces left off. Out of recovery, Frey does a stint in jail for a past drug conviction, then sets out to rebuild his life. He is advised and assisted at critical junctures by his friend Leonard, a larger-than-life Las Vegas gangster 30 years his senior whom he met in rehab and who has decided to treat Frey like the son he never had. Leonard helps Frey financially by employing him occasionally as a bagman for some of his enterprises. He guides Frey through the purchase of his first Picasso. He uses a little unfriendly persuasion when Frey’s neighbor seems about to turn murderous after an incident between their dogs. Skeptical readers might wonder if Leonard is a sort of idealized, if hard-bitten, fairy godfather. But Frey says otherwise.

"Did the stuff in the book really happen? Yeah, it did. My girlfriend killed herself the way I wrote it. Leonard helped me the way I said he helped me, died the way he died. The events in the book are the events of my life. But that’s not to say that I didn’t pick and choose what to use and how to use it. The goal was to write a great book, to create something that somebody will feel good about having read. It’s a sort of juggling act, where I have to be true to the events and the people, but where I also know that I am writing a book and that I have to be true to what the book should be," Frey says in a gravelly voice during a telephone interview.

The 35-year-old Frey and his wife, Maya, a creative director at a New York advertising agency, had their first child, a daughter, in December and are in the midst of moving to an apartment "that is a bit more baby-friendly" in New York’s Tribeca district. Frey takes the call at the home of friends, and as he talks, he moves from room to room ahead of his friends’ noisy family life.

"One thing that’s always been important to me is that nobody who has ever been in one of my books has ever had a problem with anything I’ve written," Frey continues. "They’ve never disputed my version of events or felt offended by it, even when I didn’t write about them in a positive way. Which means something."

At the very least it means that Frey is exceptionally good at conveying the emotional truths behind the events he relates. His portrait of his friendship with Leonard is deeply resonant and offers a fuller human portrait of a gangster than you’re likely to find anywhere else.

What is most striking – and most difficult to describe – is Frey’s manner of telling his tale. Here, as in A Million Little Pieces, Frey’s style is raw, visceral and emotionally electric. Frey says that when he set out to be a writer he studied writers like Hemingway, Henry Miller and Baudelaire and noted that each had a voice, a signature style that sounded like no one else’s. He deliberately set out to develop a recognizable style all his own.

"People read my books and think because they flow very easily and very simply that it must just come out that way," Frey says. "It doesn’t. I work very hard and I’m very, very deliberate and methodical in how I work."

In fact, Frey says one of the things that sets him apart from "smarter or more naturally gifted" aspiring writers of his generation is his "ability to sit there for 10 hours and get done what I need to get done, without ever losing confidence that I can do it. And to do that day after day after day after day after day."

So it’s no real surprise to learn that since completing the manuscript of My Friend Leonard, Frey has finished the screenplay for A Million Little Pieces, which will be filmed later this year, and written the script for a TV pilot for Fox. He is currently working on a screenplay for Paramount. Earlier this year, he wrote introductions for British reissues of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn.

Miller’s bold presentation of his life in his books had a powerful philosophical influence on Frey’s development as a writer, just as his friend Leonard had a powerful influence on his development as a human being. "I’ve learned a lot of things from a lot of people." Frey says. "And they all boil down to similar things: you have to be willing to hurt for what you want. You have to risk, to gain. You have to be willing to feel pain and deal with pain. You have to decide what you want out of life and be willing to pay the consequences if you want to have a great life. It’s worth it. And you’re a sucker if you don’t."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

Bill Maher

by Martin Brady

Arts & Culture, Literature

Literature Arts & Culture

Jane Smiley

Interview by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

On September 11, 2001, Jane Smiley was roughly 280 pages into a first draft of what would eventually become her 11th novel, Good Faith. In the aftermath of that day’s horrific events, the book she was working on "suddenly came to seem trivial," Smiley says during a call to her home outside of Monterey, California, where she has lived since moving from the Midwest in 1996 with her then husband and her children. My response was to take some time off and read novels that had come before. She started with The Tale of Genji, a novel written in 11th-century Japan by a woman of the Heian court, Murasaki Shikibu.

"I did it as a form of escape," Smiley says. "But serious novels don’t allow you to escape; instead they ask you to reconsider what you were thinking about in a new way. I found it incredibly efficacious to read The Tale of Genji within a few weeks of the World Trade Center attacks." Indeed, Smiley found the exercise so helpful that she decided to keep going. "By the time I had read a couple more novels, I thought, boy, I should keep track of this and start thinking about this as a project."

Smiley’s project became to read 100 novels that more or less spanned the history of novel writing. "I immediately realized that I was not qualified and also didn’t care to compile a One Hundred Best Novels list. What I really wanted to see was what a given 100 novels some of them famous, some of them obscure, some of them congenial, some of them uncongenial would teach me about the nature of the novel, so I let the list be constructed in a serendipitous way."

The result of Smiley’s reading and thinking is the astonishing Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, a book that is interesting, provocative and insightful in so many ways that it is impossible to name or catalog them all. But, at the very least, even the most casual novel-reader is certain to find pleasure in dipping at random into Smiley’s 13th and final chapter in which she writes brief, knowledgeable, sometimes funny, often surprising essays on each of the 100 books she read.

"Certain books on the list really were revelations to me," Smiley says. "I loved them in every way and they were books that I hadn’t known of before. One of them was The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett, which was a great favorite of Charles Dickens. Another was Justine by the Marquis de Sade. It’s so much more interesting than you think it’s going to be. Yes, it’s pornographic but it’s also a political treatise. It’s fascinating politically; it’s fascinating artistically. I really enjoyed it, though I was shocked by it. And I thought The Once and Future King by T.H. White was a wonderful, wonderful book that ought to be revived."

In the other chapters of the book, Smiley explores with compelling energy what a novel is (answer, in brief: a lengthy, written, prose narrative with a protagonist) and who a novelist is (to begin with, a reader). She examines the history, psychology, morality and art of the novel; its blend of narrative forms and its relationship to human history. Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel also includes two brilliant chapters of advice for novel writers, three if you include her case history of the composition, publication and public reception of Good Faith, which she began working on again as her novel-reading project progressed.

Smiley, who is best-known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Thousand Acres and for Moo, her send-up of life at a large Midwestern university, is remarkably perceptive and generous in her views of other writers’ work. She doesn’t, for example, write about good and bad writers, but instead about congenial and uncongenial writers.

"All relationships that you have with authors are essentially instinctive," Smiley says in conversation. "They are forms of friendship or kinship that are based on something not quite conscious, some instinctive response to some quality of that person’s sensibility. Since reading a novel is essentially a private experience, who am I to say that while I love The Once and Future King and you love Ulysses, you’re wrong and I’m right?"

Which is not to say that Smiley avoids offering opinions on who she finds congenial (surprisingly, Daniel Defoe) and why (to oversimplify, because he was so adept at going from the practical to the spiritual and entering the consciousness of so many different types of characters) and who she finds less than congenial (Henry James, because "he thought he was the boss of his characters and his job was to control and dominate them.").

And while the book is in no way autobiographical, Smiley infuses it with the full range of her sensibilities -her concern for the craftsmanship of the novel, her politics, psychological insight and moral vision, and her aesthetic concerns, for example – the core values, so to speak, of who she is as a writer.

Ultimately the views that Smiley expresses in Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel offer readers and writers alike a path to liberation, primarily because Smiley believes there is no such thing as the perfect novel. "Every artistic form tends in one direction or another," Smiley says, "and the novel tends toward excess, toward compendiousness, toward being about everything. And excess and perfection don’t mix." Which of course means there’s room in the world for all kinds of novels.

More importantly, Smiley thinks that the novel remains central to democratic Western society. "You cannot read a novel and have an opinion about it without feeling yourself free and also as having a right to your own opinion," she says. "So I feel that the novel has radically democratized Western consciousness simply by giving us the opportunity in our own bedroom to say, oh, I agree with this. And I don’t agree with that." Remember that the next time someone asks you why you’re wasting your time with a novel.

Alden Mudge is a juror for the California Book Awards.

On September 11, 2001, Jane Smiley was roughly 280 pages into a first draft of what would eventually become her 11th novel, Good Faith. In the aftermath of that day's horrific events, the book she was working on "suddenly came to seem trivial," Smiley…

Memoir

Memoir

Julia Scheeres

Interview by Martin Brady

by Martin Brady

Julia Scheeres’ memoir Jesus Land is a painfully candid account of a family riddled with dysfunction. Scheeres, now 38, grew up in a strict Calvinist household in Lafayette, Indiana, the daughter of a surgeon and his Bible-thumping wife. Her parents’ missionary zeal led them to adopt two African-American boys when Julia was still a toddler. One of them, David, became Julia’s soul mate. Together, the two endured their upbringing and shared many trials, including a harrowing stay at Escuela Caribe, a Christian school in the Dominican Republic run by New Horizons Youth Ministries. Scheeres’ parents appear more interested in their own religiosity than their children’s emotional needs. Her father’s answer to discipline was bone-breaking brutality; meanwhile, her mother turned a blind eye to rampant behavioral problems, including David’s attempted suicide.

Julia’s other adopted brother, Jerome, grew up angry and hostile, and his repeated sexual abuse of Julia was additional torment in their ugly home life. Jesus Land concludes with the news that David, whose personal notebook inspired the memoir, died in a car crash in 1987. He was only 20 years old. Scheeres recently answered questions from BookPage about her wrenching personal story.

BookPage: Your portrait of Escuela Caribe is troubling, since what’s supposed to be a reaffirming place for confused teens comes off as an insensitive reform school. Do you think your parents made a mistake in sending you there? Julia Scheeres: I think it’s a mistake to send any child to Escuela Caribe. For $3,000 a month, you can ship your child to a Christian boot camp in the Dominican Republic, where she’ll receive a substandard education, learn to spout “Praise Jesus,” and be so traumatized she’ll have nightmares about it for the rest of her life. Escuela Caribe is essentially a dumping ground for the problem teens of wealthy evangelicals. Many students come from homes where they were emotionally, physically or sexually harmed, yet these issues aren’t addressed by the school. Such camps are located in foreign countries for good reason: to evade U.S. regulations governing child welfare, academic quality and housing standards. The whole point of Escuela Caribe is to break the “rebellious teenage spirit” through humiliation, intimidation and suspending simple freedoms and convert kids into Christian automatons.

BP: Frank memoirs involving family and abuse can be painful reading for all concerned. What have been the reactions of those involved in your life at that time? JS: My book is first and foremost a tribute to my brother David. I found a green notebook after his funeral in which he detailed what it was like to grow up black in a white, fundamentalist family and about our time together at Escuela Caribe. I wrote Jesus Land in an effort to preserve his memory and the memory of the life we shared together. I was the person who knew him best, and it’s my job to keep telling people about what a quirky, tragic and beautiful soul he was. The reaction of other family members and acquaintances wasn’t a consideration as I wrote Jesus Land.

BP: Of all the people in your book, your father seems the most mysterious. What was, or is now, your relationship with him? JS: My father was a ’50s-era dad, who left childcare to the wife and was largely absent due to his high-pressure work as a surgeon. But he was also pressured to be the Biblical head-of-the household disciplinarian. We didn’t talk about problems or issues in my house. You were told what to do, and you obeyed. If you broke the rules, you got spanked or whipped, in my brothers’ case. I grew up fearing and avoiding my father not a healthy situation. I no longer have contact with either of my parents, who work as full-time volunteers at a missionary compound in Orlando, Florida.

BP: Being the victim of sexual abuse usually holds lingering consequences. What has been the long-term emotional or behavioral fallout for you? JS: Where to begin? A rabid distrust of people, and all men in particular? Sexual frigidity and/or promiscuity? A tendency to depersonalize and/or revile sexual partners? I’m sure it’s all well-documented in the case studies. I think the most important step for me was meeting my husband, a man who blew away my low expectations for male behavior and companionship. I don’t think people ever fully recover from ritual abuse of any sort. I still get into funks, but have learned to better negotiate them.

BP: Despite your troubled youth, you’ve gone on to obtain a master’s degree and respect as a journalist. To what do you ascribe your perseverance? JS: I’ve always had a strong sense of self and an independent streak three miles wide. Growing up, I believed that if I could just escape the pettiness surrounding me, things would get better. And they have.

Julia Scheeres' memoir Jesus Land is a painfully candid account of a family riddled with dysfunction. Scheeres, now 38, grew up in a strict Calvinist household in Lafayette, Indiana, the daughter of a surgeon and his Bible-thumping wife. Her parents' missionary zeal led them…

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