With candor and humor, Connie Chung shares the highs and lows of her trailblazing career as a journalist in her invigorating memoir, Connie.

LGBTQ+, Memoir, Nonfiction

Frighten the Horses

Oliver Radclyffe’s Frighten the Horses is a powerful standout among the burgeoning subgenre of gender transition memoirs.

Memoir, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Memoir

Health and Safety

Emily Witt’s sharp, deeply personal memoir, Health and Safety, invites us to relive a tumultuous era in American history through the eyes of a keen observer.

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Most of us had our share of candy, Coke and hot dogs when we were kids. Not so green lifestyle expert Sara Snow: her favorite snack was a whole wheat chappati chock-full of sprouts, hummus and sea kelp flakes. During my call to her home in Indianapolis, Snow spoke enthusiastically about the (dietary) quirks and graces of growing up green, her respect for family and her passion for a credo of organic living—a devotion that sparked her new book, Sara Snow’s Fresh Living: The Essential Room-by-Room Guide to a Greener, Healthier Family and Home.

How-to guides can be preachy, especially when addressing human morals and mores. Fresh Living is not: Snow’s approach is friendly, her information is accessible and the book’s “Green Bar Profiles,” brief cameos of “people from inside the natural products industry and green movement,” are inspiring. Snow walks readers through a typical American household, room by room, offering simple, easy and affordable ways to create a healthier, environmentally friendly home. “I didn’t want to advise people to go out and buy all the latest green gadgets, throw out everything in their houses and start over,” she says, “because that would do more damage than good.” Instead, Snow has produced a reasonably priced, useful guide that folks can take shopping and “scribble in the margins.” She wanted to reach everyone, wherever they were on their journey toward living a healthier, more eco-friendly life.

From kitchen to living room, bathroom to bedroom (how to make “natural whoopie”), nursery (the ecology of diapering) to laundry room and beyond to the Great Outdoors, Fresh Living helps us rethink what we put in, on and around our bodies. Did you know that green grocery shopping happens on the store’s perimeter? That’s where all the veggies and fruits are stashed. Do you have a spider plant on your counter? If so, you’ll breathe easier. Do you know the top tips for greening your car? (First, check the air pressure on your tires.) Especially insightful are Snow’s clear explanations of often confusing food labeling, hazardous pesticide use and the dangers of plastics.

Sara Snow’s definition of green—what she likes to call “fresh”—living (she thinks “green” is overused) is not only about making a healthier home environment, but also about living at a slower, more aware pace—much like the way she was raised. Daughter of Tim Redmond (a green movement pioneer and co-founder of Eden Foods) and mother Pattie, Snow grew up in a unique household where measured, low-impact living ruled supreme. “I was aware that we did things differently in our home,” she says, “and that we were part of a movement much bigger than our family. My dad and mom were involved in important work, and raised us in a very specific way.”

Elders, too, played a crucial part in Snow’s life. Though her parents swept the whole family along on the exciting green movement tide, she credits her grandparents for many of her sensibilities. “My grandparents were ahead of their times,” she says. “They were environmentalists, but they weren’t uppity about it. They would sit down in the dirt and explain the difference between a pea shoot and a weed, where food comes from and why it was important to eat food that has life still in it.” Sadly, Snow believes that many kids today lack this basic knowledge and an understanding of the slower, more earth-connected way of life practiced by earlier generations. On a bright note, though, she says that many questions she answers and consultations she has are with parents, teachers and students who want access to programs, activities and curricula about eating well, establishing responsible carbon footprints and reducing environmental toxicity.

Since 2005, Snow, helped by her previous experience as a television producer, has created TV programs emphasizing an aware, organic lifestyle. She now hosts “Get Fresh with Sara Snow,” carried by the Discovery Health channel, appears regularly on CNN and FitTV, and blogs at treehugger.com. She is an environmental activist who uses her platform to champion planet Earth. “I have a voice and I use that voice to positively encourage people who are trying to do some good. If we can simplify, buy less and start educating ourselves as consumers, we can help companies clean up their environmental practices,” she says.

To make a difference, Snow believes people need to be aware of how their slightest actions can affect their well-being and the health of the environment. “It’s about making that one small change so that you can be a little bit healthier, a little bit more environmentally conscious. Once that change becomes habit, then you add something else. One day you’ll realize, hey, I’m living a really healthy life! And that’s something you can be proud of.”

Alison Hood recycles, re-uses and gardens organically in Marin County, California.

Read more about Sara Snow on her website.

Neal Bascomb

by John Slania

Memoir

Memoir

Michael Lewis

Interview by Amy Scribner

by Amy Scribner

As a first-time mother trying to make sense of a colicky newborn—one who seemingly needed only a few minutes of sleep every 24 hours—only one thing saved me from running screaming from the house. It was Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott, a hilarious, self-deprecating memoir chronicling her experience as a new mom. I read it obsessively, dog-earing certain pages and taking solace in the fact that another mother, somewhere, sometime, had found parenting a newborn as frustrating, stressful and draining as I did.

If only Home Game had been around then.

Michael Lewis, probably best known for his sharply reported look at the finances of major league baseball, Moneyball, now focuses his keen wit and sharp observations on his own family. Married to former MTV reporter Tabitha Soren (who took our cover photo), and the father of three young children, he knows the challenges of parenthood and isn’t afraid to talk about them.

Unabashedly frank, hilarious and sweetly sentimental (“I am addicted to my wife,” he admits at one point), Home Game is divided into three parts—one for each of his children. Lewis spoke with BookPage from his home in Berkeley, California, where he’d just returned from a family vacation to South Beach, Miami. Family vacation, yes. Family-friendly vacation, not entirely.

“My nine- and six-year-old girls, this was more exposed flesh than they’ve ever seen in their lives,” Lewis says of the notoriously scantily clad (and surgically enhanced) South Beach crowd. “There was a man in a gold thong. There was a topless beach. Both girls were saying, ‘Don’t look Daddy! Don’t look!’ It was hard not to. These (breasts) were like looking at the seventh wonder of the world. In Berkeley, all the boobs go down to the navels.”

Such is the life of Michael Lewis, Family Man—an ordinary guy with an extraordinary job, one that has allowed him to write bestsellers about the business of sports and the insanity of Wall Street (Liar’s Poker), and now, about his own life.
“It’s a little weird—I don’t know how to put this—normally, there’s a subject, a kind of substance to what I’ve written,” Lewis says. “Now it’s air—it’s just my life.”

Much of Home Game is drawn from several years’ worth of columns Lewis wrote for Slate called “Dad Again.” It’s a somewhat daring and in many ways groundbreaking book about what it’s like to be a father in modern America. Lewis is incredibly candid throughout, writing about his wife’s bout with postpartum panic disorder, his incredibly awkward vasectomy and the secret so many parents share but rarely talk about:

“The thing that most surprised me about fatherhood the first time around was how long it took before I felt about my child what I was expected to feel,” he writes. “Clutching Quinn after she exited the womb, I was able to generate tenderness and a bit of theoretical affection, but after that, for a good six weeks, the best I could manage was detached amusement. The worst was hatred. I distinctly remember standing on a balcony with Quinn squawking in my arms and wondering what I would do if it wasn’t against the law to hurl her off it.”

Lewis eventually came to love all three of his children fiercely, of course, but admits it wasn’t instantaneous. He theorizes that society has something to do with the fact that more parents don’t acknowledge the hardships of raising a family.

“All you have to do is look around to see that, at least in the middle-class and above, anxiety about being a bad parent has reached epic proportions,” he said. “There were these enormous social pressures I felt: when I really wanted to do x, the world insisted I do y, so I did y, but I was pissed off about it.”

Home Game is intensely honest, and Lewis admits to a bit of nerves now that the book is actually being published.

“Writing the [Slate] columns over the years . . . was purgative,” he says. “It was therapy. Although I was really, really happy to dash off the articles, now I feel somewhat ambivalent about it.”

And how about his wife, who spends much of the book either pregnant, in labor or in tears?

“I think she knows readers will see through whatever I wrote and just feel pity and sympathy for her for being married to me,” Lewis speculates. “Really, though, she really liked that I was getting it down on paper, because you don’t remember so much of it after. We also were both shocked by how many bad things happen that we never knew existed.”

For all his confessional writing, Lewis clearly relishes being a dad. In one of the most poignant passages of the book, he details a night he spent camping with his daughter. Many hot dogs and frustrated attempts to set up camp later, Lewis and daughter Quinn call it a night. She awakens at 4:12 a.m. with an urgent thought.

“‘Daddy, I just want to say how much fun I had with you today,’ she says. Actual tears well up in my eyes. ‘I had fun with you, too,’ I say. ‘Can we go back to sleep?’ ‘Yes, Daddy.’”

After two daughters, Lewis assumed his family was complete. Not so. His wife felt someone was missing. Not long after, son Walker was born.

“Perhaps the only wise moment I had in this process was to be totally aware I had absolutely no say in how many kids we would have and when we would have them,” he said.

Being a writer, Lewis travels often for book tours and speaking engagements. He takes his children with him as often as possible.

“I try to work them into my work life as much as I can,” he said. “Eventually, if you take care of your kids, you’ll love them, but the trick is if you can really like them. I really like my kids.”

As far as writing about Quinn, Dixie and Walker, though, Lewis says he’s through. “I’m done,” he says, “certainly done in the sense that I’m not going to follow their journeys through adolescence with a pen and paper.”

Amy Scribner and family live in Olympia, Washington.

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An excerpt from Home Game:

I inherited from my father a peculiar form of indolence—not outright laziness so much as a gift for avoiding unpleasant chores without attracting public notice. My father took it almost as a matter of principle that most problems, if ignored, simply went away. And that his children were, more or less, among those problems. “I didn’t even talk to you until you went away to college,” he once said to me, as he watched me attempt to dress a six-month-old. “Your mother did all the dirty work.”

This wasn’t entirely true, but it’d pass cleanly through any polygraph. For the tedious and messy bits of my childhood my father was, like most fathers of his generation, absent. (News of my birth he received by telegram.) In theory, his tendency to appear only when we didn’t really need him should have left a lingering emotional distance; he should have paid some terrible psychological price for his refusal to suffer. But the stone cold fact is his children still love him, just as much as they love their mother. They don’t hold it against him that he never addressed their diaper rash, or fixed their lunches, or rehearsed the lyrics to “I’m a Jolly Old Snowman.” They don’t even remember! My mother did all the dirty work, and without receiving an ounce of extra emotional credit for it. Small children are ungrateful; to do one a favor is, from a business point of view, about as shrewd as making a subprime mortgage loan.

When I became a father I really had only one role model: my own father. He bequeathed to me an attitude to the job. But the job had changed. I was equipped to observe, with detached amusement and good cheer, my children being raised. But a capacity for detached amusement was no longer a job qualification. The glory days were over.

Buzz Aldrin

by MiChelle Jones

Animals

Animals

Temple Grandin

Interview by Deanna Larson

by Deanna Larson

The smart mischievous chicken, the sweet sensitive cow and the problem-solving pig are the stuff of cartoons. But these almost human qualities are based in reality, according to scientist and animal welfare pioneer Dr. Temple Grandin, and that’s hard to swallow when the animals become breakfast or dinner.

"All animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain," she writes. All sentient beings—from wildlife and zoo residents to farm animals and family pets—deserve greater understanding, humane treatment and respect, according to Grandin, who has targeted massive industrial farming companies and meat plants as well as the average pet owner with her award-winning animal welfare work.

"I feel strongly we have to give animals a decent life," she says by phone from Fort Collins, where she is a professor of animal science at Colorado State University.

Grandin’s work with animals has been strongly influenced by her own autism, a condition that has helped her understand how animals perceive the world. She has explored the connection in two best-selling books, Thinking in Pictures and Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior.

Her extraordinary new book, Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals makes a connection between the humane treatment of farm animals and the physically and emotionally healthy life that household pets deserve.

Most animal behavior—pleasant or obnoxious—is driven by "the blue ribbon emotions," according to Grandin, which include seeking (searching, investigating and making sense of the environment); rage (frustration sparked by mental and/or physical restraint); fear; lust; care (maternal love and caring); and play.

She identifies the primary emotions motivating animals in various locations: the wild, the "enriched environments" of zoos, industrial farms, ranches and homes. Then she explains how to recognize the physical and behavioral signs of both stress and satisfaction to bring out the best in any species.

"Usually—but not always—the more freedom you give an animal to act naturally, the better, because normal behaviors evolved to satisfy the core emotions," she writes.

Grandin’s interest in animal welfare dates back to her childhood, when she can recall happy, emotionally healthy dogs wandering her childhood neighborhood ("We never had leash aggression," Grandin says), which contrasts with her current observations of lonely dogs barking and whining in isolated backyards.

But the "normal" behaviors for a dog—roaming the countryside for miles per day—usually aren’t possible for the modern pet owner, so Grandin identifies good substitute behaviors like off-leash romps, plenty of games with humans and a rotating stash of toys which stimulate the play and seeking drives.

"Dominance aggression" or leash aggression has become extremely common in modern dogs. But Grandin suggests that aggression—which isn’t an animal emotion—has its basis in fear and anxiety, which are painful emotions that can be addressed through frustration tolerance and obedience training.

Her own childhood struggles with autism and her perception in pictures rather than words helped Grandin comprehend how animals see the world. Observing how cattle became calm in the "squeeze" chutes used to perform veterinary procedures on her aunt’s ranch, she discovered the same calming sensation for her own hyper-awareness and anxiety. After earning degrees in animal science at Arizona State and the University of Illinois she then designed a similar, humane chute now used by more than half of the beef processing plants in America.

In Animals Make Us Human, her anecdotes about working with the meat industry, zoo keepers, ranchers, farmers and other animal owners make for fascinating reading. She helps cowboys shoo "riperian loafers" grazing on protected land by getting them to work with the cattle’s nature instead of against it. She explores why cats are trained effectively with a clicker. ("A cat . . . hasn’t evolved to read people, and he isn’t motivated to scrutinize his owner for signs. You know a cat is going to hear a click.") She helps a horse owner figure out why his mare went "berserk" when a carriage harness was put on after discovering that a previous owner had made his harnesses out of rubber, snapping the horse’s skin like a big rubber band. And she stares at the flip side of abuse, the farm workers too tenderhearted to put runts or sick animals down. "When employees repeatedly go through the pain of holding onto an animal and watching it suffer and then finally euthanizing it or watching it die, eventually they’re going to become desensitized to animal suffering. That’s how habituation works."

Grandin has dedicated her entire career to meat-industry reform and animal welfare, designing plant audits for huge corporate buyers like McDonald’s, and showing often-reluctant CEOs that animals can be processed quickly and humanely with a few often inexpensive modifications, as well as better training and monitoring of staff.

"I would have liked that they just stopped being mean to the animals," Grandin says. "But if you want change to happen, you have to do it on business terms."

She encourages her students to enter the animal welfare field, and encourages ordinary animal lovers to find out where their food comes from, then consider writing a hand-crafted note to big corporations rather than a form letter or e-mail ("Those count," Grandin says). And she hopes that her insights into horses, dogs and cats in the book will perhaps turn a "mere" pet owner into a gentle agitator, bringing "real change on the ground."

"You have to be consistently insistent," Grandin says of her tireless and unsentimental work on behalf of animals. "Activists soften the steel, then I bend it into pretty grill work."

Deanna Larson writes from Nashville.

Author photo by Joel Benjamin.

Azar Nafisi

by Amy Scribner

Family & Relationships, Parenting

Parenting Family & Relationships

Alison Gopnik

Interview by Amy Scribner

by Amy Scribner

Flipping through the channels one recent morning, I landed on a cable infomercial showing a 14-month-old strapped in his high chair, sippy cup by his side. His mother stood in front of him, running through a set of flash cards each printed with a single word.

“Monkey!” yelled the child gleefully. “Clap!”

A voiceover on the ad urged parents to grab the small window of opportunity and give their children the edge they’ll need for lifelong success. As seen on TV, it seems, even infants and toddlers need a competitive edge to succeed in life.
Enter Alison Gopnik, an influential child psychologist and philosopher whose research at the University of California Berkeley is changing the way we think about the lives of children.

In her fascinating and thought-provoking new book, The Philosophical Baby, Gopnik argues that instead of relying on the same old how-to-get-your-child-to-sleep parenting books and gimmicky get-smart-quick products, parents should simply embrace their children’s youngest years as a necessary time for exploration and imagination. She posits that young humans are “useless on purpose,” unable to care for themselves in even the most basic ways, so that they can focus on what Gopnik calls research and development. The most intelligent and flexible species, she says, are usually the ones with the longest periods of childhood.

“I want parents to appreciate the wonder and complexity of what’s going on in their children’s lives,” Gopnik said in a recent phone interview from her home in Berkeley. “This is not a pseudo science—do this and your baby will be smarter. I don’t want them to come away [from my book] with any kind of formula for making their child better!”
Still, Gopnik understands the attraction of books and toys promising smarter, more successful children. It’s linked, she said, to a fragmented society where fewer and fewer people have experienced caring for other children before having their own.

“It’s a fact that for most of human history, almost everyone becomes a parent and more significantly at some point before becoming a parent, they took care of other children,” says Gopnik. “Taking care of children was just part of what it meant to be human. It’s only fairly recently that you have people who have babies who’ve never taken care of babies before—even held a baby.”

The oldest of six children, Gopnik certainly grew up taking care of babies. Even as a young girl, she says, she was fascinated both by children and by philosophy. The daughter of two college professors, she was reading Plato at 10 and is considered a leader in her field of study. Her brother, Adam, is a well-known author and staff writer for The New Yorker. Another brother, Blake, is the Washington Post art critic. Yet for all that, she is strikingly down-to-earth, warm and bubbling with enthusiasm when talking about her work. The mother of three grown sons, she sees children not as research subjects but as an essential part of the universal conversation about who we are.

“We raise children, and live with them every day,” she said. “It always seemed to me, even growing up, that we should talk about babies with the same seriousness and importance as any other topic. I’m always surprised at parties that the conversation around babies is how to get them to sleep, and that’s it. Then it’s, oh, no, let’s talk about real estate or something grown up.”

In The Philosophical Baby, Gopnik argues that young children have been unfairly omitted from the broader conversation about human nature—consider this from the chapter titled “Babies and the Meaning of Life:

“What makes life meaningful, beautiful and morally significant? Is there something that we care about more than we care about ourselves? What endures beyond death?

“For most parents, in day-to-day, simple, ordinary life, there is an obvious answer to these questions—even if it isn’t the only answer. Our children give point and purpose to our lives. They are beautiful (with a small dispensation for chicken pox, scraped knees and runny noses), and the words and images they create are beautiful too. They are at the root of our deepest moral dilemmas and greatest moral triumphs. We care more about our children than we do about ourselves. Our children live on after we are gone, and this gives us a kind of immortality.”

And yet, she goes on, children are rarely considered or even mentioned in thousands of years of thinking about human nature and immortality. Shouldn’t we look to the creation of the next generation as part of what gives life meaning?

For all the heavy subject matter, The Philosophical Baby is never ponderous. In fact, Gopnik explores the subject of how children think with a fresh, enthusiastic and wry voice. She draws on memories from her own childhood, weaving in lively and even poignant details from research sessions she’s conducted over her years in the field and other anecdotes.

In a chapter exploring the purpose of imaginary friends, Gopnik recounts her three-year-old niece Olivia’s imaginary friend, Charlie Ravioli, who seemingly helped her understand the busy Manhattan culture in which she was growing up. Charlie Ravioli, you see, was not a very accessible friend. Olivia often left him pretend voice mail messages imploring him to call her.

Fun and fascinating, The Philosophical Baby is a must-read for anyone who wants to better understand child development and what it means to be human.

“It matters the way all science matters,” Gopnik says. “It matters for the same reason finding out about black holes matters, finding out about DNA matters. We have to acknowledge just how important a part children are of our lives.”

Amy Scribner is the mother of two young children who would probably prefer to chew or color on flash cards.

Douglas Brinkley

by Edward Morris

Biography

Biography

Tracy Kidder

Interview by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

While working on Strength in What Remains, the excruciating and ultimately uplifting story of a survivor of the genocidal conflict in Burundi and Rwanda, Tracy Kidder violated one of his cardinal writing principles. He wrote on airplanes.

“I really can’t have someone looking over my shoulder when I’m working,” Kidder says during a call to the summer home in Maine that he and his wife, a painter, bought in the 1980s, around the time when The Soul of a New Machine earned him a Pulitzer Prize. “Privacy is a big thing for me.”

Usually Kidder has found privacy in what he describes as his uninsulated, “beautifully built little cottage down by a salt water cove” on the couple’s property in Maine. Or in the quiet office “with plenty of room for pacing” in their house—an old, converted creamery not far from Northampton, Massachusetts. But over the last five or six years, while he was researching and writing Strength in What Remains, Kidder traveled frequently to college campuses all over the country, where his marvelous account of Dr. Paul Farmer’s effort to heal the world, Mountains Beyond Mountains, has inspired enough interest that, as Kidder puts it, “hundreds of schools have inflicted it on their incoming students.”

So out of necessity, Kidder learned to write “a little bit” on airplanes.

“Writing is for me, and I suspect for many other people, a way of thinking,” Kidder says. “It is the only way that I can begin to make sense of things for myself. So I don’t write in a very efficient way. I have to concentrate. The whole idea is to lose myself somewhat, to lose self-consciousness. And when I do that, I feel very vulnerable.”

If Kidder feels vulnerable writing under normal circumstances, imagine how he must have felt writing Strength in What Remains, a stunning account of the harrowing journey of a young medical student, Deogratias (Deo), when the horrific civil war between Hutus and Tutsis broke out in Burundi in 1993. It is an amazing journey. Deo witnessed some of the most unimaginable acts of cruelty human beings can commit against one another. He barely escaped death himself. Through luck and the kindness of a schoolmate, he arrived in New York City with $200 in his pocket, not knowing a soul and not speaking English.

Haunted by his nightmarish memories, Deo slept in Central Park and worked for about a dollar an hour delivering groceries while trying to learn English by reading dictionaries in libraries and bookstores. Helped, eventually, by a number of unlikely New Yorkers, Deo entered Columbia University, studied philosophy, went back to medical school and then began working with Dr. Paul Farmer. Eventually he found a healing path for his return to Burundi.

“My wife heard an outline ofhis story and told me about it. The memory of someone else’s memory stuck with me,” Kidder remembers when asked about the origins of Strength in What Remains. “For me the only hard thing about being a writer is deciding what to do next. My wife said, why don’t you go see Deo? I did. And once I heard the story for myself, I thought I had to tell it. Deo is an enormously charming person. Captivating. One feels that even before one knows his story, but the story only enhances that— that a guy could be so good-hearted and so strong that he could return to Burundi and open a clinic, which is really such an instrument of peace. There’s a radiance about him.”

Kidder spent hours with Deo, dredging up often painful memories, “just talking and talking and talking, and listening really carefully. I’m not a good listener in my regular life, but I’m pretty good when I’m working,” Kidder says. Deo was at first a reluctant subject, Kidder says. “I don’t blame him. I would never let anybody do what I do to other people. And Deo is, of course, completely publicity shy. There were times when I thought I should stop, and I felt like a real creep for doing this to someone. But once he decided to do it, he did it.” In the dramatic finale to the book, Kidder accompanies Deo on a return visit to Burundi and Rwanda.

Kidder lets Deo’s story unfold in an unusually affecting double narrative—first as a sort of page-turner, which Kidder says is meant to present “as accurate an account of Deo’s memories as I can,” and then from a bit of a distance, “to show Deo in the throes of memory.” A postscript adds historical context for the chaos and violence unleashed between Hutus and Tutsis in Burundi and Rwanda. But nothing can answer the question Deo seeks to answer when he enrolls in a philosophy course at Columbia: what kind of human being can take up a machete and slaughter his neighbor?

Ultimately, Kidder says, Strength in What Remains is about memory—and forgetting, and taking action. Visiting a genocide memorial site with Deo in Rwanda, he writes that of course we need such memorials. But “too much remembering can be suffocating.”

Afflicted by “ungovernable, tormenting memories, Deo first sought solace by studying philosophy at Columbia. But it didn’t work.”

“I think Deo’s solution is not to dwell on memories and not to extinguish them either,” Kidder says, “but, rather, to act. The best solution is for him to go back and try to bring public health and medicine to one village. The phrase ‘never again’ has clearly become an empty platitude, because genocide keeps happening everywhere. The real answer is remembering, being guided by those memories, and acting.”

Growing more reflective Kidder says, “Over the last nine years I’ve spent the better part of my time with Paul Farmer and Deogratias. They lead you beyond conventional wisdom. A lot of conventional wisdom represents an attempt to ignore the fact that most of humanity is impoverished and in deep misery. These guys and their colleagues are confronting that misery. Through that, I believe another way of looking at the world is bound to arise.”

Kidder’s Strength in What Remains offers a glimpse of that new world arising.

Alden Mudge writes from Berkeley, California.

While working on Strength in What Remains, the excruciating and ultimately uplifting story of a survivor of the genocidal conflict in Burundi and Rwanda, Tracy Kidder violated one of his cardinal writing principles. He wrote on airplanes. “I really can’t have someone looking over my shoulder when I’m working,” Kidder says during a call to […]

Sue Monk Kidd

by Rebecca Bain

Arts & Culture, Literature

Literature Arts & Culture

Lizzie Skurnick

Interview by Trisha Ping

by Trisha Ping

Last year, blogger and writer Lizzie Skurnick set out to revisit a few of her favorite young adult novels. She chronicled the experience in Fine Lines, a weekly column on Jezebel.com. The series was a hit: hundreds of women (including me) had their memories jogged or saw old favorites get their day in the sun. Now, the columns have been turned a book, Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading.

Reading Shelf Discovery feels like attending a high school reunion and reminiscing about the best of your teenage escapades with a particulary entertaining friend. Skurnick's witty, conversational and insightful summaries of novels like Flowers in the Attic, Bridge to Terebithia, The Little Princess and Little Women are supplemented by a sprinkling of guest essays from writers like Jennifer Weiner, Tayari Jones and Cecily Von Ziegesar. The collection reminds women of a certain age how the literature we read back then helped us understand our lives—while at the same time explaining that a pig bladder could be the best toy ever (Little House in the Big Woods), the Met was a really cool place at night (From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler) and that you should never, ever trust your long-lost twin (Lois Duncan's Stranger With My Face).

BookPage talked with Skurnick about teen crossovers, desert islands and why she hasn't read Anne of Green Gables in a web exclusive Q&A.

Fine Lines got an amazing response. Were you surprised that so many other women remembered your childhood favorites?
The success of Fine Lines is very much a question of a happy meeting of circumstance. On the one hand, you have the rise of the web, which makes it easy to categorize and find fellow obsessesives in just about anything. On the other, you have this generation of women coming of age who've been busy with college and grad school and jobs and families and are suddenly like, Wait—what happened to that great book by Lois Duncan I loved? Oh, here it is for 2 cents on eBay! I did know that this was more than a moment of kitschy nostalgia. It's more that we're only just now grown up enough to see how important to us these books were, and we have the means to have the conversation.

Teen or young adult books that crossover to find adult audiences are all the rage these days (Twilight, the Hunger Games). Do you think this is a new phenomenon?
I think they're an unsurprising development in a society where everyone young wants to be old and everyone old wants to be young. But I rather like some entries into new genre—when you marry the sophistication of an adult books with the absurd fun of YA, basically you've taken an adult book and given it a plot, something a lot of adult books could use. Putting a sophisticated twist on a children's story is a bit trickier. (Disney has been putting double entendres to good use to make their product palatable to parents for centuries.) But if you simply raise the stakes—no pun intended—on a children's story by adding adult histrionics, the results are a little more uneven.

A related question: what do you think YA books offer adults that their intended audience might miss? And vice versa?
Well, I'm not sure I'd say "miss" as much as I'd say each audience is taking away what they need. I can't speak for any particular reader, but I know, as a child, I was much more interested in the small details that showed what people were thinking and feeling. I still remember so well that, in Nicholas and Alexandra, the Empress yells, "Abdique! Abdique!" when Nicholas abdicates–speaking French, not Russian, even as the autocracy crumbles–though why I remember this, I cannot say. Now, I can barely remember the characters' names—I'm much more interested in what people are doing. Adult readers moving some of their bookshelves over for YA may be impatient with the fact that you often only find a decent story–a real story, with an arc and everything—in adult genre writing, not literary fiction.

If we're talking about what children miss when they read adult books, I can safely say, pretty much everything. (What does it mean, technically, to abdicate, after all? Thank God in those pre-Wikipedia days I had a good dictionary, not that I used it that often.) But when you read an adult book as a child, you're doing the literary equivalent of listening in on your parents' fight–you understand the drama, though you have no idea what they are talking about.

Is there a book you revisited that turned out not to live up to its memory?
There were two books out of the nearly 100 I read doing this book that I found I couldn't enjoy as much as I had as a child. The first was Constance C. Greene's Beat the Turtle Drum, which was truly one of my favorite books when I was 8—I must have read it 30 times—and which I remembered as this enormous opus. In fact it's a very slim book with only a few scenes. And it's a good book, too—it's just that's it's actually written for a child. That was instructive to me, because it showed how reader age-agnostic so many of these other books really are.

The second was Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. I think that book may have actually been too important to me at a certain point in my life to make it decent to return—I wrote a column about how I felt like I was a dotty old aunt spying on a bunch of girls when I tried.

Is there a YA classic that people would be surprised to learn you hadn't read?
There are so many! But I'll give two shockers: Anne of Green Gables (gasp) and most of Nancy Drew. I'll stop there before I alienate anyone else.

Shelf Discovery deals mostly with novels from the 70s and 80s. What do you think is the identifying feature among books published during that time?
I think because they pre-date this idea of teenage girls we have now, the feature they share is that they all resist easy categorization. On the one hand, you have these hilariously inner-directed, wildly curious girls, like Harriet (of Harriet the Spy), of course, but also The Westing Game's Turtle or From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler's Claudia. Then you have these historical survivalists, like Island of the Blue Dolphin's Karana or The Witch of Blackbird Pond's Kit. Then you've also got Lois Duncan's cadre of ordinary girls suddenly wrestling with supernatural powers, or Norma Klein's Upper West Side sophisticates, who may or may not have lost their virginity but don't hang the idea of their girlhood on it. Even Beverly Cleary's novels are always questioning what being a girl is for—what's good or bad about it, how we can thrive but also protect ourselves in the world. (Fifteen is really quite a provoking novel about what it's like to like a boy.) Madeleine L'Engle manages to pull all of these factors in and add intergalactic time travel.

I think that the feminist movement influenced so many of those novels (as it did women's midlist fiction of the period, like that of authors Marge Piercy or Alix Kates Shulman). There's a far more mutable attitude towards sex and sexuality, what growing up really means, what women are supposed to be and what women are becoming. I also think that so many women had the opportunity to write and publish on a large scale for the first time, so you have this flood of stories about girlhood, about family, about divorce, about marriage. Why these books get steered into YA and the stories in Goodbye, Columbus do not, I can only (ungenerously, I'm sure) speculate.

Do you still read fiction aimed at teens, and if so, do you think it has changed?
I actually signed up to judge a YA fiction prize this year to get a closer look at what is happening. From what I have read, it seems sophisticated in different ways and innocent in other ways (for lack of a better comparison, I'll say it's like "One Day at a Time" versus "Gilmore Girls") while so much of what's interesting seems to be taking place in genre works rather than the kind of realist narrative I'm used to, like Katherine Paterson's Jacob Have I Loved, for instance.

I do think what's changed in literature is what's changed in society: now we have this idea of what teenagers are and should be—movies, stores, TV shows, schools of therapy, books are dedicated entirely to the question. When I was growing up it was Meatballs and friendship bracelets and you were pretty much done. I can't help but thinking the books of my era were devoted to releasing teenage-hood from this opaque prison (look at Paul Zindel!) while now they, like so much else in our lives, are about what happens when you live under a microscope with a pre-determined idea of what you should be. Is it better to have someone assume you're a juvenile deliquent or assume you should speak five languages and be interested in the plight of the homeless? I don't know.

It's clear from your essays that these books helped shape the way you think about the world. Do you think kids get the same benefits from books today?
You would have to talk to the kids today 20 years from now and see if Twilight has damaged them as much as 9,000 pundits seem to feel it will! But I think reading at a young age is almost always world-shaping—it's a very intimate experience, after all, one of the only ways to look deeply at another world when you still barely know your own. One practical change is that the books themselves are a quite a bit more expensive—the books I read growing up cost anywhere from 95 cents $1.25, and it was a big difference when they started going up to $4.95. I think it's unlikely that technology will make books cheaper for children—and it shouldn't, because author should be paid for their work–but I do hope it can make books more available and accessible.

If you had to pick one book featured in Shelf Discovery that everyone should read, what would it be?
I've made it my official campaign position for this book tour that I'd like everyone to buy and read Berthe Amoss' Secret Lives, a wonderful book about a girl growing up in turn-of-the-century New Orleans trying to find out the truth about her mother's death. I forgot the title for years and was only able to actually locate it through the powers of Google four years ago—I don't want that to happen to anyone else.

What's the most surprising thing you have learned from a book?
There's so many: that the Czar and Czarina spoke French at home, of course; that red abalones are the sweetest; that you can nick off enough metal from bullet shavings to make another bullet; that you have not converted a man because just because you have silenced him. (I could keep up with the references, but there are really too many.)

Who would you rather be marooned on a desert island with: Laura Ingalls or Sara Crewe?
Oh, that is so hard! Sara would be fun because she would tell stories, but you get the sense she'd be kind of useless hauling wood and might waste away from a disease if you weren't careful. Laura you'd just fight with, because she'd be as bossy as you are. Can't I just go with Karana?

What's next on your reading list?
I just moved and donated half of my books, a process during which I unearthed a biography of Frances Hodgson Burnett I've been meaning to read for years. Then Wharton, Summer, and then A Summer to Die, which my friend Elizabeth has insisted I write about, and maybe Seventeenth Summer, just to stick with the theme.

David Small

by Becky Ohlsen

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