omes down to fathers and sons, writes John O’Brien at the end of his first book, At Home in the Heart of Appalachia. A skillfully written memoir about family relationships, O’Brien’s narrative explores the meaning of home and what it takes to find a geographical as well as spiritual center.
O’Brien’s story begins and ends on a July day in 1995, the day his father is to be buried in Philadelphia. Because of a longstanding estrangement, O’Brien won’t be at the funeral, yet he needs formal closure, so he makes a trip to Piedmont, West Virginia, his father’s birthplace. He is desperate, he says, "to understand my father’s life, if only to better understand my own." In the chapters between the day’s beginning and end, O’Brien deftly weaves memories, recollections and observations about his own life with those of Pendleton County, West Virginia, where he has lived with his wife and two children since 1984, in a town called Franklin, not far from Piedmont. The stories intertwine as O’Brien blends the threads into a narrative that is gentle and satisfying despite chronicles of personal difficulties and deep community fissures. The storms that bring discord and fear of outsiders to this mountain community are paralleled by storms that bring the same kind of fear and discord to O’Brien and his family. The aftermath may fade in time, but, for O’Brien’s family, the emotional scars remain forever in nightmares, distrust and anger.
O’Brien doesn’t discover what he sets out to find on that July day "the gulf of misunderstanding remained as wide as ever" but in his exploration of the geography and people of Appalachia, which he describes with deep understanding and reverence, and in his exploration of himself, which he accomplishes with unflinching, sometimes uncomfortable honesty, he does remember good times with his dad, and he does find answers to questions that many of us have about the meaning of home. A line of poetry by a writer whose name he cannot recall has special resonance for O’Brien: "My home is in my head." Carrying the poet’s thought one step further, he writes, "My home is the memory in my head." At the end of this moving memoir, O’Brien seems to have achieved understanding and peace, perhaps with his father’s help after all.
Temple West is a creative nonfiction writer in Norfolk, Virginia.
omes down to fathers and sons, writes John O'Brien at the end of his first book, At Home in the Heart of Appalachia. A skillfully written memoir about family relationships, O'Brien's narrative explores the meaning of home and what it takes to find a geographical…
es for job seekers and employers It’s that time of year again. The days are short and dreary; your job seems tedious and boring. Staggering mountains of holiday bills convince you that career advancement should be a springtime priority.
We’ve all seen the TV commercial in which a prospective employee receives flowers and fruit baskets from CEOs trying to lure him to work for their companies. All he did was post his resume on the Internet. If he can do it, you think, so can I. A mountain of fruit baskets waits in your future! Who’s not thrilled about the prospect of your potential advancement? The human resources department at your present employer. As the clever commercial suggests, the HR game is getting tougher and tougher these days. It is not too strong a statement to say that successful hiring can directly affect a company’s bottom line.
In fact, Frederich W. Ball and Barbara B. Ball say the most critical battle waged in business today is the war for talent. They address this hot topic head-on in Impact Hiring: The Secrets of Hiring a Superstar. Today, these recruiting and interviewing experts say, job candidates aren’t interviewing to try to get a job; they interview to see if they even want a new job. Superstar candidates know that for every offer they receive, there are two or three more corporations queuing up to court them. This happened to a friend recently. Following an MBA program at a top school, he was offered seven jobs with different corporations; all considered him a superstar candidate. Each post offered significant pay and an array of wonderful benefits. All offered to help his spouse relocate, find childcare, even pay for closing costs on a new house. Ultimately his choice hinged on what the Balls call “knowing the candidate’s agenda.” The financial strength of the company, the entrŽe to an interesting and challenging position and the strength of the senior management team led him to choose a job with a company whose culture reflected his own beliefs and whose corporate vision was filled with future possibilities. CEOs and human resource directors, as well as upper level managers with hiring responsibility, should read this book. Ball and Ball offer insight into the secrets of tapping and, more importantly, attracting superstar candidates. With keen understanding and years of corporate experience to boot, they outline the crucial steps every recruiter (for businesses big or small) needs to succeed when bringing a superstar player on board. While Impact Hiring offers insight into how to attract the best new recruits, Winning the Talent Wars: How to manage and compete in the high-tech, high-speed, knowledge-based, superfluid economy by management expert Bruce Tulgan traces the reasons companies lose their best talent. Tulgan says company loyalty is a thing of the past. The corporate downsizing and restructuring of recent years sent a clear message to employees: individuals must take responsibility for their own careers. Free-agency is an existing mindset for employees, and it will drive a more efficient market-driven economy, Tulgan believes.
Winning the Talent Wars explores the macro-level employment forces at work in the economy and confronts employers with the reality that they need to reevaluate their compensation systems to best attract and retain talented employees. Tulgan says employers must embrace the new economy and come to understand its effect on current employment trends. He stresses pay-for-performance approaches and wants businesses to turn managers into coaches, leading the team to perform. He challenges corporate leaders to “create as many career paths as you have people” and restructure the traditional notion of climbing the corporate ladder. His is an exciting proposition, one that will appeal to many 25- to 40-year-olds seeking jobs.
Winning the Talent Wars tells the stories of corporate executives who have gone to battle for talent and are beginning to win the war. “More and more of your best people are leaving, or talking about it, or thinking about it,” Tulgan says. Learn strategy that allows retaining employees and hiring new ones to be a win-win situation.
In recent years, newspapers have seen a decline in classified advertising revenue as employers put more want-ads on the Internet. But not everyone, and certainly not every company, is taking advantage of the Internet revolution. Poor Richard’s Internet Recruiting: Easy, Low-Cost Ways to Find Great Employees Online by Barbara Ling is a great introduction to both looking for employees and looking for your own new job.
Why recruit on the Internet? For most businesses the advantages are easy to see. First, Ling says, it’s often free. And who doesn’t want to free up money for R&andD or salary incentives or customer research? Just look at the bottom line. The Web is quicker, can be read 24/7, is easy to use for both prospective employees and employers and is an easy form of corporate advertising.
Ling knows her subject area well. An online columnist for the Boston Herald, she has written on Internet recruiting and led seminars on the subject. After you’ve finished her comprehensive guide to web recruiting, you’ll be one step ahead of the competition.
Staying ahead of the competition is the idea behind Richard C. Whiteley’s Love the Work You’re With: A Practical Guide to Finding New Joy and Productivity in Your Job. What causes people to leave their jobs? Increasingly, personal satisfaction ranks high on the list of reasons. Employees, however, often find their new jobs also fail to offer an advanced level of personal enrichment. He likens this syndrome to a failed relationship. How many people walk away from one relationship only to make the same mistakes again in another? Whitely convincingly helps employees and their employers recognize unconscious patterns of attitude and behavior that mark unchallenging and passionless workplaces.
Sometimes, Whiteley says, employees live in fear that they will be downsized, discarded or laid off. They never develop their potential to enjoy their job because they go to work every day wondering, what next? Whitely encourages employees to see themselves as positive forces at work, responsible for their own level of job satisfaction.
Both employees and employers can benefit from Whiteley’s insights. In the competitive marketplace, he says, each employee, each CEO and each manager has to infuse the workplace with a spirit of energy. He offers a series of exercises and self-evaluations for employees. They should also be required reading for human resource professionals who watch long-time and long-sought employees walk out the door in search of the “perfect” opportunity.
Briefly noted Â¥ The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley, one of design firm IDEO’s leaders, offers a rich and exciting ride through the mindset of a unique company. A leadership book with style, charisma and fun, this book also demonstrates how to capitalize on fresh ideas.
Â¥ Entrepreneur America: Lessons from Inside Rob Ryan’s High-Tech Start-Up Boot Camp by Rob Ryan. From Roaring Lion Ranch in Montana, the founder of Ascend Communications infuses this model of how to start a business with his unique humor, wit and practicality. Ryan shoots down entrepreneurial wannabes but goes on to tell them how to get up and continue the battle.
Â¥ The PR Crisis Bible: How to Take Charge of the Media When All Hell Breaks Loose by Robin Cohn is the definitive source for what to do when the worst case scenario unfolds at your company. How to handle public relations crisis, how to prepare for them and, most importantly, how to handle them honestly is the goal of this deft manual. Required reading for every CEO.
Sharon Secor, who helped jump-start two businesses, is a Nashville-based writer.
es for job seekers and employers It's that time of year again. The days are short and dreary; your job seems tedious and boring. Staggering mountains of holiday bills convince you that career advancement should be a springtime priority.
es for job seekers and employers It’s that time of year again. The days are short and dreary; your job seems tedious and boring. Staggering mountains of holiday bills convince you that career advancement should be a springtime priority.
We’ve all seen the TV commercial in which a prospective employee receives flowers and fruit baskets from CEOs trying to lure him to work for their companies. All he did was post his resume on the Internet. If he can do it, you think, so can I. A mountain of fruit baskets waits in your future! Who’s not thrilled about the prospect of your potential advancement? The human resources department at your present employer. As the clever commercial suggests, the HR game is getting tougher and tougher these days. It is not too strong a statement to say that successful hiring can directly affect a company’s bottom line.
In fact, Frederich W. Ball and Barbara B. Ball say the most critical battle waged in business today is the war for talent. They address this hot topic head-on in Impact Hiring: The Secrets of Hiring a Superstar. Today, these recruiting and interviewing experts say, job candidates aren’t interviewing to try to get a job; they interview to see if they even want a new job. Superstar candidates know that for every offer they receive, there are two or three more corporations queuing up to court them. This happened to a friend recently. Following an MBA program at a top school, he was offered seven jobs with different corporations; all considered him a superstar candidate. Each post offered significant pay and an array of wonderful benefits. All offered to help his spouse relocate, find childcare, even pay for closing costs on a new house. Ultimately his choice hinged on what the Balls call "knowing the candidate’s agenda." The financial strength of the company, the entrŽe to an interesting and challenging position and the strength of the senior management team led him to choose a job with a company whose culture reflected his own beliefs and whose corporate vision was filled with future possibilities. CEOs and human resource directors, as well as upper level managers with hiring responsibility, should read this book. Ball and Ball offer insight into the secrets of tapping and, more importantly, attracting superstar candidates. With keen understanding and years of corporate experience to boot, they outline the crucial steps every recruiter (for businesses big or small) needs to succeed when bringing a superstar player on board. While Impact Hiring offers insight into how to attract the best new recruits, Winning the Talent Wars: How to manage and compete in the high-tech, high-speed, knowledge-based, superfluid economy by management expert Bruce Tulgan traces the reasons companies lose their best talent. Tulgan says company loyalty is a thing of the past. The corporate downsizing and restructuring of recent years sent a clear message to employees: individuals must take responsibility for their own careers. Free-agency is an existing mindset for employees, and it will drive a more efficient market-driven economy, Tulgan believes.
Winning the Talent Wars explores the macro-level employment forces at work in the economy and confronts employers with the reality that they need to reevaluate their compensation systems to best attract and retain talented employees. Tulgan says employers must embrace the new economy and come to understand its effect on current employment trends. He stresses pay-for-performance approaches and wants businesses to turn managers into coaches, leading the team to perform. He challenges corporate leaders to "create as many career paths as you have people" and restructure the traditional notion of climbing the corporate ladder. His is an exciting proposition, one that will appeal to many 25- to 40-year-olds seeking jobs.
Winning the Talent Wars tells the stories of corporate executives who have gone to battle for talent and are beginning to win the war. "More and more of your best people are leaving, or talking about it, or thinking about it," Tulgan says. Learn strategy that allows retaining employees and hiring new ones to be a win-win situation.
In recent years, newspapers have seen a decline in classified advertising revenue as employers put more want-ads on the Internet. But not everyone, and certainly not every company, is taking advantage of the Internet revolution. Poor Richard’s Internet Recruiting: Easy, Low-Cost Ways to Find Great Employees Online by Barbara Ling is a great introduction to both looking for employees and looking for your own new job.
Why recruit on the Internet? For most businesses the advantages are easy to see. First, Ling says, it’s often free. And who doesn’t want to free up money for R&andD or salary incentives or customer research? Just look at the bottom line. The Web is quicker, can be read 24/7, is easy to use for both prospective employees and employers and is an easy form of corporate advertising.
Ling knows her subject area well. An online columnist for the Boston Herald, she has written on Internet recruiting and led seminars on the subject. After you’ve finished her comprehensive guide to web recruiting, you’ll be one step ahead of the competition.
Staying ahead of the competition is the idea behind Richard C. Whiteley’s Love the Work You’re With: A Practical Guide to Finding New Joy and Productivity in Your Job. What causes people to leave their jobs? Increasingly, personal satisfaction ranks high on the list of reasons. Employees, however, often find their new jobs also fail to offer an advanced level of personal enrichment. He likens this syndrome to a failed relationship. How many people walk away from one relationship only to make the same mistakes again in another? Whitely convincingly helps employees and their employers recognize unconscious patterns of attitude and behavior that mark unchallenging and passionless workplaces.
Sometimes, Whiteley says, employees live in fear that they will be downsized, discarded or laid off. They never develop their potential to enjoy their job because they go to work every day wondering, what next? Whitely encourages employees to see themselves as positive forces at work, responsible for their own level of job satisfaction.
Both employees and employers can benefit from Whiteley’s insights. In the competitive marketplace, he says, each employee, each CEO and each manager has to infuse the workplace with a spirit of energy. He offers a series of exercises and self-evaluations for employees. They should also be required reading for human resource professionals who watch long-time and long-sought employees walk out the door in search of the "perfect" opportunity.
Briefly notedThe Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley, one of design firm IDEO’s leaders, offers a rich and exciting ride through the mindset of a unique company. A leadership book with style, charisma and fun, this book also demonstrates how to capitalize on fresh ideas.
Entrepreneur America: Lessons from Inside Rob Ryan’s High-Tech Start-Up Boot Camp by Rob Ryan. From Roaring Lion Ranch in Montana, the founder of Ascend Communications infuses this model of how to start a business with his unique humor, wit and practicality. Ryan shoots down entrepreneurial wannabes but goes on to tell them how to get up and continue the battle.
The PR Crisis Bible: How to Take Charge of the Media When All Hell Breaks Loose by Robin Cohn is the definitive source for what to do when the worst case scenario unfolds at your company. How to handle public relations crisis, how to prepare for them and, most importantly, how to handle them honestly is the goal of this deft manual. Required reading for every CEO.
Sharon Secor, who helped jump-start two businesses, is a Nashville-based writer.
es for job seekers and employers It's that time of year again. The days are short and dreary; your job seems tedious and boring. Staggering mountains of holiday bills convince you that career advancement should be a springtime priority.
In How to Read Now, Elaine Castillo models how to read not just books but also history, culture and the world with an eye toward understanding how the ideas that inform our reading lives came to be.
You write that your book’s title, How to Read Now, is both a comment and a question. Can you say more about that? Like I say in the introduction, there’s some real ambivalence on my part in the title: a reluctance, a resistance even, to writing a book about the racial politics of our reading culture that might be assumed to serve as essentially a CliffsNotes on anti-racism for the edification of white readers. That being said, as a chronically bossy Virgo and an elder sister in an immigrant family, my love language, unsurprisingly, is 24/7 critique. (To paraphrase a favorite T-shirt I once bought from The Cut, which quotes art critic Jerry Saltz, “Criticism Never Sleeps,” lol.)
But at its core, the title feels most of all like the beginning of an investigation, an exploration. Someone once asked me if I felt that writing books was therapeutic, and—if we’re staying within the realm of clinical metaphors—I don’t feel that the relationship I have to the books I write is a therapeutic one exactly. By which I mean that I know the curative capacities of writing are possible, of course, but in my experience, they’ve always been unpredictable, unreliable, idiosyncratic; personal and fragile. What feels truer to me is that writing books feels laparoscopic, like exploratory surgery. Something’s going on; you’re not entirely sure what. You have to go in to find out.
You write that books were a waypoint on your journey to becoming a reader. Why is reading bigger than books? While I was lucky enough to have one parent who was a voracious, mostly self-taught reader who passed his love of reading down to me, the majority of the people in my family would never characterize themselves as readers. In fact, in a larger immigrant family, the older generation’s confidence in reading either Tagalog or English is shaky. That said, those same people were some of the best readers of the world I ever knew or will ever know. They taught me by example how to read my way through the world: how they gauged interactions with a boss, how they sighed after a film, what places in the world they built internal altars to, what losses in the world they mourned. Like I say in the book, I don’t want a book called How to Read Now to speak only to people who had the largely middle-class benefit of the education and leisure space that allows people to become not just literate but literary-minded; but equally, I don’t want it to let off the hook the people (like those I love and come from) who say that books aren’t for them, that reading culture isn’t for them. The truth is, we read and are being read by the world every day, in a million languages, in a million minute ways. But How to Read Now is a slightly easier title than How to Dismantle Your Entire Critical Apparatus.
What’s one characteristic of a really good reader? I think expecting that you could distill the essence of a really good reader to one characteristic is probably characteristic of a . . . not . . . great reader? I’m mostly kidding, but there’s some truth to the cheek. It’s a little like Logan Roy in “Succession,” which I just started watching (culturally I’m generally three to five years late on things), demanding his people tell him what the “protein” is in any given memo, discussion or article. That instinct to say, “Well, what’s the One Takeaway I can get from this?” is the driving force of reading under neoliberal capitalism: reading as a form of market competition and resource extraction, collecting pedagogical or ethnographic data—which is how so many writers of color, in particular, are typically read by white readers in this industry—as opposed to reading as a carving out of a uniquely intimate, uniquely vulnerable space in the world, in which a reader is as laid bare to a book as the world of a book is laid bare to her.
What’s one way that you have changed as a reader over time? I think the most stark way I’ve changed is that I try to read more slowly—which, for someone who was the proverbial bookworm, a real devourer of literary worlds, hasn’t been easy. For my entire life, I’ve been someone who’ll read anywhere; most of my books as a kid had food stains on them from reading while I ate. Family members used to make fun of how they’d never see my face because it was always behind a book. And now, of course, with the advent of reading on your phone, it never ends. You’re always reading an article, falling asleep in bed reading The Age of Innocence on the Kindle, reading a friend’s PDF proof, reading a Reddit thread on how to find a Legendary Animal in Red Dead Redemption 2 or how to get through the Yiga Clan Hideout in Zelda: Breath of the Wild, reading another article on post-radiation care for senior dogs. (I adopted a senior German Shepherd a year and a half ago, my beloved Xena. She just underwent surgery and radiation, so that takes up a lot of my reading at the moment.) I’ve also never had strict taste boundaries when it came to reading. There was never highbrow or lowbrow; everything was on the table, everything was there to be read. So trying to read more slowly has been the great ongoing failure of my adult life.
“As a chronically bossy Virgo and an elder sister in an immigrant family, my love language, unsurprisingly, is 24/7 critique.”
You write that white supremacy is the “rot at the core” of the publishing industry and position this book as a reckoning. This reminds me of the book’s cover, which features a bomb in the O of the word Now; in the acknowledgements, you call the cover “tough, bold, and literally incendiary.” What’s one conversation that you hope blows up because of this book? Going back to resisting the practice of reduction to the One, I’m going to say that for every essay in the book, there’s a conversation—and yes, potentially an incendiary conversation, as the best ones can be—to be had. A conversation about the hypocrisies of reading as an empathy machine, when we demand the safari treatment—translations, glossaries, maps—from writers of color yet bestow full artistic impunity on white artists. A conversation about the national myths we ask our monuments, our parks, our land to tell us, and the fury that erupts when people who’ve been expunged from those myths tell their own stories about how those monuments, those parks, that land came to be. A conversation about whiteness in the world of science fiction and fantasy, especially with respect to fables of oppression, difference and dystopia, inspired by the marginalized experiences of people of color, who are then erased from the tale. A conversation about the great presumed oracles of California, such as Joan Didion, and the settler colonial history that inescapably makes up the foundation of her work and worldview, not to mention the readers who venerate her. A conversation about writing pedagogy in an academic institution, especially one that will not protect its students from sexual harassment and assault, and its connection to other forms of silencing, intellectual and otherwise, in the power dynamics of a classroom. A conversation about the paucity of Representation Matters Art, and the failures of the drive toward positive representation generally. A conversation about our classics, and how they become so, and just what incursions we might make into the future of those classics.
Most of these questions do have a common thread, of course: Why do we read the way we do? How on earth did we get here? And how can we imagine—creatively, culturally, sensually, politically—an elsewhere; an otherwise?
You write that acknowledging politics in literature—such as the everyday presence of colonialism in fairy tales like “Cinderella”—is an act of expansion that opens up conversations rather than shutting them down. Why do you think some readers are so resistant to these kinds of conversations, especially when dealing with works by white authors? This isn’t a great mystery, is it? Why do we think some people are resistant to critical race theory, an utterly benign label—much like “antifa”—that has been deformed and fetishized into demonic proportions by a politically successful and financially rewarded far-right white supremacist cultural lobby? Why do we think those same people are perfectly accepting of the white supremacist paranoia of espousing White Replacement Theory? The discussion makes me think of Jamaica Kincaid’s great line from Lucy, when the narrator wonders about her white employer who (in a familiar move) dubiously claims to have Native ancestry: “How do you get to be the sort of victor who can claim to be the vanquished also?”
Ultimately we can’t keep rehashing—re-diagnosing, to go back to the clinical metaphors—the whys of white supremacy, white fragility, white grievance. It’s asking people of color to waste their time getting embroiled in bad faith process arguments.
People don’t like to talk about the history of empire and enslaved labor that underpins the Regency world either, including the work of Jane Austen, because it interrupts their romantic fantasy of white gentility and interrupts their ability to project themselves apolitically into that world. So we come up with arguments like “applying postcolonial theory to Austen is anachronistic!” despite the fact that Regency scholars like Patricia A. Matthews have shown us that abolition was a widely known topic of debate in Austen’s era and that Austen’s peers wrote abolition literature, wrote about interracial relationships in their fiction, etc. It’s not unlike how the white marble statues of Greek gods were fetishized by English and German classicists to corroborate stories about antiquity as a romanticized vision of pure, noble whiteness, conveniently leaving out the fact that all of those statues had, in their time, been painted a riot of colors. So what are people really invested in when they resist acknowledging these historical facts? Is it really Austen? Is it really Greek myth? Or is it, rather, the story they’ve been allowed to believe about themselves, and their world, through these deliberate interpretations and elisions?
“Trying to read more slowly has been the great ongoing failure of my adult life.”
Headshot of Elaine Castillo by Amaal Said.
You are best known for writing fiction, especially your acclaimed novel America Is Not the Heart. How to Read Now is your first nonfiction book, and there’s a narrative quality to these essays, a feeling of following an ever-developing line of thought. Which of your skills as a fiction writer did you bring to crafting these essays? I was just joking to someone—they were asking if writing a second book was easier, having already written a first—that I don’t know if any book helps you write the next one, really. With each book, what you learn is how to write that book, and that book specifically. The next is a new world, all over again. But if there is a narrative throughline to the book, an ever-developing line of thought, then it’s probably because, like I said earlier, I don’t really have fixed boundaries around my writing; much of what I bring to bear in a novel is also what I bring to bear as a critical thinker.
But it’s also just how the book came about. I wanted it to feel like entering into the personal history of someone’s reading life, while also following along as they think, ruminate, go deeper, swim in the dark, resurface again to take a breath. Some of my favorite nonfiction books read like that, like Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, or Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, or John Berger’s many essays on art and politics. The critical thinking in those works often feels like narrative storytelling, not only because all those writers are also fiction writers themselves but also because the voices in their books are so singular, because the urgency in them is so alive, so intimate, so to the bone.
In your concluding essay, you talk about Homer’s “The Odyssey,” particularly the scene with the monster Polyphemus. Readers are taught to identify with Odysseus, but what would it mean to identify instead with Polyphemus? Well, besides pushing back against the idea that Polyphemus is a monster at all—isn’t Odysseus, in the end, also a monster? Or is that just dependent on who’s telling the story?—I’m resistant to the impulse of identification as the rhyme and reason for reading. Parsing the characters we’re tacitly meant to view as heroic, parsing the characters we’re implicitly assumed to identify with, and parsing them in ways that include discussions of their power in relation to others—their class, their race, their logics of violence—asks us to go beyond identification. To make a reference to the title of my essay on Joan Didion, “Main Character Syndrome,” the need to identify with Odysseus or Polyphemus is ultimately still part of that main character syndrome logic of fiction, part of the heroic impulse or, alternately, what Ursula K. Le Guin called “the killer story” in her essay “The Carrier Bag of Fiction”: “Lest there be no more telling of stories at all, some of us out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we’d better start telling another [story], which maybe people can go on with when the old one’s finished. Maybe. The trouble is, we’ve all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it.”
Getting out of the killer story, getting out of the bind of identification, getting out of the heroic impulse, lets us enter into the much thornier realm of intimacy, and even recognition—especially unforeseen intimacy and unforeseen recognition. The truth is, I think most of us recognize parts of ourselves in both Odysseus and Polyphemus. The parts of ourselves that are charismatic, that love to tell stories; the parts of ourselves that are adventurers, or unfaithful, or great thinkers, or irresponsible leaders, or distracted by our lusts, our ego. The parts of ourselves that know what it means to have one’s home invaded, exploited, rendered unlivable; the parts of ourselves that have sought revenge, that have chosen violence, that long for retribution; the parts of us that have never been the hero. It’s easy to say, “Well, let’s just switch and identify with Polyphemus instead.” But that way lies more killer stories. Instead, to read Polyphemus’ story with the same attention that we read Odysseus’ means we might actually be able to understand a story like his—might give it the time and space that we otherwise lavish upon the stories of characters like Odysseus. And in doing so, we might be able to read both stories more truly, more fully. If we stop looking for heroes, we might actually find people.
How to Read Now takes our most aspirational notions about reading—that it builds empathy, that it combats prejudice—and turns them on their heads.
Like his acolytes Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell is remembered today as much for his mental illness as for his remarkable poetry. This legacy is an understandable, if regrettable, consequence of our fascination with the tortured and tragic in art. By the mid-1950s, Lowell’s bipolar disorder had reached a crisis point. While committed to Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, he began a therapeutic regimen that helped him attain a measure of equilibrium. One element of that therapy was a writing project, which Lowell continued over the next three years by working on an autobiography of his family roots and childhood. This narrative, unfinished and unpolished, composes the first part of Memoirs, a gathering of Lowell’s unpublished writings about his life, edited by Steve Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc.
For better or worse, Lowell could not escape his lineage, which dated back on both sides to the founding of New England. His dominant mother, Charlotte, put particular stock in this background, and when his father’s naval career dragged the family away from Boston, Charlotte was never silent about her dissatisfaction. Conversely, in Lowell’s words, his father was “a gentle, faithful and dim man.” That ruthless paternal appraisal comes from the second section of the writings collected in Memoirs, which the editors call “Crisis and Aftermath.” These pieces are anchored by an essay, “The Balanced Aquarium,” that recounts Lowell’s time at Payne Whitney. Written in the wake of his mother’s death, the essay also recalls the earlier circumstances of his father’s final days. Shifting seamlessly back and forth in time—to childhood, to the recent past and back to the time of his ancestors—Lowell attempts to make sense of these threads with customary biting observations wrapped in elegant phrases, as he watches the traffic far below the window of his hospital room.
Lowell, of course, mined this material a few years later in one of his finest (one might even say iconic) poetry collections, Life Studies, turning the anarchy of his mind into clear-cut verse. Indeed, the best approach to “My Autobiography,” “The Balanced Aquarium” and the other pieces here is perhaps to view them as dry runs for something far greater and enduring yet to come. These writings give us added glimpses into the life of a poet who made a new art form out of baring the soul, even while expertly keeping his words measured and precise.
The final section of Memoirs collects short pieces Lowell wrote about poets he knew: Plath, Sexton, William Carlos Williams, Allen Tate, John Berryman, Ezra Pound and others. The often sordid specifics of his complicated marriages and romances are skirted, but those coals have been well raked elsewhere. Memoirs should not serve as an introduction to Lowell and his work as much as a supplement, inviting us to discover or revisit his peerless poems.
The writings collected in Memoirs give us glimpses into the life of Robert Lowell, a poet who made baring one’s soul into an art form.
Tony Earley crafts an elegant reinvention of the past The line between fiction and nonfiction is often blurred and in most cases arbitrarily drawn. In his new book, Somehow Form a Family, a collection of essays that reads like the cohering fragments of a memoir, Tony Earley walks gracefully along that line, writing about growing up in the South in the 1970s, the eccentricities of love in most families, and the essential longing to connect with a community that any writer feels but is rarely able to satisfy. "All writers are spies in their own country," Earley said in a recent phone interview. "We are afflicted or blessed with this strange sort of consciousness in which we are always looking in from the outside. I can remember being a kid walking through the playground, imagining myself as I did it, conscious of my every move, always feeling different and never comfortable in any group. Perhaps that’s why we become writers, to deal with that longing." Earley, a North Carolina native and an associate professor of English at Vanderbilt University, is the author of the 1994 short story collection Here We Are in Paradise and the highly acclaimed novel Jim the Boy, published in 2000. A few years back Granta magazine named him one of America’s best young authors, and shortly after that announcement, The New Yorker featured him in an issue that focused on the best new fiction writers in America. The last three stories in Here We Are in Paradise depicted Jim Glass and his family. From those stories, Earley developed the idea for the novel Jim the Boy, a work whose style has been compared to both Ernest Hemingway’s and E. B. White’s. Being compared to Hemingway would not come as an unwanted surprise to most young contemporary fiction writers, but a comparison to E. B. White, in our deconstructed new world where any writer worth his ink seems destined to have a distant, ironic voice, may not seem a compliment. Earley, though, is happy with the comparison and thinks he understands its source. "I started it," he said. "It’s flattering, but the comparisons probably came from my epigraph to the novel from White’s Charlotte’s Web
Tony Earley crafts an elegant reinvention of the past The line between fiction and nonfiction is often blurred and in most cases arbitrarily drawn. In his new book, Somehow Form a Family, a collection of essays that reads like the cohering fragments of a memoir,…
Maria Ressa’s book is a political history of the Philippines and an intimate memoir, but it’s also a warning to democracies everywhere: Authoritarianism is a threat to us all.
