A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

A short, heartfelt, sometimes unexpectedly funny, wrenching memoir about Delaney's son Henry, who died of cancer when he was two years old, and about his family in the time when Henry was there. It's about love and grief and joy; it's an incredible depiction of the early, intense kind of grief that feels like it's going to rip you apart; it's very beautiful. This is the kind of book where either you want to read it or you really, really don't. If you do, I recommend the audio read by Delaney.

There is no physical paradise where he’s waiting for me, and for that I’m glad. I have to imagine that would get boring after a couple of centuries, for him, for me. For you. Rather, I suspect I am a glass of water, and when I die, the contents of my glass will be poured into the same vast ocean that Henry’s glass was poured into, and we will mingle together forever. We won’t know who’s who. And you’ll get poured in there one day, too.

You’ll likely find me crying by the banchan refrigerators, remembering the taste of my mom’s soy-sauce eggs and cold radish soup. Or in the freezer section, holding a stack of dumpling skins, thinking of all the hours that Mom and I spent at the kitchen table folding minced pork and chives into the thin dough. Sobbing near the dry goods, asking myself, “Am I even Korean anymore if there’s no one left in my life to call and ask which brand of seaweed we used to buy?”

Zauner's mother, Chongmi, died of cancer, sending Zauner in a spiral of grief. The memoir reconstructs their relationship, often in terms of Korean food.

The depictions of cancer in this book are rough, even for a book about someone who died of cancer. Her mother did not have a good death - again, even in the context of death generally not being great - and the horrible way she died is a big part of Zauner's grief. As her father is white and some of her Korean family had already died of cancer, when her mother is dead Zauner struggles with the loss of heritage and culture, as well as the loss of her mother.

Their relationship is intense. Some of the things her mother does to her, especially in childhood, are abusive in my opinion, like kicking her when she hurts herself falling out of a tree. At other times, her mother is extremely loving and considerate, like wearing a pair of gift boots around the house for a week to break them in for her. Her mother keeps saying Zauner was a difficult child, but... she was a child! It sounded like Zauner, an only child in an isolated setting, was incredibly driven to please her mother, who was not easy to please. She rebels when she's a teenager and they have a big break for a while. Zauner creates a band, Japanese Breakfast, and gets a boyfriend... and then she gets the cancer call.

A memoir of grief, family, and food by a Korean-American musician sounded so exactly up my alley, and I loved the first chapter (originally a New Yorker essay) so much, that I was surprised to not love the rest of the book anywhere near as much. There were individual parts that were great, but as a whole, it never quite cohered for me.

It's hard to put my finger on exactly why. There were times when I wished she'd dig deeper into what was going on rather than simply reporting it (but there's plenty of books I love that report rather than dig deep), and the structure felt a bit scattered (but there's other books I love that also skip around in time). I kept thinking, "Wait, what about such-and-such? Is that seemingly really important thing ever going to get explored?" She marries her boyfriend because her mother wanted to see them married before she died; a family friend makes her dying mother convert to Christianity; her music career happens kind of around the edges. I finished the book thinking that she'd undoubtedly gotten divorced and her band was extremely obscure, only to look them up and discover that she's still married and the band is HUGE.

Crying in H Mart got overwhelming critical and popular acclaim, and really resonated for a whole lot of people. Maybe because I'm not a biracial Asian-American, I didn't relate to the specific intergenerational and cultural issues, but on the other hand I loved the first chapter which also was about those issues. For whatever reason, it wasn't a book for me, but that's not a critique of the book. It's obviously a book that resonated a lot with many. You will probably like it more than I did.

Where it really succeeded for me was in making me crave Korean food. I've had it twice since reading the book, and am planning a visit to the nearest H Mart.

I listened to this as an audiobook narrated by Tippi herself at the age of 89. I recommend that format, though the print edition has 16 pages of photos which I'm sure are amazing. Tippi is a great narrator of her own life, and her life is WILD. No matter how detailed this review seems, trust me that there is tons of jaw-dropping material I didn't even touch on.

Tippi Hedren is an American actress of Scandinavian descent - "Tippi" is a Swedish nickname that stuck. She starred in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (her first film role!) and Marnie, but never had another starring role in a good movie. Her memoir explains why, and it's absolutely infuriating.

She then got involved in big cat rescue! Her home in Sherman Oaks, which for those of you who don't know was and is a placid suburb in Los Angeles, was filled with LITERAL LIONS. And she made a movie called Roar, shot in Sherman Oaks and starring THIRTY RESCUE LIONS.



I have seen Roar. It's clearly intended to be a charming family comedy about a family that visits Africa and ends up in a house full of lions, a la Doctor Dolitte. But you can tell that the shoot was wildly unsafe, the lions are real and not tame, and the actors (Tippi and her actual family, including her teenage daughter Melanie Griffith) are frequently about to be actually eaten.

I was curious about how all this came about. Tippi's memoir explains. Sort of. It turns out that some things, like devoting multiple years of your life to making a movie starring your unpredictable and deadly THIRTY RESCUE LIONS and FIFTEEN RESCUE TIGERS, are beyond explanation.

Tippi started out as a model, and loved it. I've never thought much about modeling as a career, but she shows why someone might like it. She got along well with the other models, she was interested in fashion, she liked the professionalism and technical aspects of it, and she was level-headed and didn't get sucked into drama. She moved on to commercials, which she enjoyed for the same reasons. (Commercials on television were a relatively new thing at that time, and that part is pretty interesting.) We might never have heard of her, except that Alfred Hitchcock saw her on a commercial, picked up the phone, and said, "Get me that girl."

Tippi was a fan of Hitchcock and was thrilled to be considered for a role in one of his movies. At first it was all a dream. He and his wife taught her to act - they were brilliant teachers, she says - got her beautiful costumes, and were going to make her career. And then things got creepy.

Cut for sexual harassment and assault. ( Read more... )

And then came the lions! Tippi had married Noel Marshall, who she says was very impulsive and sucked her into his craziness. She does say she was also responsible for her own part in the big cat madness, and that she was also crazy. But, she says, she's much saner and more practical when she's left to her own devices. This seems a little self-serving but also probably true: all the really crazy stuff occurred when she was married to Noel Marshall, and her continued involvement with big cats after they divorced was considerably saner. Tippi herself recounts the events with genuine puzzlement as to how otherwise more-or-less normal people could have done and believed such crazy and dangerous things.

Having been born into a cult and also worked on movies and television, I can vouch for a kind of collective insanity that can overtake groups of people who are, or mostly are, sane when alone. This goes double when working on a movie or TV show, because sleep deprivation, high financial stakes, overwork, and group culture are very conducive to temporary group insanity; it's as if you create your own mini-cult. It's easy to get sucked into and hard to explain afterward.

This sort of thing was clearly at work in the production of Roar, and also in the events leading up to it.

Roar came about because Tippi visited Africa as part of a humanitarian mission. I'm not going to get much into that side of her life, but she did a huge amount of it, mostly focusing on hunger and refugees, and was instrumental in helping Vietnamese refugees set up nail salons, a niche which they hold to this day. Also, she was once taught to fly a plane on the fly, so to speak, when one of the two pilots bailed after an emergency landing, and flew a plane full of aid workers solo something like three hours after her first lesson. Tippi's entire life is one long "it could only happen to Tippi."

Anyway, while in Africa she and her husband, Noel Marshall, saw an abandoned house that had been taken over by a pride of lions, and thought, "That would make a great movie!" They talked to several big cat experts, all of whom told them that was an insane idea. Then they met a big cat rescuer in LA, who told them that if they wanted to work with lions, they needed to get to know lions... and he just happened to have a lion cub in need of a home.

That set them on a slippery slope leading to a ranch full of lions. And tigers. And panthers. And an elephant. This was an even worse idea than one might imagine. Not only are big cats wild animals that cannot ever be truly tamed, fight amongst themselves, and can kill you without even trying, but the different species don't get along with each other. They repeatedly had to chase down loose tigers in suburbia while pretending to the police and neighbors that there were no tigers, and ended up in the local hospital so frequently that the doctors got used to the family appearing on the regular with lion bites, broken bones, and GANGRENE.

Have you ever tried to train a cat to do literally anything on command? Now imagine trying to train a vicious, feral cat. Now imagine trying to train forty vicious, feral cats who weigh 500 lbs.

Due to the impossibility of getting the lions and tigers and panthers and pumas to do anything on command, the movie was mostly shot by shooing them into the house, then putting the cast (Tippi, Noel, teenage Melanie Griffith, and Noel's two sons (the third son sensibly refused to get near the big cats and did production design) into the house with them.

Cut for human harm. ( Read more... )

Cut for animal harm. ( Read more... )

Tippi says they didn't realize that they were basically making the world's most expensive and dangerous home movie. It was finally released... and flopped. She says no one wanted to see a family film in an era when sex and violence ruled, but uhhh I don't think that was the problem.

She divorced Noel Marshall, more or less came to her senses, and realized that big cats should not be kept as pets NO SHIT. She has lobbied for bans on keeping and importing big cats as pets. She also founded the Shambala Preserve, which takes in big cats that could not be released into the wild, including Michael Jackson's tigers and a lion that used to belong to Anton La Vey. The big cats are all neutered, and have no contact with humans beyond what is absolutely necessary.

Tippi Hedren is now 94. She lives in a house on the Shambala site, with multiple rescue cats. (The lap-sized kind.) They are not allowed outdoors.

The three Pullein-Thompson sisters wrote popular pony novels from the 1940s through the 1990s - about 200 of them total. They wrote separately, not collaboratively, and began when they were still teenagers. (Their mother also wrote pony books.) I've read and enjoyed some of their pony books, so I was excited to read their memoir. It's written in alternating sections by the three of them.

Normally I enjoy any memoir by anybody writing about specific details of life in any reasonably interesting time period and place. This book does have that, to some degree, and yet it largely fails to be interesting. Here is a sample from page 2:

James passed the Preliminary Cambridge University Theological Examination, probably as an external student, and in 1876 he married Emily Darbyshire and was appointed a literate deacon at Salford, Manchester. Four years later, after ordination, he became curate at St. Mary's, Manningham, Bradford. In 1883 he moved to London to become Associate Secretary of the Colonoal and Continental Church Society, and in 1886 he was appointed vicar of St. Stephen's, Bow.

It does get more interesting than that, but only intermittently. They went to boarding school with Joan Aiken, along with some other people who clearly were famous but whose names I did not recognize, but she only appears in a few paragraphs. Christine and Diana were twins, which is something I did not know, and Christine particularly felt that being a twin was very difficult and that she never really got a chance to develop her individuality. In the afterword she says that she continues to feel that way and at that point she must have been about eighty.

But you know what's missing? HORSES! That is, they do have horses, and horsey stuff is discussed, but not in the vivid, detailed, appealing manner of their fictional pony books.

I plowed through, though with some skimming, because I was curious about how they got to be professional writers as 18-year-olds right after World War II. Inexplicably, the book ends just as one of them is beginning to write her first book. Very frustrating.

My internet rabbit hole on pioneering plastic surgeon Archibald McIndoe and the Guinea Pig Club (WWII aviators who were burned and got reconstructive surgery) produced a remarkable amount of !!! from Wikipedia alone. A number of them had distinctly "you can't make this shit up" lives. (There's also one who possibly did make some shit up.)

For your interest, I present some of my favorite bits.

I had a row with a German.

Tom Gleave

"Gleave was shot down on his first sortie after restoration of his command, on 31 August 1940, and badly burned. Initially treated at Orpington Hospital, he regained consciousness underneath a bed during an air raid. His wife was called to his bedside and asked the heavily bandaged Gleave "what on earth have you been doing with yourself?" "I had a row with a German" was his characteristically laconic reply."



If you click through to just one article, make it this one.

Alois Šiška

This guy's story is incredible from beginning to end. Here's ONE section:

"Šiska was a member of an illegal cell through which he helped Jews and others escape to Poland and later to Hungary. He remained in the republic until the outbreak of war. At that time, fear grew that the Germans would discover a hidden prototype of the Z-XIII aircraft. In order not to fall into their hands, it was decided within the illegal group that the prototype must fly to the Balkans. However, this plan failed.

Together with Alois Bača, they fled across the frozen river Morava to Slovakia, then with the help of a Hungarian pastor, they crossed the Slovak-Hungarian border and continued by train to the border with Yugoslavia. There they were arrested by a Hungarian border guard and imprisoned in Hodmezövasárhely prison for several weeks. After a failed escape attempt, they were deported to the Citadella in Budapest.

Here they were held in harsh conditions together with another hundred and twenty Czechs and a similar number of Poles. An opportunity to escape did not come until 30 March 1940, when Šiška reported to the doctor suffering from scabies. He managed to escape his guards and took a taxi to the French consulate."

Now imagine that sequence of getting captured and imprisoned, then escaping repeating several more times, interspersed with a shipwreck, a lengthy life raft survival situation, and only escaping getting his feet amputated because he seemingly dropped dead.

This line in his Wikipedia entry caused me some confusion when I attempted to search for his memoir: Šiška authored the book No Response KX-B.



The OTHER pilot who flew in combat with two prosthetic legs.

Colin Hodgkinson

This guy had both his legs amputated, then returned to being a fighter pilot! There were at least two men who did this during WWII.

"On 24 November 1943, during a high-altitude weather reconnaissance mission from 11.50, in Amiens area his oxygen supply failed 6 m E. of Hardelot, causing him to crash land in a field. He was dragged from his burning Spitfire by two farm workers, losing an artificial leg in the process. For the next 10 months he was held in Stalag Luft III prisoner-of-war camp, before being repatriated and deemed "no further use to his country". He was again treated by McIndoe and he continued to fly until his release from service in 1946."



On the bright side, a shell severed the control lever and the throttle got stuck on open.

Eric Lock

"On 8 November 1940 his Spitfire was badly damaged during a skirmish with several Bf 109s over Beachy Head in East Sussex. The Spitfire was so badly damaged that Lock crash-landed in a ploughed field, but was able to walk away. On 17 November 1940 No. 41 Squadron attacked a formation of 70 Bf 109s that were top cover for a bomber raid on London. After shooting down one Bf 109, and setting another on fire, Lock's Spitfire was hit by a volley of cannon shells, which severely injured Lock's right arm and both legs.

The rounds also knocked the throttle permanently open by severing the control lever. The open throttle enabled the Spitfire to accelerate swiftly to 400 mph, leaving the Bf 109s in his wake, without Lock having to attempt to operate it with his injured right arm.

At 20,000 feet (6,100 m) he began to descend and with little control and no means of slowing the fighter down, he could not execute a safe landing; being too badly injured to parachute to safety, Lock was in a perilous situation. After losing height to 2,000 feet (610 m), Lock switched the engine off and found a suitable crash site near RAF Martlesham Heath, Suffolk, into which he glided the stricken fighter for a "wheels down" landing.

Lying in the aircraft for some two hours, he was found by two patrolling British Army soldiers and carried two miles (3 km) on an improvised stretcher made of their Enfield rifles and Army issue winter coats—made after instruction from Lock. By this point, Lock had lost so much blood that he was unconscious, and so unable to feel the additional pain of being dropped three times, once into a dyke of water."

Like the war wasn't bad enough.

Jackie Mann.

"Jackie Mann, CBE, DFM was a Royal Air Force fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain, who in later life was kidnapped by Islamists in Lebanon in May 1989 and held hostage for more than two years."

A single swipe of a spade.

Richard Pape

"He became a sergeant navigator in a Short Stirling bomber. On a 1941 mission he was shot down close to the German/Dutch border, was twice captured and twice escaped. Following his second capture he was tortured by the Gestapo. He was repatriated by the Germans on health grounds in 1944.

In November of that year he was on a retraining course when he was burnt in a drunken motorcycle accident on the Isle of Man, which led to his being hospitalised at Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead, for pioneer plastic surgery under Archibald McIndoe: he thus became a member of the Guinea Pig Club."

Also, he was mad at the Beatles.

An Amazon review of his book: Time and time again I thought that what I was reading did not have a ring of truth about it, and in some cases the account was simply unbelievable. A good example of the latter is a story of a fight between two prisoners where one cuts off the other's head with a single swipe of a spade.



Wait for the last line.

Mollie Lentaigne was not a member of the club herself, but a nurse and artist on the medical staff.

"Lentaigne worked as a Red Cross Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse at the Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead, West Sussex, where her duties included drawing the experimental operations of Archibald McIndoe and his fellow surgeons. She needed to work quickly in the operating theatre and so used pencil but subsequently added ink and colour to some of her work.

Around 300 of Lentaigne's drawings have been preserved at the East Grinstead Museum, as the Mollie Lentaigne Collection. After the surviving Guinea Pig Club members used social media to search for Lentaigne and found her living in Zimbabwe, she returned to East Grinstead in 2013 to be reunited with her work."

She was 93 at the time, and is still alive at the age of 103.

My opponent fell, shot through the head, one hundred and fifty feet behind our line. His machine gun was dug out of the ground and it ornaments the entrance to my dwelling.

The memoir of the Red Baron himself, the greatest flying ace of WWI, with 80 planes shot down. He painted his plane red, and the pilots in his squadron also painted theirs, so they were known as the flying circus. (If you thought clowns were scary...) He won a ton of medals, was a celebrity at the time, ordered trophy cups to be made for himself to commemorate his victories, and collected bits of the planes he shot down to decorate his room.

He was shot in the head while flying, but returned to duty with a bandage covering a wound that exposed his skull. At the age of 25 he was shot through the heart, probably by an Australian rifleman, while chasing a very inexperienced Canadian pilot.

Von Richthofen's memoir is quite short. It recounts his early life and how he began in the cavalry and then became an observer before becoming a fighter pilot. There's some good anecdotes of funny occurrences and snapshot portraits of other pilots, plus some dog stories which remarkably do not all end tragically. He endearingly refers to another pilot's dog as "doggie" and to his own enormous hound as "my lap-dog." (Given that, he might have been more amused than offended by Snoopy's battles with the Red Baron.)

He wasn't a good pilot immediately, and struggled with it early on. He's very dismissive of acrobatics and says that courage and a cool head is much more important than being a fancy flyer or even a good shot, noting that Boelke was a terrible shot on the ground but a master in the air. The bright, individually painted planes of his circus wasn't done as a showoff or intimidation tactic (though it definitely became the latter) but because you can't camouflage a plane in the air anyway, so it made more sense for his squadron to be individually recognizable to each other as they knew each other's strengths and weaknesses, and could make use of that when fighting.

But most of the book goes basically like this: "I bagged an Englishman today. He was my 33rd. I was very happy. I ordered a silver trophy cup to commemorate it, and I took the aeroplane's serial number and put it up in my bedroom."

He was an enthusiastic hunter, and he writes about combat exactly as if he was writing about hunting animals for sport. It's especially noticeable because he enjoys hunting on his days off, so you get an account of shooting a bison and an account of shooting a man and they're identical in all but the details.

He doesn't hate his enemies, and he respects the ones who fight well. When he lands beside a plane he downed where both pilot and observer are uninjured, he's pleased to be able to talk with them. (The best hunters respect their prey and appreciate their qualities even as they stalk them.)

I've read war memoirs where people take trophies, enjoy the adrenaline rush of combat, or find war an overall good and rewarding experience--that's all pretty common--and I've read a couple, mostly by colonial-era Englishmen, who find war a tremendously fun game. But I've never read anything quite like this. It's like "The Most Dangerous Game" from the point of view of the hunters, and it takes the cake for the creepiest war memoir I have ever read.

The context for its writing is that the German government asked him to write it as propaganda. They sent him a stenographer and had him talk to her. She took down his stories, which were edited into a manuscript and apparently heavily censored. And I read it in translation. So that's already at least three layers of distance and distortion between whatever von Richthofen actually said, let alone what he actually thought, and what I read. I'd be very curious to hear from anyone who read it in the original German, because with a translation I always wonder about accuracy and tone.

If the war hadn't happened, I don't think he'd have become a serial killer; he doesn't like hunting humans more than he likes hunting animals, just equally. (For me, that made it more chilling rather than less. And also, I have read a lot of war memoirs, and this is the first one I've read where that thought even crossed my mind.) I think he'd have been your basic rich kid who spends his life hunting and playing sports, and is admired within his circle of similar friends. But the war did happen, and so his particular attributes made him ideally suited, useful, valuable, and remembered.

Von Richthofen wrote an essay about a year afterward, which is included in some editions, in which he says he regrets the "insolent" tone of his memoir and isn't finding war quite as fun anymore. I wonder how he would have felt about it all if he'd survived the war, but considering Germany's next war effort, probably it's just as well he didn't.

On the other hand, people don't change until they do. The war memoir I've read that's closest in tone to this one was Lahore to Lucknow by Arthur Lang, by an English officer in India during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. It was his private diary, not intended for publication and only discovered after his death. To him, it's all a wonderful, thrilling game.

It continues in this tone right up until literally the last two pages, in which his best friend is caught in an accidental explosion and is horrifically burned but stays conscious. Lang remains with him until he dies that night. The last diary entry is a eulogy concluding by saying that his death ruined his enjoyment of the entire war. A postscript says that Lang became a public works engineer, and spent the rest of his life building roads in India.

A well-written and thoughtful memoir about how McBee, a trans man, trains as an amateur boxer and observes how he and the cis men at his gym navigate masculinity. He doesn't tell any of the other men at his gym until after he fights the big match he's preparing for, a public match for charity, so he gets to see how they relate to him when they think he's a cis man and how they relate to him afterward.

McBee is a journalist and all else aside, this is a good piece of sports writing on boxing. He got interested in it as a quintessentially masculine sport, but in fact there's some women at his gym and his own sister is also an amateur boxer; one of the more honest and upsetting aspects of the book is his discovery that once other people perceive him as a (white) man, he's listened to more, he's not interrupted, no one takes credit for his ideas, he's deferred to, he's assumed to be competent and correct... and he not only sees all the women around him getting none of that, but he finds how easy it is to fall into doing what all the men around him do, and ignore women's input, talk over them, etc. He does try hard to stop that and also address other men doing it, but he only realizes in retrospect that he literally didn't even let his sister, a more successful boxer than him, finish her sentence about boxing in favor of listening to his brother who has never boxed.

That's just one small piece of the type of exploration of masculinity and social performance of gender that McBee explores in the book. Another aspect I found very interesting was how the male boxers were able to touch each other and express emotion within the context of boxing, as if the sport gave them such proof of masculinity that it became okay to do things that would otherwise be seen as dangerously feminine. (McBee mentions a survey which found that American men tended to definite "man" as "not a woman," while Danish men defined "man" as "not a boy." You can see how one of those tends to go in a much more toxic direction than the other.)

Along with the thoughts on gender and gender politics is a good and moving story of McBee's relationship with boxing, how he uses it to explore his self as a man, and his relationships with other men, his girlfriend, and his family. His family is fraught in ways and has some traumatic history but is overall very supportive, and there's a lot of sweet and positive relationships in the book.

Content notes: McBee was sexually abused as a child and his mother died of cancer, but there's no graphic details of either.

Here is a letter Jennette McCurdy got from her mom.

Dear Net,

I am so disappointed in you. You used to be my perfect little angel, but now you are nothing more than a little SLUT, a FLOOZY, ALL USED UP. And to think—you wasted it on that hideous OGRE of a man. I saw the pictures on a website called TMZ—I saw you in Hawaii with him. I saw you rubbing his disgusting hairy stomach. I KNEW you were lying about Colton. Add that to the list of things you are—LIAR, CONNIVING, EVIL. You look pudgier, too. It’s clear you’re EATING YOUR GUILT.

Thinking of you with his ding dong inside of you makes me sick. SICK. I raised you better than this. What happened to my good little girl? Where did she go? And who is this MONSTER that has replaced her? You’re an UGLY MONSTER now. I told your brothers about you and they all said they disown you just like I do. We want nothing to do with you.

Love, Mom (or should I say DEB since I am no longer your mother)

P.S. Send money for a new fridge. Ours broke.

Relatable.

Jennette McCurdy's mother wanted to be an actress, so she made her daughter into one. It worked out about as well as you'd expect.

Jennette's mother was a cancer survivor up until the point that she failed to survive; she made a video of her cancer diagnosis and treatments and made the kids watch it every weekend to remember how amazing she is. She whips out her "stage four cancer survivor" status on every possible occasion, to agents, directors, waiters, and security guards. And that is just the tiniest tip of the iceberg.

She pushes Jennette into acting, which she hates and is temperamentally unsuited for, to the point where she gets the second lead on a Nickelodeon show, iCarly. (Reading this book, I learned that the show was not about an AI named Carly, but three teenagers who make a sort of early vlog.) Jennette makes friends on set, but the creator is a creepy emotional abuser and fame is both her worst nightmare and feeds her worst tendencies.

Based on the title, I expected this book to be about how much Jennette hated her mother. In fact, the problem--well, one of them--was that she loved her mother. They were extremely enmeshed and living each other's lives, and up until her mother died of cancer, Jennette was desperate to please her. The disillusionment came later, when she finally took a breath and looked out at the wreckage of her life.

There's awful stuff in this book but it's also very funny. Jennette has a distinctive, sharp, very modern narrative voice. The chapters are structured like little short stories or TV episodes, often with punchlines. She sees two therapists, and remarkably manages to capture the actual experience of therapy very well. I laughed a lot, but in solidarity. Though her terrible relationship with her mother is bad for pretty much the exact opposite reasons and in the opposite ways that my relationship with my parents was bad, I found it very relatable.

It also has some excellent surprises I don't want to spoil.

( Read more... )

I listened to this in audio read by the author, which I definitely recommend.

Thanks for the rec, mildred_of_midgard!

Content notes: Child abuse, bulimia, anorexia, alcoholism, cancer, mental illness, child labor, gross descriptions of vomit which I fast-forwarded.

From Goodreads:

Fermin Rocker was born in the East End of London in 1907, the son of Rudolf Rocker, the famous anarchist theorist, activist and disciple of Kropotkin. A book illustrator, and painter, in exploring his origins as an artist, Fermin conjures a moving and colorful picture of his remarkable father, of Anarchism and of the Jewish East End. Heavily illustrated by the author.

This slim memoir is about half perceptive and well-written anecdotes illuminating a very particular time and culture, and about half with the same subject but kind of dry. Possibly the parts I found dry would be more interesting if I knew anything about the anarchists he was describing. The illustrations, unsurprisingly, are lovely.

Fermin Rocker (his real name) was very close to his German father, who was interned during WWI along with Rocker's mother. This, like his account of the war and the splitting of anarchists over the Russian Revolution, is a heavy topic that he treats with delicacy without glossing it over. But just as much of the book is about the things he happened to remember from his childhood, from his childhood habit of peeing down on cops from off his balcony to his father's bedtime stories to the anarchist who gets treated to a lavish meal from an anonymous donor who turns out to be a local Mafia leader impressed by anyone who had two detectives tailing him at all times.

Rocker comes across as a good guy, both idealistic and willing to question his assumptions. Also, based on a photo at the back of the book, he was really hot stuff when he was a young man.

I was upside down in a pile of dogs, all howling over the roar of the engine, when I heard the pilot scream, "There's too much weight in the tail! Throw the dogs forward or we're going down!"

I was still wearing my full winter gear, which included a down parka, and the dogs bit me and the pilot and ripped my parka so that soon the plane was filled with small white feathers and flying dogs and swear words and blood.

Only Gary Paulsen. He's to wild winter tales what Adrian Tchaikovsky is to bugs.

The true stories behind his books are much more OTT than the books themselves. I hate to doubt a person's word just because their stories seem unlikely considering how much hard-to-believe stuff has actually happened to me, but I can't help wondering if Paulsen just heard some stories and then said he saw them happen. Specifically, the plane he witnessed crashing in the ocean when he was a child on the boat that went to rescue the survivors, only to witness them all get eaten by sharks a la Quint's story from Jaws. ("The sailors were literally pulling people out of sharks' mouths." REALLY?) Or the kid he saw get killed by a deer he was feeding in front of a "Don't Feed The Deer" sign. I 100% believe the dog-and-plane story though.

Be that as it may, this book is pure distilled essence of Paulsen: nature and its dangers and beauty and grossness and violence, hunting and survival and life and death. And flying dogs.