I was thrilled when Sere Prince Halverson, whose wonderful blog I’ve read for a long time, sent me an advance copy of her first novel.  The Underside of Joy, which is available here, is a beautiful story about love in all its myriad shapes and about all the ways that people can be knotted together as family.  Sere’s voice is lyrical and lovely, and The Underside of Joy kept me up way too late in my sister’s apartment in Jerusalem.  I was utterly engrossed in story and deeply invested in the main characters.

Within the first few pages, the protagonist, Ella Beene, is widowed, left alone with her husband Joe’s two children.  Ella has known Zachary, now 3, and Annie, now 6 for three years, since she met their father and almost instantly merged into their family.  When Ella meets Joe and his kids, their mother, Paige, had left four months earlier, in the throes of a deep postpartum depression.  It becomes clear as the story goes on that Ella and Joe both stayed willfully blind to the complexities of Paige’s potential return.  We begin to see, in fact, that Joe’s turning his back on the situation was more than just wishful thinking; it was cruel.

Ella is left with – literally – buried boxes and hidden envelopes full of Joe’s secrets.  She unravels the truth of Paige’s story  even as Paige herself comes back, claiming Annie and Zachary in small and then large ways.  My sentiments were originally entirely with Ella, and yet as I learned more about Paige, about the way Joe rebuffed her sincere efforts to return to her children, about the depth and severity of her depression, she became a sympathetic character in her own right.

The Underside of Joy explores the nature of family but also the meaning of  home. Ella herself had slipped into Joe’s world completely, leaving behind an unhappy marriage filled with the stress of infertility treatments and poor communications.  She finds herself in Northern California, whose particular geographical contours, arching redwood trees and rocky coastline, are powerfully evoked, and inside a family whose warm embrace feels like home.  She – and, we learn later, Paige – comes from a family with secrets of its own, which makes it impossible for her to unequivocally judge Joe for the decisions he made.  In fact, Ella learns of herself: “There was now the undeniable fact that I’d lived much of my life according to that one lesson: Look the other way.  Don’t ask.  Ever.  And good God, don’t say what you really think.”  But what The Underside of Joy traces, ultimately, is Ella’s learning to look into the blackness.  And to say what she really thinks.

As Ella learns to ask, to say, to look, she probes the deepest recesses of the human heart.  How do you define mother?  It is not, we understand, fiercely, merely a matter of blood.  What does loyalty mean, and how do you parse and order those various allegiances when they are in conflict?  How do we reconcile the devoted love we had for someone who died with the ambivalent legacy he left?

Sere is unflinching in her ability to draw complicated, deeply human people.  Everybody stumbles, she asserts, and the best we can do is turn and face our flaws.  Joe, whose spirit haunts the book, is revealed over and over as someone who preferred not to see the ugly marks, the scars, the messiness.  Though we can understand why, and Ella’s response to him is never simplified into frank blame, I can’t help feeling like he is the least likeable person in the book.  Maybe that’s not fair, because he can’t defend himself.  But it is his inability to face the bleakness at the center of those he loves most that leaves both Ella and Paige stranded in a tangled emotional forest. That said, The Underside of Joy refuses to resolve into easy answers, into good and bad.  In the epilogue, Ella looks and Annie and thinks:

What I want to tell her, but what she will have to discover on her own, is that no matter what she chooses to do for her profession, she will save people, and she will also do people grave hard – and they will be the same people, the ones she loves.

There are other subplots to The Underside of Joy, all of them involving legacy and history, the ways where we came from haunt us for better or worse throughout our lives.  The novel’s message echoes: we cannot escape where we came from, but those shadows provide immeasurable depth to the joy of our lives.  The Underside of Joy‘s last paragraph contains these lines, which are so familiar to me that my eyes filled with tears as I read them and my heart thudded with recognition:

I know now that the most genuine happiness is kept afloat by an underlying sorrow.

I cannot recommend The Underside of Joy heartily enough: it is a novel that is as moving as it is entertaining, and I absolutely loved it.

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I read a lot this last week, aided by two very very very long travel days (for example, on 12/29 we left Jerusalem at 7pm ET and got home at 5pm ET).

The Anti-Romantic Child: A Story of Unexpected Joy – Priscilla Gilman (A gorgeously written story about love between a mother and child.  Well, about love, period.  with lots of quotes from and references to my favorite poet.  I highly recommend!)

The Cat’s Table – Michael Ondaatje (I couldn’t put this down.  It’s lyrical and haunting.  I’m reminded that Ondaatje is my favorite novelist, and that I adore prose by poets.)

Admission - Jean Hantz Korelitz (Fun read, with lots of details about a place I love, Princeton)

The First Secret of Edwin Hoff – AB Bourne (Written by a friend, thriller set in Cambridge/Boston, entertaining)

The Underside of Joy – Sere Prince Halverson (An ARC of novel released 1/12/12 – stay tuned for my review.  This is beautiful!!)

The Help – Kathryn Stockett (I finally read this, which I’ve been resisting for some reason.  Very entertaining)

Amy and Isabelle – Elizabeth Strout (I seem to be reading her books in reverse order.  This is lovely, though I didn’t adore it as passionately as I did Abide With Me)

Shadow Tag – Louise Erdrich (I’m still in the middle of this)

What did you read this holiday?

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photo taken on Saturday late afternoon

Last week my dear friend Annie and I were discussing books our daughters were reading.  She asked me if I ever review kids’ books here.  No, I said, though I do write the occasional review for Boston Mamas.  Our conversation made me want to share some thoughts on reading, children, and specific titles.  Hopefully this timing is good, given the upcoming holidays.  Books are my favorite gift to give, whether for a birthday or Christmas.  I’ve actually been pleased by how Grace and Whit have reacted to this: I expected them to roll their eyes and complain that I wasn’t wrapping up something plastic and battery-operated for their friends’ birthdays.  Instead, they’ve gotten involved in helping to assemble a short bunch of their favorite current books, running their hands lovingly over the familiar covers as I stack them for wrapping.

For both my children, beginning to read has been surprisingly binary.  I expected that it would be a gradual process.  No.  In both cases, they were painstakingly sounding out three letter words and literally reading the next.

(An aside: sitting with a child, reading an early reader, biting your tongue while they sound out ddddd….oooooo……ggggggg is among the best metaphors for parenting I know.  Likewise: watching a child follow Lego instructions, observing them doing it wrong, watching them get frustrated, and having to sit on your hands to avoid just jumping in and doing it for them)

I still read to both kids, every night, and don’t have any plans to stop.  There are a few picture books we all still love, and sometimes even Grace will come to me bearing one of these favorites in her hand.  I read to them alone and together, I read to them during meals and in the tub, and, always, I read to them before bed, reminded over and over again how big they are when they jostle around, trying to get comfortable on my lap.

Some treasured picture books:

Space Boy - Leo Landry (a riff on Where the Wild Things Are, with beautiful, dreamy illustrations.  both kids love it)

Jethro Byrd, Fairy Child – Bob Graham (the power of the imagination, the existence of magic)

Firefighters in the Dark – Dashka Slater (dreaming, a gender-neutral firefighter, and magical realism)

The Winter King and the Summer Queen – Mary Lister and Ellen Verenieks (the natural world explained through the use of memorable characters, the force of good and sunshine)

Miss Rumphius - Barbara Cooney (leaving the world a more beautiful place, the impact an individual can have on the community he/she lives in, a strong female protagonist)

And some beloved chapter books:

100 Dresses – Eleanor Estes (between a picture book and a chapter book; strong message about bullying, and the content of our character being more important than what we wear)

The Magic Treehouse – Mary Pope Osborne (both of my children began their independent reading with this series and I still love the determined siblings, the empowered girl, and the broad range of historical themes)

Penny Dreadful – Laurel Snyder (Grace’s favorite book of the last year, great message about families being okay no matter what, what is inside of us matters more than our outsides)

Ramona & others – Beverly Cleary (Grace devoured all of Cleary’s books, as did I.  i am still charmed by their rambunctious heroine and their depiction of sisterhood and family life as loving, warm, and messy)

Harry Potter – JK Rowling (Where to begin?  This is among my favorite books, ever, of all, period.  Grace and I are reading them together and she has tumbled as wholly as I did into Harry’s – or, let’s face it, Hermione’s – world)

My own memories of childhood reading, in particular those from when I was Grace’s age, are incredibly rich.  So much so, in fact, that I sometimes fall in the trap of pushing books I adored onto her.  This has mixed results: she loved From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E Frankweiler and Harriet the Spy, but didn’t “get” Island of the Blue Dolphins and has thus far resisted The Phantom Tollbooth and Anne of Green Gables.  Next up in her queue (yes, she has her own stack) is A Wrinkle in Time and if she doesn’t worship it I’m not sure she’s actually my daughter.

Now, I am off to the local bookstore to buy some gifts for nieces, nephews, and godchildren!

What are some of your favorite books from your childhood, or books you have enjoyed reading with your children?

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One of my favorite questions to ask others is “what are you reading?”  I recently noted that one mark of a truly good friend, for me, is someone with whom I can exchange single-sentence emails that ask that one question.  Over the summer I asked for, and received, many wonderful suggestions.  I’ve written before about the stack beside my bedside table, about the actual, real anxiety I feel about the fact that there won’t be time to read everything I want to read in my life.  But I try.  Oh, I try.

I’ve read some beautiful things lately.  I adored Priscilla Warner’s Learning to Breathe.  I devoured the Hunger Games trilogy, fascinated and compelled by the story and the characters.  I can’t wait for the movie.  I read Meghan O’Rourke’s The Long Goodbye in tears, loving every page, and cemented my belief that some of my very favorite prose is written by poets (see also: Just Kids).

Right now I’m trying (trying!  unsuccessfully!) to write fiction, so I find myself turning in that direction.  Dani suggested I read Michael Cunningham’s A Home At the End of the World, so I plan to read that as soon as it arrives.  Also in my current stack:

Blue Nights, Joan Didion
The Underside of Joy (ARC), Sere Prince Halverson
The Bread of Angels, Stephanie Daldana
The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, Sue Monk Kidd
Admission, Jean Hanff Korelitz

Please, tell, me: what are you reading?  What’s on your list?  What’s your favorite fiction book, and why?

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I picked up Learning to Breathe knowing I’d love it.  The topic appealed to me: the author’s yearlong quest to bring calm to her life.  Dani Shapiro, whose opinion I trust implicitly, both blurbed it and personally told me she thought I’d like it.  The description of the author as someone with a “great life” who nonetheless struggled with profound panic resonated somewhere deep inside me.  So, I knew I was going to love it.  But I didn’t know how much.

Priscilla Warner has crafted a universal story out of her very specific circumstance, and in so doing has established a light at the end of what many people experience as a fearful tunnel of darkness, fear, and anxiety.  After a lifetime of serious panic attacks, she makes a decision to actively seek peace.  She begins a regular meditation practice, explores Buddhism and mystic Judaism, and pursues a variety of therapeutic avenues.  Learning to Breathe traces her steps towards peace, which are human in their stumbling and both inspiring and comforting in their success.

Describing her life before beginning her journey towards peace, Warner says that she had “always felt that [her] nervous system operated faster than normal,: for which she has taken Klonopin for years.  Yet, “on the outside [she] was functioning just fine.”  The chasm between outsides and insides, between what appears and what actually is, is a perilous place I know well.

One of the central themes of Learning to Breathe is Warner’s experience of her mother’s gradual but inexorable decline into Alzheimer’s.  As she seeks peace, one thing she specifically wants is help with what is a challenging emotional morass.  Any time studying Buddhism brings you face-to-face, almost immediately, with the central tenet that attachment causes suffering.  But Warner wonders, as I have so often, “how can you love someone and not become attached?”  Lama Tsondru, a teacher of Tibetan painting with whom Warner studies, tells her that if she “opens up [her] heart to others, the weight on [her] shoulders will lessen.”  She begins to move towards acceptance, and at one moment where her mother demonstrates how much she has forgotten, Warner remembers the teachings of Sylvia Boorstein and observes that her “heart quivered in response to pain … Compassion took hold of me.”

Over time Warner leans into a new kind of trusting of her own body and mind.  She “didn’t feel pressured to solve its mysteries” every day, and she “began to accept the unpredictability of [her] own galaxy.”  I love the notion of an internal galaxy; it is a more evocative way to describe my observation that all people have a whole universe glittering inside them.  This was just one of many places where Warner’s words touched something specific I’ve thought and felt, made me feel like I was reading a missive from someone who had been inside my own head.  This is what I mean about the universal power in a particular story: who among us hasn’t felt lost and afraid?  Warner’s story is a message of comfort to us all.

Warner finds teachers all over the place: Tibetan monks, American teachers of Buddhism, specialized therapists, and mystical rabbis.  It is Rabbi Jacobson who teachers her the power of the tears, which she had always felt vaguely ashamed of, viewing them as a manifestation of the keen sensitivity for which she had often been criticized.  To say I relate here is an understatement.  But what Rabbi Jacobson tells her is that “people who cry in healthy ways are doing so because they sense a higher presence.  And that’s beyond us.  So we cry.”  Warner – and I! – finds this logic reassuring, and she stops worrying about the tears that seem ever-present.  I love the messages that this rabbi elucidates in Learning to Breathe.  He also speaks about how life exists in the small, ordinary moments, a message that speaks directly to me:

Some of the greatest things in life don’t have to be so dramatic … It’s in the quiet moments that our lives are shaped.  In homes, in cribs, in bedrooms, in the little things.  That’s where it all happens.

As Warner moves to the end of her year, she begins to fully inhabit her new, hard-won peace.  The universe, and the past, continue to speak to her in a variety of powerful ways.  She witnesses the death of her trusted companion of 14 years, her dog Mickey, and even in the midst of that heartbreaking goodbye she realizes she had “never felt so present in my life.”    She visits with another Zen priest and teacher, Roshi, who suggests that her “frequent tears … simply meant that I was touched by life.”  They discuss impermanence, again, and Roshi comments that part of why cherry blossoms make people cry is “that these blossoms are so ephemeral.”  I guess magnolias are my cherry blossoms: they are stunningly gorgeous, and they make me cry.  During an Ayurvedic massages she experiences her father’s presence, and he tells her firmly that she was loved.

Even in impermanence, in the sea of life’s moments, some things endure.  I highly recommend Learning to Breathe: it made me feel less alone, it taught me a lot about meditation and certain somatic therapies, and it fortified my belief that maybe, just maybe, there is peace out there for me yet.  A message that Warner receives from a friend towards the end of her experiment sums up her book, her experience, and, in fact, nothing less than the human condition:

The convention of panic was just a thin veil for you … It cloaked the stillness and compassion that is you.  It takes great courage to let it all go and to display the unbearableness of so much love.

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Last summer, at BlogHer, I saw Stacy Morrison across the room.  She was getting ready to sign copies of her new memoir, Falling Apart in One Piece.  She looked happy, masterful, confident, and I remember thinking: she seems really cool.  Little did I know.  She is definitely cool!  And I adored her memoir,  Falling Apart in One Piece, which I read last week and loved.  I wept, I laughed, I underlined, I read aloud to my husband, I tweeted quotes.  Generally, I did all the things I do when a book truly speaks to me.  And this one did.

Falling Apart in One Piece is, at first glance, a memoir about divorce, but I think its message is also much more broadly relevant.  Essentially, the book is about what happens when life doesn’t turn out the way you planned and expected, and about how thoroughly that reckoning can dismantle your sense of self.  I certainly have been through these choppy waters myself, as have most of the people I know.  The triggers and circumstances that lead us into the rapids differ for each of us, but I think there is tremendous universality in the lessons.  This is the power of Morrison’s book.

Falling Apart in One Piece begins with a relatively brief description of Morrison’s childhood.  Her portrayal of her mother moved me the most.  “I thought she possessed magic, even though she also carried so much sadness,” she says, brilliantly evoking the woman whose strong pull on her continues into her adulthood.  Perhaps in response to her mother’s sadness, Morrison develops a “big personality” and a strong instinct for being in control.  She describes falling in love with her husband, Chris, and the authenticity of their feelings comes through vividly.  She lets down her guard for Chris, calling him  “the person who knew the scared, sad girl who lived inside me that I didn’t let anyone see.”  They marry young and, in many ways, grow up together.  Despite Morrison’s stubborn independence, it is clear that Chris and she are utterly intertwined.

It is only when their marriage ruptures that we see the extent to which Morrison’s sense of self was also intertwined with Chris.  The part of Falling Apart in One Piece that traces Morrison and her husband’s stop-and-start, stuttering efforts to save their marriage are among the most humane and realistic descriptions of an adult relationship I’ve ever read.  We see how deeply they love each other, but we also see the deep grooves they’ve each worn into each other.  Falling Apart in One Piece reminds us that deep love and lots of effort is not always enough to save a relationship.

That sounds cynical and depressing, but this memoir is absolutely neither of those things.  There is a deep and abiding optimism at the heart of Morrison’s story (in fact “one optimist’s journey through the hell of divorce” is the book’s subtitle).  Certainly, though, we watch her fall apart completely, a collapse that was triggered by having to let go of the way she thought her life was going to be, and by learning that the person who had defined her for so many years was not only gone but also, possibly, wrong about her in essential ways.  She has to learn to trust her own voice in her head rather than hearing Chris’s.

Even in the darkest months of her life, the times when she is least sure of anything, Morrison has moments of startling peace and, even, joy.

As I looked at the mosaic floor my son was joyously dancing on, I was reminded that what you see in your life isn’t one thing one picture, one thought.  Life is a thousand little pieces, sliding and moving, like bits of glass in a kaleidoscope.  You may get a moment of suddenly taking in a pattern whole, and then it’s gone again in a flash, changing, shifting into something else.

Morrison also shares scenes of emotional disintegration that took my breath away their intimacy and their familiarity.  She lies on the floor of her kitchen, weeping, “in full submission, a circumstance I had spent my whole life furiously fighting to avoid,”  forced to stare her own fragility and fear directly in the face.  Morrison endures sieges from both rain and fire that are biblical in nature and scale.  The metaphor is impossible to avoid: every single atom in the universe seems to have joined in the chorus telling her that she is not in control.

Morrison’s indomitable spirit carries her through these disasters and keeps her moving forward.  As her son grows into a cheerful toddler he, too, begins to act as a cord tugging her forward, out of her sadness and fear, into the moment that is right at her feet.  She finally sells the house with the flooded basement and the memories of her marriage ending, and moves to a new apartment and a new life.  She tiptoes onto firmer land, begins to realize that the negative way that Chris (and, importantly, she) saw herself at the end of her marriage is not, in fact, the ultimate judgment on her character, starts to see the potential of a family configured differently than she had imagined.  Even so, the waves of sadness and difficulty continue.

I needed to continue to find the way to make peace with the challenges of the way every day contained a little sad and a little good, the way grief was a constant undercurrent to my moving-forward life.

I need to write these lines on an index card and put them above my desk (right next to Wendell Berry’s The Real Work).  This is the work of my life right now.  Morrison goes on to reflect on her flooded basement, noting “I realized now that my soul had been carved deep to take in life’s water,” and I gasped, thinking of my own reflections on how my propensity for great sorrow and hurt is inextricably correlated to my immense capacity for wonder and joy.  Yes, yes, yes.

Even as she moves forward in her life, settling into new patterns and rhythms, Morrison finds herself occasionally blindsided with grief, shocked with a sadness she thought she had processed and moved past.  She expresses frustration that she is not “finished with this crushing grief” yet, describes with resigned awareness “this continually appearing astonishment that life could hurt so much and that I could be so unprotected.” Morrison’s refusal to wrap her story up in a neat happy-ever-after ending is part of what I love best about this memoir: it is honest, and real, in its description of grief’s winding course, in its assertion that a human being growing into herself is a decidedly non-linear enterprise.

I underlined furiously in the last couple of chapters of Falling Apart in One Piece, finding many beautiful reflections on life that rang inside my chest like a deep gong.  I can’t possibly share them all, so I will close with my favorite.  I urge you to read this book.  Morrison’s memoir is beautifully written and powerfully captures what I believe is a fundamental task of growing up as human beings: letting go of what we thought it was going to be in order to embrace what is.  What Morrison realized, and shares gorgeously, is that between the letting go and the embrace is a freefall, both liberating and terrifying.  I am living in that freefall right now, experiencing its wild freedoms and overwhelming fearsomeness on a daily basis.

That I believe in the power of love.  That I believe that life is worth living.  That I believe it is just as likely that there is something good, something amazing, waiting for me around life’s next corner as it is that there is something terrible.  I expect some of both, frankly.

Also, check out Stacy’s fabulous blog, Filling In the Blanks, which has swiftly risen to the top of my daily reads.

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I admit that I didn’t even know who Patti Smith was when I picked up her memoir Just Kids.  Well, I did, but I was wrong: I thought she was the lead singer of the Pretenders.  I had heard of Robert Mapplethorpe, though I didn’t know much beyond the controversy that I vaguely recall from my childhood.  I was entirely unprepared for the rich gorgeousness of Smith’s prose:  Just Kids is really an extended prose poem, a lamentation for the man who was the “artist of her life,” an elegy for a singular and undefinable friendship.

Smith and Mapplethorpe meet twice by accident and then, a third time, after which they are basically never apart again.  They embark on a passionate love affair, defined by each of their individual and collective awakenings as artists.  It’s clear that each recognizes in the other a kindred spirit; Smith writes that they were both “inflicted with a vague internal restlessness.”  They live together in a series of Brooklyn apartments, exploring each other, their artistic sensibilities, and the riotously flowering reality of New York in the late 60s and early 70s.

Smith describes these years in a series of vivid images.  I was reminded over and over again, from the opening pages of this glorious book, that Smith is first and foremost a poet.  The Persian necklace that both treasure, the apartment with blood on the walls, the day that Mapplethorpe papers their bedroom in mylar, the decision they make regularly between buying art supplies and eating lunch.  These moments glow in my memory like polished beads, both beautiful on their own and essential to the jewelry as a whole.  One of my favorite images is that in those early years Smith and Mapplethorpe couldn’t afford two museum tickets, so often one of them would go through a museum and rush out to share it with the other, all, a tumble of bright stories and observations.

Over the years Smith and Mapplethorpe move together and apart, in and out of romantic relationship, but their bond endures.  Smith says, “Both of us had given ourselves to others.  We vacillated and lost everyone, but we had found one another again.”  Their essential union, one that springs from a place far beyond traditional relationship, continues to grow.  When Mapplethorpe says to his spirit twin, “nobody sees like we do, Patti,” we begin to understand the source of their bond.

As Smith and Mapplethorpe grow in both skill and renown as artists, they become enmeshed in New York’s creative community.  Mapplethorpe begins to take his own photographs, as Smith had long urged him to do.  And she becomes his favorite model.  The book is filled with images, both personal photographs and examples of Mapplethorpe’s work.  It is particularly powerful to see the visceral evidence of how Mapplethorpe saw Smith.  She says, “he saw in me more than I could see in myself,” and describes that even now, looking back at his pictures of her, “I never me.  I see us.”

Just Kids traces the way that Smith and Mapplethorpe’s “undefinable devotion” twines through their lives, the central, animating relationship of each.  Their relationship with each other is like its own beating heart, a presence greater than either of them is alone.  As the book closes, Smith gets married and has children while Robert is diagnosed with AIDS.  As we read about Smith’s commitment to another man, it remains apparent that Mapplethorpe continues to be the most vital person in her life.  Their first visit after his diagnosis, when Smith is pregnant, is both powerful and prescient.  As Smith says, “he was carrying death within him and I was carrying life.  We were both aware of that, I know.”

Just Kids is an extraordinary book, gorgeously written and pulsing with the incandescent intensity of a unique relationship.  I read the last lines of Smith’s story with tears streaming down my cheeks:

We were Hansel and Gretel and we ventured out into the black forest of the world.  There were temptations and witches and demons we never dreamed of and there was splendor we only partially imagined.  No one could speak for these two young people nor tell with any truth of their days and nights together.  Only Robert and I could tell it.  Our story, as he called it. And, having gone, he left the task to me to tell it to you.

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As you know, I like to read.  As you also know, the stack below my bedside table haunts me, reminding me that I will never, ever live as long as I need to read everything I want to read.  Still I’m always adding to it.  I find myself going through seasons with my reading, though they don’t necessarily follow the calendar.  Last summer I read only US Weekly and poetry; I just could not bear to read a real book.  I’m not sure why.  I read lots of memoir and then I crave fiction.  Etc.  I’m always, always looking for recommendations from others.

My friend Kristen from Motherese yesterday asked for summer reading suggestions.  It made me think I would like to hear from you all, as well, as to what you’re reading and planning to in this season that often offers more wide open space to sink into books.  As for me, I recently read J. Courtney Sullivan’s Maine, which I loved, and Annie Dillard’s Tickets For a Prayer Wheel, characteristically full of grace and thought-provoking imagery.  I am now reading Stacy Morrison’s Falling Apart in One Piece.  I’m furiously underlining and finding myself looking up from the book, gulping, relating to so much of what she writes.  Next up, in no order yet, are Patti Smith’s Just Kids, Jack Kornfield’s The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace, and Andre Agassi’s Open.  I’m also in a big Wendell Berry phase and am finding myself drawn to his poetry right now.

I’m eager to hear what you are reading, and what you plan to read this summer?

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I read Kyran Pittman’s lovely, funny, wise memoir, Planting Dandelions: Field Notes From a Semi-Domesticated Life, in a single day.  I was smitten by page three:

“‘Look at this,’ I’d say, holding up some fragment of everyday to myself and anyone who happened to be reading, turning it over this way and that.  Look.
People … offer themselves up with a mix of shyness and excitement.  Sometimes they doubt themselves.
I thought maybe it was worth something, but I don’t know …
It’s probably too small to matter …
It’s kind of a mess and it’s broken in places …
“It’s beautiful,” I tell them.  It’s funny.  It’s deep.  It’s extraordinary.
Look.”

Pittman seems to be speaking in lucid, beautiful sentences that which I’m endlessly circling around here on this blog, stumbling over and bumping into in the dark of my life.  Yes.  It’s extraordinary.  Just look.  A couple of paragraphs later, she says that Planting Dandelions shares her “moments of truth.”  She cites “the power of small things to make a life infinitely vast,” and then invites her reader, at the end of her introduction, to “Look.  Look what I found.  Come see.”  This is on page four, and I was already nodding and crying at the same time.

The chapters of Planting Dandelions are loosely organized by theme or life stage.  Pittman talks about the complicated, “scorched-earth” way she and her husband connected, about her early days as a fierce proponent of attachment parenting, about her gradual movement back into work.  She covers sex, religion, the loss of grandparents, school, female friendships in midlife, and the US South, all in a voice that is by turns laugh-out-loud funny and wipe-tears-away tender.

One theme that I particularly related to in Planting Dandelions is the vague sense of bewilderment that dogs Pittman and her husband no matter how old they and their children become.  I totally share this.  I have often joked that I’m waiting for the real mother to come home, and that’s utterly true.  Sometimes I look across a room at my children, or catch a glimpse of them in the rearview mirror, and am absolutely awestruck, astounded, that I am their parent.  When did this happen?  Wasn’t I just, five minutes ago, a college senior, arms flung around my best friends, staggering across Poe Field on a sunny spring day?  I am conscious, every single day, for example when I go to drop off in my actual pajamas, of all the ways in which I thought I’d be more “grown up” by now.  Pittman describes this feeling, which I feel piercingly, regularly:

“…I wanted to fall to my knees, hold him to my chest and say I’m sorry, I wanted to be better for you.  I thought I might have it together by now, but I don’t, and I don’t thin I will before you figure it out and can see for yourself that other people seem to have the secret to life and we, your parents, don’t have a clue.”

There is another strand in Planting Dandelions I found particularly powerful, which is that our children are not, in fact, ours.  They belong to themselves, not to us.  We are deeply privileged to share these years with them, to shepherd and shelter them, but we are not as mightily responsible for the outcomes of their lives as some believe.  Pittman addresses this:

“I lose sight of that from time to time, and delude myself into thinking I’m the auteur of their experience, when actually, I mainly work in catering.  They don’t need me directing, feeding them their lines.  They get it.  The script of life and death, grief and joy, is written on their DNA.”

Towards the end of Planting Dandelions Pittman talks about her decision, a long time in coming, to become a US Citizen.  At one point during her deliberation, she unearths a box of old visas, medical records, and faxes.  She finds a poem, many years old, that her father had written for her.  It contains this line: Going towards yourself is the longest journey of all.  That sentence, at least for me, is the purest distillation of what Planting Dandelions is about.  It’s about the journey home, the way we build a marriage and a family from myriad small, imperfect moments, decisions, and experiences, about how we eventually figure out who we are.  It’s about the way we can lose ourselves in the desperate love of our children, about aging and wrinkles and sag, and about how a community of women becomes ever more important.  It’s about the many paradoxes and mysteries at the heart of even the most ordinary family life.  It’s about the cracks that let the light in.

And I loved it.  I know you will too.

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It is impossible to read Melissa Coleman’s beautiful memoir, This Life is in Your Hands, without thinking of Eden.  In fact, knowing as we do from the beginning the tragedy on which the narrative hinges, the story is specifically haunted by thoughts of Paradise Lost.  Coleman addresses these echoes head on in an episode about halfway through the book when she hears visitors to her family’s farm talking:

“It’s paradise here,” I once overheard a woman say to her friend.
“The very nature of paradise,” the friend replied, “is that it will be lost.”

And it is, indeed lost, in spectacular fashion.  This memoir is about how hard we can strive for something we believe in and still fall short.  It is about realizing that even dedication and hard work can’t protect us from pain.  It is about how people grow and change and how small silences in a relationship can grow deafeningly loud.  It is, ultimately, about the redemptive power of memory and about how, no matter what, the seasons turn ceaselessly forward.

Before paradise is lost, though, Coleman gorgeous draws it.  She describes in lush terms her early childhood on the homestead that her pioneering, strong-willed father establishes with her sensitive, singing mother’s help.  Young, innocent, and full of wonder, Eliot and Sue set up their lives on a piece of wild land that they purchase from their “back-to-nature” idols Scott and Helen Nearing.  From the very beginning, it is clear that they live close to the land and near to the edge: Eliot rushes to complete the bare-bones house they live in in time for their first baby, Melissa, to arrive.

Coleman’s father is the beating heart of the book.  He is a man of superhuman energy and single-minded drive.  In his pursuit of his dream of a more organic, natural way of life he becomes a kind of celebrity, eventually attracting a legion of fans who are drawn to his clear charisma.  Before long the Coleman farm is a place that young hippies go to on pilgrimage; once there, they strip off their clothes and pick carrots in the nude, swimming at dusk at the ocean and dancing with fireflies after the sun goes down.  It is, for several seasons, an idyllic place.

Coleman beautifully conjures the alternation between the fertile, sun-drenched, almost-frantic summers full of visitors and a raw, sexual energy and the cold, long winters, hibernating under feet of snow.  The family of three, and then four, traverses this progression together, a small unit closely knit by their alternative lifestyle that demanded intimacy both physical, in their small house, and emotional, in their commitment to a baldly difficult way of life.  Eventually the relationship between Coleman’s parents begins to fray, though, dissolved over time by a number of small factors that, “…like raindrops on stone, can eventually change the course of a river.  These small forces, too, can change the path of a life.”

The early years are about the hard work and deep satisfactions that come from a life drawn from the very earth most of us merely walk on without another thought.  Coleman describes the endless litany of chores, from hauling manure to digging ditches to painstaking bread-making and it is hard to not feel exhausted.  Yet the closeness of Eliot and Sue and their abiding faith that theirs is a true heaven on earth radiates from every page.  Even in her most glorious descriptions of her family’s life at its pinnacle of happiness, Coleman gently presages what is to come.  She says of her mother, “she wanted this moment to last forever, but deep down knew its impermanence was what made it so beautiful.”

It might be because we know her fate, but Heidi, Coleman’s younger sister, seems half wood-sprite, only half-human.  Her character floats through the story as though trailing clouds from the spirit world.  She senses weather before it arrives and hears the voices of an imaginary, spirit friend, Telonferdie, in the rustling of the leaves on trees.  In one beautiful scene Coleman illustrates a classic evening on the farm and her sister’s otherwordly spirit,

The glass bell of night settled over the farm … I read in the light as Heidi dangled her feet on the doorstep, looking out for Papa to return from the campground to tuck us in, the cool spring air breathing through the door … I knew the cricking came from the inflated sacs on the throats of the frogs, but it was hard to undersatnd how the slimy shapes we caught at the pond with our bare hands could make such a piercing sound.  Their concert filled the night with a noise so distinct it had a three-dimensional presence, solid with longing.  The noise shapes came right up to Heidi’s feet, praying to her like their goddess.

Then the dark cloud of terrible news descends, Heidi drowns in the pond on the farm, and the family unravels quickly.  The speed with which their paradise dissolves makes clear that there were deep cracks in eden already, but clearly the trauma of Heidi’s death sets a new narrative in motion.  Coleman renders her mother’s decline with compassion and kindness, though its impact on the girl she was was painful and profound.  We see Coleman trying to keep everything okay, worry about her mother weaving a scary thread through every single day.  In one scene, as Coleman’s mother drives both of her daughters (Coleman and baby Clara), her inability to cope crescendoes to near disaster.  Coleman, sits in the backseat, overcome with fear for herself, her sister, and her mother: “Don’t lose your grip, Mama, I whispered out the window.  Hold on, hold on, or we will crash.”

Before long Coleman longs for her father, realizing “his certainty was the one thing I could trust.”  She is relieved when she and Clara go to live with him.  Coleman, in an epilogue, tells of how both she and her mother fought losing battles against their own private guilt about Heidi’s death.  As an adult, Coleman realized that her understanding of Heidi’s death, in which she played a pivotal role, was wrong.  She has thus been released from her guilt.  And over time, her mother, too, has made peace with the tragedy in her young mothering years.  Coleman describes her, living contentedly with her second husband, in my hometown, quilting, “trying perhaps – like me – to unite the pieces of the past into a pattern that makes sense of things.”

It is a remarkable peace, actually, that suffuses the end of This Life is in Your Hands.  I read the last few pages with tears streaming down my cheeks, feeling incredibly empathetic towards all the characters, flawed and well-meaning humans who are  desperate to believe in a benevolent universe.  Coleman has accepted her history, with all of its stunning pain and unique beauty, but has refused to accept the destiny that might have come out of its central tragedy.  This, I think, is the enduring message of This Life is in Your Hands.  It is a story about self-determination and about the fact that we can, through hard work and committed belief, continue to shape the contours of our own lives.  We must not give up, surrender to what might be the easy road, whether that’s in how we till the land or how we define ourselves.

The lines of our hands, and of our lives, are not predetermined and final, but can change as we do.  We are, in fact, already creating what we will become.

(Full disclosure: Harper Collins sent me a review copy of This Life is in Your Hands)

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