Educated

 

Educated by Tara Westover
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One of the most unique memoirs I've read. Westover gives a candid account of growing up in unusual circumstances, and does so knowing its distinctiveness yet not downplaying or exaggerating its difference. So many crazy things happen, but she also leaves room for movement in her own memory, letting us know how others there remember it differently. Her accomplishments are amazing especially when she recounts the things she did not know--not only facts but how to study or how to interact with other students. It is only as she gets older that the memoir feels less authentic somehow. The actions of her parents are puzzling and Westover doesn't seem to give any theories about their motivations. Did they believe her brother because he is a male, or because they need him for the business, or because he never left? Does she not understand the reasons either or is there something she's not telling us?

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The past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time.  It expands later, & thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past--Virginia Woolf

Our lives were a cycle--the cycle of the seasons--circles of perpetual change that, when complete, meant nothing had changed at all.

But Shawn had more power over me than I could possibly have imagined.  He had defined me to myself, and there's no greater power than that. 

"The wind is just the wind.  You could withstand these gusts on the ground, so you can withstand them in the air.  There is no difference.  Except the difference you make in your mind."

"You are not fool's gold, shining only under a particular light.  Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were.  It was always you.  Not in Cambridge.  In you.  You are gold.  And returning to BYU, or even to that mountain you came from, will not change who you are.  It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself--even gold appears dull in some lights--but that is an illusion.  And it always was."

I know only this: that when my mother told me she had not been the mother to me that she wished she had been, she became that mother for the first time.

The Death of Mrs. Westaway

 

The Death of Mrs. Westaway by Ruth Ware
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Sometimes the marketing gets in the way of the novel. All the blurbs I read compared this to du Maurier's Rebecca, which I optimistically presumed would include all of the beautiful atmospheric descriptions in du Maurier's work, with the suspense nearly jumping off the page in those descriptions of whirling leaves and dark, locked passages. So this is probably a better novel than I give it credit for, because it is not that. It is a mystery using the same building blocks as Rebecca , in new formations and a different ending. It is modernized and unique and has a few unexpected twists and turns. So if you go into it with the right mindset, it would be an entertaining read--I just couldn't help feeling a little hoodwinked.

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in that moment that you turn your head to look for the second magpie, in the hope of changing your fortune from sorrow to joy--that's when you take your attention away from the things you can change, the crossing light, the speeding car, the moment you should have turned back.

When they gave themselves over to superstition, they were giving up on shaping their own destiny.

Hollywood Park

Hollywood Park by Mikel Jollett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was a fan of The Airborne Toxic Event before I started reading this, and this just made me love them more. Jollet tells the story of his life in an amazingly self-aware and candid manner. His story about growing up in and escaping from a cult could be sensational enough, but also dealing with the aftermath of what the separation from his parents did to both him, his brother, and his parents and how they deal with it is compelling. Jollet is a gifted song-writer and his prose doesn't disappoint. The fact that he was able to shape his story into a satisfying, revealing narrative makes this one of the best memoirs I've read.

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It's a strange word, F-A-M-I-L-Y.  It's big and comforting and each letter is different. Just look at it.  The F is for father right there at the front.  The M for mother is in the middle, connecting all the others.  It's a long word but usually people say it in one breath, like "famly" as if the I doesn't matter.  Without the F it's just an "ambly," a thing that ambles around from place to place.  Without the M it's just a "Fably"which is a story about something that does not exist. 

That's probably why we put people in containers when they die: coffins, urns, mausoleums--to give physical shape to the absence.

 

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was just what I needed after reading some rather heavy stuff lately. It is a smart, creative "re-telling" of Rumpelstiltskin. When I say, re-telling, what I mean is Novik simply uses the basic concepts as a jumping off point for a whole new fantasy. There is an underpinning theme about climate change and capitalism, but what I loved were the clever, strong, and determined women who refused to let circumstances dictate their choices, but to act and then act again, always searching for ways to solve problems or change their predicaments. Sometimes their actions did not result in ideal solutions, but they kept preserving, and by continuing to act they were led to a satisfactory ending. A great female-driven fantasy.

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Just Us

 

Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book points out several ways microagressions are perpetrated from whites to blacks, and their ensuing hurt, and it is eye-opening and humbling. However, this book is not a conversation. It is Rankine pointing out these offenses in essays that she then gives to the offender to respond to. These are mostly people she is friends with, and who are trying to be actively non-racist. And although she receives several different types of replies, her response is always to find more offenses, even in the friend who chose not to reply at all. Once again I am left wondering if there is anything I can do as a white person that won't cause offense somehow--or maybe that is the message--that I can't. What I would love to read is ways we can extend grace, forgiveness, and understanding across all cultural and racial boundaries.

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"James Baldwin Discusses the Problem of Being White in America" (1985);  "When Americans say change in the generality, they really mean progress.  And when they say progress, they really mean--and they don't know they mean this--they really mean how quickly and to what extent and how profoundly a black person becomes white.  They take themselves quite helplessly as the only possible model of what they call change."

Homi Bhabha from The Location of Culture, in conversation with Toni Morrison: "Remembering is never a quiet act of introspection or retrospection.  It is a painful re-membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present."