crooked house

This Life is In Your Hands. And A Spoiler Alert.

 This Life Is in Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone is a memoir by Melissa Coleman that got a lot of attention last year when it first came out. Coleman's parents, Eliot and Sue, were among the first back-to-the-landers of the late 60s and 70s. They moved to a plot of land in rural Maine that adjoined the farm of Helen and Scott Nearing, the couple who wrote Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World, which is the book credited with inspiring the movement. Eliot and Sue built their own home, grew their own food, and Sue gave birth to two little girls while they did it. It sounds Edenic, particularly for children, and partly, it was.  (This NYT review of the book does a good job of describing the basic events of This Life is In Your Hands and also the sort of see-sawing the book does between the poetry of the family's life, rooted as it was in nature, and an increasing sense of ominousness.)

It's easy for people who have never attempted to be self-sufficient through farming to romanticize the idea (witness the current resurgence of what Emily Matchar calls the New Domesticity, which admittedly doesn't seem as hard-core a movement) but the fact is that it makes for a very hard life. (I am guilty of romanticizing it myself -- in  high school I gave a speech on my version of "the good life" in which I would retreat with my little family to a cabin in the woods, where I would homeschool my children and we would all survive, I guess, on nuts and berries.) Coleman, who is now a nationally recognized expert on organic gardening, actually had a thyroid disorder, largely untreated, that spurred him on to ceaseless physical labour. And if I were going to try to accomplish what he did, I think I'd want one, too. From Melissa Coleman's descriptions of her mother, Sue, it seems to me that she  suffered terribly from post-partum depression and that this was horribly compounded by the relentless, back-breaking work that homesteading actually entailed, not to mention possible malnutrition.

Now here is where the spoiler comes in. Consider yourself warned. One day, busy preparing a feast for some visitors (as if she doesn't have enough to do), Sue shoos Melissa's little sister Heidi, who is around three at the time I think, out of the cabin, telling her to go float her toy boat on the pond. Heidi actually comes back once or twice, begging for attention, and Sue turns her away. You can guess what happened to Heidi down at the pond. She drowned.

Melissa Coleman doesn't blame her mother for this in the book, but she doesn't exactly absolve her, either. After reading it I was left feeling absolutely bereft for the poor woman, whom I was unable to track down via google, hoping to learn she has found some sort of peace. And I must admit I was also left feeling a bit pissed off about Eliot Coleman's (and the Nearings') subsequent success as  folk heroes.

Now of course children die. They die in car accidents in suburbia and of childhood cancers and all kinds of things. But all it takes is a short stroll through a pioneer-era graveyard to see how many children died when there was no choice for anyone but a  "lifestyle" of relentless physical labour in order to put food on the table. A lot of those deaths were from childhood diseases we can now vaccinate against (if we aren't against vaccinating) but many of them were from accidents that happened when parents didn't have the time and the energy to hover over their kids.

Jim Gillian: The Internet is My Religion

This is an extremely moving speech.

My Article For Brain, Child Magazine: Who We Think We Are

Some months ago I did a little genealogical research and discovered that my children are descended from royalty. I wrote an article about it for the current issue of Brain, Child magazine: 

Friedrich III, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and his wife Eleanor of Portugal were, Ancestry.com told me, the thirteenth great grandfather and grandmother of my husband! There were even pictures of them—well, paintings. There was Great Great Grandpa Friedrich getting introduced to Great Great Grandma Eleanor by the pope, as painted by Pinturicchio. There was a portrait of Friedrich looking steely-eyed and a bit jowly, the way my husband sometimes looks while watching his favorite hockey team lose. And here was a portrait of Eleanor peering wistfully at a flower, something about her expression, the lines of her face, reminding me of my son’s when I told him enough with the video games.

Because excellent records are kept by royalty—in a sense their family history is everyone’s history—once you find a connection to a king, it is possible to go back for generations and generations. I surfed for hours, looking at photographs of a golden crown that had once rested on the head of the fifteenth great grandfather of my children. I started planning summer vacations to the palaces their ancestors had once lived in. I began researching language tuition in German and Spanish for the children, never mind the fact that their ancestors lived so long ago they would’ve spoken entirely different versions of those languages. Basically, I stopped just short of writing to request invitations to Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding.

With their bloodlines becoming clearer, some of my children's quirks began to make sense. The way my six-year-old son still wanted me to dress him in the morning, as if I were his valet. My two-year-old daughter's insistence on wearing a pair of golden slippers at all times and her particularly erect posture and imperious manner. ("Play cars, Mama!" she commands with a little wave of her hand and a slight, dignified inclination of her head. "Sit here!" she orders, pointing to a particular spot on the floor, her stern expression demonstrating that she will not tolerate dissent. "Dis one, Mama!" she says, handing me her preference when I pick up the wrong one. And then, "Vivi's turn first!")

This intriguing discovery was, for lack of a better word, brief. You'll have to get your hands on a copy of the magazine to find out the rest.

Hilary Mantel On Remembering Childhood

My friend Sara O'Leary sent this excerpt from Hilary Mantel's memoir Giving Up the Ghost:

Before I went to school there was a time when I was happy, and I want to write down what I remember about that time. The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough; my early world was synaesthesic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which re-emerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines.

We are taught to be chary of early memories. Sometimes psychologists fake photographs in which a picture of their subject, in his or her childhood, appears in an unfamiliar setting, in places or with people whom in real life they have never seen. The subjects are amazed at first but then -- in proportion to their anxiety to please -- they oblige by producing a 'memory' to cover the experience that they have never actually had. I don't know what this shows, except that some psychologists have persuasive personalities, that some subjects are imaginative, and that we are all told to trust the evidence of our senses, and we do it: we trust the objective fact of the photograph, not our subjective bewilderment. It's a trick, it isn't science, it's about our present, not our past.

Sara once mentioned to me in passing that her younger son -- maybe he was in grade five at the time -- was writing his autobiography but couldn't remember much before the age of five or so. And yet, she had noticed that when he was little, he had lots of memories of that time. She suggested that we write Luke's down and I regret to say that we haven't. But this reminds me and I will. Sometimes he astounds me with what he remembers-- and it is all likely to be lost. Thanks, Sara.

One Line a Day

Seeing this pretty and old-fashioned One Line a Day: A Five-Year Memory Book makes me wonder if anyone is using twitter to write one tweet at the end of each day summing it up. Just one tweet -- no more allowed. Facebook could work like that, too. One status update summing up each day, no more. But both twitter and facebook seem much more ephemeral than a journal. Are all your tweets and status updates saved? If so, for how long?

My mother-in-law kept a five-year diary before she died -- I believe she faithfully jotted just one line or two about each day before she went to bed. And I know my father-in-law does -- he often surprises me with a comment about what we were doing on this day two or three years ago. This is particularly of interest when you have small children who seem to change so fast.

I've often thought of using something like My Quotable Kid: A Parents' Journal of Unforgettable Quotes but I already record almost everything interesting or amusing my children say either here or on my facebook page, which I know drives a lot of people nuts. But I'm even a sucker for the funny things other people's children say, which makes me the perfect audience for sites like My Kid Is Gifted. 

Babies in Literature: Sophia Tolstoy: A Biography

According to Alexandra Popoff, author of Sophia Tolstoy: A Biography, Leo Tolstoy's wife has been maligned by history. Popoff, who had access to a great deal of previously inaccessible archival materials, explains that it all stems from Tolstoy's final years, when he experienced a religious conversion that led him to renounce his marriage, his family, and his property (or try to). However much Tolstoy may have believed in his principles of poverty and chastity, this renunciation put his wife in a completely untenable position. Sophia was left to look after the couple's eight surviving children pretty much on her own. Clearly Tolstoy felt some responsibility to his family, because he kept waffling on property and money matters. Admittedly, Sophia kept fighting him on these -- who wouldn't, when she had eight children to feed, clothe, and educate? He also kept waffling on the matter of sex -- he kept sleeping with Sophia and then blaming the matronly woman for being a seductress. Tolstoy's most famous follower, Vladimir Chertkoff, managed to insinuate himself between the couple in Tolstoy's final years and ended up controlling his literary works after his death. Popoff argues that it is he who is most responsible for discrediting Sophia Tolstoy's character. This book is a must-read for anyone who is interested in Tolstoy, and really, anyone who is interested in the concept of marriage and women's historical role within it.

Tolstoy was a literary genius, to be sure, but he also must have been infuriating to be married to. Sophia was not only Tolstoy's muse, she was a  tireless worker who devoted all her efforts to creating the proper environment for her husband to write in. She was Tolstoy's copyist and later his publisher. She managed his home and often his estate and related business matters. She made most of the childrearing and educational decisions on her own. (At one point, when she asked about appropriate education for one of their teenage sons, her husband brushed her off with a comment that he should become a street sweeper or the like because of his own religious beliefs against taking part in a money-based economy.) Sophia gave birth to thirteen children, although she wanted to stop after seven or so -- but Tolstoy wouldn't allow birth control. She breastfed all these babies herself at Tolstoy's insistence even though it never became easy for her (she often developed mastitis) and most women of her position employed wet nurses. And she watched six of her children die. Exhausted and completely emotionally and physically spent, at times Sophia wanted to end these pregnancies:

By now, she was certain of her [twelfth] pregnancy. As she wrote her sister, she felt like "screaming of despair and rage."

Told the news, Tolstoy wrote he was glad they would have a child; Sophia's unhappiness came from her revolté. It would be easier for her and people around her if she assumed a more accepting attitude: "Why can't you surrender?" Sophia thought his position was morally superior and felt crushed. "If I were bad before, now I am loathsome! And if you were good, you have become so much better!" Her pregnancy explained her abnormal state, Tolstoy replied: "I know, I've heard, that it's terribly oppressive for the soul."

Meanwhile, Sophia attempted to induce a miscarriage: she took scalding baths and jumped from a dresser. To a nanny who tried to talk her out of it, she said that Tolstoy considered leaving her and their children. When her attempts failed, she approached a midwife in Tula, asking for an abortion. The midwife, afraid of exposure, refused: she would perform an abortion for someone else, but not for Countess Tolstoy.

At times, Sophia Tolstoy wanted to end her own life.

You can read a brief excerpt from the biography here.

Keel's Simple Diary

This Keel's Simple Diary looks like a lot of fun. Via paper tastebuds.

Reading Notes: The Imperfectionists, The Go-Between, and Just Kids

The Imperfectionists: A Novel by Tom Rachman. I'd call this a collection of linked short stories rather than a novel. Christopher Buckley raved about this book for the Times, declaring he was particularly impressed by the structure, which surprises me. I think it'd be easier to write a novel this way. But maybe that's just me. The subject matter, the lives of employees and readers of an international newspaper -- and that newspaper's rise and fall -- is very timely. What better way to get coverage in the traditional media's shrinking review pages? Still, a very readable and entertaining book.

The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley. I happened across a mention of this book in a piece on five books about childhood innocence and thought it might make a good addition to my list of the best books about childhood. (I need to update that list.) The Go-Between, published in 1953, is written from the perspective of an adult but this is an adult who remembers astonishingly well just what it was like to be thirteen in the year 1900. And the year is key -- for a reader in 2010, that thirteen-year-old is unbelievably naive. I kept thinking the plot might work today but only if the protagonist was maybe 9 or 10 years old instead of thirteen. Still, this is a terrific, eminently readable book and I highly recommend it, even though it is certainly overwrought and almost unforgivably melodramatic. Read it when you are in an overwrought, melodramatic mood. Interesting note: this is the book that begins with the famous lines: The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. They do indeed.

Just Kids by Patti Smith. I didn't know much about Patti Smith or Robert Mapplethorpe until I read this sweet memoir of their early romance and lifelong friendship. The jacket copy says that Smith was given the Commander of the Order des Arts et des Lettres  by the French Minister of Culture, France's highest honour for artists, in 2005 and I was struck by how her writing, which is elegant, formal, and melancholy, seems very French. It almost reads like a translation of something from the French. As I read, I discovered that she is, or was, very fond of French poets, particularly Rimbaud, so this began to make a kind of sense. She comes across as a bit of a delicate flower in this book which seems at odds with her rock and roll persona and her androgynous crow mystique -- I suppose all that makes for an intriguing contradiction. I was impressed by how devoted the pair were to the idea of making art. And less impressed by their deliberate political forays into the art world. There's a lot of name dropping. There was a definite sense that Smith and Mapplethorpe were  interested in being inspired by other, more successful artists rather than using them in order to get famous themselves but there was a lot of the latter going on, too, I think. That was disappointing -- I like the idea of artists focusing only on their art, and not on how to promote themselves. 

Sleep or Lack Thereof: Patricia Morrisroe's Wide Awake

This beautiful photo (published here under the creative commons) was posted by bitzcelt on flickr. I concur with his comment.

I realize I've been relying heavily on photos instead of words here on the blog lately -- that's because I've been having a lot of trouble stringing them together when speaking, let alone writing. I am just. so. tired. At about four or five months of age Sylvie started to pretty much sleep through the night. Regular readers of this blog could probably go back and check for the exact date -- I'm too tired to bother. Because ever since Sylvie started to crawl, about two months or so ago, she's been waking up pretty much every two or three hours at night. At first I thought she was excited by her new ability and simply wanted to get moving; then I chalked it up to teething. She had an ear infection in B.C., which certainly didn't help, and now, as a result of the antibiotics, she has thrush. So it's probably been all of those things, in sequence or in combination. I don't consider it sleep deprivation on par with that caused by a newborn -- those wakenings, at least for me and my babies, always lasted an hour or more at a time. These wakenings are usually mercifully brief, except for an early morning one that generally lasts forty-five minutes to an hour, around  four a.m.

I'm a big sleeper -- love to sleep! Loved it before I had children. Love it even more now. And I need a lot of it. I've always needed more than the average eight hours a night. I need about nine to feel normal. And I'll happily steal ten if I can. I also like to read in bed, so those ten hours are, ideally, book-ended by a couple of hours lying there reading. Of course, this does not happen nearly often enough for my liking, not with two small children, and probably too often for David's. (The man is a saint. And he doesn't need very much sleep. And I haven't said a word about all the hockey lately. Isn't there some kind of playoff thingy going on?)

One of the subjects I like to read about in bed is, drum roll please: sleep. So this week, I absolutely devoured Patricia Morrisroe's new memoir of insomnia, Wide Awake. A magazine writer, Morrisroe, who is best known for her biography of Robert Mapplethorpe, has been an insomniac since childhood. She has no trouble falling asleep -- it takes her an enviable five minutes. It's staying asleep that's the problem. She generally wakes up for at least a couple of hours in the dead middle of the night. At least, she used to. Because during the writing of this book, which she decided to write in order to find a cure, she did indeed solve the problem of her insomnia.  This is actually quite surprising, given how unyielding the problem tends to be. The book belongs as much in the popular science genre as it does in the memoir category-- it is science made light, personal and, whenever possible, amusing. In fact, even though I'm utterly sleep-deprived at the moment, it actually kept me up, reading into the night for way too long.

For a little taste of Morrisroe on sleep, check out this article about how her mother-in-law, who is 87, takes advantage of her insomnia to work her way through the classics.

I like sleep so much, I've often thought of writing a novel about it. (I wrote "dreamed" instead of "thought" first and then changed it. That was too much of a groaner, even for me.) A novel about sleep would be exciting, huh? Here's a tiny flash I once wrote on the subject.

Also, if you like the subject of sleep and you haven't read Steven Millhauser's novella Enchanted Night, you really should. There's a lot more activity in it than just sleeping but it's very ... sleepy. And it beautifully evokes a small-town summer night.

If you know of any more really good books on the subject of sleep -- or somehow related to it -- please do drop me a line or leave a comment.

Elizabeth Gilbert's Loopy, Unnecessary, and Thoroughly Enjoyable Committed

I got Elizabeth Gilbert's Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage in the mail last week and finished it in two evenings. As a writer whose memoirs are bestsellers -- her last, most popular one Eat, Pray, Love was featured on Oprah, spawned a kind of cult of wandering women, and is about to be made into a movie starring Julia Roberts -- she comes in for her fair share of criticism from literary folk. Consider this comment, from Ariel Levy, in her review of Committed for The New Yorker:

One generally doesn’t indulge another person’s emotional processing at this length unless the jabbering is likely to conclude with sex.

Or this one, about Eat, Pray, Love from the hilarious Lizzie Skurnick:

Nothing is more boring than your epiphanies. (Even worse, sojourners–the more particular they are to you, the more they sound exactly like everyone else’s.) Such is the problem with Elizabeth Gilbert’s journey through the particulars of her digestive, spiritual and moral humors–located, for your corporeal information, in the regions of Italy, India and Indonesia, respectively. It’s a bit of a punt to say the book is self-aggrandizing–how could a book focused on one’s spiritual well-being not be?–but it’s the grand the Richard Bachian strokes that provoke the reader beyond speech: "Simply put, I got pulled through the wormhole of the Absolute, and in that rush I suddenly understood the workings of the universe completely." (Simply put.)

Love that. "Simply put." And I have to agree -- Gilbert's stuff is certainly a bit loopy. Thing is, though, her writing is thoroughly engaging. It radiates warmth and good humour, like her face. And she has a very good sense of humour, too. As a woman who considers herself to have both a certain loopiness and a sense of humour (I can't lay claim to the warm nature), Gilbert is exactly the kind of woman I'd like to have as a friend. I find her work eminently readable, even if equally flawed and of value in pretty much the ways Jessa Crispin outlines in her piece In Defense of Elizabeth Gilbert:

But what's good about Committed is what's good about Eat, Pray, Love. While Eat, Pray, Love is the result of a very painful process, Committed is a clear-eyed examination of the negotiation of a relationship and the struggle to create a supportive partnership after coming out of a traumatic one. Sure, both books kind of fall apart, they are not stylistically daring, and Committed is kind of boring and just rehashes a lot of Stephanie Coontz's vastly superior Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage. It's value lies in that it's about how we get married despite all the bad news, and how, if we go into it really knowing what we're up against, we can create new types of marriages. Marriages where one partner is not unconsciously lifted at the expense of the other.

I am downloading Stephanie Coontz's history of marriage to my kindle as soon as I can get away with it. (As a sidenote, my kindle may cause me to go bankrupt. It is dangerous. I'm like a crack addict whose dealer sleeps on a mat beside my bed.) Gilbert is upfront about how much she borrows from Coontz and, if Coontz is as readable as Gilbert says she is, I'll be giving Sylvie a copy as soon as she hits puberty. If not, I'll give her my copy of Committed. (I've also got my eye on Ben Yagoda's Memoir: A History, given that I seem to have developed an addiction to the genre. And come this summer, I'll also be downloading Displaced, the new memoir by Gilbert's ex-husband, Michael Cooper. Even though Gilbert hardly mentions her first husband in either book -- and when she does, seems very respectful -- it must have been somewhat... trying to have the failure of your marriage lead directly to the kind of outrageous personal success for your ex that Eat, Pray, Love did for Gilbert.)