Fat Girls in Lawn Chairs

I've been stuck at the "guilt" level of the Critical Monkey Contest for a while now, and finally decided it was high time to get on to the "anger" stage, so I picked up a book that struck me as different from the last one that I wouldn't have ordinarily read and didn't particularly like (It's Not That I'm Bitter). This new book, Fat Girls in Lawn Chairs by Cheryl Peck, looked different in almost every way, except that it's also a collection of autobiographical essays. I figured there'd be none of the moaning about not being a size 6 in this one; in fact the title made it sound like the essays would be the exact opposite of the not-bitter-but-obsessed-with-physical-appearance ones.

Well, it turned out that there wasn't that much about body size in the book. What there was, instead, was a confusing list of terms for her siblings (the wee, the unwee, the least wee, etc.) and some stories about what they did, not at all in the David Sedaris tradition of "look how weird my family is," which is what I'd hoped for. I had a hard time figuring out why she talked about her siblings at all. In one essay, her sister tells Cheryl that she used to go into her room and touch her things. The only good part is Cheryl's response: "Touching my things is no great challenge; I keep them all out in the middle of the floor where I can find and touch them myself."

Some of the essays are about her cat, who has a silly name ("Babycakes") and doesn't do anything particularly amusing, at least not to me--and I'm usually a sucker for cat stories. Others are about what she did when she was young, and these are all pretty banal:
"I was prone to nightmares as a child and it was not uncommon for the bears and the tigers to start crawling out of the top of the wardrobe and vault across the room onto my bed and try to maul me in my sleep. I would wake up in hysterics and my mother would come running into the room to find out why I was crying and even when I pointed out the lions she never once saw one."

I like only two things in her essays about her relationship. One is that she calls her female partner "my Beloved," which is a nicer and more dignified term than many others I've heard. The other is this passage about her father:
"I have never come out to my father. I am forty-eight and he is seventy....He knows. I know he knows.
We have a covenant of trust, my father and I. I do not present him with emotional, word-intensive problems he cannot solve. He does not make anti-gay remarks in my presence and sometimes he has this--mischievous--almost expectant--little smile on his face when someone else does.
She'll get 'em--she's good with words."

But there isn't nearly enough evidence of her being "good with words" in this collection of autobiographical essays. Really, if it weren't for Sedaris and Anne Lamott, I believe I'd be about done with the whole genre right now. Do any other good collections of present-day autobiographical essays even exist?

Voting

Finally! After today there should be an end to the robo-calls, at least for a while. Why anyone thinks they would do anything except make me less likely to vote for their candidate, I don't know. But I still haven't made up my mind about who to vote for. As far as I can tell, both of the presidential candidates I am considering mostly support the issues I use as a touchstone: abortion and gay and lesbian rights. I can't vote for anyone who doesn't agree with me and George Carlin ("pro-life is anti-woman") and Anne Lamott, who captures my particular sense of outrage about the abortion rights issue in her essay "The Born" in her book Grace (Eventually):

I wanted to express calmly and eloquently, that people who are pro-choice understand that there are two lives involved in an abortion--one born (the pregnant woman) and one not (the fetus)--and that the born person must be allowed to decide what is right: whether or not to bring a pregnancy to term and launch another life into circulation....the most important message I can carry and fight for is the sacredness of each human life, and reproductive rights for all women are a crucial part of that."

I also can't vote for anyone who could possibly increase the small, daily insults to human dignity suffered by a person like David Sedaris. Here is one quandary he describes in his essay "Chicken in the Henhouse" in the collection Dress Your Family In Corduroy and Denim:

The man in the elevator had not thought twice about asking Michael personal questions or about laying a hand on the back of his head. Because he was neither a priest nor a homosexual, he hadn't felt the need to watch himself worrying that every word or gesture might be misinterpreted. He could unthinkingly wander the halls with a strange boy, while for me it amounted to a political act--an insistence that I was as good as the next guy. Yes, I am a homosexual; yes, I am soaking wet; yes, I sometimes feel an urge to touch people's heads, but still I can safely see a ten-year-old back to his room. It bothered me that I needed to prove something this elementary. And prove it to people whom I could never hope to convince.

There are lots of bigger issues at stake in the coming election, but I'll stand by my conviction that my touchstone issues tell me something about how a candidate thinks. It's simply not clear to me that any of my old strategies for deciding are going to work as well this time around. It's not clear that's a sign of progress, though. If Mr. "I don't believe in evolution" Mike Huckabee gets any votes, that's truly frightening.