Unattainable Goals

I just read Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle, which has been on my to-be-read list for about a year, ever since my friend Sarah recommended it to me. The idea of the glass castle, the house Jeannette's father was always going to build, is kind of like my to-be-read list, I'm afraid. It keeps growing beyond my reach, because every time I find a book I'm looking for, I find at least two more I want to read. Come to think of it, that's kind of like Samuel Johnson's definition of a "dullard" in his Dictionary: "a person who reads only the definition of the word he's looked up when he opens a dictionary." And it's a lot like the plot of Tristram Shandy, in which things keep happening and the narrator gets more and more behind trying to tell the story of his life.

I have a friend who tells me she's making some ungodly number of cookies today, and she's taking them to her church. This, on the first day after her husband's knee surgery, when her mother is staying with her. To her, and to all of you, I make this announcement: you can just say no. If you don't start saying no to more things, you'll have no time to read.

So finally I finished reading The Glass Castle, and I see why Sarah recommended it to me. It begins with a view of the author in her NYC apartment, seeing her mother, a homeless person, rooting through a dumpster outside. So I thought it would be the story of how they ended up at that point. Instead, though, it's the story of how her mother always had an alternative attitude on how to live her life, and how her father inspired and perpetuated that attitude for all of them. It's a real page-turner of a memoir, which was surprising to me because, in case you haven't noticed, I don't make a lot of time for reading anything but fiction and poetry (an attitude developed in reaction to the reading lists I made my way through in graduate school). Anyway, what is so mesmerizing about the way this story is told? Well, even though Jeannette's earliest memory is of getting badly burned from an accident cooking hot dogs at the age of three, she still admires the spirit of her mother, who was too busy painting in another room to help her toddler with the stove. In the acknowledgments to the book, she says she is "grateful to my mother for believing in art and truth" and to her father "for dreaming all those big dreams." That's what the book is about, not just the sordid details of how her parents often neglected basic needs in favor of what most of us would dismiss as pipe dreams.

Here is an example, appropriate to the season:
...when Christmas came that year, we had no money at all. On Christmas Eve, Dad took each of us kids out into the desert night one by one. I had a blanket wrapped around me, and when it was my turn, I offered to share it with Dad, but he said no thanks. The cold never bothered him. I was five that year and I sat next to Dad and we looked up at the sky. Dad loved to talk about the stars. He explained to us how they rotated through the night sky as the earth turned. He taught us how to identify the constellations and how to navigate by the North Star. Those shining stars, he liked to point out, were one of the special treats for people like us who lived out in the wilderness. Rich city folks, he'd say, lived in fancy apartments, but their air was so polluted they couldn't even see the stars. We'd have to be out of our minds to want to trade places with any of them.
"Pick out your favorite star," Dad said that night. He told me I could have it for keeps. He said it was my Christmas present.
"You can't give me a star!" I said. "No one owns the stars."
"That's right," Dad said. "No one else owns them. You just have to claim it before anyone else does, like that dago fellow Columbus claimed America for Queen Isabella. Claiming a star as your own has every bit as much logic to it."
I thought about it and realized Dad was right. He was always figuring out things like that.
I could have any star I wanted, Dad said, except Betelgeuse and Rigel, because Lori and Brian had already laid claim to them.
I looked up to the stars and tried to figure out which was the best one. You could see hundreds, maybe thousands or even millions, twinkling in the clear desert sky. The longer you looked and the more your eyes adjusted to the dark, the more stars you'd see, layer after layer of them gradually becoming visible. There was one in particular, in the west above the mountains but low in the sky, that shone more brightly than all the rest.
"I want that one," I said.
Dad grinned. "That's Venus," he said. Venus was only a planet, he went on, and pretty dinky compared to real stars. She looked bigger and brighter because she was much closer than the stars. Poor old Venus didn't even make her own light, Dad said. She shone only from reflected light. He explained to me that planets glowed because reflected light was constant, and stars twinkled because their light pulsed.
"I like it anyway," I said. I had admired Venus even before that Christmas. You could see it in the early evening, glowing on the western horizon, and if you got up early, you could still see it in the morning, after the stars had disappeared.
"What the hell," Dad said. "It's Christmas. You can have a planet if you want."
And he gave me Venus.

At a later Christmas, Jeannette asks her dad to stop drinking, and he ties himself to a bed and shakes for several days, before going off the wagon eventually, as he always did. Much later, when Jeanette's older sister gets burned trying to keep herself warm inside their house, this is her mother's response:
"Just remember," Mom said after examining the blisters, "what doesn't kill you will make you stronger."
"If that was true, I'd be Hercules by now," Lori said.
Only children could be so forgiving, remembering the dreams that always underlay their parents' neglect. By the end of the book, of course, it was clear to all the children that their parents were less mature than they were, continuing to believe in things much less likely than stories about Santa Claus, which they always dismissed as "silly myths."

Reading The Glass Castle made me think about what we're doing when we dismiss other peoples' dreams as foolish and illusory. I've done this--I still laugh at the thought of a friend who lived for years in a largely vacant house because he thought he was going to "make furniture" for it. I've also been on the receiving end--someday I want to live right beside the ocean, and I don't like it when anyone ridicules the idea or tries to scale it back by saying that it would be cheaper and more practical to live "just a little" inland. That gets my back up, as it would one of Jeannette's parents, and makes me want to echo Blanche Dubois saying "I don't want realism. I want magic."

The charm of Jeannette's book is that she and her siblings end up saying "you know, it's really not that hard to put food on the table if that's what you decide to do," without reproving the parents who decided to do other things.

Of the many interviews that Jeannette, evidently a well-known gossip columnist, gave after her book was published, this one is my favorite. I love that in more than one interview she says that the response to the book is often someone saying "well, you think YOUR parents were weird..."

Book Buying Meme

If you're buying books for the holidays, why do you pick out the ones you do? Harriet suggested that this would be a good meme, and I had to agree. The "buy books for the holidays" movement was started over at My Friend Amy, and you can see book bloggers' suggestions for book gifts here. I thought it was such a good idea that I spread the idea of blogging about the books you're buying to John Scalzi's Whatever via comment, and he responded by enthusiastically recommending The Gone-Away World over there, and then asking for other book recommendations (these are heavy on science fiction and fantasy, especially the Terry Pratchett variety).

If only I had a 9 or 10 year old on my list, I'd give him or her a copy of Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy, for which Harriet's blog is named. But you have to work with what you have in a given year, so, without giving away too many secrets, here are my plans (rubs hands together):

As you know, my "book of the year" is Nick Harkaway's The Gone-Away World, so if you're on my list and you're between 20-60 years old, you're probably getting a copy. I'm not giving this book to anyone much older than I am, because I'm not sure they'd enjoy being lost in it, as I eventually did (it took me about 75 pages, as you may recall). It seems to me that the complications and confusions of this fictional world might be a bit too much for my parents' generation. While my parents have always loved literature and theater, in the last few years, I've noticed that they enjoy novelty less--they still had a good time seeing Spamalot, with its flash-parodies of other recent shows, but they didn't care as much for Wicked, with its attempted inversion of good and evil (from their point of view, I think, it was a twinkie defense of the Wicked Witch of the West).

For these people of my parents' generation (in their 70's), I'm giving Sara Gruen's Water For Elephants, because it's so lovely, the way the story connects between the young narrator and the old, and also Naomi Novik's Temeraire books, starting with His Majesty's Dragon, because what educated older person doesn't want to read another (very different) retelling of the Napoleonic wars?

For the young adults on my list, I'm giving copies of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, if they're at all technophiles (this includes pretty much any teenager who plays video games), because, well, I'm a teacher and I study satire, and how can I resist an updating of the basic message from Orwell's 1984? I'm also giving a copy of Justine Larbalestier's How To Ditch Your Fairy, because it's so much fun to think about what kind of fairy you would want, and a copy of Holly Black's Ironside, because Tithe and Valiant were so good I wanted to see what else would happen, and because they had faeries almost worthy of the old-fashioned spelling, in that they were dangerous partly because of their glamour.

For the younger folk on my list, I've picked out some Roald Dahl--it doesn't much matter which, but for this one elementary-school-age kid, I got Fantastic Mr. Fox, always a favorite for my family. For my preschooler niece, we got Mr. Putter and Tabby Walk the Dog, because it's the first one that charmed us, in which they meet their neighbor Zeke, and then we also got Mr. Putter and Tabby Bake the Cake, because it's a Christmas story.

Ron is in charge of picking out most of the nonfiction books we ever give, in addition to the rare and interesting titles only he can find. He just gave a friend of ours with a before-Christmas birthday a copy of Bruce Sterling's Shaping Things, because it's a book unlike other books, and also because it's short, and it won't interfere with this person's before-Christmas grading of final exams too much.

We did not give anyone a copy of Neal Stephenson's Anathem this year, because everyone we know who wanted to read it had already bought it for themselves, and most of them have already read it. (I haven't read it yet.)

Harriet proposed these questions, which I will continue, because they're good ones: What books are you giving this Christmas? What makes a book a good gift book? Do you give the same books to a lot of different people or pick out books individually? Do you always give books you’ve read yourself, or are there occasions where you give something that you haven’t read?

Harriet also asked how altruistic your book giving is--do you give a book to a certain person because you want to talk about that book with that person? (I said yes to this one, and gave the example of my friends who give me books with the inscription "pre-read for your enjoyment.")

Consider yourself tagged! You can respond in the comments or leave a link there so we can all jump over to see your thoughts and recommendations.

Entering with Grace

I like the idea of grace, that some people carry themselves with elegance and a fine sense of balance, that there's a God who will give you a "get out of hell free" card if you try to do better, that there was once a movie star and, later, a princess who grew into the name Grace. And I like the image of grace, which I'm capable of pulling off as long as I stand still (once I played an aging dancer on stage, in a production of Arthur Miller's After the Fall), but which is dispelled as soon as I begin to move, much like Jamie Lee Curtis's character when she tries to do a pole dance holding on to a bedpost in True Lies. And I like the book Graceling, published in October and which I've been waiting to read ever since I read this enthusiastic review. It's the first book by Kristin Cashore, and the first of a trilogy, although its plot stands well enough on its own.

People living in and even visiting my house were skeptical, seeing this book lying around with an old-fashioned looking broadsword on the cover. My daughter picked it up and said, "oh great, another book with seven kingdoms that you have to keep straight." So my expectations were not too high; I feared, in fact, that it would be just another fantasy book in which it's difficult to keep straight the seven kingdoms with their various national weapons and sixty-three characters with odd names. You know, the kind of book made fun of in the xkcd comic fiction rule of thumb. I think it's easier to enjoy that kind of book if you haven't yet read a lot of fantasy, but if you're like me and have been reading fantasy since discovering Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings at the age of 11 and Zalazny's Nine Princes in Amber at the age of 18, even dipping into what I think of as derivative fantasy like The Sword of Shannara and Eragon, then you're a lot harder to please.

But, as I've already said, I like Graceling. In fact, I like it a lot. So how is it different from all of those other fantasy novels that make my family and friends squint at a book with a broadsword on the cover and then look at me in disbelief? Well, for one thing, the idea of being graced with a talent is not a static idea, in the book. It's not like receiving a broadsword at the age of 13 and going out to slay whatever unfortunate creature has been designated to you as the natural receptor of that particular weapon. It's more like learning how to use an enhanced sense, such as good sight or fast reflexes, or even powerful charisma. The two main characters, called Gracelings because their different-colored eyes identify them as people who have a special grace, think they know what their grace is at the beginning of the book. But by the end, they are still discovering how to use their graces, and aiming for a higher purpose for their use.

There is subtlety in the way they are described as coming to understand each others' talents. The character called Po grows up believing that his grace is that he can read minds when someone else is thinking about him. He hides this grace, presenting it to others as a fighting grace, because knowing what his opponent is about to do makes him a formidable fighter. When his friend and sparring partner, the protagonist, Katsa, realizes that he can read her mind, she accuses him of lying to her, and he says:
"'You would have me friendless, Katsa," he finished quietly. 'You would have my Grace control every aspect of my life and shut me off from every happiness.'
She didn't want to hear these words, words that called to her sympathy, to her understanding. She who had hurt so many with her own Grace, and been reviled because of it. She who still struggled to keep her Grace from mastering her, and who, like him, had never asked for the power it gave her.
'Yes,' he said. 'I didn't ask for this. I would turn it off for you, if I could.'
Rage then, rage again, because she couldn't even feel sympathy without him knowing it."
And later, Katsa understands even more about Po's grace when he admits that she's better at hunting and fighting than he is:
"'But you're better than I am, Katsa. And it doesn't humiliate me.' He fed a branch to the fire. 'It humbles me. But it doesn't humiliate me.'
She sat quietly as night closed in and watched the blood drip from the hunk of meat she held on a stick over the fire. She listened to it sizzle as it hit the flames. She tried to separate in her mind the idea of being humbled from the idea of being humiliated and she understood what Po meant. She wouldn't have thought to make the distinction. He was so clear with his thoughts, while hers were a constant storm that she could never make sense of and never control. She felt suddenly and sharply that Po was smarter than she, worlds smarter, and that she was a brute in comparison. An unthinking and unfeeling brute.
'Katsa....I don't see how you can compare us,' he said, 'and find yourself lacking in intelligence, or unthinking or unfeeling. I've had to spend my entire life hammering out the emotions of others, and myself, in my mind. If my mind is clearer, sometimes, than yours, it's because I've had more practice.'"
It's a nice change, in a fantasy, to see that a character has to continually work at using one of his natural gifts, not just like it's usually seen in a movie, as a brief montage with energetic music, but during most of the minutes in every one of his days.

Katsa is a woman of action, which is certainly a nice change in fantasy (remember how Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens eventually pulled back from their initial superimposition of Arwen's character on Glorfindel's?). Katsa refuses to marry the hero, declares that she will never have children, and despite the fact that she rescues a little girl, doesn't try to adopt her and doesn't change her mind about having children when the rescue is succesful. She learns to control her grace so that others can't use it to control her.

Katsa is a heroine who keeps learning to be more balanced and graceful, and Cashore is a writer who is entering the literary world with a grace all her own.

Goldengrove

After yesterday's musings on the idea that one of the purposes of fiction is to help you see things from a point of view that is not your own, I got to thinking about Martin Luther King, Jr's "Loving Your Enemies," and how he believes that agape, God's love for mankind--and by extension, the fellow-feeling of one human for another--will help people find a way to love their enemies. His assumption, as he reveals late in the sermon, is that we can all be moved by agape, that we all have some empathy for our fellow human beings.

How do we develop our sense of empathy? Certainly most of us who are interested in books do it by reading about people so different from us that we couldn't even have imagined them, before. Many of us do it by modeling our behavior on the behavior of someone we admire. Children learn empathy from caring for animals, creatures who are smaller and even-less-listened-to than themselves.

So where's the line, for a reader, between having empathy for a grieving character, and wallowing in a tear-jerker of a novel? I ask this question because I just finished reading Francine Prose's new novel Goldengrove, and I didn't like it. I thought I would--I knew the basics of the plot, that the narrator's older sister, Margaret, dies and the family has to learn to come to terms with her death--and I love the Hopkins poem (Spring and Fall) from which the title is derived. But I didn't like the novel, because it seems to me that there is no change in the narrator, Nico. The world changes around her, and she grows physically, but it is almost as if the sister's death freezes her mental processes. Even in the brief epilogue, as an adult, Nico almost believes she can enter into a painting, as she believed it as a child, before her sister's death.

Most of the novel is taken up with Nico's relationship with her dead sister's boyfriend and her superstitious attempts to be open to communication from beyond the grave:
"Margaret's room was sweltering. I walked over to the closet. The glitter comet winked at me. Margaret wanted me to find it.
I said 'I know you're not angry. I know you understand.' Nothing stirred. Not a breeze. I said, 'I'll take that as a yes.'"

It seems to me that the nearest Nico comes to change is when she says, near the end of the novel:
"I no longer expected Margaret to contact me from the beyond, and I stopped trying to analyze each new stage of my relationship with her ghost. It was hard, letting go. But if I'd learned anything that summer, it was how essential it was to hold on to the here and now, the one thing after the next."
So maybe my perception that she doesn't change is some kind of misunderstanding over what seems to me to be passive acceptance, but what she would call holding on to the here and now. Maybe I can't empathize enough with Nico. Maybe, because I've been lucky enough so far in my life, I'm not equipped with enough empathy to understand this character, or like this novel.

If you're equipped with that kind of empathy, I'd be interested to hear what you think about Goldengrove. But if you're like me, it's just a tear-jerker, and I avoid those.

Disturbing YA Fiction

I mean "disturbing" in kind of a good way; sometimes you need to be disturbed out of your placid mode of thinking. When I read John Green's An Abundance of Katherines (given to my kids right after it came out as a prize in a contest by our local YA librarian), I remember reacting to the world of the young adults in it, which is curiously devoid of parents. As a child who read E. Nesbit and Edward Eager, I was used to parents having to be out of the way so the kids can have an adventure, but sure that if the parents became aware of what was going on, they would intervene. I get no such feeling from Green's novels. The parents are missing, or they don't care what they kids are doing, or they're so out of touch with the kids' world that they're completely and utterly ineffectual.

The parents in Looking for Alaska are the third type. They have no idea what's going on in their son's life. I've had this book on my to be read pile since August, when the local Freshwater supporters handed out their list of proposed banned books and put a note by Looking for Alaska: "oral sex." I had no idea how funny it is to label the book this way. The oral sex scene is about two high school kids so innocent that they don't know how to perform or receive oral sex, and so unsupervised that they have the time to find out. It rates right up there with the sex scene in The Tall Guy as one of the funniest sex scenes ever:
"And then she wrapped her hand around it and put it into her mouth.
And waited.
We were both very still. She did not move a muscle in her body, and I did not move a muscle in mine. I knew that at this point something else was supposed to happen, but I wasn't quite sure what.
She stayed still. I could feel her nervous breath. For minutes...she lay there, stock-still with my penis in her mouth, and I sat there waiting.
And then she took it out of her mouth and looked up at me quizzically.
'Should I do sometheeng?'
'Um. I don't know,' I said. Everything I'd learned from watching porn with Alaska suddenly exited my brain. I thought maybe she should move her head up and down, but wouldn't that choke her? So I just stayed quiet.
'Should I, like, bite?'
'Don't bite! I mean, I don't think--I mean, that felt good. That was nice. I don't know if there's something else.'
'I mean, you deedn't--'
'Um. Maybe we should ask Alaska.'
So we went to her room and asked Alaska. She laughed and laughed. Sitting on her bed, she laughed until she cried. She walked into the bathroom, returned with a tube of toothpaste, and showed us. In detail. Never have I so wanted to be Crest Complete."

Obviously, Looking for Alaska is a coming of age story, and one of those in which the protagonist can't come of age until he comes to terms with the death of one of his friends, appropriately enough, since his hobby is memorizing the last words of famous people.

I enjoyed the timing of my reading of Looking for Alaska, because about the same time I was reading it, John Green evidently made a big splash at the NCTE convention, with folks lined up to get his signature on his newest novel, Paper Towns. And during the same week Libby, over at Tortoise Lessons, provided a link to his ALAN Conference speech, in which he says
"Books give us the faith that others are real, that their joy and pain should matter to us, and that ours can matter to them."
During the same week, I was listening to Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran during my commute, and got to a part in which a Muslim student makes a pronouncement that fiction is merely a model for behavior, using The Great Gatsby as an example of a novel that promotes infidelity. That day I was protesting an idea something like this one in my classes, the idea that we're all supposed to learn some lesson from what we read in classes, but not from what we read--if we read at all--for pleasure.
Green says
"As if there is some kind of dichotomy between good and fun. As if [The Great]Gatsby is oatmeal and vampires are Lucky Charms. Vampires, of course, ARE Lucky Charms--they are magical and delicious and just dangerous enough to excite me. I love vampires, and I love vampire books. And please know that I would never argue against putting books kids want to read in their hands. But I am arguing that we need to make space in our classes--no matter how advanced or remedial the students--for ambitious novels. Because good is not the opposite of fun. Smart is not the opposite of fun. Boring is the opposite of fun, and when we create the smart/fun dichotomy, what we end up implying is that Gatsby is boring."

My experience as a teacher is that when a student tells me something is boring, it means he doesn't have the context to understand it, to make it matter. That's pretty easily fixed, in a class, and it also implies the truth of what so many mothers tell us (and which John Berryman fixed in my memory forever): "ever to confess you're bored means you have no inner resources." In fact, later in the speech, Green says "I think it's always good to be challenged, to know that there are other people out there, and not all of them value the same things you do." So I'm guessing he would be glad that I find his first two novels disturbing. And maybe he would like the button I sometimes wear which reads "Comfort the Disturbed. Disturb the Comfortable."

Christmas Secrets

I turned in my grades today. Then I did a quick cleaning sweep, and went to Amazon to order some Christmas gifts. Not to give away all my secrets, but mostly I'm giving people books for Christmas, and several people on my list are getting a copy of my book of the year, Nick Harkaway's The Gone-Away World. Several young people on my list are getting a copy of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. I hope they've read George Orwell's 1984, but if they haven't, there's nothing wrong with working backwards. Personally, I've almost always read the parody first.


This button comes from My Friend Amy, and you can see suggestions for book gifts here.
Update: notice that I was responsible for spreading this idea to Whatever and getting attention for The Gone-Away World over there!

Why I Ended Up Sending My Mother a Book I Thought I Would Hate

I'm not a fan of books by Elizabeth Berg. They're too much about baby boomer concerns (Joy School and True to Form are, at any rate), and her writing is a little too consciously writer-workshop material for my taste. You know, the stuff that other writers like because it's character-centered and deals with the small details that others ("sniff") miss.

So when I saw her latest book of stories, entitled The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted (and Other Small Acts of Liberation) at the library, I was not inclined to check it out. What kind of moron goes through life denying herself things to eat and then has to write about it, I thought, mentally classing the book with last year's baby boomer sensation "I Feel Bad About My Neck" by Nora Ephron, which had struck me as the worst title ever, until this one came along. I mean, really. Who goes through life worrying what her neck looks like, or even joking about it, unless she's utterly immersed in trivia?

For some reason, I bent down (why are the new books on such low shelves at the library?) and plucked out The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted rudely, by the spine. I flipped it to the first page, sure that I'd hate the title essay and could shove the book back onto the shelf and get on with finding something better. But I got sucked in. Has this ever happened to you? You start reading something, sure that you disagree, and then are disconcerted to find that the writer agrees with you? At the end of the first page, I started reading a sequence that ended with
"You start with I want and you end with I want, only now you have even more weight added to what is already too much and don't think we don't know it all, all, all the time."
Huh, I thought. Isn't that the truth. And then the narrator of the story walked out of her Weight Watchers meeting and decided "I am going to eat anything I want from now until midnight. And I drove right over to Dunkin' Donuts. You may be thinking, Why did she go to Dunkin' Donuts if she could have anything she wanted? Why didn't she go to Cinnabon?"
And, of course, I was caught up in that question.

Once the narrator has her donuts, though, I started to back away from the story. She does some of those deprived-for-too-long things I was dreading since I saw the title, things that are gross to read about or think about, much less do, and I'm not even referring to bulemia techniques. But then I got to this paragraph, which sucked me right back in:
"Lunch was a problem, like do I sit down or continue to fast-food it. Because I really do appreciate good food, but fast food is what I always want. Drive past a White Castle? See myself opening one of the little burgers with the onions all square. Go past KFC? See the big bucket, lift off the lid, see the one corner of one breast just loaded with coating that you pull off and pop into your mouth? Wendy's? Regular with cheese...."
I so get that. Passing fast food places is what makes commuting hard. I tell myself that it's a good thing I don't watch a lot of television, because I'm way too suggestible to be sitting there through all the fast food commercials. And it's not just an impulse thing. I'm fully capable of developing a yearning for some particular kind of fast food and carrying it around for a few days or even a week, until I can finally get there. (Yeah, no room for trivia in my brain, oh right!)

After she decides about lunch, I thought the story was going to lose me again, until the narrator caught me by informing me that "I'm carrying the banner for all of you who cut off a little piece wanting a big one, who spend a good third of your waking hours feeling bad about your desires, who infect those with whom you work and live with your judgments and pronouncements, you on the program who tally points all day long, every day...."
While this isn't me, it's definitely my mother and it's some of my friends, and it's basically way too many people I know. And then the wrap-up got me:
"That's what we tell ourselves, we who cannot eat air without gaining, we who eat the asparagus longing for the potatoes au gratin, for the fettucine Alfredo, for the pecan pie. And if you're one of those who doesn't, stop right here, you are not invited to the rest of this story."
Well, I was definitely feeling invited.

The kicker, for me, was "this woman I really liked a lot who died and she loved egg salad more than anything and didn't eat it for years because it was bad for her and then when she was on her deathbed and could have anything she wanted, she was given an egg salad sandwich and she couldn't eat it anymore."
That right there is a story stripped down to its bare essentials, which is one of those creative writing workshop things I dislike. And yet for some reason I can't quite dislike it, despite the disingenuous, almost childish way it's told. So I checked the book out.

At home, I read the rest of the stories, and most of them are about characters older than I am and who I have little in common with. But there were two others, both about eating, that seized me, in fact, seized me so hard that I had to order a copy of the book for my mother, who will find the characters younger than she is and have little in common with them, except that she and my father have done things that remind me of the couple in the story Double Diet.

The complementary story to the title one is "The Day I Ate Nothing I Even Remotely Wanted," and it has almost as many good parts as the title story, but they were less surprising to me, so I'm not going to recount all of them here. I'll offer you my favorite paragraph, which pretty much sums up why I don't go to Weight Watchers meetings:
"Crispy chicken skin being the worst for you, it tastes the best. It is just diabolical, how this is all set up, that the best-tasting things are the worst for you. Isn't it hard enough here? I hear all the time that once I make the change and get used to eating right, an orange will taste like dessert. 'It really will!' they say. To which I silently respond, 'Are you talking to me?'"
And personally, I'm not even fond of chicken skin; I just seem to have an overly developed skepticism response to cheery pronouncements about what I should and should not eat. And that response, of course, has been carefully honed by living with a woman who still, at the age of 77, tells me every single time we talk on the phone that she's too fat and she doesn't deserve to eat anything. And this is because she quit smoking last year.

This time I refuse to give in. My mother quit smoking for an entire year at the age of 50, and she was so miserable about the weight she'd gained that finally my brother and I were happy when she started smoking again. And we were the sanctimonious teenagers who had bugged her to stop.

This holiday season, I swear I am going to persevere in silence when my mother starts in about how horrible it is that she's gained weight. I don't think gaining weight is as horrible as she does, but I have no credibility since I'm overweight too. However, I have two children who eat only when they're hungry, for the most part, and who stop when they're full even if there's some dessert left, an attitude I worked hard to foster--and one that my mother and I will always find strange.

So I sent her this book, and although I don't have a lot of hope that it will change anything about her seven decades of struggle with food, at least she will have had the pleasure of reading this exchange, from "Double Diet":
"Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels."
Marsha thinks about this. Then she says, "Not true."
"I know," Tom says, and sighs.