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Dear readers, The approach of my birthday always leaves me a little blue; the occasion is a sour cherry on top of my usual two scoops of critical scrutiny and second-guessing about my life. This year is no different. But I find myself leaning more toward introspection than self-loathing. I can’t account for how I’ve used the past 30-odd years, to say nothing of the previous 12 months, but I’d like to better understand how exactly I got to where I am. These books, each in its own way, model the type of precise self-dissection I strive for. (I can practically feel the snap of the rubber gloves on my hands.) And I like to think they chime with the indelible literary project the Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux set out to accomplish: “I shall carry out an ethnological study of myself.” Ready to begin? —Joumana “Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?,” by Lorrie MooreFiction, 1994
I’m nakedly pandering to myself here, because reading Moore blisses me out as predictably as Xanax. But this is, word for word and paragraph for paragraph, one of the most enjoyable novels about what-ifs I have on my shelves. Plus, it opens with a delectable bit of food writing — about brains: My husband likes the vaporous, fishy mousse of them. They are a kind of seafood, he thinks, locked tightly in the skull, like shelled creatures in the dark caves of the ocean, sprung suddenly free and killed by light; they’ve grown clammy with shelter, fortressed vulnerability, dreamy nights. Me, I’m eating for a flashback. We can taste those flashbacks ourselves. The ensuing story is a romp through the counterfactual realm. The narrator, Berie, realizes she no longer loves her husband, and begins to imagine alternative lives: What if she were in Paris, but attached to someone else? Perhaps someone who wouldn’t confuse “arrondisement” with “aggrandizement”? Her primary emotional tether is her teenage self, and the fierce adolescent bond she had with her friend Sils, a beauty who played Cinderella at the local Storyland theme park. (Berie took tickets, and stole off for frequent cigarette breaks.) It’s a little jarring to realize that the adult Berie is meant to be in her late 30s, seeing as she speaks about her colossal disappointments as if they were irreversible, her life a fait accompli. Yet I am in no position to judge. And I feel myself edging ever closer to the middle-aged woman at the center of one of Berie’s jokes. When she meets a talking frog, he offers to transform into a prince. She declines, politely: “At this point in my life I’m actually more interested in a talking frog.” Read if you like: Mary Gaitskill’s “Veronica,” Dana Spiotta “In Pieces,” by Sally FieldNonfiction, 2018
Field’s is an anomaly among the celebrity memoirs I’ve read. She didn’t lean on a ghostwriter, for starters, and she unleashes a torrent of wrenching detail. This is hardly a purring, contented look back at years of glamour and celebrity. (In fact, one of the more indelible images is of her signing autographs while in line to collect unemployment.) It’s the attempt of a woman, aged 71, trying to fit the constituent parts of her life into something she can make sense of. I need to mention the several dark, terribly upsetting episodes from her childhood and adolescence. Her stepfather, about whom she has competing feelings, abused her emotionally and sexually when she was a girl. A few years later, after her burgeoning sexuality made her feel she was “breaking out of my own brain,” she traveled to Tijuana for an abortion, which was illegal in the United States. She was a teenager at the time, but the fallout of those events never left her, really — it shaded everything from her career arc to her parenting decisions to her romantic relationships (including a controlling, exigent one with Burt Reynolds). I appreciate this book because it’s the farthest thing from a vanity project. It’s clear Field wrestled her story out of herself, at great personal cost, and in the process it shows us that understanding yourself is a life project. Maybe in four decades, I’ll rearrange my own shards and see a completely new picture. Read if you like: Inspiring textile workers to rally for better conditions, any book by Annie Ernaux Plunge further into books at The New York Times or our reading recommendations. Friendly reminder: check your local library for books! Many libraries allow you to reserve copies online.
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