Category Archives: work

Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country by Pam Houston

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I could have sworn it’s been 20 years since I read Cowboys Are My Weakness by Pam Houston in a beautiful little old home near Durango, Colorado (can you imagine a better location?!), but a quick search reveals that it was actually published in 2005!

What I remember is that Cowboys Are My Weakness was a transformational book for me. It was so real and so unlike anything I’d ever read before. Remembering this book is saying something because I started this blog to keep track of my reading!

When I realized Houston had written her most recent book, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country, I was anxious to read it. The book is a collection of short stories, and the most pervasive thread is probably her own growth in adulthood and her increasing appreciation for, and rootedness to her animals and to the land–in this case, a 120-acre farmstead in the Colorado mountains.

As a woman who has also spent a good deal of time solo and who has also acquired her own little “slice of heaven” and sheep (even some Icelandic!) and other animal friends, while also working as a writer, teacher, and scholar, I was drawn to her story and her insights, like maybe she could lend a little guiding light. And she did. Somehow reading her writing feels to me like taking a refresher grad class in creative writing. What a gift!

Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami

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Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami delves into a modern, urban female experience. The main character navigates the big questions women must face and the relationships they must navigate. Kawakami leads the reader through these issues without defaulting to any oversimplifications. The opposite, actually. Each question and relationship is as complex as real life. This book feels almost memoiristic, as I imagined Kawakami as the main character. (I’m prone to doing this though.)

The main character, Natsu, comes from poverty and brings herself out of that slowly as a novelist (the most unlikely of stories!). This character’s life leads her away from her family roots (in a sense) and complicates her relationships with her now very small extended family, not that these relationships are ever uncomplicated.

Her past (experiences with poverty and loss) also complicate her relationships and her abilities to be in a romantic relationship and to create a family of her own.

The book is strange. Natsu is confused. There is tragedy and there is triumph. It is nuanced, and that is true of the human experience, and in this case, it’s focused especially on the female experience.

I read that Breasts and Eggs was once published as a novella and then was expanded into a longer novel, which is the version I read. Through most of the book, I found myself wishing that this was two separate books, but then again, I love a good, short, digestible read. However, now that I’ve reached the conclusion, I do think extending it into one long book is defensible.

Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout

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For the first half of this book, I felt myself impatient with the main character, Lucy. I am so hungry for a female lead who is not so passive, who knows her own mind. However, the writing was good enough that I suspected this all too common characterization of female leads was going somewhere meaningful, and I was right. I also grew to appreciate the spare writing style and the diary-entry style that she uses to develop a consistent sense of voice and theme throughout.

Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy by the Sea is a great book worth reading. Although this history seems so very recent, Strout’s book helps me recall just what the early days of the pandemic were like and the politics surrounding that time.

Even more interesting to me were her characters and the subtle insights she develops through the book to help the reader see just how they came to think and act like they do. None of this life gets wrapped up in a pretty bow, and Strout’s work reflects that not uncomplicated reality.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

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A literary classic, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is, indeed, an epic work of staggering genius. I thought I had read this book in college, but realized I hadn’t once I got started. Perhaps I only read an excerpt. While I have read several books with plenty of AAVE (African American Vernacular English), especially Alice Walker, I think this book had more dialogue and more AAVE than anything I’d ever read before. Much like reading Shakespeare, the text was challenging to get in to, but once I found my pace, the language became rich and beautiful–full of great humor and the depths of human emotional experience.

There’s not much more that I can say about this book that hasn’t already been said. It fell out of preference for several decades, but was revived in the 1970s by Alice Walker and has been a canonical text in Literature classes ever since. Much has been written about it, and rightly so.

The Sun in a Compass by Caroline Van Hemert

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What a gorgeous book. Caroline is a friend from grad school, and so this book has been on my radar since it came out. However, it’s publication coincided with the birth of my son, and so I’ve been delayed in reading it. I’m so glad the time has finally arrived!

This story is undeniably epic. Reading it will reacquaint you with your adventuresome spirit, no matter how modest. At the very least, you will want to get outside and go for a hike. Information about birds and migration is artfully interspersed throughout. The uniqueness of the land and animals is overlaid with insights about climate change, and it’s impact.

Caroline’s book is the antidote to the seemingly cool, unemotional adventure teams that appear to work solely from complex datasets. And mostly male. She is fully human, full of life’s most pressing questions, full of fears and doubts, and also gumption and bravery. She brings readers intimately into the complex experience of a 4,000 mile human powered trek. We learn that just like the choices we make in life, sometimes there isn’t a well established path forward, and the answer is found in weighing options, wrestling with the odds, and searching one’s own preferences.

Lightening Flowers by Katherine E. Standefer

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On one hand, this is an engaging memoir/work of nonfiction. Threaded throughout the book is an underlying love affair with in Jackson, WY. Since I’ve spent so much time in that area over the past eight years, I reveled in the familiar landscapes and people.

However, this book does something more important, in that it offers a deep and scathing and entirely human critique of the healthcare crisis in the US. Standefer’s life-altering medical condition is traumatic enough. However, the lack of access to the healthcare she so desperately needs adds a new layer of trauma, perhaps even worse than the medical condition itself, which required months of phone calls, arguments, moving to new states, establishing residencies, and various other loopholes that were only moderately effective, but disorienting and life altering.

Even with “good insurance,” I spent nearly a year arguing over about $20k in medical bills, after my first birth. I ended up paying cash for about half of that bill. However, what should be memories of a beautiful first year as a mother are somewhat marred by the horrible healthcare system we have in this country and the hours I wasted on the phone fighting for payment.

Now, several years later, I get shaky and cold every time I have to deal with a health insurance company. Before a procedure, doctors will tell you to check with your insurance. Insurance will (usually) give you correct information, but always with the caveat that it not a guarantee of payment. So, what good is it anyway?

Standefer tells an engaging story, but there is also an important social message conveyed through the story. This is the kind of writing that can create social change, and we need more of it.

This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett

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What can I say? I thought this was a novel going in, so immediately it defied expectations. This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage is a book of *essays* by Ann Patchett. Before reading this book, my knowledge of Patchett was only vaguely that she’s a well-known female author. (I’m putting “female” in there for political reasons.)

These essays are good and follow the style of, some of the women I’ve read lately: Anne Lamott, Jane Smiley, Nora Ephron, etc. There’s an easiness and confidence in their voice and tone and especially in Patchett’s. Lamott perhaps is more questioning. Smiley a bit more interested in story, and so forth, but these women all seem very much a part of second wave feminism, confidently taking up spaces and stories.

I don’t fully relate to this confident and in control tone, but sometimes I do. These stories are worth reading. The writing is solid. Patchett marks an important time for female writers and perfectly captures a moment (okay, many decades) of women gaining and stage and gathering their voices.

It’s a great title too, am I right?

My Body by Emily Ratajkowski

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My Body by Emily Ratajkowski is a unique book–part expose on the seedy world of modeling, fashion, Hollywood, and fame, and part memoir, with deep personal introspection. In the book, Ratajkowski, whom I was vaguely aware of as a model, but now a fan and follower on Instagram, shares the story of her rise to fame, known for her perfect body. But, she’s also critic of the abuse she suffers at the hands of both the industry and the larger culture. She’s a critic of herself too, acknowledging stories when she was too naive, too confused, too scared, or too complacent to do better. It’s a complicated book that sends readers on a trajectory of introspection about women’s bodies, while also offering a look into an elite (and also surprisingly not glamorous in so many ways) world that few get to experience. I hope she’ll write more, especially about motherhood. This book is worth the read!

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal by Jeanette Winterson

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What can I say about Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal by Jeanette Winterson? She has an incredible life story to draw from and she does so in writing that understands all of the conventions of good writing. She writes about the horrors and abuse that kids face with little to no place to go to escape and how severely this is amplified for queer kids, and I think she started telling this story before many narratives like this existed. That’s important.

In many ways this book felt like the same book she’s written before. This one is about her mother “Mrs. Winterson,” and about herself. I found myself wanting it to be more about her biological mother, whom she journey’s to find in this book. However, I suppose it makes sense that it’s more about her adoptive mother, about whom she’s spent a lifetime thinking, and much less time processing a biological mother.

It’s a book worth reading. Just like the title, the book is shocking, profound, makes no sense, and is kind of funny.

All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire by Rebecca Woolf

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First, here are my unsolicited blurbs for this book:
“Please option this for a film asap.”
“Woolf is a modern day Nora Ephron.” (Possibly influenced by the fact that I just finished Heartburn, but still!)
“This book is the true LA Story.”

After following her work online for years (as one of the thousands of people whose fingers hold her up in this cosmic game of light as a feather, stiff as a board), I have been eagerly awaiting my chance to read All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire by Rebecca Woolf.

The first half+ of this book is a gripping narrative. Later, the book becomes less plot driven and slows, and I think that’s because the “after” is not/could not be a linear trajectory.

Woolf wrestles with what it means to be a feminist, or to become a feminist, and puts a magnifying glass to some of the common dynamics of life, relationships, particularly heterosexual relationships that are, to say the least, problematic. I was with her for these points because I also wrestle with many of the same questions. I differ though. Unlike Woolf, I was less tied down in my early adult life, and more so now, even though still not very “tied down” by comparison, and that is by design. I had my children later, but a decade ago, I was also reading about her life online. To be reading this book now, as I have little ones of my own feels very full circle, which she would enjoy.

Here are some lines I loved or identified with and/or that gave me pause:

First, as a fan of her writing, I loved seeing her include her numbered lists with numbers that get longer and insaner each time.

“I will not shrink myself nor prioritize people’s pleasure over my own.” Simple, true. It can be hard to recognize when it’s happening.

“Then the 2016 election happened.” This changed me forever too, and I am still not over it.

“WHAT IF IT DID NOT TURN OUT TO BE CHILL?” Just, lol, yes, this is what it is like to be a parent, mother, woman in life.

“I soon realize that it’s a lot faster for me to pack four lunches on my own.” This is just simply true and a lot of people don’t know it.

“My daughters. They are only mine now.”

“The bravest women I know are not widows. They are divorced.”

“And there is nothing I can do but let it go and drive him home. This is the moment I became a single mother.”