Clarissa Dickson’s Wright’s memoir ‘Spilling the Beans’

What do you do on summer vacation?  Beach Read!

I’m just finishing up Clarissa Dickson Wright’s memoir Spilling the Beans.  You know Clarissa, right?  She’s one half of the dynamic duo, along with Jennifer Patterson, of the television cooking show Two Fat Ladies. God, I love that show.

Part of the charm of the show is their outspokenness.  I’m sure people watched just to see what politically incorrect things Clarissa particularly but Jennifer too would say.  They had strong opinions and weren’t afraid to say them.

Clarissa’s memoir is similarly forthright.  Having been raised with an alcoholic and violent father who made everyone’s life a living hell, Clarissa is wedded to the truth ~ much like I am.  Not that I was physically abused at all, but I became painfully aware of the huge gap between what everyone agreed was the truth and what was my truth.  Why did these things not match?  I think that’s why I write realism ~ because what I’m trying to do is tell the truth as I see it.  Representing things with the fantastical is wonderful in its own right, but not what interests me.

But the problem comes when Clarissa’s declarations paint with such a broad brush.  “All alcoholics are this.” She simplifies things a bit too much for my taste on things that I know something about.  If only the world were that simple.  But at the same time, some of these pronouncements have great truth in them and also are very funny and wise.  But it’s hard to put your finger on exactly why they feel offensive at times.  I guess because they reduce people.  It feel very British colonial, which would make sense.  

Yet she's wonderfully understanding and nuanced about her father Arthur, who was such a lost soul and horrible family man yet great doctor. 

Clarissa is a good writer and has such a wonderfully wicked sense of humor.  She always goes for the salacious sex details, and I think a lot of the details she tells are rumors and gossip.  Which makes this memoir a wonderful tell-all, no matter how true it is. She’s not afraid to name drop.  It’s wonder she didn’t get sued. (Maybe she did.)

She goes into great detail about her alcoholism and all the horrible things she did and takes responsibility for it all.  She is genuinely warm and generous and wonderful.  And since I’m an Anglophile I love it, even as I’m hating myself for loving it because in a lot of ways it’s a gossip-rag.  It’s written for a British audience and so I don’t know a lot of the names of people, and she takes for granted that her audience knows, but really you don’t need to know to get the gist of things.

Did you know that Jennifer with Clarissa really did do a 180 on the bike in the Two Fat Ladies? Apparently, Jennifer planned to do it and didn’t tell the producer but told the cameraman to stay on them.  I’m not sure Clarissa knew ahead of time. Later, Jennifer offhandedly said that they would have flipped the bike had it been on gravel.  

Another thing that shocks me is that Clarissa was 48 when the first episodes were shot.  I’m 46.  That feels really weird.

And I’m reminded of the power of story.  A reader makes such a connection with the protagonist of a book that you forgive them everything, even if they are horrid.  When Clarissa was in the depths of her alcoholism, she was pretty horrid to everyone.  And the entitlement that comes with money is hard to put your mind around.  As someone who came from poor background, I find it hard to swallow the amount of pure selfish greed and the waste of a life in the middle there.

But I love her, you know?  She’s so charming and Brit Ish. I hope she’s happy now and with her mom (although as a realist I don’t subscribe to these notions). Bless you, Clarissa.

‘The Days of Abandonment,’ by Elena Ferrante

I just finished an amazing novel ~ The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante, translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein.  It’s a domestic psychological thriller much like movie Unfaithful, but told from a jilted wife’s point of view.

I have to say, Elena’s prose is so amazing.  She’s so clear and nuanced and fabulous about the inner life of this woman, Olga.  And it’s so deceptive ~ at the beginning you’re nodding your head, going, “Yeah, I identify with this woman.  She’s level-headed and reasonable, and I would hope I would act the same way,” until she’s not and you’re not.  You’re saying, “What a crazy bitch ~ justified, but crazy!”  An unreliable narrator. (Did she put the glass in the pasta on purpose?! We’ll never know.) And then you’re on pins and needles! Is that horrible thing that Elena so deftly foreshadows going to happen? Oh my God, I hope not!

And so, some glorious excerpts from the novel.

Be forewarned.  There is a lot of sex in this book, and it’s here in the last excerpt below.

A great paragraph about women and writing (Mario is the cheating husband, and Otto is the dog):

I saw the cover again in every detail. My French teacher had assigned it when I had told her too impetuously, with ingenious passion, that I wanted to be a writer.  It was 1978, more than twenty years earlier.  “Read this,” she had said to me, and diligently I had read it.  But when I gave her back the volume, I made an arrogant statement: these women are stupid.  Cultured women, in comfortable circumstances, they broke like knick-knacks in the hands of their straying men.  They seemed to me sentimental fools: I wanted to be different, I wanted to write stories about women with resources, women of invincible words, not a manual for the abandoned wife with her lost love at the top of her thoughts.  I was young, I had pretensions.  I didn’t like the impenetrable page, like a lowered blind.  I liked light, air between the slats.  I wanted to write stories full of breezes, of filtered rays where dust motes danced.  And then I loved the writers who made you look through every line, to gaze downward and feel the vertigo of the depths, the blackness of inferno.  I said it breathlessly, all in one gulp, which was something I never did, and my teacher smiled ironically, a little bitterly.  She, too, must have lost someone, something.  And now, more than twenty years later, the same thing was happening to me.  I was losing Mario, perhaps I had already lost him.  I walked tensely behind Otto’s impatience, I felt the damp breath of the river, the cold of the asphalt through the soles of my shoes.

And you know how spring is so often shown as hope, a new beginning?  Well, I love this characterization.  So economically and ingeniously shows her state of mind (Ilaria and Gianni are the kids):

Never, that is, would he have abandoned us if he had known about our condition.  The spring itself, which by now was advanced and perhaps to him, wherever he was, seemed a glorious season, for us was only a backdrop for anxiety and exhaustion.  Day and night the park seemed to be pushing itself toward our house, as if with branches and leaves it wanted to devour it.  Pollen invaded the building, making Otto wild with energy.  Ilaria’s eyelids were swollen, Gianni had a rash around his nostrils and behind his ears. 

Finally, about love.  Maybe we fool ourselves.  Maybe it’s nothing more than sex, she says. 

BE FOREWARNED:  STRONG LANGUAGE.

Everything is so random.  As a girl, I had fallen in love with Mario, but I could have fallen in love with anyone: a body to which we end up attributing who knows what meanings. A long passage of life together, and you think he’s the only man you can be happy with, you credit him with countless critical virtues, and instead he’s just a reed that emits sounds of falsehood, you don’t know who he really is, he doesn’t know himself.  We are occasions.  We consummate life and lose it because in some long-ago time someone, in the desire to unload his cock inside us, was nice, chose us among women.  We take for some sort of kindness addressed to us alone the banal desire for sex.  We love his desire to fuck, we are so dazzled by it we think it’s the desire to fuck only us, us alone.  Oh yes, he who is so special and who has recognized us as special.  We give it a name, that desire of the cock, we personalize it, we call it my love.  To hell with all that, that dazzlement, that unfounded titillation.  Once he fucked me, now he fucks someone else, what claim do I have?  Time passes, one goes, another arrives.  I was about to swallow some pills, I wanted to sleep lying in the darkest depths of myself.

Wow.

Intrusions, by Ursula Hegi

Imagine a novel with two parallel storylines.

 The first storyline is an insightful literary tale in third person about a young woman, Megan, trying to figure out how to be a wife and a mother. It follows her from the death of her parents as a kid to her being raised by her aunt and uncle, their divorce due to the uncle’s infidelity, and her finding her own husband and having a child. The story is wonderfully nuanced and non-cliché, with the woman experiencing highs and lows in unexpected ways.

The second storyline is in first person and about a woman who’s a writer working on her first novel. We don’t get nearly as much background information about this woman, and she directly addresses the reader. As she’s trying to write, she gets all these interruptions ~ intrusions ~ into her writing time from her young kids and from life. We all know how it is to try to write a novel ~ it takes a long time and the world wants you to do what it wants you to do. In fact, it’d just as soon you not write at all. As it turns out, this is the woman who is writing the story of Megan above, and she talks a lot about her process as she tries to work out Megan’s story. She gives us interesting background about minor characters and all the other things you try to work out as a writer of a novel.

But it gets even more interesting. The characters start talking to the writer, arguing with her about why she made certain choices and left out huge chunks of their lives. It’s not just Megan who talks with the writer (named Ursula, by the way) but also Megan’s husband Nick. They say they the characters have been talking amongst themselves.

I’m only about halfway done, but as a writer of novels I am fascinated by this book ~ Intrusions, by Ursula Hegi. Don’t you love finding a point of view of someone who is way into what you’re obsessed by, whether it’s writing or engineering or tying flies? You love to hear the gory details of the work, how they used an egg hook instead of a nymph bend and they added a bit of Hungarian partridge feather in with the snowshoe hair.

And this type of metafiction is interesting in its own right. We live in an age of meta where we question everything ~ from the ironies of convention to the way we tie our shoes. Putting this questing into our work is a productive technique that can yield fascinating outcomes, but it also has to be balanced with convention so that the reader isn’t left wondering what the heck is going on ~ or worse, bored to tears.

I’m not drawn to metafiction or experimental fiction generally, but there are some fascinating experiments out there. Intrusions makes me think of Julian Barnes’s Talking It Over, where the characters break the third wall and address the reader directly. Or the movie Stranger Than Fiction, where the writer played by the wonderful Emma Thompson is writing a character played by Will Ferrell, and she’s the type of writer who always kills off her characters ~ will she kill him off? Or the movie Adaptation in which a screenwriter must adapt New Yorker writer Susan Orlean’s work as a film, and there is this wonderful shift when you realize that the screenwriter gave in and turned it into genre. (Any screenplay by Charlie Kaufman is weird and wonderful and meta.)

Have you read or watched any of this wonderful meta self-aware narrative? I would love to hear about it!



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Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh

One of my favorite books as a kid was Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh. I reread it as an adult and loved it just as much, if not more.  I didn't think of myself as an incipient writer as a child, but now that I look back on it, was that yet another reason I loved Harriet?

HARRIET WAS TRYING to explain to Sport how to play Town.“See, first you make up the name of the town. Then you write down the names of all the people who live in it. You can’t have too many or it gets too hard. I usually have twenty-five.”
“Ummmm.” Sport was tossing a football in the air. They were in the courtyard of Harriet’s house on East Eighty seventh Street in Manhattan.

“Then when you know who lives there, you make up what they do. For instance, Mr Charles Hanley runs the filling station on the corner.” Harriet spoke thoughtfully as she squatted next to the big tree, bending so low over her notebook that her long straight hair touched the edges.

“Don’tcha wanta play football?” Sport asked.

“Now, listen, Sport, you never did this and it’s fun. Now over here next to this curve in the mountain we’ll put the filling station. So if anything happens there, you remember where it is.”

Sport tucked the football under his arm and walked over to her. “That’s nothing but an old tree root.Whaddya mean, a mountain?”

“That’s a mountain. From now on that’s a mountain. Got it?” Harriet looked up into his face.

Sport moved back a pace. “Looks like an old tree root,” he muttered.

Harriet pushed her hair back and looked at him seriously. “Sport, what are you going to be when you grow up?”

“You know what. You know I’m going to be a ball player.”

“Well, I’m going to be a writer. And when I say that’s a mountain, that’s a mountain.” Satisfied, she turned back to her town.

Sport put the football gently on the ground and knelt beside her, looking over her shoulder at the notebook in which she scribbled furiously.

“Now, as soon as you’ve got all the men’s names down, and their wives’ names and their children’s names, then you figure out all their professions. You’ve got to have a doctor, a lawyer—”

“And an Indian chief,” Sport interrupted.

“No. Someone who works in television.”

“What makes you think they have television?”

“I say they do. And, anyway, my father has to be in it, doesn’t he?”

“Well, then put mine in too. Put a writer in it.”

“OK, we can make Mr Jonathan Fishbein a writer.”

“And let him have a son like me who cooks for him.”

Sport rocked back and forth on his heels, chanting in singsong,“And let him be eleven years old like me, and let him have a mother who went away and has all the money, and let him grow up to be a ball player.”

“Nooo,” Harriet said in disgust. “Then you’re not making it up. Don’t you understand?”

Sport paused.“No,” he said.

“Just listen, Sport. See, now that we have all this written down, I’ll show you where the fun is.” Harriet got very businesslike. She stood up, then got on her knees in the soft September mud so she could lean over the little valley made between the two big roots of the tree. She referred to her notebook every now and then, but for the most part she stared intently at the mossy lowlands which made her town.“Now, one night, late at night, Mr Charles Hanley is in his filling station. He is just about to turn out the lights and go home because it is nine o’clock and time for him to get ready for bed.”

“But he’s a grown-up!” Sport looked intently at the spot occupied by the gas station.

“In this town everybody goes to bed at nine-thirty,” Harriet said definitely.

“Oh” – Sport rocked a little on his heels – “my father goes to bed at nine in the morning. Sometimes I meet him getting up.”

“And also, Dr Jones is delivering a baby to Mrs Harrison right over here in the hospital. Here is the hospital, the Carterville General Hospital.” She pointed to the other side of town. Sport looked at the left root.

“What is Mr Fishbein, the writer, doing?”

Harriet pointed to the centre of town. “He is in the town bar, which is right here.” Harriet looked down at the town as though hypnotised. “Here’s what happens. Now, this night, as Mr Hanley is just about to close up, a long, big old black car drives up and in it there are all these men with guns. They drive in real fast and Mr Hanley gets scared. They jump out of the car and run over and rob Mr Hanley, who is petrified. They steal all the money in the gas station, then they fill up with gas free and then they zoom off in the night. Mr Hanley is all bound and gagged on the floor.”

Sport’s mouth hung open. “Then what?”

“At this same minute Mrs Harrison’s baby is born and Dr Jones says, ‘You have a fine baby girl, Mrs Harrison, a fine baby girl, ho, ho, ho.’”

“Make it a boy.”

“No, it’s a girl. She already has a boy.”

“What does the baby look like?”

“She’s ugly. Now, also at this very minute, on the other side of town, over here past the gas station, almost to the mountain, the robbers have stopped at a farmhouse which belongs to Ole Farmer Dodge. They go in and find him eating oatmeal because he doesn’t have any teeth. They throw the oatmeal on the floor and demand some other food. He doesn’t have anything but oatmeal, so they beat him up. Then they settle down to spend the night. Now, at this very minute, the police chief of Carterville, who is called Chief Herbert, takes a stroll down the main street. He senses something is not right and he wonders what it is…”

“Harriet. Get up out of that mud.” A harsh voice rang out from the third floor of the brownstone behind them.

Harriet looked up. There was a hint of anxiety in her face.“Oh, Ole Golly, I’m not in the mud.”

The face of the nurse looking out of the window was not the best-looking face in the world, but for all its frowning, its sharp, dark lines, there was kindness there.

“Harriet M.Welsch, you are to rise to your feet.”

Harriet rose without hesitation. “But, listen, we’ll have to play Town standing up,” she said plaintively. “That’s the best way” came back sharply, and the head disappeared.

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Emotional Dishonesty, or Augusten Burrough’s This is How

I just started reading Augusten Burrough’s new book This is How.  It is subtitled Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.   I really like Augusten and his work and gobbled up Running with Scissors and Dry as soon as I could. 

A little background.  If you know me, you know I’m one of those cheerful optimistic people.  I always have a smile for everyone, and I don’t like imposing my bad mood on anybody else.

So then I read the first chapter of this book, entitled “How to Ride an Elevator.”  It tells a story about how Augusten was in a really bad patch in his life.  He was feeling really rotten.  He stepped into an elevator and at another floor a woman stepped in.  She saw the down look on his face and told him to cheer up, and then stepped off at the next floor.  His reaction was anger, of course. 

Then he talks at length about how shallow and false morning affirmations are.  You know morning affirmations, right?  Standing in front of your mirror every morning telling yourself you’re smart and pretty and all that.

My first reaction to reading that ~ that he discounted morning affirmations and that he stood there with a growly look on his face ~ made me angry.  My first thought was:  How dare he impose his bad mood on other people and then have the audacity to defend it.  How dare he dis morning affirmations.  (Not that I actually do them but I agree with them in principle.)

But then I began to wonder why I got so angry.

He goes on to say that his point is this:  It’s all emotional dishonesty.  When you smile and say banal things to people when you really feel horrible, you’re being dishonest with them ~ sure ~ but more importantly you’re being dishonest with yourself, and when you do a morning affirmation, you’re lying to yourself, the one person you need to be the most truthful with, if you’re ever going to get to the bottom of all the damage that’s been done.

So I began to think about it.  Why was I so angry?  I was angry because I felt hurt.  Why did I feel hurt?  First, I always bought into the idea of morning affirmations.  One thing that has always gotten me through the worst times was my sometimes-unreasonable optimism.  If I haven’t had had that, I think I would have committed suicide. 

Second, I realized that there have been people in my life who did not try to hold back their feelings and hence those emotions became my responsibility.  I was the one who had to smooth things over and make them feel better.  They imposed their bad feelings on me, and that’s why I was angry for Augusten thinking it was perfectly okay to walk around glowering.  Not that it was right for this woman to be so forward and impose her good mood on him.

Let me just say:  I’ve always had a problem with anger.  Not anger exactly ~ the lack of anger.  When I was young, it seemed as if I did not have a self to claim.  I thought of my body as other people’s property and I spent so much time trying to figure out what others wanted me to be that it took me a very long time to figure out what I really wanted or was. I did not own my own feelings.  So, anger? Not me.  You've got to feel like you own your self and only then do you have the right to defend it.  I’ve only just recently tried to deal with anger.

So, the ironic thing is, what Augusten is saying accomplished exactly what he is trying to do.  It was the epitome of what he’s talking about.  Emotional honesty.  You have to be honest with yourself about your emotions ~ not hide under platitudes, whether they are spoken or expressed ~ in order to heal old wounds.  By being honest with myself first about the emotion and then exploring why I responded that way, I realized some things about myself.

It was not a comfortable cogitation, let me tell you, but thank you, Augusten.

Go out and buy this book, people.  I can’t wait for the rest of the ride.

The Mindful Writer, by Dinty Moore

Writers are like prospectors or trappers or pioneers.  They spend their time in the wilds of the mind panning for gold, trapping beaver, or plowing the soil in order to transmute this raw material into something useful, intellectual bounty.

As such, we’re out here in the boondocks.  Sure, our families are with us and we have day jobs, but when it comes to our driving force, our raison d’etre, we are alone in the howling wilderness.

That’s why it’s so important to have touchstones of some sort.  We need somehow to be able to commune with others of our kind.  We need inspiration and support, someone telling us that we’re not crazy and what we do is not only valuable but invaluable.

What better touchstone, then, than this lovely little book ~ The Mindful Writer: Noble Truths of the Writing Life, by the fabulous Dinty W.Moore.  I read through it in one evening and will be rereading it again and again. In it, Dinty brings together his Buddhist practice of mindfulness with the art of writing.  It fits so very well, too. 

He takes the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism and transposes them for writers.  Here they are:

• The writing life is difficult, full of disappointment and dissatisfaction.
• Much of this dissatisfaction comes from the ego, from our insistence on controlling both the process of writing and how the world reacts to what we have written.
• There is a way to lessen the disappointment and dissatisfaction and to live a more fruitful writing life.
• The way to accomplish this is to make both the practice of writing and the work itself less about ourselves. To thrive, we must be mindful of our motives and our attachment to desired outcomes.

The rest of this small but powerful book takes quotes from writers and expounds on them as they pertain to mindfulness.  It is in four parts ~ the writer’s mind, the writer’s desk, the writer’s vision, and the writer’s life. 

Such great quotes and such insightful commentary! Some of my favorites concretize writing with lovely little metaphors or similes:

“What crazies we writers are, our heads full of language like buckets of minnows standing in the moonlight on a dock.”  ~ Hayden Carruth

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” ~ Anton Chekhov

“Writing is the hardest way of earning a living with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.” ~ William Saroyan

But they’re all good, and oh I am in love with Dinty’s soft voice, with its ever-encouraging words. 

How many ways can I say it?  This is an inspirational book ~ what it lacks in size, it makes up for in metaphorical weight.

Life Lessons from Slasher Films, by Jessica Robinson

Got great news from a friend of mine yesterday: her nonfiction book on slasher films will be out this summer!  It’s called Life Lessons from Slasher Films and it began as her master’s thesis. 

Fascinating stuff.  I’m not a fan of slasher films ~ they majorly creep me out because my stress dreams consist of men chasing me with knives ~ but nonetheless this is a great read.  I know because I helped her index it. J (Funny story about that here.)

This is what Jessica (pen name Pembroke Sinclair) says about it:

The book takes an academic/scholarly look at slasher films and the importance they have in our culture, but since I don't have any "credentials," I can't actually claim it's a "scholarly" book. The writing has been altered to appeal to a more general audience, so it should be accessible to all readers. I look at seven films: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Psycho, Black Christmas, Halloween, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream, along with the remakes of every film, except for Scream (Scream 4 wasn't out yet while I was working on this). I picked these specific films because they helped define the genre.

Some of the things I examine in the book are gender, the rites of passage from teens into adults, the killer as a demonic teacher, and how the remakes have tried to make the killer sympathetic, along with some other ideas. It's the culmination of years of work, and I still can't believe someone is going to publish it.

I have to say, one of the many things I love about the book is the skillful way Jessica builds her argument.  One of the things I’ve long admired about some writers is their ability to further an argument just short of the next point, and then bam! the next section continues the argument.  In other words, they lead your mind right to the point where you’re asking the question, and then the next section answers that question but then leads you on to the next question in the next section.  So easy for the reader, so hard for the writer. 

So be on the lookout for it, especially if you like that hair-raising feeling of spooky music, a deserted house, innocent teen sitting there not knowing about the masked maniac in the closet. Oooh!

Lovely Characterization

Aaah, “the little shocks of good that crawled out from underneath the everyday.”

I’m reading Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, and in it is a fabulous characterization of NYC.  Just amazing. I love beautiful rambling characterizations, as I’ve mentioned before.

The theater began shortly after lunch.  His fellow judges and court officers and reporters and even the stenographers were already talking about it as if it were another of those things that just happened in the city.  One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days.  New York had a way of doing that.  Every now and then the city shook its soul out.  It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.

He had a theory about it.  It happened, and re-happened, because it was a city uninterested in history.  Strange things occurred precisely because there was no necessary regard for the past.  The city lived in a sort of everyday present.  It had no need to believe in itself as a London, or an Athens, or even a signifier of the New World, like a Sydney, or a Los Angeles.  No, the city couldn’t care less about where it stood.  He had seen a T-shirt once that said: NEW YORK FUCKIN’ CITY.  As if it were the only place that ever existed and the only one that ever would.

New York kept going forward precisely because it didn’t give a good goddamn about what it had left behind.  It was like the city that Lot left, and it would dissolve if it ever began looking backward over its own shoulder.  Two pillars of salt.  Long Island and New Jersey.

He had said to his wife many times that the past disappeared in the city.  It was why there weren’t many monuments around.  It wasn’t like London, where every corner had a historical figure carved out of stone, a war memorial here, a leader’s bust there.  He could only really pinpoint a dozen true statues around New York City—most of them in Central Park, along the Literary Walk, and who in the world went to Central Park these days anyway?  A man would need a phalanx of tanks just to pass Sir Walter Scott.  On other famous street corners, Broadway or Wall Street or around Gracie Square, nobody felt a need to lay claim to history.  Why bother?  You couldn’t eat a statue.  You couldn’t screw a monument.  You couldn’t wring a million dollars out of a piece of brass.

Even down here, on Centre Street, they didn’t have many public backslaps to themselves.  No Lady Justice in a blindfold.  No Supreme Thinkers with their robes wrapped around themselves.  No Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil carved into the upper granite columns of the criminal courts.

Which was one of the things that made Judge Soderberg thing that the tightrope walker was such a stroke of genius.  A monument in himself.  He had made himself into a statue, but a perfect New York one, a gard for the past.  He had gone to the World Trade Center and had strung his rope across the biggest towers in the world.  The Twin Towers.  Of all places.  So brash.  So glassy.  So forward-looking.  Sure, the Rockefellers had knocked down a few Greek revival homes and a few classic brownstones to make way for the towers—which had annoyed Claire when she read about it—but mostly it had been electronics stores and cheap auction houses where men with quick tongues had sold everything useless under the sun, carrot peelers and radio flashlights and musical snow globes.  In place of the shysters, the Port Authority had built two towering beacons high in the clouds.  The glass reflected the sky, the night, the colors: progress, beauty, capitalism.

Soderberg wasn’t one to sit around and decry what used to be.  The city was bigger than its buildings, bigger than its inhabitants too.  It had its own nuances.  It accepted whatever came its way, the crime and the violence and the little shocks of good that crawled out from underneath the everyday.

He figured that the tightrope walker must have thought it over quite a bit beforehand.  It wasn’t just and offhand walk.  He was making a statement with his body, and if he fell, well, he fell—but if he survived he would become a monument, not carved in stone or encased in brass, but one of those New York monuments that made you say: Can you believe it? With an expletive.  There would always be an expletive in a New York sentence.  Even from a judge.  Soderberg was not fond of bad language, but he knew its value at the right time.  A man on a tightrope, a hundred and ten stories in the air, can you possibly fucking believe it?

Methland, by Nick Reding

Sorry for the two supremely dark posts in a row.  I promise to lighten up in the future!

For this month’s book club, we’re reading the nonfiction book Methland: The Death and Life and an American Small Town, by Nick Reding.  It’s about the meth epidemic in small-town America.  So fascinating and so well-written.  (I’m now a huge Nick Reding fan and want to go read everything he’s ever written.) 

It’s full of well-told stories and all kinds of interesting information.  Did you know that Hitler was a meth addict, which might account for his erratic behavior and Parkinson’s-like symptoms at the end?  Did you know that meth was invented in 1898 and was proscribed by doctors for everything from weight gain to a pick-me-upper into ~ what was it? ~ the 50s or 60s?  And did you know that Tom Arnold’s sister Lori was a meth drug kingpin in the Midwest for years?

Meth’s high apparently lasts six or seven hours ~ the long shoulder, as they call it ~ as opposed to crack which only lasts about a half hour.  Apparently, the drug takes over the basic reward system in your brain, and everything that used to feel good (food, sex, etc.) no longer does and the only way to feel good is with increasing amounts of the drug.

The personal and nationwide impact of the drug is horrendous (more on this in a minute).  I was looking at the meth statistics for Wyoming, and apparently there’s reason to be optimistic. Meth use among high school students is down, the number of meth labs went from 60 to 6, and the state did a huge billboard and awareness campaign that seems to be helping.  Above is an example of a billboard (though from Montana). 

Nick tells the story of one particular long-time meth addict who accidentally lights his mother’s house on fire, runs out, but then keeps going back in.  His flesh is burning on his body, and he stands in the yard and tries to peel long strips of flesh from his arms only he can’t because his fingers are burned off.

Nick’s hypothesis is that meth is the only drug that goes hand-in-hand with small-town working-class America. 1) The drug was legal and proscribed for a long time.  2) It helps people work harder.  3) Jobs and opportunities in small-town America have recently been severely reduced, and the only way for people either to work harder or to escape the life they’ve been reduced to is to take meth.  4) It’s cheap and easy to produce in small labs.

A very well-written eye-opening book about a horrible situation.