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.

Happy Anniversary, Hubby!

My husband and I

Happy Anniversary to my wonderful hubby of 22 years! I love you so!

Yesterday, I told my nine-year-old daughter it was our 22nd anniversary today, and she said, "You two are so cute.  I didn't know parents could be cute."

'Heaven Can Wait'

The view from our back porch

We’re on vacation on Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.  We have this lovely house up on stilts, and the sea air is soft and moist and there’s a breeze and we’re all up now eating breakfast of bacon and pancakes, the smell of which drifts up the stairs into the bedroom in a quiet corner where I’m propped on the bed typing.

I could go into the long litany of challenges we faced on the trip, but I’m not going to.  For now, I’m going to be thankful for my wonderful family and the wonderful spot in which I sit.  And for the Sticky Fingers Barbeque I had last night.  And for the fact that I live in a country that I can get on a plane with a minimum of hassle and fly to paradise and hang out with loved ones.

I hope you’re having just as wonderful a week!

Thankful

(via)

I’ve been thinking this week about the many things I’m thankful for. One of them is and always has been this: I’m thankful I survived childhood.

Your childhood experience depends very much upon where you grew up and your parents, and being raised on a ranch made my childhood more dangerous than some. Sure, I wasn’t an orphan on the streets of Bombay, but there were lots of things that could have killed any one of us. And the fact that all seven of us survived ~ though there was another sister who died at birth ~ is a miracle.

What immediately leaps to mind is the time my cousins were going to take my two brothers and I repelling. We have never been a safety family. In fact, quite the opposite. You were supposed to stare in the face of danger and laugh. Or at least grit your teeth in a pleasing way. I am and always have been afraid of heights, and I spent the whole trip up there praying fervrently to get out of it. The funny thing was, our car overheated or vapor locked or something, and I did get out of it. If there was ever a moment in my life where I would have become ultra-religious, that was it.

And the two times my one brother got majorly injured. Once, he was climbing some cliffs with a cousin, and the cousin rolled a rock down on top of him that swept his feet out from under him and he fell from the cliff. And the time both brothers were playing around a dragline, and the dragline bucket fell and the one brother pushed the other brother out of the way and got buried under the dragline bucket. My father had to dig the dirt out from his face so he could breathe, and he ended up in a body cast, chest to ankle with a bar between his knees. Which my cousins would hang him from.

Breaking horses. A stick came up under the belly of a green-broke horse that I was riding and I flipped forward, riding the saddle horn, and then back off the horse’s rump. Knocked the wind out of me but I wasn’t otherwise worse for the wear. My other brother was roping on a rainy day and his horse slipped and went down and broke his leg. It was three hours to the hospital, and he gritted his teeth the whole way. Oh, and chasing cows in freak late-spring storms when you’re just in tennis shoes and light jacket and it’s so cold the horses’ breaths are freezing in mustaches on their faces.

One of my sisters had a thing with her hips where as a baby she could sit on the floor and swing her legs all the way around her body. Another kid in the area had to be in a body cast and he died from it, but since my family never goes to the doctor, apparently the condition corrected itself.

We regularly drove trucks without brakes, and there was even a jeep that only turned one way. Driving up to summer pasture was quite a feat. And you’d get stuck in mud or snow 90 miles from anywhere (think the Draggin’ S Ranch Cow Country Cartoons) and have to figure out how to get out. People would push and it’s a miracle no one was run over. I’ve been in pickups that drove into ravines or kicked by horses and lost a wheel that went bounding across the prairie. The bus took us to and from school every day, an hour each way, rain or shine, and it’s a miracle something didn’t happen there.

Childhood diseases. I had pneumonia. I even had this strange disease that gave me circular spot rashes all over my arms and body and took away the tan I’d gotten during the summer and made me look like a reverse leopard. The doctor had no idea what it was. I broke my leg on a motorcycle and burned it on the tailpipe. I broke my collarbone by falling out of the back of a truck. A cousin got nicked by a chainsaw and another cousin got his arm shot off at Thanksgiving while turkey hunting.

I could go on and on. But I won’t. You get the picture.

This year and every year, I am thankful I survived childhood.

Sun Dog

Not the actual sun dog I saw (via)

What a beautiful morning!  It's 19 below without wind chill ~ 30 below with wind chill ~ but it makes the world so stunning.  There was a sun dog along the mountains to the north of the sun this morning, which made my day, and as I walked across the parking lot into work the ice crystals hung and flitted in the air like tiny stars. The light, too, when it's this cold takes on a pink glow that can't be matched.

I'm just glad I'm not someone 150 years ago living in a tent.

Thank you!

Oh my gosh!  Thank you all so much!  Your response to the release of How to Be a Man has been phenomenal, and I'm so glad to have you along with me on this journey.  *hand to heart*, guys. YOU ROCK.

It's a Wonderful World

Yesterday at lunch, I came back to my office with a couple of slices of pizza and thought, Wouldn't it be great if there was one last soda in the fridge? and there was!  Today, driving in to work, Satchmo came on the radio.  It doesn't get any better than that.  What a wonderful world!