I recently checked out four books from the New York Public Library - a daunting amount for someone who adheres to a schedule of teaching middle school Reading and being obsessed with Project Runway and America’s Next Top Model - but I finished all of them about a week before the due date.
1. The First Part Last by Angela Johnson. I read this book, because it’s one of those books all the urban kids supposedly love to read. I think it’s great that there are books that shows teens from all demographics, but it annoys me that a lot of higher-ups at urban schools think that students can’t relate to anything other than “big cities, bigger problems,” thus they can’t attempt to read any book set anywhere else about any other kind of person. This is so limiting and offensive to our students! Okay, off soapbox now.
So the book is about teenage pregnancy, but with the baby daddy raising the baby. Nice! It is fiction. The mother dies in the end of pre-eclampsia, which I know happens, but I find of felt that Johnson’s carpal tunnel syndrome was really flaring up when she decided, “Over a hundred pages… Damn, what do I do now? I know! Kill Nia!” This move kind of reeked of those morality novels from the seventies and eighties when knocked-up girls would die horrible deaths in childbirth or contract syphilis. It’s also so different and you know, sexy to see an urban teenage boy raise an infant.
One thing I did love about the book was how the chapters alternate between Then and Now. It’s cooler than telling everything chronologically and manages not to confuse readers and the title’s called The First Part Last. Get it? Brilliant, brilliant, I say.
2. Free Gift With Purchase: My Improbable Career in Magazines and Makeup by Jean Godfrey-June. Clearly, I love the memoirs of journalists. First, Bonnie Fuller. Now Godfrey-June, the beauty editor of Lucky and formerly of Elle. This book is occasionally funny, and I liked that Godfrey-June doesn’t come across as haughty or self-important. Still, she’s a beauty editor. I wanted more tips, secrets, and juiciness.
3. But Enough About Me… A Jersey Girl’s Unlikely Adventures Among the Absurdly Famous by Jancee Dunn. This very funny memoir is by a long-time writer for Rolling Stone. Dunn talks about interview tips and anecdotes she’s accrued over time, but also includes tasty personal morsels. These two excerpts reminded me of the relationship I have with my parents:
“My father is the most genial Midwestern guy imaginable, but for him, disaster lurks around every corner - financial ruin, squandered health, pyramid schemes, airbags failing to deploy - so he tends to use fear as a parenting tool to goad his daughters into being more prepared. This inevitably involves Kissing Things Good-bye. ‘Looks like mold,’ he’ll say, standing up and brushing off his knees after inspecting the wood underneath Heather’s porch. ‘Better get that sealed up, or you can kiss this porch good-bye…’
‘Think it can’t happen to you?’
‘Then what?’
I never know whether these are rhetorical questions, or if I’m supposed to answer them. Instead, his doomsday predictions fan my eternal flame of parnoia, which is always at a low burn. I imagine myself in an airless room, covered in a body cast… The only thing I can move is my eyes, which are fastened on my home health care aide - a recent parolee, because with my dwindling finances I can only afford someone in a work-release program. He is telling me he is quitting because I haven’t paid him in weeks. ‘Don’t make me mad,’ he hollers throwing down my bedpan. ‘My girlfriend used to make me mad.’ I look on helplessly as flies gather on the pan to have lunch. Then they move to my face for an aperitif. ‘Please,’ I whisper weakly, through cracked lips. ‘Get them off my face.’ They crawl nimbly around my eyes.
‘Bitch wouldn’t shut her mouth!’ he screams, upending my bedside tray.
The flies are laying eggs in my eyes.”
***
“Exactly four days after I had moved in [to an NYC studio], my parents arrived - my mother holding a Tupperware container with a lemon cake inside, my father carrying his Stanley Jumbo Organizer Top Toolbox. Delicately, both stepped inside the door and took in the bleak surroundings: a five-hundred-square-foot studio painted the peculiarly dingy grayish white of all New York rentals. A few weak rays of light struggled through an airshaft window.
‘Welcome, welcome,’ I said. They stood, frozen. ‘Sit down,’ I said heartily, pointing to a fatigued pullout chair. There was no room in the place for any other chairs. I glanced toward the bathroom. The john was a companionable two yards away from the couch.
‘Please,’ said my mother. ‘I’d rather you didn’t sit on the toilet.’ She gingerly lowered herself onto the sofa, still holding the Tupperware on her lap, while my father inspected the windows. ‘The lock is broken,’ he said. ‘You’d better call the super.’
‘He’s never around.’
He crossed his arms. ‘Well, then, how about the owner of the building?’
‘He lives in Israel,’ I said. ‘I don’t know if he even speaks English…’
He stalked out the door. ‘I’m going to go find this super,’ he said. ‘He should be ashamed that he’s not doing his job.’
‘Dad,’ I called after him. ‘Shame is not a motivator in New York.’”
4. The Dive From Clausen’s Pier by Ann Packer. I knew this book was some kind of Lifetime movie, which is exactly why I’d never thought of reading it. However, this writing project started thumping around in my head and I knew I had to look at stories involving major life change, relationships, and loyalty. I decided on Packer’s work about a young woman who struggles to move on with her life after her fiance is paralyzed.
The book hit close to home, as my dad broke his neck in a horrible accident just like the man in the novel. My sister and I were toddlers and had no idea what was going on. My mom, who’d been a housewife, suddenly had to support a family of four. She had to make big decisions, and they were very different from, but also similar to, the ones the protagonist in The Dive from Clausen’s Pier makes.
I hated the way the book ended and I didn’t find the characters that interesting, but the book made me think. It would be a great book club read, because it covers such shady ground as when it’s okay to leave someone and how we love, and the excerpts say it so much better:
“How much do we owe the people we love? How much do we owe them? What I had discovered was that I couldn’t give up my life for Mike - that’s how I saw it at the time, that’s the choice I thought I had to make. And because I couldn’t give up everything, I also thought I couldn’t give up anything.”
***
“‘Guilty,’ I said. ‘I feel guilty. What does it say about me that I’d leave? What kind of person does it make me?’
She didn’t reply for a moment, and I felt the long span between us, the miles and miles of wire. At last she spoke. ‘The kind of person you are.’
A rush of laughter escaped me. ‘What?’
‘It makes you the kind of person you are. People have this idea that what they do changes who they are. A married man has an affair and he thinks, Now I’ve become a bad person. As if something had changed.’
‘Meaning he already was a bad person?’
‘Meaning bad isn’t the issue. Meaning you do what you do. Not without consequences for other people, of course, sometimes very grave ones. But it’s not very helpful to regard your choices as a series of right or wrong moves. They don’t define you as much as you define them.’”
***
“It seems to me that we learn each other in stages: facts first, meanings later, like explorers who stumble on to bodies of water without knowing whether they’ve encountered fog-shrouded rivers or vast oceans. We press on until we know, but as we go something is lost: the new becomes old, and then taken for granted, and then forgotten. With Kilroy I wanted both to speed my way along and also to hold on to each separate moment of revelation.
This was what had gone wrong with Mike. I’d known everything about him but had failed to preserve the pleasure of discovery. Instead, I’d absorbed him. The landscape of his past, his mind: they were my landscapes, I’d traveled them so often.”
You have a new reader! I am a teacher and I am also from Texas and will be moving to NYC with my wife in May or June of 2007.
Very cool! Where in Texas are you from? Tell me more, tell me more…