Winter 2006 Alumnae Quarterly Web Extra
Winter Warmers for Your Bookshelf
These nonfiction books were recommended by visiting assistant professor of English Meg Murphy for Quarterly readers’ winter reading pleasure.
• Paula, by Isabel Allende (Perennial, $13.95). Weaving together memories and dreams, Isabel Allende’s memoir presents the family legend she created by the bedside of her daughter, Paula, 28. From the book’s first sentence, Allende speaks as mother and writer, turning to language for solace after Paula’s sudden slip into a coma: “Listen, Paula, I am going to tell you a story, so that when you wake up you will not feel so lost.” What follows is a book of magical intensity. It is a testament to Allende’s talent and courage, as she harnesses the power of imagination to transform despair into beauty. An author best known for her novels, such as Eva Luna, Of Love and Shadows, and The House of Spirits, this nonfiction book has been called Allende’s finest work.
• Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, by Margaret Atwood (Anchor Books, $13). Margaret Atwood’s take on the writing life is delivered with her trademark pithy style, a mix of intelligence and humor. For any woman with artistic aspirations, or simply a desire to lay claim to her inner voice, this book is worth reading. Atwood traces the narrow-minded roles traditionally offered the female artist, such identities as “nun of the imagination” or “femme fatale” or “doomed suicide,” are treated with refreshing, clear-witted analysis. About the suicide track, Atwood asks herself as an aspiring poet in the late 1950s: “Is that where the priestess of the imagination was fated to end up—as a red puddle on the floor?” Later, as a mature writer, she tells the reader: “All writers learn from the dead.” Her book is about the movement between life and death, memory and forgetting, and the writer’s task of hunting for buried secrets: “As the best authorities have it, easy to go there, but hard to come back; and then you must write it all down on a stone. Finally, if you are lucky and if the right reader comes alone, the stone will speak. It alone will remain in the world to tell the story.”
• Five Thousand Days Like This One: An American Family History, by Jane Brox (Beacon Press, $13). Jane Brox turns the occasion of her father’s dying into a meditation on life and a search for her family story. Her writing has been praised for its compassion, honesty, and restraint, and the Kirkus Reviews described this memoir as a haunting song: “This is quite beautiful music, the sound of a family’s life that keeps ringing in a daughter’s ears.” Brox takes the reader to the farms, the orchards, the rivers, and the lighthouses of New England’s Merrimack Valley, remembering the region’s history and melding it with the story of her family’s immigration. Mary Oliver, a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and fellow New Englander, describes Brox’s book: “Memory is love and cherishing, of course; but also, it is a weighing and a giving. Jane Brox’s book is a wonderful gift to all of us.”
• Travels with Myself and Another: A Memoir, by Martha Gellhorn (Penguin, $15.95). It never ceased to annoy Martha Gellhorn, one of the best war correspondents of her time, a novelist, and a travel writer, that people often referred to her as one of Ernest Hemingway’s wives. She was, in fact, his third wife, but as writer Bill Buford notes, it was best not to mention it. As he remembers: “I brought him up the first time I went to her London flat for dinner. It was a forbidden subject. “William,’ she said, ‘I have only one response to people when they bring up his name. And that’s to show them the door.’ Gellhorn’s autobiography captures the cool glamour and wit of a woman determined to live an independent life traveling the globe, covering conflicts from the Spanish Civil War to World War II. She is not always self-revealing but, if cagey, she makes up for it with a spare and unsentimental writing style that captures the feel of a place and time. Gellhorn earned her reputation as a dame. She was a woman with chutzpah, charm, and memorably disarming one-liners. Gellhorn was still writing and still traveling up until her death in 1998 at age 89.
• Writing A Woman’s Life, by Carolyn G. Heilbrun (Ballantine Books, $12.95). This book offers a concise and fascinating look at the way the story of an accomplished woman’s life is told by other people or, often, by the woman herself. If we are the stories we tell, then Heilbrun wants readers to question the script itself—the space between the life lived and the story told. Heilbrun draws on the lives, rather than the texts, of a range of female writers: she examines the reality of Eudora Welty’s life compared with the self-styled sweet version the author preferred. She looks at the trapped and traditional fates endured by George Eliot’s female characters compared with the pioneering freedom of their creator. Heilbrun’s book was published more than fifteen years ago, but its rallying cry, its claim that women must create new scripts, create new role models, and create new destinies remains a useful challenge for writer and readers, a still-urgent look at the power of story.
• A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway (Scribner, $12.95) This is a collection of character sketches and stories from Hemingway’s starving-artist years in Paris in the 1920s. You will witness Hemingway as he flees from an argument between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas; as he reacts with comical disgust at F. Scott Fitzgerald’s inability to hold his liquor; and as he plans his days around horse racing, cafés, and writing. The beauty of Hemingway’s spare style and the detail of his observation will make you feel the clarity he felt as a young writer looking at museum “pictures” on an empty stomach or, after scrounging a few dollars, the sensual joy he felt at a café drinking a half-carafe of dry white wine followed by salty oysters. His Paris feels like a place where anything is possible and poverty is elegant, as he put it in a letter to a friend in 1950: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”
• Zelda: A Biography, by Nancy Milford (Perennial, $16). Nancy Milford’s haunting account of the life of Zelda Sayre, wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a moving account of the torment she experienced as a gifted artist, caught in the struggle between her own artistic talent and her husband’s career. Zelda, as she is depicted in many tales, including Hemingway’s nonfiction stories from the 1920s in Paris, was mercilessly derided by Fitzgerald’s friends as a fiend and a temptress. She was placed in an asylum and died in a madhouse fire. This book tells a different story, her story. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and has been translated into twelve languages. Milford’s most recent book is Oh, Savage Beauty, a biography of the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.
• The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters with Extraordinary People, by Susan Orlean (Random House, $13.95) Susan Orlean’s profile collection highlights the humor and originality in everyday life. She writes about ordinary people, and by drawing out their particularity manages to make them resonate. A suburban boy moves with witty hesitancy toward American manhood, a world he imagines as filled with unlimited pizza, candy, and babies that magically appear in his home. A young woman works as the only reporter in Millerton, New York, where no news event is too small for the local paper, or as Orlean playfully notes: “Down the road, a cow expires mysteriously. A shopkeeper in town has labor pains. The corn begins to tassel, earlier than usual.” Orlean’s profiles are fun, in-depth, and reveal the engaging style that has made her a popular staff writer for The New Yorker and led film producers to bring another of her nonfiction books, The Orchid Thief, to the screen.
• Here But Not Here: My Life With William Shawn and The New Yorker, by Lillian Ross. This memoir is the candid and, although it sounds old-fashioned to say it, shocking, account, of Ross’s decades-long affair with one of The New Yorker’s legendary editors, William Shawn. The book is valuable not as a tell-all memoir but rather as a well-written and layered, if unsatisfying, account of Ross’s life as one of the earliest of female literary journalists. Ross, who is now in her 80s, remains a tremendously talented writer for The New Yorker, and, as a young woman, she wrote stunning profiles of figures such as Ernest Hemingway and director John Huston. Truman Capote went to Ross for writing tips, but her role as an innovator in literary journalism has not been as well recognized. I doubt Ross would call this memoir, published after Shawn’s death, a justification of their secret life together. She makes no apologies. But Ross’s vivid prose reveals both her love for Shawn and her awareness of the cost of a double life, for both of them.
• Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, by William Styron (Vintage, $11) This book is a classic, a lyrical description of the depression that took hold of novelist William Styron in 1985, nearly leading him to suicide. While many well-researched books on the subject of depression exist, Styron’s talent as a novelist allows him to describe the descent into mental illness with tangible immediacy. This essay, despite its harrowing subject, is a thing of beauty because it offers a way in, a way for people to understand the mysterious experience of depression and to, perhaps, understand the courage required to conquer it. Styron compares the struggle to the ascent of the poet returning from the abyss, trudging upward and upward. He made it out, and describes the return to serenity by quoting a poet: “And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars.”
