Heartland by Sarah Smarsh

I can’t be objective about this book. It’s a memoir by someone born unwanted to an unwed teenage mother, who grew up in & around Wichita.  I was born to an unwed teenage mother, and I spent a year or so in my late teens with the weirdest determination to move with my boyfriend from Staten Island to Wichita.  Hence this book was like a weird mash-up of the kind of life I could have had, poor and disadvantaged, had I not been relinquished; and the life I briefly but badly wanted to have, canning vegetables in a farmhouse in Kansas.

So, that said, let’s try to be objective. It may seem at first blush that we have yet another GLASS CASTLE on our hands – look at my crazy childhood!  Marvel at my wherewithal as I escape it!  But this is one “growing up poor” memoir that is definitely different.  Smarsh addresses the whole thing to “you” – “you” is the baby she never had; the unwanted, unwed pregnancy that would have sealed her fate, like that of her mother and grandmother before her, had she not made it her teenage life’s goal to graduate with a diploma in hand and no baby inside of her.

Furthermore, Smarsh doesn’t play her childhood for shock value. All of the main characters in her life are viewed with compassion.  In fact, the book is more like HILLBILLY ELEGY than GLASS CASTLE; but HILLBILLY wasn’t political at all compared to this.  Smarsh puts no blame whatsoever on any of her relatives for their actions; she blames everything on poverty, and poverty she blames on our flawed American system.

She has no policy prescriptions, and it’s not clear what she would advocate to fix things. Her relatives eschew handouts and help, and wouldn’t accept increased (or any) welfare payments if they were offered, so increasing traditional poverty relief programs won’t help.  What Smarsh seems to want is an admission – from somewhere, somehow – that the American Dream is a hoax.  Working hard DOESN’T help.  And then, I guess, we take it from there?

I can see whence she gets this – by all accounts, her folks DID work hard, and DO work hard. I lost track of the number of truck stops opened by the females and jobs held down by her Dad.  And I’m not seeing incapacitating addiction, other than by Dad’s new wife, or too many other horrendous life decisions; apart from too much husband-hopping and, of course, the unwanted pregnancies, these being where Smarsh lays the blame from Day 1, being one of them herself.  Her family is Catholic, so I guess that’s why contraception is not mentioned even one time throughout the entire book that I can remember.  (Smarsh stays unfertilized by choosing a boyfriend with no “physical desire” for her – she drops this strange fact at the end of the book, never having mentioned a boyfriend before, which was bizarre.)  It is odd to me how Catholics can apparently take the no-contraception rule so incredibly seriously, but not pay any respect to certain other rules, such as, oh, say, the one about marriage vows.

As a writer, Smarsh occasionally gets repetitive, as well as coming off as whiny. A big plot point is her mother’s ambivalence toward her.  She gives us very few actual examples, none of which is earth-shattering; though maybe I’m just inured to such things by the whole GLASS CASTLE genre.  The narrative also does not seem directly chronological, and gets confusing.  Apart from the names of her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, names of other relatives could get hard to keep straight, especially due to the overlapping ages of the generations due to the unplanned timing of pregnancies; but Smarsh does drop reminders reasonably often (“my young aunt”, etc.).

I wanted to return to this story again and again… maybe, in the end, mostly due to my personal reasons. I’m so happy I discovered it.

 

Taste What You’re Missing by Barb Stuckey

This was fun.  It is full of little “science experiments,” however, that might interest your eighth grader, but just get annoying to page through.  They are along the lines of, “Puree different foods and add food coloring to make them all the same color, and put them in unlabeled jars.  Hold your nose and taste them. Can you tell the difference?”  Not very profound.

The takeaway: Slow down for Pete’s sake!  Eat every bite with rapt attention.  She’s a food lover.  Her perspective is an interesting one, too: she isn’t a chef or scientist, but works in the food industry, making food taste better.  Yup, adding aromas and artificial flavors – she doesn’t go into what distinguishes ‘natural’ from ‘artificial’ flavors, unfortunately.

So, bottom line, I could have learned more.  But there were some share-worthy anecdotes along the way, and reading about food from a food lover is always the next best thing to eating food!

The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver

∗∗∗∗∗

I was absolutely mad about this modern-day, black-humored GRAPES OF WRATH.  It’s 10 or so years in the future, and the dollar implodes, leading to a nationwide economic collapse.  We follow one family’s step-by-step decline into utter destitution, in the wider setting of New York City’s descent into lawlessness.  But trust me, it was no dystopian downer; it was funny and riveting.
My five-star feelings only began to quaver after the portion set in the 2030’s ended, when we fast-forward into what I initially thought was, and then thought SHOULD have been, a brief coda, set another decade or so into the future.  The action only sagged here, in basically one scene, where the characters who were the teenagers during the collapse are now disaffected young adults unable to hold my interest.  As this portion of the book went on, I was grossly disappointed – ending with the 2030’s section was EXACTLY where it should have ended, I felt.  BUT — she did pull off a good enough ending to make the too-long coda worthwhile.  So I stick with 5 stars.

Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help

by Larissa MacFarquhar

This book was put together in a creative way; it wasn’t just philosophy and it wasn’t just case studies, it was both, but interspersed chapter-by-chapter, sometimes multiple chapters of one followed by one chapter of the other, or vice versa.

MacFarquhar is fascinated by extreme altruists, or as she likes to call them, “do-gooders.”  She interviews a wide variety of them and lets them tell their stories, sometimes directly with their own words, sometimes through her.  In between, she ponders what we owe to others vs. ourselves, and how we each answer that question differently, and what we lose – as well as gain – when we put others’ needs above our own.  “Others” in all these contexts means those who are neither ourselves NOR our family members, nor even our friends, acquaintances, or neighbors – the do-gooders chronicled here are all dedicated to helping strangers.

Personal interest: One case study involved a family that adopted 22 children, hailing from none other than my home state, in Barre, Vermont.

Enjoy her interview here with Tyler Cowen:
View at Medium.com

 

Children of the New World by Alexander Weinstein

I rarely read futuristic fiction, so when I do, I’m usually like, “OMG, THIS IS SO CREATIVE!”  But I think this was a very impressive collection of stories; only one clunker, the one about sending unlikeable kids up in rocket ships.  Every story hooked me and left me satisfied.

 

Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson

Too thinky. Too suggesty. When plot does happen, it lands like a ton of bricks. About half dozen too many tragedies.

The End of the End of the Earth by Jonathan Franzen

The book is about 50% birds, and I’m really just not that into birds, or nature or conservation writing.  So, I skimmed a couple of chapters.

 
He’s good when he is writing from a personal perspective.  I enjoyed his chapter about living in NY in the early 80s, and particularly the bookend chapters.  The first was a kind of retrospective explanation/apologia/accounting for an essay previously published, where he got pissed at the Audubon Society for trying to get people to focus on climate change instead of more immediate concrete actions that would more directly help birds; and the essay itself was reprinted.  Maybe one or two sentences could have been toned down; but I really thought it was a perfectly good essay and I’m sorry people all piled on him for writing it, calling him a “birdbrain” (har, har) and even a climate change denier (please).
The last essay really made my day, even though it WAS partly about birds; it was a recounting of a pricey expedition to Antarctica, and his sighting of an Emperor Penguin.  I even read the good bits to my husband.  It was interspersed with reminiscences of the uncle who had left him the money that made the expedition possible, which really didn’t belong; and I’m just tired of recollections of dead old relatives and pathos in general.  So this essay was an exceptional instance of wishing he’d skip the personal stuff and get back to the birds.

Eat a Little Better by Sam Kass

I didn’t realize this was basically a cookbook when I bought it for my Kindle; I thought it was just a food philosophy book by the Obamas’ personal chef. Happily, it is a recipe book but ALSO a book about food, and food policy, and cooking for the Obamas.  It made a nice sequel to the Michelle memoir.

I loved Kass’ philosophy, summed up in the subtitle: Eat a little better. Just a little better.  Marginal improvements!  One less meat dish, one more whole grain, whatever works for you; and it will add up.

And I liked his emphasis on finding ways of cooking that work for real-life families, peppered with anecdotes of what Sasha & Malia (& Barack) liked and what they turned up their noses at. (Michelle just seemed so thrilled to have someone cook for her family, she loved everything.)  However, that particular emphasis seemed to wane as the book went on.  We started out with a philosophy of ease and simplicity and lots of great, simple ideas for cooking vegetables; and ended with soaking beans and sprouting lentils and a recipe for “Couscous with Olives, Piquillo Peppers, and Pine Nuts.”  A real crowd-pleaser for the pre-teen set, I’m sure.

Sam Kass wasn’t just the Obama cook. A chef trained in Europe, he was also President Obama’s senior advisor for nutrition policy and Mrs. Obama’s “Let’s Move!” executive director.  I liked hearing about his experiences trying to write policy, and his digs (har har) at the potato lobby.  I liked hearing everything he had to say.  Great read.

Educated: a Memoir by Tara Westover

Did we really need another GLASS CASTLE so soon?
It kept me reading – you can’t help but root for her.  But it got so repetitive.  How many times can we mentally scream, “NO, TARA, NO!”  No, do NOT go get another ice cream with the guy who broke your toe and habitually shoves your head in the toilet!  This will not end well!  How many times can we think, “OK, now she’s starting to get it, finally!” and then read “So I went home for Christmas.”  You WHAT?!  “STOP GOING HOME FOR CHRISTMAS, TARA!!”

Best takeway came on the penultimate page: “Guilt is never about THEM.  Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness.”