A Geography of Reading

"It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the world in which we live." -Orhan Pamuk

Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being: The Book that Wrote Itself for Me

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a tale for the time being - ruth ozekiThe idea that a book is brought to life by its reader is not new. A writer pours all of the details and plot that they can into a work and then the reader comes along and makes it their own by keying into the things that matter to them and ignoring the things that don’t. This conversation and co-creation between writer and reader feels like magic when we allow ourselves to surrender to it. Yesterday, though, Ruth Ozeki took me beyond that magic to make me feel as though A Tale for the Time Being was not only written for me, but was being written for me as I read it. I wanted to go back and re-read it immediately to see if it changed. I also wanted to have you read it immediately to see if it was a completely different book for you. It probably isn’t (not really) but it’s very much worth a read either way. I’m going to delve into where the magic came from for me. Just go buy the book if you want to avoid my spoilers.

Metafiction Toys with Reality

A Tale for the Time Being is two books in one. The first is the diary of a teenage girl living in Tokyo in the nearish past. The second is the story of a writer, Ruth, living on an island on the west coast of Canada actively avoiding writing her next book, a memoir about her mother’s death from Alzheimer’s. Now if you look up metafiction, you’ll see that the form of authorial insertion is often used as parody. Yes, if you’re talking about Kundera. It’s also used as a tool to “explore the relationship between literature and reality, life, and art.” This is more what you see with writers like Paul Auster and it often feels like a stilted lecture. Weird, but stilted.

Ozeki, on the other hand, brings a rich humanity to metafiction that allowed me to bring my whole being to the book and not just my intellect. I’ve loved two other books by Ozeki before and I can’t recall her ever using herself as a character before, but she did it brilliantly here and it was just the right effect for this book. Part of the reason it worked so well is that she engaged my emotions first. Granted, it was the emotion of annoyance as I met an angsty Japanese teenager, Nao, who I though was being glib about metaphors as she called herself a “time being.” I pushed past that (thank God) and kept reading. Ruth’s story drew me in more easily because it is, at this point in my life, easier to engage emotionally with a writer who should be writing her masterworks but isn’t always. Ruth finds Nao’s diary and some other papers washed up on a beach in Canada and begins reading.

Through the relationship of these two stories, A Tale for the Time Being effortlessly whisked me through major events like the Fukushima meltdown, 9/11, suicide, and what it was like to be a kamikaze pilot in World War II, hitting each from a deeply human angle. Because Nao is a Japanese girl who was living in America but then moved back to Japan we also get a Japanese perspective on these events and more which was incredibly interesting and humanizing. There’s also lots of Buddhism. In gentle, washing waves that stretched my thinking and made me feel at home. The metaphor that had initially seemed pat expanded gloriously and this book wrapped around me and made me think deeply.

How This Book Wrote Itself for Me

At first it was easy to gloss over the details that were personal to me. Nao’s great-grandmother, Jiko, is 104, wise and dying. This year I lost my Djiedo at 104. Like Ruth, I’m a writer living in the Pacific Northwest (and most days I’d rather be on an island). She’s married to an artist (as am I). They’re both trying to find their place in the world—worried about being too isolated, too in the mix of things, not making enough work or the right work. Ruth had some complicated health stuff with her mom, something I’m navigating this past month (and for the last 30 years). Nao is a complicated, unhappy teen-aged girl (as I once was). And Jiku, a pacifist Buddhist nun, has to navigate her son going off to become a kamikaze pilot in World War II while I’ve worried about sending my son to war ever since I first heard myself sing “Taps” after “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” in a night of misguided lullabies (that I couldn’t seem to stop repeating for as many years as he still let me sing to him).

This is the spoiler part. There is a moment when Ruth opens Nao’s diary and finds that what was once written is now blank. That was the switch that flipped for my tired, busy brain and made me think that maybe it was no coincidence that I picked up this book, the copy of A Tale for the Time Being that I was holding, this week, a terribly busy week near the end of a terribly busy eight months in which I find myself writing book reviews at 5am and all that Buddhist balance I’ve been craving isn’t something I’ve even been able to look for. As Nao sat with Jiko practicing zazen meditation, I felt myself breathe. And it was everything.

I don’t know that this book will write itself for you the way that it did for me, but I hope you do have that experience of magic someday. Either way, Ozeki’s writing is fantastic, always.

Pick up a copy of A Tale for the Time Being from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Eight Minutes in Rome with The Pope’s Left Hand by Friedrich Christian Delius

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The Popes Left Hand - DeliusPhillip Lopate once said, “The reason I read nonfiction is to follow an interesting mind.” The best nonfiction example I’ve ever seen of this travel is Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting” in which she goes out in search of a pencil and we learn everything there is to know about everything she sees along the way (along with all the associations those things bring up). This meander through an interesting mind is less common, though, in fiction, especially in book-length fiction. This is likely because it’s very hard to sustain over a long period and also because most fictional characters don’t have the breadth of knowledge that makes a mind truly interesting. The Pope’s Left Hand by Friedrich Christian Delius is a wonderful exception.

A Back-Alley Tour of the Corruption of Rome

An 88-page novella about the five to eight minutes that a German tour guide in Rome watches the Pope during a visit to a Protestant church, this book races rather than meanders through topics as varied as “the complete fabrication of the life of St. Francis of Assisi,” the Numidian stallions, and why a Roman police car might park empty in front of a fashionable store. While many of these tangents have corruption at their core, each digression is diverse and detailed enough to be fascinating in its own right (and would have led me on countless Wikipedia dives if I had been anywhere near a computer).

Reading The Pope’s Left Hand is like having a drunken dinner with a disgruntled and wildly intelligent tour guide as he goes off on a city that he’s grown weary of but can’t get off of his mind. It is both fascinating and entertaining. I learned countless things about the personalities attached to the Catholic Church, the Roman Empire, and the Nazi invasion of Rome. None are subjects I would have considered myself ignorant of, but Delius took me deeper and tied the stories together in waves that enhanced my understanding. There are remarks on tourists, a history of the relic of Jesus’s foreskin, and more than a few pokes at Augustine.

Grounding the Reader in a Non-traditional Narrative

One of the things I have hated about Roberto Bolaño is the feeling that I’m trapped next to him at a bar and he just won’t shut up. Which is to say that I’m not always down for a chatty narrator who thinks I should be interested in what he has to say. In The Pope’s Left Hand, though, Delius draws me in with his careful observation, applying an archaeologist’s eye to every detail of the few minutes the narrator is in the Pope’s presence. This gives the reader something concrete to hold as the diversions start. Most importantly, Delius returns us again and again to our close observation of that hand. It’s these loops that give the book a strong enough structure to hold the digressions together.

“There are sights more exciting than the pope in profile, and I felt little inclined to stare at one side of a milky, careworn face. I just peered over at the partially shaded hands, hanging, resting, supporting, on their fingers no sign of the ring that his subordinates and the devout are wont to kiss. Turn on your brain camera, I commanded, point the zoom at the hands.” – Friedrich Christian Delius

In the beginning it’s necessary for Delius to intersperse these observations more closely to build the groundwork for us to return to. As the book continues, though, he’s free to wander farther and farther because the moment is built and we know already what we’ll be coming back to.

My only advice when reading this book is to find a place where you can sit with it uninterrupted for a couple of hours. That’s the closest you’re likely to get to the full feeling of spending the evening with Delius’s fascinating narrator.

To tour millennia of Rome’s corruptions with Friedrich Christian Delius, pick up a copy of The Pope’s Left Hand from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

On Red Clocks by Leni Zumas and Reading the Dystopia You’re Living

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Red Clocks - Leni ZumasWhat a couple of weeks to be reading Red Clocks by Leni Zumas. The story of a world very much like ours, an America where nothing has changed except that abortion is suddenly, radically illegal turned from dystopia into reality as Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Missouri began passing deeply restrictive anti-abortion laws. Red Clocks is not just a timely book, though, it’s also a gorgeous and thoughtful read, one I’m glad to have had by my side as conservatives chop away at women’s rights.

Interweaving Women’s Stories

The best fiction is exploratory rather than didactic, and Red Clocks delivers a rich and thoughtful experience. Zumas explores a group of women and girls living life in an Oregon beach town. There’s a Biographer and a Daughter, a Wife and a Mender. There’s even a female polar explorer, a woman whose life the Biographer is researching and whose interludes beautifully shape the rest of the text. And a wide range of women’s experiences with motherhood are illustrated in the text—from infertility to motherhood to unwanted pregnancy. All of this rubs up against a world where women have lost the power to make decisions about their own bodies. I especially loved the inclusion of the Mender as a reach back to the knowledge we used to have about our bodies before that power was given over to men in white coats.

Because the town is small we get to see the characters bounce off of each other in ways that feel real and not forced. We get the see the characters as they seem themselves and as they are seen by others. This adds a depth to the limited third person Zumas uses throughout the book. As a reader I was given just enough distance from the characters to form my own thoughts and emotions—something that made me feel for each of them all the more deeply.

I loved reading this book. I loved the characters and the story. I loved the writing. On any average day, Red Clocks would have made me more proud of my womanhood. Now, though, it made me want to stand up and fight.

Women’s Rights are Human Rights

As a child of the 1980s I had no idea until very recently how much misogynist bullshit I had taken at face value and then perpetuated. Women (and only women) running around naked on screen because our bodies are art? That should totally be in every movie. Women doing a lion’s share of the child rearing and housework? Yup (though luckily my husband’s more progressive than I on that front). The fact that a woman like Anita Hill would get up and lie in front of Congress just to smear the name of a good man? We don’t have much power, but when we do it’s manipulative and we’ll do anything to take a good man down.

In that way I’m grateful to the Trump regime. Because seeing all this crap as a grownup is making me reassess everything. Being pregnant had already taught me that while life is a gift, bearing and raising a child is work and the decision should not be taken lightly. Another way to say that is that I have never been more pro-choice than since I became pregnant and had a child. Even then, though, I failed to really look in the face the things that happen to me every day. The small ways I am ignored and dismiss and ignore and dismiss myself. The big ways that I fail to celebrate the power of my body to make life. Yes, sperm is a necessary ingredient, but sperm didn’t cradle that growing creature for 40 weeks as it rearranged my organs and fed off of my body. Sperm can’t pull forth the liquid of life to then feed that child for as long as they are willing. I’m not knocking males, I live with two of the best of them. But the fact that I have to even feel like I have to write that last sentence because celebrating women is taking men down says a lot about the baggage I’m still carrying.

While I have felt this awakening in my body, it took the Trump regime for me to open up my mouth and say, “No.” My body is mine. Women bear the unique burden of pregnancy. Some women will not survive pregnancy. Some babies will not survive pregnancy or birth. I adore my son and the idea that I could ever have had to make the choice to abort a baby makes me well up with tears, but if a woman and her doctor decide a woman decides that she cannot carry a baby to term, that is her choice to make.

If you can, please help women who are being stripped of the power over their own bodies have access to abortions should they choose. Donate to the National Network of Abortion Funds. I have. And I will continue to.

Shedding Shame

As I raise a small boy, the research I read about how to make him and empowered little human who understands consent often begins with frankness about the body, with answering his questions and naming his parts. Which challenges me. I run around with what’s probably an average amount of shame about my body, hating some of the changes maternity brought, unwilling to say genitalia-related words out loud in daily conversation, but I know I need to be better for him (and for me too). So when my neighbor saw me reading Red Clocks with Lauren Harms’ wonderful illustration on the front at the bus stop and said, “Is that women’s genitalia?” I smiled big and said, “Yes, it’s a vulva.”

To read about what might happen next, pick up a copy of Red Clocks from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About

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Mother’s Day is nearly here and whether you’re of the group that posts adorable tributes to their mothers or the one that cringes (or openly shames those posters) because their reality doesn’t reflect yours (or you live somewhere in between), this might be a good year to read What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About. It was for me. While I especially loved that the experiences represented in the essays therein were diverse enough to reflect mine and also to challenge my thinking, I was also grateful to get new angles on my relationship with my mother and with myself as a mother.

“There is a gaping hole perhaps for all of us, where our mother does not match up with ‘mother’ as we believe it’s meant to mean and all it’s meant to give us.” – Lynn Steger Strong

Maybe “motherhood” is such a loaded concept because so much of who we are and who we believe ourselves to be is tied up in our relationship with the woman of whom we are borne. For too many of us that concept becomes something we have to work on for the rest of our lives as we grow from infants to children to adults and maybe even parents. It is for me. I think it has been for my mom, too. This complexity made me appreciate the ways in which the writers in this collection worked to understand both themselves and their mothers as separate beings in addition to examining the deeply close relationship between individuals.

“Our mothers are our first homes, and that’s why we’re always trying to return to them.” – Michele Filgate

Individuation is a Bitch (and So Was I)

It took a therapist to teach me the word “individuation” and it took my son to really teach me what the word means. At three and a half he’s stretching that individuality in all the ways he’s meant to. I can see how it hurts him to rip himself from me and how much he needs to know he’s welcome back. I can see how deeply he needs to have that space to become and how much he has no idea that his own actions can hurt, too. It reminds me of both the teen years to come and of my own teen years. I don’t think it’s fair to call myself a bitch (beyond even the patriarchal implications of that word) but not only was my own becoming hard on me, it was hard on my parents. I was hard on my mom. Our relationship now is not what I think either one of us wants it to be but I don’t think either one of us knows yet how to bridge the hurts.

“In their company I find myself turning mute, surly, rude. I become a different person than I know myself to be, a different person than my close ones know me to be. The burden of the unsaid turns my heart into a balled fist.” – Nayomi Munaweera

Nayomi Munaweera’s essay “Her Body / My Body” about her mother’s inability to separate her idea of herself from her daughter hit close to home for me. The conflict is neatly summed up as “she saw no difference between her body and my body,” except if you’ve been in this kind of relationship you know how much that “neat” sentence conceals. While my mom did not wipe my ass until I was 12 (thank God!), I’ve struggled at times to feel like my mom sees me as a separate being. The push-pull of individuation is so necessary and yet it can be so painful for everyone, it’s no wonder that so many relationships break down along these lines. I hope I can do better with my son. Most days I am not doing better with my son.

Mothers are Humans

News flash! The fact that our mothers are human should not be surprising and yet the idea sort of rubs. When we are infants mothers seem purpose-built to meet our needs. As we grow up we grow into meeting our own needs many of us (guilty!) never really turn around and fully look at our mothers as people too.

“I felt so much like her and I wanted to tell her how. But I have made that phone call and it has failed me too many times.” – Lynn Steger Strong

Although Leslie Jamison’s relationship with her mom is wonderfully close—so much so that she writes how her friends never want to hear about the joy of that relationship, even in closeness there are things to learn. Jamison’s essay is about connecting with her mother’s former husband so that she can be even closer to the idea of her mother. When Jamison writes “How many times has my mom picked up the phone to hear my voice cracked with tears, only letting it crack once I knew she was there?” she is realizing new depths to her mother and that even the advice her mother has to offer isn’t something she’s fully inhabited herself. Instead that “wisdom” can be “a kind of muscle memory—something she might have wanted to tell that version of herself.”

This is tricky, because if our mothers, the women who represent the pinnacle of humanity, aren’t perfect, than how can we ever hope to be?

Brandon Taylor’s essay, “All About My Mother” left me with excellent homework. The essay is filled with a gorgeous back and forth about the ways his mother loved him and the ways she hurt him. He’s clearly grappling with understanding how both could co-exist, but in the final page of the essay he writes a slew of declarative sentences to describe his mother. I’d say they’re simple but they aren’t—the ideas are complex and the sentences contradict each other, but they are free of judgment and bring us closer to seeing her as a full human. I know that I can get closer to my mother by trying to see her in the same way. Maybe I’ll discover something as remarkable as André Aciman’s observance that his deaf mother could understand his masked conversation simply by following the movement of his eyebrows.

I was once my mother’s confidante in ways that I did not want to be. In this I related to “Nothing Left Unsaid” by Julianna Baggott which gave me a new lens to view that experience through… Baggott’s own examination and growth took me from feeling victimized by TMI to seeing my mother as a woman who might not have had anyone else to talk to.

“It’s the fear that I’ve learned less from my childhood than I should have, that I am more like her than I want to be.” – Carmen Maria Machado

The Strength to Mother Ourselves

I first heard of this book during a panel at AWP entitled “Writing the Mother Wound” where a couple of these essays were read. I learned a lot from that panel, not just about writing about motherhood but also about living with my own mother wound. One of the lessons that hit home was from Vanessa Martir who said, “I may be unmothered, but I will always want my mother’s love.” I realized then that I needed to look into this experience and not run anymore from what isn’t working. Because I do love my mom and I want her to love me. I think she does, but there are still voids between the love she gives and the love I want to receive… voids I have to learn to fill myself.

“To grasp that which has hurt you, you must trust it not to hurt you when you let it inhabit you.” – Brandon Taylor

In some ways I dream of having Alexander Chee’s grown-up experience… the one where he talks to his mom about some really hard things and she helps him rewrite his narrative more fully. It’s a door that opened for me this winter when my maternal grandmother (a well of toxicity) died and I finally had a long overdue conversation with my mom. I heard some of the things I needed to hear that day, but I’m still having trouble trusting that our next conversation will build from there. And I fear that this next quote is optimistic.

“There is a difference between the fear of upsetting someone who loves you and the danger of losing them.” – Melissa Febos

Other Things I Loved in This Book

There were so many moments in these essays I related to in ways that were not about my mother. From Jamison’s description of writers as vampires to Machado’s love/fear of toddlers and how children destroy writing to Kiese Laymon’s observations that “the folks I’ve been most harmful to in this country are people I thought I loved.” The stark patterns in “Fifteen” by Bernice L. McFadden broke my heart hard and I felt deeply for the woman Dylan Landis’s mom could have been (even if only romantically so) in “16 Minetta Lane.” I recognized the woman Cathi Hanauer’s mother is in “My Mother’s (Gate) Keeper” and am still learning from the idea of living with the itch of a mosquito bite. The way Melissa Febos inhabits her mother’s lexicon in “Thesmophoria” is pure magic and Michele Filgate’s reminder that sometimes the deepest hurt is betrayal was illuminating in ways I won’t go into now. The book is rich and the experiences varied. I think readers of all kinds of backgrounds will find something in it to relate to.

What I Really Want for Mother’s Day

Since becoming a mother I haven’t been the best celebrant of Mother’s Day in regards to my own mom. I’ve wanted to soak up the time and love of my son and husband. I’ve wanted to enjoy the cupcakes and flowers and uninterrupted baths. This year I’ve asked them for a trip to the garden store and a planting-a-thon in our gorgeous back yard—my safe haven from the world. But this year I also want to talk to my mom. I don’t know what I want to say and I don’t know what I want her to say, but I do know that the cord between us is not completely cut, nor do I want it to be. So I’m going to sacrifice some of my guaranteed bliss for a shot at the bliss of mending fences. Wish me luck!

I don’t recommend you send your mom What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About for Mother’s Day, but I do recommend you send it. Start a conversation about something you’ve never said or about something you’ve never asked. Talk to her like a human you love, one who you may not have fully recognized as a separate human. I’ll bet money hearing from you is what she really wants on any given day.

Your homework is to pick up a copy or two of What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Friday Night Lights on Race, Class, and the Makings of a Hero in Texas

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When I found a copy of Friday Night Lights by H.G. Bissinger in a Little Free Library on Super Bowl weekend, I thought it was placed there to help me brush up on my football lingo before writing a big article for work. Instead, I think it was there to help me get through the following weekend—the weekend of my Djiedo‘s memorial service in Austin. It was a timely lesson, too, in the problems of racism and classism that persist in our country, but what made it just right for me right now was understanding what makes a hero in Texas (or anywhere).

Endemic Racism

We know we have a problem with racism in our country. Or at least I hope we know how much of a problem it is. It was helpful for me, though, to dig into this story of a small(ish) Texas town obsessed with football and how much they did not see (or did not want to see) how they excluded entire categories of people based on the color of their skin. Living (as a white person) in the Northwest, it has been easier for me to pretend that the civil rights era put us on the right road to setting ourselves straight. But reading about Odessa forced me to look hard at some ugly facts. It’s hard to change the views of people who are comfortable with their lives, even (especially?) if those lives are lived on the backs of others. I was gobsmacked by the fact that Odessa’s high schools were not integrated until 1982. Not only that, but the sense of white entitlement that accompanied that segregation.

This book made me look differently at my Texas experience this time around. I’ve been looking even harder at my own actions and beliefs in the past few weeks as I’ve watched the Ralph Northam controversy unfold. I’ve never worn blackface nor a klan uniform, but I know I’ve said some racist, bigoted, sexist, and downright mean things in my life. I’m actively trying to be better, but that doesn’t change the hurt I put into the world. Looking around me in Texas this trip, I’m seeing so much of what I’ve failed to see at home—the stratification of the society around me. I see the Hispanic cashiers at the CVS, the Hispanic cooks working behind white cashiers at the BBQ joint, the almost entirely white and Asian audience at my grandfather’s memorial.

When my Djiedo’s people came to the U.S., they were just hunkies—a racial slur that encompassed anyone from Eastern Europe. He worked his way up from coal miner to professor to presidential advisor, but none of that makes me entitled to better treatment or a better life just because my ethnicity blended out in a generation. I was shocked to read about the casual racism in Odessa and it was also all too familiar. It’s easy to think I’ve earned the life I have based on my merit (that’s the American ideal, right?) when really I’ve had so many advantages (and not just racial ones).

Class Matters

One of the stories I was raised with was that my Djiedo was friends with everyone—from the man who made paperclips to the man who owned the paperclip factory. In some ways I think this was true as I’ve met some of the friends he accumulated over the years. True that many of them had achieved much in life, but some of that was that age gives us time to accomplish much and I often had the feeling that Djiedo had known many of these men “when”—before they became the titans they became.

Reading about Odessa’s origins and the glorious days of oil booms and the terrible failures of busts, the fact that people were pulling down large salaries with little to no advanced education and then were flat busted when the price of oil changed reminded me how much of our identity we tie up in our achievement—and how hard we fall when that achievement is taken away. It made me think about how harder it’s getting to make a living wage, even with a college education and how, as a country, we’re drowning in student loan debt because school seemed to become the right (only) option after 2008 even as tuition skyrocketed. How this takes us all so much farther from the “pull yourselves up by your bootstraps ideal. How it makes us afraid. How in our fear we pull even farther apart as a country. How a life like my Djiedo’s is still maybe possible, but not really. And I wonder what we’ve become.

The Making of Heroes

On a hill in the middle of the Texas State Cemetery stands a granite stone as close to burnt orange as you nature allows. On that stone the names of my grandfather, grandmother, and aunt are engraved, their ashes buried beneath. It was a big deal to my Djiedo that he was able to be buried there. Having never forgotten where he came from, acclaim mattered in every bone of his body.

I couldn’t help but think of my Djiedo as Bissinger returns again and again to the image of the Permian Panthers as gladiators—boys who carry the hopes of an entire town for a few months in the fall. While being a player didn’t change their class, they were heroes on the field. Until they weren’t. Some of those boys made good after, but not based on the brutal things they did to their bodies in that stadium.

Because my Djiedo was building for the long haul, his sense of achievement only grew with time and he never had to experience that sense of bubble bursting. Instead, my family and I sat in a large hall on Saturday while deans and a university president lauded my grandfather. They talked of his energy, the way be made friends with everyone (and for life), and his propensity for throwing erasers at sleeping students. It was a surreal experience. The kind of thing Djiedo soaked up and loved, the kind of thing most of the rest of us dreaded (being trotted out for display for the achievements of others can make you feel, well, less than achieved yourself), but something I know he earned. The stories were familiar, the film, too, but appreciated, all of it. There was a lot of love in that room for my Djiedo. And reminders that my own heart could (and should) be more open. That I have been given everything and now my life is only what I make of it (in alignment with whatever values I choose).

Life is not linear. Nor is the path to success. I was reminded of that and inspired when, at my Djiedo’s graveside, my cousin did what I would never have thought to do—she opened the lid to the urn and let my curious son release a smidgen of Djiedo back into the world. Djiedo lives on in places of honor—that cemetery, the John J. McKetta School of Engineering at the University of Texas, in my heart. And his legacy is set. Now it’s my time on the field. May I do honor to the name of great man and to the life I have been given.