What Fresh Hell is This?

Once again, I feel like a slacker. I can assure you that I’ve been reading steadily all spring and summer, but not many of my selections seem to apply to this poor forsaken blog. Oh, and I have a teething baby. You can blame a teething baby for just about anything: sleep deprivation, foul moods, scatterbrained behavior. So thank you, Baby Fitz, for providing the perfect alibi for where I’ve been for the last few months. The whole five folks who ever read this blog will appreciate it, I’m sure. Anyway, I’ve decided that being a new mommy is sort of like being in love for the first time. It’s all-consuming and it’s all you can think or talk about. Soon you find yourself gushing to your friends about how your kid ate sweet potatoes for the first time or stood up by himself for the first time. And then you see your childless friends’ eyes glaze over. Silence. Crickets. And then you remember that anyone who’s not a parent does not give a crap about any of these things. Just like my high school friends got bored to tears hearing about my first love (What was his name again? Oh yeah, it was that Nick guy!), my friends are so over hearing about baby stuff. And I’m sure my readers aren’t interested in baby milestones, either.

On that note, I will get back to using my brian and talking about books for a few precious minutes. By now it’s probably obvious that I gravitate towards anything to do with the 1920’s. Since the Gatsby movie came out, a bunch of historical fiction about Scott and Zelda has followed. The only one I’ve read so far is Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler. So much has been written about the Fitzgeralds, and I’ve read a great deal of it, that it’s almost hard to imagine an author having a new perspective. But this novel held my attention from start to finish. It’s been long enough since I’ve read biographies that I’m not sure how close to the truth it stays. In her acknowledgements, Fowler says she “often felt I’d been dropped into a raging argument between what I came to call Team Zelda and Team Scott” as she read through their biographies. The Team Zelda people believe Scott ruined Zelda’s life and use her as an example of how women suffered before feminism. It’s true that she never got to pursue writing, ballet or painting in earnest because Scott didn’t really want her to, but she also had mental issues. Scott’s drinking messed up their lives considerably. It’s hard to tell what Zelda would have been able to do if she’d been more stable and able to get a divorce and establish her own career. There’s no doubt that Scott “borrowed” from her letters and journals in her own writing. Some stories published under his name were written by Zelda. But would we ever have heard of Zelda if she hadn’t been married to Scott? I don’t think she was exceptional enough as a writer or a dancer that she would’ve been famous if not attached to her husband. She would have married a rich guy in Montgomery, Alabama, and would’ve been an eccentric Southern socialite if she had not married Scott.

Z is very sympathetic to Zelda and portrays her as an ever-suffering wife of an alcoholic who spends money extravagantly. Scott cheats on her and tells her not to write novels because he doesn’t want her stuff to compete with his similar material. His friendship with Hemingway causes all sorts of problems in their marriage. I don’t have a difficult time believing Hem was a d-bag who has his own agenda to topple Scott off the top of the literary ladder in the late 20’s. The author thinks he outright made up stories about the Fitzgeralds in A Moveable Feast that persist today as facts about Scott and Zelda. I’ve never thought about that, but she’s probably right. So many famous stories about them are accepted as myths, but no one really knows if they ever danced in the fountain in front of the Plaza. These things make fun stories, but the day-to-day marriage of these two people was a hot mess. And reading their tale always starts off as fun and games, when Scott was making an astonishing amount of money from short stories and they made friends with every famous writer of the day in New York and Paris. But then it all descends into alcoholism and madness and it’s so sad. When I finished this novel I felt angry on Zelda’s behalf. Scott was broke and bitter and very ill at the end of his life and his wife died in a fire in a crappy mental hospital. Where were all of her fancy friends when she really needed them? No one cared about Scott and Zelda at the end of their lives, and it took a couple decades before Scott’s writing gained some respect as his novels were reprinted.

I find it hard to accept the author’s portrayal of Zelda as the suffering wife, though. I know it’s too simple to dismiss her as crazy the way some people did, but she was far from innocent. It takes two to tango, as they say, and she and Scott always knew how to push each other’s buttons. They both cheated on each other. They both spent too much money. They both drank too much. They could have accomplished so much more if they could have gotten themselves together. It’s a shame. But overall Z is a fun piece of historical fiction. Maybe just skip the last few chapters of depressing material?

No less depressing is the life of my beloved Dorothy Parker, but any fan of hers knows that she could always find the humor in her dilemmas. Ellen Meister decided to write a work of fiction with DP as a character. In her acknowledgements of Farewell, Dorothy Parker, she said she realized that a ton of fiction has been written about Jane Austen and other famous authors, but not one novel existed about DP. So she wrote one. Good for her. I share her taste in authors, and by her liberal references to DP’s poems, stories, and reviews, you can tell she knows her stuff. The premise of the novel is a little cheesy, and DP herself might even write a snarky review about it. A movie critic with serious social anxiety finds the ghost of DP in the guest book of the Algonquin Hotel. DP’s ghost helps the protagonist find the courage to fix all the problems in her life. She finally stands up for herself with the ghost of DP standing by drinking gin and offering witty remarks. It’s a heartwarming story in the end, and a quick read.

Light, quick reads seem to be all I can manage these days. Every attempt I make to read a Serious Classic lately has been a total fail. I started listening to the audiobook of War & Peace and got completely frustrated with the endless chapters of play-by-play on the battlefield. The chapters where characters actually have some emotional drama in their lives kept my attention for the first section. Yes, it’s just one of those books on my bucket list, but that one might actually kill me. I’ll make another attempt when I have more brain power. Ditto for the poems of Rilke, which are fascinating and bizarre. I kept reading the same page over and over and barely comprehending a word. But they are pretty. I will keep looking for a classic that my mommy brain can understand right now.

Historical Fiction Bender

Here’s my attempt to revive this blog before I drift into baby land very soon. I’ve been a bit distracted by baby showers, crib construction, and just wondering when the heck this kid will decide to show up. But in the meantime, I have devouring a lot of books. The best of the lot are historical fiction titles from Ken Follett and Jennie Fields.

The Age of Desire follows Edith Wharton through a doomed love affair in Paris. The poor woman was famous for writing about New York society and its scandals. But her own personal life lacked passion and drama. She married a dude named Teddy, who came from the right sort of family, when she was too young to realize it was a bad match. They had zero chemistry. Dear old Ted had some bipolar mental problems. Whoops.  This means that Edith didn’t discover sex until she was 46 and met a handsome cad named Fullerton in Paris. I half expected that it would end like one of her novels, where everyone is too genteel to do anything more than secretly burn with desire for someone forbidden. But she actually goes through with a messy affair that not only causes her a lot of heartache but tosses her husband off the deep end. Whoops. Meanwhile, her loyal secretary Anna is totally in love with Husband Teddy, but nothing really happens between them. It’s all very tragic and stuff. I kept wondering why Edith and Teddy didn’t just get a divorce and stop making each other miserable. But what do I know. Fields captured the tone of Wharton’s novels and created compelling characters. It was a bit of a downer, but well written.

Fall of Giants kick-starts a trilogy by Ken Follett that follows several interconnected families through the drama of the twentieth century. I’m not usually one for war stuff, but this guy knows how to keep you in suspense at all times. I’m always impressed by a male writer than can create strong, multifaceted female characters. My favorite lady in the series is the Welsh maid who gets knocked up by her rich idiot boss, but then goes on to become a suffragette in London and eventually a member of Parliament. Other plotlines follow a Russian family that sees the revolution against the czar unfold and Communism rise in the aftermath. But of course they discover that Communism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Whoops. There is a German family that gets caught up in both world wars, and Americans who work for Wilson during the first world war. All of these characters get tangled up somehow and move the story along as the war progresses. I loved it. My only complaint is that Follett’s sex scenes are a bit excessive and borderline silly. But at least they serve a purpose. Conveniently, anyone who has sex in this book ends up making a baby. Otherwise there wouldn’t be the next generation of kids to fight World War II in the next book, you see.

So Winter of the World is the second book in the series, and it just came out in September. I felt super excited to dive into this sequel, but now I am at least two-thirds of the way through it and it’s not grabbing me the same way Fall of Giants did. The next gen is fighting the Nazis and falling on hard times and wow is it depressing. We all learned in school about the atrocities the Nazis committed against Jews, gays, and the disabled during this war, but reading about it in detail is so sad. Little kids with physical and mental disabilities mysteriously disappeared and died. The local Jewish doctor wasn’t allowed to practice medicine anymore and then… Well, we all know it won’t end well. It was a welcome bit of fun to read the brief section about the Swing Kids in Berlin, as it brought back memories of the 90’s film that was so popular when I was in high school. (1993..wow…I feel old.) Of course now you just have to feel deep admiration to anyone who had the courage to stand up to the Nazis in ways big or small. But unfortunately the youngsters in this book are not as compelling as their parents were in Book One. They just aren’t as well-developed and seem to exist just to introduce scenes about Pearl Harbor or whatever historical event Follett is writing about. The book is still worth reading, but I’m hoping the last installment in the trilogy spark with as much energy as the first.

And on an unrelated note, I plowed through Carole Radziwill’s What Remains in about two days. Now this is a book that first caught my eye when I was a fledgling library associate working in the literature department in Chicago’s main downtown library. A weepy memoir that involved the Kennedys, it was a best seller when it was published in 2005. I always meant to read it, but I kept putting it off in favor of more cheerful choices. But this fall Carole showed up as a new cast member on my favorite guilty pleasure, The Real Housewives of New York City. Now, it still seems odd that Carole, an award-winning journalist that has covered wars and major murder trials, would choose to go on a reality show. My ob/gyn declared that he found it “tacky” that the widow of Polish Prince Anthony Radziwill and BFF of JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette would subject herself to Housewifedom. Shouldn’t she be hanging out with the equivalent of today’s Edith Wharton crowd in Manhattan? But whatever…she wrote a moving, sobfest of a memoir about her husband’s struggle with cancer and her famous friends’ death in a plane crash. It’s a heartbreaker, but I highly recommend it. Carole went through emotional hell in the late 90s, so if she wants to date a member of Aerosmith’s touring band and fight with Ramona and Sonja on RHONY in 2012, it’s fine by me. She’s an intelligent, hip lady and a hell of a writer. I want to grow up to be just like her.

What I Read on My Mental Vacation

Now that the holiday weekend is over, I should explain the mental vacation I’ve taken the past few weeks. After steadily reading some heavy classics and baby prep books all summer, I needed a break. I picked up Jennifer Weiner’s Next Best Thing. In doing so, I’ve proven that writers can successfully promote themselves on Twitter. I’d always heard that Weiner wrote intelligent but fun stories for women, brainy chick-lit if you will. But she really hooked me by tweeting hilarious comments about the Bachelor and the Bachelorette this year. How many times did I think one of her quips was so funny that I had to read it aloud to my viewing companions Sis and Husband? I lost count. So I finally grabbed her newest novel. The Next Best Thing is charming and heartwarming and honest. She writes about real, imperfect women who have complex emotions and thoughts and aren’t supermodels. In this one, her main character Ruth is a TV writer who pens a sitcom about a girl and her  grandmother. Unfortunately the show gets hacked to death by the studio, turning her beloved characters into size-zero shallow stereotypes. But in the process she learns a lot and falls in love and manages to get her revenge on the Hollywood execs. Insanely likeable is how I would describe
Weiner’s writing.

I also skimmed through Mindful Birthing, which explains how moms-to-be can use meditation techniques to handle childbirth without freaking
the fuck out. I’ve been interested in meditation for the past couple of years. I’m not a religious person, but I like the concept of making time every day to take some deep breaths, calm down, and focus your mind. These techniques can be used in any situation. Theoretically you can use your breathing and meditation exercises to keep calm during labor and go with the flow of childbirth instead of feeling afraid and stressed. Now, there’s no way to avoid pain in this situation, but again, you can control your reaction to it. The only thing that bothered me about this book is the assumption that I will want to reject all forms of medication in favor of natural  childbirth. I like to keep an open mind, but I think this trend of women forgoing pain medication during childbirth is absolutely ridiculous. If there’s any time to take advantage of modern Western medicine, it’s during labor. Hello? Ladies, you don’t have to prove how tough you are. We know that women have been giving birth for millions of years
and that we’re strong enough to do it without an epidural. But….why? Why put yourself through more pain that is necessary? I don’t get it
at all. Many studies have been done to prove that no harm is done to the baby. So why are you torturing yourselves? I’m mostly trying to
mentally prep for all scenarios, like if I get to the hospital without enough time to do an epidural. Anything can happen, and I will go with the flow. But I want the drugs. Sorry. I believe in combining the best of old world wisdom with modern medicine, if that makes any sense. So please don’t write comments about how drugs make babies crazy and the only proper way to give birth is sitting in a hut in the woods in a bathtub with a doola and a life coach holding your hands instead of a nurse or doctor. I’m just not that kind of hippie girl, okay? I know there are pros and cons to all the available options. But give me my nice new hospital in downtown Chicago and all the painkillers it offers, thanks much.

That was a long detour, sorry. Back to books. I’m also listening to Rules of Civility as an audiobook, and I highly recommend it. I’m a sucker for good historical fiction, and this one is set in 1938 in Manhattan. A girl named Kate who works as a law clerk meets a bunch of socialites and her world gets turned upside down by them. It’s a fun era to explore, post-Gatsby, pre-World War II, and the female characters seem inspired by sassy, fast talking screen idols of the era: Katherine Hepburn, Myrna Loy, Rosalind Russell.

But to dive back into classics, I’m reading some nonfiction that may or may not be considered classics. One of the problems with working in a library is that every day some shiny new book catches your eye. Soon you end up with five or six books at a   time sitting on your coffee table without the time to read them all. The current pile falls into the “I’ve always meant to read that” category.  One of my meditation books by Jon Kabbat Zinn referenced Joseph Campbell. JC wrote about mythology and how it still influences society today. He did a great PBS series with Bill Moyers that was filmed at Skywalker Ranch in the 80s. The Power of Myth is the book version of their conversations. This is geeky, fascinating stuff. Campbell was a big influence on George Lucas’ Star Wars trilogy. So I’ll write more about that in a future post.

And then, since September is back to school time, I’m putting myself through a self-taught course called Feminism After 1960. Watching Mad
Men with my husband inspired me to pick up Betty Friedan’s TheFeminine Mystique. So what’s changed for American women since Joan and Peggy’s heyday? Everything and nothing. I haven’t gotten that far but the introduction contains rants about padded bras for 8-year-old girls and over-nutured children who can’t make decisions for themselves because their moms do everything for them. Sound familiar? Watch an episode of Toddlers and Tiaras or read an article about helicopter parenting and it could be 1962 again, eh?

And then the latest issue of Elle featured articles written by Elizabeth Wurtzel and Naomi Wolf, two big names in the 90s feminist movement. I’ve always wanted to read the Beauty Myth, so that’s on its way to me. And today I checked out Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women by EW. In Elle, she talked about how the book’s cover enraged people in 1998 when it was published. In the photo, she’s topless and giving the finger. Scandalous! Well, in 2012, my husband picked up his book off the hold shelf at the library and didn’t even notice topless EW next to it. “How desensitized have we become as a society that I didn’t notice a picture of a naked woman?” Good  question. hus. I thought I could always count on you to act like a heterosexual oaf. Geez. Anyway, I remember thinking EW was super annoying in the 90s. Prozac Nation struck me as the whining of a overpriveleged, over-medicated white girl. So I guess I’m wondering what 15 years of perspective will leave me thinking about 90s riot grrrl feminism. Classics? Betty F, yes, for sure. The Beauty Myth? Quite possibly. Bitch? Hmm… probably not, but by now the 90s are considered retro. It will be interesting to compare the social atmosphere of my high school and college years to what’s going on today. I’m starting to feel old but it’s nice to have more years of experience to draw from.