ABAW: Wild by Cheryl Strayed

A Book A Week, the Unintentional Mother’s Day Edition.

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed, Alfred A. Knopf 2012 (library copy)

I don’t read much memoir and biography. I don’t read much (wo)man versus wilderness. And I don’t usually read advice columns. But I love love love Sugar. I found Dear Sugar at The Rumpus when she told one of her readers to “Write Like a Motherfucker.” Sugar delivers a kind of gritty, tender, nonjudgmental, pragmatic, tough love, interspersed with bits and pieces of her own real, raw, regular life. I love her. I love being called one of her sweet peas. 

So when Sugar’s real identity was revealed to be Cheryl Strayed, and that Strayed had a new memoir about her extraordinary hike of the Pacific Crest Trail from Southern California to the Oregon/Washington border, I didn’t hesitate. I knew I had to read it and I was not disappointed.

Suffering from the consequences of grief over the loss of her mother to cancer, Strayed set out on a solo hike across California. On the hike she hoped to have a lot of time to contemplate her feelings and her troubles and to sort out the worst tangles. Inexperienced and ill-prepared, the struggle to even stand upright under the weight of her enormous backpack (“Hunching in a remotely upright position”), among other physical challenges, left little time for direct contemplation.

Strayed’s relationship with her mother was positive, but in loss, her grief turned to self-destruction. Her family drifted apart and her marriage fell apart and she found herself seeking solace and sensation and numbness in sex and drugs. Strayed was not responsible for her mother’s death, and did everything she could to care for her mother in her final weeks. Yet Strayed’s grief was so overwhelming, so heavy, that she could not seem to move forward under its weight.  

Her hike was a primal grab for a cure. In her memoir, she speaks in an intimate voice, honest and unflinching. It is not faith or religion that guides her, but the strength she finds inside herself, and support from favorite books, memories, and strangers. I could feel her physical pain. She has created a picture that allows readers to inhabit her sore and blistered body fully. As the story progresses, readers can feel her body getting harder, her emotions shifting as she walks each difficult step.

Wild thumped a drum inside me. Tapped one tender, calloused finger against a scarred place. At the end I was left with a proud, happy, throbbing, shattered, feeling — emotionally like Strayed’s blistered toes. I could not help but contemplate my own relationship with my mother reading this book, could not help contrasting my experience with Strayed’s. My emotional scars still hurt sometimes, the feelings still get heavy. But Cheryl Strayed’s story has been cathartic for me, opening channels for grief and understanding that had waited behind latched gates. On her hike, Strayed learned that she could bear that weight, and she writes about it in the same way she dishes advice as Sugar. Patiently, honestly, with pain and joy and complexity. Plus a little happy sex and ice cream. 

A Book A Week: A Spy's Guide to Santa Fe and Albuquerque by E. B. Held

While we were on vacation in New Mexico we stumbled into a cool little indie bookstore called Bookworks. And you know I can’t stumble into a bookstore without stumbling out with books. Here’s one of them.

A Spy’s Guide to Santa Fe and Albuquerque by E. B. Held, University of New Mexico Press 2011.

Held is a former CIA operative, and his book is about important, undercover events in the Cold War that took place in New Mexico, especially Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Los Alamos. The tidbits he shares are fascinating. But the book can’t decide what it wants to be. Tourist guidebook to interesting espionage sites in New Mexico is the cover’s stated content. But I’m not sure if Held means to inspire people to visit these sites, or to give people already familiar with the places some added nuance of understanding. Background familiarity with key figures in the nuclear arms race and Cold War espionage is helpful.

Inconsistent naming of figures (sometimes by code name, sometimes by real name, but not in a comprehensible framework) is confusing. As are the occasional forward and backward jumps in time. There are, however, some golden kernels of plot in there that could be part of a very entertaining narrative. The role that a shop (which would later become a Häagen-Dazs ice cream store) on the square in Santa Fe might have played in the assassination of Trotsky is one such treasure.

Trotsky’s Häagen-Dazs! Come on! Golden, I tell you.

This book has a hyper-local, hyper-specific interest base. It could have been written in a more engaging manner without losing the tether of the publicly known facts of the cases and the reasonable inferences about the situations. My one irritation with the book is that Held sometimes devolves into ascribing motivation to the people in the stories without any obvious evidence or apparent first-hand knowledge. These moments are distracting, and they made me wish he’d thrown open the doors and gone all the way to creative non-fiction with the story. The tidbits in here could be inspirational for other writers out there, looking for historical or pseudo-historical fodder for a narrative.

A Book A Week: Carry the One by Carol Anshaw

Carry the One: A Novel by Carol Anshaw, Simon & Schuster 2012 (Received in a Twitter #fridayreads participation giveaway; all opinions are my own)

In haunting physical and emotional detail we witness the ways in which trauma and guilt lead to action, inaction, self-torture, and occasionally, beauty.

On the night of Carmen’s wedding, she packs a group of friends and family into a car and waves goodnight. A musician friend named Tom, Carmen’s new sister-in-law Maude, and Carmen’s sister Alice and her brother Nick let Nick’s girlfriend Olivia drive them back to Manhattan from the rural artists’ co-op where Carmen and Matt get married. Never mind that they’re all less than sober, that Olivia and Nick are tripping on mushrooms, and that their post-party, late-night fatigue and libido might make the back-country roads dangerous. The ten-year-old girl walking in the road that night doesn’t get much warning because the headlights on the car aren’t turned on. In the moment when the riders in the car see her face against the windshield, her life ends and theirs change forever.

We never learn much about the dead girl, Casey Redman. The audience sees her in fragments. For us, she is more symbol than character: green smocked shirt, moccasin slippers, shorts, youth cut down.

The story unfolds from the perspective of the three siblings, Carmen, Alice, and Nick, from the time of the accident in the early eighties more or less to the present day.

Carmen is an activist, working in a shelter, attending protests, protecting the disenfranchised and poor. Her earnestness and steadfastness make her the pragmatic center of the family.

Alice is an artist. She struggles through an obsessive relationship with Maude, but the dead girl haunts Alice’s painting. Casey returns in Alice’s work, aging slowly, experiencing a life she was denied in reality.

Nick, with a promising career as an astronomer, remains faithful to Olivia while she is in prison, and eventually marries her. Olivia is the one who pays for the crime with prison time. She was the driver. She takes direct responsibility for the girl’s death, but eventually makes her life right for herself. But Nick bears the weight of the pain and the guilt of the group, unable to let go of his grief and remorse. He does not see the girl as a symbol, and we eventually learn that he is the only one who has been brave enough to confront and connect with the girl’s family. The pain eats him up with addiction and self-destruction.

Like Casey, Olivia is more absent than present in the story. We do not know how she copes with the tragedy, but religion is hinted, as is sobriety and a hard center that comes to rely on a memory of the dead girl.

Their lives are both extraordinary because of their involvement in this tragedy, but also ordinary because everyone has some experience that damages them in some way. Their lives are weird, hopeless, and boring in ways divorced from the girl. But even the mundane is inseparable from her. She is like a blunt object in the center of their memories. Their choices bend around their feelings about the girl they didn’t know in life. They come together and apart and they live, never feeling that they completely deserve love or success.

The phrase ‘Carry the One’ is a mathematical pun about personal arithmetic. “Because of the accident, we’re not just separate numbers. When you add us up, you always have to carry the one.” They each carry Casey Redman for the rest of their lives. But they eventually struggle more with carrying each other than with carrying the girl. It’s easier, finally, to carry their feelings about Casey, with the certainty that she is always with them. Guilt is too easy, the story reminds us. “Much more complicated was living past the guilt, bearing the permanence, accommodating the weight of having done something terrible and completely undoable.”

I have resisted allowing a tragedy in my life to define my life and actions. That is the only way I have found to keep moving forward, and now to be able to look back and find some incomplete understanding. But I know that I have the experience of that tragedy in my history, that moment that is present in the living room of my subsequent decisions like a bulky piece of furniture. With time, it has become easier to move the moment to a corner, to move more freely around it. But that moment still limits the arrangement of the other furniture, and I still whack my shins on it from time to time. Books like Anshaw’s Carry the One remind me in smart, sensory, and richly emotional ways that accommodating the difficult memories is not easy, but I do not do it alone. 

A Book A Week: The Night Eternal (Book 3 of the Strain Trilogy) by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan

The Night Eternal (Book 3 of the Strain Trilogy) by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, William Morrow 2011 (library copy)

[My comments about The Strain and The Fall]

The Strain (the first book) scared the crap out of me. I still blame del Toro for my inability to go for a jog in the dark. That book had a very visceral sense of place and bodies and blood and corruption. I liked most of the characters and loved a couple of them (I’m looking at you Gus and Setrakian).

The Strain used vampirism as a symbol of terrorism to great (and terrifying) effect. The Fall (Book 2) eased off the gripping fear a bit. It was still scary, but our heroes knew how to fight, knew how to handle themselves, and continued to progress in a strange, new post-apocalyptic world. The focus shifted from short-term survival to long-term survival, with the small hope that something could be done to defeat the vampires. The symbolism developed as well. Nuclear catastrophe is cleverly connected to the spreading monstrosity of the vampire virus. The story still grabbed us where we trembled.

But The Night Eternal? Yes, yes, the humans conquer the bad vampires (oops, spoiler) and love conquers all (sort of). But. I don’t feel any of the things that gripped me from the first books. The story is meh, mish, mash, bleh. The Biblical symbolism, which was applied thickly in the first two books, becomes too literal in this one. Nothing scared me. I couldn’t feel the grit and emotion. The characters are static and empty, phoning in the roles designated to them by the first two books. And I no longer liked any of them. There are fewer main characters, and each of them gets less internal time in this one. The clever alternate perspectives sprinkled throughout the first two books are absent (except for our intrepid Space Station astronaut). Where was the Gus I loved? Where was the Eph who inspired us as an unlikely, smart, scientific hero rather than a self-entitled jerk who just pissed me off? And no, I didn’t buy the portrayal of him as a junkie, no matter what other characters said, and no matter how many baggies of pills rattled in his pocket. The story lacked the details that might have made it feel plausible. The pill baggie lazily stands in as a marker to label him as a junkie, rather than giving us something that more clearly illustrated his descent into addiction and obsession.

On top of that, I kept feeling yanked out of the story by details that felt clumsy. If it’s been two years since the nuclear winter took over, and life in society has settled into a new kind of normal under the thumb of the vampire overlords, will there really still be vicodin in the ransacked stocks of the pharmacies? Will there still be fast food wrappers blowing freely in the streets? I know, I know, it sounds knitpicky, but I felt the yank of disbelief, and it distracted me. That and some artless writing — clunky prose. I wasn’t expecting Shakespeare, and I’ll admit that del Toro and Hogan might have painted themselves into a corner, plot-wise, in the previous two books. I could swallow that a lot better if they’d managed to put on a little bit of polish and a few more details that counted. A disappointing conclusion to a trilogy that was scary fun and promising at the beginning.

ABAW: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith, Grand Central Pub (via Hachette Audio 2010). 

Without death, life is meaningless. It is a story that can never be told. A song that can never be sung. For how would one finish it?

A modern-day bookshop owner/writer meets an odd man who gives him some old books and a list of names before disappearing. The unlikely books are the private journals of Abraham Lincoln, one of America’s most revered presidents, and - as his journals detail - also a secret scourge of vampires. The bookstore owner’s unlikely task is to make known to the world the truth of Lincoln’s life and the truth about vampires. 

This story was very entertaining. who can resist an axe-wielding man of letters and philosophy? And audiobook narrator Scott Holst brings alive the nuanced accents and speech patterns of the various characters in sharp and subtle ways. 

Grahame-Smith is also the author of another supernatural reboot that I enjoyed, Pride and Prejudice With Zombies. In both cases, Grahame-Smith employs the original story (whether novel or history) in such a way that the addition of fictional monsters both entertained and increased my appreciation for the original. For Lincoln, he seamlessly weaves historical fact with the vampire fiction, making the mashup not only feel plausible, but also inspiring a greater curiosity about the details and hardships of Lincoln’s real life.

I enjoyed it so much that I nearly recommended it to Sonar X11. But I checked myself, worrying less about the violence of the vampire slaying than about muddying with vampires the Sonar’s ideas of an important historical figure and period. Maybe later, when his grasp of the (non-vampiric) history is firmer.

Tim Burton has adapted the book into a movie due out this June. Check out IMDB for a moody trailer full of singing blades and vampire growls.