Live Through This by Debra Gwartney

Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love by Debra Gwartney

When Debra Gwartney's two oldest daughters turned 13 and 14, they began running away from home. At first, they'd stay out all night, then they'd leave for a few days at a time, hanging out with punk rockers and street kids in Eugene, Oregon. Then, after a year of tough love, wilderness retreats for troubled youth, and family counselors, the girls hopped a freight train to San Francisco, and disappeared.

Recently, This American Life rebroadcast the episode, "Didn't Ask to Be Born," which features Gwartney, and her daughters Amanda and Stephanie, telling the story of the rebellion, unhappiness, and family conflict that led the girls to run away from home, and Gwartney's efforts to hold the rest of her family together, not knowing if her daughters were dead or alive.

It was a harrowing, compelling story, and after listening to it, I ran out and picked up Live Through This. While the This American Life segment includes more details about the girls' time on the streets, the book focuses more on Gwartney's struggles on the homefront. I admire that she doesn't say much about what her daughters did while they were away, that she respects these as their stories to tell or not tell. As a result, it's not an exploitative story of how bad and wild and out of control her kids were. Instead, it's a very frank, introspective, and honest account of a worst-case family scenario.

Reading this book, I couldn't help but think of Linda Carroll's memoir about raising Courtney Love, Her Mother's Daughter, though only by its stark contrast. While Carroll tends to absolve herself of some highly ill-considered parenting decisions (e.g. sticking her kid in foster care while she moved to New Zealand to find herself, etc.), Gwartney doesn't shy away from the hard, ugly parts, the things she did wrong, the times she could have tried harder or better or differently.

And Gwartney's not a "bad mother" - far from it, in fact. She's loving, steady, smart, and supportive, and yet still completely powerless to stop her daughters once they've made up their minds to live on the streets.

It's a great book, with a powerful, hard-won resolution. Check out this interview with Gwartney to learn more about the book, and what's happened with her family in the years since Amanda and Stephanie ran away.

The Road to Anaheim: Orange County: A Personal History by Gustavo Arellano

Orange County: A Personal History by Gustavo Arellano

There's a very significant difference between me, a blandly white mutt of German and Scotch-Irish heritage, and Gustavo Arellano, the son of an illegal Mexican immigrant: his family has been in the United States longer than mine has.

And while our forefathers took similarly miserable jobs, mine working in coal mines and steel mills, his picking oranges and packing tomatoes, so that their children could someday go to college and get cushy professional jobs, there's another major difference.

Nobody ever called me names, blamed me for ruining America, or tried to legislate my family out of the country. My family is American, but in the eyes of many, Arellano's isn't.

Of course, this is beyond nutso, but then again, fate would lead Arellano's family to Orange County, one of the more nutso pieces of real estate in the United States, a nest of right-wing conspicuous consumers who love the Lord, but hate the immigrants - the land of Nixon, Minutemen, and Tammy Faye Bakker.

What made Orange County this way? It's perhaps too big a question for one book, so Arellano helpfully gives us two in Orange County: A Personal History. The first story is an irreverent, mightily refreshing history of Orange County that stands in stark contrast to most of the dry, whitewashed local histories of the region. Arellano tracks the settling of Orange County from its mission and orange grove days to the massive postwar migration, and then traces all its present-day conservatism, fundamentalism, isolationism, and racism right back to its roots. In his hands, Orange County is wittily dissected as postsuburbia, the Ellis Island of the 21st century, and "a petri dish for America's continuing democratic experiment."

But the second story, told in alternating chapters, is the story of the Arellanos in America, from his great-grandfather, chased out of town by a herd of potato-slinging youths to the author himself, and his transformation from geeky OC pocho to politically-conscious and sometimes controversial author of the syndicated column, "Ask a Mexican!"

Arellano is heartbreaking, sometimes cruel, and not always easy to read when talking about his parents' limited education ("I don't want to be like you and my mom, Papi"), his father's alcoholism during his early childhood, and the typical callousness of adolescence (none of the Arellano kids went to, or much cared about their father's citizenship ceremony). But it's all in the spirit of that all-too-rare a thing, thoughtful reflection on the past and the truthful memoir. And despite the distance he's travelled from his family's roots, it's also clear that Arellano takes a great deal of pride in their journey from the rural village of El Cargadero to Anaheim.

One small bone to pick, however. Though Arellano admits he's been called immature, perhaps a bit the result of sharing a bunk bed with his younger brother until well into his 20s, there are times when he describes women that I want to roll my eyes, and perhaps toss him into an ice bath or whack him on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper. When a woman tells you she's not particularly fond of your column, it's probably not okay to write in your book, "Chula, I wasn't too fond of the spare tire around your midsection," nor to discuss a girl by saying, "Then I actually met her - I'm not going to describe the gal since she's very much a sweetheart, but let's just say she wasn't my type," nor to describe a crush as possessing "hips that moved like hydraulics." Sort of icky.

That tiny bit aside, I adored every minute of the book, as I do just about anything that Arellano writes. You'll have fun, you'll learn something, and if you're a pinche gabacho, you may just come a step or two closer to understanding why we as a nation need to stomp out this nastiness about immigration once and for all.

As Arellano says:

"As Orange County goes, so goes my family, and as my family has traversed through a century or assimilation and resistance, so will the United States - not the easiest of transitions, but always moving forward. Toward the fruit of knowledge - not an apple, but an orange. Picked by a Mexican, of course."

To Acquire a Void: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir by Haruki Murakami

Though running marathons and writing novels require a similar skill set, people respond very differently when you tell them you do one or the other. Tell people you've written a novel, and they will likely be impressed, as it's something that a good number of people wish they could do themselves. Tell them you run marathons, and they will also be impressed; however, it will be as though you've told them that you hold the Guinness World Record for being covered in bees. They may think your accomplishment impressive, but also slightly insane and pointless.

As Murakami writes, "I've never recommended running to others... a person doesn't become a runner because someone recommends it. People basically become runners because they're meant to."

For over twenty years, Murakami has run for an hour nearly every day, more if he's training for a marathon, which he does once a year. In recent years, he's added triathlons to his repertoire. And on top of that, he's also one of Japan's most celebrated and inventive authors, his work translated into 42 languages.

The book is less a collection of essays than journal entries, in which Murakami describes how he got into distance running at around the same time he decided to become a novelist. In some sections, he's talking about writing, in others, he's talking about running, but really, he's always talking about both -- and in doing so, he's talking about the kind of life that he's chosen to live.

Some things have fallen by the wayside, like the late night social life he enjoyed as the owner of a Tokyo jazz bar in the early 80s. It's a solitary, contemplative life, but he's found that it suits him.

Writing takes talent, which he acknowledges, cannot be acquired; however, it also takes focus and endurance, which can be. You can't run without these things, and you can't write without them either. In fact, he says, "Most of what I know about writing I've learned through running every day."

As a distance runner (and a modestly unsuccessful writer), I found Murakami's observations both immediately familiar and reassuring. People often ask me what I think about when I'm running, how I keep myself from getting bored. I've always had trouble answering this question, because although running keeps my mind occupied and focused, I'm never quite sure what it's focused towards.

Murakami writes about this, saying,

"But really as I run, I don't think much of anything worth mentioning. I just run. I run in a void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void... As I run I tell myself to think of a river. And clouds. But essentially I'm not thinking of a thing. All I do is keep on running in my own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence. And this is a pretty wonderful thing. No matter what anybody else says."

It is a pretty wonderful thing, and a pretty wonderful way of talking about it.

If you liked...: On Writing by Stephen King, and/or if you're a distance runner, this book is for you.

Twitchy With Anticipation: Orange County by Gustavo Arellano

Within a matter of days, Gustavo Arellano's new book, Orange County: A Personal History will be on sale, but that's little comfort to me because I want to read it now.

Fortunately, I have been able to tide myself over with the first chapter. Unfortunately, it's so good that it only makes the waiting worse.

Now, in nearly every case, I'm very skeptical of (and not very polite about) anyone under the age of 40 who writes a memoir. But Arellano has my blessing because, based on what I've read about the book, there isn't going to be a lot of navel-gazing in this personal history. It's a history of Arellano's family (who started sneaking across the border to work thankless jobs for meager wages in 1918), and a history of Orange County, a region of the country that will terrify and amaze you, no matter which side of the culture wars you're on.

And if you read Arellano's weekly syndicated column, Ask A Mexican!, then you know he is occasionally crass, frequently hilarious, and nearly always the smartest guy in the room.

Sometimes he writes passages like this one:

There's no real reason why what you just read and anything that follows relating to my personal life should ever have been published (reviewers: there's a pull quote for ustedes if ever there was one!). The immigrant saga, the coming-of-age rebel yell, the portrait of the artist as a young hombre -- the memoir portion of this book uses those clichés of American letters to tell its tale. But the sad beauty of this country is that we forget. We forget that dumb ethnics assimilate, that they share the goals and dreams of any Mayflower descendant. It takes a snot-nosed, presumptuous minority to kick the United States in its amnesiac britches every couple of years -- consider this your ass boot.

And then mixes them with stuff like this:

Meanwhile, American historians have long dismissed [Orange County] as America's fundamentalist wild, reviled as the place that spawned Nixon, ridiculed for the perfection that drew so many to find lives of leisure. We're historical ether -- invisible but dangerous.

And I am so, so, so excited to read more.

The Onion AV Club: Reviewing Stuff So I Don't Have To

A while back I borrowed a friend's copy of Steve Martin's recent memoir, Born Standing Up. I had intended to write about it here, but after reading it I realized I had very little to say about the book.

This was not because I didn't like it (I liked it fine) but rather because - like a lot of Martin's prose work - it is a book that is so meticulously written that it's almost standoffish. I read it, I enjoyed it well enough, but whatever that element is that engages the reader and makes the experience of "reading a book" a mutually constitutive process, a gestalt that has more to it than simply reader + text, just wasn't there (for me, at least).

Anyways, don't take my word for it - take Nathin Rabin's over at the Onion AV Club, for a much deeper and more generous take on the book. And it probably goes without saying that if you are a fan of stand-up comedy or Steve Martin, you'll probably find it an interesting - if maybe bloodless - time.

What a Life! What a Dame!: Elaine Dundy, 1921-2008

Elaine Dundy, author of The Dud Avocado, passed away last week at the age of 86.

Though best known for the semi-autobiographical adventures of Sally Jay Gorce, an American screwball on the loose in Paris, Dundy was also the author of several other novels and Elvis and Gladys, a study of the relationship between Elvis and his mother, described as "the best Elvis book yet."

My favorite of Dundy's works is her memoir, Life Itself!, which is quite simply the loveliest, liveliest, wittiest, most eyebrow-raising, side-splitting memoir I've ever read. Here are a few of my favorite moments from it:

On giving a disastrous class presentation on "arson": "When you have got it firmly lodged in your head that arson is a chemical, a batch of newspaper clippings with headlines such as: 'Ten Die in Warehouse Blaze - Arson Suspected' is not going to dislodge it."

On discovering rampant anti-Semitism at Sweet Briar College: "My shit list was growing apace and I had only been there for two months."

On not buying a jar of peanut butter: "I was the only one in our household who ate it and the thought struck me with force that our marriage was not going to last before I finished it."

On the kinkiness of the British: "Of course Englishmen love flagellation. It's the only time they ever get touched as children."

Some other remembrances of Dundy can be found at:

Elvis News
Quiet Bubble: "Roy Turner, her old friend and late-period amanuensis, said that “she died doing exactly what she loved most: she had a heart attack in mid-conversation with someone famous and interesting.”
A Different Stripe

Mommas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Groupies: Let's Spend the Night Together by Pamela Des Barres

Let's Spend the Night Together: Backstage Secrets of Rock Muses and Supergroupies by Pamela Des Barres

Throughout Let's Spend the Night Together, there's a tone of sadness and nostalgia for a lost time. The groupies, past and present, that Des Barres interviews for the book lament that there are no longer "famous" groupies, that rock stars date models and movie stars, not fans, and that perhaps, the golden age of the groupie is over.

Between Des Barres previous memoirs and Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous, there's a case to be made that the groupies of the 60s and 70s were not garden variety skanks, so much as rock courtesans, vulnerable to a great deal of heartbreak and abuse, but also not utterly disposable.

The book is organized semi-chronologically, beginning with interviews with groupie greats like Cherry Vanilla, Catherine James, and Cynthia Plaster Caster. Then Des Barres moves into the considerably darker 70s, populated by the underage set like Lori Maddix and Sable Starr, and the aging groupies who fell into drug addiction and domestic abuse. After reading Maddix's chapter, you will never look at David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Jimmy Page the same way again -- they should all be in jail.

As the book goes on, things get even less romantic and more depressing, and it becomes very apparent how far the groupie has fallen. Whatever one may think of the choices these women made, it's understandable how one could take some sort of pride in being able to say, "I slept with Jimi Hendrix," or "I slept with Keith Moon." It is, in any case, more impressive than saying, "I slept with the drummer from Slipknot."

Some of the women interviewed are very sympathetic, and some have great stories to tell. Tura Satana, Cynthia Plaster Caster, and Cassandra Peterson (better known as Elvira) are particularly interesting. Also fun are the interviews with the women who got out relatively unscathed and relate their groupie pasts with a shrug and a smile. These tend to be the ones who always had something creative or meaningful going on the side, and are now quite successful in their careers and personal lives.

But even the most well-adjusted among them has a horror story or two to tell. Pat Travers is a jerk, Tom Jones is a monster, and Led Zeppelin were full-out evil. Surprisingly, Gene Simmons comes out rather the gentleman.

However, one of the most train wreck draws of the book is the narration of Des Barres herself. Obviously an intelligent, funny, and sweet woman, she is also clueless, and happily unaware of exactly how clueless she is. Gail Zappa, a woman who essentially stayed married to Frank by playing perpetual hostess, taking care of the house, and waiting on him hand and foot, is set forth as the lucky woman who "became what we all wanted to be."

And Des Barres interviews the decidedly unglamorous Connie Hamzy (immortalized in Grand Funk Railroad's "We're an American Band" and in the Spin article "Oldest Living Confederate Groupie Tells All") with a scarcely veiled contempt. Despite the fact that Hamzy shared a great many of Des Barres's conquests, Miss Pamela is anxious to distance herself from Sweet Connie's Arkansas drawl and willingness to service everyone from rock stars to roadies. When it serves her purposes, Des Barres sells herself as a wild child, but when it doesn't, she emphasizes her long-term relationships with rockers, and characterizes herself as a young girl who had her heart broken. Maybe both sides of the story are true, but geez, to be able to turn it on and off like a tap....

In any case, the anecdotal evidence this book offers about the groupie's decline heartens me, and I say, let the groupies of the 60s and 70s have their wacky stories and write memoirs about them, and let the misogynist nu metal bands have their girls gone wild.

And let the rest of us go about our business, periodically stopping to gawk at them.

The Holy Grail of Indie Rock Oral Histories

Last night, after wresting her birthday presents out of me on the pretense that it was her birthday in the state where she was born, Mary turned to me with a gleam in her eye and let drop the single greatest bit of literary/rock and roll news since Levon Helm sat down to call out Robbie Robertson for being such a goon: the forthcoming publication of Jim Walsh's The Replacements: All Over but the Shouting, An Oral History.

Judging from the pictures and the sample pages at the Voyageur Press website, I think that we are all in for some cracking good yarns.

My favorite quotes so far, from the sample pages:

Peter Buck (REM): "More people bring that up to me than anything else. And I mean way more than anything else: You played on 'I Will Dare.' What was that like?"

Bob Stinson, on repaying REM for taking Our Heros on tour: "They did give us like beer and we'd wait until they'd go on stage and. . .their dressing rooms - there was no lock, boys. We ate all their food and drank their booze. They're like doing one of their real pretty hit songs and we're just sitting there drinking their booze. And they're playing in front of a thousand people. You can't stop and come and grab it from us. We really had mean fun with them."

I So Wanted To Win That Pony

83 years ago today, Truman Streckfus Persons, better known as the enfant terrible, was born in New Orleans.

One of my favorite Capote stories is related by Eugene Walter in his memoir, Milking the Moon: A Southerner's Story of Life on This Planet. Walter knew Capote as a child, because the latter would come to Mobile to have his underbite straightened, and the children called him 'Bulldog.' Anyway, Walter says:

In the Sunday Register there was the Sunshine Page. This lady called Disa Stone had this children's page and this Sunshine Club where children wrote and sent in what they wrote and vied for prizes. The grand prize was a pony. For his contribution to the Sunshine Page and for the contest, Truman had spied on this old man who lived up the street in Monroeville and was a real old crank. Even then he was already mixing fiction and reportage...

Anyway, he wrote this rather long piece called 'Old Mr. Busybody, by Truman Persons.' His aunt, when he told her, rushed to Mobile and went to the Register and said: 'You cannot publish that. It is too true a description of our neighbor. He'll sue us, he'll smash our windows, I don't know what he'll do. I want to take that back.' And she did. Years later when I saw him in Paris, the first thing Truman said to me was 'Oh, Eugene, I so wanted to win that pony.'

Happy birthday, Bulldog.

What a Life! What a Dame!: Life Itself! by Elaine Dundy

Life Itself! by Elaine Dundy

The more I read about my fellow Angeleno, Ms. Dundy, the more I want to take her out for tea. Then again, to a woman who befriended Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Ernest Hemingway, and Vivien Leigh, I'd probably be comparatively dull company.

Dundy's autobiography is a star-studded spectacle, but the author's own life never takes a backseat to the figures of the page, stage, and screen who populate her story. In fact, given the effusive, larger than life woman who springs from the pages of Life Itself!, it only makes sense that she'd surround herself with similarly big personalities.

Born to a wealthy New York family, Dundy splits for California, the Deep South, and finally, Paris, to escape her tyrannical father, but also to have a go at a life on the stage. After achieving some modest success, she moves to London where she meets, and soon marries, theatre critic Ken Tynan. Their relationship is a stormy one, hampered by Tynan's sadomasochistic proclivities (which he only reveals to her after their wedding)*, emotional manipulation, and the extramarital affairs of both parties.

Despite trading in one tyrant for another, Dundy manages to enjoy a relatively successful career in television and radio -- she abandons the stage, after growing weary of directors joking that they'll "get a bad review" from Ken if they don't cast her. And after the birth of her daughter, Tracy, Dundy moves from acting into writing, with a bibliography that includes everything from plays to novels to a biography of Elvis and his mother.

The book is full of great stories, including a lively party Tennessee Williams threw for his mother, the "Hemingway Code" as it applied to young women in his company, and the time Ava Gardner showed up at the flat asking for cab fare, but Dundy's writing shines even when describing the mundane. While reading, I constantly regaled Potts with lines from it, and atypically, this was more to his amusement than his annoyance. A few of my favorites include:

On giving a disasterous class presentation on "arson": "When you have got it firmly lodged in your head that arson is a chemical, a batch of newspaper clippings with headlines such as: 'Ten Die in Warehouse Blaze - Arson Suspected' is not going to dislodge it."

On discovering rampant anti-Semitism at Sweet Briar College: "My shit list was growing apace and I had only been there for two months."

On not buying a jar of peanut butter: "I was the only one in our household who ate it and the thought struck me with force that our marriage was not going to last before I finished it."

If you're a fan of 50s theatre, screwball leading ladies, and stories of women who live life to the hilt, this book is for you.
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* There's a great line in the book when Dundy is telling a friend about her marital troubles, and he responds, "Of course Englishmen love flagellation. It's the only time they ever get touched as children."

Clapton Is Godawful

Here's a rock and roll memoir you probably never expected: Pattie "Layla" Boyd-Harrison-Clapton hits the shelves in a few weeks with Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me.

I don't expect anyone to come out of this book smelling like a rose, but my money's on Clapton for being the true stinker, having basically stolen George Harrison's wife. Granted, George didn't seem to get the whole "matrimony means no extra girlfriends" thing, but writing and recording a song about your best friend's wife is just tacky.*

The Daily Mail has an excerpt here. I especially like the part where Clapton tells her, "Run away with me or I'll start doing smack" and then spends the next three years on the nod.

Classy.

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* Also, "Layla" is kind of an overrated song, if ya ask me. Blah blah "got me on my knees" noodley-noodle, wanky-wank, LAYYYYYYYlla, piano outro and fin. It's no "London Calling" or "Born to Run" is all I'm sayin.

This Wheel's Highly Readable

"Hey, I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but I'm certainly not the dumbest. I mean, I've read books like The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Love in the Time of Cholera, and I think I've understood them. They're about girls, right? Just kidding. But I have to say my all-time favorite book is Johnny Cash's autobiography Cash by Johnny Cash." -- Rob Gordon, High Fidelity

Books about music are funny beasts. Writing a book and writing a song are two radically different undertakings, and just because you can compose a perfect three and a half minute ode to, I dunno, cars or girls or something, doesn't make you Joseph Conrad. (Don't believe me? Read DeeDee Ramones's memoir. I hate to speak ill of the dead, but whooooboy. I think his ghostwriter was Peeves.)

This is why Levon Helm's autobiography, This Wheel's On Fire, was such a pleasant surprise. (At this point I'd like to give a shout-out to my good friend Bob Koch, who gave me a copy when I was in Madison a couple weeks ago. Bob has also introduced me to Ross MacDonald, Joe R. Landsdale, and numerous excellent but forgotten garage bands. Hey Bob!)

Helms's memoir, which begins with his childhood in Arkansas and finishes up around the time he started acting in films like Coalminer's Daughter, is primarily concerned with his time in the Hawks and the Band. Surprisingly, it's the Hawks chapters that may be the most interesting: full of tall tales, brushes with the law, irresponsible driving, Canadian roadhouses, the mob, and the irrepressible Ronnie Hawkins, these chapters capture the tiny victories and lunatic behavior that rock and roll bands get up to on the road.

I laughed aloud in several places, and bugged Mary incessantly with "And one time? Levon and Robbie parked the car on the train tracks and left the bass player inside, and then they waited for a train, and when the train whistle blew, they started screaming that they couldn't get the car to start, which gave the bass player a nasty start, and why are you walking away from me when I'm in the middle of a story?"

When the book moves on into the Band years, it gets pretty sad in places. Richard Manuel, in particular, is tragic. And Robbie Robertson certainly doesn't come off well, though he disputes some of what Helm wrote, allegedly downplaying the role of the rest of the group in crafting "Big Pink" and "The Band" and making a ton of money off what Helms feels should have simply been split five ways. (I'm inclined to side with Levon on this one.) Watching a group as great as the Band fall prey to the usual rock and roll demons - booze, drugs, money - is about as much fun, at times, as watching Superman tie one on and moon the Pope.

That said, Helms' book is now my all time, top five, favorite music memoir ever. I highly, highly recommend it if you are at all a fan of the Rock and/or Roll.

The Music of Your Life

Petal Pusher: A Rock and Roll Cinderella Story by Laurie Lindeen

While I'd never listened to Zuzu's Petals before reading this book, I knew who they were for two reasons. First, because I knew that their lead singer (our author) was married to Paul Westerberg. Second, because I lived in Madison for a time, and everyone over the age of 30 who lives in Madison has a lot of good Minneapolis music scene stories*, some of them involving Zuzu's Petals.

Madison is a small city, but to hear it told, it experienced a sort of musical golden age in the 1990s. One of the first things anyone told me when I moved there was, "It's too bad you didn't get here when O'Cayz was still around." As the logical first or last stop on any Minneapolis band's tour itinerary, the good people of Madison, Wisconsin were bound to get the show where the band was fresh-faced and excited, or the one where they were unwashed, strung-out, and liable to go at any time. These are easily the two best shows on any tour.

Lindeen was a Madison townie who wound up at the University of Wisconsin because her school's guidance counselor had no idea how to send a student anywhere else. She flunked out several times, and left for Minneapolis without a degree, but with the burning desire in her heart to start an all-girl rock and roll band. Never mind that she didn't play the guitar, and her only musical experience involved singing second alto in the school choir.

She enlisted her college buddy, Colleen, to play bass, and the two set about finding a drummer. However, before Lindeen's band materialized, she was diagnosed with MS, which left her legally blind in one eye and largely immobile on her left side. While waiting for the disease's manifestations to go into remission, a friend brought her an electric guitar to help with the boredom of rehab and convalescence. This was, Lindeen writes, a sign.

Gradually, the stars aligned for the band. They found a drummer and a practice space and, courtesy of It's a Wonderful Life, a name. From here, Lindeen's narrative follows the gruesome and undertold story of a nobody band paying their dues**. Disasterous tours, lechy sound guys, indifferent audiences, and booking types who view all-girl acts as a novelty, or during this height of the Riot Grrrl movement, some shock rock divas liable to whip out tampons onstage or punch out the club owner. But Zuzu's Petals was not that kind of band. They were Midwestern girls with manners, a beer and pot band in a heroin age.

While I didn't always like the time-hopping narrative structure of the book, I started it last night and finished it this morning even though I had other things I desperately needed to be doing. Lindeen had me from the first chapter, where Carly Simon picks her up hitchhiking on Martha's Vineyard right through to the last shows when it officially Isn't Fun Anymore, Can We Go Home, Please.

Despite being the narrator of the story, Lindeen is very often unlikable in the book, surly when her bandmates are friendly and sweet; drunk when her boyfriends are sober. It's an unusual and sometimes off-putting choice, and yet I understood it. I have been the bad band member who complains on the road and makes everyone's life miserable. It can happen to anyone, and tomorrow, it will probably be the drummer. Rocking is great, but it does not necessarily bring out the best in people.

For Petal Pusher, I will haul out the book-describing phrase I like to use judiciously because it has become a victim of overuse -- compulsively readable. Seriously, I defy you to put it down unless you have to pee or something.

If you like...: horror stories about bands on the road like Blake Nelson's Rock Star SuperStar, Goodnight, Steve McQueen, Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous, or that awesome VH1 show from the golden summer of 2001, Bands on the Run, this book is for you.
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* Like, I knew a guy who was once hired to "keep an eye on" Tommy Stinson before a show.
** You might say, "That story's not undertold, it's in every band biography I read." But bear in mind that those band biographies usually end with sold-out shows and Jonathan Demme making a movie about you. This is more like the Bull Durham of rock and roll biographies.

To Live Outside the Law, You Must Be Honest

Of the books I read while Mary was out running very long distances, Lillian Hellman's Scoundrel Time proved to be both a great read and an unexpected case study in - with apologies to Sting and Carl Jung - synchronicity.

Ever pick up a book that perfectly and succintly speaks to a time and place in a way you weren't expecting, elegantly placing the capstone on some seemingly unrelated series of events in a manner that makes them meaningful in a new way?

If you have, then you'll understand why When the Levees Broke + The Wire + my increasing addiction to hardboiled fiction + Los Angeles + Mary's marathoning + Dubya/Hillary = this excellent memoir.

Or maybe you won't. Lemme 'splain real quick, and then I'll get right to the good stuff.

In short, the cumulative failure of our social institutions, political leaders, and public imagination to do anything but natter on in increasingly insular enclaves while New Orleans sinks, the icecaps melt, Iraq crumbles, and the filthy rich do any damn thing they want has had me on a bit of a glum streak for some time now. Britney's in rehab, the wolves are at the door, and the water has hit the top step, so smoke 'em if you got 'em friends, cause the bastards have finally won and we're all one dune buggy from Mad Max out here.

This is, you might guess, no way to live.

So imagine my delight when I read Scoundrel Time, which is a valuable document of one of our past national freakouts that is eerily prescient, from the dirty tricks to the failure of the majority of the intelligentsia to do anything but stand around with their soundbites in the wind.

What happened was this: Hellman was called before the House Committe on UnAmerican Activities and kept her head when all about her were naming names. She politely told them she would answer any question about her own activities they cared to ask. She then added, in the classiest way possible, that when it came to discussing any of her friends they could go to hell.

For this, she lost her house, the blacklist ate her career, her phones were tapped and her passport restricted, she was audited and penalized by the IRS, who also looted her bank account, and she was put under surveillance by the CIA while living as an expatriate.

(Hammett was less polite, and they did the same to him, but they threw him in jail too.)

Lillian Hellman was an amazing woman for many reasons. She was a hell of a writer, for one, and she also put up with Dashiell "TB and a gambling problem is no reason to quit drinking" Hammett.* And if this was just a book about "How I stood up to Joe McCarthy" that would be a fine accomplishment in itself. Her letter to the committee is a model of principled dissent that should be required reading in every political science, political sociology, or ethics class. But where this slim little book becomes a masterpiece is in the way she describes life in the crosshairs where, in her memorable phrase, "Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels."

Nor is this simply a story of the big bad right wing come to blow down the house of the virtuous leftist. As any student of the period knows, most fellow travellers folded like a Vegas cardsharp when push came to shove; Hellman writes of many an ostensible radical whose convictions turned out to be less dear to them than did their swimming pool. She does this for the most part without rancor, forgiving if not forgetting, and she brings the same level of scruitiny to bear on herself and Hammett as well. It is a story that is heartbreaking, chilling, and ultimately inspiring, without being sappy or self-righteous, and it's told by a master essayist whose humility is only exceeded by her insight.

If "speaking truth to power" seems to you to have come to mean "preaching to the pundit choir"...
If you need to be reminded that sometimes basic human decency is more powerful than rhetoric, Senators, and public opinion combined...
And if you think Milan Kundera is brilliant, but sometimes insufferably smug...

...this book is for you.

____________________

* In fact, the only thing of hers I had read prior to this was an essay about her life with Hammett, which moved me to tears. I am now committed to rectifying this glaring oversight.

I'll Take Game Show Memoirs for $200, Alex.

Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy by Bob Harris

While doing some Christmas shopping at the local bookstore, Brady went all "Ooooh, Navy SEALs!!!" on a number of titles of which I was skeptical. But when he picked up a book written by a five-time Jeopardy champion, and said, "I'd like to read that," I feared my sweetie had lost his damn mind. Nevertheless, I shrugged and forwarded this request to my sister, who dutifully purchased it for him.

A few weeks later, I found myself completely head over heels in love with this book, which I assure you, is about far more than a simple game show. It is a memoir about discovering that you have not panned out as a very good adult. It is also about falling in love, getting your ducks in a row, and learning to become a good friend/son/daughter/person. And it is also about Jeopardy, which as game shows go, is a '57 Mustang in a parking lot of Escalades.

Harris's writing is funny, ingenius, and, at times, incredibly moving. Not only are you in for a good memoir, you'll also learn about how memory works -- why certain tidbits stick and others get lost in the gray matter. And you'll probably be a little bit smarter when you finish it, too. Maybe even smart enough to get on Jeopardy.

I feel icky about inserting this detail, but it's easily obtained elsewhere and it's also the thing that made me pick up the book in the first place. Harris is Jane Espenson's* sweetie, and I figured that anyone she lurved was probably good people.

If you like...: Jeopardy, Buffy, or would totally clean up on the Daily Double in Midwestern Culture & Norms, this book is for you.
-------------
* Writer for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, The O.C., and Firefly, to name a few.

Nature vs. Nurture: The Case of Courtney Love

Her Mother's Daughter: A Memoir of the Mother I Never Knew and of My Daughter, Courtney Love by Linda Carroll

Sometimes you feel like reading Crime and Punishment, and other times, you stumble upon a tell-all memoir by Courtney Love's mother and clear your schedule for the day.

Over the years, Courtney Love has said some pretty awful things about her mother, so it's understandable that the woman would want to tell her side of the story. Carroll was married three times before she was 30, and dragged her children from San Francisco to Oregon to New Zealand, and back again, creating what was surely an unstable and weird environment for them. As one of her marriages crumbled, she took in a foster child; then left him with another family in New Zealand. When they left the United States, Courtney was left with one of Linda's friends. And so on, and so forth... hippie parenting at its most permissive and most horrifying.

But while the evidence against her parenting style is pretty damning, Carroll is an extremely persuasive writer and manages to come out of the story without seeming like an irresponsible flake. What's more, as a memoirist, she's very fair, compassionate, and forgiving. Despite the fact that Carroll's father molested her and her mother unfailing introduced her as "my adopted daughter, Linda," her depictions of them are, shockingly enough, filled with understanding and even love.

And yes, there are many instances that show little Courtney to be a selfish, manipulative, and deceitful bad seed; however, Carroll balances these moments with many examples of Love's creativity, intelligence, and generosity.

Carroll's search for her birth mother, who turns out to be acclaimed children's writer Paula Fox, is crammed into the book's last few pages, and the account of Carroll's life after the family returns to New Zealand is rushed. Still, it's an absorbing memoir about a woman you can grudgingly respect, even as you thank God that she wasn't your mother.

If you like...: memoirs of godawful childhood like The Liar's Club by Mary Karr and Augusten Buroughs Running With Scissors, or about women who rise above their youthful indiscretions like Beverly Donofrio's Riding in Cars With Boys, this book is for you.

Disturbing Thoughts on Grief and the Elite

As I have mentioned before, I often do not like "good" books, which is to say, books that are well-reviewed in the New York Times and Atlantic Monthly, and generally latched onto by well-educated, bookish members of the upper and upper-middle classes. Zadie Smith. Nicole Krauss. Ian McEwan. Writers who make people tilt their heads to one side, furrow their eyebrows, nod, and make contemplative little 'mmmm' sounds. There has been some talk about this kind of writer over at Ang's blog.

And actually, that comment thread is the reason I'm writing this. It was just too oddly timed. I started this post a few days ago, the purpose being to write about the problems I had with Joan Didion's latest book, The Year of Magical Thinking. If you're not familiar with the book, it is a memoir of the time during which Didion's daughter is critically ill and lying in a coma. After returning from the hospital one night, her husband of nearly 40 years, John Gregory Dunne, has a heart attack and dies. It is tragic and heartbreaking, and it is a memoir of Didion's grief.

I've always liked Didion's writing. Everything she describes just sounds beautifully scorched and wasted. She is a precise and brutally honest writer. However, reading about the grieving process of a member of the intellectual and economic elite, I realized, is a jarring and oddly unsympathetic endeavor.

Right after I started to write about it, I read an interview with Didion from the L.A. Times, printed shortly after the book's publication. During this time, Didion's daughter had relapsed and died at the age of 39. Didion was frail, her weight had dropped to below 80 pounds. She was ravaged by loss.

After reading this, I thought, what kind of monster would I be to find fault with this book? Especially when these faults are not so much flaws as nagging class issues that stuck in my craw while reading it?

After Dunne's death, one of the first phone calls Didion makes is to a friend at the L.A. Times to arrange for Dunne's obituary. Something I hadn't known before working at a large public library is that most people living in major metropolitan areas don't get obituaries. Obituaries are reserved for important people. And I have to explain to at least one person a day that their loved one is not important enough to have an obituary (though I do it more gently). Of course, it makes sense that in a city of over 3 million people, not everyone who dies can have a recounting of their life in a paper of record. Still, it is unpleasant to consider the implications of this - who matters and who doesn't.

Other parts of the book included elements of the grieving process that were utterly foreign to me. Didion holes up at the Beverly Wilshire, a luxury hotel in Beverly Hills, while her daughter is being treated at one of the finest hospitals in the country. At one point, she leaves the hotel and cruises the streets of posh, celebrity-filled Brentwood, devastated that she can't find her old house.

This is how the wealthy grieve, and I am not sure why this bothers me. It's not as though The Year of Magical Thinking is an instructive piece - it's a highly personal memoir.

Yet, I wonder if the idea that the personal is political applies here, or if I'm just, as I fear, a monster who lets the author's wealth and privilege interfere with my ability to empathize with her suffering. I wrote empathize here, but the words that popped into my head first were enjoy the book, which is obviously inappropriate. If the book is not meant to be instructive, nor to be enjoyed, it is meant to do something else.

It makes me think of the concept used to save the murderer from execution in His Girl Friday, 'production for use.' Didion is a writer; therefore, she writes. Her writing often takes the form of the personal essay, so it makes sense that she would write about something so profound and tragic as the death of her husband, and do so in an honest, cathartic way. Loss is ugly. Anyone who has ever watched their family members reduced to greedy animals when dividing up a dead loved one's personal possessions knows this.

My final thoughts on the matter, having worked through all of these thoughts? I'm not sure, but I don't feel very well about reading a memoir so gut-wrenching and awful, yet feeling so much about it that seems indecent and lacking in humanity.

You never know what's going to touch you or move you to tears. Sometimes it comes at the wrong times, and sometimes it doesn't come when it should. In Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, the speaker describes his love who gets wrought up reading the equivalent of 16th century dime novels, but doesn't understand her lover's pain. In the end, he says,

Then think, my dear, that you in me do read
Of lover's ruin some sad tragedy.
I am not I; pity the tale of me.

I think that makes a good deal of sense.

Your Body is a Wonderland

Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande

Before reading this book, everything I knew about the medical profession came from either television or my friends' horror stories about medical school. Therefore, in my mind, surgeons were either the most arrogant, self-righteous doctors in the hospital, or they were like Chris Turk(leton) from Scrubs.

Atul Gawande is a surgeon who is neither of these. For one thing, he doesn't crack a single joke for the entire book. Not even a pun. I don't think he even describes himself smiling or laughing a single time. He's a bit of a grind, but a fascinating one who writes with as much honesty (and as little arrogance) about his successes as about the patients he nearly kills.

In a way, reading these essays makes you pray you never ever have to entrust your life to a doctor. The first section of the book is entitled "Fallibility," and includes essays about the mistakes that surgeons make. Turns out, they make a lot because of the unfortunate Catch-22 that you have to train new doctors to save lives, but in order to train new doctors, you're going to have to let them cut on people when they don't really know what they're doing.

The book also contains essays about medical mysteries that make you marvel at the strangeness of the human body. I mean, science has allowed us to transplant organs and fix bum tickers, but we still don't really understand everyday things like blushing, overeating, and nausea.

To most people, medicine is shrouded in mystery and doctors are scary. This book isn't really a sensational expose of what really goes on behind the knife. It's more of an attempt to bridge the gap between patients and doctors, and once you get past the stories about the intern who botches a central line or the girl who dies having her wisdom teeth removed, there's oddly, a kind of understanding at the end.

And Gawande's writing style is a little dry and methodical, but it's never boring. You just feel like you're in the hands of an extremely competent and thorough professional, and you hang on his every word. Which is, I guess, why he's a surgeon.

If you liked...: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach, prepare to have a new favorite book because while Complications is similar, it absolutely kicks the shit out of Stiff.

May I Have Your Attention Please

Blood Done Sign My Name by Timothy B. Tyson

Stop what you're doing, and go get this book. Then clear your schedule because you won't be able to do anything else until you finish it.

There's a Tom Waits live album where he says, "To answer that, we're going to have to go all the way back to the Civil War." Tyson goes back even further than that to answer the question of why, on a night in 1970, a young black man named Henry Marrow was murdered by three white men in cold blood as he begged for his life, and how that, and everything that happened after was possible in a supposedly post-integration South.

And that's all I'm gonna say, because I don't think I can do the rest justice.

The main problem with "history" is that the word implies that it involves something that happened a long time ago, then never happened again, and that's kind of how it's studied. But Tyson takes a long, hard look in the spirit of Faulkner when he said, "The past is never over. It's not even past."

If you like...: books that change your life, this one is for you.

Con Safos

Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. by Luis J. Rodriguez

The Goods: Part memoir of the Mexican immigrant experience, part gangland horror story, part cautionary tale, and part bildungsroman of a Chicano activist, this book does many things and does them well. After moving to Los Angeles, Rodriguez's family eventually settled in a barrio community in East L.A., where the schools' solutions to Spanish-speaking students was either to ignore them or place them in special education classes. In middle school, his innocent schoolboy clique is absorbed by an established gang, and Rodriguez becomes a member of Lomas's Animal Tribe. As the book focuses on Rodriguez's high school years, it also focuses on the tension between the two Luises. One is a gangbanger, the other tries out for school mascot and is active in his school's Chicano student association, organizing walk-outs and protests. Eventually, Rodriguez leaves gang life behind, which is not to say that the book's ending is anything approaching happy.

Thoughts: Rodriguez writes of his childhood in East L.A. with both lyrical romanticism and righteous anger. Los Angeles is beautiful and Los Angeles is full of the worst kinds of ugliness, and although 30 years has passed since the events of Always Running, not enough has changed.

If you like...: Complex nonfiction about gang life like 8 Ball Chicks: A Year in the Violent World of Girl Gangs by Gini Sikes or The Killing Season by Miles Corwin, an equally complex look at gang violence from the POV of Los Angeles homicide detectives, or if you like novels about Mexican American families like Face of an Angel by Denise Chavez or Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros, this book is for you.