Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace - Anne Lamott

Resentments make even the best of us feel superior. I’ve always found a sort of security in them, as if they were monkey moms, a place to hold on that is better than nothing.

Guggenheim award-winner Anne Lamott has been a best-seller for thirty years due to her understated and self-deprecating humor on issues ranging from single motherhood and addiction to her liberal activism, Christianity, and the literary life. A sort of Everywoman who reflects the flaws we all can recognize in ourselves, she is a sort of Mark Twain for the modern ages.

The unifying theme of this collection is unexpected forgiveness, divine and human, from within and without. Although she never directly labels her indiscretions as the Seven Deadly Sins, her stories draw heavily on the themes of pride, envy, sloth, wrath, gluttony, and greed, in that order, with a scant nod to lust.

I listened to this book on Audible, but would recommend the printed version instead, as I found five-and-a-half hours of the author’s monotone, while effective in underscoring her offhand humor, to be a bit soporific. You can judge for yourself by going to the 37:40 minute mark of this one-hour book talk where she reads her essay Victory Lap, a funny and frank reflection on living a full life while dying.

The Guild of the Infant Saviour: An Adopted Child’s Memory Book

I have spent a lifetime chasing down the emotions being adopted was meant to absolve me of—low self-esteem, feelings of unworthiness, deep shame, grief, and a sense of profound loss.

Never has a book trailer affected me so profoundly as this one for Megan Culhane Galbraith’s newly released memoir. Picture a miniature baby doll, the hard plastic type from the Sixties, tumbling toward a bare crib at the hands of a miniature, hard plastic nun. Like a velvet dagger to the heart, the Allegri Miserere Mei, a Medieval ode to penitence, plays in the background. This is the author’s haunting image of her arrival in the world at a home for unwed mothers.

This essay collection is first and foremost about the adoptee’s journey to closure as she reunites with her birth-mother, embarks on motherhood herself, and comes to grips with the lingering emotional trauma that cripples her relationships. Along the way, Galbraith also revisits the history of everything from birth control and abortion to the use of abandoned newborns as human guineau pigs in practice homes at an Ivy League school. In approaching the topic of societal double-standards, she also describes her fantasies alongside those depicted in rare timepieces with automatons designed to titillate.  

Anyone who is or loves an adoptee will want to read this artistic gem. It features photo montages and staged dioramas of posed figures that were the basis of a show at the Collar Works Gallery in Troy, NY. Then there’s the writing—honest, poetic, well-researched, and tight. I flipped through the 292 pages in a weekend. Check out both at her website.

Fatu-Hiva: Back to Nature

We wanted to see if the two of us, man and woman, could resume the life abandoned by our first ancestors . . . Independent of the least aid of civilization.

In 1936, eleven years before upending conventional theories on primitive human migration by sailing the Kon Tiki raft from South America to French Polynesia, newlyweds Thor and Liv Heyerdahl left Norway for an experiment in minimalist living in the Marquesas. Fatu-Hiva, “the most verdant and unspoiled island in the South Seas . . . Mountainous and lonely [with] few natives and no white men [or so they thought]” was their home for a year that began in paradise and ended in peril.

For one season, their contempt for modern conveniences proved well-founded as they feasted on the forest’s abundance. Then came the rainy season, mosquitoes, and jungle rot that forced a retreat to beach settlements plagued with tuberculosis, elephantiasis, and leprosy. Along the way, many gentle and generous souls helped them: offering food, shelter, and medical aid that narrowly kept Live from losing a leg. They rode dug-out canoes to catch flying fish by torchlight, raided ancient burial grounds for skull samples, photographed stone statuary unlike any other in the South Pacific, and befriended a cannibal chieftain of a forgotten era whose origin stories corroborated their sketchy notions of colonization by South Americans. Sadly, when an unsavory minority threatened their security, their idyll came to an end in a cave where they watched for a rescue ship like refugees.  

Fatu-Hiva: Back to Nature, published in 1974 continues the story of the Heyerdahls’ Marquesas adventures first published in 1938 as Hunt for Paradise. At 269 pages, this second telling, equal parts memoir/history/ethnography, is superbly illustrated with 61 black and white photographs. For a peak at this beautiful island, watch this brief tour, Marquesas Discovered by Mike Satori: Fatu Hiva Island in Footsteps of Thor Heyerdahl.

The Peasants: Winter

He that takes for a wife one that might be his daughter, for his pains gets a fiend who will scorn holy water.

Poland at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution experienced a cultural nostalgia that Wladislaw Reymont satisfied with his four-volume saga The Peasants—Fall, Winter, Spring, and Summer. With pastoral settings as vivid as a Monet, cultural and colloquial details as comprehensive as a guidebook, and plotlines of mythological proportion, his won the 1924 Nobel Prize for literature fifteen years after the quartet was completed.

I discovered his work as part of a self-education drive in preparation for a someday-trip to my ancestors’ homeland. In addition to learning the language, I want to understand the world my grandmother was born into. I began with the second volume because that was what the library had on hand. Having now read some of what it that was like, I’m grateful she emigrated but also eager to read the other three volumes.

Jumping into Winter without first having read Autumn was not difficult. The beautifully rendered storm of the first chapter alone had me hooked. Then there was the drama of watching a young housewife try to turn a dirt-floored hovel into a home for her newly dispossessed family, kicked evicted from her father-in-law’s wealthy farm because her husband is in love in with Dad’s teen bride. What follows is a drama of hatred, passion, forgiveness, and endurance as they all find ways to survive the cold that threatens from without and within their homes.

Last made into a film in 1972, a new animated version of this story—from the creators of Loving Vincent—is set to be released in 2022 with English subtitles, and I cannot wait.

Best Boy

When you’re young, everything terrible is far away, but the bad thing is looking at you anyway, even if you can’t see it. And it comes toward you slowly and steadily through the years until suddenly it’s in front of you and about tot take something away for good.

If you love someone with autism, you will definitely want to read this story. And even if don’t, Eli Gottlieb’s sweet novel about a child in an old man’s body, striving to sustain memories of a mother’s love, will make you smile, weep, and cheer. It’s about outcasts and community, parental love and abuse, sibling rivalry and reconciliation, and closure.

Gottlieb based his 2016 Carnegie Medal Nominee for Fiction in fact, having an older brother very much like the protagonist. Both men live in long-term assisted care facilities staffed by a broad spectrum of low-paid workers. So, when Todd’s favorite caregiver in the story becomes overshadowed by a manipulative new hire and an antagonistic roommate, he can’t cope and sets out on an adventure to recapture the magical place of his youth. 272 engrossing pages.

To learn more about the real Gottlieb brothers, watch this author interview featuring a home visit.

1984

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

Since debuting in 1949, George Orwell’s authoritarian dystopia, a staple among top 100 lists of all time, has been banned repeatedly for political and sexual content. In what may be literature’s most knee-jerk reaction, one Florida jurisdiction even challenged it as recently as 1981 for being pro-communist. Clearly, Orwell was not on the side of Big Brother, who controls society, history, and the future through such institutions as Thought Police and Newspeak. Social commentators over the past four years have drawn on the news to illustrate Orwell’s prescience, citing revisionist history on both ends of the political spectrum. But regardless of one’s politics, this suspenseful tale of hope defeated deserves a second look.

I first read 1984 in college, when the romance essential to the plot might reasonably have made the biggest impact. Yet the image that remained forty years later was neither that nor the uneasiness of a world where survival requires mastery of Double Think in order to keep abreast of the lies. The thing I could not forget was the sheer terror of Room 101, where nightmares are manifest through virtual reality. In the case of Wynston Smith (played by John Hurt in the most recent film version), that is the threat of rats being released onto his face, which forces his betrayal of the girlfriend I had forgotten.

Trigger Warning: if you are prone to depression, loneliness, disillusion, or ennui, this is not the book for you.

The Forest House

I step out onto the porch in a loose nightgown and feel the breeze, so reminiscent of swimming, the way water flows over the skin, or fingertips to trace the curves and hollows of a body . . . suddenly I’m awake to myself.

When Joelle Fraser needed affordable digs in which to raise her little boy near her soon-to-be-ex, she found two options in her northeastern California town: a crummy apartment or a cabin on the edge of civilization. Abandoning city life for solitude, she found silence, wildlife, wood fires, and a reservoir of strength she had not known she possessed.

In my continuing quest for the perfect get-away contemplation, I found this 2013 memoir engrossing from the first of its 223 pages. Focusing on motherhood, creativity, and the seasons of the soul as one ages, it shows the artist striving for balance in her personal and professional life far from distraction. But in this haven many authors would covet, she must face the challenges of weather, the ever-present threat of mountain lions, and separation from friends.

 In this author reading, Fraser reflects on the loneliness of the holidays and the unexpected pull of city life.

The Salt Path

We had lost everything except our children and each other, but we had the wet grass and the rhythm of the sea on the rocks. Could we survive on that? We knew the answer, but to give up on this and return to the world didn’t seem like the answer either.

When Raynor Winn’s 2018 memoir of homeless camping along the British coastline was awarded £10,000 for the inaugural RSL Christopher Bland Prize, she celebrated with a cup of tea and a biscuit—a luxury after two summers of hardship and ostracization as a rough sleeper along England’s 630-mile Southwest Coast Path. With her invalid husband, just diagnosed with a rare and fatal disease, she traversed the famously rugged shoreline familiar to Poldark viewers, camping along the narrow trail bordering cliffside estates. At fifty years old, they were subjected to starvation, sunstroke, blisters, and verbal abuse, but with privation came a personal reformation of strength and hope born of natural beauty and the occasional kindness of strangers.

This selection, yet another misguided recommendation as a follow-up to the midlife rebirth tale of A Year by the Sea (reviewed February 2) was beyond depressing in my opinion, but morbid disbelief kept me listening.  I’m not sure I could have turned 270 pages to see what Mother Nature and humanity would throw at them next. Most distressing was their blithe disregard which, while easing their discomfort, made me question their priorities and sanity. But that is my prerogative as an older reader, and the story has a happy ending of sorts. To appreciate the remarkable woman behind this remarkable tale, watch this author interview.  

Etta and Otto and Russell and James

Go do whatever, wherever. Go do it alone, and now, because you want to and you’re allowed to and you can.

What more reason would an octogenarian woman need to embark on an impulsive 2,000-mile hike from Saskatchewan to the Atlantic with scarcely any baggage? Ostensibly, Etta wants to see the ocean, yet she could make it to the Pacific in half the time. She could drive, take a train or bus or plane. Instead, she rambles through the wilderness in introspective silence and misty reminiscence. Solitude is her companion, that and a lone coyote with whom she converses on the brink of dementia. Meanwhile, her husband learns to occupy himself in her absence while their best friend tails her, only to embark on his own impromptu adventure once they meet up.

This road trip novel bears a striking resemblance to The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (reviewed October 19, 2019), yet differs significantly in that Etta’s journey lacks a compelling reason. If one reaches the point in life where they have no obligations and dwindling faculties, it implies, they should embrace adventure while they still can. The idea appeals, but the execution leaves me skeptical. This ill-equipped and elderly pilgrim spends a summer sleeping under the stars, on the cold ground, and awakens limber enough each morning to go on? She never encounter dangerous animals or people, and the sun always shines? Through it all, the action flashes forward and backward through time without reason or warning, taxing not only the reader’s credulity but their patience.

Emma Hooper’s 2015 fiction is roughly based on the story of her grandparents’ courtship, as she discusses in this brief video . The story however, which I read on the misguided recommendation that it had anything in common with last week’s offering, A Year by the Sea, appeals in theory, but it taxed my credulity and patience.  

A Year by the Sea: Thoughts of an Unfinished Woman

Men-o-pause, a pause from men. Perhaps all women in long-term relationships should consider it.

When Joan Anderson wrote her memoir of marital separation in 1999, she was pausing a stagnant marriage to recharge and reorient, with no idea how it would resolve. She could not have known it would become a cult classic akin to Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea or that, nearly twenty years later, it would be made into an award-winning film starring Karen Allen. You can watch the trailer here.

Set in a primitive cottage on Cape Cod, this coming-of-age story, as she calls it, draws parallels between nature and the nature of women. It’s about the rip tides of life ebbing and flowing. It likens the seagrasses binding the dunes with their tremendous roots to women holding their families together. Sometimes, as with Lindbergh, it’s about shells: [A quahog shell] is like a woman who spends years holding her family members together, then becomes unhinged when they’re gone. It’s also about reinvention and the siren song of impulse, even when it beckons her to swim with the seals.

I personally don’t want to be shark bait, but maybe that’s just me. Yes, I was slow to embrace this story; it’s not like we all have a vacation home to escape to or the financial freedom. I feared it would be all yoga at dawn and chardonnay at sunset, but she brought me onboard by taking a job at a fish market in Chapter Three. From there, it got real and rewarding.

To hear more of Joan’s story, watch this interview.