Everyday I Write the Book

April Book Club: "This One Is Mine" by Maria Semple

The April EDIWTB book club selection was This One Is Mine, by Maria Semple.

I am having trouble deciding how I feel about this book. I'll start with the plot: it's about Violet and David Parry, a very rich married couple living in LA. Violet is a former TV writer and now stay-at-home mom with a one-year old daughter, and David is her remote and prone-to-criticize music producer husband. They are drowning in money, but have grown apart and alienated from each other. Violet gets involved with Teddy, a very sketchy man she meets during this period of alienation from David - an entanglement with some unexpected consequences. David's sister, Sally, is a ballet instructor in her late thirties and so desperate to get married that she gets engaged to a man she doesn't really know or understand, simply because his career is skyrocketing, but it doesn't bring her the fulfillment she seeks.

The other main character in this book is the city of Los Angeles, for This One Is Mine is really a satire of modern life in LA. (There's even a hand-drawn map of LA in the beginning of the book for readers who may not know where Mulholland Drive is compared to Wilshire Blvd. or the 405.) Semple, a former TV writer herself (including for my beloved Arrested Development), is quite adept at skewering the rich and aimless by revealing the ways they spend their money and time (fancy weddings; yoga sweat lodge retreats; the Hermes store). Most of the characters in this book are some combination of self-absorbed, materialistic, vengeful or desperate, and even if they have their redeeming moments, Semple's deft slash-and-burn makes for some powerful mockery.

But this book isn't always a satire. Sometimes it is instead a straightforward depiction of flawed characters who are motivated by all the wrong things. And for me, that's when the book was less successful, and bordered on implausible. I didn't need these characters to be likable, but I did need to understand them, to feel that what they were doing was consistent or at least explainable. And I couldn't always do that. Most often, my complaints had to to with Teddy and his inexplicable hold on all who came in his orbit. By the end of the novel, even David seemed under his spell. And yet, I saw almost nothing redeeming about him.  

This One Is Mine is a unique book - unpredictable and difficult to categorize. I am glad I read it, and expect that it will stay with me for a while. But I can't say that I loved it. A lot of the time, I felt sort of confused by it. I found this review of This One Is Mine by Miss Meliss on Bibliotica, and I really agreed with it. Like Miss Meliss, I suspect that a lot of people will enjoy this book (and judging by the Amazon reviews, a lot of people did). For me, it was interesting and had its high points, but it didn't work on every level.

I'm really looking forward to hearing what EDIWTB readers have to say about This One is Mine!

Giveaway: "Just Let Me Lie Down" by Kristin van Ogtrop

Oh, my poor neglected book blog. I am so sorry. It's not that I haven't been thinking about you, or that I haven't *wanted* to post. It's these late nights where I fall asleep on the couch, trying to do work, and wake up too tired to post. It has been a long week, and I just haven't found the time. But I have been reading - the EDIWTB online book club is meeting this Thursday, and I am almost done with The Girls too. So please forgive my absence, and know that I will be back soon.

In the meantime, an example of my jumbled life: I somehow got two review copies of the same book, and it's being discussed tomorrow night with the Silicon Valley Moms Book Club, and I still haven't read it. So, I would like to give one copy away here, and to at least mention it since I can't give it a full review yet. It's called Just Let Me Lie Down: Necessary Terms for the Half-Insane Working Mom, by Kristin van Ogtrop (the editor of Real Simple), and it's "an alphabetically arranged dictionary of terms, observations, lists, complaints, questions, musings, and the occasional diatribe" about the author's life as a working mom. (I love the title.)

I've flipped through the book, and it is entertaining. One entry, under "O":

One angry mother: Any woman who is over the age of forty and trying to balance a job, a husband, children, and running a household. If she has any pets, then she may be extra angry. Maybe it's hormones; maybe it's life stage; maybe it's mortality nipping at the heels, but most of the over-forty working moms I know are just pissed off. Still, they sure do get a lot done.

Pretty funny, huh?

Ok, if you want my second copy of Just Let Me Lie Down, leave a comment here. I'll pull a name on Monday, May 3.

Sue Miller's "The Lake Shore Limited" and Book Blogger Con

A few links of interest today...

The first is an article on Shelf Awareness about the upcoming Book Blogger Convention, which is taking place the day after Book Expo America in NY at the end of May. The article talks about how valuable book blogs are to publishers, as well as a survey recently undertaken by Rebecca of The Book Lady's Blog that seeks to quantify the influence of book bloggers. I am really looking forward to Book Blogger Con, so that I can see my book blogger friends and meet some new ones. I am also participating in a blogger/marketing panel at the conference.

The second is this Washington Post review of Sue Miller's new book, The Lake Shore Limited. If you're a fan of Sue Miller... this one has been getting good reviews. The Post says The Lake Shore Limited "may be the closest thing we'll get to a [Henry James-esque] response to 9/11: no drama, no crisis, barely any action at all -- just a deeply affecting examination of the thoughts and feelings of four people still moving in the shadow of that tragedy." I am generally a big fan of Sue Miller's books, though I found The Senator's Wife (reviewed here) disappointing. I am definitely willing to give her another chance on this one.

New Releases About Families

The New York Times had a section on new fiction releases that revolve around families in yesterday's paper. A number of them look interesting. Here are the ones that caught my eye:

This is Exactly Like You, by Drew Perry. From the NYT: Jack Lang has trouble planning ahead, which is how, at the start of this book, he has ended up as the owner of two houses (he impulsively put up his hand when a ranch across the street from his own was being auctioned), one of which is filled with unfinished projects: a kitchen floor half-tiled, a plywood wall where a breakfast nook was supposed to go, a half-insulated attic. Another thing that Jack hasn’t quite finished is his dissertation, which is part of the reason he’s running a mulch-and-garden center instead of teaching at the local college, like his wife Beth. Beth, meanwhile, has left him and their autistic son Hendrick to move in with Jack’s closest friend. In the course of the book all three of them confront the things that you can control — and those you can’t — and start to figure out what to do about them.

Imperfect Birds, by Anne Lamott (about which I have read mixed things). From the NYT: When Elizabeth Ferguson finds Valium pills in her daughter Rosie’s jeans, Rosie has a classic explanation — they belong to a friend. “I got all A’s last term,” Rosie reminds her mother. “I’m holding down two jobs. I’m a good kid, Mom,” That’s all true, but so is the fact that Rosie is being drawn into a world of drugs and sex, one that her mother, Elizabeth, and her stepfather, James, prefer not to see. And besides, both of them have demons of their own to contend with, including Elizabeth’s alcoholism and depression. In the end, the whole family is forced to confront what’s really happening. The book continues a family tale begun in Anne Lamott’s 1983 novel, “Rosie.” Ms. Lamott is best known for her collections of spiritually inflected essays.

The Season of Second Chances, by Diane Meier. From the NYT: At 48, Joy Harkness, a professor at Columbia, still doesn’t have the life she imagined. The one in which she “would become that self-assured woman who knew where the important people lunched,” a woman who “Susan Sontag would choose to meet for an early supper and a movie we might then hack to pieces.” So when she is recruited by Amherst, she puts her apartment on the market, packs her things and moves north. There, installed in a wreck of a Victorian, she discovers that the life she’s been waiting for might have a different shape altogether.

Please weigh in if you've read them!

"The Opposite of Me" By Sarah Pekkanen

First, congratulations to the winners of recent EDIWTB giveaways! The winner of Facebook Fairytales is Ann F., and the winner of You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried is Larissa Fair. Enjoy!

Second, here is a book I want to read: The Opposite of Me, by Sarah Pekkanen. Pekkanen is a local author (she lives in Maryland), and this is her first novel. It is about Lindsey, a Manhattan ad exec who loses her job and moves home to Bethesda - and her beautiful twin sister. From The Washington Post:

From strangers' insensitive comments to high school bullies' cruelty, Lindsey learned early to flex her brain as a foil to her sister's beauty. 'Alex was the star, and I wasn't even in her orbit,' Lindsey tells us. So when the twins' orbits collide as adults, it's high school all over again -- with Alex's homecoming crowns and football player boyfriends replaced by Washingtonian magazine cover shots and a dashing fiance.

But then each sister's life plan changes drastically. Lindsey decides not to go back to advertising after a chance meeting with an entrepreneur whose matchmaking business proves much more appealing. And Alex suddenly falls for Lindsey's friend from high school, just as Lindsey is also falling for him -- a decade too late.

The Post says that while The Opposite of Me is a bit contrived at times, "such sentimentality is counterbalanced by sharp-tongued zingers and Pekkanen's spot-on portrayal of the existential dilemmas of young adulthood." Swapna of S. Krishna's Books calls The Opposite of Me "a fun, sweet book that will have readers hooked as they go on a turbulent emotional journey with Lindsey, hoping she will come to terms with her issues with Alex and find happiness within herself."

Adding to the TBR pile...

"You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried" by Susannah Gora

Back-to-back non-fiction reviews - this never happens here on EDIWTB!

I will start off by saying that if you are not a fan of the 80s or the movies, you should stop reading right now.

If you are a fan of either the 80s or the movies, then this is a book for you: You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried, by Susannah Gora. Gora's book is a detailed, thorough, juicy and insightful chronicle of the making of the great 80s teen movies like The Breakfast Club, St. Elmo's Fire, Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Say Anything, etc. I grew up in the 80s, and those were the formative movies for me. I was pretty much the same age as Samantha Baker when Sixteen Candles came out, and I was looking ahead toward college when I saw St. Elmo's Fire, so those movies were both aspirational and reflective of what I was going through at the time.

Chapter by chapter, Gora explores the making of these movies - the scripts, the casting, the direction, and the behind-the-scenes scoop you've always wondered about - as well as the importance of the movies' soundtracks, the relationship between the legendary director/writer/producer John Hughes and his young cast members, the writing of the article that coined the term "Brat Pack", and the impact these movies have had on filmmaking in the decades since. While Gora is clearly a huge fan of these films, her book is clear-eyed and objective, her storytelling clear and readable. She talked to all the major players (actors, directors, critics) from the decade, with the exception of the man who is the focus of most of the book (Hughes), a recluse for the last few decades of his life.

I especially loved the chapter about movie soundtracks and how much importance Hughes placed on the selection of the songs that formed the backdrop for his most pivotal scenes. He "introduced many American teenagers [including this one!] to the wistful world of New Wave music" and believed that music "gave a more textured sense of who these characters were, since at that age, music is so clearly linked with identity."

I can't really do You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried justice in a short review; there is so much in here that I found interesting. It's definitely a trip down memory lane, but also a compelling look at a decade of filmmaking that transformed a genre and made a permanent impact on the directors and actors we watch today. Like I said at the beginning, this book isn't for everyone. But if you're 80s-obsessed like me (look at the name of my blog!), or simply want to know more about these iconic movies, I highly recommend picking this book up.

Susannah Gora has generously offered to give away a copy of You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried on EDIWTB. If you want to win, comment here before Monday, April 12 and tell me your favorite 80s movie or soundtrack song. (Mine is easy: "If You Were Here" by the Thompson Twins, which played at the end of Sixteen Candles when Jake waits for Samantha outside the church. Sigh.) Oh and hi FTC! This was a review copy thanks to Gora and Crown.

Good luck, and long live the 80s.

"Facebook Fairytales" by Emily Liebert

I am social-media obsessed. In addition to writing my two blogs, I am also a social media practitioner for my day job (I head up digital media strategy at Discovery Communications). So I spend a lot of time thinking about social networking. As I often say, I believe that Facebook will take over the world. The site's impact on how we communicate, engage, learn, connect and share simply cannot be underestimated, in my opinion.

So when I was offered the chance to review Emily Liebert's new book, Facebook Fairytales: Modern-Day Miracles to Inspire the Human Spirit, I took Emily up on it. [Hi FTC! I got this book for free from SkyHorse Publishing.] Her book contains 25 true stories about ways in which Facebook has connected people even in the unlikeliest of circumstances - a grown child finding his adoptive parents; a woman being reunited with two rings of extreme sentimental value thirty years after she lost them; a couple being reunited with their cat after moving sixty miles away from where they last saw it. Liebert has explored the many ways in which Facebook can impact lives, whether personally, politically, or as a force for good.

This premise may sound corny, but Liebert has chosen stories that are actually quite compelling and not melodramatic. The underlying theme, of course, is the power of Facebook to transcend physical distance, years, and fate to connect people who would otherwise have remained strangers, or to mobilize disparate groups of people around a common cause. My personal favorites - the woman who donated a kidney to someone she'd never met before, who was a friend of a friend on Facebook; the half-sisters who met for the first time in 30 years thanks to Facebook; and the woman who raised enough money to pay for surgeries for 5 severely ill children in an orphanage in China.

Facebook Fairytales came out today. It's definitely current, as it's about a site that is having its extended moment. But mark my words, Facebook will go down as the most influential website in decades. Liebert could probably write a new version of this book every year and not run out of good fodder.

Emily Liebert has generously offered a copy of Facebook Fairytales to an EDIWTB reader. If you'd like to win a copy, leave me a comment here before Sunday, April 11. I will pick a name at random on Sunday. Good luck!

"Family Album" by Penelope Lively

Penelope Lively is an author that I have been interested in for a long time, but hadn't read until this year. I just finished her most recent novel, Family Pictures.

Family Picturesis the story of the Harper family - mother Alison, father Charles, their six kids (Paul, Gina, Sandra, Katie, Roger and Clare) and au pair Ingrid, who all live together at Allersmead, a large but fading estate in England. Alison is frumpy and somewhat clueless, but focused entirely on being a mother and creating the "perfect childhood" for her six kids. Charles is a distant, distracted intellectual, who mostly ignores his children, weighing in only when discipline is needed. Ingrid, the au pair, stays with the family long after the kids have moved away, and is hiding her own secrets.

Family Pictures is essentially a collection of memories, with the now adult children telling the story of the family from shifting perspectives that reveal how they felt about their siblings, their parents, and their place in the family. Chapter by chapter, more is revealed about the odd Harper family. Alison seems to spend more time focusing on creating picture perfect holidays and birthdays than in actually engaging with her children and understanding who they are. The siblings form allegiances and individual bonds, but there is little warmth and caring among them. And Charles fritters away the years in his study, oblivious to the children growing up around him.

Lively's writing is wonderful. It is understated and at times poetic. This is the opening to an early chapter:

When the day begins, when the light swells and within the house some people turn over in bed, some people blink, burrow down for some more sleep (Sandra, Katie, Roger, Clare), and others yawn, stare at the window or the clock, return to yesterday's preoccupation (Charles, Paul, Ingrid), or simply pick up the thread of existence once more (Alison, Gina), when this spring morning gets up momentum there are nine at Allersmead, none of them more than a yard or two from someone else, but all poles apart within their heads their hearts. The adults are incapable of recovering what it is that goes on inside the mind of a person of six and a half, or ten, or fifteen. The children have on the whole not the faintest idea of what it is that drives and motivates their elders, or of the landscaping of their thoughts. The children have various instinctive understandings of why their sibling behave as they do; the adults retain the intimacy of daily association but have lost sight of one another in other ways - like most people, they know one another inside out, and not at all.

Breathtaking, no?

However, I finished this book, and felt kind of empty. In the end, the kids were so deeply affected by their unconventional childhood that they mostly rejected all notions of family themselves, dispersing around the world and barely staying in touch. I am not sure what Lively was trying to accomplish with this novel... was she making a statement about parenthood? Did she find any of her characters sympathetic?  Is there anything redeeming in how Alison raised her brood of six? I wondered, when I finished, what was the point of the book?

That doesn't mean I didn't like it, or that I regret reading it. As a work of writing, it was definitely worth it, and I'd like to try out more of Lively's work.

Guest Post on Booking Mama

I have a guest post up today on the excellent Booking Mama blog. Julie asked for people to write about book clubs for her regular Book Club Exchange feature, so I wrote about the EDIWTB online book club. Check it out!