Entries in the Category "jeannette walls"
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
I listened to this (as an audiobook) after I finished Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle, and the differences between the two books were immediately apparent. Most noticeably, this one was incredibly good.
Didion’s memoir is both smaller and broader in scale than Walls’. Didion writes only about a stretch of about eight months in her life: eight months during which her daughter battled serious, serious illness (coma, embolism, brain surgery, physical therapy to recover normal functions kind of serious illness) and eight months smack in the middle of which Joan’s husband of 40 years, writer John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly of a heart attack. It’s basically the story of how tragedy knocks a woman sideways; in this case, a woman who is remarkably intelligent, rational, and organized, and who is unused to functioning without those skills.
Didion’s meditations on grief and survival are powerful and raw, and it’s in this sense that this memoir digs so much deeper than Walls’. Walls gave the outline (the blueprint) of about forty years of existence, but she barely scratched the emotional surface. On the other end of the spectrum, Didion’s story allows the reader (listener, in my case) real intimacy—painful intimacy, because we have to deal with her grief along with her, so intensely does she render it.
It’s beautifully written, and in and around the death and destruction, it provided an interesting glimpse of the lives of professional writers. I really enjoyed the casual mentions of passing the time marking up galley proofs, adapting snippets of their lives into scenarios for novels, having dinner at the homes of movie stars (Didion and her husband were screenwriters in the late 70s, when serious writers could still be screenwriters) and New York City publishing magnates. I also loved how Didion sublimated her grief in research and then worked it into the memoir. “Sigmund Freud had this to say about grief…” and so on. Other readers—particularly those on the readers’ forums I frequent—felt a bit put off by what they felt was Didion’s academic detachment, but I loved it for what it was: a (futile) attempt to intellectualize an emotional trauma.
What really compounds the tragedy is the knowledge that soon after Didion finished her book, her chronically-ill daughter Quintana died as well.
Review in brief: highly recommended (though not for the faint of heart)
(Didion, husband and daughter in happier times)
The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls
Let me start by saying that I did not hate this book. Most of what I’m going to say about it is negative, but I keep a list of the books that I read and rate them on a scale of 1 to 5 so I can look back and remember what I liked, and I settled on a 3 for this one. That would probably translate to “liked, but didn’t love”; or “liked well enough”. “Didn’t throw it away but probably wouldn’t save it in the event of a fire.”
The book is a memoir about the author’s experiences growing up under the “care” of her father, a shiftless alcoholic with the mind of an engineer, and her mother, an enormously self-involved artist. It was doubtlessly compelling, all the way through. I kept listening (it was an audiobook) through the whole thing, feeling depressed with the family’s disappointments. I’d say I rejoiced in their successes, but for two things: 1. they scarcely had any and 2. it was 99% their fault that they didn’t. The author paints her parents as brilliant eccentrics who couldn’t be constrained by their responsibilities, but the fact remains that (if she is writing the truth) they were two people who let their children starve, walk around dirty and shoeless, and live for eight years in a rickety house with no indoor plumbing, electricity, running water, refrigeration, or heat, and all because they couldn’t be bothered to have jobs or obey city laws or take pride in caring for the children they brought into the world. It was really difficult, as a sane and relatively productive member of society, to listen to those characters endorse their senseless philosophies and to witness them subjecting their children to them.
The book is not particularly well-written, either. So many of the experiences she describes are poignant and alarming, and yet they are often repetitive. Again and again, anecdotes reinforce that there wasn’t enough food, that their conditions were subpar, that her parents were neglectful but dazzlingly intelligent, that the family pulled together through the rough times, but that her father continually let her down, but that she loved him anyway and etc. etc. etc. and yet so much is missing. Memoir as a genre requires a certain degree of personal response to give it its reason for being. So many variations on “our life was really hard,” with nothing to the tune of “what it meant to me, what it did to me, what I took from it, what I want to tell you about it,” misses the entire point of the enterprise.
If I’m enduring through 10 audio discs (which translates to 288 pages, according to the ‘net), I’m looking for something a little more insightful than the chapter that closes out this book. After several years apart, the siblings and mother reunite for a family dinner, and someone wants to toast their dead father. Three hundred pages about this deeply flawed, charismatic man who left an indelible emotional mark on all of them, but especially Jeannette, and this is the toast we get? “Life with him was never boring!” In the words of Seth (and formerly Amy) on SNL’s Weekend Update: “Really?” That’s all we get? Really?
I’ve been Googling a little bit, as well as checking some book forums I frequent to see how people feel about this book, and even though some other people have had the same reaction as me (see, for example, Amazon’s 1-star reviews of the book) the vast majority of people found it touching and moving and a triumph of the human spirit and other various cliches. They’re also listing all the other memoirs they’ve enjoyed, which seem to be mostly of the “I survived a hardship” variety. Maybe this is just an interest I don’t share, but I don’t really want to read about people’s struggles with abusive childhoods or addiction or prostitution or bad haircuts unless I get something out of it besides a sensationalistic thrill. I especially want to avoid memoirs which are written by people who are overly eager to share their experiences with abuse and addiction and prostitution, and I can’t help but put Walls in that camp.
One interesting thread in The Glass Castle (which went nowhere, of course) is late in the book when Walls is ‘making it’ as a journalist with a column about the comings-and-goings of VIPs. She describes a lunch with one of these people wherein she carefully dodges questions about her upbringing and her parents. She remarks elsewhere about how she kept her family and her past secret from friends, colleagues, everybody. I would be interested to know at what point she decided she wanted to disclose everything. That’s a pretty significant emotional shift; was it brought on by a particular event? Over time, did she become more numb to the pain? Or perhaps less numb? It began to haunt her and she wrote the book for cathartic effect?
Maybe this is unfair, but my guess is that the moment of change occurred just as a publisher told her, “Write it, and I’ll get you seven figures.”