Literal Laura

person-ing

Being a person is hard. We all have stories — from our childhood maybe, or moments from college, formative memories that cause us pain, shame, embarrassment, or some combination of all three. What happens when we let go of our dreams, let ourselves down and can’t find the strength to start over again?

On Being Human examines Jennifer Pastiloff’s stories from childhood, growing up both in New Jersey and California, as well as attending NYU before embarking on a prolonged stint as a waitress in West Hollywood. She wanted to be a writer, but her IA (Inner Asshole) got in the way of her pursuing that dream. Instead she found herself waiting tables near the New Line Cinema studios, constantly beating herself up for not returning to her studies, trying to ignore the fact that she had hearing loss and battling an eating disorder.

“I would be an adult before I realized that you don’t have to kill yourself to change,” Pastiloff writes. “The will to grow must outweigh the need to be safe.”

The amount of loss that Pastiloff suffered in her childhood is astonishing and could have easily crushed her spirit for good. She went to therapy on and off as a young person, and eventually only her primary care doctor’s samples of antidepressants helped her to stabilize. Her accounts of living with anorexia, painful interactions with her family members, and destructive intimate relationships are told in a choppy style which takes some getting used to. But once the momentum in her tale shifted (for me it was at page 130) I found that I was not just relating to her, I was rooting for her (and for myself, too).

The thing about Pastiloff’s story is it’s so familiar. In one section she gives a year by year account of how she spent a 13 year period. It’s painfully sad and heartbreaking and for me, it was very relatable. My own “dark years” as I call them were thankfully only a four year time span, but they were bad enough and filled with many moments similar to the ones she recounts. She was so filled with self-loathing that she poured all of her energy into trying to shape what was seen by others — her body and her relationships. She thought that a smaller frame would mean she took up less space, and maybe then she would like herself. She thought drinking more and exercising more and being more desirable to men would make her happy. But it didn’t, because she never took the time to examine the lies she was telling herself internally.

Once she began a cycle of anti-depressants, she stopped exercising four hours a day and began to eat a little more. That’s when she found yoga. I had to laugh about the idea that “yoga found her,” but I can see why she said it. People who have never tried yoga have attitudes about it… and some people who do yoga on a regular basis may have a negative opinion, as well. But for Pastiloff, yoga helped her calm her mind down and connect with her physical self. She began treating herself with kindness, both mentally and physically. And finally, in her 30s, she found some peace.

On Being Human recounts Pastiloff’s journey from her waitressing career to leading hybrid yoga/writing workshops all across the globe. She teaches others how to deal with their Inner Assholes, and helps people to find peace through yoga, releasing their bullshit stories, and connecting with like-minded individuals.

“My whole life I had been waiting for permission, waiting to be discovered, waiting to be acknowledged, chosen, given permission to take up space. All my life I had been waiting for someone to tell me I was enough…. Think of all the things that you thought would kill you from shame or pain that didn’t. The things you wept over that now you can talk about, if not laughing, with some kind of remove. I would ask everyone to give themselves a fucking medal,” she writes.

Give yourself a medal, indeed. If you’re looking for some inspiration, or even if you’re just in it for some celebrity name-dropping (find out who the good tippers were at The Newsroom restaurant!) I highly recommend On Being Human.

what it means to be fulfilled

It is not unusual for me to cry while reading a book, but it IS unusual for me to cry for the variety of reasons I did while reading Correspondents by Tim Murphy. A sweeping tale of families on opposite sides of the world, Correspondents manages to be both epic and intimate at the same time.

Family histories are traced as men and women fall in love, start lives together, build homes, go to church and chase dreams. Educations are sought and parents set high expectations for their offspring–wanting their children to have better lives than the ones they cobbled together for themselves. The sprawling family connections are familiar, comforting, and fraught with what are easy to consider as typical issues. As these patterns continue, a young boy leaves the life he knows in Syria and crosses the ocean to pursue a job and valuable money to send home to his family from America. Soon, that young man will become a doctor and marry an Irish-American girl, and their granddaughter Rita will achieve her dream of becoming a Harvard-educated war correspondent, reporting from Baghdad before the age of 35.

Meanwhile in Iraq, another family is just getting by. In this family, there are teachers, government workers, and grandparents that live with their grown children and help to raise the little ones. An undercurrent of fear ripples through the community as an invasion by the United States appears to be imminent. The family has been suffering under U.S.-imposed sanctions as well as the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein, but fears the unknown posed by war. The educated, professional Asmaa has been encouraging her younger cousin Nabil to learn English and get a good job his entire life, and she eventually finds him a position as a translator for the government.

This work is where he eventually meets Rita Khoury, who had been passing her time in Lebanon filing stories for the American Standard newspaper, praying that the war would start so she could meet her professional ambitions. Together Rita, Nabil, Asmaa and a cast of international characters navigate the American invasion and occupation of Iraq, attempting to share the true story with the world while keeping their lives, reputations, and sanity intact.

What cannot be captured in a brief synopsis of the book is the depth of the emotions evoked by Murphy’s writing. He manages to convey the heart-wrenchingly similar and suffocatingly brutal bonds between members of the Syrian, American, Irish and Iraqi families which we meet in his book. The high standards Rita’s father set for her were so that she would be HAPPY, not so that she would make him happy… but she lives her whole life so as not to disappoint her dad. Nabil spends much of his life running from his true desires so as not to bring shame to his family, and by the time he recognizes what he really wants he cannot be his authentic self without being susceptible to blackmail. Rita passes judgment on her sister’s decision to marry a bland guy and have kids with him, but after the trauma she experiences in Iraq she realizes maybe her sister made a good choice, after all. The small twinges are perfectly described on the page and may need to be re-read a few times for the full effect to come through.

I’m not trying to say I cried my way through this book. But when the tears came, they were real and plentiful. It wasn’t just a teardrop or two at a nicely coined phrase… it was the kind of satisfying, snotty crying one does after actually going through something.

I loved Correspondents. Much like Rita, I idolize Tom Friedman and have devoured his books. She’s a relatable character and the relationships she has with friends, lovers and co-workers ring true. I can picture the families gathering at tables, swimming in lakes, and walking into the bazaar to admire jewelry they will never buy. If you want to expand what you think about love, foreign policy and family ties, give it a read. You won’t be disappointed.

is this the real life?

If I had unlimited resources, I would distribute Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland to the masses. And by distribute, I mean I would give a copy to every single person in the country, starting at about age 16. If they were unable to read I would read it to them. I would pay for translations into any and all languages. I would pipe audiobook versions into public spaces — grocery stores, bus stops, malls, those annoying tv/speaker combos at gas station pumps — and put little notebooks and pencils around so my fellow concerned citizens could take notes. Yes, it’s that important. Yes, I may sound a little crazy.

Wait, you think I sound crazy? We haven’t even embarked on the road to crazy yet.

Kurt Andersen begins his tale prior to the founding of the United States. He takes us back in time to the days of Martin Luther and the founding of the Protestant faith, the OG of anti-establishment viewpoints. As the egoistic Protestants board ships bound for a new, holier-than-thou life and a pious future in New England, the real story begins. He discusses the willingness of Americans both then and now to believe in fantasies. Andersen traces the social and cultural trends of the colonials (including various factions of Protestants literally kicking each other out of town for not being the right type of Christian) to snake oil salesmen, the Salem witch trials, California gold rush and onward. As he weaves together the stories of religion, science, and blind consumerism through the years Andersen describes the unusual desire of Americans to believe in something greater than themselves.

Andersen focuses on what he calls the exceptionalism of America, which has two meanings–highly unusual and unusually good. America, Anderson argues, is both, mainly due to the “peculiar” American tendency to invent, build, and dominate the fantasy-industrial complex, an environment in which fiction and reality are indistinguishable. We inhabit this strange little uniquely American bubble, where we build mini suburbias that require us to drive to work, because cities are dangerous, unhealthy and crowded. We believe what we want to believe (the ubiquitous American dream) and pray to the God of our choosing. We judge those who don’t believe, look, and act the way we do, though our nation’s founding documents espouse our right to pursue happiness in whatever way we wish. We believe unbelievable stories about our nation’s founding fathers because they comfort us, and some of us think that the Bible is literally the Word of God.

Because our neighbors believing in a bunch of hooey does no physical, financial, or emotional harm to ourselves, we let them be. This “live and let live” mentality is all fine and good, Andersen argues, until it no longer is. Anti-vaxxers pose a threat to health, conspiracy theorists have eroded faith in government, and climate change deniers fail to see or believe the urgent problems created by human impact on the environment.

“As we let a hundred dogmatic iterations of reality bloom, the eventual result was an anything-goes relativism that extends beyond religion to almost every kind of passionate belief: If I think it’s true, no matter why or how I think it’s true, then it’s true, and nobody can tell me otherwise.”

In one particularly satisfying and illuminating paragraph Andersen describes how the English language changed to accommodate a softening between fact and fiction:

You can see it in our very language–particularly where it comes to discriminating between the actual and the unreal and the ridiculing fantasies purporting to be authentic. For a century, Americans had a wide-ranging, well-established vocabulary for this, talking about suckers falling for hogwash. After the 1920s, however, we invented fewer and fewer such disparagements. Soon words like balderdash, humbug, and bunkum were shoved to the back of the language attic and semiretired or eliminated, along with hooey, claptrap, and malarkey. We also did a strange thing to a certain set of older words. For as long as they’d been English, incredible, unbelievable, unreal, fabulous, and fantastic were either derogatory or neutrally descriptive, different ways of calling claims unlikely, imaginary or untrue. But then they were all redefined to be terms of supreme praise, synonyms for wonderful, glorious, outstanding, superb. It was a curious linguistic cleansing and a convenient prelude to the full unfettering of balderdash, bunkum, hooey, humbug and malarkey later in the century.

Andersen’s description of so-called “Kids R Us Syndrome” is one of my favorites. This phenomenon began in the 1980s, when baby boomers decided they did not ever have to grow up, and started playing video games and fantasy sports, spending money on plastic surgery to look younger, entertaining themselves with comic books and super hero movies, and funding artwork that could have been created by children. In other words, Kids R Us syndrome afflicts those who want to be forever young. What’s the harm? The lines blending, ever so subtly, between fantasy and reality (his example is Michael Jackson).

It is absolutely fascinating how many things I did not know about American history. For example — there was a time when everyone thought they would find gold in Virginia. Really! Not to mention John Wesley, one of the co-founders of the church I was raised in (Methodist) was effectively kicked out of that church and had to escape back to England after he broke up with his teenage girlfriend. In New York state it was not uncommon for young men to have visions of God and found very unusual religions. Andersen gets into detail on the Scopes Monkey Trial, McCarthyism, Walt Disney, and the myth of the Old South.

I could go on and on, and I sort of have because I truly loved reading this book and spoke about it at length to a lot of people who probably wished I would shut up about it. The other problem was how on the nose Andersen’s story is, and how we are up to our necks in Fantasyland. Toward the end of the book as he points out that the rise of Trump and “alternative facts” was a natural extension of the previous 450 years, I wanted some comfort or even easy fixes but none were to be found.

Read it, learn something, and enjoy the fascinating journey through the development of America. Maybe eat some macaroni and cheese to help it go down easy. Then take a walk outside, maybe a few deep breaths, and buy a subscription to a real newspaper.

it’s not paranoia if they’re really after you

I’m not a huge sci-fi fan, but I do love a well-written book. Obscura, a book club pick by our biggest sci-fi member, was an absolutely excellent choice. It’s unusual for all 7 club members to be in agreement that we liked a particular book, but that was the case here.

The protagonist in Obscura is a female researcher, Dr. Gillian Ryan (I imagine she looks like Dr. Scully from The X Files), who is trying to develop a cure for a genetic and degenerative illness that already took her husband and is now harming her young daughter. She is the preeminent force in the field and has the best odds of coming up with a way to cure Losian’s disease or at least slow down its symptoms. As she gets closer to promising developments, her funding dries up and she is at a loss for options. That’s when her old college boyfriend knocks on her door with a tantalizing offer-come work with him on a NASA mission, and her research will be funded indefinitely.

Carson, the former boyfriend, tells Dr. Ryan that the astronauts that have traveled to the international space station have been experiencing symptoms that are similar to Losian’s, which is why NASA has such an interest in her research. After some hemming and hawing about the time away from her daughter, Dr. Ryan agrees to go with him on his mission (it’s also why we have a full book to read)… and that’s when things get weird.

Did I forget to mention that Dr. Ryan is a drug addict? Ok, so she’s addicted to hydrocodone, and that part of the book REALLY aggravated me at first before I realized it was a super important plot point. My favorite scenes involved Gillian’s research assistant, Birk, who is a gigantic and protective postgrad student, who is a very well developed character that I would love to meet someday.

I would write more about it but don’t want to give away the plot. To be honest, I didn’t expect to really like this book but it was superb… and also scary! The suspense is palpable and the pages turn easily. I finished it in two days, and it came into my thoughts for days after finishing it. The book was creepy, tense, and very well written. There were some parts that I wish were more fleshed out, but I enjoyed the various formats used for describing the action, such as audio transcripts and excerpts from official government reports. All in all, this was an excellent read and I recommend it to anyone looking for something different (and of course sci-fi fans!)

Lincoln, as he knew him

The premise is a fascinating one: a book about Abraham Lincoln before he declared his intention to run for president, written from the perspective of a young man who spent hours documenting his work in the courtroom. The murder case Lincoln is litigating is dramatic, his community is torn, and he has personal entanglements with the parties involved.

Robert Hitt is hired to be the old-timey equivalent of a court reporter, writing down word for word everything said during the proceedings. Earlier in the year he had worked at Lincoln’s debates with Stephen Douglas, and when his transcripts were released to the press Lincoln’s star rose considerably given the power of his statements.

Unfortunately, the first-hand account is what makes the book so awkward. I wanted to like it. I learned a lot from the narrative but found it very hard to believe that Hitt himself actually thought what the authors wrote he was thinking. I understand that a prodigious amount of research went into their conjecture, and that at some point you have to suspend belief in order to engage with the story, however, this book is marketed as a work of non-fiction, and it’s just tough to buy it.

Another disconnect I felt was if the authors wanted to strictly present the trial transcript, they should have done exactly that. Instead, they mix in a word for word account of the proceedings with all kinds of historical context, which is wonderfully interesting, plus the “thoughts” of Hitt. So for example one chapter may contain the following: The dramatic transcript of the questioning of some witnesses.. plus, Hitt wondering where he should put the quotation marks in a sentence or two, because he is not sure whether the person who said the words meant them to be a direct quote or not, so he resolves to look it up after that day’s proceedings conclude, plus some musings on the temperature in the courtroom, an account of how the court house was built and a few funny lines about how people were afraid to lose their prime seats in the courtroom if they go outside to use the latrine.

All in all it made for a clunky read which could have been a lot more satisfying if just one path was selected and pursued, instead of the authors attempting to go down five roads at once in order to achieve something greater.

Wits, Brogues and Guns

I’ve never had a run-in with anyone in the Irish mob, but if I did, I hope it would be 1/3 as funny as Caihm McDonnell makes it appear in his book A Man with One of Those Faces. In the opening pages, a young man fulfilling the community service quota required by his aunt’s will in order to receive a monthly stipend is brutally attacked by a nursing home patient. The nurse who requested he stop in to visit the patient accompanies him to the hospital and travels with him as the rest of the unusual premise of the book plays out, much to the delight of at least this reader.

Paul, the protagonist of the story, is in his late 20s and doing his best to live on a meager monthly inheritance left by a bitter family member that he despised. Should he get a job (or get in trouble with the law) the checks will stop, and he is intent on dwindling the account down to zero. You know, for spite. As you can guess from the title, Paul is a nondescript kind of fellow. That makes it easy for him to visit with Alzheimer’s and dementia patients without them realizing that he is not one of their favorite family members. He had a deal with Nurse Brigit at one of the long-term care facilities he frequented to meet with the patients that did not have visitors in order to cheer them up. It all went swimmingly until he was brutally attacked by a patient who, after his death, turned out to be a famous gangster who the authorities believed had died decades before.

After Paul learned that it was truly a case of mistaken identity that caused his near-death experience, he had another near-death experience. This one was actually targeted. As he goes on the run with Brigit, who keeps them alive using her knowledge of criminal investigations that she learned from American TV shows, we meet an array of characters (and boy are they characters!) involved in law enforcement, the legal system, and the Irish mob. There is Detective Sergeant Bunny McGarry, who is a washed up drunk with a few tricks up his sleeve, Detective Inspector Jimmy Stewart, who is counting the hours until his retirement and whose every action follows the letter of the law, and Detective Wilson, a book smart rookie with zero street smarts for whom Stewart is responsible during his last few shifts.

What a strange, hilarious, and twisted story. The accents are very entertaining as written, and I found myself looking up certain Irish phrases (though I could use my imagination to draw conclusions about what many of the words meant). I absolutely loved the fast pace, the observational humor of our protagonist, and the way every single character is treated as an important piece of the puzzle. The book isn’t ground-breaking but it sure is solid, fast-paced, and worth the time it takes to read. I laughed out loud in points, and even highlighted some of the astute remarks on life made by the characters as they were trying to stay alive and solve the case. All in all, a very satisfying read.

{insert cliche here}

***This review contains spoilers.***

I’m not a huge fan of sappy romance novels or even chick lit, but something about Jill Santopolo’s “The Light We Lost” grabbed my interest. I wish it hadn’t. The novel about the romance between Columbia seniors Gabe and Lucy begins on 9/11/2001 and stretches on for the next thirteen years, after their careers and priorities landed them in separate parts of the world. Lucy becomes a children’s television producer, while Gabe is a photojournalist covering conflicts in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria and beyond.

One of the most aggravating parts of the book (and there were many) is how our narrator, Lucy, is telling the story TO Gabe. Therefore each short little chapter (which is identified by lower-case Roman numerals because it’s so fancy) begins with some sort of insight into life such as, “There are certain events in a person’s life that feel like turning points, even when they’re happening” and then ends with a question to Gabe such as, “But would you let me photograph you, now, if you had the chance?” Vomit. There are so many fake apologies: “I’m sorry if you don’t want to hear about me falling in love with another man, Gabe, but you left me to go chase your dreams.” There are so many asinine little asides: “Did you ever meet so-and-so’s sister, Felicia? She has corkscrew curls and the brightest smile and a keen sense of fashion.” There are just so many words that do NOTHING to bolster the narrator’s personality, character, or presence.

Here’s what really gets me about “The Light We Lost.” It’s all so promising. The fourteen month romance at the center of the story doesn’t take place right away, and it happens all while the other shoe is about to drop, because Gabe has told our narrator that he will be leaving NYC to pursue photography. They move in together anyway, vowing that they won’t ever minimize the other person’s career goals. Then Gabe becomes an experienced photographer, and leaves Lucy alone in New York. He stops responding to her e-mails. She finds solace in her gal pals, seeks advice from her science-y older brother who makes a bunch of references to chemistry, then meets another man and falls in love with him.

All the while, she is becoming established in her TV career. She works on a children’s show called “It Takes a Galaxy,” which features cartoon aliens. Lucy slowly begins contributing more to the plot points of the show, breaking gender stereotypes and helping teach kids to believe in the power of their dreams. She ends up dating this guy Darren, who she meets at a beach house, and he is a stable, polite, 9 to 5’er who seems like a safe choice after the dashing and unpredictable Gabe.

Every so often she is jarred by a reminder of Gabe–a photo of his appears in the New York Times, or she sees something on Facebook that reminds her that their lives have drifted apart. But Darren is helping her cross things off her bucket list. He buys her a puppy, which will be kept at HIS apartment. Lucy doesn’t like that–she wanted a say in the dog selection process. He whisks her away to France because she wanted to spend a weekend in Paris. That’s where he proposes.

So of course she marries this nice stable guy, even though he tells her that her children’s television job is “cute” and she thinks that’s offensive. He minimizes her aspirations, which is exactly what she and Gabe promised they would never do to each other. Gabe calls her, of course, on the morning of the wedding. He wanted to hear her voice, and she theorizes that he doesn’t have enough deep connections with other people to keep him grounded even though he has this exciting and kind of dangerous career.

He gets engaged to someone else, then they break up. Lucy and her husband have two kids and start to drift apart. Darren wants her to quit her job because, well, the guy is sort of a chauvinist and she never had a serious conversation to curb that opinion. Lucy thinks he is cheating, so eventually when Gabe is back in town, they have a one-afternoon affair and SURPRISE! She gets knocked up. Then he calls her, desperate to recapture the normalcy they could never have, and tells her he is quitting and moving back to the States to be with her. Then he gets horrifically injured in an explosion and SURPRISE! Lucy is his medical proxy so her pregnant self has to get on a plane to Israel to decide whether to pull the plug.

Ugh ugh ugh. It is all so yuck. The premise was interesting, and I admire the star-crossed lovers that want to make a difference in the world. But really, even the ENDING lacked satisfaction, because I wanted to know whether she was going to stay with the husband and didn’t even find out.

Next time that I’m tempted to pick up a chick lit book, I’ll think twice. At least this was a quick read so not too much time was lost.

hope

As an avid listener of Pod Save America, the Crooked Media podcast hosted by former Obama administration officials, I knew I would be reading Dan Pfeiffer’s book “Yes We (Still) Can!” as soon as I could get my hands on it. Dan was President Obama’s Communications Director, and he is one of my favorite hosts of “the Pod.” He’s witty, intelligent, quick with comebacks and visceral in his reactions to the political and cultural atrocities that have occurred in the U.S. since Obama’s tenure ended.

Much like I expected, Dan’s book comforted, amused and enraged me at the same time. He examines the Obama campaign and presidency through his insider’s perspective, highlighting the way the media landscape changed over a decade and created a world in which the election of Trump was possible. While not exactly a tell-all memoir, Dan shares some entertaining stories and does not shy away from describing some of his low points while working on the communications team.

I truly found the sections about Twitter fascinating. Dan writes that Twitter and most social media sites (even G-mail) were inaccessible from White House computers. Eventually in 2011 Dan himself obtained a Twitter handle, but denied the requests of other staffers to have official Twitter accounts for this reason: he was afraid that off-hand comments from every person associated with the administration would somehow disrupt official messaging.

The idea of messaging weaves throughout the book and its sections about media, fake news, and the 2016 election. As Dan writes about trying to meet a big print advertising deadline but not having a slogan yet before the 2008 election, he opines,”The lesson here is that you can’t fabricate a message. It can’t be inorganic or forced; it has to flow directly from the candidate… The sound bite comes from the story, not the other way around.”

Obviously as a senior advisor to a Democratic president, there is a very liberal bias to this book. Dan is pretty footnote-happy, and many of his sarcastic comments compare Obama to Trump. In assessing the differences between parties, he observed, “Republicans want to foster cynicism about politics and government, and to convince periodic voters that their vote doesn’t matter. For Democrats, then, the key is to inspire people to turn out to vote.” It’s fascinating and strangely appropriate that Republicans stoop to the level of cultivating distrust in government in general, and ALL politicians, as part of their fear-mongering strategy.

What made the Trump campaign so successful was storytelling. Not that Trump’s message about the decline of America (which was reflected in his morose and depressing inauguration speech) was accurate, but it was COMPELLING. Dan argues that the Democratic story did not hit home enough to drive people to the polls. The thought process went like this: “No way will Trump be elected, he’s a lunatic, Hillary’s a lock, I can stay home.” So stay home they did. Trump’s very clear, racist message motivated infrequent voters in a much stronger way.

Because so many of Trump’s claims are not based on facts, Dan examines how fake news sprang up from the seeds of the birther movement, which he refers to as the “post-truth” era. “When the lines between facts and opinions blur, it provides an opening for those who view facts as obstacles and not pillars to an argument.”

All in all I devoured “Yes We (Still) Can” with great enjoyment. I learned a great deal, became engrossed in the behind-the-scenes policymaking stories, and found it comforting to judge the current state of the nation vs. how it looked under an Obama presidency. The problem, however, was that he’s not our leader anymore. While Dan promises to show us how to move forward as liberal thinkers under a crazy Republican president, I did not find many of the action steps to be feasible. Sure I follow along with the news, I lobby my congress people and do actually write letters to officials… but where will we find another Obama-like figure to lead us out of this mess? Because I think that’s kind of what we need.

Either way, I recommend this book to anyone who may enjoy my favorite podcast, to anyone who is a liberal, to anyone who wants to read about how superstitions about chicken tenders may have influenced the first debate against Mitt Romney, and to those dorks who get really into media and politics like I do. Have hope, take a deep breath, and move forward.

an education

What does it mean to be smart? To be educated? The right to learn is not one we think about often in this country, as public education systems are provided for free to all children. But to a young girl whose parents preferred to educate their family members by having them work at their junkyard/farm in Idaho, more than just the history lessons passed on by her parents come into question as she grows up.

Tara Westover tells a riveting tale of her upbringing as the youngest of seven children in a fundamentalist family. She has no birth certificate, in fact, her actual birth date becomes a subject of controversy as her mother, grandmother and aunt all swear she was born on different days. But she works hard, and struggles to balance her intuitive knowledge with what she learns in books, after eventually fighting with her family and forcing her way into school.

The starkness of her life on the “mountain” where her family lives contrasts vividly with the town where she travels to perform in plays, much to her father’s chagrin. One by one her older siblings begin to leave the homestead, wanting more to life than being their harsh father’s crew leader on construction or salvage jobs. Tara’s mother first finds paying work as a midwife, and then transforms into a business owner, selling essential oil mixtures and other healing concoctions made from herbs. Despite the horrific accidents that plague the Westover family, they do not seek treatment from the Medical Establishment. Although all people in town ascribe to the Mormon faith, Tara’s father says that hardly any of them are true believers. In fact he criticizes members of his own church’s congregation for being Gentiles for such sins as consuming Diet Coke, doing work on the Sabbath, or wearing a skirt with too high a hemline.

As Tara ages, she struggles to find the hero and the villain in her own story. She wants to learn, and spends time huddling with an old science textbook, trying to learn basic principles in order to take the ACT. Whenever she wants to carve out time for studying, her father tells her she can do it when she’s finished with her duties. While some of her older siblings encourage her, others want her to fall in line and help to flesh out their father’s work crew. Her mother passes back and forth between supporting Tara’s dreams and demurring to their father’s violent, unhinged views.

It takes a heartbreakingly long time for Tara to embrace herself in this memoir, to finally instill within her heart a sense of self love and self respect. She has to replace her father’s and her brother’s harsh words about female values with the ones she has learned from books and in some of the most sacred founts of knowledge in the world. She finally begins to believe in her own innate value and goodness after returning over and over again to a homeland that is no longer her home, to a place that is not safe. Along the way we see Tara struggle with fitting in to society because she does not feel at home in herself. When her lack of knowledge proves her to be an unusual creature in a college environment, she retreats into herself repeatedly until she begins to own her life, to rewrite her story, and to start fresh on a new page.

My heart ached reading this book, and I did recoil at the violence of her brother and father’s outbursts. It is so difficult to picture them inflicting such rage on a young girl, and I tried not to do so. It also became more surreal with each chapter to see how her brother unraveled, and how the family chose sides by the end. Tara’s strength cannot be overstated, and her story is one that can teach all of us about making hard choices.

While the family is Mormon, there is not a lot of Mormon-trashing in the book. She just happens to have been raised Mormon, and none of the marriages in the memoir are polyamorous. I will admit I was fascinated by the pseudonyms (some family members have their real names used while others do not) and the sections where Tara admits her memory of events may be different then others in the family or in town.

If you’re interested in a non-flinching account of a girl fighting to become her own person and stand her own ground under very unusual circumstances, give this book a try. I enjoyed it even more than Hillbilly Elegy, and they are very much in the same realm.

the amateur

Until a friend mentioned her obsession with true crime stories and named the Golden State Killer in passing, I had only ever read one book from the genre. That book was “In Cold Blood,” and it gave me the heebie-jeebies. When I read Truman Capote’s tale of the Clutter family murder I lived alone, in a little first-floor apartment that I not-so-affectionately refer to as Big Brother House. Because I knew of the rumors that parts of Capote’s book were fabricated, I could distance myself from the cruelty of the story.

That was not the case with “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark.”

I came up on the waitlist for Michelle McNamara’s book just shy of two months after the alleged Golden State Killer was caught. Her account of his crimes, and the exhaustive search for him that began with the first known attack in June 1976, is stunning and powerful. To begin the book she lays all the cards on the table by describing the attacks. She outlines the unimaginable horror encountered by his victims, the turning point at which the crimes switched from home invasion and rape to double homicide, the cruel calling cards and key signs that the same perpetrator was at play. Then she introduces the reader to the investigators, and ever so slowly, to herself.

We learn that McNamara became intrigued with criminal cases at a young age, when she was growing up outside of Chicago. She shows us her aptitude for storytelling and for piecing together facts, personalities, and context while making it look absolutely effortless. Her voice is descriptive and engaging, a guiding force for a book that, as it was being written, had no ending.

I began to read “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark” while my husband was away on business. That was a gigantic mistake. She weaves together the different personas that the attacker has had over the years–the Visalia Ransacker, the Original Night Stalker, the East Area Rapist. Even though I was reading in broad daylight, the unflinching accounts of attacks against women in their own homes was too much. The details were too finely drawn and based on stringent research from police reports; the attacks so personal and vengeful and premeditated that my blood was chilled even on hot summer evenings. At night, while my husband was in California (where the attacks took place) and I was safely in our house in Rhode Island, I could not stop thinking of a bad guy with no face breaking into our first floor windows. So I put the book away.

A week or so later I picked it up again and finished within two days. The time would have been less but we were on vacation, visiting family. After McNamara teamed up with other internet researchers who were searching for the killer, I was hooked. “When I logged on to the EAR-ONS board for the first time, I was immediately struck by the capable, exhaustive crowdsourcing being done there,” McNamara writes. As a highly competent researcher and investigator with a well-respected true crime blog, McNamara gained access to more paperwork and people than your typical amateur sleuth. In one section her research partner gleefully recounts gaining access to over 60 bankers boxes worth of files, which McNamara referred to as “The Mother Lode.” She was allowed to borrow what she needed, so they transported over half the boxes from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department in a convoy, moving as quickly as they could in case anyone at the office changed their minds. These materials had been unseen by event current researchers, those who were currently employed by any department for which they wore a badge.

While she was not a detective, McNamara had passion. That drive propelled her forward into the case, and she was receiving guidance and insight from active and retired members of the force alike. As she heard their accounts, she formulated a troubling question of her own: Why didn’t more neighbors say something about their homes being cased? Why wasn’t the information volunteered, when police came around after an attack, that a prowler had been spotted or that strange items had been found in nearby drainage ditches? She wanted to blame the culture of the 70’s, but then had her own personal experience, which surprised her.

Sadly McNamara passed away two years before a suspect was apprehended. The name she coined to encompass the reign of terror he had held for a decade across the state of California was assigned to a 72 year old man that was led from his home in Citrus Heights California in “bracelets.”

I love for this book to be re-released with an afterword from McNamara, in which she tells readers how she dealt with the emotions of triumph and justice that came from using technology to find this man hiding in plain sight, living a normal retiree’s life with his daughter and granddaughter. Instead, we are left with her words describing what it’s like to keep searching: “Seeking is the lever that tips our dopamine gush. What I don’t mention is the uneasy realization I’ve had about how much our frenetic searching mirrors the compulsive behavior–the trampled flowerbeds, scratch marks on window screens, crank calls–of the one we seek.”