November Not Fiction Book Discussion

We invite you to join us Tuesday, November 4, at 7:00 p.m. in Meeting Room A of Main Library for a discussion of Diane Ackerman's The Zookeeper's Wife, a biography of Antonina Zabinski. Antonina and her husband Jan were zookeepers of the Warsaw Zoo in Poland in the 1930s and 40s. Horrified by the Nazi regime's racist beliefs about both people and animals and supporting the Polish Underground resistance movement, the Zabinskis sheltered over 300 refugees from the Nazis in the remnants of the zoo left after German bombing and Nazi hunting parties. Although the Holocaust is a dark subject, Ackerman's story shimmers with a deep appreciation for the natural world, warm admiration for the Zabinskis, and humorous affection for the animals and humans who lived at the zoo. Ackerman's prose captures the feeling of Antonina's own writing, and one gets the feeling that Ackerman is channeling Antonina's personality as well. Her story provides many topics for discussion, including the perennial question of why some people insist on seeing the difference between themselves and others while other people embrace difference and will even risk their own well-being for the sake of others. We hope you will help us while away the anxious hours leading up to the election results on Election Day!

October is National Reading Group Month

The Women's National Book Association (WNBA) is sponsoring its second National Reading Group Month in October 2008 to promote reading groups and to celebrate the joy of shared reading. For more information, visit the Women's National Book Association Inc. website.
Read, share, enjoy!

October Not Fiction Book Discussion

We invite you to join us for a discussion of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn on Tuesday, October 7 at 7:00 p.m. in Meeting Room A of the Main Library in downtown Charleston. As a boy in the 1960s, Mendelsohn could cause elderly relatives to cry simply by entering a room. He comes to understand that his family is haunted by the deaths of six relatives who disappeared during the Holocaust, who were "killed by the Nazis," and that he resembles one of them, his grandfather's brother. While still a child, Mendelsohn became the official historian of his family, and as an adult, he obsessively searches for answers to the mystery of the disappearance of the six, traveling to many countries and continents, conducting interviews with those last few remaining people who witnessed the events of the Holocaust and might have known his family. His narrative combines memoir, travelogue, genealogical research, and Biblical and Torah commentary to create a rich meditation on family, loss, and the relationship between memory and truth. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Jewish Book Award and chosen as a notable book by many book reviews, The Lost is an important addition to Holocaust literature. According to Adam Kirsch of the New York Sun, "More than just an act of familial piety, this kind of recuperation is one of the distinctive ethical acts of our time."

Notes from September's Not Fiction Book Discussion

Many of us attending the September 2 discussion of Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir The Fun Home had never read a graphic narrative before. We admitted that we assumed the graphics would merely reiterate the text. Needless to say, we were surprised and gratified by Bechdel's book. We discovered that her graphics are an essential part of her narrative, a "text" to be read just as carefully as her words. Bechdel told an interviewer for The Comics Journal, "It's very important for me that people be able to read the images in the same kind of gradually unfolding way as they're reading the text. I don't like pictures that don't have information in them. I want pictures that you have to read, that you have to decode, that take time, that you can get lost in. Otherwise what's the point?" We enjoyed sharing and decoding some of our favorite panels. One of my favorites is on the first page, where we see Bruce Bechdel has been reading Anna Karenina. It was with great delight that I recalled the first line of that novel: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." This panel taught me how to read the book and introduced its subject in a delightful and compact way.

Several critics feel that Bechdel's use of literary and pop culture allusions is too heavy-handed, rather unnecessary to telling her story, and ultimately weakens the story. We disagreed with these critics. We found the allusions to be an integral part of her story, another opportunity for the reader to decode Bechdel's tone and purpose. Bechdel self-consciously refers to the tone of her memoir, in large part created by her use of allusion, as "my cool aesthetic distance." This "cool aesthetic distance" serves both to indicate the pain her relationship with her father has caused her and, at the same time, to show her great debt to him. Her purpose in writing the book, we decided, is to reconcile the pain with the debt and to acknowledge the identity she shares with her father beyond genetics, familial obligation, or sexuality. Bechdel told The Village Voice that " . . . the book is an expansion of my childhood diary, in that it's this perseveration on detail. You know? In some ways I felt like it was almost a penance to trace everything out in such detail." And she told The Advocate, "I realized eventually that what the book was really about was not his suicide or our shared homosexuality or the books we read. It was about my creative apprenticeship to my father; it was about becoming an artist."

We will continue our discussion of family secrets and identity October 7 with Daniel Mendelsohn's memoir The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. We hope you will join us at the Main Library or here on the blog.

September Not Fiction Book Discussion

We will continue our consideration of identity with tomorrow's discussion at 7:00 p.m. in Meeting Room A of the Main Library of The Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel. Bechdel has created a new genre with her book, the graphic memoir, in which she describes her ironically charged relationship with her father, Bruce Bechdel. Alison Bechdel learned that her father was gay shortly after coming out as a lesbian to her family. A short time later, Bruce Bechdel was killed in an accident that Alison suggests might have been suicide. Bechdel circles around both the painful and touching moments of their life together, keeping emotion at just the right distance with controlled and elaborate literary allusion. Would Bechdel have had this utterly original perspective on her search for her sexual identity without her complicated love/hate, recognition/denial relationship with her father? We hope you will join our conversation, either in person or here on the blog, of this groundbreaking work that was acclaimed a best book of the year by more than twenty review journals.

Notes from August's Not Fiction Book Discussion

In an interesting follow-up to our July discussion of Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time, one of our discussion members brought in a newspaper article about the erosion and loss of top soil caused by the flooding in the Midwest this summer. The article notes that, just as with the Dust Bowl, farmers and environmentalists disagree about what to do with erosion-prone land: farm it in hopes of good yields and high prices to make up for crops lost in the floods, or plant it with native grasses, ground cover, and trees to prevent further erosion. We agreed that the Dust Bowl offered a very clear lesson in the best way to proceed.


A central topic of our discussion of One Drop by Bliss Broyard was whether Anatole and Sandy Broyard should have concealed Anatole's identity as a person of mixed race from his children until his death. All of us felt that he should have shared this information earlier in their lives, yet we did question whether we have a right to know everything about our families and what information ought to be shared and what kept private. This question begs another about Anatole Broyard: To what extent were his decisions regarding his identity related to his desire to preserve his own self-image, and to what extent were they the result of his concern for his family? We agreed that Bliss Broyard does a remarkable job of portraying her father's complex motivations, motivations that he may not have been entirely aware of himself, and that she does so in a manner that is both candid and forgiving. Bliss Broyard is also honest about her own motivations in researching her father's family history: "I hoped to discover that I was a complicated person, and since I was too young to feel I'd earned my own complications, I'd happily take some from my father."

An important theme of Bliss Broyard's book is the authenticity of one's identity. In one important scene, Bliss Broyard takes a personality test four different times, only to have it reveal each time that she is an imposter, that, as the administrator tells her, she is "not living in a way that's true to who you are." In a later scene, Bliss imagines the thoughts that must have gone through her father's mind when he was faced with a decision about which race/ethnicity box to check on his application for a social security card. She tells us that "the occasion has become the repository for all my imaginings about the different moments over the years when he had to make a calculation about how to describe his race." We discussed whether Anatole Broyard was an imposter, and decided that to some degree he was. One group member suggested that Anatole was unable to complete his novel because he would not follow the advice to "write what you know." Another member pointed out the anger that some of his relatives felt about his insistence that race was not important to his identity--because he looked white, he could choose to pass and claim it was not as important to him as it actually was. However, we decided that Bliss Broyard has come to an understanding of both herself and her father that offers all of us a useful way of thinking about race and identity in the United States today: "From my own father, I inherited a legacy that connected me to the worst and best American traditions: from the racial oppression spawned by slavery to the opportunities created through becoming self-made. Recognizing my forebears' place in the continuum of history has made me appreciate my own responsibilities as a citizen--of my community, my country, and the world--in a way that simply paying my taxes or casting a vote never did. . . . I may never be able to answer the question What am I? yet the fault lies not in me but with the question itself."

How important do you believe being "true to who you are" is? If you have read One Drop, has it influenced that opinion in any way? We hope you will join our discussion of this multilayered book and the many important questions it raises.

August Not Fiction Book Discussion

We hope you will join us August 5 at 7:00 p.m. in Meeting Room A of the Main Library on Calhoun Street for our discussion of Bliss Broyard's memoir One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race and Family Secrets. With this memoir, the Not Fiction Book Discussion group begins an exploration of identity that we will continue with each book through December. Broyard's father, influential New York Times book critic Anatole Broyard, concealed from his children until his death the fact that he was of mixed race ancestry, that he was black. Broyard examines not only her own response to her father's choice, but also what his choice could have meant to him, and she provides a social and historical view of her family's 250-year history in America. While intensely personal, Broyard's narrative is also a broader consideration of racial identity in America and the basic human urge to "know" who we are.