December Not Fiction Book Discussions

"He believed the dog was immortal. 'There will always be a Rin Tin Tin,' Lee Duncan said, time and time again, to reporters, to visitors, to fan magazines, to neighbors, to family, to friends. At first this must have sounded absurd--just wishful thinking about the creature that had eased his loneliness and made him famous around the world. And yet, just as Lee believed, there has always been a Rin Tin Tin." So begins Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend by Susan Orlean, our last book for 2012, and the last in our series of discussions about biographies and memoirs that offer us ideas for how to live. What if we could live forever? What would that really mean? And why would we want it?

On her website, Orlean describes the kind of writer she always dreamed of being: "someone who wrote long stories about interesting things, rather than news stories about short-lived events." Her deep curiosity and compassion for her subjects are evident in every piece she writes. Her subjects are often people with a similar deep connection to something. In an interview with Oprah.com, Orlean said, "I think I'm often drawn, whether I realize it or not, to the idea of what drives people. What do we love?" In Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, Orlean tells us that her fascination with her subject began with a figurine of the hero dog that her grandfather clearly felt was special and would not let his grandchildren play with. In her research for the book, she discovered many other people who were invested in Rin Tin Tin. The original animal died, but his memory lived on in his offspring and in other movie and television productions. In an interview with Publishers Weekly, Orlean said, "The power of memory is one of the important themes in the book. My memory of Rin Tin Tin, and in particular my memory of that figurine, and the persistence of those memories, were essential to my interest in the subject. As I learned more about Rin Tin Tin's history, the mystery of my grandfather's attachment to that figurine suddenly seemed to reveal itself, and since it tracked such an important part of history, it became a natural theme for the book." To Orlean, then, living forever means living on in someone's memory.

In interviews with Oprah.com and with her publisher, Simon & Schuster, Orlean mentioned that both her father and a loved dog died as she was writing Rin Tin Tin, making very real for her the consideration of loss and memory. She told the interview for Oprah.com, "What has always fascinated me and what's very emotional to me is the question of what lasts. People want to, if not live forever, have evidence of their existence live forever. And I think that part of what happened for me was that my dad died in the course of my writing this, and I started thinking about memory, the idea that things come and go and then they're gone and forgotten. But Rin Tin Tin, by being reinvented over and over in people's imaginations, became kind of a timeless model: He just keeps going and going; his story outlives everybody. I feel great tenderness toward the people who devoted themselves to Rin Tin Tin and his history because I think everybody wants to have had their existence noted by the universe." We want our lives to have mattered.

In writing about Rin Tin Tin's life and legend, Orlean learned a profound lesson about how to live. Writers write biographies and memoirs in order for the lives of their subjects and their own lives to have been noted by the universe. Orlean says near the end of Rin Tin Tin, "I, too, had set out to be remembered. I had wanted to create something permanent in my life--some proof that everything in its way mattered, that working hard mattered, that feeling things mattered, that even sadness and loss mattered, because it was all part of something that would live on. But I had also come to recognize that not everything needs to be so durable. The lesson we have yet to learn from dogs, that could sustain us, is that having no apprehension of the past or the future is not limiting but liberating. Rin Tin Tin did not need to be remembered in order to be happy; for him it was always enough to have that instant when the sun was soft, when the ball was tossed and caught, when the beloved rubber doll was squeaked. Such a moment was complete in itself, pure and sufficient."

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, December 4, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, December 20, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog. 

Not Fiction Book Discussion Titles for 2013

We are already looking forward to 2013's list of great recent nonfiction!

As Cheryl Strayed says in her memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, "There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course." Yet that seems to be the nonfiction writer's task, to understand how the world came to be the way it is, how it is changing even as we observe it, and how people make their way in it, with curiosity, determination, courage, forbearance, forgiveness, humor, and not a little luck.

We hope you will join us in 2013 to read and discuss the titles posted on the right side of this page.

And don't forget our remaining 2012 discussions of Blue Nights by Joan Didion and Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend by Susan Orlean!

December Not Fiction Book Discussions

Within two years, author and critic Joan Didion lost her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael. Her husband died suddenly of a heart attack in December 2003 while her daughter was in the ICU with sepsis, just one of a string of mysterious illnesses leading to her death in August 2005. Didion describes her grief over her husband's death in her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, which sold over a million copies, won a National Book Award, and was made into Broadway play starring Vanessa Redgrave. She shares details from their married and shared professional lives and honestly describes the madness brought on by grief that allows one to believe that the beloved is not truly gone--the "magical thinking" of the title. In Blue Nights, however, a companion of sorts to The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion does not offer us another memoir of grief. Instead, she explores a frequent and even darker companion to grief, regret.

Readers expecting to follow a linear narrative of Quintana Roo's charmed but emotionally troubled childhood, to learn specific details about her series of illnesses and death, and to find catharsis and learn to accept that death along with Didion may find themselves disappointed. Instead, they consider with Didion the very uncomfortable question of whether, and to what extent, she herself was responsible for Quintana's unhappiness. Meghan O'Rourke, in her review of Blue Nights at slate.com, says, "The regret memoir is another thing altogether, a stranger, patchwork beast. It is written by an author with no hope of recovery, who has let go of her magical thinking. It is pricklier, more nihilistic, composed knowing that the center hasn't held, rather than out of a fraught awareness that the 'center cannot hold.' . . . The book instead bears witness to the realization that the past can never be fixed (a realization many parents must at some point confront)." Didion also confesses her inability to rely on her famous elliptical style to write about Quintana and realizes that she has perhaps often chosen style over substance in her own life. As O'Rourke notes, "the story is about how style becomes a tactic that prevents you from being in the moment. . . . her writing taps into one of postwar life's most vital contradictions. It dismantles myths and self-mythologizes at the same time. It exposes a generation's narcissism while at times embodying it." And in facing the death of her child and the inadequacy of her writing to help her deal with it, Didion confronts the uncomfortable fact of her own mortality.

While readers might not get what they expected in Blue Nights, they must surely recognize Didion's courage to share with her readers the more difficult story. Sometimes we turn to writers to show us how not to live.

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, November 13, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, November 29, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

October Not Fiction Book Discussions

Fans of memoirs about unusual childhoods may have read Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller, published in 2001. In it, Fuller shares her experiences of growing up in Africa in the 1970s and 80s, at the end of colonialism, as the child of staunchly colonialist parents. She describes the harsh but starkly beautiful landscape, the dangers of the constant civil wars, and her family's many adventures and losses with wry humor and honesty. Her mother, Nicola Fuller, deemed it an Awful Book for its unflattering portrayal of her. This month, we will read her mother's story in Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness.

Fuller tells her mother's story from a greater distance from her own childhood and as the mother of children herself, bringing empathy to her sharp eye for detail and character. In an interview with CBS News, Fuller said, "Inspiration crept up on me in surges and waves and finally on a crest of illness. To begin with, mum was furious about the first memoir I had written, Don't Let's Go To the Dogs Tonight (a work about my childhood that she calls 'the Awful Book'). She said I had not seen her as she saw herself at all and that I had missed the 'point' of her, so as part of an effort to reconcile, I asked to interview her at length. To my great surprise, she agreed. So we met in Scotland at her sister's house and talked for hours with a tape recorder in front of us. It turned out that her childhood, her sense of herself and her heritage, were so rich (she is such a vivid storyteller) that I started to make pilgrimages into her geography to better understand her past--the Isle of Skye and Kenya. That initial interview and the travel that resulted from it led to more questions and interviews over several years. Still, I wasn't sure I had the material for a book until a couple of years ago when I found myself sick in bed with whooping cough for 100 days. Too ill to wade through my pile of magazines and periodicals, and too depressed to listen to the radio, I dug out my tapes and notes from all those trips and conversations and lay in a dark room listening to mum's voice. The experience lifted me out of my mildly fevered state and directly into her world. I was mesmerized by her story and started to write the book right then, propped up in bed. In retrospect, I think a temperature of about 101 was just about the perfect level of remove I needed from my own world to begin to really hear mum. The quality of my listening shifted from judgment to compassion."

This memoir poses so many interesting questions: How do we see ourselves? How do others see us? How does our understanding of ourselves and others change over time and distance? Can we really know ourselves and others? In our discussions, we can consider why Alexandra Fuller felt the need to tell her mother's story, in which she repeats some of the anecdotes she told in Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, as well as her attitude toward her mother. Fuller says, "But in the glow of love, in the heat of battle, in the cushioned denial of the present, how few have the wisdom to look forward with unclouded hindsight.  Not my parents, certainly.  Not most of us." And this is why we read about the lives of others--in order to learn how to live.

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, October 2, at 6:30 p.m. at the Main Library; Thursday, October 18, at 11:00 a.m. at the West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

September Not Fiction Book Discussions

In Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard, we will again consider a portrait of interconnected lives, including James A. Garfield, who served as the 20th American president for just four months, Charles Guiteau, a disappointed office-seeker who became Garfield's assassin, Dr. D. Willard Bliss, the head physician of the team that mismanaged Garfield's care, resulting in months of his needless suffering and death, and Alexander Graham Bell, who created a device to locate the bullet lodged in Garfield's body. Millard gives both human focus and narrative drive to this forgotten story of American history, bringing to life a tumultuous time in our nation's history, post-Civil War and pre-twentieth century, as we struggled to define our political and scientific future.

In particular, Millard presents Garfield as a remarkable man who may have made a remarkable president. He rose from childhood poverty to become a scholar, a Civil War hero, a congressman, and, although reluctantly, a president of the United States. He was a great orator but essentially a humble man. He faced his slow, painful decline with courage and equanimity. In an article on the writing life for the Washington Post (September 15, 2011), Millard said, "If I have learned anything about nonfiction writing, it is that the challenge is not in finding a great story to tell. More often than not, real life is so rich, complex and unpredictable that it would seem completely implausible in the pages of a novel. The difficulty lies in understanding the people you are writing about--not their actions, or even their thoughts, but their deepest character. It is not the famous events, the dramatic moments of public triumph, that define them. It is when their lives are difficult, even desperate, that their true nature is revealed. In those private moments, even the greatest men become understandable because those painful emotions are a universal part of human life--something that all of us, sooner or later, must face." Millard drew upon the example of character offered by her first nonfiction subject, Theodore Roosevelt, and the little-known story story she tells in The River of Doubt of his trip along an Amazonian river during which his party lost three men and Roosevelt contemplated suicide to save his son, as she learned during her second pregnancy that her unborn daughter had a rare form of childhood cancer. After her daughter's treatment and remission, as Millard was working on Destiny of the Republic, she also found Garfield to be a source of inspiration: "Perhaps no one seemed to capture my feelings as well as Garfield himself, a supremely insightful thinker who often seemed to be explaining my life to me, even as I was attempting to explain his life to others. 'I have sometimes thought that we cannot know any man thoroughly well while he is in perfect health,' Garfield wrote. 'As the ebb-tide discloses the real lines of the shore and bed of the sea, so feebleness, sickness, and pain bring out the real character of a man.'"

Millard also describes why we all, perhaps, like to read memoirs and biographies: "As I have encountered difficult moments in my own life, I have been privileged to learn from the great men I have come to know as a writer. In their moments of private agony and doubt, which we all share, we can see through to the depths of their character--to the bed of the sea--and begin to understand." In other words, we learn through reading about the lives of others how to live ourselves.

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, September 4, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, September 20, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

August Not Fiction Book Discussions

Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie: A Story of Love and Fallout, the first visual book ever nominated for a National Book Award in Nonfiction, blends stunning original graphic and visual art with a biography of Marie and Pierre Curie and a cultural history of radium. In an interview with The New York Public Library, author Lauren Redniss said, "I wanted to create a visual book about invisible forces. In this case, radioactivity and love. I was drawn to the Curies' story because it is full of drama--passion, discovery, tragedy, scandal." Not the story you heard in high school science class. A perfect summer read.

Luminosity is the guiding word for this book. Redniss says on her website that in addition to the story of the Curies' romance, "I was also interested in the way that Marie and Pierre's story could illuminate questions that resonate far beyond the life of the couple. In the century since the Curies began their work, the world has struggled with nuclear weapons proliferation, debated the role of radiation in medical treatment, and pondered nuclear energy as a solution to climate change." To research the book, Redniss visited Warsaw to see the house where Marie Curie was born and the Curie Institut in Paris to interview the Curies' granddaughter. She also traveled to Hiroshima to interview atomic bomb survivors, to the Nevada Test Site to talk with nuclear weapons specialists, to San Bernadino, California, to speak with an oncologist exploring innovative radiation treatment, and to the Idaho National Laboratory's Center for Space Nuclear Research to learn how nuclear power and propulsion can enable space exploration.

Form follows function in Radioactive. Redniss created the artwork using a process called cyanotype, in which paper is coated with light-sensitive chemicals and exposed to the sun's ultraviolet rays to produce a deep blue color reminiscent of the luminous blue glow emitted by radium.  If after a late-night read you place the book on your nightstand and turn out the lights, you will find that the cover glows in the dark.

Marie Curie wrote of radium's glow, "These gleamings, which seemed suspended in darkness, stirred us with new emotion and enchantment." Can this be said of Redniss' book?

The New York Public Library created an exhibit about Radioactive that took viewers through the creative process behind the book and displayed objects from the collection that influenced her work. Visit the New York Public Library's website to view an online, interactive exhibit about the book created by Redniss' students at Parsons the New School for Design that continues to interpret the themes of love, science, and discovery. You can even create your own virtual cyanotype print!

We hope you will join the conversation: Tuesday, August 7, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, August 23, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

July Not Fiction Book Discussions

With The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance by Edmund de Waal, we move beyond traditional biography and memoir to what many reviewers have called a new or hybrid genre.

When de Waal, a master potter, inherited a collection of 264 netsuke, exquisite walnut-sized Japanese sculptures made to be toggles for kimono, he wanted to learn the history of these objects and how they came to be in his family. His search took him back to Charles Ephrussi, a contemporary of Marcel Proust and one of the models for Swann in A la Recherche du Temps Perdue, who gave the netsuke to de Waal's great-great grandfather as a wedding gift. De Waal followed the story from Paris to Vienna, through the Anschluss and the Second World War, where the netsuke, virtually all that remained of his family and the glittering world they had known, were saved by a woman known today only as Anna.

The resulting book has been described as a memoir, a history, a family history and a biography of the netsuke themselves. De Waal says on his website that "It all started with the netsuke. I wanted to discover the places where these objects had been, how they were handled, who held them. So this is in many ways a history of touch, a history of objects. Objects need biography--there aren't many books out there that take objects themselves seriously. Of course, it was also a personal quest for me to try to work out what I could about my family and their story. I wanted to find out why I grew up not knowing this story. That's perhaps why it's been described as completely cross-genre, because I had no template for it when I began. I envisaged it initially as something quite dry and academic, but I could never have foreseen the way it took shape."

De Waal's acute awareness of his own relationship to the events of his story also sets this memoir apart. He thought to himself as he began his project, "I don't really want to get into the sepia saga business, writing up some elegiac Mitteleuropa narrative of loss. . . . I'm not entitled to nostalgia about all that lost wealth and glamour from a century ago. . . . Melancholy, I think, is a sort of default vagueness, a get-out clause, a smothering lack of focus. And this netsuke is a small, tough explosion of exactitude. It deserves this kind of exactitude in return."

De Waal's book became a meditation on the hidden life of objects and all that they bring with them from one owner to the next. He says, "How objects are handed on is all about story-telling. . . . [and] There is no easy story in legacy." He wanted to know, "What is being passed on to me with all these small Japanese objects?"  What do your favorite possessions say to you and about you, and what conclusions do you think would be drawn if one of your descendants investigated you in this way?

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, July 10, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, July 19, at 11:00 a.m. West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

View the Edmund de Waal Netsuke Gallery.