February Not Fiction Book Discussions

In Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs, Sally Mann looks back over her life's work as a photographer for its sources in family, place, and mortality.

Asked to deliver the Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard, Mann notes that "My long preoccupation with the treachery of memory has convinced me that I have fewer and more imperfect recollections of childhood than most people," so she turned to the boxes of family papers in her attic and to the social and cultural history of the rural South where she grew up. She says, "I will confess that in the interest of narrative I secretly hoped I'd find a payload of southern gothic: deceit and scandal, alcoholism, domestic abuse, car crashes, bogeymen, clandestine affairs, dearly loved and disputed family land, abandonments, blow jobs, suicides, hidden addictions, the tragically early death of a beautiful bride, racial complications, vast sums of money made and lost, the return of a prodigal son, and maybe even bloody murder. . . . And I did: all of it and more." Lively with incident, conversational and confessional in tone, Mann's memoir makes the reader feels as if she is having a conversation with Mann in her studio or walking with her on her beloved family farm in Virginia.

Mann's photographs are unconventional, and some would even call them controversial. In her photographic projects over the years, she has depicted her family's most intimate moments, her husband's body reduced by muscular dystrophy, the Southern landscape, dead and decomposing bodies, Civil War battlefields, and Black men. Acknowledging the inherently exploitative and reductive nature of photographs, Mann says of her work, "In general, I am past taking pictures for the sake of seeing how things look in a photograph, although sometimes for fun, I still do that. These days I am more interested in photographing things either to understand what they mean in my life or to illustrate a concept."And to viewers' shocked or judgmental reaction to her work, Mann responds, "How can a sentient person of the modern age mistake photography for reality? All perception is selection, and all photographs--no matter how objectively journalistic the photographer's intent--exclude aspects of the moment's complexity. Photographs economize the truth; they are always moments more or less illusorily abducted from time's continuum." Mann's photographs can be compelling, both beautiful and disturbing, calling up for the viewer unexamined aspects of their lives and the society and culture they live in.

Asked to account for her artistic interests and vision, Mann says, "As for me, I see both the beauty and the dark side of things . . . And I see them at the same time, at once ecstatic at the beauty of things, and chary of that ecstasy. The Japanese have a phrase for this dual perception: mono no aware. It means 'beauty tinged with sadness,' for there cannot be any  real beauty without the indolic whiff of decay. For me, living is the same thin as dying, and loving is the same thing as losing, and this does not make me a madwoman; I believe it can make me better at living, and better at loving, and just possibly, better at seeing." What do you think? What does Mann's memoir help you understand about her photographic works? If you had seen the photographs without benefit of the memoir, what would you have thought of them? What do you think of her understanding of the purpose of photography as a means of exploration rather than ornamental depiction? Is this a new concept for you? Do any of her photographs compel you, disturb you, or maybe both? Why do you think that is? How do you interpret the title of Mann's memoir, Hold Still? Do you agree that photographs essentially exploit their subjects and compromise memory? Have you found this to be true in your life? How has the use of photography in society and culture changed over the course of your life?

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

Readalikes: If you enjoyed January's selection . . .

If you enjoyed H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, then you might also like these suggestions for further reading from Macdonald's publisher, Grove Atlantic: The Goshawk and The Sword in the Stone by T. H. White; The Peregrine by J. A. Baker; A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines; The Birds of Heaven: Travels with Cranes by Peter Matthiessen; The Bird Artist: A Novel by Howard Norman; and Life List: A Woman's Quest for the World's Most Amazing Birds by Olivia Gentile.

Check out these other memoirs about grief: A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights by Joan Didion, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed, Son of a Gun: A Memoir by Justin St. Germain, and The Long Goodbye by Meghan O'Rourke.

And these books take an honest look at death and dying: When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande and Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty.

And finally, here are two suggestions for inspiring nature reading from discussion group members:
Raven Seek Thy Brother by Gavin Maxwell and The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen.

January Not Fiction Book Discussion

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald explores that most universal of human experiences, grieving the loss of a loved one. "It happens to everyone," she writes. "But you feel it alone." Macdonald's father died suddenly of a heart attack on a London street at a time when her personal life and career were in transition, and to manage her grief and sense of being untethered, Macdonald turned to her lifelong avocation of falconry. She chose, however, to train the most notoriously difficult and lethal raptor, a goshawk. Macdonald goes beyond mere interest or distraction to very near the edge of obsession, unplugging her telephone and asking her friends to leave her alone while she trains her hawk. In its wildness, it represents for Macdonald immunity from loss and grief: "The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief and numb to the hurts of human life." Yet she names her hawk Mabel, meaning lovable or dear, and Mabel gradually teaches Macdonald how to reconnect with the world around her through curiosity, radical empathy, and the desire to nurture the young hawk. In the moment of naming her, Macdonald notes, "And as I say it, it strikes me that all those people outside the window who shop and walk and cycle and go home and eat and love and sleep and dream--all of them have names. And so do I. 'Helen,' I say." How does Macdonald ultimately resolve the paradox posed by her grief?

H is for Hawk includes precise and evocative nature writing. Through her descriptions of Mabel the bird rather than Mabel the myth, Macdonald asks us to reconsider our relationship with the wild. She notes that many nature books and myths of human-to-animal metamorphoses were "quests inspired by grief or sadness" in which, to heal their hurt, humans fled to the wild. Macdonald realizes, however, that this is "a beguiling but dangerous lie . . . the wild is not a panacea for the human soul . . . I'd fled to become a hawk, but in my misery all I had done was turn the hawk into a mirror of me." Where do you think this persistent literary idea of the wild as a healing force comes from? What are its positive and negative influences on our relationship with our environment?

Macdonald also includes bibliomemoir/biography in H is for Hawk, exploring her relationship to T.H. White's book The Goshawk, which she first read at the age of eight. In it, White describes his own unsuccessful and inadvertently cruel attempt to train a goshawk. She initially dislikes the book, wondering, "Why would a grown-up write about not being able to do something?" But she feels compelled to reread his book and wrestle with his example. "The book you are reading is my story," she writes, " . . . It is not a biography of Terence Hanbury White. But White is a part of my story all the same. I have to write about him because he was there." How does Macdonald's understanding of White's book evolve over time, and how does his story inform her own?

In an interview for Guernica Aditi Sriram asked Macdonald what story "wanted to be told" when she sat down to write H is for Hawk. She replied, "I wanted it to be a memoir about grief, certainly. In England there is this notion of the 'misery memoir' as a genre, the 'misery lit' genre. And I’m really happy for it to be seen as that, because it was a very miserable time. But I also wanted it to be nature writing, and I wanted it to be a biography. Having all those three genres in one book was a very definite decision I made. What grief does is shatter narratives: the stories you tell about your life, they all crumble at this point. Things become very confused, your agency is called into question, you’re not really sure who you are or what you’re facing, and I wanted that confusion to be in the text." How do you feel about Macdonald's decision to combine three genres in one narrative? Is it successful?

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, January 5, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, January 21, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

Not Fiction Book Discussion titles for 2016

“All I needed for the mind was to be led to new stations. All I needed for the heart was to visit a place of greater storms.”

“In my way of thinking, anything is possible. Life is at the bottom of things and belief at the top, while the creative impulse, dwelling in the center, informs all.”

― Patti Smith, M Train

In 2016 we will be reading memoirs and biographies, the two genres of nonfiction that have been most popular with discussion group members over the years. Several of this year's titles feature an interesting interplay between word and image, and several use an epistolary format, offering us the chance to consider how we narrate our lives through many kinds of texts. Our authors' topics--family, race, history, travel, ambition, vocation and avocation, longing and belonging, loss and mortality--reflect lives lived passionately in the present and recollected with hope and consolation.

We hope you will join us! See the titles and dates posted on the right side of this page.

Readalikes: If you enjoyed December's selection . . .

If you enjoyed My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead, then you might also like these books recommended by Mead. If you like bibliomemoirs, then check out these books Mead read while working on her book: Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence by Geoff Dyer, Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece by Michael Gorra, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman, To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface by Olivia Lang, Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life by Adam Gopnik, How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell. And here are Mead's six six favorite books that illuminate the Victorian era: Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey, Parallel Lives by Phyllis Rose, Possession by A.S. Byatt, Angels and Ages by Adam Gopnik, Gross Indecency by Moisés Kaufman, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry.

December Not Fiction Book Discussions

Perhaps you've heard this Groucho Marx quotation: "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read." The stories we tell and the stories we are drawn to listen to are some of the most important relationships of our lives.

 My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead is a memoir about Mead's relationship with George Eliot's novel Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. From her first encounter with the novel as a young girl in school to her repeated readings through young adulthood and early career and into middle age and family life, Mead found instructive, inspiring, and consoling parallels between the plot lines of the book and her own life, parallels that only became understandable as she grew into them. She says, "A book may not tell us exactly how to live our own lives, but our own lives can teach us how to read a book."

What is your relationship with Middlemarch? Are you as fond of it as Mead is, or have you just become acquainted with it through Mead's memoir? Which story lines, characters, and relationships resonate the most with your life? If you have not read Middlemarch, has Mead's book inspired you to do so?

Virginia Woolf characterized Middlemarch as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." What did she mean by this? Are marriage plots and happy endings merely childish fantasies?

Do you have a relationship with a book like the one Mead has with Middlemarch? What has this book revealed to you about your life over the years, and what has your life helped you understand about the book?

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, December 1, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, December 17, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

Readalikes: If you enjoyed November's selection . . .

If you enjoyed The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace by Jeff Hobbs, then you might also like these books, articles, and films recommended by our discussion group members: Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life by William Deresiewicz; Confessions of an Ivy League Frat Boy by Andrew Lohse; Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward; Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson; Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell; To Reduce Inequality, Abolish Ivy League, an editorial in USA Today by Glenn Harlan; and Good Will Hunting, a film written by and starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.