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.

June Not Fiction Book Discussions

As we noted in last month's discussion of Blood, Bones & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton, a challenge for every writer of memoir is to determine which details from one's life to include and which to leave out, which contribute to a clear narrative and theme, and which do not, as well as how to find an engaged but dispassionate perspective on the events of one's life. With Townie: A Memoir by Andre Dubus III, we will consider another Bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story, about the moral and psychological growth of the narrator. And as with Hamilton's story, Townie also happens to be a Kunstlerroman, or story about the development of an artist. In these genres, the narrator begins his or her development when a great disruption occurs in the family's life, and he or she must grow up quickly. This coming-of-age involves conflicts with society and culture that are eventually resolved to some degree, and the narrator is able to reflect upon his or her journey, often through art, with equanimity and self-knowledge.

Lisa Shea summed up Dubus' story in a review in Elle: "In his memoir Townie, Andre Dubus III bravely claims all of the shadows he grew up under--his famous writer father, his parents' divorce, his newly single mother's impoverishment, the rough streets of the many working-class New England towns he called home. Fighting saved him for a while; then he put down his fists and picked up a pen. Lucky him, lucky us." We accompany Dubus in his quest to avenge the losses and disappointments in his and his family's life, especially his father's abandonment of the family, through physical violence. As he disciplines his body and mind to fight, looking for opportunities to act the hero and fight on behalf of someone, anyone, we experience along with him both the magnetic power and the sickening transgression of violence. As he takes up the new discipline of writing, following his father's path, we observe his gradual transformation. And when his father is severely injured in an automobile accident, we witness his ability to forgive his father and become the caretaker his father could never be.

Dubus has said in interviews that he tried unsuccessfully for years to tell this story through fiction and that he inadvertently wrote it as memoir while trying to write a short essay on deadline about baseball and his sons. He found he had to explain his own relationship with his father in order to do so. In an interview with Powell's Books, he said that as he wrote "I really felt, frankly . . . What's the word? I didn't feel exhilarated. There was a calm. I knew there was a calmness to me as I wrote this. And I realized I had no anger and no judgment anymore about where I'd been, where we'd been as a family. I realized, I guess I just have to tell it straight as Andre, and not some character. Even though I had a contract expectation from my publisher, I thought, You know, this is for my kids. This is for my three kids and they're going to know more about their family, and their dad. I wrote it in that spirit, and, then, towards the end, I felt, Maybe this is a book that other people might get something out of. My biggest hope, or my biggest fear--my biggest hope is joining my biggest fear--was that this wasn't about just me. If so, who gives a shit? [Laughter]I hope it's about more than just my family." Is Dubus successful in capturing and holding our attention and our sympathies and in conveying us successfully along his hero's journey? How does his memoir compare with Hamilton's in perspective and tone?

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

May Not Fiction Book Discussions

If you love food and salty, spicy, sweet coming-of-age stories, then Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton is the memoir for you.

Hamilton is the chef/owner of the acclaimed restaurant Prune in New York's East Village. She also received an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Michigan, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, GQ, Bon Appetit, Saveur, and Food & Wine. Before these accomplishments, Hamilton spent twenty hard-living and hard-working years trying to find purpose and meaning in her life after her family fell apart when her parents divorced when she was in her early teens.

With honesty and humor, she describes the many kitchens that helped her become the chef and woman she is today: the rural kitchen of her French mother; her many jobs bussing and waiting tables, including an underage stint as a cocktail waitress at the Lone Star Cafe in Manhattan; the kitchens of France, Greece, and Turkey where she was often fed by strangers as she spent two years traveling; the soulless corporate kitchens of large New York catering companies where she learned her craft; her own kitchen at Prune; and the kitchen of her Italian mother-in-law, who is the true center of her conflicted marriage. 

Running through the narrative is her poignant search for family, inextricably intertwined with her passion for simple, nourishing food. As Frank Bruni, former restaurant critic for The New York Times, says, Blood, Bones & Butter is "a story of hungers specific and vague, conquered and unappeasable"--the perfect ingredients of a chef memoir.

A challenge for every writer of a memoir is which details from one's life to include and which to leave out, which contribute to a clear narrative and theme, and which do not. Add to this the difficulty we all have of finding perspective on the most recent events of our lives. Does Hamilton satisfy your hunger for a satisfying narrative arc rich with significant detail and tempered with dispassionate perspective? Or do parts of her memoir feel, well, uncooked?

We hope you will join the discussion of this book that Anthony Bourdain calls, "Simply the best memoir by a chef ever. Ever.": Tuesday, May 1, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, May 17, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

Click here to view the menu at Prune!

April Not Fiction Book Discussions

Last month, Stacy Schiff helped us see Cleopatra, the woman and the ruler, with fresh eyes and not a little respect and admiration for her leadership skills. This month, we will be reading about another woman who has created a remarkably successful life and career in Bossypants by Tina Fey . Comedian and writer Fey delivers a laugh-out-loud series of sketches about childhood, parenthood, womanhood, and being the boss, and she describes her experiences performing improv with Chicago's Second City, writing and performing for Saturday Night Live, and creating and starring in the television series 30 Rock.

In an interview with the New York Times, Fey admitted that she found writing the book to be an unexpected challenge, saying the process "was a much higher, steeper roller coaster" than other projects. "I kept saying, 'This is going to ruin me. I'm ruined!' 'Well, I hope you're all happy'--like, to no one in particular. . . . No one forced me to do this, but I kept acting like I had been forced to do it." The interviewer notes that "[s]he decided to write a memoir, she said, after considering book offers for years; turning 40 made a difference. 'I felt like, I guess I've lived long enough to have some experiences,' she said, with no hint of underembellishment."

Some reviewers have questioned whether Bossypants is really a memoir. While Fey does tell readers some revealing stories, she does not attempt to tell us the full story of her life. What is her purpose in sharing this book with us in what she calls her "last five minutes" of fame? And how does her particular style of deflective humor support this purpose better than a more traditional and "serious" memoir might have?

As Craig Wilson said of Bossypants in USA Today, "It's not every day you read something that makes you laugh out loud every other page. Then again, Tina Fey doesn't write a book every day." So we hope you will read this book and join the discussion: Tuesday, April 3, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, April 19, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library, and here on the blog.