Books
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The Solitude of Prime Numbers
The image of Michela playing with a twig and breaking up her own reflection in the water before sliding into it like a sack of potatoes ran through his head like an electric shock. Exhausted, he sat down a couple of feet from the river’s edge. He turned around to look behind him and saw the darkness that would last for many hours to come. He stared at the gleaming black surface of the river. Again he tried to remember its name, but couldn’t. He plunged his hands into the cold earth. On the bank the dampness made it softer. He found a broken bottle, a sharp reminder of some…
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Friday Randomness
Nothing earth shattering today, so we’ll dive on in, OK? Just a bunch of randomness that’s been swimming through my brain a bit. We’re trying Genevieve on a new drug. She had stopped eating, which had us really concerned. Or, to be more accurate, her eating was very sporadic and unpredictable. She didn’t want her kibble, so I started making her some homemade food. She liked that for awhile, but then seemed to tire of it. We’d try to hand feed her, and she’d just turn her head away. She was always happy to eat dog treats, cheerios with milk, that kind of thing, but not regular dog food. She…
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The Forgotten Garden
Cornwall, 1900 – Eliza has been living in abject poverty, hidden in the attic with her brother. Her brother makes money cleaning chimneys. Eliza cleans and launders clothing that Mrs. Swindell brings in, for money. Mrs. Swindell strains the broth that they eat before feeding them. No reason to waste meat on children such as them. Their mother recently died, but before she did, she warned Eliza and Sammy to always be careful, always watch out for the bad man, the bad man who is searching for them. London, 1913 – A 4 or 5 year old girl hides in the dark, just as she has been told. She’s waiting…
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The Other Wes Moore
When I was in college, there was another woman with my name (Julie Ward (click to read the story of her murder, the mystery of it, and the obstruction of justice at the hands of the British police)), who was murdered in Africa. I remember seeing an article in the paper about it, and clipping it out and hanging it on my bathroom wall, with a certain degree of gallows humor. I wrote on the clipping, “One Down…”, because it reminded me of The Terminator, when Arnold Schwarzenegger comes to the front door, says “Sarah Conner”, and then kills the poor woman. I know, it’s sick. I was young. But…
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One Day
At twenty-three, Dexter Mayhew’s vision of his future was no clearer than Emma Morley’s. He hoped to be successful, to make his parents proud and to sleep with more than one woman at the same time, but how to make these all compatible? He wanted to feature in magazine articles, and hoped one day for a retrospective of his work, without having any clear notion of what that work might be. He wanted to live life to the extreme, but without any mess or complications. He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph. Things should…
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Every Last One
I came across this book in the silliest way. A few months ago, Ted and I had some time to kill at the bookstore downtown while Maya did some cheer thing or another. I had a pile of library books at home to read, so I wasn’t really looking for something to buy. I got a little bored and started playing a dumb game with myself. The game was, looking at the bookcases at the bookstore, and seeing if there were any shelves without at least one book I had read before. I was feeling pretty smug and proud of myself, seeing books that I had read on so many…
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Pictures of You
April Nash is leaving her marriage. Leaving her husband and young son behind, traveling on a foggy road towards another life. Unbeknownst to her, her son, Sam, is asleep under a blanket in the back seat. The car was moving. Sam heard the rivery sound of the road under him, and he sat up, rubbing his eyes, pulling the blanket from him. Cars were zipping past in a blur of color. And there was his mother in front, singing along to some song on the radio. “You are my spec-i-al someone,” she sang, and because Sam thought she meant him, he grinned. Her voice sounded bright, like it was full…
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Finding Nouf / City of Veils
Jeddah, gateway to Mecca, on the Red Sea. Photo found here “Despite the independence, or perhaps because he had too much of it, his childhood had provoked an intense longing for a family, a longing that lasted well into adulthood and that he was certain would never be satisfied. His deepest fear was that he’d never marry. Parents arranged marriages. Parents had brothers and sisters who had children who needed to be married. They organized the complicated social visits in which a man got to meet a prospective bride – veiled of course, but the groom could at least study her fingers and feet (unless she was socked and gloved…
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Cutting for Stone
I will not cut for stone, even for patients in whom the disease is manifest; I will leave this operation to be performed by practitioners, specialists in this art. ~ From the Hippocratic Oath Cutting for Stone begins with the pregnancy and birth of slightly conjoined and separated twins, Marion and Shiva Stone, orphaned at birth with the death of their mother, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, and the disappearance of their father, Dr. Thomas Stone. Marion and Shiva are raised at the Ethiopian hospital where they are born, by two Indian doctors, who love them as their own. They grow up amid political upheaval, though they are mostly insulated from…
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The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
But the day was darkening outside, and as I finished that first bite, as that first impression faded, I felt a subtle shift inside, an unexpected reaction. As if a sensor, so far buried deep inside me, raised its scope to scan around, alerting my mouth to something new. Because the goodness of the ingredients – the fine chocolate, the freshest lemons – seemed like a cover over something larger and darker, and the taste of what was underneath was beginning to push up from the bite. I could absolutely taste the chocolate, but in drifts and traces, in an unfurling, or an opening, it seemed that my mouth was…
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The Chosen One
Kyra is the 13 year old protagonist of The Chosen One, a young adult novel à la the polygamous compound from Big Love. Kyra is the 5th of 20 children born to 1 man and his 3 wives in a cult-like compound, where the message of fundamentalist Mormonism has gone from marginal and alternative, to cruel and insane. It seems that on this compound, people who believed in the way of polygamy lived a decent life following their belief, in which a man cannot obtain entrance to Heaven without at least 3 wives, and a woman cannot obtain entrance without bearing children. The benevolent prophet of this sect has died,…
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Brave Girl Eating
“These days of keeping Kitty close represent an oddly peaceful interlude in the surreal world we now inhabit, Jamie and Emma and I and this new Kitty, with her pointed chin and enormous eyes and will of iron. I try to remember my daughter as she was just a few months before, dancing through the house, laughing and affectionate, talking on the phone or going out with friends. Already this new Kitty, gaunt and tense and slow-moving, seems normal. Human beings can adapt to anything, from infinite riches to the horrors of Auschwitz. I don’t want to adapt to the way things are now. I want to scream, howl, tear…
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Freedom
In Jonathan Franzen’s novel, Freedom is something devoutly to be wished, and yet turns out to be a trap in and of itself. It turns out, over and over again, that the trappings and constraints of life are preferable from freedom from these trappings. The story is told in the third person, telling the stories of Patty, Walter, Joey, and Richard, as well as their families around them. Patty is the damaged basketball star daughter of a WASPy NY family, who travels to college in Minnesota on a sports scholarship. Walter is the good son who helps his parents to tend to their motel on weekends and summers, which his…
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Life After Yes
There is something about mothers. Whether your own or someone else’s, whether Northern or Southern, liberal or conservative, they spill bits of wisdom as they walk. They just know better. Depending on the day, this can be infuriating or enlightening. Quinn is a 26 year old Manhattan lawyer who has just become engaged to Sage, a banker from down south. They’re living in Manhattan, and the time has come to plan their wedding. Which seems like it should be a happy time, but this is early 2002, in New York, and Quinn’s father was killed in the attack on September 11. Sage is a caring man, and gives Quinn a…
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The Last Bridge
Two days after my father had a massive stroke my mother shot herself in the head. Her suicide was a shock – not the fact that she killed herself but the way in which she did it. It was odd that my mother chose such a violent end to her own violent life. For someone who had endured years of torture at my father’s hand, I thought she would choose a more quiet way of leaving. Perhaps she would take pills and put herself to bed in a silk nightgown, or she’d walk naked into the ocean at sunset. Instead, she cleaned the house, changed the linens, stuffed the freezer…