#83 - My Little Red Book

Also read My Little Red Book (Twelve, 2009) Monday, just before it was due back. Felt like I was a bit behind the curve on this one; a dear friend gave it as a gift to her daughter on the occasion of the daughter's first period, and heck, even Littlehazel devoured it before I'd even cracked the cover open.

The book, edited by Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, is an anthology of stories about girls'/ women's first periods. It's both a quick read and a fascinating one. The settings range from 1919 to WWII Europe to a contemporary text message, and the contributors include such well-known authors as Meg Cabot, Megan McCafferty, Tamora Pierce, and Gloria Steinem (who revised her famous "If Men Could Menstruate" essay for the occasion). Simply put, a must read for anyone with strong feelings about this occasion in their own lives (whether it's decades past or still somewhere ahead of you) or strong feelings for a young woman they're close to.

#82 - The Believers

OK, good -- it's been a while, so I was about due for one of these. The Believers, by Zoe Heller (Harper Collins, 2008), was awesome! I picked this one out based on a New York Times review, which works out better some times than others ... this book was one of the betters. It's a well-written, believable, moving story about a family, yes -- but it's also a novel about what we believe in, and what happens when those beliefs are shaken.

Most of the novel is set in contemporary New York City, although it opens with a brief trip back to London in the early 1960s. Here, Audrey Howard, 19 year old daughter of an utterly dismal working-class family, meets Joel Litvinoff, a fiery leftist American lawyer some 12 years her senior, at a party. On a whim, they take the long train trek to her parents' home the next day, and such begins an odd courtship we're never really privy to.

However, it must have been successful, as 40 years later, the pair are still married (more or less happily, we presume), with three grown children. Consequently, when Joel suffers a sudden stroke in the courtroom, and is left in a coma, five lives are thrown into disarray. Rosa, who's shared her father's socialist and atheist sentiments for most of her life, has recently begun testing the waters of Orthodox Judaism, and struggles to reconcile not just a lifelong skepticism with the comforts of faith, but the many restrictions of that faith with her intellectual heritage. Karla, an overweight social worker who's forever apologizing and trying not to ask too much, is embarking on adopting a child with husband Mike (she feels she owes him that much, even if she's fairly indifferent about the whole thing) when she forges a tentative friendship (or is it?) that leads her to question everything she's settled for over the years. And Lenny, himself adopted at 7 after his birth mother was jailed for Weatherman-type activities, has been pretty disorganized all along, struggling with his drug addiction and the suffocating results of Audrey's one vein of maternal instinct.

Audrey herself, frankly, is awful ... so much so that you don't know whether to laugh or cringe. When a former lover of Joel's shows up on the doorstep after his stroke, wanting her young son to get to know his half-siblings, you find yourself feeling like Audrey had it coming (not my usual reaction in stories where adultery suddenly comes to the surface). To say too much more would spoil much of the pleasure the book offers, but it's both a page-turner and a thinking person's novel. Enjoy.

#81 - The Not So Big Life

Last night, I finished Sarah Susanka's The Not So Big Life: Making Room for What Really Matters (Random House, 2007). I considered all sorts of plays on the title for this review -- the not so good book, the not so big seller -- but ultimately, decided the jury's still out for me. I really enjoyed Susanka's The Not So Big House, and will probably pick up Not So Big Remodeling if and when we finally get around to that remodel we've been chewing over for almost a decade now. (Hmm, I guess I should get busy with 1000 Best Job Hunting Secrets first.) I'm not sure, though, if this book -- in which, according to the dust jacket, "Susanka takes her revolutionary philosophy to another dimension by showing us a new way to inhabit our lives" -- really works.

Part of the problem may be with the dust jacket, actually. An excerpt:

"Tthe bigger-is-better idea that triggered the explosion of McMansions has spilled over to give us McLives. ... Our schedules are chaotic and overcommitted, leaving us so stressed that we are numb, yet we wonder why we cannot fall asleep at night. In The Not So Big Life, Susanka shows us that it is possible to take our finger off the fast-forward button, and to our surprise we find how effortless and rewarding this change can be."

Based on this, I was expecting something along the same lines as Affluenza and Simple Prosperity. Well, I was wrong. I guess it's A Good Thing (thanks, Martha) that this isn't yet another book about voluntarily simplicity; the topic has pretty much been done to death by now, and I think it's hard to bring much new to the discussion. However, while Susanka's concept -- applying architectural principles to the construction of our own lives -- is interesting, it doesn't seem particularly well-executed, and feels forced or New Age-y (granted, at least she recognizes the potential for skepticism here) as often as not.

Most of the first part of the book is fairly abstract in nature, which is usually a turn-off for me; I'm no architect, but when it comes to reading, I like my concrete. Some of the architecture: life parallels are interesting ("There's a perfect parallel between our attempts to find home by building bigger and our attempts to find satisfaction by buying stuff and staying busy. These obsessions have hidden from view what matters to us and what brings a sense of meaning to our lives."), but others seem strained at best ("Our lives could benefit from [sliding door or screen] flexibility, but most of us have only standard-size swinging doors between the various compartments of our lifes, giving us a limited sense of flow.") The written exercises which appear throughout the text also seem uneven, though I didn't actually attempt any of them.

I was intrigued by the latter part of the book, in which Susanka talks more about mindfulness and meditation ... enough so that despite everything I've said above, I've considered picking up a secondhand copy of the book to own (this one's a library copy), and working through some of the exercises in my journal (yeah, I'm a college town-livin', long hair-wearin', tofu and bean-cookin' neo-hippie wannabe, and your point is??). I'm not sure, though, if Susanka's training as an architect or even her own experience with meditation makes her the most qualified person to write or teach others about these topics. In short, some good ideas, but only so-so execution.

#80 - Queen Takes King

Likewise for Gigi Levangie Grazer's Queen Takes King (Simon & Schuster, 2009), a fairly stupid and somewhat disappointing beach read about a nasty divorce among Manhattan's rich and famous. I managed to finish it, but Olivia Goldsmith Grazer ain't.

The principals: Jackson "Jacks" Power, a Manhattan real estate mogul, tabloid darling, and all-around legend in his own mind, and his wife Cynthia, former prima ballerina and Missouri gal turned social X-ray and NY Ballet Theater board member. The morning after the couple's perfectly-executed 25th anniversary gala, the New York Post runs a photo of him with his mistress, beautiful young news anchor Lara Sizemore, and Cynthia immediately files for divorce. All sorts of nasty, underhanded hijinks (changing the locks, sending one another crude gifts and prescriptions, and setting Barry Manilow on auto-repeat) ensue, and are compounded by the fact that, on their lawyers' advice, neither is willing to move out of their Park Avenue home. Along the way, we also meet Goldie, Cynthia's unorthodox long-time therapist; the couple's dilettante guerilla daughter, Vivienne; and Adrian, a writer/ bartender Jacks hires to seduce Cynthia in hopes that she'll agree to a speedier divorce. No, they don't get back together, and yes, there are a handful of reasonably chuckle-worthy scenes in here; Jacks is such an ass that you really do want to see him get his, and feel a flicker of satisfaction when your wish is granted. But frankly, The First Wives' Club did it all way earlier, and way better.

#79 - The Triple Bind

I finished The Triple Bind: Saving our Teenage Girls from Today's Pressures, by Steven Hinshaw (Ballantine, 2009), last Tuesday. As you may have guessed from my last few reviews of books about the perils facing adolescent girls in contemporary U.S. culture, it's rare for a book on this topic to impress me -- but The Triple Bind did. In my partially-informed layperson's opinion, it's of interest not just to parents and teachers, but to social scientists interested in female adolescence. If I actually had a reader base, I'd encourage you/ them to correct me if I'm wrong, but c'mon now ... let's get real.

All right, self-deprecating humor aside, Hinshaw's main thesis is that today's teenage girls are caught in what he calls a triple bind: the expectation that they excel at 1) all the traditional "girl" stuff, i.e., being pretty and nice; 2) most of the traditional "guy" stuff, including sports and Ivy League-level academics; and 3) at the same time, conform to a narrow, unrealistic set of standards and make the whole package look effortless. As the title of the first chapter ("Impossible Expectations") suggests, that's no mean feat -- and the book is generously laced with accounts of accomplished young women who crumble in the attempt, sometimes with devastating results. This isn't to say that the book's alarmist or overly sensational; it's not. Yes, Hinshaw includes the occasional extreme example (the chapter on cyberculture begins with the well-known story of Megan Meier's suicide), but the majority of case studies portray girls whose injuries are far less extreme. His point (and this is where he differs from other similar books like So Sexy So Soon and The Lolita Effect, which pretty much stop at illustrating a disturbing trend and tossing off a few obligatory recommendations for countering it in the last chapter) is that the triple bind has specific, measurable negative consequences for girls: specifically, high rates of depression, self-mutilation, eating disorders, and increasingly, aggressive behavior.

As a one-time economics student, I was intrigued by Hinshaw's linking the triple bind to the global and uncertain nature of today's economy. Citing Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat (one of many, many items on my ever-expanding Wanna Read list), he suggests:

"[W]e're in the process of moving toward a global economy, one in which work is almost infinitely transferable to anyplace on the planet. ... Reading between the lines, however, you get a much more disturbing story, one in which no American, no matter how well qualified or well trained, is safe from the prospect of losing not only a job but the very possibility of having a job."

He also cites Barbara Ehrenreich's Bait and Switch, which I have read, toward a similar end: For a whole host of complicated reasons, the insecurity that poor and working-class workers have long known has crept upward, and is now part of the middle-class reality as well. In short, there's more pressure on everyone to do whatever it takes to succees in today's workplace -- girls, boys, whoever.

The book then goes on to define depression, and handles the nature-nurture question (do people really still debate this anymore?) quite adroitly (in brief, you can inherit vulnerability to depression, but your life experiences still play a big part in whether you ever develop the illness and how bad it gets. Um, no kidding.) Interestingly, too, Hinshaw also talks about the particular dangers depression poses for teenage girls, stating that even one bout of major depression in adolescence dramatically increases both the odds of another such episode later in life, and the severity of any subsequent episodes that do occur. (Um, no kidding, again. Can you tell this book struck a nerve or 3 with me?) He argues that the risk is compounded by the typical busy, sleep-deprived life of the average teenage overachiever, the loss of intrinsic meaning of the many activities cramming their schedules, and the belief that girls are not only supposed to excel at all this stuff, but they're supposed to make it look easy. Other chapters talk about "the popular culture of 'self-erasing identities,'", i.e., "the very images that seem to offer a girl alternatives for discovering her identity in fact demand that she erase herself so as to better blend in with the crowd;" the hidden dangers of empathy; the objectification of female sexuality; cyberculture; and female agression. I could go on, but in short -- this is an interesting and compelling book, and one I'll recommend to others interested in the subject matter.

#77 - The House on Fortune Street

Hooray. This is not a novel set in the 1950s; it's set in contemporary London. It's also a darned good read, and manages to make the whole idea of telling one story from multiple perspectives seem fresh.

The House on Fortune Street, by Margot Livesey (Harper, 2008) is the story of a tragic watershed moment in the lives of three young adults sharing a house on, well, Fortune Street. It's also novel about the role of luck in our lives. The bare facts are laid out fairly early on. Abigail, the driven theatre manager who seems to be in perpetual motion, owns the house; her boyfriend Sean, an impoverished ABD Oxford grad student, has recently moved in; and the fragile Dara, a counselor and Abigail's college best friend, rents the downstairs flat. We know from the dust jacket that tragedy will strike one of the three, and sure enough, it does. The book opens with Sean's story. Already struggling to balance writing his long-overdue dissertation and his other gig, helping select promising new plays for Abigail's upstart theatre, he takes on yet a third job, co-writing a mass-market book on assisted suicide with his friend Valentine, to help pay the rent Abigail suddenly insists on charging. Since Abigail is already perpetually busy with her theatre work, an anonymous letter accusing her of being unfaithful strikes a nerve with Sean. He becomes suspicious, and starts questioning the decision to abandon his less passionate but more companionable marriage to Judy, his ex-wife, for this tempestuous but shaky affair with Abigail.

The second survivor of fortune we get to know intimately is Dara's father, Cameron, who left the family under mysterious circumstances when Dara was a child, and who's only recently re-entered her life. He recalls his childhood, and the devastating death of his younger brother Lionel, never mentioned since, at 14. Fast-forward to his courtship and marriage to Fiona, Dara's mother; the birth of Dara and her younger brother; his largely innocent fascination with Dara's young friend Ingrid; and the sudden collapse of their family when a weekend camping trip with Ingrid's family goes awry.

From here, we meet Dara, and learn of her intense but sporadic relationship with violinist Robert; her shock and seeming resilience on learning that he still lives with an ex-girlfriend and their daughter; her immersion in colleagues' Halley and Joyce's are-they-or-aren't-they relationship; and her increasing resentment at Abigail's treating her like a poor relation. Lastly, of course, we focus on the ambitious Abigail -- her vagabond childhood at the hands of self-absorbed, follow-your-bliss parents; her de facto adoption by Dara's family during their college years; and her determination to control her own life and make her own luck, unencumbered by love or other unplanned interruptions.

As I said, this was a pretty good book. The characters are well fleshed-out and believable, and Livesey's way of revealing new details and interpretations with each person's story keeps you interested even though you know, at the end of the first, what happens at the end. The conclusion is fitting without being too neat and tidy. If you like this kind of story, this one's a solid good read.

#78 - The Lolita Effect

Just took a foray into non-fiction again with The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Can Do About It, by M. Gigi Durham (Overlook Press, 2008). Having read more than a few hysterical and/or oversimplified books on this topic, I was a bit skeptical at first, but ended up being pleasantly surprised. Not only is The Lolita Effect far more balanced and nuanced than So Sexy So Soon, but it also scores high on readability.

The nuance begins with the title. Durham argues that while we (popular culture) have come to use "Lolita" to describe a young girl who deliberately behaves in a seductive manner, Dolores Haze, the original Lolita in that book by Nabokov, is not an intentional nymphet, but an innocent victim of her predatory, pedophile stepfather, Humbert Humbert. (True confessions time: shamefully, I haven't actually read Lolita, so I'm taking Durham's word for this.) She is also emphatic about not being anti-sex or advocating censorship. On the contrary, she suggests that previous works and authors on this topic (hel-LO, Mary Pipher!) have often tended toward an overly dualistic, "moral panic" approach that makes for some strange bedfellows (i.e., traditional, mostly Christian conservatives and progressive, usually sex-positive parents and teachers). Explains Durham,

"[I]t is not girls' sexuality in and of itself that is a problem; the problem is that the expression of girls' sexuality seems to be possible only within an extremely restrictive framework. Girls' sexuality, it seems, has to comply with the markers of sexuality that we recognize, and it cannot be manifested, recognized, or mobilized in other, potentially more empowering and supportive, ways."

Most of the book is devoted to defining the five myths that constitute the Lolita effect. These are as follows:

1. Sexuality equals looking sexy, or, in Durham's words, "if you've got it, flaunt it."
   
2. Exactly what looks (and therefore, is) sexy ("hot," in common parlance) is very narrowly defined. In short, the perfect girl/ woman looks like Barbie. Not only is this an unrealistic, unhealthy ideal for girls to aspire to, but it's racist and classist (after all, who has the money to buy The Look?) to boot.
3. Younger is better -- not just as in, society thinks women in their 20s are more attractive than those in their mothers' generation, but as in, very young, still a girl. Hearken back to the days of Britney Spears' Catholic school miniskirt-wearing, pigtail-sporting, lollipop-sucking debut, among other examples.
4. Violence is sexy. Here, Durham cites slasher films, music videos and lyrics, and violent video games a la Grand Theft Auto as examples.
   
5. Sexy is defined for and by the male gaze. Boys choose girls, girls are sex objects, and alternate pairings -- male-male, female-female, or even non-traditional male-female -- Just Don't Exist.
   

Durham is a professor of journalism and communication, so it's not surprising that the remedies she proposes tend heavily toward increased media literacy and consumer education. Again, she's very clear about not advocating censorship, partly because that's a slippery slope that might lead us to censor Lolita and Romeo and Juliet, and partly because she takes the matter-of-fact position that yes, children and adolescents are sexual, and we need to respect and acknowledge that ... it's just that we should be doing so in "more empowering and supportive ways" than we've tended to see of late. Her list of internet and print resources is impressive and useful, as well. It's been a while since I've said this of a book on parenting and/or sexuality, but I recommend this one highly.