Role Models

By John Waters
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

When you decide to read a memoir, do you do so to commune with the author–to get to know his inner secrets, what makes him tick? If that’s the reason you usually shop the autobiography and memoir section of the bookstore, steer clear of controversial filmmaker (Hairspray, Cecil B. Demented) John Waters’ new “memoir” Role Models. While disclosing inspiration is no problem for the eclectic Waters, laying his guts out on the table is not his strong suit.

Of course, memoir can also be an account of someone else’s life as observed by the author–and in this case, we’re talking about the lives of famous crooners, a notorious killer, and fringe pornographers, to name a few. But if you’re looking for major insight into why John Waters is simultaneously comfortable with labels like “King of Puke,” “Duke of Dirt” and maker of “trash epics,” but doesn’t want to end up a gay cliché–as he confesses one of his heroes Tennessee Williams avoided becoming, you won’t find it here.

You won’t find much of anything personal in this book. As Waters warns, “The ultimate level of celebrity accomplishment is convincing the press and public that they know everything about your personal life without really revealing anything.” And speaking of Tennessee Williams: his chapter begins “Tennessee Williams saved my life.” From what? He never says. Waters alludes to conformity and cliché as terrible things to avoid in life; but you might find yourself longing for more depth from a lengthy and detailed confession about the psychic wounds of childhood after reading such a statement. It just isn’t there.

In his Leslie Van Houten chapter, Waters confesses to the tragic event in his own life that inspired his used and reused face-pressed-against-the-windshield-of-a-car image. Beyond this small detail, you’d be hard-pressed to find much else worth discussing in film school or after a screening of Polyester, for instance, in this self-effacing work.

Perhaps his most interesting observations are found in the "Leslie" chapter simply because there are no other humanizing portraits of this Manson family killer to be found: “Leslie inspired me too. Inspired me to believe that if you wait long enough and work hard enough on your damaged psyche, you can eventually come out of it with some kind of self-respect and mental health.” But again, the questions and not the answers to the Waters’ enigma resurface for the reader: why does Waters see his own sins as akin to those of a woman who stabbed another sixteen times with a knife in the lower back, as Van Houten did to Rosemary LaBianca in 1969? The "Leslie" chapter is the most compelling of the book, but Waters lingers too long on this subject and apologizes for the crime, saying he understands its severity, too many times.

As this critic went over her notes after finishing the book, she discovered that she’d written more than two dozen question marks in its margins. This harks back to the point Waters made early on about causing people to think they know everything about him, when really he has shrewdly kept his secrets under wraps. For every insight into the real Waters the reader gets, there's at least one question about said reality that naturally follows.

Role Models is an interesting read, but it’s never as shocking or grotesque as any one of Waters’ films. And its message is muddled: do perverts exist because of or in spite of public opinion? Waters’ seems to teeter back and forth between wanting to vindicate his socially rejected role models and wanting to celebrate their freak status. One thing is for sure: reading this book is like turning over a rock in the mud and examining all of the creepy-crawlies you’d find there. Do it for the fun of learning something new, even though you’ll learn very little about cult filmmaker John Waters.

Review by Rachel Moehl

Video Slut: How I Shoved Madonna Off an Olympic High Dive, Got Prince into a Pair of Tiny Purple Woolen Underpants, Ran Away ...

By Sharon Oreck
Faber & Faber

Sharon Oreck has the career that any child of the ‘80s would envy. She has produced over 600 music videos, many of which defined the monolithic “MTV generation.” She has been nominated for Oscars, Grammys, Women in Film awards, and of course, MTV Music Awards (twenty total!). From 1984 to 2000, Oreck’s work was a model for the visual repertoire that shaped the collective imagination of teens around the globe. Her role in popular culture is so far-reaching that she has been included in a film alongside such figures as Hillary Rodham Clinton (14 Women).

The majority of Oreck’s memoir relates events that occurred while shooting Sheila E.’s "The Glamorous Life," Aha’s "Take on Me," Madonna’s "Like a Prayer," and my personal favorite, Chris Isaak’s "Wicked Game." Upon viewing the videos, Oreck’s talent is immediately obvious. But what was she thinking when she was shooting? Apparently, she was thinking about a lot.

Reproductive rights, feminism, beauty—these are just a few of the topics that Oreck contemplates in Video Slut. Her most empowering moments as a writer occur during the introspective climax, which pairs her decision as a pregnant teen to keep her baby with the demise of her first production company, NO Pictures.

Oreck’s book is written in a tips-from-your-cool-older-sister style. Oreck spares no details and even offers pointers for making it in the scantily clad rock video world—most importantly, don’t make fun of executives until after they’ve left the room. More notably, this narrative updates the classic format for celebrity memoirs by exchanging the contexts of alternating chapters between a video career and an early pregnancy at sixteen. Video Slut puts the spotlight on the largely undocumented moments during video’s heyday—overqualified assistants, moonlighting pot dealers, egotistical bigwigs, and pop stars are the mediums through which Oreck relates her professional and personal milestones.

This is one of the most likable new books that I have read, and I look forward to more of Oreck’s outstanding work; her experiences combine elements of after-hours stand-up comedy, frank confessionals, and visionary strategies for survival when the odds don’t look so good. After all, that’s what petty cash is for, right?

Review by Maria Guzman

Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale

By Belle Yang
W.W. Norton

I jumped at the chance to review Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale, an unconventional graphic memoir from writer/artist Belle Yang. While I am no expert on graphic literature, I did devour Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis series. With this medium, I enjoy (and envy) the way an artist can show emotions through inked illustrations, and use words more sparingly. Further, there is an intimacy created on the page, because the typeface and conversational style evoke a personal journal lying on a nightstand.

Yang is a Chinese-American woman, and her story, in part, tells of the identity struggles she experiences in separating from the Chinese traditions of her immigrant parents. When she travels to Beijing for art school, Yang has a chance to learn cultural history while not being bound to it.

At the outset of her tale, we see the source of Yang’s title: her Chinese name, Xuan, means “Forget Sorrow.” When Yang was thirty years old, she sought shelter from a violent boyfriend by moving back to her parents’ home. While there, she began to give shape to her father’s childhood stories in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, World War II, and Mao’s Great Leap Forward. Yang writes, “I have a voice in America. I won’t waste it.”

The art in Forget Sorrow is tender, powerful, and moving. One ink illustration that stands out is Yang’s nightmare about her abuser, which captures a feeling of stark terror. In contrast, Yang’s illustrations also evoke tenderness between father and daughter, a feeling of comfort for him as he shares painful memories.

Yang’s story demonstrates ways in which strength comes from relationships. Her father’s tales are painful at times. Under communism, family relationships were made subordinate to party affiliation. Important aspects of tradition, such as honoring elders, did not apply if those elders were deemed to be landlords or capitalists. The political side of Yang’s family story makes it very clear that social change should not come at the cost of human life or dignity.

Through telling her family’s story as well as exercising her voice and her artistic vision in Forget Sorrow, Yang found new freedom. As a writer, artist, and woman, she shapes her own future.

Review by Lisa Rand

The Gerbil Farmer’s Daughter

By Holly Robinson
Three Rivers Press

Holly Robinson begins this book by saying that, essentially, this is a story she has never told. That this is a story she didn’t want to talk about. I am so glad she did.

I am not much for holding back information about my own life and it is completely unfathomable to me how anyone could manage to grow up with a father who raised, became an expert on, and built an empire out of gerbils. I suppose if one was squeamish about having others think you were quirky or odd, you might hesitate, but the story of Robinson’s childhood growing up with a retired Navy captain-turned gerbil farmer is absolutely delightful in its implausibility. I, for one, would not only share the story, but wear it like a badge of honor. I hope she does now that the word is out!

Robinson’s writing is conversational and comfortable. It was like listening to an old friend roll her eyes as she recalled the things her ignorant, dorky parents used to do. We all had embarrassing parents growing up, and it is simply lovely to read about someone whose family was undoubtedly weirder than your own. For anyone who still has secrets locked away in her closet, frightened that her friends or her children or her children’s friends might someday discover, The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter is a huge sigh of relief.

Robinson, while no doubt mortified by her father’s obsession with gerbils, was also mystified by her mother’s tacit refusal to have anything to do with them. She was raised by two individuals who, for all their weaknesses, modeled the notion of following your dreams for their children. Those dreams didn’t necessarily coincide or even complement each other, but Robinson may have benefited heartily from her mother’s example that a wife need not blindly follow her husband’s ambitions, military leader or no.

This story is a lighthearted, entertaining read and Robinson does a lovely job of reminding us that there is no such thing as a “normal” childhood.

Review by Kari O’Driscoll

The Blessing Next to the Wound: A Story of Art, Activism, and Transformation

By Hector Aristizabal and Diane Lefer

Lantern Books

As a survivor of government sanctioned torture in Colombia, Hector Aristizabal was left with unsettled anger and fear. His wariness towards both his country and his future there worsens when one of his brothers is murdered by paramilitary soldiers. Aristizabal is eventually able to cast aside his bitterness, and find ways to aid others in their struggles by holding workshops for prisoners and victims of violence in the United States. While the dust jacket of The Blessing Next to the Wound gives the impression that it is a memoir of surviving both torture and a corrupt government, the book's focus is actually splintered. It tells many stories connected through Aristzabal’s drive to aid others set both before and after his imprisonment and torture for alleged political ties.

The Blessing Next to the Wound begins with Aristizabal aiding his pregnant girlfriend and other young women seeking an illegal abortion. While Aristizabal boastfully lists the many women he seduced throughout his life, he also offers sympathy for the plight women face in a country with limited birth control resources. This later motivates him to undergo a vasectomy following the birth of his own two children, admitting that while he may not always be faithful to his wife, he will never impregnate another woman. While Aristizabal shows himself to grow, his treatment of women is never shown to be fully resolved. As a feminist, I fruitlessly waited for this to be given some resolution during the course of the book.

Each chapter tells a different vignette from Aristizabal’s rich life experience. While this approach causes the book to lack a clear focus, and often a sense of chronology, the bits and pieces he shares from his life are nonetheless captivating and often moving. During the course of the memoir Aristizabal chronicles the hardships faced by his homosexual brother who eventually dies of AIDS, the effect of the cocaine industry on Colombia, the many human rights violations that exist in the United States, and how his theater-based therapy work aids others in places of crisis in their lives. Now and then Aristizabal will make a connection between the chapter’s experience and his time spent imprisoned and tortured; these connections serve to lessen the fragmented feel of the work.

Despite its lack of focus, The Blessing Next to the Wound offers a moving portrayal of finding inspiration and direction after surviving torture.

Review by Adrienne Urbanski

Bitch is the New Black

By Helena Andrews
Harper Collins

I don’t believe bitch is the new Black any more than I believe that thirty is the new twenty. As our most recent racial shenanigans have reminded us, Black is still its same ol’ Black self. And anybody who engages in the same shamtastic behaviors at thirty as she did at twenty is just plain trifling. That said, I think y’all should check out Helena Andrews recently published memoir Bitch Is the New Black.

We know good and well that it ain’t easy out here on single Black women. And the Tyler Perryization of Black women’s lives has made it possible for the likes of Steve Harvey and every other jackleg Black relationship expert to capitalize on our story but us. Since Black women are always represented as loud, sassy, and inappropriate, our silence has been deafening. It’s high time that we get bell hooks with it, and start talking back. Helena Andrews has done that masterfully.

Hers is a delicious Black girl story, one that hits so many familiar notes that you are transported episodically to different moments of your own life to recall how you handled a similar situation—family conflicts between your mom, your grandmother and your aunties; your first cheating lover; a pregnancy scare; a ridiculously stressful and uninteresting first job; your first encounter with the domestic abuse of a loved one; your love affair with The Cosby Show. And yet, Helena Andrew’s story is also all her own—unique, self-contained, and filled with the kinds of idiosyncrasies that remind us we are not the same, no matter how many two-dimensional portraits of ourselves we encounter daily.

Here we learn what it is like to be a Black girl reared by a lesbian mother, in a family that associates same-sex love with pedophilia. We encounter a bohemian Black girlhood, one associated with movement, not because of poverty or military life, but because of her mother’s need for new surroundings. For the adult Helena, this translates to a life of literally walking the walk. She doesn’t drive and has no interest in learning, even after two muggings. And when she isn’t walking it out, homegirl Helena is talking it out, in classic Black woman fashion, with an endless string of refreshingly familiar girlfriends and colorful female characters.

The text is, of course, not without its hiccups. But then, neither is the path of a professional Black woman approaching thirty. There are moments when the transition from e-chat speak to text are choppy and disorienting. That’s a technical issue. There is, however, also the sense that while Andrews grew up with a lesbian mother, she wants us to be very clear that she’s as straight as they come, whatever that means. There are, thus, endless recourses to referring to the most mundane of things as being “so gay,” or as in a chapter called "Trannygate," referring to a transchick as “the she-man... name unnecessary.” Uh, not cool.

Andrews certainly didn’t need to get didactic with it, but her own childhood put her in a unique position to represent queer folk humanely and heterosexual dating in ways that might have avoided such strident heterosexism. That said, I know now in a very real way how much courage it takes to let others into your life—particularly among sisters who can sometimes be the worst critics among us—and so I refuse to be overly critical of this book. I don’t promise that you’ll like everything in it. You might even dislike the author, given her self-professed bitch tendencies. But what she has proved is that our stories matter—and if you don’t like hers, write your own.

This is a book for every Black woman who’s ever needed to read, hear, feel, breathe another sista’s story, a book for every girl who’s ever dealt with inappropriate sexual conversations from a mother who’s trying to be hip, an ex-dude with stalker tendencies, or a dead end relationship that kept you pinned down because the sex made your toes curl. And while Andrews has her admittedly bitch moments in this book, she does not shy away from admitting the vulnerability that informs those moments, or from brutal, gut-wrenching honesty in general, even when it means discussing the suicide of a close Black girlfriend in a culture where strongblackwomen just don’t do that.

When I heard about this book last Fall, its title caused me to approach it with the same skepticism with which I approach Tyler Perry movies. I didn’t need to have anyone else calling me a bitch just because I’m educated, especially not a sista. Unlike TP, however, this text does not disappoint. When you read Bitch Is the New Black, you will know that there’s another Black chick out there, who’s slogging through it, who’s working it out, perhaps very differently from you, but who ultimately gets it.

Review by Crunk Feminist Collective

The Last Living Slut: Born in Iran, Bred Backstage

By Roxana Shirazi
It Books

The Last Living Slut: Born in Iran, Bred Backstage, written by Iran native Roxana Shirazi, was a complete and utter waste of my time. The book was championed by writers Neil Strauss and Anthony Bozza, who met up with Shirazi one faithful day and immediately became enthralled by her tails of debauchery with bad up and coming rock ‘n’ roll bands, as well as some oldies, but not so goodies like Guns N’ Roses. Appetite for Destruction never did anything for me musically or otherwise, but apparently the mere appearance of Axl Rose was enough to give Shirazi “gushing orgasms” as a teenage girl and her sexual fantasies about him set her on her path to groupiedom.

I’m not surprised that two men would be impressed by a book in which an otherwise intelligent woman makes a fool of herself by revealing that she’s let musicians piss on her and has had sex while so wasted that she threw up on one of her many partners for the night. According to these boys, “This was a woman who was not a victim, but who made rock bands her victim—and she got off on pushing them to extremes that made them uncomfortable.” Did these guys read the book? From what I could tell, it didn’t take much coercing to convince the men to degrade her, and a person who’s completely at ease with their lifestyle isn’t prone to nervous breakdowns, depressive episodes, or the need to constantly be wasted, as was detailed by Shirazi.

It’s apparent that this book is meant to shock, but I found nothing shocking about it. Shirazi, who calls herself a feminist, defends her use of the word slut before her story begins. I don’t care about her use of slut; it’s not offensive to me in any way. What is offensive, however, is attempting to pass this book off as a heroic piece of writing by a fun and carefree young woman who happens to have a penchant for wild nights and rock stars. If anything, this book just verifies that being a groupie is a lifestyle often chosen by women with low self-esteem.

The first portion of the book details the author’s childhood in Iran where she was a “child basked in gunfire, Islamic law, and sexuality.” Raised mostly by her mother and grandmother, Shirazi was abandoned by her opium addict father, molested and raped by neighbors, and beaten by her step father. It seems to me that these are the kinds of things that shape a young woman.

Having suffered through similar circumstances, I can attest to the fact that burying the feelings that result from these occurrences only sets you up for disaster once your sexuality is blooming and your childhood has left you with the impression that men are supposed to hurt, yell, hit, and take anything they want from you—even when you say no. It seems absurd to me that Shirazi doesn’t make the connection in the book that her feelings as a child, a belief that the abuse she suffered at the hands of men was her own fault, was the most likely reason she grew up and allowed herself to be further taken advantage of, almost as if she felt like she deserved it and that it was her duty to be the thing that men used to get off.

What’s wrapped up to look like a fun package, a carefree romp in the hay, is actually a very depressing book that often reads like a bad romance novel. (“I don’t understand how Stuart found the energy and ability to fuck me so masterfully all night, nor how his testicles were able to produce such a huge amount of sperm.”) Shirazi is disparaging of other women, often only describing them in terms of their weight, makeup, clothing choices, and ability to be fucked by second rate rock stars. You get the impression that she’s the type of person who thinks calling another woman fat or ugly is the biggest insult that can be hurled.

If anything was shocking about The Last Living Slut, it was the author’s implication that the rockers she is sleeping with are fulfilling her “hunger for a free-spirited life, for breaking the rules, for laughing, for knowing the meaning of it.” If fucking teenage boys in bad bands and has-been rock stars in worse bands is the meaning of life—and the new face of feminism—I better bow out now.

Review by Tina Vasquez

I'm Sorry You Feel That Way: The Astonishing but True Story of a Daughter, Sister, Slut, Wife, Mother, and Friend to Man and Dog

By Diana Joseph
Berkley Books

Diana Joseph has weekly breakfast dates with her Satanist neighbor, a dog that tirelessly humps everything (including her petrified son), terrible relationships with men (including one that produced the previously mentioned son), and issues with her brothers. Save for the Satanist neighbor and humping dog—perhaps—most of those topics are standard fare for memoirs, and in the first seventy pages of I’m Sorry You Feel That Way, Joseph does not do much to set herself apart from other memoir writers.

The stories Joseph is telling are obviously her own, but she writes with a disinterested tone that is slightly unsettling and boring to read. Then she makes this statement, referring to her battle with OCD and subsequent refusal to continue taking Paxil: “I don’t think it’s ever going to completely go away. I’m not sure I want it to. Because then who would I be? What would I think about? How would I spend my time?” This marks a shift in her writing. She still maintains her dry wit and keeps a slight distance from what she is writing about, but she has a distinct talent for weaving in moments of vulnerability that—because of the straightforward voice she otherwise employs—never feel forced or exploitative.

“It’s Me. It’s Him. It’s Them.” is Joseph’s finest piece in this series of stories. It shows off her ability to not only write vulnerably, but also to write pointedly. She tells the story of her “perverted” friend Andrew, and why she’s not quite sure she can call him a pervert. The story steers away from Andrew and hones in on her discomfort with her buxom figure, and men’s opinion of it, which culminates in this self-exchange:

Do I hide my body under sweaters and sweatshirts and jackets or do I let the world know I’m female and as a female, I have breasts? Why do I feel so self-conscious anytime I wear a color other than black? Do I want to be looked at or not? I don’t know.

And that’s that. She doesn’t know. She offers readers a look into the battle that she fights with her body and doesn’t announce a winner. Because if she were to have some kind of cathartic answer to all of those questions besides “I don’t know,” she would no longer be a non-fiction writer.

It’s that baldfaced honesty that serves Joseph well throughout I’m Sorry You Feel That Way. While I’m curious to see what would happen if she were to bring herself closer to the stories she’s penned, perhaps those moments of honesty and glimpses of vulnerability wouldn’t otherwise be so rewarding to read.

Review by Alyssa Vincent

Knocked Up, Knocked Down: Postcards of Miscarriage and Misadventure from the Brink of Parenthood

By Monica Murphy Lemoine
Catalyst Book Press

This book is not just for those that have experienced a miscarriage. Let’s make that clear. Yes, Knocked Up, Knocked Down: Postcards of Miscarriage and Other Misadventures from the Brink of Parenthood is all about the journey of healing from the great loss of being pregnant, physically caring for this baby within, then suddenly having parenthood ripped from beneath you. It’s a horrendous experience. However, what this book does best is open up that harsh reality to everyone who has never experienced it. Too often those that suffer through miscarriage or stillbirth feel outcast. While people generally know how to react to the death of a family member or friend, the death of an unborn child is confusing territory. The worst: some people just don’t understand how terribly painful that loss is. Reading this book will change that.

Knocked Up, Knocked Down is a very personal account of Monica Murphy Lemoine’s experience of entering motherhood, but ending up without a baby. How do you heal from such a confusing and heartbreaking experience? While it’s different for everyone, Monica found that most of the grieving literature in regards to miscarriages and stillbirths wasn’t at all helpful. If anything, she found it to be patronizing and irritating. While she tried many of the suggestions, her journey of finding out for herself what helps and what just makes it worse is helpful for anyone in a similar circumstance or anyone wanting to understand those that are.

As far as the writing itself, with a jarring, crass beginning, and slow character development, it takes at least thirty pages before you even begin to feel like you’re truly getting to know the author. Even though she shares plenty of personal information right from the beginning, there’s not much of an introduction. The story begins forty-eight hours after her miscarriage, jumping right into the focus of this journey, but you feel like you’re playing catch up trying to get to know her.

Once you get about fifty pages into this 200 page book, it all starts to come together. All of the introductions are finally explained with sufficient back-story to feel like you personally know Monica and her husband Kevin. Once that’s in place, it’s easier to understand, relate, and feel great compassion for this couple as they try to heal from their loss. Is Knocked Up, Knocked Down a bit depressing? You bet. But will it give you new perspective? Absolutely! This book is completely worth the read.

You would think with miscarriages and stillbirth being as common as it is (as Monica points out, the International Stillbirth Alliance states that 4.5 million stillbirths occur worldwide each year), that this topic would be addressed more often. But the truth is, it’s not. Good for Monica helping others feel less alone and providing everyone else with the means to begin to comprehend. Plus, readers can continue to follow Monica through her blog Knocked Up, Knocked Down. After reading her book, you are sure to wonder “What happens next?” and fortunately with her blog the journey continues.

Monica manages to bring you inside her world and allows you to share in her experiences, both the good and the bad, without making you feel like a voyeur. She opens up in a way that feels like family, a really close-knit and brutally honest family. No doubt you’ll walk away from reading her story a little wiser and much more empathetic.

Review by Sarah Eve Nichols-Fulghum

All Over the Map

By Laura Fraser
Harmony Books

Author Laura Fraser has just celebrated her fortieth birthday and is attending a college reunion. While observing the range of accomplishments that have been accumulated over the years by her former classmates—and mentally comparing herself with them—a friend shares with Laura the idea of a the Manhattan trifecta: you can, over the course of your life, have the perfect relationship, the perfect job, and the perfect apartment. Just not all at once. Laura realizes that she has a great apartment and a great job, but there is no great man in her life and she wants to change that.

All Over the Map is a like a less self-indulgent Eat, Pray, Love. Laura Fraser is a freelance writer who travels frequently for her work. In her previous book, An Italian Affair, she wrote about the breakup of her marriage and finding solace in an Italian romance—a cleansing, hedonistic break. In All Over the Map, Laura is in her forties and trying to find balance in her life. The book chronicles several years while she tries her hand at settling down, all while traveling frequently on assignment.

For Laura, the idea of what constitutes "settling down" changes gradually over the duration of the book. Initially, she thinks that she wants a husband and children, but after a series of half-hearted romances, and as her fertility wanes, she realizes that she'd rather find a place to settle herself as an individual, while remaining close to a circle of friends. You can feel her mood lightening as she shifts from an intense focus on finding a man and starting a family, to being a happy woman with a house in Mexico in a town full of artists and divorcees.

Laura Fraser is a frequent contributor to glossy women's magazines, and knows how to craft a gripping sentence. While All Over the Map could be considered a beach read, there are darker and more complex moments in the book. Among the most engrossing chapters are when Laura describes her travel to Italy and Samoa to interview sex workers for articles. These chapters begin as typical travel pieces, singing the beauty of these locations, and end up darker and more menacing. The men and women involved in the sex trade that Laura speaks to are full of anger, fear, and desire, and dealing with women's new roles as breadwinners around the globe while living in largely paternalistic societies. These chapters have really meaty implications about the shifting role of women around the world, and come at a point in Laura's life where she's struggling to become a wife and mother. It's an interesting contrast and comparison, though one Laura doesn't choose to explore.

Ultimately, the book shifts back to Laura's story and the happiness she's able to find for herself. It's a quick read with interesting implications about female vulnerability and independence around the globe. Buy it if you'd like a light, feminist read with some intellectual heft.

Review by Catherine Nicotera

Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

By Gregory Boyle
Free Press

At times, I could almost hear my heart breaking as I read this book by Father Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit priest who works with hardened gang members in Los Angeles and assists with reintegrating them back into society through his organization Homeboy Industries. Boyle founded Homeboy Industries to provide encouragement and support in the form of jobs and vocational training to former gang members who have expressed a desire to rehabilitate themselves.

Not only did my heart break more than once while reading this book, I found myself inspired by Boyle’s recounting of his experiences during the past twenty years in the barrios of East L.A. What kept this book from being flat out disheartening in terms of the obstacles that Boyle and the gang members are up against (Boyle has officiated at the funerals of hundreds of children, adolescents, and adults over the years as a result of gang violence) is Boyle’s sense of humor and faith that glimmers in the stories that he tells. His stories reminded me of homilies strung together to create a beautiful testimony to faith and humanity amongst tragedy and despair.

Boyle is also well schooled in the street language of his homies, which adds even more reality and credibility to his retelling of events. This is a priest who used to ride around on his bike to some of the most dangerous parts of L.A. at all times of the day or night to tend to his flock. Boyle doesn’t share these stories as a means to laud his bravery or piety, but to tell the stories of lost generations of individuals who find themselves in a seemingly unbroken cycle of violence, and to remind us of their humanity. Many of these former gang members were abused by parents or left to raise themselves with no resources or role models. Boyle writes of taking some of his homies to a sit down restaurant for the first time and how these normal day-to-day experiences that we take for granted are as foreign to them as riding a spaceship. Boyle also tells of the death threats he has received as a result of his work from people who don’t believe gang members can or should be rehabilitated.

According to the text, there are:

1,100 gangs encompassing 85,000 members in Los Angeles County, and Boyle Heights had the highest concentration of gang activity in the city. Since Father Greg—also known affectionately as G-dog—started Homeboy Industries more than twenty years ago, it has served members of more than half the gangs in Los Angeles.

I laughed and cried while reading this book. Boyle has a master’s degree in English and has received numerous awards, including the California Peace Prize. He sprinkles quotes of famous spiritual leaders of all faiths throughout his text, including Mother Theresa and Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk, poet and peace activist. While I found this book painful to read at times, I also found it to be transformative.

Review by Gita Tewari

Just Don't Call Me Ma'am: How I Ditched the South, Forgot My Manners, and Managed to Survive My Twenties with (Most of) My Dignity Still Intact

By Anna Mitchael
Seal Press

Who better, I ask you, than a Yankee like me who moved to Texas to review Just Don't Call Me Ma'am, a book by a Texas-girl who moved to the East? Considering how absolutely dead-on hysterical this “survival story” was, I couldn’t be happier about how fate brought us together.

The one thing Anna Mitchael didn’t like was people calling her "ma’am." Ma’am is reserved for your grandmother – or an elderly lady that a twenty-something man is holding the door for. But ma’am is unacceptable when aimed at a woman who swears (even though the crow’s feet might say differently) that she is a spring chicken in the prime of her life.

This wonderfully humorous romp begins with Anna making her way through a myriad of places before settling in Brooklyn. Now, New York City to a Texas woman is something of a high-fashion, fast-moving, cement and glass world of cynicism, and as the author states, it wasn’t a full-on romance for her right away. NYC was an acquired taste.

From a breakup, Anna brings us back to the first time love bloomed; she was twelve years old, gazing at the neighborhood boy with the bright blue eyes who was bound to be the next All-American quarterback playing at Texas stadium. All the girls were massively in love with the young man and wanted to spend the summer trying to get him to notice them. But Anna was tempted by the one person she loved more than life to leave town that one fateful summer…her Grandma.

Grandmothers always know the right bribe to dangle, in order to get their grandchildren to come for a visit, and Anna’s was no different. She bribed her granddaughter with the soap operas that she’d taped all year long, and Anna salivated at knowing that she could spend a couple of weeks in front of the television learning all about high-fashion makeup hounds who spoke with a hoity-toity accent and slept, well, with pretty much anybody, anywhere. Unfortunately, when the two week excursion of sin was over, Anna got a call from her friend to let her know that the guy had found himself a girlfriend. Life lesson learned.

From there, the author takes us on many journeys, offering knowledge about her Southern background, such as how the summers in Texas can actually kill; Southern desserts that Yankees just don’t understand, like bourbon balls; and, being a bridesmaid two hundred times and having to wrap yourself like a horrible Christmas package in pink taffeta and pretend to cry at the “I do” part. She lets us know that you can’t spit in Texas without hitting four hundred churches, and that vegetarianism is a much frowned-upon activity in the world of meat, poultry, and that white gravy. She brings us with her as she tries to adapt to mysteries like Brazilian waxing (which is so painful that I’m sure Hitler used this on his enemies at one time); trips to Las Vegas with the girls; and other topics I met head-on when words went from “get” to “git.”

I laughed out loud as she put a Southerner in Yankee-ville. It took me back to the times when a Texan smiled at me like I was a complete moron when I said “you guys” instead of “y’all.” And when I had, without thinking, told a Southern lady that I was from New England and her response was, “Really? You don’t sound British.”

What I realized while reading Just Don't Call Me Ma'am was that the accent that may frame our words, or whether our grandmothers cooked grits or mashed potatoes, simply doesn’t matter. In the end, we’re all people who are making our way through life the best way we can—whether in the backyard of our own upbringing or setting a course for adventure and moving into an unknown world.

I applaud Mitchael and hope that, like the great Erma Bombeck, she continues her foray into the wonderful – true – world of life’s humor. And, a special note to her, my Grandma was absolutely fantastic, too. It was so nice to read a story about one of the really great ladies the world had to offer. We become much better people when we are lucky enough to have those wonderful women in our past.

Review by Amy Lignor

Cross-posted at Book Pleasures

Falling Apart In One Piece: One Optimist’s Journey Through the Hell of Divorce

By Stacy Morrison
Simon & Schuster

I’m one of the many women who have been through divorce so I picked up Stacy Morrison’s memoir Falling Apart in One Piece, about her divorce, with interest. Because few of my friends and family members have experienced divorce, it’s been one long lonely road for me. How do people deal with the guilt? I’ve wondered. How do they stop worrying about their ex—even after they’ve fallen in love with somebody else?

Less literary and more chatty-confessional style—in vogue with the women’s magazines that Morrison has edited all these years (Mirabella and Marie Claire, for example, or, most recently, Redbook)—Morrison relates her tale like a woman sitting down over a cup of tea with a friend. Her story takes us to the heart of despair in the wake of divorce. Though Morrison’s husband didn’t abandon their son, he left her holding the bag for a house that was falling apart around her. Morrison soon realized that she was literally living a metaphor, the house a perfect symbol of her crumbling marriage.

What did I do wrong? Morrison wonders. How could I have believed in marriage, only to be fooled? How could marriage have been just the thing I needed, while my husband felt like it was sucking his soul dry? And, most importantly, How am I ever going to be a single mom? How am I going to afford it? How am I going to get rid of this damned house? Even as she takes a new job as Editor-in-Chief of Redbook Magazine, Morrison wonders if she’s a fraud. Can she promote marriage and family when her own has disintegrated?

Through all her financial struggles, loneliness, self-doubt, and desolation, Morrison works hard not to become bitter or angry, so that she and her former husband can be good parents to their son. She comes through it with hope for the future and a new-found respect for her own abilities to make it through anything.

Falling Apart in One Piece is neither a literary masterpiece nor a self-help manual, but it is another genre somewhere in between those two—a personal story of heartache, loss, and hope, told honestly and thoughtfully. Definitely worth reading for those who have been through divorce and want to understand their own muddled emotions.

Review by Jessica Powers

Things Seen

By Annie Ernaux
Translated by Jonathan Kaplansky
Bison Books

From the baby carriage to the grave, life unfolds more and more between the shopping center and the television set. – Annie Ernaux

Born in 1940, and a published author since 1974, Annie Ernaux is known for writing in depth about her own life: her parents, her marriage, her abortion, and later, her breast cancer. In Things Seen, Ernaux turns her gaze outward, both to Paris and the world.

Written as a journal, the book feels as though it traveled in a coat pocket, pulled out to pass the time in train stations and grocery stores, riding on the Metro and eavesdropping in cafes. The writer states the journal is a result of the “simple habit of putting life into words.”

Events are recorded through the initial reaction felt by the writer. Refreshingly absent is the expected self-examination and excuses made for the content of the reaction. We hear the writer’s thoughts as she thinks them, without editing. There is no need to place additional weight on any one topic, as one would in conversation; the narrative flows over war, racism, and homelessness as swiftly as it does hair appointments, grocery shopping, and visits to the dentist. This does not render the writer shallow or uninterested; it reminds the reader of all the passing commentary we also make to ourselves in our day-to-day lives. The commentary doesn’t need to make sense to anyone else. In fact, upon reflection it might not make sense at all.

The idea I found most resonant in the book is that while one may feel they are the only true individual in a crowd, to each other person, one is just part of the nameless crowd. The writer’s viewpoint is that of a passive audience, watching other people's lives unfold in front of her with little more emotion than one would actors on a stage. A memorable example is that of the many different beggars encountered on the Metro; the writer finds it easier to give change to someone playing music than to someone who might actually be starving. It is easier to give the same coin for pleasantry than to accept the concept that someone might literally die without that help.

The writer is distanced from actual events, and this makes the book speed along, as we do not stop to analyze the thoughts themselves; we simply follow the words at the pace of life, just as the writer recorded them.

Review by Melissa Ruiz

Lahore with Love: Growing Up with Girlfriends, Pakistani-Style

By Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Syracuse University Press

A poet’s power lies not only in her well-crafted images but in the rhythm of her recitation. As I read Lahore With Love, the memoir of Fawzia Afzal-Khan, I longed to hear her read the volume aloud. Many parts of her story poured out in a stream of consciousness, and her anecdotes deftly wove between youth and adulthood, lighthearted desires and the pain of loss, politics and the laughter of girlfriends.

Afzal-Khan interweaves her personal story with key elements in the history of the establishment of Pakistan, her homeland, which was formed just ten years before her birth. The painful string of military dictatorships running her country creates a mirror for the tragic experiences endured by her girlfriends. As she writes, with foreboding, “I have sensed disaster coming their way, my way, my country’s way.” In some ways, Afzal-Khan escaped disaster: she is a professor in the English Department at Montclair State University (New Jersey), a scholar of postcolonial studies, a poet, and an actress. Yet while she lives a successful life in the United States, she carries with her a complicated sorrow and relief, a pain of loss that is aggravated each time she visits Pakistan and sees some new wounds inflicted upon her home and her loved ones.

Lahore With Love gives us vignettes of upper middle class life in a culture where propriety called for gender-segregated social gatherings, but someone was always ready to break rules. The line between acceptable “colonial” habits (Catholic school) and the dangerous “Western decadence” (art school) was at times thin and slippery. As the author forges her own self-identity, the nation also seeks a shape; she heads to the U.S. to obtain her PhD, and Pakistan begins to undergo Islamization, with new layers of reactionary rules added to the old. There is nothing dry about the presentation of material; in one bloody chapter, the story of Shia martyrs is juxtaposed with bullfighting in Spain.

At times I would have enjoyed seeing the vignettes fleshed out more fully, and I suspect some readers will want a volume of Pakistani history by their side to read further about incidents to which the author refers. However, any changes to the unique narrative structure would detract from the author’s intense style. Her voice is the one we use when we long for a reunion with dear friends who are now gone, or hunger to return to the past to stop tragedy from striking, or barely restrain our anger at the callousness of our fellow humans.

Afzal-Khan asks, “Are we doomed to inhabit this binary universe or can we challenge the system that turns us into the roles we wear like selves?” She sets for the reader a powerful mold-breaking example when she self-identifies as “actorsingerpoetactivistmemoirist.”

Review by Lisa Rand

Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison

By Piper Kerman
Spiegel & Grau

Piper Kerman recounts the nightmare that is the judicial system in her memoir Orange Is the New Black. This is a gentle introduction to life behind bars compared to the stories of other less fortunate prisoners. Kerman spent one year of her life in a minimum-security federal women's prison in Connecticut for money laundering. Surprisingly, the worst events didn't even happen within the prison itself. She was indicted on a minor drug charge committed ten years prior; she then had to wait another five years to even be sentenced.

Her jail experience wasn't as bad as she thought it would be, though it was no vacation. Piper was subjected to humiliating strip searches, strict rules, nonsensical regulations, verbal abuse, and sexual harassment by her boss while she was working hard as a prison electrician. She later had to finish her yearlong sentence by traveling via the notorious Con Air, and staying at other worse prisons in order to testify. On the (very slim) bright side, she learned vital life lessons from other prisoners. Kerman recalls these women and her friendships with them through tender sentimentality and brutally succinct detail.

I felt very touched by the solidarity of prisoners, as well as the descriptions of holidays and birthdays spent in prison. The women found joy doing one another's hair and nails. They also enjoyed craft projects, such as tailoring their prison uniforms, creating blankets for family, and (on one funny occasion) a crocheted yarn replica of a penis as a gag gift for another prisoner. They also cooked with the few resources they had, and a recipe for Prison Cheesecake is included in the book.

Most importantly, the author owns up to her own personal privilege. Piper is a self-described "blond-haired, blue-eyed, bohemian WASP," and a Smith College graduate. She realizes how infuriating the treatment from the system was for her, and how it wasted years of her life. However, she often proclaims how much worse it would have been if she were not a privileged white person with a private lawyer. She feels for her fellow prisoners, most of whom face dismal options and impossible challenges. Prison does little to educate offenders of their crimes and does not prepare them for the outside world once they are finally released.

In reality, prison does little to rehabilitate those who commit non-violent crimes, and there seems to be little distinction between the treatment of non-violent and violent offenders. In this memoir, it is noted that the minimum and maximum security prisons were within close proximity of each other and often traded inmates back and forth. I agree with Kerman that those who commit non-violent crimes would be better remedied, and more beneficial to the community, if they were ordered to do multiple years of community service instead of traumatic and expensive ($30,000 per year per inmate) prison time.

Orange Is the New Black is engaging, educational, moving, irritating, funny, morose, and extremely hard to put down.

Review by Jacquie Piasta

Daughters of Empire: A Memoir of a Year in Britain and Beyond

By Jane Satterfield
Demeter Press

The poet and essayist Jane Satterfield writes a hauntingly discontinuous prose-poem about a sort of exile. To those of us with dual citizenship—or, perhaps, to those for whom home is two places, neither tidily reconcilable with the other—Daughters of Empire speaks poignantly to the longing for connection between past and present, mother and daughter, literary inspiration, and career frustration.

The author here teases us with the possibility of a conventional narrative of exile: what will happen when a woman who spent most of her formative years in the United States becomes pregnant and has a child while being cast aside by a prospective employer and emotionally abandoned by a narcissistic and controlling husband? Will she find in this land of her birth and ancestry an escape from the soul-deadening labor of fixed-term teaching in American institutions, and instead find joy in teaching Larkin and Plath and Heaney and Hughes to students who understand and appreciate the value of being taught by a working poet? Will she find in the geography of her own imagination the spiritual bond to the Brontë sisters that she seeks?

Our relationship to place is similarly discontinuous, and home, whatever that means, is an ongoing negotiation. Satterfield’s narrator is unstuck in time, just as she is unstuck geographically, so we get poetically rich spots of memory: “I stand on Charlotte Brontë’s front steps, thinking I’m going to be sick,” she tells us on the first page—either a vertiginous reaction to this confrontation with her nineteenth-century literary forbearer, or perhaps a bit of first-trimester nausea. And then suddenly it’s several years earlier, and she’s a different sort of exile, not quite fitting in to this group of students or that literary community brought together in American college towns. And then she’s a punk, a Johnny Rotten, but with much more ambivalent feelings towards Queen and country.

And then she’s in Corby, a “piss hole in the dead heart of England” where she was born, traveling with her mother through a reconstruction of her own ancestry and her mother’s shared dual sense of place. But then, heartbreakingly, she’s starving emotionally and perhaps physically as a mother estranged from her husband, whose Fulbright Exchange, in the mid-1990s, was in part responsible for this year in England which serves as a potent but unstable center of this narrative.

Because of the evocative power of her memory and the clarity of her language, she draws the reader willingly into this vortex. And yet, she resists closure. Does she find career fulfillment? Can she bridge the imaginative/historical gaps and construct a satisfactory home? Can she free herself from this dreadful relationship? The memoir asks instead that we participate in her desires, in her lyrical remembrance, in her evocative moments that shuttle back and forth through time, woven together by her search for identity, for her discovery of home.

Review by Rick Taylor

The Girls from Ames: A Story of Women and a Forty-Year Friendship

By Jeffrey Zaslow
Gotham Books

As I became immersed in The Girls from Ames, I started to view it as a collective memoir of eleven women who have been friends since they were young girls in Ames, Iowa. While I expected to find the book a worthwhile read, I was pleasantly surprised to find how much I could relate to in this book. I found the story of these women both touching and humorous as I read it, prompting a reflection on my own female friendships over the years. The older I get, the less I take my friendships for granted, and I felt somewhat envious that these women, who were all born in the early 1960s, had maintained such a strong bond of friendship throughout marriage (sometimes more than one), children, cross-country moves, joy, heartache, and tragedy.

What takes this book beyond the memoir genre is that Zaslow has approached the topic of female friendship with the zeal of a journalist and sociologist, and the heart of a father of three daughters. In addition to telling the story of the way the friendships evolved over decades, he provides added context in the form of research that has been done on the struggles women face at different stages in their life (i.e., teen and college years, young mothers, mothers of teenagers, divorce, midlife changes, and stages of grief) and how female friendship can be an antidote to the trials and tribulations we all encounter as we progress through life. Some of the women reflect on their own "mean girl" tendencies as teenagers now that they see their teenage daughters dealing with mean girls and other complexities young girls face in today’s world.

At the end of chapter one, Jenny, whose father was an insurance executive who pored over actuarial tables and statistics on a daily basis, recalls how he warned her as she was about to leave for the University of South Carolina not to be surprised if her friendships didn’t survive the passage of time: “My guess is in fifteen years, one of you will be estranged from the group. Two of you will be divorced. One of you will still be single, one of you may be dead. You have to expect that. Because that’s how life works.” Zaslow writes that Jenny and her father still remember that conversation “where they were sitting, how her dad’s words hung in the air in the darkness, and how she sat there thinking he had to be wrong.”

I understand why The Girls from Ames has become a national bestseller and inspired women to form reading groups to discuss the book with their friends. Female friendship has the potential to be powerful, healing, and transformative. Zaslow has captured that sentiment in this book.

Review by Gita Tewari

Whip Smart: A Memoir

By Melissa Febos
St. Martin's Press

Here's a confession: I've never actually read a memoir before, so I went into Melissa Febos' cleverly titled Whip Smart with complete ignorance. As a result, I'm not sure if the book's half-plot, half-retroactive dime-store psychological self-exploration formula is typical of the genre or not. Either way, I found the real-life narrative of a twenty-year-old college student turned self-destructive sex worker simultaneously engaging, sickening, unflinchingly honest, and enormously annoying.

Febos' story is certainly uncommon. As a straight-A student at New York City's The New School in the early 2000s, she decided to become a dominatrix, not because she was particularly strapped for cash or because she became seduced by the BDSM scene or even because she was bored. She makes the case at the beginning of the memoir that it was either that or stripping. "The vulnerability of stripping had always disturbed me; it seemed too easy to be condescended to, to be humiliated," Febos writes. "My need to be in control had always trumped the allure of being so desired." A couple of calls, a short interview, and a few training sessions later, the author is plunging headfirst into the world of dominant-on-demand women and the wealthy men they serve.

As the story advances, it's hard to believe that anyone performing the kinds of acts she did (for the small salary of seventy-five dollars an hour, given the extreme things she was asked to do) would exalt themselves above a stripper, who is never required to urinate, defecate, or spit on their clients, as Febos frequently did. She manages to do it, repeatedly, while separating her dominatrix sessions from other types of sex work because she didn't get nude or allow her clients to have sex with her (although she did frequently have sex with the men, with the help of a strap-on). It's this frequent, repetitive holier-than-thou diatribe about her position within the sex trade that makes the book annoying.

Hand in hand with her top-of-the-sex-industry lines were hollow words about female empowerment and her mother's feminism, which apparently was seriously misconstrued in it's transference to the next generation. Take this scene where she decides to fess up about the new job:

Instinctively, I tried to appeal to my mother's feminist, therapist values...The women I work with, they're amazing, strong, educated, creative women. It's not like I'm a prostitute or something. I'm in control of everything that happens. It's empowering.

Empowerment and feminism are obviously not the same thing, while being paid to serve as a sex object (nude or not) is a form of prostitution. Febos' lines aren't from any feminist playbook; they're just ways the author—always used to feeling like the smartest person in the room—justifies her profession, which she admits was, at times, demoralizing and plain disgusting. Because of the exchange of currency that occurred in "the dungeon," she and her co-workers were objects fulfilling a dominant sexual fantasy for the men without actually being dominant. Dominance, also, isn't synonymous with feminism or empowerment, as is often insinuated in this memoir.

While the story revolves around life in the dungeon and it's crazy cast of characters, Febos also weaves a parallel story of her heavy drug use, which occurred concurrently with her dungeon ascent and descent. There are also the other bad habits that she reveals—like randomly stealing books from Barnes & Noble and lying at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings—all of which are eventually resolved as Febos becomes stronger in her power over her addictions.

Despite our differing opinions on women, society, and sex work, I admired Febos' willingness to tell the whole truth in the least preachy way possible. Although it was evident that she thought (and maybe still thinks) many of her actions were commendable because of their shock value and adversarial relationship to social and sexual norms, it takes some serious guts and huge (ahem) balls to pull off publishing this type of story. For that reason alone, Whip Smart is an absolute must-read.

Review by Whitney Teal

Cross-posted from Uptown Literati

A Book of Silence

By Sara Maitland
Counterpoint

I'm not sure why I wanted to read A Book of Silence; I think I must have read a review somewhere because, as a memoir by a religious feminist, it seems an unlikely choice for me. But when I came upon it on Green Metropolis, I decided to buy it—a bargain since I got the hardback edition.

Another weird thing about this book is the feeling I have that somewhere, sometime I've met the author... a very strange feeling, indeed. Sara Maitland is a novelist who, over the last few years, seems to have been slowly withdrawing from society in search of silence. The silence she seeks is the kind in which one immerses oneself for prayer, amongst other things. A Book of Silence tells not only of her journey—including trips to places associated with silence, such as deserts, woods, hermitages, hillsides and mountains—but also of her reading books and poetry that discuss silence, and her gradual realization that she needs to withdraw from the noisy pace of modern life.

There are many different silences, and ways of being silenced. Some are forced upon us (e.g., solitary confinement and exile), but many others are chosen (e.g., retreats and withdrawal). Maitland describes the different way she experimented with silence: sitting in the desert, walking in the mountains, living in a remote cottage on Skye for forty days. She explores other people who have written about silence, particularly nuns, monks, and other religious followers (not just Christians, like herself).

All in all, I'm not sure I enjoyed A Book of Silence, although for some reason I kept reading. It made me think about the noise we are continuously surrounded by, and also made me realize that although I enjoy my own company I'm rarely silent in the way that Maitland means. She ends the book by telling how she (partly) manages to find the requisite silence, and how even then it isn't (and can't be) complete.

Review by Ms. Moll

Cross-posted from Ms Moll's Reading Year