The Dirty Life is a love story, not just to her husband, Mark, but to the farm that they built together.  Like anything or anyone you love, it took time for Kimball to get to know the farm, to learn to relish the frustrations of the relationship.  Unlike other love stories, this one includes butchering cattle and Amish auctions.

In some ways, this book is redolent of other organic-farming tales that have been so popular lately.  When Kimball is plowing behind her two work horses, she stops to muse on whether it is ever possible to get food without killing.  This is sharply reminiscent of Joan Dye Gussow’s comment in This Organic Life that all food is gotten through the suffering of animals.  While Kimball certainly hearkens back to these other writers, it would be reductive to claim she’s simply ripping them off.  On the contrary, her delicate yet honest prose is a lot like the food her husband cooks: rich, rewarding, interesting, and making use of animal parts no one else might eat.

One of the most interesting things about this book for me was the business model they’ve built.  Unlike your run-of-the-mill CSA, Kimball isn’t just giving people their summer veggies.  For a not-small sum, she and Mark have committed to trying to provide all the food their members need: maple syrup for sweetening, dairy products, vegetables, fruit, and meat.  I’ll be honest: this book made me want to move close enough to become a member, although presumably they can’t provide a damned thing Zachary would eat.  Because he doesn’t eat food.

It’s an honest but not brutal memoir, gently humorous without hysteria.  It didn’t make me want to become a farmer, but I’d sure as hell like to spend a week on their place, as long as I wasn’t put in charge of leading the giant workhorses on the plow.  Or slaughtering anything.

As soon as I finished Fadiman’s book, I picked up the book for our next book club meeting, George Howe Colt’s The Big House, another memoir.  Some of you already know where this is going.  About two or three pages into the book, everything seemed very familiar, as though I already knew this family.  A quick Google search confirmed: Colt and Fadiman were married to each other.  That I read the books back-to-back was a bizarre coincidence never to repeat itself.

Until now.

Somehow, I found myself reading Be Different: Adventures of a Free-Range Aspergian, by John Elder Robinson, on my phone while working through a paper copy of Running With Scissors, by Augusten Burroughs, before bed each night.

So here I am, reading along in both and thinking, “This is so fucking weird.  They both grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, where I grew up.  They had bad, bad childhoods in Amherst, where I had a bad, bad childhood.  Is Amherst just the scene of miserable childhoods?”  Because these dudes have different last names, it took awhile for me to realize they are brothers.

Another reason, perhaps, is that these guys present radically different perspectives on their childhoods.  Now, maybe Robinson’s Asperger’s colors the way he perceives things, but he isn’t all that pissed about his childhood.  He acknowledges that his father is a drunk and his mother is a lunatic, but he also credits them with helping him as he grew up. Burroughs, on the other hand, rakes his horrendous parents over the coals, hilariously and painfully.

Did their age difference have something to do with it? Or perhaps it’s because Robinson is writing a book about Asperger’s, not crazy mothers?  Or is one telling only part of the truth?  But then, memoir is always only part of the truth. You leave things out when you don’t want to hurt people, you arrange things to be artistically coherent, and you meld together two days for the sake of brevity.  I take no issue with this, and my rule as a memoirist is always tell the absolute, ugliest truth about myself, but feel free to spare any others by leaving stuff out or to run it through a writerly lens.  If memoirs were just factual, they’d be boring as hell.  I intend to preface any books I ever publish with that disclaimer.  Nothing I tell is untrue, but if Henry David Thoreau could meld two years into one to give Walden a strong structure, I’m allowed a little leeway, as well, as long as I’m never trying to make someone else look worse or to make myself look better.  Does that make sense?  I value honesty, not naked facts, which seems to be much the way Burroughs approached his book.  I have absolutely no doubt that the doctor’s turds were removed and set out to dry, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Burroughs had to fictionalize some of the dialogue around it or edit out some detail that would make Hope look pathetic.

Anyway, both books were excellent.  I learned a lot from Be Different.  It’s a wonderful way to learn the perspective of someone on the spectrum.  I laughed a lot with Running With Scissors.  And cringed regularly.

Anyone want to recommend any other family-tie book pairings I could try out?

While Beth Kephart’s son, Jeremy, had a different and more acute set of needs, her 1998 memoir A Slant of Sun particularly resonated with me.  It’s a glimpse into the challenge of trying to help a small child with high, high needs.  Kephart’s language is poetic and evocative of the way parents live from one trial to another error as they search for the right school, the right professional, and the right parenting methods for this unique child in this very moment.

Jeremy is diagnosed with pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified, which offers his parents little guidance, beyond don’t let him fixate for too long on his cars.  Kephart is home with him while also maintaining a freelance writing career, but her quest to help her son takes over all aspects of her life. It is draining: emotionally, financially, and physically, yet Kephart remains steadfast and committed to her little boy.

If A Slant of Light has a weakness, it’s that it evades the sense of hopelessness I feel so often.  Even when Kephart is writing about the way her son completely shuts down and refuses to join in at school, she never seems to give up believing she can help.  As a mother who desperately wants to give up much of the time but then doesn’t because parents don’t get to give up, it’s humbling to imagine that other mothers face their children’s special needs without that feeling.  I don’t know if Kephart really did feel that way but kept it out of her book or if she’s just a better woman than I am.

I left the book with the desire to email Kephart and ask her: “Now that he’s all grown up, how are things?  Is he happy?  Living a fulfilling life?  Has he read this book?  Is he OK with you having written such personal things about him?”  Standing where she stood 13 years ago, and writing about my kids in a similar vein, I want to know these things.  I want to know it’s all going to be OK.

Remind me to check for a sequel.  Right after I’m don’t helping Benjamin plan how he’s going to put on first one sock, then the other.

My five-year-old, Benjamin, recently told me that, of course, I’d be able to take care of his kids when he grows up.  After all, we’ll be living in the same house.  I believe him, too; he will take pity on me in my dotage and bring me into his home.  That kid walks with his heart first.

I’m reluctant to let them grow up and away from me, but I know it’ll happen and I appreciate their sweet reassurances.  But it wasn’t until I read the opening chapters of The Reading Promise, by Alice Ozma, that I realized the most heartrending truth of all: someday, maybe someday soon, they will stop allowing me to read to them.

Here was the passage that made me go cold, right there on page 3: “My sister was in fourth grade when she said she no longer wanted my father to read to her.  It seemed childish to her, especially since she was already reading novels on her own.”

I read this passage while sitting on seven-year-old Zachary’s bed.  He was next to me, reading The 39 Clues, his latest series.  He spends hours a day alone reading these books if he can, but every night after I’ve read to the other two kids, I read him a chapter from wherever he is in the book.  Then I go get whichever book I’m reading and sit next to him on his bed, reading side-by-side.

We need this time together desperately. Zachary is a very cerebral child (in case you missed that).  I am a very cerebral adult (in case you missed that, too).  We’re not snuggly, cuddly folks.  In fact, if I put my arm around him while I’m reading, he always moves away in a couple of minutes.  But the reading together?  That brings us together, connects us.  I read to all three children, and they’re all very into books, but it’s core to my relationship with my eldest.  Books are what we do. 

So, when I read those sentences on page three, I almost stopped breathing.  Then I interrupted his reading – a sin of the highest form.  “You’ll always let me read to you, right?”

“Of course,” he said, not looking up from his book.

Over the next week, I read about Alice Ozma – named for two of her school-librarian father’s favorite characters – and her dad, who promised each other they’d read together every night until she went to college.  I read about her dad’s discomfort with physical affection and how for years the only time they touched was during reading.  I read about his commitment to her, and how he embarrassed her, and how dedicated he was.  It’s a beautifully simple, elegantly crafted book, and it would be humiliating to me as a writer that Ozma can write like that at twenty-two if I didn’t admire her so much.

I finished the book tonight, sitting next to Zachary on his bed.  As he read his 39 Clues, he tilted his head and brought it to rest on my shoulder, the first time he has ever done this.  For tonight, and I hope for many more years to come, we have books to bring us together.

Fallenberg’s Teo Levin is one such survivor.  A famous Israeli choreographer, in his mid-eighties he has never stopped regretting the dancing career he could have had in Europe if Hitler had not come to power.  He becomes friends with Vivi, a fortyish waitress who dabbles in one artistic form after another.  Vivi is the daughter of Holocaust survivors who tries to imagine herself as part of the generation that has put the Holocaust behind them.  Tries is the key word, here.

Their relationship is sensual yet believable, despite the difference in age.  Through it, they both come to a place of peace and acceptance.  To get there, however, they need to walk through the fire of their memories.

Fallenberg’s story is of two Israelis who lost their selves to men in Berlin, only to find them again together decades later.  It is perfectly wrought, and the precise prose delivers a plot that is breathtaking in its devastation.  The characters are at once sparsely sketched and fully developed.  Place is important in this book, and Berlin becomes almost a character in itself.

Consider reading this one for your book club.  If you have a book club of really intense people.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet.  Kickass title for a book, no?

It’s set in Seattle during 1942 (and 1986).  Henry, a twelve-year-old Chinese-American boy, lives with his very anti-Japanese father and less-vitriolic mother in Chinatown, right next to Japantown.  His parents send him off to a white prep school on scholarship.  On Henry’s way out the door, his dad pins a button that reads, “I am Chinese” to his chest.

Therein lies the question.  Henry doesn’t self-identify as Chinese, exactly, but he doesn’t see himself as not Chinese, either.  Through his friendship with Sheldon, a black jazz musician, and his love for Keiko, an American girl of Japanese descent, he begins to shape his own identity.

The text goes back and forth between 1942, when Henry watched his Japanese friends and neighbors be evacuated, and 1986.  Henry’s wife has died after a lingering illness, and he is again as much in search of himself as he was in 1942.  A long-abandoned hotel is purchased, and the new owner uncovers a cache of trunks, boxes, and parasols, all belonging to Japanese families who were carted away during World War II.  Henry, having just closed the middle chapter of his life, goes back to the first chapter before deciding how to live the last one.

Unlike the last book I reviewed, which was also about the Japanese-American internment, this book is sparse, leaving room between the words for the reader to think, wander, and discover.  Jamie Ford does a wonderful job subtly changing the voice for pre-adolescent Henry and middle-aged Henry.  The characters are fully developed, but with light, sensitive prose.  The plot is engaging, the setting remains a backdrop, and the full horror of what happened in the US during WWII is realized because the reader is required to play along.

I went through a long, long phase of not reading books because of children and work and moving.  But about a year ago, I started reading again, and now I’m reading like a maniac.  Not my old pace of a book every day or two, but certainly at least a book a week, and usually more.  It’s kind of distracting, since I’m supposed to work and take care of the kids and sleep, but instead I’m pretending that I’m sorting the laundry and sneaking in a page.

Last weekend, we went out to breakfast.  The kids were maniacal, and my husband looked over at me, annoyed.  “What are you doing?” he demanded.

I snapped my head up from the iPhone in my lap, which I thought I had so cleverly hidden.  “Just reading the last chapter of Pride and Prejudice.”  Totally caught red-handed reading Jane Austen while allowing my husband to deal with three kids in a restaurant.

This, however, is not a review of Austen who is the bomb and does not need me to say any more.  This is a review of David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars.  All of you have probably read it, but I’m just now catching up.

If you haven’t read it, you should know that it is filled with beautiful images of woods and strawberry fields and the sensuousness of a woman.  A Japanese-American woman, blossoming into her fullness and beloved of a passionate white American man.  (Yes, that sentence is meant to be read rather wryly.)  It’s a bit much, all the sensual imagery, honestly.  The man really could have made the point with somewhat less detail and not an insignificant reduction in words.

That said, it’s an imaginative and enjoyable read, and it brings up questions of justice, passion, love, and truth.  It breathes life into the Japanese interment, a period of time that for many Americans is just a chapter (if that) in our history books.

Jane Austen it’s not.  It takes itself a little too seriously.  Nonetheless, worth sloughing through all those words that underscore the difficulty of that shameful moment in American history.

Wasserstein’s plays were often semi-autobiographical, and she wrote a lot about her life, so it’s hard to imagine what a biography would add.  Plenty, it turns out.  Salamon’s portrait is of a woman who came across as affable and insecure, but who managed to keep everyone compartmentalized and within limits.  Growing up in a family adept at keeping secrets, Wasserstein learned to keep things under wraps… when she wanted to.  The secrets were not-so-secret much of the time, often to the surprise of those who thought they were in her confidence.

Wasserstein wanted a husband and a baby, yet she also rejected conventional life.  She felt superior and inferior at the same time.  She bought expensive clothes that didn’t suit her.  She seemed flighty and showed up for rehearsals in her pjs, but then had a keen ear for everything on the stage.  She was, in short, a study in contrasts.

Salamon’s research is extensive, and she seems to have interviewed pretty much everyone Wasserstein ever met.  Her narrative is clear and engaging, and she somehow debunks the feeling that we all knew Wendy Wasserstein while then making us feel like we know her even better.  Sort of like Wasserstein herself used to do…

Whoa.  Damned good book.

Ninety-Eight Point Six is a collection of interrelated short stories hung together with the theme of alternate identities.  Each story explores a different case of identity performance.  In one, two men sit waiting to get their drivers’ licenses, except both are using the same identity because one is an undocumented immigrant who has stolen the other man’s digits in order to try to obtain documentation.  In another, a woman constructs an alternate online identity.  The stories question how we consciously and not-so-consciously develop identities, misread other people’s identities, and just in general walk around a few different people.  Or half a person.  Or not a person at all.

I was puzzled by T.I.A., the story of a woman in a mysteriously deserted office.  I reread it, trying to figure out what it all meant, but all I could get was that she was in some sort of top-secret office where she was not in on the secret.

By far, my favorite story was “The English Aisles,” the story of a grocery store manager who torments his customers by moving items all around the store.  I kept trying to read lines aloud to my husband, but I was laughing too hard to do so.  If I were organizing a grocery store, that’s exactly how I’d do it.

If, like me, you only get about ½ hour to read each night, the bonus is that each story takes 20-30 minutes to read.  Just right for after the kids are in bed.  If you get two hours to read each night, still read the book.  Also, come over and put my kids to bed so I get more time to read.

Jack’s whole world has always been Room, where he interacts with such things as Table, Chair, and Snake, the last being built out of old egg shells.  His mother puts him to bed in the cabinet each night in case her tormenter comes to pay a visit.  On weekdays, they play Scream, a game that involves standing on Table to be closer to Skylight.  Jack doesn’t understand the purpose to the game.  He doesn’t even comprehend that he’s a prisoner or that there’s a wide world outside of Room.

The book could easily devolve into some sort of pity-fest, but Dononghue is way above such sloppiness.  Jack is a thoroughly engaging character, and he’s perfectly age-appropriate for a five-year-old who has been kept in a room his whole life.  Not that I know exactly what such a five-year-old would act like, but as the parent of a boy just Jack’s age, I totally bought his voice.  The plot is perfect, which is amazing, given that the entire point of the book is that they are in one room.  I won’t tell you more about the plot because spoilers are for assholes.

I read this book in about three days, which tells you something because the only time I get to read is once the kids are in bed.  In fact, after admonishing my five-year-old to put the books away and go to sleep, I stayed up well past my bedtime reading Room.

If you’re one of those people who hasn’t read it because you’re afraid it’ll give you nightmares, I’ll confirm.  It’ll give you nightmares.

And it’s worth it.