A Literary Life

This Common Secret (Susan Wicklund)

I can guarantee right now that this post will probably drive more traffic and hit more search queries than most other things I write and, in fact, I actually considered not reviewing it. Why? Because this book is the memoir of an abortion doctor. That’s right, a sane, kind, intelligent female doctor who aids other women in ending unwanted pregnancies. Here’s the word again in case the search engines missed it: Abortion. Oooooo. Get a soapbox and a fire extinguisher, because someone is going to get up on the former and someone else is going to violently spray them with the latter. That’s just the nature of the passion the subject sparks.

This calm, measured and thoughtful book, however, is anything but incendiary in my opinion. Granted, my opinion is firmly in the pro-choice camp, so perhaps it’s easy for me to say that. But Susan Wickland’s story could make a more convincing case for safe, legal abortion than doubtful readers out there may expect. After suffering a horrific abortion as a young woman and then becoming a mother, Wickland became a doctor later in life, specializing in women’s health issues. She had to fight for the right to learn the abortion procedure, thinking that it was a necessary thing to know when you dealt with women who, you know, get pregnant and might want to, gee, have a perfectly legal procedure done to stop that pregnancy from progressing.

She had little idea what she was getting into. Because of the high personal risk of the job, very few doctors are willing to step into the shoes of “abortion provider.” They’re stalked, libeled, threatened — as are their families. From 1977 until 2005, these doctors have seen seven murders, 17 attempted murders, 52 bombings, 100 acid attacks, 3 kidnappings and 480 cases of stalking. Needless to say, few have the courage to provide the services anyway and more women than you would ever guess are thankful for them every year. And Wickland? Well, she even had the courage to provide services to the very women protesting outside her door, who would then use privacy protections to be out on the front lines the next day, harassing other women in the same situation.

“Smile: Your mom chose life!” read several billboards around my city, the very conservative town of Colorado Springs. These ads make me very angry, because they assume that every pregnancy is potentially unwanted, that women make arbitrary decisions about such important things. (Should I dye my hair red? Should I have this baby? How insulting to our intelligence. No wonder some think they have the right to make choices FOR us flippant women.) The experiences Wickland describe have nothing to do with women using the procedure as birth control or making offhand choices. These are real women making hard choices, women who would have no where else to turn except dangerous, back-alley, illegal providers. These are the victims of rape, abuse and incest. They are women who don’t want to bring their child into the wrong situation. They are women who know they aren’t ready. Women who don’t need to share their motivations with anyone, really, just as they need not make if or what form of birth control they use, what career choices they make, who they love public. It’s a hard choice no doubt, but one they have the right to make.
Wickland writes: “Abortion is about life: quality of life for infants, children, and adults. Everywhere and in every sense of the word. Life, not death.”

If you don’t believe this, or don’t believe that the above could be true for ANYone in ANY situation, read the book. Perhaps it will change your mind.

Biography, Non-Fiction | Comment (0)

Sin in the Second City (Karen Abbott)

I’m a sucker for sin. A relatively (ok, a VERY) vanilla person myself, I love delving into the social and literary history of sex and sin. Not “evil,” mind you, but “sin” — that delicious and glorious word that connotes rebellion, scandal and transgressions against buttoned up morality. I mean, I wrote my thesis on female sexuality in 18th century Britain, for sin’s sake, and I’ve reviewed many of the most controversial books about sexual liberation (Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Lolita, for instance) and even sexual subjugation (Story of O, anyone?) So when I picked up this excellent book of creative non-fiction about two of Chicago’s most infamous madams, I knew I was in for a deliciously sinful treat.

Chicago — the second largest American city at the turn of the 20^th century — full of marvels like horseless carriages, trolleys, skyscrapers and modern medicine. But also overflowing with immigrants, shysters, con men, crooked politicians, bribed policemen and, of course, prostitutes. By the tally of the 1911 Vice Commission, there were no less than 1,020 brothels in Chicago and 5,000 full-time prostitutes, and the Levee (the red-light district) raked in more than $16 million per year, which would amount to $328 million in today’s inflation-adjusted dollars.

Enter Minna and Ada Everleigh and the Everleigh resort. (Yes, yes, the ever-lay club. The pun is intended.) These two madams set out to elevate the profession, which they see as a necessary service to male society, a sex that they not-so-secretly disdain. Their harlots are fed gourmet meals, dressed opulently, cared for by a respectable physician, taught to recite Balzac and made never to drug, rob or otherwise con their clients. The Prince of Prussia drank champagne out of the slipper of a Butterfly, as the Everleigh’s harlots were known, and any visitor to Chicago (who had the money, of course) wanted to see the inside of the sisters’ carpeted, gold-plated, perfumed bordello.

But this was 20^th century America and the moral reform movement was already at hand, the same movement that would pass the Mann Act to prevent white slavery and make alcohol illegal for more than a decade. And so the free spirits of the Levee district and their bacchanalian attitudes clash with the street preachers, the stern lady do-gooders and the fiery spirit of moral uplift. I think we all know who wins.

Even if the reader knows that the brothel doors will one day be closed, Abbott is a masterful story teller. Never dry or dusty, she brings the lives of these ladies off of the page with sensory details, real dialog pulled from first-hand accounts and a burlesque sense of humor that it’s difficult not to share.

“Imagine yourself,” Bell (a Chicago-based preacher and reformer) wrote, “In this awful district with Satan and all his cohorts let loose, seemingly. The cursing of men and the screeching of dope-filled and half drunken women; the banging of electrical pianos; the honking of autos; the throngs of young men going like mad into these houses of horror, where the air is reeking with the fumes of dope and tobacco and millions of germs; where women are in their scanty attire with painted faces and colored and false hair, with their honeyed words and foolish prattling, calling and alluring men into their fearful clutches and then to awful sin and death perhaps!”

Ah yes, just imagine. How sordidly and wretchedly fun to read and imagine.

5 out of 5 Star Books, Biography, Non-Fiction | Comment (0)

Perfect from Now On (John Sellers)

I like John. I like John a lot. I think John and I could be friends and drink beer at a local pub and jam on each other’s iPods. However, I admit I didn’t RABIDLY enjoy John’s book the way I did immediately take to his personality. I liked the book — especially the fact that it turned me on to a lot of new music — but a dozen pages of footnotes dedicated to how he spends the anniversary of Ian Curtis’s death drones in my eyes and makes me sleepy.

In other words, portions of the book are pure fan-to-fan fiction. If you don’t share the same heartfelt passions for particular gods of indie rock, you won’t truly get what the man is laying down, dig? And given indie fans’ (all music fans?) tendency to bash the well-loved indie bands of others as “too trendy” or “knock-offs” to make their own favorites seem more cool, he alienates a few readers, too. (I mean what’s with the animosity, or perhaps just indifference towards Modest Mouse, Johnny boy? Huh?!)

But I’ll give the man props for this: He made me REALLY listen to the music of The Shins. Outside of the ubiquitous Garden State Soundtrack, that is. While Seller’s prose didn’t disappoint me (let’s get that straight), it didn’t wow me either, but lyrics like this from The Shins (Sleeping Lessons, Wincing the Night Away) do:

Eviscerate your fragile frame
And spill it out on the ragged floor
A thousand different versions of yourself

And if the old guard still offend
They got nothing left on which you depend
So enlist every ounce
Of your bright blood
And off with their heads
Jump from The hook

You’re not obliged to swallow anything you despise
See, those unrepenting buzzards want your life

And they got no right
As sure as you have eyes
They got no right

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars - Vacation book club selection

Update: I can’t upload the song here, as per The Boyfriend’s little reminder of legality (party pooper!). Check out the link in the comment below for the YouTube video of Sleeping Lessons.

Biography, Non-Fiction | Comment (1)

Leap of Faith (Queen Noor)

An American woman marries the King of Jordan in the Diana-Charles-style romance of the Arab world. She converts to Islam, aims for peace in the Middle East, starts many charitable organizations, throws herself into her adopted country and pops out quite a few children along the way. She sees peace effort after peace effort fall apart, innocent civilians die at war and homelands stolen. In the end, she must witness her husband’s surrender to cancer.

It’s a great biography that gave me a lot of insight about the country of Jordan and their unique role and perspective in the region, and it also fleshed out and humanized the role of women in politics in the Middle East. While I wouldn’t say Queen Noor (Noor meaning light in Arabic) is a hero of mine or any such thing, I would say her life story is a valuable addition to my view of the world and the people who inhabit it. Oh, and she’s really purdy, too, especially for a woman that’s my mother’s age.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars - Vacation reading

Biography, Non-Fiction | Comment (0)

My Hutterite Life (Lisa Marie Stahl)

So we all know the Amish, right? (Even if some of us only know them through their association with Harrison Ford) And some of us know the Mennonites. But I for one had never heard of the Hutterites, who live mostly in the northern US (Montana) and Canada, speak German, live communally and wear very distinct and plain clothing. So young Lisa, a teenager in Montana, decided to write a newspaper column for several years about what it means to be a Hutterite: how they don’t shun technology, how they divide labor along gender lines, how they make clothes, ceremonial and holiday traditions, etc.

While she goes into detail about how to make bread for a hundred and her school schedule, even that her brothers hoard John Deere tractor catalogs like other boys do dirty magazines (my words, not hers), she doesn’t really go into the things I want to know. Such as do they talk about the birds and the bees? Is enjoying sex a crime because the act in purely for reproduction? Are there illegal drug rings skulking around the barns in the dead of night? You see, that’s why I couldn’t be a Hutterite, that dirty little mind of mine.

So while I enjoyed the book, I wanted more. I wanted the truth that didn’t have to be read by her mother before it went to press. Also, the narrative style was a bit choppy given that the book is simply a compendium of her previous columns, not a cohesive work. I guess all that bread baking keeps a girl too busy to re-write from scratch. Still, a really fun read. I think I finished the whole book over the course of an airplane trip with a layover.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars - Vacation reading

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What Fresh Hell is This? (Marion Meade)

Not a lot of people outside of obsessive literary circles know who Dorothy Parker was or have read her poetry and short fiction. However, I have always been drawn to her wild and witty personality, her simple and acerbic words and also, I will admit, her artistic and wretched vices — so common among the Literati of the 20s and 30s (She socialized with Faulkner, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fitzgerald and Hemingway to name a few). This biography was reverent and exhaustive in its depiction of the life of this “Celebrated Wit,” and though it was long, I enjoyed most every page of it.

“What fresh hell is this?” Such was the typical, pessimistic attitude of Parker when the doorbell rang or something new happened to interrupt the old. She was known to like you to your face, and rip you to shreds when you back was turned. She had but a few friends, but those loyal, and an on-again-off-again success monetarily. As in the newspapers, gossip columns and magazines of the day — she was one of the first writers, and a continuing one, in The New Yorker magazine — she is still remembered for her biting one-liners. A sampling:

• When told that President Coolidge was dead, she asked, “Well, how can you tell?”
• A friend of Dorothy’s was described as never being able to hurt a fly. She replied, “Not if it was buttoned up.”
• At one of her first literary jobs at Vogue, Dorothy wrote captions for fashion pictures. One, which almost ran before it was caught, read, “From these foundations of the autumn wardrobe, one may learn that brevity is the soul of lingerie.”

But her personal life was turbulent, and included abortion, two divorces, buckets — if not barrels, if not ships — of alcohol, Communism and other then-disdained political choices, and chronic financial neediness thanks to a drive towards charity and the need to spend every penny in her hand, when she had it.

One of my favorite of her magazine poems, many of which she came to think of as vapid and silly in her later life, spoke of marital problems:

By the time you swear you’re his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying —
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.

It’s a long read (414 pages in my copy), but worth it if you have an urge to find out more about this “Wit.” (I’d like to know, how do you get the title of “Wit” anyway? Is it possible in the 21st century?) However, the story of her life is darker and deeper than her cutting words. The biographer did a great job, but her poetry and short fiction depict her personality, too, in a much more dynamic way… a more true way, from a certain point of view. Besides, it kind of depressing to know that her ashes are still lying unclaimed in some attorney’s office in New York.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars – Book club selection

Biography, Non-Fiction | Comment (0)

The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)

So after rollicking my way through a 700-page, action-adventure, supernatural thriller, I turned back into my normal self to tackle this seminal work by our favorite head-baking poetess. I’ve always been curious about this mostly autobiographical account of Plath’s adolescent depression and suicide attempt, especially given the fact that hers is one of the most infamous suicides of the female literary world (along with Virginia Woolf, naturally), and I wasn’t disappointed. Told in simple and often poetic language, this book describes the unexplainable yet tangible descent of depression, which the author likens to being caught under the stifling lip of a bell jar (see illustration).

With brutal honesty, Plath speaks of how meaninglessness and powerlessness can sneak up on an otherwise successful girl like a thief in the night, stealing her ability to sleep, to read, to eat, to feel. Yet she manages this without resorting to self-pity or whining. She is more a journalist who returned from the brink, chronicling the dark side with a dispassionate and often humorous tone. It’s also a quick read - I finished it over a weekend - that nails the specifically female and specifically adolescent penchant for morbidity and doubt.

I liked the book. I don’t know how much of my feelings sprung for the fact that the novel is almost wholly truthful and that Plath descended once again beneath that bell jar, never to return: She killed herself one month after the book’s English publication and long before it came out in America. We are all interested in the dramatic misfortune of others, especially if we see roots of that person within ourselves. (No, I’m not suicidal, but I am an author, a woman and an emotional being.) We like to see the depths to which a person we can recognize can sink without having to take the plunge ourselves. And there’s always something so sad yet so poignant about a truly talented being drawn inevitably toward an untimely death like a moth to flame. (Elton John would say a candle in the wind, yes?)

(My favorite Plath poem? The very famous, but still excellent “Daddy.”)

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - Book club selection

Biography, Classic Lit, Fiction | Comment (0)