If you missed Fine Arts 101, read Lanie Tankard’s review below and click on all the links. You will enjoy the ride–especially since a lot of those links take you to countries and cities in Europe. Lanie is heading off to Singapore soon. We’re all lucky she squeezed this fine review of an excellent memoir into her crowded schedule. Since Lanie and I both have this teacher bug we’ll never get rid of, here’s more about Singapore. But be sure to come back to read the review!

[sic]

by Joshua Cody

New York: W.W. Norton, October 2011  (272 pp.).

Available in hardcover and ebook formats.

Reviewed by Lanie Tankard

“In memory everything seems to happen to music.”

—Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

The Latin word [sic] in brackets is a heads up to the reader that what may appear strange or incorrect has in fact been written intentionally or quoted verbatim, according to the unabridged edition of The Random House Dictionary of the English Language.

Thus, we suspect before we ever crack the spine of Joshua Cody’s new memoir about being sick, titled [sic], that we’re likely to encounter the unconventional within its pages. Indeed, that becomes so much the case that Cody may have created a new form of memoir, or at least a subgenre that redefines the approach. I’ve always been fond of intellectual nuance, and [sic] displays it in abundance.

Cody brings to writing a music composer’s ear, to memoir a forceful libretto of cancer survival, and to readers a brilliant polyphonic score played capriccio, energico, and espressivo.

Joshua Cody was a young composer in New York City about to finish a PhD at Columbia University. He had already earned a bachelor’s in music composition at Northwestern University, studied privately in Paris, had a Chicago radio show called “Music of This Century” on WNUR–FM,  cofounded the international journal and website Paris Transatlantic  as well as the Ensemble Sospeso, and written a number of articles.

Then he noticed a lump in his neck, and his life turned upside down when the tumor was diagnosed as a belligerent cancer. Cody cuts right to the chase on the first page of his memoir as he brings us along with him to begin chemotherapy, wondering, “’What’s it going to be like?’”

We hitch a ride inside his head as he’s handed orange pamphlets, “professionally printed, the Garamond font levelheaded, direct but never alarming, confidential, appropriate; poised; the thickness of the paper just right, more consequential than flimsy copy stock, but a good long way from cardboard, which would be terrifyingly permanent. The care that takes, the thought that goes into it: all the parameters are really masterfully designed, as if the hospital had hired a PhD in semiotics from Brown.”

He digresses into his thoughts as he waits, likening that period between being a patient reading the pamphlets and “the unknown experience that beckons” to “Philippe Petit on that taut tightrope between the Twin Towers.”  Cody wants specifics, like what kind of chair he’s going to be sitting in and whether he would be alone in a room.

“Are you expected to carry on a conversation with the nurse? What’s the etiquette?”

Anyone who has spent time docked in chemo ports of call, or accompanied a friend or loved one to such anchorage, will nod in recognition of Cody’s trenchant observations.

And it turns out he’s not alone in the chemo room: “I’d brought a friend, my journal.” Slowly he reels out his life, giving us the backstory of his illness and the childhood memories it triggers. He is a relative of Buffalo Bill Cody.

Joshua Cody thinks about all that is around him, all that is going into his body, all that he has experienced, and all that might happen. He follows, in fact, any line of thought when it pops up in free association. He tunes out his oncologist speaking to him in the present, wondering instead about the strong aroma of rubbing alcohol in the room.

“What was the source of the odor?”

Then he takes off pondering the meaning of happiness, considering the things he would miss if he “made it out of all this alive.”

He talks a lot about writing as he writes — metawriting. He utilizes a conversational manner to bring the reader into his stream of consciousness with phrases such as “I’ll talk more about this later” and “Why relate all this?” He points out “the literary tone I am attempting to employ.”

Cody switches from Susan Sontag to David Foster Wallace with the ease of a conductor directing a baton toward different sections of the orchestra. He transitions from Mozart to the Rolling Stones on his iPod as effortlessly as he talks about actor Ray Liotta in the movie Goodfellas in one paragraph and painter Paul Klee in the next.

Cody travels in his thoughts, rolling along wherever the train takes him. One minute we’re in Paris  with Ezra Pound, and suddenly we find ourselves in Germany: “Like this one time I was in Düsseldorf with a couple of German friends having brunch, and….” Next thing you know, he’s having his car washed in a Chicago suburb, pondering the effect of sunlight on water and glass, listening to Debussy in his head.

Suavely Cody blends remembering with theoretical musings, observations about his cancer treatments, and descriptions of the sex and drugs he turns to for escape. It’s a virtuoso performance.

He begins to experience chemophobias. He sees a psycho-oncologist. He compares the chemotherapy that has just failed him with the radiation that is supposed to save him. His mother arrives to assist, and we see pages of her notes. He reproduces his calendar, covered from corner to corner with medical appointments.

“Being sick is very much a full-time job,” he comments.

Cody is aware of the “immediate stimuli of the present moment” bombarding him along with the “recalled stimuli of the past.” He notes, “And these two layers wrap around each other like two electric currents encircling some wobbly magnetic pole.”

He tells us of his marriage to a Bulgarian girl named Valentina and his fake imprisonment in a pretend hospital room to assist the Kádár government of Hungary in a propaganda charade, with fake IVs in his chest and arms.

His mother arrives, and he tells her they can leave to go to the limo waiting outside because the pretense is over. When he rips out the fake IVs, pretend blood spurts out. Pretend nurses rush in, while eeeevvvver so gradually he is made to understand that everything is very real indeed — that he is in the hospital for a bone marrow transplant and he is having a morphine fantasy.

“Well it just goes to show things are not what they seem.” That line from the Sixties song “Sister Morphine” is an appropriate summation of the events in Chapter 5, which is also aptly titled “Sister Morphine.”

Mick Jagger,  Keith Richards, and Marianne Faithfull cowrote the lyrics to this haunting song. The Stones and Faithfull each recorded “Sister Morphine.”

Recently (October 10, 2011), I heard Faithfull perform the song on her Horses and High Heels tour at Rotterdam’s  Nieuwe Luxor Theater, where this highly talented woman who has battled both morphine and cancer received two rousing standing ovations for her marvelous show. Click here for her performance of “Sister Morphine” at the Citadel Festival in Berlin on May 29, 2011.

As for Joshua Cody: “They took me off the morphine that night and switched me to fentanyl.” He turns to Freud, Darwin, and Nietzsche to make sense of it all, saying, “The crystalline clarity of this morphine delusion proves, perhaps, the Nietzschean maxim that ‘some situations are so bad that to remain sane is insane.’”

Cody considers creativity, memory, subtext, and voice in memoir — asking: “So what, exactly, separates a sharp memory of early childhood, say, from a morphine delusion, or an image seen in a dream from an image read in a book? They’re all equally tangible, equally intangible products of electromechanical signaling.”

These questions are the kind of research done by neuroscientists like David Eagleman, who spoke at the Texas Book Festival on October 23 about his new book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. He noted there are as many connections in one neuron as there are stars in the Milky Way. A NOVA profile explores Eagleman’s investigation of the question: “How does the brain construct reality using the information it takes in?”

Cody debates why certain things bring comfort during hospitalizations for such traumatic events as bone marrow transplants, reminding us “finding sources of pleasure is an important aspect of dealing with high levels of pain.” He compares painters and writers, saying writers are “unjustly burdened by the weight of words.”

Cody examines his parents’ marriage and divorce, and his relationship with his father, who tried to make it as a writer but never did.

Author Jonathan Franzen has also trekked in this territory of memory, particularly in “My Father’s Brain” in How To Be Alone: Essays. Indeed, Franzen makes an appearance in Cody’s memoir several times. (I reviewed Franzen’s most recent book, Freedom, on 100 Memoirs when it came out last year: Part I and Part II.) When I heard Franzen interviewed by Lev Grossman in Austin recently, Franzen mentioned that he was reading [sic], calling it a “weird memoir by an overarticulate guy with cancer — really good.”

Cody underscores the important role his mother played in helping him during his treatments, taking notes and running interference with hospital personnel. He writes, “My mother’s transcription of the dialogue between patient, doctor, caretaker, and pain management staff is fascinating in its expression of the fragile complexity in calibrating the collaboration of different specialists.”

He explains what it means to be in discomfort, he weighs nonbeing versus aging, and he relates the feeling of his near-death experience during the bone marrow transplant. He tells us what suffering is like for the sufferer, and comes close to suicide until he realizes he wants to kill the disease, not himself. Cody knows he’s getting better when he begins to feel boredom, and then says to his mother as they’re finally leaving the hospital, “I love traffic.”

He worries the night before he has to return for more scan results. He can’t sleep, so he sits down to write in his journal, remembering his father’s advice: “write it out, write it out.” He wonders if he’s losing his mind.

“Just keep pen to paper,” he tells himself.

“I am trying very hard,” he replies.

He wraps up his book with “the motif of journals and memoirs” and discusses “’journals’ as opposed to notebooks,” quoting David Byrne  on this arcane point.

Finally Cody admits he’s a bit tired.

“This book turned out to be a little longer than I thought, and way more work. Plus I’m hungry.”

He ends with a crescendo of framing.

As Victor Hugo put it in his essay on William Shakespeare, “Music expresses that which cannot be said, and which cannot be suppressed.”

Joshua Cody is a maestro and his words will ring in my ears for a long time. Bravo!

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Lanie Tankard is a freelance editor and writer in Austin, Texas. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and a former production editor of Contemporary Psychology: A Journal of Reviews.

I met Terry Helwig when she brought her amazing Thread Project to The Fetzer Institute several years ago. I could tell then that her passion for peace comes from a deep place. Lanie Tankard’s review of Helwig’s new memoir confirms the resilient transformation that made her mature contribution to peacemaking possible.

Moonlight on Linoleum: A Daughter’s Memoir

by Terry Helwig

 Foreword by Sue Monk Kidd

New York: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster, October 2011 (304 pp.).

Available in hardcover, paperback, and ebook formats.

Reviewed by Lanie Tankard

“It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”

—Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

You know you’re in for a bumpy ride from the very first sentence of Terry Helwig’s new book, Moonlight on Linoleum: A Daughter’s Memoir. When an author can’t even locate her mother’s grave because she doesn’t know her last name, the reader’s senses go on alert. Helwig’s mother had married so many times, her daughter lost track of which appellation she was using when she died.

Helwig became a mother herself way too early as a child, long before she ever gave birth to her own daughter as an adult. She spent her formative years taking care of five younger sisters, one of whom was actually a cousin.

Helwig presents her mother, Carola Jean, as a wild rose who married at fourteen — lying about her age to become the wife of a twenty-two-year-old tenant farmer. Helwig was born eleven months later.

Carola Jean knew nothing about how to run a household. By the time Helwig was eighteen, her mother had been married to three different men (one several times) and befriended many others. “Going to Timbuktu” became her mother’s euphemism for carousing in bars.

There is child abandonment and abuse, alcohol and drugs, attempted suicide, a stint in a mental hospital, and finally an overdose on the part of Carola Jean — and yet through it all, Helwig shepherds her siblings to happy adulthoods. Their current close-knit bond began when “we forged an indestructible ring of sisterhood that helped keep all of us afloat.” In fact, Helwig drew upon their collective memories when she wrote this memoir.

During her childhood, she employs varying methods to make it through the tough times. One day, she plays the Car-Counting Game while wondering if her mother will ever come to pick her up. Another day, she tells herself, “I’ll be so glad when I forget this.”

The memoir is reminiscent of The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, with less powerful prose. Details are sketchy at times. The book ends somewhat abruptly, with a large chunk of Helwig’s life omitted before the Epilogue. Still, the story presented is testimony to the triumph of the human spirit.

Two people can experience very similar hardships in childhood, yet evolve into very different adults. How does one person use those terrible memories to strengthen the soul while another watches the very life force ground away by them?

Memoir has a way of getting at the heart of this question through the sharing of tales in what ultimately becomes a collective storehouse of insights. The act of placing those painful memories on paper is cathartic for a writer. And Helwig has reached a position of objectivity regarding Carola Jean — assessing the full spectrum of her personality traits, bad as well as good. Still, the various fathers in the book seem to have many more redeeming qualities.

For readers, knowledge of other lives can certainly help us view our own in comparison, and learn coping strategies.

Sue Monk Kidd, in her foreword to Moonlight on Linoleum, uses the word redemption to describe the story told within. That’s a fitting way to characterize someone like Terry Helwig. Her itinerant family barely stays in a town long enough for the girls to finish out a grade level. Over the span of eleven years, Helwig attended twelve different schools. Thus, as a child, she didn’t identify with “one particular school, group of friends, town, or state.” Instead of becoming bitter, however, Helwig associated herself “with something larger, more inclusive, the sum of many parts — like humanity….”

Growing up in this nomadic and unpredictable family, Helwig found her own compass points. “My familiar landmarks had become, by necessity, overarching — the stars, sunsets, and moonrises. These were my constants. I knew the earth as a mountain, field, canyon, desert, and sea. My roots weren’t anchored to a particular neighborhood, yet they sunk deep into the earth….”

Helwig eventually rose above her childhood to become a counselor and create The Thread Project: “Some say our world is hanging by a thread. I say — a thread is all we need,” she states.

I’d call that resilience, which the American Psychological Association defines as “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or even significant sources of stress — such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems, or workplace and financial stressors. It means ‘bouncing back’ from difficult experiences.”

Terry Helwig definitely bounced, and her reverberations are global.

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Lanie Tankard is a freelance editor and writer in Austin, Texas. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and a former production editor of Contemporary Psychology: A Journal of Reviews.

Lanie Tankard, reviewer extraordinaire and world traveler, is about to set off for distant lands – again. Before she left, however, she sent in this review. Reading it is an adventure in itself. Enjoy!

The Road to Somewhere: An American Memoir. New York: W.W. Norton, August 2011 (411 pages)

by James A. Reeves

Reviewed by Lanie Tankard

“Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?”—Jack Kerouac, On the Road (Part 2)

I took a road trip with James Reeves.

We crisscrossed the grid of this country together, along all the highways and byways, up and down, back and forth, flipping the dial listening to snippets of talk radio to pass the time during fifty-five thousand miles. Along the way, he pondered what he was seeing and hearing, offering observations much like a sociologist would. He photographed interesting scenes along the roadside, calling my attention to images not normally found in travel brochures.

I didn’t want to get out when the Dollar Rent A Car finally ground to a halt five years later in New Orleans, for Reeves had opened his heart on the pages of The Road to Somewhere: An American Memoir and I wanted to keep reading. I truly felt as though I had been in the car with him, so vivid and personal was his writing.

He drove many roads I remember well, and described many towns I know, yet he viewed them from a different perspective and showed me angles I’d missed when I’d been there. Reeves pulled back the curtains of fly-by-night lodgings to peer out the windows at the hidden landscape of America, desperately trying to find a place for himself in it beyond all the Waffle Houses.

What is it that a man is supposed to do, expected to be, required to accomplish? He breaks down his quest for the answers into sections titled Men, Country, Work, Home, Discipline, God, Guts, and Strength.

Driven partly by grief over the sudden loss of his mother, he combines his quest for meaning with his journey through mourning. Reeves adds to the mix photos from his own family and childhood, blending them with memories of his grandfather, his father, and his mother to create a poignant, elegant, thought-provoking memoir unlike any I’ve ever seen.

He takes the “Road to Nowhere,”  á la the Talking Heads 1985 song, and turns it into The Road to Somewhere. Tina Weymouth, David Byrne, Chris Frantz, and Jerry Harrison penned the song lyrics this way:

“Well we know where we’re goin’

But we don’t know where we’ve been

And we know what we’re knowin’

But we can’t say what we’ve seen.”

Reeves, on the other hand, has no idea where he’s going, but he’s sure trying very hard to say what he’s seen. He does so in a scientific, dispassionate way at times, and occasionally  bares his soul on the printed page.

He wonders whether other countries “hold such a passion for their highways,” if our country is too big, what people are picking up in all their pickup trucks, why a shocked woman is standing in the middle of the road in a negligee clutching a cat at 2 a.m. on his drive through the Smoky Mountains — “Just needed a walk,” she tells him.

He notices, “everyone has a device nowadays,” adding “I have no idea what everyone is up to behind their little screens.”  When you can see which newspaper someone is reading or the cover of the book that person is holding, “I can judge you.” In that sense, he notes, technology has taken away our ability to evaluate one another. What might that mean? He wonders at what point handwriting might no longer be required.

Reeves pushes ideas to the brink, saying, “I drive to the edges of things.” He stops to spend time at places that interest him, such as the Cosmic Ray Center in Utah.

Ultimately he sees “There’s kindness on the road.” After his mother dies, he notices his father shuffling around the house, sighing.

“I told him to pack a bag. We’re going for a drive. That’s my answer to everything.”

The tender memories Reeves shares about his mother are some of the most touching parts of the book. The reader can almost see the love. He went beyond her charge to “go out into the world and look around” — he also contemplated what he saw. He photographed it and he wrote about it. And then he bound it between two covers and dedicated it to her, adding, “I miss you.”

A.A. Milne put it this way: “Pay attention to where you are going because without meaning you might get nowhere.” James Reeves, I feel sure, will end up somewhere.

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Marla Miller, of Marketing the Muse, explains to a writer with excellent credentials how to make her query letter stand out by strengthening the “hook”:

I agreed with Marla’s advice. Did you? Would you want to read a memoir on this subject? How do you determine a good “hook” in your own writing? Do you have a good critic who helps you?

My first post on 9-11 this week asked for stories. One friend, artist Erma Martin Yost could not just write a comment. Her heart and mind were bursting. So she sent me an essay, which I immediately asked permission to share. As journalists search for stories of hope, I wonder how many of them have told this kind of story? Erma tells an honest story of hope and courage.

By Erma Martin Yost

Memories that touch my heart most are those of the young children fleeing nearby schools. One young child asked his teacher, “why are the birds on fire?” The “birds” were falling human bodies.

A little child. . .

Another image is the photo of two-year old Patricia Smith pictured in the NY Times leaving the stage with her father after the Police Department’s highest award was hung around her neck in honor of her mother, also a police officer. On the 5^th anniversary of 9/11 she was pictured again.  I wonder if her photo will appear again this year.  As a two-year-old, she holds on to her father with one hand and sucks her fingers with another. Clearly she cannot comprehend what is happening. Her picture in The New York Times reached right out and grabbed me. It seemed to symbolize all the losses–of life, of innocence, of a sense of security within the “homeland,” that strange new word we all now speak.

Constant Code Orange

           For 27 years prior to 9/11 my photographer husband Leon and I lived in Jersey City just six blocks in from the banks of the Hudson River directly across from the World Trade Towers. Since that day we were never not under “Code Orange.” We stayed an additional seven years after, but the memories and daily reminders of that fateful day eventually became too much. We now spend most of our time living in Carlisle, PA, where rightly or wrongly there is a greater sense of safety, free from the frequent terror alerts and constant sense of fear.

My story of 9-11: A Survivor’s Tale

             On that bright beautiful Tuesday morning of 9/11/01, I went out the front door to go to a water aerobics class only to find the street and sidewalk filled with neighbors looking east towards the Hudson River. I turned to follow their gaze and saw the horrific sight of the first tower burning (lined up with the end of our block). Shortly, I witnessed the impact of the second plane which shook the ground so hard it buckled the knees of us standing there and the image of that orange fire ball burned into my memory permanently.

An index finger. . . a forearm

I knew a friend of ours worked above where that plane hit. All that was ever found of him was an index finger and forearm.

My student’s voice on 911

More friends and neighbors perished, as did a former student of mine. The only civilian 911 tape that was released to the public was that student’s call and she was on the line until she was overcome and died. Victims from the WTC towers and surrounding buildings fled to piers on our side of the river on anything that floated. Still covered with ash, they walked past our house looking for their homes, cars, and any way to get away. There were many more horrific sights that on day and in the days and weeks and months that followed.

Twisted steel and lights

The iconic twisted burning metal that everyone is so familiar with was lit with bright lights at night for three months, a beacon for rescue workers, but also a glow in our bedroom. At first the smells included that of burning flesh, and the acrid smell of burning plastics continued for months permeating bedding, clothes hanging in the closets, curtains, anything absorbent. The drone of fighter planes flying their circuit’s overhead every few minutes sounded like buzz saws inside our house. There was the constant pull of wanting to stand with friends in spontaneous meeting places and wanting to stay inside the “safety” of one’s home.

Some stayed. Some fled. We did both.

Someone said there were those who stayed and those who fled.  In the immediate days, months, and years that followed Leon and I tried to stay. We knew from the beginning of this tragedy that city life had changed forever and assumed that one day we would adjust to the changes. Eventually the decision was made to move, as did many of our friends. Within the first year of living in Carlisle, PA, we met several families that had moved there too, their hometown, having fled life in the Big Apple. I hope such people are not viewed as quitters, non resilient, or not hopeful. Our new beginnings just have to take place elsewhere.

Bio: Leon and Erma Yost bought a row house in Jersey City in 1974 where they lived and maintained their artists’ studios for 36 years. They also worked in Manhattan, going through the World Trade Center many times a week on the PATH trains. In 1993 Erma missed the bombing of the WTC by perhaps minutes. She had taken the PATH train into the towers, went outside to buy art supplies and when she returned a short time later, people were running out of Tower One. No emergency crews had even arrived yet and no one knew what had just transpired. The crater that the bomb left was on the PATH platform where she had just departed the train.

Wow, Erma. Thank you so much for this gift. You challenge us to think about the many ways to make “new beginnings.” I hope 12-year-old Patricia Smith will somehow find this essay and know how important she is to you and to all of us.

When we help others heal, and when we tell truthful stories of how we have wrestled with the twin angels called Courage and Hope, we heal a little more of our own wounds. Shalom. Now, what are YOUR stories?

 

When guest blogger Lanie Tankard, who has reviewed a dozen other  books on this site, read my last post about Courtney E. Martin, she was ecstatic because, unbeknownst to me, she had just finished a review of Project Rebirth and had planned to send it to me. Synchronicity at work!

Project Rebirth

Survival and the Strength of the Human Spirit from 9/11 Survivors

by Dr. Robin Stern

and Courtney E. Martin

 New York: Dutton/Penguin Group (USA), August 2011 (228 pages)

Rebar is set. Steel framing stretches toward the sky. The World Trade Center site is slowly being rebuilt with five office buildings.  The core walls look solid.

What about the survivors of 9/11, though? Was there an architectural plan to rebuild their lives over the last decade?

A new book follows eight individuals who used their grief to reconstruct themselves: Project Rebirth: Survival and the Strength of the Human Spirit from 9/11 Survivors by Robin Stern and Courtney E. Martin.

Every year since 9/11, filmmaker Jim Whitaker interviewed these survivors on the anniversary of the attacks and used some of the stories in a documentary called “Rebirth.” The movie, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival in January, was recently released in theaters and will air on Showtime on September 11.

What sets this book apart from both the film and other books about 9/11, however, is the perception Stern and Martin bring to these narratives. The two knowledgeable authors enhance the eight accounts with details from the latest research on grief. Gradually the writers enlarge these chronicles until they become universal insights about how individuals in tragedy find inner resources to cope and ultimately emerge stronger. Stern is a psychoanalyst, educator, and author, while Martin is a writer and speaker. Experienced and eloquent, they have separately worked in innovative ways on solutions to some of humanity’s deepest problems.

In Project Rebirth, we meet a young man who was a teenager when his mother, a finance trader, died on the 104^th floor. There is a construction worker whose brother, a firefighter, died going in to save people. A man from Harlem rushed to volunteer and stayed for 117 days straight. An investment bookkeeper lost his partner, an insurance worker on the 102^nd floor. Two firefighters headed over together, but only one returned. A police detective helped in initial rescue efforts and then recovery of remains. A fifth-grade teacher in Brooklyn assisted her class through the day but later suffered because she was an Arab Muslim. Lastly, a woman about to be married lost her fiancé, a firefighter, who was never found.

These survivors are representative examples of everyone who experienced 9/11 firsthand. They had to make modifications in their lives that were not ordinary maintenance or repair, but rather major reconstruction. As they determined how much of their interior space was actually still habitable, each selected a different floor plan. The detailing differs — where one chose a cornice, another used a cupola — but is always elegant in its presentation by Stern and Martin.

Although these eight survivors do not know one another, their stories prop each other up. When taken together, they form a block of rowhouses: an unbroken line of attached houses sharing common side walls. In Project Rebirth, they attain what the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission defines as historic appearance: “the visual appearance of a structure or site at a specific point in time after it has undergone alterations or additions which enhance or contribute to the building or site’s special architectural, aesthetic, cultural, or historic character.”

These Post-2001 People have undergone significant landscape improvement over the last decade as they added character-defining elements in their processing of 9/11. Survivors meet the criteria for landmark designation in historic districts just as surely as do buildings.

Project Rebirth not only bestows that well-earned title on them but also designs a resilient layout for anyone who grieves — which at some point in our existence includes all of us.

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Lanie Tankard is a freelance editor and writer in Austin, Texas. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and a former production editor of Contemporary Psychology: A Journal of Reviews.

Madeline Sharples, author of Leaving the Hall Light On, reviewed here, has volunteered to review another memoir about  mental illness. 

White Elephants: A Memoir. Chynna T. Laird, Eagle Wings Press, 2011.

Reviewed By Madeline Sharples

Everyone knew something was terribly wrong with her mother, but nobody did anything about it …that is until Chynna T. Laird wrote White Elephants.

Chynna T. Laird and I met while I was on my WOW – Women on Writers blog tour last June. She graciously hosted me on her “White Elephants” website and later wrote a review of my memoir, Leaving the Hall On, which she posted on one of her blogs, “The Gift Blog.” When my tour was over, I reached out to Chynna because I realized how much we had in common – most notably, that she and I are both survivors. She survived growing up with an abusive and alcoholic mother as a result of her bipolar disorder, and I survived living with an adult son with bipolar disorder and his suicide as a result of his illness.

We both agree how important it is to communicate these kinds of stories in hopes of erasing the stigma of mental illness. Only when the victims as well as their families know the causes and available treatments do we have a chance to save lives.

The meaning of the title of Chynna T. Laird’s heart-wrenching memoir about her life with her bipolar and alcoholic mother, Janet, says it all: “a White Elephant [is something] everyone can see but no one wants to deal with; everyone hopes the problem will just go away on its own.”

Except in Janet’s case, the problem didn’t go away. It became increasingly worse.

Like my son Paul, Janet was a creative genius – so typical of people with bipolar disorder. She was poet and artist, but her greatest gift was music. She earned a living as a piano teacher. And music was the only way she and her daughter, called Tami while she was growing up, could communicate. Tami learned piano and sang in the choir so that she could do something her mother would approve of.

Otherwise Janet resented her daughter – she made it clear she never wanted her, and she blamed her for not having the same musical success as her sister who was a renowned opera singer in Canada.From the very beginning and throughout her life, Tami and Janet did not get along.

Tami was only five years old when she realized that something was desperately wrong with her mother – that the reason she and her brother Cam went to stay with their grandparents was not because their mother was on “vacation” but because she was on an alcoholic binge and not capable of caring for them. And as always, after the binge was over, the children went home with their mother and nobody said or did anything to help her.

When the grandparents finally got fed up and forced Janet to keep her children home with her, both Tami and Cam went downhill fast. Tami was a witness to many of her mother’s affairs in their home, and at age twelve she was raped by one of Janet’s boyfriends, resulting in Pelvic Inflammatory Disease. Janet never even asked her what happened, calling Tami a tramp in front of the doctor who treated her.

In trying to endure the chaos in her life and home, little or no sleep, and the insecurities of puberty, she began cutting herself at age thirteen – soon after Janet remarried a man as much of a drinker as she was. Janet couldn’t even be contained during her two pregnancies during her second marriage.

Tami also drank – she tells about her mother offering her, her first drink at her tenth birthday dinner. Cam, three years younger than Tami, also succumbed to alcohol and drugs. He partied as heavily as their mother and her husband and displayed his ever-increasing anger toward Janet by punching holes into walls and later punching her out. But he didn’t go as far as Tami. She tried to end her life by taking a whole bottle of aspirin. Even then Janet didn’t help her. She called the suicide attempt acting out, so once recovered Tami actually did begin to act out – she became a full-fledged punker.

In her late teens Tami contacted genital warts and later cervical cancer, and finally developed a life-threatening case of anorexia – all because of an abusive and unloving mother who couldn’t get through the day without drinking herself into a stupor. Janet not only caused Tami and Cam to self-destruct, her two younger children still suffer from her drunken abuse of them.

Tami finally began to straighten out her life in her twenties. She lived with her godmother, Auntie Lois, who taught her she had worth as a human being. Later on she lived with her father and although this visit didn’t end successfully, it laid the groundwork for a long-term relationship with the father she hardly saw growing up. Then, needing to return home, she lived with Janet again until she could stand it no longer.

When she finally got a job as a legal assistant, she moved into an apartment of her own – never returning to live with her mother again. Tami took control and began building a healthy life with her husband, Steve, three daughters and one son, and a degree in psychology.  As an adult she took on her given first name, Chynna, as a symbol of moving forward and added her mother’s birth name, Arlene, to her name.

In her mother’s memory, Chynna carries on her efforts to help children and families with Sensory Processing Disorder that affects two of her children. She also is committed to help other families living with bipolar disorder.

Although Chynna’s is a horrendous story, it is also a story of survival. Although she admits that she and her brother, Cam, may never get over what they went through as children and teens, she is finally in a place where she can embrace all that has happened to her. She feels fortunate that it has given her an insight into her own children’s problems. And most important, she lives for now – because tomorrow may never happen.

As author Chynna T. Laird says, “Janet Batty [her mother] was a person with mental illness. It doesn’t excuse the things she did or erase the damage done as a result of some of her bad choices. But her story can help others. It might give strength to those who see a mother, sister, daughter, lover, wife, best friend, teacher or acquaintance in need.”

What makes tales of survival succeed in the goal of helping other readers? Have you ever read a memoir that helped you cope with a significant issue in your life?

Look out Barbara Kingsolver, here comes Britt Kaufmann!

I am pleased to present yet another guest blogger. This time, a former student, who is publishing up a storm and making her teacher proud. Not only is Britt a poet and a playwright, but she has published her first chapbook and has had her first play produced! Here she is talking about the experience of becoming a playwright:

I’ve been following Britt’s adventures with chickens and children on Facebook this summer and told her she has the makings of a great mini-memoir in the experience. She took the challenge of turning FB entries into a memoir essay. I think you’ll agree she is a talented young writer about to flap her wings high!

The Sky is Falling

By Britt Kaufmann

Start small, I decided.  No, to the horse my daughter was begging for.  No, to the goats my husband hankered for to reduce his weed eating chores.  But a year ago I said Yes, to chickens.

There are plenty of good reasons to have chicken aside from fresh eggs and thumbing one’s nose at diabolical big agri-business.  For starters, they are great tools for teaching my elementary aged children about work ethic, responsibility, finances, and watching where you walk.  Also, in a culture that hides death, there is nothing quite like having chickens to parade it around.  Besides, I took Animal, Vegetable, Miracle very seriously—as a how-to book.  Namely, I’m interested in how to become Barbara Kingsolver.  So if raising chickens was the next step, I was in.

It is interesting that both my mother and mother-in-law were traumatized by chickens in their childhood and, to better their children’s lives, chose not to raise poultry.  Now, here we are with a small flock to better our children’s lives–I think.

In the last month, we have seen a lot of upheaval in our hen house.  One day, Mort, (our brown hen who successfully hatched seven chicks this spring) suddenly decided she was done mothering.  She no longer scratched for the chicks,cluck-clucked for them to follow her, or slept with them on the floor at night.  She was D-O-N-E, done with them.  We lost Cleopatra that day.  A few weekends later, when I was gone on a writing weekend, three other of the teenager chicks vanished.  (Everything always happens when I’m away.)

During that same period, July hatched a single white chick and abandoned her other two eggs.  By floating the eggs in a bowl of water, we determined they still had live chicks in them.  So, we cracked them open to see if we could keep them alive–but they weren’t ready.   A week later, a friend successfully hatched two eggs from her incubator.  So, we convinced July to adopt the two new chicks by tucking them under her at night when she couldn’t see enough to reject them.  By the next morning she had adopted them as her own, and the chicks would cry (pee-ope pee-ope) when she was out of their sight.

One day, in an effort to keep track of the remaining teenaged chickens—who have a tendency to wander off on their own—I told my sons I’d pay them 50 cents each to find them and give them scratch.  The next thing I knew, I heard a terrific screaming from the back yard.  Immediately, I raced for the door, meeting one son on the way.  “Mom, Grey Legs is attacking!”

When I reached the back yard, I could see my other son, red faced, screaming, with big hot tears rolling down his face. He’d taken a wooden croquet mallet to protect himself from the rooster, just in case, and was swinging it ferociously back and forth in front of himself.  (This is a kid who batted 3rd in the line-up this spring.)  I saw him connect with the rooster twice, and still the bird wouldn’t back down.  The rooster kept looking for ways to dodge inside the arc of the mallet, until my larger presence and voice ran him off.

My son had welts across his back, a hole through his shirt, and a bleeding gouge under his armpit that, even by my standards, merited a bandage.  That was it.  “Do you want us to just kill him, or do you want to eat him?”  I asked after the tears had subsided.  “Eat him,” my son replied.  The rooster went into the box that evening and was hung by his legs and butchered the next day.  It was the first time my children had seen a butchering, so I made sure to be on hand to answer questions and present a cool demeanor.  After the rooster had been good and dead for a few minutes, I ran up to the garage to get a trash-bag to dispose of the skin and feathers.  On my way, a roar erupted from the barn.  (Everything always happens when I’m gone.)

Apparently, after the death-throes, the rooster had finally stilled itself and was deemed safe to pluck feathers from.  Just as my two sons approached and reached their hands forward, he set up a wild flapping that scared the pants off of them.  By the time I returned, neither of them would get close.   So much for life-lessons without trauma.

Now we enter a new phase, a new pecking-order must be established, and we’ll see how the hens survive without a protector.  But now the kids are eager to do chicken chores again and my, how much more peaceful the mornings!

Surely this story has prompted some other memory from childhood for you, whether about chickens, roosters, other animals, or just summer adventures gone wrong. Tell us about them!

I’m a regular listener to The New York Times Book Review Podcast. Every week I look forward to Julie Bosman’s “Notes from the Field.” In her case the field is “publishing.” In our case the field is “memoir.” And our reporter is Kathleen Friesen.

If you’ve been reading this blog regularly, you started seeing Kathleen’s comments beginning more than a year ago. Comments are the way to any blogger’s heart, and so I started clicking on Kathleen’s name to find her own blog(s)–one about organizational management and the other a contemplative photography blog, which derives its inspiration from the concept of Miksang. I hope you discover Kathleen’s quiet and deep voice, both in her blogs and in these two essays about memoir she brings to our attention.

Notes from the field from guest scout, Kathleen Friesen:

Readers of 100 memoirs may find the following items of interest:

First is Dani Shapiro’s tribute to her mentor, Esther Broner. In this short piece, Shapiro offers insight into a woman who encouraged her to write and live authentically:

From her, I learned many of the lessons that I carry with me as a teacher myself today. It’s possible to tell the truth in a way that is not wounding, but empowering. It’s possible to be a role model with no ego involved. It’s possible to be a mother and a grandmother and a novelist and a feminist and a teacher, and have all of these things feed one another, rather than be in conflict.

These integrative life lessons are worth visiting. Of note, Dani Shapiro’s Slow Motion was included in Sue Silverman’s list published previously in this blog. Her most recent memoir is Devotion.

Who are the mentors who have paved the path for you? What lessons did they teach?

Second is Joyce Carol Oates rebuttal to Julian Barnes review of her memoir in The New York Review of Books. Oates writes, “A memoir is most helpful when it focuses upon immediate experience, not a clinical, subsequent summation from what would be the “future” of the individual ….” While this may be true for her, in my experience meaningful memoirs can and do focus on memories.

I have read Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking several times, but a read-through of Oates’ A Widows Story ‒ done standing in four different bookstores over a period of a week ‒ did not prompt a purchase. Didion’s spare, direct prose resonates with my own experience as a widow. Oates’ memoir contains some of the same themes, but sprawls and crawls, with fewer insights into the path of grief and mourning.

I have one quibble with Oates’ reviewers: their judgment of Oates for remarrying too soon. They suggest that this choice disqualifies her from writing a memoir about her first year as a widow. In my opinion, memoirists may choose to limit the book’s timeframe from necessity or choice. And, in my own experience, remarriage does not nullify the ongoing experience of grief and mourning, of revising ones map of the world.

Barnes asks, “So what constitutes “success” in mourning?” As readers and writers of memoir, the question is, “So what constitutes “success” in a memoir?” Is it “most helpful when it focuses upon immediate experience?”

A Review of Madeline Sharples’ Leaving the Hall Light On. Lucky Press, LLC, 2011.

by Guest Reviewer Dr. Jason M.Dew. 

Madeline Sharples accomplishes in Leaving the Hall Light On what no mother or parent, for that matter, would ever want to accomplish: an eloquent, honest recounting of events before and after the suicide of her oldest son, Paul.  Three months shy of his twenty-eighth birthday, Paul, a sufferer of rapid-cycle Bipolar I disorder, locked himself into a bathroom and slit his wrists and throat with a box cutter.  The discovery by his father the next morning and the subsequent pronouncement of his death was the starting gun for a maniacal onslaught of answerless questions and flimsy conjectures.  The power of Sharples’ memoir, however, lies in the fact that she allows the reader to see her desperation, her madness at having lost a son, her grasping for any kind of perspective that would offer her a moment of peace.  Sharples delivers, ultimately, a memoir that is oftentimes painful to read, but in the end, one that compels the reader to see that mental illness, in the case bipolar disorder, has a face, was once a chubby child who loved the “really back” of the station wagon, is able to fall in love, have a broken heart, is a friend, a brother, a beloved son.

Sharples spares no detail and is not one to mince words.  She freely admits that Paul became a “pain in the ass” after he became ill, pacing the halls at night, never able to sit still, living “selfishly” by asking for money or refusing to take his medication on the grounds that it stymied his creativity at the piano.  Leaving the Hall Light On does not sentimentalize her relationship with her oldest son (an easy pitfall given the circumstances), but it does, I think, offer something more authentic in terms of how real individuals, a mother and a son, the latter with a mental illness, related to one another, amiably or not.  Though Sharples expresses some guilt connected with her not saying the right things to her son – words that could have prevented the tragedy – she does not take the blame for Paul’s death.  It was his doing – to be sure, an act prompted by an illness – but it was his act nonetheless.  The fortitude to make this assertion is a testament to Sharples’ sense of her role as Paul’s mother to the extent that she recognizes that there were limitations to what she could and could not do and that, in the end, Paul was his own man, broken though he was.

Were these pointed conclusions all there were in the memoir, Leaving the Hall Light On would be an angry word assault on a son who was too cowardly to stick around to answer her many questions; however, what presides throughout the book – and this is really important to note – is the broken-heartedness only a mother could feel as a result of such a betrayal.  Sharples is understandably angry, confused, and hurt by Paul’s suicide, but these feelings do nothing to overshadow or otherwise diminish the abiding love she had for her son.  She writes often of his ability to play the piano and repair computers.  She muses over the connection he had with children and of his meticulous nature.   But the choice of photographs included in the memoir, I think, really speak to her mother’s love and, more importantly, her approach to dealing with his suicide.  The reader is not presented with photographs of a teenager standing darkly aloof or a young man staring angrily into the camera.  Instead, the reader sees a photograph of a cute and happy toddler sitting at his grandparents’ piano and, later, more pictures of Paul, at different ages, smiling by himself or next to relatives.  The sense is that Sharples has pulled the family photo album off the shelf and is proudly showing photographs of her son, not to display his illness but, rather, to show that he was loved like other sons are loved and that bipolar disorder can infiltrate and affect even the most “normal” of families.  Sharples’ use of this uneasy juxtaposition between the story she tells and the photographs she shows communicates her own unsettled feelings about her son’s death and captures between the covers, to be sure, the fact that she will never get over his suicide.  What mother could?  The technique with the photographs and the narrative perfectly symbolizes the conflict.

Sharples divulges to the reader that she does not wholly subscribe to the explanations of death afforded by her professed religion, Judaism, and that she does not believe in prayer or the afterlife.  In her words, Paul is “gone,” plain and simple.  Her choice, then, to dabble in activities such as Native American cleansing rituals and magical thinking in the form of leaving the hall light on in hopes that Paul might return might leave readers baffled or with the feeling that Sharples has, perhaps, understandably slipped into flaky ways of coping.  I believe those who would make such conclusions would be in error, however, because they would miss the fundamental question that is being begged by her inclusion of these experiences in her memoir about the loss of her son to suicide: How might you, the reader, react if you, the reader, suffered a similar loss?  It is, naturally, a difficult, perhaps impossible question to answer, but the fact that Sharples freely gives her answer speaks to how bare she is really laying herself in this work.  She undoubtedly deserves our thanks.

Leaving the Hall Light On might be seen as a reincarnation of a son as his mother would like the world to see him: troubled, yes, but essentially a good guy.  Sharples deftly pulls together the shattered pieces that were the result of Paul’s suicide and presents them to her audience, re-organized for effect, appearance, and coherence.  And it is the latter of the three, I believe, that would benefit those unlucky to be in similar shoes the most.

In the end, though, Sharples shows that such an experience as the loss of a child can be survived.  She soldiers on by sticking to a regimen of working, writing, and exercising; she refuses to quit, lie down, hole up like her mother did after the death of her father.  Sharples routinely confesses that pressing on despite the heavy weight in her heart was difficult, still is difficult, but after such confessions, the reader sees that there are more pages to turn and that Sharples, in effect, continues to turn her own pages, seeing what tomorrow might bring, how her own survivor’s story might turn out.

About the reviewer: Jason M. Dew earned his BA in English from Lock Haven University and his MA and PhD in Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania.  He is an Associate Professor of English at Georgia Perimeter College where he is also the Honor Program Coordinator for the Dunwoody campus.  He lives in Atlanta with his wife and three daughters.