If You're Missing Girls, Read This

Girls in White Dresses by Jennifer Close. 

It’s hilarious – again, rom-com done right, and with a pulse and a grittiness that is hard to find in this genre.  I think I laughed out loud on just about every page.  Close “gets” girlfriends:  How we interact, how we talk to each other, how we love each other.  Plus, she’s a genius with dialog.

The story centers on a group of twenty-something female friends in Manhattan.  Like Dunham’s Girls, the women live in vermin-infested walkups, desperately trying both to make bills and “find themselves,” but the novel’s scope continues through this period and into their middle adulthood (careers, marriages, babies, divorces). 

To me, the best part of the book is Close’s understanding of female friendship.  True girlfriends, the best kind, know exactly what to say when we’re at our worst.  They are masters of self-deprecation with the timing of a comedian, or an Olympic hurdler. 

One of my favorite parts from the book happens at Mary’s wedding.  (Background:  Mary’s mother-in-law is named Button.  She’s insufferable, as the name would require.)  During the reception, Button finds Mary and says, “You know that Ken can’t eat shrimp, right?  He breaks out in hives.”

“Yes,” Mary said.  “I know.”

“Oh, okay.”  Button seemed relieved.  “I just wanted to make sure.  I just didn’t know why you would ever serve shrimp at your wedding if you knew your husband could break out in hives.”

Mary went to the bathroom and locked herself in the handicapped stall.  She stood in her dress and breathed deep breaths until she heard Isabella walk in.

“Mary?”  Isabella called.  “Are you in here?’’

Mary unlocked the stall and stood there.  “Button,” she said.

Isabella nodded.  “Harrison’s mother told me last weekend that she thought polka dots were out of style.” 

“So?”  Mary asked.

“I was wearing my pink-and-white polka dot dress,” Isabella said.

“Okay,” Mary said.  “Okay.”

This is what we do, right?  This is how we communicate our support of and love for one another – no matter how bad your situation seems, it’s actually normal, and at least we’re all in this crazy fucking boat together.  Girls in White Dresses is a love letter to girlfriends. 

On Daughters, and Shopping

Last August, I took my then-seven-year-old daughter, Eloise, and her best friend, Lola, shopping for the perfect first-day-of-school outfit. 

Eloise is a great kid – but of course I think this, she’s mine.  She’s smart and beautiful and wacky and creative.  She’s also strong-willed and stubborn and emotionally high-strung and sometimes extremely flaky.

To illustrate:  At breakfast I’ll suggest an outing – the zoo, for example.  The kids and I (Eloise included, of course) will discuss when we’re leaving, the things we’ll see, what we’ll pack for lunch.  Maybe Eloise will help make sandwiches or gather water bottles.  We’ll load the car.  And 30 minutes into the drive there, Eloise will look up from her book, dazed, and say, “Wait.  Where are we going, again?”

I cannot tell you how many times this EXACT SCENARIO has happened.

But she’s one-of-a-kind, that’s for sure – and this is probably my favorite thing about her.  This morning, for instance, she said, “May I please have some peanut butter and crackers to cease my appetite?”  Not to be funny.  That’s just how she talks.

Lola, Eloise’s best friend, is also a great kid, in a completely different way.  She’s outgoing and friendly, the life of the party.  She draws people out and makes friends easily.  She and Eloise complement and balance each other – where Eloise is shy and reserved, Lola is talkative and open.  Where Lola is physical and energetic, Eloise is calm and peaceful.  It’s a fun friendship to watch, precisely because of their opposites. 

So, on this particular day, the day of the back-to-school shopping, we ended up at a popular clothing store.  You know this place – lots of jersey knits, t-shirts, leggings, jeans.  Lola and I start picking items to take to the dressing room.

(I must note here:  Lola is truly fun to shop with.  She tries everything on, asks your opinion.  “Do you think this top looks better with the skirt or the jeans?  Which color sweater is cuter?  Do I need a bigger size in these?”  It’s kind of like shopping with a teenager, when you were a teenager.  The main point of Lola’s shopping is the dressing up, and the socializing, not the buying, necessarily.)

Eloise, meanwhile, wanders around the store, blurry and unfocused.  Or, at least that’s what it seems like.  She floats, not really engaging with anything, not exactly participating in any part of the trip.  And this is the point at which I get a bit frustrated with her, honestly.  This is supposed to be fun!  Who doesn’t like a new outfit?  We’re even here with her best girlfriend, and still – she’s just not that into it, really.

So I hold up one of my selections.  “Honey.  What do you like?  What do you think of this outfit, with the leggings?  You could choose any color.  What about the purple?”

And she says, “Nah.  Not really, Mom.  I don’t really like any of this.  I’ll just wear something I already have.”

(Again, time out.  I must interject here:  This is TOTALLY INCOMPREHENSIBLE TO ME.  Wear something one already has?  Whatever FOR?!?)  For the love.

I say, “Why?  This is what kids wear!  There are lots of cute outfits here – what’s not to like?  I want you to pick something.  It’s fun to wear a new outfit on the first day of school.”

Eloise looks at me appraisingly.  Considers.  Sighs.  “Okay, Mom.  Fine.  Where are the yellow satin blouses, then?”

And that’s when I got it.  This girl, my dreamy sleepwalking-but-awake child, the one who is never really HERE, always ELSEWHERE – she lives in her head, and in her (rather volatile) emotions.  She spends most of her time thinking about things that don’t exist.  Fairies, for example.  Magic.  Fiction.  Tall tales and supernatural creatures.  Cotton balls and Q-tips that signify animals, and pieces of paper cut into a million intricate shapes that make sense only to her.  Art detritus left in her wake, made-up melodies hummed under her breath.  So nothing at a store, ANY store, is going to be as wonderful as something she dreams up in her marvelous imagination.  Nothing could possibly compare.  This is who she is.  This is why I love her to pieces.  This is why she makes me ABSOLUTELY crazy.

So this summer, I’m doing a little preemptive surprise sewing.  I hope she’ll be pleased.

A Conversation, with Jenny

So Jenny and I were at the pool a few days ago and I was telling her about this woman in my yoga class, we’ll call her Anna, who admitted that she “wasn’t a reader.”  (I must note that Anna was speaking with the instructor, not directly to me.  I was just eavesdropping, like a creeper.)

Anyway, Anna went on to say that she felt really guilty about it because she knew it was important for her kids to see her read and enjoy it, and she worried that they weren’t getting the right scholarly influences from her at home, etc.  And the instructor replied that there was a lot of societal pressure about this subject and if we had a dollar for every single thing that inspires guilt in us as mothers, we’d be rich, or something like that.  Let it go, in other words.

It got me thinking.  I’m a reader, a writer, and a former English teacher and scholar, so of course my home is rich in print, and I read constantly, and we go to the library and to the bookstore, and we read together and separately, and listen to books on tape, and I go to book club and we go to book club and I read to them and with them and in front of them.  But that’s easy for me – it’s what I’d be doing anyway, independent of my role as a mother.  Reading is not something I decided and committed to do.  Being a capital-R Reader is natural for me; it’s who I am.

And then I thought about Mike, my husband.  He is not a Reader.  I think he’s a genius, though.  He can build anything, fix anything, make sense of any kind of technical problem.  He’s a talented musician, a wonderful artist, and a successful businessman.  And I know many other successful and brilliant adults who have fabulous careers and live quality lives yet don’t really do books. 

So to play devil’s advocate, I posed the question to Jenny:  Is it really a parenting absolute that we need to be so diligent about our kids’ reading?  Do we need to raise Readers?  (And I’m certainly not championing illiteracy.  I’m talking about being a Reader, a lifelong lover of books, not knowing how to read.)  The short and easy answer is yes, of course.  But I guess my feelings are complicated by the fact that there are SO MANY things our kids need to know how to do nowadays – swim and use the internet and play basketball and do chores and drive a car and ride a bike and plant vegetables and sit still at the symphony and serve their communities and recycle and say please and thank you and budget money and eat organically and so on and so forth – that it gets overwhelming, for a parent.  I can honestly say that I don’t require my kids to get enough exercise.  None of them are very athletic, and I don’t force it.  Maybe I should.  I mean, with childhood obesity rates, and everything.  But no mother can do everything.  (And it’s so hot here in Houston.)

Jenny’s response was in the affirmative.  She wants to raise Readers.  And her reasoning is persuasive – reading takes us out of ourselves, teaches us about the world, forces us to see things from differing perspectives.  Reading promotes a larger world view.  Yet while I agree with her, I wonder – is reading truly the only thing that does this?  We then tried to think of families we knew and realized that pretty much all of our friends were either Readers, or married to one.  Which means that their kids have the experience of at least one parent as a Reader.  Are these kids truly better prepared, more educated, smarter? 

My point is that we all feel guilty about some area in which we don’t measure up.  Can we cut ourselves some slack on the reading thing, knowing that there are plenty (TONS AND TONS) of extremely successful adults who aren’t Readers?  Or is the guilt well-placed?  What do you think?

Some Summer Reading Suggestions

I really want to be writing today.  But this is going to be quick, because my dog reeks SO BAD I can smell his fetid ass from across the room.  I have no choice but to cut my writing time short, to take care of his repulsiveness.  I’m resorting to mouth-breathing, for the present.

I want to tell you about two books I’ve read recently that you might like.  The first is Lalita Tademy’s Cane River.  It was an Oprah book many moons ago, and it’s one that was repeatedly recommended to me, which is the reason I finally got to it (it was published like ten years ago or something).

Anyway, meh.  It’s okay, I guess.  The research is excellent, the writing fine, but the subject matter just isn’t my cup of tea.  If you have a particular interest in either slave narratives or genealogy, you’d probably really enjoy it, but I found the characters very stock and predictable.  So, whatever.

Then I read The Fault in Our Stars by John Green and OH MY GOD, kill me.  

This book will rip your heart from your chest, sucker punch it, stomp it on the ground, resuscitate it, and then repeat maybe 100 more times.  It is technically categorized as “YA,” but from what I can tell, the only thing “YA” about it is the age of the two main characters.  (Furthermore, I have a kind of ethical issue with this label.  What does it even mean?  While I understand that categorizing must be necessary for marketing purposes, it seems a bit demeaning.  Right?)  The Fault in Our Stars is a love story, and a cancer story, and I really can’t tell you anything else about it or I’ll ruin it for you and that would be morally reprehensible.  I will share this texting exchange between myself and my friend Wendy, who loaned it to me, for the purposes of convincing you of its absolute awesomeness.

Me:              Ok, Wendy.  I cannot be held responsible for any abuse I do to your                                book.

Me:              Because I tried valiantly to hold myself off w postit notes; and now I’m swimming in LITERARY DESPAIR AND AM DYING.  Every sentence and I’m DYING.  Don’t give me books like this again.  I’m a wreck.  Sorry for the defacing.  But you must agree, there was no alternative.

Me:              Not that I pulled it apart.  I just had to write all over the margins in pen

Me:              IN PEN.  Ran out of postits and couldn’t contain myself.

Me:              Sorry girl.  Nothing that could be done

Me:              I’m a wreck.

Me:              Love you [insert adorable and adoring emoticons]

Me:              Sleep lovely.

Me:              [insert additional blushing happy face emoticons]

(An aside:  I just noticed that this is less of an “exchange” and more of a “monologue.”  I promise that I do have actual friends, and that Wendy does, indeed, exist, as a physical being.  For real.)

So there you go.  Read it right away.

To close, I must direct your attention now to this little gem, which I’ve watched on YouTube maybe fifty times in the last two days.  THEY PRONOUNCE “NICHE” CORRECTLY.  Kill me now, I can die happy. 

You're welcome.

Wave – Sonali Deraniyagala

Wave is the story of Sonali Deraniyagala, who lost her entire family – her two sons, her husband, and her parents – in mere seconds during the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka.  The book itself is small, the size of a diary, and indeed, that is what the narrative reads like.  It is perhaps the most intimate memoir I’ve ever encountered, a true feat of human courage. 

I wouldn’t recommend this book to the fainthearted.  It is strikingly difficult to read, but so beautifully written, and so raw, so unflinching, that I consider it to be the best depiction I’ve seen in capturing human despair.  The tsunami occurred almost a decade ago, and this memoir is the product of that much time spent in grief, self-reflection, and healing.

As I read, I began to examine why I loved Wave so much – because this isn’t a book one could “like” or feel indifferent toward – it demands complete attention and strong emotion.  Am I some sort of voyeur in the misery of others?  Is there something ugly about me that finds this story so riveting?  The answer I came up with, after some thought, however, is that I love Wave because it explores a facet of humanity that is so often covered and hidden in everyday life.  Grief is unseemly.  Misery is not to be made public.  But Deraniyagala breaks through all those social mores and is the hero of her story, in her ownership of her misery, in baring the worst parts of her soul for all to scrutinize.  She is extraordinarily brave.

Most meaningful to me, personally, were Deraniyagala’s struggles with her memories.  On the one hand, she savors her recollections:  The cadences of Steve’s East London accent, the sound of Vikram’s violin practice, the curl of her mother’s fingers over a spoon, stirring dhal.  But on the other, Deraniyagala wonders if, to survive this heartbreak, she must make her memories “murky” – either through time, or through force of will.  The remembering can be too cuttingly poignant, too painful.  But my favorite bit is near the end, because it shows the beginning of a kind of peace with this internal struggle:

More and more now I keep my balance while staring into us.  And I welcome this, a small triumph, it lights me up.

Deraniyagala keeps going.  She makes tea.  She does the dishes.  She sleeps and she eats.  She remembers, and she plans.  And because of this, because of her superhuman strength to choose, daily, to keep living, ultimately, there is hope.