Review: Mom and Me and Mom by Maya Angelou

Mom and Me and Mom

by Maya Angelou
Random House, April 2, 2013
Hardcover, 224 pp
Genre: Memoir

Synopsis: The story of Maya Angelou’s extraordinary life has been chronicled in her multiple bestselling autobiographies. But now, at last, the legendary author shares the deepest personal story of her life: her relationship with her mother.

For the first time, Angelou reveals the triumphs and struggles of being the daughter of Vivian Baxter, an indomitable spirit whose petite size belied her larger-than-life presence—a presence absent during much of Angelou’s early life. When her marriage began to crumble, Vivian famously sent three-year-old Maya and her older brother away from their California home to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. The subsequent feelings of abandonment stayed with Angelou for years, but their reunion, a decade later, began a story that has never before been told. In Mom and Me and Mom, Angelou dramatizes her years reconciling with the mother she preferred to simply call “Lady,” revealing the profound moments that shifted the balance of love and respect between them.

Delving into one of her life’s most rich, rewarding, and fraught relationships, Mom and Me and Mom explores the healing and love that evolved between the two women over the course of their lives, the love that fostered Maya Angelou’s rise from immeasurable depths to reach impossible heights.

Review: Mennonite In a Little Black Dress By Rhoda Janzen

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home
by Rhoda Janzen
Holt Paperbacks, 2010
Trade paperback, 241 pp.
Genre: Nonfiction - Memoir

"It is rare that I literally laugh out loud while I'm reading, but Janzen's voice—singular, deadpan, sharp-witted and honest—slayed me." —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love

Review: Expecting Adam by Martha Beck

Expecting Adam: a true story of birth, rebirth, and everyday magic 
by Martha Beck
Berkley Books, 2000
Trade paperback, 328 pp
Genre: Nonfiction - Memoir

John and Martha Beck had two Harvard degrees apiece when they conceived their second child. Further graduate studies, budding careers, and a growing family meant major stress--not that they'd have admitted it to anyone (or themselves). As the pregnancy progressed, Martha battled constant nausea and dehydration. And when she learned her unborn son had Down syndrome, she battled nearly everyone over her decision to continue the pregnancy. She still cannot explain many of the things that happened to her while she was expecting Adam, but by the time he was born, Martha, as she puts it, "had to unlearn virtually everything Harvard taught [her] about what is precious and what is garbage."

After reading the description on the back of the book (above) I thought I would really love this book. But I didn't.

Although Martha Beck's voice sounds genuine, she came across as whiny to me. I realize she was struggling with a difficult pregnancy which she later found out was because of an immune disorder. Her husband's job took him to Asia for weeks at a time which left Martha to care for their toddler daughter on her own, adding more stress and responsibility. But still, she was whiny. For the duration. While pregnant, she also  experienced a number of unexplained spiritual encounters. She called them her "puppeteers."

When, through prenatal testing, she learned that the child she was carrying had Down Syndrome, she became even more "woe is me." She was given her options, and chose to continue carrying the baby.

She spoke frequently of her fear of what others would think of her retarded son, but I think her biggest obstacle was herself. She often referred to her unborn son as "damaged."

Her writing is good but I didn't find it especially funny let alone "frequently hilarious" as the blurb on the front cover said. Maybe a chuckle or two, but again, not hilarious.

Worth your time? Sure. A lot of folks gave this book rave reviews. I didn't hate it. I finished it. Just a bit disappointed. I was expecting more from Expecting Adam.

Talk to you soon,
Angela

P.S. First book for my Where are you Reading? Challenge. Woo Hoo.

Anna Quindlen Interview

Bestselling and Pulitzer Prize winning author, Anna Quindlen did an interview with CBS This Morning promoting her new memoir, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake that is scheduled for release tomorrow. In case you missed it, I've embedded it here for you to check out. The interview is about six and half minutes long. It sounds like a pretty great book. I love to read a well written memoir. So far, Nora Ephron is my favorite memoir-writer, but that's a completely different post for another day.

In this irresistible memoir, the New York Times bestselling author and winner of the Pulitzer Prize Anna Quindlen writes about looking back and ahead—and celebrating it all—as she considers marriage, girlfriends, our mothers, faith, loss, all the stuff in our closets, and more.

As she did in her beloved New York Times columns, and in A Short Guide to a Happy Life, Quindlen says for us here what we may wish we could have said ourselves. Using her past, present, and future to explore what matters most to women at different ages, Quindlen talks about

Marriage: “A safety net of small white lies can be the bedrock of a successful marriage. You wouldn’t believe how cheaply I can do a kitchen renovation.”

Girlfriends: “Ask any woman how she makes it through the day, and she may mention her calendar, her to-do lists, her babysitter. But if you push her on how she really makes it through her day, she will mention her girlfriends. Sometimes I will see a photo of an actress in an unflattering dress or a blouse too young for her or with a heavy-handed makeup job, and I mutter, ‘She must not have any girlfriends.’ ”

Stuff: “Here’s what it comes down to, really: there is now so much stuff in my head, so many years, so many memories, that it’s taken the place of primacy away from the things in the bedrooms, on the porch. My doctor says that, contrary to conventional wisdom, she doesn’t believe our memories flag because of a drop in estrogen but because of how crowded it is in the drawers of our minds. Between the stuff at work and the stuff at home, the appointments and the news and the gossip and the rest, the past and the present and the plans for the future, the filing cabinets in our heads are not only full, they’re overflowing.”

Our bodies: “I’ve finally recognized my body for what it is: a personality-delivery system, designed expressly to carry my character from place to place, now and in the years to come. It’s like a car, and while I like a red convertible or even a Bentley as well as the next person, what I really need are four tires and an engine.”

Parenting: “Being a parent is not transactional. We do not get what we give. It is the ultimate pay-it-forward endeavor: We are good parents not so they will be loving enough to stay with us but so they will be strong enough to leave us.”

From childhood memories to manic motherhood to middle age, Quindlen uses the events of her own life to illuminate our own. Along with the downsides of age, she says, can come wisdom, a perspective on life that makes it satisfying and even joyful. Candid, funny, moving, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake is filled with the sharp insights and revealing observations that have long confirmed Quindlen’s status as America’s laureate of real life.

Happy reading,
Angela

Free eBook for April

The University of Chicago Press is offering, for free, the e-book edition of French Lessons: a memoir by Alice Kaplan during the month of April. 

Brilliantly uniting the personal and the critical, French Lessons is a powerful autobiographical experiment. It tells the story of an American woman escaping into the French language and of a scholar and teacher coming to grips with her history of learning. Kaplan begins with a distinctly American quest for an imaginary France of the intelligence. But soon her infatuation with all things French comes up against the dark, unimagined recesses of French political and cultural life.

The daughter of a Jewish lawyer who prosecuted Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg, Kaplan grew up in the 1960s in the Midwest. After her father's death when she was seven, French became her way of "leaving home" and finding herself in another language and culture. In spare, midwestern prose, by turns intimate and wry, Kaplan describes how, as a student in a Swiss boarding school and later in a junior year abroad in Bordeaux, she passionately sought the French "r," attentively honed her accent, and learned the idioms of her French lover.

When, as a graduate student, her passion for French culture turned to the elegance and sophistication of its intellectual life, she found herself drawn to the language and style of the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine. At the same time she was repulsed by his anti-Semitism. At Yale in the late 70s, during the heyday of deconstruction she chose to transgress its apolitical purity and work on a subject "that made history impossible to ignore:" French fascist intellectuals. Kaplan's discussion of the "de Man affair" — the discovery that her brilliant and charismatic Yale professor had written compromising articles for the pro-Nazi Belgian press—and her personal account of the paradoxes of deconstruction are among the most compelling available on this subject.

French Lessons belongs in the company of Sartre's Words and the memoirs of Nathalie Sarraute, Annie Ernaux, and Eva Hoffman. No book so engrossingly conveys both the excitement of learning and the moral dilemmas of the intellectual life.

“Alice Kaplan beautifully describes the intricate mixture of lust and embarrassment and voyeurism and submission and pride involved in immersing oneself in another language.… This girl’s own story—of a daughter, a spy in the house of French, a teacher and scholar—is imbued with a sense of the multiplicity of identity, and it gracefully tells us what Kaplan says French has taught her: ‘There is more than one way to speak.’”—Lisa Cohen, Voice Literary Supplement

Click here to get your copy.


Talk to you soon.
Happy reading, 
Angela