Post #90 – Women’s Memoirs, Book & Video Raves – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
Memoir Review of: Take Me Home from the Oscars: Arthritis, Television, Fashion, and Me by Christine Schwab
Reviewed by Lanie Tankard
Christine Schwab uses the backdrop of an illness to describe the daily life of a high-profile career while at the same time examining a shaky childhood. The resulting memoir,Take Me Home from the Oscars: Arthritis, Television, Fashion, and Me
Women trying to figure out how to write about even one of these elements in memoir format might examine this book for ideas about how to unroll the canvases of their lives to paint larger portraits.
Schwab, for example, offers many insights into her battle with rheumatoid arthritis, which she had to hide to advance in her profession as a fashion and beauty reporter appearing in front of television cameras. All the while, she ponders an untethered childhood during which her father disappeared and her divorced mother boarded her out to live in other people’s homes for eight years.
Pushed by society’s preoccupation with youth, beauty, and perfection, Schwab wears fingerless black lace evening gloves to hide her hands as they become disfigured, passing the accessory off as a style trend. She utilizes her experience producing makeover segments, when people travel to New York to appear on Live with Regis & Kelly, to put a cover up on her own body as arthritis asserts itself.
Readers are taken backstage to witness what Schwab terms a “cutthroat” business. One executive producer tells her, “Results, Christine, are ALL we care about. The sound of the audience as we reveal the before and after, the loud Ahhh reverberating into millions of homes around the country. Then we put them on the plane home.”
As Schwab comes into contact with television personalities such as Barbara Walters, Oprah Winfrey, and Bryant Gumbel in her work, and encounters actress Kathleen Turner in an airport, she is constantly inventing new ways to hide the symptoms of her illness. She trades in her black patent Jimmy Choos for cushioned sneakers as her feet begin to swell, passing the shoes off as the current accent.
“’I didn’t realize sneakers were so in right now,’ one of my stylist associates said, looking down at my khaki-colored, army-boot-style shoes. ‘You have to be very confident to wear THOSE,’ she glared.
“‘They’re totally chic—where have you been?—and soooo comfy,’ I replied in my most elitist tone.”
All the while, Schwab hears the voice of her mother expecting her to be perfect.
It’s interesting to watch the way this memoir writer portrays her glamorous profession, juxtaposing it next to her upbringing to seek parallels between the two. She realizes she learned to pretend in childhood to protect her heart every time she was dropped off at a different home. Now she pairs that ability with her television makeover training to hide arthritis in her professional interactions. She begins to wonder whether she’s making over others because she never felt worthy as a child, and now feels a need to prove herself.
Schwab also takes the reader behind the scenes of medical settings as she begs doctors to help her, seeks out the latest research, pounds at the doors of drug trials begging to be let in. And as doors open, side effects begin to add up. Her hair falls out in tufts. Her hearing is affected. She uses the early survival training of childhood fantasies that helped her escape the sadness of foster homes to flee the current toll on her body from rheumatoid arthritis.
We slip inside double blind studies of drugs awaiting FDA approval. Schwab describes the boundless energy of being on high-dose steroids for six months as she boings off the walls, attempting to control an unquenchable appetite. Schwab employs a dry wit to describe trying to munch quietly on a constant stream of tortilla chips as she talks on the phone.
“I couldn’t wait to taper the steroids, because while taking such high dosages I couldn’t stop eating. I couldn’t stop anything. I was on a moving sidewalk that ran beneath my feet. Feet that now felt good, masked with steroids,” she writes.
She is assisted throughout her battle by the love and support of an uncritical husband, also in the entertainment business, who doesn’t mind her slanted hands and swollen joints. The one aspect that could have been developed more was motherhood. In her acknowledgments, Schwab mentions three children, but they make only cameo appearances in the memoir.
Schwab goes to UCLA as a research patient in a drug trial, and also enrolls in a writer’s program there. She takes a class with author Hope Edelman, author of Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss, Second Edition
Through memoir, “the pieces of my shattered childhood puzzle slowly fell in place….Overall, the knowledge empowered me because I now knew I wasn’t the cause. Still, when all the shock had settled, it mostly made me sad. Sad for what could have been. Sad for the lost childhood….I wasn’t sad for me, but for all the lost possibilities of how life could have been better.”
Schwab wrote her memoir to help change the face of arthritis and to say to those who have it: “Define your disease, but don’t let the disease define you.” She no longer needs much medical oversight, as she now gives herself a weekly shot of a drug that brought her back to “the world of the healthy.”
Schwab has made her peace with society’s ideals as well. “I look at my hands in disbelief. They stare back at me, reminding me that I am not perfect. Over time they have taught me that perfection was not what should be important in life.”
The takeaways from Schwab’s memoir are manifold.
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.
