Post #66 – Women’s Memoirs, Book Raves – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
I am pleased to introduce Catherine Alexander to you, our new guest blogger with a special book perspective, just for you.
Let me back up a number of years. I had just moved from Palo Alto to Gilroy and made my way to the library. I had a conversation with a librarian and before I knew it, I had agreed to speak to the Gilroy Writers Project about the book I was completing. Soon this same person had me join the GWP and eventually talked me into being chairperson, finding speakers, introducing writers, and sending out publicity.
It takes a special person to do that as I’m usually pretty good about saying, “Thanks, but no.” Who was that librarian? Catherine Alexander, of course. Catherine and I have been friends for a number of years. She also managed to talk me into serving on the steering committee for the library when it was seeking funding for a new library through a bond measure. In a thrilling endeavor and through the hard work of many people, including Catherine, the bond measure passed. Not an easy task since a super majority of 66.67% was required. The old library that I knew so well — leaky roof and all — is gone and the bones of the new LEEDS-certified library can now be seen.
Then our lives took us in different directions. Catherine and I haven’t seen each other in more than a year. We shared interest in a local Thai restaurant and I used to ask after her when I’d eat there. She had moved to San Jose to settle her mother’s estate and begin fixing up the home her mother left her.
Meanwhile, Kendra and I had been looking for the right person to provide a different take on our memoir book reviews. When Catherine contacted me recently, I immediately called Kendra to say that I knew the perfect person. Yea. A few emails later, Catherine has signed on to provide a librarian’s and writer’s perspective on books. She will often, as she has done so beautifully this week, describe several books and why they may interest you. She has woven part of her personal story into her post and I look forward to reading each of her stories and recommendations as they arrive over the coming year.
I hope you’ll also welcome Catherine to our site. If you leave her a comment, I’m sure she’ll be delighted to find out your interests in memoir books as well as your thoughts on her posts. With a round of applause, here’s Catherine.
Don’t think of Oranges
Catherine Alexander, Women’s Memoirs Guest Blogger
It took years for me to actually trust myself enough to write, solely for the joy of writing.
Like many women, I felt compelled to write cogently and authoritatively when I had an issue or position to present for a practical purpose. However, writing about my own history, about my family memories, and about the many activities within my region of the country, felt less like an authentic life pursuit because, well, it was “fun.”
In my upbringing and within my family of origin, “fun” was considered to be highly suspicious stuff. It implied that not enough of the real, “important” work might be getting done, like canning, sweeping, learning the declension of Latin nouns, and writing those ubiquitous, weekly thank-you notes we penned so often in the 1950’s and 1960’s. “Thank you for your thank-note. I really enjoyed it.”
In the 50’s and 60’s “Fun” meant that you were somehow getting into something that might have to be mentioned in Confession. The parents weren’t sure what your quiet, soul-cleansing revelation might be on Saturday morning, but they knew it would be a negative reflection on their parenting, one way or another. Our parents worked hard, they were honest, and they weren’t happy all the time, so how could their kids possibly expect to be “happy” without some misguided wrongdoing involved?
Good, hard, sober work was highly valued on my mother’s side of the family. “Work” consisted of those activities which:
a) garnered a stable income but not so much cash that anyone else in the family might become too jealous or resentful,
b) kept a boss consistently in focus because their opinion mattered much more than yours ever would, could, or should,
c) led to regular promotions [for caveat, see “a”], and,
d) gave one’s parents bragging rights over the success of their child within the loamy family ecosystem, rife with the sprouting eyes of their own past failures.
Education was also valued, but only if it lead to a, b, c, and d. Too much education was considered excessive and self-promoting, especially for the women of the family. It distracted from time which could be spent, you guessed it, at work.
I should say that a counterpart to “d” above, was a certain Greek chorus of woe and heightened phone activity when I or my cousins experienced challenges within our work or personal lives. We were all responsible, we paid our bills on time, contributed to charity, volunteered selflessly, but our parents remained concerned and vigilant lest too much happiness lead us astray. “Why do you want to go to graduate school? Don’t you have enough education already?” “Can you afford a vacation?” “Where is he taking you? What does he do for a living? He does what?” All said with the look.
I remember one widely reported incident regarding the health of one of my cousin’s testicles. This was a second-generation subject of morbid controversy for at least three weeks running, no matter how much my poor cousin tried to quell the topic among our aunts. I would rather not have known anything about it, or them. (Don’t think about oranges. Please don’t even talk about oranges. I don’t even want to know you have oranges.) When I had a biopsy in later years my family never knew about it. I took a good friend, and we found copious ice cream varieties afterward. No oranges were harmed in the making of my personal drama. I would like to thank the Academy.
So, we learned early not to report the truth when our lives were a bit shaky or bumpy. We were always winners. We always succeeded. We never told our parents the real truth of our lives, because it would explode exponentially beyond our control, like an exquisitely hand-tied fly, cast high over a broad, fast-running stream. One which we knew we could never reel in and recast for it would be forever lost among the reeds, on a swift current moving ever forward, until summer’s heat and a new year left it tattered and scorched, waiting to be rediscovered and reexamined. In our family, secrets never died, they were reconstituted like enhanced gravy at each holiday meal, appearing nearly as often.
Our mothers and aunts were born into a family where a married woman did not have hobbies, which were considered to be too unproductive. Hence, whatever foolishness we had gotten into (or out of) each week became our parents’ version of our reality TV. Tune in, take an aspirin, call your sister, and talk about the worst case scenario. My cousins and I were the Cuban Missile Crisis, Med Fly, Whip and Chill, “Get under the table and HOLD,” “Can’t get no satisfaction,” generation. We chewed on sugar-stiffened doilies, we melted red licorice in the steam of our mentholated vaporizers, and we beat our parents at Gin Rummy but had to do the dishes anyway.
Our parents were more cautious, coming from a generation which had tasted wild abandon in the rhythmic flavors of Swing, and Jive, yet had it all suddenly yanked out of their hands again by the swiftness of war. They could remember a long climb out of the Great Depression, with deserved pride.
We loved them and we clashed. We tried to convince them that being happy had value. We no longer believed that if we collected enough psychic Green Stamps that some day we could redeem our filled, sticky books and be happy.
We watched the murders of JFK, RFK, MLK Jr., and John Lennon. We watched Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Love the Bomb, and tried to forget the Cold War. We wanted some happy right now, because our future was not guaranteed according to the lingering fears of the Greatest Generation. We wanted just enough happy to know that we were really alive today. Touch wood.
If we could, just for a few moments, feel the warmth of the sun on our Yardley-washed faces, feel it’s heat though our tie-dyed t-shirts, and know that blissful release from winter’s cold down to our Birkenstocked toes, we could leave this fragile life with not only a material legacy, the dream of our parents, but with a life dream, a memory of having reached inside for a creative joy that grew out of our own intrinsic sense of value. We could finally be at peace.
Now on to the books
Here are some books that have led me back to the joy of writing and a creative mindset, when I have, at times, temporarily abandoned a lifestyle that included my art. (Titles of these books are linked to WorldCat, which will allow you to enter your zip code and find them in a library near you. WorldCat also finds these books for you on Amazon and other online book retailers, if available.)
For those of you who, like me, seem to get sidelined away from writing (or your own particular art form), I have found Julia Cameron’s How to Avoid Making Art (or Anything Else You Enjoy) (Penguin 2005) to be a great kick-start back into living your writing dream and eliminating self-imposed distractions. Cameron uses simple, humorous, line drawings to illustrate concepts particularly appropriate for women who get too involved in others lives and find themselves with no time left for their own creative journey.
For women who tend to want to wait to write or live fully until they have achieved some inner laundry list of perfection, Women, Food and God by Geneen Roth (Scribner 2010) is a revelation of wisdom about coming to a place of wholeness, so your life may actually begin right now. If you are waiting until you lose 20 pounds, get your garage cleaned out, put your kids though college, or finally have your remodel done before you live your dream, this book is for you.
Sometimes changing focus from a busy life to a writing life can present challenges. We can’t tell our children, our jobs, or our elderly parents to stop having needs or crises so we can have time to write. If you need help finding your writing voice within a chaotic life, Natalie Goldberg’s Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir (Simon and Schuster, 2007) has pages of prompts that can give unfocused and distracted writing a starting point. Her suggested exercises and themes are also helpful for blocked writers.
Lastly, and I say this truly in all seriousness, we all need a life-memoir tiara. Not a Burt Parks, Miss America type of thing, but a self-made crown which reminds us of the best of who we are and how far we have come on our writing or life’s journey. Build yourself a circular ode to your spirit, whether in chicken wire, pipe cleaners and old earrings, or an embellished, aluminum pie plate covered with old magazine photos, glitter, and old buttons. Let it remind you that you have a creative, inner life and a writing spirit that needs tending. For home made tiara ideas, I like Crowns & Tiaras: Add a little sparkle, glitter, and glamour to every Day by Kerri Judd and Danyel Montecinos (Sterling Publishing, 2007). Wear it with pride.
Catherine Alexander
The Silicon Valley Librarian
http://www.siliconvalleylibrarian.com/
