One of the defining moments of my life happened in a cemetery. My mom and I were walking toward my grandma's grave, talking about the funeral of my mom's ex-husband, which had happened recently. My two older sisters, Suzette and Michele, were his biological children, but my dad adopted them soon after he married my mom, and then we had literally zero contact with my sisters' biological paternal family. Until he died, and my mom's ex-mother-in-law called to invite her to the funeral. I don't remember if she went or not, but I will never forget  the conversation we had as we walked across the cemetery grass. She told me some things I had never known about her first marriage, both how it got bad and why ended up getting a divorce, and then she said "choosing to divorce him was one of the best decisions of my life."

I had to stop walking for a few seconds when the realization hit me: she decided to divorce him. It wasn't some fuzzy thing that happened to her in her nebulous past. It was a choice she made, and when she chose it, she also chose me. I could feel just how flimsy my very existence is: if she had chosen to stay with her first husband, who would I be?

That moment undid something in me. It put into an unforgettable clarity how our choices create our lives. And not just our lives, but our children's as well.

Who would I be if she had decided something different? From the other end, it looks like fate that she divorced him and then, years later, married my dad. Like it couldn't have turned out any other way because that is how it turned out. But of course, it could have. She could have stayed married to him. She also could have told my dad no when he asked her to marry him.

Not all choices change the future. At least, not in such dramatic ways. In my life, I think the three choices that changed everything were these: quitting gymnastics, my experiences with J, and marrying Kendell. Each decision was a hinge upon which my life turned, and sometimes I wonder. What would my life be like? If I hadn't quit gymnastics, if I hadn't had J in my life, if I had married someone else? I think my essential personality would be mostly the same...I think I would still love reading and writing, running and hiking. I think. But everything else would be different, and I think about it quite often. Not with regret, really. But just curiousity. How would I be different, who would be in my life, what else would my decisions change?

Jo Walton's novel, My Real Children, attempts to answer some of those questions. It tells the story of Patricia, an old woman living in a care center whose chart regularly reads "VC." Very confused. She is confused because of dementia, but also because she isn't sure which of her memories are correct: Did she marry Mark and have four children? Or did she say no to Mark, fall in love with Bee, and have three children? Is her life as a traditional wife and mother the real one? Or the one where she was a travel writer in love with Italy? 

The memories hinge on her choice to marry Mark, or not marry him. Alternating chapters tell the story of each of her lives, in worlds very similar but not identical to our own. In one, for example, President Kennedy is assassinated by a bomb; in another, he fades from history after the Bay of Pigs incident that resulted in nuclear bombs being dropped on Miami and Kiev. Both worlds have space stations on the moon, but in one, the scientists are friendly to all nations, and in another no information is shared between countries. But the most visible difference in the story is in Patricia's life. In one she is called Trish, in another, Pat; in one she is a traditional wife, in another she is a lesbian struggling with an intolerant society. 

This isn't a book with a traditional narrative structure. For one, it can't be, what with the alternating story lines. But it also doesn't build to a major conflict and then conclude. Instead, it is just the ebb and flow of life; babies are born, families are made, disasters are either circumvented or survived. But the last chapter—oh, the last chapter. In it, Pat/Trish are each in a care center, trying to figure out which life was their "real" one. They realize not just that their personal lives were different, but the whole world itself, too. Neither Pat nor Trish can figure out why. "She hadn't been important, in either world, she hadn't been somebody whose choices could have changed worlds," except for the butterfly effect.

What made me cry so hard was that, seeing both lives, she wants to chose which one is real but she cannot, because in each world, there are good things and people she loves. In a sense, it doesn't matter which world is "real," because which child would she give up? Which life would she uncreate? It is impossible to choose and yet still so compelling in its possibility. Just to see both lives. In her unhappiest life, the one with Mark, the world itself is happier and safer; in her richest life, with Bee, the world is ruled with tyranny and scarred by nuclear fallout. If she decides her life with Bee is the real one, she decides to doom the world; if the life with Mark, then she dooms herself.

But the simplicity of the idea also made me cry. The ugly cry, the kind that shatters out from a deep place of constant aching. There are so many possible lives we could have! Why are we limited to only one? What if I could know, could see somehow, what my life would look like if the hinges had turned the other way—if I hadn't quit gymnastics, if I had chosen differently with J, if I had married someone else? Sometimes that alternate life seems so real, a thing I could see if the film separating the two (or three, or five) lives from each wasn't so opaque. Maybe it wouldn't matter; maybe with everything different I would still be the same me. Patricia thinks so: "It didn't matter what they called her," she decides, "Patricia or Patsy or Trish or Pat. She was herself. She had loved Bee, and Florence, and all her children."

It's been a little while—since I loved a book so much. Maybe it isn't the book itself so much as it is the concept and how it struck one of my individual chords. Maybe it wouldn't resonate with everyone else so strongly. But for me, it was a devastating book (in a good way) and one, like that day I walked across the cemetery grass talking about divorce with my mother, I will never forget. 

some books make me question why I make the reading choices I do. Especially teen books—I'll usually find myself, in the middle of one, realizing that I'm not exactly the right audience for the story. I have to change how I interact with YA, modify what I expect and remind myself that I am looking back at the story, rather into it as a teen reader would be.

This holds especially true for teen contemporary fiction. I remember feeling how that one boy would be the end of you, how your friends' opinions were the only thing that mattered, how school sometimes felt impossible. But I can't remember clearly; my experiences are a sort of vellum on top of the memories, making them more opaque because I can't separate what I know now from how I felt then.

(In this sense, I think that writing YA fiction might be the trickiest genre.)

I felt this quite a bit reading Year of Mistaken Discoveries​ by Eileen Cook It tells the story of Avery, who's, you know, pretty popular at school. She's dating a football player and is a cheerleader. But she isn't really happy. Mostly she's anxious about getting in to Duke, like her parents. When her childhood best friend, Nora, overdoses, she leaves her the project she was working on. Both of the girls were adopted as babies, and Nora was trying to find her birthmom. Avery decides to take up Nora's project on her own, a project that feels especially important when she doesn't get early acceptance at Duke.

Honestly, I'm not even sure why I checked this book out. Cheerleaders (or any other uber-popular girl-group member) finally having an ah-ha moment isn't my favorite story line. And searching for your birthmom as a way to get into college seems fairly manipulative. Luckily, the book didn't turn that way. It wasn't a happy-ever-after, everything-ends-perfectly sort of book. Not a book that will stay with me forever, either, but one I think that teenagers, the people inside those stories, will like. 

Last year on Father’s Day, I was in Mexico with Haley, Suzette, and my mom.

The year before that, I didn’t go to church because it was the day after the Ragnar when I sprained my ankle.

I can’t remember before that.

But this Father’s Day, I was surprised by how all of the talks in church were all about dads. About being a good father, and about helping your husband be a good father.

And it left me thinking: what does it mean to be a good dad?

I didn't have many strong male examples in my life as I grew up. My paternal grandpa died when my dad was sixteen, so I never knew him. I knew and loved my maternal grandpa, but he died when I was twelve. I didn’t have any brothers, my uncles were disinterested, and my dad was…my dad. It’s hard to explain. I had three sisters and an authoritative mother who taught me early on that men weren’t really to be trusted. My dad was always on the outside, on the fringe. His role was to bring in money and my mom took care of everything else. I hesitate to write that because I love my dad (my mom, too). He was a good dad because he was a good person. He was kind and funny and smart. He went to all of my gymnastics meets. He taught me to love reading, working in the yard, cats, and solitude. His example of tramping around outside—he loved going out into the desert to look for arrowheads—was a contributing factor to my own love of being outdoors, even though our motivations are different. (I’m horrified at the thought of taking ancient Native American artifacts out of their final resting place.) He taught me how to water ski, how to ride a bike, how to prune a rosebush. He taught me to look for humor.

(me and my parents at my university graduation. My dad always encouraged me to go to school, study what I love, and graduate.)

But he wasn’t perfect. Of course, no parent is perfect, but there are ways I wish he would have been different. My mom has a very red personality and she tended to make the choices in our home. I wish he would have taken more initiative to participate actively in raising us, instead of sitting back and watching it happen. I wish he would have spent more time with my kids, especially my boys. I wish he would have sought me out more, when I was a child, and been an active parent instead of a passive one.

My dad grew up in the Geneva era of Utah County—the time when you could get a good, reliable job at the steel mill. He worked there until I was 12 or 13, when the first layoffs happened, and then, after taking part in a class-action lawsuit I still don’t fully understand, he took an early retirement and never really worked again. We were never a wealthy family, but we were comfortable before that layoff. After, we were…well, it still hurts me to write it, but we were poor. Not desperately poor, because my mom started working, but never comfortable again. Always on the edge of some financial crisis. His unemployment had a significant impact on my adolescence. It changed entirely how I felt about myself; before it I wondered at the difference between my more wealthy friends and myself (why did they have big houses and new cars and nice boats and fancy vacations when I didn’t?), but after it felt like a sort of inescapable outcome (they must be better or more remarkable than me in some way I couldn’t see to deserve their wealth). (This way of thinking wasn’t made better by the fact that I grew up in a town that was very divisive about wealth and status. If you were a Have Not, you were never going to be a part of the Haves, even if you pretended for a few months in seventh grade.) After his early retirement, my dad tried different small businesses. He tried to become a realtor and then an appraiser, but he never found his place. Part of this was circumstances out of his control, but part of it was his choice. He could’ve actively chosen a career path somewhere that didn’t rely on sales or serendipity for success. It affected all of us in different ways, but it changed everything. 

So yeah: my dad wasn’t perfect.

He made choices with negative consequences that I still feel. He didn’t give me some essential pieces of self-confidence he should have. He didn’t try hard enough to be the kind of grandpa my kids needed when he had the chance. He kept an essential part of himself hidden from me.

But I still think he was a good dad.

Because he forgave me. Sincerely and utterly—like he literally forgot all of the awful things I did as a teenager. He forgave me for quitting gymnastics and failing to get a scholarship. He forgave my black years and my mistakes and he never threw them back in my face (not even the time I stole his credit card and went to Lake Powell). Because he talked to me with honesty—about his doubts with the church, faith, and God. Because he told me stories sometimes about his escapes with friends. Because of that one faint memory I have of the time he took me fishing on the banks of Deer Creek. Because he saw I needed music to survive and bought me a stereo of my own, and records. Because even with his goofiness and his absent-mindedness and the way he’d tell rambling stories without regard for how long they were, he was kind and had a gentle heart. Because no matter what, even when I took it for granted, he always loved me. He always loved me, not an idea of who I might be without all of my disappointing flaws, but me for who I am.

I don’t know if fathers walk around with the same guilt mothers do—with that ever-present feeling of walking the edge of a sandstone fin, with failure and doom blooming below at every step. Maybe because moms are usually the ones primarily responsible for the kids, we feel it more. I don’t know what my dad felt about being a parent. I don’t know what I would be like if I had had more strong and actively-involved father figures in my life.

I do know none of us is perfect.

I know we all bring our faults, imperfections, histories, and biases to our role as parents. I know that sometimes we are disappointed by our kids’ choices even though deep down we blame ourselves for the wrong ones. I know that we all want to be better parents and I imagine most of us are trying as hard as we can to give our kids what they need. I know sometimes we fail and sometimes we manage to succeed.

Then what does it look like? Being a good dad?

I look at my own kids and how they interact with their father. Kendell, too, isn’t perfect. He is quick to anger in ways that I don’t like or understand. He harps too much on cleanliness and perfection. But he still loves his kids. He shows it in ways that are hard for them to see right now but which I think they’ll recognize when they are older. He has taught them to work hard and to take pride in what they do. He laughs with them. He apologizes when he messes up. He worries about them, especially their futures, and works with them to help them make good plans.

He loves them.

In the end, I think all fathers fail in some way or another. Just as all mothers do. Even though we don’t intend to, we all end up damaging our children. So to me, what makes a good dad is not his ability to do everything right or never make mistakes. It is his willingness to share himself, in some way or another, with his kids. To try to teach them some of the things they need for the future. And, more than anything, a good dad loves his children—and he shows them that he loves them, so they can carry that knowledge with them for their whole lives.

This goes for moms, too.

All we can bring to this job of parenting is ourselves. Yes, that includes our faults. But it also includes everything else, our quirks and strengths and passions and personalities. If we needed perfect parents we would all be doomed. We just need real. We just need present. We just need to be loved for who we are, and in that sense, my dad was perfect. 

In the summer when I was a kid, my favorite thing to do was to sit on the comfy lounge chair on our shady patio, reading books and eating snacks. (I’m sure I snacked on other things, but my clearest memory is of eating peaches while I read.) In the summer we’d have our gymnastics lessons early in the morning, and then we’d sometimes go on a hot, hot one-mile run around the grassy track at a nearby school. So I’d be hot, and tired, but fresh from the shower and feeling like I had accomplished something.

Sitting in a comfy spot with a book and something delicious to snack on, without any of the nagging guilt or “you should be doing something productive” feelings that adulthood brings, is one of the true but fleeting joys of childhood.

During those blissful summer afternoons, I would read my book. But sometimes I’d daydream, too. Imagining forward, when I would be the grown up, and I’d have my own daughters, and I’d know exactly what books to check out from the library for them. They seemed so entirely real to me, those future moments with future people. The conversations we’d have over books, or the times we’d spend just sitting together, reading. I could very nearly see their faces, and so one of the things I looked forward to the most about being a mom was sharing books.

Except, as usually happens, life didn’t give me exactly what I imagined.

I still have shared books with all of my kids. And we have had those moments of sitting together and reading. But my kids’ relationships with books and reading are entirely different than mine. They don’t need books like I did (like I continue to do) and they aren’t always reading. Haley’s reading tastes have always been different from mine, too, so we never bonded over Anne of Green Gables or Little House on the Prairie like I thought we would. (We bonded over different books instead.) At first this was hard for me, but as my kids got older and became more and more themselves, I started learning they are, each of them, who they are, not just smaller copies of myself, and that they need different things from the world, and that is OK.

A couple of years ago, my library friend Julie went to England, and I asked her to buy me a copy of Noel Streatfeild’s book Circus Shoes.  All of the other books in that series—one I read many, many times during those summer afternoons—are still in print in America, except Circus Shoes. She brought it to me, and then I waited for the perfect time to read it. That time came in February, when my mom was in the hospital and then long-term rehab after her spinal fusion surgery. The thing I’ve learned about taking care of someone in the hospital is that a book is an absolute necessity, as there are a lot of empty hours to fill. But the type of book is equally important. It has to be what I think of as “comfort reading”—books you’ve read before and so know the story, and the characters are liked old friends, and their adventures don’t give you any anxiety because you already know how they will turn out (a thing that isn’t true with the “adventure” you’re having the hospital).

So I took my copy of Circus Shoes, a book I hadn’t read since I was ten years old, and read it while I was with her. I read most of it at the hospital, in fact. I was a little bit worried that the story wouldn’t hold up to my memory of it…but it did. Especially I was glad to read again Santa’s transformation from sheltered girl to a tumbler, and how she fails to practice but then is motivated to improve on her own. I fell right into the story, even though I could feel that reading it at 43 was definitely different than reading it at 10. But that was part of the pleasure of it—a sort of rediscovering of how I used to feel, a little time travel via book.

I read most of the book at the hospital with my mom, but I finished it one night, late, in my living room with everyone else at home but asleep. When I closed it, I thought of myself all those years ago, reading alone on the patio and imagining my future kids reading the same book. How real those future daughters felt to me! It was one of my first instances of feeling just the very edge of how time seems to fold in on itself, sometimes. And I realized with a start: it wasn’t my future kids who I would connect with over those books I loved. It was me. My adult self, looking back at the kid I used to be. And just for a second, I was filled with a feeling I don’t have a name for, a sort of string-like feeling, like the thread on a strand of pearls, and that Amy reading so long ago was just along the thread that connected me to the current Amy reading.

Which sounds a little bit crazy, written like that. But It brought me such peace—like I took a deep breath for the first time in more than thirty years. Like I found a missing part of myself.

Wait—who says that? Who could hate summer, with its flowers and its break from school and its long days of lingering sunshine? 

OK, maybe hate is too strong a word. Dislike. Am made uncomfortable by. Have a complicated relationship with.

I mean, it's not the kind of negative emotion I have for Valentine's Day.

Or even Mother's Day.

It's just...well, summer is my least-favorite season. Even though I love so many things about it: yes, the flowers, but also running that's rarely interrupted by weather, hiking, summer vacations, green everywhere, late-afternoon thunderstorms, mowing the lawn, backyard barbecues.

I love all of those things.

But sometimes the things I don't love about summer outweigh what I do. Namely:

1. Shorts. Seriously. I have been shopping for my entire adult life for shorts I look good in, and I have never found them. The length doesn't matter—what matters is that my thighs look enormous in shorts. There's something about pants that balances out my disproportionate quads (just a little...I am always self-conscious about my legs) but in shorts they just look awful. And this isn't limited to regular, every-day shorts; it's also a problem with running shorts. You know those tiny little swishy running shorts that most runners wear? Yeah. Those don't work in my thigh-touching world. But running shorts with any sort of looseness also look pretty awful on me. Like I'm an escaped junior-high PE teacher. It's kind of strange, but true: the only running shorts that don't look awful on me are the tight ones. The tight long ones.

2. Short sleeves. Nope...my summer clothing disagreements are not limited to shorts. The older I get the more aware I am of my chubby arms. In every other season I can manage this self-consciousness with one of my favorite clothing items, the cardigan. But even I (with my body's occasional inability, due to my unhappy thyroid, to properly manage my body temperature) can't go around in cardigans all summer.

3. It's hot. I don't like being cold, either. (Apparently this post is devolving into one big whine-fest.) But I have a tendency to be emotionally effected by the heat. And not in a good way. Translation: I can turn fairly quickly, in a hot room or building, into a raving psychopath. (It’s not as bad outside.) Being hot makes me grumpy, and it's usually not reversible like being cold is. You can always add layers but there are only so many clothes you can take off.

4. Hay fever. This isn't a problem every year. For reasons unknown (but which I could probably uncover if I went to an allergist), some years are really bad and some years I never sneeze once. This has been my worst hay fever summer for five or six years and I am not happy to be so forcefully reminded of how miserable the sneezing and the constant throat tickle and the always-burning eyes are. What makes it worse is I can't function if I take hay fever meds. Even the non-drowsy ones turn me into a sort-of living zombie. I did have a little bit of success the year I tried Singulair. No itchy nose or raspy lungs. Unfortunately it made me bawl. Random, unpredictable crying. Not as bad as Prednizone but close.

5. Swimming. I don't mean swimming in nature. But, you know, putting on a swimming suit and sunscreen and finding the goggles and the snacks and the beach towels and then going to a swimming pool. My kids love it (well...Kaleb still loves swimming. Jake & Nathan only want to do nothing. See #6.)  and I just...don't. I can remember loving it, especially the long afternoons Becky and I spent in the pool at the Landmark casino in Las Vegas. But now that I'm grown up, swimming annoys me. It has more than a little to do with the same reason I hate shorts (chubby thighs). Maybe if I had the slender legs of women whose thighs don't touch, I'd also love swimming. (And really. Don't even get me started on swimming suits. The one part of my body that isn't chubby is the only part I wish were, as well as the part that swim suits try to emphasize. If you have any. Which I don't.)

6. The kids are home. OK, that sounds even more awful than saying I hate summer. I love spending time with my kids, and I love having them around, and I love that we don't have to worry about homework, grades, exams, forgotten projects. But Bad Mom syndrome starts setting in pretty quickly—it flashes up when I realize all that they've mostly done with entire days is watch TV, play video games, and eat snacks. (This article pretty well sums up what I mean. Really. If you're a mom with kids at home, you should read it. I'll wait.) And argue with me about the jobs they don't want to do. All of my Mom Failings are highlighted in the summer. At least for the rest of the year I make sure they, you know, go to school 'n stuff. I want to be one of those fabulous moms who has tons of activities planned for her kids...but usually that involves swimming. And, let’s face it: the teenagers don’t want to do anything else. They don’t want to go to the pool, the zoo, the mountains for a picnic. They’d rather nah. So then I feel bad that they don’t want to do anything, and I feel bad for not making them or I feel bad FOR making them, and I feel bad for Kaleb who ends up doing less stuff.

7. Sunburns. I used to love lying out in the sun. Used to, when my skin had the capacity to get brown. Now it just burns and peels, burns and peels, in an unending cycle that's only punctuated by the weird even-whiter dots I get instead of a tan. True, I do​ love peeling. Except, I don't love worrying about skin cancer and wrinkles. 

8. Miscellaneous annoyances. Bugs! (especially mosquitos, which love me, and flies, which I detest.)  It's too hot to cook my favorite meals. Traffic—one of the reasons I'm not a fabulous mom with tons of activities planned is that everyone else is also going, and the older I get the less I can deal with lots of annoying people everywhere. The electricity bill (hate it though I do, I'll happily pay it. Probably my neighbors and/or friends would be willing to pay it if I refused, because the cost of air conditioning is so much more bearable than a grumpy Amy). The untenable process of blowing your hair dry after a shower and even though you're paying a $*(#&$ fortune for air conditioning it is apparently no match for the heat of your blow dryer, which never seems to dry a damn lock of hair because the water from the shower just gets replaced with sweat.

As I wrote my list, I realized something: most of the things I dislike about summer are things I wish I could change about myself. Or maybe just accept with more grace. Maybe, in the end, that’s the reason I don’t like summer: it forces me to see more clearly my faults. They’re easier to overlook in the other seasons. 

(I have been wanting to add a new category to my blog for awhile now. Reading Memories will be posts about books I didn't read recently but am still thinking about.)

I read an article the other day about how, when you are writing a novel, you should think about your audience and tailor your writing according to what that audience generally expects. I was frustrated by this article, because it made some fairly sweeping generalizations (for example, suggesting that women in their 40s are drawn to mysteries, and I'd rather poke my eyes out than read most mysteries), but it did make me think: 

What kind of reader am I the audience for?

While I am not the most snooty of readers, I do have my own kinds of book snobbery (as has already been established here!). Just like my tastes in music are a little bit strange, I like offbeat books. Collections of essays, books with tidbits of story that eventually connect (or don’t), even, yes, poetry. I like novels that stretch me outside of my current ways of thinking. I like books with plots that surprise, characters who change or learn, and writing that makes me stop and think ahhh, that is beautiful. I will read any genre, so long as the book expands something for me.

In other words, most of the books I love are not destined to be best sellers, and let's face it: that is probably the kind of book I am likely to write. Expanding books aren't always appreciated in droves.

Aleksandar Hemon's collection of long essays, The Book of My Lives, is an expanding book for me.

I read it two years ago, right after it came out and I discovered it on our New Book display the library. Read it, and fell in love, but didn't ever write about it because, I think, I needed to let it age a bit. Today I thought about it, then found it and put on my display shelf. It'll sit there for a while, until someone brave takes a chance on a book with a blue alien on the cover.

Most of the essays are about Hemon's younger life in Sarajevo, his response to the war in Bosnia, and his experiences as an immigrant to America. These were moving and memorable to me because it that is not a part of the world I am very familiar with, and yet I have a clear picture of it in my mind, even two years after reading this. The way he writes about Radovan Karadzic (the man responsible for the killing of thousands of Bosnians) was startling and illuminating, a man turned into a killing machine by way of a book.

When he moves to America, he is able to find (after much walking) a sort of "geography of the soul," or at the very least a city he never wants to leave. (His "Incomplete, Random List" for why made me wonder if I could write something similar about my own little town.)

Perhaps because his way of thinking and his reactions are similar to mine, I responded with a sort of ache of familiarity to his experiences, even if we lived in entirely different settings. In his twenties, for example, when he was feeling anxious or depressed, he would retreat to his parents' cabin in the mountains. He writes that he experienced this malady as "a drought of thought and language. The purpose of going to the mountain was to replenish my mind, to reboot the language apparatus." Depression as drought is not a connection I have drawn for myself, but it feels entirely right, and yes: the mountains replenish many things for me, including my mind.

One of the book's reviewers, Colum McCann, says that the writing here fulfills a function of storytelling: "to get to the essence of that which might eventually break our hearts." Nowhere is this more true than the final essay in the book, "The Aquarium," which is about his infant daughter Isabel, who has an incurable brain tumor. The whole experience is related in a language that is simultaneously stiff (that tone you use when you are trying to speak around the lump in your throat) and moving (yet never sentimental). At the end, Hemon writes something I will never forget:

One of the most despicable religious fallacies is that suffering is ennobling, that it is a step on the path to some kind of enlightenment or salvation. Isabel's suffering and death did nothing for her, or us, or the world. The only result of her suffering that matters is her death. We learned no lessons worth learning; we acquired no experience that could benefit anybody. And Isabel most certainly did not earn ascension to a better place, as there has never been a place better for her than Teri's breast, Ella's side, or my chest...Isabel's indelible absence is now an organ in our bodies whose sole function is a continuous secretion of sorrow.

When I read that, I thought about my mother-in-law's death, and about how angry I still am over it. Maybe she is needed where she is at. But she was also needed here. Kaleb needed her. Kendell needed her, in ways he maybe couldn't see but I could. I don't think I would have acknowledged that anger without reading that paragraph in Hemon's book.

Maybe I thought of this book today because my friend's husband died last week. One of those deaths where you have to decide: how much medical intervention do we want to put this body through? I have been thinking about what to say to her. "I'm sorry" hardly seems like enough, but I want to say—how sitting with my dad as he died was one of my life's most difficult and yet sacred experiences, and how deciding to stop with medical treatments that do nothing but prolong misery still feels akin to murder. (Even though it isn't.) I don't know how to say that to her, though, because it is a knowledge I gained from my dad's death. Maybe that same knowledge is harder to find with your husband. "There has never been a better place for her," and yet, people still die. Our bodies still fail us and the rest of us stay here, for awhile, surviving. But always with that new, dreadful organ.

This is a book that will never be a bestseller. It is too full of hard truths and lacks easy platitudes. Some sorrows you never recover from, and we are all a survivor of something. But he is wrong in his idea that his daughter's suffering did nothing for the world. It is a small thing that it did—the death and his willingness to write about it—and so is only cold comfort. But he brought to me a lingering sort of shared knowledge. We try to make peace with death with religious imagery, and while I believe some things that he does not, I think there is still something to be said for saying: no, I can't find peace with that idea because that person should, by every right thing in the world, still be with me. However they go—war or the ravages of an insane leader or old age or inexplicable illness—even if a death is a blessing in the end, it is still, even as we witness it, unimaginable.

I like historical fiction. I think my affection for it started fairly young, with the book Hitty: Her First Hundred Years, which is a children's book about a doll who was made in the early 1800s and then has many adventures with different owners over the course of (yes, you guessed it) 100 years. This lead to loving the Little House books, Anne of Green Gables, and Little Women. 

All of which are books about girls, so I think my feminist bent started early.

I also adore books that retell or incorporate fairy tales. (You can see a list of them here or read about one of my favorite short story myth retelling collections here.) That affection originates in my childhood afternoons of reading fairy tales, combined with my English degree... a retold fairy tale for grown ups seems like a practical, if imaginative, extrapolation of the thinking behind literary theory into story. (How they change the story and what they do with it are equally as fascinating, in other words, as the story itself.)

Plus, ever since going to Italy, I have wanted to read a really good novel set there. 

So when I read about Kate Forsyth's novel Bitter Greens, which is historical fiction about a French woman who was a cousin of the Sun King in, mixed with a retelling of Rapunzel set in Venice and northern Italy, you can imagine I felt like I might have found the perfect novel for me. (I made the collection developer order it that very day!)

Bitter Greens​ tells the story of Charlotte-Rose de la Force, who was a writer in Enlightenment France. A distant cousin to King Louis XIV, she was sent to live in a convent for many years because of scandalous rumors. She is most well-known for her writing of the Italian fairy tale Persinette, which the Grimm brothers included in their collection as Rapunzel. Her part of the story moves back and forth through her life, from her childhood at the home of a Count to her adventures in the royal court. Eventually her edgy choices make it impossible for the king to keep her at court, and he exiles her to a convent. There she meets the nun Soeur Seraphina, who tells her the story of Margherita, a beautiful Venetian girl stolen by a witch and locked into a tower.

I so wanted to love this book. It has so many elements that I adore in a novel. The myth, the history, the women's issues, the setting, the inclusion of little bits of poetry (even Anne Sexton!), a main character who is a writer, even the back-and-forth-in-time plot structure.

Unfortunately, the writing itself made me not love it.

Especially the story set in France. Maybe this is because, I confess: I am not a Francophile. It seems like a beautiful country and I would happily visit, but it isn't a country whose history and zeitgeist have had a true and passionate appeal to me. Several times, in fact, I had to put the book down so I could research the historical figure being referred to, the politics of the French kings, the timing of important events (how close was this story to the French Revolution, for example). That isn't a bad thing—you can't include all of history in a novel. I just am not fluent in my knowledge of French history; I didn't know, for example, that so many people were killed when they refused to give up their Huguenot (Protestant) beliefs. Plus, the way the book portrays French people was bothersome to me. Do they really only care about clothes and food and entertainment and sex? All of them, from the king on down, seem extravagantly silly.

But more than anything, Charlotte's voice felt inauthentic to me. Several times I considered diving into the OED to find out if they really did say that word back then. It felt...made, somehow. Constructed in a way that I could see the strings moving the puppet.

The story of Margherita felt like it was better written. It is set in Venice, which perhaps increased my enjoyment—I could remember instead of imagine what the air feels like in that city, and I know what the torre dell'Orologio is and what St. Mark's cathedral looks like. But more, it was the flow of the story and the stylistic structure. It also has a story-within-a-story structure, mirroring the organization of the book: not only do you get Margherita's Rapunzel story, you get the story of Seraphina, the witch who steals her and puts her in the tower. The length and strength of all that hair is explained. There are skeletons in cellars and Renaissance painters, witches in training and nuns with ethereally beautiful voices. I actually really, really loved Margherita's story—until I got to the romance with the man who climbs her hair and enters the tower. 

Then the book does a thing that far too many romance novels do. Because really. Say you're sixteen or so. Say you've lived in a tower away from people for five years, as a sort of living-fountain-of-youth for the witch who has enchanted with a spell into never leaving the tower. Say before that you lived in a convent, with nuns and other unwanted little girls, and before that you were an actual little girl. Say you've never read or been told anything about sex. Now say you meet a man. You see him three or four times. Sure, he brings you food, and you've been starving so that's nice. He tells you you're pretty and that you're strong enough to get away from the witch. He teaches you about periods (I mean, seriously. Let that sink in: you don't know why you're all of a sudden bleeding, except maybe the witch has found out you let a man in your tower). And then, at last...he kisses you! And then, at last, "they loved more deeply and passionately than anyone had ever loved before."

{INSERT MY FAVORITE SWEARY QUOTE FROM HEATHERS HERE.}

This is why I don't read romance novels. I can totally suspend my disbelief about witches and parsley-shaped birthmarks and spells made from weaving the red hair of dead prepubescent girls into a living prepubescent girl's hair. But a totally naive and unknowing girl not completely freaking out about having sex for the first time (and not just having it, but learning about it, for the first time, during her first time)? Not just not freaking out, but enjoying it? Loving more deeply and passionately that anyone before? I cannot suspend my disbelief for that story. And I know all the arguments someone could make. It's a fairy tale, after all. But it's about humans, and that is not how humans react. That is pure, unbelievable fantasy.

So, in the end, Bitter Greens. I have many mixed feelings. I enjoyed the story and I even loved some things about is. The problem might not be with the book itself, but with me as this book's audience. I am a book snob, after all, in that I really do like reading really good writing, and this book doesn't offer itself up as "really good writing." So maybe I'm asking too much. I'm just so heartily disappointed because it came so close​ to being a book I could truly and passionately (but probably not deeply and passionately than anyone ever has) love. Instead I wanted to toss it across the room.

(Which I guess is a sort of passion, but not, alas, the right kind.)

So…All the Truth that’s In Me. A recent Beehive Award nominee. A book I really enjoyed.

A book with a fairly horrible cover. I mean, come on. If you saw this cover:

would you guess it is a book about a girl living in a Puritan-esque village?

When I first saw it, I was fairly baffled. The eye make-up suggests model, the hair suggests the hair straighteners, product, and color of 2015, and the shirt suggests the Jessica McClintock factory outlet. Almost nothing about this cover gives readers even a hint about the actual story, except that tear across the model’s mouth, which is a sort of visual foreshadow of the violence that’s been done to the main character. Her name is Judith, and part of her tongue has been cut off, so she cannot tell out loud the story of what happened to her during the past two years, when her friend was abducted and then murdered and she herself lived in a cabin in the remote woods with a strange captor: the father of the boy she had a crush on in the village where she used to live.

If I were still teaching, and I wanted to teach a lesson about voice and writing style and how the two combine to create something memorable, I would use this book as my source material. It’s written in short fragments that grow longer as you grown more comfortable with the story. This fits as most of the story is within Judith’s head: memory, flashbacks, things she doesn’t want to remember. Her mother is fairly abrasive to her and, it turns out, so is the rest of the village. Since she can’t tell her story, most of them assume the worst, so she lives in silence, harangued by her mother, teased by her brother, and still pining over Lucas. Then a battle with a neighboring settlement starts to change everything, and Judith must be willing to try to find her voice again.

Although the details of the battle—who they were fighting, and why—felt muddy to me, I really enjoyed this book. It’s an interesting combination, a historical mystery with some romance and not a small amount of bildungsroman as well. It didn’t progress in the way I thought it would, and the characters’ actions and motivations felt true within the context of the setting.

But I confess: My reading of the story continued to be influenced by the cover. The Judith on the cover (who I don’t think I like) was so jarringly dissimilar from the Judith in the pages (who I did like, very much). I know, you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover. I actually really hate that cliché, because it’s mostly not true. You can learn quite a bit about a book from clues on the cover. At least, you can if the cover image and the story work together. This one gives all the wrong sort of vibes. (The paperback version, which has a white flower turning red on one petal, is better, but only for its vagueness which really doesn’t suggest much of anything.)

All of which has left me thinking about book covers in general. I decided long ago that I would like my book covers designed by Anna and Elena Balbusso (who made the Folio illustrated edition of The Handmaid’s Tale which, I just discovered, is on sale this month and I might just have to finally break down and buy the gorgeous thing), but I know that authors don’t always actually have much input on covers. For me, it's actually pretty rare that book cover designers manage to capture exactly what the author intends, but when they do, it is magical. When they don’t, especially on a spectacularly fractured (not even ironically or intentionally) level as this example, the results are jarring for readers.

Or, at least for this reader. Are you ever influenced by book covers?