Book Review: The Future Tense of Joy by Jessica Teich

Note: I got this book as an advanced reading copy from Netgalley, but you can read it in September 2016.

So, this book made me cry.

It was in the last quarter, when Jessica intervenes in a issue her daughter is having with a schoolmate. The school has a word, the crisis is averted, and her daughter goes back to being a happy, if somewhat pensive, child.
“It was that simple,” says Teich, “That’s how easily someone could have saved me…”

And I cried, because like Teich, like many women who have been abused, I realised it could have been that easy for me to be saved too. And it stings that no one did.

This is not a novel about abuse necessarily, although Teich does go into her history in depth (abusive boyfriend, absent mother). It’s a story about a woman who sees the world she’s trying to desperately to mould into perfect safety slowly eroding away. Late at night, questioning her choices as she navigates family life, Teich picks up a decade old obituary and sees a kindred spirit in the dead girl, Lacey. Both high achievers, Rhode scholars, women with difficult relationships with their mothers – how is Teich in this life, with her daughters and a husband who adores her, and Lacey in the ground after committing suicide at 27?

The novel then rambles through Teich’s search to uncover Lacey’s life. She contacts Lacey’s family and friends, trying to get a sense of her and trying to uncover what drove her to such a drastic act. At the same time, Teich uncovers more and more of her own life, explaining and exploring her neuroses using Lacey’s life as a mirror.

Some of the writing here is just beautiful. Poignant, reflexive and heartfelt, Teich treats Lacey as a beloved sister. Her love for her children shines, and her pain at not feeling the connection to her family that she craves is exquisitely written in.
That said, the book goes on way too long. The whole last section could be easily removed without losing any of the story. The story about Angelia is pretty, but I really don’t see how it fits in with the surrounding story – if it had been woven in better, introduced earlier it may have worked, but it’s like a story that’s been added later to drive home a point, and it’s quite jarring. The parts about her travelling back to Oxford could have been more succinct, because again, a lot of the conversations she has seem to be added to just reinforce what the book is about.

I feel like a lot of the present day autobiographical content is very self indulgent. Yes, memoir is by definition indulgent, but not THIS indulgent. It’s as if Teich wants applause for working out her demons, returning to her husband, learning to release her vice-grip on her children, and learning to live her life despite the abuse she suffered as a teen. But she doesn’t need to ask for accolade. A lot of women (and men, i guess) who want to read this understand implicitly how hard it is to love and be loved after abuse. How hard it is to let children out into a world that is inherently unsafe. How guilty not being happy with a life that looks perfect on paper makes you feel. Just saying ‘here’s my history, here’s my demons, here’s what I’ve done’ would have been good enough. And made for a book that didn’t drag at the tail end.

The writing style nearly makes up for it. But not quite. However, this would have been an extremely difficult book to write (and harder yet to release into the world), and I have to give Teich props for handling the subject matter with poise and delicacy. At no point did I feel her inclusion of Lacey was voyeuristic or macabre (and I’m pretty sure Lacey’s family felt the same). She shows her daughters in a way that demonstrates her absolute devotion, but doesn’t make them larger (or more perfect) than life. She handles delicate, uncertain and painful topics with grace, and there should be more books that talk about this stuff.

3/5 stars.

 

Book Review: This is not a drill by Paul Carter

I haven’t read Carter’s first book (Don’t tell mum I work on the rigs, she’s thinks I’m a piano player in a whorehouse – a title which always makes me wonder if he does actually know how to play piano), but that didn’t make my enjoyment of this sequel any less. Carter explodes into the book, immediately diving into the life or death situation that gives the book it’s name. From then until the very end the book is a whirlwind ride of dangerous and comical situations, crazy characters, giant crabs and excessive amounts of alcohol, love and heartbreak.

Carter flies around the word, from Russia to Japan to Afghanistan and back to Australia to see his long suffering girlfriend (now wife) Clare. He reconnects with his Dad and a few of his Dad’s war buddies over single malt scotch, barbecues toes during a storm, discovers the best way to sneak a ciggie on a non-smoking rig and nearly gets blown up researching mercenaries in the Middle East.

Carter’s writing is pretty damn eloquent, given that he’s been a self-professed rigrat for most of his adult life. Sure, there’s some very colourful phrases throughout, but on the whole, the style comes across like an editorial – well researched and factual, but still personal and emotive. Sometimes I found Carter gets a little verbose when he starts talking about causes and issues close to him, which doesn’t quite fit with the rest of the book, but forgive him that and this is a rollicking read which carries itself well into the early hours of the morning.

Review: Monsoon Rains and Icicle Drops by Libby Southwell

Monsoon Rains and Icicle Drops is a memoir written by a founder of AdoptSriLanka, a charity which aims to help people reestablish their livelihoods after the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004. Partial proceeds from the book go to AdoptSriLanka, so I feel a little bad that I loaned it from the library instead of buying it. Libby starts the book in a Mongolian ger, saying it’s about as far away from home as you can get. She’s cold, miserable and missing the love of her life. You can tell this is not your average adventure. The next few chapters go into Libby’s life before she travels – her early working life, getting engaged to her boyfriend Justin and his tragic death in a climbing accident and then the deaths of several close friends. Desperate to get away, Libby takes a high stress job in Sri Lanka, but soon finds she needs to get away again and in finding some of the most obscure parts of Asia, find herself.

Libby travels through Asia for the next year, sometimes alone and sometimes with friends or new associates. She travels through Sri Lanka and India, into Nepal and Tibet and the southern parts of China. She heads up to Mongolia to spend time with migrating herders in the desert. I don’t want to go into the minutia of her travels, I want you to read the book for yourself. While it describes the sights and sounds (and smells) of mainland Asia, this book is so much more than a travel narrative. Libby opens her very soul and pours out the heartache and sorrow she feels about the loss of her beloved Jus. And somehow, wandering ancient pilgrim paths and living emerged in the cultures she is visiting, Libby comes through her grief and emerges stronger.

It sounds like a coming of age memoir for grown ups, doesn’t it? And it is, but not in an overbearing way. And Libby really threw herself whole-heartedly into the places she visited – the book is an anthro students dream travelogue and I read the entire thing in a night and wanted more once I was done. Forget Eat Pray Love and read this instead (or if you enjoyed it, try this as well).

Review: The Butterfly Mosque by G Willow Wilson

The Butterfly Mosque is a memoir. It’s not an autobiography because it doesn’t run a perfect timeline. Willow (I think the G stands for Gwendolyn, but don’t quote me) jumps back and forth quite a bit between using ‘I remember when…’ and ‘I was doing…’ which for me, made the story more engaging. It’s also a bit of a travel narrative as Willow spends a year immersed in Muslim culture in Egypt. This is not a book about Islam. It has lots of references to Islam, Islamic writers and the Quran* and the main character does convert to Islam within the first few chapters of the book, but it’s still not a book about Islam. It is a book about Willow, the faith and culture she embraces and the many, many contradictions she sees while being an American girl married to an Egyptian in a Muslim country.

Willow heads to Egypt after college to spend a year teaching at an English language school in Cairo. Having secretly and somewhat uncomfortably, given her atheist background and the recent events of September 11, embraced Islam, Willow arrives in Egypt with little knowledge of the culture, but ready to embrace all that it entails . She meets Omar and finds herself falling in love with a man she has never even touched. Determined to stay in Egypt with Omar, Willow officially converts to Islam and marries him. Despite being welcomed into Omar’s family and free to worship the god she has chosen, Willow finds assimilation into Egyptian culture difficult. She slowly becomes more and more accepted in her community, but there are problems when she wants to travel the Middle East and even more difficulty when she wants to return home to the States.

This book is a loving recount of a young girl’s year in Egypt. Willow speaks of her hardships and her joys in gorgeous prose and writes observations about religion, culture and humanity that are wise beyond her years. My favourites include

‘With remarkable foresight, the chancellor of BU [Boston University] kept classes in session that day, becoming one of the first to argue that if we disrupted our way of life we would be helping the terrorists.’

‘This is the heart of the clash of civilisations: not the hatred of the Other, but the self-hatred produced by the Other. This is what makes hatred so easy to propagate, and so difficult to counter even for those who question it’s authenticity.’

‘It was such a tantalizing contradiction, being a woman in the Middle East – far less free than a woman in the West, but far more appreciated. When people wonder why Arab women defend their culture, they focus on the way woman who don’t follow the rules are punished, and fail to consider the way women who do follow the rules are rewarded. When I finished an article or essay, all I got was an email from an editor saying, “thanks, got it.” When I cooked an iftar meal during Ramadan, a dozen tender voices blessed my hands.’

Doesn’t that last line just make your heart want to weep and sing at the same time? This book is challenging and engaging. It took me a long time to read and even longer to digest in order to write this review.** Read it if you are not Muslim in order to get a little bit of insight into a challenging and adoring world from the point of view of someone who is western born and educated (and therefore a little skeptical). Read it if you are Muslim for a sweet story of love and acceptance and of finding god when god was hard to find. Read it if you are atheist, change the capital g in god it a little g and you will still enjoy the story! But read it. Even if you don’t agree with everything that Willow says – I certainly didn’t, there were some very confronting parts to this book for me – you will still love the story and the writing is superb.

What have you read lately that made your heart sing? I’ve promised Richard that once I finish The Curse of the Mistwraith I’ll finally read Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy***, but after that I’m wide open – give me something to read!

*There are like a bazillion ways to spell this word. Don’t bash me.

**Simple as it is.

***42 is now a running joke in our house.