Read. Think. Act.

Catherine Read

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His Other Life – Melanie McCabe

His Other Life (March 2020) This book was captivating. A real page turner. I love the writing and following Melanie McCabe through her journey as a novice researcher. I’m delighted to know that she is a local English teacher in Arlington, Virginia, and that a writer of such talent teaches creative writing in a public high school. How fortunate her students are to learn the craft from someone so accomplished.

The premise of the book is intriguing. It certainly makes me consider how little we know about who our parents were before they were our parents. In this instance, Melanie’s father Terrence McCabe, had an interesting connection to the playwright Tennessee Williams. The elusive Hazel Kramer, loved by both men, passed away young and tragically. I can appreciate how invested the author came to be in giving her a voice and a presence that is now capture for posterity along with a fuller portrait of the father she lost at such a young age.

It’s a wonderful book and I highly recommend it.

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Educated: A Memoir – Tara Westover

(March 2018) “I am not the child my father raised. But he is the father who raised her.”

A gripping memoir. From the opening passage to the final sentence, I was pulling for Tara Westover to make it.

Raised in a Mormon family in Idaho that eschewed modern medicine, public education and was deeply fearful of the government, Tara did herself and the world a great favor by keeping journals from a very early age. The word that kept flashing in my brain throughout this book was “gaslighting.” She was constantly being made to feel that SHE WAS THE CRAZY ONE by her family – her parents, her siblings and the larger Mormon community.

Despite never having attended school at all (nor having the “homeschooling” her parents claimed to provide), she managed to enroll in Brigham Young University based on her high ACT score at the age of 17. From that point, she was fortunate to connect with people who recognized her ability and wanted to help her to realize her potential. Those professors and mentors kept opening doors that she walked through to claim her future.

At the same time, she kept striving to remain a member of her nuclear family.

I never knew what would happen next. It is an emotional rollercoaster. Keeping a journal turned out to be central to this memoir. All of us have faulty memories. It’s hard to be accurate in hindsight when intervening events color our memories of the past. Having a contemporary account of what happened in the immediate aftermath of traumatic events provided a more reliable witness to her life.

Perhaps I’m just particularly drawn to memoirs of strong women these days. Tara’s internal struggles to reconcile her life with her desire to stay connected to her family reminded me of Emily Nunn’s memoir The Comfort Food Diaries which addressed similar issues. (Both authors changed the names of their immediate family members to protect their privacy.) Where does our commitment to our family begin, and end, when it impacts our ability to live a full and healthy life?

I would highly recommend this book. It is a testament to the triumph of the human spirit in the most difficult circumstances. Our history does not dictate our future. Our origination story is not the only story. We can write a narrative for ourselves that accepts that where we have come from is only part of who we are. Our “self” is in our heads. We do have choices. And self preservation is the choice we have to make first.

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The Comfort Food Diaries – Emily Nunn

The Comfort Food Diaries(Oct 2017) I listened to The Comfort Food Diaries as an audiobook on a long drive from Northern Virginia to Dalton, GA, and back home again. I wanted my husband Tom to listen to this book with me because I didn’t think it was a book he would read otherwise. We both loved it.

Tom was drawn into Emily Nunn’s story without knowing any of the people in the book. I was drawn into the story because I knew many of the people in this book and I wanted Tom to know them too. I became aware of Emily’s journey on her Comfort Food tour because of Facebook. After connecting with her Aunt Mariah on Facebook, I ended up connecting with her cousins Toni and Susan, and then with Emily. There’s a point in the book when she talks about posting a question on Facebook asking people what they think of as their comfort food. I remember answering that question.

Galax is a small city in southwestern Virginia near the North Carolina border. The five Nunn siblings and the five Sublett siblings attended the same Methodist Kindergarten.  My family lived next door to her Uncle John and Aunt Mariah Nunn (to whom she has dedicated this book) and their three daughters until we moved in 1968. The parts of her memoir that talk about her childhood in Galax have a familiarity to me that is uniquely personal, and yet it could be the story of many small rural towns in the 1960s and 70s.

As I listened her memoir unfold, it also brought to mind a famous quote from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

I can’t speak for other people’s relationship to food, but in my family, when we think of our best childhood memories, food always has a central role. Is that just a Southern thing? I’m not sure. But the recipes in this book speak to both the dishes of my childhood and the life I live now married to a “foodie.”

She talks about making Morning Custard at the Bluebird Café in Athens, GA, when she was a student at the University of Georgia, and that reminded me I had made a video several years ago of my 90 year old Tia Sylvia showing my sister and I how to make our Granny’s baked custard. Does this happen in all families? I have no way of knowing. Emily’s memoir, centered around food, family dysfunction and failed relationships resonated with me.

My daughter Emily called me tonight to ask me recipe questions – she can’t make out her Grandma Sublett’s handwriting on her signature meatloaf recipe. In a meandering conversation about her childhood, she observed that sometimes she wonders if she and her sister Allison actually lived in the same house because they remember things so differently. That was a real “aha” moment for me. As one of five children myself, I’m sure we each experienced our lives in the same family and household quite differently.

Catherine and Emily 1964That is a significant point that I don’t want to overlook. This is Emily Nunn’s story of her life the way she experienced it. It’s not up for a vote on “right or wrong” or “good or bad” nor is it anyone else’s story but her own. Her relationships with her family, fiancee and friends are relayed to the reader as she lived them. It’s not about them . . . it’s about her relationship with them. This is her journey.  She owns it and she’s sharing it through this memoir. Writing a book about the most personal aspects of your life is likely quite cathartic and satisfying on a number of levels. The vulnerability required to then look at reviews written by friends, colleagues and total strangers about that book, is beyond anything I can imagine. That takes strength and fortitude I’m not sure I have.

After hearing the wonderful audiobook version of The Comfort Food Diaries, my husband Tom ordered the hardcopy book so we would have the recipes. It was a glorious experience to hear Emily’s descriptions of dishes, meals and so many aspects of food preparation while sitting in a traffic backup on I-81 in Virginia. We’ll always remember where we were when we heard her talk about Cathy’s mother’s Sour Cherry Pie, which I knew immediately was the book’s cover photo.

Spending time with this book, experiencing it with someone I wanted to understand the people and places contained in its pages, was a beautiful thing. Life is about the journey. We need to embrace it all – it’s what we have. My heart aches for the loss of Emily’s brother, as my heart aches for the loss of my own brother – who, quite ironically, was born the same day in the same hospital as her cousin Toni Nunn. My dad was the hospital administrator. Because that’s how life was in Galax in the 1960s.

I highly recommend this book. It’s unique. It’s thoughtful and hopeful and real. And the recipes are out of this world wonderful!

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A Cup of Water Under My Bed – Daisy Hernandez

A Cup of Water Under My Bed (April 2017) I loved this book for so many reasons. Daisy Hernandez is an American, born here to a Columbian mother and Cuban father. This book is called a memoir, but it’s so much more than that. It’s the chance to see the arc of a life in this country through a different lens. Hernandez is a gifted writer and above all else, the book is beautifully written.

Her book is somewhat chronological starting with her remembered first impressions as a 5 year old child who speaks only Spanish being sent to a Catholic school in Union City, New Jersey. Her coming of age story has many things we consider common experiences, but it’s unfamiliar to those of us who do not understand the culture of her parents and their particular immigrant experience. I marked so many passages that jumped out at me as beautifully articulated thoughts intended to resonate with readers like me – those who want to understand how other people experience the world and how that feels.

“If white people do not get rid of you, it is because they intend to get all of you.

They will only keep you if they can have your mouth, your dreams, your intentions. In the military, they call this a winning hearts-and-minds campaign. In school, they call it ESL. English as a second language.”

Daisy Hernandez works hard in school and has an interest early in her life to be a writer. She earns a scholarship and attends college where she is introduced to feminist studies and meets a diverse group of young people including the first lesbians she has ever met. She is awakened to her own bi-sexuality. This is an important part of her story, but it’s only a part of it. This is an interesting observation about coming to terms with our sexuality:

“Generally speaking, gay people come out of the closet, straight people walk around the closet, and bisexuals have to be told to look for the closet. We are too preoccupied with shifting.”

She has relationships with men, with women and with transmen. This is in the late 1990s when such lifestyles are hardly mainstream. It’s important to know that this community has been there for a long time. Her relationships are important in how she sees the world. It causes her mother great pain and upsets her close relationships with her three aunties. They cannot understand this.

The chapters in her book are shaped by addressing different aspects of her life – she is a Latina, she is bi-sexual, the first in her family to go to college. When she gets a summer internship at The New York Times on the editorial board, a colleague remarks she is probably the first person to ever work on that board whose parents don’t speak English. She notices how little diversity there is at the Times, not just racially, ethnically and gender-wise but people who are of a different socio-economic status from the one her family is in. “We belong to a community based in part on the fact that we are all doing somewhat badly.”

She talks about learning of a concept in high school her teacher calls “Keeping up with the Joneses.”

“It takes years for me to understand that the Joneses happen in houses where people cook in one room and eat in another. The Joneses do not happen in places where people are called white trash and spics, welfare queens and illegals, and no one asks the Joneses if they are collecting.”Read More

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When Breath Becomes Air – Paul Kalanithi

When Breath Becomes Air“Lucy and I both felt that life wasn’t about avoiding suffering. Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving. Describing life otherwise was like painting a tiger without stripes. After so many years of living with death, I’d come to understand that the easiest death wasn’t necessarily the best.”

To read this book is to spend precious time with 36 year old neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi as he wrote of his life in the last months of it. His wife Lucy write in the Epilogue: “This was the life he was given and this is what he made of it. When Breath Becomes Air is complete just as it is.”

Paul had an undergraduate and graduate degree in English Literature which is reflected in the beautiful prose of his memoir. He masters the art of the compelling turn of phrase, rendering concepts so beautifully and so memorably.

In considering a choice of summer jobs in college between a primate lab and working at a summer camp, he ponders: “If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?” He was clearly a deep thinker all of his life.

His choice to go into medicine was a surprise that came to him in graduate school, despite the fact that both his father and brother are physicians. In retrospect, his choice of neurosurgery was a perfect marriage of his life of the mind with the biology of the mind. It was something that evolved through his graduate studies and final thesis.

Paul came to understand deeply the implications of his work as a neurosurgeon. “People often ask if it is a calling, and my answer is always yes. You can’t see it as a job, because if it’s a job, it’s one of the worst jobs there is.”Read More