Cindy Harrison Tell A Friend About Us:

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

What I liked about Lisa See's historical novel set in China was the sense of female friendship that ran so strong through the culture. A friendship between two women from different social classes is the frame of this book, with the fascinating backdrop of long-ago Chinese tradition. The powerlessness--of the women and the peasants--is appalling.

I loved the voice of the main character. Lily, and getting the low down on the then "secret" woman's language and that writing was a main mode of communication over the years. I loved the loyalty Lily and her best friend showed each other, but also that the human side that came out with misunderstandings. Fascinating too, is to see the rigid class system and how only one thing allowed women to move out of their birth position on the tier of weath, power, and success--the shape of their feet.

Footbinding made the feet of women appear as lotus petals, the highest sign of beauty and blessed karma in China 200 years ago. The "best" feet were only 3 inches long!!! Bones broken, feet set into impossible shapes not meant for walking--blood and pain--not for the faint-hearted reader. I've avoided Lisa See's novels in the past just for this reason, but I adore her mother's work, so when my book group suggested this one, I was game. And See is a talented storyteller. Bet I know where she gets it from.

Inspiration: Your Ultimate Calling

Just finished Dr. Wayne Dyer's book on how life can be totally lived from a place of true inspiration. I read a lot of this type of material, and love his positive messages full of hope and joy. I've been talking about the book as I read it here and there, but I liked it so much I still have more to say.

One of the things that freaked me out in the chapter on absorbing inspiration from others is this statement: "Teachers often have such low self-esteem that they lose themselves completely in devotion to something that's far removed from their true calling."

My first reaction was low self-esteem??? Dyer didn't make it a blanket statement, and he added that many teachers are highly effective (he was once a teacher, too), but that low self-esteem bit just hit me between the eyes. The more I thought about it, the more I knew it had been true of me. I started teaching high school English, and that was really far from my true calling. Then I went on to teach at university, where I was one of many adjunct profs teaching the basics of college writing. Also not anywhere close to my true teaching desire. Finally, I got to teach creative writing and something clicked. I'd found my home. This process took a long time, though. 15 years!

"A person," Dyer says "may have the highest intellectual credentials available and still be detached from his or her spirit." So, that's just a warning to trust your gut, from what you read to right work, despite what the experts, including myself, might say.

Here's a piece from his chapter on being an inspiration to others: "Being at peace with ourselves is a way of going through life eschewing conflict and confrontation. When we're in a state of tranquility, we actually send out a vibration of energy that impacts all living creatures..."

And one final great message from a chapter about transcending uninspiring energy. By uninspiring energy, Dyer means the news of the world, and the way we're bombarded with negativity from our waking moment. If you turned on your television to CNN first thing in the morning and watched it all day, you'd soon be bumming out big time. The focus, even in our local news is on what's wrong, not what's right. Even the celebrity gossip is about who OD'd this week and who's marriage is on the rocks. Letting all that energy in through a constant, open stream, would be enough to make anyone depressed.

Dyer recommends limiting negative input. This is not the same as ignoring the pain in the world. See the pain, she the problems, but let's face it, we can't fight Bush. We can fight the suicide bombers. We can't fight the serial killers and the animal abusers. Well, I can't. Maybe you can: maybe you have money, time, and passion and the willingness and inspiration to devote your life to peace or justice. I know myself, and that is not my road. All I can do is sign petitions, give money to good causes when I can, pray, and vote for a decent candidate.

Or so I thought. Until I read this book. Dyer says we can also be opt for "alternatives to bad news and political quarreling...regardless of how many others wish to live as if they're in a pitched battle where conflict and agitation rule." He goes on to say "There is no way to happiness--happiness is the way....Nothing makes me happy. Happiness and inspiration are what I bring to life."

By now you may have caught on that Dyer believes your inner energy vibrations affect the outer world. After reading this book, I believe it, too.

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Walla Walla Suite

Ann Argula's second in a series featuring former cop and menopausal private detective Quinn is a hoot. There are a lot of menopausal women in this country. And we read a lot of books. Our kids and husbands, if we have them, demand less attention. We are so skilled at our many jobs we can do most of them sleepwalking. We have practically given up dusting, except when book group is expected. We buy lots and lots of books and read them. So why not more women-of-a-certain-age novels?

This annoying dearth of fifty plus heroines is enough to give a woman a hot flash. Speaking of which, here's Quinn's description of the particular hell of hot feet: "I moved away from the window, put the phone back in the cradle, and myself back to bed. I watched the small flames leaping from my toes. I swear I could see them."

The whole thing is funny like that, but dark. Noir as it gets, what with Quinn trying to find the killer of a beautiful young woman and her best friend acting even stranger than usual. When a string of unsolved serial rapes inserts itself into the middle of her investigation, someone confesses to everything. The guy's a nut job for sure. A sicko, no doubt. But Quinn is not convinced he's their man. So she plays a hunch that just might be her last...except this is a series and the next book's on the way.

Hurry up, already. I need something good to read when my sheets get so sweaty I can't sleep.

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September, 2007

Eat Pray Love

Thanks to my friend Debbie Bressman for giving me Elizabeth Gilbert's wonderful book. I saw it at the bookstore several times in the memoir section and even picked it up but I just never quite was enthused by the jacket copy enough to buy it. And yet, I totally loved it and spent a wonderful weekend reading it. Reading is almost not the right word for it. I drank it in, enraptured. It was a conversion experience, or would have been, had I not already been a meditator and admirer of all things Buddhist.

First, she lives in Rome for several months, eating pasta and regaining some of the weight she'd lost during her tormented season back in New York. She also slowly finds joy again, in her own company, and in the Italian language. Next, she encloses herself in an Ashram in India for several months, praying and meditating and facing down her inner demons. This is not the grim tale it sounds--she's a funny writer, and she meets interesting characters, and it's all very readable. Her final destination is Bali, and it is here that she seeks balance between the meditative life of a monk and the pleasurable experiences of a hedonist.

As I read, I fell deeply in love with her words, the way she arranged them, the way they conveyed exactly the human experience of suffering and release. Gilbert calls herself "a student on the ever-shifting border near the wonderful, scary forest of the new." But I'd say she's more like a sage on the page, a brilliant writer and fearless chronicler of her own desperate states of mind for the solace it might offer others. Lovely, lovely book.

Mad Dash

Wouldn't it be cool if you could just call up your favorite authors and order a book, the perfect book for you on that particular day, week, month, year? Minus the phone call, that's kind of what happened when I read Patricia Gaffney's latest novel. It simply resonated with so many of the things going on in my life. Not only that, but it gently led me (and, incidentally, Gaffney's characters) to a new understanding and acceptance of life just as it is, right now.

Dash's nickname comes from Dorothy, because she hates Dot. Right away, the legendary Gaffney wit is in evidence. Dash, a married mom and photographer of babies, is in her 40s and having a bit of a marriage/empty nest crisis. Her only daughter, Chloe, has gone off to college and has decided she won't be home for Christmas. Andrew, Dash's professor husband, is (to Dash, not to me) predictable and irritating. I found Andrew precious, inadvertantly funny in the way only men, those foreign creatures, can be. When the couple finds a nearly frozen to death puppy on their front porch, Dash wants to keep it. Andrew, hyper-vigilant regarding his health, including sundry allergies, says no.

So Dash takes off from their D.C. lifestyle for the wilderness--theiir Virginia cabin at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Dash leaves her home and her marriage and flirts with changing careers. She also flirts with the local handyman/farmer, while back at home, Andrew has some adventures of his own. That's the plot, but the heart of the story is something more, things too often unarticulated, except among the closest of friends after a glass or two of wine, about long marriages, grown children, and the roads not taken.

I loved every minute of this book. Gaffney couldn't have done it better if I'd called in my exact order.

Best Friends

Sometimes fun books are harder to write than more serious stories. Just finished Motor Mouth, and while it kept me mostly amused and turning pages, it wasn't as clever as Metro Girl. Or maybe it was just that I'd read just the day before the very tightly plotted, nicely character-driven page turner Force of Nature by Suz Brockmann and Evanovich seemed a little too loose. It's probably not fair to compare a thriller to a comic farce, so I won't, but suffice to say I prefer characters with a story behind their action and at least an attempt at plausibility.

I have been pretty good about not discussing the books I've read this summer that didn't cut it for me. Why bother dissing? Just go right for the good stuff.

And Best Friends is the good stuff. The novel is not a typical page turner. It's not a mystery or a comic farce or a thriller. It's women's fiction, by first-time author Martha Moody, about two best friends who meet in college and stay tight through their lives. I could not put it down. Started in the afternoon and finished before shutting the light out for the night.

Clare and Sally meet in college in 1973. Clare's family is not rich or even well-off, so don't ask me how she got the guts to go to Oberlin or why her parents agreed. Maybe becasue she's really smart and she knows it, and like most young people, she feels like she deserves the shot, never thinking about the financial toll her tuition will take on the family. Sally, on the other hand, is filthy rich, but she doesn't flaunt it. You'd never know she's from money unless you looked for the labels on her plain jane clothes, like Clare does.

Clare's from Ohio and Sally's from Los Angeles. Sally goes to Clare's family for Thanksgiving that first year, and soon enough, Clare makes a dream trip out to L.A. which begins her love affair with the city and with Sally's entire family. The novel's almost 500 pages, and as the pages turn, the women go from teens up into their 40s. They finish school, have impressive careers as a doctor (Clare) and lawyer (Sally). They marry, have children, figure out their places in the world, and uncover some family secrets on both sides along the way.

I didn't identify with either of these women, but found them fascinating nevertheless. I often disagreed with their choices and their ethics. Clare, from whose point of view the story is told, is so high-minded and unforgiving, if it weren't for a few fuck ups, she'd lack all human messiness. Sally, meanwhile, is so bent on doing right that she almost kills herself trying to be everything to everyone, including best friend to Clare.

Moody's complex story has an organic structure, not entirely linear, not too abstract. The beautiful writing made it a pleasure to read this book straight through.

The attraction between Mamah and Frank begins when Cheney's husband decides to have FLW build them a house in their Oak Park, Illinois neighborhood. At first, it's just a deep intellectual affinity, but after time goes on, things get more complicated. Lots more. They end up both leaving their families for Europe and living with the hard choices they've made in a time when divorce was rare and women were not allowed custody of their children.

What I really loved about this book was Mamah's story, her search for herself as a woman, artist and mother. Her yearning to have a Big Life, with integrity and according to her ideals, without sacrificing motherhood or love or even the ability to make her own money. There's plenty of early Frank Lloyd Wright in here too. His struggles, his successes, his genius and the way it sometimes railroaded over Mamah's more quiet writerly personality.

The ending's a shocker for anyone who doesn't know the story, but debut author Horan handles it like she does the rest of this compelling story, with classy care and an artistry of her own.

August, 2007

I Feel Bad About My Neck

It took me a while to read Nora Ephron's latest book, because even though I think she's really funny, I am trying NOT to feel bad about my neck, my wrinkles, my sags and bags and basic aging. But I figured if she's joking about it, maybe she would make me laugh. And she did.

I still don't feel bad about my neck, though. I had a cyst removed when I was in my 20s and have had a really ugly scar right across my throat ever since.

When my dr. told me I had a lump that would have to be removed and biopsied, I said, "Oh no, that's just my Adam's Apple. It's big."

She said, "No honey, it's a lump, and we have to get it out. Now." Lucky for me, it was benign. After something like that, having a less than perfect neck just seems small.

Summer Reading

Hilma Wolitzer's new novel is lovely because it's the very best kind of summer reading: smart AND fun. The book group at the center of this Hampton's set story is hosted by rich wife Lissy, who is young and sad and empty despite all her money and stuff. Angela, a former English teacher, leads the group and choses the books, mostly classics, which lead to nice meaty discussion.

I miss my book group, can you tell? Wolitzer's book comes with a suggested reading list at the back--I've read them all except Trollope's Can You Forgive Her?, but it's been a while since Villette, so maybe I'll pick up both of those next time I'm at the bookstore. Which is going to be today. I want to buy Pen on Fire, too.

Saving Fish From Drowning

I loved loved loved this funny entertaining novel by Amy Tan narrated by a ghost who watches as her friends go on the trip to Burma she'd planned with them before her death. She goes too, and reports the action, but of course nobody knows she's there. I can't explain the plot any better than that but some of the themes are imperialism, money, politics, racism, reality t.v., oppression, art, relationships, nature, the rape of the natural world, and sex. And the voice of Bibi Chen is so funny. Ironic. Very, very cool. Loved this luscious book!

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