childhood memories

One Book a Week-49: “Anything Is Possible”, Elizabeth Strout

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Her books are deceptively simple with so much to say about people and life. This is the fourth book I have read of hers this year. It interweaves many of the characters in the books I previously read back to the towns where they were born and grew up. One part of the book discusses one family who were so poor the children dug food out of dumpsters and everyone made fun of them at school. Only one truly escapes and finds success. One lives a lonely life at the home place, and the other is filled with anger and resentment. Much of the book is about how even if persons escape a horribly poor and dysfunctional family and find success later in life, the terrible things that happen to them as children are always there lurking in the shadows. This includes a lot of resentment and anger from some family members who do not manage to escape. Other parts of the book detail the lengths to which people will go to find solace often secretly with few or no one having a clue about how their lives really are. How well can we really know another person?

One Book a Week-34: “If I Survive You”, Jonathan Escoffery

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

After reading about this book and its author in a recent issue of the Sunday “Los Angeles Times”, I saw it while wandering around the local library and checked it out. Although the author’s work has been published in various magazines, this is his first book.

This collection of short stories reads like a novel because the characters in the stories are either identical or related from Trelawny and his brother Delano to their ill-fated cousin, Cukie, all of whom are the descendants of Jamaican immigrants living in or near Miami, Florida. Sometimes excluded because they are Black, they face other challenges, e.g. Trelawny because people cannot figure out what he is ethnically or racially due to his complexion and hair, light and only somewhat curly. All struggle to discover who they are and where they belong, if anywhere.

While many of their experiences remain heart wrenching, Escoffery has the ability to also make their stories funny. I kept think of some works by Sherman Alexie whose stories are both horrifying and hilarious.

Note: The next three books will remain anonymous and no blogs about them because they are for a project and I cannot report about them. I will be blogging poems and essays about other topics.

One Book a Week-32: “gilead”, Marilynne Robinson

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

A theological treatise, a family history, and a love story, this winner of the Pulitzer Prize, left me wondering. It is nothing like any of the other books I’ve previously read. As a long letter from an aging preacher to his young son, it contains family stories of his pacifist preacher father and his violent preacher grandfather, an ardent abolitionist who knew and aided John Brown, theological religious analyses and musings, personal beliefs and doubts, and his own unlikely love story only found at the age of 67, and his views and feelings toward the Iowa prairie and the tiny town where he lives.

For a substantial portion of this letter, the narrator discusses the mixed feelings he holds toward his namesake, the wayward son of his best friend, another local preacher. In the paperback version I read, the first 215 pages continue, no breaks, no chapters. Then, suddenly, there is a blank page and the narrator relates some rather unexpected new information about his friend’s wayward son and his own reactions to this information. In the last two pages, the narrator discusses his love of the prairie and the town and why he never left.

I read several reviews on Amazon and find some do not really review the book but rather rant about their religious opposing views to what the narrator relates or criticize the style and subject matter with which they disagree. For me I can read a book and even though I may disagree with some of the material, if it is well written. Well, this novel is well written. The prose is lovely, often poetic, and some of the descriptions remain memorable. However, if you want a traditional plot, do not want to think about religious views and philosophies, then this novel is not for you.

One Book A Week-27: “Lucy By The Sea”, Elizabeth Strout

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

A short, honest, realistic view of life, this book by Strout, written from the viewpoint of Lucy
Barton, continues the story started in her book, “Oh, William”, where Lucy and her ex, William, go to Maine to seek out his long lost sister whom he did not know existed until he took a DNA test. Once again they head to Maine, but for a much more stressful reason, the Covid pandemic. They both live separately in NYC where Covid hit early and hard. After accurately assessing the danger, William finds a large, old house to rent on the Maine coast and convinces Lucy to go with him there to save their lives. He convinces one daughter to leave NYC but the other insists on staying.

The book addresses the issues of isolation brought on by the pandemic and how people deal with stress and isolation differently and with the difficulties which arise when once close families can no longer see each other. It also shows that isolation can bring the positives that can be found in a more quiet life. Strout’s uniquely simple style emphasizes the emotions and stresses as well as the joys life can bring to all of us.

One Book a Week-26: “Holding Fire: A Reckoning With The American West”, Bryce Andrews

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

If you LOVE the West, but sometimes struggle with its violent history, this is the memoir for you. Here is a quote from page 178: “I’m embarrassed at how long it has taken me to notice that a rancher’s view of the natural world is blindered in comparison to the hunter’s perspective; that driving livestock from one field to another is nothing like stalking free-ranging herds; that finding, gathering, and preparing a hundred different wild plants bears no resemblance to growing alfalfa or oats…”

Andrews also discusses the difference between sustainability and reciprocity. Before reading the book, I had never thought about this. He notes that sustainability is taking without damaging. Reciprocity entails giving back, e.g. nature, asking, “What can I give back? What can I do to take care of this place that feeds and shelters me?” This is quite different from “How much can I sustainably take?”

Andrews grew up in the West. However, after cowboying on several ranches in Montana, hunting annually, and later inheriting his grandfather’s Smith and Wesson revolver, he begins to question the gun violence and destructiveness of Western culture. This book details his journey. He continues to live on a farm in the Montana mountains, slowly transforming the land to make it profitable but also a place for nature, for wildlife to prosper.

One Book A Week-25: “The Daughters of Madurai”, Rajasree Variyar

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

The first sentence of the book reads: “A girl is a burden. A girl is a curse.”

In India in early 1990s, Janani lives with her abusive mother-in-law and an alcoholic husband who is often absent, chauffeuring people here and there. Although she is allowed to keep daughter number one, the fate of the next daughters is death. She, who is Tamil lower caste, is lucky enough to work for the same higher caste family for whom her mother worked and with whom she spent most of her childhood. They treat her much better than her husband and mother-in-law who hate her for not bearing a boy baby.

The book goes back and forth between this time period and 2019 Australia where the fate of Indian girls and women is far different. The family returns to India for the funeral when the family patriarch dies. Those who know little about their family history learn some shocking revelations.

In the Afterward, the author discusses female infanticide. Although many educated families oppose it and national laws prohibit the practice, it remains so common in parts of rural India that in those places there is a shortage of women for marriage. As a consequence, men resort to kidnapping women from other areas.

I thought it would take me a while to read this 326 page novel. However, I became so engrossed, I finished it in two days while also engaging in several other activities.

Book a Week-20: “Sankofa”, Chibundu Onuzo

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

After her mother dies, Anna searches through her mother’s belongings and discovers a hidden diary written by the African father she never knew and about whom her white mother, who never married, told her nearly nothing. She travels to Scotland to have the diary authenticated by an expert, researches, and discovers her father had to return to Africa, became a revolutionary, and then president (or dictator, depending on the source) of a small African nation. She also learns that he is still alive.

Leaving behind a daughter and white husband from whom she is separated, Anna decides to travel to Africa to find her father. Treated unequally as a biracial child in England, in Africa she is seen as “obroni”, white. Thus, the book addresses issues of racial identity, family acceptance (she does find her father) and belonging, and tells a tale of the adventures of a middle-aged woman in search of self.

One Book a Week-15: “Oh, William”, Elizabeth Strout

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Told from the point of view of the main character, Lucy, in first person, the simple language the author uses as Lucy tells her story, reflections, and anecdotes belies the deep knowledge of marriage, parenthood, the entire human condition underlying this novel. Two once married individuals go on a trip to Maine to learn about a relative one did not even know he had until he received the results of a casual DNA test, a gift he did not originally take all that seriously. They’ve been married and then divorced for years and have two daughters together. In spite of their best efforts to the contrary, they remain connected even when they find each other a mystery.

A rather simple story, written in plain language, holds the following piece of wisdom–Lucy’s words which end the novel:

“Everybody in this whole wide world, we do not know anybody, not even ourselves!

Except a little tiny bit we do. But we are all mythologies, mysterious. We are all mysteries, is what I mean.

This may be the only thing in the world I know to be true.”

National Poetry Month-2: Butter Love

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Is it inherited?

Six year old me watched Grandmother

look around, take silver knife, cut into pale

yellow rectangular prism, plop a chunk into

her mouth, close her eyes,

smile.

In Aunt Julia’s presence, this never occurred,

Was it our shared secret,

Grandmother and me?

Yesterday, I told the cafeteria lady,

“Please bring me biscuits, extra butter.”

Less courageous than Grandmother,

I use blue corn pancakes, homemade bread, pasta,

excuses to eat butter, lots of golden, melted

butter.

Who eats butter on conchiglie?

I do, scooping out a tablespoon

from the butter bowl, watch it melt

in hot, drained Italian pasta from a

six-hundred-year-old monastery,

sprinkle on some sea salt, plop

a spoonful in my mouth, close my eyes,

smile.

Note: This poem is published in my book “You’re Gonna Eat That? Adventures with Food, Family, and Friends”. My grandmother, Mom’s mom, rarely smiled. When Mom went to the hospital to have my sister, the family story is that Grandmother fed me so many bread, butter, and sugar sandwiches, I became fat. I was two. I remember a mint patch in her backyard. She’d gather mint, boil water, and make mint tea with cream and sugar. I liked it. When Aunt Julia traveled out of town, I remember seeing Grandmother eat butter and smile. This is Grandmother’s wedding photo.