Broken (in the best possible way) by Jenny Lawon

Broken (in the best possible way) by Jenny Lawson

Read by Jenny Lawson

Published  April 2021 by Holt, Henry and Company, Inc

Source: audiobook checked out from my local library

Publisher's Summary:

As Jenny Lawson’s hundreds of thousands of fans know, she suffers from depression. In Broken, she explores her experimental treatment of transcranial magnetic stimulation with brutal honesty. But also with brutal humor. Jenny discusses the frustration of dealing with her insurance company in “An Open Letter to My Insurance Company,” which should be an anthem for anyone who has ever had to call their insurance company to try and get a claim covered. She tackles such timelessly debated questions as “How do dogs know they have penises?” We see how her vacuum cleaner almost set her house on fire, how she was attacked by three bears, business ideas she wants to pitch to Shark Tank, and why she can never go back to the post office. Of course, Jenny’s long-suffering husband Victor—the Ricky to Jenny’s Lucille Ball—is present throughout. 

A treat for Jenny Lawson’s already existing fans, and destined to convert new ones, Broken is a beacon of hope and a wellspring of laughter.

My Thoughts:

I love Jenny Lawson. I love her incredible sense of humor but even more her incredible honesty and openness. I love to listen to her books because she always reads them and I'm certain that they are just that much funnier, that much more thought provoking, and that much more empathetic. Although, I did just find out that the printed book has photos and drawings and I'm a little bummed to miss that. 

“The Bloggess writes stuff that actually is laugh out loud, but you know that really you shouldn’t be laughing and probably you’ll go to hell for laughing, so maybe you shouldn’t read it. That would be safer and wiser.” —Neil Gaiman

Lawson got her start writing a blog, called The Bloggess (hence the reason Gaiman referred to her as such), which is where I first discovered her. In her debut collection of stories, Let's Pretend This Never Happened, Lawson talked about her life, from her very unconventional childhood through becoming a parent. I have never laughed so hard when I read (listened) to a book.  Until now. One day, as I drove home from work listening to this book, I swear to you I actually guffawed. I was laughing so hard that I seriously considered pulling my car off the road. 

But things are not all funny. There's a full chapter that's a letter to an insurance company; to say that Lawson's troubles highlight the problem with our entire health care system is an understatement. Lawson has a lot of medical problems, from rheumatoid arthritis to anemias to inactive tuberculosis. And that doesn't take into account her mental health issues which include avoidant personality disorder, anxiety, ADD, and treatment resistant depression. Despite having insurance, she spends hundreds of dollars every month on medicines and treatments that her insurance will not cover but which work for her. Her quiet rage is entirely understandable. I'm certain her fearlessness in sharing her battles with all of this helps other people who face similar battles although she is quick to credit those how have shared, through comments on her blog, their own struggles, which led to her writing more openly about her issues. 

Lawson is probably not for everyone - she does curse quite a lot and reproductive body parts come into play frequently. But if you can handle that, and you don't mind chapters that often veer wildly off the original topic, I promise that you will laugh out loud (not just say "lol"), who will actually get some pretty good insights into what makes a marriage work, and, most importantly, you will get to hear from a woman who wants you to know that you are not alone. That's important to her because she needs readers to remind her that she is not alone either. We're all in this together. 

Life: It Goes On - July 6

Happy Tuesday! Because Sunday was busy and Monday was headache day. Did you all have a good holiday weekend? We went to Lincoln twice to see family, both Saturday and Sunday and got to spend time with my sister and her husband and The Big Guy's brother and his wife, and, of course, my dad. BG's brother and his wife have a condo in a building in downtown Lincoln that has a communal deck on the 11th floor. From there we could see fireworks for miles across Lincoln; the sound was deafening. It might be my new favorite way to watch fireworks, in no small part because I don't have to worry about fire and limbs while I'm watching. We ate so much of the traditional Fourth of July faves that we only needed two meals and still went to bed feeling like we'd eaten too much!

Last Week I: 

Listened To: My dad give his 45th speech at the 45th annual neighborhood Fourth of July breakfast. This year the focus of his speech was on how the 84 words near the beginning of the Declaration of Independence made it so much more than a mere declaration and how they changed the world. I may be biased but I'm always so impressed about how he finds new ways to teach his neighbors (and family).  

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government..."

Watched: We went to a movie, we went to a movie! The first movie BG and I have been to in more than a year and a half. We went to see Lin-Manuel Miranda's In The Heights, which we both very highly recommend. The cinematography, choreography, and singing are all terrific and we had fun finding people in the cast that we recognized from other things. 

Read: I haven't done much reading this past week. I'm plugging away at Twelve Patients but I'm eager to pick up something less weighty. My dad just loaned me Dennis Lehane's latest and I'm looking forward to picking it up soon.

Made: The traditional egg casserole for the Fourth of July breakfast and traditional red velvet cake for Fourth of July dinner. 

Enjoyed: See above and also an evening on friends' deck, catching up and decompressing. 

This Week I’m:  

Planning: I'm trying to decide which project to tackle next. I need to do some room painting but I'm not sure I'm up to tackling that big a project just now so I may focus on some smaller things, like a mini-makeover in my dining room or re-decorating the shelves in my family room. 

Thinking About: I learned a couple of weeks ago that a long-time friend has been diagnosed with lung cancer and last week found out that it is Stage 4. She is in my thoughts constantly. Yet more proof that life is not fair. 

Feeling: Relaxed. I took an extra day off to give myself a four-day weekend and I'm headed off shortly to have my hair done (and you know how much I love those two hours!). 

Looking forward to: We're hoping to be able to catch our nephew from California who will be in Lincoln. 

Question of the week: I grew up loving musicals and love them to this day. How do you feel about plays/movies where the characters break into song and dance?

Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh

Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh

Read by Sarah Smarsh

Published September 2018 by Scribner

Source: audiobook checked out from my local library

Publisher's Summary:

Sarah Smarsh was born a fifth generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side, and the product of generations of teen mothers on her maternal side. Through her experiences growing up on a farm thirty miles west of Wichita, we are given a unique and essential look into the lives of poor and working class Americans living in the heartland. 

During Sarah’s turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, she enjoyed the freedom of a country childhood, but observed the painful challenges of the poverty around her; untreated medical conditions for lack of insurance or consistent care, unsafe job conditions, abusive relationships, and limited resources and information that would provide for the upward mobility that is the American Dream. By telling the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves with clarity and precision but without judgement, Smarsh challenges us to look more closely at the class divide in our country.

My Thoughts:

I live in Nebraska. Sarah Smarsh grew up in Kansas. Right next to each other, both are considered agricultural states. But that's about as much as we have in common. When people disparaged my state, I was always quick to distant myself from the rural parts of the state. I grew up mostly in a city, middle-glass, stable and loved. Smarsh spent a lot of time on farms (being on a farm was all that kept her family from going hungry) growing up but she lived a lot of different places (she went to four different schools for kindergarten), the men in her life came and went and were often abusive, and her mom was distant. Still, Smarsh is so good at describing how her family lived and the way she grew up that it's easy to relate to her experiences. 

More importantly, Smarsh makes readers respect people like her family, people who work hard but can never pull themselves out of the hole of poverty. They are people who work jobs that don't provide insurance (even if they do, the price is too steep), who work dangerous or dirty jobs, whose schools don't necessarily have the same advantages as city schools. Children find themselves mired in histories of physical and substance abuse, teenage pregnancies, and absent parents. 

Smarsh shames those who harshly judge those mired in poverty, who treat the poor as though their lot is a choice they have made, a failure on their part. She points out the many, many ways the government, the banking industry, and businesses have pushed the poor further and further down. From the farm crises of the 1980's (her family didn't think much of those rich musicians performing in Farm Aid concerts, raising money that never made it into their empty pockets), Reaganomics (trickle down economics has never seemed to trickle down to the people who most need the help), and businesses that don't provide safe working conditions or a livable wage. 

Smarsh has written this book speaking to the child she never had, the child she never wanted or intended to have. It's a unique way to write a book but that child is what saved her. She named the child August before she was even old enough to know that name also meant venerable, respected, distinguished. In the beginning August was the "person" Smarsh could always talk to; then the "person" who drove her to fight for a better life; and, finally, the "person" she worked hard to avoid having so that she could finish school, attend college, and have that better life. 

This is one of those books everyone should read but it will especially ring true for those of us who live in middle of the country, in the bread basket of America, where schools are continually forced to consolidate, jobs are disappearing, and the family farm has all but disappeared. 

Happy Fourth of July!!!

 

Northernmost by Peter Geye

Northernmost by Peter Geye

Published August 2020 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Source: checked out from my local library

Publisher's Summary:

In 1897, Odd Einar Eide returns home from a near-death experience in the Arctic only to discover his own funeral underway. His wife, Inger, stunned to see him alive, is slow to warm back up to him, having spent many sleepless nights convinced she had lost both him and their daughter, Thea, who traveled to America two years earlier but has yet to send even a single letter back to them in Hammerfest, their small Norwegian town at the top of the earth.

More than a century later, Greta Nansen has finally begun to admit to herself that her marriage is over. Desperately unhappy and unfulfilled, she makes the decision to follow her husband from their home in Minnesota to Oslo, where he has traveled for work, to end it once and for all. But on impulse, she diverts her travels to Hammerfest: the town of her ancestors, the town where her great-great-grandmother Thea was born—and for some reason never returned to. Braiding together two remarkable stories of love and survival, Northernmost wades into the darkest recesses of the human heart and celebrates the remarkable ability of humans to endure nearly unimaginable trials.

My Thoughts:

Peter Geye quickly became one of my favorite authors when I read his debut work, Safe From The Sea; it was, by far and away my favorite book of 2011. In 2012, I read the first book in his Eide family series, The Lighthouse Road. The series continued in 2016 with Wintering. In Northernmost we have what would appear to be the end of the family's story, traveling back to the first Odd Einar Eide and the ordeal that made him a Norwegian folk hero. 

We sing of winter wonderlands but it's more often the harshest of environments and nobody captures that better than Peter Geye, both the brutality and the beauty of winter. He gives us the joy of a child laughing as snow flakes land on her face and her awe as a great lake freezes enough to walk out onto it. But we can also vividly hear the wind blowing through the gaps in a cabin's walls and understand how that unrelenting sound could make a person made. In Northernmost, we see winter in all of its forms - the tamed version where we have vehicles that are able to traverse easily along snowy roads and the untamed where Odd Einar fights for his life against both beast and nature above the Arctic Circle. 

Geye is equally as good writing about family relationships - between fathers and sons, fathers and daughters, husbands and wives, our ancestors and ourselves. His books are always an exploration of those relationships - Odd and Inger, Greta and Frans, Greta and her father, Gus - as well as our relationship with the family that came before us. His characters are almost always complex and interesting. 

Kirkus Reviews says that Geye's choice to pair Greta's quiet struggle to find happiness and her own life against Odd's fight for survival is chancy but that "Geye maintains an elegant counterpoint between the two narratives so that the novel is equally satisfying whether it’s situated in the past or present." I'm afraid I was not as equally satisfied. I was far more drawn to Odd and Inger's storyline than I was to Greta's, perhaps because I couldn't summon empathy for Greta. She had married a man she wasn't sure she loved and stayed with him for 20 years; she was every bit as much to blame for the failure of their marriage as her husband. And Stig, the man Greta falls for when she travels to Norway felt too much like a set piece. 

I can't tell you how much this disappointed me because I had such high hopes for this book. Even a lesser book by Geye still has a lot to offer, though. His writing here is often poetic, there are some marvelous passages here and quotes to keep, and I love the way Geye uses words that challenge me (palimpsest, for example). Now I'll just look forward to Geye's next novel!