Life: It Goes On - June 12

Happy Sunday! It's been a quiet week at Casa Shep (we don't really call it that; I don't know why I wrote that!). Laundry is caught up, floors are clean, furniture is dusted, book reviews got written. We have had rain, rain and more rain this month and our lawn and plants are looking marvelous but also it's been dry enough most dinner times that we've been able to eat on the patio. You know how much I love being able to do that!

Last Week I: 

Listened To: I started Kindred by Octavia Butler. I'm not enjoying the reader much. I think I would be enjoying this one more in print. 

Watched: Hmm, it's been one of those weeks when The Big Guy has the t.v. on but I'm not actually watching it. I do have Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet on this morning. It's good, but I still prefer the Franco Zefferelli Romeo and Juliet, with the beautiful Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting. 

Read: I had to give up on Kate Folk's collection, Out There, because it was too appropriately titled for me. I'm now reading Jennifer McMahon's latest, The Children On The Hill. 

Made: Salads, so many salads. We needed a week of good eating to make up for last weekend. 

Enjoyed: My sister and her hubby stopped through on their way to her class reunion Thursday, unexpectedly. We had a lovely couple of hours eating pizza and talking on the patio before they got on the road for their final hour of travel. 

This Week I’m:  

Planning: We're cat sitting this week (unexpectedly), so my plans for this week have changed as I'll need to either spend time in the basement with my son's cat or supervising the two cats when his cat is out of the basement. Still putting together a game plan of what I can do while doing either of those things. 

Thinking About: The last time my brother was up, they brought up a cup shelf that has been in my family for a long time and I finally got it picked up from my dad's yesterday. Now I'm pondering where to put it - and whether or not I refinish it, paint it, or leave it as is. You'll know me well enough by know to know that last one probably won't be my choice! 

Feeling: A little nervous. We have a new person starting at work tomorrow, who I'll be in charge of and will have to train. She may be less nervous about starting a new job than I am about having to get to know her!

Looking forward to: A trip to see my brother and his family. Let's be honest, I'm most excited to see his grandchildren and to meet my great-nephew who just turned one. 

Question of the week: I like my Sundays to be low-key productive with lots of time for relaxing before the coming week. How about you? Do you try to pack a lot into your entire weekend, make one day more productive and one more relaxing, or have you found the way to take it easy for an entire weekend?

The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan

The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan

336 pages

Published January 2022 by Simon and Shuster

Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary:

Frida Liu is struggling. She doesn’t have a career worthy of her Chinese immigrant parents’ sacrifices. She can’t persuade her husband, Gust, to give up his wellness-obsessed younger mistress. Only with Harriet, their cherubic daughter, does Frida finally attain the perfection expected of her. Harriet may be all she has, but she is just enough.

Until Frida has a very bad day.

The state has its eyes on mothers like Frida. The ones who check their phones, letting their children get injured on the playground; who let their children walk home alone. Because of one moment of poor judgment, a host of government officials will now determine if Frida is a candidate for a Big Brother-like institution that measures the success or failure of a mother’s devotion.

Faced with the possibility of losing Harriet, Frida must prove that a bad mother can be redeemed. That she can learn to be good.

A searing page-turner that is also a transgressive novel of ideas about the perils of “perfect” upper-middle class parenting; the violence enacted upon women by both the state and, at times, one another; the systems that separate families; and the boundlessness of love, The School for Good Mothers introduces, in Frida, an everywoman for the ages. Using dark wit to explore the pains and joys of the deepest ties that bind us, Chan has written a modern literary classic.

My Thoughts:

A great example of a book that you finish reading a have no idea how to feel about it. I can't say that I liked it. I'm not sure that any one would be able to say that; it's not that kind of book. The New York Times review called it "frustratingly timely." Vogue had this to say: 

“The School for Good Mothers picks up the mantle of writers like Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro, with their skin-crawling themes of surveillance, control, and technology; but it also stands on its own as a remarkable, propulsive novel. At a moment when state control over women’s bodies (and autonomy) feels ever more chilling, the book feels horrifyingly unbelievable and eerily prescient all at once.”

It will also make you think about what goes through your mind every time you hear news about a parent like Frida. You know when you hear stories about parents doing what Frida did, you instantly label them as "bad parents." We have very little empathy for a parent who has become overwhelmed and done a bad thing, made a bad choice. "Why didn't they ask for help?" "They have no business having children if they don't know any better than that." 

Then there are the kinds of things we so often say about our justice system. "Why do we just incarcerate people? Why don't we rehabilitate them, teach them how to do better?" That's just what happens to Frida - the state decides they will teach Frida how to be a better parent, a good mother. But it's coming from a place of thinking of all of the parents as inherently bad, essentially unredeemable even with training. And that there is only one "right" way to become better, to prove that you've been rehabilitated. Which is also a thing our justice system does. Which is the way all of us are prone to feeling, if we're being honest. 

Here the state determines, after only one brief visit with Frida and her daughter, that her daughter should be taken away and that Frida should be committed, for a year, to a new rehabilitation program for parents. At the school, each parent will be given a robotic child, which vaguely resembles their own child, and taught how to properly care for children using the dolls. Except it's almost impossible to satisfy the instructors, especially given that the robot children don't react exactly the same way that real children would, that they aren't children who already know this person. The women are repeatedly told they are bad parents, regularly have their weekly calls to their real children withheld for weeks and months on end, and are held to standards none of us could meet. Here again, there are often lessons that seem, on the surface, to be well intentioned. But the way the lessons are taught, the insistence that success can only be measured in one way, that if you can't get your "child" to react in the way that the instructors have deemed "right," then you are a failure. 

It's relentlessly frustrating and depressing and you find yourself feeling sorry for even the women who truly committed heinous crimes against their children when the other side is a state which seems bent on making the parents jump through hoops - while their on fire - ten feet off the ground - and six inches in diameter. There is no hope for these women. 

And then they meet the fathers. Who are held to entirely different standards. 

The School for Good Mothers is like nothing I've ever read before, nothing like what I was expecting. It was a struggle for me to read but also a book that has me thinking. About the way we judge parents, the standards we hold them to, and the lack of real help we offer them. 

An Education by Lynn Barber

An Education: My Life Would Have Turned Out Differently If I Had Just Said No   by Lynn Barber

Read by Carolyn Seymour

4 hours, 45 minutes

Published 2009 by Penguin 

Publisher's Summary: 

When Lynn Barber was sixteen, a stranger in a maroon sports car pulled up beside her as she was on her way home from school and offered her a ride. It was the beginning of a long journey from innocence to a precocious experience-an affair with an older man that would change her life. Barber's seducer left her with a taste for luxury hotels, posh restaurants and trips abroad-expensive habits that she managed to support in later life as a successful London journalist whose barbed interviews both terrorized and fascinated her smart-set subjects. 

A poignant, shockingly candid account of the stages in a literary life-from promiscuity at Oxford to a stint at Penthouse to a complex marriage that endured-An Education is a classic of English memoir.

My Thoughts:

As I was looking for an available audiobook about an author, I came across An Education. I'd seen the movie adaptation, starring Carey Mulligan and Peter Skarsgard but was unaware that it was adapted from a book (despite the fact that Nick Hornby was nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay). I'd enjoyed the movie and thought I'd give the book a shot. 

I surprised to find the movie is, in fact, only an adaptation of the first chapter of the book. This was initially disappointing. But Barber went on to lead quite an interesting life and I soon got over my disappointment. Barber studied at St. Anne's College, Oxford, there briefly dating a drug smuggler before meeting the man she would later marry. After graduating, desperate for work as a journalist (and money), she took a job as an editorial assistant at, of all places, Penthouse magazine, which was in its early days. I must admit to having an adverse reaction to her working for this kind of publication. But Barber defends the magazine as being much classier then other smut magazine and her work there as being great experience in all kinds of journalist jobs, including interviews, which became the kind of writing she was best known for as her career continued. 

Marriage and motherhood were an education for Barber, as well. She hadn't expected to be good at either, nor to enjoy them, and was surprised to be proven wrong. In 2003, her husband of 32 years died of cancer. This part of the book felt even more honest than the rest of the book with Barber admitting that she was not the kind of person cut out to care for a dying person. 

An interesting life, well told and well read. Even if it wasn't what I expected at all, I enjoyed it. 

Life: It Goes On - June 5

Happy Sunday! After hardly leaving the house for the past two years, we hopped in the car Thursday for a trip to Dallas for the wedding of the daughter of one of The Big Guy's oldest friends. Home now and exhausted from the two ten hour drives in four days. We packed so much into just a couple of days! 

Last Week I: 

Listened To: I finished People We Meet On Vacation and immediately took it off my book club's reading list. Just not enough to discuss in this one. On the road we listened to a lot of music and a couple of podcasts including an episode of Tooth and Claw, about a moose attack that made me even more grateful that Ms. S survived her recent encounter with a moose. Had I told you about that? 

Watched: When it was time to unwind or to get ready to head out this weekend, I watched several episodes of Gilded Age. 

Read: Anne Tyler's latest, French Braid, which I'm sorry to say I'm not enjoying all that much. 

Made: In my defense, we haven't been home for more than half the week and were using up things from the refrigerator before we left. So, yeah, nothing again this week. 

Enjoyed: Top row: a morning at the Dallas Museum of Art with our nephew, which included getting to see a collection which is a recreation of a home that originally belonged to Coco Chanel and which still included her furniture. Middle row: the Dallas Arboretum with our nephew and his wife - if you're ever in Dallas, I highly recommend it. Bottom row: lunch at my fave Dallas eatery (so far!), Rodeo Goat, The Big Guy all dolled up for the wedding and having fun at the reception. Not pictured, a trip to historic Grapevine and a tour of our nephew's and his wife's new home. 

This Week I’m:  

Planning: It's going to be a busy week at work this week so I anticipate bringing work home most nights which means that not much will get done around her but I do need to get some work done in the yard and gardens. 

Thinking About: Our friends who were meant to also go down to the wedding but couldn't go because she got CoVid. We've been looking forward to this for months and I'm, once again, so annoyed that we are still dealing with this virus. 

Feeling: Shocked by how well my leg/back held up with all of the walking I did this weekend. I think I've finally found the right combination of medication and it allowed me to get some exercise which, in turned, helped the leg feel better. I was even able to wear heels last night!

Looking forward to: Seeing my sister this weekend. 

Question of the week: If you've ever been to, or live in Dallas, what's your favorite thing to do there? 

We both feel like there are still a lot of things we'd like to do and see there and see another trip down in our future. 

The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee by Marja Mills

The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee by Marja Mills

Read by Amy Lynn Stewart

8 hours 11 minutes

Published July 2014 by The Penguin Press

Publisher's Summary: 

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is one of the best loved novels of the twentieth century. But for the last fifty years, the novel’s celebrated author, Harper Lee, has said almost nothing on the record. Journalists have trekked to her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, where Harper Lee, known to her friends as Nelle, has lived with her sister, Alice, for decades, trying and failing to get an interview with the author. But in 2001, the Lee sisters opened their door to Chicago Tribune journalist Marja Mills. It was the beginning of a long conversation—and a great friendship.

In 2004, with the Lees’ blessing, Mills moved into the house next door to the sisters. She spent the next eighteen months there, sharing coffee at McDonalds and trips to the Laundromat with Nelle, feeding the ducks and going out for catfish supper with the sisters, and exploring all over lower Alabama with the Lees’ inner circle of friends.

Nelle shared her love of history, literature, and the Southern way of life with Mills, as well as her keen sense of how journalism should be practiced. As the sisters decided to let Mills tell their story, Nelle helped make sure she was getting the story—and the South—right. Alice, the keeper of the Lee family history, shared the stories of their family.

The Mockingbird Next Door is the story of Mills’s friendship with the Lee sisters. It is a testament to the great intelligence, sharp wit, and tremendous storytelling power of these two women, especially that of Nelle.

Mills was given a rare opportunity to know Nelle Harper Lee, to be part of the Lees’ life in Alabama, and to hear them reflect on their upbringing, their corner of the Deep South, how To Kill a Mockingbird affected their lives, and why Nelle Harper Lee chose to never write another novel.

My Thoughts: 

I'm more than a little embarrassed to admit that I was sent this book in 2014 for review. I really, really wanted to read it then and was so excited to offered a copy. But I didn't have time when it arrived to read it so it went on the bookshelves where, as you may know, books go to die. I saw a meme today that read: "I haven't read the book, but I own a copy." So me. When I saw that my library had the audiobook, I knew it was time. Lest the publisher think I never even picked up the book that they had so kindly sent me, I made this one a read/listen combination. 

The year after this book was published, Harper Lee's original work, Go Set A Watchman, was published, with much controversy. A year later, Lee died. Three years later, I read Hillary Huber's Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud and the Last Trial of Harper Lee. Everyone of those events gave me new perspectives about Harper Lee and made reading this book now a completely different experience than it would have been had I read it eight years ago. 

The truth of the matter is that Alice opened her door to Mills; gradually Nelle came around to trust Mills as well. They were instrumental in getting the house next door for Mills when Mills needed to take a break from her reporting work. By this time, Mills was already "in" with the sisters and loved life in Monroeville. As a person with chronic disease, Mills lived a slower life that fit in perfectly with the Lee sisters' inner circle of elderly people. She became an important part of their group and incredibly close to the Lee sisters. 

The Washington Post review said that this book might have become "sycophantic" but didn't. True enough. But it can also hardly be said that Mills was entirely objective. She clearly adored these people and I can't imagine that she would have had it in her to disparage them. She doesn't entirely let Nelle off the hook, which made it all the easier for me to believe the rest of what she wrote about her. Having read those other works, I won't have been able to believe that she was just an eccentric old woman. Although she was that. 

This book makes Nelle Harper Lee human. She was a devoted sister, a woman who was lucky enough to have earned enough money to allow her to live life in a way that brought her pleasure, and, if you were lucky enough to be in her inner circle, someone that would have been fun to know. But she was also a woman who, once To Kill A Mockingbird was popular, could never fully live life entirely on her own terms. 

I'm sorry to the publisher for putting reading this book off for so long. But I'm glad that I read it after I'd read the other two works, which gave me enough background on Lee to make this feel like I was getting a finishing picture of her. The Mockingbird Next Door earned acclaim when it was published and deservedly so.