Book Review: I am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced by Nujood Ali with Delphine Minoui

Rating: B-/ Before I read this book, I knew nothing about Yemen, not even where on the map it was, and I didn’t have the foggiest idea of what life was like there. I learned from Nujood Ali’s memoir that Yemen is a Middle Eastern country with the very traditional values that often come hand-in-hand with Islam. In Yemen young girls are often married off at an extremely young age, and that’s what happened to Nujood, when her parents fell upon hard times and her father sold her into marriage to a grown man in order to scrounge up enough money to live on.

Book Review: A Mother’s Reckoning by Sue Klebold

Rating: B/ Reading A Mother’s Reckoning, I was reminded of a line in the novel Little Children by Tom Perrotta where May, the mother of a middle-aged child molester, knows on some level that her son is a monster, but she finds that she cannot flip the switch in her mind and stop loving him. Books don’t get more ripped from the headlines than this memoir by Sue Klebold, the mother of Dylan Klebold, one of the shooters at Columbine. As everybody who doesn’t live under a rock knows already, Columbine was one of the first large scale and highly publicized school shootings in the U.S.

Book Review: Finding Fish by Antwone Quenton Fisher

Rating: B+/ I watched the movie based on this story, Antwone Fisher, when I was twelve or thirteen, and even though maybe I was a little young for the film’s heavy themes, the plot stuck with me for years. I had the memoir on my shelf for years and had unsuccessfully tried to get through it once when one day I remembered it and impulsively decided to pick it up. It’s hard to call this an ‘inspirational’ story, because of the severity of abuse the author, Antwone Fisher, suffers as a child. However it’s a book that makes you think about the resilience of the human spirit, and it’s impossible to not a little in awe of Fisher. He’s had a fascinating life, and he seems to have bounced back from his abusive childhood with a great deal of candor and strength.

Book Review: January First by Michael Schofield

Rating: B-/ I feel weird criticizing this book. The author has obviously been to hell and back, so pointing out his shortcomings feels a bit like kicking a puppy. January First is the alternately powerful and frustrating true story of the writer’s five-year-old daughter’s horrific struggle with childhood Schizophrenia and her subsequent diagnosis and treatment. The little girl, January, initially seems to be hugely creative and imaginative, and has a host of imaginary friends at her disposal. Later her father Michael discovers that the ‘imaginary friends’ are in fact paranoid hallucinations who, although sometimes comforting, force January to act out violently against her parents and baby brother, Bodhi.

Book Review: Admit One- My Life in Film by Emmett James

Rating: C+/ For a book called Admit One: My Life in Film, this seems to be more about the ego trip of the author than loving the art  of cinema. Something about the author of this book just rubbed me the wrong way, I guess. You’d be forgiven for not having heard of Emmett James, since the pinnacle of his career seems to have been a bit part in Titanic. James recounts his childhood in Croydon, South London and his appearance on the movie scene, and the thing is, some of his stories are fun, entertaining and well worth telling. It’s not the stories that are the problem as much as James’ air of superiority and smugness.

Book Review: Lucky by Alice Sebold

Rating: A-/ Over the last few years, but particularly since Trump’s vile ‘grab ’em by the pussy’ comments recently resurfaced in the form of a viral video, sexual assault has been a commonly discussed topic in the American media. Most people would probably agree that it’s a subject that needs to be talked about, and incidents like Brock Turner’s trial have brought to life time and again the rampant issues concerning sexual violence against women and the justice system.

Book Review: Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

Rating: B+/ I’ve been having a creative dry spell lately, ever since I finished a novella I was writing and became completely stumped over what to work on next. My mom encouraged me to read this book, a copy of which she had bought me a couple of years ago and which has spent ever since just kind of gathering dust with all my hundreds of other books on the shelves in my room. I hadn’t read a book all the way through in several months, lacking the concentration and patience, but I completed this short, sweet bit of autobiographical non-fiction by one of my mom’s favorite authors within three days without hardly trying. I found it an easy and leisurely read, and in the end, I was glad I took the time with it.

The Film Club by David Gilmour

David Gilmour’s occasionally on-point, more often ever-so-slightly smug memoir is best when it focuses on the films he so clearly has a passion for. Gilmour’s rationale is dodgy (he lauds his own decision to let his fifteen-year-old son drop out of high school- but only if the boy watches three films with him a week) and he often comes off as a bit of a self-satisfied chode. The kid, a white boy rapping underachiever who doesn’t seem, in this reader’s opinion, to be the brightest light, emphatically needs all the education, public or not, he can get.

But most disturbing of all is the ugly chauvinism- the male entitlement and thinly veiled contempt for women, especially pretty women- that Gilmour seems to exhibit and passes down to his son. Early on, Gilmour desscribes his son, Jesse, leaving with a Vietnamese beauty with a barbed, and troubling metaphor- he compares the girl to a nice car that he hopes his son won’t scuff or scratch up.

However, when the memoir is all about movies, it’s magical. David Gilmour skillfully incorporates movie facts and anecdotes in his searing prose. I love movies, and never fail to be fascinated by the mechanics, the minutae, the curious hows and whys of them. But I simply didn’t care about Jesse’s teen drama, his adolescent angst, his drug and alcohol habit, his dating and relationship woes.

It was also puzzling and disturbing to me how the father constantly and unreservedly took his son’s side in these issues involving women- doesn’t he understand that relationships involve a constant give and take, that Jesse’s girlfriend Chloe might not of left him because she is a ‘bitch’ (he never directly uses this word to the best of my recollection, but, as they say, it’s right on the tip of his tongue,) but because she is unhappy in the relationship?

Did it ever occur to him that it’s none of Jesse’s business if she sleeps with another guy after she’s already told him, under no uncertain terms, that it is over? That she might not be a two-timing whore, but just human? Gilmour doesn’t says these things, mind you; it’s more what he doesn’t say that floors me. And although I’m sure Jesse’s old flame Rebecca Ng, a bona-fide drama queen, was a royal pain in the ass, do I believe she was the sly manipulative nymphet Gilmour describes her as? No, I don’t. Considering Gilmour’s impotent bitterness concerning the fairer sex, I think he’s the very incarnation of an unreliable narrator.

‘The Film Club’ is a book where the author isn’t a very nice person, which would be fine (writers don’t have to be,) but he’s also the subject, the focus of his self-involved one-man orchestration. And don’t tell me it’s about his son, because I don’t buy it. David Gilmour wants to be seen as the all-time cool dad, a kind of miracle worker for gangly underachieving kids. When the book is about David Gilmour watching movies, it’s sublime. But when it’s about David Gilmour and his self-satisfaction bordering on self-obsession concerning his peer-like relationship with his son, I found myself thoroughly unmoved, and moreover, unimpressed.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

Esteemed poet and memoirist Maya Angelou chronicles her life from lonely, isolated black girlhood to sexual awakening and teen motherhood in this sad, poetic true-life account. Little Maya never believed much in her own self-worth, and racism was as rampant in the small community of Stamps, Arkansas, that she lived in with her Grandmama and disabled Uncle Willie as the wrenching poverty of both blacks and whites. Her unwavering sense of fatalism  forced her into the belief that she would live a brief, harsh life of subjugation before dying in a crazy dramatic way (in this sense, she is more like the modern youngster than she might think.)

But Maya (AKA Marguerite) had a  way to escape her tough circumstances- her love of books and writing, which kept her spirit strong and her mind sharp in the face of myriad staggering adversities. Through prejudice, sexual abuse, and eventually teen pregnancy, Maya not only survived, but slowly developed her sense of self and the belief that she and the African-American race deserved better than what they had been given.

Good writing is a prerequisite in an autobiography, but it also helps to have an interesting story that will grab the reader’s interest. ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ has both. Angelou retreats so far into the mind of her younger self that the book seems free of Angelou’s adult beliefs and opinions. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out how she felt about a situation at the time she wrote the book. Maya Angelou has had a fascinating, though frequently tragic life, and the prose she incorporates into the book rolls off the tongue like sweet honey.

I found the author’s own personal feelings of self-hatred and worthlessness following her rape at age eight at the hands of her mother’s boyfriend particularly heart-wrenching. No one should ever have to feel guilty for a act of sexual violence done unto them. But I was thrilled when Mr. Freeman (the name of the bottom-feeding pederast in question) was rubbed out by Maya’s mafioso relatives. Sweet justice! Of course, it would have been better if the abuse hadn’t occurred at all, but the killing of the child rapist gave me pleasure in an mostly bleak and depressing book.

The racism portrayed within these pages is shocking (the white dentist achieving a particular low,) but it makes the reader think about how far we’ve come as a society. Nowadays if someone cared to indulge in a ‘jigaboo walks into a bar’ joke they would be greeted by most with moral outrage and unlaughing silence. Back then racism wasn’t just a mindset- it was a way of life. People had never considered that blacks could be anything more than their drastically inferior dark-skinned servants,  and in many places- including the South- thinking that there might be an alternative to prejudice and hate was all too much for these white hicks to take in.

The only thing I didn’t like about this book is that it ended far too abruptly. It concluded on a hopeful note, but at the same time it just kind of left me hanging. It’s funny, a lot of the behavior exhibited by Maya’s most well-regarded relatives would be considered child abuse by today’s standards.

She just kind of laughs countless whippings and frankly psychotic behavior (for instance her stuttering Uncle Willie  threatening to burn her and her brother Bailey on the stove) off, but nowadays that kind of acting out by unhinged grown-ups would now be followed by a visit by CPS. People talk about the ‘good old days,’ where kids were hard-working and respectful and everything was more wholesome, but were the old days really that great? This book, and others, answer my question with an emphatic no.

If you like kind of slow books that love each word onto paper, rather than simply writing them in the way of popular writers, you’ll adore Angelou’s precisely, and gorgeously written memoir. And, grim as it is, ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ is not without it’s humor. “Preach it, Brother Thomas!” In the wake of Maya Angelou’s death the world lost a great literary voice. She brings barbed honesty and haunting lyricism into what could have been a standard coming-of-age narrative.

The Tricky Part by Martin Moran

Memoirist Martin Moran has a skillful touch when it comes to prose, but “The Tricky Part” is so disturbing and sad that it will probably end up being a read-only-once book for most people. What makes “The Tricky Part” different from most sexual abuse stories that feature heavily in books and TV and get paraded around the media is Moran’s ambivalent feelings toward his molester. It also makes it a whole lot more interesting than the average pervs-messing-around-with-kids book.

When Martin was twelve, he was an eager-to-please, bright-eyed boy who had his whole life to discover sex and intimacy all in due time. His camp counselor, Bob, took all that away from him. And yet… and yet what? Martin fell for Bob. He was a quite willing participant in a ‘relationship’ (a love affair only in the loosest sense) that lasted several years. Of course a twelve-year-old child cannot consent to sex with a thirty-something-year-old-man, but Martin believed he had something special with his abuser. He loved him. He hated him. He was so fucking confused and he sook out his attention like a moth to the flame, even when it was destroying him.

He felt like Bob’s one and only, even when there was a harem of young boys slipping in and out of Bob’s designated love nests under Martin’s nose. After a fraught adulthood rife with dysfunction and sex addiction, Martin decided to seek out his abuser. This is his story. The first half of this book can be a little hard to read because of the graphic depiction of pedophilia, but it articulates 12-year-old Martin’s confusion and desperation well. This isn’t just a tawdry ripped-from-the-headlines abuse story, it strikes the reader as extremely brave and cathartic for Moran to write.

Moreover, it is interesting to see how Moran got a career in musical theater and came to balance his childhood Catholic beliefs with skepticism and new-age curiosity. Martin is an extremely interesting person, though you can tell he’s been through the ringer emotionally and sexually. You might not agree with everything he does (trying to fuck a fifteen-year-old boy in the men’s lavatory anyone?) and his continual dishonesty to his lover, Henry, is as heartbreaking as it is reprehensible (I’d be so done with him for cheating on me multiple times with guys he didn’t even like, let alone want an intimate relationship with; but Henry never seems to give up on Martin.)

However, you can’t help but feel for Martin. I don’t think his continual abuse at the hands of Bob is an excuse to cheat on his lover repeatedly, but it helps you understand the heartbreaking compulsion that overtakes him again and again. It’s like what Atticus FInch said in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” You step into someone’s shoes and walk around in them. Books help you do that, which is part of what is so great about them. You look at someone’s action from the outside (like Moran’s infidelity) and you go “wow, that’s dickish” but looking inside his mind by reading something he wrote helps you understand.

The second half of “The Tricky Part” is more about Moran’s therapy and gradual healing, which is easier to read psychologically but can get a little wordy in terms of mental health and dream analysis. Despite the transitions between Moran’s childhood and adulthood the two pieces of the book fit together pretty well. It will come as a relief to hear less about Bob in the later chapters. He is truly a monstrous human being.

This book will twist your gut. It will break your heart. It might even make you laugh sporadically. It will make you wish Martin had castrated his abuser for the emotional damage he eked out, rather than forgiving him his transgression. But bloody revenge, as good as it might feel at the time, does not salve the soul like forgiveness does. Forgiveness isn’t just ‘letting it go’ or ‘pretending it never happened.’ It’s healing. And Martin needed all the healing he could get. He couldn’t just be two broken halves of a whole his entire life.

“The Tricky Part” isn’t my favorite memoir, but it’s one of the rawest and most honest. Martin Moran lays bare his soul all to see. There’s nothing not brave about that. I recommend this book to those interested in the effects of childhood sexual abuse and readers of memoirs in general.