The Hunger Games and Philosophy is out this month. Contributors to the And Philosophy series (this is about the twenty-ninth volume) write accessible essays introducing basic philosophical concepts via popular culture.
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Review: Fall in Love Like a Romance Writer, by Amelia Grey
Fall in Love Like a Romance Writer was published in February 2011 by HCI, the publisher best known for the Chicken Soup for the Soul series. HCI has experimented with blurring the line between fiction and reality in its True Vows series, in which romance writers write biographies of real life ordinary couples. Only five True Vows were published, the last one a year ago, suggesting that the market for those books is nonexistent. I picked this one up because I was reviewing another, similar book, and I wanted to get a sense of what this mini-genre, the “romance self-help book” was like. Since it’s Valentie’s Day tomorrow, here’s a review.
Amelia Grey is a pseudonym for Gloria Dale Skinner.* It looks like her historical romances were published under the Skinner name throughout the 90s, and under the Grey name, by Sourcebooks Casablanca, in more recent times. I have not read any of her books. She asks in the intro, “What could be more fascinating, and more inspiring than to read about the true romances of some of America’s most beloved romance authors?”And she gathers over sixty romance writers to share their own love stories. The essays range from two pages to about seven, so they are short.
Alongside authors I’ve read such as Mary Balogh, Mary Jo Putney, Eloisa James, Rachel Gibson, Elizabeth Hoyt, Stephanie Bond, there are a whole bunch of authors I’ve never heard of. There are late career authors like Bertrice Small and Linda Lael Miller, and newer ones, like Nicola Cornick. Hanging around on the internet, it can sometimes feel like a very small circle of authors dominates discussion (Nora Roberts, Loretta Chase, Jennifer Crusie, etc.) so I was delighted Grey included so many authors. That said, there are no black romance authors, not one, in this collection. Jade Lee is the only nonwhite contributor. That is inexcusable. The author group is also heavily skewed towards writers of historical and contemporary: no PNR, erotic, or m/m authors appear (as far as I could tell). And, perhaps needless to say, not one of these stories is written from the point of view of a gay writer.
The title identifies Fall in Love Like a Romance Writer as an advice book, and it is indeed organized around seven “Secret Keys”, such as “Trust and Respect”, and “Humor.” Those make sense as ingredients in a lasting relationship. I’m not sure, however, how a reader is supposed to run with “Secret Key #2 : Moonstruck”, or “Secret Key #3: Inspiration”, getting moonstruck or being inspired not being things one actually does. Title and editorial organization aside, this really doesn’t read as a self-help book, and it worked better for me to ignore the advice and just enjoy the essays as abbreviated romantic biographies.
Some essays are very funny. Putney’s essay begins:
How can a couple keep things romantic? Well, a near death experience can help.
And this from Robyn Carr:
I do remember starting one Christmas letter with, “The children are trying to kill us. . . .” And there was this time a neighbor gave me a jar of chlorine “shock” for the pool and I lifted the lid and gave it a sniff—after which I keeled over and my husband had to call Poison Control to find out if I was going to expire. He kneeled over me and said that my nose and throat would be very sore for a hours, but I wasn’t in danger of dying. And he added, “But, you did kill a lot of perfectly good brain cells and will be dumb as a stump for a couple of weeks.”
One of the funniest essays was by Teresa Medeiros. In the early days, her boyfriend Mike gifted her with a short story. She writes:
Naturally, I did the only thing a woman could do under these touching circumstances—I took the story home and revised it.
I appreciated the authors’ modesty about their own expertise. They recognize the difference between fiction and reality, and generally resist being cast as sages. As Victoria Alexander wrote,
Because I write romance, I’m often asked for my advice about love and marriage. As a writer, I’m not sure my advice is valid. After all, I write fiction. I make it all up. But ask for advice based on my real-life relationship of more than thirty years and I can go on for hours.
And Amanda McCabe:
But when people ask me how to keep romance alive in real life—that’s not quite as clear and easy! I guess if I knew that answer, I could write self-help books as well as novels. . . .
Jo Ann Ferguson:
Across the crowded basement room with its beer-sticky floor, my gaze focused on a guy behind the bar. I always grin when I get to this part because if I put it in a novel, my editor would make me rewrite it. Yet as I looked across that crowded room, I knew he was the man I would marry.
Jane Porter’s funny account of falling in love with a surfer she interviewed for a book aside, this book is more about how a good relationship can contribute to writing good romance novels (really, success in one’s career), than the reverse. As Laura Lee Guhrke notes, in a theme many authors take up,
When you write romance, you have to put in the grand, sweeping gestures and the passionate declarations, but in real life, true love sneaks up on you, catches you when you’re not looking, and teaches you things you didn’t even know you needed to learn.
Eloisa James’s concluding comment encapsulates this view:
I’m tremendously lucky, and I like to make sure that my heroines are just as lucky as I am!
While Fall In Love Like a Romance Writer is inherently a celebration of the genre, it is not a defense of it, and there is a big difference. None of the essays insists on romance exceptionalism, the notion that writing or reading this particular kind of fiction makes someone uniquely good, extra happy, or specially knowledgeable about human relationships. I didn’t feel hammered over the head with life lessons, and Grey wisely allowed the writers to speak for themselves, appearing herself only at the beginning and end. The essays read more like invitations to think about love and romance.
There were also some genuinely moving essays. Although the essays are on the whole very positive, there is a whole segment on “Second Chances”, an open acknowledgement that through divorce or death, relationships — even good ones – end. Barbara Samuels’ account of finding love after her nineteen year marriage ended centers around a frigid, rainy foot race up Pikes Peak in Colorado. It was a standout. Some writers talk about the death of their children, or the joys and strains of having children with severe disabilities. From Pamela Morsi’s essay:
He had a wonderful deep voice, a very dry wit, and a deep love of his family, his friends, his fellow man. When he died after a long and exhausting illness, I felt both cheated out of our future together and grateful for the years we had.
Morsi’s essay, “Lightning Strikes Twice”, is about second chances. But Deb Stover’s is not a second chance story: it focuses very sweetly and sadly on the husband she loved and lost to cancer. Ditto for Cathy Maxwell.
This is from one of my favorite essays, “I Want Him”, by Kasey Michaels:
Do I believe in happy endings? No, I don’t.
…
You marry with stars in your eyes, we all do. Sometimes we’re lucky, sometimes we’re not. You have to bury your premature son. You pace the floor during your husband’s emergency surgery because his aorta is about to burst. You deal with cancer. You juggle kids, and aging parents, and bills—because this is real life. We all live it.
One nice thing about this collection is that many of the contributors are older. They’ve been married twenty, thirty, forty years. Perhaps it’s the wisdom that comes with age, but they are also willing to admit that sometimes they themselves have caused the bad things in their lives, through impulsivity, selfishness, or plain meanness. This is also a G rated book. Although many contributors refer to their mates as “sexy”, and mention the importance of sexual compatibility, there are no sex tips here. Bertrice Small’s comment that “We all want love. Love as opposed to just sex.” is typical. If you are a reader who wants folks to open the bedroom door, this is not the book for you.
Those looking for diverse lifestyles will not find them in this book. Almost all of the relationships in the book are very conventional heterosexual marriages. Susan Andersen writes…
[our] lifestyle that might not appeal to everyone, but it works for us. And that’s probably the secret to most workable marriages: they don’t have to be what anyone else considers viable.
I wish this had been taken more to heart by the editor of this book.
I’ve mentioned the essays I liked, but many seemed very carelessly thrown together. One would think that authors writing in their own voices would sound unique, but there was a numbing sameness to many of the essays, proving the point that fiction writers do not necessarily make great nonfiction writers. Often they read like a newspaper article on a relationship, nothing magical, just a recitation of facts. I imagined several of them had backburnered this for other kinds of writing and threw it together at the last minute. I think there were at least a dozen accounts of blind dates (blind dates must have been a lot more common back in the day), and in general there was a lot of repetition, making many of the essays just blend together. I had to put it down and read it over several weeks in order not to feel like I was reading the same essay over and over. Jill Marie Landis’ concluding lines are representative:
He’s such a head over heels romantic and so in love with me that he’s loved me through thin and thick. The feeling is mutual.
As are Kat Martin’s:
My husband and I have been married twenty-five years. We are still in love. But marriage is work. Keeping that in mind is another secret of a lasting relationship.
It’s not that I disagree with Landis or Martin; it’s just that this kind of truism, stated this way, is not interesting to read if it’s not wrapped in an interesting narrative. In short, this collection is a real mix of good and bad, as are most such collections.
I’ll leave you with this from Cathy Maxwell:
Sometimes souls collide; sometimes they willingly slip together; sometimes they linger only for a moment before moving on to love again. I may not understand how love is mastered, but I do know it is worth the risk.
*In the process of putting this review together, I noticed the book had only one positive review, from RD (Read Daily). It turns out that RD has pretty much only reviewed Amelia Grey’s books. In one case, a five star review for 2009′s A Duke to Die For, RD takes it upon herself to chastise the other, less stellar reviews. One reviewer observes, “Has anyone read the 5-star review on this book from RD/Read Daily? I’m pretty sure it’s the author herself and I just about peed myself laughing at the defensiveness… “. I have no idea what to make of that, but I know many readers care a lot about these things, so I leave it to you.
Review: Perfection: A Memoir of Betrayal and Renewal, by Julie Metz
I picked this one up in the Detroit airport on a whim. Perfection (2009, Hyperion Books, 344 pages) is a memoir about a freelance graphic designer and artist whose husband, Henry, drops dead at age forty-seven. The memoir begins grippingly with that tragic moment, and then takes us through the first six months of grief and healing, including a brief affair with a younger man in their circle of friends. It picks up steam when, six months later after Henry’s death, through gossip, friends, and an email trail, Metz discovers that Henry was having an affair with a close friend and fellow resident of the upscale Long Island suburb in which they reside. Worse, this woman’s six year old daughter was best friends with the author’s own little girl. In short order, Metz discovers at least five more affairs. She has to reevaluate her life and pick up the pieces, which includes tracking down and confronting the other women, conducting her own sexual and romantic experiments, and, eventually, moving back to the city.
This is a well-written and fairly compelling memoir. It served the purpose of getting me electronics-free through takeoffs and landings. Here’s the opening bit:
It happened like this: Henry’s footsteps on the old wooden floorboards. The toilet flushing. More footsteps, perhaps on the stairs. Silence. Then the thud.
I was working downstairs in my office on a bitterly cold Wednesday afternoon. My workspace was an enclosed sunporch off our living room, the small-paned windows on three sides framing a view of the snowy hills across the road. Wrapped in a shawl, wearing fuzzy socks on my chilled feet, I continued studying the project on my computer screen. I had been a graphic designer for nearly twenty years, a freelancer, specializing in cover designs for book publishers. Today’s project was a novel about hard-luck cowboys, due yesterday, as always. I stopped fiddling with type design possibilities as I glanced at the computer clock—in an hour I would have to make a dash out to the car to pick up our six-and a half-year-old daughter Liza just before school let out at 3:10. Henry had been sick in bed all morning. There would be the freezing cold wait and the daily social milling with the other mothers on the school playground, then the quick drive home to finish my work. I’d wear my new sheepskin coat today and feel guilty about its expense on a warmer day. On second thought, the distressed sans serif type worked better with the moody image of a cowboy leaning against a split rail fence.
Suddenly my brain rewound sharply.
It wasn’t a package dropped outside by the UPS guy.
My office phone rang. Instinctively, I answered. The photographer on the line asked me how I liked the images he had emailed.
It wasn’t the cats knocking groceries off the kitchen counter.
“I can’t talk now—something bad is happening.” I ended the call abruptly.
The rooms were silent as I ran up the stairs, calling for Henry. Two of our four cats skittered out of my way, their nails clawing the wooden treads. The bedroom was empty. I raced back down the stairs.
I found Henry on his back, spread-eagled on the kitchen floor, his head a few inches from the oven broiler.
So why didn’t I love this book? While I appreciated that Metz didn’t make her marriage seem perfect in order to highlight the tragedy of the loss or the shock of the discovery of his affairs, by the end, I had a portrait of such a vile man and an awful relationship that I couldn’t figure out why on earth she was, or ever had been, with this guy. He ignored and yelled at their kid, called her moody and neurotic and insisted she stay on drugs so she wouldn’t complain about him or their marriage, was basically unemployed (he blew through an advance he had to write a book on “umami”, or perfection), overspent, flirted outrageously, and was terminally pissy. Telling the reader over and over Henry was charming, a flirt, the life of the party, is not the same as actually showing it, and I could never see the attraction.
Memoirs don’t have to showcase bad things happening to good people, or chart the personal growth that results, but this is supposed to do both, and does neither. I developed expectations based on the title and blurbs, which were reinforced by the book club questions at the end of the book (as Metz says, “I hope it will provide comfort for those women who have experienced the intense shame and loss of infidelity. I hope my book can serve as a cautionary tale for younger women as they make partner choices.”). Yet, I found myself feeling very distant from the author, never getting a sense of who she really is.
I wondered how she could fall in love with this man, who first came on to her at a party while his girlfriend stood not ten feet away. While they dated, he had an affair with his massage therapist. I wondered how on earth this guy’s marital infidelities could have surprised her. During their marriage, he struck up intense friendships with single women he would fly thousands of miles visit. At one point, he met a very young stunner at a local party and hired her to be his “spiritual guide”. None of these rang alarm bells for Metz? Really? As for “Cathy”, the mother he was having an affair with, he’d go to her house when neither kid was there, just to “hang out”. The reader is also informed later that Metz herself had an affair with a married man prior to meeting Henry. Many of these revelations come late in the book. Certainly, if I had known all of this at the beginning, the “shock” of infidelity in the marriage would have been greatly lessened, and the narrative impact, such as it was, dulled.
Obviously, many women do get into bad relationships, but what I wanted more of was an answer to the question of what needs in Metz were met by Henry. Why did she stay married to someone whom she is sexually repelled by, and describes as “smarmy”. Inchoate gesturing to their young child really doesn’t cut it in this day and age, when divorce is as common and easy as pie. Even more to the point, what did she contribute to the failure of that marriage? What were her flaws? What did her claws sink into when she let them out? The reader gets a glimpse during an argument in which Metz remarks, “I don’t know what you do all day”, pointing out that she herself, as the breadwinner, doesn’t have time for gym visits and long lunches. Not in this memoir, but in an interview, I discovered that Henry’s one published book was actually about the “male pregnancy”, a memoir about Metz’s pregnancy with their daughter: he seemed to have more pregnancy symptoms than she did. In just how many ways did he depend on her? And how burdensome did that feel? And why? Exploring that kernel, perhaps of some hidden resentment and anger, might have revealed something really interesting about the love-hate relationship Metz seemed to have with Henry, but she doesn’t go there. Or anywhere interesting, really, when it comes to her own complicity and agency in the life she co-created with him.
Metz has said she called the book “perfection”, not only as a reference to the book project Henry was working on, but to highlight the ways women are coerced into portraying their lives as perfect, leading them to downplay or ignore the flaws. Yet, at the end I felt this was a book about other people’s flaws. So, while I turned the pages to see who Henry’s next affair was with (torrid emails with lines like “I love the fact that you love me so much and I love that fact that I love you so much. I love it when the both of us are able to express this love.” made for wince inducing but entertaining reading), whether there would be a showdown at the school parking lot, or whether the author’s next date would pan out, I can’t recommend this as a meditation on grief or marriage or infidelity. It’s much closer to People magazine than to Didion.
Review: This Won’t Hurt a Bit, by Michelle Au
This Won’t Hurt a Bit (and other white lies) (Grand Central Publishing, May 2011) is a memoir of Michelle Au’s medical school and residency years (pediatrics and then anesthesiology). I received my copy free from the publisher via Net Galley in exchange for writing this review. I’m considering adopting this book for my undergraduate bioethics course in the fall, which is comprised mostly of pre-med seniors. Au has gotten blurbs from some medical writers I admire, like Kevin Pho (Kevin MD) and Robert Coles, and nice advance praise from Kirkus (“An upbeat memoir ” written with “style and humor”) and Booklist (a “treasure of a medical memoir”), so I was looking forward to reading it. This review will be fairly critical, but it’s clear I am an outlier on this book, at least judging by early critical and audience reception.
Au, raised in New York City, is the daughter of two Chinese American physicians. She met her husband, Joe, a future oculoplastic surgeon, in medical school at Columbia, where she also did her residencies, first at Children’s Hospital of New York at Columbia and later anesthesiology at Millstein (NY Presbysterian — also Columbia).
Like Julie and Julia, this is a book based on years of Au’s blogging at The Underwear Drawer (named for the place she kept her journal). And it suffers the way so many of those books do. The immediacy, brevity, and audience connection of a blog post can make up for a lack of really strong writing, overarching themes, organization, or other literary type things you might hope for in a non-free book (this one is hardcover for $15.98 — list of $24.99– or digital for $11.99). Also, I think blog posts, because they are short and spaced apart in time, can be more artlessly and casually narcissistic than memoirs can be without grating on readers. Finally, I enjoy first person present tense in fiction, but in reading This Won’t Hurt a Bit, I found the present tense doesn’t work as well for a memoir. Unlike a fictional narrator, I know that Dr. Au exists in time and place, as an anesthesiologist in private practice, which contrasts jarringly with phrases like, “What is happening now is this: I am wearing a pair of too-large latex gloves” (the opening lines), or like “Being the medical neophyte I still am…”.
Au had a baby during residency (and was pregnant with a second when she graduated), and the book advertises itself as the rare medical memoir which addresses work/life balance. On the cover is a cute stuffed monkey in bandages, and the subtitle is “My Education in Medicine and Motherhood”. This attempt to market to working mothers explains in part the tendency of the blogging reviews to be from mommy book blogs (like Literary Mama (“a treat to read”), and also explains why Amazon notes that the customers who bought this book also bought Tina Fey’s Bossypants.
Marketing aside, I can’t imagine this book really appealing on a wide scale to working mothers. In fact, the book is focused much more heavily on the medical training than the subtitle suggests, and it’s a good thing, because Au’s writing on motherhood is not exactly groundbreaking. You would think that physicians are the only women who have demanding jobs which force them to make tough decisions about childbearing and childraising. She only gets six weeks maternity leave! She has to use her breastpump in the shower, because there are no lactation suites in her workplacel! She has to eat her Hot Pocket … cold! *eyeroll*
Reading the book, Au came across to me as a privileged woman who had no sense of this. That she is a very smart and capable person who was working tremendously hard, I have no doubt. But she was working hard at a profession she voluntarily chose, which would give her a career of tremendous social prestige and wealth, and which her privileged background helped her, in no small measure, to pursue.
For example, Au’s nanny, eschewing the incremental raise schedule she has apparently agreed on, decides to ask for a 50% raise without warning. The nanny digs in her heels, “despite being told that 50 percent of the net income of our household is already being diverted directly into her pocket (we actually show her our paystubs from the hospital)…”. Then she is fired. Now just consider this for a minute. The way the incident is described suggests that the amount of money the nanny deserves for this work, and the amount of money the nanny needs to live on, is completely and wholly determined by how much money her employers can part with. But maybe the nanny’s child or mother became ill. Maybe the nanny’s husband lost her job. We never know, because the nanny is a nonentity in this story, not identified even by race, age, or any other factor besides her gender. Au concludes, despite the fact that she is an employer who more than likely offers a low wage, no benefits and no job security, that “regardless of who is employing whom, any set of parents with full time inflexible jobs are essentially held hostage by those who are taking care of their children during the day.” Really? Only a person in a vacuum of privilege can possibly equate her own temporary inconvenience with the livelihood of a low wage worker.
When Au has a child, she describes herself as “turning into a hippie mom.” What this means, for her, is not anything interestingly thoughtful, but that her own son is “too perfect” for circumcision and that she is too tired from her job as a doctor to not co-sleep. Um, I don’t think “hippie mom” means what she think it means.
Au’s chapter on working in the pediatric emergency room is a diatribe against the people who dare to show up without a reason she personally deems legit. To her credit, Au admits that “the Emergency Room is turning me into kind of an asshole.”
For every patient who has been dragged in by his parents for sneezing twice and not being able to finish his Whopper Jr.,…
6:00pm-11:00pm One of the busiest stretches, and also a peak time for people to bring their children into the ER for seemingly no good reason whatsoever. “Hey kids, we’ve all had dinner, we’re all still awake, what you say we take a big family trip down to the Emergency Room and check out what’s playing on that little TV they have out in the waiting room?”
Au vilifies a parent who does not know what medicine she is giving her child, and a host of other patients, without once considering how they got to this place of ignorance or bad choices. She concludes, bitterly, that “parents are idiots.” But wait, when her doctor friend has a child, Au delightedly reports Ms. Female Physician’s ignorance of how to care for her newborn (“Should she just … pour water on him? Dunk him into the water like a teabag? What kind of soap should she use? Towel or blow-dryer? … Baby bathing was not covered on the Board Exam!”). I guess when you don’t know how to parent because you were too busy becoming a doctor, it’s ok.
In fairness, Au recognizes, after having her own child, that her attitude towards her ER patients was one of hubris, but never at any point in the book do I get the sense that she thinks about medicine as a social practice in a society stratified by a lot of things, many of them kind of unfair. Actually, there is one brief reference to feminism when Au gets a fellowship at Columbia in anesthesiology at the same time her husband gets one at Emory. What might be a prompt for some real reflection on gender and managing parenting in a demanding field is completely skirted when she says “really, in the end, there is never any question, and it amounts to not so much of a subversion of my own plans as a global plan for our family and what is best for all of us.” But it’s not obvious to this reader, anyway, why”there was never any question.”
When a colleague smirks that “all the jobs in medicine are daddy jobs”, she has a momentary flash of irritation, but then wonders, “really, why am I even offended? Isn’t it true?” And then she refers to herself as a bad employment bet: “I have to wonder, would anyone dare to offer me, a female physician in her childbearing years, a job at all.” I think exploring these issues might have made for a very interesting read, especially for women med (and pre-med) students.
This book might be useful reading for students looking for a first person account of medical school and beyond. Au is very forthright about her nervousness and sharp learning curve. Au has said in interviews that she hoped for an upbeat but not a naive portrait, and I think she has succeeded there.
If I were to assign this, I would absolutely have to fill in some blanks. For one thing, Au’s references to nurses come in two varieties: (1) mute helpmeets, or (2) bitches on wheels. To take one example, you would think Au was the only one on the code team, the way she describes the codes. But nurses are an integral part of responding to codes, as are other staff. In some scenes you would think there were two anesthesiologists and them alone taking care of a patient. She never mentions hospitalists, and barely mentions critical care doctors. And finally, I am quite sure every Columbia facility has, or has access to, a cracking good ethics consult service, but you would think from reading this book that there is no support for doctors, patients or families when it comes to difficult ethical issues that arise in practice.
For those not in the medical field, there are a handful of vignettes which are very worth reading: her account of being in a Manhattan hospital during the events of 9-11, her account of declaring a patient dead, and then having to de-declare, her account of having to go ahead with aggressive treatment when part of the family and the staff disagree, to name three examples. It’s a quick read, and not badly written. If medical memoirs are your thing, you might give it a try.
