Dawn's Reading Blog

The title – Darkness Visible : A Memoir of Madness – makes this book sound a lot more interesting than it is. The two books I’ve read by Styron before (Shopie’s Choice and The Confessions of Nat Turner) were wonderful, but it seems Styron does a better job imagining how his characters might feel than relaying how he himself actually felt.

The book is short and flat. It describes, with surprisingly little detail, a period of depression in his life from which he recovered. Although he tells us that this depression was horrifyingly painful and debilitating, he’s only telling us that. We don’t see it or feel it. A talented auto-biographer could make shopping for a pair of shoes more suspenseful and absorbing than this was. It was a disappointment.

Who reviews these things on Amazon? Do you think they’ve actually read the book?

I don’t know Rick Steves. I’ve never seen his TV show, taken one of his tours, or used one of his guidebooks. Perhaps if I had I’d have found his Postcards from Europe more interesting. The book follows him on a whirlwind tour of Europe, revisiting many of the places he takes his tour groups or has written about in his guidebooks. The trip is so quick (no more than two days in any city) that we don’t really learn anything about the places he visits.

In his defense, the book is supposed to be more about people than about places. But it fails on that level too. Conversations that clearly never happened are repeated to illustrate various cultural stereotypes: Italians talk with their hands and ogle women; the French don’t shower and are rude; Americans are in a hurry and expect modern conveniences; Even if these sterotypes are true, they’re nothing new.

The most interesting parts of the book are his recollections of past trips and the stories about how he got into the travel business. The older stories have the ring of truth and the adventures he recounts are spontaneous, not planned for the purpose of retelling.

At the end of the book he acknowledges that the conversations are fictionalized and that the trip didn’t really happen that way, that it was really three trips he’s strung together. The revelation is hardly a surprise. The book reads that way. I think it’s a mistake to take a trip just so you can write a book about it. You can’t force interesting conversations and experiences. First you should have the interesting conversations and experiences and then you should look back on them and say, “hey, that would make a good book” and then maybe you’d have a good book.

The irony is that Fat Girl made me hungry and Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia made me feel ashamed to eat

Judith Moore’s unhealthy relationship with food is so lovingly recounted that it can’t help but make you crave the very foods that made her fat. “I’d like some of that,” you think, as she stuffs herself in misery, somewhat missing the point which is not the food but the misery.

I’ve never been severely overweight. I was looking for a book to help me understand how it feels, but this book concentrates more on why and how she developed a weight problem, rather than on what it’s like to live with one, although you do get snippets of that.

So Moore had an unhappy childhood. It’s a pretty sad story, but you can’t be sure that it contributes as much to her weight problem as she thinks it does. She eats a lot during the few periods when she’s happy too. She also has an obese father, which is just as likely to be the culprit in my opinion. Both genetics and the culture of eating to excess are passed down.

Marya Hornbacher doesn’t do any better a job explaining how exactly she came to develop bulimia. It started so early for her, it seems like she can barely remember a time before it. As though bulimia just happened. The transition from bulimia to anoxeria is far more clear because it was intentional. She saw anorexia as a higher plane.

She does such a good job explaining her thought processes that you almost buy into them. I’d feel ashamed about the cookies I was munching as I read about the cookies she refused to munch. I had the strangest feeling that she was right and I was wrong. Of course, it’s the middle ground that’s right: eat, but you don’t need so many cookies. That middle ground is hard to achieve, as both writers have shown.

How do you stop obessing about your weight without allowing it to get out of control. And even then, they don’t stop obsessing. Both Marya at the bottom of the scale and Judith at the top spend way too much time thinking about what they’re eating and how much they weigh.

And here I am in the middle and I do too sometimes. To stick in the middle you have to keep flirting with both ends. Sometimes I yell at myself for being fat and lazy and having a cookie, like Marya, and other times I comfort myself with food and reassure myself that eating is human nature and I can diet later like Judith. Sometimes I look at my butt and worry about the way it sags even though I’m at my target weight and sometimes I congratulate myself with a cookie for losing two pounds when there’s a lot more to go. So I’ve seen it both ways, though certainly not so extremely.

Both interesting books, both well written, and a good combo read.

Smashed got a bit dull. While your own drunken exploits are always pretty entertaining, other people’s are less so. Koren started drinking young, for sure, and continued drinking so steadily it’s hard to imagine how she made it to adulthood in one piece (and with her virginity in tact until mid-college). It’s just not that interesting to read after a while. There she is, drunk again. Frankly, I think a lot of people have had more interesting adventures while drunk than she did.

Although she quits drinking in the end, she never does admit to alcoholism. She just drank too much. Which is different. Somehow. So the book doesn’t even serve as a good introspective look into how an alcoholic develops. It’s nothing more than the story of a safe and spoiled girl from a well off family who carries on binge drinking beyond her college years.

When I saw the movie it was by accident. I’m not a movie watcher generally but I was in a hotel with free HBO and wanted something to fall asleep to. Instead I was wide awake for the next two hours, riveted and sickened. In fact, I was wide awake for weeks afterwards. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything that made me feel so queasy about being human – the kinds of things we can do to each other – and at the same time how lucky I am to be safe and warm and not starving on a daily basis.

The book wasn’t as riveting, being told rather factually. Plus, you couldn’t hear him play which was lovely when he played in the movie. It’s probably a book worth reading but I recommend the movie much more strongly.

A Bright Red Scream is a good overview of the topic of self-mutiliation but a little too text-booky for enjoyable rubber necking. I was hoping for a more intimate view of the actual people – how they got started down this path and whether or not they’re able to recover – and for less technical information.

The author does use real people as examples but she tends to summarize their stories, not to follow them in detail. There are several chapters which cover related physcological disorders, discussing similarities and common treatments, that barely touch on the subject of self-mutiliation at all.

As an outsider, I didn’t find this book to be a particularly interesting read or a good introduction the subject. It might be a good review for a friend or family member who wants to dive deeper into the topic.

Papillon is supposed to be a true story but if you believe it you’re a gullible idiot. No man was ever so loved, so capable, so selfless, wonderful, valiant, stalwart, loyal as Papillon. If it were sold as fiction it would be given the thumbs down for not having a believable main character. So why would we find him believable just because someone claims he really existed?

Reading this story made my brain hurt. If one more person had given Papillon his last dime, grandfather’s trusty revolver, or virgin daughter because Papillon is just that swell and inspiring, I’d have puked. I can’t dis-recommend this book enough.

Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You is an oddly poetic look at incest/abuse. The story is pretty riveting but I found myself wanting a more prosaic rendition. There were times when she would say something like “I stayed in bed for three weeks” where I couldn’t decide if she meant it figuratively or literally. And if she meant it literally, shouldn’t there be more to it? Part of the poignancy of her story is how everyone looked the other way, intentionally not seeing what should have been so obvious. But where are the details to help us see that? If she indeed spent three weeks in bed, what did people make of it? What excuse was given? I would have liked to have known more.

And after a bit, her style kind of grates. It’s all very floaty. She’s trying to convey some pretty down to earth information – that she was systematically abused for her entire childhood – and the result is that much of the information doesn’t actually get conveyed. Now, the unreality of what was happening to her, the defense mechanisms she used to avoid confronting it, that comes through pretty well, perhaps because she’s still avoiding confronting it by using intentional vagueness as a literary device.

This is not a review of what happened to her, only of how she has presented what happened to her in a book form.

Some might be tempted to blame her for not speaking up, but she does a good job of helping us understand why she never did. Her father’s absuse, starting at such an early age, and her mother’s apparent acceptance of that abuse, warped her ability to understand and reject what was happening to her. She didn’t have our conventional moral sense because she was never taught it. Throughout the book she reveals to us, as it’s revealed to her, her dawning realization that what she and her father do must be hidden, first, and must be unusual, second.

I wish the poetic passages had been mixed in with a little more prosaic detail, but maybe that just makes me a voyeur. I’m not talking about sex scenes. Actually, she gets pretty descriptive about what exactly he was making her do or doing to her here and there. I’m talking about the context of what was going on in her life and in the lives of those around her at the time. Some good old fashioned narration, in other words. 272 pages makes for a long poem.