Hemingway and The Paris Wife

May 18, 2013 By Valorie Grace Hallinan in Books, Novels, Travel Tags: A Farewell to Arms, Earnest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hadley Richardson, Key West, Paula McLain, The Great Gatsby, The Paris Wife, The Sun Also Rises 11 Comments

I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her. Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

I was prepared not to like The Paris Wife, Paula McLain’s novel about Ernest Hemingway’s first of four marriages, to Hadley Richardson, written from Hadley’s point of view. Generally, I don’t like novelized versions of real people’s lives. The author has to work doubly hard for me to wholeheartedly enter her fictional world, because I can’t forget we’re seeing actual events filtered through her idiosyncratic speculations, which could be way off base.

I read The Paris Wife back-to-back with Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (which I read years ago) because I thought it would be interesting to see portrayed, in The Paris Wife, the “real” people who were models for Hemingway’s characters in The Sun Also Rises. (I hope you can follow this.) These two books I read while spending a few days in Key West with my family and visiting Hemingway’s former home, now a museum.

I found The Sun Also Rises just as tedious as when I read it as a baffled teenager. Aimless, self-absorbed people endlessly drinking in European bars and cafes, and then they go to a bullfight. I half-wished Hemingway would kill off the insufferable former war-time nurse, Lady Brett Ashley, but I knew better. I had to laugh when a note left by a previous reader fluttered out from between the pages of my book: “Brett is a low-class whore.”

But this time, I tried to understand who these people were: the post World War I Lost Generation, stunned and alienated after the bloodiest war in history, surrounded by stratospheric, dissipated wealth alongside abject poverty. Despite my initial reservations, The Paris Wife was a good read and helped me see Hemingway and his first novel in a new light. Hemingway (and Jake Barnes, Hemingway’s alter ego in The Sun Also Rises) almost certainly had what we’d call today post-traumatic stress disorder. I hadn’t realized Hemingway was only 18 (about my son’s age) when he served as an ambulance driver in the war, saw horrific battles, and was seriously wounded. He then fell in love with a nurse a few years older than he (Catherine was her incarnation in A Farewell to Arms) who called off their marriage after she fell in love with an Italian officer.

This was Hemingway’s state of mind at 21 when he met Hadley, who was 28. I don’t mean to suggest his early adult experiences explain everything about Hemingway, because personalities and destinies are more complex than that. But Paula McLain is an excellent storyteller, and I trust her when she portrays a couple who were so right for each other at the time in their lives when they met, and then so wrong for each other a few years later, when both needed to move on.

(By the way, Paula lives in Cleveland, my hometown, and she wrote much of this book in a Starbucks there. Paula has also written a memoir about growing up in foster homes, Like Family: Growing Up in Other People’s Houses, which I look forward to reading.)

Here are some of my thoughts and impressions:

The Paris Wife didn’t fare well with many critics, but it is a bestseller. I think the more of a literary scholar and purist you are, the pickier you’ll be about how accurately McLain portrays motivations and personalities, how authentically and gracefully she finesses the dialog, and other matters. What I loved about her book was how richly she recreated the unconventional life led by an artistic, adventure-loving couple living in strange, unsettling times.
I appreciate the dynamic of the Hemingway-Hadley relationship McLain depicts. How the strong, self-effacing (and some would say stodgy and boring) Hadley appreciated, nurtured, and was subservient to the great artistic personality. But it wasn’t all one way. As Hadley wrote much later, Hemingway entered her life like an explosion and liberated her from what could have been a circumscribed, unrealized life. For a time, there was deep, genuine love between the two, and even though the marriage broke up, the trajectory of Hadley’s life was forever altered.
Marriages that end the way the first Hemingway marriage did are never pretty, but I think the ending of this marriage was especially nasty and torturous for Hadley. Pauline Pfeiffer, Vogue writer and wife #2, literally made my skin crawl. At the end of his life, Hemingway wrote an apology to Hadley, which he included in A Moveable Feast, a memoir in which he lovingly recalls his early years with Hadley. There has been more than one edition of A Moveable Feast, and I find it amusing that the edition published by one of the descendents of the Hemingway-Pfeiffer children removed the apology.

After Hemingway married Pauline, they moved to Key West. Visiting their former Spanish colonial home, I loved the wraparound balcony on the second floor and the tall, shuttered windows that let in the sea breezes, but there was an air of sadness and neglect about the place.

After his marriage to Pauline ended, Hemingway moved to Cuba, where he married journalist Martha Gellhorn. That marriage ended, too, and he spent his last years married to Mary Welsh in Idaho.

When my husband and son went snorkeling off the coast of Key West, their guide pointed out four posts several miles out. At one time, Hemingway’s “stilt” house, or fishing shack, sat atop these posts, where he’d spend days in solitude, writing. The writing life, Hemingway once wrote, is a lonely life.

Key West sunset

If you’ve read The Paris Wife and want to comment, or if you have thoughts about Ernest Hemingway, please add them to the comments below.

Tasting Home – Judith Newton on writing memoir

May 13, 2013 By Valorie Grace Hallinan in Books, Cooking, Creativity, Memoir, Nonfiction, Writing Tags: A Homemade Life, Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird, cooking, food, food memoir, Imaginative Writing, Janet Burroway, Judith Newton, Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate, memoir, MFK Fisher, Mollie Wizenberg, Tasting Home, The Gastronomical Me, Tristine Rainer, writing, Your Life as Story Leave a comment

I’ve been reading Judith Newton’s Tasting Home: Coming of Age in the Kitchen.

I was curious about how Judith so successfully conquered new territory by authoring a memoir, having spent her career writing for academic audiences. My background as a marketing communications writer has been both a help and a hindrance when it comes to memoir and other personally expressive writing.

If you are a writer who wants to try new forms or reach new audiences, you may find Judith’s insights helpful. And if you simply want to read more fine food memoir collections, Judith has some excellent suggestions.

In your acknowledgements you mention having to transition from writing academic texts to writing memoir. Can you comment about some of these challenges and how you overcame them?

When you write as an academic, you are writing defensively. It’s customary to begin a book by outlining the arguments of other works on the subject. You then situate your own argument in relation to those of other works and point out how your own says something better or new. You’re always aware of how others might criticize your argument and you’re careful to defend yourself against that. It’s a competitive culture and some people are downright mean.

Writing a memoir requires a different emotional orientation. The idea is to open yourself up, to share private stories with your public, and to engage with readers on an emotional level. I had to imagine a non-academic audience to write like that and, even then, writing the memoir sometimes felt like jumping into free fall off a cliff. Taking classes was helpful with this. I often imagined my audience as the other people in the class.

I did read other memoir writers. M.F.K. Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me was a big influence because it conveyed a great deal about the emotional hungers that are fed in cooking for, and dining with, others. Laura Esquivel’s novel Like Water for Chocolate implicitly connects food to politics, which is something I wanted to do. In Like Water cooking for, and eating with, others is what sustains women and men, physically, emotionally, spiritually, and politically as well. Mollie Wizenberg’s A Homemade Life, which, among other food memoirs, combines personal vignettes with recipes, supplied a model for the form.

I had to learn how to write differently as well. Although I made a habit of including personal stories in my academic writing, those stories were an addition to, or comment on, the argument I was advancing. I had to learn how to sustain a personal story for the length of a book, how to give it a narrative arc, how to write scenes, develop characters, write dialogue, use imagery and all the rest. I took classes to do this (at U.C. Extension and Osher Lifelong Learning), and I really believe in classes for the instruction and for the community they give you. I needed that community support. (I also loved being a student rather than the teacher!) I made a conscious decision to go into my classes feeling open to criticism because insightful criticism is a writer’s gold. I wanted to experience, in a full way, whatever the class brought.

I can remember feeling that Annie Lamott’s Bird by Bird was incredibly liberating and comforting. Two other really helpful books were Tristine Rainer’s Your Life as Story and Janet Burroway’s Imaginative Writing. I especially like Rainer’s book and think that people who write screenplays have a lot to teach us.

If there are food memoirs and cookbooks you’ve especially enjoyed, let us know in the comments below.

Judith Newton is Professor Emerita in Women and Gender Studies at U.C. Davis. While at U.C. Davis she directed the Women and Gender Studies program for eight years and the Consortium for Women and Research for four.

Tasting Home is the recipient of a 2013 Independent Publisher Book Award.

In addition to Tasting Home, Judith is the author and co-editor of five works of nonfiction on nineteenth-century British women writers, feminist criticism, women’s history, and men’s movements. Four of these were reprinted by Routledge and the University of Michigan Press in fall 2012. Currently she writes for The Huffington Post.

Tasting Home – Judith Newton on cooking, coming of age, feminism

May 10, 2013 By Valorie Grace Hallinan in Books, Cooking, Memoir, Movies, Nonfiction, Writing Tags: Belinda Robnett, cookbooks, cooking, Craig Claiborne, feminism, food memoir, James Baldwin, Janet Flammang, Judith Newton, Julia Child, Linda Joy Myers, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Moosewood Cookbook, Sarah Polley, Tasting Home, The New York Times Cookbook, The Stories We Tell, women's movement Leave a comment

“…cookbooks were more to me than a reflection of my past. They’d been agents of my recovery – from childhood misery, from profound self-loss, from my fear, even as an adult, that the world would never seem like home. I’d cooked from them to save my life, and I’d succeeded.”

In her newly published memoir, writer and historian Judith Newton looks at her own life and the culture of her time, from the 1940s to the 2000s. Along the way she writes of the cookbooks and cuisine that fed her in body and spirit.

I can’t say enough good things about Tasting Home: Coming of Age in the Kitchen - I just loved it. Judith writes of her difficult early childhood in Compton, California, of coming of age at Stanford and Berkeley in the 1960s, and of her beautiful and haunting relationship with her husband, Dick. I found Judith to be especially eloquent in describing her intellectual and spiritual awakening and continual growth.

As a young girl, I watched the 1960s unfold mostly on television and in newspapers and magazines. Reading Judith’s memoir, for me, was like hearing stories from an older sister who actually lived those events.

And the food! Judith includes childhood recipes inherited from her parents and the land they lived on (Death Valley Date Nut Bread, for example) and recipes from influential and groundbreaking cookbooks of the day, such as Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, et al., and The New York Times Cookbook by Craig Claiborne. (Moosewood Cookbook is another classic Judith knows well. See a previous post with an excerpt from Tasting Home.) Throughout her memoir, Judith speaks of the joy, fulfillment, and healing power of cooking and sharing meals with loved ones.

Here is part 1 of an interview with Judith. Watch for part 2 in my next post. Thank you for talking with me and sharing your thoughts with us, Judith!

When I read your comment about cookbooks being an agent of your recovery, I realized I view books and music in the same way. I’m sure many of your readers have had a beloved pastime that got them through tough times. Has reader response to Tasting Home borne this out? Did this theme resonate with those who supported you during the writing process?

Yes, it did! One woman in my writing group found release in jazz and in singing and dancing. Another reader, Linda Joy Myers, who is herself a memoirist, writes of how she was sustained by the warmth of a music teacher, by the beauty of music, art, and the Midwestern plains. Several of my old colleagues at Davis found refuge in cooking and understood very well how a kitchen table can lay the groundwork for political community.

How did you come to believe the personal affects the political and society?

My years of teaching women’s studies had made me aware that the private and public spheres are dependent on each other and that the personal always informs the political. Traditionally, for example, women have fed, cared for, educated, and humanized members of their household including men, children, and the old. This frequently invisible and unpaid labor is essential to having a society at all, and especially one that involves people working in cooperation with each other.

In writing a book that celebrates home cooking as a humanizing and healing kind of work, I think of myself as carrying on a feminist project—that of giving value to a traditionally female, often unseen, but essential form of labor, one that the political scientist Janet Flammang, in her book A Taste for Civilization, calls a preparation for civil society itself.

Another feminist project has been to show how political movements also depend on a kind of emotion work. The sociologist Belinda Robnett, for example, in her book How Long? How Long? African American Women and the Struggle for Civil Rights, writes about how African American women worked behind the scenes during the Civil Rights Movement, meeting ordinary people, listening to their needs, and building face to face relations of friendship and trust. This emotion work was critical to the success of building a grassroots movement, and is critical to the success of present-day coalition as well. By demonstrating how cooking can bring people into connection with each other, not just in a domestic setting but in a political group as well, Tasting Home continues this project of linking the political to the personal and emotional.

Do you feel this healing through cooking helped you make a more meaningful contribution through your work?

Absolutely! I learned from reading James Baldwin in 1963, the year I joined the Civil Rights Movement, that a committed political life could and should involve “sensuality.” “To be sensual,” Baldwin wrote, “is to respect and rejoice in the force of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.”

For me sensuality and joy in life were primarily expressed in food. Being able to access this joy in a daily way kept me going in every facet of my life and work, making it possible for me to retain the optimism that has informed my politics and my writing. If I didn’t feel that optimism, I wouldn’t write at all.

Tasting Home is the recipient of a 2013 Independent Publisher Book Award.

In addition to Tasting Home, she is also the author and co-editor of five works of nonfiction on nineteenth-century British women writers, feminist criticism, women’s history, and men’s movements. Four of these were reprinted by Routledge and the University of Michigan Press in fall 2012. Currently, she writes for The Huffington Post.

The Stories We Tell

Speaking of memoir, this just-released family documentary directed by Sarah Polley looks so tantalizing, and it’s gotten rave reviews. There are a few trailers floating around but I like this one the best: The Stories We Tell.

Five favorite books and blogs

April 14, 2013 By Valorie Grace Hallinan in Books, Novels, Nature, Mental Illness Tags: books, schizophrenia, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Wally Lamb, Kent Haruf, Kazuo Ishiguro, David Copperfield, When We Were Orphans, Jane Eyre, Plainsong, Eventide, Benediction, We Are Water, I Know This Much Is True, blogs 5 Comments

Many thanks to Claire McAlpine, who tagged me in a Five Favorite Books challenge, which I’m to pass on to five other bloggers. Here goes, but before you read on, be sure to visit Claire’s delightful blog, Word by Word. Claire, who lives and works in the south of France, is a prolific, passionate reader who never fails to inspire me when I’m wondering which book to read next.

Of course, it’s impossible for me to name my five favorite books of all time, so here are five books I love that happened to come to mind as I sat down to write this:

I Know This Much Is True, by Wally Lamb. I’ve read all of Lamb’s novels, but my favorite is I Know This Much Is True, about twin brothers, one with schizophrenia. Dominick Birdsey is an unforgettable character, and so is his brother, Thomas, who battles the demons of serious mental illness. My mother had schizophrenia, so for me this book is especially meaningful. Lamb’s portrayal of the illness is spot on. I Know This Much Is True blends comedy and tragedy as Dominick soldiers on in the difficult odyssey that is his life, the kind of real-life struggles we can all identify with. You just won’t want to stop rooting for Dominick, and I, for one, couldn’t stop reading until I found out whether he would end up with the love of his life. I was taken with the darkly comic opening involving a librarian who has an especially trying day. (I read this before I knew I was going to become a librarian.) Check out Wally Lamb on Facebook. He’s a generous, down-to-earth author who loves talking with his readers.

In October, 2013, Lamb will publish his newest novel, We Are Water. In this video, Wally Lamb tells how We Are Water came about. Listening to his story will make you want to get the book, which I’ll be writing about in a future post.

Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte. I’m a romantic, partial to female gothics, and there is the undercurrent of madness, which “transfixes” me (as Mr. Rochester would say). I read this in high school and have been fascinated and mystified by it ever since. Has anyone seen the most recent movie incarnation? I thought Mia Wasikowska and Amelia Clarkson (young Jane) were fabulous. And Judi Dench, of course.

When We Were Orphans, by Kazuo Ishiguro. When I was looking for a hyperlink to When We Were Orphans, I was surprised Wikipedia authors say it is regarded by some as Ishiguro’s weakest book. I don’t see that at all. For me, it eloquently captures childhood loss and its lifelong consequences, and there’s also the fascination of Ishiguro’s typically unreliable, self-deluded narrator. Except in this case I think the narrator comes to a sad, more realistic understanding of himself and the world. I’ll say no more since I’d like to write further about this book in the future.

Plainsong, by Kent Haruf. I loved visiting this small Colorado town and meeting the simple, kind, and decent people there. It does my heart good to know there are writers like Haruf creating fictional worlds like this one. I was swept away by Plainsong and the sequel, Eventide. Haruf makes writing look easy, but this sort of simplicity isn’t easy at all. I’ve not had the pleasure of reading his newest book, Benediction. Can’t wait. I’ll be sure to write about it here.

David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens. I read this in high school, too, and haven’t read it since then, so I want to revisit it sometime soon. Another deprived childhood story. (Do you see a trend here?) After I read David Copperfield I felt I’d lived an entire life. This is a great book to read when you are young and just starting out, and then at least once again when you’re looking back. I believe there was a PBS version that aired in the dark ages when I was reading the novel. It, too, was wonderful.

And here are five blogs I really like:

A Leaf in Springtime Sheer exuberance in writing and photography, by Sharon, who is Chinese (born in Malaysia) and now living in Finland.

The Hiker Mama I love the Pacific Northwest, and I wish this blog had been around when we were hiking with our sons. Jennifer and I had the pleasure of taking a class together taught by Christina Katz.

Fine Little Day Because I’m half Swedish and I love fabrics and country houses and all sorts of things.

66 Square Feet A garden, seasonal living and cooking in New York City, by Marie Viljoen. Just beautiful, reminds me of my big city days.

Flowery Prose Plants, veggies, flowers, gardens, the outdoors, and lots of fascinating information about all of these.

Still reading Barry Lopez

April 6, 2013 By Valorie Grace Hallinan in Books, Essays, Memoir, Nature, Nonfiction, Travel, Writing Tags: About This Life, anagama, Barry Lopez, books, Crow and Weasel, essays, fables, reading, stories, travel, writing 7 Comments

Stories…offer patterns of sound and association, of event and image. Suspended as listeners and readers in these patterns, we might reimagine our lives…As long as it took for me to see that a writer`s voice had to grow out of his own knowledge and desire, that it could not rise legitimately out of the privilege of race or gender or social rank, so did it take time to grasp the depth of cruelty inflicted upon all of us the moment voices are silenced, when for prejudicial reasons people are told their stories are not valuable, not useful. Barry Lopez

In the introduction to his essay collection About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory, Barry Lopez tells of meeting a man on a plane who asked what words of advice he could pass on to his teen-age daughter, who wanted to be a writer. This is what Lopez said:

She must read, and her choices should be whatever she is drawn to.

She should read the classics, too, but she’ll have to work harder to find stories of heroism, love, and our noblest values that are written by women.

Second, she must “become someone” and “speak to us from within those beliefs.”

Third, he advised that she “separate herself from the familiar.” After exploring other places and meeting a diversity of people, she`ll know why she loves the familiar and share this knowledge through her writing.

Early on, Lopez felt he was noticed, accepted, and rewarded as a writer in part because he was white, male, privileged and well educated. If you read his work, you’ll find he is keenly sensitive to the fact that many voices haven’t been heard because they are different or not within traditional circles of power. He thrives on traveling to the far corners of the earth and seeking these people out - artists, artisans, farmers, naturalists, explorers who live close to the land, indigenous peoples, and others.

I was mesmerized by an essay in About This Life, “Effleurage: The Stroke of Fire.” An Oregon potter and builder of a unique anagama kiln invites clay artists from around the world to fire their work. Jack doesn’t care about marketing or commercial success; he’s totally immersed in the process of making pottery out of materials from nature. Every three or four months, up to twenty artists bring their work to be fired in the Dragon Kiln. Families, friends, even pets tag along. The firing goes around the clock for several days. Building the tremendous fire that heats the kiln is an art in and of itself. Different kinds of wood – black locust, maple, cherry, Lombardy poplar, red cedar – make different kinds of fires, and keeping the fire properly stoked is a community effort of like-minded artists who put aside their egos for the benefit of the group.

Lopez says you must become someone to write. I think he would agree the kiln designer and the clay artists are “becoming” through their life’s work, just as their clay pieces are forged in the fire. It’s a process that never ends. Even the clay pot continues to change, subtly, after the firing.

Over and over, Lopez celebrates journeys into the unknown, strangers who become friends, coming home again, and the writing of the story. You see this in About This Life and in his fable, Crow and Weasel.

Recently, Lopez published a revelatory personal essay that has received a lot of attention, “Sliver of Sky,” in Harper’s Magazine, about a period of sexual abuse he endured as a child. That Lopez waited until his seventies to write about this suggests how deeply confounding and wounding it was. The trauma and years of silence may explain in part Lopez’s empathy and compassion for others who were silenced for one reason or another. And no doubt it has contributed to his sense of mission as a writer.

I’ve written about years of being silent and feeling silenced by others because of my mother’s mental illness. I think that is partly why I didn’t make the commitment to becoming a writer when I was younger. How can you mature as a human being and as a writer when you can’t work with the very material that is woven into your identity?

If we’re silenced, we’re blocked. We don’t become our fullest selves. Diminished in what we are able to offer the world, the world will be diminished, too. It is in our bests interests to see that no one among us is silenced.

So I find reading Lopez to be a rare and important form of encouragement.

In an interview with Bill Moyers, Lopez says he’s viewed as a nature writer but, actually, he is writing about humanity.

“Every story is an act of trust between a writer and a reader; each story, in the end, is social. Whatever a writer sets down can harm or help the community of which he or she is a part.”

Quotes from: About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory, Barry Lopez, Vintage Books, New York: 1998.

Reading Barry Lopez, gathering words

March 30, 2013 By Valorie Grace Hallinan in Books, Memoir, Nature, Nonfiction, Travel, Writing Tags: About This Life, Arctic Circle, Arctic Dreams, Arctic explorers, Barry Lopez, Bill Moyers, dictionaries, Lexicon Practice, Priscilla Long, The Writer's Portable Mentor, Webster's New International Dictionary 2nd ed., writing 9 Comments

Chasing Ice

March 16, 2013 By Valorie Grace Hallinan in Books, Memoir, Movies, Nature, Nonfiction, Travel Tags: Andrea Barrett, Barry Lopez, Before My Time, Chasing Ice, climate change, docucumentary, Earth Vision Trust, Extreme Ice Survey, glaciers, global warming, Ice: Portraits of Vanishing Glaciers, James Balog, Jeff Orlowsky, Little Theatre, Scarlett Johansson, Terry Tempest Williams 2 Comments

This is the memory of the landscape. That landscape is gone. It may never be seen again in the history of civilization. James Balog

He is a master photographer, an obsessed and possessed artist documenting our dying glaciers.

We sat with a packed audience Tuesday evening at The Little Theatre in Rochester watching Chasing Ice, a documentary about James Balog’s quest, which has become the quest of many others. After the movie, producer/director Jeff Orlowski (thoughtful, intelligent, thoroughly engaging) spoke with the audience via Skype.

Your first stop should be here, to listen to and watch this perfect marriage of music, image and theme: Scarlett Johansson singing “Before My Time” to a montage of Balog’s magnificent work.

Chasing Ice is playing in selected cities around the country. You can request to host a screening by filling out a form on the Chasing Ice site. Let’s hope that it will be available on Netflix and other venues soon.

While you’re waiting for the documentary, visit the Extreme Ice Survey (art meets science) to see the official trailer, and then stop by the Earth Vision Trust.

Balog has just published Ice: Portraits of Vanishing Glaciers. His other books include Tree: A New Vision of the American Forest; Wildlife Requiem; Anima; and Survivors: A New Vision of Endangered Wildlife.

The filmmakers dedicated Chasing Ice to their children and their children’s children.

So stop by for a listen and a look. It’s the next best thing to seeing the movie.

Next up at Books Can Save a Life

At the moment I’m interested in nature, art, memoir, and fiction all rolled into one, so I’ll be featuring Barry Lopez (Arctic Dreams, Winter Count, About This Life, and “Sliver of Sky,” a recently published essay in Harper’s Magazine); The Voyage of the Narwhal by Andrea Barrett; and When Women Were Birds, by Terry Tempest Williams.

Arcadia, and what’s next

March 11, 2013 By Valorie Grace Hallinan in Books, Meditation, Movies, Nature, Nonfiction, Novels, Spirituality Tags: Arcadia, Barbara Kingsolver, Chasing Ice, climate change, David Loy, Flight Behavior, global warming, James Balog, Joanna Macy, Lauren Groff, Michael Soule, Philip Kapleau, Rochester Zen Center, World As Lover World As Self, Zen Bow 4 Comments

Arcadia, an American commune

March 5, 2013 By Valorie Grace Hallinan in Books, Nature, Novels Tags: 1960s, 1970s, An American Commune, Arcadia, communes, counterculture, hippies, intentional communities, Lauren Groff, Mundo Films, Nadine Mundo, Rena Mundo Croshere, The Farm 6 Comments

I was so embarrassed and desperate to fit in. I didn’t tell anyone about the commune. Rena Mundo Croshere, in the trailer for the documentary, American Commune

I’ve been reading Arcadia by Lauren Groff, a novel about a boy named Bit who grows up on a commune in western New York. The fictional story was inspired by The Farm, an intentional community in Tennessee that grew to become the largest commune in America in the 1970s. When I was describing Arcadia to a friend, she mentioned a documentary-in-the-making about The Farm produced by two sisters, Rena Mundo Croshere and Nadine Mundo, who were raised there.

I looked at the trailer, which is tantalizing. I’m looking forward to watching the full documentary, which is slated for release this year. I was especially taken with a moment when Rena Mundo Croshere describes abruptly leaving The Farm after over-population and a police raid caused a mass exodus of families. After a shot of flower children singing on the commune, you see a VW bus driving along a highway, then a TV ad for Barbie make-up, followed by a teenage Rena in her bedroom, with her voice-over saying she wanted to fit in so badly, she didn’t tell anyone about the commune. Moving off The Farm, with its lifestyle built on a vow of poverty, to Los Angeles and mainstream, materialistic America was, she says, like moving to another country.

This notion of hiding one’s true self and background resonates with me because I did something similar by not telling anyone about my mother’s mental illness when I was growing up. I can identify with this leading of a double life, of presenting one face to the public while hiding one’s true self and world of origin. For the same reason, I was drawn to the novel Arcadia, at once curious about what life was like inside a 1970s commune and about how the teenager, Bit, would adjust to living in urban New York after 14 years on a commune. Bit had never once seen the outside world – had never traveled to the “big cities” of Syracuse or Rochester, had never seen bathrooms as we know them with toilets and conventional indoor plumbing, had never been inside a grocery store or to public school.

Groff doesn’t glamorize the communal life but, in her view, completely abandoning the hippie cultural experiment isn’t the answer, either. I had thought Groff’s climax and conclusion would center on Bit’s adjustment to vastly different cultures, but she doesn’t end it there. She takes us into the future, to the year 2018 or so – a world of pandemics, climate change, and food shortages – implying that we need to take another look at these utopian social experiments that were, in many ways, ahead of their time.

In an interview included in the paperback edition of Arcadia, author Lauren Groff says, “In my research, I saw many 1960s counterculture idealists become, over time, obsessed with things like Peak Oil and gold and how to live off-grid, a kind of palpable belief that society is at the brink of failure. They’re not wrong. It’s hard to raise a child these days and not fear doom. This book was my argument with myself for hope.”

More about Arcadia to come in my next post.

Book Giveaway Winner

Lynne Favreau has won my Books Can Save a Life 1st anniversary book giveaway! You can catch her very funny blog here.

Quote by Lauren Groff from “A Conversation with Lauren Groff” in Arcadia, Lauren Groff, Hyperion, New York: 2012.

Quote by Rena Mundo Croshere in the trailer, American Commune, Mundo Films.

Children of mental illness, part 2

February 26, 2013 By Valorie Grace Hallinan in Books, Medical Humanities, Mental Illness, Nonfiction Tags: Daughters of Madness, Doris Parker Roberts, Growing Up With a Schizophrenic Mother, Margaret J. Brown, medical librarians, mental health system, mental illness, NAMI, National Alliance on Mental Illness, schizophrenia, Sons of Madness, Susan Nathiel Leave a comment

“…so we just took her home to wait for a bed in the good hospital, which was going to take a few days, according to him [the psychiatrist]. He said to keep a watch on her, remove all the knives, put sheets over the mirrors so she can’t see herself, because that would set her off. And of course, make sure she doesn’t kill herself, or anybody else.” June, from Daughters of Madness, when she and her sister (ages 13 and 15) sought treatment for their mother in the 1980s.

I’ve been reading Growing Up With a Schizophrenic Mother by Margaret J. Brown and Doris Parker Roberts, and Daughters of Madness by Susan Nathiel. After my last post, Children of Mental Illness, I was thrilled to hear from author Susan Nathiel. Susan tells me she will publish Sons of Madness this August. There are fewer interviews in her forthcoming book than in Daughters of Madness because male volunteers were harder to find. Susan says, however, that the interviews included in her new book are excellent. I’m glad to hear about this new publication, because there still isn’t a lot written about the experience of growing up with a seriously mentally ill parent.

When I was coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s, I thought I was the only daughter in the world who had a mother with schizophrenia. Many of the individuals interviewed in these books are baby boomers like me. Some of us had encounters with mental health professionals who were compassionate and helpful, but more often they were uninterested in helping children and teens with a mentally ill parent, unaware of their needs, or not permitted to help by the mentally ill parent or another adult family member.

Back then, there was no NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness). There were no support groups for families of the mentally ill, little in the way of books or educational materials about mental illness, and no Internet where you could plug in a keyword such as “schizophrenia” and retrieve information. Sometimes, I think that dearth of information and the fact that mental illness was kept secret by all concerned were the reasons I went into communications and later medical librarianship. I wanted a voice that could be heard, and I wanted to give people the vital health information they needed and deserved.

Thankfully, things have changed, though I don’t think they’ve changed enough. There are excellent mental health family services at the medical center where I work, and we librarians at the medical library often give information and educational materials to patients. One of our librarians specializes in providing mental health information to patients and families. But mental health care in our country still needs fixing; unfortunately, too many patients and families don’t get the services they need.

When I was a teenager, it didn’t occur to my mother’s mental health care providers that I might need to know her diagnosis. Now, when I give a patient or a family member health information, I feel I’m doing a little bit to validate their experiences and make their lives better. But I’m also making up for what I never got until quite late in the game. I’m saying to patients and their families: You matter. You need to know. You deserve the best information we can give you.

Book Giveaway

In celebration of my first anniversary as a blogger, I’m giving away a book to one lucky person who leaves a comment on any of my posts here at Books Can Save a Life in February. There are still a few days left to join the conversation and add your name to the drawing, so please do!

Quote from: Daughters of Madness: Growing Up and Older With a Mentally Ill Mother, Susan Nathiel. Praeger, Westport, Connecticut: 2007.

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