lory_enterenchanted's Reviews (582)

I found this book through the excerpt included in You Can't Make This Stuff Up, the last chapter titled "Three Spheres." It's a series of interconnected essays exploring the author's interactions with the so-called mentally ill, and glancing at her own past mental struggles. I found the mannered, poetic prose to be very effective at reaching toward expression of impossible to express, liminal experiences...others may find it opaque and irritating. But that will probably be only if you have had no experience of such states yourself.

That lack of experience, or the ability to admit those dark and wordless places in ourselves, is probably what produces the distance between "therapist" and patient" that Slater urges us to break down. "My patient and I sit down, look at each other. I see myself in her. I trust she sees herself in me. This is where we begin." A moving, heart-ful yet not at all sentimental dive into some of the deepest mysteries of being human. I won't soon forget this.

I can't understand reviews that characterize this book as funny and lighthearted. It's the story of a pastor search gone tragically wrong -- from the assembly of the ill-chosen, ill-assorted committee members onward, a grim and depressing tale. 

I don't know much about UU, but from this book, the denomination seems to have about as much spirituality as a Miss America contest. It comes across as superficial, worldly, and obsessed with appearances rather than inner transformation. Members and pastors prate about love without ever acting in any way loving or unselfish, their high-minded ethics of inclusion seemingly an empty tokenism. Along with the outer forms of Christianity, which may indeed be in need of renewal they seem to have rejected the inner essence of the Christian path, and to have no idea of the true meaning of love and sacrifice. 

The emphasis on food was weird. If the group had been more interested in selecting a viable candidate and less in what they were eating -- or all the alcohol they were drinking! -- the search might have had a better outcome. Food can serve a purpose, to bring people together, to be the focus of communal work and offering ... but here it just felt self-indulgent on the part of the author, or her alter ego, who writes all her books "with recipes" no matter what they are ostensibly about. I don't care what the characters ate at all their restaurant meals and potlucks, and that space could have been better spent on fleshing out their cardboard personalities. 

I read the first half of this and skimmed the rest. Having read an earlier craft book by Gutkind, there wasn't that much new information. He likes to use the same examples (I think I've heard enough about "Frank SInatra Has a Cold"). 

The "therapy memoir" is becoming a favorite genre of mine - written by a therapist who, as they are not supposed to do in individual sessions, reflects on their own life and trauma history along with stories drawn from their practice. These stories are endlessly fascinating to me, even though they have to be somewhat fictionalized, if they are not to violate the privacy of the subjects, and I'm not sure how I feel about labeling the result as "nonfiction." At any rate, I always learn best through stories, and these chronicles of suffering, hard inner work, and hope are inspiring to me.

The theme of this particular book is generational or inherited trauma, what is handed down from our ancestors and how we can unpick that tangle to heal ourselves, finding a future unburdened, though not entirely disconnected from the traumas of the past. Parents and grandparents thought it was shielding us not to tell us these stories, but we are finding that they are carried in our bodies and mysteriously come out in the events of our lives, which can strangely synchronize with those buried, secret histories. I hope that more and more the secrets can come to light and be released and healed, for the good of our whole, suffering world. 

Atlas focuses mainly on the stories, not on the science or theory involved, which I suppose one can read more about elsewhere. She has an unfortunate tendency to rely heavily on Freud; one might come away from the book thinking there had been no other approach to psychotherapy, nor any serious drawbacks to his method, which is far from the case. But this diminishes as the book goes on. Overall, moving and thought-provoking.

"It is the ability to accept that which cannot be changed or fixed that allows us to start mourning.  That permission to grieve for our losses and faults, as well as for our parents', connects us with life and welcomes the birth of new possibilities."

"The freedom to think and to feel even the most disturbing thoughts and painful emotions brings with it the experience of being alive."

"I believe the main evidence for strength is the ability to look reality in the eye. When you are able to do that, you save yourself and the next generation from carrying your unprocessed trauma."

"From a young age, we learn to follow our parents' signals; we learn to walk around their wounds, try not to mention and absolutely not to touch what mustn't be disturbed. In our attempt to avoid their pain and our own, we blind ourselves to that which is right before our eyes."

"To some extent all feelings are isolated, enigmatic, and we transform them, through words, into a form that we can share with others. But words do not always capture the essence of our feelings, and in that sense, we are always alone."

It's been a while since I felt so drawn into the world of a novel, so immersed in its setting and characters. The description of the development of a musician/composer was absolutely wonderful, reaching toward that ineffable thing, the experience of music and its creation. Some of the technicialities might put off readers who are not themselves musicians; I'm not sure how well Conroy might succeed at drawing them in. But for those with some experience of the piano, it's a delight.

The first half of Claude's story was strangely lacking in conflict. As he grew into an artist, everything was handed to him. No troubles with teachers, fellow students, his own ambition or anxiety...it was a bit odd. In the second half, this fact that he had been "gifted" so much was brought up, and some of his hidden or bypassed weaknesses did become an issue. So maybe the lack of tension in the storytelling was intentional, but I did find it a bit odd at the time of reading. Atypical of what one expects in a novel, and unrealistic in life, but not impossible I suppose.

Another awkwardness in the storytelling came at the end, when the author switched into another POV to reveal something to the reader that is kept from Claude. Otherwise, the whole novel is in written in a 3rd person POV that sticks close to Claude and his perspective--with occasional drops into the future, but still nothing that couldn't be known by him. I found this switch infelicitous artistically; it would have been much more pleasing to stay with Claude, and perhaps subtly suggest something to the reader rather than hitting us over the head with it.

Other than these caveats, I absolutely loved it.

This was assigned reading for my Spiritual Direction training. I was not enamored of the author's jokey, pop-culture saturated style, but otherwise I enjoyed learning about the Enneagram and found it brought some useful insights.

Pretty basic and somewhat dated information, with a few useful tidbits. I liked the advice that even if in first person, creative nonfiction should not be egotistical; it needs to teach the reader something. Also a point well taken was that CNF is built around scenes, just as fiction and drama are, even though the material is from life rather than fiction. The author's sample writing about a mentally challenged boy whose claim of rape is questioned was a bit disturbing, out of context from its longer work; it could have been better to choose something else. The piece "A Garden in Winter" was my favorite.

Fun mystery set in an ancient Athenian theatre, though clearly a modern story in old clothing. It was entertaining to see how the author worked in various aspects of Greek life and culture, although none of it could be taken too seriously. The author implausibly wedges in a connection for his main character to every notable name from Pericles to Euripides, even making Socrates his annoying little brother -- but he does it with such breezy abandon that I forgive him. The solution didn't make much sense to me; I couldn't believe the killer would have chosen such an over the top method. But that's often how it is in mysteries, the author wants to use a certain method of murder, usually a highly implausible one, and has to work out a story that fits around it.

Dench's reminiscences are fairly tame, not nearly as dishy and fun as Mary Rodgers's SHY, which I just read, but a pleasant peek behind the scenes with one of today's greats. It's more meaningful if one has seen the plays she discusses, but still interesting to me even if not. I didn't know that she was in Cabaret in London - the director told her not to worry that she wasn't a singer, nor was the character in the novel the show was based on - nor that she was originally slated to play Grizabella in Cats, but snapped her Achilles tendon. Her take on the Hollywood Oscars circus, which she got into after being nominated for Mrs Brown, is refreshing - she has a marvelous time while finding it all a bit crazy, especially when she won the award for Shakespeare in Love, "eight minutes with bad teeth."  Wish I could have seen her in person once, but at least we have the films. I'd like to read the biography (this is meant as just a supplement).

It was all right, but I was not overwhelmingly impressed. The characters were too stereotypical to really be engaging, and most of them were downright unpleasant. (Of course, one doesn't want to suspect pleasant characters of murder, so usually there are quite a lot of these in a murder mystery.) The mainspring idea was whether Salieri's throat-slicing in the play Amadeus could be made to happen in real life on stage. I found it unbelievable that a real cut-throat razor was used, that would be far too dangerous -- surely a non-sharp prop could have been found, rather than covering a real one with tape.