How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran

I am always on the lookout for books by (and about) funny women but they aren’t so easy to find. You’d be amazed at the junk that pops up in a search on Google or Amazon; aside from recent offerings by the heavy hitters like Helen Fielding, Tina Fey, and Ellen DeGeneres (all of which I’ve read), there’s not a lot to choose from. Pretty quickly your search starts turning up titles about how to laugh at your breast cancer. No thanks. But eventually I poked around enough to discover Caitlin Moran. She’s not nearly as widely known in the U.S. as she is in her native Britain, where she’s an award-winning columnist for The Times, but How to be a Woman was reviewed widely in the U.S. and sold well.

This book is scary funny and scary raw. Moran, it seems, will say anything, and in this book she tackles all sorts of issues: body image, pornography, feminism, fashion, childbirth, and especially poverty. She is fearless and relentless as she makes her points, in a way that is both shockingly direct and extremely funny. This book is not light humor. It’s social commentary delivered via shovel, in a voice that is loud, original, irreverent, and hilarious.

Moran grew up the oldest of 8 children in a three-bedroom council house (subsidized public housing) in a down-at-the-heels northern English city in the 1980’s. Despite this bleak beginning, she was winning writing awards by the time she was 13 and by 18 had landed a job as a reporter at a music magazine. Her childhood poverty informs all her commentary, especially when she takes on mainstream academic feminists and really anyone whose privilege gets her goat. Moran has also cultivated a larger-than-life public image in Britain and recently led a 24-hour boycott of Twitter in response to the anonymous threats of violence against outspoken women that are pervasive on that social network.

In case you like the idea of Moran’s work but aren’t very interested in how to be a woman, last year she released another collection called Moranthology which applies the same approach to more gender neutral political and pop culture topics. I just bought that one for my Kindle – sample chapters include I Do a Lot for Charity but I Would Never Mention It, and Downton Abbey Review 2: “SEX WILL BE HAD! SEX WILL BE HAD!" 

(Book 3, 2014)

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace

I confess to only having read two of the seven essays in this book, and those only under duress from folks who insisted I try them as an alternative to Infinite Jest, which I abandoned earlier this summer. I am glad I read them, and I enjoyed them up to a point, though there's only so much DFW a person can take.

In the title essay, Wallace, at the invitation of his editors at Harpers, goes on a cruise. Could there be a better "fish out of water" story? Imagine Wallace, disheveled, cynical, alone, embarking on a cruise with thousands of cheery retirees. Just the setup is funny. And Wallace does it justice, managing to skewer the cruise industry and much of American society in the process, while seeming vulnerable and earnest as he does so.

Ticket to the Fair, about Wallace's visit to the Illinois State Fair, was good too, but I didn't like it as much as the other one. Maybe it's because Wallace, as a native of Illinois, knew a little of what he would find at the state fair. Indeed it was almost like he was expecting the sense of dread that eventually overcomes him, like it was inevitable. His observations were sadder and not as funny.

I finally realized who Wallace reminds me of and it's Nicholson Baker. My favorite Baker book, The Mezzanine, weighs in at a compact 142 pages. Is it because Howie's escalator ride only took five minutes, but Infinite Jest spans years? Baker did the whole footnote thing back in 1987, when The Mezzanine was first published; also the minute observations and the technical digressions. Now that I think of it, that's a far more readable book than Infinite Jest. I wish I had just re-read that.

(Book 23, 2013)

I Remember Nothing by Nora Ephron

This was better than I Feel Bad About My Neck, about which I complained in this post back in 2007. The essays in Ephron's new book have more substance; more of them are about something, Ephron reminisces about her childhood and her early experiences as a journalist in New York in the 1960’s (shades of Mad Men, only funnier). It’s another fast read (like the Calvin Trillin book I posted about recently) and good for filling in an afternoon.

I keep trying Ephron’s essays because I like her movies (Julie & Julia, Sleepless in Seattle, When Harry Met Sally). However, the Ephron work I’m most interested in right now is the play Love, Loss, and What I Wore, which is a collaboration with her sister Delia Ephron and which was based on the book of the same name by Ilene Beckerman. I loved that book and for a couple of years I gave it as a gift to a lot of my friends. I am hoping to see the show at the Broadway Playhouse in Chicago before it ends its run in January.

(Book 34, 2011)

About Alice by Calvin Trillin

I know Trillin is famous for his witty essays in the New Yorker, but I'm only an occasional reader of that magazine and somehow his stuff has escaped me thus far. A few weeks ago, however, I saw Calvin Trillin on the Daily Show  He was delightfully funny, and I realized that I was probably missing a lot by not seeking out his work. His new book Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin (even that title is funny) has a long queue at the library, so I picked up About Alice instead. What a sweet book! It's an homage to his late wife and is touching and hilarious at the same time. It's a very short read and a perfect introduction to Trillin. If, like me, you have never quite gotten around to reading anything by him, About Alice is a good place to start.

I've pinned a link to the Daily Show broadcast to my Pinterest board.

(Book 33, 2011)

Roast Chicken

I am making roast chicken for dinner. This gives me the opportunity to write about two of my favorite books of all time.

I make my roast chicken following the directions provided by Laurie Colwin in her great book More Home Cooking. She advises slow roasting on a low heat for at least two hours, a method which has never failed to result in a lovely juicy chicken. Colwin advises stuffing the chicken with half a lemon, but I use half an onion instead. I do follow her suggestion to sprinkle the bird with paprika, and baste frequently.

More Home Cooking, and an earlier book by Colwin called Home Cooking are collections of her columns from Gourmet magazine, written in the 1980’s and early 1990’s. They are not traditional cookbooks. Instead, while they do contain some recipes, they are mostly Colwin's ramblings about food and how it fits into family, friendships, and life. Colwin's stories are comforting, accessible, inspiring, unpretentious, funny, and delightful. I love these books with all my heart and they are two of the very few books that I will occasionally re-read. I have given them as gifts to so many people so many times that I have lost track, and thus once presented my aunt with Home Cooking two years in a row.

My favorite essay in Home Cooking is called Feeding the Multitudes, where Colwin describes her weekly stint cooking lunch in a women’s homeless shelter, and which ends with a recipe for Shepherd’s Pie for 150 (“Chop 10 large onions and 4 bulbs of garlic…”).

Laurie Colwin was a gifted writer who wrote several novels in the 1980’s, mostly about life in New York, and about families. Unfortunately she died at the age of 48, in 1992. I consider her death a great loss to the world of fiction and food writing. But a quick check of Amazon.com tells me that most of her books are still in print, including Home Cooking and More Home Cooking. That makes me happy.

The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup by Susan Orlean

I’ve occasionally read pieces by Susan Orlean in the New Yorker, so when I saw this paperback at the library book sale, I picked it up, thinking it would be something good to dip into now and then. That has proved to be true, except for a few problems.

No, really only one problem, but that problem infects several of the profiles in this book. Most of the pieces in this book were written in the mid-1990’s and a few of them date back to 1987. While the quality of Orlean’s writing certainly remains consistently good, it’s the subject matter that no longer works 20 years later. For example a piece originally published in Rolling Stone in 1988 on the pop star Tiffany was a dud for me. Who was Tiffany? I can’t for the life of me conjure up even a passing memory of her, so I really wasn’t interested in reading about her. The same was true for pieces on Hollywood movie moguls and New York music promoters from the same era.

On the other hand, a few of the pieces are timeless, such as the profile of Kwabena Oppong, the king and supreme rule of the Ashanti tribespeople in the United States, and one about surfer girls in Maui. I think I need to stick to Orlean’s current work in the New Yorker, though I see from her Web site that she’s got a collection of more recent pieces called My Kind of Place.

The title of this book is like a parlor game, or a homework assignment for a creative writing class. Can you make up any similarly unexpected phrases? Here are two I came up with: “The farmer adjusts her stockings” and “The nurse trims his mustache.” It’s harder than you might think.

(Book 27, 2008)

Cleopatra's Nose by Judith Thurman

It’s time for me to admit that I am never going to finish this book. It’s been hanging around on my nightstand for months, and I’ve been occasionally dipping in, but for every three essays that I read, I hate two of them. That’s not a good enough average to keep going.

Thurman writes arts and cultural criticism for the New Yorker. Cleopatra’s Nose is a collection of her pieces written in the earlier part of this decade. They cover subjects such as Anne Frank, Leni Riefenstahl, Coco Chanel, and a visit to an artisan tofu maker in Japan. I’m linking to a review of the book that originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times. The author of that review, Meghan Daum, does a much better job of explaining the book’s problems than I can do. If you are truly considering reading this book, you should read Daum’s review first. I am going to just quote a few lines from her review here to give you a sense of what’s going on:

Thurman sometimes appears to be trying too hard to assert her Kulturkritik credentials…It's a good instinct for an essayist to pepper her prose with the kind of declarative sentences that evoke a camera pulling back for a wide shot. But for Thurman, with her particular fondness for assertions whose metaphysical pretensions outshine their relevance to the topic at hand, this works about half the time.

(Or for me, one third of the time.) Daum goes on to ask:

… what are we to do with wide turns into jargon such as this (on Spanish fashion designer Cristóbal Balenciaga): "Piety and chic may not obviously be compatible, but penitents and perfectionists tend to have a lot in common" or this (on photographer Diane Arbus): "Idolatry is a form of vandalism that often inspires a violent counterreaction of antipathy to the idol"?

Daum says what we should do is shake our heads and stay with the author. I disagree. When I encounter a statement like the one above, about Arbus, I feel like I’ve just run into a cinderblock with my car. Everything comes to a crashing halt, and I stand there saying “whaaaa???” Daum praises Thurman for not talking down to the reader; I criticize Thurman for being so purposefully obtuse as to baffle the reader and interrupt the flow of the essay.

Maybe if Thurman followed a statement like the Arbus one with an explanation, for example “I believe that idolatry is a form of vandalism because….” I would have more patience for it. But she just drops these bombs into the middle of her essays and then moves on, like the truck ahead of you that has dropped the cinderblock and driven away without noticing or stopping to see if you are hurt.

After the shock wears off I find myself thinking that I must just be too stupid to understand what the author is trying to say. But I know I am not stupid, so my next reaction is that the author is showing off and that somehow she wants me to feel stupid. Neither interpretation makes me enjoy what I am reading, so I’m abandoning this. Just for the record, I did like one essay, called “Reader, I Married Him” about Charlotte Bronte. It contained no cinderblocks.

I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron

Another victim of over-hype, this book is funny, but not THAT funny. Screenwriter and novelist Ephron’s collection of essays about aging, and her life as a woman are cute, and at times direct and revealing. The final essay, called Considering the Alternative, which of course is about death, is the best. But I’m glad I checked this out of the library and didn’t spent $19.95 for the hardback edition. The other essays are very light, extremely light, did I mention they were light? Some are just insultingly light (i.e. the essay What I Wish I’d Known, which contains the groundbreaking advice to “buy, don’t rent.”). As blog entries (read for free!) or maybe even articles in Cosmo, they would be fine. Otherwise? Well, you decide. I’m tired of saying bad things about books.

(Book 8, 2007)

Yarn Harlot: The Secret Life of a Knitter by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee writes the excellent blog Yarn Harlot. This book is not a collection of blog posts, or a blog turned into a book, a la Julie and Julia. Instead it's a standalone collection of essays about – you guessed it – knitting. Also about parenting, passions, staying true to yourself, dealing with change, etc. It's moving in places, and very funny. Knitters will love it, and so might other obsessive crafters or collectors. Her essays about dealing with her ever-growing stash of yarn are a scream; this is a woman who, when she runs out of storage space, hides yarn in her freezer. (I know compulsive book-buyers who hide new books with similar zeal.) Pearl-McPhee is a popular speaker on the fiber-arts circuit and author of several other books about knitting. I visit her blog every day for a good laugh.

(Book 6, 2007)

Don't Get Too Comfortable by David Rakoff

Eh. This was okay. I've enjoyed Rakoff on the radio, and in the New York Times Magazine. He's a little like David Sedaris, but not as snarky. After a while, though, the "I'm a gay man in New York City and I have a lot of anxiety" schtick just got kind of old. This was an audiobook, read by Rakoff himself. He's got a nice voice, but then I knew that.

Briefly, for those who care (Margo), the book is a collection of essays about food, travel, various consumer goods, and whatever else catches Rakoff's passing fancy. After a while you forget what he's talking about. In truth, I failed to finish it. Can I still count it?

You can read a longer (and more laudatory) review here.
(Book 23, 2006)

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell is interested in American history, especially 19^th (and early 20^th) century presidential history, with a special emphasis on the offbeat, off-the-beaten-path aspects of it. In this book she examines the events surrounding the assassinations of three US presidents: Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. Her method is to travel to as many places as possible that are related to these events: for example, Ford's Theatre (an obvious choice) and the Oneida Colony, a free-love religious commune which was, for a time, the home of Garfield assassin Charles Guiteau.

Vowell's knowledge of history is deep, and her interest obsessive. The book is loosely divided into three sections, one for each presidential assassination, but within these sections the narrative is structured around her trips to visit places, and see artifacts, so you don't really ever get a complete chronology of the particular assassination itself. Not that this matters. What you do get is a very funny and sharply observed commentary on everything from the architecture of the Pan-American Exposition of 1901 in Buffalo, New York (site of the McKinley assassination), to the efforts by the Mudd family to clear the name of their (justly) accused ancestor.

This is a really odd book and I can't believe I finished it. I never would have read it (I said this in an earlier post) but found it delightful to listen to as an audiobook. Vowell reads it herself, and has recruited actors and radio personalities to do various voices of characters. Vowell, a regular on the radio show This American Life, was also the voice of Violet in the movie The Incredibles.

You can listen to an excerpt from it here.
(Book 15, 2006)