Banning Books
The American Library Association (ALA) released data documenting over 1200 demands to censor library books and resources in 2022. They will unveil the top 10 list of most challenged books during National Library Week 2023 later this month. Do what you can to fight censorship by checking out Unite Against Book Bans. What strikes me most in reading this and other articles is the number of organizations challenging books. This isn’t just individuals—it is a strategic effort. And don’t be fooled by the real purpose—to make our librarians and teachers second guess putting a book on the shelf to avoid controversy.
I ordered my Free People Read Freely bumper sticker. Don’t them take our freedom away. I believe this former Navy Commander Wes Rexroad stood up and said it best at this school board meeting.
Oregon Coast and California Redwoods
John and I took a trip to the California Redwoods and the Oregon Coast this past month. This was a trip that had been put off since before the pandemic and it was nice to get out even though it was still cold and it rained most of the way. We drove down to Ferndale, California a cute little Victorian town I discovered back when I was a young person out exploring with friends. John and I stayed at the Victorian Inn and then drove down to the California Redwoods National Park and took a drive along the Avenue of Giants. We made a pit stop at the Trees of Mystery the only tourist trap my father would stop at when we traveled. The place has improved with the addition of a walk along a trail set up high in the trees and a ride up to the top of the hill in a tram. Then we stayed up the road in Klamath and then we drove up to the Oregon Coast and stayed at the Hallmark Resort in Newport. We had a balcony view of the ocean and an excellent dinner at their restaurant Georgie’s Beachside Grill.
No trip would be complete without a little book shopping which the Visitor’s Center in the Redwoods provided. I purchased:
The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature by David George Haskell
The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert
Are You Somebody? by Nuala O’Faolain
Judging by some of the recent online reviews I’ve seen, some people can’t handle misery in a memoir. Personally, I love a good memoir of bad times, alcoholic parents, and family scraping by under the weight of poverty or an oppressive belief system. While I’ve had an easy life, my parents did not. My Dad grew up poor in a company sawmill town and told me about playing in the wet woods with his siblings in their new brand-new shoes. They tried drying them at a campfire only to have the shoes melt. He said they tied them back on with the twine from inside a baseball for the long walk home to face their parents. My mother lost her father at twelve and my grandmother raised five kids on a Woolworth’s salary living in the then-new projects of New Orleans. There was gambling and alcoholism in the family and my mom’s chin bore a scar from a mugging. She told me she used to sit at the window and dream about escaping the neighborhood—an escape that my father, an airman, provided.
This is all to say that Are You Somebody? by Nuala O’Faolain is not for those looking for some light topics and a feel-good memoir. This is more Frank McCourt material but from a woman’s perspective. O’Faolain was a TV producer and columnist for The Irish Times and this memoir originally published in 1996 is a bleak look at an era in Ireland between the 1950s on. This memoir is honest. She writes about her childhood with a famous father (also a columnist) and an alcoholic mother neither of whom O’Faolain describes as “careless.” She asked a family friend who knew her parents what class they belonged to
We had very little money, and home was bleak, compared to the homes of our school friends. But my mother read all the time, and my father taught us the words of German songs, and we played extracts from Swan Lake om the gramophone, and we put on plays, whereas the other families we knew did not do those things. “Were we working class?” I asked him. “Because we certainly weren’t middle class.” “What you were was bohemian,” he said.
This book was a bestseller in Ireland when it came out based on its frankness in discussing things that a woman could not have written about in previous decades. O’Faolain writes about her relationships with unfaithful men in Great Britain in the 60s and 70s. Men who left after years with a simple note about returning on Tuesday. Men who simply moved her clothes at their shared cabin the weekend she didn’t go so his other woman wouldn’t know about her. The fear of sex and pregnancy are ever-present. O’Faolin is there for a friend who becomes pregnant, informs the girl’s parents, and then is there when the baby is picked up for future adoption.
O’Faolain often ran in circles of the famous and the literati. The book’s title is a question someone once asked her. The book is full of details about those encounters. Philip Larkin apologizes for not attending to her while she is attending the University of Hull. “I was asked to look out for you, but I’m afraid I couldn’t be bothered.” She describes a dinner at film director John Huston’s house with his “various silent children, done up like the children of the English aristocracy in white knee socks and velvet headbands, sat at the table, their meal administered by either a nanny or, in the case of one exquisite little boy, by his exquisite mother.” She describes Robert Shaw berating his wife at another dinner until the wife runs from the room crying. Shaw announced to the guests that he needed to do that to her to keep her sharp.
O’Faolain writes about her various careers in television and as a writer. After a stint in England, she rediscovered Ireland and returned to work at the RTÉ. She first returns to attend a Merriman Summer School in Shannon.
It was 1973. I flew to Shannon one August day and got myself across the county to the grey stone market village of Scarriff, in a mild turquoise landscape of wooded hills and water meadows and lakes and broad reaches of the Shannon River. I had never been in rural Clare before. I could number on my fingers the days I’d spent anywhere in rural Ireland. It was so beautiful after the grey streets and the dirty tube stations I walked through in London every day. The voices of the people were so expressive. At that school, I fell completely in love with an Ireland which turned out not to exist. Yet this visionary Ireland gave me the impetus to break my links with England. And it pointed me in the direction of the real Ireland I am getting to know now. If I hadn’t encountered modern Ireland late in life, and if I hadn’t—because of my ignorance and because of being away—thought it was magically interesting., I wouldn’t have been so eager to learn about it. And learning about it has meant more to me with every passing year. A new concept of “home” came into my life when I realised that Ireland, in all its aspects, present and past, was mine. That I belonged to Ireland, just because I am Irish.
For me, one chapter stood out though. And surprise—it was the chapter where O’Faolain writes about learning to read and which writers were important to her. She may have grown up poor, but her mother was a reader, her father a writer, and she ended up with an Oxford education.
Reading certain books was a complex and complete experience. I had a room in a squalid mews in Dublin for a while when I was a student; the landlord had whips hanging from his bedstead. I remember it only because one summer morning I settled in the weedy yard when I had done the housework and began reading Madame Bovary. Hours later, the sun had moved to the other wall, and my heart was beating heavily as Flaubert led me, under his perfect control, into the last chapter. I remember gasping—involuntary light gasps—as Henry James added another circle to the rings of consequences that expanded from the actions of the principals in The Wings of the Dove, until void settles around Desher and Kate. I lived in Teheran for a few months in the 1970s. The revolution was near. Men with machine-guns patrolled the lobby in front of elevators. Places you could buy alcohol—dim shops like cupboards in the alleyways around the Russian embassy—were closing down. I didn’t care. Every evening I’d hurry back to my room to pour out a glass of mild Iranian vodka and settle with a perfect happiness into whatever I’d got to in Remembrance of Things Past. It took me eleven weeks to read Proust, that first time. His world was my world; I just bore with the days, exotic as they were, until I could get back to it.
I can relate to her love for a good preface (she mentions those written by Cynthia Ozick, Seamus Heany, and Henry James) and I had a chuckle when she wrote about not wanting to waste time on middle-range authors who she described as “Kundera, say, or Paul Auster. Writers who play middle-level games.” Instead, she goes to the other end and enjoys Judith Krantz, Scott Turow, and one of my favorites Maeve Binchy. It reminded me of what Gertrude Stein said to Ernest Hemingway in A Movable Feast, “You should only read what is truly good or what is frankly bad.”*
I liked the book—bleak yes, but she was a terrific writer. The book does jump around quite a bit, almost as if she kept thinking of things to add. And there are a few things glossed over such as her live-in relationship with another woman who does not get the same treatment as her male romances.
I am not sure who recommended this book to me or what made me order it from the library. I think maybe it was a mention on Backlisted podcast with John Mitchinson and Andy Miller. It was Episode 141 with guest and author Caroline O’Donoghue and they discuss Nuala O’Faolain’s memoir Are You Somebody?. If you are still on the fence, check out their lovely conversation about the book and why it was important in Ireland when it came out.
*I think I’ve found my next tshirt.
10 Books that Prove Miserable Childhoods Make Great Reading
Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Black Boy by Richard Wright
First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi
The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover
Writing
Check out this interview with Merve Emre about Elizabeth Harwick in NYRB. There is a delightful paragraph about the difference between critical writing and academic writing. While academic writing has “bureaucratic protocols designed to standarize, routinize, and professionalize language” and ultimately to speak the same voice. Critics on the other hand, and what Bowen did was, “education, entertain, scold, and charm.”**
**This may be another tshirt I need. I have a lot of tshirts.
Upcoming Folio Events
A World of Trouble on May 17th. A panel with Mort Kondracke and experts on Russia, China, and the Middle East.
NOTIS is hosting the 4th Annual Translation Slam on May 18th.
Folio Speakeasy: A Fundraiser and Celebration on June 2nd with Brad Holden.