Review of When the Heart Waits, by Sue Monk Kidd

Christian, Musings, Nonfiction Review, Personal Growth, Starred Review 0

When the Heart Waits

Spiritual Direction for Life’s Sacred Questions

by Sue Monk Kidd

HarperSanFrancisco, 1990. 217 pages.
Starred Review

Here’s another book by a woman exploring the deep questions and issues of facing midlife. Those always resonate with me. This one, with the theme of waiting, of slow growth, seemed particularly apt.

She uses the image of spinning a cocoon and having radical transformation from a caterpillar to a butterfly. It takes time. And when the transformation has been made, even unfurling your new wings is difficult.

Here are some passages I especially liked, to give you a taste of the wisdom in this book:

“When it comes to religion today, we tend to be long on butterflies and short on cocoons. Somehow we’re going to have to relearn that the deep things of God don’t come suddenly. It’s as if we imagine that all of our spiritual growth potential is dehydrated contents to which we need only add some holy water to make it instantly and easily appear.

“I received a letter recently from someone who was feeling impatient about taking the long way round. She wrote, ‘Pole vaulting is so much more alluring than crawling.'”

“Most of us Christians don’t know how to wait in pain — at least not in the contemplative, creative way that opens us to newness and growth. We’re told to “turn it over to Jesus” and — presto! — things should be okay.

“But inside things usually aren’t okay. So on top of everything else, we feel guilty because obviously we didn’t really turn our pain over or else it wouldn’t still be with us. Or we decide that God wasn’t listening and can’t be trusted to deliver on divine promises.

“How did we ever get the idea that God would supply us on demand with quick fixes, that God is merely a rescuer and not a midwife?”

“If you want to be impressed, note how often God’s people seem to be waiting….

“I came to the parable Jesus told about the ten maidens waiting for the bridegroom…. I’d always thought that the point of the story was that we should be prepared. But in my reading after the retreat, it seemed to be just as much about waiting. Waiting through the dark night. The idea is that waiting precedes celebration. If you don’t show up prepared to wait, you may miss the transcendent when it happens.

“Most stunning to me was the picture I began to get of God waiting. The parable of the prodigal son would be more aptly named the parable of the waiting father. It tells us much more about God than anything else — a God who watches and waits with a full heart for us to make our homecoming.”

“Shifting from a self-centered focus to a more God-centered focus is terribly hard. I think we’ve gone wrong by assuming that such a radical movement can be achieved simply by setting our jaw and saying one or two prayers of relinquishment.

“Letting go isn’t one step but many. It’s a winding, spiraling process that happens on deep levels. And we must begin at the beginning: by confronting our ambivalence.”

“Looking back, I’m aware of several experiences that sifted together to bring me quietly to the place of letting go. They had the effect of slowly and gently uncurling my grip, finger by finger.”

She takes us through her midlife journey, including many painful moments. But then comes the time of unfurling the new wings:

“When the time is right, the cocooned soul begins to emerge. Waiting turns golden. Newness unfurls. It’s a time of pure, unmitigated wonder. Yet as we enter the passage of emergence, we need to remember that new life comes slowly, awkwardly, on wobbly wings.

“I waited many long months before I felt newness begin to form, and many more before it began to unfold in my life. Gradually — oh, so gradually — my waiting season came to an end. The pain began to diminish bit by bit, as if it had peaked and now was giving way to something new. Many of the questions I’d lived with began to sprout little seeds of insight. Light trickled in. A new vision and way of life began to take shape not only in my head but in my heart and soul as well. It was as if I’d discovered a new room inside myself — a wider, more expansive place than I’d known before, but a room that had been there all along.”

This book will uplift and encourage anyone going through a similar journey. She offers us Hope:

“Hope for you and me and the journeys we undertake. Hope that we would trust our waiting hearts enough to risk entering them, that we would listen for the Voice that bids us come to the edge, and that we would welcome the gentle push of God, who is both our wings and the wind that bears them up.”

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/when_the_heart_waits.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of Women Who Run With the Wolves, by Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Creativity, Current Issues, Folk Tales, Musings, Nonfiction Review, Personal Growth, Stand-outs, Starred Review 0

Women Who Run With the Wolves

Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD

Ballantine Books, New York, 1997. First published in 1992. 582 pages.
Starred Review
2010 Sonderbooks Stand-outs: #2 Other Nonfiction

This wonderful book is full of riches. I read it very slowly, and will definitely want to read it many more times to better grasp the wisdom it contains.

For some time, I’ve loved books by Allan B. Chinen, such as Once Upon a Midlife, that take fairy tales from around the world and reveal the psychology behind them and what it means about the passages in a person’s life. Women Who Run With the Wolves is similar, taking fairy tales and stories from all over the world that shine light on women’s lives. Only Clarissa Pinkola Estes is much more poetical and symbolic in applying the fairy tales, so that her own skills as a storyteller shine out even in the explanations.

Here are some thoughts the author shares in the Introduction:

“Healthy wolves and healthy women share certain psychic characteristics: keen sensing, playful spirit, and a heightened capacity for devotion. Wolves and women are reolational by nature, inquiring, possessed of great endurance and strength. They are deeply intuitive, intensely concerned with their young, their mates, and their pack. They are experienced in adapting to constantly changing circumstances; they are fiercely stalwart and very brave.

“Yet both have been hounded, harassed, and falsely imputed to be devouring and devious, overly aggressive, of less value than those who are their detractors. They have been the targets of those who would clean up the wilds as well as the wildish environs of the psyche, extincting the instinctual, and leaving no trace of it behind. The predation of wolves and women by those who misunderstand them is strikingly similar….

“Like a trail through a forest which becomes more and more faint and finally seems to diminish to a nothing, traditional psychological theory too soon runs out for the creative, the gifted, the deep woman. Traditional psychology is often spare or entirely silent about deeper issues important to women: the archetypal, the intuitive, the sexual and cyclical, the ages of women, a woman’s way, a woman’s knowing, her creative fire. This is what has driven my work on the Wild Woman archetype for over two decades.

“A woman’s issues of soul cannot be treated by carving her into a more acceptable form as defined by an unconscious culture, nor can she be bent into a more intellectually acceptable shape by those who claim to be the sole bearers of consciousness. No, that is what has already caused millions of women who began as strong and natural powers to become outsiders in their own cultures. Instead, the goal must be the retrieval and succor of women’s beauteous and natural psychic forms.

“Fairy tales, myths, and stories provide understandings which sharpen our sight so that we can pick out and pick up the path left by the wildish nature. The instruction found in story reassures us that the path has not run out, but still leads women deeper, and more deeply still, into their own knowing. The tracks we all are following are those of the wild and innate instinctual Self….

“Stories are medicine. I have been taken with stories since I heard my first. They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything — we need only listen. The remedies for repair or reclamation of any lost psychic drive are contained in stories. Stories engender the excitement, sadness, questions, longings, and understandings that spontaneously bring the archetype, in this case Wild Woman, back to the surface.

“Stories are embedded with instructions which guide us about the complexities of life. Stories enable us to understand the need for and the ways to raise a submerged archetype. The stories on the following pages are the ones, out of hundreds that I’ve worked with and pored over for decades, and that I believe most clearly express the bounty of the Wild Woman archetype….

“This is a book of women’s stories, held out as markers along the path. They are for you to read and contemplate in order to assist you toward your own natural-won freedom, your caring for self, animals, earth, children, sisters, lovers, and men. I’ll tell you right now, the doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.

“The material in this book was chosen to embolden you. The work is offered as a fortification for those on their way, including those who toil in difficult inner landscapes, as well as those who toil in and for the world. We must strive to allow our souls to grow in their natural ways and to their natural depths.”

This book was a perfect choice for me as I was going through divorce and trying to figure out who I am as a single woman, looking at my life and wanting to create something beautiful. This book was exactly the sort of encouragement and wisdom I needed.

As she says, these stories are to read and contemplate. I highly recommend them, and I am sure I am going to come back to this book many times.

I’ll close with some bits of wisdom from its pages:

“Though fairy tales end after ten pages, our lives do not. We are multi-volume sets. In our lives, even though one episode amounts to a crash and burn, there is always another episode awaiting us and then another. There are always more opportunities to get it right, to fashion our lives in the ways we deserve to have them. Don’t waste your time hating a failure. Failure is a greater teacher than success. Listen, learn, go on. That is what we are doing with this tale. We are listening to its ancient message. We are learning about deteriorative patterns so we can go on with the strength of one who can sense the traps and cages and baits before we are upon them or caught in them.”

“A woman must be careful not to allow over-responsibility (or over-respectability) to steal her necessary creative rests, riffs, and raptures. She simply must put her foot down and say no to half of what she believes she “should” be doing. Art is not meant to be created in stolen moments only.”

“There is a time in our lives, usually in mid-life, when a woman has to make a decision — possibly the most important decision of her future life — and that is, whether to be bitter or not. Women often come to this in their late thirties or early forties. They are at the point where they are full up to their ears with everything and they’ve “had it” and “the last straw has broken the camel’s back” and they’re “pissed off and pooped out.” Their dreams of their twenties may be lying in a crumple. There may be broken hearts, broken marriages, broken promises.

“A body who has lived a long time accumulates debris. It cannot be avoided. But if a woman will return to the instinctual nature instead of sinking into bitterness, she will be revivified, reborn. Wolf pups are born each year. Usually they are these little mewling, sleepy-eyed, dark-furred creatures covered in dirt and straw, but they are immediately awake, playful, and loving, wanting to be close and comforted. They want to play, want to grow. The woman who returns to the instinctual and creative nature will come back to life. She will want to play. She will still want to grow, both wide and deep. But first, there has to be a cleansing.”

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/women_who_run_with_the_wolves.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on my own personal copy.

Review of This Is Not the Story You Think It Is…

Biography, Current Issues, Musings, Nonfiction Review, Personal Growth, Relationships, Stand-outs, Starred Review, True Stories 0

This Is Not the Story You Think It Is…

A Season of Unlikely Happiness

by Laura Munson

Amy Einhorn Books (Penguin), New York, 2010. 343 pages.
Starred Review
2010 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #1 True Stories

I read this book months ago, but put off reviewing it because it was not a library book (and therefore wasn’t due back) and I hardly knew where to begin. However, now I’m trying to catch up and get reviews for all of my 2010 Sonderbooks Stand-outs posted — and this was easily the nonfiction book that most stood out in my mind this year.

A year or two before, I’d read an e-mail that had been circulating with an essay by Laura Munson, and I’d been touched and impressed. It told how her husband had informed her that he didn’t love her any more, and wanted out. But she didn’t buy it. And she chose not to suffer. They went through a summer where he sometimes came around and sometimes didn’t. And in the end, he came back to her and realized how much she and the family meant to him.

When I discovered she had expanded the story into a book, I ordered it from Amazon as soon as possible. I was not disappointed. All the wisdom of the original essay was there, with much more background. The book is powerful. I’m strongly recommending it to anyone whose husband is going through anything remotely like a midlife crisis. Or anyone who has heard those awful words, “I don’t think I ever really loved you.”

Laura Munson wrote this book as a journal during her crisis. It comforts me that she let out some of her frustration to the journal! However, I can see that she’s also talking herself into being rational. She has chosen not to suffer, and she’s helping herself stick with that choice by writing out her reasoning. Here’s a section from the first chapter:

“At this moment in my life, I am not sure where my husband is. He left last night to bring the trash to the dump after announcing that he’s not sure he loves me anymore, and hasn’t come home. He isn’t answering his cell phone. He isn’t responding to texts.

“But I don’t buy it. The part about him not loving me. As much as it’s devastating to hear, I believe there’s more to the story. I believe he’s in a state of personal crisis. I believe this is about him.

“I’m going to give you a challenge here. I’m going to give both you and me a challenge here. Let’s try in all this not to take sides. Because how does it feel to take sides? Do we get to be right? Self-righteous? I think there’s more suffering in self-righteousness than most of us are willing to fathom.

“I see it like this: we all have our seasons of personal woe. I’ve certainly had mine. I know how much he hates his job, how much he punishes himself for not making enough money and not knowing where to go next with his career; how stuck and desperate he feels, especially in our small mountain town where the high-paying jobs are NOT plentiful. I know that he’s suffering intensely. I know because I’ve been there. I feel his pain and I’ve told him so.

“But he’s not hearing my voice. His own is too thunderous. He has to come to the end of it by himself…. And I know it’s more helpful to practice empathy here. Not anger. Or fear. Even though his words were like sharp sleet.

“It’s like when teenagers scream ‘I hate you’ and slam the door in their parents’ face. Does that ‘I hate you’ have credibility? Or does the parent know instinctually that something upsetting happened at school? That it’s not about the parent at all? I’m not saying that my husband is acting like a teenager. (Or, God forbid, that I’m his parent!) I’m just saying that I think there’s more to the story.”

She writes on about all her personal struggles with this. It’s not coming easy for her, and if she pretended it had, this book would have lost its power. I like this part, later in that first chapter:

“Now, I know, dear reader, there’s a strong possibility that you’ve got your hackles up. You want to tell me I’m being a fool to put up with this unacceptable behavior. You want me to fight….

“But I’m opting for a different strategy, and I’m going to believe it will work in a way that fighting, persuading, and demanding never have. Because whether or not he comes back to me, I will be ultimately empowered by my commitment not to suffer. It’s a way of life. A way to life. And it’s about many and no religions. Plug it in wherever it meets your life. We all want to be free, don’t we?

“And yes — this strategy is new to me, too. I’m sure it’ll be shaky at times. But I’m going for it. And I’m going to write my way through it. Both for my process. And for yours. For anyone in any situation in which one is tempted to go into panic mode, or worse, victim mode, rather than taking responsibility for one’s own well-being.”

She goes on and takes us through the next several months, as well as giving us the background of their marriage and life, and her own recent crises. She has some setbacks. But mostly she handles some awful situations with incredible grace. I love the scene where they have a “talk.” Because she responds brilliantly. She keeps asking the question (which she has practiced with her therapist), “What can we do to give you the distance you need without damaging our family?”

When he answers that he can get his own place in town, she asks him, “What would that look like?” And she talks to him. By asking questions, she gets him to realize that he hasn’t thought this through. Her conversation is brilliant and wise — and I love how she puts in italics what she would have really liked to say! He insults her and accuses her, but they work out that he will look into a studio apartment over the garage and still stay with the family.

As I was reading this book, I started feeling sad that I hadn’t come across it when my husband’s crisis started. That I did not react so beautifully and calmly. But you know what? I was comforted somewhat when, despite her wise and loving reactions, her husband did awful things and blamed her.

She said something perfectly reasonable: “Our son looked out the window this morning and said, ‘Oh look. Dad’s truck is in the driveway.’ And I didn’t like that to be a surprise — for him or for me.” His response is not even close to reasonable. He swears at her, slams the door, and sleeps in another room. She says:

“Here’s what inspires me to fall to sleep finally: he heard those words. He reacted like a child. He knows it. I didn’t say or do anything wrong. He got triggered by the truth. He doesn’t want to be who he’s being. His anger is real and it’s scary, but it’s anger toward himself. It’s not my fault.

“And here’s what I am convinced of. In fact, I think it’s the key to a relationship. Any relationship.

“If you get out of someone’s way, they will fight and they will kick, but eventually, there’s nothing they can do but look at themselves and get real. Very, very real. Or totally self-combust in a life of lies. Or that dear opiate, denial.”

What encouraged me about this was that even when she was reacting so well, her husband acted just like other men in midlife crisis. A light dawned in my brain. It really is all about him.

Mind you, I am sure that Laura Munson saved herself excruciating hours upon hours of suffering. But I don’t think that it was necessarily her good reactions that saved her marriage. If her husband had another woman who was egging him on, who knows what might have happened. Here’s another insight about the treatment she was given:

“All abuse is just bait. To get you to the be one who freaks out. So the other person doesn’t have to deal. Doesn’t have to take responsibility. Oh look — she’s the one with the black eye. She’s the one crying in the corner. She’s the one leaving. What a bitch.”

Later on, in another incident where her husband yells at her, she says what she would like to say, and then reflects:

“But I stay silent and practice not taking the bait — not being resentful. Letting it wash over me. Because when I stay here I am powerful. Very, very powerful. Take note of this. Let him have the middle-aged tantrum. Just be sure to duck!”

It’s about him. It’s about him. This was so much easier to see in someone else’s story than in my own! And it helped to see that just because your husband yells at you does not necessarily mean that you deserve it. It also helped to see that even when treated badly, a wife can remember that this is a man she loves.

And they get through it. By the end of the summer, her husband was back in their home, spontaneously telling her that he loved her. I’m not sure if Laura Munson realizes that a midlife crisis only three months long is a minor miracle all by itself, and that it could have gone much, much worse. But I am sure that even if the situation had lasted years instead of months, she would have handled it with grace, and she would have continued to choose not to suffer.

In the beginning, Laura Munson tells about her Author’s Statement taped above her desk.

“It says: ‘I write to shine a light on an otherwise dim or even pitch-black corner, to provide relief for myself and others.’

“That’s what this book is all about. Maybe it will help people. Maybe even save marriages, and jobs, and children’s hearts from breaking. I wish I had this book on my bedside table right now. If only just to know that I am not alone.

“If my husband and I come out the other side, together, in love, still married, and unsuffering, then this summer will have been worth it. This book will be worth it.

“And even if we don’t, then I know I will be a better person for living this way.

“So stay with me. Like a gentle friend. Maybe we will both learn something that will change our lives. I’m willing to try. On our behalf.”

Take it from me: Laura Munson succeeds beautifully in her goals. She inspires you to keep going, whatever the outcome of your husband’s crisis. She reminds you that suffering simply isn’t worth it. You can love him, but you don’t have to take the bait.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/not_the_story.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a book I purchased from Amazon.com.

Review of Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Children’s Book

Musings, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review 0

Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Children’s Book

Life Lessons from Notable People from All Walks of Life

edited by Anita Silvey

Roaring Brook Press, New York, 2009. 233 pages.
Starred Review

Here’s a fabulous and thought-provoking celebration of children’s books. I read it slowly and savored it, enjoying a few pages a day. I definitely want to purchase my own copy so I can go through it again many times.

In the Introduction, Anita Silvey explains what she has accomplished with this magnificent book:

“In this book 110 society leaders from various areas — science, politics, sports, and the arts — talk about a children’s book that they loved and its impact on their lives. Funny, insightful, and inspiring, these stories testify to the amazing power of the right book for the right child — at the right time.

“A single illustration from Treasure Island created by N. C. Wyeth made his son Andrew want to become a painter and inspired Robert Montgomery to become an actor. Sometimes a specific book sent an individual on a career path: Steve Wozniak of Apple Inc. read the Tom Swift books, knew he wanted to be an inventor, and eventually created Apple I and Apple II. Characters became role models; Jo March of Little Women inspired actress Julianne Moore, television commentator Judy Woodruff, and writer Bobbie Ann Mason. A book revealed a truth about the person’s character, as Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel did for Jay Leno. At times single lines from a book have resonated for a lifetime: William DeVries, the cardiothoracic surgeon who implanted the first artificial heart, has thought about a statement from The Wizard of Oz all of his career — ‘I will bear all the unhappiness without a murmur, if you will give me a heart.’…

“All of the essays reveal interesting details about the person who wrote them. Many of the people in this volume remember the name of their librarian or teacher, the bookstore they frequented, or the person who handed them a beloved book. When we give children books, we become part of their future, part of their most cherished memories, and part of their entire lives.

“Children’s books change lives. Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Children’s Book provides insight into how they do this. I hope the essays in this book will inspire you to find great books for the children in your life and move you to read to them. The act of reading to a child is the most important contribution to the future of our society that adults can make.”

The large format of the book includes a one-page excerpt with a picture from the book that the famous person is remembering. On the page about their remembrances, there is a sidebar about the background of the book and the person who was touched by it.

The books chosen and remembered present an amazing range of titles. There are picture books, chapter books, and even books considered adult books. Given the ages of the contributors, many of the books were written long ago, but a large number of them are still in print and much beloved today.

Here’s a passage that I enjoyed from Kyle Zimmer, who talked about falling in love with The Hobbit as a child and later reading that same book to his own son. Perhaps I especially loved that essay because the same is true of me and that very book. But his summing up applies to so many more books and so many more people:

“When we read great books with our children, we teach them to turn to great books throughout their lives for comfort, humor, and for illumination of the human experience. The most influential leaders and thinkers in the world have consistently relied on literature for inspiration at their most difficult moments. Nelson Mandela turned to Steinbeck during his imprisonment and says it changed his life. Lincoln was criticized for reading novels in the middle of the Civil War; he defended himself by saying that it kept him sane.

“Whether we are called upon to govern a nation or organize a birthday party for too many children, the key to both surviving our days and cultivating our next generation of leaders is many books, well chosen.”

In many ways, that sums up why I love being a children’s librarian and think of it as more of a calling, than a job. (So I am still a children’s librarian, even though I am currently not employed as one.)

As Jerry J. Mallett says in the very last essay, “It is never too late to have your life changed by a children’s book.”

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/everything_i_need_to_know.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of The Gift of an Ordinary Day, by Katrina Kenison

Musings, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review, True Stories 0

The Gift of an Ordinary Day

A Mother’s Memoir

by Katrina Kenison

Springboard Press, New York, 2009. 310 pages.
Starred Review

I think that Katrina Kenison’s two sons must be right in between the ages of my two sons. I remember reading her book Mitten Strings for God about being the mother of young boys when my boys were young. Now she’s written a book about being the mother of teenage sons who are growing up and finding their way in the world. It resonates with me, because my oldest son has graduated from college and moved out, and my youngest son is about to be a junior in high school.

That wasn’t the only thing I liked about this memoir. In the book, Katrina Kenison deals with so many issues of midlife. They leave their home of many years and find a dream home that needs to be rebuilt. She leaves her long time job. There are so many issues of change and meaning that a woman deals with at this time of life, and I was encouraged and uplifted to read about Katrina Kenison’s journey.

I liked this paragraph about parenting during the difficult times:

“It is always a relief to be reminded that my job is not to control, or judge, or change my son, but simply to help him remember, with words and touch, who he really is. Loving him this way, I am better able to find within myself the faith and patience necessary to survive his painful transformations. I know to hold a space for his beauty, even when it slips from sight. And I come a little bit closer to understanding his true essence, to remembering the goodness that resides just beneath the surface of even his very worst behavior, behavior that is usually rooted in fear and confusion and self-protection.”

Here’s a nice passage about the changes and growth of midlife:

“The world is filled with need. If I am to be of some use, I must first rise to the challenge of my own rebirth and growth, must engage in the gradual, demanding process of discovering the person I am meant to be now and taking up the work I am called to do.

“’Go into yourself, and see how deep the place is from which your life flows,’ the poet Rainer Maria Rilke once instructed an aspiring young writer. The advice might as easily have been written for a middle-aged woman contemplating her emptying nest. The work my friends seem compelled to undertake in their forties and fifties is no longer what they think they should do. It is what they feel, in their deepest souls, that they are meant to do. What the example of their lives suggests, what I desperately want to believe, is that once we have weathered these changes, honored our sorrows and released them, there is also great joy in moving on.”

And here’s a wonderful part about growing up as a mother:

“Now, we’re in a different place and a different time, and I need to become a different kind of mother. A mother who knows how to back off. A mother whose gaze is not quite so intently focused on her own two endlessly absorbing children, but who is engaged instead in a rich, full life of her own. A mother who cares a good deal less than she used to about what time people in her household go to bed, what they eat for breakfast, whether they wear coats or not, and what they choose to do, or not do, with their own time. A mother who, though her protective, maternal instincts run as fierce and deep as ever, manages, in all but extreme moments, to keep those instincts in check. A mother who trusts in who her children are, even if they aren’t exactly who she thinks they ought to be. Who keeps faith in their futures, even when the things they do, and the words they say, give her pause in the present. A mother who remembers, above all else, that the greatest gift she can give to her own two wildly different, nearly grown sons is the knowledge that, no matter what, she loves them both absolutely, just exactly as they are.”

I enjoyed this book tremendously. Reading it is like having a friend to talk to along the exciting and interesting journey of midlife. She makes it feel a little less uncharted and scary.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/gift_of_an_ordinary_day.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of Firstlight, by Sue Monk Kidd

Christian, Musings, Nonfiction Review, Personal Growth 0

Firstlight

The Early Inspirational Writings of Sue Monk Kidd

GuidepostsBooks, New York, 2006. 227 pages.

Sue Monk Kidd got her start writing for Guideposts. She wrote many inspirational pieces for them and for other publications for many years.

Firstlight is a collection of some of her early writings. They make an inspiring, uplifting collection. I made a habit of reading a section or two in the morning during my devotional time.

I think her philosophy is summed up by these words:

“I believe in stories. The world has enough dogma. It’s stories we need more of, stories that reverence the still, small voice that sings our life. As Anthony de Mello observed, “The shortest distance between a human being and Truth is a story.” Jesus, himself, told stories about the most common things in the world: a lost sheep, a seed that falls on rocky ground, a woman who sweeps her house in search of a coin, a man whose son runs away from home.

“All personal theology should begin with the words: Let me tell you a story.”

Sue Monk Kidd writes her devotionals as stories — stories that illustrate the hand of God, or perhaps a lesson about life, or perhaps a reminder of joy.

This book will give you something to smile about as you start your day.

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/firstlight.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of Reading Like a Writer, by Francine Prose

Musings, Nonfiction Review, Writing 0

Reading Like a Writer

A Guide for People Who Love Books and For Those Who Want to Write Them

by Francine Prose

HarperCollinsPublishers, 2006. 273 pages.

Francine Prose begins her book like this:

“Can Creative Writing be taught?

“It’s a reasonable question, but no matter how often I’ve been asked, I never know quite what to say. Because if what people mean is: Can the love of language be taught? Can a gift for storytelling be taught? then the answer is no. Which may be why the question is so often asked in a skeptical tone implying that, unlike the multiplication tables or the principles of auto mechanics, creativity can’t be transmitted from teacher to student. Imagine Milton enrolling in a graduate program for help with Paradise Lost, or Kafka enduring the seminar in which his classmates inform him that, frankly, they just don’t believe the part about the guy waking up one morning to find he’s a giant bug.

“What confuses me is not the sensibleness of the question but the fact that it’s being asked of a writer who has taught writing, on and off, for almost twenty years. What would it say about me, my students, and the hours we’d spent in the classroom if I said that any attempt to teach the writing of fiction was a complete waste of time? Probably, I should just go ahead and admit that I’ve been committing criminal fraud.”

She goes on to admit:

“Like most, maybe all, writers, I learned to write by writing and, by example, from books….

“In the ongoing process of becoming a writer, I read and reread the authors I most loved. I read for pleasure, first, but also more analytically, conscious of style, of diction, of how sentences were formed and information was being conveyed, how the writer was structuring a plot, creating characters, employing detail and dialogue. And as I wrote I discovered that writing, like reading, was done one word at a time, one punctuation mark at a time. It required what a friend calls ‘putting every word on trial for its life’: changing an adjective, cutting a phrase, removing a comma, and putting the comma back in.

“I read closely, word by word, sentence by sentence, pondering each deceptively minor decision that the writer had made. And though it’s impossible to recall every source of inspiration and instruction, I can remember the novels and stories that seemed to me revelations: wells of beauty and pleasure that were also textbooks, private lessons in the art of fiction.”

This book opened my eyes to things about the writing process that had gone right past me before. She talks about and gives examples of writers who chose just the right word, then goes on to talk about beautiful sentence-level writing, and then the way writers construct paragraphs. She talks about narration and dialogue, and creating characters. She talks about telling details and gestures.

I must admit this book reads a bit like a college textbook. I took it very slowly, only tackling a chapter at a time, if that. But it would be a textbook for a fascinating, enlightening college class, and I couldn’t help but be jealous of her students.

With this book, Francine Prose equips the reader to better appreciate — and therefore emulate — the fine art of writing beautiful and powerful fiction.

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/reading_like_a_writer.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of Kitchen Table Wisdom, by Rachel Naomi Remen

Musings, Nonfiction Review, Personal Growth, Starred Review, True Stories 0

Kitchen Table Wisdom

Stories That Heal

by Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D.

Riverhead Books, New York, 10th Anniversary Edition, 2006. 337 pages.
Starred Review.

In her Preface to the 10th Anniversary Edition, Rachel Naomi Remen writes,

“Because I am not a writer, when I sat down to write, all I had were my memories. The stories I had lived through and the stories I had shared. The stories people had told me in the supermarket, on airplanes and in the ladies room. So I told my computer a story. And then another. And another. When the manuscript deadline arrived, I had four hundred pages of little stories.

“I was mortified that this was all that I had to show after a year of work. In the world of medicine, where things that can be expressed in numbers are considered truer than things that can only be expressed in words, stories are considered poor form and storytellers are highly suspect. My tendency to tell stories had always been frowned upon by my medical colleagues and rejected as ‘anecdotal evidence.’ They preferred to measure truth in terms of hard data. So I had learned to keep my stories to myself….

“Now, ten years later, I too am less afraid, less apologetic. When I wrote Kitchen Table Wisdom, I had no idea what it would come to mean to people, about the way it would reach people and strengthen them, the way it would touch people and make them feel less alone. I have discovered the power of story to change people. I have seen a story heal shame and free people from fear, ease suffering and restore a lost sense of worth. I have learned that the ways we can befriend and strengthen the life in one another are very simple and very old. Stories have not lost their power to heal over generations. Stories need no footnotes.”

In the original Introduction, she talks about how she found these stories, when male doctors asked her to talk with patients, expecting a woman to be more comfortable with that.

“At first, I was surprised that people with the same disease had such very different stories. Later I became deeply moved by these stories, by the people and the meaning they found in their problems, by the unsuspected strengths, the depths of love and devotion, the rich and human tapestry initiated by the pathology I was studying and treating. Eventually, these stories would become far more compelling to me than the disease process. I would come to feel more personally enriched by them than by making the correct diagnosis. They would make me proud to be a human being.

“These stories engaged me at another, more hidden point. I too suffer from an illness, Crohn’s disease, a chronic, progressive intestinal disease which I had developed at the age of fifteen. So for me, these conversations eased a certain loneliness. This was a different sort of connection than the easy banter and camaraderie I enjoyed with the other medical residents. This was the conversation of people in bomb shelters, people under siege, people in times of common crisis everywhere. I listened to human beings who were suffering, and responding to their suffering in ways as unique as their fingerprints. Their stories were inspiring, moving, important. In time, the truth in them began to heal me.

“Everybody is a story. When I was a child, people sat around kitchen tables and told their stories. We don’t do that so much anymore. Sitting around the table telling stories is not just a way of passing time. It is the way the wisdom gets passed along. The stuff that helps us to live a life worth remembering. Despite the awesome powers of technology many of us still do not live very well. We may need to listen to each other’s stories once again.”

For some time now, I’ve been reading one or two of these stories every morning. What a blessing! They are stories of healing, stories of wonder, stories of transcendence. And they do pass along wisdom, a wisdom Dr. Remen learned from people coming from all walks of life. Truly a beautiful book.

“All stories are full of bias and uniqueness; they mix fact with meaning. This is the root of their power. Stories allow us to see something familiar through new eyes. We become in that moment a guest in someone else’s life, and together with them sit at the feet of their teacher. The meaning we may draw from someone’s story may be different from the meaning they themselves have drawn. No matter. Facts bring us to knowledge, but stories lead to wisdom.”

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Review of The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life, by Steve Leveen

Musings, Nonfiction Review, Personal Growth 0

The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life

How to get more books in your life and more life from your books.

by Steve Leveen

Levenger Press, 2005. 123 pages.

This book is a celebration of reading. Steve Leveen talks about how to get more books into your life, with ideas like making a personal lifetime reading list, listening to audiobooks, and sharing books with others in book clubs. As an avid reader myself, most of his ideas were not new to me, but I did enjoy reading the ideas of another book lover for savoring books.

Some of his writing is a celebration of the reading life:

“Book love is something like romantic love. When we are reading a really great book, burdens feel lighter, cares seem smaller, and commonplaces are suddenly delightful. You become your best optimistic self. Like romantic love, book love fills you with a certain warmth and completeness. The world holds promise. The atmosphere is clearer and brighter; a beckoning wind blows your hair.

“But while romantic love can be fleeting, book love can last. Readers in book love become more skilled at choosing books that thrill them, move them, transport them. Success breeds success, as these lucky people learn how to find diamonds over and over. They are always reading a good book. They are curious, interested — and usually interesting — people.”

I especially like his conclusion:

“On the first page of this little guide, I suggested that I could help you find more time to read. I hope that by employing some of the ideas in this little book and others you discover, you’ll fall deeply in book love — not once but perpetually. Then you will not have to worry about finding the time to read; that time will come to you. You will naturally do some things less as you read more. What those things will be is obviously your decision.

“Finally, I hope you read some books for no reason other than pure enjoyment. Let a fine story grab hold of you, let yourself be embraced in this uniquely human pleasure with sweet abandon. As you collect books for learning, also collect books that make you laugh and cry and shudder and forget the real world completely. It is good for us in more ways than we know.”

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Review of The Second Journey, by Joan Anderson

Biography, Musings, Nonfiction Review, Personal Growth, True Stories 0

The Second Journey

The Road Back to Yourself

by Joan Anderson

Voice (Hyperion), New York, 2008. 205 pages.

Here’s a book written by a woman in midlife, musing about the paths we take. As a 45-year-old woman going through divorce, with a looming job loss due to budget cuts, I was very ready to listen to what she had to say, to share her journey.

I especially liked the last section, where she spends some time on Iona, an island off the coast of Scotland. I especially enjoyed it simply because I have been to Iona, only for a few hours, but it’s easy to remember the spiritual magic of the place, and easy to take vicarious pleasure in her journeys there.

In the prologue, Joan Anderson says,

“The call to a second journey usually commences when unexpected change is thrust upon you, causing a crisis of feelings so great that you are stopped in your tracks. Personal events, such as a betrayal, a diagnosis of serious illness, the death of a loved one, loss of self-esteem, a fall from power are only a few of the catalysts. A woman caught thusly has no choice but to pause, isolate, even relocate until she can reevaluate the direction in which she should head. Should she stay the course or choose another path?

“But alas, many of us inhibit our capacity for growth because the culture encourages us to live lives of uniformity. We stall, deny, ignore the ensuing crisis because of confusion, malaise, and yes, even propriety. Yet more and more, I come in contact with women, particularly in midlife — that uneasy and ill-defined period — who do not want merely to be stagnant but rather desire to be generative. Today’s woman has the urge to go against the prevailing currents, step out of line, and break with a polite society that has her following the unwritten rules of relationship, accepting the abuses of power in the workplace, and blithely living with myriad shoulds when she has her own burgeoning desires.

“This book will help you navigate through change — from being merely awakened to being determined, impassioned pilgrim on her own individual path. This does not mean giving up family and friends; it simply means integrating the web of family and other relationships into your world so that they are a part of your life but not your entire life.”

Here are some good thoughts for your own second journey.

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.