A couple of weeks ago I posted my review of Maggie O’Farrell’s latest novel Land and wrote about seeing her speak at the start of the Manchester Literature Festival, where she talked at length not only about the new novel but about Hamnet and about her 2017 memoir I Am, I Am, I Am. The title draws on the closing words of Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar in which the deeply troubled main character tries to kill herself several times and experiences extensive medical treatment for mental illness. In O’Farrell’s memoir she writes about her “seventeen brushes with death” after each of which, against the odds it would seem, she manages to survive.
O’Farrell has written and spoken extensively about her childhood illnesses, serious conditions (most seriously perhaps was the encephalitis she contracted around the age of 8) which meant many months of hospital treatment, missed schooling, separation from her family and then, when she did return to school, a sense of distance and separateness from her classmates – she was the child who often needed a wheelchair or was unable to participate in all the usual activities. At the time, being so young, of course, she was unaware of the seriousness of her condition, but nonetheless had a kind of insight into what was going on around her. She is able to recall her childlike observations of medical staff, the matter of fact response to overhearing a nurse tell another child in hospital that she was likely to die soon; too old to not understand, too young to have developed an emotional and philosophical attachment to “life”. And yet, the body endures, pulls through.
The adult Maggie is therefore able to look back on her life as framed in terms of life or death events – each time her luck could go either way. It is striking to me that many of the events here would not, for most of us, be considered a brush with death – a nasty illness or accident can be frightening, leave us shaken, but we might not see it as a brush with death if we had not had a really close brush with death in our formative years. Events like food poisoning in Asia, a knifepoint mugging in South America, even almost having a car boot brought down on her head by her mother when she was young (not interpreted by her at the time as a brush with death, only after her mother told her about it later). This is interesting because towards the end of the book, she writes about instances which speak less of her own mortality and more of her children’s. O’Farrell is a mother of three and it is clear that she sees her own life inextricably linked to that of her children – all parents will identify with this I think, and she captures the sensation brilliantly. The car boot incident has only entered her lexicon as a brush with death since she has had her own children and realised what it feels like when your children’s lives are threatened. As a parent you would give anything to swap places with them.
The final chapter is given over to her daughter. She has a number of severe life-threatening allergies and the author describes to us what her life is like – a kind of exclusion from the carefree life of other children, who can go on play dates without a care, don’t need to worry about who they sit next to when sharing a packed lunch and who can participate fully in all the activities that most of us take for granted. Her life will always be one of extreme caution. As her mother, every threat to her child’s life, is a threat to O’Farrell’s very existence. In some ways the ending is as if she has passed this baton of health concern on to her child, but in another it is about how the risks to the child are an extension to her personal sense of mortality, only much much worse.
This is a poignant, powerful, brilliant ending to the book that had this reader in tears; as the mother of a child with a life-threatening allergy (though not nearly as extensive as O’Farrell’s daughter’s) I could identify strongly with her fears. The ending is also, however, triumphant, on behalf of both herself and her daughter – the human instinct to survive, sometimes against considerable odds, is really quite awesome.
A superb book, highly recommended. I listened to this on audio and found the narration by Daisy Donovan very effective and engaging.
It therefore seems timely that I recently read the memoir Unorthodox by Deborah Feldman. Deborah is in her mid-thirties and lives in Berlin, with her young son. However, she grew up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn as a member of the Satmar sect of Hasidic Jews. She was brought up by her grandparents; her parents separated when she was very young. Her father was a man with sub-normal intelligence, though the precise nature of his disability or illness was never identified. Deborah’s mother was English, the daughter of poor divorced Jewish parents (though not Hasidic), who was unlikely ever to be able to marry well. The marriage was effectively one of convenience for both of them and Deborah was born soon after. The marriage broke down quite quickly, however, and Deborah’s mother was compelled to leave. The community put enough pressure on to ensure she left her child behind.
So now it is time top get back on track and announce the book for November. Our theme is a children’s book; we are winding down towards the end of the year, but I am not going to make it too easy, because this book is a challenging one – John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. I have been meaning to read this ever since it was published to great acclaim in 2006. My elder daughter read it recently and has been nagging me to follow suit. She found it very moving so I am looking forward to it.
This book caused something of a sensation when it was published last year. It is the extraordinary memoir of a young woman who grew up in rural Idaho, as part of a large Mormon family. Nothing too outlandish there until the author begins telling you about the father’s survivalist beliefs (he hoards supplies of food and fuel in their bunker for when catastrophe strikes, as he believes it inevitably will), his Christian fundamentalism (quite extreme beliefs about, for example, what women should wear, that even their fellow Church members find uncomfortable) and the obsessive control he exerts over the rest of the family. The unconventional nature of the family would be enough to make this a fascinating read, but what makes it shocking is the level of violence, of almost sadistic cruelty. Some of is quite hard to read and at times I found myself gasping out loud.
My book club chose this for our pre-Christmas read (I’ve only just finished it!) and we all thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s long, and perhaps could have been edited somewhat, but I imagine the main buyers of this book will be Michelle-fans who want as much detail as possible. The first part of the book was, for me, the least engaging. My fellow readers and I were a little surprised to learn that Michelle Robinson did not in fact come from an affluent background. She was a ‘Southsider’ – from a part of Chicago that was fairly blue-collar and largely African-American, and became more so as she grew older and some of the white residents moved out. A picture is painted of a family with strong values around hard work, doing the right thing, caring for others and loyalty to family. Michelle excelled in school through hard work, determination and the support of her parents and attended both Princeton and Harvard Law School. She has never forgotten her humble beginnings, however, and this underpins her commitment to equality and social justice. However, I did feel this part of the book was most descriptive; in the context of the book as a whole I can see why it would have been important to her to put her politics in perspective, but it was a tiny bit…pedestrian?
We decided for our March meeting we’d read Graham Norton’s 2014 memoir The Life and Loves of a He Devil. We wanted to read an autobiography and felt that among the many “celebrity” memoirs out there, Graham’s might have more to offer than most. We all like him as a broadcaster and personality and thought it might be fun. We were not wrong! But when we came to meet and discuss it, we had very little to say. We’d exchanged a number of messages on our WhatsApp group in the preceding weeks, with many laughter emojis, asking each other if we’d come across the dog and condom anecdote yet, or the Dolly Parton story. Some sections of this book, which I read most of whilst on a train journey to London, were laugh-out-loud, or rather “try to suppress a laugh because I’m in public”, moments. It’s a romp and Graham writes the way he speaks, with wit, authenticity and complete honesty. His writing style is similar in his novel 
I was really torn between Claire Tomalin, Anjelica Huston and Alan Cumming. I left it in the hands of the local library and it was Alan Cumming that became available first! I’m still waiting for Claire Tomalin, and that is probably the one I was keenest to read. I was attracted to Alan Cumming’s book, however, because its premise is not dissimilar to the book I am writing, namely family research and the uncovering of a long-held secret. There the similarity ends, however, as Alan’s book is much more about his relationship with his father.
For November, the challenge is to read a book set in or by a writer from the southern hemisphere – which is, broadly, South America, southern Africa and Australasia. As the nights draw in and it gets increasingly wintry I wanted to be reminded that in other parts of the world it is Summer! So, my choice this month is Isabel Allende’s Portrait in Sepia, a book I picked up in my local Oxfam bookshop and which has been sitting on my ‘to read’ pile for far too long. Allende is such a fine writer and I’ve read a number of her books over the years. It’s great to have an excuse to dive into this one and experience the sensuousness of her writing and the world she evokes, as the last leaves fall from the trees here and nature seems to go into hibernation.
