Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes
Chronicle Books, 1996
Category: Biography

The books I like best are all about people, places, cultures that are far removed from my own. This explains why most of what I read is speculative fiction–you cannot get farther away than imagined worlds–but it also means that I love historical fiction, hard science, and travel memoirs. Traveling through literature is satisfying in a different way than traveling for real; you miss out on actually being there, but you also get to see the world distilled through someone else’s eyes, free from the little annoyances of being in an alien place that can ruin your experience. Like Peter Mayle settling in Provence, Frances Mayes came to Tuscany and became caught up in the place, suggesting that each of us has a home of the heart where, if we are lucky, we’ll be able to live.

This book is not a true biography or even a travel book, but it is the kind of memoir that becomes biography just by being an accurate depiction of events. Fresh from a failed marriage “that was never supposed to fail” Mayes has just begun finding herself in a new life, with a new companion, when she buys this abandoned villa in Italy and sets about the awesome task of repairing it. As she tells of each new development, each moment in her new life, Mayes also reveals the person she is becoming, her development paralleling subtly the rebuilding of the house. She and Ed, who married in 1998 (and I mention this because she fascinatingly never refers to him by any relational term like “boyfriend” or “life partner”), put a lot of themselves into the work, mostly because of the cost, but in the end because it’s unimaginable not to. At one point Mayes compares the heavy lifting of clearing stones to the aerobic workouts she does back at “home” in California. Both build the body but only one is actually fun. I started imagining myself clearing out the small patch of garden at the side of my house or actually learning how to care for the rosebushes, which dangle forlorn dried-up pods, or buds, or something leftover from last summer at the tips of their branches. Another disadvantage to traveling through literature is the horrible dissociative shock when you step back into reality and it has thorns.

This is also not a book to read when you are on a diet, particularly a low-carb diet. Why do southern Europeans love their food so much? The only times I’ve ever wished my religion didn’t forbid wine is in reading about French and Italian cuisine, where the great variety of wines seems not to exist for the sake of intoxication but as an integral part of the meal; I get the sense that refusing the bottle the waiter brings to the table is sort of like wanting your food served without tomatoes, or something like that. On the other hand, it’s very clear that traditional Tuscan cuisine is the sort of thing I could enjoy cooking, because it is so simple. You people who love to cook and refer to certain recipes as “simple” often don’t remember that you’re comparing that recipe to something that takes ten hours and a dozen reductions. “Simple,” from my perspective, is the recipe for cold tomato soup: chopped basil and tomatoes stirred into chicken stock and refrigerated. Mayes’s travels throughout the countryside include frequent descriptions of the places she and Ed stop to eat and how basic and unvaried the menus are (“menu” in this case meaning “what the lady of the house decided to make that day”). I’m getting hungry just thinking about it.

Mayes is, at heart, a poet, and I think prose written by poets is always either unbearably purple or beautifully right. Mayes’s writing falls into the last category. It even infected me, not a poet of anything beyond limericks or fake haiku, and I can feel even now how my syntax in this review is altered because of it. I can heartily recommend this book to a wide variety of readers–lovers of Italy, lovers of good food, lovers of poetry, but most especially to those who find themselves at a point in life that is not so much a crossroads as a trackless wood.

The Glass Castle  by Jeannette Walls
Scribner, 2005
Category: Biography

This book is my worst nightmare.

Not the terrible things Jeannette and her siblings went through, though that’s bad enough.  My worst nightmare is becoming like her parents, those shiftless, selfish, hopeless dreamers whose manias exposed their children to hardships no one should have to face.  They have just enough good characteristics–imagination, independence–to keep them from being completely awful, but those characteristics are so often warped by their selfish natures that it was impossible for me to feel compassion for them, not for more than a page at a time.

The Glass Castle is the story of the author’s childhood, growing up rootless with a couple of iconoclastic parents and her brother and sisters.  Rex Walls was a genius and a drunk who believed his intelligence made him better than everyone around him; he never kept a job for long because he would argue with his bosses or claim that they were part of a vast conspiracy ruled by the Mob.  His passion was to strike it rich by mining gold with a unique invention created by himself, but never actually completed.  Rose Mary Walls was an artist, both a painter and a would-be writer, obsessed with hoarding things and money, always looking for a bargain.  Their children’s young lives in Arizona and California were wonderful and terrible by turns.  I actually admire some of what the parents taught their children about self-reliance and toughness, even as I’m horrified by how they neglected their kids in the name of thriftiness or independence.  The family moved around to avoid debt collectors, packing up in the middle of the night and leaving everything behind.  Jeannette carried a single geode with her for years because it was the only thing she could manage to keep.

Then the family moves to Welch, West Virginia, and the tale becomes truly grim.  Jeannette writes of scavenging in the school garbage cans for her classmates’ discarded lunches because they can’t afford food, of living in a house that was falling apart with a toilet that was just a hole in the ground, of abuse suffered at the hands of her father’s mother, a bitter woman who was likely responsible for some of her son’s eccentricities.  Showers taken haphazardly at the homes of relatives or friends, living on pinto beans for a week because it was cheap, inadequate clothing or heating…the list of physical deprivations goes on.  But what’s worse is the spiritual degradations these children suffered.  Their mom was likely manic-depressive and untreated, their father’s drinking got worse; the children couldn’t count on their parents to support them in any way.

Whatever good qualities Rex and Rose Mary Walls had were completely subsumed in their overwhelming self-centeredness.  They never thought of anything but their own needs.  The scene where Jeannette and her sister find their mother chowing down secretly on an enormous chocolate bar when the kids have been hungry for days sticks with me–the mother sobbing about how she’s a sugar addict and she can’t help herself, as if begging them to forgive her.  Or Jeannette going with her father to "make some money" hustling pool at a dive, which ends with Jeannette almost being gang-raped and her father dismissing her complaints because he "knew she could handle herself."

It’s amazing that three of the four kids made it out not only alive, but came out successful:  oldest sister Lori became an artist, Jeannette went on to be a reporter, and Brian, the only son, became a police officer (an ambition he first realized when he had to call the cops to break up his parents fighting).  Maureen, the youngest, fell apart for a while–I had to go and hug my own exquisite blonde-haired blue-eyed daughter at this point–but even she seems to be pulling her life back together.  And yet I’m angry at those who would point to this story as a success simply because the children didn’t follow in their parents’ grimy footsteps.  What parents do matters.  Just because the Walls siblings made it out alive doesn’t excuse their parents from being complete failures.

I honor Jeannette Walls for being able to love her parents despite their massive failings–for finding a way to make love not mean accepting the horrible things people do.  She was literally scarred for life because of them, and chose to make her life matter instead of using her experiences as an excuse to fail.  Hers is an amazing story, and she is incredibly brave to tell it to the world.

Boy by Roald Dahl
Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1984
Category: Biography

Boy begins with a note from the author that this is not so much an autobiography as it is a collection of reminiscences from his childhood. Because of this, the book is entertaining and light where it might have dragged along.  My first real awareness of this book was in the movie You’ve Got Mail, in the scene where Meg Ryan as “the Story Lady” reads to a bunch of captivated children.  It takes a little doing to see what book she reads from, but this is the one.  Since that time the desire to read it for myself has niggled at the back of my mind, and now…here we are.

If Hugh Grant and Hugh Laurie had a baby, that baby would look like the young Roald Dahl. He was the only boy in a family of sisters (he had an older half-brother and half-sister, whom he refers to as “ancient,” but his relationship to them, while close, is different that what he had with his full sisters) and quite dark-haired to their Norwegian blondness.  Boy contains a scattering of photos and excerpts of letters he wrote home all the years he was away at school, in his own handwriting, many of which are simply placed between paragraphs with no explanation.  This adds to the texture of the book rather than making it disjointed, particularly the passages that contrast starkly the experiences he had at school with how he described them in writing home.

I know a few people who dislike Dahl’s stories because the over-the-top brutality some characters display toward children is unsettling, unpleasant, an interruption of the suspension of disbelief necessary to enjoy any fiction.  I don’t feel that way myself, but I was startled to learn just how close to the truth some of his stories are.  While the actions of Dahl’s cruelest characters are of course exaggerations, the emotions, the raw brutality those characters embody, is not far from the truth of what he and other boys experienced at school.  The headmaster who drew out each stroke of the cane to make the punishment more terrifying; the prefect who prided himself on laying each stroke of the cane in the same place (and this, another student!); the teacher who casually instructed a beaten child to clean up the blood and get back to his class–the miracle is that *anyone* came out of that system spiritually unbroken.

Balancing this are moments where you see why the young Dahl became the writer that he did.  School wasn’t uniformly awful.  He particularly talks about how the Cadbury company would on occasion use the boys as test subjects, something Dahl admires as extremely clever–they harnessed the most discerning consumers of chocolate in England and got their opinions for free!  Dahl’s loving memory of those large boxes full of chocolate bars was the direct inspiration for his most famous book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

The ending feels rushed, possibly because Dahl’s teenage years weren’t as interesting; the entire book has the feel of your favorite grandpa sitting you down at his side and telling you thrilling stories of his youth.  It ends with Dahl traveling, as he always longed to do, to Africa, and then enlisting in the RAF when WWII breaks out–and the promise of someday writing another book about those years.  That book is the sequel, Flying Solo, and since I have that one as well, I’ll have to try not to wait so long to read it this time.

Marie Antoinette: The Journey  by Antonia Fraser
Doubleday, 2001 (US edition)
Category: Biography

Yes, that’s right, it took me a long time to read this.  Mostly because my reading time has been taking up by writing, but also because, as interesting as it was, it was also very intense–too intense for long stretches.  (Right up until you get to 1789, and then I couldn’t stop.)

The first thing that occurred to me was that the rulers of Europe in the 18th century really did act like they were playing a life-size game of Risk with an entire continent.  Reading their correspondences and the history of shifting alliances, it sounds exactly like a bunch of wargamers negotiating for advantage, or a fantasy football league in the middle of draft picks ("I’ll take that Austrian Archduchess if her dowry includes that little chunk of Saxony you’ve been sitting on for three rounds, Bill.")  They didn’t seem to be aware that their countries were full of ordinary people who might be affected by their actions.  Which isn’t entirely true, because Marie Antoinette, for one, was very concerned about philanthropy; it was just that political policy was shaped by the concerns of maybe two hundred people.

The second thing was that the people of France went from adoring their Queen to turning on her like a pack of rabid hyenas in a matter of months.  The things that were written and said about her in the press were so vicious and so baseless that I started to wonder if there wasn’t an organized plot to discredit her. The libelles printed about her that were the basis of what the populace "knew" about Marie Antoinette read like imaginative porn with the right names pasted in.  What’s truly infuriating is that I’ve never seen so clear a proof that rational, scientific thinking still wasn’t widespread by the end of the 18th century.  Mob mentality is one thing, but Marie Antoinette’s "trial" consisted of 40 "witnesses" who made stuff up and were never countered, never had to prove their allegations, things that a modern court would have tossed out immediately.  My favorite bit was when one of the prosecutors said that they had written proof Marie Antoinette had committed treason and would present it in court–or at least would present the testimony of someone who’d seen it, because the documents had gone missing.

But that’s all irrelevant.  Marie Antoinette was doomed from the moment the royal family failed to escape France.  The revolutionaries needed a scapegoat, and the foreign Queen was perfect.  People who couldn’t quite feel comfortable condemning their King as a traitor were thrilled to be able to pin all of their anger on an easy target who, at the end, had been deserted by all her former allies.  She was an extremely unlucky woman, not well educated, not suited to politics, and as complicit in the financial excesses of the French court as anyone.  She was also determined, compassionate, devoted to her family, and willing to step outside her comfort zone to try to save the monarchy when Louis XVI collapsed emotionally.  Even knowing how it all would end, I mourned her death.  (Then I cheered, later, when that bastard the Duc d’Orleans was led to the guillotine.  That fake man of the people who threw his entire class under the bus, sided with the revolutionaries, and voted for the death of his cousin the King, was himself a victim of the Great Terror.  Hahahahaha.)

Marie Antoinette was the ultimate winner.  It was less than twenty years after her execution that her story began to be rewritten, thanks to the many memoirs written about her time by men and women who actually knew her.  Though the image of the vicious, uncaring, spendthrift queen still exists, it’s more than balanced by the records who paint her as she likely was: a sweet and well-meaning woman who was utterly unprepared for the challenges life handed her.  And I have to admit that I hope she *did* have an affair with Count Felsen, and that it gave her everything she couldn’t get from her husband.  (I will relate the story of why it took more than seven years for Louis and Antoinette’s marriage to be fully consummated, but only by private request, because it’s quite graphic.  And funny.)

Fabulous book.  Antonia Fraser is one of those writers who conveys her sympathy for her subject without ignoring historical fact.  She also paints a portrait of historical Europe and the French court that makes Marie Antoinette’s life come into excellent focus.  I’d recommend this book to anyone interested in either the subject or in 18th century history.

I See By My Outfit  by Peter S. Beagle
Viking, 1965
Category: Biography

I learned to play "Streets of Laredo" on the guitar when I was in fourth grade. Not until reading this book did I learn that there was a parody version written by the Kingston Trio, which is where the title of the book comes from. The stuff you find out when you read, huh?

For the purposes of this project, I’ve lumped all sorts of biographical writing into the Biography category: biographies, autobiographies, memoirs. I See By My Outfit is Beagle’s account of traveling cross-country with his friend Phil on a couple of scooters, New York to San Francisco. Though it is technically a travel memoir, it’s less about the country than about the people they meet along the way. The style is pure Beagle: balancing on the precarious edge between poetry and purple prose, turning the journey of two madmen (did I mention the scooters? and how they don’t actually know how to repair them?) into something epic. They refer often to the journey to Mordor from The Lord of the Rings, which is with the title song one of the two main themes of the story. It sometimes shows up as a running gag; "This must be Mordor." "No, Mordor is at the end of the journey"–the humor being that the end of the journey is Enid, Beagle’s girlfriend and the reason he is making the trip.

It’s a little weird to read Beagle’s explanation of what The Lord of the Rings is, in this era when people living under rocks have heard of it–but he was writing in a time when the books had only just been reprinted in the "official" edition, when they were a touchstone for the counter-culture and not yet a culture in themselves, a time before the great fantasy literature explosion of the early ’70s.  But then Beagle himself was writing fantasy in this era, and sometimes I wish I’d been alive to read those novels without the background assumptions of modern fantasy.

I thoroughly enjoyed I See By My Outfit. It’s beautifully written, and I love the evocation of a time not that far off by the calendar, but a million miles from our own time in every respect.  Except, perhaps, the people–and maybe a travelogue of human culture isn’t such a strange idea after all.