Category: Early Review

Letters to Kurt

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Erlandson, Eric. Letters to Kurt. New York: Akashic, 2012.

I was wrong about this book. I previously said I thought I could read it in a weekend. What I was really thinking was that I could read it in an hour. I was oh so wrong. Very wrong. On both accounts. Here’s how it really went: I could read it for 15-20 minutes and then had to walk away. Words blended and sentences started to sound the same. I lost my place among the pages often. Letters became redundant if I read too much. How do I describe this book accurately? Here are the words I jotted down while reading this on a Sunday morning, coffee balanced on knee, propped up in bed: Clever. Cliche. Rambling. Private. Joking. Culture. Pop. Jealousy. Sexy. Rude. And finally, a sentence. “I’m feeling left out.” Even if you were parked in front of every media outlet in the 1990s you will still miss some of the reference Erlandson makes. I wavered between thinking this was a glorified writing assignment, “write for ten minutes straight” and feeling it was an outpouring of grief and rage in the form of stream of consciousness prose. It babbles and barks. There is bite. It’s sad and strangely beautiful. But, as I said earlier it is not something to devour in one sitting. You will get indigestion, for sure. Bite small. Chew slowly. Push the book away often and everything will taste better in the end.

May ’12 is…

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Hawaii. Hawaii. Hawaii. This is going to sound sick but I am trying to get psyched for an upcoming trip to the islands. Not The Island that I know and love. The Sandwich Islands. Hawaii. Or, more specifically Oahu and Maui. My first time to either. Here are the books that are helping me learn about Hawaiian culture and history:

  1. Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen , Lilioukalani
  2. West of Then by Tara Bray Smith
  3. Six Months in the Sandwich Islands by Isabella Bird
  4. Volcano by Garrett Hongo
  5. Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl (don’t you just love his name?)

In addition to that (completely unplanned) list I am trying to stick to the reading schedule. That would include

  1. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott in honor of May being Eeyore’s birth month (in other words, something sad)
  2. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan in honor of May being Asian American Heritage month,
  3. and last but not least, Charlotte Gray by Sebastian Faulks in honor of May being sex month.

It’s a bit of reading but I think West of Then and Kon-Tiki are going to be really quick reads. Volcano might also be quick…not sure yet.
Oh! Two last books! For the Early Review Program (LibraryThing) – I almost forgot! I have the United States Coast Guard and National Guard by Thomas Ostrom and Letters to Kurt by Eric Erlandson. Both arrived this month. The Coast Guard book is a January book and I think Letters is a February book. So, a little late, but I’ll get to them! Letters to Kurt I’m sure I’ll read in a weekend or less. Hello coffee in bed!
What else to tell you? In less than two weeks I will be walking 60 miles for Just ‘Cause. In less than four weeks I will be saying goodbye to my cousin. What can I say? I can’t wait for June.

Small Fortune

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Dastgir, Rosie. A Small Fortune. New York: Riverhead Books, 2012.

On the surface A Small Fortune is about a lonely man who obtains an inheritance from a recent divorce. The dilemma is not what Harris should do with the money; there are plenty of family members who all feel entitled to at least a portion of it. First, there is the family back home in Harris’s native Pakistan. Then there is his struggling nephew who can’t find happiness with any employment venture. While she hasn’t asked there is also his fiercely independent and completely Westernized eighteen year old daughter four hours away in London. The real struggle arises when Harris impulsively hands over a majority of the inheritance to the least deserving yet most conniving cousin. When Harris realizes his mistake and then wants the money back he cannot summon the authority to demand its return. Amidst all this turmoil Harris wrangles with starting over as a single parent to a secretive daughter while trying to juggle a new relationship with a woman equally as independent as his daughter. Harris’s entire personality has to undergo a transformation in order for him to cope.

The majority of the time I was reading A Small Fortune I had this nagging thought that wouldn’t shake loose. The main character, Harris, reminded me of someone else in fiction. Someone epic. It bothered me that I couldn’t put my finger on who that other character could be; I couldn’t pin her/him down. So, I started a list of characteristics for Harris: fatherly, over-protective, slightly unlikeable, scheming, paranoid, eager to please, impetuous…And then it dawned on me. Garp. T.S. Garp from The World According to Garp. Dastir’s Harris could be related to Garp, a half-brother of sorts. Throughout A Small Fortune Harris is so wishy-washy I wanted to slap him several times over. The fact that Dastgir was able to create a character that evoked such emotion in me is a testament to her writing ability. Harris really did annoy me that much.

My favorite character was Harris’s daughter, Alia. She hovers between obligatory concern for her father and resentment because he hinders her freedom to be modern. Her independence as a western girl is compromised by his old world culture.

April ’12 is…

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April is and will always be my WhatTheFukc month. It’s the last full month of Just ‘Cause training. It’s the month when I think I’m never walking enough despite hours on the treadmill. It’s the last full month of the semester at school. It’s the month when the animals students are doing stupid sh!t like hanging from water pipes and causing a major flood in their dorm. I kid you not. It’s the last truly cold month of the year. At least one can hope. It’s the last month I feel comfortable wearing knee high boots. For reading it’s an even more discombobulated month. April is National Poetry month so between the novels I’ll be reading poetry. It’s like a car stalling. I can’t explain it.

Anyway…here’s what I PLAN to read for the month of April. You know as well as I do I probably will stick to only 75% of this…
April is Alcohol Awareness month so I’m reading John Barleycorn by Jack London. April is also food month so I’ll be depressing myself with Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of an All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser. April happens to be National Humor month so I’m buzzing through The Egg and I by Betty MacDonald. The Civil War started in April so I threw Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier on the list. I need to wrap up a couple of series I started in Janurary so The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien and These Happy Golden Yearsby Laura Ingalls Wilder are on the list. Last but not least I finally, finally got an Early Review book from LibraryThing: A Small Fortune by Rosie Dastgir. Oh. And there’s the random poem in between all that…

What else is April all about? Easter with the in-laws to talk about our upcoming trip to Hawaii. My sister’s birthday. It’s a big one. A jaunt to the theater with a good friend. A Red Sox game. Maybe a little cowbell in Vermont? Not sure.

March ’12 is…

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What is March 2012 all about? Hard to say . Or as they say on Monhegan, hard tellin’ not knowin’. Fitting I suppose for a reading project still in limbo. I’m still reading books off my own shelves and borrowing books from my own library. To those not in the know that sounds strange, but there you have it.

Here are the books I *think* I’ll be reading in March:

  • A Grain of Wheat by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (baptized James Ngugi) ~ in honor of March being African Writers Month
  • Little Town in the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder ~ in honor of the Dakotas (series was started in January)
  • Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101 Airborne from Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest by Stephen Ambrose ~ in honor of March 4th being “Hug a GI Day.” Since I don’t have a GI to hug, I’ll hug a book about World War II.
  • Lord of the Rings: Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien ~ in honor of New Years (series was started in January)
  • Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte ~ in honor of March being National Literature month.

For the Early Review program for LibraryThing – I never got the February book so we’ll see if it comes in March…Incidentally, I just checked the LibraryThing website and I was awarded a March book as well. Now the race is on to see which book makes it here first.

February ’12 is…

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I feel like I should be singing that diet song that Jennifer Hudson sings – you know the one about it being a new day, a new dawn or a new whatever? Every February I see a chance to refresh, renew, in other words start the fukc over. Think New Years resolutions only a month late. But. But! But, I have my reasons. I was born in the month of February so to me, this month IS my new year. I shouldn’t be here so every year that I am is like starting over. But, enough about all that. Here are the books:

  • Bread and Jam for Frances by Russell Hoban in honor of Hoban’s birth month. I plan to read this on a smoke break. LOL
  • Personal History by Katharine Graham in honor of February being Journalism month.
  • Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer in honor of February being a big month for history.
  • Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien to continue the Lord of the Rings series that I started with The Hobbit last month.

I did get notification that I got an Early Review book from LibraryThing. That’s cool. What’s even cooler is that it’s a book about the Coast Guard. Having just come from an very, very classy veteran’s (air force) funeral for my uncle I am interested to explore the history of my father’s military branch.

Edited to make a correction: I misspelled Mrs. Graham’s first name as Katherine. My apologies.

Six Years

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I have to stop for a moment and catch my literary breath. For the past six years I have been reading at a break-neck speed. Between Early Reviews for LibraryThing (started in 2007), gifts and recommendations from friends and The BL Challenge I have been reading a lot. Tons. Here’s the thing. I never stop at the end of the each year to really review the progress. People ask me where I am at with “The List” and I can easily say how many Book Lust books I have read for the month but. but! But, that’s only half the story (or a third of it if you want to get down to brass tacks.)

So, it might seem crazy, but here is six years in review:

October- December 2006 – I read 19 books total. 12 for the Book Lust Challenge and 7 “for fun.” To be fair, I started really reading in late October. Interestingly enough, my first BL book was Last River by Todd Balf, reviewed on November 15th. Favorite book? Hands down, Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck.

2007 – I read 106 books total. Two yoga books for fun, six for the Early Review program in conjunction with LibraryThing, and 98 for the Book Lust Challenge. Favorite book? Griffin and Sabine by Nick Bantock. I will always love this book.

2008 – 100 books total. Again, two for fun, fifteen for the Early Review program, and 83 for Book Lust. Favorite Book? Without a doubt, The Translator by Daoud Hari. His words resonate with me to this day. Read it! Read it!

2009 – 123 books total. Four for fun (gifts mostly), 11 for Early Review, and 108 for Book Lust. Favorite? And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts. Astonishing.

2010 – 104 total. Again, four for fun, 14 for Early Review, and only 86 for Book Lust. Favorite has to be Homer’s Odyssey by Gwen Cooper.

2011 – 111 total. Two for fun, 11 for Early Review, and 98 for Book Lust. Favorite? It was a tie between The Long Run by Matthew Long (I am still recommending it to people, anyone who will listen) and Losing Clementine by Ashley Ream (which I will be recommended to everyone who will listen as soon as it is published in March 2012).

The grand totals for everything: 485 challenge books, 57 ER books, and 21 fun. 563 in all.

Solomon’s Oak

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Mapson, Jo-Ann. Solomon’s Oak. New York: Bloomsbury, 2010.

This was published over a year ago, in October 2010, so I feel sort of strange calling it an “Early” review for LibraryThing. It’s not exactly early in the grand scheme of things.

Here’s the quick and dirty: Glory Solomon is a newly widowed woman trying to make ends meet on her California farm. After the sudden death of her beloved husband (from pneumonia) Glory finds herself at odds with the new life she must forge without him. She struggles to keep her life exactly the same: taking in last-chance dogs, fostering children, and managing the farm all while keeping her head above water. When a new foster child unlike any other enters her life Glory realizes life will never be the same.

Everything about this book errs a little too much on the side of pleasant. I kept waiting for the trick, the edginess of each new situation to find it’s way into the story, but it never came. Mapson opens the door to many ominous opportunities to make the story a little grittier but never actually steps through it. Juniper McGuire is described as angry and troubled yet I saw more flashes of kindness and happiness than teenager angst. For all that she had been through she really wasn’t that bad of a kid. Then there’s the budding relationship with damaged ex-cop Joseph. Glory’s good friend growls to Joseph that he should “stay away” from the widow and yet that threat falls flat when he refuses to do so.

The last quirk to Solomon’s Oak is the narrative. Mapson does a great job with telling the story from a third party perspective but at the end she gives Juniper a voice allowing for an odd first person narrative. For the sake of consistency I wish Juniper had been allowed to tell her story all along.

Favorite line I feel comfortable quoting, “Glory loved her sister even if some days she had to work hard to like her” (p 74).

Cruising Attitude

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Poole, Heather. Cruising Attitude: Tales of Crashpads, Crew Drama, and Crazy Passengers at 35,000 Feet. New York: Harper, 2012.

When I first picked up Cruising Attitude I did so remembering (with fondness) the male flight attendant who admonished smokers with this, “You are welcome to smoke on this flight. Please do so in the fresh air. There’s a spot for you on the right wing.”
Was this something I just couldn’t put down? I thought the writing was uncomplicated and easy and definitely entertaining, but I wasn’t obsessed with getting to the next chapter. Was this something that had me spellbound through each and every sentence? Not really. I found it cute, but even snarky at times so it had bite to it. I didn’t laugh out loud, but I did giggle on occasion. Did I believe every story? I guess so. There really wasn’t a reason to doubt her…or really care if I was duped by a good yarn spinner. I did have a few ah-ha moments as if Poole cleared up a few great mysteries for me. Mysteries I never knew confounded me. Those ah-ha moments were mostly related to airline stewardess behavior – like when they insist on greeting (or saying goodbye) to every passenger using a different phrase. It’s like they spent the last hour of the flight reading the slang thesaurus in the bathroom “(buh-bye, so long, see ya, g’bye, so long).
My only real “complaint” (and this is a tiny one) is the lack of flow and organization of stories. It’s as if Poole is thinking outloud, trying to cram in as much as possible, and as a result her writing jumps around from thought to thought. The best example of this is when Poole dishes on famous and/or wealthy people’s behavior in flight. It’s two pages of “see if you can guess which celebrity did this obnoxious thing.”
All in all I liked Cruising Attitude and if Poole’s motive for writing it was to enlighten passengers who fly the friendly skies, it worked. I will never look at flight attendants the same way again.

Call Me When You Land

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Schiavone, Michael. Call Me When You Land. New York: Permanent Press, 2011.

If Nancy Pearl had to categorize this book for one of the chapters in Book Lust this would easily fit into either her “Families in Trouble” or “First Novel” chapter. If she had to categorize this book as a selection in More Book Lust it could easily fit into her “Men Channeling Women” chapter. First, there’s Katie Olmstead. Alcoholic, artist, single mother slowly losing her grip on reality. Then there’s Katie’s reality, C.J., the angst-ridden son. C.J. is uncommunicative, lonely and lost. Finally, there’s great-uncle Walter. Coughing up blood, stoned, patient and pathetic. Parsing out words of wisdom to said mother and son while quietly raging against his own frailty. Spoiler: he disappears from the story halfway through; a disappointment because he was the glue that held mother and son together.
All of these characters fit an eye-rolling stereotypical mold. Katie, in a spurt of mothering, makes her son breakfast. C.J. isn’t used to seeing his mom awake much less standing at that hour is skeptical and more than a little suspicious. Their dialogue is full of cliche zingers like, “what’s your deal this morning?” and “I’m not poisoning you.” Character development is minimal. People like Peter and Caroline pop up without introduction. There is a lot of backtracking to fill in the blanks.
To be honest I read this book like it reads: in fits and starts. It wasn’t the kind of book I could read for hours on end without coming up for air. I was beyond frustrated by all the name brand products. Aquafina, Alka-Seltzer, Aleve, Advil, Best Buy, Barolo, Benadryl, Ben & Jerry’s, Coors, Claratin, Cabernet, Capri Sun, Chips Ahoy, Clearasil, Dunkin Donuts, Disney, Dewars, Diet Coke, Dairy Queen, Desitin, Dolce & Gabbana, Emergen-C, Eggos, Febreze, Fruit Rollup, Gap, Gatorade, Grand Marnier, Halo 3, Hydroxycut, Hot Pocket, iPhone, J. Crew, Joy, Keds, Kools, Kleenex, Liz Claiborne, Mountain Dew, McDonalds, Marc Jacobs, Odwalla, Pepsi, Pellogrino, Palmolive, Prozac, Ray-Bans, Ritalin, Rockstar, Rice-a-Roni, Ragu, StairMaster, Starbucks, Sprite, Snuggie, Shiraz, Splenda, SeaWorld, Timberland, Tylenol, Trader Joe’s, Target, Tag, Tuff, Tropicana, Tanquerey, Under Armour, Visine, Vasaline. I know I could list a dozen more. If this were a movie the product placement would be nauseating. Writing should be timeless. If the products aren’t around ten years from now the piece becomes dated and clunky. There is the danger of alienating the reader as well. Not everyone will know what Halo 3 or Rockstar is. Something gets lost in translation when the product is the punchline to a funny line.

What I liked best about Call Me When You Land is the potential for a happy ending. The promise of change is hanging in the air. Differences are happening and that’s all that matters.

July ’11 was…

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Where the fukc do I start (besides the fact that I’m posting this very late)? July 2011 was hell with a twisted sense of humor. Chronological speaking the first week of July was first a new car, then a wedding, then a quick trip to Monhegan and Kennebunkport (not impressed). A first week of fireworks and fun. The second week of July was an eight hour drive to Chautauqua, New York to see (from dead center second row, thank you very much) Miss Natalie Merchant at her best. A stunning performance I won’t soon forget. The third week was another trip to Maine, burying my grandfather, having my house robbed, and struggling to make sense of administrative setbacks. Week four was Kisa having to replace a tire on the truck, replace a cracked skimmer on the pool, our hot water heater flooding the basement in the middle of the night and lots and lots of home security upgrades. The ongoing issue is Jones freaking out. I don’t know what happened during the robbery but I do know he’s not the same. Insane to get out, he claws and cries and scrambles frantically at every door and window. He acts like a tortured prisoner. In the midst of all this chaos I have tried my best to keep reading. It was only semi-successful. Many fitful starts, few finishes:

  • Where the Heart Is by Billie Letts ~ in honor of it being a book within reach while I was on Monhegan. I think this should be a movie.
  • House of Mirth by Edith Wharton ~ in honor of New York becoming a state in July. Greedy book. I didn’t completely finish it. I got the point three quarters of the way through it and got the point.
  • Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe ~ in honor of Burton Bennett’s birthday. This was made into a movie & no, I didn’t finish the book or see the movie. Another greedy book.
  • Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin ~ in honor of it being a book in the library. I was ten pages shy of finishing this one.
  • It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life by Lance Armstrong ~ in honor of the Tour de France. I will never look at this book the same way again for it was what I was reading on the ride home from the burial…and yes, I finished it …when we pulled into the driveway.
  • Hitty: Her First Hundred Years by Rachel Field ~ in honor of going to Rachel’s “home” state, Maine.
  • The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen ~ I barely finished this (supposed to be read in August in honor of Franzen’s birth month). I’m waiting for the movie version.

And for LibraryThing and the Early Review Program:

  • Deadly Indifference: The Perfect (Political) Storm: Hurricane Katrina, the Bush White House and Beyond by Michael D. Brown and Ted Schwarz ~ I didn’t finish this. After awhile it got really repetitive with all the blame and finger pointing.
  • Pretty by Jillian Lauren ~ I loved this book. I loved how raw and messed up it was.

We ended July the exact same way we started it – with a road trip and awesome music. A blog about Rebecca Correia’s fantastic farm show will be posted on the other side.

Pretty

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Lauren, Jillian. Pretty: a Novel. New York: Plume, 2011.

This is another one of those can’t-put-down books that I read in just seven hours time (on a car ride from Jamestown, New York to Western MA).  I was mesmerized by the characters, the story, everything. Beth “Bebe” Baker has just lost her boyfriend in a horrific accident. Disfigured from crawling over broken glass and deeply dependent on drugs she enters a halfway house to find sobriety and a sense of self. There, and at the cosmetology school, she meets a cast of misfit characters who take her under their own broken wings. It’s a troubling tale of coming to terms with not just the past, but the unknown future as well.
Before reading Pretty I had just finished reading Where the Heart Is by Billie Letts and I think I had that storyline running through my head because I found a few similarities where there shouldn’t have been. Letts’s character, Novalee Nation, shares many personality traits and similar experiences with Lauren’s character, Beth “Bebe” Baker. Both are young woman essentially far from home and practically homeless (Novalee lives in a Wal-Mart and Bebe lives in a rehab halfway house). Less than scrupulous men abandon both women. Both women deal with pregnancy. Both women adopt creatives outlets as a coping mechanism and a means of escape (Novalee takes up photography while Bebe studies cosmetology). Both women search for salvation in the arms of a quirky community of misfits. Both experience the return of lovers and learn to let go.
But for all that, this is where the similarities end. Lauren’s style of writing in Pretty is raw, gritty, real. While the title of the book is  Pretty Bebe is someone who isn’t always pretty. She has her moments of displaying downright ugly. This characteristic just makes her all the more human. One example of this reality is the wearing down of her resolve to stay away from someone less than good for her. This man is a connection to her drug addled past and Bebe knows that in order to remain sober she needs refuse all contact with him. She does well to ignore his phone calls until the rest of her life starts to unravel and she weakens…but isn’t that always the way?
This is a quick read…but that’s a good thing because that only means you’ll have time to start at page one and read it all over again.

Deadly Indifference

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Brown, Michael D. and Ted Schwarz. Deadly Indifference: the Perfect (Political) Storm” Hurricane Katrina, the Bush White House, and Beyond. Lanham: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2011.

I have to wonder if there is a tell-all grace period. Wait so many years, put so much distance between now and then, and then spill the beans with abandon. Deadly Indifference is that type of book. Michael Brown was Under Secretary of Homeland Security during the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. As Director of FEMA he was the appointed scapegoat of the entire fiasco and for all intents and purposes Deadly Indifference is his chance to clear his name. This is his opportunity to set the record straight and blame other people. As former Under Secretary of Homeland Security he has nothing to lose and therefore can tell all with straightforward clarity. It is to be expected that Brown points the finger everywhere but himself. In the first chapter I was even wondering if he was going to blame the residents of New Orleans simply because they willingly chose to live in a “fishbowl” city well below sea level. When Brown does get around to placing some of the blame on himself he does so lightly and delicately. His heavy hand is reserved for people like New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin and Louisana governor Kathleen Blanco. While Brown’s book is thought provoking one would benefit from reading several different accounts of what went wrong before, during and after Hurricane Katrina. It would be interesting to compare this to someone with an unbiased point of view.

A Matter of Conscience

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Hoppe, Sherry Lee. A Matter of Conscience: Redemption of a Hometown Hero, Bobby Hoppe.Nashville: Wakestone Press, 2011.

In a nutshell: A Matter of Conscience is about the trial of Bobby Hoppe. 31 years after shooting a man to death the football hero is finally brought to justice.
The first thing I have to say, just to get it out there, is that this is not a neutral, unbiased portrayal of one man’s fall from grace and subsequent redemption. The author fully acknowledges that in her forward. Written by his widow, Sherry Lee Hoppe, Bobby Hoppe is portrayed as a deeply religious man heavy with guilt and regret; a vehemently repentant mama’s boy. Subsequently, from page one his victim, Don Hudson, is painted as the super villain, the guy everyone would have gunned down if Hoppe hadn’t done it first.
Despite his widow’s insistence Hoppe was an angel I had a hard time believing in the depth of Hoppe’s alleged guilt since he never came forward with his self defense claim when the crime was first committed in 1957. True, he may have lived with “demons” for 31 years but he didn’t give much thought to Hudson’s family in that entire time. He probably would have kept his silence indefinitely had it not been for the victim’s family and their never-ending search for justice.
What A Matter of Conscience does really well is paint a socioeconomic picture of North Chattanooga, Tennessee in the late 1950s. Football and bootlegging were the heaven and hell of the day. As a young man in the poverty stricken south you were involved in one or the other. You either played a hero’s game or did the work of the devil. Both earned you a reputation worth fighting for.
But, probably the best aspect to A Matter of Conscience is the heart of the story – the trial. Ms. Hoppe takes you into the court room, puts you behind the defense table, and allows you to have intimate access to every nuance of her husband’s difficult case. Hoppe’s defense team was mesmerizing and the trial, mesmerizing.

Art and Madness

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Roiphe, Anne. Art and Madness: a Memoir of Lust Without Reason. New York: Doubleday, 2011.

From the start I struggled to find the purpose of this snapshot-in-time memoir. In the beginning there is a brief mention of Roiphe at age 11 but most of the book is confined to the 50s and 60s; Roiphe’s artistic coming of age. There is a parade of authors mentioned, name drops like Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, Salvador Dali and on and on. Despite a yo-yo’ing time line across the decades there is a constant in Roiphe’s dedication to holding her male counterparts up for success. It was an era when use and abuse of women was the norm and Roiphe takes it all in stride. As she says, she was the muse instead of the writer. Throughout Art and Madness Roiphe illustrates a different side of motherhood as she shamelessly bares the truth about toting her daughter all over predawn New York to answer the drunken beck and call of prominent men. But, with destruction comes the need to rebuild. In the end, Roiphe finds a self-proclaimed redemption. The muse becomes a writer in her own right.

Confessional: Art and Madness was something I would pick up and read voraciously for a day or two at a time. Yet, when I put it down weeks would go by before I would pick it back up again. I read it sporadically, compulsively, and yet, not obsessively. I have no idea why because it really was fascinating.