Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opioid Epidemic by Sam Quinones

Hardcover, 384 pgs, Pub Apr 21st 2015 by Bloomsbury Press (first published April 15th 2015), ISBN13: 9781620402504, Lit Awards: PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Nominee for Shortlist (2017), Los Angeles Times Book Prize Nominee for Current Interest (2015), National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction (2015)

The spectacular public service reporting Sam Quinones does in this nonfiction is so detailed and many-faceted that it left me feeling a little voyeuristic, not having been visited by the scourge of opioid addiction myself. Good lord, I kept thinking, so this is what we are dealing with. I knew something was different, I just didn’t have any conception of the size, scope, method, and means of this problem.

Quinones starts his story in the early 1980s when the first ranchero Xalisco marketers came up from Mexico with an innovative method for just-in-time drive-by selling of drugs to rich white kids in the suburbs. They explicitly avoided cities and black people because they admitted they were afraid of them, their violence and their gang activity. Besides, the thinking went, blacks never had any money. They’d just as soon steal from a dealer as pay him. The white kids had money and wanted convenience above all.

At almost the same time, and a cultural habitat away from small-time drug dealers of black tar heroin from Mexico, a drug company owned by the Sackler medical empire released an opiate derivative in pill form meant to alleviate pain. Early on, it is possible that creators, marketers, and prescribers of this plague did not know what they had unleashed. But within a couple of years, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that great numbers of people within and without the company sold the product in full knowledge of its wicked potency and addictive properties.

Quinones has been researching and reporting on this topic for a couple of decades, and lived in Mexico for ten years, observing the supply-side. Before having a comprehensive understanding of the subject, Quinones thought the heroin problem began with U.S. demand for drugs. After researching the situation in the heartland United States, he has decided that our problem now with heroin and fentanyl overdoses was paradoxically caused by a huge supply of opioid pills, prescribed by doctors in legal clinics, and condoned at every level of society and government in our country.

The story Quinones shares is un-put-down-able and truly remarkable, particularly his discussion of the marketing techniques for black tar heroin used by the small farmer-seller systems first set up by residents of Xalisco. Their method of growing-packaging-selling expansion into the heartland of America should make us sit up and pay attention. Ground zero for the meltdown of middle America is identified by Quinones as Portsmouth, Ohio, a middle class town at the center of a web of major cities like Cincinnati, Cleveland, Louisville, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh. The first known vector of the opioid infection was an unscrupulous doctor who overprescribed pills, knowing they were addicting his patients. Aided by ordinary well-meaning doctors who listened to marketing spiels by the drug makers, and who believed the pills to be non-addictive, the infection spread rapidly. Quinones tells the tale as it unfolded, involving Medicaid scams and cross-state purchases and sales.

What Quinones tells us gives us lessons for many other supply-side problems (marijuana? guns?) we may face in our society, now or in the future. When asked in an interview why restrictions on Class A prescription pills or opiates of any sort would produce the better outcomes, Quinones points out that when prohibited liquor was once again allowed to be sold openly, it was classified as to strength and sold differently. He warns that we are rushing to sales of marijuana with potency levels unknown fifty years ago and may wish we’d instituted some restrictions or controls before it becomes socially acceptable.

This nonfiction is dispassionate enough to allow us time to adjust our thinking around the problem of young people—entire families, really—losing their place in a productive society, with almost no way out. Now, with the recognition of the problem being forced upon our politicians, teachers, medical personnel, and law-enforcement officers, some changes are being instituted which may help after the fact of addiction, never a good time to try and solve a problem. With discussion and buy-in by ordinary citizens it may be possible to attack this problem before it begins.

There are at least seven interviews with Quinones free on Soundcloud, ranging in length from 15 minutes or so to an hour and a half. You have to hear some of these stories. It's mind-blowing. I listened to audio version, very ably read by Neil Hellegers, and produced by Bloomsbury. It is a must-read, must-listen.



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Tell Me More by Kelly Corrigan

Hardcover, 240 pgs, Pub Jan 9th 2018 by Random House, ISBN13: 9780399588372

The subtitle of this book is “Stories about the 12 Hardest Things I’m Learning to Say” and her chapter headings are those twelve phrases. Corrigan’s grandmother always reassured her that she was “good enough,” and would be able to withstand the vicissitudes of life because when she failed, she just got right back up again and did something else. That resilience is a quality more important than beauty or intellectual horsepower when it comes to success in life, though nobody believes that when you’re young.

Some of these stories are sad, like when Corrigan loses her dad, and at little later, her best friend Liz. Corrigan can be eloquent when describing how important her best friend was to her, and what a horrifying shock it was to discover she would die. But she leavens her memories with the funny bits…the bits where both their families travelled together with the kids and shared laughs and more.

She is irreverent about her own accomplishments, a career writing, two daughters and a loving husband, but we can tell how much it means to her to be with them. It’s all she wanted: “Four by Forty,” is how she put it. Well, she did not have four kids because breast cancer intervened, but there were still four of them when she turned forty, two kids and two parents, so she satisfied herself with that. Corrigan volunteers to hold newborns at a local hospital once a week, getting her baby fix while giving relief to the corona of families and staff that surround a baby at risk.

One thing Corrigan had learned to say was “tell me more,” which works when someone is upset or when they are angry. The very fact of listening draws people out and clarifies their anxieties so that those stressors can be dealt with or dismissed. One doesn’t have to have any special expertise for this listening and yet people often find it most consoling.

The lesson I liked best was her learning to say ‘No.’

“Sexually, professionally, personally…saying ‘No’ takes balls. One friend told me her one big take away from three years and $11,000 of therapy was ‘Learn to say no and when you do, don’t complain and don’t explain. Every excuse you make is like an invitation to ask you again in a different way.’”

I learned this lesson early and all my life it has been my super power. Corrigan tells us her mother was a ‘No Pro’ who had no desire to curb another’s activities. “She had her own mind and she used it.” If she didn’t want to go somewhere everyone else wanted to go, she’d wave them off and settle happily to spend her evening alone.

“It must be possible to say ‘No’ nicely and still be loved,” Corrigan opines. Her mother must have managed it, since Corrigan loves her now. She may not have at the time, however, and we know this because of Corrigan’s earlier book Glitter and Glue in which Corrigan settles into recognition and love for how she was as a mother.

“Very few people I’ve known are able to set themselves free the way my mother has, liberated by the simple act of saying “no,” which I submit is impressive for any woman and downright radical for one raised in the “nice and easy” generation. My Mom had always been able to find outs where others could not. Looking back I think it came down to her impressive willingness to be disliked and her utterly unromantic position that people should take serious, if not total responsibility, for their own happiness.”

Corrigan has lots of personality—that used to be a way for men to say women are loud—but she actually says stuff rather than just blow air, and she can be really funny. It you listened to her describe using her daughter's round-tipped scissors to cut off a shirt she’d bought on sale but couldn’t manage to take off past her boobs once on, you know what I mean. She may actually be a little bit loud, but she is definitely the one you’d aim for at a party or for a long walk—she’d never be without some observation worth developing into something bigger and deeper. I am nothing like her, but I appreciate that mother nature of hers to the end. I have always admired mothers for their stop-gap practicality and their attention to the things that matter.

The end of this memoir reads like a long eulogy for Liz, and what her friendship meant. It is the best darn eulogy I have ever heard…in a way it sounds like a wedding toast, it is so full of life and love and gratefulness and remembrance. It would be a wonderful model for someone wishing to find a way to say what is in their hearts for their own friends or relatives. We’ll all have to face it one day and judging from Corrigan’s experience, we are never ready.

Corrigan reads the audio of this book herself, and it is a good way to enjoy the Penguin Random House production. The book would be good as well because the eulogy passages you may want to read again.

Attached please find Corrigan in a very short NYT video discussing Glitter & Glue, and below that, a 5 minute audio clip of Tell Me More:





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I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street by Matt Taibbi

Hardcover, 304 pgs, Pub Oct 24th 2017 by Spiegel & Grau ISBN13: 9780812988840

The detailed nature of this book about the life and death of Eric Garner allows us to see, in horrible living color, exactly where we’re at in terms of race relations in the United States. Eric Garner died July 17, 2014 in Staten Island, victimized on this day by police who put him in a chokehold and ignored his pleas that he could not breathe. What Taibbi does exceptionally well in this difficult book is allow us to see Eric Garner for the man he was—a well-liked and respected member of his community.

The entire story told here is a long and winding one, going back to pick up relevant cases along the way, including that of Carnell Russ of Alabama, whose death in 1971 by pistol shot at close range in a police station was challenged in court a number of times until finally we learn a monetary award was never paid to Carnell’s widow. Forty-five years later the original prosecutor in the Eric Garner trial, Dan Donovan, was elected to Congress, proud of his role in protecting the white people, in his eyes, unjustly under attack for upholding the law.

So carefully has Taibbi prepared his case in the writing of this book that when we read the words “disrespect for the law, contempt for society, a refusal to abide by the responsibilities of a civilized people,” we briefly imagine the words were chosen to describe the men and women of the NYC police force who refused to give credence to citizen complaints about uncalled for police harassment and reckless endangerment. But no, this language was used by Joseph Concannon, retired NYPD captain and staunch defender of whatever the police did in the course of their duties, illegal or not.

City politicians elected before, during, and after the prosecution of the Eric Garner case come off looking weak and ineffectual at best, deliberately obfuscating at worst. The case of the killing of Eric Garner came amidst a rash of police killings around the country that were well publicized, mostly due to actual video of the crimes. It is absolutely horrifying to imagine for a moment how these cases would have been treated in the absence of a video record. Even in these cases, obstruction into the behaviors of repeat offender police is rampant, common, and from the point of view of the citizenry, indefensible.

The black lives examined in this work are extremely stressful. Putting ourselves in their place, we might even say these lives and conditions of life are hopeless. But Eric Garner did not see things that way, and certainly on the day he died, he was the happiest he’d been in a very long time, his son having just been awarded a sports scholarship for advanced education. Taibbi is able to make us feel the heat that day in July, and the satisfaction the big man would have felt. We’re plenty pleased, too.

I have wondered, in thinking of Taibbi’s past work, what it would be like to to be on the other side of one of his scathing investigations. Now we know, because he co-authored a book during his expat days in Moscow, in which he targeted everyone in the outsized-profits-fueled economy, from foreigners gaming the system to Russian oligarchs and their deadly, beautiful hookers. Adolescent, ridiculous, and forgettable, excerpts I read from that earlier work should have meant a far longer, more circuitous path to legitimate journalism. The argument in the link above charges Taibbi with sexism and misogyny, a shadow of which, it could be argued, appeared in his description here of Assistant DA Anne Grady.

It is my contention that Taibbi’s work uncovering the hows and whys of the life surrounding Eric Garner is a far weightier thing on the scales of right and wrong-doing than that earlier work. It is important we all scour our own past for sexism—doling it out or letting it pass—before nailing the coffin shut on the talent and real heart shown here. With this book, Taibbi blows past any criticisms that could be leveled for those earlier errors in judgment and gives us something terribly important: a honest, raw look at where we stand in our race relations right now. Perhaps only bad boys could understand, empathize with, and give us the nuance of all the imperfect characters Taibbi details for us here, and get to the depth in this story that explains Eric Garner’s life and untimely death.

Several of the Irish-sounding names in this history are exactly those of loved ones within my own family, though I don’t believe I am related to any of them. My grandfather was a Boston cop. What I take from this is that whatever place these white policemen go to in their heads when it comes to fairness and justice, it is not inevitable, and it doesn’t come from the color of their skin. I recall the recently-discovered 19th-C diary of African American boy convict Austin Reed,

“Yes, me brave Irish boys, me loves you till the day that I am laid cold under the sod, and I would let the last drop of this dark blood run and drain from these black veins of mine to rescue you from the hands of a full blooded Yankee…Reader, if you are on the right side of an Irishman, you have the best friend in the world.”

A lot has happened from then to now, but nothing that can’t be undone.





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Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor

Paperback, 291 pgs, Pub November 14th 2017 by Catapult (first published April 6th 2017), ISBN13: 9781936787708, Lit Awards: Man Booker Prize Nominee Longlist (2017), Goldsmiths Prize Nominee (2017)

McGregor's remarkable achievement in this novel long-listed for the 2017 Man Booker Prize is the flammable combination of his intimacy and his distance. He is daring in never mentioning Reservoir 13 again after naming his novel after it and insinuating, merely by its prominence, that it had something to do with the disappearance of Rebecca, or Becky, or Bex, the 13-year-old girl who disappeared one year and was never accounted for, though she’d been looked for and not forgotten for the thirteen years of this novel.

The book is a slow burn, like fire in peat, smoke hinting at fire somewhere, though pinpointing the source is difficult. McGregor is an impassive observer with no dog in any fight, recognizing the churn of seasons and families and friends, and recording how lovers grew apart and found new lovers, or did not, or how difficult it is to keep an allotment well-weeded and producing. Except that the story was his to create and so he must have had some reason for choosing the threads as they crossed, their color and texture and placement. In the end, this diet of village life recorded in the most entrancing language fills one with surprise, curiosity, delight, and despair.

Wondering, once finished, how this book was received by critics, I came upon a review by Maureen Corrigan in The Washington Post in which she says

“Those bland details of everyday life fill McGregor’s mammoth paragraphs like foam insulation being sprayed into walls.”

That made me laugh. She was the one to point out that the girl was thirteen when she went missing, and the time recorded in this novel is thirteen years. I would have thought it was much longer. It felt longer. I started noticing the time I spent reading, and treated myself to an occasional skim, just to see if I could uncover his mystery before I succumbed to numbing despair.

I admire McGregor's prose immensely and like his idea. It was a risky thing, this novel. I am pleased his daring and initiative was recognized by the Man Booker Prize committee.





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Love-Lies-Bleeding by Don DeLillo

Paperback, 112 pages Published January 10th 2006 by Scribner (first published January 2002) ISBN13: 9780743273060

I believe this is the first time I have been able to read something by Don DeLillo. I’ve tried in the past, not recently. This is a play, his third, with four characters. Staging is minimal, consisting of chairs on the stage. Set changes are made by lighting, by who is on stage, by clothing changes for one character who is in a wheelchair.

He touches, in practically so many words, the big themes: life, death, familial and sexual love, time, compassion, generosity, jealousy, resentment, desire, beauty. A man, a painter, suffers one, then two, massive strokes. His family, such as it is, gathers.

They discuss him. But mostly they discuss themselves, their needs, wants, desires. He has a second wife, much younger. She focuses on the painter, but it is her love, in the end, that she wants to preserve. They discuss what is fair treatment, what is right and what is good, now, about his life. How long should it be preserved? He dies.

The spare dry air of the southwestern desert plains is clear in a few short sentences:

ALEX
I’m just here. In winter the sharp-shinned hawk comes down to the scrub. I can sit and watch a hawk in a tree for unnumbered hours. I’m on his time. He don’t move, I don’t move. I drive to the site and stay four five days at a time. Work and sweat. Talk Spanish to my crew.

That was before, before the strokes. Time grows short, and it is almost always time for bed. What is the good, the right, the fair thing to do?

Masterly in its control, this short play condenses a lot of experience into an hour or so, without giving us any sense that the answer given here finishes the debate. It is a moment, in a wide open plain, when the sun slowly sinks into the west and the Love-Lies-Bleeding evokes color, suffering, mystery. “That’s what being in the world means. At times we suffer.”

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Hope for a Cool Pillow by Margaret Overton

Many end-of-life discussions have been popular these past couple years, but this one is a little different. It comes at the discussion from a different angle, and it is an angle I have not seen well-articulated, certainly not by a doctor.

For one thing, it is intensely personal, especially in the beginning. Overton claims to be an introvert, but she does an awful a lot of reaching out in this book. I laughed aloud at one joke she told on herself:

At her nursery school, they often played musical chairs, “which I loathed and which may have scarred me for life. I still worry about adequate seating. Usually some poor kid who was not paying attention got stuck without a chair. Then he stood awkwardly and felt blazingly stupid while everyone else sat comfortably and looked smug. It was a terrible game.”

It is hard not to like this woman flinching yet at a child’s game. But, in a way, this book is about paying attention so you can lie as comfortably as possible on your own deathbed.

As a doctor, Overton has the viewpoint, motives, and reaction to incentives of a doctor. But here she is talking about the health care system and why it doesn’t seem to work for everyone (according to statistics, we might say anyone) in this country. I have never personally seen a doctor question in detail the incentives of the system, but Overton does here. She is very thought-provoking, particularly because she doesn’t give us easy answers. She acknowledges the questions, and asks us to do the same.

”The last six months of life accounted for roughly twenty-five percent of our Medicare spending….We try really hard to revive the people least likely to benefit….doctors often operate to fix something that will not save a dying patient, and in doing so avoid the difficult conversation with patients and caregivers about their prognosis and what they want.”

So, it is not so different from Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, except that she gives a little responsibility to doctors, many of whom are not trained nor equipped for this conversation.

If a person with good health insurance and a terminal disease is in the hospital, is there any reason to limit treatment? She suggests that a for-profit private system of healthcare may not give us the kind of incentives, treatments, and quality of life (or quality of death) we desire.

”I find the concept of for-profit hospitals appalling. There’s an inherent misalignment of motives in the “business” of medicine. Physicians have a moral and financial incentive to provide excessive care to people who can pay for it as long as they have a heartbeat.”

She interleaves her narrative about taking a three-part post-graduate course at Harvard on hospital administration with the declining health of her father and her mother, and with experiences she is having in the hospital. Mostly she wants to share her grief, her expertise, her thinking, and her care. She seems the best kind of friend to talk with about end-of-life issues.

Her father had urged on her the need for preparation, and attention to these matters. He managed very well, until his cancer diagnosis. After many treatments meant to extend his life rather than cure his cancer, things got grimmer. He decided he’d had enough, and his preparation meant his family did not have a hard time of it.

Overton’s mother was a different story, and many of you will recognize the more lingering death of a dementia patient. However, even this wasn’t as painful as some of us experience, due to that planning again. The real problem comes when someone has no family to help, as is the case with many patients Overton sees in the hospital at the last stages of their lives, treated callously by an ever-changing roster of medical care personnel, and unable to make clear decisions.

I find it fruitful to hear the experiences of a doctor, and note she says “Personally, I don’t want to live into my nineties.” Her recommendation is that we do not wait on thinking about these things because life is fragile, and you don’t want to be one of the 45% of patients without advanced directives. Your life, in that case, would no longer be your own.

Totally inappropriately, I am adding a note that Overton introduced me to the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is something I thought I'd invented, frankly. It is the notion that incompetent folks may be too incompetent to know how incompetent they are. It is a very useful construct, particularly in these times.


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Rules for a Knight by Ethan Hawke

Hardcover, 175 pages Published November 10th 2015 by Knopf ISBN 0307962334

This handbook for knights is a 6” x 4” hardcover bound with green cloth and a gold ribbon to place as you read. Hawke initially did not intend it for wide circulation: It was begun when his wife and he decided to have some “rules of the house,” which became more like “rules for living” the more he tried to think about what was really important to share with his children.

The format and the content suit one another. Twenty chapter headings address key attributes or phenomena that face each person as they grow, accompanied by a pen-and-ink drawing of a long-lived bird and a short statement around the concept. This is followed by a longer (two-page) story, parable, lesson, or illustration of the concept in action. For instance, one of my favorites was “Discipline,” pictured with a grey heron:

”In the field of battle, as in all things, you will perform as you practice. With practice, you build the road to accomplish your goals. Excellence lives in attention to detail. Give your all, all the time. Don’t save anything for the walk home.The better a knight prepares, the less willing he will be to surrender.”

The story that follows sounds like eastern philosophy: “Often we imagine that we will work hard until we arrive at some distant goal, and then we will be happy. This is delusion. Happiness is the result of a life lived with purpose.” Hawke goes further, articulating the need for discipline: “Without it, locating your saddle may take all morning.”

On that tricky question of “Honesty,” Hawke tells us that often

“people lie because they feel the truth will cause pain to themselves or others. Do not fear suffering. The strongest steel is forged in the hottest fire. The facts are always friendly. Without a little agony, none of us would bother to learn a thing. The earth has to be tilled before the seeds can be planted.”

Hawke adds chapters on surprising things, like "Equality", and his chapter on "Love" is heartfelt and personal. His chapter on "Death" shares a wisdom we can all use.

"Life is a long series of farewells, only the circumstances should surprise us."

In this small book we sense naked emotion and lived experience at the same time it is charming, and useful. Perhaps it is his actor's gift, to do that. Hawke’s stories are often not his own: he has chosen stories and lessons he learned from Native American myth, Buddhism, high school coaches, Bob Dylan, among others and has turned them to his own purpose. Hawke adds a list of those he considers knights at the end of the book, in which list we find the names of Julian of Norwich, John Keats, and Martin Luther King, Jr. along with Thich Nhat Hanh, Joseph Papp, and River Phoenix.

In a New Yorker interview about this book, Hawke says that he learned just enough to entertain rather than be scholarly. I sensed that lack a depth just a little at times, but we can all use what he has collected. We can imagine how purposeful and meaningful it must have been for him to pull together the more constant precepts he has encountered in his life and to have pared them all down to a few short pages. Very satisfying indeed, and an admirable attempt. We may not always agree with what Hawke has chosen to highlight or his interpretation, but placing our thinking next to his raises his challenge. This collection is well worth the perusal for teachers, parents, novelists, poets as well as middle-graders and teens.

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When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

Hardcover, 228 pages Published January 12th 2016 by Random House

What makes human life meaningful? Kalanithi, a thirty-six year old neurosurgeon, tried to locate the nexus of language between science and philosophy to answer the question. “Literature provide[s] the best account of a life of the mind, illuminates another’s experience, and provides the richest material for moral reflection.” There is messiness and weight in real human life that is not accounted for by science, says Kalanithi. Science and analytics (and atheism) cannot encompass all the mystery of human life. He gives the best argument I have heard for religious faith, suggesting that no one human has any answers because each individual has only piece of the puzzle. It is only in human connection that we can start to put the pieces together, making sense of the world. “Human knowledge grows in the relationships we form between each other and the world.”

Science, created by human hands to make sense of the world, cannot contain the world. It doesn’t account for those things that make literature, and life, so compelling and so meaningful: “hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue…sacrifice, redemption, forgiveness…justice...goodness…mercy.” Questions without answers. Pieces of a puzzle.

Kalanithi died of lung cancer shortly after writing these words. But he strove every day, in his work, in his studies, in his family and friends, to find meaning in life. He thought it might reside in words. Language. As a neurosurgeon he was taught, and he believed, that if a person lost the capacity to communicate--to speak or to understand language—their life became no life at all. He was a student of literature besides being a neurosurgeon, and in language was meaning.

This memoir is Kalanithi’s attempt at connection. The Foreword is written by a Dr. Abraham Verghese, author of the unique and unforgettable novel about medicine and Africa, Cutting for Stone. The Epilogue is written by his wife, Lucy Kalanithi, also a doctor. Their words fore and aft add heft and a kind of imprimatur: this man really existed and, yes, he was as thoughtful as he appears. His life had meaning.

Kalanithi changed my mind about something, and showed up a deficit, a smallness in my own thinking. I have always been suspicious of people who spend their lives in school, even though they might be concurrently working, piling up more and more degrees. Anybody can do that, I thought. Kalanithi completed a Bachelor's in English literature and human biology, a Master's in English literature, a degree from Cambridge in the history and philosophy of science and medicine, a medical degree with neuroscience and neurosurgery specializations. He was in his mid-thirties when he finally finished. And then he died. That last year he wrote this book and he managed to show me that, if one is focused and serious and seeks the critical nexus between life and death, one may begin to perceive the outlines of a moral philosophy that might help answer the large questions. We only have a lifetime to find meaning, and sometimes that lifetime is short.

When Kalanithi talks of his 8-month old daughter shortly before his death, how she is all future and he is all past, we see what he sees: that their circles just touch, but don’t significantly overlap. She will never know him. This has the poignancy, truth, messiness, love, and tragedy of literature. Of life.

I listened to the audio of this book, read by Sunil Malhotra and Cassandra Campbell. I have encountered Malhotra before and he is one of the best narrators in my experience. His pacing is perfect and he makes the reading very easy to follow. I ended up buying the hardcover because the book was so meaningful for me and because it is easy to pass around.

“One key to managing a terminal illness is to be deeply in love, vulnerable, kind, generous, grateful.” –Lucy Kalanithi

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Light of the World by Elizabeth Alexander

Hardcover, 209 pages Published April 21st 2015 by Grand Central Publishing (first published April 14th 2015)

"Oh beauty, you are the light of the world!"
--Derek Walcott

It is said the way to deal with loss is to remember. Alexander chooses the most gorgeous memories for the elegy of her husband Ficre, like a bowl of blowsy, fragrant roses or a rarely-blooming South African bonsai covered in pink blossoms that exude a sweet perfume. The unusual capacity of both artists to see beauty and possibility in the world gave them loving friends that each of them gathered about themselves and cherished for one another. They lived a life of such richness and beauty that they cannot now be sad it had to end. That it was a privilege, both of them would acknowledge.

Ficre Ghebreyesus was only days past his fiftieth birthday when he died of a massive heart attack one evening on his treadmill while he waited for his wife and the mother of his two sons to return from a poetry reading. The memories of their meeting, the births of their sons, their life together--he as a chef and painter, she as a teacher and poet--is as wonderful as anything I have ever read, and as mysterious in alchemy as any chemistry.

Gorgeous. Unforgettable. Oh joy, oh pain, oh beauty.



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Becoming Abigail by Christ Abani

Paperback, 120 pages Published March 1st 2006 by Akashic Books

Chris Abani is a novelist and poet who often writes about his native Nigeria. Graceland, his novel about a boy in whiteface growing up poor in Lagos, broke onto the literary scene like a storm. Since then, Abani has written several books of poetry, as well as novels and novellas, all of which look frankly at conditions under which the most exploitable among us must live.

Becoming Abigail looks at the life of a young girl raised by her father in Nigeria. Her mother, also called Abigail, died in birthing her and ever since, her father looked at the child to fill the gap made by her mother’s death. Abigail’s inadequacies were agonizing to her.

The story opens in London, where the fourteen-year-old Abigail was brought by a "cousin" after the death of her father. Abigail feels responsible for all the pain in her world. The cousin dresses her in thick makeup and skirts too short. Abigail looks much older than fourteen. Her confusion about safety, trust, love makes her vulnerable, and at the same time, invulnerable.

Abani enters a woman-child’s places of pain and sees, and speaks of it. It is a searing experience. One would think that, having viewed the worst in humankind, the author would have no kindness within him, but the opposite appears to be true. He embodies a generosity of spirit that refreshes.

This short novella can be read in a sitting. Abani's clarity and willingness to examine truth is what makes his writing exceptional and essential. This novella is informative for what it tells us of experience, and how that forms or deforms us.

Other work by Abani:
• Hands Washing Water (2006)
• Virgin of Flames (2007)
• Song for Night (2007)
• There Are No Names for Red (2010)
• Sanctificum (2010)
• The Secret History of Las Vegas (2014)
• The Face: Cartography of the Void (2014)


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Medicine Walk by Richard Wagamese

Canadian author Richard Wagamese manages to slow our heart rate down with this story of an Ojibwe Indian who lost his bearings, and about an old man and a boy living on a farm carved out of the wilderness. Stories told and listened to form the heart of this novel: one feels sure that if only there were enough stories, things might have turned out differently. But in the end, the larger story—the story of this novel—lets us know that life encompasses both the tragic and the magnificent and to know one, we must know the other.

"When you share stories, you change things."

The land is central to this novel: how it nourishes and refreshes the spirit, how it returns generosity shown it. The old man and the boy live in concert with the land and, having learned its lessons, treat one another with a gentleness and love that approaches the sacred. "Just get it done," is what the old man tells himself and teaches the boy, and throughout their lives together the two of them face difficulties or obstacles with the same quiet fortitude and firmness. They discover the pleasure in bending one’s back to difficult work, and in contemplating the end of a task well done, whether it be straight, square, strong fencing or burying a man, facing east, in stony ground.

The boy’s father, Eldon Starlight, had left his son with the old man because he couldn’t find the strength within him to care for another. When gradually the outlines of Eldon’s life come into focus, we discover his struggles are mostly internal, that despite the gifts of his physical health and strength, he hadn’t enough strength of spirit to see him through the inevitable twists and turns of an unexamined life. His addictions explain, but do not excuse, his inattention to the only things that really matter. Eldon realized, at the end, that he really wanted a connection with his heritage and with the land, and the boy, though he had reason to hate his father, showed just what kind of man he was becoming by honoring him, padding his grave with moss and boughs and sprinkling it over with tobacco. His upbringing and connection with the land developed reserves of generosity within himself that he could share when the world displayed too little. There is terrible pain in the world, but there is also grace.

The section of this novel that deals with Franklin bringing his father to his final resting place, finding his way in the woods, encountering a bear, fishing without line, hunting without a gun, the boy generates love. He is sixteen and a man in all the ways that matter.

The bare simplicity of the narrative, and the clarity of the language both hold a beauty that is rare in novels today and makes this a standout. The harsh reality of someone dying of drink is achingly real and truly described, as is the beauty and bounty of open forest. The relationship between the old man and the boy defines what sustains us in a world that too often feels outside our control. In the end, we are all is nourished, blessed even, by the strength their relationship.

"Feels good to miss things…it makes you know you’re living, that you touched something, that something touched you."

I listened to the audio production of this book, beautifully read by Tom Stechschulte, and published by Recorded Books. I highly recommend this book, this meditation, for centering oneself in a busy world and for reminding us of what is important.

In an interview with CBC Richard Wagamese says that this is his best novel, and that it may lead to another novel or two to flesh out the lives described within. To my thinking, the novel stands on its own, though I would love to see more of this author's work and reprise the feeling I had when I read/listened to it.


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H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

"The archeology of grief is not ordered."

Helen Macdonald’s book-length nonfiction is so many things at once: a eulogy, an elegy, a biography, a memoir, a training manual, a journey. It is a conversation about death, and community. It is so filled with passion and pain that one reads, breath bated, to see which will crush the other. This book is only partly about a hawk, despite the title. It records the author’s journey of a few years, starting with the unexpected death of her father, through the purchase and training of a hawk, to a new place of understanding about what and who humans are and what we need to live well.

The author looks closely at the life and writings of another vulnerable person, T.H. White, to express sorrow and a kind of sympathy with his derangements. She learns the origins of his extraordinary flights of fancy in literature, tracing over the sores of his upbringing until we see clearly the agonies of his confused psychopathy. White was a hawker, but a hawker one might quote to show how not to train a hawk. Macdonald loathed his book The Goshawk as a child. When she gets her own hawk after the death of her father, she reads it again. This time she discovers White’s pain--seeing, feeling, tracing it until it is as clear as her own.

Macdonald shares one of the best descriptions of bereavement that I have ever encountered (italics are hers):

"Here’s a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It’s from the Old English bereafian, meaning 'to deprive of, take away, seize, rob.' Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn’t to be shared, no matter how hard you try. 'Imagine,' I said, back then, to some friends, in an earnest attempt to explain, 'imagine your whole family is in a room. Yes, all of them, All the people you love. So then what happens is someone comes into the room and punches you all in the stomach. Each one of you. Really hard. So you’re all on the floor. Right? So the thing is, you all share the same kind of pain, exactly the same, but you’re too busy experiencing total agony to feel anything other than completely alone. That’s what it’s like.' I finished my little speech in triumph, convinced that I’d hit upon the perfect way to explain how it felt. I was puzzled by the pitying, horrified faces, because it didn’t strike me at all that an example that put my friends’ families in rooms and had them beaten might carry the tang of total lunacy…

...I’d dreamed of hawks again. I started dreaming of hawks all the time. Here’s another word: raptor, meaning 'bird of prey'. From the Latin raptor, meaning 'robber,' from rapere, meaning 'seize.' Rob. Seize."

Hawks apparently have a shamanic tradition of being able to cross borders that humans cannot and "were seen as messengers between this world and the next."

The author trains a bird of prey, a hawk called Mabel. Mabel is a predator; she is all about death, violent death. The wildness of the bird seeps into the author’s consciousness, and her perceptions become acute. Macdonald is recovering from a loss, and her bond with the reptilian raptor Mabel underscores her warm-blooded need for love and her bond with the human community. This book is the author working through grief and terror and want and coming out naked and vulnerable on the other side.

The language Macdonald employs in this memoir is as extraordinary and ingenious as her laying out such diverse topics as death, hawking, T.H. White, and history as interlocking pieces. She holds us rapt as she defines her grief. The words she chooses make us hypersensitive to differences in shade, angle, meaning: "Goshawks in the air are a complicated grey colour. Not slate grey, nor pigeon grey. But a kind of raincloud grey…" Or this: "I was…grey, loose-spun wool on an aching set of bones." Or this: "I felt like I was holding the bastard offspring of a flaming torch and an assault rifle." Her meanings are exquisitely clear.

Macdonald was born a hawker. We are all born with something innate but dormant until awakened by opportunity. Fortunately Macdonald was able to find and exercise her passion because she liked to read. It reminds me of teachers we may have had that spark an interest in something that feels as natural to us as breathing, and as necessary. Macdonald discusses six books that formed her consciousness about nature, makes us realize once again that a seed spilled on tilled ground can yield the most amazing things. It breaks my heart a little to think that every child probably has some thing in them that would burst into flame with the right tinder. Not all of us find it, early or ever.


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My Struggle, Volume I by Karl Ove Knausgaard

I hadn’t really thought to read this despite it being “the” book of 2012, but I read the article he wrote for the March 1, 2015 NYT Sunday magazine, Part I(!) It was the funniest thing I’d ever read. Here is an author whose linked novel/memoirs has taken the literary world by storm and he is showing his utter unpreparedness for that world and the interactions it requires. I wanted to see if that tongue-in-cheek droll self-awareness was his constant subject.

As it turns out, Volume One of his six-volume memoir cum fiction is much more than that. It has a vibrancy, truth-telling honesty, and relevance far beyond anything I expected. And the writing…well, the writing was involving and exacting…and addictive. For a man who doesn’t like to talk to strangers, he does an awful lot of talking to strangers.

My Struggle Volume I begins with a discussion about death and how the dead have been removed from our purview, we lucky ones in the Western world who do not experience street conflict. This is precisely the thing I have been mulling over lately, so he drew me in with his talk of death rather than put me off. Without even a pause or a section break from our dip into death’s icy waters in the first pages, Knausgaard relates a news event in his childhood he watched on television, in which some newscasters showed the waters of a fjord, explaining that some Nordic fishermen were lost on a ship that sunk without a trace. His parents had laughed at his eight-years-old imagination that he had seen a face in the waves on the newscaster’s film shot. He returns to that humiliation again and again as he grows older, for the sense of having seen something and the shame of having been laughed at never leave him.

There is a circular momentum to his narrative (a circling-the-drain quality, all facetiousness aside), for he returns to the death of his father in the second half of Volume One. But first we learn his age (39 years), and learn of his marriage, his children, his attempt to create something important, circling back to begin at the beginning, his birth and childhood. Knausgaard as a teen is not to be missed. The second half of the book is consumed with his father’s death, which occurred just before he turned thirty. When viewing his father's corpse he writes: "The idea that I could scrutinize this face unhindered for the first time was almost unbearable." Unhindered? What a remarkable thing to say. But, he goes on to say, "I was no longer looking at a person but something that resembled a person." His father, with all his personality, strengths and failures, was gone.

The very ordinariness of his days, and of his detail about those days makes the novel/memoir something extraordinary. Knausgaard says in a Paris Review interview that he was trying to get the detail "as close to life as possible," so we shouldn’t feel surprised to experience a palpable peristalsis of boredom followed by intense interest and inescapable need. The interminable house cleaning and grass mowing…we feel those details in our exhaustion, repugnance, and need to escape. The accretion of detail, the structure, the language…all of it add up to something impossible to put down and impossible to forget.

"But as anyone with the least knowledge of literature and writing—maybe art in general—will know, concealing what is shameful to you will never lead to anything of value."--Paris Review interview

Karl Ove, the narrator, shows us how he is his father’s son. He claimed to hate his father, but he loved him, too, and was more like him in his reserve than he dares mention. But we see it. We never get a clear or complete picture of his father--his father as son, his father as husband, as teacher, as neighbor--but the moments of his tenderness and of his decline flash from the book like beacons.

"But still, there is much more to a relationship than what you can say. You just take one more step back into yourself. I’ve never understood psychoanalysis. Mentioning things doesn’t change anything, doesn’t help anything, it’s just words. There is something much more deep and profound to a relationship than that. Revealing stories and quarrels—that’s just words. Love, that’s something else."--Paris Review interview

Observing Knausgaard’s intense reluctance to self-reveal in ordinary day-to-day interactions and conversation, one has to ask why Knausgaard wrote a book like this. The answer comes in a thousand ways, but it revolves around the breaking of accepted patterns, of standing outside so as to observe and understand more deeply, of the spaces between things, like language…what it doesn’t describe, what it can’t catch. "Writing is more about destroying than creating." He seeks to make an experience, rather than just describe one. Well, he’s done something provocative here, and it is absolutely an experience reading this book.

Review of Volume 2
Review of Volume 3
Review of Volume 4

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