Category: Books

A Wolf at the Table by Augusten Burroughs

This post originally appeared on I Read Everything

Book: A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father

Author: Augusten Burroughs

Type of Book: Non-fiction, memoir

Why Did I Read This Book: Because I quite like Augusten Burroughs. Full stop.

Availability: Published by Picador, you can get a copy here:

Comments: I put off reading this book because there was a mild, teeny-tiny literary kerfuffle when A Wolf at the Table was released. Some critics took exception to a scene in the book wherein there is a violent outburst between Burroughs’ father and his older brother. Burroughs remembers bringing his brother a gun and begging him to kill their father. Some people felt this scene was created from whole cloth, and brought up some evidence to back their belief. Evidently, Burroughs exaggerated some scenes from his book Dry. He admits to making up a terminally ill woman who was doing her best to die sober. It raised all the usual thorny subjects about memoirs, the name James Frey was invoked and it was disheartening.

Then Augusten Burrough’s older brother, who wrote his own book about his life with Asperger’s, explained it for everyone. You see, the fight did happen. The conflict was real. And little Augusten did come to him with a gun – a pellet or bb gun, and begged him to shoot their father. In the eyes of a child, it was a life or death conflict and Augusten was telling truth as he understood it as the child who experienced the trauma. Other issues of veracity came up with the book, but all of them are issues I understand and can explain myself, so I am unsure why critics didn’t clue in. Maybe they all had really good childhoods.

I think that the debacles many avid readers experienced with J.T. Leroy and James Frey have caused a lot of people to reject the idea of a subjective truth. We want the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth without remembering that a robotic recitation of objective truth can at some times be impossible and that the subjective truth is often all that matters when you are reading about a person’s life. I hope this desire to force all memoirs to come from a place of universal knowledge and total recall ends soon. Regardless, the brouhaha, even though it was resolved, made me put off reading this book longer than I should have. I guess I feared that there might be some tiny part of the book that would not seem subjectively true to me and I love Augusten Burroughs. I felt it risky to read this book lest I find some egregious fault with him.

That certainly was not the case, as it turned out. This book was utterly true to me even down to the smallest details. Like the rotting deck. The sick animals that never got treatment. The alienation and loneliness punctuated by violent and psychotic melodrama. All of this is true to me because even now, as an adult, I know that things that seemed like a threat when I was a child were probably no more than tense minutes, but the child who perceived it all is still in me and resents the everloving hell out of anyone who dares suggest that it wasn’t that bad or that I am misremembering. I should have read this book and responded to it much sooner.

Because I often respond very personally to the books I discuss here, it probably won’t be a surprise to regular readers if I do it again. I feel very comfortable talking about the time when I went psychotic and had to go to inpatient lockdown. I openly discuss my prescription pill addiction that almost destroyed my marriage and could have cost me my life had I not been very lucky. I talk about my life as an adult with a candor that I worry will hamstring me terribly should I ever again need a day job. But I find it very difficult to speak in detail about my childhood.

Mostly, I have a hard time discussing it because nothing ever changed much and it is a topic that can get boring – human misery is a jail and not much happens in day-to-day life in jail. I also tended to block a lot of things, living in my mind and I can’t recall what it felt like to be a child alone and without recourse the way many writers can. I also think much of my childhood is still humiliating to me so I prefer not to recall it in lots of detail. But mostly, I don’t talk about it because I have some half-brothers out there somewhere. We know we all exist but beyond that we know nothing much about each other, and if they ever Google me and find my book reviews, I don’t want the first things they find out about me to be the graphic details of the depths of my loathing for our late father.

But unless I simply say, “Hey read this book because I say so!” I don’t know if I can discuss this book unless the memory of my own father is invoked because while the details are different, the emotions and reactions Burroughs revealed in this book were dangerously close to some of my own.

Augusten Burroughs’ father John was a college professor who seemed well-liked by his peers. However, his family knew a far different man. He terrorized his wife. He terrorized his son. He treated family pets with a psychopathic disregard for their pain. He didn’t like his son even talking in his presence. He turned his son’s life into a living hell, likely exacerbated the mental illness his wife suffered from, and generally behaved in a predictably unpredictable manner. The only thing one could expect when reading this book was that John would continually do things that seem unthinkable and sickeningly bizarre to people who are unfamiliar with abusive sociopaths.

My father wore the same mask that Augusten Burroughs’ father wore. I recall reading critics who felt that Burroughs was stretching the truth about the description of his father. John had severe psoriasis that caused his skin to be red and flaky, making him bleed through his clothes. He had a mouth full of rotting teeth. His overall appearance to Augusten was repellent and fearsome, but some wondered how it was a man who looked so terrible could hold a job in academia, as if academia doesn’t harbor some very strange physical specimens. I can recall too the extremity of my own father’s appearance and that never once cost him a job or hindered his work life.

Indeed, it seems impossible to anyone who has never known a sociopath that they could be so dreadful in action or even appearance yet thrive and paint a picture of themselves that utterly defies what those close to them understand about them. Burroughs explains this mask very well.

I thought of the few times we’d gone to the university together and how he’d taken me around and introduced me to his colleagues. He’d seemed like such a dad that I’d wondered what was wrong with me to always feel so suspicious of him. I remembered thinking how, in the light of day out in the world, my father was just like anybody’s father. But as soon as I was alone with him again, Dad was gone and dead was there in his place.

Even if Burroughs recalls some of the details of his life with his father through the lenses of a child or an unreliable narrator, this bafflement of a child who wonders why the clerk at the supermarket gets a charming, polite dad but the kid gets a nasty, bitter, cruel dad reads utterly true to me.

Burroughs also conveys very well the shrill, brittle tendency that children emotionally abandoned by parents experience, that horrific need for kindness and concern that, if left unchecked, can result in us becoming pests to those who give us crumbs of kindness.

I was just not accustomed to large, grown people asking me if I wanted to share in what they were doing. The moment had been thrilling. I had to run away, because there existed the very real danger that I would run to him, leap right up into his arms, and smother him with kisses, like some icky girl. Fleeing had been an act of self-preservation, not shyness in this case.

I think, in some ways, this passage explains why I am a hermit. Because even as an adult with a happy marriage, I feel a strange chasm in me that I know will never be filled. I often think I keep people at an arm’s length because I fear I will show too much need or will reveal too much about myself via thoughtless enthusiasm. You can recover from a terrible childhood, but no matter how much therapy you receive, no matter how much you genuinely change, there is a fine web of emotional distress that covers you from head to toe and which shows itself at odd and sometimes embarrassing moments.

This entire book is filled with quotes that were statements full of “aha!” for me because they had kernels of truth to them about my own condition and the contents of my mind.

…I never smiled when I was alone. Why would I?

Very few unhappy children smile much unless they have a parent whom such smiles placated. Nothing annoyed my father worse than the sight of me smiling and I grew into an adult who never smiled much until I began to shake off the emotional detritus my father left behind.

People believe in God because they can’t face being alone. It didn’t scare me to think of being alone in the world. It scared me that I wasn’t.

It was a comfort to read this particular bit. I always wondered why, in a family of believers, I ended up an atheist. I suspect this may be as good an explanation as any. I like being alone, my husband’s company being the main exception. Aloneness suits me. I used to feel sick when my father came home from work as his presence meant walking on eggshells, it meant being unable to make noise, it meant not being able even to chew in a manner that he found acceptable. I spent all my time in my room when I was a child, reading, staying out of the way. It became a habit, all the reading and all the quiet. Now I can be alone with no worries of my mental peace being interrupted. I think God or god or deity of any kind would disturb my hard won solitude.

The prospect of a family vacation created extreme anxiety in Augusten, an anxiety that rings all too familiar to me.

I developed a rank, metallic taste in my mouth, always the precursor to illness. My throat felt raw, like I’d been howling. And my joints ached, skin tender to the touch.

Sickness was how my body responded to anxiety.

Oh god, do I ever know what this means. I came to understand that I am not a hypochondriac, which is what I thought I was for many years. I finally now understand that the crushing anxiety that plagued me as a little girl and which still plagues me now knows more than I do. It knows when I can handle situations and when I cannot. So when I cannot cope, my anxiety thoughtfully makes me sick. Severe headaches, stomach cramps, body aches, general malaise. Anxiety shuts me down. It happens less and less as I get older but as Mr. Everything can attest, it still happens. The force of anxiety cannot be ignored. It can give you fevers. It can make your throat so sore you feel like you have strep. It protects you, in an abusive, sick way. I think once I no longer get sick when I feel upset, I will know the claws of the past no longer are running themselves down my skin.

There is an anger so powerful that the fist must go through the wall. It is not humanly possible to contain or manage this kind of anger.

Yet there is a kind of anger that goes beyond even this. Where you are lifted so high by your fury that for an instant you hover, suspended; the fist does not go through the wall. You hold your breath and wait, you hang, you float. This is where I found myself and I laughed.

And I continued to laugh.

And again, anyone who has seen me collapse laughing when things have gotten as bad as they can get may now know why. Because you get to the point to where not even the catharsis of violence will save you. All you can do is laugh the howling laugh of the damned. That Augusten Burroughs knows this, I think, leaves me with little doubt that he experienced everything in this book, filtered through the eyes of a frightened child, the haze of an alcoholic adult, and the gaze of a man who has hopefully transcended the past.

I think this is a fine book but I have no idea if you should read it or not. If you don’t know what I know, maybe it won’t be worth it to you. Because I think, at its heart, this is less a memoir for me than a book of kinship, a description of what it is like to be small and terrified, held in thrall to a mentally ill and at times despicable parent, to never feel peace, to watch creatures you love die (or in my case disappear entirely without a trace) and have nothing you can do about any of it. I felt a great connection with Burroughs, as if finally there might be a person on this planet who could hear the story of my own life and nod and not pepper me with questions as they tried to understand how a man can be a monster to his family and a kind, a polite family man to strangers.

My Booky Wook by Russell Brand

This post originally appeared on I Read Everything

Title: My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs and Stand-Up

Author: Russell Brand

Type of Book: Non-fiction, memoir, drug abuse

Why Did I Read This Book: Because Mr. Everything and I went to see Get Him to the Greek and loved it. Also, someone somewhere told me that given my grudging (borderline psychotic, actually) affection for the late Sebastian Horsley, Brand’s memoir would be up my alley. Then a friend online revealed her mother was reading My Booky Wook when she passed away due to brain cancer (true story). So yeah, I had to read it.

Availability: Published by HarperCollins in 2009, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Increasingly I find myself questioning my decision to review all the books I read. Because I read voraciously and indiscriminately, I often find myself discussing books that were neither amazing enough to praise nor terrible enough to lampoon. Middling books that were entertaining enough when I read them but really meant little other than the entertainment they offered during the moments as I was reading them are hard to discuss. I mean, I guess I could become a reviewer who routinely just tosses 500 words or so out there and calls it a day but why bother. There are hundreds of sites like that already. And my will to go on at length forbids such brevity. But it’s problematic even beyond not knowing what to say because when I can’t find much to discuss, I put off writing and the books stack up. So it’s a quandry. If I don’t review everything, I’ll take it easy on myself and just review when I want to and if I force myself to review everything I procrastinate. Maybe I just need to man up. I don’t know

(I do know I will not review another Stieg Larrson book even though I love them all and want to discuss them. The search strings that led some people to my review of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo filled me with angst and loathing. I almost want to take the review down so that when I check my site stats I don’t have to see how it is that people never stop trying to rake the dead over the coals.)

Anyway, My Booky Wook is not as annoying as Dandy in the Underworld. Brand can turn a phrase very well. At times he is clever. And he does not openly embrace a lack of substance and wallow in nihilism. He doesn’t seem like he is a rip-off of someone else. It doesn’t suck. But overall, it’s a biography about Russell Brand. I mean, he’s entertaining and all, but he’s a comedian who had a drug and sex problem. He likes bosomy women. He did some really terrible things as an addict and owns it in his amusing way. It is what it is. If you find yourself stuck in an airport for a 5-hour layover and this book is for sale at one of news stands, you should definitely buy this before you buy the latest thriller or horror title. Honestly, this isn’t an amazing book but you won’t regret reading it. But if asked to write a substantive review for your online review site, you may find yourself saying very little in a whole lot of words.

Okay, synopsis: Brand is born. His parents separate. His mom has cancer twice. His dad is a cad. He loathes his stepfather. He is an obnoxious kid using obnoxiousness to shield his tender heart and he grows into an obnoxious adult. He flounders in University. He develops drug problems. He has issues with what in the old days was called sexual continence. He gets a job with MTV and goes from obnoxious to insufferable. He goes to rehab. He pulls himself together. The end.

While this book is not going to be a classic memoir – truly, there is no danger of it surpassing the memoirs of Nabokov, Fox, Dickens or Orwell – Brand has a brave capacity of knowing himself and showing himself at his worst. There are moments in the book wherein you finally understand some of what makes Brand an interesting man outside of his appalling hair. He certainly doesn’t pull any punches with what he chooses to present about himself and as a person who is a notorious head case in my own right, I can appreciate this. And at times, he has a startling depth to his words, and I say startling because having listened to interviews with him, he didn’t initially strike me as a man with hidden depths. But he has them and he presents them very well.

For instance, he summarizes the compelling force behind most comedians – that sense of being a complete loser and adopting a clown persona to compensate:

This is… the reason why stand-up comedy is the perfect career for me. Not just because I’m constantly scribbling notes inside my own mind to deal with the embarrassment I perpetually feel, but also because I’m always observing, always outside. It’s a perfectly natural dynamic for me to stand alone in front of thousands of people and tell ’em how I feel. The fact that I’ve managed to make it funny is bloody convenient, because I can’t think how else I would make them listen.

His thoughts on the driving forces behind addiction were also not only surprising coming from a man with such dreadful hair, but were also eloquent and right on the nose.

All of us, I think, have a vague idea that we’re missing something. Some say that thing is God; that all the longing we feel–be it for a lover, or a football team, or a drug–is merely an inappropriate substitute for the longing we’re supposed to feel for God, for oneness, for truth. And what heroin does really successfully is objectify that need…

It makes you feel lovely and warm and cozy. It gives you a great, big, smacky cuddle, and from then on the idea of need is no longer an abstract thing, but a longing in your belly and a kicking in your legs and a shivering in your arms and sweat on your forehead and a dull pallor on your face. At this point you’re no longer under any misapprehension about what it is that you need: you don’t think, “Nice to have a girlfriend, read a poem or ride a bike,” you think, “Fuck, I need heroin.”

Brand’s ability to mix humor into the darkest of his discoveries was nice. In this passage, he is discussing a therapy program while he was in sex rehab:

In the next program, “Wanky-Wanky,” we addressed the subject of sexuality. As the title suggests, this episode was a little more juvenile than its immediate predecessors, but still interesting nonetheless. The question was, “Is your sexuality constructed by environment and experience or is it innate?” I examined this issue by wanking a man off in a toilet. In conclusion, your sexuality is innate.

He then goes on to recount a sexual encounter he engaged in for a television program he was working for at the time – I can’t recall if it was MTV or not. Regardless, he ended up in a bathroom stall with a pretty foul man while the whole awkward, smelly thing was recorded by a camera crew. It was funny, Brand’s description, but it also created a mental parallel for me, however inappropriately, with scenes Peter Sotos described in Selfish, Little. Oh yes, Brand reaches completely different conclusions about jerking off old, fat men in public toilets, but the sense of darkness, degeneracy and a life out of control in the worst sort of way resonated nonetheless.

Brand also understands and explains well why addiction may serve a purpose above and beyond that which degrades us:

For all the damage it had enabled me to do to myself and my career, heroin had also provided a degree of sanctuary. Marianne Faithfull once said that heroin had saved her, because she was suicidal and it kept her alive.

And don’t I ever know that feeling, that as bad as things had become, they could have been so much worse.

I think I’ll leave this review with a quote from the beginning of the book, another stinger in which Brand expresses himself not elegantly but humorously and with a lot of clarity:

…I realized that the outer surface of what I thought was my unique, individual identity was just a set of routines. We all have an essential self, but if you spend every day chopping up meat on a slab, and selling it by the pound, soon you’ll find you’ve become a butcher. And if you don’t want to become a butcher (and why would you?), you’re going to have to cut right through to the bare bones of your own character in the hope of finding out who you really are. Which bloody hurts.

So… All in all, it’s a memoir by Russell Brand, a man who essentially gets paid in movies to behave as he once did, which may require a lot of skill. I don’t know. As I recited back these quotes, I realized that I don’t understand why I am not giving this book an unreserved hurrah. I think you can do a lot worse than read this book. But maybe it’s because I don’t feel a lot of connection to Brand. Maybe you need a closer affinity to the person writing words that offer redemption, even if it is redemption mixed with spitting at hookers, heroin, manic insanity and lots of humor. Maybe that’s it. I just don’t think I feel Brand. That’s not his fault and this is a good book despite my lack of connection.

Also, Russell Brand loved and was inspired by Bill Hicks, and no matter how much of an asshole his drug addiction made him, loving Bill Hicks makes anyone a good egg. Brand is a good but irritating egg. So, I feel okay saying that this is a good book to read and I may read the next book out there by Brand. I’ve read books for worse reasons than that the author liked Bill Hicks. I think we all have.

The Covert War Against Rock by Alex Constantine

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: The Covert War Against Rock

Author: Alex Constantine (and yeah, I am submerged in his site right now, reading about Duncan and Blake – brb after I have fallen off the deep end entirely)

Type of Book: Rock and roll, conspiracy theory

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It posits unusual theories about the deaths of famous rock stars.

Availability: Published by Feral House in 2000, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Okay, by now, if you’ve spent any time reading here, you’ll know I am highly skeptical of much conspiracy theory despite the fact that I can’t ever read enough about it. Yet, even as a skeptic, I have a conspiratorial bent to me, depending on how much my belief is beggared. I think there was a covert CIA plot to kill JFK. The more and more I read about the death of RFK, the more uneasy I am about whether or not Sirhan Sirhan acted alone and if his current mental state is due to organic schizophrenia. So embracing such ideas means that a little part of me believes that elements of the American government could want specific celebrities dead. And while some of this book seemed unlikely to me, some of it that hit my belief-o-meter. I’ll need to read more and research more before I can completely buy into some of this content, but there was a lot of information in this book that had the ring of truth to it.

I was surprised at how much of this I knew before reading this book – I’ve clearly absorbed more conspiracy than I thought. Very little of it was new, yet I am surprised by my reactions at the parts that were new to me. I mean, I always suspected there was much more behind the deaths of Bob Marley and Peter Tosh than just cancer and a gun shot, respectively. I mean, when the CIA decides to destabilize an entire country, it isn’t too much to believe that they would also take steps to assassinate reggae musicians who, through their charisma and music, were overt leaders against American political control. Did Bob Marley really get cancer via a copper wire put in boots given to him by the son of a head of the CIA? I tend to think maybe not, but then again, I also live in a world where dissidents get killed via ricin in an umbrella gun.

But the part of this book that was the most new to me was the section about Tupac Shakur. I recall clearly when he died but I thought little of it. He had seemed like a gangsta to me and gangstas sometimes get shot. I didn’t (and mostly still don’t) listen to rap and knew little about the man, to be honest, but the media portrayal of him painted a picture that substituted itself for real information about the man and his death. Constantine’s research into Shakur’s death revealed a completely different picture of Shakur for me, and pointed to very sound reasons why there might have been a conspiracy to kill him. That Shakur was the heir apparent to an activist family, one of whom escaped from prison and defected to Cuba, the way the shooting occurred, the seeming lack of police attempts to solve the murder, all make it seem as if there were some sort of conspiracy to kill Tupac and obfuscate the investigation.

Aside from the belief that Mama Cass Elliot may have been the victim of government-sponsored assassination, there was not a single case in this book that I could say, “Pants!” to (Cass Elliot died of an undetected heart defect, nothing more, nothing less). Whether or not you think the government killed John Lennon, Phil Ochs, Jimi Hendrix or Jim Morrison, Constantine raises interesting questions about time lines, government interest in these performers and details that were blurry then and blurrier now. (Actually, I did invoke underpants when I read Constantine refer to Donald Bains’ The CIA’s Control of Candy Jones. I found the book so lacking in anything approaching proof that I didn’t even want to keep the book once I discussed it here. Candy Jones was a victim of her own sad mind and the utter incredulity of Long John Nebel, not the MK-Ultra program or the CIA or anything else.)

Of all these deaths presented in this book, it was Michael Hutchence’s that affected me the most. Born in 1970, neatly sandwiched between the deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, I was too young to be as interested when most of the stars in this book died, or, in some cases, I was not alive yet. But INXS was a band I adored as an adolescent and young adult. I recall seeing INXS perform on their tour for Listen Like Thieves. Terrence Trent D’Arby opened and despite being in nosebleed seats, my friends and I danced and danced, thrilled to be there. Shabooh Shoobah and The Swing are two of my favorite pop albums ever. His death just seemed so unlikely – death by auto-erotic asphyxiation? Really? The information Constantine presents about elements of Hutchence’s death, important details that never made the public airways, genuinely make me wonder about Hutchence’s demise.

All in all, this was an interesting book. It took itself seriously and as a result, I took it seriously. Constantine certainly knows his conspiracy, and he can write a tight sentence. I think the chapter on Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls is worth the price of admission, and the chapter on Marley and Tosh was a welcome double feature. I don’t buy all of the content in this book but it raises a lot of questions, which, when you are dealing with content of this sort, is often the best anyone can ask for. I mean, I still think Mark David Chapman acted alone, but just because he beat the government to John Lennon, that doesn’t mean the government did not want him dead. This the oddbooks corollary to “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.”

(However, aside from Mama Cass and Candy Jones, this book did strike a major discordant note with me. Maybe rock conspirators can help me out. Constantine asserts that Joan Baez claims she is a survivor of ritual abuse via the Monarch Project. However, the sources he uses combined with his specific verbiage do not support that Baez ever said she was a victim of ritual abuse. Though he says Joan makes this claim, his actual sources never verify anything except she is a vocal opponent of torture and that she has been in intensive therapy. So I fired up the ol’ Internet to see what I could find out.

After several hours spent online reading lots of assertions that Baez survived the Monarch Project (and cringing as the sites pinged my anti-virus software), all I could find were people saying that because her father worked for Cornell, the supposed site of many government mind control experiments in Ithaca, and because she wrote a song called “Play Me Backwards,” which has lyrics that can be interpreted as the words of an abuse survivor, Baez was a victim of mind control. I could not find a single source with a direct quote from Baez indicating she was a victim of the Monarch Project. Those sites that claim she says such a thing use her song lyrics as a de facto admission on her part, which in my mind is hardly the same thing.

More troubling is that the longer I read, the more familiar the phraseology the sites used became. In fact, I began to think there was a single source that asserted Baez was a victim of the Monarch Project, likely based on the fact that she once lived in Ithaca and wrote a disturbing song, and endless others cited that first source. See for yourself what I mean. Google “joan baez ritual abuse.” Soon the phrase self-described victim of ritual child abuse will become very familiar, as all the sources for this information seem to be revisiting one original source that I cannot run to ground. If the belief that Baez was a victim of such abuse is stated outright by Baez somewhere and I missed it, I would love it if someone would direct me to the source. That she has been through intense therapy and speaks out against torture is not enough proof in my books. Interpretation of song lyrics is not enough proof either. Baez has worn her beliefs and attitudes openly for years, speaking out about injustices. If she was a victim of the Monarch Project, I would expect there to be a direct quote from her saying so, not innuendo about song lyrics. So if it is out there and I densely overlooked it, please direct me to it. Leave a comment here, or e-mail me. Some of you send me some pretty interesting e-mails so if anyone knows the answer, I think one of my readers might.)

Stuff by Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee

This post originally appeared on I Read Everything

Book: Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things

Authors: Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee

Type of Book: Psychology

Why Did I Read This Book: I admit it. I watch Hoarders. I also read the TWoP thread about the show. When this book came out, people in the thread mentioned the book. Later, a woman whose blog I read also recommended the book.

Availability: Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (boo, hiss) in 2010, you can get a copy here:

Comments: I am sickly fascinated by hoarding. I have more cats than the average person would think is normal and let us not even discuss my book collection, but at the end of it all, I am pretty finicky. I have a boat load of books but little other items of decoration. And I own two Dyson vacuum cleaners because I just can’t abide cat hair everywhere. Sometimes I think I find hoarding fascinating because it helps me feel better about the areas of my life that are a bit messy, but I also must admit that the whole train-wreck element of some of the homes tickles the tabloid part of my brain.

And yet even though I find hoarding of infinite intellectual and visceral interest, this book was bland for me. I think that there are some issues for me that I don’t really want to understand. Serial killers, for instance. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s interesting to know how people become serial killers through abuse and brain injury and such, but I mostly want to know how many bodies were recovered from the basement. It’s not a good personality trait but we all have our failings in life. I suspect the same thing is at work with hoarding. I just want to know how many tons of garbage were loaded onto dump trucks. I also know how intractable the mental condition behind hoarding can be. In a way, understanding hoarding and how it relates to OCD is almost useless because in the end, it is so hard to treat.

Still, parts of this book held some interest. Of most interest to me was the chapter about Pamela, who fell victim to a guru-like psychiatrist who manipulated her patients into caring for abandoned cats. She eventually ended up in a 16-room house with hundreds of cats, none of which were ever desexed because the doctor felt it unnatural, and the group of believers would go so far as to “rescue” animals who would otherwise have been spayed or neutered. Before long the situation was completely out of control, yet it continued on for years. Pamela ended up in the doctor’s home, caring for cats 21 hours a day. She finally fled when she was in her early 50s, ending up homeless for a while. But even after she clawed her way out, so to speak, she still fought the urge to collect cats. Most hoarders of animals describe animals as possessing a “pure” love, an unconditional love that was denied them in chaotic, abusive childhoods.

It was illuminating to understand some of the thinking or cognitive issues behind hoarding. One man saw limitless potential in every item he hoarded. A bucket with too many holes to hold water could hold something else. A piece of an ancient set of Venetian blinds needed to be kept on the off chance that he one day found someone who might need that slat.

One woman’s example explained the organization issues that some hoarders face. She saw things in terms of the space they occupied, instead of where they should go. Irene kept things in piles because in her mind, if she put them away, she would not remember them. A newspaper clipping, a phone number, her electricity bill – they all went into the same pile on the floor and she blamed a faulty memory when she was unable to find what she needed. She never seemed to understand that no memory was good enough to keep track of things in piles. She didn’t use drawers for the same reason – how could she know what was in the drawers if she put clothes away? Best to keep them out where she could see them. Irene also had issues with decision making, as she often could not assign just one meaning to an item. How could she put things away when some items had more than one meaning or emotional definition. A sweater could be as potent a reminder of a specific memory as a photograph or a diary entry, and therefore the sweater was not just clothing, but a mental place holder for certain events.

This book covers a lot of ground, discussing some hoarders who live in what seems to us like filth yet fear contamination when people touch their things. People who use items and animals to replace people. The perfectionism that makes positive action impossible. The desire to make sure nothing is ever wasted (the woman who saved her maxi-pads thinking she would one day wash them and reuse them was horrifying). The ability to see unspeakable beauty in bottle caps and piles of garbage.

But overall, I think the reason this book didn’t hit me well is because I left it feeling frustrated. Reading Frost’s accounts of dealing with hoarders was hellish. I felt like whacking someone on the head as I read his struggles to get just one cognitively impaired person to throw out one slip of paper with a phone number on it, only to have the patient go and retrieve the piece of paper from the trash. The successes were few and hard-won and I think I am callous enough that I crave the quick, visual fix that the television presentations of this condition offer. Yeah, those house-emptying examples don’t really solve much, but then again, aside from the examples of people intervening with children who suffer from hoarding tendencies, the psychological approach doesn’t work much either.

But my need for a quick clean-up, a definitive though likely temporary cure, is hardly the fault of the authors. I suspect people who like reading books that have case studies of patients with certain conditions, those who find hoarding interesting, or those who are dealing with hoarding will appreciate the looks this book gives into how it is that people end up in a home packed with garbage, unable to function, yet unable to change without lots of psychology and the threat of a city-operated backhoe.

A Hell of Mercy by Tim Farrington

This post originally appeared on I Read Everything

Books: A Hell of Mercy: A Meditation on Depression and the Dark Night of the Soul

Author: Tim Farrington

Type of Book: Memoir, psychology, mental health, spiritual

Why Did I Read This Book: Not long ago, I reached a place of acceptance wherein I will no longer battle my darkness. It’s a choice that is so intensely personal and specific that no one who suffers from depression should look to my decision as any sort of guidance or advocacy. But because I have decided to simply be a person who is isolated, weird and dark rather than fight it with therapy or medication any longer, I find other people’s mental health voyages fascinating.

Availability: Published by Harper Collins in 2009, you can get a copy here:

Comments: This was an erudite, elegant book and I am glad I read it. As I read it, I found myself questioning decisions I have made about my own brain chemistry, and after reevaluation, I decided my impulse to simply leave my brain alone and let it be, treatable illness though I may have, was the correct decision. Reading Farrington’s journey, his spiritual outlook on life and the chemicals in his brain, served for me, a decidedly non-spiritual person, as a fresh and very nearly inspiring look into how it is all people with depressive tendencies can interpret their disease and their lives without recrimination or guilt. Farrington recounted his life with phrases that all but hit me in the head with meaning, and I had “aha!” moments constantly in this book. There is very little in common between Farrington in me aside from wonky chemical reactions that affect our minds, so the ability of his words to affect me and touch me seem almost miraculous.

So this is an intensely personal reaction to a book, less a review than a discussion of how the book affected me. It would help to bear that in mind as you read, because I really did find myself overwhelmed at times at how eloquently Farrington put into sharp focus all the words I have bouncing in my skull but have been unable to express. This is one of those books I read and think, “I could have written this,” but that is untrue. I could not have written this. I’m not enlightened enough yet and my heart will never be this spiritual. Nevertheless, it was the right book for me to read at the right time.

Farrington conveyed very well not only how it is that we can never truly see mental illness coming, but that being smart enough even to have known it was coming for us would not have been enough and perhaps that is a good thing.

My cluelessness, I see in retrospect, conferred a certain advantage on me. If we were smart, we might never become wise.

And god help me, how many times did I justify myself, sanctify the worst of my tirades as if having brain chemistry problems excused it.

…I came to see depression as my shadow on the path; like the “black dog” of Churchill’s recurrent blues, it was an inescapable presence. My lows could be debilitating, but they also seemed intimately related to my creativity itself and so were slightly glamorous, like Hemingway’s alcoholism and Dostoyevsky’s epilepsy. But my art at this time was self-indulgent stuff at best, and I invoked it much too readily to justify failures of character.

I can’t even begin to explain how many times I have excused my poor behavior because I have an “artistic” temperament and how many times my husband clung to that mental raft every time my rages sent him out to sea. This, more than any other, is the area wherein I feel guilt about being a depressive, and it helps that Farrington explained my own foibles to me so well. Interestingly, about the time I began to reject such thinking is the time I stopped being able to write fiction. I lack the will to investigate this cause-effect very carefully but it does make it very hard to understand the link between what I perceive about myself and who I truly am. Surely my fiction cannot have just dried up because I rejected brain chemistry as a reason to continue acting poorly but you never know. All I know is that when I no longer saw magic in being as wretched as Baudelaire, my words dried up and I started writing about books instead of trying to write books.

But then again, what I had to write back then may not have been worth much. My first novel was a disaster, and Farrington seems to have had similar problems, because the seduction of being mad does not always imply genius, no matter what we try to tell ourselves.

…I ended up writing an incredibly pretentious novel, a sort of first-person anti-Gospel: “My name is Jesus. I am an old man now,” it began. Yikes.

The book was bad, but it was good in the sense of being better than suicide, and after a while the voices faded to a dim roar and I began to write merely puerile bad novels in a more standard fashion…

His description of a time in which he submerged himself into the darkness, searching for answers, will ring utterly true to those who have observed my own depressive antics.

I was living on cornflakes and macaroni and cheese, and I was pretty whacked-out. I didn’t talk to anyone for months and slept on my own eccentric schedule – approximately a twenty-five-hour day, cycling gradually through all manner of weird wake-up times. I had a half-serious theory that I was actually from another planet that had a longer day and that therefore my diurnal clock was unfitted to the Earth’s twenty-four-hour rotation..

Medications never blunted my creativity like they did with Farrington, probably because I am largely unsuited to psycho-pharmacology. That which calms most minds will leave me hearing voices. If it makes a person drowsy, I will be climbing the walls. But his experience is a common one, I think.

Still, one cannot stray far from what passes for normal consciousness in our culture without encountering the guardian deities of medication. At that point in the late seventies, lithium was the state-of-the-art antidepressant, and the perverse simplicity of the notion that a minuscule failure of electrolytic salt lay at the root of my intricate suffering was almost dizzying. I tried it briefly and found what every artist fears from psychiatry to be true: the drug interfered with my writing. I felt blunted and dim on lithium, displaced about three feet from the center of myself, a gray bystander to my essential life.

And have I ever felt that disembodied feeling, a numbness that permits observation but no immersion. A chemical meant to save your life but leaves you separated from all that makes life worth living. My chemical alienation lay mainly in benzos and pams, but I sense the feelings are often similar – not a new self but a novel, wooden ability not to care about the old self.

But much of what Farrington has to say does apply to those with a creative spirit.

Some people go back to school at that point, get their MFA, and eventually teach; some go into business and promise themselves they will write someday when they are financially secure. But I felt my own bridges back to such reassuring normality had burned long since, and, being the melodramatic mystical sort that I am, I went into a monastery instead.

This passage meant a lot to me, grad school dropout that I am. And I am definitely a person for whom bridges to normality have been burned. Some depressives sleep all day. My early depression manifested itself in insomnia that I would dose myself endlessly with pills and booze to try to counteract. My life became centered on a lack of sleep and the side-effects that endlessly chasing sleep causes. This sort of thing does not lend itself well to a 9-5 life and when you fail at job, after job, after job, eventually you just know better than to try any more. I luckily have a partner who takes up the financial slack and I make our domestic lives as easy as I can, a life that makes my sleep issues less of an issue, so to speak. I know there are lots of others out there like me, but they have kids a and firm financial obligations and they cope somehow, but in my case, not even the pressure of needing money overcame the haze of ten Tylenol PMs washed down with some gin. That’s a method of suicide to most people but for me it was just self-medication burning my bridges to reassuring normality. And sadly, there are no convents for atheist girls like me.

It’s not actually such a stretch to consider depression as an involuntary form of postmodern mortification, a salutary humiliation akin to a hair shirt… What if some degree of pained and penitential consciousness, of realized inadequacy in the light of the sacred, is in fact necessary to the full human life? Our depressions, which we labor so to cure before they disrupt our self-enclosed routines, may be nefarious blessings, gestures by our stymied souls toward the conscious embrace of helplessness and suffering.

This, for me, is a key passage, because I know full well to the bottom of my blackened heart, hermit that this disease has made me, that if I do have a soul, depression has softened it. Depression has, beyond a doubt, made me a kinder person. I see a man who probably drinks, asking for money and I give it because I know. I know that but for two strikes of luck in my life – my husband and my capacity to detox and make it stick – I could be standing there because addiction and depression hold each others hands. They switch back and forth, one leading to the other. It is a nefarious blessing, to know that you really are able to say, “There but for the grace of god go I,” and mean it, without any bitterness or arrogance towards those for whom the battle has led them down a far more bridge-burning road.

There are things you simply cannot prepare for. This is not something anyone really wants to hear. We spend our lives preparing; we stake our pride on mastering the troublesome aspects of our world. We study, we practice, we polish and adjust; even our earnest efforts to “go with the flow” and humbly surrender to the processes of a life force larger than ourselves are invariably suffused with a hidden agenda. If we are good, bad things will not happen; if we are good enough, our suffering will end.

When I was in high school, I knew depression intimately but no one really called it that back then. I knew it even if I didn’t have a name for it, the sinking sense that if I did not fight and flail I would sink down into the mud and no one would ever be able to save me. I joined every extracurricular activity I could. I was an honors student. I had a part-time job. I matched my shoes to my outfits and ironed my underwear. I internalized good as “middle class and going places” and I worked so hard to be good. To look good in my own way. To disavow the blackness around my lungs where I sensed my soul should be but wasn’t. I burned myself out being good, and it began to show in college. It really began to show in my 30s. There is no good enough for depression. There is no closet large enough, no shoes that gleam enough, no resume that wows enough. There is no way to prepare. Even as I gave up and went with the flow, the tiny goodnesses I managed to achieve – saving a cat or two, helping a neighbor’s child – were not enough to hold the badness at bay. This, I think, is the hardest lesson depression taught me: there is no way to prepare well enough to prevent the dark days from coming.

My life had always been peppered with black days, days in which taking a shower seemed far beyond my means, days in which I just hunkered down like a wounded beast and endured; I’d had black weeks and even the occasional black month. During a particularly trying time in the early nineties, I’d spent an entire summer staring at the blank cursor on my computer screen, as if at a receding satellite; unable to write a word.

My equivalent of this is spending all day long in bed reading Encyclopedia Dramatica. This is more or less how I spent the summer of 2009. And that is a measuring stick to me. When showering begins to seem like it is too much, too hard and too pointless, I know the depression is wrapping its hands around my neck.

“It is one of the paradoxes of transformation that the closer we get to new possibility, the worse things seem to seem,” Richard Moss writes in The Black Butterfly. In another of the paradoxes of transformation, however, I found no comfort at all in this notion. I was haunting the bookstores, looking desperately for some help, but the spiritual books all seemed like chatter now. The universe had simplified itself into a desert of meaningless suffering, and the wisest words were just marks on the bleached expanse. Joy, compassion, peace and the divine: yadda-yadda-yadda.

I think this sort of depressive nihilism is why I read so precisely the details of the saints, the ones who suffered and starved and found enlightenment through pain because I still am a nihilist myself. I cannot meditate. I know no god. This is not entirely depression’s fault. I never believed in the fantastic, the mystical. Santa Claus was always a man in a beard to me though I put on a good act as a child. I am not entirely sure I have a soul, though I know my dead cat did, and that my dead grandparents did. If nothing else, depression has separated me from any comfort or sense of salvation. But being a person shaped by depression, this bothers me a lot less than it probably should.

Nothing will screw you up more than a team of professionals determined to help you.

Except, perhaps, believing that therapy and medicine can offer us no help at all. The fact that you’re depressed doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re not going through a dark night, but it is just as true, and as crucial to know, that seeking therapy, or taking medication for a biochemical affliction, doesn’t necessarily mean you have subverted your spiritual process or numbed your reality sense with muffling anesthetics.

I sometimes wonder if I will ever return to psychotropics for cures. I let myself have a tiny dose of a relatively inoffensive substance (well, it is inoffensive to me) daily to keep the worst of the anxiety that the darkness causes me tamped down. But it is good to know that I am not the only person left who embraces an approach wherein we manage to keep ourselves whole however we can. Too many shun medications as weak and too many embrace them as all-encompassing panaceas. I hit a point wherein I believed continuing to seek medical answers to my brain problems would probably kill me as I am not that well suited to the trials and physical misery that comes from getting the biochemical solutions right. But even at the worst of it, I think my disappointment stemmed from knowing so many people find the right drug and that after years of experimenting with my brain, it was time to stop. There would be no cure, at least not then or now.

“At the first-order of experiential description,” Denys Turner notes in The Darkness of God, “John of the Cross’s accounts of the sufferings of the ‘dark nights of the soul’ are uncannily similar to what a person will give from the inside of depression.”

As alienated as I am from any spiritual leanings, I still hope that this darkness is but a journey toward salvation but at the same time, I don’t think it is. It has gone on too long, though St. Paul’s dark night of the soul lasted 45 years. Rather, I think that instead of preparing to stave it off, I simply know that it comes and that I need to understand it will come and go when it wants. I don’t think, as much as narratives like this stoke my heart, that this suffering of mine will lead me to god. And this lack of faith is why I read books like this.

It sounds bizarre, but I think the key point in the dark night is basically everything but this death being hell. I was still, silent, perfectly accepting at last, inwardly, only because it hurt so much to move. It didn’t feel good or holy or anything much, but it didn’t hurt. It was not peace, in any positive sense, at least not for a very long time, but it was quiet and painless, and for me at that point, after years of every spiritual effort causing only pain, frustration, dryness and inner noise, that quiet–not Quiet, just quiet–would do just fine.

And that is where I am now. In a place of quiet. I don’t go out of the house much. People set my teeth on edge, which is not a good thing since I have given myself a TMJ disorder grinding my teeth at night. I never talk much, even on the phone, and recently discovered I had gone so long between uses on my pay-as-you-go phone that I lost my number due to inactivity. I am shut off from the world and for the first time in a long while I don’t mind. This quiet for me is not Quiet, but it is peace and I will take what I can get.

It’s been a while since a book spoke to me this profoundly, wherein I could not analyze it in terms of information or literary quality but could only sit and read with awe and understanding. This is an excellent book, through and through.

Dead in the Family by Charlaine Harris

This post originally appeared on I Read Everything

Book: Dead in the Family

Author: Charlaine Harris

Type of Book: Fiction, paranormal romance, vampires

Why Did I Read This Book: Because despite the fact that the cheesy Sookie Stackhouse series has increasingly made me lactose intolerant, I’m hooked.

Availability: Published in 2010 by the Penguin Group, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Oh, good heavens, this was a terrible book. Terrible, terrible, terrible. Horrible, even. And yet I know that I will be reading the next in the series the day it comes out in hard cover. It’s maddening. I don’t know what bizarre alchemy Harris has discovered here because she’s not even turning base literature into gold. She’s presenting base lit, I know it’s base lit, and I devour it like it’s gold. Almost all of the Sookie Stackhouse books are like this. I know they are American cheese but I seek them out like they are caviar.

But that having been said, the weird alchemy that Harris performs fell short in this book. Her past books were so much better. Where was this book’s equivalent of really steamy shower sex with Eric? Where was the equivalent of the bloody war between the Fairies? Where was this book’s exciting werewolf one-on-one battle for supremacy? Where were the “this book” equivalents of the antics that made Harris’ past books the sort of guilty pleasure I don’t mind admitting? This book was not even American cheese. It was microwaved cheez whiz that has been left out on the counter top with the lid off. The turgid plot lines are what reel me in and keep me reading but this Sookie novel did not deliver. It just didn’t have enough of the cheesy goodness that I long for when I read Harris. There were several subplots that never delivered the visceral, gleeful punch that one needs when reading Sookie Stackhouse tales.

Plot summary: Sookie and Eric still have undead Viking/insufferable blonde human sex and are still uneasy in their relationship and nothing gets resolved. Victor is causing problems and Sookie wants him dead and nothing gets resolved. Claude moves in, with no real point behind it. Sookie babysits her young cousin and nothing comes of it. Jason is still a were-panther but has settled down and Sookie goes to a pointless cookout with her brother and his new girlfriend. Werewolves find a dead body on her property and nothing gets resolved. Eric’s maker shows up with the undead Tsarevich and it’s ridiculous as well as pointless. Sookie finds Lorena’s other “child” and the book ends after this happens and we can only hope it goes somewhere in the next book in the series. There are some little bubbles of interesting behavior but overall, there are a bunch of subplots that rattle around and ultimately go nowhere.

This trend of Harris’ to introduce all kinds of intriguing subplots, like the presence of Hadley’s son, bringing new characters and situations into the mix in every chapter, dangling them out there, then doing nothing with them aside from revisiting them blandly and pointlessly, just telling little stories that have no impact on the plot or give any better understanding of the world Sookie lives in, is wearing thin. This tendency has got to be reined in at some point – I know editors may be reluctant to lay down the law to a proven money maker like Harris, but all these tiny subplots and all these characters milling about and not doing much are diluting the fun.

There were also a lot of continuity problems in this book. If a casual reader like me noticed them, any editor worth his or her salt should have seen them, too. I think as this series grows and with its popularity, there is increasing pressure for Harris to crank novels out. It doesn’t leave a lot of room for a quality book, but I wonder if that even matters. I mean, I am slamming the hell out of Dead in the Family but I know I will continue reading the series. I suspect it will take a lot more than one complete clunker with a bad plot and continuity issues to cause most of us leave Sookie behind in disgust but it would be nice if our unconditional love for this series was respected via tight story lines and excellent plots.

However much I don’t expect the most stellar of writing in the Sookie Stackhouse series, Harris did manage to create a plot line in this book so bad that I honestly have no idea how anyone could have thought, “Hey, this is a good idea. Let’s include this hot mess and no one will raise an eyebrow.” Eric’s maker, Appius Livius Ocella comes to see Eric due to all kinds of vampire machinations. And with him be brings Alexei Romanov, his newest “son” and Eric’s “brother.”

Yes. Alexei Romanov. The one killed by the Bolsheviks. The one whose corpse was exhumed and his identity verified via DNA testing. The one who was a hemophiliac, the doomed adolescent who was shot to death in a basement with his parents and sisters. That Alexei Romanov.

How does Harris explain away all the, you know, historic and scientific evidence that Alexei Romanov died and remained dead and was not turned into a the undead by an ancient Roman vampire? Well, you see, Appius Livius knew that when the mass pit of Romanov bodies were finally discovered, it would only be a short while until they found Alexei. So the Justin Bieber-aged vampire removed his bones bit by bit to recreate his skeleton. Poured acid on the bone fragments and burned them too. Lucky for Alexei vampires can regenerate bone and heal quickly. And that there is no DNA test for vampiricism. Or that 16-year-old vampire bones produced in fragments then burned and buried for less than 20 years looked identical to the bones of Alexei’s sister, who had indeed been buried for over 80 years. Or that the Tsarevich survived the multiple stabbings and the two bullets that were put in his head long enough to be turned into a vampire.

I didn’t really object to Harris’ prior use of Elvis as he is a pop culture icon of questionable gravitas. But it was a bridge too far in terms of common sense, believability and even good taste to resurrect Alexei Romanov, a hemophiliac whose life had been quite bad before he was killed in a basement and his remains defiled, as the new sex toy for an old Roman vampire. Bleah on the whole thing.

So, all in all, this was not a good book. But that won’t stop you from buying it and reading it if you are already hooked. Just keep your fingers crossed that editors with a keen eye, common sense and feel for plot whip Harris’ next Sookie Stackhouse offering into shape before we shell out $25 for the privilege of reading it.

She and I: A Fugue by Michael R. Brown

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: She and I: A Fugue

Author: Michael R. Brown

Type of Book: Fiction, experimental fiction, memoir

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: The author and I “know” one another from butting heads in some blogging communities before I lost my will to argue online. We find the other extremely questionable in our approaches in political and social realms (he is an Objectivist Libertarian and I am a Bleeding Heart Liberal, each of us married to our own belief systems in a way that beggars belief to the other). I first encountered the author in a community devoted to stupid behavior online. Two years later, I forget how I did it, but I discovered his full name and the name of his book and to reward me for not being as much of an idiot as he initially judged me, he sent me a copy of the book. So that was a bit odd. Then the book itself proved to be an odd experience, to be sure.

Availability: Published in Petrarcha Press in 2009, you can get a copy here:

Comments: I debated on how to handle this book in my review. I was tempted to go with snark but I can’t. I may not pull any punches but I plan to be as honest and candid as I can while I explain why this book is one of the worst books I have ever read. In a way, being snarky and comedic might be stomached easier because they are easier to dismiss. “Oh, a liberal clown didn’t like my book, lol.” I also tell myself that there is nothing unkind in complete honesty.

So since I am being honest, I need to say outright that this is an awful book. It is awful for many reasons and I am going to discuss all those reasons. It may seem like overkill, but when you don’t like the author, it’s too easy to say, “It sucked, take my word for it.” I don’t want you to take my word for it. I want to give you all the evidence that led me to the conclusions I reached. I don’t want anyone to walk away from this far-too-long review and think I dismissed the book because I would rather be buried alive with a full bladder than ever again read Ayn Rand or listen to one of her devotees go on at length.

This is the longest discussion I have written to date and am putting the bulk of it under the jump.

Unless you know either the author or me, or unless you just love reading critiques of bad, experimental literature, you may have zero interest in any of this.

The Spinster and the Prophet by A.B. McKillop

This post originally appeared on I Read Everything

Book: The Spinster and the Prophet: H.G. Wells, Florence Deeks and the Case of the Plagiarized Text

Author: A. B. McKillop

Type of Book: Non-fiction, biography, history, feminism

Why Did I Read This Book: Like any book fiend of long term addiction, I often buy books in frenzies. I have no idea where or when I purchased this book, so I no longer know what initially drew me to it. But once I noticed it on my shelf, it still went unread for a couple of years because though I didn’t have any feelings for H.G. Wells one way or the other, I had a feeling that I would have pretty strong feelings once I was finished reading this book. I was correct.

Availability: Published in 2000, you can get a copy here:

Comments: I am not a big science fiction fan, so H.G. Wells, while I certainly read him and was socially aware of him, was not an author for whom I had any great affinity. But it was nevertheless disappointing to realize that he was a completely unlikeable, self-absorbed, trivial, priapic worm. Add to it that he may well have been a plagiarist who stole words knowing the person whose words he stole would likely have no recourse because she was not famous, had little money of her own, and most importantly, because she was a she and not a he, and it would appear H.G. Wells was a vile little man in many respects.

I often do my best to avoid biographies of writers or performers I have any sort of respect for. Like I said, I had little opinion about H.G. Wells before reading this book and knew this book was unlikely to paint him in a favorable light. Yet I was shocked at how much I disliked him at the end. I had once read about his affair with Rebecca West and their child in a different book, but I had no idea how he more or less rubbed his wife’s nose in it, how very young West was when the affair began, how Wells used his literary status and genius as an excuse to fuel and justify his sexual id. I haven’t felt such disappointment learning about the life of a literary figure since I found out what a repellent human being Robert Frost was. At least I had far less literary heart invested in Wells when I read about him.

Here are the nuts and bolts of the book: Florence Deeks, a middle-aged Canadian spinster, began to research and write a history of the world focusing on how women had shaped the world, from ancient matriarchies to the then current roles of women in societies. It took her five years of research and writing, beginning and roughly ending with the first World War. She submitted the manuscript, which she called The Web, to the North American branch of Wells’ publisher, Macmillan. She had long conversations with a particular editor about the book but did not receive it back, rejected, until almost two years had passed. The manuscript, when returned, was a mess, smudged and showed signs of heavy wear, wear that would become crucial in the court case that showed how some of the worn pages contained plagiarized passages. It seems very likely from the evidence that McKillop presents in the book that the editor that Deeks dealt with at Macmillan obfuscated the location of the manuscript and sent it to Wells, who had himself been discussing writing a history of the world. Indeed, Wells, to that point a man who wrote mainly turgid, lightly veiled autobiographies of himself, according to his assertions, managed to write a massively researched book in record time, a book that bore similar amateurish marks as Deeks’ endeavor. Despite many expert witnesses who showed the distinct similarities between Wells’ book and Deeks’ book, despite many appeals, the courts consistently decided against Deeks in her court cases. Wells’ book, The Outline of History, a best-seller then but now largely ignored, made Wells’ fortune secure.

Deeks herself immediately saw similarities between Wells’ work and her own rejected manuscript, similarities that several experts echoed. In fact, the entire outline of Wells’ work echoed her own, unique outline. Moreover, Wells used references to works Deeks had agonized over whether or not she should quote but ultimately did not. That Wells used the same source that Deeks in her inexperience had not cited, himself not citing the author, was particularly damning. That Macmillan could not prove where the manuscript resided when it was in their custody – indeed, there is a record that indicates it was received twice at the office when Deeks only submitted it the once – also lends credibility to Deeks’ belief that Wells altered her manuscript.

The proof that Wells likely did not write his 1,324 page history without pilfering Deeks’ work seems likely on its very face and despite all the compelling examinations of the similarities between the texts, the most damning evidence to me was the timeline involved. Though Wells was an undeniably erudite man, he had only written fictional novels and did not have experience as a historian.

Three of the most experienced and prolific professional historians in the world, James Harvey Robinson, Charles A. Beard and James Henry Breasted, had required several years to research and write their collaborative history of Western civilization. Wells and his ever-faithful wife ventured into their first and only exercise in the writing of history with few research notes and little intensive help from others, and somehow managed to accomplish the task in a span of time so short it beggars the imagination. In mid-November 1918, nothing on the project had advanced as far as the typescript stage. By February 15, 1919, Jane [Wells’ wife] had produced 50,000 to 60,000 words in typed form. Twenty days later her husband… had written between 75,000 and 80,000 [additional] words, researching along the way. At the end of the year, the whole manuscript was complete.

This is all I am going to quote from the book on the topic of the investigations and the trials that compared The Web to The Outline of History. That part of the book is extremely interesting, a sort of literary CSI. But I will say that after reading about the number of bad acts on the part of Macmillan employees, the analysis laid out by Deeks’ witnesses and Wells’ own response to the accusation (attempting to smear Deeks), I believe H.G. Wells stole large parts of the book that made his fortune.

But despite learning about Wells’ nasty and underhanded disputes with literary icons like Henry James and many other acts that shed a bad light on him, his utter need for and complete contempt for women almost overtook the plagiarism claim this book puts forth (and in my opinion, proves). But in a sense, that is what this book is about. The book’s topic is plagiarism in a specific sense, but the overarching theme of this book is how one man, the publishing industry and court system deprived one woman of her voice and work but also deprived all women of having access to a book that would have described their own unique role in history. You see, when Wells plagiarized The Web, he removed all of the work that Deeks did to show how women had indeed played a role in shaping the world. Not content just to steal, he stole the work and stripped it of all its original intent.

Yet worse was the fact that even as ambitious as his plagiarism was, it would never have been possible without the toil of his wife, Jane. Jane, of all the women Wells used in his life, suffered the most. She wasn’t even permitted the luxury of using her own name. He called Catherine Wells “Jane” during their entire marriage, a name she did not encourage but could not dissuade him from using. His two-named wife clearly played a role in getting The Outline of History ready.

By all accounts, Jane Wells, once more a silent voice at a crucial point in her husband’s career, was his saving grace in the creation of The Outline of History. “Without her labour in typing and retyping the drafts of the various chapters as they have been revised and amended, in checking references, finding suitable quotations, hunting up illustrations, and keeping in order the whole mass of material for this history, and without her constant help and watchful criticism, its completion would have been impossible.”

The theme of how Wells played a role in silencing and marginalizing two women is the theme that stuck with me above all the injustice, all the proof of plagiarism, above all the sexual indiscretions and bad behavior on Wells’ part. Even as the reader feels perhaps a modicum of pity for Wells, as he at times was indeed pitiful, this book simply serves to remind the reader that in addition to being a fair science fiction writer, a terrible literary fiction author, a man of many affairs, and probably a plagiarist on more than one occasion, Wells can best be remembered as a man possessing such monumental ego that he would not permit his own wife to have her own name.

The Spinster and the Prophet is meticulous researched, and while it includes recreations of what the author thinks may have happened in some scenes, he makes it clear that he is using this writing approach, and his recreations never seem fanciful or forced. A literary tome about literary crime, it was both erudite and accessible. I enjoyed reading it and definitely recommend it for those out there who enjoy biography, history and a good, down in the dirt expose on what really happens when the socially privileged close ranks.

James Shelby Downard’s Mystical War by Adam Gorightly

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: James Shelby Downard’s Mystical War

Author: Adam Gorightly

Type of book: Non-fiction, conspiracy theory, occult symbology, Masonry

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It’s about James Shelby Downard’s whacked out and at times strangely on the nose beliefs and how they relate to the mass of conspiracy theory as a whole.

Availability: Published by Virtualbookworm.com in 2008, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Having read Carnivals of Life and Death by James Shelby Downard (I reviewed it here), I wanted to know more about the man, whether or not he was a real human being, and specifically what Gorightly had to say about him. I really like Gorightly’s biography of Kerry Thornley, which I also discussed on this site. I also have a soft spot for Discordians, it must be said, so I am kindly disposed towards Gorightly in general. But I was not as impressed by this book as much as I was by Gorightly’s earlier effort. There was a scattered quality to this book, with a ton of information thrown at the reader in very short order. If you are unfamiliar with Downard or with vast swathes of conspiracy theory in general, you will spend a lot of time Googling when you read this book.

It was quite nice to see that some of my own research and my own suspicions may have some validity to them (because it is impossible not to start feeling some paranoia when you read content like this and it can become hard to determine if you are suddenly seeing odd shadows where there are none). In my review of Carnivals of Life and Death I posited that Downard likely did not exist and may have been a group hoax created by Adam Parfrey, Michael Hoffman and William Grimstad, and Gorightly addresses that idea without confirming or denying it. I find that interesting but don’t see it as anything anyone should find upsetting if Downard is indeed a hoax. Art (or artifice, as it were) is the lie that tells the truth, sometimes. And even though I felt at times that Golightly veered off into his own riffs, I found this book mostly interesting, though the discussions were shallow and yet covered a shocking amount of ground. This is a short book, only 93 pages long, 10 of which are two separate introductions and another three are the index and appendices.

Chapters 1-5 discuss some of the topics Downard covers in Carnivals of Life and Death, as well as the article Downard wrote about the JFK assassination called “King Kill 33.” His unbelievable stories of being a Masonic scapegoat, combined with his supposed sex slave wife and similar mental maunderings are better read in his book, but Gorightly’s discussions are amusing enough. I particularly enjoyed chapter five, which dealt with mystical toponomy. There is an intoxicating “holy crap” element to Downard’s discussions about the 33rd latitude – there is something completely insane yet undeniably obvious about all of it.

It’s around chapter six and onward that things just let loose, applying various branches of conspiracy theory to Downard, mainly via mystical toponomy and mind control. A whole bunch of names who are more or less entire books in their own right get tossed out there in just chapter six alone, from Aleister Crowley to Richard Oppenheimer to Jack Parsons and how they all relate back to the 33rd latitude. From there we expand into Robert Temple’s Sirius theory and UFO-lore, including the Order of the Solar Temple cult suicides, then move on to the assassination of Robert Kennedy, “The Revelation of the Method,” insane journeys with Downard in his silver stream trailer, the connections between Jim Keith’s death at Burning Man and the movie The Wicker Man and the Son of Sam murders… and it was about here that I found myself a little overwhelmed. There is a ton of information crammed into this little book, almost too much.

Seriously, from chapter six on it is like a who’s who of whacked culture and fucked history. David Berkowitz, Terrence McKenna, the Unibomber, Jim Keith, the Carr family, Henry Lee Lucas, Stanley Kubrick, Bill Cooper, Prescott Bush, my hometown hero Alex Jones and so many, many more. This little book could make you go blind from the sheer audacity of its scope. I am unsure if this is a complaint or praise. You tell me…

Because stuff like this matters to me, I will add that the editing at times annoyed me. I suspect that most people who read this sort of stuff don’t care but the editing got very sketchy half-way in. Pepsi Cola did not have an ad that wanted to teach the world to sing. The use of dashes was bizarre. The book incorporated British-style and American-style use of conversational punctuation with no real rhyme or reason. If you’re gonna present a boatload of information in a short amount of space, it helps when the editing and more basic elements of fact checking are on the nose. In some places the editing outright grated.

And so did some of the theories and assertions. I mean, one cannot really disprove that the planet Sirius brought civilization to Earth (well, maybe you can) but you can definitely prove that Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole did not commit several hundred cannibalistic murders. The only reason Henry Lee Lucas is linked to Jim Jones is because he confessed to killing everyone at Jonestown himself, but I think he claimed he shot and stabbed them instead of delivering cups of cyanide-laced fruit drink. Lucas was a semi-literate, probably mentally-challenged grifter who could be coerced into admitting anything. Indicating there was anything sinister in Bush the Lesser commuting his death sentence, linking him to the MK-ULTRA program and the Matamoros drug cult is wacky and sort of dumb. But then again, I also tend to think Gorightly has more than a little trickster in him. I suspect sometimes he just throws things out there to see what will stick, who will believe and who will not. But that’s just a guess because of the whole, you know, Discordian thing.

So, this is a reserved recommendation. If you’re new to the game, you may wanna read up on various insanities before reading this book because it is just an overview of madness and how it related to the theories of James Shelby Downard, and if you have not read Downard, definitely read Carnivals of Life and Death before you read this book. This book was loony though maddening at times, but because I kind of like Gorightly and because I was never bored reading it, I fall more on the end of recommending it than not. But heed my warnings, gentle readers – this book is a one-inch dip in the ocean of conspiracy and as a result may be more taxing than entertaining.

Prozac Diary by Lauren Slater

This post originally appeared on I Read Everything

Book: Prozac Diary

Author: Lauren Slater

Type of book: Memoir, psychology, psychiatry, non-fiction

Why Did I Read This Book: I love tales of psychiatry and mental illness. I was one of those who was prescribed Prozac in the first wave of the drug’s popularity and like reading about how others responded or did not respond to the drug.

Availability: Published in 1998 by Penguin Books, you can get a copy here:

Comments: I think this book was probably more interesting 12 years ago. I am a pharmacological refugee and on a personal level find tales like Slater’s interesting, but I can also tell you that unless you have tinkered with the chemicals in your brain, unless you have walked down this road, this mild, ethereal and at times random memoir may not have any resonance. As interested as I am in memoirs of people who struggle with mental illness and the drugs used to treat mental illness, there were times I found this book less than gripping.

That is a problem with memoirs. A person’s life is of infinite interest to them but sometimes their life stories do not translate into an absorbing story for others. Couple that with the fact that psychopharmacology has changed dramatically not only since Slater was prescribed Prozac in the late 1980s, but also dramatically since this book was published in 1998, and you can see why this book may lack relevance now. This book almost seems quaint when one considers the intensity of the sorts of drugs available these days.

Slater suffered from a variety of mental illness symptoms when prescribed Prozac and her reaction to the drug was miraculous. She felt like an entirely new person yet felt like she was finally feeling like the person she was meant to be, which brings up all kinds of questions about identity and mental illness. If you have been mentally ill or depressed all your life and you suddenly feel like yourself after taking a medication, who is the real you? That is a question that those for whom medications work ask themselves routinely and it takes a strong writer to ensure this question does not sound like a cliche. Slater just isn’t that strong a writer.

Moreover, there are at times in this book when Slater shows a tendency towards the mystical, and while I understand the sort of miraculous nature of brain meds when they work properly, this book was often too airy for me. And god help me for saying this (or condemn me as the case may be), but the things that made Lauren Slater a mad woman and the things that distinguished her when well simply are not as interesting as some other similar memoirs out there. Marya Hornbacher, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Susanna Kaysen and even Sylvia Plath did it better. With better offerings out there, it is hard to recommend this book. I don’t want to perpetuate the idea that mental illness needs to be entertaining to be valid but it needs to be entertaining in order to make a good book. While what happened to Slater before she was medicated and after were of great interest to her, those experiences are not consistently interesting to the reader.

That having been said, Slater does make some interesting points that resonated with me. I have always been intensely annoyed by the story of Mary and Martha from the Bible and Slater has an intriguing take on how Prozac ended her endless Mary-like navel contemplation and turned her into a Martha who got things done.

According to conventional Christianity then, and probably Judaism too, Prozac is a conduit to sin because it makes you more attentive to the tasks, the tiny things, altogether less transcendent. But perhaps, as Merton might say, the truth is in the tiny things, which is why I have for so long used illness to avoid them. Daily tasks–washing, laundering, banking, baking–they force me to my flesh, to the feel of fingers in repetitive movement, to the sloughings and tickings, the burst of soap bubble, the death of a cell.

Anyone who has ever been so depressed that even taking a shower was difficult for them understands this. But it is still interesting nonetheless to see this struggle, this giving-up in life assigned a higher meaning than simply being so ill one cannot do anything but passively contemplate one’s misery.

I also found interesting Slater’s sense of how Prozac altered her creativity. “I will lose my ability to write/sculpt/paint!” We have all heard that old argument from every person who has ever been so in love with their mental illness that they assign it a specialness that becomes an excuse to keep themselves from getting better. I’ve used it myself.

It’s been almost a year now since I’ve composed a short story or a poem, I who always thought of myself as a writer, all tortured and intense… Basically good writing is intensity, pitch, sex. Raymond Carver used to say that sometimes, when he was deep into a poem, he would look down to find his hand cupping his balls. I’ve read that Prozac reduces the sex drive, so it would stand to reason that it might diminish the by-products of that drive as well…

Though I am no longer a person who uses drugs to pave the potholes in my brain (prescribed, recreational or liquid, as self-medication is so alluring to those with misfiring brains), I also no longer write fiction. I’ve tried and tried and tried but the active steps to being strong mentally have removed fiction from the table for me. I began my book review sites when it became clear that my stories would likely not come back and I needed to find a way to control words in some manner. I think this is an intriguing topic, the idea that all great genius comes from more than a small dose of madness, but Slater doesn’t spend as much time on this as I wanted to read. And in a way discussing the sex element of Prozac shows the age of this book. Since this book was published, we now have Wellbutrin to cut back the sexual side effects of antidepressants. Not that it works for everyone, to be sure, but in 1998 when this was published, SRIs were almost certain death to the libido.

I also appreciated how Slater addressed the idea of diminishing returns on Prozac. No one ever told me either that Prozac could one day stop working, which is a very real problem with the drug. Rather, the failure of Prozac to be a continual cure for my depression was used as prima facie evidence that I am bipolar (believe me, I am unipolar as all hell). That even today the potential that Prozac could stop working, which Slater experienced herself and shared plainly, is not understood or subject to misinterpretation by doctors, which is several different kinds of frightening.

But even though there were some elements of the book I could relate to, the fact is there were too many passages clogged with the mystical, like when Slater found some sort of otherworldly relevance to a street magician singling her out. Then there were just bizarre passages that added nothing to my understanding of Slater’s mental illness or how Prozac helped her. Take this passage, for instance (she is at a spring bath with women who see themselves as eunuchs):

And just for a moment she stood before us, shed of the fabric of water, utterly visible, so I could have maybe have seen the space between her thighs, a cold crotch or a pit of possibility. She faced me, mammoth, the sagging shelf of her breasts, and it was only there I dared to look, at the wizened nipples with dark hairs around them, black-lashed and bloodshot. Ugly.

Pardon me, but what the hell am I supposed to do with this passage and similar passages wherein Slater reveals a horror so unique to her and yet meaningless to me and possibly anyone else? Nice prose, but this is why I think you should read Marya Hornbacher and not this book. Hornbacher makes the unrelatable interesting in a way Slater cannot manage. Passages wherein Slater is made sad by a person’s double chin have nothing to do with her awakening or even point to the inner workings of her mental illness but rather read as jabs against those who were not slim, young and fit, no matter how sound or peaceful their minds may have been. There are far too many passages like this, uninteresting and at times ridiculous looks into Slater’s mind that ultimately made this book tiresome to read and seemed to have no purpose.

And this is just me reacting negatively to the attempted poetry of Slater’s writing, but I cringed when I read passages like this:

And to Susan I also want to say, “See. See me. This isn’t just Prozac. Or all Prozac. I am the girl whose hands are stained with purple juice, who spins over ponds, who is hock and horse as she jumps. I am lather.”

Some may find a lot of poetry and beauty in the above quote. I find it forced and precious and quite a bit of the book is written in this manner. This may be a journal in print but not every journal entry is worthy of publication.

So I guess what I am saying is that this book is not the worst book but not the best ever on the topic of mental illness and psychopharmacology. If you read it, you likely will not find it complete waste of time, but you may not find it wholly interesting and you likely will not experience any greater epiphany than that Prozac worked for some people. You may shake your head at some parts and wonder what the hell Slater was getting at and those may outnumber the times when you feel she completely nails an idea. I don’t think that is a large enough of a return for reading this book, especially when there are so many better books that explore mental illness and its treatment out there.

(When I was looking for a link to Slater, I found this article in which Slater is accused of making up quotes in a book she had published in 2004. I find this interesting, though I take it with a grain of salt.)