*MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD*
Any book that receives a massive amount of hype threatens to let readers down when the climax or twist ending doesn't deliver quite the way it's expected to. That's what happened here for me, but on a degree that didn't make my overall reading experience a flop. I have some gripes about how the female characters are portrayed in general that also contribute to some of my more negative comments about this book, but there are plenty of good things to talk about first! The integration of Alicia's journal entries, for example -- chef's kiss and one of my favorite parts of the entire story as well as the novel's form. Beginning with her voice juxtaposes so well the irony that she remains silent for nearly the entire book. It's just so good. And each part beginning with her expanding on this story that she's being watched and no one's listening to her works to make the reader wonder if they can trust Alicia or not. She is, after all, in a psych ward for killing her husband. Getting the main narrator, Theo's, perspective for the majority of the book serves the twist ending I think the author's able to pull off well. A combination of maintaining the illusion that Theo cares about Alicia for pure reasons (related to his humanity and devotion to his career of psychotherapy) and seeing Alicia act out in occasionally violent fits sustains the notion that Alicia is not mentally well and needs the interference of someone who thinks they can help in her journey of healing and eventual return to speaking. While it becomes clear this isn't entirely the case, I was still entertained long enough to get to the first false victory: Theo getting Alicia to speak. Precisely because we see Theo dealing with the realization his wife is cheating on him with some unknown man, the possibility he's mentally unstable is believable later and, more than anything, satisfying. When he starts to unravel and fantasize about what he'll do when he gets his hands on his wife's lover, he's already showing signs that he's capable of the violence and crazy he displays with Alicia -- it's just not until the end that we realize how unreliable of a narrator Theo is, that he's been telling us a story that operates on two separate timelines for the sake of revealing all the stuff he did to Alicia after the fact that she killed her husband -- something he didn't think she'd actually go through with doing. Now, I was really worried that Theo was going to get away with all of it, that the way he'd been viewing and talking about and treating the female characters in this book the whole time was going to go unaccounted for. But Alicia being sneaky with the placement of her journal to end up getting Theo incriminated was even more satisfying a twist for me then realizing Theo had been Alicia's stalker all along. Even with the obvious attraction he was feeling toward Alicia in their sessions, I was still shocked enough to gasp out loud and start piecing together all the parts of the narrative's puzzle in my head with delight. There's a lot more I could talk about regarding the side characters, but I'll mainly just comment that I think they're really well written to serve smaller order purposes in the narrative. Like Christian being a perfect suspicious therapist with motives regarding Alicia that can't be anything but good. And the head of a psych ward having extensive knowledge on a Greek myth directly tied to Alicia's circumstances and personal affiliations (later revealed in her journal). This mythological tie in was one of my favorite parts. But are we surprised? I get the sense the male author of this book wanted the clearly unreliable, egotistical narrator of his book to not treat or view women in the healthiest of manners, but at times I had to remind myself that just because the novel was written by a man doesn't mean he was ignorant to the portrayal of his female characters throughout. Whether or not this was the best execution of a purposefully problematic character, I'm a sucker for a solid unreliable narrator to analyze and maybe even despise, so I was on board with Theo, at least from an analytical perspective, from the start. The character I was the most intrigued by from start to finish was Alicia, though. Star of the show for real. Was I entirely convinced by all the stuff about how it was actually Gabriel who killed Alicia and not she who killed Gabriel? No, but I still appreciated the drama of the big moment and how it connected to other psychology tidbits sprinkled throughout. I wished I could've been able to see depictions of her art that are described so beautifully throughout. I also had fun listening to the audiobook version of this novel. The voice actors were very talented, and it felt like the kind of thriller made to fit the theatrical elements of an audiobook. I give it a solid four and a half stars.



Some of my favorite quotes from The Silent Patient:

"...we often mistake love for fireworks - for drama and dysfunction. But real love is very quiet, very still. It's boring, if seen from the perspective of high drama. Love is deep and calm - and constant."

"We are drawn to this profession because we are damaged - we study psychology to heal ourselves. Whether we are prepared to admit this or not is another question.” (can you say 'foreshadowing'?)

"Trust, once lost, is hard to recover."

"Well, I’d rather be lonely than be with the wrong person." (BARS)

"Perhaps some of us are simply born evil, and despite our best efforts we remain that way."

Nonfiction essay collections on music always pique my interest. This vast, sweeping collection is about more than just music, though -- it's about lifting up marginalized Black voices and the impact of profound music for the sake of recognizing facets of the American experience as a person of color. I really appreciated how this book was structured with music and culture constantly at the forefront. From each of the five essay sections being "Movements," to every essay having some sort of reference to music, popular culture, historical performers and musicians, and specific songs (the Whitney Houston and Aretha Franklin content were my faves), there's just so much here. I also loved the author's stylistic choice to use ampersands in every "On Times..." essay that begin each Movement. The two essays where we see the expected rule broken, where other prepositions and punctuation are used, really draws attention to the content. In general, I felt like I wanted to underline every other line in this book because Abdurraqib makes writing extremely profound sentiments in simple, heartwrenching prose look like a piece of cake. I can only imagine the amount of revision it took to get to these polished final versions, how sprawling the sentences may have started out just for the sake of getting a complete thought down on the page, but wow, I was continuously blown away. I also just adore how much I learned from every essay on topics I didn't even realize I was interested in. Like marathon dancing and dance competitions, for example. What a niche, random concept, with a rich, multilayered history. Abdurraqib always finds a way to connect every topic back to ideas of humanity, community, and the struggle of marginalized people groups, specifically African Americans. The personal connections he makes to his family and friends also shine in their vulnerability and dedication to detail. Once again, I was grateful and interested to learn as much as I did from the well-integrated research that each of these essays frames within a narrative that often feels like fiction, like the author just did some cool Googling and wants to share what they found with you in a way that's so far from condescending. My two favorite essays were "On Marathons and Tunnels" and "The Josephine Baker Monument Can Never Be Large Enough." I definitely recommend this book to any readers trying to read more nonfiction or break into the nonfiction genre. 



Some of my favorite quotes from Notes in Praise of Black Performance: A Little Devil in America:

"I’ve run out of language to explain the avalanche of anguish I feel when faced with this world, and so if I can’t make sense of this planet, I’m better off imagining another."

"And I realized then that this was yet another funeral. I was reminded, once again, that our grief decides when it is done with us."

"I am in love with the idea of partnering as a means of survival, or a brief thrill, or a chance to conquer a moment. Even if you and the person you are partnered with part ways walking into the sunlight after exiting a sweaty dance hall, or spinning off-camera after dancing your way down a line of your clapping peers."

"There is not enough distance between tragedies for my sadness to mature into anything else but another new monument obscuring the last new monument."

Learning as much as I did about aspects of the Vietnam War I wasn't aware of or hadn't thought to examine before was one of the most valuable parts of this reading experience. Reading it with the support of a classroom environment to talk through some of the viscerally violent scenes and more political context of the text was also extremely helpful, as I think I would've felt lost in all of the historical and cultural impacts otherwise. Generally, the intrigue of our unnamed narrator, a man who's able to empathize on a level that makes his profession as a double agent more complex, kept my interest the entire way through. This was mainly due to the fact that I couldn't always tell if I sympathized with the sympathizer, if I felt pity for the series of events he lives through or general disgust for the way he views and interacts with women (this quality in the narrator is still an uncomfortable one for me). On the other hand, the narrator's relationship with his childhood friends Bon and Man ends up being significant in the narrator's ability to understand how, despite all three of them believing in different political ideologies, America's influence on the war in Vietnam has caused all of them terrible suffering. I was also really interested in this narrator's consistent guilt over the various things he's done as a part of his spy work. We get the occasional glimpse into white interrogation rooms before an extremely violent scene involving a female communist agent at the end reveals just how much trauma this man is holding inside of himself. Witnessing the narrator kill two people and then be essentially haunted by these two people is also a curious craft move to show inner turmoil and guilt. I ended up diving into a conversation with a classmate for the sake of research on the concept of names and namelessness. She framed it like this: "Who's doing the naming and what are their names?" A fascinating question to ask of a book where most of the men are only given names that signify their careers or rank in the military (Commandant, Captain, "crapulent major," etc.), and the two prominent women are given actual names and referenced as such (Ms. Mori/Sophia and Lana). What this is meant to either say or not say about how the narrator views other characters in light of their national identity as Vietnamese-Americans is only complicated by our narrator who never receives a name, but by the end of the book has begun to see himself dually as "a man with two faces." I haven't even mentioned the movie the narrator ends up taking a part in, chiefly in working with and advocating for the Vietnamese refugees acting as extras on the set, tasked with representing their entire people group on the silver screen dictated by an American director. But I could go on and on, and won't for the sake of my own time and sanity. Be wary of the aforementioned violent scenes in multiple parts of this book, but step into it as a whole with an open mind and willingness to engage with a narrator that feels hard to fully grasp in the best possible way.


One of my favorite quotes from The Sympathizer:

"What was it like to live in a time when one's fate was not war, when one was not led by the craven and the corrupt, when one's country was not a basket case kept alive only through the intravenous drip of American aid?"

I'll be pretty frank in saying that I didn't really enjoy this essay collection as a whole, though I can most definitely recognize how big of a deal its publication and positive reception were for the world of nonfiction writing. Jamison's intersection of impressive research, self-reflection, and meaningful questions related to the illusive concept of empathy and how we can understand and act it out is interesting as a premise. In execution, though, I got lost along the way. I can't overgeneralize the whole collection with comments about specific essays, but enough of the pieces felt like they were trying to do too many things at once for me to latch onto one solid idea of aboutness and run with that. It really is impressive to see all the different moving parts at work here, within each essay as its own little city as well as the collection as a whole, but it's just a lot. And sometimes I wanted the point Jamison was trying to make concerning empathy to be a bit clearer. This is just my personal preference when I read creative nonfiction essays, and I'm very aware of that. But some of the essay's tones felt overinflated and rose on hot air to the rafters until the general vibe turned pompous and overly academic. I started to get annoyed with how many times I had to reread sentences... But her willingness to experiment with form throughout the entire collection is admirable. The first essay, also titled "The Empathy Exams," is by far my favorite and, seeing as it was the first one I read, I expected the rest of the collection to wow me in equal measure. I can't blame the text for not meeting expectations I set and upheld, but it just continued to sour my overall reading experience. I think I might need to return to the collection for a second read and read everything slower, to give it another chance and digest all of the content crammed into its pages. But for now I'm content to end my review here.


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Some of my favorite quotes from The Empathy Exams:

"Empathy isn't just remembering to say that must be really hard---it's figuring out how to bring difficulty into the light so it can be seen at all."

"At what volume does feeling become sentimental? How obliquely does feeling need to be rendered so it can be saved from itself?"

"We're disgusted when anything comes too easily. But also greedy."

"This is how writers fall in love: they feel complicated together and then they talk about it."

"Empathy is contagion."

"How do we represent female pain without producing a culture in which this pain has been fetishized to the point of fantasy or imperative? Fetishize: to be excessively or irrationally devoted to."

"The wounded woman gets called a stereotype and sometimes she is. But sometimes she's just true. I think the possibility of fetishizing pain is no reason to stop representing it."

The few choice words I'd use to describe this book are melancholy, introspective, wistful, and paranoid. I realize all these words mainly reflect how I view the narrator, Reverend John Ames, who is essentially writing one long letter to his young son. Ames is slowly dying, and already an older man who's lived a long life. The realization you won't be around to watch your seven-year-old son grow old, or witness most of his formative memories, experiences, and develop into his own person, seems like enough to make one think about what kind of legacy they want to leave and how they might take a bit of ownership over how their child may view them. I grew really curious when the very clear epistolary-centered tone at the book's start seemed to evolve into more of a steady stream of consciousness for Ames concerning another character: his best friend's Boughton's son, John Ames' namesake. There's imagery and symbolism left and right suggesting Ames sees John, or Jack Boughton, as a sort of mirror turned back on himself. I took that mirror to be revealing places where Ames fears he wasn't a good enough father or husband in the "caretaking" category. Deeply religious, I think he also sees how Jack has strayed from the church and more traditional behavior glaringly. It's hard to watch your best friend's son make decisions that hurt himself and the people around him; you grow defensive of your best friend. You also generally grow defensive of such an individual being around your wife and impressionable child. With that being said, the careful, almost obsessive attention Ames gives to Jack later in the narrative made me really question if Jack was as untrustworthy as he seemed, or just being painted in a suspicious light by a suspicious narrator. The information revealed about Jack's past and present struggles didn't end up aligning with what I thought might happen, and the surprise really caught my attention in some slower portions of the second half. Truth be told, Jack's story is a sad one, and the way Ames does his best to show empathy and compassion made me a little emotional. The first half is by far my favorite for the many times it attempts to capture quiet joy. Every instance Ames records of observing his son's behavior, from playing with a neighborhood friend to blowing bubbles with his mother in the front yard -- every one of them was heartfelt and pulled on my heartstrings. This careful attention and crafted nostalgia the narrator has for his life while he's still living it feel like the heart of this book. The other heart definitely revolves around the time Ames spends writing about their family history, mainly his relationship and perception of his father and grandfather. A lot of context to the Civil War and the violent South during Ames' grandfather's times, Kansas specifically, influences the storytelling. I consciously tried to make connections between the history Ames referenced and how it related to his hotheaded grandfather and polar opposite pacifist father. Both mens' occupations as preachers (Ames' occupation as well) color the issues they disagreed over even more. The first half's emphasis on the narrator's father and grandfather as people he believes his son should know as told by Ames fascinates me; this theme of preserving and understanding family history became a clear theme from the get go. One thing I had some trouble grasping within the novel was time periods, which is definitely due to there being so many flashbacks and memories cited by Ames as well as current scenes he writes about concerning his son, Boughton, and Jack Boughton. I also liked how Ames described his first wife and the genuine love he had for her before slowly giving readers more information concerning his current wife, Lila, and how their marriage is a quiet one full of love and general stability. I really keep coming back to the words melancholy and wistful, since the narrator's oncoming death hangs over the whole story whether or not the reader is always aware of it. I know I got caught up enough in the story's nuances to forget and then go, "oh yeah, this is a letter with a very pointed, bittersweet purpose." It's an epistolary novel of likes I haven't come across before.


Some of my favorite quotes from Gilead:

"You can love a bad book for its haplessness or pomposity or gall, if you have that starveling appetite for things human, which I devoutly hope you never will have."

"...I hope you are an excellent man, and I will love you absolutely if you are not)."

"You didn't wait till this morning to realize that I am old... How I wish you could have known me in my strength."

"He would say, Peace will come only when that war ends, so the God of peace calls upon us to end it. He said all this with that gun in his belt. And everyone there always shouted amen, even the littlest children."

"I can't believe we will forget our sorrows altogether. That would mean forgetting that we had lived, humanly speaking."

"'Rejoice with those who rejoice.' I have found that difficult too often. I was much better at weeping with those who weep. I don't mean that as a joke, but it is kind of funny, when I think about it."

"You see how it is godlike to love the being of someone. Your existence is a delight to us."

"I knew perfectly well at that time, as I had for years and years, that the Lord absolutely transcends any understanding I have of Him, which makes loyalty to him a different thing from loyalty to whatever customs and doctrines and memories I happen to associate with Him."

"There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient."

I ended up relating to this memoir's general commentary on mental health stigmas and the church. While this author specifically deals with and writes about her experience as a Christian living with bipolar disorder, and I've identified as a Christian who lives with OCD, I appreciated many of Gazmarian's connections to her lived situation, biblical stories, and, you guessed it, doubt. There are several instances in which she cites the Gospels, Old Testament, and New Testament texts to specifically align them with some sort of anecdote in her own life. The narrator is someone who grew up in the Evangelical tradition, and recounts many a time where their diagnosed disorder caused them to seriously question their view of faith. I read this book for a Nonfiction class, and will be meeting the author at a visiting writer event this fall, so getting to discuss various craft moves and opinions with my classmates has shaped my overall perspective on what this memoir attempts to accomplish. I disappointedly must say that every time the author seemed about to crack open a really profound and vulnerable anecdote relating to her struggle with faith and mental health identity, she'd back off and move onto another topic entirely. It turned into a pretty predictable pattern, which made the memoir a relatively easy read, but I wanted to get into the nitty gritty, kind of ugly stuff that the author seemed to want to tiptoe around. I completely understand and respect that when a writer sets out to write a memoir, they have every right to tell their story in the precise way they see fit. I know editors and publishers end up having a pretty big say in concluding matters as well, and this book was picked up by the renowned Simon & Schuster. So even though there are more complex, behind-the-scenes decisions to consider, I wanted to dive deeper into Gazmarian's overall opinion on how the church approaches Christians' mental health struggles. She seems to sort of exist in a vacuum, self-contained to her own world and, eventually, the world of her husband David and the marriage they create for themselves. I did really appreciate how every medication the author was on was listed and explained, that understanding how they affected the author's ability to function or make decisions was paramount to the narrative. As a result, though, some of that vacuum-effect seems to be heightened. But, there isn't a lot of drama to how she tells her story, which I highly appreciate, seeing how such drama could accentuate a story that doesn't need all sorts of glitz and glam to have profound impact. In general, a book like this is delicate since the author still has to interact with the characters she writes about, like her parents, friends, husband, and church congregations. The funny thing about nonfiction is how relationships like these end up affecting how the story gets told. I'm looking forward to meeting and picking Gazmarian's brain for details she may have included in a first draft but had to sacrifice for the sake of edits.

This had a slow start, a faster-paced middle, and a slower end. I unfortunately must say I was bored for most of it. Then again, this is the first literary fiction novel I've read in a while, and they don't move as quickly as most of the fantasy books I'm used to. I can, however, appreciate a book or movie where nothing really happens. But only if in the act of nothing happening, there's some internal character development or growth going on. In which case, something is happening, on a subtle, satisfying level for the reader or viewer. Some readers may have been able to find growth in the main character of this novel, some semblance of a character arc or a sense that she learned from her oftentimes harmful and destructive decisions. But I just didn't. There are certainly moments where it seems like, in her quest to sleep for long enough to wake up a new, rejuvenated person (with the help of heavy doses of assorted medication), the narrator realizes not everything's going completely according to plan. For example, her sporadic realizations that she's moved around and purchased things while asleep or in between states of sleep and consciousness. No one wants to realize they maxed out their credit card while sleep walking. But we see her continue to self-medicate, trying even harder to stock up on enough to really knock out. The most movement seemed to come in the middle of the book when she physically visits Reva's, her one friend's, hometown for her mother's funeral. There was loads of symbolism and irony, but I was just sad. The narrator resists very clear trauma she has from her own parents' deaths and less than healthy parent-child dynamics. It got frustrating for me to see a character capable of a lot of growth and self-awareness be (what I interpreted) willfully blind to the fact that she has undiagnosed trauma from her childhood. She ends up selling the house left to her in the wake of her parents' deaths, and if that was meant to be a symbol of her finally letting them go, it didn't feel satisfying enough. She didn't really solve any of her deeper-rooted problems in the process. Sleep, though fantastic, just can't fix everything about current unhappiness or lack of fulfillment, and readers know this to be some sort of fact when they pick up the book. But the execution of the concept fell short for me, and I don't have much more to say on it other than that. So I'll leave it at that.



One of my favorite quotes from My Year of Rest and Relaxation:

"I thought life would be more tolerable if my brain were slower to condemn the world around me."

Oooo, I loved this so much more than I expected! I had low expectations based on reviews from friends and the high bar Book Lovers has set. But if the premise of this rom-com isn't enough to draw you in, all of the nuanced flaws and desires of the host of characters should at least get you past the first chapter. Right off the bat, we realize Daphne Vincent has seemed to hit rock bottom -- her perfect fiancé has left her for his perfect best friend he said "nothing would ever happen with" on the night of his bachelor party. Which means Miles Nowak is in a pretty similarly low situation -- his fiancé, said perfect best friend, has also inevitably left him. Needing somewhere to stay other than the house she bought with her now-ex, Daphne ends up moving into Miles' place, conveniently taking the second bedroom. Now they're roommates, and you can pretty much guess from here how the story plays out. It's a fun trope -- heartbroken roommates turned passionate lovers. And, really, it starts out as "fake dating to spite our exes." But I thought the depth of the leads' relationship went beyond cheesy tropes and bits. I thought Daphne was a phenomenal example of a woman used to people walking out on her, afraid to fully let people in or get too close to those who might eventually drift off to things bigger and better. She has a sad backstory and struggles with letting not just Miles, but her quirky librarian co-worker friend Ashleigh, in for the entire book. And who can blame her, with the evidence we see of her dad being as flaky as she remembers him being as a kid? Miles is also such a well-rounded character, affably "nice," as Daphne would put it, and charming in all the right, quiet ways. But, as revealed through his boisterous younger sister Julia's ruminations, Miles did everything he could when he was still a boy to keep the people he loved from being disappointed, even at the expense of his own happiness and energy. Seeing how both Daphne and Miles learn to navigate communication with one another, when it seems like they'd resort to witty banter and quick comebacks all the time if they could, was refreshing and really brought their romance to life for me. I also adored Daphne's personality as it pertained to books and her career as a librarian. Glimpses of her work at the library, of making true friends with the staff as the haze of heartbreak began to burn off, and how much she loved the work she got to do with kids, made me smile at the pages. I'm a sucker for a bookworm main character unashamed to embrace the nerdiness that comes with such a title.
I'm impressed with all the little moving parts in this book too, mainly how all the smaller side characters end up being important or relevant in some way. I knew as soon as Daphne noticed that little green cottage that it wasn't just some potential fixer upper, that it would be a symbol if nothing else. I also like how the entire story moves toward the Read-a-Thon event at Daphne's library. The subtle shift in chapter titles from Daphne counting down the days until she can leave town and start over somewhere else, to forgetting to count at all, to realizing she could leave but actually wants to stay for a new life she's building for herself was duly noted. In the end, Daphne chooses Miles and herself, prioritizing herself in a way that she didn't realize she hadn't in past relationships. I really admired that about the conclusion. I also thought the traditional third-act breakup felt unique in this book's case. Everything's going right, which naturally makes you wonder when thing's will go wrong. When they do, it takes a while for the whole picture to develop like a well-shot Polaroid. First, Miles doesn't show up and leaves Daphne reeling from what she surmises is yet another "I was left before I could leave" situation. Then Peter shows up asking for Daphne to take him back, that he and Petra the Perfect Best Friend are done and never would've worked. Daphne turns him down (hell yeah), seeing as she's not the person she was when he shattered her old life, and we presume Miles has been with Petra, maybe even got back together officially with her. A dramatic verbal sparring match occurs (it's raining, cause of course it's raining), and we don't find out until way later that Miles was with Petra, but only after confronting Daphne's dad who most definitely deserved the talking to he got from both Miles (and Daphne over the phone). Rambling aside, the pacing and purposeful evasion of certain details was really satisfying for me as a reader. Daphne's learning how to be a better friend to Ashleigh in the process of embracing Miles loves her, possible heartbreak and all, also struck a chord with me. I resonated most with the recurring theme of trust meaning the possibility of pain. My life experience is that of being just an I, in opposition to Daphne being part of a we, as Ashleigh puts it. I liked reading about a girl whose default is a relationship, as my default is the exact opposite. I'm trying to absorb some of this theme's truth into my own understanding of how beautiful it can be to trust people in a romantic way, to be alright with the possibility of great love as well as great pain. It's still an entirely foreign concept to me, but isn't that exactly why we read? To transport ourselves to other realities and empathize with people and situations that seem entirely different from our own on the surface? There's a universality to the heart of this book I think a wide range of audiences could get behind, while simultaneously enjoying the silliness of a roommate love story. I'll finish with an appropriate comment about parallelism: the book starts and ends with Daphne reminiscing on the telling of stories, mainly love stories, and specifically her own. First, it's Peter, and it's his story to tell. Then, it's Miles, and it's hers and his story to tell. But he knows how much she enjoys telling her version, and that it's inevitably a funny one. :)


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Some of my favorite quotes from Funny Story:

"'It's from a book,' I say. 'Never mind.'
'Ah,' he says. 'Not a big reader.'
'I know that's a possibility,' I say, 'and yet I truly cannot fathom it.'
'What do you like about it,' he says.
'Everything,' I say.
His mouth curls. 'Fascinating.'"

"I’m a cynic. And a cynic is a romantic who’s too scared to hope."

"It’s a library, Daphne. If you can’t be a human here, where can you?"

"But no one person can be everything we need."

"You're the reason for the word wonderful. It really shouldn't be used for anything else."

My nonfiction writing friends referenced Anne Lamott enough times over this past year for me to grow curious. Seeing as I primarily live in the world of fiction, hers was not a name I was familiar with. I agree with this book of hers being instructions on life as well as writing. For one thing, they're inevitably entwined. And the anecdotes Lamott weaves to illustrate what she's learned about the mysteries of writing through her long, illustrious career come straight from her experiences with her son Sam, her late friend Pammy, and her various students. She places these stories in parts and chapters that cover most of what I can think a book like this should contain: writer's block, publication, spirituality, self-doubt, characterization, plot and its movements, etc. It felt like everything I was hoping to read about in a truthful manner was covered, which I'm very grateful for. My pink pen underlines are all over the place, marking up particular spots I know I'll want to reference later. Especially the sentiment to take the mountainous task of storytelling one step at a time, or one bird at a time. I mainly read this book with a watchful eye for sections or certain tidbits of advice that might be helpful for the college freshmen I'll be teaching this fall. We'll be sharing a semester of introductory level writing together, and while I know I certainly have an arsenal of knowledge and stories to share from my own life, I'm nowhere near too proud to look outside of myself for illuminating texts and advice on this thing called writing. I found, though, that the layout of this book's instructions are more suited for students of creative writing, those individuals who've purposefully signed up for a class or course because they know they want to seriously write and live under the banner of "writer." So it was entirely helpful for me, but I sense may be a bit beyond what the room full of seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds I'll soon be in charge of are looking for.
I had the pleasure of hearing Anne Lamott speak at an interview hosted by my university (yet another reason to adore our annual Writer's Symposium by the Sea events). I briefly met her when I handed her my copy of Bird by Bird to sign. She asked me a question I can't entirely remember now. I do remember my answer was to tell her I was one of the university's master's in writing students. Her response was, "Good for you" as she drew a heart next to her signature scrawled in thick Sharpie. I have to agree. Very good for me. 

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Some of my favorite quotes from Bird by Bird:

"One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around."

"Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up."

"Because for some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you."

"In general, though, there's no point in writing hopeless novels. We all know we're going to die; what's important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this."

"Plot grows out of character. If you focus on who the people in your story are, if you sit and write about two people you know and are getting to know better day by day, something is bound to happen."

"Over and over I feel as if my characters know who they are, and what happens to them, and where they have been and where they will go, and what they are capable of doing, but they need me to write it down for them because their handwriting is so bad."

"I honestly think in order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here?"

"Sometimes intuition needs coaxing, because intuition is a little shy. But if you try not to crowd it, intuition often wafts up from the soul or subconscious, and then becomes a tiny fitful little flame. It will be blown out by too much compulsion and manic attention, but will burn quietly when watched with gentle concentration."

"Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly."

"One of the things that happens when you give yourself permission to start writing is that you start thinking like a writer."

"I don't think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won't be good enough at it, and I don't think you have time to waste on someone who does not respond to you with kindness and respect."

"All the good stories are out there waiting to be told in a fresh, wild way."

"Don't be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done."

"This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be."

"You notice how a writer paints in a mesmerizing character or era for you, without your having the sense of being given a whole lot of information, and when you realize how artfully this has happened, you may actually put the book down for a moment and savor it, just taste it."

"When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored." 

This book didn't end up being quite what I expected, but I was particularly hooked toward the end when the main climax and series of events began to unfold. I didn't expect it to involve Neil and Alice, two hopelessly awkward mortal lovebirds, as much as it did, but the way their mild lives intertwine with the rote routines the Greek gods have developed ended up being the main part of the plot. I liked the opportunities the author took to accentuate tropey parts of the gods' and goddesses' characteristics, like Aphrodite working as a casual phone sex operator, to Apollo being a TV clairvoyant. Clever stuff like that made some of the slower parts of the book worthwhile for me. Because I didn't really know where the plot was going for a while, to be honest. And I still don't quite know if Aphrodite had a motive for the pot-stirring she does at the beginning of the novel, or if she was just bored. If she was in fact just bored, this seems to make the most sense for the general theme of the novel I picked up: immortals have little knowledge of what it means to own up to the consequences of actions, but that doesn't mean major consequences don't exist. Aside from the amusing cover, I purchased this book with the intent to read it for thesis research. It proved to be a great example of what authors can do with the reputations of Greek gods and goddesses, the archetypes they represent, and the clever ways they can be inserted as characters in a modern setting, all crammed into a crumbling, dirty house in London to be specific for this book’s case. For me, it’s an example of what I’m not explicitly doing in my own novel, seeing as my book takes place in a fantasy world with mythological inspirations, but original characters. It becomes clearer as this novel progresses that these deities find their power in acknowledgment from mortals, and that as time moves forward, they aren’t recognized or “worshipped” in the sense that they were once used to and even took for granted. I found this really interesting as I read, to see which deities lost power or had to adapt in strange ways (Hera, Zeus, Artemis), and which seemed to adapt to "regular life" the easiest (Apollo, Aphrodite, Hermes). The concept of gods' power being dependent on mortals' belief (or lack of belief) was something I played around with for a bit in my own work, and while I've strayed further away from it now, this novel makes the concept a large part of its plot and the vices of its characters (Poor Athena, she knew all along but just couldn't communicate it in layman's terms).Aphrodite’s scheme to get Apollo to fall in love with Alice (with the perfect aim of Eros’ arrows) seems to be one of the biggest reflectors of the book’s title. Again with the main theme: with no boundaries or limits for consequences, immortal beings will do what they like and hurt mortals who very much have to deal with the consequences of potentially fatal actions. There’s Aphrodite, who messes with Apollo for reasons that seem to be either hidden for most of the book or, ironically, there is no reason other than entertainment. There’s Apollo himself, so far removed from the concept of consent that he has to ask Alice if rape would constitute as hurting her. And Zeus, bedridden and largely forgotten, striking Alice from her body with one of his lightning bolts because of a petty slight. It’s all “bad behavior,” to put it mildly, but putting it mildly completely fits the tone of the book, which I would describe as humorous in a dry, satirical kind of way. I really liked the simplistic dialogue tags, something I'll admit I'm not great at doing in my own writing. The often short and sweet quips and comebacks only add to the book's aloof aura. The imagining of Hades' and Persephone's Underworld felt creative in a classically unique way, too. Obvious thought was put into what life after life can look like, and having a Tube station function as the essential Gateway to Hell made me chuckle. While this wasn't a rapid page-turner for me, I still appreciated the vision and execution of said vision!



Some of my favorite quotes from Gods Behaving Badly:

"One thing about mortals that had never changed was that they all believed themselves to be immortal. He quite liked that about them. It was so arrogant, so optimistic. Like himself on a better day."

"Like parched earth in the rain, she drank in the wonderful contours of his face, the lively expression of his eyes---lively! Was anything lively in the underworld?---the tightening and slackening of his skin as he spoke, every hair, every pore, everything she had tried to conjure up for herself, and tried not to conjure up for herself, throughout that long lonely time without him. And she could see Neil staring at her, and she wondered if her own face was reflecting back that same dazed, amazed look."

"'It's so nice to hear you speak,' said Neil."

"The crowd was chanting, 'Who the fuck is Neil? Who the fuck is Neil?'
...
'Hello,' he said. 'I the fuck am Neil.'"