Book Review: Bossypants

Tina Fey’s Bossypants is very funny.

It’s so funny that I tried to read one particular passage out loud to my husband, and I couldn’t even finish it: I was laughing too hard. I may be wrong, but I don’t think he found this situation anywhere near as amusing as I did. And I don’t think he found the passage as funny either, once I finally did managed to sputter through it. It’s not because it wasn’t funny, but it wasn’t funny out of context. Which is, to be honest, the main challenge in reviewing this kind of book. I’m worried that I won’t be able to do it justice.

While she’s probably best known to Americans as “the woman who played Sarah Palin,” Fey really focuses more on her comedy writing than her acting. Writing for Saturday Night Live and producing 30 Rock seem to be her proudest achievements, which leads to one of the main strengths of the book. As a writer, her greatest talent lies in crystallizing the humor in everyday situations and events. In one particularly hilarious passage, she talks about the absurdity of getting a manicure:

The first few times you go, it can be intimidating. For starters, you may forget that you yourself speak English. You enter, smile, and nod at the manager. “Manicure-pedicure?” “Pick color,” she chirps back in her Korean accent. You pick out a couple of the three hundred shades of off-white. “This for manicure. This feet. Magazine okay?”Why are you talking like that? Now that you have racially embarrassed yourself, you are ready to squeeze into a seat at a tiny table and basically hold hands with a stranger for twenty minutes. (page 112)

I only had one real problem with the book (aside from the cover, that is, which I think is absolutely freakish). Fey’s humor is largely self-deprecating, and I get that. The problem is that she goes out of her way, over and over again, to point out what a really, really, really normal person she is. But come on, is her book on The New York Times Bestseller List because she’s just an average Jane? Of course not. Lots of people are funny. Lots of people were theater geeks as kids. But only a handful of people have Lorne Michaels’ cell phone number of speed dial. And he only picks up for a small portion of them. Lorne Michaels picks up for Tina Fey. That makes her a BIG deal. The “I’m-just-a-regular-girl-from-Philly” thing grated on me after a while.

I was glad that Fey dealt head-on with some of the sexism issues that go along with working in the entertainment business, although I thought she stopped short of calling a few people out, especially when she was discussing her tenure at Second City. Still, this is a very funny, very gutsy book. If Tina Fey makes you laugh, you really ought to read it. But those who love modern memoirs and those who enjoy popular culture will also find a lot to enjoy here.

Here’s another title for Introverted Jen’s Dewey Decimal Challenge. So thanks again for hosting the only challenge I have completed so far this year, Jen!

Book Review: Mennonite in a Little Black Dress

When I wrote up my goals for the year, I said I’d like to do more short reviews. This is one of those.

I picked up Rhoda Janzen’s Mennonite in a Little Black Dress in an airport bookshop where the pickings were pretty thin (unless you happened to be a Danielle Steele or Stephen King fan, which I’m definitely not). The premise was certainly interesting: a worldly college professor, recently dumped by her newly out-of-the-closet husband, goes back to her Mennonite family to convalesce after surgery.

I generally like memoirs, and Janzen’s is both raw and real. It was good – it just wasn’t great. Maybe that’s because the cover design and copy made me think this would be hilarious, and it really wasn’t. There were some funny parts, but the overriding emotion of the memoir was bitterness, not mirth. Maybe she wrote it too soon after her divorce. I could really feel the sting of it, but I found it oddly deflating.

Still, the book demystifies Mennonites, appreciated because I live in an area with a significant Mennonite population, and didn’t really know very much about their traditions and history. I would recommend it to anyone interested in knowing more about the group. It would probably also be appropriate for someone going through a divorce, as it does have a positive message about resilience, and learning to appreciate what you have. Not at all a bad book, it just didn’t fit my life or mood at the moment – thank goodness.

Driving Over Lemons, and making lemonade

There’s something intriguing about the guy who might have been the drummer for Genesis shearing sheep and running a farm in Andalucía. Of course if he had stuck with the original job, and not vacated his seat for a guy named Phil Collins, who knows if Genesis would have become Genesis? But I’d think that it would make a person wonder what might have been every once in a while.

Well, not Chris Stewart. Years after leaving the band, Stewart went to Spain, fell in love with the rugged mountains of the Sierra Nevada, and suddenly bought a farm without running water or electricity. And it appears he never looked back.

Driving over Lemons recounts Stewart's early years of raising sheep and oranges at El Valero, a decaying farm on the “wrong” side of a river that separates the farm from civilization at some times during the year. There are the funny bits and quirky characters readers have come to expect from these kinds of cross-cultural memoirs. But like any book with a “different” culture at its heart, this book is ultimately about the author’s own culture, examining which parts of it the author can shed, which parts of it he or she can adapt, and which parts of it are so close to the author’s soul that they can never be left behind. In the case of Chris Stewart that would be: tea.

Seriously, the one thing that this book lacks, compared with the others in its genre, is a coming to grips with the inner turmoil of living outside your culture. For most people it is confusing at first, and sometimes even threatening. But Stewart’s view is decidedly rosy. The author describes himself as an “optimist,” and I definitely would not describe myself as one, so maybe I just don’t understand his perspective. But the book seemed a bit “light” to me, as though Stewart didn’t want to offend anyone. The way he was pushed around by El Valero’s former owner almost made me put the book down – maybe he’s optimistic, maybe he’s just naïve, or maybe he’s naively optimistic. In the end I couldn’t decide.

Having spent some time in Spain, I did appreciate Stewart’s descriptions of the countryside, and his collection of the common wisdom of the local farmers has some funny moments. This is not the kind of book that made me laugh out loud, but it did give me some insight into the joys of veering out of life’s fast lane. I just never identified with Stewart enough to really share in his ups, because I didn’t see any of the downs. Still, the book is highly recommended for someone planning a trip – or a life – in Andalucía, and anyone who loves travel-based memoirs.

Stealing Buddha’s Dinner: Food as Culture

Bich Minh Nguyen’s Stealing Buddha’s Dinner is a memoir of one Vietnamese refugee’s path to self discovery, oriented around food. Nguyen hardly remembers the time before she lived in America – her father escaped the fall of Saigon with her older sister, her grandmother and two uncles when she was just two. Her life in Grand Rapids, Michigan, continues to be dominated by her outsider status long after she has lost the ability to speak fluent Vietnamese, however. The idea behind the memoir is to reflect on the author’s evolving conceptions of family, cohesion and identity through the one element of culture most accessible to outsiders: food.

A lot of the book focuses on what Nguyen is not: mostly, she is not white. And in her youthful view, white would be better. Conveniently (perhaps too conveniently), her frustration at not being American enough is in direct juxtaposition to the feelings of her 1st generation La Raza stepmother, who eschews everything “white.”

But Rosa didn’t want to be like the Vander Wals next door. She called the Midwestern dinners bland, sticking out her tongue for emphasis.” (p. 52)

As a communications scholar, I was particularly interested in the way media constructed Nguyen’s world. She does share some remembrances of media, but they do more to catalog the television commercials of the late 70s than to illuminate Nguyen’s feelings toward them, for the most part. There are some gems of self-reflection scattered through the text, however:

To me, life in commercials was real. Commercials were instructions; they were news. They showed me what perfection could be: in the right woman’s hands, the layers of a cake would be exactly the same size. In the right woman’s kitchen, a cartoon rabbit would visit the children and show them how to slurp down a tall glass of Nestle Quik with a straw. A shaken cruet would spill a stream of Good Seasons over hills of lettuce leaves. Commercials had a firm definition of motherhood, which almost all of my friends’ mothers had no trouble fulfilling.” (p.125)

That’s the kind of perspective-driven self-reflection I would have liked to have read more about. Instead, I found the food metaphor grew thin, and finally stretched toward incredulity. In trying to present her young self, Nguyen tried to divorce herself from the present, and her current realization of self in a multi-cultural America. But without knowing where she wound up, the memoir had less resonance.

Bottom line: because of my love of both food and culture, I wanted to love this book, but I only liked it. This is a good book. Nguyen is a talented writer. I would recommend it to anyone looking for a personal memoir of contemporary America. I just wish the author had dug a bit deeper, and offered more adult perspective – what does she think of living in the United States now? One hopes her conceptualization of being “white” has evolved as much as her conceptualization of being “American” or “Vietnamese-American,” but Nguyen never deals with anything but the caricatures. Her thesis remains undeveloped. The fact is we can only imagine the children we were. Who we are now seems so much more important.

The Motion of the Ocean will make you root for monogamy

I loved Janna Cawrse Esarey’s The Motion of the Ocean: 1 Small Boat, 2 Average Lovers, and a Woman's Search for the Meaning of Wife. It was funny. It was personal. It moved fast, most of the time. And most importantly, it was self-reflective, but not necessarily self-absorbed, which is a pretty tough posture to assume convincingly.

The story is simple: boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy leaves girl, boy meets girl again, girl dumps girl, boy meets girl, boy moves in with girl, boy marries girl (FINALLY), boy and girl sail 17,000 miles from Seattle to Hong Kong to see if their marriage will actually work. You know, that old chestnut. Janna is the “girl,” and she tells the story of her romance with passion, joy and energy. She doesn’t shy away from the nasty bits, whether discussing herself or her “boy,” Chinese-speaking, and all-around bronze bod goddy, Graeme.

Without giving away the answer to the central question of the novel, namely, can two people overcome their shared and difficult history to create one life out of the two that their break-ups have created, I can say that the book is in turns very romantic, very comic, and very disturbing. Although the backdrops are stunning – Mexico, Micronesia, and Hong Kong among them – they are not a “character” in the same way the locales are in other travel-oriented memoirs, such as Eat, Pray, Love. Rather, they play second-fiddle to the love story, providing little more than location for a story of relationships. I actually appreciated that, because the author isn’t trying to make her story some kind of allegory – the places are incidental because the story truly is paramount here.

To be honest, the author’s personality is so very close to my own (perfectionist, justice-oriented, emotional, petulant), and her husband’s so very close to my husband’s (entrepreneurial, calm, egalitarian, aloof) that even though we have 10 years both in age and marriage on the couple, I couldn’t help but root for them. I would absolutely recommend this memoir to people who love travel, who appreciate the beauty of a long-term relationship, and who have ever wondered whether love is a force of destiny or a work in progress.

So that’s my body of water title. Loved it! Two-thirds of the way through the What’s in a Name 3 Challenge. Next up is my title title, The Madman and the Professor. I’ll also be using this for the Summer Season Challenge on Goodreads.

Goat Song: An unlikely and compelling walk through the Vermont hills with goats

Brad Kessler’s Goat Song: A Seasonal Life, A Short History of Herding, and the Art of Making Cheese was just what I was hoping for when I picked it up. It was an interesting story about intelligent (and very likeable) people who chose to change their lives. There is no critical moment that forces Brad and his wife Dona’s move from New York to rural Vermont: the longing was there, and when the opportunity came, they simply took it.

The story of their first year with their goats is absolutely engrossing. Since they are so central to the book, the individual personalities of their first two milking goats, Hannah and Lizzie, are documented in extraordinary detail. In fact, the only real “antagonist” in this story becomes an uncooperative goat, which in turn becomes the vehicle through which we see the author’s maturation as a pastoralist.

The author’s musings on the significance of herding to the development of human society were very interesting, but little of the history was new to me. I enjoyed the author’s adventures in cheese making, and wished I could taste one of his artisanal tommes, to taste the flowers and grasses of the previous summer in a wedge of cheese. The author’s asides into the Christology of cheese making, and the relationship between cheese and monasticism, however, were a bit more far-fetched – and that’s coming from someone who studied medieval history as an undergraduate. I squirmed a bit as Kessler got in touch with his “inner monk.”

For a couple of crazy minutes during an insomnia-induced reading session, I actually thought about getting one of those cute Nubian goats, which tells you how wrapped up I became in Kessler’s narrative. I heartily recommend this book to anyone who likes microhistories, to foodies, to non-fiction lovers and to anyone who enjoys a good animal story. So that’s Book 2 in the What’s in a Name 3 Reading Challenge: a musical term. My next book is the food title, as I’m reading Lizzie Collingham’s food history of the Indian subcontinent, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors.

Kabul Beauty School: Cut and Tease

Debbie Rodriguez' Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil is a tough book to review. On the one hand, her experiences are unique -- a hairdresser from Holland, Michigan, who winds up founding the first beauty school to open in Afghanistan after the Taliban were driven out of the capital. On the other hand, it is not a brilliantly written or particularly insightful book.

Fleeing her own abusive husband, Debbie finds purpose in Kabul. Her accounts of her dealings with the byzantine bureaucracy might make for Kafka-esque reading on their own, if the author was better able to contextualize them. Instead, Rodriguez reports them, often dismissing or simply failing to interpret the cultural differences that led to the impasses in the first place.

It's the stories of the women who attend the beauty school that make the book so fascinating -- as daughters of a tribal Islamic society, they occupy a completely different space within the cultural framework than any American woman would, a fact that the author sometimes learns the hard way. However, their stories run together, fueled by one or more antagonists: abusive father, abusive husband, abusive brothers, even abusive sons. The "men" of Afghanistan are one brutish monolith, unless they are lucky enough to be touched in some way by Western culture (cultural hegemony, anyone?). The women are more sympathetic, but often disappoint because of their own cronyism and lack of empathy for each other's plights. The women of Kabul are NOT the Sisterhood of the Traveling Burqua.

Despite this, in the end I felt great compassion for the women of Afghanistan, and that may have been the author's point. But the book reads more like an edited diary than a well-considered memoir, and most of the characters remained unidimensional to the end. Many threads were left unwoven into the final manuscript; new and interesting characters were introduced toward the end, with no resolution. The author's own life remained largely unexamined.

Finally, I couldn't help wondering whether or not the author's frank discussions of some of the personal issues associated with her long-suffering students wouldn't be exacerbated by the book, which made me feel somehow complicit in their suffering. I wound up hoping things were going well for them, but not too optimistic.

Ultimately, I would recommend reading the book, as it does tell a compelling tale. I'd suggest you bring a level of skepticism to the text, however. First book in the What's in a Name 3 Challenge -- a place name -- complete! Next up for me is the musical term, since I've chosen Brad Kessler's Goat Song: A Seasonal Life, A Short History of Herding, and the Art of Cheesemaking.

Eat, Pray, Love

Obviously, this best seller fits into none of the categories in the What's in a Name 3 Challenge. But it's the book that needed to be finished before I could start on the challenge. So, I'll report that it's finished, and I loved it. I know it's one of those books that people either love or hate -- I come down on the love side. Liz is so AMERICAN, so difficult, so sincere in her yearning. She is high maintenance, but high performance as well. Her trip in Indonesia was reminscent of A Tale of Two Cities: Recalled to Life! I'm glad this book is launching me into the reading challenge, as it's about having an open mind. And that is the theme of the books I have chosen for this challenge.