Memoir
Book 59 of 52: We Were Dreamers: An Immigrant Superhero Origin Story by Simu Liu
Let’s take a trip with a very handsome man! Simu Liu, who is most known as the lead in Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the 10 Rings. He has quite a story to tell in We Were Dreamers: An Immigrant Superhero Origin Story. And most of it is not about Hollywood.
Liu is a Chinese-Canadian actor who spent the first four years of his life in China with his grandparents, as his parents scraped their way to establishing a new life for the three of them in Canada. When Liu was finally able to join them, it wasn’t a perfect reunion. Not only were his parents essentially raising a small child they didn’t know, but they also pressured him to succeed in sometimes cruel ways. No way around it: they beat him, and did things like lock him out of the apartment if he was bad. They made him feel worthless if he was not at the top of his class, and beyond, in everything.
I thought a lot about book 44 in this series, I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy. The big differences are that his parents didn’t want Liu to have anything to do with […]
Book 54 of 52: I’m Not Really a Waitress by Suzi Weiss-Fischmann
I started doing my nails in 2018, at 38 years old, in a grasp at control. On the night before I was to run a 50K ultramarathon in 83 degree heat — in Pennsylvania, in October — I went to a CVS up the street from my hotel. I bought a bottle of base coat, top coat and Black Onyx by OPI. I was sick from dehydration for two days after the race, but my nails still looked pretty good.
I did my nails sporadically after, and I collected a handful of colors — enough to take up the front of a bathroom drawer. Then the pandemic hit, and I wrote story after story about the exact ways in which COVID killed people, and the systematic failures leading us down the path to mass tragedy. I couldn’t control that, but I could control my fingertips.
Since then, I have done my nails every week (usually on Wednesdays, since that’s my off day from running). I don’t wear makeup, and I don’t color my hair, but I now have more than 100 bottles of nail polish taking up two bathroom drawers. Not only have manicures been a way of covering up damage […]
Book 50 of 52: Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures by Robert K. Wittman and John Shiffman
Who doesn’t love a good heist story? And who doesn’t want to listen to a book about heists and exactly how FBI got back said heisted items while driving across the midwest?
I like both of these things, which is how I ended up listening to Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures by Robert K. Wittman and John Shiffman on my recent road trip to the National Parks of Minnesota and Michigan. What a ride — both the book and that vacation. Turnpikes are convenient but wow sometimes very boring. It helps to have something interesting to listen to along the way.Wittman is a former FBI agent who created a niche for himself while still at the Bureau: art, antiques, jewelry and gem identification. While working at the Philadelphia bureau office, he retrieved a startling number of key works — more than $300 million worth, according to his website. Those include Geronimo’s War Bonnet, a Peruvian backflap that had been looted from a tomb, Rembrant’s Self Portrait, a Civil War battle flag carried by the 127th United States Colored Infantry Regiment, and an original copy of the Bill of Rights.
For each recovered piece of art, Wittman (and co-writer […]
Book 44 of 52: I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy
I listened to the audiobook of Jennette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died while packing for and then starting my road trip to the national parks of Minnesota and Michigan, and often had to stop the recording to process what I’d just heard.
McCurdy was a child star pushed into show business by her mother, an abusive narcissist who taught her daughter how to be anorexic, did “exams” on her into her late teens, didn’t let McCurdy shower herself (and often showered her together with her teenage brother), and didn’t even let her wipe herself after she went to the bathroom until she was at least eight years old (she describes the behavior at that age but if she said when it ended, I didn’t catch it).
The book is about that life, and also what her mother pushed her into: a role in the Nickelodeon show iCarly, whose producer, Dan Schneider, has been […]
Book 43 of 52: Fly Girl by Ann Hood
Fly Girl by Ann Hood is a “look behind the curtain” type memoir. After college, and before becoming a successful novelist, Hood worked as a flight attendant for TWA, “at the end of those glamour days,” she writes, starting her job a time when flying was something you dressed up for, and ending after deregulation started to shrink prices but also amenities, seats and leg room.
Those glamour days were also more sexist, where flight attendants couldn’t be married, couldn’t have children, were chosen in large part based on their looks, and had to maintain a specific weight (and could be fired for going over, especially in their first six months of “probation”). That didn’t discourage women though. At the time Hood applied, TWA had acceptance rates lower than Harvard. It was an in demand job.
It was a big change from when the role was “courier” and only open to men. In 1930, Ellen Church, a registered nurse, convinced United Airlines to hire her too, arguing that putting women on plans would make people feel more comfortable about flying them – because if they hired women, especially nurses, on it had to be safe, right?
The nursing requirement was dropped during […]
Book 40 of 52: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomedy by Alison Bechdel
This post starts with a book I haven’t read: The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and the Body in Healing Trauma by Bessel Van Der Kolk, which I bought months ago and kept picking up and put it down. Earlier this month, I finally told myself “You’re finally going to read it, damnit.” I even painted my nails the same color as the stars on the cover, and took a picture holding the book.
And yet.
I’ve been thinking enough about trauma lately and couldn’t bring myself, in this exact moment, to read about what it’s done to me. We’re coming up on the 10th anniversary of Superstorm Sandy, a terrible tragedy I covered and told myself for a long time could not a big deal to me personally since I was safe and I didn’t lose my home. I was just the channel through which other shared their despair and anguish, what’s the big deal? I grew up in a “brush it off” household. I should have been able to brush that off too.
Spoiler: I did not. And nearly a decade later, a little voice inside my head keeps telling me I am weak because I haven’t, even though I […]
Book 35 of 52: Where the Deer and the Antelope Play by Nick Offerman
I have so many thoughts about Where the Deer and the Antelope Play by Nick Offerman that I’m going to number them.
1. It’s not uncommon for celebrities to partner with ghost writers for their books. I don’t mind this — in fact, I think it’s a good thing. A celebrity has a story to tell and hires a professional to help them tell that story in the best possible way means we get a better book, and a pro writer gets paid. However, that’s not the case here. Offerman calls himself a “humorist” and is a pretty good writer. I listened to and loved Paddle Your Own Canoe and also The Greatest Love Story Ever Told, which he co-wrote with his wife Megan Mullally (Good Clean Fun, which is about woodworking, fell flat to me, though I listened to it while running a 24-hour race, so that vibe might be related to what I was doing at the time). I think I need to read his books in physical form. His voice? Fantastic, of course. But I love listening to celebrities read their memoirs, and his celebrity isn’t the driving factor here, nor is he really […]
Book 34 of 52: Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes
My plan to go back to Italy in 2023 or 2024 proceeds, as does reading books about Italy. So Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes it is (or was since I finished the book last night).
This 1996 blockbuster memoir is by Mayes, a professor of creative writing who takes her divorce settlement and buys an abandoned villa in Tuscany. Through the course of the memoir, she and her pal Ed (who eventually became her husband) fix up the place, and spend all their summers there (which seems to be a thing that has only been disrupted by the pandemic). It’s a home renovation story, a second love story, and, probably more than anything else, a food story.
I’ve spent some time in Tuscany in early fall, which is when Mayes usually returns to San Francisco, but even after the rush of summer, the food is unbelievable. In 2008, I met up with my own “pal” at the time, who was there for work, and we at so much gelato that I thought I’d never be able to eat American ice cream again. He had been a vegan and recently switched to vegetarian and, for one meal only, still tried […]
Book 30 of 52: Baggage: Tales from a Fully Packed Life by Alan Cumming
I’m a big fan of taking long road trips. Since I flew to Texas to buy my 2002 Jeep Wrangler TJ and drove it home to New Jersey without really knowing how to drive stick – and didn’t die in the process – I’ve found the appeal of taking a very long drive.
Book 25 of 52: Italian Neighbours: An Englishman in Verona by Tim Parks
How about a little travel to kick off the summer?
I’ve been sticking to domestic trips lately for obvious reasons, but I’m hoping to go back to Italy in 2023 or 2024. I like it there. I’ve been twice, once to the Tuscany region, and another time to Rome with a jaunt to Capri, where I had sandals made for me, haggled in bad French with an Italian shopkeeper over a vintage Louis Vuitton bag, and bluffed my way into a nightclub that wanted me to pay a 40 Euro cover charge.
I’ve also been doing a genealogy project and looking into my Italian roots (yes, really, don’t mind my last name), which was partly inspired by a trip to Ellis Island in December. I saw where my great great grandparents, Salvatore and Giuseppina, came into this country and, for better or for worse, you’re all now stuck with me – for now.
Who couldn’t use escaping into another world, even if it’s just through a book?
Tim Parks, a writer, teacher and translator, moved to Italy with his wife in 1981, settling in the Via Colombare in Verona. Italian Neighbours: An Englishman in Verona is a series of essays about their first year […]
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