Category: 30 Books in 30 Days

American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld

Many will be familiar with Sittenfeld’s popular book Prep, a book that I highly recommend.  It is a moving and realistic portrayal of one young girl’s navigation of the privileged realm of the private boarding school.

While American Wife possesses all of Sittenfeld’s strong narrative qualities, it is in fact more wide-ranging in its scope and extensive in its character depth and is a very different book.

What’s the book about?  Laura Bush.  This hardly seems like a book that I would want to read, much less end up raving about.  And yet, I really do want to rave about it.  I find this book fascinating and intelligent and illuminating.  Here’s what Sittenfeld does: she writes a fictionalized account of the ex-first lady’s life based upon extensive research she did into Laura Bush’s life.  By fictionalizing this account, (our main character is in fact named Alice Blackwell), Sittenfeld is able to narrate her way into the mindset and life of her character while taking some creative license.  Sittenfeld’s book is dense.  It is ultimately a book that humanizes both Laura Bush as well as her husband.  It moves from the time when Laura was a school librarian, working on her own and spending time at night creating elaborate creative projects for her students, up through the relative present, showing the moment when the U.S. declares war on Iraq.  Sittenfeld creates scenes of Bush family opulence, recreating their various residences as well as family vacation retreats.  Sittenfeld also brings us into the various geographical locales that the family moves to over the years.  We learn of Laura Bush’s painful high school accident where she was responsible for the death of a friend in an automobile accident.  We learn of her deep love for the president amidst her awareness of his very real flaws.

Read this book.  You will come away with a deeper understanding of Laura Bush and her marriage to her husband.

Thought I’d spend this post offering some recommendations for good writing books.  Throughout my life really, I have just inhaled writing how-to book after writing how-to book.  Something about their tone just appeals to me.  Much like my favorite genre, memoir, it’s the mix of personal confessional tone along with the story of one’s birth as a writer that appeals to me.  Most of my favs are pretty well-known.  In my early teens I gravitated toward Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones.  It may, in fact, have been a gift from my grandmother, who was a poet.  I loved Writing Down the Bones and loved hearing about Goldberg’s experiences with a Zen Master in Minnesota.  She also describes her experiences coming out to her parents, and uses this as a model for how not to hold back in writing.  This was the first time I heard the very common writerly advice to lay it all out in one’s writing practice, regardless of your sense of family reaction, etc. I was happy to find Goldberg’s other titles Wild Mind, which was almost equal in terms of how much I liked it, and Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America, which seemed like drivel that she was able to publish simply on the success of her other titles!  Still, she remains my first influence from the plethora of writing guides that are out there.  Others that have been great reads, the very popular Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, the older title, Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande and The Right to Write by Julia Cameron (and, really, any of Cameron’s title on creativity and writing are true gems.)

There are as many writing guides as there are personalities out there!  Suffice it to say that the above guides are more like letters from true friends who tell of their successes and most personal foibles as they engage in the writing life.  The tone in all of these is very casual, very candid and very conversational. And some of them have great jump-starting exercises interspersed throughout.

If you’re looking for more formal guides, methodical guides, guides that lead you through exercises—or anything else–you can find them at your local bookstore or online.  Seek out your writing guides and they will find you–the ones that fit your style and voice.

Life on the Outside by Jennifer Gonnerman

I was riveted by this book.  Gonnerman’s reporting is excellent. She spent a year or two following the life of Elaine Bartlett, a woman who is freed from jail and then has to pick up the pieces once back in the real world.  Gonnerman’s premise for the book is that no one follows peoples’ lives once they are out of jail.  How do you repair a life and a family life that has been irrevocably splintered by time away?

Gonnerman shows Bartlett’s struggles to find employment and to keep her children together.  There is no sugar-coating in Gonnerman’s portrayal.  She doesn’t gloss over the mistakes that Bartlett makes nor does she hold back in her descriptions of the injustices that occur as a result of the justice system.  For a glimpse into the life of a woman who undergoes struggles that many in similar roles experience, pick up this book.