Hoo, did I struggle with Chris Kluwe’s new book of essays, Beautifully Unique Sparkleponies: On Myths, Morons, Free Speech, Football, and Assorted Absurdities. Kluwe, as you probably know, is the quick-witted, sharp-tongued, outspoken NFL player who catapulted to the forefront of popular culture last year when he wrote a wildly-popular letter to a Maryland politician about gay marriage.

Kluwe stayed in the headlines with his unabashed and unending support for marriage equality, even resigning his position as a St. Paul Pioneer Press blogger after their ham-handed marriage amendment editorial. Because publishing loves nothing more to than to cash in on a star that’s burning brightly we now have a collection of essays by Kluwe that range in topic from marriage equality to time travel to his own eulogy.

In these essays he’s often funny, nerdy, and charming. He’s at his best when he’s discussing video games, his daughters, and football. He doesn’t do so well when it comes to societal woes and social justice issues.

Kluwe makes some pretty serious and dangerous claims about certain issues. Like, for instance, how domestic violence would end if the woman would just realize that the man hitting her doesn’t love her and leave. Duh! This is especially disappointing to read considering how rampant the problem is in the NFL, where last year 21 of 32 NFL teams had players charged with domestic violence.

This is but one example of how he often oversimplifies issues. I don’t know if the over-simplification is due to his persistant need to be glib or if it’s that he hasn’t really thought through all the issues he’s spouting about.

At another point he chastises the people who beg for subsidized healthcare and yet still eat at fast food restaurants, as if these two things are mutually exclusive and not indicative of the very large wealth-gap in our country. It’s often the poorest people who eat the worst food, because healthy food is expensive. So is health care.

A lot of the time he comes off, intentionally or not, as blaming the victim, and many of his essays hinge on the premise that the world would be a much better place if everyone weren’t so stupid — as if it were just that easy.

This is not to say that I didn’t enjoy a good portion of the book. I loved whenever he talked about football and his family, video games and music. These were easily my favorite essays finding Kluwe a little more personable, humorous in a self-deprecating way and not so harshly judgmental.

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When I babysat my nephews, The Tibbles, a few weeks ago we were at the grocery store gathering supplies for our “make your own sandwiches” lunch. Make your own sandwiches is their favorite lunch, right after the local Chinese buffet. Tip: little boys like to be empowered when it comes to lunch options whether it involves all-you-can-drink chocolate milk and lo mein or a provolone black olive sandwich.

As we were grocery shopping my nephew, Liam, 7, grabbed a bag of something from the potato chip aisle called “Puffcorn.” Because I am the best aunt ever, I bought that bag of puffcorn. But I am also a flake and so we never even ate the puffcorn. I forgot all about it.

I will get to Jay Farrar and his book Falling Cars and Junkyard Dogs in a minute. This will all tie together. I promise.

So the other night I was scavenging for snacks when I happened upon the puffcorn. I dove in with the culinary zeal honed from years of bacon-flavored squirt cheese on bacon-flavored crackers and State Fair cuisine (seriously, some day you should ask me about a corn dog I had at a Mike Doughty concert on Harriet Island. I still think fondly about that corn dog). Puffcorn is a weird popcorny-type conglomeration of flavored chemicals and salt. It’s like salty cotton candy with a little bit more substance. A cheesepuff sort of exterior that dissolves the instant it touches your tongue and leaves you feeling like you maybe might have sort of ate something.

It is not wholly unpleasant, but is totally unsubstantial exactly like Farrar’s book of vignettes. Farrar, for the uninitiated, is the lead singer of Son Volt and for a short time was in the band Uncle Tupelo with a fellow named Jeff Tweedy.

Now Farrar has written the kind of songs that make my entire body sigh in a sort of shivery resignation to the emotion his music provokes in me. I cannot hear the song “Windfall” and do anything besides listen to it. It’s a stop all the presses kind of song.

And after reading his book, I kind of wish the presses had stopped before popping it out. This small collection of vignettes isn’t worthy of Farrar’s name. These aren’t even essays. These are short paragraphs loosely joined by his vacuous, sometimes pointless memories of this or that or the one time he almost saw Willie Nelson walking across a parking lot. I wish I was kidding about that.

The book isn’t without its charms. When Farrar is actually telling a story, like going back to the scene of a one-car accident to retrieve a mix tape featuring one side of Husker Du and one side of The Replacements, it’s pretty good, but this is a rarity. He’s at his best when he talks about his dad and at his worst when he writes two paragraphs of not really significant encounters with famous people. And there’s a whole lot of stuff in the middle ground that I can’t quite remember already because there is no substance. Really, there isn’t enough meat to these “stories” to even cobble together a mediocre blog.

Totally disappointing.

On Twitter I quipped that the book was 60% Meh + 20% Right on! + 20% just bitch about Tweedy already. I think that math still adds up.

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One of the things that drive me nuts in reviews and workshops is when the critic critiques a story based not on what it is, but rather what he or she wanted it to be. Right now I have to resist the urge to become the very thing I despise.

I wanted more from Ryan Van Meter’s If You Knew Then What I Know Now. Not because the book itself is lacking anything, but because I’m a greedy, greedy reader who could not get enough of his lovely, bittersweet prose.

This beautiful series of linked essays (it’s not a memoir, though sometimes I wanted it to be) is about Van Meter’s coming of age and coming out. Growing up gay in the suburbs of St. Louis isn’t easy for Van Meter, who spends a lot of the book knowing his is different, his is gay, and being unable to put words to it.

He struggles with his differentness in the face of parents who try to make him “more normal.” He spends a summer playing baseball, practicing for hours with his dad even though neither of them seem to be enjoying the experience at all.

In the book opening essay, “First,” Van Meter is a kindergartener in love with a neighbor boy named Ben. They sit in the wayback of the station wagon, facing the back of the car away from the adults, holding hands when Van Meter asks Ben to marry him. This is my favorite of all the essays (you can even read it online). Van Meter captures that joy of riding in the station wagon, the unadulterated affection children have for their friends all while managing to ratchet up the tension in that car until it’s almost too much to bear.

Damn, he’s good. It’s not often you read essays that are fraught with tension, but Van Meter manages to bring it out in the thousands of little turning points we experience in our lives. It’s the tension in these essays that make them so readable.

And while I loved the first essay the most, that’s not to say things go down hill from there. The book is filled with those kinds of exquisite, tension-filled moments. For instance, when his first girlfriend creates a shimmering bubble out of shredded plastic painters tarps, pillows, christmas lights and candles. It’s a place she deems perfect for their first kiss, an event that hadn’t happened even though they’d been dating for over a year.

Plus, I really enjoyed Van Meter’s struggle with the word faggot which finds him researching the word’s origins hoping to find out why it’s so a loaded. Hell, I really enjoyed the entire book because he captures the pain of being different so well. Often, Van Meter writes about how he prayed to God to make his differentness, in his case his homosexuality, go away. Reading this made me burst right into tears because as a young teen, I too prayed to God to make my own differentness, in my case being unusually tall, go away.

It was this ability to capture with such authenticity, and the bravery to share it that made reading If You Knew Then What I Know Now such a pleasure.

And, lest you think the book is filled with maudlin tales of woe, there is plenty of humor to go along with it — like how Van Meter’s mom is hooked on Tetris, Van Meter’s first “date” with a man even though he never realizes he’s on date, and the hijinks that ensue when two bored teenagers decide to exact revenge on an ex.

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Tina Fey gets a lot of shit. She’s too much of a feminist, she’s not feminist enough. She’s funny, she’s not funny. The woman cannot win. The latest is that her “memoir” Bossypants isn’t revealing enough.

Here’s the thing though, it’s not a memoir. I don’t know why it’s being dubbed a memoir. I’m not even sure what the definition of memoir is. Oh wait, I have the Internet. Here’s what comes up when you type “definition of memoir” in Google:
1. A historical account or biography written from personal knowledge.
2. An autobiography or a written account of one’s memory of certain events or people.

Okay, using that convenient definition, Bossypants is NOT A MEMOIR. What is it then? It’s a book of humorous, personal essays ala David Sedaris.

Why am I making a big deal about this? Because I think the way you approach this book will help with your enjoyment of it. If you approach this as a memoir expecting Tina Fey to reveal all kinds of emotional details and dish dirt you will be sorely disappointed.

If you approach this book as a light-hearted bunch of words Tina Fey felt like typing, you’ll be much happier with the results. I went into Bossypants thinking it was like a David Sedaris book and I got exactly what I wanted – hilarity, bits of insight, and a small, small peek into Tina’s world.

I loved it. I will push this breathlessly on everyone I know. In fact, I listened to the audiobook version of Bossypants and for the first time ever, I might actually push this exact version on people. Listening to Tina tell the stories is awesome. Throughout she acknowledges the audiobookness of what you’re listening to. She often refers you to a PDF (that comes with it, even when you download the book from Audible.com like I did) to see a picture of what she’s talking about.

There is a lot to like in this one. One of things I really appreciated is that Tina realizes how blessed and lucky and privileged she is. She says she works her ass off, but that she’s lucky because she gets to do it at her dream job. She says she often turns down “mother of the year” awards because they make her uncomfortable, not just because motherhood is so fraught with politics and judgement, but because unlike so many mothers she has a nanny who helps her tremendously. While some people might see this as a woman not taking credit for her success, for down playing her work. I choose to see it as someone recognizing their privilege and being thankful for it.

It’s all good. But my very favorite passage in the book was about Amy Poehler. In this section Tina talks about Amy being new to Saturday Night Live and a bunch of dudes not liking something Amy had said or done. Being dudes they didn’t think the jokes aimed at a more female audience were funny. Amy’s response? “I don’t fucking care if you don’t like it.”

So awesome. Just like most of the book.

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I’ve grown leery of the essay anthology after the horrible experience I had reading Things I Would Have Learned in English 101 if I Hadn’t Skipped Class to Have Sex, I mean, Things I Learned from the Women Who Dumped Me. The book was so awful and cliched that I feared I had be scarred for life.

Then I kept reading about Love is a Four-Letter Word, subtitled True Stories of Breakups, Bad Relationships, and Broken Hearts, edited by Michael Taeckens. It worried me and then I saw that the introduction was by Neal Pollack, and made me even more worried. But ultimately I was won over by the author list — Junot Diaz, Kate Christensen, Dan Kennedy, and Said Saytafiezadeh.

Thank god I put my fears aside and dove in. This was fun.

When writing about love and heartbreak there’s a tendency to the maudlin, to the woe-is-me, to the “this is the worst thing to ever happened.” But there wasn’t a lot of that in this anthology. Instead most of the artists approached their heartbreaks from an area of remove, with wizened eyes because they knew they had survived. As a reader, I really appreciated it. As a writer, I think it was quite brave. It’s hard to admit our romantic failures and the stupid, stupid things we do for love, even though we all do it.

What surprised me the most about this collection is that the writers who drew me to it were, kind of disappointing. Instead I discovered brand-new writers — Maud Newton, Jami Attenberg, Jennifer Finney Boylan, Amanda Stern, Margaret Sartor– who charmed me, made me eager to seek out their other work.

I especially liked Jami Attenberg’s essay “The Story You Will Tell” for purely egotistical reasons. See:

He say’s it’s amazing that he loves not having to talk to anyone. You understand completely. This was one of the reasons why you liked him. Because he understood why not having to talk to anyone was a good thing. (pg 177)

He doesn’t call or e-mail. But it’s okay. You are already turning it into a story in your head, that time I made out with my ex-boyfriend. Because this is what you do, you turn things into stories, and then it’s okay. You don’t need to be in a relationship. You are already in a relationship with yourself. You are going to love yourself forever. It is a little bit sick, but it is a little bit healthy too. And you never not call. (pg 179)

The same can probably be said about Michael Taeckens’ piece (incidentally, he chose The Smiths in the Largehearted Boy Book Notes essay by the authors included in this book).

I had been confusing beauty and sadness for a long time, apparently. My belief that that they were intertwined was like a double helix in my genetic code. And perhaps the sadness and beauty were mixed up with the masochism too. Emily Dickinson was my favorite poet. (Funerals! Flies buzzing!) Ingmar Bergman was my favorite film director. (Death! Schizophrenia!) The Smiths was my favorite band. (You don’t even know I exist, but I love you!) Even as early as age fourteen, my predilection for the maudlin made itself known — the theme song I chose for my relationship with my girlfriend was Chicago’s “Hard to Say I’m Sorry/Get Away”: Even lovers need a holiday far away from each other. The song just seemed so romantic. (pg 130)

The collection is so overwhelmingly solid that I won’t mention the big, dull duds (*cough*Gary Shteyngart*cough*), and just give it a hearty recommendation.

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