Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

One of my weaknesses as a reader, and as a human, is that I’m not too keen on history. I don’t like to read about olden times. If a book takes place before say, 1940, I’ve already started to lose interest. If a book takes place during WWII my eyes start to close. I’m shallow, yes.

So with a description starts with the line, “Effia and Esi are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana,” Homegoing does not seem like my kind of book.

And yet. And yet. And yet. I read it and I loved it. This epic, sprawling novel told in short stories tells the tale of generations of people and the ever-present impact of slavery on their lives — both the Africans who never left Africa, and those who were sold into slavery to America.

The book follows the descendants of Effia and Esi in alternating chapters, jumping from generation to generation. The story is engaging, information, heartbreaking, and will envelop you totally. This is one of those novels that reminds me why I love reading so much.

The Leavers by Lisa Ko

When eleven-year-old Deming Guo’s mom never returns from her job at a nail salon, he’s quickly shuffled into the foster care system. Poor orphaned Deming is shuffled around a bit before landing at the upstate New York home of a couple of college professors who rename him Daniel and eventually adopt him. The book follows Deming after he’s been kicked out of college while he bums around NYC and tries to unravel the mystery of his mother, which he eventually does. This one about illegal immigration, adoption, and abandonment, suffers by comparison to Lucky Boy, which deals with the same subject matter. Deming is a puzzling character and his lack of motivation to do anything feels suffocating. Polly, his mother, doesn’t feel like an actual person and the reason for their separation just feels contrived. This one was only okay.

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

As I mentioned above, I’m not such a good student of history. However, I like to think I know the biggies, which is why it kind of pissed me off that the killing of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma during the 1920s was brand new information to me. Like I know we love to white wash our history and really, really underplay the genocide of Native Americans, but this juicy piece of history seems like one of those things history teachers would eat up. Prohibition, oil rights, Teapot Dome, J. Edgar Hoover, the wild west, explosions, and tons of mysterious deaths. However since the people dying were Native Americas, this tragic, bizarre, and horrifying period of American history seems to be forgotten.

This one is a good one, though sometimes I got a little lost with all the names thrown around. Still fascinating and disgusting look at how our country treated Native Americans and what some people would do out of greed.

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So . . . nearly a year after getting the book in hardcover and like nine days after downloading the audiobook read by Mary Lucia, I’ve finished Trouble Boys: The True Story of The Replacements by Bob Mehr.

I have, as the kids say, so many feels. All the feels. Oceans and galaxies of feels. Unmeasurable and unmentionable feels. I have feels as a writer & reader, a fan, and a cranky 45-year-old feminist killjoy. That’s a bunch of feels, don’t you agree?

First of all, the book is entirely too damn long. Just because Mehr learned it doesn’t mean the reader needs to know it. Did I need to know the ethnic background and year of birth of every single person who ever came into contact with The ‘Mats? Nope. If I had a dollar for each time Mehr used the phrase “Born in. . . ” I could buy every single person on the planet a copy of the ‘Mats’ greatest hits.

Because I’ve read a kajillion rock & roll memoirs/biographies, I always associate this trait with dudes. Like Keith Richards and Pete Townshend (and Bob Mould) had to tell you every single thing that ever happened to them ever regardless of its role in their music/success/fame/etc. The women, they get to the good parts. They edit out the boring. Dudes do not do that, because of course they think all the things in their lives are interesting and significant. They are not. Knock it off.

Second of all, the book broke my fucking heart. This surprised me, because it’s not like 80% of this story was news to me. Hell, as you might recall I got to share my own ‘Mats story in Jim Walsh’s The Replacements: All Over But the Shouting: An Oral History. You can see a braggery pic of my bio from that book over on my About page, you know Chilton, Christgau, Chromey. . . the usual suspects.

Because Bob Mehr is a good writer and storyteller, once he really got into the sad saga of The Replacements he had me, especially when it got to the real good stuff — the firing of Bob and Chris, the hiring of Slim, the end of the band, the death of Bob. And while I didn’t give a shit about who produced what or drove the van to Canada, when it came to the actual relationships the band had with each other, I was all in. It was Mary Lucia who got me through the boring parts. I love her voice. It’s not only been a sonic comfort to me for, damn, 20+ years now, it’s also a voice I pay attention to. Having her read the book to me was an absolute joy and I really cannot recommend the audiobook enough.

I always call myself a “bad fan” because there’s a lot of stuff I don’t care about when it comes to musicians. In fact, I often try to avoid reading about my favorites because I don’t want to know what total assholes they are and thus ruin my tender feelings towards their music. So while I knew, in a general kind of way, about what self-destructive jerks the ‘Mats were, reading about how relentless their jerkiness was made me angry. Yes, I was retroactively angry at a bunch of 20somethings from the mid-80s.

Maybe it’s because I am frequently broke or maybe because the book often mentioned how the ‘Mats had zero dollars and zero cents, but each time they destroyed a bus or dressing room or guitar or lit their actual per diem money on fire, I was actively annoyed. I had zero sympathy for any of them when they quit the band and had no money. Maybe if they weren’t such privileged white boy babies they’d have a few bucks to their name when it all came crashing down.

I was frustrated because this is the kind of behavior we accept from male artists. We accept their bad choices and antics as byproduct of their genius. This is bullshit. So much bullshit. And while I get that they were often chemically altered, self-medicating mental illnesses using drugs and alcohol, still. . . enough is enough. I didn’t see anything rock & roll or alternative or punk rock in all the senseless destruction, I just saw a bunch of grown men acting like petulant brats.

As I was reading I wondered if 22-year-old Jodi who had just discovered The Replacements would have found all that nonsense kind of romantic and rock & roll. Probably, 22-year-olds are stupid.

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I tend to avoid essay collections/memoirs by bloggers. This is a little strange, considering I’m an aspiring author with a blog that turned 16 years old last month. But a lot of times when I see a blogger get a book deal I shrug and think “Meh.” To be fair, ninety-nine percent of the time the book-deal-getting blogger is someone I’ve never read before. I figure if their blog doesn’t interest me, reading it in book form isn’t going to do much for me either.

However, for the first time that I can remember, a blogger I actually read released a book. It’s Nora McInerny Purmort’s It’s Okay to Laugh (Crying is Cool Too), and I gobbled the book up in less than twenty-four hours and enjoyed it immensely, even when I was a little annoyed by the writing.

Since I already bragged about my blog, I just want to say that I discovered Nora’s writing through her sister, Meghan, who was one of handful of women bloggers in Minnesota back at the turn of the century. Though Meghan has long since given up personal blogging, we’ve been social media friends for years. She is delightful and so is her sister.

Before I get into it I have to admit from the get go whenever Nora talked about being super tall, I rolled my eyes hard. Why? Because I am an asshole. A six-foot-five-inch asshole who doesn’t think anyone gets to claim “tall” until they are at least 6’4″. HOWEVER, I did cackle with complete glee when she talked about how dudes have zero idea how tall they are. Because she is so right. I’ve often claimed I never met a man who was under six-feet tall, which at varying times makes me anywhere from 6’8″ to 7’3″. Seriously men, we’re on to you.

But so, back to Nora. Her story is a heartbreaker. Did you read My Husband’s Tumor? You should have. Hell, you still can. I think most of the Twin Cities were captivated by Nora and Aaron’s love story. I know I was. I watched the live-stream of their wedding like a good, creepy internet person. I also, sadly, watched Aaron’s funeral internet and still get goosebumps when I remember Nora eulogizing her husband and how the nurses were talking about his heart.

If you don’t know the story. Girl meets boy. Boy gets brain tumor. They get married, have a baby, tumor worsens, there’s a miscarriage of a second baby, father dies (Nora’s dad, was also an author and he answered the 6 questions we always ask a few years ago), boy dies, everyone cries for 100 years, because how does any one person handle so much loss in a matter of weeks?

If nothing else, Nora is resilience personified.

The book chronicles Nora’s life before, during, and after Aaron. She writes about falling in love, being a couple, and coping with cancer. She writes about her family, how she got to know her siblings in a new way after losing their dad and how they helped her while Aaron died. She writes about high school and college, and all the jackass mistakes we make in our twenties. She writes about grief and anger and trying to get through the swamp of that. She’s self-deprecating and funny throughout, but also sincere. It never felt like she was hiding behind humor, which was refreshing.

I’m not sure if they’re calling this a memoir or essays, I choose essays because there’s not a strong linear narrative throughout. It’s kind of jumpy and and it reads a lot like her Tumblr blog — short essays interspersed with lists. This book is big on personality and if you don’t care for hers, this isn’t the book for you. I find her utterly charming and was charmed by the book, even when the repetition got a little exasperating. There are way too many mentions of the lime green Beetle her mom drove, the retainer she wears, her love of the Real Housewives, and a few other things where her phrasing is nearly identical every time she mentions them. Though, to be fair, the repetitive nature probably stood out more because I read the book in a day. Nora is an engaging writer and once I started reading I didn’t want to do anything else, which is really the highest praise I can give a book

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In her memoir Living Like a Runaway Lita Ford, writes about how unimportant high school was to her and how she skipped out on her graduation to play a show with The Runaways. This apathy toward learning is pretty easy to see in this poorly-written, reflection-lacking, yet still entertaining memoir.

The writing is bad. Like cringe-inducing, eye-rollingly bad. Throughout the book she uses female (adjective) when she should use woman (noun). It makes her come off as, well, not very smart. Plus there are a lot of anecdotes that end with “Yeah, that was a good time” or “it was so funny.”

The book reads as a kind of “this is how I spent my summer vacation” essay written by a high school sophomore. Only instead of summer vacation it’s the past fortyish year of and then this happened and then that happened and then this happened.

Ford only spend a few chapters on her time as a Runaway, which was a little disappointing for someone who adores Joan Jett. And ol’ Joanie doesn’t come across too well in this one. You can tell there’s not a lot of affection between Ford and Jett, and it’s tough to figure out why. Perhaps Jett really is the emotionless automaton controlled by her manager that Ford paints her. Or maybe Ford never really connected with Joan because as a teenager Ford was ooged out by homosexuality, something she kind of glosses over in her re-telling of her time with The Runaways.

Its kind of tough to take Ford at her word. There are many times throughout the book where her actions don’t match up with her words. She says she’s a kind, loving, nice person. She had a great relationship with her parents (the doted on only child of Italian and British immigrants). Yet the book is rife with stories of fight fights (both drunken and sober), black eyes, broken noses, and in one weird incident a burrito thrown at a waitress.

Either Ford has no problem reconciling her violent tendencies with being “nice” or there’s a real lack of self-reflection. I tend to think it’s the latter, which is kind of disappointing.

Ford spends very little time on what it was like being virtually the only woman in heavy metal. And a lot of it is self-aggrandizing, as though she was the only woman with the courage and talent to break into the sexist boys club. If there is one thing we learn about Lita Ford, she is not lacking in the self-esteem department. She tells us endlessly about her hot body and skimpy costumes, which is sad in its own right. Lita Ford, you are more than a hot piece of ass!

But this doesn’t mean the book isn’t any fun. It is. Ford is unapologetic about the way she has lived her life, boozing, drugging, and fucking her way through the 80s. She’s totally one to kiss and tell, which makes her memoir fun to read in a wholly shallow way. She pretty much tells a story about every famous dude she had sex with (Eddie Van Halen, Jon Bon Jovi) and she’s very frank about how her engagement to Tony Iommi (Black Sabbath) ended because he was an abusive, face-punching asshole.

The last part of the book is a bit weird and veers on coy. Ford had a contentious seventeen-year-marriage with a man she refuses to name (though Google tells me it was Jim Gillette). They have two sons and eventually move off to a secluded island in the Caribbean where Ford is pretty much cut off from society and spends her time home-schooling her boys. She says she really lost herself and eventually she had to leave. Ford also claims that her ex-husband turned her sons against her and now she tries to raise awareness about parental alienation. It’s weird, because Google tells a very different story about the end of her marriage and the relationship with her sons.

This one is quite the mixed bag, a poorly-written mixed bag sure, but I still kind of liked it.

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I have a strange compulsion to read all the memoirs written by women in music. I’m not exactly sure when it started. Maybe as a sort of research for my own book-in-progress. Maybe it’s because I love rock & roll and want to know more about the women who make it. Maybe I am slowly turning into my mom and instead of memoirs by 40s & 50s Hollywood actresses, my drug of choice is women in rock.

So of course when I stumbled across Carly Simon’s memoir on Audible with a credit burning a hole in my pocket, I downloaded Boys in the Trees quicker than you can say “anticipation.”

First, let me get this out of the way — even though the book is read by Simon I would not recommend the audio version. Throughout there is music played behind her narration at a volume that makes it hard to understand her. It was super frustrating and never stopped being annoying.

This is kind of shame, because Simon’s memoir was surprisingly delightful. I had very little Carly information going in: “You’re So Vain,” James Taylor, and her father co-founded Simon & Schuster (yeah, that famous publishing house).

The memoir starts with her childhood growing up the ugly duckling with two beautiful sisters and a younger brother. She was named Carly because her parents were keen on having a boy and had already picked out the name Carl. She tells tales of dinner parties at their home with guests like Jackie Robinson and Benny Goodman; summers in the Hamptons; and all those kinds of things you hear about wealthy New Yorkers doing. Of course it’s not all grand, Mummy moves her nineteen-year-old lover into the house ostensibly as a tutor for Simon’s brother Peter, Daddy is a depressed alcoholic who is being pushed out of his business and dies when Simon is sixteen.

As for Simon she has a stutter, bad hair, and struggles with depression, which she calls The Beast.

She starts singing with her sister as a way to fight the stutter, and eventually drops out of Sarah Lawrence to focus on singing. She bounces around Europe with a boyfriend for awhile. She spends a lot of money on therapy, and mentions being kind of broke, but an actual job never appears.

Eventually she gets signed, gets famous, and things get really good. Carly is totally the kind to kiss and tell and it is so fun to read, especially her thing with Mick Jagger. I loved the thing with Mick Jagger, which was more flirtation than affair. She was already with James Taylor at this point and Jagger was married to Bianca, but that didn’t stop him from sending a dozen red roses to every hotel she stayed at with James while on some tour. It also didn’t stop Bianca from calling Taylor on the eve of their wedding to tell him Carly and Mick were carrying on.

Hoo boy!

Then there is the relationship with Taylor, which isn’t all that great, but you can tell she still has a deep love for him even though they’ve been divorced for more than thirty years.

This one is a good’un with just enough dirt and emotion to keep you going and none of the boring stuff about how boring touring is.

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