Shelf Life

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Memoir meets history meets politics in Jennifer Kabat’s book, The Eighth Moon, a fascinating account of moving to the Catskills in 2005, and stumbling on a history of America’s forgotten populist uprising, the Anti-Rent War, that culminated in 1845 with the murder of a police officer, Osman Steele. Drawing on archives, conversations, and her many hikes through the countryside, Kabat favors a writing style that feels akin to an overflowing mind, moving back and forth between eras and observations, daring the reader to keep pace. You could say something similar of Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal, the 2020 novel that Kabat has chosen to discuss for this episode. Her other pick is “Culture and Anarchy,” by the poet Adrienne Rich. 

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A teenage prodigy who worshiped Joni Mitchell, Ricky Ian Gordon has made a career turning novels and poems into operas and song. “I was that kid who was invited to the party because I could play anything, no matter how hard, and incite everyone into singing all night,” he writes in his  memoir, Seeing Through: A Chronicle of Sex, Drugs and Opera. But that exuberant talent has an undercurrent of pain and sadness that has shaped and colored his life and career. It’s there in his opera of John Steinbeck’s depression-era novel, The Grapes Wrath, as well as his musical interpretations of poems by Langston Hughes, ee cummings, Emily Dickinson and the contemporary poet, Marie Howe, whose poem “What the Living Do,” has become a deeply personal touchstone for his life and work.

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Rex Ogle’s series of YA memoirs, beginning with Free Lunch, about life as a poor kid in a wealthy school district, and culminating this year in Road Home, which chronicles his experience as a homeless teen have won acclaim for their frank ability to illuminate the shame and isolation that comes with poverty. In the words of Ogle’s mother, "being poor in America is like staring at an all-you-can-eat buffet. You can see all of this food piled high but you can’t have any of it.” Ogle’s mother turns out to be a hugely complicated figure who towers over Free Lunch, the polar opposite of Maia Kobabe’s mother in the graphic novel, Gender Queer, one of two books that Ogle has chosen to talk about for this episode. The other is Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming, a memoir of growing up as an African American in the 1960s and 70s. 

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Is there a more primal terror than a mother’s fear of losing a child. Helen Phillips, one of our greatest speculative writers, explored that terrain in her acclaimed 2020 novel, The Need, in which a mother fears her children are being abducted by her own doppelganger. She returns to that theme ih Hum, a novel set in a near-future when artificial intelligence and surveillance pose urgent questions of what it means to be human, and how a family is capable of finding intimacy in a world mediated by technology. The maternal instinct is at the heart, too, of Fever Dream, a claustrophobic, propulsive horror story by the acclaimed Argentinian writer, Samanta Schweblin, in which a mother realizes that control is an illusion. Phillips other choice for this episode is ed Chiang’s  short story, Exhalation, from the collection of the same name, in which a robot-scientist discovers that the world is running out of energy.  

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The musician Orenda Fink, best known for her early 2000s band, Azure Ray, purveyors of a dreamy, confessional pop, has now penned a frank, unsparing memoir, The Witch's Daughter, in which she grapples with her complicated family story in which her mother's profound emotional needs operated as a kind of centrifugal force.  “Life with my mother was like being in a trap,” she writes. “Once you entered there was no escaping.” There is no escape, either, for the children in the  books that Fink has chosen to talk about for this episode of Shelf Life: Jeannette Walls acclaimed memoir, The Glass Castle, and the Pulitzer-Prize winning play, August: Osage County by Tracy Letts, in which the disappearance of an alcoholic patriarch unlocks a family’s secrets.

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What does Charles Portis’s 1968 novel, True Grit, twice made into a Hollywood western,  have in common with Kay Thompson’s whimsical children's book, Eloise? Here to tell us is Jennifer Belle, the author of five novels, including most recently, Swanna in Love, an indelible, and often very funny portrait of a 14-year-old girl trapped in an artist’s commune in Vermont with her bohemian mother and her mother’s alcoholic lover. Belle is no novice at crafting novels that push readers outside their comfort zone, and heartily defends the right of all novelists to do the same. Here she talks about her early fame,  hanging out with Madonna, and why the campaign to cancel Jeanine Cummins, author of American Dirt, transformed publishing for the worst. 

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The author of seven novels and one collection of stories, Curtis Sittenfeld specializes in sharp-witted female protagonists in stories that reflect a Jane Austen-like cunning in using comedy as a vehicle for social observation.  For those who are familiar with her work, it may come as little surprise that Austen’s Pride & Prejudice is among her favorite books.  We also get an all access pass behind the scenes of Saturday Night Live thanks to Tina Fey's bestselling 2011 memoir, Bossypants. It so  happens that SNL and Tina Fey were instrumental in Sittenfeld's most recent novel, Romantic Comedy. Says Sittenfeld, “People say, ‘Write the book you want to read’, but I think I was actually writing the world I wanted to exist in.” 

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Loss, longing and melancholy dominate the strange and sometimes mordantly funny short stories of Eudora Welty, the writer whose debut 1941 collection, A Curtain of Green is among two books that Ada Zhang has chosen for Shelf Life. The other is William Maxwell's short, taut So Long, See You Tomorrow. Zhang's debut story collection, The Sorrows of Others is a tapestry of first and second generation Chinese immigrants dealing with cultural and geographical dislocation, women on the threshold of adulthood, and intergenerational misunderstanding. Her characters reveal as much about themselves in what they say as in what they don’t.  “Lies say a lot about people," Zhang has said.  "What we choose to lie about can be incredibly telling. Getting your characters to lie or hide the truth is a sure way to get to know them.”  (Audiobook clip from The Sorrows of Others courtesy of Audible).

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When did you first encounter Dylan Baker? Perhaps it was as the brazen wife killer Colin Sweeney in the long-running CBS show, The Good Wife. Or maybe it was the FBI bully-in-chief, J. Edgar Hoover in Ava DuVernay’s civil rights-era movie, Selma. Or was it much longer ago as the monster with the human face, Bill Maplewood in Todd Solendz’s 1998 movie Happiness.  He says, “I went into the business because I really enjoyed exploring dark places in human beings, it was always how I searched out roles.” But if his screen portrayals often show men abusing their power; his book choices for this episode of Shelf Life - Gore Vidal's Lincoln, and Robert Caro's The Path to Power -  show men who manipulated power for positive change, some bumps notwithstanding. 

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The bestselling  finance guru-turned-TV star, Ramit Sethi is on a mission to help all of us live what he calls our rich lives, but he's not just another finance bro. The son of Indian immigrants who were too poor to afford restaurants or overseas vacations, he has developed an extraordinary skill in helping people figure out how to spend money on the things that make our lives more enjoyable. One thing that separates Sethi from the crowd? He reads!  His choices for this episode of Shelf Life are Christopher Alexander’s  The Timeless Way of Building, a clarion call to think about buildings and urban environments in the context of community, and  Elliott Aronson’s The Social Animal, a touchstone of 20th century psychology that aims for nothing less than to understand "how we think, how we behave, what makes us aggressive, and what makes us loving."