Sunday Salon: One Last Time for 2013

Dateline:  Sunday, late morning/noontime, on the living-room sofa/at the kitchen desk. The windows are open, the breeze is blowing, and picture-perfect Tournament of Roses Parade weather is coming in. I’m puppy-sitting while everyone else is at the movies, because I decided to get some writing done instead of seeing The Hobbit a second time--two books need to be reviewed. The puppy is cooperating by taking a nap.  Thank you, Bellatrix (or as I sometimes call her, Trixiebelle)!

• UPDATE: They came back, with a refund--the tickets were for an 11:15 PM show, not AM. I will still be writing, but not so much puppy-sitting, and we’ll do the movie on Tuesday night. (Yikes, that means we’ll actually be out on New Year’s Eve!)

Reading: It’s already 2014 in galley reading around here. I’m trying to finish Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books, by Wendy Lesser before my review is officially too late for Shelf Awareness, and I’ve started Jason Porter’s novel Why Are You So Sad? (e-galley via Penguin’s First to Read Program) in my Kobo app. But I’m still trying to decide what my actual First Book of 2014 will be for Sheila’s challenge on Wednesday. She suggests that 

“It should be a special one--a book you love and are re-reading, or perhaps a book you have been wanting to read for some time.” 

I’m most likely going with Option 2, but since I have a LOT of those hanging around the house I’m having a hard time choosing!

Watching:  We’ve barely turned on the TV this week--there hasn’t been much on, we’ve had family around and Christmas to celebrate, and we have been being entertained by the afore-mentioned puppy. Bel won’t be with us long--she’s traveling back to New Hampshire with Kate at the end of the week--so Tall Paul and I have been trying to spend lots of quality time with our visiting grand-dog.

Listening: I have no audiobooks underway right now, because I haven’t been commuting...but I did get my monthly Audible credits last week, so I’m open to suggestions!

Blogging/Writing: I didn’t plan on a blogging break this past week, but I’m not actually sorry I ended up taking one, and I think I’ll be extending it through the week ahead as well. I may not be completely away--I'll be working on my 2013 retrospectives and Books of the Year picks--but whatever I do may not be on view here until 2014. We’re on the verge of a new year and many other bloggers seem to be taking it slow right now as well, so I won't feel too bad about it. On a related note, I took the nuclear option on my feed reader yesterday in hopes of keeping up with a lighter load through the first days of January--we’ll see how that works out.

Pondering: Also along the lines of “new year, new start” and all that, I’m considering various writing and blogging directions going forward.

• I’ve installed the DayOne journaling app on my MacBook and iPad with a goal of writing something there daily, even if it’s just some quick or sketchy notes. It may provide seeds for blog posts or other writing, or it may not, but I think it’s a practice worth testing.
• I will continue to post my thoughts about every book I read or listen to, but I will be honest about the fact that some books, although I enjoy them, don’t actually leave me with very many thoughts. Not every read is profoundly life-affecting, and I want to let myself off the hook for writing about them as if they all are--and for choosing books with the expectation that they need to be. I don’t want this to feel like work, and it’s starting to--I want to stop that before it gets too far along.
• I received a generous Christmas gift of “conference money,” so I’m trying to decide how I want to use it. I’ve been thinking about going back to Book Expo this year, since I skipped 2014--is anyone else already making plans for that? Let me know!

Gratuitous Photo of the Week

We so rarely have the whole family together that we wanted to document it. This is one of the less-goofy shots. That's Bel at the lower left, being held by Kate.

I hope you had a Merry Christmas, and that I’ll see you in the (Happy) New Year!

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WW: Before the Night

Our Wordless Wednesday Linky Group will indeed be wordless this Wednesday--we're taking Christmas Day off, and posting today on "The Night Before." Happy Holidays!

Summer Solstice in Boston, June 2013

Posted with Blogsy

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Sunday Salon: Chicken Soup and Cookies

Dateline: Sunday morning, around 6:30 as I begin this, in the loft. I wasn't sure I'd post today, but I got a cosmic message yesterday which seemed to be telling me I should, and which I present as a Gratuitous Photo of the Week:

I get it! I'll post something!

Consuming: Water and honey-lemon Ricola cough drops, soon to be followed by Zicam and Mucinex tablets. I have been nursing a cold since Wednesday, and dinner has been a can of chicken soup for the last few nights (well, not the same can every night, of course–I stocked up). It's not that bad a cold–just enough to be annoying when there are things to do–but I'm trying to subdue it before the family converges this week.

Reading: My lack of progress with the books I was reading last week--
Someone Else's Love Story by Joshilyn Jackson and the essay collection Why I Read by Wendy Lesser–continues, I'm sad to say. With some time off this week, I hope to spend some more time with them, but considering what else is going on this week, I'm not making any lofty plans. I suspect I'll fall just a bit short of my book-a-week reading goal this year, but I can live with that.

I don't think I'm joining any reading challenges for 2014. I'll set a total-books reading goal for the year, but I'll be tracking it on BookLikes rather than GoodReads (and my full book collection will continue to be cataloged on LibraryThing).

Watching: All of our TV favorites have gone on holiday hiatus, so we've cleared out the DVR–that's a minor accomplishment right there! There will probably be some movie-going during the next couple of weeks, but I'm not sure what we'll be seeing just yet.

Listening: I finished One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson this past week, and since I'm only going into the office on Monday this coming week, that's probably my last audio for the year. I hope to get the review drafted shortly, but since I suspect many of us won't be reading a lot of blog posts for the next week or so, I'm not sure when I'll put it up. I'd have fallen even further behind on my reading goals without audiobooks this year, and I'm appreciating them more than ever.

Blogging/Writing: As I sad last week, I'll be getting to work on my year-end retrospectives and Books of the Year picks soon, but those posts probably won't go up until after January 1. It may be easier to make time for that than for reading this week, to be honest, but we'll see. There will probably be behind-the-scenes blog stuff going on around here, but posting's likely to be more sparse than usual. But we've all got other things to do than blog at this time of year, don't we?

Anticipating: The same thing as many of you, I suspect–good food, fun, and family time on Christmas Eve and Day.

Planning: We have just a few last gifts to pick up and wrap, I'll be baking cookies today (and making every effort not to add unwelcome ingredients from my cold!). Tall Paul likes his chocolate-chip cookies traditional, but I'll be making another batch with butterscotch chips and cinnamon added in for Chris and Kate. And Spencer can't eat any of them, so he'll get gluten-free brownies.

Gratuitous Photo of the Week #2

How's your weekend going?

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A Christmas Story, 2013

It’s the first Christmas in the new house--the house we bought this past summer, next door to the old house. The old tree is up in the new living room. It’s not stuck in a corner here, but claims a place of honor right next to the staircase, in the middle of the house, and gets to wear more of its ornaments this year. The cheerfully wrapped packages wait under it for Christmas morning to arrive. We wait for our children to arrive on Christmas morning.

For Paul and me, the best Christmas gift will be having all of our children with us, together, under our new roof. It won’t happen until Christmas Day, and it won’t last nearly long enough.

This is my twelfth Christmas in California, and my son, Chris, has chosen to spend all but two of them out here with me. He was almost eighteen when his father and I divorced, so custody issues and the related holiday schedules were never really an issue; he’s always been able to make his own decision about where to spend Christmas. I’ve never taken for granted that he’ll spend it here--partly because this isn’t “coming home” for him, and partly because I’m waiting for the year that the “other” family he might spend the holiday with won’t be his dad’s back in Memphis, but a girlfriend’s...and eventually, his wife’s, and someday, their own. However, that year isn’t this year. Assuming that Washington, D.C. isn’t snowed in on December 23, we’ll have him here with us from Christmas Eve through Boxing Day.

This is my ninth Christmas with Paul, and since his children are younger than mine, holiday schedules have been very much an issue. They alternate Christmas Eve and Christmas Day between their parents each year. This is a Christmas Day year for us, and that will be the first time we see his daughter, Kate, since she left for college in New Hampshire back in August. We moved into this new house the week after she moved across the country, so she’s never lived with us here, and her old room at her mother’s house is now being occupied by her brother Spencer--in a way, this isn’t “coming home” for her, either, any more. But since our kids are coming to us, we feel like it’s a homecoming.

Thanks to our Italian heritage, my side of the family gives just as much weight to Christmas Eve celebrations as most do to Christmas Day. We would have a special late dinner, then go to midnight Mass, and each of us would open just one gift after we got home from church. Midnight Mass isn’t part of the tradition any more; I haven’t attended Mass more than half a dozen times since moving out here, and all I really miss is the singing, but the rest of my family of origin will be there on Christmas Day in the morning.

The special dinner, however, remains fully in effect. On Christmas Eve, we’ll gather at my sister Teresa’s house--Paul’s kids won’t be there this year, but mine will, and so will hers, of course. Teresa and her husband Mike will do most of the cooking, but I’ll probably be asked to bring my roasted potatoes as a side dish--my dad tells me he waits all year for those. My ten-year-old nephew Joey has been taking piano lessons, and I’ve heard that he’ll give us a little musical entertainment during the evening. Between dinner and dessert, there will be gifts to open--each of us will have one, and the younger ones among us will have quite a few more than one.

I love Christmas Eve with my relatives, but in the years that Kate and Spencer are with us on that night, it almost feels like Christmas Day itself doesn’t matter so much--we don’t linger over unwrapping gifts because they need to get back to their mother’s house, and since Spencer’s been eating gluten-free for over a year, we don’t have the customary Christmas morning cinnamon rolls any more.

This year, Christmas morning may get a late start, because even if my stepchildren don’t linger over unwrapping gifts at their mother’s, it’s still a good half-hour drive between there and here. The packages will wait a little longer, but the kids are older and the waiting’s not as difficult as it once was, even without cinnamon rolls. And Paul and I have been waiting for months to have them all together, in our home, on this day--we’ll manage these last few hours.

I’ve struggled to feel the “Christmas spirit,” whatever that’s supposed to feel like, for the last couple of years. This year, it’s seemed to come more easily, fueled by the anticipation of having our family together in a home that’s truly ours.

This is the final piece I wrote for my online Writers' Workshop, in response to the prompt "'Twas night before Christmas and all through the house–what?"

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Ornamental (Semi-Wordless Wednesday)

Here's a highlights tour of our Christmas tree, via this photo collage assembled by my husband. Our ornaments are a blend of pop-culture landmarks and mementos from our travels. Let me show you around...

Top row (l-r): The TARDIS (Doctor Who), Santa Homer (The Simpsons), Ralphie & the Leg Lamp (A Christmas Story)
Middle row (l-r): Shuttle from the Enterprise (Star Trek), Yellowstone souvenir ornament (2008), U.S.S. Constitution souvenir ornament (2013)
Botton row (l-r): Mr. Plow (The Simpsons), "Madly in Love in Carmel" California souvenir ornament (2006), Lincoln Memorial souvenir ornament (2010)

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The Controller; Or, Relating to My Writing

“Controller” has been my job title at three different places in the last fifteen years. It has very specific connotations in management accounting concerning the conservation and presentation an organization’s financial assets, but sometimes I think about how the word applies to me in broader terms.

A lot of my personal “work” during the last decade or so has been on my own issues related to control--accepting and backing off in areas where I don’t have much of it, applying it more wisely where I do, and trying to judge correctly just where a particular situation falls on the control spectrum. (It seems to come down to a spin on the Serenity Prayer, doesn’t it?)  My writing is an expression and representation of myself. It’s subject to the same assessments, and I think it also illustrates them.

In writing, I have almost all the control over what to include in a particular piece and how to present it. I have lots of tools (and a few tricks) available to use, and I sort and filter and shuffle through them as I put the words together. Even when the piece is for a specific assignment, and I’m working with someone else’s subject or style requirements, I still get to make most of the choices about what to say and how to say it. I choose whether to be more or less personal or objective, more or less thoughtful or emotional, and what details to bring in or leave out.

I have almost none of the control over how a reader will respond to that piece.  I know she’ll read my words through her own experience filter, but I can’t know what that means or how it will shape her reaction. I usually have some idea of the response I’d like to get--validation and praise, like back in my honor-student days, although now I hope for some understanding and empathy along with them--but all I can do is craft something that says what I mean, as well as it can, and hope it’s received in the way it’s intended. I know that sometimes it won’t be. When it’s not, I have to hope the reader can accept that the story I want to tell may not be the story she’s hoping to hear, but she can appreciate it anyway. (I’ve had to make that bargain as a reader plenty of times, so I don’t think it’s out of line to ask for that consideration as a writer.)

I’ve come to understand it like this: I can control the product. I can control some aspects of the process. But I can’t control how the market will respond to the product. Sometimes there’s no way to get it right, because sometimes there’s no “right” answer (which is one big difference between working with words and working with numbers).

I could maintain all the control if I never let my writing be seen by anyone else, but since I’ve chosen to do it in the public space of the internet, I’m apparently not going that route. When I let the words go off into that space, I lose my control over what happens to them next. I can’t control the response they’ll receive. I made my choices in the writing--the mood, the details, the style--with an intended effect, but the truth is that I can only know how they’d affect one specific reader: me. And I’m pretty sure I’m not the only reader I want.

I equivocate there--saying I’m “pretty sure” rather than I “KNOW” I want others to read my words--because what I’ve written is a product and representation of myself. The response isn’t only to what I write--it’s to me, as I come across through what I write, even when I’m not writing about personal experiences. The books and movies and TV shows I choose to write about are revealing, even before getting into what I actually say about them. I judge people on what they read and watch and listen to, so I expect to be judged for the same--but I don’t control what that judgment will be. I can only hope it’s mostly favorable, most of the time.

I wrote this piece during the week we discussed "Your Relationship to Your Writing" in the Writers' Workshop I've been participating in since September. We just wrapped up our fall session this week.

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Sunday Salon: 10 Days Till Christmas Edition

Dateline: Sunday morning, too bloody early. I did not intend to be awake at 5:30, people–that's for work days, not Sundays. And yet I am, so here I am, in the loft, having decided that since I'm up, I might as well get a Sunday Salon post done. Any typos may be blamed on writing on the iPad while wearing my regular glasses–I may be up already, but I don't have to put my contacts in yet.

Consuming: Water only right now. Recovering from steak and (gluten-free) chocolate cake last night, both eaten in celebration of Spencer's 14th birthday.

Reading: I've finally gotten to the November (!) She Reads Book Club selection, Someone Else's Love Story by Joshilyn Jackson, which I am alternating with the linked-essay collection Why I Read by Wendy Lesser…and I'm not making much headway with either one right now. Last week was my busy one at work–that's my official excuse, but I hope to get a little more done on the reading front this week. That includes blog-reading, too; I did some triage on the feed reader last night, and I hope that helps!

Watching: Also in celebration of Spencer's 14th birthday, we saw The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug yesterday. I'm sure it's not the last time I'll watch it (and I'm actually considering re-reading the book now–or at least finding it in audio–since I haven't read it since high school). I liked it a lot, but it felt like it was a little short (no pun intended) on actual Hobbit. On television, we're finally into the current-season Parks and Recreation episodes that have been collecting on the DVR. I think my favorite TV show right now is Arrow–superhero soap opera is definitely a weakness of mine!

Listening: I'm more than halfway through One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson, and I'm really enjoying it. I like his yarn-spinning style of telling history. (And don't tell my dad, but I'm getting him a print copy for Christmas.)

Promoting: Sheila is inviting us all to post a photo of what we're reading on January 1. I'm not sure what book it'll be yet, but I'm in! How about you?

Blogging/Writing: My writing workshop ends this week, and I need to finish my final assignment for it before 2 PM today. That and the piece I wrote last week may both turn into blog posts for this week, since I haven't finished any books and have nothing else ready. The past couple of weeks have been pretty review-heavy around here, but I'm all caught up on those now. I'll be getting to work on my year-end retrospectives and Books of the Year picks soon, but those posts probably won't go up until after New Year's.

Anticipating: All of our kids here next week, and three generations under our new roof on Christmas Day.

Planning: Getting the Christmas tree and decorations put up today!

Gratuitous Photo of the Week

This is Bel (short for Bellatrix). She's a mixed breed puppy adopted from Fur Baby Rescue in Los Angeles, currently fostering at my stepkids' other house. She's going back to New Hampshire with Kate after the holiday break, and we're all excited about spending Christmas with her.

How's your weekend going?

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Book Talk: I WANT MY MTV, by Rob Tannenbaum and Craig Marks

I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution

Rob Tannenbaum and Craig Marks

Penguin Plume (2012), trade paper (ISBN 0452298563 / 9780452298569)

Nonfiction: pop culture (oral history), 592 pages

Source: Purchased ebook (iBooks ISBN 9781101562415)

Reason for reading: Personal

The popular music of my lifetime is divided, in my mind, between “before MTV” and “after MTV.” I first saw Music Television in the fall of 1982--my boyfriend’s family had cable--and was fascinated by the channel and the new music it showcased. I lost track of it for a few years--the boyfriend became a husband, we became parents, and we didn’t have cable--and when I caught back up with it again, we had both changed. MTV came to define the 1980s...but in reading about its first decade in the oral history I Want My MTV, it occurred to me, and not for the first time, that its 1980s weren’t exactly my 1980s.

The 1980s are sometimes dismissed as an era when style trumped substance, and MTV and its influence are a big part of why it has that reputation. In its early years, MTV was radio with an enormous potential reach, and as the book notes, it reached audiences that hadn’t had the chance to be exposed to cutting-edge popular culture--many smaller, more isolated markets had cable television well before the big coastal cities did. (MTV was produced in New York City, but it actually wasn’t available for New Yorkers to watch it for a while.) But the “television” part of Music Television was what made the difference--the channel’s reach was amplified by the visual images that accompanied the music, and presented us with style and attitude that soon seeped into the mainstream.

I Want My MTV delivers on the style and attitude. I thought it resembled the channel’s early, all-music-video years in the way it kept me reading, eager to see what would come along next--but it also mimicked the exhaustion that would set in after watching MTV for hours, seeing some videos half a dozen times while the ones you were waiting to see never turned up at all. The book includes quotes from hundreds of people who were involved with MTV during its first decade in both its business and creative operations, and result is rarely dull, but it’s often scattered and not particularly insightful. It’s not at all difficult to imagine a multi-part TV documentary based on this--the talking-head clips are already here, and there’s certainly plenty of suitable video footage to edit in among them.

I might watch that documentary, to be honest, and I’d probably find it more satisfying than the book. I really did hope for more substance from I Want My MTV, and maybe that was my mistake. Maybe those years I lost touch with MTV are part of it too; I missed much of the channel’s transition from “modern rock” to “hair metal,” so I was less interested in the behind-the-scenes dirt on many of the videos discussed in the book. Don’t get me wrong--it was fun to read all the insider stories here, but I find that I don’t really need to hear as many tales of excess and decadence as I Want My MTV offers. I think MTV’s influence on late-20th-century popular culture is undeniable, but I think I’d like to read a history of it that’s a little more analytical and a little less personal.

Rating: 3.25 of 5

Book description, from the publisher’s website:
It was a pretty radical idea-a channel for teenagers, showing nothing but music videos. It was such a radical idea that almost no one thought it would actually succeed, much less become a force in the worlds of music, television, film, fashion, sports, and even politics. But it did work. MTV became more than anyone had ever imagined. 

I Want My MTV tells the story of the first decade of MTV, the golden era when MTV's programming was all videos, all the time, and kids watched religiously to see their favorite bands, learn about new music, and have something to talk about at parties. From its start in 1981 with a small cache of videos by mostly unknown British new wave acts to the launch of the reality-television craze with The Real World in 1992, MTV grew into a tastemaker, a career maker, and a mammoth business.

Featuring interviews with nearly four hundred artists, directors, VJs, and television and music executives, I Want My MTV is a testament to the channel that changed popular culture forever.

From the Introduction:

“Hardly anyone thought it would succeed.

“Upon hearing of the plan to launch a TV channel that would show music videos around the clock, businessmen of wealth and experience--wealthy men who ran record companies and partied with rock stars, and visionary men who made fortunes by anticipating the explosion of cable TV--scoffed and snickered. Who would watch this channel? Even if it proved popular, who would advertise there? Why would FM or Anheuser-Busch want to reach this channel’s audience, consisting mostly of fourteen- to twenty-four-year-olds? Where’s the money in that?

“Prior to the launch of this channel on August 1, 1981, only a few dozen people believed it would succeed, and all of them worked at the channel. The start-up staff was a coterie of misfits, inexperienced and determined, and included two one-eyed executives who were later hailed as visionaries. Which is not to say everyone who worked at the channel believed it would succeed. ‘It sounded like an asinine idea,’ Bob Pittman (one of the one-eyed executives) admitted five years after the launch, when the channel was the centerpiece of a $525-million bidding war. It’s easy to imagine this as the theme of one of the network’s early advertising campaigns, which were usually brash and self-mocking: ‘MTV: It sounds like an asinine idea.’”

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Holidays at Home--Wordless Wednesday

Holidays at other people's homes, that is--we won't be decorating for our first Christmas in our new home until this coming weekend.

Fireplaces, flowers, and flame: Sights of the Season

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Book Talk: FRACTURES, by Lamar Herrin

Fractures: A Novel

Lamar Herrin

Thomas Dunne Books (November 2013), hardcover (ISBN 1250032768 / 9781250032768)

Fiction, 320 pages

A version of this review was previously published in Shelf Awareness for Readers (November 26, 2013). Shelf Awareness provided me with a publisher-furnished galley to facilitate the review, and compensated me for the review they received and posted.

The politics and economics of alternative energy are filtered through one family’s experience in Lamar Herrin’s Fractures. In one small town above the Marcellus Shale, retired architect Frank Joyner may be the last holdout against the oil-and-gas companies looking to set up their derricks and release the natural gas it contains from its deep underground pockets. Controversy over the potential environmental impact of hydrofracking and the disruptiveness of drilling operations haven’t deterred many of Frank’s neighbors from leasing their land to a developer, and his public statements of ambivalence haven’t endeared him to some of his community.

Although the decision to lease the Joyners’ hundred acres to a gas company ultimately rests with Frank, he’s getting competing messages and agendas from members of his family, and whatever choice he makes is likely to alienate someone. The Joyners have some experience with that, however, which become apparent as Herrin explores their complicated relationships with each other. There’s clearly love and good intentions between them, but the hurts and hostilities simmering underneath grow just as clear as the novel moves toward its stunning, tragic climax.

As the narrative perspective shifts between several characters, including Frank, his children Jen and Mickey, and gas-company landman Kenny Brewster, each of them develops into someone complex and convincing. Herrin is drawing a pretty obvious metaphor between family dynamics and fracking in Fractures, but it’s effective, and it’s rendered with such empathy and emotional honesty that readers may be reluctant to choose sides.

Book description, from the publisher’s website:
The Joyner family sits atop prime Marcellus Shale. When landmen for the natural gas companies begin to lease property all around the family’s hundred acres, the Joyners start to take notice. Undecided on whether or not to lease the family land, Frank Joyner must weigh his heirs’ competing motivations. All of this culminates as a looming history of family tragedy resurfaces.

A sprawling family novel, Fractures follows each Joyner as the controversial hydrofracking issue slowly exacerbates underlying passions and demons. With echoes of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, Fractures takes its reader deep into the beating heart and hearth of a family divided.

Opening lines:

“On an April day in 1970, when most of his fellow architecture students were taking their spring break, Frank Joyner drew a Gillette razor blade across his left wrist with one express purpose in mind: he wanted to see if, when the blood appeared, he was willing to let it flow, or if, in fact, he wanted to live. On hand he had a stack of gauze pads, an Ace bandage, and a leather belt he’d tested on his forearm and then punched a new hole in that could serve as a tourniquet. In an anatomy book he’d checked out of the library, he’d read that the veins running down his wrist would yield, if cut, a dark blood, which would only ooze out, and that gauze pressed down beneath an Ace bandage would be sufficient to stop it. Flanking the veins and deeper set were the radial and ulnar arteries, and these would yield a bright red blood in a pulsating flow, which would take a tourniquet, in addition to the gauze and bandage, to stop. The arteries brought blood from the heart, oxygenated to that brighter red as it passed through the lungs; after its long, wearying trip through the body, the veins brought the blood back.

He’d intended to cut to the deeper and thicker-walled arteries, so that he would know, know for sure, but had in fact cut only to the depth of the veins, which had yielded a slow, blanketing flow more plum-colored than red, and which he’d contemplated for a while—impossible to say how long—before sighing deeply and applying the gauze and Ace bandage. He was twenty years old. Of course, he accused himself of cowardice in not cutting deeply enough to reach the arteries, but he also commended himself for not wasting time. He didn’t need the brighter, more youthful blood to tell him what the darker, more traveled blood had already made clear. He wanted to live.”

 

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Book Talk: SOME NERVE, by Patty Chang Anker

Some Nerve: Lessons Learned While Becoming Brave

Patty Chang Anker (Twitter) (Facebook) (blog)

Riverhead (October 2013), hardcover (ISBN 1594486050 / 9781594486050)

Nonfiction (memoir/self-help), 368 pages

Source: ARC from publisher

Reason for reading: Personal

I don’t usually quote more than the opening passage when I write about books here, but Patty Chang Anker captured something that smacked me in the face on page 161 (ARC) of Some Nerve: Lessons Learned While Becoming Brave (emphasis added):

"The girls and I have something in common. We've been told all our lives that we're smart…(T)here are two problems with this. One is that, if you actually are smart in some areas (which most people are), and things come easily to you there, you don't get in the habit of working hard to figure things out. The second is that if you really are gifted in *every* area (and no one I know is), being told you're smart makes looking or feeling dumb intolerable. We're not supposed to fail. If we fail, it's the activity that's dumb, not us. Of course, underneath it all is the ever-present fear that we're not really smart or capable at all, but we have to keep the world believing we are."

Physical and emotional traumas are commonly accepted as underlying roots of crippling fears, but “Impostor Syndrome”? Fear of screwups that could undermine your entire self-image? If I wrote in books, this bit would be highlighted with “story of my life” written in the margin alongside it. I’ve been working on changing that story since I officially entered “midlife” a decade ago. That was Anker’s milestone as well, and Some Nerve--a book born on her blog Facing Forty Upside Down--talks about how she, and others, changed their stories by doing what they feared.

As the mother of two young daughters, Anker realized that she didn’t want to be a “do as I say, not as I do” parent, and that she’d have a lot more credibility getting her kids to try intimidating new things if she was willing to as well. She wanted the girls to learn to swim, but she’d need to overcome her own fear of water in order to join them (and not be deterred by the broken foot she suffered during a trip to the beach with a friend); she took lessons in diving and surfing. A lifelong city girl, she learned to ride a bicycle so she could help teach her daughters how to do the same.

As she began facing her fears, and writing about her experiences while doing it, Anker came into contact with people who could help--and with people who wanted help to do what she was doing. Anker’s biggest fears concerned activities requiring physical skill, and while she didn’t experience some other common fears--such as flying, heights, and public speaking--she believed that they could be addressed with a similar combination of coaching, instruction, exposure, and gradual experience doing the scary thing. In moving from blog to book, Anker expanded her scope beyond her own efforts to include the stories of others who wanted to get out of their narrow, uncomfortable “comfort zones,” and were willing to share the process of doing so.

Some Nerve is a hard-to-pigeonhole book, and I think that may work to its advantage. As an account of one woman’s efforts to become a braver, better role model for her children by learning to do things that scared her, it’s memoir in subject and form. As an account of the specific steps that she, and others, took to overcome their particular fears, it’s inspirational and encouraging in the manner of self-help books, but because it takes a storytelling rather than instructive approach, it avoids “how-to” territory. Anker’s earnest, conversational style and good humor made it easy for me to connect with her as a reader, and she came across as someone I’d like to know better as a person. I hope she’ll continue talking about this--I’ve managed to conquer my own fear of highway driving, but I’m still apprehensive about plenty of other things, and I could certainly use the support.

Rating: 3.75 / 5

Book description, via the publisher's website:
Patty Chang Anker grew up eager to please and afraid to fail. But after thirty-nine years, she decided it was time to stop being a chicken. 

Motivated initially to become a better role model for her two young daughters, she vowed to face the fears that had taken root like weeds, choking the fun and spontaneity out of life. She learned to dive into a swimming pool, ride a bike, do a handstand, and surf. As she shared her experiences, she discovered that most people suffer from their own secret terrors—of driving, flying, heights, public speaking, and more. It became her mission to help others do what they thought they couldn’t, and to feel for themselves the powerful sense of being alive that is the true reward of becoming brave.

Inspired and inspiring, Some Nerve draws on Anker’s interviews with teachers, therapists, coaches, and clergy to impart both practical advice and profound wisdom. Through her own journey and the stories of dozens of others who have triumphed over common fears, she conveys with humor and infectious exhilaration the most vital lesson of all: Fear isn’t an end point, but the point of entry to a life of incomparable joy.

Opening lines:

"I’m in a bathing suit, and people are laughing. Oh, this can’t be good.

"The sun was a spotlight on the diving board. It must be 20 degrees hotter up here, I thought. My forehead was sweaty, and, come to think of it, so was everything else. 

"I bent over. The image of Tiffany Chin skating her 1987 U.S. Nationals long program with a wedgie in her blue Lycra costume flitted through my head. I dug my toes into the nubby wet board and tried to get a grip on my own situation.

"Do I have a wedgie? I don’t think so."

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