reading lately: life stories

One thing I love about reading is getting inside of life stories, and getting a little taste of another’s experience with the world. Here I have a mix of fiction and non-fiction reads that are all about the story of a life, or how the story of a life is portrayed or told – and some pretty fascinating lives, too!

Heating and Cooling
In these 52 “micro-memoirs”, which range from a couple of sentences to a couple of pages, Beth Ann Fennelly takes on the range her life story, being a woman, a writer, a mother, a daughter, a wife - sometimes very poignantly, sometimes with a wry humor, and sometimes poetically. You get childhood memories and cultural observations and everything in between. One favorite very short one is titled “Married Love, III” and reads: As we lower onto the December-cold pleather seats of the minivan, we knock hands: both of us reaching to turn on the other’s seat warmer first.” Doesn’t that just turn the mundane routines of a marriage feel poetic and wonderful? I also loved the one called “I come from a long line of modest achievers”: “I’m fond of recalling how my mother is fond of recalling how my great-grandfather was the very first person to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge on the second day.” I just love the unexpectedness and humor that comes in this little bit of family lore she shares. You can easily read it in an afternoon, or it would also be great to pick up and read here and there, so you can have a little more time to ponder. Either way, it’s great, as is her memoir, Great with Child, that I originally knew her from. 4/5 stars


Theft by Finding
This is literally a life story: daily diary entries written by David Sedaris between 1977-2002. Aside from a brief introduction, there’s no editorializing, just the presentation of the entries. And I found it so fascinating and enjoyable. Fascinating because he’s a writer I feel I know pretty well from reading all of his work and listening to a lot of interviews with him (plus his work tends to be stories about his life) - but here you get to know a lot of David Sedaris before he was David Sedaris. So interesting to see how he just scraped by in his 20s and 30s, doing various struggling artist lifestyle kinds of things, like drugs and an assortment of odd jobs, and then to see how his career develops, and get insight into his creative process as well. And it was enjoyable because aside from the beginning feeling a bit slow, these are just delightful little snippets of insight into David Sedaris’ mind, and I think he has the most funny, wry way of observing the world and its quirks. If you haven’t read any David Sedaris before, you should get to know his other work first (better yet, listen on audio - his voice is so great); I’d say the diaries are better to read once you already know and love him. 4/5 stars


Hello, Sunshine
Sunshine Mackenzie is on her way to being a Food Network star, with her hit YouTube channel, popular cookbook, and gobs of Twitter and Instagram followers, until one day it all comes crashing down when her Twitter feed is hacked by someone claiming she’s a fraud. We quickly see that despite her carefully crafted social media responses to handle the situation, it’s actually true... Her cute backstory is totally fake, and now she’s losing her fans, her TV deal, her husband, and her apartment. As she’s forced to return to her childhood home and her true roots, she starts to really think about what it would be to live an authentic life, but only after she tries to claw her way back to the top using all of her old tactics of crafting her celebrity story and public persona. I would call this quite a light read, but it also takes on a serious topic of our times - how the current era of social media saturation influences how we portray our life stories, and how we live our actual lives in light of that. I found that quite interesting, but the character of Sunshine quite annoying at times (that happens to me often when a character might be a perfectly fine character but acts so unlike how I would that I can’t quite handle it), so instead of 3.5 stars, it’s: 3/5 stars


Young Jane Young
While interning for a Florida congressman during college, Aviva Grossman had an affair with the boss, which created quite the national news frenzy when it was found out. Now, years later, we see through three perspectives – her mother’s, her daughter’s, and her own – what that did to her life and her dreams for her future, the lengths she has had to go to make a new life story for herself, and how her past mistake comes back for her when she tries to run for office herself. So here’s another timely one for our culture of cable news punditry and social media! It’s an entertaining read for sure, but it’s also smart and serious and really makes you think about issues like “slut shaming” and the stories we tell about women in our society. In tone (smart characters and zingy dialogue) and format (narrated partly by mother and partly by emails to a pen pal from her precocious daughter), and in taking a bit of a satirical look at something about modern society, it reminded me of Where’d You Go, Bernadette - so if you liked that one, try this! (Also definitely read Gabrielle Zevin’s last book, The Storied Life of AJ Fikry, if you haven’t yet…it’s totally different, but so good!) 4/5 stars


The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
Evelyn Hugo is an Elizabeth Taylor movie star kind of character - she comes from what we might think of as this glamor age of film, with a long and illustrious career - but might be even more famous as tabloid fodder, with all of the Hollywood romances and marriages and scandals. So in this story-within-a-story, Evelyn has decided to finally reveal her life story, telling all of the juicy details to a young reporter, to be published after her death. She details the origins and endings of her famous seven marriages, and reveals who her truest and deepest love was (spoiler alert - not one of the husbands!). I enjoyed the Hollywood story (kind of in the way I enjoy my guilty pleasure, People magazine) and how it spanned her entire career, but the outer frame of the book, the relationship with reporter Monique that you get lots of foreshadowing about, was a less satisfying story arc. Overall a good vacation-type read, particularly if you enjoy some old Hollywood glamour, though even if that's not your thing, it's still a fairly riveting fictional life story either way. 3/5 stars


I'm usually a fiction reader, but the memoir type books here reminded me that I should branch out into that category more. If I find the right one, I find them just as compelling as my beloved novels. Any other great suggestions for me?


Sharing on What We're Reading Wednesday, Show Us Your Books.