jodiwilldare's reviews
1523 reviews

What has always drawn me to the short stories of Mary Gaitskill is that she spends a lot of time writing about the struggle women have with their intelligence and their sexuality and how giving into one always feels like subverting the other. This is a struggle a lot of intelligent women have because giving in to sex means turning off your brain and that’s scary. Plus, it can get you into a lot of trouble.

Don’t Cry, Gaitskill’s third short story collection, isn’t about struggle. In fact, I’m not entirely sure what it’s about. Not that collections are about any one thing, but usually have a sort of common theme that ties the stories together (like a record comprised of different songs).

As an avowed Gaitskill fangirl, I find myself floundering a bit when it comes to talking about this book.

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Leif Enger is one of those Minnesota writers I’ve always wanted to read but never got around too. Part of the fear was the old-timey western sort of themes that seem to run through his books. I’m not an old-timey western kind of girl. But you know, sometimes it’s good to branch out from your comfort zone.

I’m glad I took the chance on So Brave, Young, and Handsome, Enger’s roadtrip book about a novelist with writer’s block and a train robber bent on apologizing to the wife he abandoned decades ago.

There’s something charming about older gentlemen taking off from their homes in search of that something missing from their lives. Enger’s book, which came out a year or so before, reminded me of The English Major by Jim Harrison. Both have older men (and by older I mean men past the bullshit 20/30something angst that plagues so many novels) traveling across the country and getting into some kind of trouble.

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There is a sort of adage passed down from writing teacher to student, usually after workshopping a student story where the last paragraph involves the main character waking up only to discover the previous thirteen or twenty-three pages have all been a dream. Oftentimes there is an alarm clock involved.

The adage goes something like this: “Nobody cares about your dreams. Nobody wants to read about them. Knock it off with this dream nonsense.”

The problem with dreams is that they can mean anything and nothing. They’re tough to interpret and to really get the significance of the dream you often need a lot of information about the dreamer. Symbols in dreams are so incredibly specific to the dreamer that without that information it just seems, well, weird.

Knowing all this, reading the first volume of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, Preludes and Nocturnes was kind of tough. I cared roughly fifty-percent of the time, which seems about right. Because when someone tells me about a dream they had, I care for exactly half the amount of time it takes them to tell me the dream.

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When the Largehearted Boy proclaims that something is his all-time favorite ever, I run out and consume whatever that thing might be. That’s what fangirls do. I am still waiting for him to proclaim Michael Cera his all-time favorite Canadian ever, but that’s beside the point.

The point here is that LHB proclaimed that David B’s Epileptic was his favorite graphic novel, even though it’s a memoir (why is it that graphic memoirs are always called graphic novels?). I’d have picked it up based on that endorsement alone, but the luck I’ve had reading graphic memoirs (see: Persepolis, Fun Home, and It’s a Bird) made me extra excited.

Holy crow! This is the kind of book that kicks your ass and ties your brain in a knot. It’s not for the faint of intellect or for those who cannot handle emotions laid bare.

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A few months ago my friend Wolfdogg loaned me a couple of post-9-11 anthologies that contained a bunch of short graphic (as in pictures and not extremely, grossly detailed) stories about the artist’s reactions to 9-11. I dove into one of the books and about half-way through put it down. I couldn’t continue.

It’s not that it was too soon, it was that it was entirely too late. The comics filled with kumbaya, we’re all in this together, united we stand, blah, blah, blah just rang false nine years later. Knowing years after 9-11 the fallout of that event — our country more divided than ever, thousands of lives lost fighting wars for reasons that were false and unclear, economic ruin — the peace, love, and understanding tone of those anthologies just rang false and, ultimately, naive.

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Dear @colsonwhitehead,

I’m sorry for doubting you. I was going to write this apology/review in a series of 140 character paragraphs (ala tweet) but that’s too much of a pain in the ass and would do your beautiful book, Sag Harbor, a great disservice. It deserves better.

I’m sorry for wondering about the story-ness of your story. I was getting scared. From the beginning you set up a certain kind of story, the summer Benji and Reggie went to Sag Harbor and were the kids in the empty house, out for the summer while their parents toiled away in the city, only visiting on weekends.

You set up a story where Benji and Reggie, a mere eleven months apart in age, were beginning to sever the Benji-Reggie two-headed beast, and you set up that story so beautifully, it took my breath away. I loved how you explained their bond:

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By all laws of logic and mathematics, I should love Jeffrey Brown’s graphic memoir Little Things: A memoir in slices. We like the same music, we’re about the same age, we’re both writers, and this is the stuff that fills his book. Seriously, I should have a full-blown crush on this book right now.

And yet, somehow, I don’t.

The problem is, I think, that Brown is too much like me, and most of the 30somethings I know. His stories, while amusing at times, lack the kind of emotional significance and depth I look for when I read. And that’s not to say every story you read has to be a life or death moment of drama-filled importance. However, the onus is on the writer to include in his/her story why exactly the story is being told at all. And that’s what each of the slices is missing, the whyness of them.

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I have to admit The Rock Snob’s Dictionary: An Essential Lexicon of Rockological Knowledge was probably not meant to be read from cover to cover like most books. Really, who sits down and reads the dictionary?

I did, and it was a little exasperating. Mostly because the definitions started to get a little samey. How many times can you use the word hirsute in one book? Apparently 48 kabillion. Ditto lodestar. In fact, those two words were used so often that I started to count each instance. But then I decided that was insane and stopped.

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You know, my gut told me Laura Rider’s Masterpiece was going to be disappointing chicklit. But I didn’t listen to my gut. Instead I listened to the voice in my head. That voice was Jane Hamilton’s, who I sew read in 2007 at The Loft. She was there as judge of the McKnight Fellowships (I think) and she gave such a great speech about writing and how even though people keep telling her to write a memoir or something other than fiction, she doesn’t because nobody realizes that those kinds of writing aren’t the same thing. I was smitten.

Then she read from the beginning of her work in progress, a book about a bored Wisconsin woman who runs a garden shop with her husband. It was witty and funny and her main character, Laura Rider, was obsessed with a public radio personality, Jenna Faroli. What she read was funny and witty. So when I saw the book had finally been released, I ignored my gut and followed my head.

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