Secrets of the Talking Jaguar – Martin Prechtel

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The Mayan culture has a rich tradition of shamanism that is as wild and wily as any indigenous spiritual way. In Secrets of the Talking Jaguar, Martin Prechtel, a Puebla Indian who hitchhiked to Guatemala and landed in Santiago de Atitlan, relates his own initiation into Tzutujil shamanism by an irascible ninety-year-old wise man nicknamed Chiv. Nicolas Chiviliu Tacaxoy was a famous shaman in the Tzutujil tradition and he believed Martin had been sent to him to train.

It’s really quite a good story—Chiv, the initiating shaman was a respected elder in the village, a powerful healer and sage. Prechtel was a mess, an Indian kid disenfranchised by the simultaneous marginalization and forced assimilation of his tribal culture, set adrift by the early death of his mother, penniless, open to adventure and drifting below the border in Oaxaca and then in the Mayan Highlands. But his visionary justification for all the rough adventures that befell him served him well enough. He had the gift of seeing what happened as portents and milestones on a pilgrimage, his own journey to discover who he was.

Daily life in the colorful village is brutally hard and beautifully symbolic. Ritual is shot through with grace, miracles abound, the gods and the people live in an intimate alliance that must be renewed continually with celebrations, ceremony, contributions and veneration. Prechtel learns deep qualities of attentiveness and mental toughness. He undergoes difficult trials to prepare him to hold the teachings and the power of a sacred lineage. He drinks a lot of local moonshine and learns to listen for the true voices of the rain, the spirits and the wind.

I knew Santiago for some of the time Prechtel studied with his master and lived there as a respected shaman although I had no knowledge of him. I was an outsider without the curiosity or courage to penetrate the closed traditional society and there was no ancient shaman to invite me in. I saw—and feared–the army post at the edge of town, the unease at the assassination of the mission’s Catholic priest and the anticipated reprisals, and the unsmiling faces and breathtaking embroidery of the women in the market. I could sense much of what Prechtel laments about the destruction of the villagers’ culture and vivid spiritual life but he fills in the facts.

The world he stepped into in the 1970s as a guitar-toting vagabond no longer exists. The beliefs he was entrusted with, the skills he was carefully taught, the sacred Village Heart, the medicine bundle of objects that would help him to invoke the power of the gods, all accompanied him into exile—back home to New Mexico. But before he was forced to leave, he trained with a wickedly funny trickster and gave his own heart to the place and its people. As a traveler, I could only glimpse the outside edges of what was forfeit to a modern, uncomprehending world. Martin Prechtel captures the old truths in the pages of a book, keeping them safe for the day when they might emerge into the light of the Highlands once again.    

Secrets of the Talking Jaguar   Martin Prechtel | Penguin Putnam

The Toughest Show on Earth – Joseph Volpe

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Joe Volpe was the volatile, rags-to-riches general manager of the Metropolitan Opera. In the Met’s rarified Upper East Side social environs, an apprentice carpenter who rises through the ranks to take over the whole shop is an oddity—never happened before and not likely to happen again. So, The Toughest Show on Earth: My Rise and Reign at the Metropolitan Opera is Joe Volpe’s Cinderella story, although Cinderella he is not.

The story is as self-serving as any news-name memoir usually is. Volpe casts himself as the hero in the drama with flawless recall of the one-line zingers he delivered to those unwise enough to cross swords—or words—with him. He served as general manager for sixteen years, working at the Met from 1964 until becoming the top dog in 1990 and then retiring in 2006. His is a story of mastery and ambition—Volpe seems to have always envisioned himself as destined for Valhalla—the Met’s version anyway. And he was good at what he did—from building a set to reorganizing how opera’s massive sets are struck in order to streamline the work, to negotiating with the intractable musicians’ union when a last-minute walk-out threatened to scuttle the whole season.

Many chapters are devoted to the larger-than-life personalities who strut and fret and deliver high C’s on the Met’s stage. Sopranos and tenors get the lion’s share of the ink as they tend to be the biggest divas and pitch the most histrionic fits. Volpe was legendary for not taking crap from trantrumming performers and their insistent managers. He spends time twice justifying his firing of the troubled (and troublesome) Kathleen Battle—a move that generated international headlines and fatally damaged Battle’s career. To be fair, she seemed to be doing an excellent job of damaging her own career without any help from Volpe and that is the reason we are given for her dismissal. Pavarotti and Domingo, the two legendary tenors in lifelong contention for top billing, had some less-than-public issues about that competition that Volpe details at length. The failures and foibles of leading ladies, villains and heroes–weight, sex appeal, musicality, professionalism–all end up under the magnifying glass. The dishy stuff is fun.

Opera directors—the designers and shapers of the multimillion-dollar new productions that are the flash and dazzle of the opera world—can’t hide behind the scenery when Volpe is telling tales. I have been fortunate (or unfortunate, depending on the production) to observe several new productions from pre-rehearsal to opening night, critical reviews and run of the debut season at the Met and the drama is crazy, the results not always predictable. Some directors create enduring dreams that deliver on first performance and fill the house season after season. Quite a few fail to measure up. A number of the successes are trotted out year after year until they are dusty, shabby and tired but audiences still clamor for them. Horses, donkeys, dogs and other fauna ensure that chorus members step lively to avoid stepping in anything. Occasionally, scenery fails to perform as expected and can even be dangerous. Predictably, artists have love-hate relationships with directors and those may be carefully smoothed over or end badly with ugly headlines and empty seats.

I won’t grant Volpe the evaluation that the Met is the toughest show on earth. It’s a complex, risky and exhausting venture, with too many capricious constituents and perilous finances at the best of times. But opera is story and music and, while you can really mess that up, you never start from square one with an opera. The art form has its perennial devotees and new presentations thrust it into a continual limelight of discovery. It takes heroic effort to land a solid hit or even a mediocre performance. But a Verdi chorus or a Mozart flute trumps any single player, general manager or prima donna. Volpe’s epic run at the Met gave him a lot of gray hairs and a lot of great stories. Quite a few of them surface in this engaging book. Not precisely a 3-ring circus but a little something for everyone, including a few high-wire acts, daredevils and snarling beasts.

The Toughest Show on Earth: My Rise and Reign at the Metropolitan Opera   Joseph Volpe | Alfred A. Knopf   2006

Charlotte au Chocolat – Charlotte Silver

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Charlotte au Chocolat is a memoir—part foodie journal/part chronicle of a childhood spent in a well-known restaurant in Harvard Square. Charlotte Silver was named for the dessert and her parents served several versions of it in Upstairs at the Pudding, the third-floor dining establishment at the Hasty Pudding Club. But the chocolate recipe was so popular that it was always on the menu. So were other favorites—all unapologetically rich, hand-crafted dishes that made the elaborate restaurant avant-garde in a wasteland of Boston baked beans and student fast-food specials.

Charlotte recounts a menu of memories, incidents laced with marbled beef, roasted pheasant, Chantilly cream and the ubiquitous Shirley Temples, served with a flourish to a little girl ordering her nightly meal at the staff table in the corner. She was taught to greet customers and staff by name and dressed every night in an appropriately fancy costume—dress-up for the glittery dining room and its upscale guests. She wore black patent leather Mary Janes instead of sneakers and took naps under the linen covered bar until she got too big for the crawl space.

It was an elevated life for a not-at-all-wealthy family—nightly fine dining in the midst of affluent Bostonians and Harvard visitors, serenades at Sunday brunch by the Krokodiloes—a campy Harvard singing group, brioche stuffed with fried oysters, never macaroni and cheese. Julia Child lived in the neighborhood and stopped in occasionally. Celebrated actors and actresses were feted at the annual Woman and Man of the Year Awards. It was pure theater, a magical world for a child. And a lonely one. But the fairytale setting and access to an intense adult business compensated for the odd upbringing.

Charlotte au Chocolat is interesting—light as a meringue in most spots, serious as Beef Wellington here and there. It reminded me occasionally of Collette’s memoir of her mother, although these memories are far less complex and vividly drawn. Charlotte’s mother was a force to be reckoned with, a woman perfectly attuned to elegance and stage settings who worked like a stevedore in the kitchen and always dabbed a little Joy in her cleavage before the evening seatings. “Never cry in the restaurant,” was one of her strict rules and she didn’t, not even on the night that the Pudding served its last meal and closed, a victim of the greedy real estate gobble that transfigured Harvard Square and peopled it with chain stores and big box emporiums.

Charlotte Silver didn’t take her finely calibrated tastes to Harvard. She studied writing at Bennington in Vermont, on scholarship—the restaurant never made much money and the fridge in the family’s rented apartments was usually untended and mostly empty. Her mother went on to open another, less ambitious restaurant while Charlotte followed somewhat in her father’s footsteps. After a divorce, he gave up working as head chef and began a new career as an art photographer, happy to be out of the kitchen for good. But the Pudding imprinted itself so strongly on a child who grew up there that her mother’s world is the one that defines her. Pink is the predominant color and recollections of elaborate meals, transient staff friendships, endless Shirley Temples and desserts worthy of a court table flavor Silver’s tea party of a book.

 Charlotte Au Chocolat: Memories of a Restaurant Girlhood   Charlotte Silver | Riverhead Books   2012

My Mother’s House & Sido — Colette

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Colette wrote lyrical vignettes that describe her unconventional country childhood and her beloved mother, the Sido of the title of My Mother’s House & Sido.  It is a collection rich in sensuous detail, mirroring the delight in nature and the keen observance Colette inherited from her mother. She writes of endless flowers in a much-cultivated garden and of Sido’s reluctance to cut them as ornaments for a neighbor’s funeral. She recounts meals, tastes and textures so faithfully a reader longs for the simple, natural breads, creams and country dishes of a past era.

Her eye captures the shimmer and hue of every fabric and her quick mind conjures the private motivations of neighbors, big brothers and the mysterious and indulgent parents who allowed her to grow up unfettered and a little wild, secure in her own choices and observations. It was an ideal childhood for a writer and Colette adds to the fairytale quality by idealizing what may have been very pedestrian events and the deprivations of a family out of fortune. She felt rich, her mother was certain of their abundance and the child exulted in her experience. Apparently, she never forgot a thing.

The second section of the book, Sido, deals in more depth with Colette’s father, a war veteran who adored his wife but was frustrated in his business dealings. After his death, the children discovered that a shelf of carefully matched volumes in his library was meant to hold his own books, all named on their spines, but was filled with beautiful blank pages instead. The Colette siblings—Colette was the family name of Sidonie Gabrielle Colette—were a headstrong and quirky lot. One brother became a doctor, another was a prodigiously gifted musician who preferred his solitude and silence to a career, an older sister kept her distance from the rest and married badly. Colette was the younger of the two children from her mother’s second marriage, and the baby, so she had Sido’s complete attention and the benefit of her considerable country wisdom.

Colette is such a wonderful writer that these bits are compelling and entertaining, even though they don’t follow a story arc and appear to be random musings. My Mother’s House & Sido evokes a lost world that seeped into the consciousness of a prolific writer, along with the scents, sights and sounds associated with an idyllic childhood and the woman at the center of Colette’s early memories.

My Mother’s House and Sido   Colette | Farrar, Straus and Giroux   1995

The Man Within My Head – Pico Iyer

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When I saw that Pico Iyer had written a self-examination of his long fascination with and links to Graham Greene, I knew I’d have to read it. Iyer’s work evokes Greene for me sometimes—the outsider’s adventures in extreme and theatrical cultures are the stuff of movie swashbuckling or gritty documentaries. But the exploits cast another kind of filter over the events that I knew as well. There is a sharp and bitter loneliness in not belonging. There are shadows, a knife-edge of introspection, a heightened awareness of what is—and what you are not. It’s easy to become someone else when you travel beyond your own social boundaries but, paradoxically, it’s impossible to avoid yourself.

The Man Within My Head covers territory not often encountered in travel writing. Iyer digs into his bifurcated childhood as an Indian boy in a British boarding school with regular trips home to Santa Barbara where his parents’ academic lives were immersed in the culture of the 60s and 70s. Pico Iyer’s boyhood public school experiences were similar to those of Greene—and his subsequent wandering around the globe duplicated patterns of Greene’s journeys as well.  Greene became for him a kind of surrogate father, a fictional counterpart to the real father, a distinguished Gandhi scholar, who regaled college students with his brilliant syntheses of East and West, classical and contemporary.

The book is not a linear narrative. Scenes emerge, fade, veer off, double back like hairpin-turn mountain roads—the kind with single lanes, sheer drops and white crosses marking fatalities. Trips to Ethiopia and Bolivia seem foolhardy with explicit danger. In Sri Lanka, an explosion of violence makes leaving the relative safety of a hotel room unappealing. In Cuba, the trips are research for an eventual novel, Cuba and the Night, that is very thinly fictional. Our Man in Havana places Greene in eerily similar circumstances. In fact, Greene’s books ghost through Iyer’s travels from Indo-China to the Caribbean. Greene’s spiritual dilemmas engage Iyer in an enduring argument, even as Iyer turns his back on his world and upbringing, searching for some spare truth in his own peregrinations.

A surprise in the recounting of the life of a writer I have always sought out (Iyer, although I could claim the same thing about Greene), Pico Iyer is a good friend of Bernie Diederich. I knew Bernie and worked with him in Miami—he is the grand old dean of Latin American and Caribbean coverage and has written brilliant books on many of the region’s legendary dictators—but, in all the time I knew him, I never suspected he was close to Iyer. A small world just got much smaller. Made me nostalgic for the days when any bag I carried contained a passport, a reporter’s notebook, a pair of Raybans and some cash for the currency exchange.

Iyer’s trek inside his own mind isn’t an extended essay and it isn’t a memoir—more like the puzzling of a Zen koan or a long meditation on a literary and personal influence. Graham Greene was, and remains, a strong presence for him. The Man Within My Head examines the convergence of their lives and work, pulls out pieces of Iyer’s life and holds them up to the light, reveals as much about the author as it does about the real and fictional fathers who haunt him.

The Man Within My Head   Pico Iyer | Alfred A. Knopf   2012

Related post:  Cuba and the Night

Just Kids – Patti Smith

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Patti Smith’s National Book Award-winning memoir of her twinship with Robert Mapplethorpe, Just Kids, is many things. It is a primer on how to follow an inchoate longing and become an artist out of nothing and nowhere. It is a testament to a bond so unbreakable it survived gut-wrenching poverty, sexual ambivalence, homelessness, hunger, and an assemblage of male lovers—some his, some hers.

The two kids who swanned around Greenwich Village, Coney Island and the Chelsea Hotel in their thrift store costumes fed each other, supported each other, used each other in their art, moved apart and came together from their earliest days in New York City to Mapplethorpe’s death at 43 from AIDS in 1989. Along the journey, Smith discovered how to merge her poetry with rock and roll and Mapplethorpe turned away from his Catholic boyhood into a fascination with hustling, S&M and a singular vision of photography. Her first album, Horses, with an iconic cover photo shot by Mapplethorpe, exploded into public consciousness. His evocative and disturbing photos, collages and drawings established him as a polarizing rebel who inspired love and hate in equal measure.

Smith writes description in poetic riffs that transform memory into dream. She has clear recall of telling moments with the pantheon of musical, literary and artistic greats who hung out at Max’s Kansas City, the Chelsea Hotel, CBGB and Horn & Hardart’s. Allen Ginsburg once supplied the missing dime that allowed a starving Smith to snag a cafeteria sandwich then, ever on the prowl, asked her if she was a boy or a girl. Smith once cut her long hair in the style of Keith Richards and earned instant acceptance from some hard-sell members of Warhol’s crowd. Mapplethorpe saved Smith from a dinner date gone wrong by pretending to be her boyfriend—and then he became her boyfriend. They were silly, naïve, intensely serious about becoming artists, worked on their art day and night, shared a single hot dog, a single museum ticket, a single room with a hotplate, a single vision that filled their empty bellies and warmed their unheated digs.

Just Kids is the “this happened” and “then that happened” and then “this is who was there” formula of celebrity memoirs that capture a rich period in time. But it’s much more. It’s the story of a connection that seems almost mystical to Smith. Mapplethorpe embraced his homosexuality but turned to Smith as his permanent muse. Patti Smith went on to marry and have two children. The last photograph Robert Mapplethorpe took of her includes her infant daughter, reaching out to him from her mother’s arms. When they were young, hungry and just starting out, a tourist urged her husband to take a picture of Smith and Mapplethorpe at Washington Square Arch in the Village, a hangout for colorful types all dressed like impoverished artists. The husband surveyed the two of them, real artists deep in anonymity and still searching to define their art, and said “Nah. They’re just kids.” They were. But he missed a great shot.

Just Kids   Patti Smith | HarperCollins   2010

Sweet Judy Blue Eyes – Judy Collins

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I’ve been a fan of Judy Collins forever–some of her greatest hits and quirkiest songs were my anthems and her work wears well. Not so much the life recounted in her memoir. Such a creative genius, sensitive intelligence, major talent, raging alcoholic and faithless lover. She drank her way through most of the heyday of peace, love and folk music, knew everybody before they were anybody, and embraced free love–or at least overlapping serial monogamy–with the passion of a true zealot.

Early Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Stephen Stills and a roster of musical greats are woven in and out of the story of a Colorado mountain girl with a larger-than-life dad who never let blindness hold him back and never let moderation curb his drinking and destructive rages. Judy adored him and when she could, she emulated the drinking, if not the fierce temper. She admits booze ran her life but blames her own naiveté and her unconventional therapists for decades of blackout drinking and daily intoxication. She was a high-functioning drunk, able to perform and mix socially as long as she was within reach of a bottle. It’s the sad refrain of a remarkable life and a career that made her a huge star. Drinking and the gypsy life of a performer cost Collins her marriage and eventual custody of her son, even as it left us with amazing music.

The stories of how gigs got put together, meetings resulted in brilliant collaborations and hits, history happened and wrote itself into the music, are fascinating. She sang through the eras of civil rights struggles, the Kennedy assassinations, the murder of Martin Luther King, Woodstock and the Viet Nam War protests. She shared club dates and stages with Janis Joplin and knew the Baez family well, loved and left Stephen Stills before Crosby and Nash, hung out in Laurel Canyon with Joni, discovered the songs–like “Both Sides Now” and “Send in the Clowns”–that would make her albums go platinum and launch careers for a few songwriters. She wrote her own haunting music, found a lifelong voice teacher in the apartment next door to hers on the Upper West Side, tried and failed to keep her son safe from the family curse of drinking and addiction that would eventually take his life.

Sweet Judy Blue Eyes is a riff on Stills’ “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” that he wrote when Collins was leaving him for Stacy Keach. It gets a little hard to keep up with her—but the dish on the Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene, the beginnings of Elektra Records, the jam sessions that turn into memorable hits, the endless travel, the hook-ups and the break-ups are an intimate glimpse of the world behind the album covers and the footlights. I was exasperated at the excuses for the incessant high-risk drinking but it was an accurate portrait of a drinker’s life—not a pretty picture. I was happy she managed to sort it out, kick the addiction and find a committed, healthy long term relationship. The sorrow of a son lost, the friendships that survived those rocky, heady early years, the lyrical music are all in this book—with a few black and white photos for nostalgia buffs and more tour itineraries than even the staunchest fan will be able to keep track of.         

 Sweet Judy Blue Eyes: My Life in Music    Judy Collins | Crown  2011

Colors of the Mountain – Da Chen

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I opened Colors of the Mountain to find a beautiful calligraphy and a red chop along with the word “Happiness” and Da Chen’s scribbled signature. We bought several of his books a few years ago when he came to a Chinese New Year celebration in Manhattan. He sat at a table patiently signing and painting in each book purchased and took the time to talk to everyone with a question or a comment.

The celebration was sponsored by an organization formed by parents who adopted children from China—kids who were abandoned because of the One-Child policy. The children were victims of politics and economics who ended up in the U.S. just as Da Chen himself did, although he grew up in the Cultural Revolution when educated and well-off entrepreneurial families were castigated, relieved of their property and sent to re-education labor camps. Da Chen’s resilience, as a bullied but mischievous small boy who was first-in-class but least in esteem, allowed him to survive an often hellish childhood intact. He seemed rather pleased to see the rambunctious children—most of them girls—decked out in their holiday finery, poring over books and Chinese Barbie dolls, performing traditional dances and watching Monkey King theatrics, gymnasts, er hu players and drummers.

His book is as delightful as he is. In the small southern Chinese village of Yellow Stone, the Chen family is despised as members of the “landlord class.” They spend months starving each year during the famine season and the older children are soon sent to work in the fields. Father and grandfather are frequently called out, mocked, beaten and sent for long stretches to hard labor at re-education camps. Da Chen, the youngest, is a wizard in school but he is shunned, bullied, beaten and even set-up by his teachers and threatened with jail as a nine-year-old boy by the teachers and principal of his school.

He responds by finding a ragtag group of outlaw boys who become his best friends and save him from the awful loneliness and corrosive treatment he endures in school. With his carefree band of trouble makers he learns to smoke, cut school, steal food, cheat at cards and generally misbehave, mostly under the radar of the authorities. He is a character right out of Mark Twain—tricking the unwary to his own advantage, happiest in the middle of a forbidden adventure, a bright kid using his wits to engage with life however mean and brutal it is.

Da Chen is very appealing, even when he drops out of school and becomes a minor lawbreaker. But the shining, early promise of his good grades and admirable industry are casualties of his social survival tactics. When Mao dies and the Party reverses its position on education he is caught short, wanting to take the exams for college but years behind in his studies.

The grown-ups are fully drawn characters in this narrative and they shape the boy as much as his misadventures. Grandpa was a wise, great man who taught Da Chen calligraphy, an art form he still practices. Mother and father struggled to feed their brood and find opportunities to save them from a life as field hands. Da Chen studies English with an older Chinese woman who is a Baptist missionary. He goes head-to-head with incompetent teachers in the local schools and learns what he can from the real teachers who isolate and mock him in class. He spies on pretty girls with his unlettered, hoodlum friends and writes love letters for them. He eggs-on a few friends to try for college, accepts the buddies who would rather perfect their gambling, tutors his eldest brother for the life-changing exams and commits himself to months of 15-hour cram days to sit for the English exams.

This is one of the best portraits of life in the Cultural Revolution I’ve read. It is rich in detail, alive with humor and mischief, equally descriptive of the light-shifting Ching Mountain that overlooks the town, and the bleeding, broken blisters and exhaustion of mandatory farm work. Da Chen’s family is intelligent, loyal and loving. His friends are incorrigible and entertaining. The politics are horrific and infuriating. The boy himself is a born survivor with a quick wit and an inventive approach to his troubles. You have to root for him. And you can’t help being inspired by his valiant, all-out effort to overcome the hand he has been dealt and achieve his dreams.

Colors of the Mountain ends as Da Chen leaves his village for the university in Beijing, an unheard of feat for a boy who went barefoot and hungry for much of his life. His adventures at university and eventual scholarship to Columbia University Law School and life as a bestselling author are all in the future. I’m looking forward to reading a few more of the books we bought from him that day. His debut memoir is one of the most uplifting stories I’ve read in a long time.

 Colors of the Mountain  Da Chen | Anchor Books  2001

Blue Nights – Joan Didion

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Blue Nights is more like a poem than a memoir. Joan Didion writes about her daughter Quintana Roo, motherhood, loss, and aging in that succinct prose of hers that works like embroidery stitches—precise, practiced, selected with the impact of the finished piece in mind. She describes a sad journey to a dark place by editing out far more than she reveals and circling back to evocative fragments over and over.

Quintana died less than two years after the sudden death of Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, but she was already gravely ill when he died. She was 39 years old and succumbed to a septic infection that no medical intervention was able to cure, after repeated relapses, induced comas, emergency room visits and hospitalizations in intensive care units. A Year of Magical Thinking chronicles the cardiac arrest that claimed Dunne in their Manhattan apartment after a hospital visit to see Quintana, while Didion was preparing dinner in the kitchen. By the time the hugely popular best seller came out, Quintana, too, was gone and Didion could find no magic to sustain her through her losses.

The book’s title refers to a few weeks around the summer solstice when the evening light just before sunset turns a luminous blue. Didion says this doesn’t happen in southern California, where Quintana Roo was adopted and where she spent her childhood. But the blue light is observable in New York, where the family moved decades ago and where Quintana died. The blue is the same as the spent rods in nuclear reactors or stained glass in a cathedral, Didion notes, and I grant her poetic license because I have been in the spent fuel chambers of a nuclear reactor and seen the eerily beautiful blue light wavering up through the pools of water but I have never seen an evening or a sky like that in the city, or in Central Park.

It is a gentle metaphor, though, for all the sorrow in this slim reflection and there are other colors that pierce Didion’s prose and return again and again to haunt her: the peach-colored cake from Payard at Quintana’s wedding reception when the whole family was alive and together and unaware of what loomed ahead; the iridescent blue and green peacocks on the lawn of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine; the red soles of Quintana’s Christian Louboutin satin shoes visible as she knelt at the altar; the white stephanotis she wove into her braid under her bridal veil. Months later, by the end of that year, Dunne was dead and Quintana was in the first of several comas.

There are other colors and bits and pieces of life picked up, examined, put down and then picked up again. Didion writes of the fear that is born with a child and how it never leaves you—the overwhelming need to make sure she is safe, the worry in advance about all the things that might go wrong, the late-night panic about how wrong you are, how unsuited to the task of shepherding this miraculous creature through childhood and into a fairytale life.

No fairytales, after all, in Blue Nights. Quintana goes to the right schools, travels with mom and dad on movie shoots and publicity tours, is articulate, bright and precocious as you might expect from a child with two successful writers for parents. And Quintana suffers from her own demons, years of therapy for inconclusive diagnoses—manic depression, alcohol abuse, OCD, suicidal ideation, borderline personality disorder. Didion searches her own soul for the blame. Was Quintana insecure because she was adopted? Were her parents too busy with their careers to give her enough attention? Was the child forced to grow up too quickly in a household of sharp minds and quick wits, an adult world? Maybe, as much as the fear, the impulse to self-blame comes with the territory of motherhood. Who is a perfect parent? Who is even a good-enough parent? These are unanswerable questions.

How do we survive after our children? Didion asks. What matters after everyone you loved is lost? What to do with the colors and the memories? How to grow old and frail alone, consigned to the waiting rooms of doctors and the apartment stuffed with mementos that can never bring back the husband, the daughter? It doesn’t seem fair. It isn’t fair—it just is. Didion stares at the bleak years and edits every meticulous word. She misses Quintana. “How could I not still need that child with me?” she asks. Blue Nights is Joan Didion’s poem about the ebb of a life. It is heartbreakingly sad.

Blue Nights  Joan Didion | Alfred A. Knopf  2011

Are You Somebody? – Nuala O’Faolain

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Ireland is such a myth of mist and legend to those of us whose ancestors made their wretched way here and promptly buried their secrets. We have no history but we have the legacy – the enchantment of stories, the entrancement of drink, the scars of deprivation and humiliation passed down for generations. Ireland seems to me to be a land of lilt and loss and Nuala O’Faolain’s unsparing memoir provides plenty of both.

She was one of nine children – I remember an Irish-American family in one of the parishes where I grew up who were admired for their twelve. As if the rest of the families hadn’t quite made the cut as Catholics, as if that family was restocking the ranks of the faithful and we fell woefully short. The Ireland O’Faolain writes about lived on in the diaspora, too.

Growing up she had a mostly missing, charming father, a mother who adored him but was quickly overwhelmed by babies, poverty, an absent philanderer and a retreat into drink. New siblings arrived year after year and Nuala barely got to know them. Mammy was a voracious reader. Daddy was a journalist and raconteur. Young Nuala absorbed their gifts, and the rigid definition of what it means to be adult and female and the blessed forgetfulness at the bottom of a bottle. Her escapades sneaking off to dances got her kicked out of the local parochial school and sent to boarding school where she failed to reform. She pitched her life against the constraints of a country in which women had few options and managed to win scholarships to university and to Oxford. She became a producer for the BBC and a columnist for The Irish Times.

It is to her credit that the litany of lovers–many lovers–and drinking and failures and rescues holds up. These are not revelations in any surprising sense. The society that shaped her was slow to accept the autonomy of women and to grant them options for work, for romance, for making meaning of their lives. But nowhere was it much better and families everywhere hold each other in the same suffocating thrall. So we travel her bumpy life with her and marvel at what she achieved and recognize in her stories our own.

O’Faolain the journalist does a good job reporting on herself without pity or embellishment. She traces the spiral that circles her back on herself through episodes, lovers and leavings and shares her hard won introspection without fanfare. “Are you somebody?” is a question asked when you might just be recognizable, maybe a minor celebrity, a person whose name might be known. But it’s the deeper question as well, one O’Faolain has spent a lifetime asking. In the end she still wants what she was trained all her life to want, the answer to the question revealed in the eyes of someone who loves her. It doesn’t seem like a lot to ask but it is everything. People are each unhappy in their own way, lonely in their own lives, she finds. Extricating a life from the tentacles of family and society’s suffocating constraints is a life’s work.

O’Faolain died of lung cancer in 2008. Her memoir was a bestseller and she took some comfort from the outpouring of recognition and emotion that it generated among readers, especially women. But she claimed in the book and in interviews shortly before her death that she never felt like a success, always felt on the cusp of beginning her life. Despite the intelligence and optimism that she chronicled in Are You Somebody?, the story affirms that what goes missing in our earliest years creates wounds that never heal.

Are You Somebody?: The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman   Nuala O’Faolain | Henry Holt and Company First Owl Books Edition 1999