by Sara Nelson
I started with The Beauty Myth (read about what you know!) but didn’t get too far; I remember thinking that everything Wolf said in her book about how our culture makes women neurotic about their appearance—duh!—had been more wisely and wittily dissected at the average dinner party. But once I sat down with Turning Japanese, I was hooked. The memoir of a second-generation Japanese-American married to a Caucasian woman but searching for his roots immediately struck a chord. Like Leo, Mura was an artist—a poet. He grew up, like Leo, in Chicago, and he was about Leo’s age. Mura’s family had “assimilated” to the point of shortening their name from Uyemura; Leo is called Leo, but his real name in his family is Akira. Thanks to an artist grant, Mura took his family to Japan for a year, half-expecting that a return to the land of his ancestry would provide him with the sense of belonging he’d never quite felt in the States. (Leo, at this point, had never been to Japan either, but he held it out in his mind as something of the promised land.) The trip wasn’t altogether satisfying, because the notoriously xenophobic Japanese-born Japanese considered him a foreigner—he was “other” even there—but along the way, he did come face to face with some of his own confusions and prejudices, some of which had to do with his wife. I remember that the review I eventually wrote focused on that wife, and on the fact that Mura seemed remarkably unsympathetic to her discomfort during that year. Not only did she live through his flirtation with another woman, but as a tall, big-boned woman (read about what you know!), she regularly felt frustrated by the inability to find clothes or shoes in her size.
I became obsessed enough with Turning Japanese back then that I immediately went out and bought several copies, which I gave as gifts to my Yoshimura nieces and nephews that Christmas. But Leo never read it, and I moved on. But recently I discovered Mura’s subsequent book, Where the Body Meets Memory. And this time I’ve been torturing Leo about it.
Where the Body Meets Memory is a pretentious title for a book that, in its first half, at least, is a moving rumination on growing up Japanese-American right after WWII. (It then, unfortunately, devolves into an account of Mura’s premarital sexaholism—always with white women, of course—that more properly belongs on an episode of The Jerry Springer Show than in a literary memoir.) It describes the way Mura struggled with his parents, who, like Leo’s, almost never talked about their experiences in the camps, except in the most benign ways. (The Yoshimuras, who were interned at Manzanar near Santa Ana, California, always refer to this time as their years “at camp,” as if they’d been shuffleboarding in the Adirondacks.) Mura discusses the fact that his sister—and several other Japanese-American women he knows—almost never dated Asian men because it felt “too incestuous.” (In Leo’s family, only one of his ten siblings is married to another Asian, and Leo has never even dated one.)
On page after page, I underlined passages. There was the revelation that in the camps, his parents decided they’d need to be two hundred percent American from then on; in Leo’s family, the line was “Be more American than the Americans.” At one point, Mura complains to his wife that his father talks about the camps “as if they were nothing.” My father-in-law regularly sidesteps any questions Leo or I pose about that period with the disclaimer: “Compared to what the Germans did to the Jews [pointed reference to me, here], it was nothing.” By the time I reached page 45, I was so agitated and the book was so marked up that I called Leo at the studio.
“Listen to this!” I said, as I read him a snippet of conversation between Mura and his father, who, like Leo’s father, is a man of few words. “Yeah. So?” came my husband’s response.
“It’s just like your family!” I nudged.
“Uh-huh,” he said.
Maybe another, smarter woman would have let it go at that. But I couldn’t. I went back to the book and called him again, twenty minutes later. “You’ve got to hear this!” I said. Then I read him this line from Mura: “It’s difficult to underestimate how much as a teenager I wanted to fit in, how deeply I assumed a basically white middle-class identity.” I’d heard that sentence, almost verbatim, from Leo many times.
“You’ve got to read this book!” I exhorted.
I heard the sharp intake of breath that I knew meant he was getting fed up with me. “Sara, will you just leave me alone?” he said.
And then he said something that flies in the face of everything I thought I knew about reading, something that destroyed my whole theory of reading about what you know.
“Why should I read it?” he said. “I don’t need to. I lived it.”
February 1
Double Booked
When you think and talk about books as much as I do, sooner or later you hear just about every theory. Never read in bed, some say; others say that’s the only place. Always read the book before you see the movie, they’ll tell you—except others will tell you the opposite. Or this, from a guy I dated when I first came to New York: “Always have a couple of things going at once,” said Ray—a writer, natch!—once he’d gotten a load of my library habit. “That way,” he said, “you’ll never be lonely.”
Ray was wrong about a lot of things, but about that, at least, he was right. By double-booking—keeping one book at home and another in my backpack or glove compartment—I always had something to do while stuck in traffic, stranded in a long line, or as it turned out, sitting by the phone waiting for him to call.
He’s now long gone, but the double-booking habit has remained.
I started this week with Nine Parts of Desire, Geraldine Brooks’s collection of essays about her interaction with Islamic women in the mid-1990s. While well reviewed when it was first published, it did not exactly change the configuration of the bestseller lists, maybe because of its unfortunate timing. It came out in 1995, at just about the moment that the locus of attention for most Americans was switching from the Middle East to the NASDAQ. But my sister Liza told me she’d liked it, and even gave me the copy she’d bought at a secondhand bookstore near the Georgia farm where she lives. It still had the Newnan bookshop sticker on it.
When I get a book, or a recommendation of a book, from Liza, I take it seriously because as a novelist (Playing Botticelli) and a reviewer, she’s highly critical of most contemporary work and her praise comes so infrequently. (I think of her as the kid, Mikey, from the old cereal commercial, the one in which the little boy rejects every breakfast suggestion except one. “Mikey likes it! He likes it!” the other kids crow in amazement.) I’m particularly susceptible to Liza’s suggestions because, as my big sister (she’s six years older), she holds the position, for better and worse, as my intellectual mentor. It was because of Liza that I, who was born at the tail end of the baby boom, became a full-fledged Bob Dylan freak, able to chant all the words to Dylan’s obscure “Motorpsycho Nightmare” on the school bus when I was in seventh grade. It was because of Liza that I first heard of Jane Austen. (The paperback of North-anger Abbey that sits on my shelf today has her name in it.) It’s because of Liza that I began to develop whatever social conscience I now have. (The first book she gave me, when I was about twelve, was a photojournalistic essay about a tenement. Her inscription read: “Read This and Think of Our Back Yard.”) Although we didn’t always get along so well—she’s laughing now, if she’s reading this, because of the enormity of that understatement—I always wanted to be like her, especially in the brainy department.
We joke sometimes that as two middle-aged writers, we’ve become like the best friends in the old George Cukor movie Rich and Famous: she’s the brilliant but broke poet played by Jacqueline Bisset; but for some substantial physical differences, I’m the Candice Bergen character, more concerned with the commerce of book publishing than with art. And it’s true: While Liza has spent most of her adult life writing serious fiction, I’ve been writing about fiction, serious and not. She’s “high” culture, I’m “low.” While she may envy my more active, public life, I’m always more than a little jealous of her creative talent—and so the balance
is maintained. As long as our particular twains never meet, we do fine.
But because of our role-playing history, sometimes her recommendations scare me. Ever the little sister, I wonder if I’ll be “up to” whatever book or concept she recommends. Which probably explains why I’d filed Nine Parts of Desire high up on the shelf, where I could conveniently “forget” about it. But now, with yet another war raging in the Middle East, and a new paperback edition in the bookstores, I summoned Liza’s gift down. I was relieved to find the collection of essays about women chafing, surviving, and very rarely thriving in Muslim countries both erudite and immensely readable. It was also a book I could take out in public. While we rarely admit it, what we read speaks, well, volumes about us. I remember, several years ago, coming upon a profile of Sandy Hill Pittman, then the wife of MTV cofounder and now deposed AOL Time Warner COO Bob Pittman. Apparently, they met on an airplane, back in the days when Sandy worked at a fashion magazine. Spying the attractive Bob sitting near her, she made a calculated decision—to be seen reading The New Yorker instead of, say, Mademoiselle. The clip is lost to me now, but I remember her being quoted as saying, quite bluntly and unapologetically, that she wanted this cute guy to think she was the kind of person who read something serious and worthy. P.S. Her scam worked, at least temporarily; the two married and had a son, though they’re now divorced and Pittman is married to someone else, about whose reading habits little is known.
I’d like to think I’m above this kind of ruse—and besides, Leo is the type who could tell you what I was wearing on our first date, fourteen years ago (hint: there’s a hat involved) faster than what I read in bed last night—but the truth is, a book can be a good conversation (and relationship) starter. In college, I always went for the dark, poetic types who carried around a slim volume of T. S. Eliot in their back jeans pocket. Whether they actually read the books or not didn’t matter: their choice of reading material defined them and attracted me. People notice what you read and judge you by it. Which is why if I were going to read Danielle Steel, I wouldn’t do it at the office. But Nine Parts of Desire speaks to anyone who might be listening: I’m smart, it says. I’m concerned with current events, it announces. I am a serious person.
And I am a serious person, sometimes, but I also like my share of fun. So when my old friend Robin slipped me an advance copy of Her, the third book by former publishing executive Laura Zigman, I abandoned Nine Parts in what they call one New York minute. Zigman made something of a splash a few years back with Animal Husbandry, a light, single-woman-looking-for-love novel. (The book was also the basis for an Ashley Judd vehicle called Someone Like You, which left the theaters in about as much time as it took most of us to read the far more charming novel.) It was gimmicky, but in those pre-Bridget Jones days, it seemed fresh. And I loved it. So on the night of our dinner, I returned home a little buzzed and immediately gulped down the first adorable chapters of Her, which promised to be a delightful novel about a woman so obsessed with her fiancé’s ex that she just about kills her relationship. Her, I decided, would be my bedtime reading. Nine Parts would go with me out of the house.
But it’s not only because Nine Parts has better show-off potential that it got the exalted place in my Maria Turgeon handbag. A book of discrete essays, it is better suited to the stop-and-start nature of my daytime reading (on the bus; in between answering Charley’s questions on his homework; in a restaurant waiting for a tardy lunch date). It’s also paperback, which makes it easier to carry around than the brand-new hardcover Her. Hardcovers have jackets, and I’ve learned the hard way that those jackets are not meant to survive the constant push-and-pull of the here-and-there reader. They get ripped, and beat-up, and pretty soon you’ve got a $25 piece of literature that looks like it’s covered in a paper dishrag. A few times, I thought to remove the jackets entirely and just carry the actual book. But somehow the covers never find the books again—last week I found the cover to The Ash Garden, which I read months ago, in a dust pile at the back of my closet. As surely as the dryer invariably turns up single socks, bookless jackets disappear.
But isn’t it weird, a friend asks, to divide your concentration between something so grave as the sorry state of womanhood abroad and the admittedly flimsy story of a privileged D.C. fiancée with too much time on her hands? On the contrary. With stories so different, you’re in virtually no danger of conflating the two and wondering why, say, Zigman’s Elise doesn’t wear a hijab to stalk her nemesis. Likewise, you’re surely not going to expect Brooks’s Western-educated assistant—who becomes an Islamic extremist—to admit she’s jealous that her fiancé’s ex is thinner than she. It may be true that this is a particularly unusual reading cocktail I’ve mixed up, but for me, at least, it works.
Woody Allen once said that the advantage of bisexuality is that it doubles your chances of finding a date on Saturday night. Having a bifurcated reading brain—one part that likes “junk” and one that reveres “literature”—is the same kind of satisfying. You don’t have to be any one thing and you don’t have to think any one way. And should you happen upon different kinds of people in different situations, your pool of conversation topics is twice as deep.
Anyway, I’ve started to think that the books I’ve been reading this week aren’t as different as they at first appear. Brooks’s work, while educational, also offers us Westerners a frisson of gratitude that however bad or problematic or troublesome our superficial lives may be, we’re still better off than our sisters toiling (or in most cases, not even being allowed to toil) under extremist Islamic regimes. Zigman, on the other hand, purports to write about our real lives, or at least the real lives of the thirty-something female book-buying population. But where Brooks is a journalist and recounts events and conversations and beliefs pretty much as they occur, Zigman, a novelist, takes the typical to the extreme. Are unmarried privileged thirty-somethings really as self-involved, however amusingly, as Elise? Of course not. By (over)dramatizing their plight, Zigman allows us the same kind of schadenfreude as Brooks. “No matter what,” we can think, “my life isn’t that bad.”
I wouldn’t have bothered to explain all this to Liza, as I was pretty sure she’d never heard of, much less read, anything by Laura Zigman, but I figured she’d be pleased to hear I’d gotten to Nine Parts of Desire. So I called her. “You were right,” I said to flatter my brainy big sister. “This is a terrific book. I’m so glad you gave it to me.”
“What book was that again?” she asked.
I told her.
“I didn’t give that to you,” she said. “I don’t know a thing about it.”
I was suddenly the eight-year-old who had brought her the wrong treat from the Dairy Queen on the corner. “But it has a Newnan bookshop sticker on it!” I almost wailed.
“Well,” she replied, sounding, I thought, like the fourteen-year-old who’d been purposely vague about what treat she wanted me to fetch her in the first place, “I’m usually reading a couple of things at once, so maybe I just don’t remember.”
February 8
Endless Love
Liza recommended Kate Manning’s Whitegirl, too, and this time I’d be shocked if she didn’t remember. She’d liked it so much she had placed a specific call to tell me about it last fall and offered to give me the bound manuscript she’d read for review purposes when we got together at Christmas. Now, three months later—and three hundred miles away—it remained at the bottom of the bedside pile. (A truth: Sometimes that pile is arranged by size—so bound manuscripts would naturally go on the bottom—instead of by my degree of interest.) But as I pack for my five-day vacation in Florida to visit my mother, I decide to take a look at it.
It’s been only a couple of weeks since my Funnymen debacle, so I want to be careful. I want to take something that won’t be too jarring in the new world, but I also need it to be something that will keep me from mouthing off at my mother during the day and keep me company on the nights when Mom has gone to bed at eight P.M.
and my very few friends there are out of town. When I talked to Liza the night before I left, she reminded me of Whitegirl. I hung up and dug out the manuscript, which bore a striking resemblance to—and sparked a memory of—a book I’d taken on my annual Mom visit a few years earlier. On that trip, I’d spent a long layover in the Miami airport reading most of Kurt Andersen’s Turn of the Century—also a very long book, also in bound manuscript—and laughing out loud so many times that the woman sitting next to me finally asked what the book was that was obviously making me so happy. Call me superstitious, but this seemed a good omen for Whitegirl: now all I had to do was get far enough in to be sure it would retain my interest.
When Liza handed over the hulking mass of pages covered in blue plastic, she hadn’t said much about it, beyond that she thought I’d relate. The story of a white model married to a black athlete, it raised some of the kinds of questions Liza and I have often discussed about my own interracial marriage. While Leo is not famous, or nearly as rich, as the character in the book, who was a champion skier, then a sports commentator, and finally a movie star, our relationship has a lot in common with the one Manning writes about. I was immediately impressed by how she managed to show, for example, that despite the greater acceptance of race and multiculturalism and blah blah blah, such “mixed marriages” had specific issues of their own.
Before anybody who’s read Whitegirl worries that they should call 911 on my behalf, I should say that the plot of the novel does not mimic my life. Manning’s narrative opens with Charlotte, the now ex-model and mother, reeling from a violent attack that may or may not have been perpetrated by her estranged husband. It then proceeds to flash back through the many years of Charlotte and Milo’s relationship, from their first meeting in college through their next encounter in New York, through the birth of their children, through Charlotte’s unfortunate encounter with a scandal-hungry press, up to the attack and the potential dissolution of their marriage. Still, there are vignettes that I found strangely familiar, as when Charlotte confesses to her feelings about being the only white person in a room: it reminded me of walking into Leo’s parents’ house for our first Christmas together and feeling, for the first time, completely “other.” (“That’s how I’ve felt most of my life,” Leo told me when we talked about it later.) And while Leo’s temper is nowhere near as explosive as Milo’s, there is a rage in him that when analyzed, usually comes down, like Milo’s, to his lifelong sense of, as he puts it, not being able to be mistaken for Cary Grant.