A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel

Two things I don’t care for much are memoirs and audiobooks. The people that read the audiobooks either speak too slowly or get the voices all wrong. With memoirs, it’s always the doom and gloom factor that gets me—someone was abused or has some problem with addiction or—you get the point, and in the end you can’t put it down and know it’s just fabricated like you can with fiction. The last memoir I tried to listen to, Unbearable Lightness, made me want to give up on the whole consuming food thing all together. My mother gave me a memoir on audiobook and despite all of the many ways that could go wrong I had to listen to it because it was a gift. If I had known the only problem with it would be trying not to laugh hysterically in my cubicle at work, I would have listened to A Girl Named Zippy months ago.

The catch about Zippy is that it’s a memoir of a happy childhood. Like all childhoods, there are the scattered introductions to heartbreak, but there's nothing basement-level-sorrow-inducing here. In her case, it’s finding that the chicken she loved had been killed by some local dogs and watching other friends experience family woes and grief and not quite knowing how to handle it. Other than those two things, her biggest problems (on the page, at least) were obstacles like having to reclaim her best elementary school friend from the cool new kid from LA that brought culture and a leather jacket to their small town of Mooreland, Indiana and trying to talk her way out of going to the Quaker church with her mom each Sunday morning. Her stories are mostly centered around the quirky cast of characters from the town they live in and her family, who swore they bought her from a pack of traveling gypsies. The novel is full of normal childhood moments that were relatable to my own childhood: the attempted séances at slumber parties, simultaneously hating and worshiping older siblings, going crazy over decoupage and crafts only to discover that you aren’t particularly talented in the art department, and having major crises over the state of one’s hair. There was also a period where she recorded everything she could on a little cassette tape, which I vaguely remember trying to do with a YakBak without much success.

The thing that I enjoyed the most about the book was Kimmel’s ability to narrate everything from the voice of her childhood self without dumbing down the content. While I obviously can’t speak to the accuracy of that voice as I didn’t know her twenty some years ago, I can say with certainty that it’s believable:

"I figure heaven will be a scratch-and-sniff sort of place, and one of my first requests will be the Driftwood in its prime, while it was filled with our life. And later I will ask for the smell of my dad's truck, which was a combination of basic truck (nearly universal), plus his cologne (Old Spice), unfiltered Lucky Strikes, and when I was very lucky, leaded gasoline. If I could have gotten my nose close enough I would have inhaled leaded gasoline until I was retarded. The tendency seemed to run in my family; as a boy my uncle Crandall had an ongoing relationship with a gas can he kept in the barn. Later he married and divorced the same woman four times, sometimes marrying other women in between, including one whose name was, honestly, Squirrelly."

See what I mean?

The thing that got me the most about the book, though, was Kimmel’s relationship with her father. She knows he only gets drunk at work but she’s not quite sure if he works or what he does. He plays the best prank on their neighbors I’ve ever heard of in my life. When someone messes with his kids, he gets pay back. While he doesn’t agree with a lot of things the mother says or does, he still backs her, regularly giving Kimmel a look she says means, “I respect every way in which you are a troublemaker, but get up and do what your mother says."

While her parents are genuinely good people and actively show her love and support, they aren’t always the most involved or strict and usually don’t exactly know what’s she’s up to. After visiting a friend’s home and witnessing a different family dynamic, she says, "They did a lot of cleaning in their house, which I considered to be a sign of immoral parenting. The job of parents, as I saw it, was to watch television and step into a child's life only when absolutely necessary, like in the event of a tornado or a potential kidnapping." This is probably because her Dad is usually doing something smart assed and her mother is constantly just making her dent in the couch bigger, rereading science fiction, which leads to a misunderstanding where Kimmel thinks her mother is having an affair with Isaac Asmov. (This leads to Kimmel's second memoir, She Got Up Off the Couch, which details her mother finally doing just that.)

The best part of the book (for me) was the scene where the father tells Kimmel he’s going to take her to his church since neither of them believe in God so she can see his version of religion. When he takes her out to the middle of a campground to sit in the woods, she gets confused, because there’s no proper pews or minister or singing. He asks her, “What does the Bible say about where one or more are gathered?” and she tells him that equals fellowship, but there aren’t any people out there for fellowship. He points out the Bible doesn’t say one or more people, just one or more in general, and he’s having fellowship with this group of trees and that group of birds… that there's one or more of a lot of things to have fellowship with out in nature. While the school aged Kimmel is no devoted Quaker like her mother, she doesn’t seem to be able to get behind her dad’s brand of religion either, but there in the woods they make the most of it. It reminded me quite a bit of some moments I shared off the parkway with my college friends up in the mountains. (Unfortunately, somehow those moments also usually involved them being high and/or naked, but that’s neither here nor there.)

While Kimmel finds every excuse in the book not to go to church with her mother, at one point she decides she wants to bond with a girl she considers to be holy that informs Kimmel that in order to be a good Christian, you’ve got to do good works. Feeling put upon, she reconsiders that friendship after her quests to do good deeds turn into minor disasters. Later, she decides she wants Jesus to be her boyfriend, and she says of him, "On Jesus: "Everyone around me was flat-out in love with him, and who wouldn't be? He was good with animals, he loved his mother, and he wasn't afraid of blind people." She waits for boyfriend Jesus in the woods and her family doesn’t discourage her because they think it’s finally an act of dedication. Since she seemed earnest about it and she was only a kid, I laughed endlessly at this without feeling like I was cracking up over something sacrilegious. Kimmel eventually went to study theology at a divinity school but I'm not sure where she stands on faith now.

The last two best things about Kimmel are that she studied creative writing at NCSU and she currently lives in my home state which I appreciate because this means there’s finally an author I like that I may be able to realistically catch at a book signing. (How I always manage to miss Sedaris has become an ongoing point for frustration. Also, don't point out that he writes memoirs, becuase they are in the fiction section.)

Walks With Men by Ann Beattie

“You see through this; understand I was too naïve, even if you factor in that I was young. The ‘80s were not a time when women had to put up with male tyrants. No woman had to fit herself around a man’s schedule. To do so was lazy, as well as demeaning. But I didn’t introspect; I didn’t ask enough questions. I expressed passivity by pretending to myself that whatever I did for Neil was charming, old-fashioned dutifulness. More embarrassing still was the fact that I let him support me, that I had delusions of becoming a major essayist (In this culture? as Neil would say).

If you think for a minute, you might guess what happened next, because clichés so often befall vain people.”

Do not be deceived by the cover—Walks With Men is no poorly written piece of chick lit. Anne Beattie, the author, teaches in UVA’s highly regarded MFA program and is an O. Henry and Pen Award-winning author. (Plus, Miranda July endorsed her on the back cover, and if that doesn’t make her acceptable for the standard indie book snob, what does?)

The main character of our novella, Jane, has recently finished her education at Harvard with honors, has become decidedly anti-establishment, and is of interest to the press because she decided to tell the school on graduation day where they could shove it—in front of God and Jimmy Carter. She has these plans to live on a farm in Vermont with her granola boyfriend Ben and his goats, but the professor that interviews her—arrogant, twice her age, and sure he has a stockpile of wisdom to dispense upon her—wins her over. They have an arrangement where she can ask him any question she likes and he must answer, as long as no one knows about their relationship. (Cue in ominous music here.) He supports her in an apartment while he writes nonfiction novels and she “works” gathering research for him and not doing much else. While their relationship seems to exist in a carefully sealed vacuum, the rest of Neil’s life does not, and the things that she does not know eventually come out and overwhelm her.

Like all men, all people, while Neil is quirky and interesting and loveable, he’s deeply flawed. The complications he tries to hide from Jane but ultimately brings into her life are many and she starts to see over time that his wisdom is limited to superficial things—where to have sex, what to do when depressed, what to do with leftovers from restaurants, how to take your drink, where to buy your scarves. How to be in a relationship without steamrolling the person you love, on the other hand, might be foreign to him. As their relationship progresses (don’t worry, no spoilers) she begins to have issues with self-importance and direction that seem to travel back directly to the fact that she has allowed Neil to take care of her for so long. Characters with strange subplots: her ex that’s high on yoga and love, her gay neighbor that’s been struggling from mental health issues left over from Vietnam, his lover who wants Jane to watch them have sex, all help her work through her loneliness and get a hold of who she is and what it is she does and doesn’t want. Jane isn’t always without her own issues, however, and we see that illustrated through her issues with her mother and closest female friend, Jan, an obvious foil without much going for her but a pointing finger.

As a female, I can appreciate a piece of writing like this for a variety of reasons—it was literary, it was accessible to me despite the fact that I’m from a different generation and mindset than her main character(mostly due to the universal relationship issues Beattie touches on), and because Beattie trusts her audience and doesn't pander to them. Beattie gives female readers the best of both worlds.

All in all, a good read.

The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton

I’m waiting to hear back on my graduate school applications to the MFA programs at McNeese and George Mason and in the process, have become obsessed with all things MFA-related. This includes authors fresh out of writing programs that have enjoyed some degree of success, which is how I found out about The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton. She’s just two years older than me and already a "golden girl" in the writing scene.

Maybe I’m being catty but I’m not sure I get why she warrants such attention. I am not in the habit of turning my back on a book before I’m finished reading it… If I am having a relationship with the novel in front of me and participating in a dialogue with the author, not finishing a book just seems—I don’t know, rude? Regardless of my ideas about reading etiquette, I was tempted to give up on this one.

The Rehearsal focuses more or less on two characters—Isolde, the younger sister of a girl who has just left school due to an affair with one of her school’s music teachers and Stanley, a nearby student at a prestigious acting school. We do not witness Isolde’s story first hand, but rather through her interactions with her nosy (and detestable) Saxophone teacher. We never know if any of our characters are giving us actual accounts or simply acting, as the novel is about what is perceived to be true as much as it is about what actually is true. Eventually, the two strangers come together and Stanley puts together a play based on Isolde’s older sister’s scandal and awaits the reactions.

My main problem with the novel was the dialogue. For example, the conversation where the saxophone teacher is discussing the death of one of her students, Bridget, with Bridget’s mother:

“I understand that this is something you couldn’t possibly have prepared
yourself for,” the saxophone teacher says to Bridget’s mother. “I’m shocked
myself. I feel partly it’s because Bridget was so dull. I always imagine that
the ones who die are the interesting ones, the wronged ones, the tragic ones,
the ones for whom death would come as a terrible, terrible waste. I always
imagine it as a tragedy. Bridget’s death doesn’t quite seem to fit.”

The mother responds by nodding and agreeing, more or less, that her daughter was too boring to die. On what kind of planet do exchanges like this happen? Earlier in the novel, while Bridget was still alive, the same teacher told Bridget she was too “scrubbed pink” and therefore not sexy enough, mysterious enough, to play the saxophone, and should stick to something more appropriate, like the clarinet.

One of the subplots in this novel is that of a gay student named Julia that also has private lessons with the saxophone teacher. One night, the teacher takes both Julia and Isolde out to a performance and tries to strike up a romance between the two young girls. In their lessons that follow, she will ask one what happened, and then the other, throwing in not-so-subtle hints about what she thinks should happen should they see one another again. Here, a conversation between Julia and the saxophone teacher, before Julia launches in on a conversation about trying to seduce Isolde:

“I’ve been looking at all the ordinary staples of flirting,” Julia says, “like
biting your lip and looking away for just a second too late, and laughing a lot
and finding every excuse to touch, light fingertips on a forearm or a thigh that
emphasize and punctuate the laughter. I’ve been thinking about what a comfort these things are, these textbook methods, precisely because they need no decoding, no translation. Once, a long time ago, you could probably bite your lip and it would mean, I am almost overcome with desiring you. Now you bite your lip and it means, I want you to see that I am almost overcome with desiring you, so I am using the plainest and most universally accepted signal I can think of to make you see. Now it means, Both of us know the implications of my biting my lip and what I am trying to say. We are speaking a language, you and I together, a language that we did not invent, a language that is not unique to our uttering. We are speaking someone else’s lines. It’s a comfort.”

Once again, the focus on acting v. being, etc. Insightful, yes. Something I can actually picture a high school girl saying to her mentor? No.

I realize I'm almost to the end of the reviw and have barely touched on the other main character, Stanley. It seems he's only a shadow of a real character, a conduit through which things will happen. I found myself skimming through his sections.

I think that if I could have read about Bridget, Julia, and Isolde functioning in their natural environments, I would have enjoyed the book. The actual meat of the novel is interesting, but the way that it is conveyed made it a burden to stomach. I understand that she’s trying to do something different, something ambitious, that this is probably exactly the kind of writing that MFA programs go crazy for… but as an “average reader” it didn’t work for me. I want to know what actually happened more than I want to know what their posture was like while they sat in their lessons, talking about something that may or may not have actually happened, instead of playing their instruments… which is what I assume saxophone lessons are for.