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Summary
Summary
The sexual politics of a faculty wives dinner. The psychological gamesmanship of an inappropriate therapist. The emotional minefield of an extended family wedding . . .
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Whatever the subject, Emily Fox Gordon's disarmingly personal essays are an art form unto themselves--reflecting and revealing, like mirrors in a maze, the seemingly endless ways a woman can lose herself in the modern world. With piercing humor and merciless precision, Gordon zigzags her way through "the unevolved paradise" of academia, with its dying breeds of bohemians, adulterers, and flirts, then stumbles through the perils and pleasures of psychotherapy, hoping to find a narrative for her life. Along the way, she encounters textbook feminists, partying philosophers, perfectionist moms, and an unlikely kinship with Kafka--in a brilliant collection of essays that challenge our sacred institutions, defy our expectations, and define our lives.
Author Notes
Emily Fox Gordon is an award-winning essayist and the author of the novel It will Come to Me , and two memoirs, Mockingbird Years: A Life In and Out of Therapy and Are you Happy?: A Childhood Remembered . Her work had appeared in American Scholar, Time, Pushcart Prize Anthology XXIII and XXIX, the New York Times Book Review, Boulevard , and Salmagundi. She lives in Houston.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
After publishing two memoirs (Mockingbird Years; Are You Happy?) and a novel (It Will Come To Me), Gordon claims the personal essay as her chosen metier. "What I seem to want to do. is not to have experiences but to think and tell about them," Gordon asserts. Touching on several subjects-her childhood as a "faculty brat," her experiences in therapy, her husband's colonoscopy, a niece's wedding, and a conference of philosophers among them-this collection is self-absorbed and tedious. For example, the author shares a few pages of random notes jotted at the conference ("A guy with a canvas Brentano bag, looking dyspeptic and confused."), but fails to derive any meaning, or even much humor, from her musings. Her combative but successful marriage and her "sense of exclusion" provide repetitive fodder for rumination, while extraordinary events in her life, such as an illegal abortion and being raped, are given only glancing looks. Gordon's "thinking aloud" makes the reader feel superfluous. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
New York Review of Books Review
At 11 years old, Emily Fox Gordon was on a psychiatrist's couch. At 18, after several other psychotherapeutic ventures and a suicide attempt, she was dispatched to Austen Riggs, the Massachusetts psychiatric hospital, for a stay that lasted as long as some college careers. After her treatment there, and long into adulthood, she continued psychotherapy. Her memoir of that experience, "Mockingbird Years: A Life In and Out of Therapy," published in 2000, was praised by critics and won her fans for its unflinching honesty and aseptic prose, free from the maudlin melodrama that has suffused so many recent memoirs. Her second memoir, "Are You Happy? A Childhood Remembered," published in 2006 - again to some critical success - described her 1950s childhood, deeply enmeshed in the lives of her alcoholic mother and autocratic father, yet simultaneously estranged from them. (A 2009 novel, a satire set in academia, received mixed reviews.) So readers might be eager for "Book of Days," in which Gordon explores her preferred form - not memoir, but personal essay - nor does it hurt that Phillip Lopate, il miglior fabbro of the art, gives his rousing approval in the introduction. Many of the essays, including the one that prompted the book "Mockingbird Years," have been previously published, but not all. She writes with a stringent delicacy about sickness and marriage in "Fantastic Voyage," one of the more polished pieces in the collection. Her husband's routine colonoscopy fills her with a curious mortal dread, inspiring both waiting-room anxiety - what if he has some terrible cancer? - and then an egocentric reverie: Will she get to play the part of the martyred caretaker? How will she face the "dire glamour" of a life-changing diagnosis? (The sickness-as-glamour leitmotif runs through Gordon's work. She writes in the essay "Mockingbird Years" that going to Austen Riggs as a teenager would not only make her college-bound friend jealous but was "the fulfillment of an adolescent fantasy. The status of mental patient would invest me with significance") In "Fantastic Voyage," she writes, tartly and honestly, that she is deeply envious of her husband's organized mind, his promptly scheduled medical exams and command over the minutiae of life she can never seem to control. "He was the one who had made himself pure and ready, while last night's furtively eaten supper of leftovers rotted invisibly in my own unexamined colon. He was the one who would walk into the waters of anesthesia this morning; he was the one who would emerge on the other side while I remained in this anteroom, fully dressed and conscious, a fugitive from medical justice." The fantastic voyage, of course, is not the colonoscopy but their 30-year marriage, which she describes as combative but sustainable: "We're like two boxers who have fought so many rounds together that we've decided to forgo the late ones in favor of an extended, exhausted clinch." It's a funny and brutal moment of self-recognition. Gordon dissects female friendship, femininity and feminism, and the changing state of marriage, in "The Most Responsible Girl." Sometimes the writing is fresh and amusingly self-lacerating - she writes of getting into "male-pattern trouble" - and sometimes it's distressingly academic. Marriage has changed over the last few decades, certainly, but I am not sure if writing that "the hierarchical rolebound form which found its origins in the division of labor has now been replaced by the companionate egalitarian dyad" is the most inviting way to put it. In "Here Again," Gordon describes her 25th or so visit to a meeting of the American Philosophical Association, as companion to her husband. (He is George Sher, a former chairman of the philosophy department at Rice University.) Anyone who has spent time at an academic conference recognizes this scene: having to spend "a bleary interval at a vegan steam-table restaurant where I sat opposite a graduate student who spoke at length about her five-year plan to penetrate the upper echelons of the administration at some northwestern Florida university." Some of her best passages linger on mortality. She describes the shock of seeing people only once a year, who have "tumbled abruptly into a new category of age." One elderly visitor at the convention is so brittle her colleagues, upon greeting her, will not actually touch her, but give air kisses and pretend pats around her shoulders, offering an "airy substitute for human contact: the idea of an embrace." But Gordon meanders. Sitting in on a colloquium about mental disorders - something she knows a bit about - she throws up her hands and writes that she is helpless to form a coherent narrative: "Instead, I'll simply transcribe my notes." Sample: "Visual system is modular. Mind is not. Central nonmodular STUFF WE CARE ABOUT." This makes for a page of - well, calling it filler seems a bit forgiving. Isn't her mandate as an essayist to take the stuff of life and form a narrative, a thought, a juicy little bit for the reader? I felt neglected by these dreary excursions into her notebook. The title essay is a strange kind of apologia for her previous work, a description of how she was lured by New York publishing types into writing memoirs instead of collections of personal essays. A New York editor with "a voice like sun-softened caramel" called her after reading the essay "Mockingbird Years" in a literary journal. "His voice evoked a feeling I hadn't had in many, many years - the sense of submitting, with token resistance, to a stranger's seduction." He seduced, an agent was hired, an auction conducted, and Gordon suffered misgivings as she wrote the book, believing she had made a Faustian pact with the publisher. GORDON raises the flag of cultural fatigue against the memoir and questions the essential honesty of memoir-writing. "I regret having written 'Mockingbird Years' - the memoir, that is, not the essay. Perhaps I should say I regret its dishonesty." The dishonesty inherent in memoir, she argues, is that an entire life cannot be contained in one book, and so the writer is forced to follow only one story line: Me and drugs, me and my dysfunctional family, me and my depression, me and my eating disorder. The publishers forced her, she writes, to create a narrative arc to bolster her original personal essay - and that necessitated that her book become not the full story of her life but what Lopate suggests in his introduction is the predictable contemporary memoir, a by-now threadbare template of dissolution, struggle and (cue sunlight parting the clouds) requisite redemption. "Preferably," Lopate writes, the story should be "one revolving around addiction, abuse, poverty or some other nasty problem whose overcoming will yield the desired triumph-of-the-human-spirit results." Lopate writes that Gordon "tells ruefully the tale of how she was seduced, not once but twice, to write and publish memoirs, instead of being allowed to bring out a collection of personal essays." This all sounds a bit ungrateful. I can practically hear the rooms full of M.F.A. students shrieking, Please don't throw me in the brier patch! Please, we want a phone call from that editor with the voice like sun-softened caramel! No one will take Gordon to task as a writer for her memoir-regret. She didn't actually make anything up; she told no outright lies. "It was no sin against literature to write as if the story of my life in therapy had been the story of my life," she writes. "But I think it may have amounted to a sin against myself, or a sin against my life, or - more accurately yet - a sin against the true story of my life, the one I can never tell and never know." But no memoirist worth his madeleine could possibly pack an entire life's worth of meaning into anything less than a seven-volume work. I'm not sure I could read seven volumes about Gordon's life. But a few essays? Yes. In one essay, Gordon compares her combative but sustainable marriage to a long boxing match. Alex Kuczynski is the author of "Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession With Cosmetic Surgery."
Kirkus Review
A literary late bloomer blossoms in this collection of personal essays."The memoir and the personal essay are crucially different forms," writes essayist and novelist Gordon (It Will Come to Me, 2009, etc.), who here expresses more affinity for the latter in dealing with some of the material that informed her two volumes in the former genre. The best of these ten essays combine the details of memory with reflective insight and a command of tone that resists clich, while refusing to settle into simplistic understanding. "What I really wanted to do was to examine my experience, to think aloud," she writes. These pieces constitute a more or less chronological narrative, from childhood amid the household tension of a professor father and an alcoholic mother, through a "suicidal gesture" followed by an institutional stay and decades of serial therapy, and a marriage that she categorizes as "long, loyal, close, angry," as it spurred her transition from therapy to writing. "Writing has allowed me...to escape the coils of therapy," she writes. "I don't mean that writing has been therapeutic, though sometimes it has been. The kind of writing I do now is associative and self-exploratorymuch like the process of therapy, except that the therapist is absent and I've given up all ambition to get well." Whether she's explaining her affinity for Kafka or exploring the tribal rituals of faculty wivesher husband is a professor, as her father wasGordon writes with flinty humor, unsentimental precision and a refusal to let herself or anyone else off too easily. In a characteristic twist on conventional wisdom, she writes that "the unlived life might not be worth examining."Despite some repetition of detail among the essays, each is a standalone gem.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
This is a gathering of Gordon's autobiographical essays, effectively her third memoir, after Mockingbird Years and Are Your Happy? Readers will find the author often revisiting experiences covered in those previous books, such as her teenage time as a psychiatric patient at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, MA, and her subsequent decades in various forms of therapy. She discusses such epidsodes as classic transference, of feeling beleaguered by the system, of individual, group, and couples therapy (she has had each kind), and of feeling as if she has seen her last therapist. She uses psychiatric jargon with ease and relates stories about her therapy with humor and bluntness, showing how therapy has informed her life, from being a young faculty brat to being a newlywed, graduate student, faculty wife, writer, and mother. Verdict Naturally, as essays originally published separately, this book does not provide one unfolding story. There is redundancy both among the essays and between them and her previous memoirs. Those who like autobiographical pieces on therapy and/or recovery-and who have not read Gordon's previous titles-might appreciate this collection more than those familiar with her memoirs.-Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
FACULTY BRAT The photograph is small, printed on shiny black stock, black and white and curled at the edges. It represents me, at age two, sitting in the lap of what we called Library Hill, my arm loosely slung around the neck of our German Shepherd. His big head is cast upward as he tolerates my embrace, and his tongue lolls rakishly. We sit in a dent in the long grass. The wind has unsettled my tam o'shanter; the shoulder button of my overalls has come undone. My dog and I look happy, and a little idiotic. Photographs like this are marked by the pathos and authority of a different time. In another, my mother poses with me and my infant brother, standing in front of our boxy Plymouth station wagon, grayish white in the picture but in historical fact a pale aquamarine. The year is 1949. She is wearing a mouton coat and heavy shoes with ankle straps. Her hair looks frizzy--she had probably just home-permed it--and her face is tired and pretty and young. My brother is a faceless bundle in the crook of her arm. Enough time has passed, enough of destiny has been realized for all three people in this picture so that looking at it gives me a little shock. It's as if I'd been waiting for a chronically turbulent pool of water to clear and, as a reward for my patience, had seen at the bottom a small brightly colored stone. We lived in two houses, one after the other, both rented from the college for, if I recall correctly, $125 a month. The houses sat next door to each other in a gentle declivity on a small meandering street next to the library and across from a freshman dormitory and the small white clapboard building which housed my father's department. In both houses we children felt the influence of the undergraduates, their beer parties and the shouts of their impromptu lacrosse games, from one direction, and the emanations of the alumni at the Williams Inn from the other, their chuckles and hoots over martinis in the lounge. Williams is a very old school; its campus is uncloistered, mixed with the town. At least it was then. Now both of my childhood houses are coeducational dorms. The first house was low-slung and rambling and painted gray. After my family moved next door it housed the chairman of the Williams drama department and his dramatically bohemian wife. Wild parties spilled out onto the lawn and were gossiped about. Thornton Wilder, there for the Williams Theatre's production of Our Town, woke us up one early morning when he stumbled about on our lawn drunkenly, calling "Here, kitty, kitty, kitty." Still later, when scouts went looking for a quintessentially academic setting for the movie Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? that house, I'm told, was nearly chosen. The other house was larger, a white Victorian wedding cake with tent-shaped attic rooms and a butler's pantry. A great chestnut tree grew in our yard, and every fall my brother and I gathered fallen pods, slit open the moist spiky green jackets and popped out the glossy inner nuts. We kept them in sacks and dragged them along to football rallies, threw the nuts into the bonfire for the pleasure of hearing them hiss and explode. My memories of the first house are internal, centered on the furniture, the corners, the dark-yellow hopsacking curtains that turned morning sunlight butterscotch as it entered the room, the odd wallpaper in the dining room, diamond-shaped broken-line enclosures containing red-combed roosters. I remember moving my three-year-old hands along that cool wall, mumbling "A rooster, a rooster, a rooster," until I ran out of roosters. When my own daughter was the same age it occurred to me that another child might have counted the roosters. For me it was enough to repeat the name, over and over. The second house I remember more for the views out of its windows. One of those stretches diaphanously across my mind's eye while I process grocery lists and weekly plans, like the faint background wash o Excerpted from Book of Days: Personal Essays by Emily Fox Gordon All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| Emily Fox Gordon: The Real Thing | p. xi |
| Faculty Brat | p. 3 |
| Mockingbird Years | p. 27 |
| The Most Responsible Girl | p. 59 |
| Faculty Wife | p. 89 |
| Kafka and Me | p. 113 |
| My Last Therapist | p. 145 |
| Fantastic Voyage | p. 179 |
| Book of Days | p. 207 |
| The Prodigal Returns | p. 237 |
| Here Again | p. 269 |
