Hello Friends!
A Big Weekend
Happy Father’s Day. I know holidays can be full of missing loved ones as well as celebrations of those we have with us. I hope you find something/someone to bring you a moment of joy and that the day includes good company.
I also know yesterday was a big day for lots of you. I attended a protest, one I figured would be quite small. It was small relative to protests in major cities. And yet it was a big, beautiful 😉protest—four times the size of the last protest I attended in the same place. We had to park about ¾ mile away as the streets were full. The thing I like about attending protests is the energy of the crowd, which can fuel a lot of follow up action including writing letters and postcards to voters in swing districts as well as emailing and calling legislators.
Summer Reading Considerations
I’m considering my summer reading, which, unlike the beach read stereotype, can be serious. For me “summer reading” only means extra hours of light for reading good books.
While I’m always (slowly) reading a book in print, I also listen to audiobooks when I can. I don’t drive a lot; though I walk my dogs regularly, I mostly do so with my son. So the audiobooks don't always add up. But for this summer, I have high hopes for lots of listening because I plan to work on a major sewing project, one that will take months, and I like to listen while away the hours. So I’m making a list!
Generally, I’m tired of seeing the same few books recommended in every newspaper’s book review section and by every literary blog. It seems they don’t reach very far to come up with ideas. Perhaps they have agreements with the big five to promote specific books. Who knows?
How to Survive a Bear Attack
I started my summer books with a recommendation from Kelly Turner: How to Survive a Bear Attack by Claire Cameron. It’s not what the title might lead you to believe. While Cameron does talk about how to survive a bear attack, she mostly discusses how rare bear attacks really are. Her interest in them is connected to two facts in her life. An extremely unusual bear attack that killed a couple in a place she loves—Algonquin Park, a vast Canadian wilderness area—makes her question the peace she has felt there. How can terror exist in such beauty? And, when she is diagnosed with the same melanoma that killed her father (he died at approximately the same age at which she was diagnosed), she wrestles with the reality of having the same genetic issue, wondering if her sons will also have it. So the ‘bear attack’ that she is really surviving is her rare cancer—a thing that feels as strange and inescapable as a predatory mauling.
How to Survive is a worthy read. The only thing I didn’t connect with was getting into the bear’s head and having its motivations assigned to specific causes. I kept thinking of the philosophical problem of “What is It Like to be a Bat?” (It’s impossible to know what it’s like for a bat to be a bat.) But the wrestling with a world of beauty, danger, and cancer was relatable and touching.
The Frog in the Throat
My next, and most recent, read was The Frog in the Throat by Markus Werner (translated by Michael Hofmann). It’s a NYRB imprint and I’d hoped it would make a good family book club read, so I bought two copies. It didn't land the way I’d hoped. While it is considered a literary work (as are all the NYRB classics), the humor felt juvenile and the connection between the dead father and the living son didn’t hit. But maybe you’ll like it. Here’s a link to a blog post by someone (Jackie Law) who enjoyed it.
What we have here then is two generations looking back on their lives and how [they] were moulded by expectation. Subjects drift in and out of their consideration: men, women, desire, love, marriage, parenting, aging, manners, greed, politicians, crime, fame, television. As they postulate why attitudes have changed the reader may ponder the likenesses between their wider thinking.
The Safekeep
The Women’s Prize announced two winners for the best works by female authors of any nationality written in English and published in the U.K. Yael van der Wouden won the Fiction Prize for The Safekeep, a novel about collective memory and personal secrets that brings together two women in the post-World War II Netherlands. I mentioned previously that I’d read it. There’s a lot to love about The Safekeep and I’m glad to see it win a major prize. The one problem I had with it—and it was an issue for me—was that the big ‘reveal’ the author is setting up is obvious very early on. I was neither shocked nor surprised by it, but instead responded with ‘well, that took forever.’
A Few Books I Plan to Read
One book that is everywhere in my news feeds, and that I do plan on reading is Melissa Febos' The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year without Sex. The ubiquity of it and all the positive buzz has me interested.
In the The Republic of Letters, Isaac Kolding recommended a William Dean Howells novel, A Hazard of New Fortunes. The post discusses how Howells has fallen into obscurity. In grad school, I read one of his novels—The Rise of Silas Lapham—and really liked it. So I think this is a recommendation I’m going to take up.
A Hazard of New Fortunes … is a panoramic depiction of Gilded Age New York City—from beer halls and eating houses to the mansions of the nouveau riche—seen through the eyes of a blinkered, bourgeois, morally normalist, but ultimately sympathetic couple, Basil and Isabel March.
Books on the FLDS Cult
As my novel, Keep Sweet, launches in less than a week, I want to recommend some good books I’ve read about the FLDS polygamist cult that Keep Sweet is partly modeled on.
Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer
Krakauer’s dive into the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) was the first to draw me to the topic of highly authoritative Christian patriarchy. FLDS is based on ‘the principle’ that polygamy is a directive from God and is required for members to reach the highest levels of celestial afterlife.
To show how the FLDS came to be what it is, Krakauer gives a history of the LDS Church (Mormons) and shows how two of its original ideas play into the brutal 1984 murder of Brenda Wright Lafferty and her baby daughter Erica by her two brothers-in-law, Ron and Dan Lafferty. One of these ideas is that men (and only men) can receive direct revelations from God; another is blood atonement.
Krakauer includes life in “Short Creek” (Colorado City, AZ and Hildale, UT) under the despotic Warren Jeffs, who arranges marriages and prohibits toys, books, TV, and even the color red. While Jeffs raped girls as young as twelve and had audio recording of some of his crimes, his later arrest and conviction—after being placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List—is outside the timeframe of Banner.
Because the FLDS doesn’t believe that government authority is legitimate, Short Creek citizens are free to cheat local, state and federal government out of resources, most notably by receiving multi-millions in welfare benefits for women who are plural wives (but not legally married) and their children.
Should women attempt to escape their arranged marriages, they can be returned by police and other authorities who are also members of the cult.
Though Krakauer labels the concern of (literary critic) Harold Bloom that Mormons will become exceedingly powerful in the near future as ‘far-fetched,’ old-time patriarchy is making a comeback. (”Your body. My choice!”) This alone makes reading Under the Banner of Heavenworthwhile. Short Creek’s Warren Jeffs and the FLDS is a template for what theocratic Christian patriarchy can look like.
Escape by Carolyn Jessop
Escape is the story of a woman’s life in Short Creek under the reign of Warren Jeffs. Jeffs arranges Jessop’s marriage to a family enemy when she is eighteen years old. A man more than thirty years her senior, Jessop’s husband already has three other wives and will go on to have at least two more.
Jessop’s husband plays his wives off of one another. All but one can’t stand him, yet they vie for his affection. He alternates sleeping with (and impregnating) them. Jessop has baby after baby—eight in all—and one of her children is severely disabled. At one point pregnancy and childbirth almost kill her, but none of the other ‘sister wives’ will help her because they are envious. They tell her that her child’s disability is God’s judgment on her for being willful and disobedient. An “alpha wife” rules the roost, making the others cook and clean. She beats the children who are not her own. Eventually, Jessop’s health issues require her to have a hysterectomy. According to the religious tenets of the FLDS, the purpose of polygamy is procreation, but Jessop’s husband still demands sex—that is, when he isn’t sending her off to work in a hole-in-the-wall motel. Her escape at age 35 and her successful custody battle for her children will have you cheering.
Stolen Innocence by Elissa Wall
Elissa Wall of Stolen Innocence has a slightly different story. While her place as a woman in the FLDS cult is the same–-to submit to her husband in mind, body and soul—she is only fourteen when forced to marry. She tries everything she can to get out of it, but Warren Jeffs won't listen, claiming to have had a vision from God. Elissa’s husband is her first cousin, with whom she has never gotten along. She is his first wife. He rapes her on a regular basis. Before she can escape, she has several miscarriages and a stillbirth.
When Warren Jeffs is arrested on charges of child sexual abuse, Elissa is one of the primary witnesses against him in his trial. Her bravery is key to putting him behind bars. Unfortunately, while Short Creek is no longer run by the FLDS and many have left the cult, Jeffs continues to control, from prison, the actions of those still in the fold. These include praying for the death of author Jon Krakauer (Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith).
Lost Boy by Brent W. Jeffs
An obvious question for the reader of books on the FLDS concerns boys. If each man is supposed to have at least three wives, what happens to the leftover boys? The answer is that they are thrown out on the road to fend for themselves when they are young, keeping the ratio of men to women low. These throwaways are called ‘lost boys.’
The author of Lost Boy, Brent Jeffs, is the nephew of Warren Jeffs and the grandson of the earlier FLDS prophet, Rulon Jeffs. Brent was the first to file charges of sexual assault against Warren Jeffs, after recovering memories of being repeatedly raped by Warren when he was five years old. After his family is excommunicated from the FLDS cult, and Brent has a falling out with them, he becomes a lost boy. He shows us what this means: without family support, the boys must fend for themselves in a society where they are entirely unprepared to live. The results are poverty, drug and alcohol addiction, and sometimes suicide. With help and therapy, Brent succeeds in creating a family of his own.
Do you have any recommendations for other summer readers?
