We seek leadership from each other, and the cautionary Girl at War (Sara Novic)

We are, in this country, in a state of profound bewilderment—or the vast majority of us are. Ours has become a land of unloosed epithet throwers, flame tossers, defacers, chanters, emboldened murderers...and the millions and millions of the rest of us who are saying no, this is not who we are, this is not what we want, this is not what our fathers and brothers and sisters and mothers have fought for, this is not the United States, this is not leadership, this is not even remotely "fine."

Without leadership from the top, we seek leadership from each other.

I teach in the spring at the University of Pennsylvania. I take solace, on those Tuesdays, from the students who sit with me—the students who go deep, take risks, find the words, remind me of the future, the students who, in times of great moral peril, remain willing to imagine and empathize and tell the truth.

But I'll have to wait until January to meet them, and between now and then I find myself spinning, lost, then regaining traction through the books that I am reading. Camille T. Dungy's Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History has been alerting, and helpful. Edwidge Danticat's The Art of Death. CeCe Bell's El Deafo. Nina Riggs's The Bright Hour. And, read over a long period of time so that it would not come too soon to its end, Sara Novic's Girl at War.

Novic's much-lauded novel begins with the story of a ten-year-old girl living a tomboy's life in Croatia's capital. Things aren't perfect there, hardly—her baby sister is sick, money is tight, her father and mother are sometimes at odds. But there are still simple pleasures like bike rides with a best friend and the stories her father tells at night. All of which swiftly changes as war settles into this civilized place. Shattered buildings. Underground shelters. Plumes of war smoke watched from a balcony.

On the left, the twin peaks of Zagreb Katedrala stretched taller than all the surrounding buildings. I couldn't remember a time when the cathedral wasn't at least partly swathed in scaffolding and tarps, but that only added to its sense of majesty, its wounds a physical manifestation of the sorrows and confessions of the city. In nights before the war, two spotlights lit the stone towers in dual rushes of warm gold. Now, with the lights quelled in anticipation of a blackout, it was difficult to pinpoint the boundary between the spires and the night sky.

And things are about to get worse, as Ana's baby sister is sent away for medical help, a car blockade derails Ana's life, and Ana finds herself in a safe house learning the mechanics of warfare. Later Ana will be secretly ushered to the United States. She'll struggle to live with her buried past. She'll finally return to the country that was broken by war.

While not an autobiographical novel, Girl at War is an utterly authentic one—a story Novic began writing as an 18 year-old in a college classroom. She pursued the facts in long months spent in Croatia. She kept writing until she found its arc.

The result is vivid, heartbreaking, and not just historical. It is alive with the cautions of what happens when communities allow minor and major differences (a desire for new roads, a hatred for cultural differences) to tear themselves apart. It seemed to me, as I finished reading yesterday, to be an exemplary cautionary tale.

If we let ourselves devolve into the fractions the white supremacists hope we will, we will become a country even more at war with itself. We must, then, lead from within. Lead each other.

I'm teaching literary middle grade and young adult literature next spring at Penn—the writing of books for and about the young that sear into our minds and hearts by virtue of their organic concerns and crafted structures. Sara Novic, whose adult Girl at War won an Alex Award (books written for adults that have special appeal to young adults, ages 12 through 18) will be coming to Penn on March 13, 2018, as part of my curriculum.

(As always, I have Julia Bloch and Jessica Lowenthal to thank for making my guest-list dreams come true.)

I know that seems like a long way off. I know we can't imagine who we will be, as a nation, at that time.  No matter what, mark your calendars. Read her book in the meantime.

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Reflecting on Here/There Memoirs in Today's Publishing Perspectives

Today in Publishing Perspectives, a digital magazine about the international world of books, I'm reflecting on a sub-species of memoir I like to think of as Cross-Border memoirs, or Here/There memoirs.

I kick the piece off with thoughts about the great Michael Ondaatje's indispensable Running in the Family, then move on—toward Edwidge Danticat, Anthony Shadid, and Sophia Al-Maria.

The heart of the piece is here, below. The whole can be found here. So many thanks to Ed Nawotka for giving me room to think out loud.

More about memoirs I love, memoir exercises, and Handling the Truth can be found here.

All memoirists travel across the accordion folds of synapses and time. Border-crossing memoirists additionally move back and forth across space — past signposts, over deckled landmasses, into new weather, toward the science of geomorphology. Their points of view are duality inflected. Their vocabularies are exotic and hued. Their ideas about home are perforated and embellished by contrasts, contradictions, and corporeal compromise.

Finally, on a related (sort of matter), I will be in Alexandria, VA, this weekend at Hooray for Books, with the phenomenal Debbie Levy, whose work crosses many borders. We begin at 3:30. Readers and writers are both welcome. We're going to be talking about international books, and about truth and fiction and the line between. Many thanks to Serena, who is helping to spread the word, here. 

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from the writerly life to the reviewing life

There's a funny thing that happens when you stop writing your own books—when you cool the fever, when you walk the garden, when you do not rise at 3 AM, determined.  Other people's books become your obsession.  Their stories, their words, their worlds.  You grow responsible for understanding.  You yield your empathy, devote your time.  The days are long and hot and languid, and New Orleans wafts by courtesy of Ruta Sepetys, and Haiti, thanks to Edwidge Danticat, and the humor of Haven Kimmel, the confessions of Caroline Knapp, the daughter of a salt god (Ilie Ruby), Cambodia at war (Vaddey Ratner), the very secret life of objects (Dawn Raffel).

Over the course of the last month, I have bought nearly 100 books and others, due out soon, have made their way to me, courtesy of publishing houses and authors.  My triple-stacked shelves in every book-devoted room are officially overtaxed.  Book piles approximate architecture.  Most women get up and ask, What will I wear?  I wonder, upon rising, what to read.

My mind is clear; it is at peace; it is satiated.  I sleep better than I did.  I want less.  I am comforted by books, comfortable around them, and the words I do write these days are reviews and essays, opinion pieces, suggestions.  Short pieces, perhaps 1,000 words a day, that help me put into context those things that I'm learning about language and how it works for others.

It seems enough, for summer.

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Brother, I'm Dying/Edwidge Danticat

Saturday night, a young woman I'll call E. returned from her year in Port-au-Prince, where she had been at work in a hospital clinic as a nutrition program coordinator.  Daughter of remarkably loving parents, sister to an incredibly talented and goodhearted son, E. is also a member of my church family (she is as well a super-star athlete, but that's a tale for another day).  We were all collectively holding our breath until E. arrived home safely.  We knew how much good she was doing over there.  We equally recognized that Haiti is not the easiest domicile for a recent college grad.

In honor of E.'s safe return home, I read Brother, I'm Dying, the Edwidge Danticat memoir.  The book had been sitting here for quite some time.  Having finished it this morning, I can neither understand nor forgive my earlier resistance to it.

For this is a book.  This is memoir at its most pure and form-redeeming—intelligent, researched, heartfelt.  Calmly and with great care, Danticat weaves together the story of the man who raised her as a child in Bel Air, Haiti (her uncle), and the man who fled to Brooklyn in an effort to create for his whole family a better life (her father).  Two brothers, then, two father figures, and two ultimately tragic trajectories as each man fights to survive impossible odds and their daughter fights hard not to lose them.  In a single year—2004—Danticat, now married, in Miami, pregnant with her daughter—will watch her world unravel.  She will bear witness to what revolutionary upheaval and disease can do to the men who, for so much of her youth, were not just essential but invincible.

Memoirs that make room for family history and country politics challenge their writers structurally; they ask more from the words on the page.  No false binding will do, no obvious superimpositions, no easy themes, no ready truths.  There are higher stakes, in memoirs like these.  More is expected, more wanted.  Danticat, who has proven herself in book after book, forges a remarkable narrative.  She is there throughout, of course; memoir by definition is an "I story.  But she is not her memoir's heroine; she is its maker, and there's a difference.  She has set out to honor others, not to claim pity for herself.  She has written with both intimacy and something I can only call nobility.  She has made of fragments a whole.  We believe her, utterly, when she writes these words:

I write these things now, some as I witnessed them and today remember them, others from official documents, as well as the borrowed recollections of family members.  But the gist of them was told to me over the years, in part by my uncle Joseph, in part by my father.  Some were told offhand, quickly.  Others, in greater detail.  What I learned from my father and uncle, I learned out of sequence and in fragments.  This is an attempt at cohesiveness, and at re-creating a few wondrous and terrible months when their lives and mine intersected in startling ways, forcing me to look forward and back at the same time.  I am writing this only because they can't.

I am writing this only because they can't.  Those who dismiss memoir as a genre have not read Brother, I'm Dying. 

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new additions to my library

When my American Express bill came in this past month, something odd and spectacularly unprecedented occurred: I owed a mere ninety-nine cents.  True, I have been so holed up here, so focused on work, that I've been operating as a blinkered horse, my eyes on the finish line (s), my mind shutting out all purchase-able distractions.  Also true: Except when it comes to buying gifts (I buy many, many gifts) I have never been exactly profligate.  Malls drive me batty.  Excess crowds me in.  My decorating aesthetic is whatever lies between homey and uncluttered, warm and just enough.  My wardrobe features three pairs of jeans, some turtlenecks, some sweaters/coats, an occasional skirt, and some dresses, for when I have to wear dresses.  My mother used to buy me my most interesting, most meaningful clothes.  She passed away several years ago, and I never rose to the challenge.

(I do like shoes.  By my count, I have too many shoes.)

Still, what I do buy is books—I buy a lot of books—in support of an industry, in specific support of specific authors.  Thus, I rectified my no-buying spree yesterday by adding a number of titles to my personal library, all of them, I realize, falling into the nonfiction camp.  That's nonfiction the way I define it, and not the way John D'Agata wishes I would.  (For more on the D'Agata controversy, I suggest you read the Gideon Lewis-Kraus RIFF in the New York Times.) 

Among the titles that will (at one point) be reported on here are the following:

Rough Likeness: Essays (Lia Purpura)
Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (Edwidge Danticat)
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity (Katherine Boo)
Winter: Five Windows on the Season (Adam Gopnik)
House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East (Anthony Shadid)
Istanbul: Memories and the City (Orhan Pamuk)
The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist (Orhan Pamuk)

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