Joan Rivers, Gail Godwin, and Age, Invincible Age

Last night, in between bouts of fever-induced delirium, I watched the IFC documentary, "Joan Rivers - A Piece of Work."  It was, in a word, riveting—a blow by blow account of Rivers' 76th year, of months spent seeking work, seeking access, seeking acclaim, seeking relevance, seeking, above all else, respect in a world that honors youth.  She is relentless, Joan Rivers.  She is needy.  She is not afraid to show it.  She wants to squeeze every hour for what it can deliver unto her, and she wants you to show up—at her signings, her shows, her roasts, her Apprentice TV—so that she can be sure that she still matters.

This past weekend, in the New York Times Book Review, Gail Godwin, now 73, wrote a moving piece about what she, as a writer, still wants.  "You want to be taken seriously; that doesn’t change," she wrote.  "What has changed for me is the degree of compromise I am willing to inflict on my work in order to see it in print."

Godwin, unlike Rivers, is not making impossible demands on every hour.  She does, she tells us, "a lot of lying around."  She has accepted that her "supine dithering is fertile and far from a waste of time."  She has gained an "increased intolerance for the threadbare phrase."  She hopes "to do credit to the material that has been hers...."

Reading Godwin's essay and watching the Rivers documentary back to back is like being offered two utterly dichotomous versions of your future—the future in which you still trust time to give you time (and story) or the future in which you do battle with every second.  I hope I have the presence of mind to trust time, if I live to that age.  I hope that I do not need to be loved, but that I still have a talent for loving. 

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Unfinished Desires: One Reader's Early Experience

This morning I was working my way through Gail Godwin's Unfinished Desires. Working my way through.

It's a dense book, but I've never been opposed to that. It incorporates multiple points of view, multiple storytelling sounds. It centers on one particular year—1951—at Mount St. Gabriel's, an all-girls school, but it weaves across time and through repercussions as that year is recollected in an elderly nun's purposefully dry, "official" memoirs. The cast of characters is rather gigantic, and the tangents are so multitudinous that I found myself setting the book down and wondering how the author (a three-time National Book Award finalist) managed to keep track of them all. Perhaps I also wondered how we readers are expected to, and whether or not there'll be sufficient pay-off in the end.

But what is stopping me more, is the sound, in this novel, of the young teens about whom it is mostly about. "Well, unlike Tildy, I never needed to have just one special 'best friend' I could tell everything to," one 16 year old says. "Probably Mama has filled that role for me. We're still girls together, giggling in the darkroom about how interchangeable most boys are." This 16 year old has a sister who is 14. The sister often sounds like this: "We can entertain ourselves. Chloe is a very interesting person to be with, and she finds me interesting."

A long time ago, when I was a frequent reviewer for the Baltimore Sun, Michael Pakenham, the editor, cautioned me against having an opinion about a book until I had in fact finished reading it. I didn't pronounce mid-course opinions then, and I'm not pronouncing an opinion here, but I am describing one reader's experience. I will continue to work my way through, for many readers have enjoyed this book, and sometimes stories just need time to unfold. I'm 130 pages in, and I've got 263 pages to go.

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The Books I Bought This Week

I have a funny habit of buying books when I know—it's an unbeatable, unbearable fact—that there will be no time to read them. They sit on the chair that sits opposite my desk, their lovely perfect spines toward me. They tease, they seduce until I finally give in—slip one into my bag and take it with me, everywhere.

I steal into a page or two while waiting in the Whole Foods line. I read while warming up for Zumba. I hover over pages while on hold on conference calls. I say to my husband, "Go ahead. No, seriously. You watch that show on the air battles of World War II; I'm just going to go upstairs."

It feels so good it almost feels wrong.

Here are the books that came into my home this week, in the order in which I believe I will read them. (I've already started The Disappeared, and so far it's the dream I thought it would be after reading the review in last week's Times):

The Disappeared (Kim Echlin)
The Girl with Glass Feet (Ali Shaw)
How I Became a Famous Novelist (Steve Hely)
A Jury of her Peers (Elaine Showalter)
Unfinished Desires (Gail Godwin)

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