The Confession

The Confession

John Grisham

I’ll admit, I heart old-school John Grisham.  The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client.  My stack of ten paperbacks stands as ­a (sad and wobbly) monument to my sadly un-ironic love of stories featuring small-town lawyers, poor defendants, bad guys in black hats or black suits, all soaked in bourbon and sweet tea and set out to dry in the sun and dirt of the rural south.  (It also testifies to how much I love used bookstores).

Once his lawyers got richer and started turning into corporate douchebags in fancy cars and private jets, I aggressively lost interest.  The Confession reads like vintage Grisham.  It’s like The Chamber, but from the opposite side of the coin.  I read it straight through in three days, nose-in-book, doing things with one hand and trying not to bump into the walls, the way I read when I was a kid.  It made me want to watch The Client, and Dead Man Walking, and maybe also Thelma and Louise because I just love Susan Sarandon that much.

The plot is so sadly familiar.  A cheerleader disappears and, after a couple of weeks, the police have no idea what happened to her.  They arrest Donte Drumm, an 18-year-old football player.  Legally an adult, he’s interrogated for hours without his parents, without a lawyer, without any recordings of the interrogation.  No physical evidence, no body, an anonymous tip to the cops, a confession full of factual inaccuracies and leading questions.  Any one of those things should add up to reasonable doubt…did I mention that he’s convicted of murder and they can’t prove that anyone’s dead?...but none of those things make a difference.

I was about a third of the way through, on August 18^th (trust me, the date’s significant), and realizing that Donte was going to be killed for something he didn’t do.  It made me feel horrible, because it reminded me of Damien from the West Memphis Three.  I ran the Arizona branch of the support group for years, spent a lot of hours tabling out on Roosevelt on First Fridays, telling anyone who would stand still long enough to listen about three boys in jail because they wore black clothes and listened to heavy metal.  I saw Wil Wheaton at a benefit years ago, and was so busy going ohmygodit’sWesleyCrusher!!! in my head that I was too shy to go up and say hi to him.   I hadn’t checked in with the effort for years, mostly because I was terrified that I’d find out that they’d set a date for execution or worse.   It was also the beginning of a bad time in my life, and a lot of my memories are colored with memories of a bad ex-boyfriend. 

In a weird moment of synergy from the universe, the next day the news broke that they were being released.  It was the happiest I’ve felt in a long time, and it felt wonderful to be so purely happy for someone else.  And it happened without the ex-boyfriend from hell.  It felt like, because I had the end of the experience by myself, he was cleansed from the entire experience.  Like someone took a giant bunch of sage and smudged him the fuck out of my memories.  I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair, except with voodoo incense that you use to chase spirits from your home.  Suddenly, like everything was shiny and new, and a part of my old life was mine again.  

Fault Lines

Fault Lines

Nancy Huston

I used to date this guy.  The fact that he was an absolute and total raging douchenozzle is immaterial to this story, except that I can’t think about him without wanting to punch babies.  But anyway, I used to date this guy.  All the before-the-sex stuff was amazing, but then the actual sex was, well, not long enough and also 4” too short.  The fact that the preshow was so good made the actual event even less of a show. 

This book was kind of like that.

I love love loved the beginning.  It’s a generational story, working backward from California in the mid-2000s to Germany during WWII.  The first section is told by this precocious, slightly terrifying six-year-old named Sol.  He thinks he’s the center of the universe, which is normal for a six-year-old, because his mother tells him he’s the center of the universe, which I understand has become normal for parents.  The book reminded me that kids think magically instead of rationally, not stepping on cracks or believing in crossing your fingers and holding your breath while making a wish, but the book also reminded me that the mid-2000s must have been a scary time to live in a world that operates on magical rules.  Sol wants to grow up to be George Bush (or God), wonders if heaven is like Texas, and sneaks off when his mom is busy to look at porn and pictures of Abu Ghraib. 

After Sol’s section, the book moves backward through his father, grandmother and great-grandmother, all of whom share his self-centrism and perfectionism.  As it moves back in history, the story seems to move more and more inevitably toward the big reveal, which is that his great-grandmother was kidnapped from her family as part of the Lebensborn program in Nazi Germany.  (In part, the program “reassigned” Aryan-looking children from occupied countries to high-ranking SS families). 

Ultimately, while I loved the narrative, the ending had the effect of explaining away the darkness that runs throughout the family.  They’re drawn to violence and obsessive self-control not because we all are, but because someone planted that seed in their family line.  They have an out, which feels like what we’ve all been looking for in the last decade.  I didn’t want Himmler to be the bad guy; I wanted us to admit that the bad guy is in all of us.  It’s a lot to ask from this book, and it wasn’t the point of the book, but I loved the beginning so much that I wanted more from the ending.    

The Linus Blanket

This is completely unrelated to the 52 Books project…it’s closer to what my old Myspace blog was, ages ago.  I miss that blog and, while it came out of a dark time in my life, I miss that time and space.  I think something similar might be helpful right now.

I’ve recently been informed that I’m basically losing my mind.  I’ve been told that I’m losing my shit on a fairly regular basis, and more frequently than is normal even for me.  Although I maintain that (a) I’m not, and (2) if I were to be slightly less hinged than normal, coming slightly unglued at the edges, I’d certainly be justified, I have to admit that the asshole who told me that might have a point.  Maybe.  A small point.  I’ve called him Damaged since I met him, so he may know a thing or two about fucked-up-edness.  (That’s not as mean as it sounds…I told my best friend that I met a Tall, Dark and Damaged guy.  Only one of those names stuck around, although he is still all three).

My stress level regularly hovers around “Friday the 13^th and a full moon in a city emergency room…” so I don’t necessarily notice when it goes to “…and the zombies are attacking.”   But they’ve been attacking, and winning, for awhile now. 

I don’t really like change.  It’s a Cancer, nesting, I carry my house on my back kind of impulse.  I have this intense need to feel secure, but I also have this thing that says nobody will ever take care of you, so you have to protect yourself.  I’m sure with years of psychoanalysis I could figure it out, but I suspect it’s related to being told that nobody was going to protect me as a kid.  I’m just spitballing there…I could be wrong. 

This kind of understanding of the world drags me into two places: first, because nobody is going to take care of me, I’m suspicious of anyone who tries.  Psychotically suspicious, even, especially if it’s someone who might actually care about me, and specially especially if I actually need the help.  (I can take help from someone I don’t know well, when I don’t really need help, perfectly easily).  I tend to treat an offer to help me with something when I clearly need it like it’s an offer to eat candy and play with the puppies from a guy with a mullet and a windowless van.  And, apparently, being treated like a creepy child rapist might be insulting to some people.  (Maybe I should treat them like non-creepy child rapists.)

Secondly, I try to substitute physical security for emotional security, which works perfectly adequately until I don’t have the same level of physical security that I’m used to.  Say, and again this is just an example, I pick up and move to a different state.  I love living here, but from a business perspective it’s expensive and risky and I’m paying rent and a mortgage and I still can’t find an indie coffeehouse I like to save my fucking life and even when I try to go to my clear blue ocean place, I have to fight my way through an army of theme park freaks because the closest Sephora to where I live is in the middle of goddamn downtown Disney. 

So, the physical security takes a hit, or a few, and then my mental state which has been really leaning on at least I’m not going to end up homeless goes absolutely batshit.  That’s where I am right now…I refuse to recognize that I might have any backup from anyone else, and the things that usually calm me down are gone and I don’t know if they’re coming back.  I feel like I lost my Linus blanket.  I didn’t realize that I felt this marooned until right now.  I’ve been white-knuckling it this whole time, and I’m really tired of that now.  

A Caress of Twilight

A Caress of Twilight

Laurell K. Hamilton

Reading this series is sort of the literary equivalent of eating Annie’s boxed mac and cheese instead of the neon orange powdered stuff, or peanut butter Puffins instead of Cocoa Puffs. 

I’m perfectly aware that if you didn’t have hippie parents, that comparison means nothing.  You’ve probably never heard of Annie’s or Puffins.  I don’t so much care…I did have hippie parents, and I ate homemade yogurt and unsweetened oatmeal.  If I had to eat it, you can handle hearing about it.

My point it…it’s literary junk food.  It may have some redeeming qualities, but it’s junk food nonetheless.  Whatever.  I happen to like Annie’s mac and cheese and peanut butter Puffins.

I also like this series, for one big reason: the open, structured, functional polyamory of the Unseelie sidhe culture.

It’s very different from the open, structured, functional orgy culture found in Anne Rice’s work and in so many other fantasy-genre authors.  (Not that I’m opposed to functional orgies.  Literary porn is the bestest porn ever).  Hamilton’s work reads like it comes from a place of knowing how polyamory works in the real world.  It’s not a two guys for every girl kind of thing, it’s a tonight is my night, tomorrow is your night, and we will deal with the rest of it as it comes.

It’s unusual that fiction involving polyamory addresses jealousy.  And it’s unusual that it’s unusual, because that’s a cornerstone issue in those relationships.  “I tried to be hurt, jealous or even miffed that he might have been playing slap and tickle with Marie, and I just wasn’t.  Maybe it was because I was sleeping with the other men.  Maybe to be truly jealous you have to have some pretense of monogamy.  I didn’t know why, but it simply didn’t bother me.”

The book occasionally brushes past group sex, which it does as truthfully as possible, given that the main character, Meredith, is literally a faerie princess.  It’s not cop-out, bullshit two-on-one masquerading as group that some people cling to.  (Yeah, boys, that’s directed squarely at you.  If you want the girl+girl(s) to play in a girl+girl+guy scenario, you have to be willing to help out with the other guy when the ratios are reversed.)  I love this part, simply because the men are interacting with each other: “Doyle moved from beside me to put his back to Rhys…As if they’d arranged it, Rhys rose from the pillows to his knees and showed clearly that he was nude.  He rolled Doyle’s long braid in his arms until he came to the end and began to undo the ribbon that bound it…Rhys was working Doyle’s hair free of the braid.  I’d seen Doyle with his hair free of that braid only once.  Only once had it been like some dark living cloak to shroud his body.”  

I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell

I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell

Tucker Max

This book is alternately horrible and hysterical, and it often turns on a dime between the two.  Tucker Max is, straight up, an asshole.  Much of the book serves to illustrate this.  I’m fairly sure that the suggestion to read this book was made sarcastically, since I’m a proud femmenist…yes, I spelled that wrong on purpose, the image of modern feminists is decidedly butch and I am most decidedly femme…and I don’t like douchebags.  (My last zillion boyfriends notwithstanding, I don’t like them.)  The image of Holden Caulfield just popped into my brain, with his entitled jackassery.  (I’m possibly the only English literature snob in existence who can’t stand Catcher in the Rye.  I’ve tried many times, and I can’t get through it.  It’s excruciating to read.)  The girl-power side of me didn’t have much of a problem with this book, which I’ll explain shortly. 

I have nothing against assholes as long as they’re honest about it.  Quite a few of the earlier stories in this collection deal with the consequences of not being honest about your intentions, and he’s self-aware enough to realize that those consequences were predictable outcomes of his behavior.  Telling a girl “I love you” when you just want a fuck buddy is a dickish thing to do, and he openly admits that it contributed to being stalked by girls who bought the line and now love him back. 

I’ll admit that I hate the use of the words “slut” and “whore” and how often they appear.  It’s they way that he describes the girls who act like he does, and the double standard makes me want to spit.  On him.  A lot.

One of my favorite stories is about a girl who comes over and gives him a blowjob before going on a date with another guy, and he realizes he’s probably been the second guy at some point.  He’s completely losing his shit over girls who act like he does, and it makes me happy.  (Another one of my favorite stories is about someone telling him that he’s probably slept with a post-op transsexual at least once.  I like when people get slapped in the face with their own closed-mindedness). 

This passage struck me as absolute truth, albeit in a “he stumbled across it, idiot-savantly” kind of way: “Ladies, let me give you some advice.  You can throw all your stupid fucking chick-lit, self-help, why-doesn’t-he-love-me books out, because this is all you need to know: Men will treat you the way you let them.  There is no such thing as ‘deserving’ respect; you get what you demand from people.”  This is a zillion percent gospel truth, and it was missing from a lot of 2^nd-wave feminist thought.  Having equal capability with men means that we should be held to the same standards as men.  Assuming that women “deserve” some extra measure of anything suggests that we’re frail or delicate or easily broken.  Fuck that.  He says later, “…if you demand respect, he will either respect you or he won’t associate with you.  It really is that simple.”  Also a zillion percent true, and something we all probably needed to hear in high school.  And college.  And last week. 

Quite randomly, there were quotes that convinced me that he and I know the same people:

“If you EVER speak ill of the McGriddle again I will personally force-feed you one while I fuck you in the butt using the wrapper as a condom and then donkey punch you when the infused syrup nuggets explode in your mouth.”  (I know two people who talk like this.  It’s terrifying when the two of them are in the same room.)

I have wanted to say this to people: “It stops talking to its intellectual superior or it gets the hose.”

And finally, I would put this bumper sticker on my car: “The pen may be mightier than the sword, but the vagina is stronger than both.”

Love and the Eye

Love and the Eye

Laura Newburn

I typically don’t like narrative poetry.  I don’t “get” it, in an emotional, visceral sense.  This really is just personal prejudice, a function of my OCD that says things need to be observed, analyzed, broken down and then consumed in order to understand them.  I look for detail, I want to know what the world smells like, tastes like, before I feel like I can enter it.  (To be fair, I know a few narrative poets who can capture that sense of place, but not many). 

I read through Love and the Eye quickly, but mostly because I didn’t linger in the world.  Newbern’s writing often felt myopic, like she was looking at an object or a scene in a dark room without context.  In Apartment Elegy, “A table, a blue / glass pitcher. Flat // black of the table, / forget. The roundest // of blues, forgive. / Then a small rain; // then silence, silence / like earthenware.”  I follow her connection between the black of the table and the verb “forget,” and also the connection between the blue curve of the pitcher and the verb “forgive,” but those connections are intellectual rather than emotional. 

Similarly, in “Motel, I have difficulty emotionally attaching to the descriptions: “Flat motel bed. / Flat brown / expanse. Car // outside and yet / another new life / doing its tanta- // lizing dance on the / ceiling.”  In this case, “flat” doesn’t seem expansive to me, in the way that the Texas landscape is flat; it seems small, insignificant, defeated.  I understand it, but I don’t know whether I care.

However, I find her line and stanza breaks delicious.  It’s hard to see the impact of the stanza break between “tanta-“ and “lizing” in the paragraph above, so here’s how it appears on the page:

“outside and yet

another new life

doing its tanta-

lizing dance on the

ceiling.”

The break in the middle of the word becomes onomatopoeic; the word sounds the way it means.  (“Pop” and “squish” are textbook examples, when you say them, you feel what they mean.  I learned that from Reading Rainbow when I was like 5.  PBS fucking rocks!)  “Tantalizing” evokes a sense of eager anticipation, an intake of breath, which is exactly what the stanza break forces you to do. 

I’ve always connected very short lines with imagistic poetry; I didn’t connect short lines with narrative work.  In the poem Death, Fifth Avenue, her use of short lines, often hanging at the end, serve the motion of the story in a very interesting way: “I saw two old women / moving through time / through the huge // lobby of the building / I work in, through / the gold doors too / heavy to ever truly / open, or close. They were moving” Leaving “through” to hang at the end of the line pauses the reader for a split second on that action, reinforcing the transitory feeling of moving from one place to the next. 

Like any other poetry reader, I am a collector of lines I love.  I’m simultaneously jealous and greedy; I want to steal the lines and live inside them.  My favorite lines in this collection appear in Little Bird: “What is a child but dark. / What is a child, if not a pocket of dark.” 

52 Books

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend.  Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.

…Groucho Marx

I was one of those little girls who consumed books like air.  I once decided I wanted to read every book in my elementary school library; I didn’t finish, but I made a sizable dent.  I used to spend my birthdays at Changing Hands…this amazing indie bookstore in Tempe…back when it was on Mill and you really could get lost in the stacks. 

I used to literally walk around with my nose in a book and, given that we’re now afraid to let kids leave the house for fear of UV rays, strangers with vans and candy, and death by lack-of-elbow -pads, I was probably one of the last kids every told to go outside and play, goddammit!  (Okay, maybe my mom didn’t say the last part, but I bet she wanted to). 

I put inappropriate books in different jackets.  I’d find where my parents hid my books so I could sneak them back when I was finished reading them. 

Books were such a huge part of my life, but I haven’t read as much lately and I hate that.  Because I’m about to turn 30 and I haven’t yet turned into the person I want to be when I grow up, and because I still have an irrational and quite possibly unhealthy love for deadlines and homework, I’m giving myself an assignment.

One year.  52 new books. 

I want to read them, then discuss them.  And by discuss, I mean say something that may or may not be at all related to the book.  I’m fairly associative and tangential when writing in my own voice.  Non-linear, even.  I’ve decided that, while writing This Sucks in crayon on a napkin does not constitute a book review, writing it and publishing it in my own little corner of the digital ‘verse does. 

If I had a list of 52 books in mind that I wanted to read, I’m hoping I would’ve read them already.  I don’t, so I’m asking my well-educated and literate friends to help.  (If I have any undereducated, illiterate friends, they’re are probably not reading this anyway.  I have faith in my friend group…we’re all smart-as-hell-type people).  So…please give me suggestions!  I’ll add to my list along the way, but I’d really love help filling out my list. 

My rules and requests:

*The list is more of a suggestion, kind of the way I used to think about syllabi for classes I didn’t really want to take.  They’re not numbered in anything resembling a relevant order.

*I want to read new books I’ve never read before.  Books I pretended to read in college but didn’t actually read…like Moby Dick…count as new.

*I’m not reading Moby Dick.    

*I prefer fiction to non, although I’m also partial to biography.

*I love old school, Bradbury-style sci-fi, but have found that most modern sci-fi writers spend more time defining their worlds than playing in them.

*I love magical realism.  Love love love it.  Neil Gaiman, Francesca Lia Block, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

*I prefer my fantasy in the J.K. Rowling, modern magic vein, not so much with the swords and the dragons.

*Did I mention I love Neil Gaiman?  I also love John Steinbeck, but I’ve read almost everything from both of them.

And here’s the list…

1. The Volcano, Norman Dubie
2. Some Nights No Cars At All, Josh Rathkamp
3. Smoke and Mirrors, Neil Gaiman
4. Love and the Eye, Laura Newbern
5. A Caress of Twilight, Laurell K. Hamilton
6. Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
7. Seduced by Moonlight, Laurell K. Hamilton
8. Fragile Things, Neil Gaiman
9. The Prophet, Kalil Gibran
10. I Heard God Laughing, Hafiz
11. Norse Code
12. The Doomsday Book
13. I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, Tucker Max
14. Fault Lines, Nancy Huston
15. The Confession, John Grisham
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