Not Becoming My Mother & Other Things She Taught Me Along the Way
By Ruth Reichl
Penguin Press, 2009
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As editor in chief of recently defunct Gourmet magazine and a long-respected food journalist, Ruth Reichl knows the joy of a hard day’s work. Sadly, her mother, Miriam, rarely experienced that same reward. In three bestselling memoirs, Ruth has shared many memories of her mother, her “Mim Tales”—Mim’s constant lateness, her penchant for concocting poisonous meals—yet there was much that she kept to herself while her mother was alive, and much she did not know. When a cache of Mim’s diaries and letters were found, her mother finally became not the “charming character of the Mim Tales” but a complex person who, “by negative example,” cautioned Ruth not to make the same mistakes she had.
Mim aspired to be a doctor, like her father, but her parents dictated that she seek a suitably ladylike education. She doctored in music, then never again picked up her violin. At 20, she ran a successful bookstore, communicating with writers and editors all over the world (among her papers was a love letter from Bertrand Russell). But when she finally entered into family life at the age of 30, she retired into misery and idleness. “My mother, like most of her friends, literally had nothing to do,” Reichl observes. “They were smart, they were educated, and they were bored.” It wasn’t until Miriam had endured decades of what Ruth describes as a “tsunami of pain” that she found at least a little of the peace she had lost. At only 112 pages, Not Becoming My Mother feels like a snapshot, but the portrait she paints is no less intense because of it. —Vanessa Salvia
No Impact Man
By Colin Beavan
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009
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At the beginning of the book, the Beavan family—Colin, wife Michelle, toddler Isabella, and Frankie the dog—live the typical life of professional New Yorkers, gratifying their every want as conspicuous consumers. Then Colin embarks on an experiment: Can he (and his not-so-willing family) live a life of zero environmental impact for one year? That means no trash, no packaged or disposable products, no taxis, no boutique clothes, no air conditioning. No toilet paper.
By humorously recounting the decisions his family faced, and supporting their new philosophy with eye-opening statistics and Buddhist wisdom, Beavan makes a strong case for examining the way we live and how small changes can have a great impact. The Beavans start eating only locally grown vegetarian food, walking more, taking their own cups to the Juiceteria, and blowing their noses on handkerchiefs—though these might seem like baby steps to eco-aware Eugeneans, they are a giant leap for these ninth-floor-apartment dwellers. By the end of the book, they forget that their apartment has electricity.
But they aren’t trying to enforce a life of asceticism. Beavan and his wife quarrel over their new lifestyle, and they aren’t perfect—they take a couple of train trips to visit family, for instance—but they do show that even in the center of a pulsing metropolis it is possible to create a world in which everything does not automatically come individually wrapped. Even more inspiring is how the Beavans chose to continue living once the experiment was over. Colin Beavan blogs at noimpactman.com, and a documentary film on his family’s experiment is showing in selected cities. —Vanessa Salvia
A Gate at the Stairs
By Lorrie Moore
Alfred A. Knopf, 2009
Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs is a rare book: a literary
page-turner that captures the paranoia and disconnects of a nation on an intimately human scale. The book tells the story of Tassie Keltjin, a 19-year-old college freshman coming of age in the year after 9/11. Tassie grew up on a farm in Wisconsin but yearned to be part of the world of thought and intellect that she is finally tasting at her university. When she takes a job as nanny to a mixed-race adopted child, whose parents are the embodiments of liberal guilt, it quickly becomes clear that a mini universe of conflicting messages, competing ideals, shifting power structures, and deceit has found its way to Tassie’s doorstep.
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Though the conflicts Moore explores in the novel are far removed from the developments of 9/11, the author, best known for her short stories, bares these events out in her fiction in ways that are in turns startling, uncomfortable, and hilarious. Tassie—who narrates the story and who makes cultural references well beyond her years—never quite seems as naïve as the author suggests her to be (she’s never taken a taxi, or eaten Chinese food, for instance). Her voice, sharply poetic and bitingly funny, is that of an erudite cosmopolitan who has long escaped the plains. But Tassie is also an uncommonly memorable teenage character, one who earns her more hardened worldview in ways that will both enlighten readers and break their hearts. —Emily Grosvenor
