Recently in Not Oprah's Book Club Category

I'll just come right out and admit it: I'm becoming more and more of a sucker for spiritual exploration. Call me a cliche of my later 20s...letting go of the perfect girl mentality and wanting to understand deeper questions about what it's all about. Call me a girl from Colorado Springs who felt oppressed by the dominant culture of hard line traditional religions, so waited until later to consider the softer side of spirituality. In any case, I'm here and wondering.

I found The Seeker's Guide: Making Your Life a Spiritual Adventure by Elizabeth Lesser in my parents' book shelf while home for a visit and was immediately hooked. This substantial book is split into five books: The American Landscape, The Landscape of the Mind, The Landscape of the Heart, The Landscape of the Body, and The Landscape of the Soul. So you can see, Lesser's pretty much got the whole gamut covered.

She's an incredible guide because she's one of the founders of The Omega Institute and has been planning and participating in workshops there for decades. She's been able to sample all sorts of rich traditions, spiritual philosophies, and experiential self-help (don't worry, she talks about the dangers of "spiritual tourism"). The book is, in essence, her philosophy culled from the bits and pieces of all of those experiences, and some original insights of her very own.

I was moved through out the entire book. Lesser is a great story teller and a beautiful writer. There were times when I wished I could have asked her a question, pushed her on her assumptions about the dynamics of the universe, her leaps of faith that still don't sit well with me, but just the fact that I wanted to ask these questions, that I wrestled with the material, seems like the sign of a good book to me.

I like her idea that spirituality is about both "the biggies"--Is there a God? Where do I go after I die? What is I anyway?--and "the dailies"--What is the most ethical way to live? How is my life reflecting my beliefs? What would Jesus do?. I also love her notion of spiritual and political enlightenment being a process of "transcending and including" (it was originally Ken Wilber's from A Brief History of Everything). We must constantly be asking ourselves how our polity and our personhood represents our highest ideals. Do away with the hypocrisy, injustice, inequality and include new ways of being whole, kind, and fair.

There's so much more, but I'll let you seek out the rest...

No doubt you've heard more than you ever wanted to hear about how stress is bad for your health. Cortisol floods your system and breaks down your capacity to heal, be happy etc. Many call it the fight or flight system--that physiological reaction to our psychological scares.

But not enough of us are aware that there is also a calm and connection system, as Dr. Kerstin Uvnas Moberg, puts it. Reporters rarely tell us that, yes, stress is bad for you, but joy, pleasure, and passion are actually good for your health--both short and long term. She explains:

This calm and connection system is associated with trust and curiosity instead of fear, and with friendliness instead of anger. The heart and circulatory system slow down as the digestion fires up. When peace and calm prevail, we let our defenses down and instead become sensitive, open, and interested in others around us.

This system is jump started with oxytocin--an amazingly complex hormone that for years was thought to only be associated with childbirth and breastfeeding. In fact, it is released at all kinds of interesting moments, most associated with a sensual experience of pleasure. I like that.

So get out there, get calm and connect. In the long run, your immune system will be boosted, your capacity for memory and learning will be enhanced, and your risk of heart disease--the number one killer of women--will be reduced.

Check out Lisa Chen and Lisa Witter talking about their new book, The She Spot: Why Women Are the Market for Changing the World--And How to Reach Them above.

When I first heard Lisa W. speak this winter at the Women's Media Center I was absolutely smitten with her (she's clear, smart, inventive, and managed to be all that while a GIANT baby (hers) hung out on her hip). But I have to say that I was immediately worried about the thesis of The She Spot, which is that marketing to women (for both nonprofits and political campaigns) requires essentially different principles than marketing to men (i.e. men are from Mars, women are from Venus--the social justice version).

The Lisa's explain their idea about gender different this way:

When it comes to improving the lives of women and girls and creating the society we want to live in, we couldn't agree more that women should be treated on equal footing with men. But we are selling ourselves short if we deny the fact that gender differences exist.

What I like about their view on gender differences, as queasy as it makes me, is that they're not just arguing that there are neurological and hormonal differences, but that there are differences bred by the continued differential socialization of girls and boys in the country. In other words, fight against it for the long term, but in the short term, recognize that some of the ways in which women are socialized (to care deeply about others, to be self-sacrificing) are actually assets for social change.

I'm excited to think about the ways in which The She Spot might influence politicians and nonprofits. In a world of the Lisa's making, there would be no more candy cotton pink websites that are supposed to appeal to women, no more use of the terrible term "women's issues", and lots of appealing to single women--who they note are THE most important constituency for the 2008 election. In their world, the Survival of the Fittest would be evolved into the Survival of the Connected. In their world, fundraisers and communications consultants would understand that though it takes longer for women to decide to give money or get involved in a cause, they are more loyal over the long run and give more of their proportional income. In their world, people would understand that a passionate woman tells everyone about her cause.

They sum it up:

At the dawn of the 21st century, the social and political tides that define where and who we are as a people today make the values that matter most to women--connecting and community--a winning blueprint for social change and transformation.

Can't wait to hear your thoughts...

Greg Mortenson is an unlikely advocate of girls’ education. A hyper-masculine mountain climber, he spent much of his young twenties figuring out how to get to K2, one of the tallest mountains in the world, and climb it. He failed. But as with so many failures, there was a wild success underneath.

He fell in love with Pakistan and its people, especially the native peoples of Korphe, a tiny village high in the mountains that defeated him. After building a school there (another climb that included many, many obstacles), he found that it was not outdoor sports but education that he was most called to. He wanted to keep building schools, keep interacting with the people of Pakistan, keep—he would later conceptualize—fight terror through the safety of books and open minds.

The 300 page book (exhaustively detailed at times) is a powerful retelling of Mortenson’s journey. As a sucker for these kinds of biographies in altruism, I was riveted the whole time. Mortenson’s resilience and determination inspired me to take a totally new perspective on my own definition of “set back.” He is sometimes frighteningly unafraid.

But what I found missing from this account were the moral complexities. In Korphe, for example, Mortenson helps the village people—historically separated from “civilization”—by an abyss, build a bridge. What seems simple, however, had to have caused all sorts of wild changes in the community. Relin only dwells on the positive, briefly mentioning that there are often unintended side effects of well-intentioned acts. As someone interested in all the gray of international development and civic involvement, I want to read about those side effects, not see them glossed over.

In short, the biography was too sunny for me, to glowing and angelic. Nevertheless, I was incredibly moved by Mortenson’s example and you, no doubt, will be too (if you haven’t already been…it's a bestseller after all).

Next time: The Oxytocin Factor by Kirsten Uvnas Moberg

This powerful memoir by Meredith Hall is the kind of work that you read on two levels. On one, you are actually experiencing the words, reflecting on their meaning, recognizing yourself in them. And on the other, you are continually amazed and grateful that the book exists.

With Hall, it almost wasn’t the case, not just because she experienced a traumatic adolescence and spent much of her young adult life—in effect—trying to die, but also because as an older adult she’s rarely had the resources needed to sit and write. Thanks to a grant from A Room of Her Own (a foundation that support women writers), a scholarship to Bowdoin (from which she graduated at 44), and her own resilient spirit, Without a Map was born into the world.

So was Hall’s baby, at 16, and then promptly stripped from her and never spoken about again among her family (except in moments of shame and rage). Once the darling of her town, Hall becomes an outcast, abandoned by her own mother and eventually disowned by her own father. The memoir follows her through the turbulent 60s—a political time that matched her inner angst, on her travels through the middle east where she wasted away into almost nothing, and then as she resurrects her life in her own image.

I don’t want to give away too much, but suffice it to say that this woman’s journey is totally ordinary and, at the same time, extraordinarily moving. And her writing, well, see for yourself:

Maybe all of us at some time move from our compass point of true north, that place in which we determine to correct the failures done to us, and we circle, waiver and find out own direction outward in the world to create injury. The rhumb lines of navigation are not straight.

Grief coming to wisdom. Wisdom is impossible without reckoning with a past.
Whatever else may have gone wrong, whatever of grief and loss is carried by each of us, so too is love. Nothing is lost.

Next week: Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin.

You sort of want to hate Sloane Crosley. Especially if you're the kind of young writer who devours Vivian Gornick and SarahVowell and Meghan Daum. And then you really want to hate her because you see that Meghan Daum has blurbed her (what a weird, weird verb) and on the back of her book she's compared to no less than Dorothy Parker, David Sedaris, and oh yes, Sarah Vowell. Awesome.

But when you open up her little paperback original (beautifully designed, of course), ready for the hate to calcify, instead it just melts away. She's just too funny, just too honest, just too original. You'd hate her if you could, but you can't, so instead you love her. Especially for lines like these:

My father did this sometimes, so I recognized it—a tweaked out kind of racism in which one is abnormally accepting of others simply because they're different. To this day, he has a keen interest I how my black and gay friends are doing. He loves seeing old Chinese men and Mexican babies.

The side effects of growing up "just outside of [insert major urban center here]" are many but practically intangible. This is logical given the fact that suburbia itself is a side effect and practically intangible. For instance, suburban kids are uniquely mean. They don't have the dangers of drive-by shootings or shark attacks to put things into perspective. The poor aren't considered genuinely impoverished and the wealthy aren't rich rich. Everything is muted. Other side effects include but are not limited to: inadvertent house arrest until the age of eighteen, the mall as ecosphere, jingling car keys as status symbol, an intimate knowledge of golf courses but a lack of global awareness.

And the description of her childhood friend, Francine, going to a school dance in a dress made of pages of Seventeen and YM duct-taped to her body is the nail in the coffin for my anticipated but never realized hatred of Ms. Sloane. She calls the dress a "Betty Friedan paper doll."

Read it. And don't hate. She's just that good.

Next week: Without a Map by Meredith Hall and after that Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin.

We've got a great guest review from Chelsey Clammer this week. Chelsey is a feminist, queer, and disability rights activist living in Chicago with her partner who wants credit for the ideas in the last sentence of this review. You got it, Marie.

In her debut novel, Jane Kotapish puts the fun back in dysfunctional. The story opens with an unnamed narrator explaining the eccentricities of her childhood: “I named my dead sister Nancy and talked to her in the privacy of my closet for eleven years.� Emerging from the delusion of her best friend/worst enemy/dead sister/imagined ghost relationship, the narrator eventually grows into a generically successful New York City woman. But not all is right in adulthood. In NYC, the narrator witnesses a horrific accident that eventually sends her back to the Virginia countryside to contemplate her life and identity.

In her newly acquired quiet Virginia life, the narrator—now in her 30’s—reacquaints herself with her delusional and idiosyncratic mother, Lois. Ultimately a novel about unconventional mother-daughter relationships, Salvage reveals the ways in which connections can form through peculiar ways. You see, Lois has also taken up talking to imaginary friends. While these friends do not come in the form of the daughter she had a miscarriage with years ago, they do come in the form of Catholic Saints. And eventually both the narrator and the reader start to question if these Saintly friends are actually imagined, or if life is really just that weird. As this delightfully dysfunctional mother-daughter pair navigates their past and present delusions, they learn how to re-adjust their atypical relationship with each other.

My favorite relationship in this wonderfully quirky and poetic novel, however, is the bond that the narrator forms with her next-door neighbor, Edith. As our narrator drinks wine by herself in her enormous Victorian house, she begins to notice the crazed life of the woman who lives across the street with one too many kids, not enough support from her husband, and never enough time to herself. The narrator calls Edith one day when she notices a slight pause in the chaos of Edith’s house:

“I don’t say, I saw you hesitate in the doorframe, you’re lost and half-crazed with fatigue, come keep me company in my neurotic isolation. I say, ‘Hey, looks quiet over there, want some tea?’� As the tea turns into vodkas, these women solidify their friendly love for each other and create a community of support for each other to better deal with their own families.

It is with Kotapish’s lyrical style and understanding of women’s lives and relationships, as well as her approach to detangling the knots of grief and longing in a well-told story that make Salvage amazing. Shifting between the child’s perspective and the woman’s narration, the unnamed narrator is specifically unnamed as tries to connect the pieces of her past in order to understand the fractured person she is now. Smart but simple, Salvage encourages a certain self-reflection of the reader’s past—it is a novel that makes you think about how it is you remember the things you have yet to forget.
--Chelsey Clammer

Next week: I Was Told There'd Be Cake by Sloan Crosley and then Without a Map by Meredith Hall the week after.

Sabrina Chapadjiev’s anthology, Live Through This: On Creativity and Self Destruction, strikes me in all ways as a carefully crafted object—which so few books are these days.

It is small and pleasing, covered in gorgeous art, and filled with important, diverse, beautiful, heartbreaking, original essays/poems /comics/drawings by some of the most fascinating writers I know of: Eileen Myles, Patricia Smith, Kate Bornstein, Toni Blackman, bell hooks etc. But even more, the message about women and madness—something that has been mined to death in some ways—is carefully crafted.

In the preface, Chapadjiev writes: “The glamorization of this issue, combined with the fear and shame built around it, has made understanding self-destructive behaviors almost impossible.� And this is what I’m grateful—immediately—that she understands. As the curator of a book like this, you are charged with the seemingly impossible task of talking about women’s creative impulses, as coupled with their self-destructive ones, without making the pairing look pretty. Or so ugly its romantic. It just is, or as she puts it:

We’ve been taught that self-destruction is an awful thing. “It is bad,� we’ve been told my therapists, psychologists, and those who do not understand its seduction. I would like to edit that. Instead of “It is bad,� I would like for it to read, “It is.�

It is. (And it reminds me of the Mad Pride Movement that Vanessa posted about earlier this week).

To my mind, one of the major unfinished revolutions within feminism is the whole field of equal parenting, work/life balance, feminist mothering etc. Just taking a look at some of the recent books on the topic (Perfect Madness by Judith Warner, Get to Work by Linda Hirshman, The Feminine Mistake by Leslie Bennetts, Opting Out by Pamela Stone) gives one a sense that there is a whole lot of unresolved angst when it comes to women's relationship to the mothering role.

That's why I'm so excited that one of our third wave icons, Amy Richards, has taken a stab at dealing with some of the lingering dilemmas in her new book Opting In: Having a Child Without Losing Yourself. (Thanks for writing this before I got there, Amy!)

Some of the most salient parts of the book, for me, were Amy's discussion of the ways in which feminist mothering is about tiny, everyday choices. She is a bit cynical about the notion of a full scale motherhood revolution (unlike the gals at MomsRising and some other great organizations), but she certainly believes Gandhi's old adage that each of us must "be the change you wish to see in the world." That applies to feminists in lots of interesting ways...if you have one, do you pay your nanny a living wage? Do you send your child to a school that has a diversity of students and mirrors your feminist values? Do you model self care and compassionate communication for your kids on a daily basis?

One of the things I've noticed, while traveling the country and speaking about body image issues, is that mothers--in particular--love to blame the epidemic of food and fitness obsession on external institutions ("media", plastic surgery industry, celebrities), but are rarely willing to look at their own modeling in an honest way. I feel like Amy is trying to counter that inclination, trying to get mothers to own up to their own choices and inspire them to really strain to close the gap between their lives and their values.

For my last reflection on these two books and their intersections, I want to focus on their eloquent conclusions and what they suggest about dismantling gender roles as a path toward true liberation.

No matter what you think of some of the logistical leaps and ambitious parallels Faludi makes in The Terror Dream, you can't deny that she is a wildly talented writer. Towards the end she sums up her thesis:

When an attack on home soil causes cultural paroxysms that have nothing to do with the attack, when we respond to real threats to our nation by distracting ourselves with imagined threats to femininity and family life, when we invest our leaders with a cartoon masculinity and require of them bluster in lieu of a capacity for rational calculation, and when we blame our frailty on 'fifth column' feminists--in short, when we base our security on a mythical male strength that can only measure itself against a mythical female weakness--we should know that we are exhibiting the symptoms of a lethal, albeit curable, cultural affliction.

When we are most fearful, we are most likely to regress into familiar, albeit limiting scripts about who we are, what our dreams might be, what's safe and what's too scary. Faludi painstakingly details the ways this plays out for both women and men--the damsels in distress or the proud, vengeful mothers or the cowboys and heroes. Bottom line: none of these roles are authentic. None of them make us more safe. And none of us are free as long as some of us aren't free. Our cartooned femininity is directly related to men's cartooned masculinity. Until we recognize the relationship, and the ways in which its continuance makes us feel somehow invulnerable, we will be doomed to smaller, more fear-based lives.

And May, whose every leap and parallel are meticulously executed (chalk it up to her academic orientation), ends by looking at the ways in which Boomers dismantled some of the domestic romanticization and containment so lauded post WWII. She quotes one smart woman as writing at the time:

'What is wrong with the women trapped in the Feminine Mystique is what's wrong with men trapped in the Rat Race...Isn't it true, that one of the problems, the biggest really, of our present day society is that there isn't enough meaningful creative work for anyone these days?'

It makes me shudder to think how true this statement still is, fifty some odd years later. Until we look at the ways in which our families are structured--both in terms of our own personal preferences and those that are dictated by institutions like the corporation and government policy--we won't be free to truly explore who we are, what our purpose and passion dictates, how we can be in relationship fearlessly. Both women and men have to be liberated from traditional notions of femininity, masculinity, acceptable work, if we are to live out enlightened personal lives, and the whole damn country has to be liberated from traditional notions of cowboy power, retaliatory violence, and safety in regressive tradition, if we are to live out enlightened political lives.

But all of this is different than love, which seems to be the missing word in a lot of these reflections. I still believe that love--radical, role bending, life-giving love--is the beginning of the answer. As bell hooks writes, "The moment we choose to love, we move towards freedom."

I'm still wading through both The Terror Dream by Susan Faludi and Homeward Bound by Elaine Tyler May. Check out last week's post for a rundown of why.

One of the things that struck me the most during this week's reading was the notion of comfort and how we seek it in very personal ways after very public events. In the case of Homeward Bound, comfort was to be found in marriages with traditional gender roles after WWII, when in fact, as May demonstrates, many people were profoundly uncomfortable in their own lives (but had told themselves a story about why it was necessary and good for it to be the way it was). She draws on the Kelly Longitudinal Study, which consisted of several surveys of 600 middle-class men and women during the post-war era. Some of the excerpts she picks out are totally heartbreaking, like when one mom/wife named Emily enumerates the things that she's sacrificed for her comfortable family life:

1. A way of life (an easy one)
2. All friends of long duration; close relationships
3. Independence and personal freedom
4. What seemed to contribute to my personality.
5. Financial independence.
6. Goals in this life.
7. Idea as to size of family.
8. Personal achievements--type changed.
9. Close relationship with brother and mother and grandmother.

But she never considers divorce. Wow. The domestic ideology that May describes so well trumps all of Emily's innate instincts to create a life that satisfies her on a deep level and/or represents her most authentic way of being in the world. It is shockingly antiquated and inhumane to me.

And yet, Faludi is arguing that the sacrifice of authenticity for a perceived comfort is still very much alive and well.

I’ve been reading Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream and Elaine Tyler May’s Homeward Bound side by side—in part because the books have similar themes and I thought it would be interesting to experience them as a pair, and in part because I get to meet Elaine this weekend. Whoo-hoo! It helps to be best friends with her amazing son.

Anyways…

I’m only about a quarter of the way through both, but already my mind is being kind of blown. I’ve never read two books that make the link between the personal—in this case family and gender roles—and the political—war, violence, global insecurity—so amazing clear.

Faludi’s argument is that the attacks of September 11th sent Americans into a frenzy of traditional, regressive gender roles. Images of burly firemen saving damsels from distress were everywhere, feminism was framed as irrelevant and newly immoral, and all of us were led to believe that it was not just “normal,� but our patriotic duty to fall into stereotypical gender norms (ladies, make babies and spend money; boys, don’t cry or puss out).

“Woooow. Come over here Court. Come look at this,� my roommate Yana would holler from across our tiny dorm room.

“What is it?� I asked, while getting up from my desk chair and heading towards her. Putting my hand on her shoulder and leaning over, I was rudely confronted with a picture of rotting flesh. “GROSS!� I screamed, turning back to my post-colonial lit essay aglow on the computer. “Why do you do that to me?�

“Necrotizing faxciitis, flesh eating bacteria,� she announced, a smile still on her face.

Yana is not the devil. Actually she’s the closest thing I’ve ever come to knowing a real life angel. Today she is a pediatric resident at Boston Children’s Hospital. She helps teenage moms learn how to feed their toddlers. She works ungodly hours and eats crappy hospital food. She frickin’ saves babies.

Her altruism, matched with her curiosity about biology, anatomy, and health, has led her to be a doctor. When I went to visit her recently, she handed me a copy of Atul Gawande’s Complications and urged me to check it out. Not only is it really good writing, but it’s fascinating, sometimes frightening reading about the human body in all its fragility.