The Wave of Fiction I've Been A'ridin'

I go through little periods of what I choose to read for pleasure these days.  It's usually something like this: nonfiction, nonfiction, nonfiction, fiction, poetry, nonfiction, nonfiction, fiction, poetry... you get the picture.  I almost always will choose a memoir or collection of personal essays over anything else. I just enjoy thinking about the craft of creative nonfiction, because it's the sort of niche I feel closest to: I enjoy writing it the most, so I also enjoy reading it the most, I suppose.

I found this book at our local Hastings though:

I instantly gravitated toward the clever title, Blueprints for Building Better Girls, and was not disappointed by Elissa Schappell's work, here.  It is a gem and completely revitalized my love of fiction.  The book is a short story cycle with characters who are on the periphery in earlier chapters appearing later and telling their own stories (there is a lot of flipping back through the pages to try and remember how you know so-and-so, which has to be symbolic of something great, although I haven't thought it through fully).  The book revolves entirely around central female characters, all of whom are complex and struggling with various issues like: a cool teenager being wrongly labeled a high school slut, a mother watching her daughter suffer w/ an eating disorder, a pair of moms in NY desperately trying not to let their identities be subsumed by motherhood, and so on. 

 

The real standout in this collection for me was about a college girl who returns home to stay with her family after getting into a possibly suicidal car accident; she is despondent, and you instantly want to get to the heart of her depression. You want to help her. Her mother is the typical worrying kind, struggling to take care of everyone in the family at once: accompanying her husband on a weekend-work thing, trying to communicate with her troubled daughter, and making daily trips to see her rapidly debilitating father in a nearby nursing home.  The meat of this story is the college girl's mom leaving town and requesting that her daughter tend to her dementia-suffering grandfather, so that he isn't alone that weekend.  Through the girl interacting with her grandfather, we learn that she is suffering from PTSD after she is raped at a party.  What struck me most about this story was thinking about who the girl could open up to.  She rejects phone calls from her friends, hardly speaks to her mother, but finds herself revealing her dark secret to her grandfather. The fact that the only person to whom she can communicate her trauma is also a person two generations removed from her and has trouble remembering who he is and how to perform everyday functions is absolutely heartbreaking; the pairing of these two individuals as central characters in a story--genius. I mean, a young girl trying to recover those sacred pieces of herself after being violated and an old man who is full of pride and who also falls in bathrooms and wavers in and out of reality represent two starkly different ways of dealing with the same thing: trying to hold yourself up and be normal when everything you know is crumbling, fleeting, and trying to make you fall.  I found it a stunning story, extraordinarily important.

 

Okay, so that's my little blurb on this book.  Up next will be Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad and Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, because that's the order I read these books in.