Should we go back to Alaska?” I asked Rebekah each spring, on the phone. We’d sit in silence, pondering our excuses, before deciding that this was not the year. Maybe next year. Maybe the year after that. But soon Rebekah was married, pregnant, settled in a way I could only marvel at from a distance. She said, “I would never let my daughter do what we did.” Blair Braverman and her parents lived in Norway when Blair was a ten year old girl; she spent her […]
Keeping up with the Kennedys … or what happens when you can’t
A few years ago Cracked wrote an article titled “Five Real Life Horror Movies Deleted From You History Books” that brought Rosemary Kennedy to my attention. Rosemary was intentionally hidden away from the public by her family after the lobotomy secured for her by her father failed spectacularly. The Kennedy family benefited from this tragedy happening before the Internet. Rose Fitzgerald, a staunch Catholic, married Joe Kennedy, an American business man with political aspirations, in 1914. The couple welcomed two sons, Joe Jr and John, […]
After a While You Get Used to Mediocre Memoirs
I would guess I’ve read almost two dozen memoirs this year alone; it’s one of my favorite genres because it’s so varied and even when they aren’t very good they’re usually pretty quick to get through. After a While You Just Get Used to It falls into the category of “well, it didn’t take very long to read…” I applied my Dr Pepper lip gloss and pulled on my deflated Nike airs, watching Mom give John a hug before saying her world-famous line, ‘Well, excuse our […]
“I’m not too good when exposed to people”
Over the summer I cancelled my SiriusXM membership because between borrowing CDs from the library and downloading books off Overdrive I almost always had an audiobook to listen to in the car. Typically, I leave my book listening to the car but not with Where’d You Go, Bernadette? I couldn’t put it down (so to speak) and since it was downloaded onto my phone I didn’t have to. Bernadette went with me to my lunch break at work, while I was cooking and even while I was […]
‘So much of desire, at that age, was a willful act.’
Last year I read Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter and it was easily one of the best non-fiction books-hell any genre of book- I read that year. Emma Cline’s The Girls takes a fictional approach to violent cults in the late 1960s and falls short of the real life horrors. That isn’t to say The Girls isn’t a good novel- it is- it just doesn’t live up to the hype that surrounded it this summer. “They didn’t have very far to fall—I knew just being a girl in the world handicapped […]
Space and Race
Like most people who watched NBC’s (abysmal) coverage of the Olympics this summer I saw the preview for Hidden Figures starring Taraji P Henson and Octavia Spencer. Just as I was about to exclaim “How interesting” my husband muttered “ugh, Oscar bait” which means I’ll have to bring it home from Redbox a few months after it leaves theaters. Luckily for me, like most movies nowadays, there was a book used as source material. Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures tells the story of the African American women […]
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