Second Monday book group selection. I led the discussion and adapted some questions from the online reader’s guide. One of my big points was that this was the vanguard of the whole miserabilia memoir genre.
- Sheriff goes up to neighbor women “setting in motion a series of robe-tightening and sweater-buttonings.”
- “Like most people, he lied best by omission…”
- Oil-storage tanks “like the abandoned eggs of some terrible prehistoric insect.”
- “It turned out to be impossible for me to ‘run away’ in the sense other American teenagers did. Any movement of all was taken as progress in my family.”
- “The four of use tended to eat our family meals sitting cross-legged on the edges of that bed. We faced opposite walls, our back together, looking like some four-headed totem, our plates balanced on the spot of quilt between our legs.”
- a penis: “it felt like a wet bone encased in something”
- “Maybe drinking caused Mother to go crazy, or maybe the craziness was just sort of standing in line to happen and the drinking actually staved it off a while.”
- ““Don’t make no difference, bigger,” Daddy says. “Bigger’s just one thing. They’s a whole lot of other things than bigger, Pokey. Don’t you forget it.”
- Kids trying to navigate their own fate “when we wanted a straight-thinking adult but couldn’t find one”
- “bench-pressing boxes up” into an attic
I kept cutting my eyes between my window, where the new glass skyscrapers going up just slid past, and the small rearview mirror, where Mother’s eyes were still eerily blank. Nothing showed in those eyes but the road’s white dashed lines, which seemed to be flying off the road and into the darkest part of her pupils, where they disappeared like knives.
It is a sad commentary on the women of my family that we can recite whole wardrobe assemblages from the most minor event in detail, but often forget almost everything else. In fact, the more important the occasion—funeral, wedding, divorce court—the more detailed the wardrobe memory and the dimmer the hope of dredging up anything that happened.)
The school had taken up something called self-paced learning, which meant kids worked independently through a progression of reading folders and math folders. Student monitors oversaw the classes. The teachers stayed in the lounge all day smoking and eating from big Tupperware containers they took turns bringing in—brownies and cupcakes and cookies by the boatload.
I loved the idea that looking at a painting or listening to a concerto could make you somehow “transcend” the day-in, day-out bullshit that grinds you down; how in one instant of pure attention you could draw something inside that made you forever larger.