The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath
Leslie Jamison, 2018
Little, Brown and Co.
544 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316259613
Summary
With its deeply personal and seamless blend of memoir, cultural history, literary criticism, and reportage, The Recovering turns our understanding of the traditional addiction narrative on its head—demonstrating that the story of recovery can be every bit as electrifying as the train wreck itself.
Leslie Jamison deftly excavates the stories we tell about addiction—both her own and others'—and examines what we want these stories to do and what happens when they fail us.
All the while, she offers a fascinating look at the larger history of the recovery movement, and at the complicated bearing that race and class have on our understanding of who is criminal and who is ill.
At the heart of the book is Jamison's ongoing conversation with literary and artistic geniuses whose lives and works were shaped by alcoholism and substance dependence, including John Berryman, Jean Rhys, Billie Holiday, Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, and David Foster Wallace, as well as brilliant lesser-known figures such as George Cain, lost to obscurity but newly illuminated here.
Through its unvarnished relation of Jamison's own ordeals, The Recovering also becomes a book about a different kind of dependency: the way our desires can make us all, as she puts it, "broken spigots of need." It's about the particular loneliness of the human experience-the craving for love that both devours us and shapes who we are.
For her striking language and piercing observations, Jamison has been compared to such iconic writers as Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, yet her utterly singular voice also offers something new.
With enormous empathy and wisdom, Jamison has given us nothing less than the story of addiction and recovery in America writ large, a definitive and revelatory account that will resonate for years to come. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1983
• Raised—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Harvard, M.F.A., Iowa Writers' Workshop; Ph.D. Yale University
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York, New York,
Leslie Jamison is an American novelist and essayist. She is the author of the novel The Gin Closet (2010), an essay collection The Empathy Exams (2014), and The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath (2018). Jamison also directs the non-fiction concentration in writing at Columbia University's School of the Arts.
Early life
Jamison was born in Washington, D.C. and raised in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. Her parents are Joanne Leslie, a nutritionist and former professor of public health, and Dean Jamison, an economist and global health researcher. Leslie Jamison is the niece of clinical psychologist and writer Kay Redfield Jamison. Leslie grew up with two older brothers. Her parents divorced when she was 11, after which she lived with her mother.
Jamison attended Harvard College, where she majored in English,; her senior thesis dealt with incest in the work of William Faulkner. While an undergraduate, she won the Edward Eager Memorial Fund prize in creative writing, an award also won by classmate, writer Uzodimna Iweala. She was a member of the college literary magazine The Advocate and social club The Signet Society.
After Harvard, Jamison received an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and later her Ph.D. in English literature from Yale University. Her 2016 dissertation, "The Recovered: Addiction and Sincerity in 20th Century American Literature" became the basis for her 2018 book, The Recovering.
Writing
Jamison's first novel, The Gin Closet, follows a young New Yorker searching for an aunt she has never met, eventually finding her living in a trailer and drinking herself to death. The two form a tenuous bond, each trying to save the other's life.
The Empathy Exams, Jamison's second work, an essay collection, shot quickly to #11 on the New York Times bestseller list. Olivia Lang writing in the Times, said, "It’s hard to imagine a stronger, more thoughtful voice emerging this year."
The author's third book, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, was described by Publishers Weekly as an "unsparing and luminous autobiographical study of alcoholism." It combines Jamison's memoir of her own alcoholism and others' (some famous), with a focus on recovery.
Jamison's work has been published in Best New American Voices 2008, A Public Space, and Black Warrior Review.
Teaching
In the fall of 2015, Jamison joined the faculty at Columbia University's School of the Arts. She is assistant professor and director of the non-fiction concentration in writing.
Personal life
Jamison lives in Brooklyn, New York City, with her husband, the writer Charles Bock, a daughter, and stepdaughter. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/16/2018.)
Book Reviews
Extraordinary.… [S]he calls to mind writers as disparate as Joan Didion and John Jeremiah Sullivan as she interrogates the palpitations of not just her own trippy heart but of all of ours.… Her cerebral, witty, multichambered essays tend to swing around to one topic in particular: what we mean when we say we feel someone else's pain.… I'm not sure I'm capable of recommending a book because it might make you a better person. But watching the philosopher in Ms. Jamison grapple with empathy is a heart-expanding exercise.
Dwight Garner - New York Times
Fascinating…energetic, colorful, fun, buzzy, affecting, and spot-on.… Emotional, as well as factual, honesty is the sine qua non of a memoir. Yet this kind of deep honesty—the merciless self-examination and exposure that Jamison displays--is increasingly rare.
Melanie Thernstrom - New York Times Book Review
Brilliant.… [I]t's as if Jamison has shrugged off her restraints.… We are aware, most fundamentally, of her urgency. This, of course, is as it should be, for Jamison is writing to survive.… The Recovering leaves us with the sense of a writer intent on holding nothing back.
David L. Ulin - Los Angeles Times
Jamison's story makes for riveting reading.… Desire and romantic love are major themes, explored with aching vulnerability and unsparing honesty.… Jamison shows us the human animal in all its wildness, its messiness, and its failure.… Quite on its own terms, The Recovering is a beautifully told example of the considered and self-aware becoming art.
Priscilla Gilman - Boston Globe
Jamison's ardent writing style and extended-release doses of empathy have made her a consistently powerful journalist.… Ambitious, provocative, lyrical.
New York Magazine
If reading a book about [pain] sounds… painful, rest assured that Jamison writes with such originality and humor, and delivers such scalpel-sharp insights, that it's more like a rush of pleasure.… To articulate suffering with so much clarity, and so little judgement, is to turn pain into art.
Entertainment Weekly
A remarkable feat.… Shot through with real yearning.… The Recovering seamlessly blends the story of Jamison's own alcoholism and subsequent recovery with something like a social, cultural, and literary history of addiction.… It's a neat trick: Jamison satisfies readers who want the grisly details that addiction memoirs promise while dismantling that same genre, interrogating why tales of addiction prove so resonant.… She is a bracing smart writer; her sentences wind and snake, at turns breathless and tense. .… Instead of solving the mystery of why she drank, she does something worthier, digging underneath the big emptiness that lives inside every addict to find something profound.
Sam Lansky - Time
Jamison writes with sober precision and unusual vulnerability, with a tendency to circle back and reexamine, to deconstruct and anticipate the limits of her own perspective, and a willingness to make her own medical and psychological history the objects of her examinations. Her insights are often piercing and poetic.
The New Yorker
The crawl back up to sobriety is as engrossing as the downward spiral in this unsparing and luminous.… The dark humor, evocative prose, and clear-eyed, heartfelt insights Jamison deploys here only underscore her reputation as a writer of fearsome talent.
Publishers Weekly
Jamison's questing immersion in intoxication and sobriety is exceptional in its vivid, courageous, hypnotic telling; brilliant in its subtlety of perception, interpretation, and compassion; and capacious in its scholarship, scale, concern, and mission
Booklist
Throughout Jamison's somber yet earnestly revelatory narrative, she remains cogent and true to her dual commitment to sobriety and to author a unique memoir "that was honest about the grit and bliss and tedium of learning to live this way—in chorus, without the numbing privacy of getting drunk." The bracing, unflinching, and beautifully resonant history of a writer's addiction and hard-won reclamation."
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for THE RECOVERY … then take off on your own:
1. Leslie Jamison opens her account of her own alcoholism by disdaining the "tedious architecture and tawdry self-congratulation of a redemption story." What does she mean, and does she remain true to her desire to avoid the traps she so dislikes? Does she achieve redemption? Is she self-congratulatory? Is her story tedious?
2. How does Jamison link addiction with creativity? Why have so many artists (of all genres) fallen prey to alcoholism? How does addiction and/or attempts at sobriety affect the creative life and output?
3. To what does Jamison attribute her own addiction to alcohol?
4. What is Jamison's experience with Alcoholics Anonymous? What does she find most valuable? How does she view the sharing of attendee "drunkalogs"?
5. Follow-up to Question 4: The author writes, "The paradox of recovery stories …was that you were supposed to relinquish your ego by authoring a story in which you also starred." What is meant by that observation? It seems contradictory: how does one go about dispensing with ego while creating a story with one's self as its center?
6. What is your own experience with alcoholism: either for yourself or someone (family or friend) with whom you are, or were, close? How much about addiction and recovery did you understand before reading this book? Has it changed how you view alcoholism?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready
Meaghan O'Connell, 2018
Little, Brown and Co.
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316393843
Summary
A raw, funny, and fiercely honest account of becoming a mother before feeling like a grown up.
When Meaghan O'Connell got accidentally pregnant in her twenties and decided to keep the baby, she realized that the book she needed—a brutally honest, agenda-free reckoning with the emotional and existential impact of motherhood—didn't exist.
So she decided to write it herself.
And Now We Have Everything is O'Connell's exploration of the cataclysmic, impossible-to-prepare-for experience of becoming a mother. With her dark humor and hair-trigger B.S. detector, O'Connell addresses the pervasive imposter syndrome that comes with unplanned pregnancy, the fantasies of a "natural" birth experience that erode maternal self-esteem, post-partum body and sex issues, and the fascinating strangeness of stepping into a new, not-yet-comfortable identity.
Channeling fears and anxieties that are still taboo and often unspoken, And Now We Have Everything is an unflinchingly frank, funny, and visceral motherhood story for our times, about having a baby and staying, for better or worse, exactly yourself. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Meaghan O'Connell's writing has appeared in New York Magazine, Longreads, and The Billfold, where she was an editor. She lives in Portland, OR, with her husband and young son. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
For every What to Expect When You're Expecting (and its ilk), there should be a What to Expect When You Weren't Expecting. But, strangely, there isn't, so Meaghan O'Connell has committed her experience of accidental pregnancy and motherhood to the page.
Elle
Stripping away the mythical fantasies of motherhood, O'Connell delivers a poignant and funny look at what it means to be a parent in our current time. The warts-and-all examination is powerful reading for anyone with or without kids.
Esquire
The kind of book I wished for when I was pregnant. Pulling no punches, the writing is blunt, honest...This should be required reading that your doctor hands you after you see the two pink lines on the pregnancy test.
BookRiot
Part memoir, part guidebook, And Now We Have Everything captures all the fears and anxieties mothers-to-be have, but still aren't allowed to say out loud. Smart, insightful, and searingly honest, Meghan O'Connell's exploration of motherhood should be on every expectant parent's baby registry.
Bustle
Frankly speaking, this is a must-read for anyone with a mother, anyone with a baby, anyone who knows anyone with a baby—anyone.
Refinery29
A well-written book that provides refreshingly candid insight into the physical and emotional changes that take place during pregnancy and early motherhood, times that are both "traumatic [and] transcendent.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for AND NOW WE HAVE EVERYTHING … then take off on your own:
THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS presume you are a woman and are pregnant or have been...
1. In the first essay of Meaghan O'Connell's book, she says, "A baby was the thing we were trying to keep out" and also "Part of me loved this feeling, of being steamrollled by life, of being totally fucked." Talk about those twin yet contradictory emotions as they relate to the author's experiences and to those you might have felt when you learned you were pregnant.
2. Follow-up to Question 1: In what other ways would you say that O'Connell explodes—or at the very least, undermines—the myth of the glories of motherhood?
3. How much of O'Connell's roller-coaster ride throughout her book resonantes with your own experiences, either in pregnancy, labor, or the earliest weeks with your first child?
4. Are parts of this book cringe-inducing? Do parts of it make you uncomfortable?
5. In the chapter "Maternal Instincts," O'Connell talks about feeling trapped between, again, two extremes: "nurturer and stalker, human and animal." What does she mean?
6. Early on, O'Connell obsesses over the baby's safety. Do you think that our culture, with the constant hype of life's dangers, has made parenthood feel more dangerous than it is? Not to say that we shouldn't be extra vigilant, but should we "be afraid, be very afraid!"—remaining in a constant state of heightened alert? Or is it wise to be extra cautious, given that new parenthood comes with no instruction manual?
7. Presuming you are already a mother, do you wish this book had been available to you during your pregnancy?
8. Talk about the toll on O'Connell's relationship with her new husband and on her career.
9. What is the significance of the book's title: And Now We Have Everything? Is it ironic or sincere?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
I Miss You When I Blink: Essays
Mary Laura Philpott, 2019
Atria Books
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781982102807
Summary
Acclaimed essayist and bookseller Mary Laura Philpott presents a charmingly relatable and wise memoir-in-essays about what happened after she checked off all the boxes on her successful life’s to-do list and realized she might need to reinvent the list—and herself.
Mary Laura Philpott thought she’d cracked the code: Always be right, and you’ll always be happy.
But once she’d completed her life’s to-do list (job, spouse, house, babies—check!), she found that instead of feeling content and successful, she felt anxious.
Lost. Stuck in a daily grind of overflowing calendars, grueling small talk, and sprawling traffic.
She’d done everything "right," but she felt all wrong. What’s the worse failure, she wondered: smiling and staying the course, or blowing it all up and running away? And are those the only options?
In this memoir-in-essays full of spot-on observations about home, work, and creative life, Philpott takes on the conflicting pressures of modern adulthood with wit and heart.
She offers up her own stories to show that identity crises don’t happen just once or only at midlife; reassures us that small, recurring personal re-inventions are both normal and necessary; and advises that if you’re going to faint, you should get low to the ground first.
Most of all, Philpott shows that when you stop feeling satisfied with your life, you don’t have to burn it all down and set off on a transcontinental hike (unless you want to, of course). You can call upon your many selves to figure out who you are, who you’re not, and where you belong. Who among us isn’t trying to do that?
Like a pep talk from a sister, I Miss You When I Blink is the funny, poignant, and deeply affecting book you’ll want to share with all your friends, as you learn what Philpott has figured out along the way: that multiple things can be true of us at once—and that sometimes doing things wrong is the way to do life right. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Mary Laura Philpott writes essays that examine the overlap of the absurd and the profound in everyday life. In 2015, she wrote and illustrated the humor book Penguins with People Problems, a quirky look at the embarrassments of being human. Her next book, I Miss You When I Blink came out in 2019.
Philpott's writing has been featured in print or online by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, and other publications. She is the founding editor of Musing, the online magazine of Parnassus Books, as well as an Emmy-winning cohost of the show A Word on Words on Nashville Public Television.
Mary Laura lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with her family. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
I've spent my adult life prowling bookshelves for the modern day reincarnation of my favorite authors—Nora Ephron, Erma Bombeck, Jean Kerr, and Lawrie Colwin—all rolled into one.… Good news: I have finally found their successor.… [R]efreshingly honest and funny… [Philpott's] real gift lies in making the connection between the small moments and the big ones, so you feel you've walked into a complicated, glittering web.… [D]elicious.
Elisabeth Egan - Washington Post
Be forewarned that you'll laugh out loud and cry, probably in the same essay. Philpott has a wonderful way of finding humor, even in darker moments. This is a book you'll want to buy for yourself and every other woman you know.
Real Simple
This wonderful memoir-in-essays from Nashville writer Mary Laura Philpott is a frank and funny look at what happens when, in the midst of a tidy life, there occur impossible-to-ignore tugs toward creativity, meaning, and the possibility of something more.
Southern Living
In her memoir-in-essays, acclaimed writer Mary Laura Philpott addresses the conflicting pressures of modern adulthood and that inevitable "stuck" feeling so many of us become familiar with. Part confessional, part pep talk, I Miss You When I Blink is a reassuring read about learning how to accept that doing things wrong can be the way to do life right.
Bustle
[H]eartwarming if occasionally self-indulgent…. Readers who worry their type-A personalities have led them to be unsatisfied with their successes, or those who yearn for change but can’t pinpoint exactly why, will find this book comforting and reassuring.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) Laugh-out-loud funny…. Mary Laura Philpott's hilarious and comforting essay collection will reassure women questioning their abilities and choices.
Shelf Awareness
A mosaic of a life changing in subtle rather than radical ways…. Readers with their own sets of anxieties should be charmed by the author's friendly tone, warm sense of humor, and relatable experiences.
Booklist
[I]nviting autobiographical essays.…Warm, candid, and wise, Philpott's book is both an extended reflection on the pressures of being female and a survivor's tale about finding contentment by looking within and learning to be herself. Delightfully bighearted reading.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. "It’s the perfect sentence, but I didn’t write it. My six-year-old did (1)." What did you initially think the phrase "I miss you when I blink" meant and what you do you think of it after reading the book? Do you think it was a good choice of title for this collection?
2. "We all keep certain phrases handy in our minds—hanging on hooks just inside the door where we can grab them like a raincoat, for easy access. Not mantras exactly, but go-to choruses that state how things are, that give structure to the chaos and help life make a little more sense (2)." Do you have one of these? What is it and where did it come from?
3. "For so many people I know, there is no one big midlife smashup; there’s a recurring sense of having met an impasse, a need to turn around and not only change course, but change the way you are (3)." Have you ever felt this way? How did you get yourself out of it?
4. Mary Laura mentions finding her brilliant college notes about Virginia Woolf and feeling detached from that person. What is the version of yourself that you miss most? [Technically, that was a hypothetical "she" who found those notes, but as long as that tiny distinction doesn’t bother you all, it’s fine with me if saying it this way in the question makes it simpler.]
5. Are you a perfectionist like Mary Laura? Why do you think so many women define themselves as perfectionists?
6. Have you ever thought of your life as an endless to-do list? Mary Laura finds herself checking things off, getting to the end of her "successful adulthood" list, but feeling more disoriented than ever, like she hasn't arrived anywhere (12). How can we remain goal-oriented without finding ourselves at this impasse? Is being goal-oriented even something to strive for? Is the impasse inevitable? [just slightly reworded bc "nearing the end of hers" initially made me think it meant "nearing the end of her life" lol]
7. "It wouldn’t be fair for me to say, 'I’m just an average person,' or 'an ordinary' person, because I am also a lucky person. I was raised in a loving home and grew up to have another loving home, and I do not suffer from dire physical, financial, or situational disadvantages that so many people struggle under. But being fortunate doesn’t mean you won’t reach a certain point in life—many points actually—and panic (13)." How can we recognize the privileges we have while still treating our own struggles and feelings with respect?
8. "All of us have one prevalent personality trait, no matter what other qualities we possess. There’s always one ingredient that flavors everything else about us. The cilantro, if you will (16)." Do you think this is true? And if so, what’s yours?
9. Mary Laura writes about the trope of blaming your parents for your flaws: "So there you have it. When I was growing up, my mother was a hard-ass, and she turned me compulsive. It’s all my mother’s fault. Or: When I was growing up, my mother was my cheerleader, and she made me successful. It’s all to my mother’s credit (26)." How do you view the effects your parents had on you? Is there another way to look at this?
10. "In school we’re taught to do our best, but we’re limited by the bounds of what we understand to be right—and ‘right’ looks different to everyone (35)." Do people ever fully learn that lesson? How do you teach kids what’s right and wrong while also teaching them that right and wrong look different to everyone?
11. Have you ever dated a person who was "totally wrong but really fun for a little while (49)"? Spill.
12. Do you believe that the potential selves you could’ve been "exist as surely as my past selves do and as truly as the real, right-now self does, too (85)"? How did reading that make you feel?
13. Have you ever found yourself in a conversation about the weather or traffic and wondered, "Have conversations always been like this (122)?" How do we get into conversational ruts (with our friends or our partners) and how can we get out of them? What do you do to break through the small talk?
14. At the end of Mary Laura’s solo retreat in Nashville, she writes in her journal, "I am too smart to go back to being miserable (172)." How do you feel about this sentiment?
15. Mary Laura believes you can always start over. Do you? Have you? Will you?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Look Alive Out There: Essays
Sloane Crosley, 2018
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374279844
Summary
Sloane Crosley returns to the form that made her a household name in really quite a lot of households—her essays!
From the bestselling author Sloane Crosley comes a brand-new collection of essays filled with her trademark hilarity, wit, and charm. The characteristic heart and punch-packing observations are back, but with a newfound coat of maturity. A thin coat. More of a blazer, really.
Fans of I Was Told There’d Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number know Sloane Crosley’s life as a series of relatable but madcap misadventures.
In Look Alive Out There, whether it’s scaling active volcanoes, crashing shivas, playing herself on Gossip Girl, befriending swingers, or staring down the barrel of the fertility gun, Crosley continues to rise to the occasion with unmatchable nerve and electric one-liners.
And as her subjects become more serious, her essays deliver not just laughs but lasting emotional heft and insight. Crosley has taken up the gauntlets thrown by her predecessors—Dorothy Parker, Nora Ephron, David Sedaris—and crafted something rare, affecting, and true.
Look Alive Out There arrives on the tenth anniversary of I Was Told There’d be Cake, and Crosley’s essays have managed to grow simultaneously more sophisticated and even funnier. And yet she’s still very much herself, and it’s great to have her back—and not a moment too soon (or late, for that matter). (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 3, 1978
• Where—New York City, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Connecticut College
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York
Sloane Crosley, a journalist, essayist, and novelist, was born in New York City where she still lives. She graduated from Connecticut College in 2000 and has worked as a publicist at Random House as well as an adjunct professor at Columbia University in the Master of Fine Arts program.
Writing
Crosley's first collection of essays, I Was Told There'd Be Cake (2008), became a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for The Thurber Prize. It was also one of Amazon's Best Books of the Year.
Her second collection, How Did You Get This Number (2010) also became a New York Times bestseller. Her third book of essays is Look Alive Out There (2018). Her debut novel, The Clasp (2015), has been optioned by Universal Pictures.
In addition to her novel and essay collections, Crosley is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and was the founding columnist for The New York Times "Townies" Op-Ed series. She has written columns for The New York Observer Diary and The Village Voice and has has been a regular contributor to The New York Times, GQ, Elle and NPR. Her frequent contributions include cover stories and features for Salon, Spin, Bon Appetit, Vogue, Esquire, Playboy, and W Magazine. She co-wrote the song "It Only Gets Much Worse" with Nate Ruess.
Crosley was also a weekly columnist for The Independent in the UK and editor of The Best American Travel Writing 2011.
Aside from writing, Crosley serves as co-chair of The New York Public Library's Young Lions Committee and on the board of Housingworks Bookstore.
In 2011, she appeared on the TV series Gossip Girl as herself and she has been a regular fixture on The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/18/2018.)
Book Reviews
[S]o what if you don’t read Crosley’s essays for universal human truths? Read them because, when life is like a long drive on I-80 west of Omaha, you want a clever, funny friend along for the ride.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Look Alive Out There is a delightful collection of hilarious essays that manage, in some cases, to point to relatable life lessons. It's equally smart, creative and hilarious.
Associated Press
Crosley’s best essays combine her sparkling verbal facility with a willingness to expose and explore more personal issues.… She has that rare ability to treat scrapes with sardonic humor and inject serious subjects with levity and hijinks with real feeling—a sort of unlicensed nurse to our souls.
NPR
Crosley wields her wit and commands all of your attention in her third collection of insightful and hilarious personal essays.
Esquire
(Starred review) Crosley… continues her tradition of hilarious insight into the human condition…. Crosley is exceedingly clever and has a witticism for all occasions, but it is her willingness to confront some of life’s darker corners with honesty and vulnerability that elevates this collection.
Publishers Weekly
Whatever their experiences, readers can readily relate when she describes the frisson of climbing an active volcano and playing herself on Gossip Girl.
Library Journal
(Starred review) Laugh-out-loud funny seems too trite a phrase for a writer whose takes are so addictively original and unexpected, but it’s also true: dear readers, you will laugh. Whether 2 or 20 pages in length, Crosley’s essays are complete and stop-you-in-your-tracks clever.
Booklist
(Starred review) The latest collection from the Manhattan-based essayist suggests she can write engagingly about nearly anything.… A smart, droll essay collection that is all over the map but focused by Crosley's consistently sharp eye.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for LOOK ALIVE OUT THERE … then take off on your own:
1. "Outside Voices" is ostensibly about the challenges of living in New York and learning to cope with the outfall of one of the most densely populated cities in the country. But what really bothers Crosley about the teenage boy who lives next door? Is it the frequent noise that disturbs her personal space … or something else?
2. In "If You Take the Canoe Out," what surprised you most about the pot-growing swingers the author stumbles into?
3. How does Crosley view her vertigo in "Cinema of the Confined"? She says "This was not some exotic destination that I would one day leave and report back on. This was my home now." What does she mean by that … and what are the emotional implications of her illness?
4. Is there a unifying thematic concern that link the 16 essays in Crosley's collection?
5. Make note of the author's narrative strategy in a number (if not all) of her essays: the essay opens with one particular topic/idea but gradually morphs into something different, often taking a completely unexpected direction. Talk about how that narrative tactic plays out in some of your favorite pieces.
6. In "The Doctor is a Woman," Crosley writes about her frozen eggs: "They are just floating fractions of an idea,” she writes. “I know that. But I had never seen a part of my body exist outside my body before. I felt such gratitude." Care to unpack that observation?
7. Crosley is a self-effacing writer. Give some examples of how her jokes (many, if not most) are mostly at her own expense. Do you appreciate her self-deprecation, finding it refreshing and honest? Or do you tire of it, finding it overdone?
8. How do you view Crosley's essays? Do they point to deeper meanings: serious epiphanies about today's culture or about her own personal failings? Or do you see them as ironically humorous commentaries about the idiosyncrasies of living in the 21st century? Perhaps, the essays do both.
9. How would you describe Sloane Crosley? Is she someone with whom you could be friends? Do you admire her? If so, why? Or if not … why?
10. Consider both the book's title … and the arresting cover photo with its finch perched on a white-gloved finger. Why?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II
Sonia Purnell, 2019
Penguin Publishing
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780735225299
Summary
In 1942, the Gestapo sent out an urgent transmission: "She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her."
The target in their sights was Virginia Hall, a Baltimore socialite who talked her way into Special Operations Executive, the spy organization dubbed Winston Churchill's "Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare."
She became the first Allied woman deployed behind enemy lines and—despite her prosthetic leg—helped to light the flame of the French Resistance, revolutionizing secret warfare as we know it.
Virginia established vast spy networks throughout France, called weapons and explosives down from the skies, and became a linchpin for the Resistance. Even as her face covered wanted posters and a bounty was placed on her head, Virginia refused order after order to evacuate.
She finally escaped through a death-defying hike over the Pyrenees into Spain, her cover blown. But she plunged back in, adamant that she had more lives to save, and led a victorious guerilla campaign, liberating swathes of France from the Nazis after D-Day.
A Woman of No Importance is the breathtaking story of how one woman's fierce persistence helped win the war. Based on new and extensive research, Sonia Purnell has for the first time uncovered the full secret life of Virginia Hall—an astounding and inspiring story of heroism, spycraft, resistance, and personal triumph over shocking adversity. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Sonia Purnell is a British biographer and journalist who has worked at The Economist, Telegraph, and Sunday Times, all UK publications.
A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win the War, is Purnell's most recent book and was published in 2019. Her previous book, Clementine: The Life of Mrs. Winston Churchill (2015, published as First Lady in the UK) was chosen as a book of the year by the Telegraph and Independent, and was a finalist for the Plutarch Award.
Purnell's first book, Just Boris: A Tale of Blonde Ambition (2011), was longlisted for the Orwell prize. The book is a biography of Boris Johnson, the colorful former Mayor of London, current member of Parliament, and outspoken Brexit supporter. (Adapted from the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[A] compelling saga of a remarkable woman whose persistence was honed early on by her battles against low gender expectations and later on by her disability.
USA Today
[R]eads like a detailed novel.… Purnell’s fascinating book supports her description of Hall’s life as a "Homeric tale" of adventure, action, and seemingly unfathomable courage.
Columbus Dispatch
Sonia Purnell has written a riveting account of Hall’s work as a ferociously courageous American spy.… [She] writes with compelling energy and fine detail.
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
[V]ividly resurrects an underappreciated hero and delivers an enthralling story of wartime intrigue.… Purnell does a fine job of bringing Hall’s story to life. Fans of WWII history and women’s history will be riveted. Illus.
Publishers Weekly
Purnell's work is well researched, fast paced, and gives a captivating look at one of World War II's unsung heroes. This will interest readers intrigued by the history of espionage as well as women's and military history. —Crystal Goldman, Univ. of California, San Diego Lib.
Library Journal
(Starred review) Purnell’s writing is as precise and engaging as her research, and this book restores overdue attention to one of the world’s great war heroes. It’s a joy to read, and it will swell readers' hearts with pride.
Booklist
A remarkable chronicle… [and] lively examination.… [I]f Hall had been a man… she would now be as famous as James Bond.… Meticulous research results in a significant biography of a trailblazer who now has a CIA building named after her.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE … and then take off on your own:
1. Sonia Purcell describes Virginia Hall's resistance work during World War II as "a Homeric tale of adventure, action and seemingly unfathomable courage." How would you describe Hall? What was it about her personality and inner character that attracted her to spy-craft—and what made her so adept at its practice?
2. Consider the danger involved involved in undercover operations—a field in which its participants are at high risk for capture, torture, and death. What drives people, both men and women, to take such dire risks and to play the high-stakes game of cat and mouse?
3. Purnell observers, "Dispatching a one-legged thirty-five-year-old desk clerk on a blind mission into France was, on paper, an almost insane gamble." Almost insane? What was their thinking?
4. Talk about the good-old-boy office politics underlying some of the decisions to place under trained personnel in the field, and some of the fatalities those decisions led to.
5. It's almost as if Hall had a sixth sense, which repeatedly kept her out of the Nazis' clutches. Talk about her use of disguises, her ability to build trust across borders, her sudden appearances and just as sudden disappearances. What are some of the close calls in which she escaped capture? Do some episodes stand out more than others—in terms as being more daring, more thrilling, or more anxiety-drenching?
6. Discuss the many other individuals involved in the resistance network, those doing extraordinary work. Consider, for instance, Germaine Guerin. Or perhaps the woman who simply asks for three aspirins at a cafe.
7. What about Hall's post-war life in which she had to fight another type of tyranny: sexism? Discuss the offer of a low-level clerkship at the CIA despite Hall's brilliant performance in the field. Or recall the man who referred to Hall as a "gung-ho lady left over from OSS days overseas." Talk about the other women who made untold (literally) sacrifices for the Allied forces during the war. See our LitBlog post detailing some recent works hailing women's service.
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)