Born Round by Frank Bruni

I have neither a therapist's diagnosis nor any scientific literature to support the following claim, and I can't back it up with more than a cursory level of detail. So you're just going to have to go with me on this: I was a baby bulimic.

Maybe not baby—toddler bulimic is more like it, though I didn't so much toddle as wobble, given the roundness of my expanding form. I had been a plump infant and was on my way to becoming an even plumper child, a ravenous machine determined to devour anything in its sights. My parents would later tell me, my friends and anyone else willing to listen that they'd never seen a kid eat the way I ate or react the way I reacted when I was denied more food. What I did in those circumstances was throw up.

I have no independent memory of this. But according to my mother, it began when I was about eighteen months old. It went on for no more than a year. And I'd congratulate myself here for stopping such an evidently compulsive behavior without the benefit of an intervention or the ability to read a self-help book except I wasn't so much stopping as pausing. But I'm getting ahead of the story.

-Born Round

"Born round, you don't die square." So believes Frank Bruni's grandmother: that kind of change isn't possible in a lifetime. What does that mean for Bruni, though? He's a born eater, a self-professed baby bulimic who has struggled with food issues his entire life. At the beginning of the book, he's working in Rome as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. After a rough period during which he covered the 2000 election campaign of George W. Bush and piled on the pounds, he finally seems to have his weight under control. A life-changing opportunity comes his way: the position of Times food critic is open, and he's up for consideration. But can he handle the intense commitment to food that the job requires without falling back into his old habits?

Having posed the question, Bruni travels back to the beginning of things. He details a childhood filled with food and love, with the former seen as an appropriate way to express the latter. His beloved grandmother, born in Italy, never makes anything short of a feast for her family, and Bruni is happy to partake. He does notice that his appetite outstrips that of his siblings, and even at a young age he's bigger than his older brother. His mother begins to devise diets for the two of them to try, but it breaks his heart to turn down one of his grandmother's fritti.

Bruni is able to (temporarily) leave diets behind when he finds he has a natural affinity for swimming. His rigorous practice schedule keeps his weight in check, although he still finds himself eating more than anyone around him. When he goes off to college and quits swimming, he scrambles to prevent his overeating from affecting his weight, eventually turning to bulimia. Although he manages to recover from that, his weight problems continue to plague him. He's intensely self-conscious about his weight, going so far as to repeatedly postpone dates so that he can lose just a few more pounds before he's seen. It may come as no surprise that these dates often never happen.

Things change for Bruni, but slowly, and they get worse before they get better. Born Round is not only a very personal account of  his struggle with weight, but also a moving story of his family life and the sweetness of his professional success. He really lays himself bare before his reader. It breaks my heart to think back to one story he tells, of a family gathering when he was at his heaviest. The siblings are sniping at one another, and one of his brothers calls him fat. It's everything he fears and hates about himself, and he flees the room, finding an out-of-the-way place where he can cry. It's hard not to be drawn in by a writer who is willing to show such vulnerability.

I very much enjoyed Born Round. I spent awhile reading it, but I could easily see how someone could delve in and read for hours. Bruni is a very likable narrator, and in addition to all of the personal stories, he also has some good inside dirt about being a food critic. I think it would be an excellent book to travel with. I would love to read more by him—maybe I'll dig up some old reviews, if I can find them. I'm pretty jealous of his facility with words, I must say. His prose seems effortless. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist before he was thirty, and you can see why. Pretty remarkable.

Up next: The Best American Mystery Stories 2008, edited by George Pelecanos (Wire shout-out!).

Lit by Mary Karr

That's pretty much how the reading went, one balled-up page after another, mingled with lyric poems of great finish and hilarity. The audience hooted in wild and rolling waves. Guys in the front row started throwing the paper balls back, which made Knott hump even deeper in his oversize clothes as if dodging hurled tomatoes. 

At the end, a guy in a tie next to me said, I used to think poets shouldn't get public grants, but this guy really can't do anything else. 

When Knott left the stage, people hollered for him to come back.

I sat on the hard floor almost aquiver. Writers had heretofore been mythical to me as griffins—winged, otherworldly creatures you had to conjure from the hard-to-find pages they left behind. That was partly why I'd not tried too hard to become one: it was like deciding to be a cowgirl or a maenad.

-Lit

Lit is author Mary Karr's third memoir, following her hugely successful account of her childhood, The Liars' Club, and Cherry, in which she recalled her teenage years. I haven't read either of those books, and it did occur to me before picking up Lit that it might not be ideal to drop into the middle of Karr's story. Although Lit might have more resonance in some places for readers who are more aware of the particulars of Karr's background, I found that it worked extremely well as a standalone book as well.

I stumbled upon Lit at the library, where it was shelved opposite Stephen King's On Writing. I had been craving some high-quality nonfiction and, based on some dimly-recalled reviews, I thought that Lit would fit the bill. In Lit, Karr picks up her story on the cusp of a sea change in her life: college. It's a big step for her, a decision she grapples with, and one that will help set her on the winding path to becoming a bestselling writer and award-winning poet (Guggenheim Fellowship!). It's a tumultuous journey in which she is both buoyed by love for her husband (and later her son) and dragged further and further down into the murky depths of alcoholism. The latter takes a wrecking ball to the fragile stability she'd wrought with the former, as you might imagine. Recovery is a slow, halting process.

William Faulkner once famously wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Karr's past pops up continually, from the ongoing drama of her relationship with her parents (Mother and Daddy, as she calls them) to her unease at fitting in with her husband's patrician family to her concern about righting the wrongs of her childhood in raising her own son. The glimpses of her childhood that we get in Lit are traumatic, not the kind of thing that it's easy to make peace with. Karr struggles long and hard, and, surprisingly (to herself most of all), begins to find solace in prayer. She's cynical at first, refusing even to get to her knees as she mutters two sentences of gratitude. Through contemplation and discussion with many people around her, particularly those she's gotten to know through AA, her thoughts on religion begin to change. This can be a tricky subject to address without becoming overly preachy; luckily, Karr is an adept writer who always maintains a humanizing, almost self-deprecating element when recounting her conversion.

Karr's training as a poet is evident throughout Lit. She has a gift for finding the perfect word, and her choices often recall her hardscrabble childhood (people tend to holler instead of yell or shout, for example, as you can see in the excerpt above). It wasn't a difficult read in terms of language, but it was intense, which makes me think I'll wait a bit before picking up The Liars' Club. Based on Lit, though, I know I'll want to read it at some point.

Up next: Continuing the memoir streak with Born Round by Frank Bruni.

On Writing by Stephen King

[B]ooks are a uniquely portable magic. I usually listen to one in the car (always unabridged; I think abridged audiobooks are the pits), and carry another wherever I go. You just never know when you'll want an escape hatch: mile-long lines at tollbooth plazas, the fifteen minutes you have to spend in the hall of some boring college building waiting for your advisor (who's got some yank-off in there threatening to commit suicide because he/she is flunking Custom Kurmfurling 101) to come out so you can get his signature on a drop-card, airport boarding lounges, laudromats on rainy afternoons, and the absolute worst, which is the doctor's office when the guy is running late and you have to wait half an hour in order to have something sensitive mauled. At such times I find a book vital. If I have to spend time in purgatory before going to one place or the other, I guess I'll be all right as long as there's a lending library (if there is it's probably stocked with nothing but novels by Danielle Steel and Chicken Soup books, ha-ha, joke's on you, Steve).

-On Writing 

When I was about 15, I went through a Stephen King phase. It was summer, I remember, and I'd picked up a sheet from the public library with spaces to record everything I read (a habit I picked back up in college, and basically just expanded upon when starting this blog). The Stand, Thinner, The Shining—just a fraction of King's bibliography, but a pretty good run. Somewhere along the way, though, I decided his books were too scary for me and moved on to other things (I think this was also around the same time of my ill-fated foray into Oprah's Book Club books, oddly enough). On Writing is the first Stephen King book I've read since, and I'm glad I finally got around to it.

On Writing is subtitled A Memoir of the Craft, which tidily sums up the different sections of the book. In the first section, C.V., King lays out his history and details how he got from the four-page stories he wrote as a kid to nailing rejection slips to his wall to publishing his first big success, Carrie. King has a special talent for developing an instant rapport with his reader, and I was with him immediately. He's plain-spoken but clever, honest about criticism he's received, and, heck, he just seems like a cool guy. It's hard not to be in his corner.

In the second section, On Writing, King gets into advice for aspiring writers. He covers everything from grammar to dialogue to editing, with some nifty examples included. His biggest piece of advice is simple but undoubtedly true: if you want to be a writer, you need to read a lot and write a lot. (I don't have the book with me right now, but I believe King stated he read 50-60 books a year; a list of his reading in the years he was working on this book is included at the end). I first heard the advice about reading more to write better from my 9th grade English teacher. As a voracious reader since childhood, I could always handle the "read a lot" part. "Write a lot" is harder. King recommends at least 1000 words a day (he himself writes 2000 daily). Whew. While not impossible in the least (you have to average 1700 words a day to make it through NaNoWriMo), it's a definite commitment. Which is good, really—you should be committed to something if you want to get better at it. But coming up with the words yourself is harder than reading them, that's for sure.*

The third section of On Writing is the most affecting. In it, King covers the 1999 accident in which he was hit by an out-of-control van. As someone who has been in the hospital pretty recently, I was wincing in sympathy. The extent of his injuries is actually difficult for me to fathom. I know how awful it is to break your leg in one place. King broke his in nine places; his doctors seriously considered amputation. Plus there was the broken hip, broken ribs, collapsed lung, etc. Really horrifying.

King was in the midst of writing On Writing when the accident occurred, and—unsurprisingly—it took him a while to get back to it.  Thank goodness he was able to. I enjoyed On Writing thoroughly. It even left me open to idea of trying a little more of his scarier works in the future—Misery, for one, sounds pretty gripping. It might be a good Halloween-y sort of read...

Up next: Continuing on the memoir kick: Lit by Mary Karr, whose book The Liars' Club is said to have started the memoir craze.

*This entry (minus the excerpt and this aside) is 610 words, just as a point of comparison, and took me a good hour to write.

All the President's Men by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward

June 17, 1972. Nine o'clock Saturday morning. Early for the telephone. Woodward fumbled for the receiver and snapped awake. The city editor of the Washington Post was on the line. Five men had been arrested earlier that morning in a burglary at Democratic headquarters, carrying photographic equipment and electronic gear. Could he come in?

-All the President's Men 

When I was in college, I took a course on the coming of the Civil War. The professor of that course always emphasized how different the war was to the people who lived it. Today we are able to keep the outcome of the war in mind even when we're talking about Fort Sumter, and it's easy to view everything with the advantage of hindsight. But no one in 1861 said, "Alright boys, it's time for the Civil War. We expect to be at it for the next four years. Those of you in the gray coats...don't get too excited."

Similarly, Bob Woodward had no idea that that phone call he received the morning of June 19th would help to set into motion an investigation that would eventually lead to the resignation of the president. In retrospect: well, that's a pretty momentous phone call.

Everything in All the President's Men is like this, and with good reason. The book was published in June of 74; Nixon didn't resign until August. Even at the end of the book, at that time, it must have been difficult to believe that it would come to that. I can see why—it's really hard for me to imagine a presidency falling apart like that (even remembering back to the '98 scandal).

It's such a gradual process. There's about a billion people involved—the robbers, the people who paid them, the people who approved the payments, the people who covered that up, the people who hired the people who covered that up, etc. Thankfully Woodward & Bernstein provide a handy list of characters to refer back to, as well as photos of some of the key players. As someone who had a astonishingly poor grasp of Watergate* prior to reading the book, I must say that was pretty helpful.

All the President's Men wasn't the quickest read, but I think it was a pretty important one. Coming into this book, I only had very basic facts at my disposal: there was a break-in, Nixon had some incriminating tapes, he resigned. I had no sense of the timeline. (Look back up there if you're not so familiar with this point in history: The break-in was in June of '72, Nixon resigned in August of '74—that is a long time for that whole thing to play out). I think I learned a lot. It says something to me that those incriminating tapes, one of the few bits of the period I was aware of, were not even mentioned until the last ten pages of the book—that's how much was going on and that's how long it took to really get Nixon implicated in things. Crazy story. You couldn't make it up if you tried.

Up next: Stephen King's memoir On Writing, which is very enjoyable so far.

*I only just recently learned, for instance, that Spiro Agnew resigned from the vice-presidency for reasons unrelated to Watergate. D'oh.