Reading Lips: A Memoir of Kisses

payal — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Let the whole world put on a pair of rubber gloves and plunder and pillage. We have no secrets any longer. We have become public property.

Women who write about their lives face challenges that male writers do not. Not only are women charged with writing about their own lives, with creating selfhood on paper, they are somehow additionally responsible for upholding the idea of womanhood. In this way, they bear the responsibility for representing, and in a sense, for creating the lives of all women. (Considering the diversity of possible identities which women take on for themselves, this is at the very least, a difficult task.)

While we might ask whether a woman writer should even be obligated to tell a story other than her own, for women who read life writing, the question might as easily become: which parts of a woman’s life are hers and which belong, through the construction of womanhood, to all women? Which part of this woman’s life is mine?

In Reading Lips: A Memoir of Kisses, Claudia Sternbach navigates the terrain of personal memories and public ones. Through her nimble use of language, which is delightfully suffused with sarcasm, she connects with women of various ages and experiences. The emotions of the moments, if not the moments themselves, ring true to experience.

“But please,” she writes to her future husband, “You and your soon-to-be platonic friend, enjoy the pool. Enjoy the tennis courts. Bring her up here to the rose garden for a picnic.”

Sternbach also connects with women by wittily drawing on cultural references or events that are familiar to every reader: “…Ma won’t let me leave until my plate is cleaned. Because you know about those starving babies in China.”

While Sternbach never states that she is speaking to a specific idea of womanhood and, in fact, directly backs away from the idea that she speaks for anyone, the effect of this effort to form a connection with other women and their lives is that Reading Lips is less a story of one woman’s life, and much more a celebration of the experience of living a woman’s life. It is a celebration of an idea of womanhood in which “Teddy put his lips right up to mine and they stayed there … and right then I could see our whole long lives.”

Written by: Elizabeth Brasher, April 29th 2011

Remedies

beth — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Kate Ledger

Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam

“When you [lack] words to make others understand your truths, you [stand] apart from the jabbering masses. You alone [possess] proof of your unique and involuted humanness, and through that, contact with something divine.”

Our ability to experience pain is what makes us human, but it is our inability to describe pain that brings us close to god. In moments of great crisis, religious rituals provide us with the right words to say. But when we turn toward what is beyond our understanding, do we do so because we feel ourselves rendered mute by trauma or because we are looking for a quick fix to our pain?

Kate Ledger’s premiere novel, Remedies, centers around Simon and Emily Bear, an affluent couple who seem incapable of saving their marriage. Simon is consumed with his work as a physician, treating patients suffering from chronic pain, and this blinds him to the growing resentment of his wife and their daughter, Jamie. A confident performer in her fast-paced career, Emily doubts her ability to be a good mother. She finds that her need to be closer to Jamie gains urgency even as Jamie resists her, and especially as she feels herself disconnecting from Simon. As their marriage and family life disintegrates, Simon and Emily reflect on their roles in the world: their careers, their marriage, their relationships with their daughter, and their unspoken pain over their son who died as a newborn.

Remedies is layered with symbolic landscapes. After the death of their infant son, Simon placed their son’s things in a box labeled “Baby.” The box sits on a shelf in the basement of the Bears’ home. Emily has never opened the box and, in fact, avoids going into the basement at all, just as she has never visited the baby’s grave, just as she and Simon avoid having any conversations about him. The basement is also the physical threshold between Simon’s home and office, an indication that Simon has compartmentalized his life, but the fact that the last physical traces of the baby are stored in that transitional space indicate that Simon’s worlds cross over in complicated ways.

Ledger creates dense domestic surfaces—the distant tone of the narration and the tendency toward sketches make this book feel chilly; Simon and Emily are so disconnected from one another, it is difficult for the reader to connect to them. Reading Remedies is something akin to visiting a national park and observing the landscape from behind a velvet rope while listening to the park ranger on your earphones. There is no opportunity to get close to anything, to touch anything. What you experience from your limited vantage point is tempered by the voice in your ears and is, unfortunately, too much like what you’ve expected to see.

Remedies ends dubiously, deus ex machina, with Simon crying in a synagogue. Frustratingly, although Ledger’s finest writing surrounds Emily in the penultimate part of the novel, what the reader learns of Emily in the final part is through Simon, in effect, shortchanging her. Ledger creates a tenuous parallelism between Simon and Emily: predictably, while Simon grieves in a synagogue, Emily, alone in her apartment, angrily stabs a painting of her lover who has returned to his ex-wife.

Though the ending gestures at resolution, nothing is actually resolved. Simon decides that he will ask Emily for her forgiveness because he feels reassured by the space of the synagogue, by common prayer: “Open Thou my lips… age-old proof the words [don’t] come easily.” As anyone who has experienced pain knows, words do not come easily, but while we muddle through our lives as we can, knowing that there is no such thing as a quick fix, Ledger’s Simon Bear unconvincingly takes a quick fix for a permanent one.

Written by: Elizabeth Brasher, October 28th 2010