father daughter

Somewhere

mandy — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 09:00:00 +0000

It’s hard to give a shit about the rich. The beautiful and the damned don’t stir much sympathy. All the angst of moneyed loneliness seems… slight, when compared to poor and ugly people who feel lonely. Pity should be reserved for people the world shuts out, not those who shun the world’s embrace. Sofia Coppola’s new movie, Somewhere, is about the sadness of having everything. Luckily, it’s not as bad as you might think.

At the Chateau Marmont—an opulent hotel with an edgy reputation—we meet a famous actor (Stephen Dorff) who is feeling isolated. He spends his days by the pool, or watching pole dancers perform for him in his hotel room. He receives anonymous text messages telling him he’s an asshole. He drives his fast car, in circles, on a deserted race track. And he tries, fitfully, to be father, though there’s a sense in which he thinks his daughter is too good for him. She, fortunately, loves her dad. And together, they are charming.

As the dissolute dad, Dorff looks like a men’s fragrance advertisement. He’s got so many stomach muscles. His tattoos are winningly rebellious. His looks devil-may-care when he smokes. Even though he’s a scarcely-articulate douchebag with the intellectual life of a palm tree, you still want to hang out with him.

Elle Fanning has been in showbiz since an agent cut her umbilical cord (she had her first major screen credit at age two), so it really is a stretch for her to play a non-actor. She’s innocent as a lily in Somewhere, and she easily presents the strongest argument as to why anyone should care about Dorff's character. Her role is to be authentic; a real person in a morass of phonies. Thankfully, she isn’t given the kind of precocious wisdom children are often endowed with in this kind of movie. Instead, Fanning gets to play a girl who seems entirely normal, who doesn’t see her uncertain future or how painful adolescence is going to be.

The photographer Helmut Newton died, age eighty-three, when the Cadillac he was driving crashed into a wall outside the Chateau Marmont. After a lifetime celebrating excess, even his death seemed glamorous. Not many octogenarians die in this way. The fact that Somewhere is set in the cloistered walls of a celebrity retreat, and not in a mall in Boise, Idaho, is because Coppola knows depression is easier to look at when it’s dressed in pearls. Her movie is elegant and perceptive. But poor people have it worse.

Read the full review at Movie Waffle

Written by: James Tatham, January 11th 2011

The Keening

priyanka — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By A. LaFaye

Milkweed Editions

A. LaFaye’s The Keening is one part poem, and one part novel. Though the narrative is strong, it is the layered, considered language, and the dance with fantasy that make this novel something special. Both a modern-day ghost story and young adult novel, the book is complex, something that can’t be tied to just one genre.

This book’s protagonist, Lyza, lives with her father on the fringe of a Maine fishing village. With the family’s feet dug deep into fantasy and another foot tipped towards reality, the village doesn’t quite understand them. After her mother’s death from the 1918 influenza epidemic, Lyza has to decide whether she will head to Portland to take a college examination or stay and save her father from those who do not understand his obsessions.

Like many teenagers, Lyza is unsure of her place in the world. Often, she feels as though she has been “orphaned” from her family’s talents and creativity: her mother’s knack for sewing and her father’s carvings. This feeling of otherness or isolation is not helped by her oddball parents who are content to live away from the village. Mater and Pater, as Lyza calls them, do not care that the town ostracizes them or that they are talked about. They are comfortable in their world of sewing, carving, and creation.

Once her mother passes, Lyza’s search for her identity intertwines with the plight to save her father from being institutionalized. Soon, she taps into her family’s heritage and sees the souls in her father’s wood carvings. Like many children who shy away from the thing that makes them different, Lyza realizes that she is not unlike her father, her talents are otherworldly, and that much will need to be done to mend the wounds between her mother’s family, her father, and the different worlds between which she is caught.

The joy of this book is when the descriptions are subtle yet layered. The characterization in this novel is punctuated by sharp descriptions. For example, LaFaye writes “...Mater liked her meals with the tides—breaking her fast as it went out, setting down to supper when it came in, preferring to eat as gulls do between times—pecking at this or that...” In just a few sentences, Mater’s personality is chiseled to perfection.

If there is a misstep to the novel, it is its ending. Here, the speaker tries to wrap up each string or piece of the future: mentioning “the staircase leading up the cliff to home. To college. To anywhere the spirits and the Good Lord cared to lead me.” The final sections of the novel explain too much: The speaker’s realizations about paths—whether or not Kingsley Cove could be emptied out—seem too loud for such a dream-focused novel. The strength of the novel is diluted when the speaker puts her feet on the ground.

It’s moments like when Lyza’s Pater looks up and sees “angels in meteors” or when the writer describes her friend, Jake, and his inability to stand up to his father as “folding like a church lady’s fan” that this novel shines. The poetry in this novel is sharp and layered like Pater’s wood carvings. When Lyza finally learns not to “trip over her talent,” it’s like the glow of a lantern on a dark day. Soon, Lyza learns that if she paddles long enough, keeps her eyes, mind, and heart open, and listens to what’s around her, the shore is sure to come.

Written by: Lisa Bower, December 10th 2010

The Gerbil Farmer’s Daughter

admin — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Holly Robinson

Three Rivers Press

Holly Robinson begins this book by saying that, essentially, this is a story she has never told. That this is a story she didn’t want to talk about. I am so glad she did.

I am not much for holding back information about my own life and it is completely unfathomable to me how anyone could manage to grow up with a father who raised, became an expert on, and built an empire out of gerbils. I suppose if one was squeamish about having others think you were quirky or odd, you might hesitate, but the story of Robinson’s childhood growing up with a retired Navy captain-turned gerbil farmer is absolutely delightful in its implausibility. I, for one, would not only share the story, but wear it like a badge of honor. I hope she does now that the word is out!

Robinson’s writing is conversational and comfortable. It was like listening to an old friend roll her eyes as she recalled the things her ignorant, dorky parents used to do. We all had embarrassing parents growing up, and it is simply lovely to read about someone whose family was undoubtedly weirder than your own. For anyone who still has secrets locked away in her closet, frightened that her friends or her children or her children’s friends might someday discover, The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter is a huge sigh of relief.

Robinson, while no doubt mortified by her father’s obsession with gerbils, was also mystified by her mother’s tacit refusal to have anything to do with them. She was raised by two individuals who, for all their weaknesses, modeled the notion of following your dreams for their children. Those dreams didn’t necessarily coincide or even complement each other, but Robinson may have benefited heartily from her mother’s example that a wife need not blindly follow her husband’s ambitions, military leader or no.

This story is a lighthearted, entertaining read and Robinson does a lovely job of reminding us that there is no such thing as a “normal” childhood.

Written by: Kari O’Driscoll, August 19th 2010

Bone Worship

admin — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 08:15:00 +0000

By Elisabeth Eslami

Pegasus

After finishing Bone Worship, I wanted to let it sit for a while before I reacted. Full disclosure: Elizabeth Eslami is a friend, and has blessed a book of mine with a glowing review. Situations like this can be awkward, so over the years I’ve developed a de facto policy when I find myself faced with reviewing a work by a friend. Generally speaking, if I find a friend’s book lacking in more respects than is acceptable, I tend not to review it. Fortunately that’s not the case here; Eslami’s debut novel is wonderful.

Jasmine Fahroodhi is a young woman with possibly the worst case of sophomore slump on record, which endures until her parents pick her up at graduation—only a few days after she lets them know she’d flunked out of school. Her father, a Persian-born doctor, seems less rattled by his daughter’s failure in school than by her choice of a major other than pre-med. Jasmine goes home to Georgia with her parents, where her father embarks on his “Plan B” for Jasmine’s future: hastegar, an arranged marriage. Jasmine, as unenthusiastic about home life as she had been at the University of Chicago, musters only the mildest American feminist opposition to this plan.

Dr. Fahroodhi is a classic fish out of water. Opaque even to his family, he is frequently hostile to Jasmine—“you’re stupid” being among his most frequent utterances. Her reluctantly co-dependent mother, born in the Old South, oddly supports her husband’s plans for an arranged marriage, helping him take out “Bride Available” ads in newspapers catering to Iranian-Americans. Jasmine reluctantly goes along with the plan, which—true to the book’s dust-cover teaser—results in humorous and awkward meetings with potential suitors, and then the unexpected happens, though not in the saccharine way this telegraphic summary might lead you to expect. In the meantime, Jasmine stumbles through a series of suburban job-hunting moments, culminating in one of those menial jobs a lucky person finds every now and then that utterly transforms them.

That’s the plot, but this novel isn’t really as much about plot as it is character, primarily that of Jasmine’s father. Jasmine’s relationship with her difficult father is the central point of the novel. Early on, she remarks that despite having known him all her life, “If I had to stand up at his funeral one day and tell the world about his desires and hopes and who he was as a person, I’d stand there mute.” In the novel’s first pages Jasmine lists the seven big things she knows about her father—his lifelong aversion to broccoli; his habit of calling his parents in Iran every other Sunday; the fact that he used to beat their dogs with a shovel; his having pushed a young cousin off a wall in Iran, badly injuring her, and a few others as well distributed along the spectrum from banal to vile. As the chapters unfold, Jasmine examines each of those seven known things in some detail. Eslami deftly structures the narrative around each of these channel markers.

Eslami’s portrayal of Dr. Fahroodhi is frank, and there is much to dislike in the man. His vulnerabilities, explored as the book unfolds, may make the reader cringe on his behalf, but they do little to soften our impression of him; they mainly help reveal what broke him. Jasmine’s relationship with her father is one of those that might seem inexplicable to an outsider, a bond that apparently persists out of duty alone, with neither party gaining much. At that, it’s like a lot of father-daughter relationships. There is tenderness there, but it’s deeply masked: the unrequited love of a daughter for a man who observed his children “from a safe distance like a potentially flammable lab experiment,” the arguable love of a man for his incomprehensibly un-Persian daughter that mainly manifests as frustration and anger. That anger and frustration, felt on both sides, never comes to a head. Maybe it’s American of me, but I found myself wishing for a more open confrontation between the two.

All that notwithstanding, Eslami has not created a loveless father. Jasmine sees his love for her mother plainly and from a bit of a remove, as though it’s a specimen described in one of the natural history volumes she checks out of the small local library. One of the things I liked best in Bone Worship is Eslami's use of images, memories, passing conversations, and other bits of detail to represent Jasmine’s exploration of her relationship with her family and herself. The whole hastegar plot itself is a fair symbol for the involuntary relationship Jasmine has with her family—as we each have with our families. Eslami weaves these images into her prose quite deftly, and in ways that made me frankly envious of her sight. This is a hell of a fine novel, especially for a debut.

Cross-posted at Coyote Crossing

Written by: Chris Clarke, August 3rd 2010

My Father’s Love: Portrait of the Poet as a Young Girl

admin — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 17:01:00 +0000

By Sharon Doubiago

Wild Ocean Press

I find memoirs difficult to criticize, especially when the content is personal and intimate. The first volume of author and poet Sharon Doubiago’s memoir, My Father's Love, feels like an open wound, the scar tissue scraped off to allow for belated healing. My Father's Love is a detailed account of Doubiago’s childhood, tragically defined by sexual molestation by her father, and willful ignorance by her mother.

This is an engaging book, thanks to Doubiago’s poetic and honest language, fastidious fact checking, and pages of photographs to give a visual to the people in her early life. She traces her family tree back to its American roots, finding common threads that run throughout her family genealogy and her own life. This is not a short book, running over 400 pages, and yet Doubiago makes it all a coherent account. I turned each page, not to find out what happens next, but to get to know the young Sharon from the photographs.

Engaging with this story became confusing for me. Why do I read this book? Is it for myself, or for Doubiago? It’s not for entertainment or education, and there’s a bit of guilt involved in what sometimes feels like an invasion of privacy. Memoirs as a genre walk a fine line between voyeurism and empathy, exhibitionism and honesty.

Memoirs can be notoriously bad, exemplifying “navel-gazing” and self-promotion. However, a good memoir can be sublime. My personal favorites are Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (admittedly a fictionalized memoir), and Allison Bechdel’s Fun Home. These are books that restore my faith in the memoir, so often challenged by poorly written, self-congratulatory schlock (I don’t need to name a recent “rogue” publication). My Father's Love, a heart wrenching read with a grim ending, evokes disconcerting emotions and questions, and demonstrates what a memoir is capable of.

Doubiago brings up weighty issues such as patriarchy, class discrimination, and false memory, as well as the pervasive problem of familial sexual abuse. The issue of false memory plagued me while reading her account, as she describes the resistance to her claims from her family, and even in her own mind. I too wanted her memories to be false, for her young handsome father to have never betrayed his daughter, despite the truth. One of Doubiago’s greatest accomplishments with this book is showing how complex memories can be, as she exposes her own process of remembering.

After finishing My Father's Love, I started thinking about the role of memoirs. Why is it important as women to tell our stories? And why, as women, is it important that we read each others' stories? Perhaps it is a cycle, and through telling and listening, reading and writing, a memoir becomes complete.

Written by: Claire Burrows, December 30th 2009

Fatherless Daughters: Turning the Pain of Loss into the Power of Forgiveness

admin — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 01:00:00 +0000

By Pamela Thomas

Simon & Schuster

I recently saw an Oprah show on hoarding. At a certain point during the program, the two women featured on the show said they could trace this psychological condition back to losing their father. Both women were married when they lost their fathers (one is now divorced and the other is separated from her husband) and both have children. I mention this because in our society we treat grief as a luxury we can’t afford to dwell on rather than a necessary part of life we can’t avoid, and this lack of compassion and understanding for grief and loss seems to resurface in myriad ways in people’s lives.

When I lost my father three years ago to complications related to Alzheimer’s disease, even though his death was not entirely unexpected, I found myself thrown into a maelstrom of emotions. As a freelance writer and editor, I couldn’t have imagined returning to work after the typical one or two weeks of mourning that most companies typically allot to their employees. I also found that our culture exerts a certain amount of pressure on one to get back to life as quickly as possible and not dwell in your grief for too long. While I tried to get back on track both personally and professionally, my unfinished grief seemed to haunt me, and I found myself feeling unmoored and ungrounded in the world. In my grief journey, I have continued to seek out books and resources to help me understand how to navigate through this uncharted territory.

Reading Fatherless Daughters is another step in this process. In this book, Pamela Thomas explores the impact that the loss of a father has on women of all ages. Whether through death, abandonment or divorce, the loss of a father has a profound influence on a woman’s life. For this book, Thomas interviewed women ranging in age from nineteen to ninety-four. Most of the participants lived in the U.S., but she also spoke to women living in Canada, Mexico, and Japan.

Thomas explores our commonly held attitudes about fatherhood and provides a historical and cultural perspective. She references various works on the subject, including Luigi Zoja’s book, The Father: Historical, Psychological and Cultural Perspectives. As Zoja points out, the concept of fatherhood came late in our evolutionary process, and our notions of masculinity and fatherhood have traditionally been at odds with one another. The idealized version of fatherhood from 1950s television shows, like Ozzie and Harriet, has often contrasted sharply with the reality of fathers who viewed their primary role of that as breadwinners.

While one might assume that losing one’s father to death is easier than losing a father to divorce or abandonment, this isn’t always the case. Every woman’s journey of grief and loss is unique, but there are some common themes such as the primary roles that a father represents in a woman’s life: protector, guide to the world at large, breadwinner, alternative parent, second opinion, and male role model. The loss of this important figure in one’s life can have a devastating impact on one life. Allen also devotes a section of the book to the stages of child development and how losing a father at a young age can have a lasting impact on one’s life. When a woman loses her father at an early age, she tends to experience more insecurity and doubt in her life often manifesting in relationship related issues such as fear of abandonment, anger, low self-esteem, problems with assertiveness, and issues with commitment.

While I found this book to be a well researched and informative read, I found I could only read a few chapters at a time. However you choose to read this book, the fact remains that we will all experience loss and grief in our lives. The compassion we extend to ourselves and others during this time seems to be key to finding our way to the other side of grief. This book can be a helpful guide for that regard.

Written by: Gita Tewari, November 25th 2009

Vanishing

admin — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 09:09:00 +0000

By Candida Lawrence

Unbridled Books

Upon receiving my copy of Vanishing, Candida Lawrence’s writing was relatively new to me. The fourth offering in a series of standalone memoirs, Lawrence’s stories cover various stages in her life, from childhood father-daughter power struggles to marriage and child-rearing to aging. Her writing covers a vast array of life experiences and the resulting emotions.

Lawrence vividly describes experiences that have happened to many other women. In a story about abortion, she presents all of the female characters with dignity. Their distinctive personalities explain their own reactions, giving flavor to their diverse backgrounds.

The piece about her elderly parents was too much for me to swallow—I don’t do well with geriatric indignities—and I had to put the book down several times during that part. I managed to finish it, but it just reaffirmed my belief that when my own body starts to decay, I’m walking off into the ocean, or something like that.

Despite the serious nature of many of the painful topics in Vanishing, Lawrence injects the writing with frequent humor. Even amidst the bowels of sagging flesh and dementia, I found myself laughing.

One topic that I was curious about concerned her pieces about sexual intercourse and infidelity. She has a dream about her guy, Jack, with another woman. Packing her dog up, she heads out to his home to see if her dream was correct. Watching the two, she describes their sex as rather bland and mechanical with no kissing. In another story, she sleeps with Jack and it’s about as electrifying as doing the laundry, although there is a loving embrace from their years of being together.

I wanted to know whether sex was that boring for her generation, or is her writing simply mechanical when it comes to the more risqué scenes? Despite that question, her honesty about how she sees the world is engaging. There is an acceptance of life and the unpredictable. Lawrence does not resign herself to the struggles and give up, but pushes forward.

Some of these stories are not for the weak-hearted, or those in denial. Proceed with the expectation to feel many emotions.

Written by: Nicolette Westfall, June 7th 2009