Posted on by Kirsten T. Saxton

Senior Book Chat

Dearborn by Ghassan Zeineddine  (2023)

  • Winner of the 2023 Khayrallah Book Prize
  • Finalist for the 2024 CLMP Firecracker Award for Debut Fiction
  • Shortlisted for the 2024 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing

Spanning several decades, Ghassan Zeineddine’s debut collection examines the diverse range and complexities of the Arab American community in Dearborn, Michigan. In ten excellent stories, Zeineddine explores themes of identity, generational conflicts, war trauma, migration, sexuality, queerness, home and belonging, and more.

The New York Times review beautifully articulates how I feel about these stories of immigrant experience:

Dearborn’s characters are split on what part of America is worth acquiring, what part must be resisted and how deep anyone is allowed to dream at all.

We had a good discussion, as always with this terrific group, and we agreed that these compelling stories drew us in, and we all wanted to know more.

However, I needed more help than usual from the group. My beloved dog scratched my eye, a particularly frustrating event given my already poor vision, so I could not manage taking notes on this collection, leading discussion, or taking notes on the group chat for this blog post. After the discussion, I asked people to send me notes and this blog is a group effort!

Patricia, to whom we are indebted for her recommendation of the book, opened the discussion; and several members sent me notes afterward. This week was even more than usual a clear demonstration of the value of community, an apt theme for this collection!

Several members talked about the way the author uses humor even when his stories deal with pain and regret. All of us were struck by the story of “Speedo” with its portrayal of humor and nostalgia as well as the charm of a modern “peddler” con man. Members reminded me how we appreciated, as a group, the “diversity of ethnic background, circumstances and personalities presented in the stories” and reminded me how we applauded the refreshing frankness about sexuality coupled with humor. We discussed the complex portrayals of marriages in the stories, which while located in specific local space, varied as in all spaces and groups between the good, the meh, and the abusive and ugly.

We discussed the stories’ references to the recent past, when Dearborn was a typical mostly white suburban town and barricaded itself against protests in Detroit in contrast to its now status as a vibrant community with a large immigrant population. The references to ICE are chillingly current.

The collection includes a variety of immigrant experiences and attitudes: from those who are able to return for a visit to their home country, those who cannot, and those who have no desire — either to return or in some cases, of the generation born in the states, to visit a country they have never seen. We hear of the longings of place: whether a past homeland or a dreamed future one, in Manhattan or Los Angeles.

The collection provides food for thought regarding traditional values and social relationships as they shift between nations and generations. We wondered about the effects — both toward less and more tolerance–as people navigated different value systems. We considered the ways the collection invites us to consider how success is valued in different cultural spaces. Does the desire for economic power motivate moving? Or is it created by being in the US? Or both?The collection presents such questions and issues without editorial judgment. Instead, the confident narrative lets us see how the characters are feeling.
Despite our varying connections with Lebanon, most of us knew little of the Lebanese community in Dearborn.

The two collections of short stories in our current series veer from our usual selections that focus on older female protagonists. Although we intend to return to that early focus, we all agree that these stories led to important insights both about immigrant communities, whether in Danticat’s portrayals of the Haitian diaspora or Zeineddine’s stories of the Lebanese diaspora, and about the ways in which cultural values shift, personalities abide, and community and tolerance and care are essential.

Posted on by Kirsten T. Saxton

Senior Book Chat

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez 2019 Virago

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When the narrator unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the large Great Dane he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, and by the threat of eviction the dog harbors, as dogs are prohibited in her building.

Isolated from the rest of the world, increasingly obsessed with the dog”s care, and determined to read its mind and fathom its heart, the narrator comes dangerously close to unravelling, but, unsurprisingly perhaps, the novel is about the deep bounds of friendship its title suggests.

This book received a hugely positive critical response: it was listed as one of the New York Times Best books of the 21st century; won the 2018 National Book award, and was described generally in superlatives as a moving novel of grief and emotional depth, a delightful and delicious read.

And reader, upon first listen? I did not like it one bit.

When I noted my lack of enthusiasm, someone suggested that since the writing had been compared with that of one of my most favorite writers, Virginia Woolf, they were surprised I had such a grumpy reaction to it.

Both Woolf and Nunez write about death, about grief, and ultimately about writing itself. What appeals to me in Woolf’s characters, the artist Lily Briscoe and her plight, and not Nunez’s unnamed writer? Initially, I thought perhaps it was a matter of character development. Woolf’s Mrs. Ramsay and Lily interact, seem real somehow in a way Nunez’s narrator did not for me.  But is that really true? I am not sure. 

Perhaps it is a matter of prose style, or referentiality. I was a bit irritated at the abundance of literary allusions, even though I recognized most of them; however, some of the group enjoyed them. 

Perhaps, and here I am most sure, it was the masculinist space of the writing world she describes. The novel is fully engaged in the world of the professional writer and the profession of writing and teaching writing. I was both put off and bored by the male womanizing writing professor and the near fandom of his many students, particularly the women. This reminds me of a world I have been proximal to but have never been interested, let alone been fascinated by. I find the heated self conscious and self important literariness decidedly unerotic and intellectually dull. I cared only about  Apollo, the great Dane rather than any of the human characters that populated the novel.

In contrast, some members appreciated the friendly relation between the woman and her mentor, a friendship primarily based on intellectual conversation and shared intelligence. Despite, or perhaps because of, their different professional alignments, many found relatable truths in the novel’s portrayals of the friendship of a writer and her mentor. 

While I remain unmoved by the mentor relationship or the literary world the novel engages, with some consideration and attention to the groups’ insightful observations, I began to realize I had missed what most interested them, and what in retrospect I realize is the novel’s great strength: its meditations on grief, and particularly its moving engagement with grief after a suicide. Here are two quotes about grief that moved readers:

Nothing has changed. It’s still very simple. I miss him. I miss him every day. I miss him very much.

But how would it be if that feeling was gone?

I would not want that to happen.

I told the shrink: it would not make me happy at all not to miss him anymore.

What we miss – what we lose and what we mourn – isn’t it this that makes us who, deep down, we truly are. To say nothing of what we wanted in life but never got to have.

It is this thematic center of the novel that touched most of the group.

On the whole, members of the group are glad we read this novel, and because our experiences differed so much, our discussion was lively. 

Some members considered the entire account of Apollo a narrative conceit to make sense of her mentor’s suicide attempt and are convinced the reality is the embedded account of her visit to the man with the dachshund who survived the attempted suicide and spent time in a psychiatric hospital. 

This is a novel about writing and what it does; passages comment for example on the role of writing and memory:

You write a thing down because you’re hoping to get a hold on it. You write about experiences partly to understand what they mean, partly not to lose them to time. To oblivion. But there’s always the danger of the opposite happening. Losing the memory of the experience itself to the memory of writing about it. Like people whose memories of places they’ve traveled to are in fact only memories of the pictures they took there. In the end, writing and photography probably destroy more of the past than they ever preserve.

We talked about the many ways we use writing to process and record our experience and feelings, from private diaries and journals to memoirs or for accounts we have inherited or are creating for others.

The Friend touched each of us and led to lively discussion. I may even need to read it again.

Posted on by Kirsten T. Saxton

Senior Book Chat

Edwidge Danticat Everything Inside (2019)

Set in locales from Miami and Port-au-Prince to a small unnamed country in the Caribbean and beyond, the short story collection Everything Inside, explores how people come to terms with death, both their loved ones’ and their own. We agreed with the publisher’s comment that the collection offers “vividly imagined stories about community, family, and love” 

Danticat is a two-time National Book Award finalist, MacArthur Genius fellow, Neustadt laureate, and winner of scores of other prestigious literary honors. NPR describes the book as “ a stunning collection that features some of the best writing of Danticat’s brilliant career.”

We had decided that each of our group members would choose one story on which to comment. When we met, we discovered that our choices were split mostly between two stories: “ Sunrise, Sunet” and “Seven Stories.” All of us commented that the story we chose was so heartbreaking that we almost did not return to read more, but, we all would return, compelled by Danticat’s beautiful prose, her precise descriptions, her memorable characters. 

We talked about our observations of how she created male characters striking for their gentleness. For example, in “Sunrise,Sunset” the elderly grandfather lovingly tried to protect his wife and hide her dementia from others and the young husband tried to understand his wife’s disinterest in their baby, though he had no understanding of what we recognized as post partum depression. We shared our experiences with the ravages of dementia on families, and we recalled a similar kindness in our own lives or in other literature; for example, in the Madonnas of Leningrad which some of us read in the group some years ago. 

Each character, no matter how flawed, was legible in some way that did not exclude them from care. We considered how Danticat’s portrayals are kind, even loving, and noted that, like Tillie Olsen’s portrayals of suffering characters, Danticat cares about her characters; none are villains or beyond compassion.I have often encountered the notion that reading fiction helps to create empathy. Whether or not that is true, we discussed how we felt that Danticat’s stories insist on our empathy not only for her specific characters but for our communities.

We were delighted to have a visitor join our discussion: Oakland librarian Nabilla Mohamed, who helps our members locate books, sometimes even having them delivered to the member’s local branch. Nabilia read Danticat’s stories and shared her insights about the experience of homelessness that haunts every person who has moved from a homeland to a new country, whether by choice or necessity. She shared about attempts to maintain the best of one’s homeland culture, the values, the foods and spoke of the experience of always feeling to some extent as an outsider in both places even when one has the means to return for visits. We all wanted her to join our group despite her young age, and assured her she would always be a welcome guest.

The LARB review comments of the collection that “This is existentialist fiction: everyone is exiled in their own suffering, we can’t fully know another’s pain although we can touch it briefly, and our full essence — everything inside — is not manifest until the moment of death.” While this failure of total knowledge is of course true, that “brief touching” is meaningful, and we were grateful for the ways Danticat’s collection both exemplified that meaning in prose and in our own personal experiences that her prose invited us to share. 

Posted on by Kirsten T. Saxton

Senior Book Chat

February 7 2025

Our winter 2025 season opened with a lively discussion of A Man Called Ove by Fredrick Backman (2012), a novel about which a number of members shared strongly held opinions. One reader pointed out her disappointment—-not only in the novel but more importantly, its divergence from the stated original focus of our book group: the book is neither written by a woman nor focused on an old woman. When I admitted that members had recommended two few on-topic books for t this season, she reminded me that she submitted a lengthy list. She had been unaware that we only consider books a member has read (we diverged from this “rule” when we agreed, prior to its publication, to read Elizabeth Strout’s Tell Me Everything because we so loved her other books. 

Our resultant disappointment in Strout’s most recent novel coupled with a discussion regarding our shifting from our founding goals resulted in our determination to dip into that lengthy list of on-topic books prior to our next round of selections.

To that end, please send me your suggestions of books you discover that are written by women and focus on older women! You can see our list to note what we have read previously.

Now back to A Man Called Ove,originally published in Sweden In 2012  and then translated by Henning Koch and published in English in 2013. The novel was on the New York Times best seller llist for 42 weeks. It has been adapted for two films, one in Swedish and a second in English.

The story follows a miserable, grumpy, elderly man living alone on a suburban street. Bitter over and still grieving the loss of his wife, Ove, alone and misanthropic, is disillusioned with the modern world and determines to end his life.  Described by his neighbors as “the bitter neighbor from hell” he eventually strikes up a friendship with a boisterous young family who moves in next door. His pregnant neighbor Parveneh, keeps interrupting his solitary life with her daily challenges. As you may anticipate,these multiple interruptions eventually re-connect Ove with the joys of human connection. The plot is obvious from the beginning, and members either  found it boring and derivative or appreciated the ease with which the plot  structured reading and the promise of a feel good ending..

The Kirkus review notes: “The book opens helpfully with the following characterizations about its protagonist: ‘Ove is fifty nine. He drives a Saab. He’s the kind of man who points at people he doesn’t like the look of, as if they were burglars  and his forefinger a policeman’s torch.’ What the book takes its time revealing is that this dyed-inn-the-wool curmudgeon has a heart of solid gold.

We generally sympathized with Ove and the hardships he had endured since childhood: the loss of both his parents, his loss of a job for refusing to be a snitch, the loss of his house to fire,his unborn child, and finally the loss of his beloved wife, Sonja whose upbeat personality balanced his curmudgeonly take on life. Some of us attributed his attitudes to grief; others said he was born into the wrong time, and we agreed that as readers “of a certain age,” we shared some of his complaints about the ineptitude of ordinary people to make their own household repairs, to mend a bicycle, or to back up a vehicle. We applauded his integrity and disagreed some about whether he had a heart of gold or just a sense of responsibility

The general tone of many reviews and the views of many of our group align with this feel good take on the novel. However, some members of our group wholeheartedly disagreed, frustrated with how the novel removes his own responsibility for his emotional disconnection, and provides little reason for his wife to have loved him except a tired adage that she saw something underneath his surface lack of empathy or kindness.  The novel also leverages the stereotype of the repressed, isolated Swede enlivened by the warm, open woman of color and her “chaotic” energy. 

The discussion was lively, and we all agreed that in this exhausting moment, the sort of “gentle ease” of the novel made it an easy read. We agreed that we will continue to look for books by women that focus on “old ladies” as we had decided to do five years ago, when the group began.

Posted on by Kirsten T. Saxton

THE WINTER & SPRING LIST

Winter/Spring 2025 Downtown Oakland Senior Center Book Group with Dr. Ruth Saxton

Thanks to Carole Glanzer for organizing!

January 27- May 12 (8 meetings) 2nd and 4th Mondays of each month. 1:00- 2:30 PM on Zoom  Note: First session: January 27

1/27    A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman, 2019, 368 pgs. A grumpy 59-year- old man learn that life is worth living, even in the face of loss and adversity. A testament to the power of friendship and community. Rave reviews.

2/10    Everything Inside by Edwidge Danticat, 2019, 240 pgs. (stories) Danticat is a master of economy, with a remarkable ability to build singular fictional worlds in a matter of sentences. Examines how migration to and from the Caribbean shapes her characters.            Spare, evocative, moving.

2/24    The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, 2018, 224 pgs. Quietly brilliant and darkly funny, aggressively unsentimental interrogation of grief, writing and the human-canine bond.

3/10    Dearborn by Gassen Zeineddine, 2023, 240 pgs. (stories) Stories full of humor and warmth about an Arab American community in Dearborn, Michigan. Irresistable, warm, funny and unrelenting voice.

3/24    How to Read a Book by Monica Wood, 2024, 283 pgs. After accidentally causing the death while driving , a Maine woman does time in prison. The prison bookclub and its members are her solace before she reestablishes her life and defines herself on the outside. A finely wrought story, beautifully told, with deeply memorable characters.

4/14    State of Wonder by Ann Patchett, 2011, 368 pgs. A pharmacologist travels into the Amazonian heart of darkness in this spellbinder. Nail-biting action scenes are balanced by contemplative moments that give this gripping novel spiritual and    metaphysical depth, right down to the final startling plot twist. Thrilling,            disturbing and moving in equal measures

4/28    Ladies Who Lunch by Lore Segal, 2024, 128 pgs. (stories) These deceptively simple stories, about older women who meet for lunch, glide with a clear-eyed calm and the grace of a writer’s lifelong career to inform them. Gemlike stories from a master of the form.

5/12    Sipsworth by Simon Van Booy, 2024, 240 pgs. Apparently, it takes a village to care for an abandoned mouse with breathing issues, and to lure an elderly woman out of isolation. The Washington Post calls it “a deep, moving and vibrant saga.”

Posted on by Kirsten T. Saxton

Senior Book Chat January 2025

Tell Me Everything (2024) by Elizabeth Strout

“A generous, compassionate novel about the human need for connection, understanding and love, and the damage that occurs when those things are denied.”—San Francisco Chronicle

Elizabeth Strout returns to the town of Crosby, Maine, and to her beloved cast of characters — Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, Bob Burgess, and others. In this novel, the community must navigate a shocking crime in their midst.

Our book group previously had read Strout’s Olive Kitteridge at my suggestion. I had taught the book at Mills, and the students found the stories engaging and thought provoking. The book group agreed, and we eagerly returned to Strout’s characters in Olive, Again, Oh, William, and Lucy by the Sea, so when we saw the announcement of Tell Me Everything, we immediately added it to our fall 2024 reading list. We anticipated Strout’s familiar conversational style, her quirky characters, with a central plot threading together all the bits and pieces. dWe were surprised by the larger cast of characters, the multiple plot lines, and we were a little disappointed.

We had not been put off by large casts of characters or multiple plot lines in other books, and we wondered why this book, well reviewed as the Chronicle quote above indicates, did not sit well with us.

Perhaps we expected her more familiar form. Unlike novelists whose books do not return to the same places or characters, Strout’s connected novels, while not formally a series, create a fictional world that invites readers to return to a place they know well, offering new surprises and plots but within an expected structure. So the shift in structure, as it did not have a clear point–was not obviously making an argument via form–put us off a bit.

We also had feelings about the characters’ fates. We have leaned into novels with tragic or or unhappy outcomes, but here we were invested in the characters across a series of stories, and so our reactions and expectations differed. Perhaps we were perplexed by the choice to make Lucy remarry William, whom none of us really like. One group member wondered why she built up the intimacy between Lucy and her friend Bob Burgess only to alter it so abruptly. We speculated that Lucy married William to force herself to loosen the ties to Bob. Our reaction, as if these are people we know, is fascinating to consider. For example, long after my initial reading and weeks after the group discussion, I still feel the initial burst of satisfaction I had when Olive’s good friend in the memory care section of their shared nursing home defied her daughter’s insistence to move across the country near family and insisted she needed/wanted to stay close to her best friend, Olive.

Strout’s characters always feel “real,” and her writing is always strong, but I wonder about the dangers of writing a series of linked novels, as well as the pleasures. I did not, finally, enjoy this novel nearly as much as the previous ones. I’d love to know what you think!

Posted on by Kirsten T. Saxton

Senior Book Chat December 2024

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt (2022)

Shelby Van Pelt was inspired to write this novel after viewing the underwater documentary My Octopus Teacher.  The novel focuses on the friendship between an octopus and a seventy year old widow whose eighteen year old son has mysteriously disappeared while on a boat trip decades before. After her husband’s death, Tova takes up night shifts mopping floors and tidying up at the Sowell Bay Aquarium where she becomes acquainted with Marcellus – a curmudgeonly giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. The book begins with narration by the octopus, named Marcellus McSquiddles—much to his chagrin, for he is not a squid.  Marcellus complains about his captivity as he approaches the end of his lifespan, and he introduces us to the aquarium and the night shift cleaning woman, Tova.

Like the readers who made the novel a bestseller, our group praised the novel as heartfelt and uplifting. The deft shifting first person narration made us really care about its characters . We appreciated its somewhat improbable but hopeful ending that, in the way of a Victorian novel, ties up all the loose ends. Readers in our group lightly criticized the somewhat ageist stereotypical depiction of Tova who lacks the technical skill we all have as seniors who meet over zoom and are deft with cell phones, computers, and ipads. We cringed a bit at the title of her group of friends, “the knit wits” even though it was based on their initial formation as a knitting group.

 That said, we all agreed we loved the novel anyway. Our favorite character was Marcellus, and the friendship we most admired was that between Tova and Marcellus rather than her group of slightly zany friends. Some of us share Tova’s Scandinavian stoicism, social reticence, and need to be busy, and we admitted that despite our technological skills, we often identified with her. We wondered at first why she took the laborious night job, but then an insightful reader of Scandinavian heritage reminded us of Tova’s desire for privacy and avoidance of gossip, unlike the gossipy owner of  the convenience store, Ethan, whose penchant for news contributes to the plot as much as his fondness for Tova.

I highly recommend this enchanting novel. You will never again see octopus as you do prior to meeting Marcellus. In fact, one of our members admitted she has replaced her original dread of octopuses with a new fascination for their brightness.

Posted on by Kirsten T. Saxton

Senior Book Chat

The Heaviness of Things That Float (2016)

Jennifer Manuel

This book was difficult to find. We could not find copies in local libraries, but group members managed to obtain copies nevertheless as Carole’s note describes, in a brief anecdote that reminds me of the connections we make by reading together, connections that Bernadette, the protagonist of this novel, longs for:

“Linda and I live just a few minutes’ walk from each other and we’ve shared books for our group before. Usually, I’d finish and pass the book on to Linda, but this time we had a more elaborate arrangement. I found that I had no time to read during the day, so Linda had the book during the day and I had it overnight, since I seem to have quite a bit of awake time during the night these days. Mostly, we left the book for each other, inside my front gate or at Linda’s front door. Sometimes we met up for the exchange. It was fun to check in about where we were in the book and what we thought about what was going on. “

I was unable to access the book in an audio version; I had ordered a copy from a local bookstore, hoping I might be able to read parts with my magnifier, but it had not arrived by the time we met. So my contribution was simply a quote from one of the novel’s reviews I was able to access online. I quoted Carrie Breck’s Blog to open the discussion: “A truly conscientious writer brings first-hand experience, research, and timeless understanding, to a relevant issue.  For this reason Jennifer Manuel’s 2016 debut novel, The Heaviness of Things That Float is well worth talking about.” 

And talk we did, in a rich discussion led by Diane Anderson, who first suggested this book that touches on so many important topics. Diane writes:

There are 4 main themes in the book, as seen through the characters. They are starting over, loss, belonging, and the depiction of the indigenous community. The main character, Bernadette, has worked for 40 years as a nurse and is about to experience the loss of her job and identity: ‘Nobody could wholly know the heart of another, no matter which side of the unbalanced world we live in’ (284).  Bernadette longed to belong to the First Nation community, but the Tawakin people still considered her an outsider.  Her only sibling, her sister has recently died and left her a home on the mainland. She has rejected her former lover, Frank as a partner and has lost Chase Charlie, Frank’s biological child whom she loved. The author insists on people’s dignity and humanity in the face of unflinching sorrows (alcoholism, abuse, poverty, suicide).

The novel contains beautiful prose, describing the reservation as a community  where stories are

like organisms all their own, life upon life, the way moss grows around poplar trunks and barnacles atop crab shells, the way golden chanterelles spring from hemlock needles. They spread in the cove with the kelp and the eelgrass, and in the rainforest with the lichen, the cedars, the swordferns. They pelt down inside raindrops, erode thick slabs of driftwood, puddle the old logging road that these days led to nowhere.

I am sorry I could not read all of this evocative novel, but am lucky to have been introduced to it so well by this group of excellent readers. The novel reminds us that there are many sorts of community, and how important attentive belonging is.

Posted on by Kirsten T. Saxton

Senior Book Chat

Welcome to the Frog Hospital

Lorrie Moore (1994)

Lorrie Moore was wandering through an art gallery when she came upon a painting called “Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?” The work, by Nancy Mladenoff, depicts two young girls regarding a pair of bandaged frogs. Ms. Moore not only bought the painting, she also borrowed its title and imagery for her second novel.

The novel is narrated by Berie Carr. While vacationing in Paris with her husband, Berie recognizes that her marriage is deteriorating, noting that “I feel his lack of love for me. But we are managing.” Facing this disappointing state of adulthood, the book narrates her recollections of an adolescence in Horsehearts, New York. Berie looks back to 1972, when she was a wild teenager with her best friend Sils. They had summer jobs at Storyland, an amusement park where Sils plays the part of Cinderella and Beris works as a ticket seller. The emotional heart of this short novel is the intense friendship between the two young women. Berie is nostalgic 

for that summer in which she felt so alive: smoking and drinking and sneaking out, the passionate connections, the fearless quality that is so yearningly absent in her life as she approaches forty with a philandering husband and no zest for the present.

Moore’s precise period details take us to a specific moment in American history: the music, the styles, even the lip gloss, are familiar to readers who grew up in that time. As is the political climate, the illegality of abortion in much of the country, the gendered assumptions.

In our discussion, we differed widely in our response to the book. I was perhaps the most negative, confessing my disappointment in reading such a negative, hopeless account of a narrator less than half my age who yearns with such nostalgia for a lost adolescent exuberance and girlhood friendship but who, at not even forty, in good health, has so much time left, so much she can do, can choose. I wanted her to get a life in the present, to develop underdeveloped aspects of herself. 

Other members of the group enlarged my appreciation of the novel, describing it as sad, and quite accurate to how it can feel in middle life, to be stuck, not in the adult life one imagined, and yearning for a romanticized intense lost youth. One reader commented that if the marriage is hopeless, Berie may leave it and that she probably has decades of new experiences ahead of her.  Another reader read us the narrator’s description of singing in a girls’ choir and noted the magic and hope contained in that uplifting passage. Some readers and reviewers enjoyed tagging along with a narrator through memories of a youth so much more wild than their own, particularly when we are not troubled by the fear she will not survive it. 

It occurs to me that we really reacted to Berie as a person, or a cipher for the author, rather than a character designed by Moore to show us a set of emotions and memories. And that response speaks to Moore’s success as a writer. I will end with a couple of examples of her precise and powerful prose:

On her husband: 

[H]e studied Spanish once, and now, with a sad robustness, speaks of our childlessness to the couple next to us. “But,” he adds, thinking fondly of our cat, “we do have a large gato at home.” “Gâteau means ‘cake,'” I whisper. “You’ve just told them we have a large cake at home.” I don’t know why he always strikes up conversations with the people next to us. But he strikes them up, thinking it friendly and polite rather than oafish and irritating, which is what I think.

On femininity: 

I remember thinking that once there had been a time when women died of brain fevers caught from the prick of their hat pins, and that still, after all this time, it was hard being a girl, lugging around these bodies that were never right – wounds that needed fixing, heads that needed hats, corrections, corrections.”

After listening to our animated discussion about the plot, the character, and the writing, a reader who had lost interest in the novel and set it aside decided to finish reading it.  

Posted on by Kirsten T. Saxton

Senior Book Chat

Dinners with Ruth: A Memoir on the Power of Friendships by Nina Totenberg

Dinners with Ruth: A Memoir on the Power of Friendships (2022)by Nina Totenberg was our selection for  September 23rd. Lauded National Public Radio legal affairs correspondent Totenberg’s book chronicles her almost half a century long friendship with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. We enjoyed the book, although it lacks the personal detail, or first hand sense of intimacy, or sensory granular texture we realize we expected from a memoir (rather than say a more formal biography).

In her September 13, 2022 review for The New York Times. Susan Dominus describes the book as:

a loosely organized account of her [Totenberg’s] own life, and the role of Ginsburg (among other friends) in it, has a genial, likable tone. Totenberg’s stories are lively but never go on too long; she appears to reflexively turn the reader’s attention to the generosity or small kindnesses of others. She writes, without pretension or self-congratulation, about moments of journalistic triumph of which she has every right to be proud. She is also unfailingly discreet, a quality that the reader must concede reflects well on her as a friend. It serves her less well as the author of a memoir whose most central character, outside of Totenberg herself, is one of the most influential, fascinating and, to some, frustrating women of the last century.

My recent inclusion in the Senior Center’s creative writing/memoir Zoom group provided by Litquake informed my own awareness of the ways in which memoir draws on fictional techniques and differs not only from scholarly writing, my usual form,  but also differs from journalism. We realized that we could get more information about Ruth Bader Ginsburg from other sources, and that while we enjoyed the historical information and personal touches, we wished either for the book to be more of a memoir or more of a biography. 

However, we all found the book generally enjoyable. Totenberg’s journalistic skill provides the reader with lots of information, and her account of friendships and the tending of friendship is an important reminder for readers of any age. As seniors, Totenberg’s discussion of the past reminded us of historical times we also experienced.  And we enjoyed the behind the scenes observations of members of the Supreme Court, Tottenberg’s colleagues at National Public Radio, and the accounts of friendship networks in Washington, D.C.

The personal bits were most powerful for us. Totenberg’s most moving stories are about how the two women helped one another through the grave illnesses of their husbands. The reporter’s first husband was the late Senator from Colorado Floyd Haskell, a man 26 years older than herself, who died after they were married for 15 years and she shares the advice and wisdom Bader Ginsberg offered her during that difficult time, notably to tend to her work and not lose herself in endless days of waiting in the hospital. 

We all agreed that while we are glad we read it, we wished to learn more about both Totenburg and Ginsburg than this very discreet book offers.