Read with Me: The Cast by Amy Blumenfeld (Lacuna Loft Book Club)

Amazon Link

Twenty-five years ago, a group of ninth graders produced a Saturday Night Live–style videotape to cheer up their ailing friend. The show’s running time was only ninety minutes, but it had a lasting impact: Becca laughed her way through recovery, and the group―Jordana, Seth, Holly, and Lex―became her supporting cast for life.


On the silver anniversary of Becca Night Live, the friends reunite over the Fourth of July to celebrate Becca’s good health―but nothing goes as planned. The happy holiday card facades everyone’s been hiding behind quickly crumble and give way to an unforgettable three days filled with complex moral dilemmas and life-altering choices. Through humor, drama, and the alternating perspectives of five characters, The Cast explores the power of forgiveness, the importance of authenticity, and the immeasurable value of deep, enduring friendships to buoy us when life plays out differently than expected.

So I joined this book club through Lacuna Loft, a young adult cancer support community that has made an incredible difference in my life, especially during this stupid quarantine. You may have read some of my original pieces, which have been inspired by the writing group, but there is so much more to it. I've made some incredible friends. I feel like this has given the cancer a meaning that I never expected.

Anyway, I digress.

I started the first chapter of this book, and I'll be truly honest, I was not hooked. It felt too busy too quickly for me, and there were too many characters introduced rapid-fire for me to keep up. Also, with the story starting with 9th grade students, I felt like it was a little younger of a YA book than I was ready for. Overall, I was critical straight off the bat, and struggled to get through that first chapter. I read plenty of YA fiction, but I started to worry that maybe this was a bad idea because it was just not my type of book. I'm  sucker for science fiction, dystopian fiction, philosophy, a little bit of everything in between. This was somehow not what I was expecting

Chapter 2 caught my attention and I started to have a lot of feelings about the situation. I don't want to spoil anything yet, but I will say that there were a few well placed cliffhangers in this chapter that had me questioning my initial judgment of the book in the first chapter. In one margin, I wrote down "WHAT?!?" I didn't know how to react, and then I just had to push on through.

I am now about 6 chapters in, and I need a minute to contemplate what in the what is happening. Whoo, I can tell this is going to be a roller coaster. So who wants to join in on this wild ride?

Fave Quote of the Book: Small Victories by Anne Lamott (Part 2)

From Amazon:

So, where did we leave off? (LINK)

Was I saying that I came from an unhappy family?

What does it mean to have a happy family?

Who knew that I'd be exploring such difficult questions in a silly little blog that is supposed to be about non-cancer. Yet, here we are.

My family is special. I remember a childhood of laughter, silliness, bad jokes, talking lobsters, and spontaneous trips to unexpected locales.

I also remember a childhood with tears, fear, hurt and misunderstanding, and being misunderstood. As a shy introvert from an exceptionally loud family of extroverts, I spent too much time with my own thoughts, wishing I fit in better. I had feelings I didn't understand, couldn't put words to, and as an early reader who read "at the college level" by the time I was 11, it was unusual to be unable to find the words I needed.

We fought (and still fight). We cried (and still cry). We try to understand each other, even though it often feels like we all came from different planets. Are all families like that? I honestly don't know.

We had love, but we also had an unfair share of unhappiness. Well, I call it unfair, but I don't know if that is true either.

We have hard conversations, hard feelings, and hard hearts, and all the wishing in the world can't undo some of the terrible things we've done, or unsay the terrible things we've said. Lamott says,

"Forgiving people doesn’t necessarily mean you want to meet them for lunch. It means you try to undo the Velcro hook. Lewis Smedes said it best: “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.” (Lamott 117).

As family, we should always be prepared to forgive, because we are family, right? Even the Bible says we should turn the other cheek, so forgiveness is the word of the day, yes?

Maybe.

For me, explicit forgiveness is not free. Again we come back to the idea of grace. I am not full of grace, I might be full of something, but grace ain't it. Forgiveness comes at the cost of acknowledging the wrong, committing to never repeat it, and apologizing. An apology involves the words "I am sorry" or "I apologize for the hurt I caused to you."

A non-pology might include the words "I'm sorry if..." or "I'm sorry but..."

"I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings" is NOT an apology. "I'm sorry but I didn't mean it that way" is NOT an apology. I'm sorry for anything that I might have done" is not an apology. It is so difficult to find grace when trust is broken. Trust might be healed if the apology includes a commitment to not repeat the transgression. Trust might be healed if the transgressor takes some action toward healing. Trust might be healed by respecting boundaries.

I am no expert on grace, but I have so many expectations. I love the idea of grace, of love undeserved and without conditions. I want to learn that grace.

My therapist tried to teach me about giving myself grace. Do you want to know what is even harder? Giving grace to others. But as Smedes above said, forgiveness sets us free. Perhaps that is the grace that I am looking for. That doesn't mean that my heart is left open to be trampled by any and all who wish to stomp on it. The doesn't mean that I have no hurts left, because I do. But in my quest for giving myself grace, I have to try to let go of those hurts and move forward. Unconditional love is not the same as unconditional trust, but maybe we can learn to get closer to that, no matter how far away that grace might seem.

Read this book. It is by far one of the best I've stumbled across in a while.

Fave Quote of the Book: Small Victories by Anne Lamott

From Amazon:

Anne Lamott writes about faith, family, and community in essays that are both wise and irreverent. It’s an approach that has become her trademark. Now in Small Victories, Lamott offers a new message of hope that celebrates the triumph of light over the darkness in our lives. Our victories over hardship and pain may seem small, she writes, but they change us—our perceptions, our perspectives, and our lives. Lamott writes of forgiveness, restoration, and transformation, how we can turn toward love even in the most hopeless situations, how we find the joy in getting lost and our amazement in finally being found.

Profound and hilarious, honest and unexpected, the stories in Small Victories are proof that the human spirit is irrepressible.

I first read Anne Lamott in grad school. Her book, Bird by Bird, changed the direction of my education, my career, and my life. Although Lamott and I have some things in common, our belief systems are vastly different, but that's ok. Obviously, I don't know this woman, but from her writing, I get the impression that she is kind, warm, and thoughtful. I'd love to have a meal with her, or buy her a cup of coffee.

Throughout my diagnosis, I've been heavily contemplating the idea of grace. My therapist says I should give myself grace, but I don't always know what that means. She says I should forgive myself, and I don't always know how to do that. I have spent the majority of my life mastering negative self-talk; what is this grace we speak of?

I feel like Lamott understands me, without even knowing me. One of my favorite parts of this book is when she says,

"When you are on the knife’s edge—when nobody knows exactly what is going to happen next, only that it will be worse—you take in today" (Lamott 4). 

I feel that this is my diagnosis, summed up in one sentence. I'm still in a place of intentional ignorance. This diagnosis has taught me to take in today, one day at a time. Like an addict, I don't count too far ahead in the future. I count tomorrow, and the rest come as it may.

Lamott also talks about her family:

"Ours was like any other family, basically well-meaning, with lots of addictions, secrets, and mental illness. We were such a polite catastrophe that everyone’s energy went to survival, self-medication, Mask Making 101, and myopia" (Lamott 161).

Every family has their secrets, right? As Tolstoy said, "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" (Anna Karenina). While I'm not prepared to share all of our secrets, I will say that Tolstoy had his wisdom.

Am I saying that I came from an unhappy family?

Stay tuned to find out more!

Fave Quote of the Book: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Amazon link:

One of the twentieth century's enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize-winning career.

The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Rich and brilliant, it is a chronicle of life, death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the beautiful, ridiculous, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America.

Love and lust, war and revolution, riches and poverty, youth and senility, the variety of life, the endlessness of death, the search for peace and truth -- these universal themes dominate the novel. Alternately reverential and comical, One Hundred Years of Solitude weaves the political, personal, and spiritual to bring a new consciousness to storytelling. Translated into dozens of languages, this stunning work is no less than an account of the history of the human race.

I've read this book before, and only recently finished it. I don't know if I struggled with it because my brains have been poked and prodded, or because my memory sucks, or because this is just a tough book, but it takes place over the course of a literal hundred years, and many of the characters have the same names across generations. Aureliano Buendía and the 17 (literally 17) other Aurelianos over the years made this book a challenge for me this time around, but even though I found it challenging, I loved it. Gabriel García Marquez is the king of magical realism, and he gives the reader no chance to figure out which way is up before someone inexplicably floats away, someone else goes blind and nobody notices, and for no discernible reason, it rains for more than four years.

The version I read was translated by Gregory Rabassa, and he did an incredible job of keeping the lyrical prose and the poetry embedded in the plot with chapters that enveloped me in beautiful words and sentences like a warm blanket.

My favorite quote from this book, when a group of men are traveling through a dense jungle:

"The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin . . . For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief" (Garcia Marquez 11).

A universe of grief. My God, how beautiful is that?

I imagine the all-encompassing silence in this dense jungle. I remember the days after my diagnosis. After the sobbing, after the hysterics, the panic and fear. The stillness in the house. I felt like I was silently drowning in my sorrow. Shattered to pieces, scattered all over the floor. Days merged into nights, and still I cried until I was all dried up inside.

The men in this chapter are overwhelmed by ancient memories, and I was overwhelmed with ancient traumas from my youth rising to the surface unexpectedly. Old hurts mixed with the new, perhaps as a reminder we are made of all the pieces of our pasts, whether we like it or not. They say that the present is a gift, but if I may be so crude, sometimes, it is a shitty gift, the kind where you paste on a fake smile and hope nobody notices the disappointment in your eyes.

This universe of grief still overwhelms me. I mourn the many things I have lost, from the piece of bone in my skull to the ability to actively engage in large groups of people without debilitating anxiety. I grieve for all of these lost things, but none of that grief can be expressed as beautifully as GGM did. Read this book. It is beautiful and it is weird, and it is worth every page.

Books: The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers (Part 4)

I am still working my way through The Power of Myth, and today, I want to think about the answer to life, the universe, and everything.
Before I get to that, remember that last time, I talked about learning from our imperfections, and I examined the cycle of death and life and death again. I looked at the beauty and ugliness in the world, and in myself.

I'm mentioned before that I've been a lifelong cynic, always the pessimist. I am sarcastic, I have a dark and morbid sense of humor, and I am composed of 65% snark, 25% spite, and 25% bad at math. I've been a lifelong cynic because life has been hard. I suffered a traumatic loss at fifteen years old. My first husband was no gem. My bad attitude cost me friends. I was an underachiever. I was born right at the edge of Gen X and right at the beginning of the Millennial generation; cynicism comes naturally to me.

Campbell discusses men risking their lives to rescue their compatriots during the Vietnam War. I would argue that it takes an extremely idealistic type of person to take such a risk for someone else. This kind of person must do what they do because there is some hope that they will succeed. Campbell says,

"Life is pain; life is suffering; and life is horror—but, by God, you are alive. Those young men in Vietnam were truly alive in braving death for their fellows" (Campbell and Moyers 141).

Life is funny that way. No matter how pessimistic we are, no matter how low our expectations are, life finds a way to kick you in the rear. All that pain, all that suffering, all that horror.


All of this adds up to so much terribleness (that doesn't seem like it should be a word), and yet here we are, plugging along, doing the best we can, even though we hurt, and we die. Even though we are frightened and alone. Even though we are betrayed and broken-hearted.

I know that I have the darkness: the pain, suffering, and horror are inside of me. I suspect they are inside of so many others.

But sharing that darkness inside of me with you allows me to have a spark of hope.

All it takes is one spark to light a fire.

Books: The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers (Part 3)

I am still working on The Power of Myth, and today, I want to talk about a concept with which I've always been fascinated: beauty. Before I get to that, remember that last time, I talked about learning from our imperfections, and I examined the cycle of death and life and death again.

I've written term papers about beauty versus ugliness, and thought at length about the ramifications of the conventional Western beauty standard. This diagnosis of mine has changed me in so many ways, including in the way that I think about beauty. I've mentioned before that I don't consider myself to be vain, and I've discussed my hair at length. I still don't consider myself overly vain, but I will say that the way I think about beauty has changed a bit.

In the before, I used to consider beauty primarily in regards to the physical: people, faces, bodies. I found beauty in the written word, the shape of trees, the melody of my favorite songs. It simply hadn't occurred to me to deliberately consider the intangible beauty that can be found elsewhere.


Campbell discusses art and beauty.

"When a spider makes a beautiful web, the beauty comes out of the spider's nature. It's instinctive beauty. How much of the beauty of our own lives is about the beauty of being alive? How much of it is conscious and intentional" (Campbell and Moyers 100)?

In the world outside of us, there is so much beauty, and in the worlds within us, there lies beauty as well. There is beauty in reconnecting with old friends, even when the cause of this reconnecting is so very ugly. There is also beauty in meeting new friends, becoming part of a community through shared adversity.

I've felt such ugliness. When I was first diagnosed, I did not feel any beauty in being alive. I was devastated that this extraordinary life of mine had turned out to be so ugly. I tried to deny the truth of this diagnosis. I simply couldn't imagine living in a world where this was my reality.

My anger was all-encompassing.

I hated the world and everything in it. It was ugly, and I couldn't bear to be a part of a world that harbored this ugliness inside of me. I could find no beauty in being alive.

You have to understand, even when the emergency room doctor told me that there was a mass on my brain, I never once considered cancer. Even the word is ugly.

As time has passed, and I've had the unfortunate opportunity to become accustomed to this ugliness, I'm finding that there is a small but quiet change happening within me.

I still feel the ugliness inside of me. I am still angry.

Yet I have discovered some beauty. Not in my hair, and not in the bags under my eyes, but in the kindness and compassion of my friends, in the generosity of my family, the love of The Husband. Sometimes I have to remind myself that it is not always so ugly. There is that ugliness inside of me, but there is also a nugget of something not quite so ugly hiding out in there.

Books: The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly (Intro)

I recently finished this book that I had been simul-reading with The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers, and I need each and every one of you to get your hands on a copy and read it immediately: The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly.

Amazon describes it as such:

"High in his attic bedroom, twelve-year-old David mourns the death of his mother. He is angry and alone, with only the books on his shelf for company. But those books have begun to whisper to him in the darkness, and as he takes refuge in his imagination, he finds that reality and fantasy have begun to meld. While his family falls apart around him, David is violently propelled into a land that is a strange reflection of his own world, populated by heroes and monsters, and ruled over by a faded king who keeps his secrets in a mysterious book... The Book of Lost Things."

When I started reading this book, I was immediately devastated and immediately hooked.

"Once upon a time—for that is how all stories should begin—there was a boy who lost his mother. He had, in truth, been losing her for a very long time" (Connolly 1).

If this isn't a gut punch of an opening, I don't know what is. It grabbed me by the heart and squeezed, refusing to let me go. This is a story that could not be ignored or set aside.

—

From https://www.thepunctuationguide.com/em-dash.html
© 2019 thepunctuationguide.com

—

From https://www.thepunctuationguide.com/em-dash.html
© 2019 thepunctuationguide.com

The protagonist is 12-year-old David, and his mother is dying of some unnamed illness.

"Before she became ill, David's mother would often tell him that stories were alive. They weren't alive in the way that people were alive, or even dogs or cats. People were alive whether you chose to notice them or not, while dogs tended to make you notice them if they decided that you weren't paying them enough attention. Cats, meanwhile, were very good at pretending people didn't exist at all when it suited them" (Connolly 3).

Okay. Excellent description of people, dogs, and cats. But stories... I am intrigued.

"Stories were different, though: they came alive in the telling.[. . .] Once someone started to read them, they could begin to change. They could take root in the imagination, and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read, David's mother would whisper. They needed it. It was the reason they forced themselves from their world into ours. They wanted us to give them life" (Connolly 3).

Three pages in, and already I feel that this book isn't just a book. It is already coming to life in my hands, in my mind. It is grasping at my soul, and I am simultaneously losing myself in the ink on the pages while finding my secret truth buried in between the lines.

This was recommended to me by one of my favorite people, and I swear that she recommended it because she knew I needed this book. It fits perfectly into the types of fiction that I prefer, bordering somewhere between science fiction and fantasy, straddling the line of a dark fairy tale that brings adults back to their days of reading YA fiction. There are stories that we read that keep reality crystal clear right in front of us. Personally, I prefer to read stories that pull reality just beyond the reach of my fingertips, tugging at the veil of my imagination. It is in these stories that I am able to escape, and what is the point of reading fiction, especially science fiction and fantasy, if you can't escape into worlds unknown and unexplored?

I have a few more things to say about this, but right now, I want you to order this book, request it from the library, download it to your Kindle, whatever. Get your hands on this book!

Books: The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers (Part 1)

I'm currently simul-reading a couple of different books, but I want to talk about one that I am in the middle of right now.

Amazon has this to say:

The Power of Myth launched an extraordinary resurgence of interest in Joseph Campbell and his work. [ . . . ] With Bill Moyers, one of America’s most prominent journalists, as his thoughtful and engaging interviewer, The Power of Myth touches on subjects from modern marriage to virgin births, from Jesus to John Lennon, offering a brilliant combination of intelligence and wit.

This extraordinary book reveals how the themes and symbols of ancient narratives continue to bring meaning to birth, death, love, and war. 

This is a book that has sat on my bookshelves for years, and for some reason, when I finished When Things Fall Apart by the Venerable Pema Chodron, The Power of Myth reached out and grabbed me. I've been reading a fair number of philosophical or faith-based books, and at this point, I felt like it was time to change it up a little. This book touches on so many different topics, and I felt like I needed a book that took a different approach. This book is written in a bit of an unusual format compared to the other books I've discussed in the last six months.

In this one, Bill Moyers is interviewing Joseph Campbell. This long-form interview covers much of Campbell's works, but is particularly interesting because Moyers does not always agree with Campbell; in fact, they hash out some points of dissent over the course of the interview, further developing their own and each other's ideas.

As I have been on this journey of illness and self-discovery, weakness and epiphanies that have surprised me over and over again, I've realized many things about myself.

I am not always kind to myself. I have flaws that I'd prefer not to admit to, although I am sure that many of you have been witness to one or many of them. I have reserves of strength that reach deeper than I ever expected. I am even more stubborn than I ever thought I could be. People are complex. I am complex.

In an early part of the interview, Campbell says,

"the only way you can describe a human being truly is by describing his imperfections. The perfect human being is uninteresting—the Buddha who leaves the world, you know. It is the imperfections of life that are lovable. And when the writer sends a dart of the true word, it hurts. But it goes with love. This is what [Thomas] Mann called 'erotic irony,' the love for that which you are killing with your cruel, analytical word" (Campbell and Moyers 3).

The flaws in life are what make life interesting, right? It is too common for people to try to gloss over the faults in our friends, our family, ourselves. Think of the last funeral you went to: I have been blessed; for me, it was 23 years ago. People spoke so kindly of the dead. You know, and I know, that we should not speak ill of the dead, right? I felt so uncomfortable speaking so kindly of the dead and erasing the essence of who this person was. Of course, that is not to say that this person had no positive qualities, but ignoring those flaws swept away that which made this person so important, so loved, so missed. Ignoring those flaws distorted my memories, even as I knew that people were merely trying to be kind. 

But what did it mean that we, collectively, could not be honest with ourselves and each other about the true essence of this person? Why did we work so hard to pretend to ourselves and each other that there were only and exclusively good things to say about this person?


Moyers posits that

"what human beings have in common is revealed in myths. Myths are stories of our search through the ages for truth, for meaning, for significance. We all need to tell our story and to understand our story. We all need to understand death and to cope with death, and we all need help in our passages from birth to life and then to death. We need for life to signify, to touch the eternal, to understand the mysterious, to find out who we are" (Campbell and Moyers 4).

Anyone who knows me at all knows that my favorite book is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I love it so much that I have a tattoo inspired from the book. In this book, among other things, they are trying to find the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything. The search for meaning appears to be a universal truth, contained within the pages of a British comedy trilogy and the pages within this more academic book about myth.

Something that I've always known about myself is that I love stories. I don't think that this makes me unique; stories tie us together, keep us together, bind us to each other. I love books, movies, tv shows, any medium that tells a story. This is part of what brought me to teaching at the community college. There is so much tucked away within the stories we read, the stories we tell each other, and it is far too easy to feel separated from each other when we are allowed to forget the universality of these stories.

I miss teaching. One of the best parts of teaching, for me, is getting to see the look of recognition on a student's face as they realize that this or that experience is not unique to their own life. I have interacted with so many students who feel alone in their experiences, singled out, on their own. Outcast, out of place, rejected. Having the opportunity to build connections and community with my students through shared stories has been the single most fulfilling part of my life. Finding shared meaning is so rewarding.

Did you read with me? The Power by Naomi Alderman

Did you Read with Me?

The Power

Because this is not like a traditional book club, I am posting this follow up because I finally finished the book. If you have not finished be aware, spoilers may be found in the rest of the post and in the comments. Continue if you dare!

Spoilers!

Before we start with any of the discussion questions that I had linked to before, I wanted to talk about a couple of things that stood out to me.

Remember, Amazon's blurb says

"In THE POWER, the world is a recognizable place: there's a rich Nigerian boy who lounges around the family pool; a foster kid whose religious parents hide their true nature; an ambitious American politician; a tough London girl from a tricky family. But then a vital new force takes root and flourishes, causing their lives to converge with devastating effect. Teenage girls now have immense physical power--they can cause agonizing pain and even death. And, with this small twist of nature, the world drastically resets."

I expected this book to play with gender roles in unexpected ways. I did not expect this book to completely avoid the idea of sex vs. gender in the way that it did. There was one male character who had the power (in one of Margot's chapters, because it was a boy that Jos knew) but the book made it clear the reason the boy had the power was because of a chromosomal abnormality. I expected Jos's troubles to turn out to be because she was trans, but unless I missed something, from what I can tell, the power was entirely determined by sex, not by gender. So she was just defective.

I was disappointed that there was this missed opportunity to examine how the power would affect those who are trans, those who are intersex, those who may have transitioned, and how the new society would affect, accept, or reject those who did not fit these norms. Besides the one boy (can anyone remind me of what chapter he appeared in??) the only examination of gender roles besides the obvious was with Jos and her trouble controlling her power. Her lack of control was presented as a defect, and I was not comfortable with the idea of her lack of control being viewed as failing to present her femininity in the expected and most appropriate way. In this book, are woman with the power expected to remain consistently in control? As a logical counter-example, are men in the real world (not the book) expected to remain consistently in control?

A couple of things that stood out to me before I address some of those discussion questions:

At one point, Tunde writes in his notes that

"At first we did not speak our hurt because it was not manly. Now we do not speak it because we are afraid and ashamed and alone without hope, each of us alone. It is hard to know when the first became the second" (Alderman 269). 

This really jumped out at me, not because of the evaluation of masculinity, but rather because of the universality of trauma. It is so easy to feel alone in whatever trauma you have experienced, and that feeling of aloneness leads to a stigma, a feeling of shame because how are we strong and independent people supposed to admit weakness as a result of our traumas? We all have traumas, right?

I have at least two separate moments in my life that definitively caused PTSD. I talk about those moments with close friends and family. I talk about those moments even more with my therapist. How many people talk about those moments at all? How many people suffer alone in their hurt?

Roxy and Tunde eventually end up together, and the next thing that really jumped out at me was:

"Their bodies have been rewritten by suffering" (Alderman 324).

This really speaks to me about identity. Suffering changes us fundamentally, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, even physically. Depending upon the kind of suffering we are talking about, there is a visceral change from deep within, and learning who you now are can be quite the journey. Of course, because of my diagnosis, there are certain things I pick up on. I have changed fundamentally because of this diagnosis. But the idea that the change is a rewriting of myself speaks to me as an English Instructor. Those of us who teach composition spend so much time talking about re-writing, the difference between revision versus proofreading, the importance of understanding that writing is a process.

Reading this, I suddenly had this feeling. Suffering changes us, but it had never before occurred to me that suffering could make us better. The other day, I was speaking with my therapist (remember, therapy is good, y'all!) and she said something that really changed my perspective. She told me that an oncologist had asked her why she decided she wanted to specialize in oncology counseling as opposed to all the other kinds that are out there. She told me that she thought about it, and told the doctor that she found that her patients discovered their best selves as they worked through treatments, pills, radiation, therapy, and everything else. She said that in other specialties, she rarely saw so much change so significantly in her other clients as in her oncology clients.

I think that my body has been rewritten by suffering. The beautiful part of that is that I get to rediscover who I am going to become.

So, in the meantime, let's talk discussion questions:

1. The premise of The Power seems to be that if a new world order were created—with women in charge—it would look little different from the way it does now. That woman would use their power to oppress men. Do you agree with that premise? Does Naomi Alderman make her case convincingly? Do you see other possibilities?

2. Follow-up to Question 1: The book poses a question: why do people abuse power? What does the book suggest the answer is? What is your answer?

3. As an interesting exercise, go through the novel to identify those societal structures, both legitimate and criminal, that have been changed by feminine power. Look at how the book treats religion, the military, sex trafficking and porn, harassment, even bullying. What does the new power inversion say about the way gender and sexuality operates in "normal" society (i.e., today in the early 21st century)?

4. In what ways does each of the four characters—Eve, Roxy, Tunde, and Margot—illuminate the events of the novel and all that has changed? Whose perspective or story do you find most interesting … or revealing … or engaging?

5. What do you make of Neil Adam Armon and his gushing letter to Naomi Alderman, "I am so grateful you could spare the time," and "Sorry, I'll shut up now"? If you are a woman, does that tone, do those words, have a familiar ring? Also, what's the joke here about appropriation, given that Alderman's name, not Neil's, ends up on the novel? (If you haven't already, play around with the letters of Neil's name.)

6. Vogue reviewer, Bridget Read (really), calls parts of the book "revenge porn." Do you agree with her label? Do you find the revenge satisfying or twisted … or both?

7. Neil ponders: "Gender is a shell game. What is a man? Whatever a woman isn't. What is a woman? Whatever a man is not. Tap on it and it's hollow. Look under the shells: It's not there." What does Neil mean, and do you agree or disagree? How do you see gender? Is it "real" or a social construct?

I will answer some (but not all) of the questions in the comments below.

Remember, spoilers abound!

Read with Me: The Power by Naomi Alderman

If you would like to read with me, check out the info below:

The Power

It is almost time to start reading!

I don't want to run this like a traditional book club, because that requires everyone to be on pretty close to the same pace, and I know that my pace has definitely slowed down (2 brain surgeries!).

So, instead, I found a site with discussion questions to think about as we read. No deadline, no "read chapter 1 by Monday" or anything like that. Read with me, ahead of me, or along with me, and think about those discussion questions. Post comments here if you have thoughts, questions, or want to ask me or anyone else for clarification.

Have fun!

A short update, and introducing: Read with me? The Power

Yesterday, I had a hard day. Yesterday, I was not more than my diagnosis. Yesterday, I could not escape the word cancer hovering over my head, so I slept, then I cried, then I slept some more, then I cried some more. Then I took some valium, because sometimes the best you can do is get some chemical help.

Today, I am more than my diagnosis. So I've decided what book to read next. If you would like to read with me, check out the info below:

The Power

This book was on my wish list, and a very dear friend sent it to me, so this is the one I am reading next. I will probably wait about a week to start reading it, so if you would like to read with me, let me know, and I will wait until a good few of us have copies ready and are ready to start.

In the meantime, I need to finish eating breakfast and take my morning meds, because I have a friend coming over soon. Sometimes, it's all about keeping busy!