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Catherine Hollis

NonfictionMemoir

Will you be my best friend?

Review by Catherine Hollis

Rachel Bertsche is a 20-something freelance writer and editor who, after following her husband to Chicago, found herself in need of a new best friend. Or several of them. So she did the 21st-century thing and started a blog, MWF Seeking BFF, setting herself the task of going on 52 “friend-dates” in a year. One year later, mirabile dictu, she’s found new friends, strengthened her marriage and landed a book contract. We should all be so lucky (or energetic).

Apart from documenting her “year of friendship,” Rachel’s memoir (I feel like we’re on a first-name basis) is also a charming exposition of the latest research on social connections. Anthropological research suggests that humans are capable of maintaining 150 social relationships, so Rachel figures out that she’s got openings for 20 new friends. Although she’s happy in her marriage, and close with her family, these good things are no substitute for real female friendship.

Female friendship, we learn, is characterized by a face-to-face dynamic: Imagine two women sitting across from one another at brunch, chatting. Male friendship is more typically characterized as a side-by-side dynamic: two men sitting on the sofa watching the game. Gender stereotypes aside, this is one explanation for why women happily married to men may still feel lonely; there’s a conversational dynamic potentially missing from their primary relationship. Indeed, recent research shows that married people are as likely as single people to feel socially isolated: A spouse may be a best friend, but we need more than one best friend to feel connected to the world around us.

MWF Seeking BFF reads like an extended personal essay in O: The Oprah Magazine, where Berstche was an editor. It combines personal narrative and social research in an upbeat and approachable manner, and has clearly hit a nerve with female readers in the 25-40 age group, who keenly feel the loss of youthful friendship in the years devoted to building a career and/or a family. If this describes you, I’d recommend reading it at the gym, so you can pass your copy on to the woman at the next elliptical machine. It may be the start of a beautiful friendship.

Rachel Bertsche is a 20-something freelance writer and editor who, after following her husband to Chicago, found herself in need of a new best friend. Or several of them. So she did the 21st-century thing and started a blog, MWF Seeking BFF, setting herself the task of going on 52 “friend-dates” in a year. One […]
NonfictionMysteryMemoir

Remembering a life of crime

Review by Catherine Hollis

Reading Agatha Christie’s autobiography is like sitting down to tea with an especially chatty, good-natured auntie; one would never suspect her of slipping arsenic in your drink. The Queen of Crime, it turns out, was also a gifted and engaging memoirist, and readers who missed out on the 1977 publication of An Autobiography will be delighted with its reissue, timed to celebrate the 120th anniversary of Dame Christie’s birth.

As Christie’s grandson Mathew Prichard notes in his foreword, much of this autobiography focuses on her childhood, a happy and imaginative time that laid the groundwork for her future writing career. Young Agatha was a natural storyteller, creating imaginary friends known as The Kittens, and later inventing The School, a series of stories she spun about a group of schoolgirls. Learning about poisons while working in a pharmaceutical dispensary during the First World War gave Christie the idea for a detective story, which eventually became The Mysterious Affair at Styles, her first published book; witnessing the plight of Belgian refugees in England inspired Christie to make her detective Belgian—and thus Hercule Poirot was born. A marriage to handsome airman Archibald Christie was happy for a time, but Archie, it turns out, couldn’t much bear unhappiness. Agatha’s mother’s death in 1926 led to his affair and her infamous disappearance later that year. Christie doesn’t address the disappearance directly here, but says enough about her mental state to support theories that suggest she’d had a nervous breakdown of sorts.

Funny anecdotes about surfing with Archie in Hawaii and Cape Town (who knew Dame Christie could stand-up surf?), a happy second marriage to archaeologist Max Mallowan and periods spent with him on site in Iraq and Turkey are all fascinating. Christie’s enjoyment of the “indulgence” of memoir writing is apparent on every page of this lovely book, giving it a cheerful tone, as if she’s just turned to face you across the tea table to tell you a story. Packaged with a CD of newly discovered recordings of Christie dictating portions of the book, An Autobiography is essential for both mystery and memoir readers alike.

Reading Agatha Christie’s autobiography is like sitting down to tea with an especially chatty, good-natured auntie; one would never suspect her of slipping arsenic in your drink. The Queen of Crime, it turns out, was also a gifted and engaging memoirist, and readers who missed out on the 1977 publication of An Autobiography will be […]
NonfictionBiography

Dickens’ path to greatness

Review by Catherine Hollis

Award-winning biographer Claire Tomalin now turns her attention to Charles Dickens in a substantial new work. Building on her earlier biography of Ellen Ternan—the young actress Dickens left his wife for—Tomalin surveys the broad expanse of Dickens’ life, from his professional successes to his personal failings. The result is an engaging, clear-eyed account of a most complex writer and man.

Tomalin gives each of Dickens’ biographical personae its due: We meet the child-laborer son of a bankrupt father, the energetic and talented young man sketching sympathetic portraits of London workers, the actor and performer, the champion of the poor and finally the writer, dipping his head in cold water to keep working through the night. Dickens’ preternatural energy as an author—seen in his ability to write two novels, The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, simultaneously for monthly serial publication—and his lifelong concern for the underdog brought him acclaim, wealth and enthusiastic readers in both England and America.

Haunted, however, by his lonely and impoverished childhood, Dickens could also drive a hard bargain, alienating friends and publishers in his single-minded pursuit of financial security. And despite claiming that his marriage to Catherine Dickens was unhappy, he nonetheless fathered 10 children in 20 years by her, increasing the domestic and financial stresses he felt so keenly. His attraction to innocent girl-women resulted not only in the creation of impossibly virtuous characters like Little Dorrit, but also in an abiding interest in London prostitutes.

Dickens’ affair with Ternan ultimately tore apart his family and dissolved some of his professional relationships. Tomalin carefully and fairly considers the evidence for the birth and death of an illegitimate child born to the couple, shedding light on a biographical secret that went unspoken for decades. In doing so, she brings the light and dark of Dickens’ personality into focus, the virtue he pursued and the vice that bedeviled him.

Tomalin’s Charles Dickens is a masterful balancing act, presenting the great artist as a fallible human without ever losing sight of the miracle of his literary achievements and the generosity of his spirit.

Award-winning biographer Claire Tomalin now turns her attention to Charles Dickens in a substantial new work. Building on her earlier biography of Ellen Ternan—the young actress Dickens left his wife for—Tomalin surveys the broad expanse of Dickens’ life, from his professional successes to his personal failings. The result is an engaging, clear-eyed account of a […]
NonfictionMemoir

Testimony from under the big tent

Review by Catherine Hollis

Donna Johnson’s sensitive and revelatory Holy Ghost Girl takes its readers under the big revival tent of evangelist David Terrell. Johnson’s mother played organ for Brother Terrell’s traveling circus of a ministry in the 1960s, eventually becoming one of several women to bear his children out of wedlock. On the “sawdust trail” with the last of the old-time tent preachers, Johnson witnessed miraculous healings, speaking in tongues and the casting out of demons. This was a mysterious and surreal world for the little children bundled up in quilts in the back of the tent.

For Johnson and her brother, David Terrell was both stepfather and prophet, a man who kept their mother away from them for months at a time and a preacher with a direct line to God. Johnson offers a harrowing portrait of a childhood on and off the revival road, particularly when she and her brother are left alone for months at a time with a series of unstable caretakers. Long after leaving Terrell’s ministry, Johnson now offers a clear-eyed and compassionate view of her childhood and the man now widely discredited as a cult leader (Terrell eventually served 10 years in jail for tax evasion).

An impressive achievement of perspective and maturity, Holy Ghost Girl follows Johnson out of the Pentecostal movement into the wide world of “hellavision,” books and boys without slamming the door on the mysteries of her youth. Her memoir places David Terrell’s ministry in historical context, showing for example how the tent revivals of the 1950s and ’60s were an early site of integration in the American South. Both personal and social history, Holy Ghost Girl lifts the veil on a controversial sector of American religious experience through a child’s point of view. It is a haunting and memorable book.

Donna Johnson’s sensitive and revelatory Holy Ghost Girl takes its readers under the big revival tent of evangelist David Terrell. Johnson’s mother played organ for Brother Terrell’s traveling circus of a ministry in the 1960s, eventually becoming one of several women to bear his children out of wedlock. On the “sawdust trail” with the last […]
NonfictionMemoir

A family talent for disaster

Review by Catherine Hollis

A memoir is an impression of a life, and how a writer shapes her material often tells us more about her character than it does about the facts. Jeanne Darst’s family life could as easily be tragic as comic, but in Darst’s painfully hilarious Fiction Ruined My Family, comedy wins out every time. A consummate performer, she keeps her readers balanced on a fine line between laughter and tears.

Darst comes from a St. Louis family distinguished for its politicians, writers and alcoholics; when her father gives up politics for writing, the family’s fortunes begin to decline. Darst’s mother, who had been a child equestrian and debutante, takes to her bed with a bottle of whiskey, keeping “a light cry going most of the time” as she laments her lost social prospects. When their father moves the whole family to New York, the four daughters learn to fend for themselves.

Darst’s portrayal of her father is a masterpiece of comic empathy. His rejected novels and devotion to literature make him into a kind of tragic hero, a Don Quixote of freelance writers. From him, Darst absorbs the idea that bad life equals good art, a dysfunctional lesson that she lives out as an impoverished young actor in New York. The funniest parts of this book emerge from Darst hitting bottom again and again as an alcoholic and must be read to be believed. Honestly. Still, it’s hard for Darst to compete with her parents, who “hog all the death and destruction” for themselves. Her mother divorces her father so that she can concentrate on her drinking, and yet the divorce doesn’t take; he continues to look after her until her death, channeling his emotions into an obsession with F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. It doesn’t sound very funny, and it isn’t: Darst’s tone shifts in the later sections of the book, as she describes the squalor her mother lived in, and her own struggle to get sober.

Darst’s memoir is proof that the answer to her ultimate question—can you be funny, creative and sober?—is emphatically yes. Fiction may have ruined Jeanne Darst’s family, but the humor she learned from them as a survival strategy flourishes in this book.

A memoir is an impression of a life, and how a writer shapes her material often tells us more about her character than it does about the facts. Jeanne Darst’s family life could as easily be tragic as comic, but in Darst’s painfully hilarious Fiction Ruined My Family, comedy wins out every time. A consummate […]
NonfictionBiography

Into the mystery of Ruess

Review by Catherine Hollis

Cult figure Everett Ruess gained a wider fame after Jon Krakauer’s best-selling Into the Wild identified a number of parallels between Ruess and Chris McCandless, the subject of Krakauer’s book. Both young men were idealistic dreamers, drawn to wilderness solitude, and both disappeared in the wild under mysterious circumstances. Ruess’ body has never been found.

David Roberts’ definitive biography draws a full and sensitive portrait of the quixotic Ruess, who spent four years making increasingly arduous solo treks into the Southwestern canyonlands before disappearing in 1934. While the rest of America suffered under the strictures of the Depression, he scoffed at those who worked for a living, while financing his wilderness trips largely through an allowance from his parents. Ruess grew up in a loving, artistic and possibly over-involved family, and his rebellious claims to independence (bolstered by that allowance) make him sound exactly like the teenager he was, and strengthen his connection to McCandless.

Through the ample quotations from Ruess’ letters and diaries included here, we hear the adorable hubris of this wilderness-loving boy. “I must pack my short life full of interesting events and creative activity,” Ruess writes to his brother, mixing radiant descriptions of the desert alongside stories of throwing boulders off cliffs and chasing after his runaway burros. Roberts’ aim in this biography is to provide a corrective to overly idealized portraits of Ruess, and he does not shy away from discussing Ruess’ looting of Anasazi ruins or his use of a Navajo hogan for firewood. A balanced portrait emerges of a complex figure who—while fascinating—was no saint.

The second half of Finding Everett Ruess reads like a detective novel, as Roberts tracks Ruess’ afterlife through the theories and legends that surround his disappearance. Roberts pursues a lead that takes him and a team of forensic anthropologists to an anomalous ridgetop grave, and seems poised to solve the mystery. His narrative about working with Ruess’ niece and the Navajo family that found the grave provides a suspenseful kick that will keep readers hooked until the very end of the book.

Perfect for a late summer read, this biography will attract many more people to the brief, artistic life of Everett Ruess, and provide compelling fodder for further debate about the many issues raised by his life and death.

Cult figure Everett Ruess gained a wider fame after Jon Krakauer’s best-selling Into the Wild identified a number of parallels between Ruess and Chris McCandless, the subject of Krakauer’s book. Both young men were idealistic dreamers, drawn to wilderness solitude, and both disappeared in the wild under mysterious circumstances. Ruess’ body has never been found. […]
NonfictionBiography

Two well-bred gals venture West

Review by Catherine Hollis

Back in the hardscrabble past, our grandparents walked barefoot 10 miles in the snow to get to school on time. Sound like a joke? Not for New Yorker editor Dorothy Wickenden, whose grandmother Dorothy Woodruff, with her best friend Rosamond Underwood, broke trail on horseback in a blizzard to get to their teaching post at the rural one-room schoolhouse in Elkhead, Colorado.

Nothing Daunted tells the delightful true story of how Dorothy and Rosamond, two well-bred Smith College graduates, lit out for the frontier in 1916 to work as schoolteachers rather than do the expected thing and marry. Little did they know that idealistic Ferry Carpenter, the lawyer and rancher who masterminded the building of the Elkhead school, hoped that importing schoolteachers would provide wives for the local ranchers and cowboys. (He requested a photo with each job application.)

Dorothy and Rosamond embrace the hardships of mountain life with irrepressible good humor. One of the first lessons they learn is that wearing spurs on horseback reduces their commute time to school by 15 minutes. Their pupils, the ragtag children of local ranchers and miners, charm and frustrate in equal measure; of maintaining order in the classroom, Dorothy writes, “my boys . . . say such funny things—but they are regular imps of Satan, too.”

Ferry Carpenter is a charismatic figure, a man of all trades drawn to the egalitarian West, able and willing to fill in as a Domestic Science teacher when it becomes clear that neither Dorothy nor Rosamond can cook. Ferry and Bob Perry, the son of a mine owner, engage in a friendly rivalry for the affections of Rosamond, but it’s hard for Ferry to compete after Bob endures a kidnapping and bravely escapes his assailants.

Nothing Daunted began life as a 2009 New Yorker article, after Wickenden fortuitously discovered her grandmother’s Elkhead letters. Scrupulously researched, it is both an entertaining and an edifying read, bringing early 20th-century Colorado to vivid life.

Back in the hardscrabble past, our grandparents walked barefoot 10 miles in the snow to get to school on time. Sound like a joke? Not for New Yorker editor Dorothy Wickenden, whose grandmother Dorothy Woodruff, with her best friend Rosamond Underwood, broke trail on horseback in a blizzard to get to their teaching post at […]
LiteratureArts & Culture

Behind a childhood classic

Review by Catherine Hollis

Before Harry Potter came along, Charlotte’s Web was the best-selling children’s book in America. Generations of kids found real magic in Zuckerman’s barn, through young Fern’s relationship with Wilbur the pig and Charlotte the spider. Charlotte’s Web set its talking animals alongside realistic lessons about the cycles of life and death in the barnyard, a naturalism that emerged from author E.B. White’s own farm in Maine and his lifelong fascination with animals.

The Story of Charlotte’s Web, Michael Sims’ slice-of-life biography of E.B. White, focuses on those elements that directly contributed to the creation of Charlotte’s Web. The first section of the book is stunning, an almost novelistic recreation of the child Elwyn’s imaginative world. The youngest of seven children, Elwyn was shy and anxious, happiest when rambling alone in Maine’s lake country or watching chicks hatch in a barn. He was equally drawn to reading and writing about the natural world, becoming a published author at age nine with a poem entitled “To a Mouse.” Sims shows us how Elwyn’s childhood reading, from the animal stories of Ernest Thompson Seton to Don Marquis’ comic verses about Archy and Mehitabel, influenced the writer White would become.

Sims’ imaginative re-enactment of pivotal scenes in White’s life is unconventional yet compelling. A wonderful example of this occurs when 26-year-old Andy (as White was known after college) peruses a magazine stand in Grand Central Station in 1925: Sims vividly details the covers of Film Fun and Time magazine before focusing his lens on Andy’s life-changing purchase of the first issue of The New Yorker. The staging of this scene helps Sims build out the literary and cultural contexts in which Andy becomes a professional writer, grounding the drama in solid historical research.

The adult Andy—successful New Yorker writer, married to editor Katharine White, dividing his time between Manhattan and a farm in Maine—is perhaps not so intriguing as the child Elwyn, until he becomes fascinated with orb weaver spiders, spending two years obsessively studying their habits in preparation for the creation of Charlotte A. Calvatica. Sims deftly handles the writing and publication of Charlotte’s Web, building thumbnail portraits of the legendary children’s book editor Ursula Nordstrom and illustrator Garth Williams. But this biography is at its best in the barnyard, illuminating that “sacred space” E.B. White brought to life in his beloved children’s book.

Before Harry Potter came along, Charlotte’s Web was the best-selling children’s book in America. Generations of kids found real magic in Zuckerman’s barn, through young Fern’s relationship with Wilbur the pig and Charlotte the spider. Charlotte’s Web set its talking animals alongside realistic lessons about the cycles of life and death in the barnyard, a […]
NonfictionMemoir

Turning to Jane for advice

Review by Catherine Hollis

Equal parts sentimental education and literary guidebook, William Deresiewicz’s enjoyable memoir about coming of age through reading Jane Austen’s novels offers life lessons from which any reader could benefit. Discovering Austen as a callow graduate student, Deresiewicz finds himself surprised and humbled by her intelligence, and ultimately changed forever by her insight into “everything that matters.”

Emma is the tool of his conversion: Reading it for the first time, Deresiewicz finds himself bored and irritated by the endless discussions of card parties and neighborhood matters, identifying with Emma Woodhouse’s disdain for the provincial town of Highbury. But when Emma insults the scatterbrained Miss Bates at a picnic, Deresiewicz has his “a-ha” moment: Emma’s cruelty mirrors his own, and Austen knows it. Therefore, Emma’s lesson in humility must also be his own; both must learn to appreciate the “minute particulars,” those apparently trivial details that make up the fabric of real life.

With Jane Austen as his teacher, Deresiewicz learns from Pride and Prejudice that growing up is a never-ending process; from Mansfield Park that truly listening to other people’s stories is the best way to be helpful to them; and from Persuasion the importance of building a community of friends. Vignettes from Deresiewicz’s life and episodes from Austen’s biography are seamlessly interwoven with discussions of the novels, beautifully illustrating the interdependence of reading, writing and real life. Whether it is the challenge of gaining distance from his overbearing father, the temptations of friendship with wealthy, idle people or the pursuit of for-real adult love, Deresiewicz turns to Jane Austen as a wise and kind, if occasionally tart, teacher/aunt/elder. This is a fresh and appealing take on the coming-of-age memoir, pleasurably demonstrating that books really can change your life.

Deresiewicz is an award-winning literary critic and a former professor of English at Yale University. It is sure proof of his literary talent that A Jane Austen Education is so eminently readable, both substantive and entertaining. I found myself galloping through it, inspired to turn back to Jane Austen myself to see what lessons her novels have for me.

 

RELATED CONTENT
Interview with William Deresiewicz for A Jane Austen Education.

Equal parts sentimental education and literary guidebook, William Deresiewicz’s enjoyable memoir about coming of age through reading Jane Austen’s novels offers life lessons from which any reader could benefit. Discovering Austen as a callow graduate student, Deresiewicz finds himself surprised and humbled by her intelligence, and ultimately changed forever by her insight into “everything that […]
NonfictionMemoir

The long, dark nights of grief

Review by Catherine Hollis

Joyce Carol Oates’ intense, raw memoir of her husband’s unexpected death in 2008 provides a compelling window onto the writer’s working life by exposing the gap between “Joyce Carol Oates,” the masterful, prolific American novelist, and Joyce Smith, a wife of 48 years, suddenly widowed.

After Raymond Smith dies of a hospital-acquired staph infection, “the Widow” (as she refers to her new role) must learn to negotiate the world of “death duties”: a funeral home, the will, sympathy cards she can’t bear to read, a ringing telephone she can’t bear to answer and endless crates of Harry & David sympathy gift baskets, a “quantity of trash” that she must roll out to the curb, weeping in February’s icy rain. Retreating to “the nest”—the marriage bed remade into a safe place to grieve—the insomniac Widow tries to lose herself in work and in emails to longtime friends.

This generous memoir gives its readers intimate access to the most abject moments of sorrow, even as it explores the boundary between private and public selves. The solace of work, of inhabiting the role of “Joyce Carol Oates,” helps the Widow get through her days, though she struggles through the long dark nights, when even the cats avoid her. We learn that the Smiths retained a certain “privacy of the soul” in their marriage: Raymond never read Joyce’s many novels, and she never read his single unfinished one. The Widow’s struggle over whether or not to read this abandoned novel prompts uneasy reflections over how well she knew her husband, or how well we might know anyone we deeply love.

There is a breathless, antic quality to Oates’ prose here, an abundance of exclamation marks, dashes and repetitive phrases, stylistic markers that mirror the shock of unanticipated loss and its debilitating physical and psychological repercussions. This gives the memoir a kind of lightness and manic energy that make it a (paradoxically) pleasurable reading experience, and readers will come away grateful for having been granted such an intimate glimpse of a long and happy marriage.

Joyce Carol Oates’ intense, raw memoir of her husband’s unexpected death in 2008 provides a compelling window onto the writer’s working life by exposing the gap between “Joyce Carol Oates,” the masterful, prolific American novelist, and Joyce Smith, a wife of 48 years, suddenly widowed. After Raymond Smith dies of a hospital-acquired staph infection, “the […]
Memoir

Viewing the world through a distorted lens

Review by Catherine Hollis

Prosopagnosia (“face blindness”) is a rare neurological disorder that inhibits a person’s ability to recognize a face: When Heather Sellers brings her new husband and two stepchildren home to Florida to meet her parents, she notices the “tiny elderly woman” staring at her angrily in the gas station, but literally doesn’t know her own mother. A lifetime of social anxiety and misunderstandings (hugging the wrong man, offending her best friend by walking right past her) isn’t, however, the only perceptual challenge Sellers documents in her stunning memoir, You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know.

Growing up with a mother who nailed windows shut, who followed suspicious vehicles on the highway and insisted that her daughter walk on her knees to save the carpet, also gave Sellers a thoroughly distorted lens through which to view the world. Amazingly, Sellers was in her late 30s before she developed any sense that her mother was mentally ill; she couldn’t recognize that the disorder and dysfunction in her own childhood was the result of her mother’s paranoid schizophrenic delusions (not to mention her father’s alcoholism and cross-dressing). This sets up a neat parallel between the twin detective stories Sellers narrates: the uncovering of her mother’s illness and the discovery of her own prosopagnosia, both of which create a skewed sense of reality.

Composing a memoir is like composing a life; for Sellers, the process of writing itself helps to correct the distorting mirrors of childhood. As a writer (if not in her messy life), Sellers is confident, a master of her craft. Her memoir is paced like a work of suspenseful fiction, moving back and forth between her childhood and her present-day quest to uncover the truth about herself and her family. A third narrative strand—about the breakdown of her marriage to libertarian Dave, who first helps her to recognize her own perceptual distortions—is equally compelling. Sellers’ balanced approach to these difficult but loving relationships is hard-won and appealing.

Despite the dire subject matter, Sellers’ writing is sprightly, even funny; this is a memoir to be devoured in great chunks. The pleasure of reading it derives both from its graceful style and from its ultimate lesson: that seeing our past for what it really was, and forgiving those involved, frees us up to love them all the more, despite their (and our) limitations.

  

Prosopagnosia (“face blindness”) is a rare neurological disorder that inhibits a person’s ability to recognize a face: When Heather Sellers brings her new husband and two stepchildren home to Florida to meet her parents, she notices the “tiny elderly woman” staring at her angrily in the gas station, but literally doesn’t know her own mother. […]
Nonfiction

The English-ification of the world

Review by Catherine Hollis

Language is a lens through which we see and understand the world, a pair of “magic glasses,” in Leslie Dunton-Downer’s metaphor, that shapes our reality. And as her compelling new book, The English Is Coming!, demonstrates, the reality of the 21st century is increasingly shaped by the use of “Global English” as a lingua franca in business and science. While this might sound like linguistic imperialism—the English language dominating and edging out local languages—Dunton-Downer makes a thoroughly convincing case to the contrary. In her argument, Global English is “a language made up of many languages,” a truly international phenomenon; for example, there are more people in China who speak some English than there are English-speakers in all of America.

Dunton-Downer is persuasive and, better yet, entertaining. She’s an affable and learned guide to the history and future of Global English. Much of her book is an exploration of the etymologies of more than 30 words recognizable the world over:robot, bikini, shampoo and O.K., among others. Shampoo, for instance, evolved in English from the Hindi word ch?mpo, meaning to knead or press; it traveled from India to Britain, along with the silk, tea and opium imported by the British East India company, and eventually became associated with restorative massage treatments. It now exists in similar form in languages as diverse as Japanese, Russian and Greek.

The fascinating stories Dunton-Downer tells show how language is thoroughly embedded in culture and history. One of the most intriguing stories concerns PIE, or “Proto-Indo-European,” a lost ancestor language that gave birth to the family tree of Indo-European languages familiar to us from the endpapers of our dictionaries. Like archeologists sifting through a ruined city, linguists seek out signs of PIE in words as modern as blog (the web inweblog—which was quickly shortened toblog—emerges from the primal root formwebh, which means both “to weave” and “to move quickly”). As the World Wide Web weaves instantaneous connections across the globe, so too does Dunton-Downer’s explanation link our ancient past and our technological future. Her skillful, humorous and thoroughly absorbing book shows us that the English language has always been polyglot, and it continues to evolve into a mirror for our global community. 

 

Language is a lens through which we see and understand the world, a pair of “magic glasses,” in Leslie Dunton-Downer’s metaphor, that shapes our reality. And as her compelling new book, The English Is Coming!, demonstrates, the reality of the 21st century is increasingly shaped by the use of “Global English” as a lingua franca in […]
NonfictionMemoir

William Deresiewicz

Interview by Catherine Hollis

Literary critic William Deresiewicz discusses his charming new memoir, A Jane Austen Education, and Austen’s timeless appeal.

Your book describes a series of “life lessons” you learned by reading Jane Austen’s novels, such as how to truly listen to other people’s stories and the value of a true friend. Do you think Austen consciously embedded these lessons in her novels, or was it unintentional?
Definitely intentional. As someone once said, she was a moralist without being moralistic. She didn’t preach, but she definitely wanted to teach—by example. The examples are what happens to her heroines. The lessons Austen imparted are the ones they learn themselves. Their stories are about learning to live better, and we’re supposed to get the idea, too.

You also document your coming-of-age through reading Jane Austen as a graduate student in English. Why do you think it was Austen who brought about this change, and not George Eliot or James Joyce, for example?
Partly it was simply a matter of timing. I discovered Austen at an age when I was probably ready to start learning these things, and through a professor in whose company I was eager to learn. But I also think it’s Austen. For reasons that I think I still don’t fully understand and probably never will, she just spoke to me in a way that no other novelist ever has. There’s something intensely personal about her writing, which is why I think so many people feel they have a personal relationship with it. You feel like she’s talking directly to you. Which is not to say that I haven’t learned important things from George Eliot and James Joyce: Joyce at a younger age than Austen, in college, when every young literary man identifies with Stephen Dedalus; Eliot at an older age. She’s more a writer of limitation and disillusionment.

Your professor Karl Kroeber acts as a kind of father figure in this memoir , introducing you to Austen’s Emma and modeling good teaching. Is it fair to say that Jane Austen was a mother figure?
Yes, I think that’s fair, all the more so because in a lot of ways she projects a maternal presence in her fiction—though the kind of mother who’s as apt to smack you in the head if you do something stupid as she is to nurture and defend you. She regarded her characters as her children, a fact that comes out explicitly in her letters. But for me, I also think it’s more complicated. A mother figure, but also a friend. Maybe a big-sister figure.

What drew you to write this hybrid of memoir and literary criticism for a general audience, as opposed to your scholarly work on Austen?
I’ve been writing about literature for a general audience for a long time, as a book critic. Actually, the fact that I was more interested in doing that than in scholarly work is the reason I decided to leave academia. The memoir part is new for me, though, and it’s been an interesting challenge: a technical challenge to blend the two and a personal challenge to be so candid in such a public way. The second part is a little frightening. As for why I decided to write the book this way, well, the idea was to convey the lessons I learned by reading Jane Austen, and I realized pretty quickly that the best way to do that would be to actually talk about the way I learned them, not just explain them in some kind of abstract and impersonal way.

What did you think of the recent Masterpiece Theater production of Emma? Was it faithful to that book's lessons?
Oops. I haven’t watched it yet. I tend to be wary of Jane Austen adaptations because so many of them are such travesties. But I should give it a shot.

Jane Austen taught you moral seriousness, how to be an adult and, ultimately, how to love. What would you like your book to convey to its audience?
First, that her books aren’t just soap operas and aren’t just fun—though of course they’re incredibly fun—they also have a lot of serious and important and very wise things to say. Second, that they aren’t just about romance (which is usually the only thing the movies have room for, or interest in). And finally, that they aren’t just for women. I would love it if the book helped introduce more men to her work. Maybe people could get it for their boyfriends/husbands/brothers.

What advice do you think Jane Austen would give to a contemporary single woman in want of a relationship?
Ha! Great question. The first thing I think she would say is, don’t settle. Then, marry for the right reasons: for love, not for money or appearances or expectations. But most importantly—and this is what I talk about in the love chapter, the last chapter—don’t fall for all the romantic clichés about Romeo and Juliet and love at first sight. For Austen, love came from the mind as well as the heart. She didn’t believe you could fall in love with someone until you knew them, and then what you fell in love with was their character more than anything else, whether they were a good person and also an interesting one. So I guess that means, date someone for a while before you commit, and don’t get so carried away by your feelings that you forget to give a good hard look at who they are. As for sex, it’s not so clear she would have disapproved of sleeping together before marriage. I think she maybe even would’ve liked it, as a chance to learn something very important before it’s too late.

Do you think Jane Austen still has more to teach you?
Absolutely. Every time I read her novels I learn something new.

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