Comfort by Ann Hood

Photo: from Ann Hood's webpage, here.

When a 5-year old child dies...Well, I can't really even finish the sentence, much less write a book about it.  Such loss is inexplicable.  It is impossible to imagine, even by a person like Hood who makes her living from her literary imagination.  The talent to do so must be immense.

You have to do honor to yourself, your own emotions, the child, to the death, to the reality of how it happened.  The details.  The exact details.  Details so exact you have to live your own worst nightmare over and over and over and over just to get the details right.  Because to get them wrong--purposely wrong--is a sort of blasphemy.  Yet you also don't want to sound whiny, or maudlin, like you don't realize other people have lost their kids, too.  You have to write about the cold hard facts, and how do you describe emotions at all, especially as cold hard facts?

And you have to write it well, not like a diary or a journal.  You have to write it over and over, drafts innumerable, to get the tone of everything above, and everything I can't even think of, just right.  It is a high-wire act, a balancing act of art, and therapy, and confessional, and literature, and a sort of diary-journal in memoir form.

I'm a writer--hopefully a pretty good one--and I can't imagine ever being able to do this.  Ann Hood, a former (or current?) Rhode Island College professor [full disclosure: I attended RIC but did not have the good fortune to get Ms. Hood as a professor, though of course I did have some good ones] does the high-wire act and succeeds because her writing is that direct, that honest, that good.  This book will jab you with its simplicity and it's reality.  Not realism, which is a fakeness of literature that makes the unreal real.  This book is all real, all the time.  It is one of the heavier 186-page book you'll ever read, and read it you should.

It doesn't matter if you've never lost a child.  When you reach a certain age, as I guess I have, you've probably lost somebody, and no matter how old they were, I'll bet you thought they weren't old enough.  And you're right.  At least, I think you are, because that's how I've felt about my loved ones who've died.  In fact, I feel that way about everyone I know who've died, even those who were quite old.

More than the death of her child, that's really what Comfort is about: Death.  The death of anyone.  Anyone you've loved.  Anyone you thought died too young.  Weren't they all too young?

Of course, it's harder to explain when they are really that young.  How do you explain the death of a 5-year old girl?  Especially when it's your own daughter, how do you explain that?  Another thing this book tells you is that there is no explanation.  There's no Why.  How can there be?  How can we possibly understand why such a thing happens?  Hood makes it very clear right away, and reminds us throughout, that she doesn't know why it happened.  She doesn't have a belief about it, either.

It happened.  That's the source of the grief, and maybe of the comfort.

It happened.  And there is no why.

A remarkable work that deserves to be read.  When you're done you'll feel something, which is what good books are supposed to make you do.

Lincoln: Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin--Book Review

Photo: Book's paperback cover, via doriskearnsgoodwin.com. There are many editions, but this is the one I read.

Extremely well-written and well-researched book (and, from just a few pages, partially the source of Spielberg's movie, which was also very good) that will make you see and know Lincoln like you never did--or, like you never thought you could.  There's so much to digest here that you'd better take your time to do so--but it is well worth the slower pace.  I normally read books--even ones this long--in a few days (just over 700 pages, including the epilogue and notes.)  Maybe a few weeks, if I'm really busy.  This one took several weeks, and I started and finished other things in the meantime.

But, as I said, it was worth it.  Reading this spawned a few historical fiction ideas for me.  (My book would be narrated from John Hay's POV.  Read the book to find out who this guy was.)  It gave birth to a memory that I have Carl Sandburg's (until-now authoritative) biography around here somewhere.  Reading this book reminded me that I also have a book of Lincoln's own writing around here somewhere.  (I have to seriously organize my books.)

By the time you're done with this, you'll feel like you knew Lincoln personally.  That you were there in D.C. with him, in those cold rooms, during those cold winters.  That you were there to see Mary, his wife, misbehave.  That you were there for Chase's political greed, or for some northern generals' incompetence.  In essence, you'll simply feel like you were there.

There've been so many books about Lincoln that writers now have to find a different vehicle from which to tell his story.  (I suspect the same is true for Jesus and Shakespeare.  A recent book about Shakespeare--his biography written in tandem with the exact lines of Shakespeare's famous "Seven Stages of Man"--comes to mind.)  This is true here.  Goodwin chose to write her Lincoln biography via the men of his cabinet.  His team of rivals, if you will--all men who ran against him, or who were in different political parties, or who had differing political agendas, or...you get the idea.  And so we get a biography of Lincoln, in Goodwin's voice, told with the information taken from Lincoln's team of rivals.  And the wives, girlfriends, and friends of those men.  And throw in the information provided by the more important generals, too.  The people providing most of the material include John Hay and John Nicolay, his assistants; William Seward, his Secretary of State; Edwin Stanton, his Secretary of War; Salmon Chase, his Secretary of the Treasury; Edward Bates, his Attorney General; and Gideon Welles, his Secretary of the Navy.  The generals we see and hear from the most are, of course, Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman; and, to a lesser extent, Generals McClellan, Hooker and Burnside--all three of whom almost managed to lose the war.

But this book isn't just told via diaries, journals, letters, etc.  Goodwin's writing style and voice gather all of these together.  The result is a mesmerizing, incredibly thorough and very enlightening book that is never boring or condescending.  It'll show you why Lincoln is revered, even deified, by many Americans today.  If you thought Lincoln's reputation was overblown or perhaps ill-deserved, read this book, and, like me, you'll learn otherwise.  And who knew he had such a high-pitched voice, or that he was such a political genius?

Diary of A Farmer's Wife, 1892

photo: Farmer's Wife in Clogs, 1892 by Louis Roy, from 1st-art-gallery.com

Check out this website, 1892farmwife.blogspot.com.  As the link suggests, it's a diary of a Maine farmer's wife in 1892.  Doesn't sound interesting?  Well, I thought so, too, but since I was doing some research for The Gravediggers--I needed to know everyday life for New England farmers in 1892--I gave it a shot.  The really interesting thing about the journal is that its author writes just a few sentences--if not just one--per entry.

And so you might think, "How much can I learn about someone who only writes a couple of sentences per entry?"  The surprising answer is: A lot.  Why?  Because she writes every day!  And I do mean every single day.  So it's not what she writes that matters; it's the consistency of what she writes that matters.  And because the writing is so spare, you learn a lot about her, and the time, because there's no fluff at all to get in the way.  In fact, I read the whole year in about 30 minutes.

You learn that she's religious.  Okay, most rural people at the time were.  But you also see that she mentally beats herself up quite a bit.  When she even hints that she may have done something bad, it's jarring.  And she never tells you what she's done, or to whom she's done it to, so part of the enjoyment of reading this thing is that you have to do a lot of playful guesswork sometimes.

The publisher of the website says she has an entire journal to put on the site, but nothing beyond 1892 appears yet, even though it's been a few years now since it was posted.

Why am I pushing this?  Because the woman's philosophy is one I'd love to embrace.  Keep it simple.  Thoreau: "Simplify, simplify."  This woman is honestly grateful for everything!  She keeps it simple (and keeps it real) by doing what she has to do, accepting what comes, being grateful for the good, and hoping for better.  She's no pushover, either, just passively accepting everything.  (She comes across as someone not to be messed with.)  She's a hard-working go-getter, if not a particularly gifted writer, and she is an obvious presence.  The site's author notes that her great-grandmother (the author of the journal) was a woman of her time, and probably not known at all outside of her household and closest neighbors.  But she seems content with this as well, and just gets along as best she can with her bad knees, her quiet convictions, and her place in a very unpopulated area that is very cold and very harsh.

I've been keeping a journal--as I always have--but lately I'm trying to do the same: to boil the day down to its two- or three-sentence essence.  Maybe I can make my head and psyche as clear as my journal.

And maybe you can, too.