My Husband's Autobiography

My husband has always had another love.  He doesn't even try to deny it.  If he walks into the room and sees Rob Lowe on the TV screen, he simply cannot keep himself from saying "Now that's one good looking guy".  The best compliment that you could give my husband would be to say that he looks just like Rob Lowe.  Truth be told, I think he does.  However, when I told our friends that the other night they burst out laughing.  I guess I'm wearing my rose colored glasses again.

Any who . . . when Rob Lowe's autobiography, Stories I Only Tell My Friends, came out, my husband reminded me daily that he hoped to get it for Father's Day.  Mind you, during our 16 year marriage, my husband has only read 2 other books that I can think of.  My kids and I got him the book, and he started reading as soon as he got the chance.  Let me tell you that if Rob Lowe ever needs a new PR guy, my husband is available.  I can't even guess how many copies of this book he has sold by telling everyone he knows about it.

I, on the other hand, have never been all that into Rob Lowe.  He's fine, and I've liked lots of movies that he has been in, but his poster was never hanging on my wall.  I started reading his autobiography with a certain degree of skepticism.  I mean really, how good could it be?  I have to say, it was that good.

Throughout the book, Rob tells stories of his growth as an actor and as a person in a way that seems both honest and believable.  He is candid, while not burning any bridges.  He drops tons of names, but when he is really bashing a person, that name is not mentioned.  I have to think that any person identified in the book will be able to read it, and still like Rob.  A love fest doesn't generally make for a good story, especially in an autobiography, but in this case, it works.  While he's not trashing anyone, Rob is providing a lot of back stories that never made the tabloids, and still mentioning the scandals that the tabloids devoured.

For me, the most surprising part about Stories I Only Tell My Friends is that Rob wrote it.  (Notice how I slipped into using his first name?)  I flipped back to the front cover more than once to confirm that no ghost writer was credited.  I am sure that he had really good editors, and I did find 2 tiny typos, but I have to say, he is a great writer.  Rob talks to the readers as though they really are his friends.

When I was just about finished reading, my husband mentioned that we should take a trip to Santa Monica and Malibu and "all the places that Rob Lowe lived".  While I am not exactly ready for The Rob Lowe Tour, I have put a hold on "About Last Night" at the library, and can't wait to see "The Outsiders" again.

Next Up:  Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray.  Yes, I have delayed reading my BFB for more than half of the summer.  It's time that I got started!

Still listening to:  A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.

Don't Avoid The Goon Squad

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan is unusual.  It is a fun, timely, quick read, that is also an award winner.  AVFTGS won both the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 2010, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2011.  With credentials like that, one would expect an amazing, but maybe a difficult book.  Instead, AVFTGS is a page turner and a perfect summer novel.  In short, it is everything that it's cracked up to be.

AVFTGS is the first book that has made me wish for a Kindle.  Each chapter is a part of a complete story, including some, but not all of the characters in the book, from a random time.  The story flashes back and forth, without obvious clues such as dates indicating where we are in time or in narrative.  Each chapter contains subtle and obvious hints as to what will happen in later chapters. One of the characters introduced in the first chapter, for instance, doesn't become important to the story again until the last chapter.  A Kindle would come in handy here, because I spent a ton of time flipping back when a new character was introduced to see if that character had been mentioned before.  As I understand Kindle, no flipping would be necessary, and I would just be able to search for "Lizzie" or "Noreen" to see if they had been mentioned earlier and I missed them. 

Most simply, AVFTGS is the story of an aging producer, his protege, his girlfriend, and a groupie/klepto turned producer's assistant turned mom.  Other story lines involve a failed publicist, a failed writer, a failed actress, a failed dictator, a failed rock star (or two?), a failed presidential hopeful, and the children of all involved.  Some of the failures find success, and some of the successful fall to invisibility.

This is a great book.  I am adding it to my favorites list, and buying it for my daughter to put away until she is old enough to read it.  One short chapter details a groupie/girlfriend's regrets in a way that is poignant and memorable.  Another great chapter is written entirely in powerpoint style slides from the point of view of a teenager trying to understand her parents.  I might let my daughter read that chapter now.  The final chapter predicts the near future in which rock stars cater to babies, known as "pointers" for their ability to point to interesting things on an ipad-like touch screen, with the parents following the children's choices.  Somehow, this doesn't seem too unlikely.

I've said it before, and I hope to say it lots more:  Go. Get. It. And. Read.

Interested in rock and roll stories?  I've read more biographies in this area than fiction, although this seems like a topic ripe for fiction.  A really good biography that you may have missed is Everything I'm Cracked Up to Be by Jennifer Trynin.  Unlike other rock and roll biographies, this is the story of an "almost was" instead of a "has been", and is really interesting in that regard.

By the way, today it's been a year since I started blogging regularly.  What got me started was being really upset with one of my kids' teachers, and wanting to send a vicious email to him that I knew I would regret.  Instead, I broadcasted my rant onto the world wide web, and no one was harmed in the production of this blog.

Next Up:  Stories I Only Tell My Friends by Rob Lowe.  My husband just finished reading this one, and he was pestering me to read it before he even got to the end.  I have a hunch that the characters in this book will be easier to keep track of, because I know them all from People Magazine.

Still Listening to:  A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.  Talk about a great book with characters who are mentioned and then show up in more important roles later . . .apparently this style has been around for a while!

All Was Vanity

There are three books that I have read more than once, on my own both times.  There are many others that I read first for a class assignment and then later to see what I missed when reading on a deadline.  There are still others that I read first because I wanted to, and then again because my son wanted me to read them to him.  But the three books that I read twice just because I wanted to are Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, and now All is Vanity by Christina Schwarz.

When I first read All is Vanity, my kids were really young, and I didn't have much time for myself.  I remembered it as being a great book, but I've never met anyone else who read it, let alone liked it, and I wasn't sure if my impression of it may have been overly enthusiastic because I was so starved for grown up books.  On my second reading, I liked it even more than on the first.

All is Vanity is the story of Margaret, a woman who is smugly convinced that she is destined to be a novelist, and Lettie, her childhood friend who is now a stay at home mom to four children.  Margaret quickly finds that writing a novel isn't as easy as she thought it would be.  Lettie, meanwhile, is thrilled that her husband has accepted a new, higher paying job, and is anxious to improve her standard of living.

Both Margaret and Lettie feel a sense of entitlement.  They feel that they are not living at the level where they should be at that point in their lives.  While they don't realize it, they are on parallel tracks, where neither is satisfied with her position as compared to her peers.

What I remembered about A is V was Lettie's outrageous and uncontrolled, but somehow understandable, spending.  I remembered Margaret as the more reasonable of the two, who was guilty of encouraging Lettie's spending, but not really responsible in the end.  Truth be told, if more people had read A is V prior to 2008, the Great Recession would have been prevented.  Ben Bernake's warnings are nothing compared to Lettie's example.  But in this reading, I really understood Margaret better, and saw her faults which far exceeded her schadenfreude. 

All is Vanity is a really well written book, with interesting characters who will seem recognizable.  While it is a completely different story, The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walters is likewise a great book tackling the topic of a character's self created financial ruin.  What is impressive is that Schwarz was savvy enough to see the future of American consumerism and write this indictment five years before the cracks in our economy were discussed on daily talk shows.  Walters looked back in 2010, and wrote his story with 20/20 hindsight, but in 2003, Schwarz was dead on in telling the story of what would soon be.

Next Up:  A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Still Listening to:  A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens