Review by New York Times Review
MARRIAGES OFTEN APPEAR more fragile from the outside looking in, possibly because the daily exertion of staying married entails wildly different calisthenics from couple to couple. The open communication that keeps one couple thriving would tear another couple apart within minutes. The delineation of tasks that keeps one couple safe from destitution and filth would feel horribly rigid to another. The mutual teasing and sly insults that make one couple feel more alive might have another reduced to fisticuffs in seconds. Thus, to be married is to view other couples through divorce-colored glasses: Even when they're engaged in the very exercises that hold them together, they might as well be huffing spray paint and sleeping with the nanny instead. That said, Dani Shapiro could make even a moment of weakness with a can of Rust-Oleum sound like poignant revelry with some timeless yet romantically volatile elements. In the first pages of "Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage," her latemiddle- age, state-of-my-union memoir, the author gazes out the window at her husband on the lawn in his white terry-cloth bathrobe. He has purchased a gun so that he can kill a pesky woodpecker destroying the exterior of their home in the Connecticut countryside. But she doesn't like guns. "A gust of wind lifts the hem of the bathrobe," Shapiro writes, "exposing his pale legs as he stands on a sheet of snowcovered ice." We quickly grasp the real problem: Our fearless heroine finds herself married to an aging, not-so-Wile-E.- Coyote. One with pale legs. Soon this moment of disillusionment dissolves into a larger portrait of loss and regret. But even though the basement floods regularly, even though the cold wind flows through a crack in the door, even though the couple have seen tough times - their son had a near-fatal illness as a baby, her mother died of cancer, his mother suffers from Alzheimer's - Shapiro clings eloquently to her faith that they'll make it through it all. The biggest struggle, though, seems to lie in her perspective on the somewhat unfamiliar man her husband has become. Once a courageous foreign correspondent, M. (as Shapiro refers to her husband in the book) has spent the past 18 years as a screenwriter - one who, like most screenwriters, sometimes sells his work and sometimes doesn't. Shapiro has certainly had her share of career highs: Three popular memoirs and a televised interview with Oprah represent the kind of success most writers only dream about. But while Shapiro seems to worry more about their financial future, M. handles the finances and has been known to make mistakes. The health insurance lapsed and he didn't tell her; she finds herself frustrated and nervous about what the future holds for them. Such brutal honesty is the bread and butter of the marriage memoir, yet Shapiro still manages to make her husband sound quirky and tenacious in the manner of the best romantic comedy leads. And her prose has a way of making even mundane disappointments feel portentous and universal, if a little melodramatic: "I'll take care of it, M. said. A familiar refrain, one I have always loved and longed to believe. . . . The creaky house, the velocity of time, the accretion of sorrow. The things that can and cannot be fixed. I'll take care of it." But M. does not seem to be taking care of it. He spends six months writing a TV pilot that might never get made, and the couple have no savings and no retirement plan. This is where the record scratches to a halt. Shapiro is 52 and her husband is 59; they live in what sounds like a big house in "the wilds of Connecticut"; they founded a writers' conference in Italy; they fly to the West Coast to have lunches with studio executives. Yet they don't have a cent saved for retirement? Suddenly the title "Hourglass" seems less apt than, say, "Time Bomb." The nostalgic tone feels less freewheeling and poetic than dark and suspenseful now. Even the charming son who is "funny and kind" and has a "vast network of friends" can't lighten the mood, nor can the vague musing ("How do you suppose time works?"), or the scattered reflections on unexpected misfortune ("Where does hope go when it vanishes? Does it live in a place where it attaches itself to other lost hopes?"), or even the weighty-sounding but abstract quotations ("'A mosaic,' writes Terry Tempest Williams, 'is a conversation between what is broken' "). To Shapiro's credit, by the end of her short book, we want to know what will happen next - but we come away with more philosophical musing instead. "Time is like a tall building made of playing cards," she tells us, meaning we're all in this crazy, unpredictable mess together. But we're not quite buying it. "Use sturdier building materials!" we want to tell her. Then again, maybe this is the true lure of the marriage memoir: We are gathered here today to witness a two-person catastrophe in motion, a leap of faith that ends, at least half of the time, in a cloud of dust at the bottom of a tall cliff. IN "WEDDING TOASTS I'LL NEVER GIVE," Ada Calhoun takes a much more lighthearted approach to the toils and snares of marriage in the hazy light of midlife. Springing from a New York Times Modern Love column, Calhoun's memoir reads like a series of light and funny essays, formed from original, engrossing anecdotes interspersed with somewhat more predictable life lessons. Calhoun and her husband have been married since they were in their 20s, and she writes, "I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be single again." When their son was a toddler, her husband confessed that he had feelings for another woman. Later, Calhoun had a brief dalliance with a handsome colleague while she was out of town on a book tour. Even so, the stakes never feel that high: The couple decide together that seeing other people is a bad idea. In spite of his own brief emotional entanglement, her husband comes across as a charming weirdo who seems just as willing to own his blind spots and weaknesses as she does. Calhoun offers marital anecdotes rich with the alternating warmth and pathos that typify a long-lasting union: When her husband discovers her on the floor sorting Playmobil pieces from Legos and asks "What are you doing?" Calhoun memorably replies, "A dramatization of why there are no Great American Novels by women." But her attempts to summarize the eternal themes of marriage present a jarring change in tone, one that constitutes the book's weakest passages. It's as if every time we downshiftfrom the delightfully odd specifics of Calhoun's family life to the sweeping, perfume-infused inquiries of lady magazines ("How might we learn to appreciate our spouse's quirks in the moment?"), a little angel trades in its tramp stamp for a waffle iron. But considering the fact that wedding toasts are either surprisingly moving or hopelessly dull, it probably makes sense that Calhoun's extended paean to marriage is a little bit of both. IN HER MEMOIR of "midlife reckoning" called "Love and Trouble," Claire Dederer sidesteps both theatrical prose and broad clichés in favor of frank and colorful admissions of impatience, lust and guilt. Maybe because Dederer never tries to sweeten her suffering with sentimentality, it feels less onerous to ride sidesaddle on her journey through the barren flats of holy matrimony. Dederer's midlife struggle is also less focused on disappointment or frustration than it is on her own shifting identity: She feels older but still wants to be ravished. She feels liberated from outdated expectations of herself but still wants more excitement in her life. And alarmingly enough, work doesn't provide the same refuge it once did. "A new inertia has overcome you," she writes. "You are shaken and insecure, and simultaneously enervated." Dederer is struggling with an odd mix of writer's block, midlife crisis and sexual reawakening. But just as a potential affair seems to present itself, Dederer swerves into an extended reminiscence of her reckless formative years as a sexual conquistador. These pages are more detailed than expected, and include, among other things, an elaborate map of the Seattle cool-kid hangouts from her high school years ("all the dishwashers at Pizza Haven were heavy metal guitarists"); a recollection of her first serious boyfriend, who had "floppy Steve Prefontaine hair" and manual techniques that leftmuch to be desired; and a veritable laundry list of drugs taken, sexually transmitted diseases treated, and attempts at achieving True Lust thwarted. Dederer's comical, erratic storytelling is nuanced and unpredictable, dwelling on the recklessness of youth without ever selling short the courage and daring it took to be so reckless. She brings all of the arrogance and longing of early sexual exploration to vivid life with real empathy and verve. But there's darkness in the mix, here, too: After her mother's adult male friend climbs into her sleeping bag when she is 13 years old, her understanding of her own desire is muddled irreparably. This explains why we're offered not one but two chapters that are open letters to Roman Polanski, an indulgence we might be more willing to endure if the book's initial seduction weren't dropped and never revisited, while another encounter in a hotel - which serves as a kind of climax to her crisis - remains unnervingly vague: "A man slips into the room with me before I can stop him." Wait - who is this stranger? Is this an assault? She never explains. Instead, Dederer offers up a chapter analyzing the reasons for her sexual proclivities. "My agent wanted an answer, so I did this: I traced my hypersexuality back to an incident. It's because Jack Wolf got in the ol' sleeping baggerino in 1980." The odd use of cute language (baggerino?) seems like an attempt to evade her discomfort with the subject at hand. Even so, Dederer leans in - way in - with an extended analysis of her desire to be dominated in bed: "Whether I like it or not, as I grow older and lose my beauty, I also lose the opportunity to be victimized in the particular way I crave and fear." Dederer is an excellent writer who spins her prose with the casual grace and easy humor of a seasoned professional (she has been a critic and journalist for years and wrote the best-selling 2012 memoir "Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses"). Yet by the end of the book, her strange, nonlinear tour ends up feeling a little rushed and incomplete. We don't get to peek behind the curtains that are central to the story (Who is this mystery lover - or is he an attacker?) yet we're invited to ruminate on Roman Polanski's past at length, analyze Dederer's libido in uncomfortable ways, hear her agent's questionable directives, and learn that her husband wants her to hurry up and finish it so she can get paid ("Sell a book, he said. I'm going as fast as I can, I said"). As brazenly honest as these passages might be, perhaps they suggest that in a marriage memoir - as in marriage itself - total honesty is at once necessary and the biggest liability of all. We are gathered here today to witness a two-person catastrophe in motion. HEATHER HAVRILESKY is a columnist for New York magazine and the author of "How to Be a Person in the World."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 3, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
In her frank and frankly hilarious new memoir, Dederer (Poser, 2011) explores the female midlife crisis in all its glorious, tear-streaked, and hormone-crazed inconvenience. Lost somewhere between her teenage sexual awakening, college, early married life, and what should have been a calming-down, a leveling out, Dederer finds herself in an awkward place: frisky at 44. Except, she writes, as Morrisey says, that joke wasn't funny anymore. Memoirs are often a relatable trip down memory lane, but this book offers an edgier look at marriage, sexuality, intimacy, feminism, and the desires of women everywhere from the perspective of a mother who is still raising a teenage daughter. Using her adolescent journals, imagined correspondence to Roman Polanski, and her own recollections, Dederer tells stories of crying with friends and friends crying with her, seducing her husband of 15 years, and out-of-control encounters with strangers in alleys. Dederer's razor-sharp writing conjures fits of laughter and tears in equal measure. This is an excellent suggestion for fans of Lena Dunham and Brittany Gibbons.--Paloutzian, Andie Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this edgy, frank, and at times outright hilarious tale of lost youth and midlife angst, Dederer (Poser), a wife and mother of two who lives on an idyllic island a ferry ride away from Seattle, describes finding herself in a funk at age 44 in 2011. Dederer is "inexplicably sad" (as are many of her middle-aged friends); the high point of her day is nibbling pomegranates (while cloaked in a stained gray hoodie) and drinking bourbon. She wonders what happened to the feisty, adventuresome, and sexually promiscuous young woman she once was. Inspired, in part, by an unexpected kiss from an older writer, Dederer journeys into her past, lining up 20 diaries ranging from age eight (a 1975 Peanuts diary) to the night before her wedding. Though she deems her diaries "a pageant of stupidity" and her former self a "clueless bitch," she longs for the heightened sense of time, place, and sexual excitement she finds in their pages. The memoir takes readers through Dederer's childhood in suburban Laurelhurst (her mother and father divorced when she was five and her mom took up with a younger hippie), her teen obsession with boys, and her days at Oberlin College, where she felt "trapped and anxious." The author briefly lived in Australia before returning to Seattle and eventually choosing a life of "constraint." This candid memoir will resonate with women (and quite possibly men) of all ages, but particularly those in midlife. Dederer brings a startling intimacy and immediacy to her version of growing up female in America. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
What and why women want persist as questions that intrigue or nag, depending on who's asking. Here, three memoirists write about what they want and how they figured out how to get it. Beset by tearful miseries and strong yearnings at age 44, journalist and critic -Dederer (Poser) set out to determine what was happening to her-and why. In search of the reason for her erotic jump-start, she digs out her youthful diaries and revisits the Seattle of her sexy, "pirate girl" teenage years as well as the Oberlin of her angst-ridden college years and several other (literal and figurative) hot spots from her past. In unvarnished prose, she unravels the threads holding together the domesticated wife-mother-writer-persona she had assembled and examines the woman, formerly wild child, underneath. Her elegantly structured, expansive, and unapologetic account captures the sense of one woman's self about as honestly as it is possible to do on a page. Grey, a pseudonymous British columnist for the Guardian, documents her experiment in online dating after her unexpected, unpleasant, and unwanted midlife divorce. Determined to achieve coupledom again via the matchmaking powers of online dating, she endures years of inaccurate profiles, deceptive photography, misleading emails, disappointing first dates, awkward sex, and requests of an extremely personal nature involving Skype. Grey's report of her odyssey through the world of men thought to be appropriate for her is hilarious and detailed. She kisses her way through a whole house full of frogs in search of a prince and, luckily for her readers, keeps notes on the process. Woven throughout the chronology, however, are strands of dating fatigue and skepticism about the process as a whole. After all, she reasons, would a dating website have suggested her polar-opposite type parents to each other? Nevins, a veteran documentary producer and president of HBO Documentary Films, presents a series of essays, poems, and brief sketches intended to capture her more than 50 years working in the media industry. The 77-year-old author is coy about whether or not she is the featured character in the pieces yet promises that all of the stories she tells are true, even if she is hiding behind other names. She discusses topics as disparate as how a "Cosmo girl" style evolved into something less dependent upon the trading of sexual favors in the workplace, to the guilt heaped upon working mothers by others (including other women, and in one comic case, a hamster). Her tone is conversational and her powers of observation sharp, whether discussing the terrors of waiting for a mammogram or skewering a philandering male. VERDICT Grey's and Nevins's titles will appeal to anyone in similar circumstances, but Dederer's memoir speaks eloquently to questions all women have.-Thérèse Purcell Nielsen, Huntington P.L., NY © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A fierce new memoir from the essayist and longtime New York Times contributor.In her debut, Poser (2011), Dederer trained her keen eye and penchant for dry self-deprecation on yoga and motherhood. Here, the author turns to other topics, primarily sex and aging. It seems she had no choice. Ensconced in her apparently perfect lifecomfortable house, kind husband, loving kids, career success and recognitionDederer found herself intermittently and uncomfortably aware of her "chaotic past," of the "disastrous pirate slut of a girl" who was "breathing down my neck." One day when she was 44, for reasons not entirely clear, though maybe as simple as the encroachment of middle age or the scent of nostalgia in the air, the latent hungers and preoccupations of her sexually active youth came rushing back, "as if a switch is flipped," and refused to disappear. A disruptive, unbidden kiss from a man who was not her husband widened the crevice in the wall between her libidinous past and relatively contained, conventional present. Informed by her own diaries20 of them recovered from boxes scattered throughout the basementthe author dedicated herself to considering the "horrible girl" she once was, examining her from a variety of angles to face her head-on and bravely mulling disquieting questions of identity and purpose. With candor and humor, Dederer dives deeply into her sexual history, which began with an unwelcome encounter at age 13, continued through her teenage explorations based around Seattle's University Avenue in the early 1980s, and into her unhappy time at Oberlin and beyond. Along the way, she contemplates power and victimhood and the battle, or balance, between freedom and safety. Dederer is unstintingly honest and unafraid as she excavates her motivations and reservations, her fantasies, and the implications of the choices she has made - and those she has yet to make. Insightful, provocative, and fearlessly frank, Dederer seduces readers with her warmth, wit, and wisdom. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
