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Reviews and articles posted here are property of The Book Lady's Blog and are not to be posted elsewhere without permission. Please contact me if you wish to post any of my work, or any excerpt thereof, in any other location or format.
Jul
30
Voldemort Can’t Stop the Rock
2011 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
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This song appears on Iris Blasi’s awesome publishing playlist, and I just *had* to find a video. The video quality could be better, but come on. A BAND CALLED HARRY AND THE POTTERS!
Margaret Robison on Writing THE LONG JOURNEY HOME
2011 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
If you read Augusten Burroughs’s Running with Scissors and wondered what life looked like from his mother’s perspective, wonder no more. Burroughs’s mother Margaret Robison is here today with this guest post about how and why she wrote her own memoir, The Long Journey Home (Spiegel & Grau, May 2011).
My 87-year-old friend told me that she’s not at all the same person she was when she was young. She said her mother told her that as an old woman she’d felt the same way she’d felt at 26. My own mother said that when she was in her 70’s she still felt the same way inside she’d felt when she was 16. In my mid-70’s I don’t feel at all like the person I was when I was young. Life’s experiences continue to change me.
I spent over 10 years writing The Long Journey Home, a memoir about my life as a child and continuing through my college experiences, my years as a young married woman with two sons — one with Asperger’s — and a middle-aged woman who had several psychotic episodes that required hospitalization, and much later a stroke and recovery from that stroke. Looking back at some of my experiences, I can’t imagine the person I am now doing some of the things I did when I was younger. A part of me is inclined to judge myself harshly for doing some of those things. I am filled with sorrow at the people I hurt along the way, my sons in particular. Another part of me is grateful that I lived through those experiences to come out of them a wiser, more loving person. Certainly there are many ways to mature creatively, emotionally, and spiritually. Writing my memoir was one of my most important ways. Read more
The Bare Necessities—Maddie Dawson (THE STUFF THAT NEVER HAPPENED)
2011 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
The Bare Necessities is a series in which authors and book industry professionals share annotated reading lists of books they love.
Maddie Dawson is the author of The Stuff That Never Happened, now out in paperback from Broadway Books. She’s here today with a selection of her favorite books about marriage, secrets, and self-deception.

I hate to admit it—it makes me sound so ghoulish—but I am fascinated by unhappy marriages. In fact, I’d have to say that I’m taken with the whole crazy notion of marriage in the first place. The very idea that two people can stand up together in their best clothes with all their friends and family watching and declare that they will not only live together for the rest of their lives, but also be each other’s best friend, soulmate, lover, co-parent, and financial partner, for pretty much forever, amazes me.
I mean, really—what could possibly go wrong?
And yet, despite the rumors circulating that this system doesn’t always produce the very happiest of circumstances, people do keep standing up for this—droves of them day after day after day. (I myself have done it twice—and just like the national average, it’s worked in 50 percent of my experience.)
Yet all marriages—from the happiest to the most disillusioned—go through upheavals and changes and stages, and no one (sometimes not even the participants themselves) can accurately predict whether it’s a keeper or not. When I was writing The Stuff That Never Happened, I wanted to show a 28-year-long marriage that almost anyone would describe as successful and happy—happy, that is, except for one thing. The two people involved, Annabelle and Grant, have made a pact never to speak of a secret at the core of their marriage: the fact that in their first chaotic year together, Annabelle fell in love with Grant’s best friend and mentor, and actually left for a while to go off with him.
Ghoul that I am, some of my favorite books are about marriages and delusional secrets, and all the fun and exciting ways in which we deceive ourselves. And when a book about those subjects can make me laugh as well—well, then I’m out buttonholing strangers and friends and forcing them to read right along with me.
One of my very favorite books about these very subjects is Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler, the story of two people who are wonderfully mismatched—Maggie is garrulous and scattered and believes that she can get (read: manipulate) the people she loves to do the right thing, while Ira is aloof and precise and thinks that everything is just about to go to hell—and yet they keep plugging along in a marriage that really, despite all its exasperations and mistakes, has a lot of love at its center. Neither Maggie nor Ira undergoes a huge change in the novel, which takes place over the course of one long summer day, but—really, isn’t that reality for you? Anne Tyler creates so many funny, real, and telling moments in this book, passages that make you put the book down and just laugh in recognition. Read more
Quickie: TURN OF MIND by Alice LaPlante
2011 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
Published July 2011 by Grove/Atlantic
Dr. Jennifer White’s best friend Amanda has just been murdered and found with four fingers surgically removed from her hand. And Dr. Jennifer White? She’s a retired surgeon who specialized in hands. Naturally, this makes her a prime suspect. When Turn of Mind opens, the investigation is just beginning, but it is hardly going to be an open-and-shut case. Why? Because Jennifer can’t remember whether she murdered Amanda. And she’s not lying about that.
Alice LaPlante’s unbelievable debut novel (unbelievable because it is so freaking good AND because LaPlante writes with the kind of confidence and authority you rarely find in debuts) is about much more than the whodunit. Jennifer White has dementia, and her narration reflects the ups and downs of her memory, the coming and going of consciousness. Her mind is deteriorating, and it is evident as she relays her story and lets us into her thoughts. Turn of Mind is riveting, heartbreaking, and constantly surprising in a dozen different ways. The mystery is compelling, but the real thrills here are in LaPlante’s presentation. This is one not to be missed.
Escape to CLUB READ!
2011 at 9pm Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
The Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance is at it again! In partnership with the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association, Book Club Girl, and Reading Group Choices, SIBA introduces Club Read.
Club Read is more than a getaway. It’s a one-of-a-kind event where booklovers get to spend quality time with their favorite authors. For 24 hours, you’ll dine, socialize, learn, chat, laugh, and make friends with a dozen of the finest book-club writing authors.
The Deets
- Saturday, October 15th and Sunday, October 16th, 2011 (put it on your calendar now!)
- Mariners Landing Resort and Conference Center, Huddleston, VA
- $500 gets you accommodations, four meals, refreshments, internet access and 24 hours of awesome with 12 superfantastic authors
**Register at a participating independent bookstore or click here.**
The Authors
- Jessica Anya Blau
- Susan Henderson
- Joyce Maynard
- Sena Jeter Naslund
- Heather Newton
- Matthew Norman
- Greg Olear
- Dolen Perkins-Valdez
- Gretchen Rubin
- Amy Stolls
- Adriana Trigiani
Oh, and I’ll be there! So come on. Twelve authors, twenty-four hours, all awesome. Club Read!
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