Looks Like Home: Brooke Berman's Memoir

I had Brooke Berman's No Place Like Home: A Memoir in 39 Apartments in my Amazon shopping cart for a really long time. Like, more than a year. House and home and leave-taking...these are concepts that are hugely meaningful for me, almost to the point of being talismanic. Not that I've lived in 39 apartments or anything. But one of my dearest childhood wishes was stasis. I wanted a big white colonial, like the one in Father of the Bride. And I wanted to live there until I turned 18, and I wanted my room to remain untouched so I could come home on break from college and sleep on wildly age-inappropriate sheets, surrounded by my perfect attendance trophies and unicorn beanie babies.

I finally caved and bought it two weeks ago, and I'm still not sure what I think of it. Berman tells the story of the twenty-odd years between her grand move to New York City at the tender age of 18 and her discovery of "true love" as she nears 40, all while struggling to define her own success as a playwright and find spiritual enlightenment through scented candles and neighbors who read tarot cards. Instead of chapter-headings, we have addresses. Instead of characters, we have friends and lovers who blend into one another and merge and inevitably disappear, fading in and out of Berman's history and becoming ex-friends and ex-lovers that, along with un-loved possessions, are purged from storage spaces and end up curbside.

The thing about the book I can't get past is the way it settles into an ending. Berman's beautiful, theatrical, one-footed mother dies, and she can finally embrace her success without guilt or the fear that, halfway across the country, her mother is overdosing on something. She finds a man who wants a committed, monogamous relationship (or are their neediness gauges just the same?), and they get engaged. She finds...mortgaged bliss? Harumph. It's much too tidy, I think.

One of the book's strengths is the way in which it links transitions between spaces and transitions between people. The implication is that, when you find a space you can settle into, you can probably settle into a relationship as well. And vice versa. As the book morphs from a story about the intangibility of home into one about the tangibility of love, are we meant to fully embrace that implication. Does one equal the other?

Being at home in another person. It's a mighty clichéd idea, but also a pretty nice one. 

Hungry Hungry Hunger Games: For the Love/Hate of Paperback Sensations and Their Blockbusting Counterparts

Hoopla. I believe it is created by a secret cache of 12 to 14-year-old teeny boppers and their 40-year-old mothers whenever a new, romance-driven YA series hits the shelves. Alternatively, it is the product of anybody who has ever ridden an airplane and devoured a paperback copy of The Da Vinci Code, or Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and then feels the need to prove their worldliness by asking of their friends, family, and co-workers, "Have you read --insert any recent and relatively popular novel title here-- yet?" A question inevitably followed by expressions of shock and dismay when the answer is no.

Best case scenario: 1000 years from now, when distant civilizations search for insight into our lives, they will unearth Harry Potter.

Worst case scenario: they unearth Twilight.

This year, the three books from Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games series were under the Christmas tree. OK, I thought, I'll give them a go. I had heard that, while the inevitable love-triangle persists, it remains peripheral to a much more interesting post-apocalyptic reality. With the first book (The Hunger Games) I was  riveted. With the second (Catching Fire), I was not, mostly because the love-triangle took over more than I would have liked. The third (Mockingjay) left me  confused more than anything else.


The Hunger Games, I think, capitalizes on some really provocative themes; political oppression and revolution, the cost of war, the roles and responsibilities of the individual in the modern world, etc. And it does so with just enough fluffy love stuff to attract readers who enjoy fluffy love stuff, without triggering the gag reflex of those like myself, who are against fluffy love stuff. At least gratuitous fluffy love stuff. And I can see why it didn't take long for the screenplay to get scooped up. The story is terrifying and glamorous in all the right ways, and, I'll admit, the trailer that's come out is pretty darn good. After seeing Jennifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone, I'm optimistic about how she'll perform. And I'll see almost anything with Stanley Tucci in it.

My first impulse after finishing the series was appreciation for Collins, as I have to assume that only an author refusing to concede to the demands of the Hollywood blockbuster could have turned out something like Mockingjay. Yes, there are weak points, and loose ends. Some reviewers attribute the loose ends to Collins's greater plan to leave the reader with feelings of emptiness at the end of the series, and demonstrate something greater about the horrifying consequences of war. While I'm hesitant to give her quite so much credit, I do think that Collins's overall decision to leave the end sort of misty and unsatisfying results in a book that, despite its fantastical plot, achieves something like realism. Yes, we want the satisfaction of death for every villain, and we want a virtuous hero/heroine to carry out the sentence. But that's not often the way the world works, as the messiness of Mockingjay's ending reminds us. Again, it's far from perfect, and there are parts where I think sloppiness is just, well, sloppiness. But it does something I haven't seen a YA book do in a while; leave the reader unsettled, and, with its closing, allow us to reconsider right and wrong, our place between them, and all the world's grey areas that can be cleanly filtered neither here nor there.

I'll be very interested to see what Hollywood does with the final book's strange ending.

HARRY POTTER DAY. Part V

Almost time to head out. Moody refuses to have a lightning scar drawn like me, so I'm putting the Dark Mark on his arm. He thinks he's bad-ass. I shouldn't heckle him though, because he did just find this for me:

Famous album covers re-imagined with HP characters. Take a look at all of them here.

HARRY POTTER DAY. Part IV

Classic. Laugh or you're a Death Eater.

HARRY POTTER DAY. Part III

The best of Etsy and Harry Potter merchandise. Holy cannoli, I love Etsy.

HARRY POTTER DAY. Part II

Winnie the Pooh is next on my list. I grew up with House on Pooh Corner, so I almost wee-ed myself when I first saw the teaser trailer a few months ago. Don't you see though? Even Pooh loves Harry Potter.

HARRY POTTER DAY. Part I

This time tomorrow, Moody and I will be at the midnight showing of Deathly Hallows. So I’ve declared it Harry Potter Day. Do please enjoy. All day long.

Ten Mostly Irrelevant Things Pertaining to My Relationship With Harry Potter:

1. There’s a statue at the Met that looks just like Voldemort. It’s my secret favorite.

2. For the first few years I was reading the books, I thought that Hagrid actually had a slobbery pet boar. Dear old Fang. You’ll have to excuse me, I was like nine.

3. I was visiting my family in England when the seventh and final book came out.  I stopped talking to my mother for two days because she bought Keane tickets for all of us for the day of the book release. I like to think I was not the only kid in that arena reading during the concert.

4. I read the entire first book aloud to my sister to get her into the series. She loves them almost as much as I do now, but there were some dicey times there. Unfortunately, she refuses to re-read any of them. I plug my ears and sing when she confuses the main characters.

 5. One of my good friends in middle school had her 13^th birthday as a backyard carnival, and the prizes at one of the booths were goldfish. I won two fishies, which I named after Dobby and Winky. I took them home, and Dobby ate Winky. Trauma. I will never keep fish again.

6. I have a (not so) secret grudge against any and all non-Ian-McKellen Dumbledores. He’s just the wizardy-est wizard there is. Hell, he can play Merlin, the Wizard of Oz, and Jafar while he’s at it.

7. I played the flute in high school (ha, ha), and during my sophomore year we played the Harry Potter theme at our spring concert. Mostly because I was subliminal messaging the shit out of the band teacher.

8. The day I didn’t get my acceptance letter to Hogwarts was a dark, dark day. This winter I actually bought a green pen and wrote one out (word for word according to the book with the official Hogwarts seal, and even including a list of required materials) for a friend who was waiting for grad school acceptances. She got into UPenn, but I think my offer was better.

9. I considered saving up for a Wii solely because I wanted to cast spells on it. Luckily, my sister and her dude beat me to it.

10. My boyfriend’s last name is Moody, so I’m thinking that if I ever get lonesome for more Potter, I can mess with one of his eyes, and have my very own Mad-Eye.

My Love Affair With Chuck Palahniuk's Angsty Goodness

If you've never read Fight Club, you've been living under a rock. Most people have seen the movie, which is lovely (bad adjective, but it kind of is), but if you read the book, you're likely to want to read more from Palahniuk, and then the magic happens. His books are glitter and blood and chalk-lines and and heroin all mixed together in a mess on the floor. Which is on fire. There are so many memorable lines in his writing, and pretty much all of it is dripping with angst.


"No matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close." -Invisible Monsters

"The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person." -Invisible Monsters

"The truth is you can be orphaned again and again and again. The truth is, you will be. And the secret is, this will hurt less and less each time until you can't feel a thing. Trust me on this." -Survivor

“You know, the condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip it on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night, then you throw it away. The condom, I mean. Not the stranger.” -Fight Club

"Maybe humans are just the pet alligators that God flushed down the toilet." -Lullaby

"Music is crucial. Beyond no way can I overstress this fact. Let's say you're southbound on the interstate, cruising alone in the middle lane, listening to AM radio. Up alongside comes a tractor trailer of logs or concrete pipe, a tie-down strap breaks, and the load dumps on top of your little sheetmetal ride. Crushed under a world of concrete, you're sandwiched like so much meat salad between layers of steel and glass. In that last, fast flutter of your eyelids, you looking down that long tunnel toward the bright God Light and your dead grandma walking up to hug you--do you want to be hearing another radio commercial for a mega, clearance, closeout, blow-out liquidation car-stereo sale?" -Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey

Go read a (messy-gorgeous-dark-and-twisty) book. Go.