Recent Reviews
My Reading Life by Pat Conroy
As spring turns to summer, newspapers and magazines devote entire sections to books recommendations. Some provide shorts lists and some long reviews. As I peruse these lists, I delight in pondering the book possibilities for this summer.
To add another dimension to this enjoyable endeavor, my husband recently gave me Pat Conroy’s 2010 book, My Reading Life. I have admired Pat Conroy’s since I read his well-known novel The Prince of Tides in the 1980’s. Conroy’s novels draw from his social isolation as a kid moving from military base to military base and the physical and emotional abuse he endured from his fighter pilot dad, Don Conroy. Conroy writes like a poet when he describes a place, he thinks like a psychologist when he writes about people and he transports his readers into his stories with his lyrical prose.
"My Reading Life" is not a work of fiction; rather it is a collection of fifteen essays. Taken together, these essays represent a homily of respect and reverence for the role that novels played in Pat Conroy’s life.
In his first essay, Conroy shares the origins of his obsession with books and the critical contributions they made to his well being. Not to be too Freudian, but his first essay is like a prayer of thanksgiving to his mother, Peg Conroy. He says, “I tremble with gratitude as I honor her name”. He says of his mother, “Novels taught her everything she needed to know about the mysteries and uncertainties of being human.”
Many of the benefits that Conroy ascribes to his mother’s reading life, apply to Conroy as well. Because his family constantly moved and his father terrorized his family, he felt a deep loneliness. Books and libraries became safe places where he could escape the isolation he felt. It wasn’t until he went to high school in Beaufort, South Carolina that he felt some sense of stability. In his essay titled, The City, Conroy states, “At any time, I could take a sudden departure from the fighter pilot’s house and find myself drifting through the tumult of Paris described in a book by Balzac. I could find myself on Whitman’s river-shaped Manhattan or be in Daisy Buchanan’s arms when I woke up with a hangover in the Great Gatsby. I’ve used books to take me on journeys all over the world, to outer space and to forbidden planets beyond.”
In other essays, Conroy acknowledges with gratitude his relationship with a series of father figures that embraced him. First among these men is his beloved English teacher Gene Norris. He says, “Gene Norris didn’t just make his students love books; he made us love the entire world. The world of books was a sacred grove to him.”
He writes about his love of bookstores and collecting books. His shares his experience of teaching literature to African-American kids on Daufuskie Island and writing his novel The Great Santini in Paris. He knew that rigorous reading would improve his writing. Yet his primary motivation for writing was more therapeutic. He says, “Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.”
Conroy celebrates dozens of novels and their authors in these essays and offers meaningful musings on their importance to him and to the literary canon. He admires Proust, Balzac, Wolfe, Hemingway, Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Wolfe, Steinbeck, Salinger, Fitzgerald, Dickens and Dickey but in his essay The Count he asserts that War and Peace is the finest novel ever written.
As you consider your own summer reading list, I would recommend My Reading Life. It will inspire you and remind you of the magical, mysterious and mystical moments that can be experienced when reading a compelling novel or this collection of Conroy’s beautiful and wise essays.
Between Them by Richard Ford
In his memoir Between Them, the writer Richard Ford attempts to describe the lives of his parents Edna and Parker Ford both born in Arkansas in the first decade of the twentieth century. It is gripping to see a writer of Ford’s talents string together words that so vividly bring his parents’ lives into focus. In two different essays written thirty years apart, Ford seeks to make a permanent acknowledgment of his parents’ time on this earth and through his writing better understand them. He says, “The fact that lives and deaths often go unnoticed has specifically inspired this small book about my parents and set its task. Our parents’ lives, even those enfolded in obscurity, offer us our first, strong assurance that human events have consequences.”
Ford’s parents’ lives were ordinary by most measures, but of course, they were the center of Ford’s identity. He describes their outward lives almost as a timeline filled in with dates and places. Yet, he is interested in their inner lives, elusive to him then and elusive still in this 2017 book. They had both lived and died and Ford was left to consider all he knew about them and all that he did not. And isn’t that true for all of us: we have incomplete knowledge of our parents’ lives. As a way of explanation, Ford says, “There had already been so much important life before me –of which I knew little, and that to them did not bear talking about since it did not include me.”
Ford’s parents fell in love. They married in 1928 and did not have him until 1944. As he grew up, Ford felt loved by his parents yet peripheral to their deep connection. During those prior fifteen years, Ford’s mother traveled with her husband from town to town while he made sales calls selling starch for the Faultless Company. When Ford was born, his parents decided they needed a home base. They chose Jackson, Mississippi, the center of his father’s territory. In a very poignant passage, Ford imagines the loss his father might have felt after his wife stopped traveling with him. “And how was it for him? Driving, driving alone? Sitting in those hotel rooms, in lobbies, reading a strange newspaper in the poor lamplight; taking a walk down a street in the evening, smoking? Eating supper with some man he knew off the road? Listening to the radio in the sweep and hum of an oscillating fan. How was it being a father this way – having a wife, renting a house in a town where they knew almost no one and had no friends, coming home only weekend, as if this were home?” And what of his mother, this dramatic change to her life? When Ford became an adult he never asked them.
Ford’s book spoke to me. In our busy modern lives, we avoid asking meaningful questions of those we love until it is too late. His book speaks to his parents’ external lives while longing to understand their inner lives. His analysis is beautifully written, but not psychologically penetrating. He doesn’t seem to probe too deeply about the effects of Edna and Parker Ford in shaping who he grew up to be. Yet, in the afterword, Ford summarized, “I was fortunate to have parents who loved each other and out of the crucible of that great, almost unfathomable love, loved me. Love as always confers beauty." Whatever distance Ford felt towards his parents, he felt sustained and supported by their imperfect love.
Becoming Freud by Adam Phillips
Utter the name Freud and people will often respond with obvious emotion. Even if they have never read one of Freud’s two-dozen books, his thousands of letters or one of the many biographies, Freud’s name evokes a reaction, and not always positive (which of course means something). While Darwin explored the biological evolution of humans, Galileo explored the heavens, and Columbus discovered new continents, Freud set out on a different type of journey. He sought to discover the vast unexplored territories that exist within each of us. Freud didn’t want to simply describe human behavior; rather he wanted to understand the hidden sub-conscious motivations of individual human behavior.
Though I have read several books about different aspects of Freud’s life, I recently reread Adam Phillips’ incisive and illuminating 162-page biography, Becoming Freud The Making of an Analyst. Using lucid language, Phillips, a psychoanalyst himself, insightfully conveys Freud’s journey from young Jewish medical school student to the creator of psychoanalysis. Phillips argues that because Freud experienced persistent anti-Semitism, he reconciled himself to pursuing a less conventional professional path. In addition, Phillips believes that Freud was fortunate that the power of religious explanation was losing its authority toward the end of the 19th century. Freud did make some erroneous judgments and conclusions, yet his quest to develop words to connect to emotion was unprecedented. Phillips acknowledges these limitations yet also explores the confluence of factors that propelled Freud toward his theories of the internal emotional development of human beings, something that didn’t exist prior to Freud. In this, he reminds us that in attempting to uncover the continent of the unconscious Freud remains the original explorer or the human psyche.
Here are my six favorite Philips’ quotes that succinctly capture the essence of a few of Freud’s theories.
“Freud will show us how and why we bury the facts of our lives, and how, through the language of psychoanalysis, we can both retrieve these facts and describe them in a different way.” p. 4
“In Freud’s view we are defensive creatures simply because we have so much to defend ourselves against; our fears of the external world are second only to our fear of the internal world of memory and desire, and both are warranted (it was Freud that made the ordinary word “defense” such an important part of common currency). “ p. 8
“What some modern people couldn’t help but notice after Freud, through their symptoms, their dreams, their slips of the tongue and their bungled ambitions, -especially modern people who were no longer religious believers was how unconscious they were, how removed from a clear sense of their own intentions, how determinedly ignorant they were about their pleasure.” p. 14
“And the truths of psychoanalysis Freud would find, are often revealed by the repetitions in people’s lives, in the things that keep happening to them, and the things they keep doing despite themselves, and that therefore insist on being thought about.” p.28
“What he called the “transference” in his fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (the Dora case) what the patient transferred on to the doctor as expectation, hope, and fear –Freud would see as the essential clue to the patient’s suffering. p. 130
“The dream, like the joke, reveals people, from a psychoanalytic point of view, to be in hiding; consciously in hiding from the disapproving others, but unconsciously hiding from themselves. “ p.144
Though people criticize Freud, I for one, am grateful for his desire to understand people, not judge them. Adam Phillips’s excellent book provides a clear and concise description of Freud’s trajectory toward becoming an analyst. Phillips acknowledges Freud’s important breakthrough in identifying a language that helps people understand their behavior and the behavior of others. No matter what you think of Freud, his contribution to humanity is akin to that of other early scientists. We remember him not because every one of his ideas is still considered correct, but because he started us down the road to a better understanding of the human condition.
