Dusk, Night, Dawn: On Revival and Courage

 By Anne Lamott

Riverhead     2021

208 pages     Spiritual

Like me, Anne Lamott is in the “third third” of her life. (I love that thought.) Newly married for the first time, she is coping with her life that has changed dramatically and the world that she is living in which has changed dramatically as well.  In Dusk, Night, Dawn, Lamott is trying  to manage all these changes and to find a way forward. She is looking for revival and renewal—something most of us are seeking, as well.

Lamott is a recovering alcoholic, and that horrific time in her life as well as her recovery is seldom off her mind. The lessons she learned continue to reverberate in her writing. She is also a Christian, and the spiritual side of her life determines her outward actions as well as her inner turmoil.  What makes her writing compelling is that she laces practically every paragraph with a self-deprecating zinger. For example, in speaking of surviving this difficult year, she says, “I am sober, loved, grateful, sometimes brave, and wearing dry pants.”

The chapters in the book are random essays, each written on the general theme of managing life and calling upon the grace of God to help get through the turmoil of our current situation. Of course, she discusses the Trump years and this Covid year. Each essay is filled with her personal experiences, laced as they are with  humor and insight. While she attempts to justify the reasoning for her marriage to Neal, and to understand what being married means, she is ultimately so pleased that she was able to find someone to share her craziness with. One of the strengths of her writing is the humor. The reader can say, yeah, I’ve felt that way. While she is a very spiritual person, she is not a very pious person, and in a lot of ways, her faith matches mine.

Probably Lamott’s greatest strength is her ability to connect with her readers. The strength of her faith is matched only by her questioning. Here is one of her prayers: “Help me start walking in your general direction. And the greatest prayer: Help me not to be such an asshole.” What we realize when we read Lamott is that this life of ours is a major journey, and it is through the grace of God that we survive and perhaps even thrive.

I have read several of Lamott’s books, and if you have not read one of her books, I highly recommend them, although this is probably not the one to begin with. This may just be agism fatigue on my part, because much of this particular book by Lamott deals with aging. Several of the last books I have read concerned aging, including Face: One Square Foot of Skin by Justine Bateman and Women Rowing North by Mary Pipher. In a conversation with my brother-in-law last night, he mentioned that everyone he knows is talking about Covid, aging, and dying. He said he was sick of talking about it. I am feeling the same, although in both of the aforementioned books, and now including Dusk, Night, Dawn, I have gained inspiration and encouragement to persist and move ahead.

Other Lamott books I have read and reviewed include: Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, Hallelujah, Anyway, and Some Assembly Required.

Here are a couple of interviews with Lamott about Dusk, Night, Dawn. One with Maria Menounos and the other with Caroline Myss.

 

Face: One Square Foot of Skin

 By Justine Bateman

Akashic     2021

270 pages     Social Science

Tonight as I was watching the PBS news, I paid special attention to Judy Woodruff, her guest Senator Capito, and a reporter Charlayne Hunter-Gault. These were all women in their 60s and 70s and they presented themselves in all their power, faces and all. They are the women that actress, writer, director and producer, Justine Bateman, is addressing in her new book Face: One Square Foot of Skin. In this book, Bateman examines aging faces and describes the discrepancy between men’s aging faces and women’s aging faces. She says that “traditionally, men’s older faces signify power, and women’s older faces signify a loss of power.” She goes on to say. “I hated the idea that half the population was perhaps spending the entire second half of their lives ashamed and apologetic that their faces had aged naturally.” I was proud to see those women on the news. They did not appear at all to be ashamed of their beautiful, intelligent faces.

As Bateman entered her forties, she found that she was being treated differently than when she had been a young, fresh-faced ingenue. As a consequence, Bateman chose to explore the issue of women’s faces through very short stories that are based on interviews she made with women of all ages. The stories are intimate and are significant examples of the tenuous nature of women’s self-assurance and confidence. The stories are very revealing because Bateman argues that a woman’s confidence should grow rather than deteriorate as she ages. It should not be destroyed by society’s misled attitude about that “one square foot of skin.” I saw this happening recently when a woman I knew in her early 50s was forced to find a new job. She knew that she was more than qualified for the job for which she was interviewing, but she worried that she might be too old. Did her face have too many lines? Were her eyes puffy? Was her neck saggy? Would her face be judged rather than her immense capabilities.

Bateman feels that cosmetic surgery is a “Ponzi Scheme.” She wants women to walk out into the world with an attitude that says, “Fuck you! I look great.” I would imagine that for celebrity women like Bateman, the pressure to “fix your face" is especially intense. Occasionally, I get caught up looking at Facebook entries headed, “You won’t believe how (so and so) looks now.” Bateman has made me look at myself much more critically in the mirror, scanning my face for wrinkles, etc. Other than a saggy neck and no eyelids or eyelashes, I am looking my age. I think I feel worse about my flabby upper arm than by my saggy neck.

Last night my book club met virtually. There are twelve women in the club, with ages from 38 to 78. They are all extremely intelligent, confident women with faces to match. We were having a Zoom call with a well-known author, who was obviously impressed by our analysis of his book and of our questions. I was so proud to be one of those beautiful, strong women.

This is what Bateman’s book emphasizes—celebrate who you are, wrinkles and all. As she says, "So, let's imagine that our one-of-a-kind faces are a new kind of NFT, a currency backed by a life lived without hesitation in the sunshine of good days and bad." Read Face: One Square Food of Skin in conjunction with Women Rowing North that I reviewed last month. Your confidence will be renewed.

An interview with Justine Bateman in Vanity Fair. Time magazine’s review concludes that Face is "an engrossing look at an issue that continues to be problematic for millions of women every day."

Astrid Sees All

 By Natalie Standiford

Atria Books     2021

272 pages     Literary

Most young adults want excitement in their lives and the home town is not the place to get that excitement. It is no different for Phoebe, a young college graduate from Baltimore in the insightful novel, Astrid Sees All. Phoebe follows her college friend, Carmen, to the crazy lower Manhattan scene of the early 1980s. She has been devasted by the death of her father, but she knows that she must find something new in her life. The two young women descend on the East Village and find themselves enmeshed in an underworld that is both exciting and frightening. Phoebe becomes the fortune teller at the “it” club in the neighborhood. She disappears into a character, Astrid the Star Girl, and tells fortunes using the ticket stubs from the movies she and Carmen have seen—a brilliant plot device, by the way.

These are young women searching for an identity in the midst of shadows of all sorts, past, present, and future. We understand Phoebe to a certain extent but many of the other characters remain very elusive, including Carmen. There are no easy answers to the dilemmas that face them and no bright future, despite the fact that they are young, full of ambition, and drive. On the other hand, as they walk into the situations that are determining their future, we mature readers are cautioning those characters to be careful, to take it easy, and to not make such stupid decisions.

Astrid Sees All serves us best as a look at the gritty side of New York in the 1980s. We touch base with celebrities and scoundrels, druggies, as well as others as fresh and innocent as Phoebe. There is a lot of grief in the novel, but the plot keeps moving and the reader keeps reading. As we watch Phoebe weathering everything that has come her way,  we root for her survival. One reviewer called the characters “damaged young dreamers”, and that is a very accurate assessment of the lives we are reading about.

The novel has resonance in part because Standiford is a person who lived that scene and describes it so vividly. The book moves along surprising well, filled as it is with yearning and insight. It’s pretty dark, but I was able to move through it quite rapidly and appreciated both the dark and light of the story. All of a sudden this morning, I recalled one character and why she was included—I had not figured it out before. She is an old woman living in the building where Phoebe and Carmen are living. Addled by dementia, she wanders around the building knocking on doors, asking “What time is it?” Phoebe is extremely annoyed by her, but I believe the old woman is the voice of reason, calling on Phoebe and the others: “What time is it?” Time to get your shit together!                                                                            

 All of my children lived in New York City in their young adult lives, with varying degrees of success and satisfaction. My oldest son and his wife left the city and moved closer to home before the arrival of their first child. The other two left when the city tanked following 9/11. I very much appreciated the crises that enveloped Phoebe and the other characters, including her mother’s anxieties, because my children suffered from some of the same discomforting situations, and I was frequently anxious for them.  On the other hand,  I missed the city’s charms when my children moved to more familiar territory and I had no reason to visit the city.

Astrid Sees All is on everyone’s radar right now. Standiford was interviewed via Zoom for our local library this week, and there are also many reviews and interviews of the author to be found online. Here is a one minute sharing of the plot by the author. After thinking about it for a couple of days, my opinion is that the book is extremely readable but surprisingly flawed.

Natalie Standiford has written several children’s and young adult novels. Astrid Sees All is her first adult novel. Here is her website.