Book Report: Deadly Housewives

As it turned out, I wasn't far from blogland after all.

Now, about this paperback cover. The white picket fence. The four women. And that title: Deadly Housewives. All a little familiar, isn't it?

I picked up this bargain book at Borders the same day I purchased Julie & Julia and Second Shift. Funny how that feminist theme snuck its way into all of my picks. But on to the review.

Blatantly cashing in on the popularity of the TV show Desperate Housewives, the Deadly Housewives short story collection features women who have moved beyond desperate into the more disturbing realm of, well, deadly. I think just about every story centers around a housewife murdering someone. Some of the stories are funny, others are just downright dark. Similarly, some were cheesy while others boasted more layers. All in all, it was the kind of book I was embarrassed to be reading. (Which might make you wonder why I'm broadcasting it to the world here. But as I often say, this blog is dedicated to reporting an accurate cross section of all my intellectual and artistic experiences, however good or bad).

That's not to say that I wasn't entertained by this murderous missive.

The story that intrigued me the most was "Next-Door Collector" by Elizabeth Massie. Its heroine is Anthea, a stay-at-home mom and artist who likes to be alone. The drama begins when a new neighbor, Lisa, moves into the house next store with her forty or so dogs and cats. As messy as Anthea is pristine and as sociable as Anthea is aloof, Lisa takes every opportunity to invite Anthea into her unkempt and fur ball-ridden home, cheerfully explaining that her pets are like the children she could never have. But Anthea, put off by Lisa's slovenliness and forward nature, politely declines, insisting that she needs time to work on her paintings. Meanwhile, Anthea notices that Lisa often ventures out to her yard in her bathrobe past midnight to haul a veritable forest of plastic storage bins into her basement. Although troubled, Anthea seems content to satiate her curiosity by spying. The story most likely would have ended here had Anthea's only son not taken a shine to Lisa and her menagerie. He sneaks over along with the other neighborhood children to play with Lisa's pets, much to Anthea's horror. She forbids him to return, her anxiety ignited when she hears that her son's two best friends -- twin brothers -- are missing. Convinced that Lisa and her ominous boxes are somehow to blame, Anthea creeps into Lisa's basement one night. As predicted, Lisa is there in her bathrobe, handling the boxes. Her movements are punctuated by crying that seems to be coming from beneath the floor. Sure that's she's hearing the pleas of the twins and countless other kidnapped children, Anthea bludgeons Lisa, killing her. The deed done, Anthea peers into one of the boxes and finds -- dogs. Piles and piles of dead dogs awaiting burial. Then Anthea returns home and begins painting a picture, entirely in black, in a frenzy. In the morning her husband sees her and says, "You've killed another neighbor, haven't you?" And that's when we realize that the "next-door collector" isn't Lisa, a mere lonely woman with too many pets, but Anthea, a paranoid serial killer who's murdered neighbors in various cities, forcing her family to move time and time again. (The twins, by the way, resurface quickly, having run away.)

Creepy, huh?

Book Report: (A Blogger's Take on) Julie & Julia by Julie Powell

I had been wanting to read Julie & Julia for a long time. Partly because I saw the movie when it came out last year, partly because I'm a fellow blogger. Last Friday I finally got around to finishing it. There were things about it that I really liked, and things about it that I really didn't. Although the movie was very similar to the book, the book had an undeniable dark streak running through it (as books often do) that was much diluted in the movie.

So, things that I liked. As a writer and blogger, I could relate to Julie. Right from the get-go. I particularly liked this excerpt on page 11:

"When I was a kid, my dad used to love to tell the story about finding five-year-old Julie curled up in the back of his copper-colored Datsun ZX immersed in a crumpled back issue of the Atlantic Monthly. He told that one to all the guys at his office, and to the friends he and my mom went out to dinner with, and to all of the family who weren't born again and likely to disapprove. (Of the Atlantic, not Z-cars.)"

Here Julie establishes herself as a reader. It sort of sets the tone for the rest of the book, because it lets us know that she wants to do something with that, and that that something, of course, is to become a writer. But finding ways to do that prove kind difficult because of, well, life, and all its mundane daily trials. Enter the Julie/Julia Project, in which Julie will spend 365 days cooking her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, chronicling every misstep and triumph in a daily blog. As a springboard for a writing career, it's an odd choice. Julie spends a small fortune on unappetizing ingredients such as beef marrow, kidneys, and cow brains, spends hours preparing them, and then sits down with her husband, Eric, to actually eat them, often at the mind-boggling hour of midnight. I found it very, very hard to understand why she forced herself to eat cow brains. But then, this is supposed to be the part about the stuff I liked . . .

Fast forward to the whole blogging thing. At the start of the project, Julie doesn't know what a blog is. Her husband tells her, and it's with a certain tentative technical unsavviness that she ventures to write her first post, an excerpt of which is, "Too old for theater, too young for children, and too bitter for anything else, Julie Powell was looking for a challenge. And in the Julie/Julia Project she found it. Risking her marriage, her job, and her cats' well-being, she has signed on for a deranged assignment. 365 days. 524 recipes. One girl and a crappy outer-borough kitchen. How far it will go, no one can say . . . " (26). And she's off. The blog becomes popular relatively quickly, garnering Julie the kind of readers who comment daily and write near-tearful missives if she disappears for too long. She begins to depend on hearing from them, telling her husband that she can't stop the project because her "bleaders" (as she begins to call them) are expecting to hear from her. Julie becomes so immersed in blogging that she questions the point of blogging itself by analyzing the seventeenth century diarist Samuel Pepys (you may remember this character from high school English class). Here was a guy who jotted down every detail of his life, both the shocking and the run-of-the-mill, solely for his own enjoyment. Julie ponders this, writing, "What I think is that Sam Pepys wrote down all the details of his life for nine years because the very act of writing them down made them important, or at least singular. Overseeing the painters doing his upstairs rooms was rather dull, but writing about it made overseeing the painters doing his upstairs rooms at least seem interesting. . . . " (110). It's true, what Julie says. Writing stuff down does make it seem more interesting. That's why we read, after all. Sitting on your porch and slipping into someone else's world is almost always preferable to whatever you've got going on in your own. I guess that was what Julie herself was doing when she blogged: adding interest to an otherwise (by her own confession) uninteresting life. I chose to view this as a positive move, a way for her to reclaim her own destiny.

Now, on to the things I didn't like. Or rather, the things that troubled or confused me. Julie has a very nice husband. He helped her with all aspects of the project and hardly ever complained. He was her high school sweetheart, and they'd married at the age of 24, together moving to New York seeking intellectual and artistic adventures. To me, this seemed romantic. But Julie seems kind of ashamed of it, a state of mind she reveals in various parts of the book. Consider this (graphic - I warn you) section from page 21: "Please understand - I love my husband like a pig loves shit. Maybe even more. But in the circles I run in, being married for more than five years before reaching the age of thirty ranks real high on the list of most socially damaging traits, right below watching NASCAR and listening to Shania Twain." It seems like maybe Julie doesn't want to be married. (I got a little of this from the movie, but the overall message was that they were happy despite Julie's neuroses. A Hollywood spin, I suppose). And I'm not really sure why. It's not as if her husband is some Neanderthal, you know? A Google search revealed even more upsetting news. After publishing Julie & Julia, Julie wrote another book called Cleaving, which is about her adventures as an apprentice butcher away from home and all the affairs she has. (Part of me wants to read it but knows I can't. The butchering descriptions would be the end of me. I'm very squeamish about blood and had to skim several of the more graphic cooking scenes involving organ meat and butchery in Julie & Julia.)

At the end of Julie & Julia, you sort of hope that Julie is finally fulfilled. (At least I did.) That writing a blog that turned into a book that turned into a movie was what she was looking for. But once I heard that she'd run off and cheated on her husband I began to question her capacity for any kind of happiness. Maybe she wasn't just another frustrated writer. Maybe she was a woman with issues with a capital I. And I think this was what bothered me the most. Because for all its wittiness and David vs. Goliath sensibilities, Julie & Julia lacked that essential ingredient of the kind of book that you want to reread and remember -- heart.

All of this having been said, I couldn't help but ask myself, "Why do I blog?" The easy answer would be that I love to write. I've always loved to write. Even during the few times in my life when I told myself I was done with writing, I found myself creeping back to it, almost unconsciously, jotting down snippets of things on scrap paper. I like to weigh the rhythms of sentences, adding and subtracting words until they sound perfect. I like to describe things: people's expressions, clothes, meals, houses. I like to make up characters (which applies to writing fiction, not blogging, but still). So, blogging is a fun, easy way to write about stuff that interests me. Why not just keep a private journal, then? The best answer I have is that blogging provides a way for me to join the conversation of the world, which is important to me because I feel like I have something to say. True, it's a mostly one-sided conversation, but to be honest, I prefer it that way. If I had a ton of commenters, then I think that would make me feel nervous and accountable and would take the fun out of it.

Impossibly Easy Cheeseburger in Paradise Pie

Once upon a time, I used to cook. I've been feeling a little guilty about my lack of culinary prowess lately, no small thanks to my current reading of Julie & Julia. You know you've reached the depths of laziness when you're reading about a woman who pulls the spinal cords out of lobsters when you can't even summon yourself to fry up a grilled cheese. Nevertheless, the other night I managed to make this appropriately named Impossibly Easy Cheeseburger Pie, an old gem from my mom's recipe box. Attractive it isn't, as evidenced by its dubious photo. But this is one of those cases where looks are only skin deep. Not that you want to think of your dinner as having a skin. Anyway, if you love meat and cheese (and really, who doesn't?), then give it a try:

Ingredients:

1 lb ground beef (I mistakenly bought 2 and so even as I type this have a frying pan full of ground beef fermenting, untouched, in my fridge).
1 large onion, chopped (My inveterate laziness came into full flower here; I skipped the onion entirely, opting instead for the ever-trusty garlic salt.)
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup shredded cheddar (By all means, don't feel fettered to the lone cup.)
1/2 cup Bisquick
1 cup milk
2 eggs

Directions:

Heat oven to 400 degrees. Grease a 9" pie plate. Brown beef and onion, drain. Stir in salt. Spread in pie plate; sprinkle with cheese. In bowl, stir remaining ingredients. Pour into pie plate. Bake about 25 minutes or until knife comes out clean.

I'm glad to be back on the recipe-posting wagon, if only temporarily. But my inconsistent cooking and reporting thereof has made me rethink the overall feel of this blog. I mean, one day I'm posting about an arts and crafts project, then I'm on to reviewing books and movies, and finally, there are all those pictures of me in the crazy outfits. (I realize I'm neglecting to acknowledge a whole other faction of random writings, but to go into every weird thing I share would take too long.) The thing is, I'm fine with this mess. But sometimes I wonder what you think about it. After all, most of you started reading for the art and handmade business posts (thank you, fellow Etsy followers) and may not care about the clothes, reviews, recipes, Golden Girls homages etc. Similarly, the Photo Shoot Friday fans probably care only about what I'm wearing and don't want to know what I'm thinking. And then there are those people who may check in occasionally just because they know me. By being such a scatterbrain, I run the risk of fragmenting my audience, subsequently losing some of it along the way. Julie Powell of Julie & Julia fame, on the other hand, was a blogger extraordinaire, drawing a vast and loyal readership by recounting her challenging and often hilarious cooking adventures working her way through Julia Child's cookbook. To read her accounts is to feel the excruciating pain of her uphill climb. (Her own mother begged her to stop the project because she was killing herself.) But despite all of her myriad issues, culinary, social, psychological, and otherwise, she is unarguably and unflaggingly focused, managing to deliver a story that is uncomplicatedly cohesive. I don't know if I have it in me to be so creatively monogamous. And honestly, I probably won't even try. So this little ramble has been kind of unproductive.

Book Report: (And Now for Something a Little More Intellectual) The Second Shift by Arlie Russell Hochschild

I went to Borders to pick up a copy of Julie & Julia the other day and was waylaid by a display of bargain books before I could even make it into the store. Thumbing through the selections, my curiosity was piqued by a sociology book called The Second Shift by Arlie Russell Hochschild, a Berkeley sociology professor. The title sounded familiar, and I stared at the cover, trying to remember where I'd heard it. Then I remembered. One of my particularly liberal male professors had raved about it. It wasn't a novel. And I wasn't in the habit of picking up nonfiction in pursuit of a good read. But scanning the back cover and perusing the pages promised that The Second Shift had all the elements of compelling fiction.

I wasn't disappointed. Hochschild's book is based on her interviews with working married couples with children. Her central question for each couple is the same: Who handles the second shift? The phrase "second shift" refers to the job that starts after the one you get paid for ends. You know. Cooking dinner. Grocery shopping. Scrubbing the toilet. Driving the kids to soccer practice and then helping them with their homework. Laundry. Trips to the post office. Buying birthday cards. Making angry phone calls to the insurance company. The couples being questioned came from all walks of life and subscribed to one or more of the three gender ideologies: traditionalists, who believed that the husband should earn more money and that the wife should handle all of the second shift; egalitarians, who believed that husbands and wives should equally share the job of earning money and handling the second shift; and transitionals, who fell somewhere in between. Now, you may be thinking, oh, so this is a man-bashing book. But it's not. If anything, it's a society bashing book. Hochschild delves in the everyday lives of dozens of different couples, pulling up a chair at their dinner tables to find out what makes them tick.

To me, the most interesting part of this study is the cross-section of couples being interviewed: Men who want their wives to handle the entire second shift instead of working who are married to women who want the same thing. Men who don't mind if their wives work as long as they handle the entire second shift married to working women who want their husbands to help with the second shift. Men who want to help their working wives with the second shift married to women who do not want their help, deciding instead to adopt a "supermom" strategy. Men and women who want each other to work and ignore the second shift entirely, paying housekeepers and nannies to do it. Within each couple, each husband's and wife's viewpoint was based on his or her ideas about gender roles coupled with the powerful motivator of financial need. Reading Hochschild's analysis of each couple was fascinating. She deftly peels back the onion-like layers of each husband's and wife's issues (and there are plenty) to reveal the psychological lies, or as she terms them, "marriage myths" they construct to keep their unions alive in the face of conflict. The conflict is usually between a husband and wife who have different ideas about who should do what. However, husbands and wives who believed in the same ideology dealt with a conflict between said ideology and either finances (traditionalists) or family life (workaholic egalitarians).

Not surprisingly, the most common couples were comprised of husbands who didn't mind their wives working as long as dinner was on the table and wives who wanted to rebel against this. (The book was published in 1989 and was based upon interviews conducted in the late 1970s and early 1980s.) Hochschild doesn't offer a solution to this problem at the book's end. Instead she expounds upon a theme woven throughout the book, which is that working women are part of an ongoing revolution to which men must still adapt. She says that these days women are changing more than men because they're moving from the home to the office, whereas back in the 1800s, men were changing more than women because they were migrating from farms to cities. At that point it was the women who weren't changing because they were always at home. So, the woman's revolution isn't over yet. That was what I got out of that.

The one thing I kept thinking while reading this book was, I'm glad I don't have kids yet. Kids, it seems, tip the scales in terms of the drama and bitterness that the second shift can create. You can ignore a sinkful of dishes and subsist on takeout instead of grocery shopping (I'm guilty of both more often than I'd like to admit), but you can't ignore a child. Not that a child can be equated with a dirty dish or a pizza. (Please do not to send hate mail.) But, if I was a working woman with children, then I probably wouldn't be able to do much of anything. This includes blogging. And reading books to blog about. And painting hippos and ice cream cones on tote bags. And writing. And spending the entire weekend in my pajamas. And living on Smartfood popcorn. Maybe such fears sound shallow, but at least I'm honest in acknowledging that life as I know it would change.

So, The Second Shift. Pretty compelling stuff by a lady who tells it like it is.

Book Report: The Other Side of the Story by Marian Keyes

Sparked by my renewed interest in writing fiction, I decided to reread The Other Side of the Story by Marian Keyes. Like most of my favorite authors, Keyes write women's stories (I refuse to call them chick lit) that are funny and touching yet deep.

The Other Side of the Story explores the publishing industry through the eyes of three very different yet inextricably linked women. Jojo is the seasoned and sharp shooting literary agent with a heart, Lily is the sensitive, starving artist novelist, and Gemma uses writing as a means of getting back at her philandering father as well as her ex-best friend (who just happens to be Lily). I'm not going to get into the entire plot (well, not too much), because it's complicated (albeit compelling). I'll just say that this story engaged me because it offered an illuminating behind-the-scenes glimpse into the business of getting published. Now, this is a light-hearted story. It has a happy ending, and the reader (at least this one) walks away feeling good. But it also exposes the ruthlessness of the publishing business rather than glamorizing it, which I found refreshing.

Take Lily. Her first novel, which is about a company knowingly tampering with a town's water supply, causing its residents to get cancer (she once worked for a PR firm that represented just such a company) and took her five years to write, is rejected by every agent she sends it to. Some suggest changes, which she makes, but the long-awaited acceptance never comes. Then she loses her job, falls in love with her best friend's (Gemma's) ex-boyfriend, gets pregnant, and is subsisting on the meager salary she draws from freelance writing. But even at this point, Lily's luck hasn't reached its nadir. Walking home from a meeting with a supermarket about writing a pamphlet on spinach, she gets mugged. As a result, she becomes utterly depressed and as means of cheering herself up starts writing another book. Although she has little interest in publishing it, her boyfriend, the ever-supportive Anton, intervenes, doggedly sending it to every agent in London despite Lily's protestations. Eventually, one of them (the illustrious Jojo) takes her on. But then Jojo has trouble finding a publisher, and even once the book does get published, the critical reviews are not so good. Anton lands her a book signing alongside a wildly popular, established author, and the only people who speak to her are the ones who think she works at the bookstore. It takes a very long time for the book to start selling, but once it does, Lily's popularity skyrockets. She receives glowing reader reviews on Amazon, and one group of readers even form a coven in her honor (the book is about a white witch). When the time comes for her to accept her publisher's advance immediately or hold out for more money, she decides to hold out. Anton persuades her to buy their dream house against her better judgment. She begins receiving fan mail, some of it nice but a lot of it scary. She has nightmares about the house being taken away. She obsesses over the possibility that Gemma is plotting revenge. She is so stressed that she can't concentrate on writing a new book, so she sends her editor the one about the contaminated water. The editor gobbles it up, anticipating a best-seller. But the public hates it. They wanted another feel-good book and are offended by the new one's weighty subject matter. Lily's publisher drops her, and the bank forecloses on her and Anton's house. (Ironically, the novel's critical reviews are excellent.) Lily blames Anton for the loss of their house and breaks up with him, taking their daughter with her. It isn't until she nearly dies in a car accident that she's inspired to write another feel good bestseller and reunite with Anton.

Okay. I realize that sounded very melodramatic and not at all like the type of story that could offer any practical insights. But to be fair, I don't think my synopsis did it justice. I promise that it's a fulfilling and balanced read, chock full of relatable scenarios and details.

That having been said, I'm now on the prowl for a new book. I'd like to read something new this time and am contemplating Julie & Julia.