Monday, July 22, 2013

Book Review: A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty by Joshilyn Jackson

A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty by Joshilyn Jackson

Brief Synopsis: The Slocumb family is no stranger to a vengeful God. Ginny "Big" Slocumb fetched up pregnant with her headstrong daughter, "Little" Liza, at the age of fifteen and was promptly booted out of her Southern Baptist home to fend for herself. Another fifteen years later, Liza showed up pregnant herself and left home shortly after the baby's birth, only to show back up on her mother's doorstep two hard-lived years later. Now her daughter, Mosey, is fifteen, and the Slocumbs are dead in the middle of another "trouble year." Liza, at a too-close-to-home thirty years old, has suffered a stroke that they chalk up to her rough past and methamphetamine use. Mosey is shrugging around in her skin, trying to figure out if she's sharing it with a sex-maniac who could take over any minute and repeat Slocumb history. When Big has Liza's favorite willow tree pulled up by the roots to make room for a therapeutic swimming pool, a box of tiny bones rips out what seams are left holding all of their lives together.

Published: 2012

Format read: Hardcover, until Husband caught me reading my signed first edition and made me buy the e-book to finish. Meanie.

Comparison: It is hard to compare this book directly to any other book because I haven't read anything else quite like it. Joshilyn Jackson's writing is whip-smart and tangy a la Haven Kimmel, but there's depth there, too. In this book, especially with Liza, she yet again shows off her unique skill in capturing the tangled-up complexity of the human spirit held in bondage that I've only seen done half as well in A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick. In this work and all her others, she writes about poverty with a truthful, almost journalistic eye which reminds me of John Steinbeck. Her voice is so very different, but the heart is the same. She tells the worst of it like it is without pointing a single, judgmental fingernail. It is just how Steinbeck used the hard-luck Joads not only to break our hearts in The Grapes of Wrath, but to underline the tenacity of the human spirit, the universal worth of mankind, and hope which keeps right on springing up, even from nothing but salted earth. She does that so well that it squeezes my heart to pieces and I can taste sweat and dirt on my tongue.

Review: I have been a devoted fan of Joshilyn Jackson's work since I first read gods in Alabama as an ARC (Advance Readers Copy) when I was a wide-eyed, story-starved bookseller. I got the book off the freebie shelf in the back room of the store where it was mixed in with a pile of this and that. I picked it for the simple reason that it was the only book on that particular shelf that didn't have a black and white spine. Dumb way to pick a book, I know, but it worked out for me. I read that book in one voracious setting and have been an advocate for Ms. Jackson's books ever since. I've read everything she has put out to the public, including her wonderful blog, Faster Than Kudzu, and so should you.

If Joshilyn Jackson has a mid-life crisis and gives up fiction writing to spend the rest of her life writing the backs of cereal boxes, I will throw out all my Honey Nut Cheerios and read on.

So should you.

What I'm saying is that her books are good. Very.

A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty does not disappoint. It has the same salty southern women running down its spine, this time three generations deep. The POV shifts between the characters, with Big and Mosey in first person (a feat in itself given the gap in their ages and personalities), and third person limited for Liza. In all of them, Jackson manages to keep in her signature playful style without sacrificing the individual voices of the characters. I have yet to figure out how she does it, turning nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns and basically batting around syntax like a cat with a ball of yarn, and somehow it makes things more clear. Maybe that's why her work feels so heartfelt. She says things the way we mean them, not the way we're told to say them.

I will admit that I had some trouble with this one when I started reading it. It was Liza. Right off the bat, we're told that she was a hellion from the womb, yet when we first meet her, she is a raisin-soft shadow of her former self. I had trouble picturing her young. My age. It was too wrong, too wasteful and unfair. Reading her chapters was hard going. I couldn't be in her head like I could be in Big's and Mosey's. I had to work my way in from a distance. Like Mosey and Big interpreting her "Mosey-baby" noise, or her "yes" and "no" signals, there was a tendency for me to throw my hands up and say it was too hard, too sad to look at her with her scrambled eggs trailing down the bad side of her face. I was feeling what Big and Mosey must have felt, and the frustration was almost unbearable.

Having read all of Ms. Jackson's work, I should have known better.

She does not write weak characters.


Even when they're broken. Even when they think they're used up and spent. Even when they're captive in their own bodies. Even when she lets you pity them, it will only be for a flash, because she does not write weak characters.


Eventually, Liza's chapters became my favorites. There was so much complexity to her character, this woman who did all the things we're told makes someone "bad" but she is so very, very good, so truly herself even when she is lost inside of her own broken body. A firecracker forced underwater is no less a firecracker at its core.

The book weaves in and out of their three lives, and eventually you come to see that there is far less truthful communication between the characters who can talk to each other than there is with poor damaged Liza. Big is tormented by loss and responsibility, and bursting with love for her family--and for what her family should be. Mosey is such an engaging character, wise for her years, but not so much that she's not a believable fifteen-year-old. She and her best friend Roger have a great, three-dimensional relationship that earns Roger his place as the Encyclopedia Brown clue-finder to assist with furthering the plot. There is enough mystery and puzzle-solving to keep the pages turning, but as I went, I realized that I wasn't just reading for the answers like the back of a crossword puzzle book (as I'm apt to do with many mysteries/thrillers. I'm looking at you, Dan Brown). I cared about the answers because I cared about the characters and all their jagged pieces. I wanted them to fit together, somehow, so that they could finally be whole.

That's the mark of a good literary fiction novel--you don't just want to know what happens/happened, you just want to know. Anything. Everything.

I would also throw in a mention that I wish more men would pick up books like this one. Yes, the cover is feminine, it has "pretty" in the title, and it doesn't just have a woman protagonist, it has THREE of them. However, I think if more men read books like this one, they would understand women so much more--what maternal instinct looks like from the inside, how fiercely we can love, how fiercely we can fight, and not to count us out, not even in what looks like the end of days. Strong women are not to be feared or reviled or ignored, but should be seen for their truth. We are allies, and when necessary, warriors.

"You have to hold these things and strive, always, for one more word and one more step. You push forward and you fight, for as long as ever you can, until the black world spins and the moon pulls the tide and the water rises up and takes you." --A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty, by Joshilyn Jackson.

Saturday, July 20, 2013

Captive Audience

Yesterday, while I was at the laundromat with one of my most vulnerable clients and everything she owns that could possibly fit into a washing machine, my back flipped me the bird and went on strike. No really, I could actually hear its little overworked cusses bumping up my spine to my ears as I lost all strength to my lower body and excruciating pain ripped me into tiny little pieces.

If your back has never gone out, do not let it.


Not even if you are really curious.

Not even if you are writing a really important novel about someone whose back goes out.


I didn't want to freak out my client--this is an easy thing to do and usually requires hours to undo--so I just played it nonchalant. I leaned my elbow on a triple-load washer that was almost my height and tried to pretend that I was still breathing. I sneaked a call to my supervisor and she came in like Social Work Superwoman and took over with my client and drove her home. Husband then arrived to take me home. Getting in the car was difficult.


Getting out of the car was worse, but I did not have anymore religion to lose, so I just yelled a lot. I'm sure the neighborhood association thinks my husband is a horrible murderer. (Horrible because he's not good at it because I am still intermittently yelling for someone to hurry up and finish killing me when I move the wrong way.)

Last night, Husband left the TV on for me since I was forced to sleep on the couch. I was in a lot of pain and woke up in the middle of the night to find this blaring proudly:

 Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II.

No. Too sleepy and groggy and uncomfortable even to laugh at Godzilla. I looked around for the remote--which I spotted across the room where I had no hope of getting to it.

I was stuck. I watched Godzilla tromp his way through Kyoto while Rodan received a life-force boost from a chorus of children singing a magical song they heard emanating from a prehistoric plant. Meanwhile, this hatched from an egg that glows red like a giant mood ring when it is grouchy:

No, that's not Barney with a skin condition. That is Baby Godzilla. Yes, that's a proper name because that is what they named him. Or her.

Because of Baby Godzilla, they were able to glean that they weren't able to defeat Godzilla because Godzillas have extra brains. In their HIPS.

Right about then, when they started plotting to shoot out poor Godzilla's extra hip-brains to paralyze him, I started feeling some kinship with the old boy. I mean, he can't help it that he has big feet and Kyoto was in his way. They have his Baby Godzilla, for crying out loud. He's just looking for his kid. Or something. Either way, they shouldn't give him lower back pain. It's INHUMANE.

But they did. And then Rodan came into the picture and zapped Godzilla with his special child-song powers and made his hips better and he went off into the sunset with Baby Godzilla to smash cities another day.

I dozed off somewhere in there and woke up this morning still dreaming of Barney smashing Japanese landmarks. I thought that surely, SURELY this movie was a dream because if it had been real, I would not have watched it. Then I moved and yelled and hurt and remembered.

Where's Rodan when you need him?

Anyway, since I've been splayed out on the couch, I have realized that being a captive audience has its perks. I will no longer think anything my imagination conjures is too bizarre because Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II makes anything I come up with look positively sobering (and I have an in-progress novel involving mind-controlling towels. Seriously). I have gotten some quality time with the animals:

Also, I have no excuses not to read and write. A lot. I'm going to make the best of this.

And when I can't, when I have to make that inevitable excruciating walk to the bathroom, pay no attention to the screeching and groaning. It's just Godzilla tromping through the Memphis suburbs, minding her own business.

Monday, July 15, 2013

Inspiration Monday: Don't Judge Me

I just got back from an office supply store. I went in for one single thing, but it is school supply season and even though I do not have school or kids or any need of supplies, these are dangerous times for writing/drawing/paper-gluing types like myself.

I picked up my one-single-harmless-thing-I-went-in-for, and I headed toward the register. Then I turned around. I couldn't go into an office supply store and not go down the paper aisle. Not in school supply season. That would be UNNATURAL.

So I did. I meandered up and down, looking at the sale tags and chewing my lip. I have plenty of paper. I even make my own notebooks. See?

I have plenty of paper. I couldn't. I shouldn't.

I did.

Don't judge me.

I scuttled up to the register with my nose scrunched up and to the side like a defensive bunny wearing its "don't judge me" face. I tossed down the I'm-not-telling-you-how-big pile of these under my arm:

Composition notebooks, $1.00 each. What I hoped no one saw was that I dove into a display as tall as me to find these particular special ones. Yes, they were on the bottom, and yes, I was thrilled when I found them, and no, I didn't need them.

Don't judge me.

The cashier picked up the notebooks. "You must like these," she said glancing at my pile.

"Yes," I said and hurried through my wallet looking for my debit card. She was judging me. I could feel it. She didn't understand.

"Hmm," she said. "Do you mind telling me why?"

Judging. She was. I knew it.

"Well, I'm a writer. least, I write a lot. These ones are made in Brazil. They have the best paper, especially for fountain pens. These are the college ruled ones, and you almost never find them."

"Oh!" she said and flipped through them. "That's so funny--you're a writer, too! I'm in school for creative writing, and I am always looking for good paper I can afford. I'm going to have to get a pile of these myself!"

She hadn't been judging. I had.

We chatted a few minutes more about fiction writing and screenplay formatting and yes, where the last stash of the good notebooks were. I'm not selfish.

How many times have you missed out on making a connection with someone because you thought you could read minds? (Hint: You can't.) What about your characters? What makes them scrunch up their noses and hurry through their purses?

We all have quirks and foibles and idiosyncrasies, and most people are just a smidgen sensitive about them. Sprinkle some on your fiction and you'll be surprised at how many people can relate.

Sunday, July 14, 2013

Moment of Truth

This is Stray Cat #A. (Also known as Kitty Friend, Sweet Kitty, Honeybaby-Sugarmonkey-Kittypie-Darlingkins the First).

Thus sayeth the vet, thus goeth the rest of us.
Stray Cat #A came into my life about a month ago.

I was sitting outside my office in our little courtyard trying to gather my thoughts.

It was not easy. All my thoughts were broken into pieces and they did not want to fit back together. It had been a rough day.

Then, the heavens opened and God dropped a cat into my lap. Literally.

I sat there on the low wall alongside the building, trying to pretend I wasn't just counting ants, when I heard a cute little husky meow. I looked up right in time to see a sweet-faced fluffball of a cat jogging toward me. She jumped directly into my lap and rubbed her head into my chest. "Purr," she said. "Purr and coo and mew and purr again," she went on, more or less.

I forgot all about my ants and I melted into a syrupy puddle of instant cat-love.

Before I could drip and run all the way into the gutter, I had to pull myself together. This beautiful, friendly, polite (if a bit forward) creature had to be someone's beloved pet who had wandered away from home looking for a little adventure in the big city. I couldn't fall in love; it wasn't my place. Someone else had to already love this cat. They had to.

She stayed outside at my office for the next week. Every day I checked on her and played with her, gave her water in a paper coffee cup, and sneaked her food from the bag of cat food I hid in my trunk. I watched her lounging on the steps, ignoring the baby birds that were perched in a low nest practically on top of her head. I was grateful she didn't try to eat them, but still. She's a CAT. They're supposed to WANT to eat them anyway. She didn't. She didn't know she was supposed to. This was no outside cat, and she wasn't going to make it if she stayed out there much longer.

Husband and I did all of the things people told us we were supposed to do with a found pet. We did the found pet report, went through lost pet listings, put her all over the internet, slapped up some fliers. No calls. She was homeless.

Not a bad driver, if you don't count the pedals.
Finally I couldn't stand it anymore. I loaded her up in my car and decided she had to live somewhere, so she could visit with me. I wasn't committing, see. She might have still been someone else's kitty, and all I could think was that if something like this happened to Boo, my Teacup Panther, I would hope that someone would be kind to her and take care of her until I could track her down. (Of course, I'm fooling myself to think so. If anyone even tried to be kind to her, the poor sap would probably end up in the hospital for their trouble.)

I took her to the vet (or she took me, one or the other), to get checked out before I took her home. "What a great cat!" they all cooed as she tucked her head under my arm and purred, ignoring the beagle who was NOT ignoring her. "Are you going to keep her?" the receptionist asked.

"Umm, I don't know," I said. "She might be somebody's."

She made sad eyebrows. "Honey, I think she sounds like a drop-off. If you haven't found the owner yet, you probably won't. Don't you want to keep her?"

"I don't know," I said again, chewing on it a little longer this time. I didn't know. I wanted to, but she wasn't mine. Someone could swoop in and take her from me at any time and it would break my heart. But maybe, just maybe, it would be a little less if I didn't admit I wanted her to be mine. "I'm going to foster her," I said. "Then if nothing comes up, we'll see."

Stray Cat #A got the all clear to come home with me to be "fostered." By "fostering," I mean that I made desktop wallpapers of her cute face:

I took endless snaps of her doing mind-blowing things like yawning, drinking, sleeping, or not sleeping. I cuddled with her, bathed her, brushed her, and sweet talked her. I bought her a bed and toys and a little purple collar.

The one thing I didn't do was name her.

I tried. I thought of options, but I just couldn't do it. Somewhere deep inside, I knew that if I named this cat, she would be mine. Once I name a thing, it is mine forever and ever and I will love it down to its tiniest cells and walk to the ends of the earth for it. It's a big step, and try as I might, I kept tripping over it.

Then she got sick.

She stopped eating. At first we thought that she was depressed. Boo has been less than hospitable. She had been somebody's and now she was living in a house with new people, but she was nobody's. Maybe she knew it. Maybe she knew that I was hiding a secret behind all my sweet words. The secret was that I was afraid to let myself love her, at least not all the way. Maybe I had made her sick with my half-love which was not what she deserved, this good good cat.

She slept all the time. She wouldn't eat anything. She stopped hopping up to greet us with her goofy little cat-smile when we came in the room. Then she stopped bothering to put all four paws in the litterbox. Her bones poked through her skin like a cat suit on a hanger.

Husband and I took her back to the vet. They remembered her. "What'd you name her?" the friendly receptionist asked, happy I had apparently decided to keep the cat.

"I didn't," I said, guilty.

The cat specialist, heretofore known as Saint Vet, took two seconds with Stray Cat #A and said, "Looks like liver failure."

The heavens opened up again, but this time it rained bricks instead of kitties. "Liver failure?" I asked. "Like, her liver is failing liver failure?"

She nodded gravely. "Maybe," she said. "I just want to prepare you for the worst. It could be [some giant medical word that sounded like something from Harry Potter], but since she was negative for FIV and Feline Leukemia, that would be very unlikely."

She brought us an estimate of what it would cost to do all the tests necessary. If it was her liver, she would need hospitalization, a blood transfusion, several Harry Potter-sounding tests, fluid IV, and lots of expensive medicines. There was a lower priced option and a higher priced option, but for my social service worker budget, they were both astronomical. I looked at Husband and he made sad eyebrows.

"Don't do that," I told him. "Do not look at me with sad eyebrows. We have to take care of her. We do not let things die, not if we can help it. We can sell things, but we cannot let our cat die."

Because she was. Ours. I looked at her lying there, skinnier than a runt kitten, and I knew that I'd sell the shoes on my feet to keep her breathing because name or not, she was my cat. The moment of truth had come. I loved her. All the way.

No sooner than that poignant thought had crossed my mind and stung my eyes, Saint Vet came back in with a little more color in her own cheeks. "She has Harry Potter-itis. I can't believe it. She is eaten up with Harry Potter-itis, and it could have shut her liver down if it wasn't caught, but I think we caught it in time."

Words do not exist, even in Harry Potter, to tell you how relieved I was. She was going to be okay, I wouldn't have to sell my fillings, and she was my cat. She figured it out, too. She crawled in my purse and looked at me all like, "Let's go!"

She has to take a lot of yucky medicine that is NOT easy to give her. We follow her around with a Cat Buffet so that she can have a choice of what to eat as long as she is EATING (and she IS!), and she
has to go back in a week to see Saint Vet.


 She still isn't named, but it's because I have to find one worthy of My New Cat #A.

Monday, July 1, 2013

Inspiration Monday: Mutually Inclusive

Books Again, Decatur, GA. As far as I know, books are regular price but hair costs extra.
Sometimes things seem so black-and-white separate, there is no reason to consider that they could ever go together.

Maybe we should.

I'm not saying we should go and put bologna on an Oreo or anything--I like those in black and white just fine, but sometimes its a good idea to challenge all of those little fences in our brains and see if the things they're keeping apart really need to be kept apart.

As I mentioned in my last post, I recently attended an audiobook launch that the author was unofficially calling a "bookless booksigning." I thought it was clever and it caught my attention because that is a thing that seems impossibly impossible, but she made it possible anyway (and it was awesome).

Earlier that same day, I had an interesting conversation with one of my formerly homeless clients. We were on our way back from an appointment that happened to be in one of the ritzier areas of town. While we drove along, she stared out at the expensive houses, each one big enough to practically envelop her entire apartment complex and fronted by fresh-combed lawns the size of parks.

She shook her head. "A lot of these rich folks don't know how bad they got it," she said.

This woman had been homeless for the better part of a decade, slipping in and out of shelters when she could, going without regular meals or medical care, and refusing all friendships because, as she once told me, the surest thing she ever learned was that people can't hurt you if you don't let them close enough to get at you. 

"Tell me how the rich folks have it bad," I said. It wasn't a question because I wasn't asking. I already believed her.

"Those poor rich folks don't know nothing," she said. "If something bad ever came along, they couldn't survive it. They ain't ready for it. They think that everything is all okay, but they really don't know what they don't know."

"Some of them do," I said. "Some of them worked their way up just like you're doing. Some of them know."

"Well, they ain't the poor ones," she said.

She went on to tell me about her grievances with the "wealthy poor." 

"There are two kinds of poor folks," she said, happy to be educating me so that I would know what I don't know. "There's the poor folks like me that worked hard all their lives and then had it all taken away from them and spend every day trying to get back up on their feet. Then there's the wealthy poor. Those people are the ones who could do better but won't. They're the ones that take up all the help from the people who really need it. They give the rest of the poor people a bad name so that nobody gets the help they need."

From this woman who spent long years feeling that anger was her only currency and that her voice was as pointless as another hot breeze in summer, came truth as sharp as citrus tang. Having money doesn't make you rich and not having it doesn't make you poor.

She might not have an income yet, but she's not poor, not with sharp eyes like those.

She had it right. In the end, no matter what your bank balance says and no matter where you sleep, we are all just scuffed-up, soft-bellied human beings.

Now you know.