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Starting this week, at the request of a friend and reader, I am making book titles into live links to Amazon. These live links are also Affiliate links. If you want to buy a book, find more information on length or publisher, just hover over the title and click. If you decide to purchase one of the books through these links, you will be putting pennies in my cookie jar and offsetting college tuition by .0000005%!
I read two books this week. One a non-fiction memoir and one a fiction with a whole lot going on!
The parents in this book claimed to know their son was gay when he was just three years old. Perhaps so. They were very accepting of him for who he was. Kudos to them for that, indeed. In spite of that, sadly, he struggled and by his young teens was hospitalized after a suicide attempt. It is every parent's nightmare.
Striking here? How much was attributed to their son's homosexuality and the world's lack of preparedness to deal with it properly. He suffered from various psychological struggles, was diagnosed or perhaps misdiagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome multiple times, something the parents did not accept. And perhaps this was rightful on their parts. To their credit, his parents were honest, at times, wondering whether his problem were a result of his 'gayness' or if they were completely independent. But they returned to the same conclusion: teachers who did not deal properly with him and his homosexuality were causing these problems. I don't want to say they were shifting blame, but something was niggling at me while I read his father's account of the struggles they had with their son.
Schwartz also shares research about how far we have come regarding gay rights, how harmful school regulations to 'remain neutral' on the subject of homosexuality are to children and the proliferation of suicide in the gay community. Worthwhile on its own.
Hindsight is 20/20 and it's always easier to be an outsider looking in. Now, they have a thriving son for whom they found wonderful gay youth programs and camps once he came out to them. Clearly his parents loved him unconditionally, so he was luckier than most in that regard. I wonder, and you can decide for yourself, whether his homosexuality was a problem that spilled over into other aspects of his life or alternatively if he happened to be a gay boy who had a host of other issues that would have impaired him regardless of his sexuality? His parents were insistent that they were inseparably intertwined. Throughout, this was something I continued to question. The question that follows is, does it matter?
What do you get when a first time fiction writer, formerly a midwife, writes a novel and in it are the Depression, the KKK, a tragic mysterious crime, a law-breaking midwife, Union strikes, lots of babies, West Virginia, coal mines, Samuel Gompers and racial tension? It could have been a hot mess, but in Patricia Harman's hands it was a wonderful read.
Midwife assistant Patience Murphy was on the run with her mentor, when her mentor passed away and left her to inherit the business. How will she handle the Appalachian births on her own? No car, no money, no phone. Soon she is befriended by townspeople and through serendipity, gets an apprentice of her own. This tough lady with her own demons makes a life for herself just after the 1929 market crash kicks off the Depression. Harman weaves a story with many dimensions.
Her memoir the blue cotton gown: a midwife's memoir (2008) talked about her personal experiences catching babies. Now she takes that life and drops it into another time with a cast of characters whipped up from her vast imagination. A blend of reality and research crafted a story that absorbs the reader into another time with just enough description to make everything vivid but she doesn't lose you in a tedium of detail. She doesn't wait until the end to tell you the bigger pieces of the puzzle. Regardless, there is more to keep the pages turning.
No doubt, readers will be hungry for what she has to share next.
I read, therefore I am,
the lowercase b
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