nonfiction

Normal Women, by Phillipa Gregory

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If you’re going to read the history of women in England for the last 900 years, then you can’t be surprised that it is a huge book. Long? Yes. Also, fascinating and infuriating.

Women have suffered ever since William the Conqueror brought his patriarchal ideas about the superiority of men over women to England in 1066, obliterating the more equitable society he found there. Sound like a generalisation? Read this book, where each assertion is backed up by example after example drawn from primary sources, starting with the Norman laws that dictated the so-called natural inferiority of women, morally, mentally, and physically.

Gregory’s extensive research yields statistic after statistic, example—by name—after example of women doing the work of society while having no power. She divides the book by eras and, within each presents a cogent description of areas such as the status of women’s health, marriage rights, widows, work (paid and unpaid), female soldiers, sexuality, slavery, rape, and prostitution.

Bottom line? Every time things start to look better for women, every time they are given a modicum of power, the immediate reaction by terrified men shoves them backwards. Think it’s all in the past? Look at how the percentage of rapes of women that are investigated by British police—already appalling low—have declined in recent years. If I remember correctly, the most recent figure in the book is from about ten years ago and is shockingly only two percent. Two percent!

Century after century, women are excluded from profitable work, from unions and guilds, from being able even to train for better work. All this while they are the ones feeding the family, more often than not. Elite women cheerfully throw their lower class fellow females under the wheels of their chariots.

A lot of this I already knew, but the tsunami of detail, of individual stories, really brought the horror of this persistent imbalance of power home to me. One area I hadn’t realised is that women were the true force behind the great resistance movements in England, the ones that pushed back against enclosure of common lands, automation, and other power grabs by the wealthy that left everyone else to starve. The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was sparked by two women from Kent, Joan Hampcok and Agnes Jekyn protesting a poll tax, not Wat Tyler, as the history books would have it.

If you think that 500+ pages of this would be boring, think again. There are surprises everywhere. Did you know that boxing was primarily a women’s sport in the early 18th century? Gregory writes with a cool attention to story, grabbing the reader’s attention and not releasing it. You cannot even turn away from her ten pages listing names of women murdered in Britain in 2019, nearly all dying from domestic violence. She tells us of the broken ribs and deformed bodies of women laced into too-tight corsets, of women colliers dragging coal out of mines like pit ponies.

She reminds us of how men of every period attempted to define women—quoting their very words—in ways that demeaned them and reinforced male dominion. All these unscientific theories of women’s nature spoke of her weakness of body, mind, and morals.

We are introduced to so many extraordinary women in these pages, but the author reminds us to look around us. “The history of women is a struggle over identity and inclusion: we are all ‘normal’ women even when we have been described as exceptional or deviant or inadequate, even when our vanity prompts us to stand apart, or our ambition to compete with each other.”

Yes, it’s a long book. You may want to pace yourself, though I confess that I tore through it. This is the book that I’m recommending to everyone this year.

Have you read any part of this remarkable book? What did you think about it?

Burning Questions, by Margaret Atwood

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Subtitled Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021, this is Atwood’s third collection of essays, speeches, book introductions, and reviews. What astonished me was how readable this heterogeneous collection is. Of course, we have Atwood’s voice throughout: intelligent, calm, learned, self-deprecating, and witty.

In today’s world, where so many people value opinions and beliefs over fact, it is a huge relief to communicate with someone who actually believes in science. Both of her parents were scientists–an entomologist and a nutritionist–and she spent much of her youth in the woods of Northern Ontario. She talks about the family pulling over when an infestation was spotted so that they could collect the invading critters. “Other families stopped for ice-cream cones. Ours stopped for infestations.”

That early influence shows in her concern with the threats to our environment, both in her fiction and her nonfiction, including a number of pieces in this collection. She writes of how this concern fueled her Oryx & Crake trilogy and her MaddAddam trilogy, as well as a moving tribute to Rachel Carson, calling her “a pivotal figure of the twentieth century” and “Saint Rachel.”

Another theme that threads through this collection is the way autocracies try to silence writers and control women. She has been a force in founding Pen Canada and acted as its president in the 1980s. In “If We Don’t Defend Free Speech, We Live in Tyranny” she writes about the attack on Salman Rushdie and the murder of translator Hotoshi Igarashi. In another piece she states that “There is nothing that repressive governments desire more than imposed silence . . . secrecy is an important tool not only of power but of atrocity.”

She generously continues to write about The Handmaid’s Tale, noting that “absolutist governments have always taken an inordinate interest in the reproductive capabilities of women.” She adds that writing a dystopia from a woman’s point of view “does not make The Handmaid’s Tale a ‘feminist dystopia,’ except insofar as giving a woman a voice and an inner life will always be considered ‘feminist’ by those who think women ought not to have these things.”

These pieces are not all darkness with a glimmer of wit. In “Literature and the Environment” she writes that “as long as we have hope—and we still do have hope—we will be telling stories, and—if we have the time and the materials—we’ll be setting them down; because the telling of stories, and the wish to listen to them, transmit them, and derive meaning from them, is built into us as human beings.”

Indeed, the pieces I most appreciated were about how essential the arts are to our well-being and about writing in particular. Parsing out her approach to these short pieces taught me so much about her methodology. Often she starts with a clear statement of purpose: “I’ll divide my talk into three parts, and I’ll even tell you what they are, just so you know what’s coming.” That’s from a speech honoring the Department of Forestry’s centennial. I’m touched by how, despite her blockbuster status, she’s willing to turn up and speak at so many events.

After the statement of purpose, she wanders here and there in the best tradition of essay-writing. She includes asides, rhetorical questions, digressions, allusions. She explores the question without answering it, instead opening our minds—gently and respectfully. I also especially appreciated the pieces about other authors and about her late husband, author Graeme Gibson: both joyful moments and mor trying times as he drifted deeper into dementia.

While some readers may be unnerved by this collection’s length, diversity, and chronological structure (rather than thematic), I found it a joy to read. Most of the pieces are quite short, making it a perfect bedtime book: you can read a few pieces and chuckle at her quips before you turn out the light.

I’m grateful to Atwood for collecting these pieces—no small task—and putting them out for us to absorb. In fact, for a more global understanding of the issues facing us, their interconnectedness, and how we can move forward, this book cannot be beat.

What have you read by Margaret Atwood? Her novels, poems, and/or essays?

Vesper Flights, by Helen MacDonald

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The author of the exquisite and deeply moving memoir H Is for Hawk returns with this collection of essays. She compares them to the objects you might find in an 18th-century cabinet of curiosities, a Wunderkammer, where objects of many sorts from the natural world are displayed so that their strangeness and accidental proximity might inspire wonder and perhaps prompt a larger discussion.

Like the best sort of host, MacDonald opens the doors on these wonders and then lets us make of them what we will. There’s no lecturing. Although she is a presence in the book, it is not about her. Instead, her evocative prose bears witness to these marvels, inviting us to experience them ourselves.

The essays range around the world and into varied environments: from fields and forests to volcanos and the Empire State Building. As MacDonald tells us about wild boars, boxing hares, and several sorts of birds, she encourages us to see the natural world as something other than a reflection of ourselves.  “What science does is what I would like more literature to do too: show us that we are living in an exquisitely complicated world that is not all about us. It does not belong to us alone. It never has.” We are introduced to animals and birds as sentient beings in their own right, with their own needs and wants.

Another theme that runs through these essays is the effect of the loss of habitat on these creatures: those we have lost, such as the wood warblers, and the adaptions some have made, such as the peregrine falcons nesting on the decommissioned power chimneys of the Poolbeg Power Station in Ireland.

For much of the 20th century, falcons were celebrated as romantic icons of threatened wilderness. The mountains and waterfall gorges where they chose to nest were sublime sites, where visitors could contemplate nature and meditate on the brevity of human existence. But there’s a romanticism to industrial sites too. The rusting chimneys and broken windows of the Poolbeg site have their own troubling beauty, that of things that have outlasted their use. Falcons haunt landscapes that speak to us of mortality, mountains by virtue of their eternity, industrial ruins by virtue of their reminding us that this too will in time be gone and that we should protect what is here and now.

Although she deplores the idea that the natural world should be preserved because we humans find it useful in lifting our moods or teaching us about ourselves, insisting instead that it has its own right to exist independently of us, she is not averse to showing how we benefit. She says, “At times of difficulty, watching birds ushers you into a different world, where no words need be spoken. And if you were watching urban falcons, this is not a distant world but one alongside you, a place of transient and graceful refuge.”

Among my favorite parts is the titular essay, which is about chimney swifts and their still mysterious ascent. Twice a day, at dusk and dawn, they fly up out of human sight, where “flying so high they can work out exactly where they are, to know what they should do next. They’re quietly, perfectly orienting themselves.” Another thing I learned is that “Unlike other birds, they never descend to the ground.” Now, when I walk in the evening and see the swifts whirling above, her words speak to me: “Swifts are magical in the manner of all things that exist just a little beyond understanding.”

Another, related theme in these essays is loss: the lost paradises of youth, the chestnut and elm trees that once graced our streets, the extinction or near-extinction of many species. This spring I was thrilled to hear a cuckoo while walking in England, where their population has dramatically declined. She says:

Increasingly, knowing your surroundings, recognising the species of animals and plants around you, means opening yourself to constant grief.

And:

Their loss is not about us, even though when that meadow disappeared, part of me disappeared, too, or rather, passed from existence into a memory that even now batters inside my chest. Look, I can’t say to anyone. Look at the beauty here. Look at everything that is. I can only write about what it was.

Yet there is hope here as well, and treasures to embrace. Even her “Eulogy” for her friend Stu is filled with peace and hope along with the sadness, its ending giving me goosebumps just remembering it.

I keep thinking I’ve finished this book, yet find myself coming back again and again to this essay or that one. I love the way she communicates the “qualitative texture of the world” and opens for me some of its wonders.

What essay or book have you read that reminded you of the wonders of the natural world?

The Stranger in the Woods, by Michael Finkel

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Subtitled The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit, this nonfiction book introduces us to Chris Knight, a man who spent 27 years living alone in a tent in the Maine woods. Not alone the way Thoreau was at Walden Pond, where he entertained guests and took his laundry home to his mother, but truly alone. In all that time, the only word Knight uttered to another person was a gruff Hi to a hiker he ran into.

Obsessed with avoiding discovery, or even another chance encounter, he never built a fire or walked in the woods when there was snow on the ground. When the ground was dry, he knew the woods so well that he could move through them without making a sound or leaving a sign.

In researching this book, Finkel sets out to answer the questions we can’t help but ask: Why would he choose such a life? How did he survive the winters in just a tent? What about food, medicine, etc.? No matter how much you cut back on that etcetera, you surely need a sharp knife, a candle or lantern, clothes to replace those that wear out.

We learn, often in his own words, how Chris broke into nearby cabins to steal food, clothing, reading material, and other things—only dire necessities and only cabins that didn’t have year-round occupants. People in the area told stories about the North Pond hermit, and it was during a theft that he was finally arrested.

Wondering why anyone would choose such a hard path, Finkel delves into the lives of solitaries, from the Desert Fathers and anchorites to solitary confinement in prisons. He reviews current thinking about the autism spectrum and goes further to consult scientists about a physical component.

One’s desire to be alone, biologists have found, is partially genetic and to some degree measurable. If you have low levels of the pituitary peptide oxytocin, sometimes called the master chemical of sociability, and high quantities of the hormone vasopressin, which may suppress your need for affection, you tend to require fewer interpersonal relationships.

Nurture always goes hand in hand with nature, and we learn that Chris’s family was compulsively private, living off the grid and having only minimal contact with neighbors. When 20-year-old Chris disappeared, driving away from his first and only job (one that he’d only barely begun), they didn’t report him missing or try to find him.

Finkel interviews Chris in jail and exchanges letters with him, thus giving us first-person accounts of Chris’s life in the woods. I can only imagine, having worked in one, how awful jail must have been for this man who had lived in silence (aside from natural sounds) for 27 years.

It’s a fascinating story, and one ripe for discussion. Was Chris lucky to be arrested before he aged to the point where he could no longer manage his survival? He was already slowing down. While he never took much, Chris’s thefts scared people and invaded their privacy; only once he was arrested did they return to not locking their doors. And what about Finkel himself? His pursuit of Chris in the face of the man’s reluctance to talk or meet with him borders on stalking. Or does it cross over? Is it okay because he’s brought us this incredible story?

While privacy ranks high on my list of moral imperatives, I have to admit that I’m grateful to know this much of Chris’s story. I make time to be alone, preferably among the trees, when I can. I’ve lived in a tent in the New England woods, though in a shelter with a wood stove in the winter. I would never do what he did, but a part of me understands it.

It’s possible that Knight believed he was one of the few sane people left. He was confounded by the idea that passing the prime of your life in a cubicle, spending hours a day at a computer, in exchange for money, was considered acceptable, but relaxing in a tent in the woods was disturbed. Observing the trees was indolent; cutting them down was enterprising. What did Knight do for a living? He lived for a living.

Have you read a story—fiction or nonfiction—about someone who has turned their back on society?

A Dog in the Fight, by William Davies

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Instead of a book, this week I want to talk about an essay-length book review that has helped me understand some of the cultural trends that have mystified me. William Davies’s review of A Fan’s Life: The Agony of Victory and the Thrill of Defeat, by Paul Campos, was published in the 18 May 2023 issue of the London Review of Books.

Using football, American for the author and British for the reviewer, both dig into what it means to be a fan. While referees and judges in and out of the sports world are expected to be fair and objective, not favoring one side over another, Davies says fans “make no pretence of balance or reason. They are drunk on irrationality and obstinacy, hurling themselves after the fortunes of their chosen team, band, TV show or celebrity.”

Where it gets interesting for me is this quote from Campos: “While sports allegiances can be seen as a sublimated form of politics, political allegiances can also be understood as a form of sublimated fandom.” Some politicians have supporters who weigh a candidate’s positions on issues, proposed solutions, and their character in order to choose the person most appropriate to represent them, while other politicians have fans who don’t care how illogical or offensive the politician’s statements are.

Davies also discusses how the internet has emphasised fandom:

Once there is sufficient space for every opinion and claim to be published, what need is there for anyone to be looking down on them from a position of assumed disinterest? Fandom can become the norm instead. The internet is less a ‘marketplace of ideas’ (as conservatives and libertarians would have it) and more a ‘marketplace of passions’.

This has significant knock-on effects for the rest of the media, especially the liberal media that once sought to distinguish themselves in terms of their commitment to facts, neutrality and critical distance – values which, in a public sphere awash with fandom, can appear both technically unnecessary and culturally haughty.

As quoted in the review, Campos offers the surprising insight that “‘Sports are a form of entertainment, but deep engagement, which makes the entire sports branch of the entertainment industrial complex viable, is not about entertainment at all: it is about suffering.’” True fans stick by their team no matter how rarely they win; the nostalgia for its few successes is “integral to fan identity.”

Davies discusses “the growing difficulty Americans – especially American men – have in distinguishing ‘life’ from ‘sport’.” The concentration on men and masculinity in both the review and the book is interesting. Certainly, sports are an arena where even the most repressed men feel free to express emotion, but I think there’s plenty here that is applicable to women as well.

The review goes deeper into the connection between sports, politics and fandom, and how in politics and sports, the participation of the middle class in this kind of obsessive fandom can be traced back to a shift from snobby dismissal of the working class to wanting to join it and the subsequent flood of money into sports. Davies calls it an

embourgeoisement of the game. While middle-class men began dressing like working-class football fans, top-tier football was flooded with Rupert Murdoch’s money and the glamorous Italian players it was used to recruit – this was the beginning of the long investment wave that led to today’s multi-billion-pound industry. ‘To have been sports fans over the past few decades,’ Campos writes, ‘is to have witnessed how our passions have been identified, catalogued and then exploited by the relentless engines of hypercapitalism, in its insatiable pursuit of ever-greater profits.’

Lots here to consider in the mix of sports, politics, journalism, and capitalism.

What are you a fan of?

A Fever in the Heartland, by Timothy Egan

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I thought I knew pretty much about the Klan’s history. I knew that it was originally formed in the 1860s by Confederate veterans and tapered out a few years later. I knew that it surged back following the release of the blatantly racist film Birth of a Nation in 1915. But I had no idea how huge it became in the 1920s.

Egan tells a captivating story of D. C. Stephenson, a conman originally from Texas, who appeared in Evansville, Indiana in 1922 and, with no qualifications, set out to take over the state and eventually the White House. How? By appealing to the fears of ordinary white folks, stoking their anxiety about change and blaming their problems on Blacks, Jews, Catholics, and immigrants. The solution, he told them, the way back to that mythical, golden past was to enforce white supremacy.

“These were the people who held their communities together. They were not the criminal element, they were not the psychopaths, sickos and all that.” However, “A vein of hatred was always there for the tapping.”

Stephenson was thoroughly repellent. A cheater and serial rapist who got off on beating up women, his power grew as he quickly rose to the top of the Klan. “Cops, judges, prosecutors, ministers, mayors, newspaper editors—they all answered to the Grand Dragon . . . Most members of the incoming state legislature took orders from the hooded order, as did the majority of the congressional delegation.” Egan says, “The Klan owned the state and Stephenson owned the Klan.”

He became rich by taking a cut of membership dues and other schemes. He bribed pastors to tell their parishioners they must join the Klan. He lied to everyone. “He discovered that if he said something often enough, no matter how untrue, people would believe it. Small lies were for the timid.”

Within two years after his arrival in Evansville, he created a shadow government in the 1924 election. He controlled the General Assembly, the legislature, city halls, courthouses, police departments, and many protestant churches. And he had his army of 400,000 Hoosiers, loyal to the Klan and to Stephenson.

Egan is one of my favorite writers and this book does not disappoint. Vivid writing, solid research and a searing story made it a must-read for me. My only disappointment was that the subtitle—The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them—is misleading.

The woman is 28-year-old Madge Oberholtzer, an employee at the Statehouse, who was raped by Stephenson in 1925. More than raped, but I won’t repeat the details here. Her “dying declaration” finally persuaded a jury of White men in a Klan-dominated town to convict Stephenson and send him to prison. Humiliated Klansmen began to quietly pack up their robes.

So, yes, she took down the Klan but not in the derring-do way implied by the subtitle. I wonder if that was the publisher’s work.

If I had read this book before 2016, I would have struggled to believe it. Surely he must be exaggerating, I’d have thought. A few people, of course, but one in three men in a state? How could that many people be so filled with hate, so blindly loyal to such a disgusting man, and so cruel to others? How could so many judges, politicians, ministers be willing to betray their oaths?

Well, Egan doesn’t explicitly draw the parallels with today, but he doesn’t need to.

Now I’ve learned how dependent we humans are on our social tribe and how hard it is to go against them or question their mores. I’ve learned that people don’t want to admit they’ve been wrong—the sunk cost fallacy—or that they’ve been the dupes of a conman. I’ve learned that some churches are out to take over the country and remake it with religious instead of civil rules, just like the Taliban. And greed can outweigh integrity.

Now, I see it happening again. The military-wanna-bes are just sad, but they are only a small part of this wave. I admire the brave journalists, rabbis, and prosecutors who stood up to Stephenson, at great cost. Today we too must stand up to protect democracy here in the U.S. I hope Egan’s book is a great awakening.

Have you read any historical nonfiction that has helped you understand today’s plots to take over the U.S.?

On Interpretation

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The first theater class I took was Oral Interpretation taught by the inimitable Esther Smith. If you ask anyone who was lucky enough to know Miss Smith, I bet they would tell you about the profound influence she had on their lives. She certainly did on mine.

The class was on how to work up a part based on a written script, i.e., how to interpret the text and deliver it in a way that conveyed your interpretation. One of the first things she said to us was about the three components of communication. I don’t remember the exact words she used, but basically the originator, the thing itself (book, painting, spoken words, etc.), and the person receiving it.

As a writer, I think about this often. I have control over the first two, but not the third. As a reader, how I understand a story or poem depends on me alone. Well, me and my cache of experiences, cultural contexts, predilections, etc.

I know what kind of experience I intend my story or poem to create in a reader, but they may get something entirely different from it.

What brought the idea of art as communication to mind was a recent review by Thomas Meaney in the London Review of Books, Vol. 45 No. 4, of an exhibit of George Grosz’s work at the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart.

It actually was an illustration that struck me: Grosz’s Tatlinesque Diagram. You can see a reproduction of it here.

The description by Paloma Alarcó on the website of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, says that the woman is a prostitute, based on her connection to another collage, and says that the collage simply represents contemporary people of various sorts. The title refers to Vladimir Tatlin, a Russian and Ukrainian artist and architect who famously designed The Monument to the Third International, also known as Tatlin’s Tower.

Indeed, in his review Meaney quotes this artist statement from Grosz’s autobiography: “My drawings had no purpose, they were just to show how ridiculous and grotesque the busy cocksure little ants were in the world surrounding me.” Meaney does not mention the Tatlinesque Diagram in the review but does describe “Grosz’s great theme – the domestic horror show of bourgeoisie.”

The collage says something quite different to me. The first thing I noticed was the walking man’s turned head. I thought it clever the way his larger head continued facing forward, while a tiny head inside is turned to fix on a photo of a naked woman. A woman in the foreground has just passed him. She, too, is naked, though wearing a hat, a ribbon around her neck and thigh-high stockings. She’s furtively glancing back at the man who just passed her. We see a grinning man approaching her, his head shown in outline like that of the larger head of the other man. We are left to imagine what his inner head is doing.

What struck me immediately was how accurately this collage depicts the way it feels, as a woman, in a public space where men are also looking at depictions of naked women. It might be a calendar on the wall or something on a computer screen or even a cartoon. No matter how fully clothed you are, you immediately feel naked.

It doesn’t matter if that’s what Grosz intended or if he just meant to depict the world around him. That’s what the collage conveys to me.

The writing life is one full of rejections. I try to remember how subjective the reader’s opinion is. We all bring different experiences and mindsets to what we read. The first piece of mine that won an award is a good example. In the same envelope with a letter saying the piece had won first prize (yay!) was the critique I had paid extra for—obviously written by someone else—saying it was one of the worst pieces they’d read, and that I should take an introduction to creative writing course.

All we can do as a writer, actor, or artists, is create as best we can and put it out there in the world. Sometimes a reader will actually see something in a story or poem that I didn’t intend but am delighted to have pointed out to me. Here are two quotes from authors, responding to a request from a student as to whether that ever happened to them:

Ralph Ellison: “Yes, readers often infer that there is symbolism in my work, which I do not intend. My reaction is sometimes annoyance. It is sometimes humorous. It is sometimes even pleasant, indicating that the reader’s mind has collaborated in a creative way with what I have written.”

Joseph Heller: “This happens often, and in every case there is good reason for the inference; in many cases, I have been able to learn something about my own book, for readers have seen much in the book that is there, although I was not aware of it being there.”

Has something you’ve created ever been understood by others in a way you didn’t intend?

Circle of Quiet, by Madeleine L’Engle

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Memoirs come in many different forms. Some tell a chronological story, while others center around a theme. Some experiment with different structures. First published in 1972, this first in a series of memoirs by the author of A Wrinkle in Time and other beloved stories is more of a meditation, inviting us to explore with her, follow her thoughts, and see where they take us.

In the process, L’Engle gives us the kaleidoscope of her life at 51: spouse, parent, writer, teacher, choir director, member of communities large and small.

Many of her reflections are about writing in general, and specifically writing for children. She’s forthright about her years of rejections and how she felt about them. Invited to teach, she maintains that writing cannot be taught, but you can teach particular tools. Of course, she learns as much as she teaches, classroom discussions leading to new ideas.

She also defends children’s literature: its enduring appeal, its benefits for children and adults, and its literary quality.

L’Engle notes that “the concentration of a small child at play is analogous to the concentration of the artist of any discipline.” In those moments, we are not conscious of ourselves, not self-conscious. She goes on to say: “Detachment and involvement: The artist must have both. The link between them is compassion.”

At one point she says that “An author is responsible for his characters in much the same way that a parent is for his children, or a teacher for his students.” I think she means a moral responsibility, but it is still a concept that I’ve been turning over in my mind.

She speaks of her family’s years in New York City, and even more the years at Crosswicks, their rambling summer home in a small Connecticut town where at times four generations of her family live under one roof. There is much about community, and the peculiar interrelationship of people in such a small village, such as being suspicious of newcomers but still turning out to help them when they are in need.

Her portrait of the U.S. in the 1960s—the time period of this memoir—sometimes distracted me, sending my mind off into my own memories of those years. Hearing how someone the age of my parents viewed the happenings of that turbulent time sent me back to my own memories, turning them into new patterns.

She doesn’t shy away from the big subjects, such as faith, marriage, family, what might constitute a meaningful life. Still, it is her thoughts on writing that most resonate for me.

I am often, in my writing, great leaps ahead of where I am in my thinking, and my thinking has to work its way slowly up to what the “superconscious” has already shown me in a story or poem. Facing this does help to eradicate do-it-yourself hubris from an artist’s attitude towards his painting or music or writing. My characters pull me, push me, take me further than I want to go, fling open doors to rooms I don’t want to enter, throw me out into interstellar space, and all this long before my mind is ready for it.

The title comes from her need to retreat sometimes to her “circle of quiet,” a particular place at Crosswicks. We all need such a place, one where we can be our true selves. If you want a rest from the trauma Olympics of many memoirs on the market, try these reflections from a writer whose work you may know very well.

Do you have a “circle of quiet,” a place that is peculiarly your own?

A Spy Among Friends, by Ben Macintyre

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I thought I knew a lot about Kim Philby, the infamous Third Man of Cold War-era Britain. In 1951, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, two of Philby’s friends from university, were exposed as Russian spies, but were tipped off in time to escape to the USSR. At the time, and for years afterward, there were rumors of a third spy, a mole in England’s security service.

Macintyre’s astonishing account of Philby’s life, how he operated as a spy, and especially how he continued to escape detection until 1963, shows me how much more there is to the story. With penetrating insight, voluminous research, and access to newly opened files, Macintyre has fashioned an absorbing nonfictional narrative that helps us understand the man himself and the milieu in which he operated.

The title refers to E. M. Forster’s famous statement: “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” Forster spoke for a certain segment of English society. A generation later, it is the key to Philby’s choices: He gave his first loyalty to his true friends, the four schoolmates who, together with him, became known as the Cambridge spies.

Many people believed themselves to be Philby’s friends; however, extracts from his writings show what he really thought of them, even as he pretended to value them. Philby beguiled everyone he met.

The word most consistently used to describe Kim Philby was ‘charm,’ that intoxicating, beguiling, and occasionally lethal English quality. Philby could inspire and convey affection with such ease that few ever noticed they were being charmed. Male and female, old and young, rich and poor, Kim enveloped them all. He looked out at the world with alert, gentle blue eyes from under an unruly forelock. His manners were exceptional: he was always the first to offer you a drink, to ask after your sick mother and remember your children’s names. He loved to laugh, and he loved to drink – and to listen, with deep sincerity and rapt curiosity.

He was “the right sort,” a member of the tribe of Eton-educated, cricket-loving Englishmen who populated MI6—and other institutions—in class-conscious England. For such a person there was no need to inquire into their references, their past, or even their competence.

Part of what makes this book so fascinating is Macintyre’s portrayal of the competing cultures in the nascent security organisations of the time: MI6’s old-boy bonhomie, MI5’s mistrust of their rival’s upper-class blindness, the newly-formed CIA’s respect for their predecessor.

No one was more taken in than Nicholas Elliot, also of MI6. Over the thirty years that the two men worked and socialised together, Elliot never suspected that everything he shared with Philby went straight to the KGB. When the evidence finally mounted to a point in 1963 where MI6 could no longer deny the truth, they sent Elliot to debrief the man he had considered his best friend.

Using the transcript of that conversation, Macintyre fashions a stunning conclusion to this book, decoding the seemingly innocuous dialogue. A lengthy afterword by John le Carré includes his own memories of Elliot and the other players.

Subtitled Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, this is a story that shows the human impact of these political intrigues. James Angleton, head of counter-intelligence for the CIA, also counted Philby as a friend. Macintyre’s description of the effect of Philby’s betrayal on Angleton stands in contrast to the Great Game, the name for the 19th century rivalry between Britain and Russia. Coincidentally, the term was popularised by Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, also the source of Harold Adrian Russell Philby’s nickname.

By immersing us in the moves and countermoves of individuals during the Cold War, Macintyre helps us see how it can come to seem like a game, and how it can become an addiction for men like Philby, Elliot, and Angleton. Then he shows us how the game plays out. Brilliant.

What nonfiction books have you read that are as absorbing as a novel?

Best Books I Read in 2022

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As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. In no particular order, these are the ten best books I read in 2022. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of those I’ve reviewed.

1. The Wall, by Marlen Haushofer
The narrator wakes from a nap to find herself alone. She’s visiting family members at their hunting lodge on the edge of the Alps, and they have gone into town, leaving her with their dog Lynx. She walks down the road to meet them, but both she and the dog run into an invisible wall that separates them from the rest of the world. This journal of her solitary life in the years that follow is stunning.

2. Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell
O’Farrell’s tour de force focuses on Agnes, Hamnet’s mother, Shakespeare’s wife, and in so doing immerses us in the day-to-day experience of raising children and managing a household in Elizabethan England. What makes this novel so stunning is the author’s evocation of the details of each scene. It is a powerful reading experience that gives us insight into Shakespeare’s work, but even more into the lives of the many women who loved, married, and bore children in obscurity.

3. Generations: A Memoir, by Lucille Clifton
Lucille Clifton is one of my favorite poets and a huge influence on my writing. In this memoir, originally published in 1976 and now a new edition from New York Review Books, she brings a poet’s sensibility to crafting her story. The chapters, while prose, in their brevity exhibit the conciseness of poetry; anything not absolutely necessary is pared away, leaving the kernel. And you, the reader, bring your own understanding and experience to fill in the spaces.

4. Memorial Drive, by Natasha Trethewey
Trethewey is another of my favorite poets, so I looked forward to reading her memoir. Not needing to know anything more than the author’s name, I plunged in, only to emerge finally, astonished and awed. With a poet’s concision and musicality, she conjures her rural Southern childhood. Trethewey’s voice is quiet—quiet as Black women’s voices have had to be. Yet with all that, her voice carries the emotions held in check by her composure, a tribute to the author’s exquisite use of language. She has created a moving exploration of memory and of how we manage, or fail to manage, our painful past.

5. Migrations, by Charlotte McConaghy
Arriving in Greenland with only her research gear, Franny Stone is determined to study the last of the Arctic terns. She says that even though her expedition has been canceled, she intends to follow the terns on what will be their final migration to Antarctica. The book is set in the near future when climate change has wiped out most birds, fish, and animals. Although disapointing at times, this profound story is worth your attention.

6. The Tradition, by Jericho Brown
I am astonished by these poems, the power and sheer artistry of them. They are personal and political, specific and universal. Brown deploys the tools of poetry—enjambment, white space, personification—boldly. Some of the poems take up hardly any space, lines only two or three words long. Yet even with that limitation they are remarkable, the fragmentation creating a rhythm in counterpoint to and with the rhythm of the words. He also creates his own tools, complex forms that defy gravity.

7. The Crane Wife, by CJ Hauser
This book of essays, anchored by the superb title essay, is about the stories we tell ourselves about our lives and about who we are. Hauser balances personal stories with those of others, sometimes her friends, sometimes writers or their characters, sometimes the natural world.

8. The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson
From 1915 to 1970 almost six million Black citizens left the south for northern and western cities looking for better lives. For the first time Wilkerson’s monumental book gives us a history of the Great Migration. The book is long but eminently readable, due to Wilkerson’s approach. By closely following stories of three individuals, she captures the reader’s attention and sympathy and keeps us turning pages.

9. Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler
This 1993 novel begins in the then-distant future of 2024, which startled me at first. Due to her mother’s drug abuse while pregnant, teenager Lauren Olamina actually feels all the sensations she witnesses in others. She calls it “sharing” and finds it a liability in her world, a dreadful world that is only too likely how things will turn out here, given the trends already present in the 1990s and only worse today. A brilliant story of one woman’s journey.

10. Miss Benson’s Beetle, by Rachel Joyce
London in 1950 is still recovering from World War II, with food rationed, ruined buildings being cleared, another generation of men wiped out, and women chucked out of their wartime jobs. Middle-aged spinster Margery Benson finally cracks and quits her job teaching domestic science in an elementary school with out-of-control children. She decides to set out on the adventure of a lifetime: an expedition to New Caledonia to find a mythical golden beetle. So much fun!

What were the best books you read in 2022?