Spring reads

Madhuri’s short reviews of books by Jeffrey M. Schwartz, Lucy Cooke, Eva Petulengro, Celia Imrie, Tess Stevens, Catherine Cookson, Annabelle Forest, and Nancy Horan

Brain Lock
Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior
A Four-Step Self-Treatment to Change Your Brain Chemistry
by Jeffrey M. Schwartz, MD, with Beverly BeyetteI wish this book had existed when I was 18 or 19 and suffering the fires of hell – but I never heard the term OCD then, and nobody I spoke with had any idea what was going on with me. Even therapists basically just shrugged, and boyfriends were disgusted and baffled. The author runs (or ran – the book is from 1996) a program at UCLA. OCD sufferers were put in MRI scans and it was discovered that it’s caused by a brain glitch – genetic – and is often accompanied by a tic (which I also have).

Apparently OCD people make great patients and the disorder responds beautifully to behavioural therapy without meds. I wish I had known all this! So much shame and wretchedness, until I somehow stumbled on the idea that I also had some rights and did not have to listen to the bully telling me to do bizarre things. That popped the cork, and afterwards I was able to observe impulses without being drowned in helpless shame and compulsion.

I was helped immediately reading this book in that it said the brain leaks a dread-feeling into your system before the behaviour impulse takes over (and then repeats and doesn’t know how to stop). Immediately I began observing the random dread, and watched it rise up, spread all over, then vanish. No need to do anything! Just a bodily sensation, soon passing.

The book lays out the program of treatment – which has a lot to do with finding the wisdom and courage to ignore the bizarre compulsions – and is extremely clear and optimistic. Quite a few case histories. A valuable book!

Life in the Sloth Lane
Slow Down and Smell the Hibiscus
by Lucy Cooke

I got this book because I’d liked the author’s book Animal.

Turned out it’s a little picture book (with pithy texts) which I enjoyed because I have actually seen sloths, in Costa Rica. Their slowness is strange to witness; most mammals are very quick, including us of course. They seem to live a very different life than the rest of us. And they are quite mossy.

The Girl in the Painted Caravan
Memories of a Romany Childhood
by Eva Petulengro

A joyous book, by a Romany clairvoyant born in 1939. It’s mostly a hymn of praise of the way of life her people enjoyed before circumstances forced many of them to settle in the ‘gorger’ world. Chaotic, extravagant, singing and dancing, affectionate, nature-loving – that’s the picture she paints. Her dad was a white guy grafted into the Gypsy life, and it’s evident that he could never adjust to the fact that his wife and daughter were infinitely wiser than he was; they would foresee events and order a plan of action, he would refuse, they would persist… and they would prove right. He tried to control his wife by not letting her live near her family, also.

But otherwise a great time was had by most, and the author grew up to write a syndicated astrology column and read the palms of all and sundry, including 2 of the Beatles, and to marry the love of her life (not a Romany).

The book is enormously lively, and the photos are great – she came from a family of beautiful women, of which she is one. There’s an interesting and somewhat perplexing combination of great, self-respecting feistiness, and a certain subservience to the family males at the same time.

It’s basically a gentle, feel-good read.

Orphans of the Storm
by Celia Imrie

In 1911 a young mother in Nice, France, is trying to divorce her abusive husband. He runs off with the two little boys and books the three of them on to the Titanic, bound for New York. He uses a stolen passport, and he also has no idea how to look after children, and not much interest in it – he just wants to spite his wife. So that when the tots are thrown at the last freezing-cold minute into a lifeboat, one is naked, just wrapped in a ship’s blanket, the other wearing only a shirt.

A novelised version of a true story, this is a very competently-done tale, which gets more interesting as it goes along. I really got into it! The author is a well-known British actress who lives in Nice; both she and a friend who did the research had relatives who survived the shipwreck – in the same lifeboat. The characters were all well-drawn and convincing, and the action is believable and based in documentation – and made of the stuff of human life in many of its forms, from the banal, the happy, the reprieved, to the extremely colorful and scary.

A good, chewy read.

Sold
The true story of a little girl sold into a life of vice
by Tess Stevens

The cover doesn’t suit the book – the author is fat, freckled, ginger, and plain, as she keeps telling us. It’s a story of a manipulative, clever, unscrupulous mother who runs a brothel in post-war Croydon, near London, and keeps her 5 kids locked away whilst her parties are going on. Until she recruits the eldest daughter to help out.

The whole book takes place in the underworld of prostitution and petty theft, and it’s only interesting because of the thoughtful, quite clear-eyed efforts of the author to understand her mother and the relationship between them.

Lots happens, much, though not all, of it between consenting adults, so that we are revolted but not completely aghast on every page (well, the state of sex itself is cause for consternation, and prostitution adds a terrible weight to that. The young girl is traumatised forever by a few incidents, and that is icksome and bad enough). We learn a thing or two: “Some men can’t wait to get away from their families at Christmas, so it’s a busy time for working girls.”

I think what I found most interesting was the scenario of a large family house being used as a brothel and nobody noticing (the police were in the madam’s pocket) and the loose and flowing (and well-dressed) way things were done there. The mother was a force of nature. And then of course the tragedy is how the child is influenced forever, and goes on to perpetuate that life… until her partner (female) encourages her to write a book. It’s so good that people’s stories get to be told.

And it’s so sad that humans have lived for thousands of years and have still learned so very little about this basic thing – sex, and how it can be an opportunity for love too, if great awareness is brought to it. Making it mercantile misses the point a thousand percent. There seems to be a perpetual dogged helplessness and blindness about what is right under our noses.

The Upstart
by Catherine Cookson

Another excellent novel from this indefatigable writer. An extremely intelligent butler in a big house near Newcastle, during the first decade of the 1900s, falls in love with a daughter of the house. The dad, who is the upstart of the title, is a crass nouveau riche shoe store magnate. There’s a ne’er-do-well son, and all sorts of sparks fly.

For me, the book was like eating really good locally-grown food in a comfy pub before a fire. The dialect, the believability, the originality of the phrasing and the author’s single-minded intent – all act as a kind of tonic I can’t quite explain. 349 pages, and I liked it all.

The Devil on the Doorstep
My Escape from a Satanic Sex Cult
by Annabelle Forest

Reading this, I felt grateful that long ago we all switched to the Osho Zen Tarot decks and stopped using the Crowley one. Like going from dark to light. Anyway, here is a book about a creepy, sordid, dim-bulbed, bad-food-eating cult of Crowley-ites in Wales, at the mercy of the greasy, tall, one-toothed, paedophile, control-freak, word-salad-spouting boss man who started it. This icksome character managed to attract a small harem and regaled it with peculiar lore whist groping, prostituting, impregnating, ordering, the women; and any males around including his own sons, are persecuted. Gah.

Anyway, the woman who wrote this was dragged there at age 7 by an evil mom and spends the next 12 years having horrible things happen to her. Her story of breaking free is gripping and real. It was the protective, empowering hormones conferred by motherhood that gave her the courage, the strength, and the imperative to escape.

Yet another instance where a bad-breathed mini-tyrant runs rampant and one’s only hope is to trust one’s instincts – which she had been absolutely conditioned to ignore; and of course as a child she’d had no choice. Learning as an adult to trust those instincts was then incredibly challenging.

It’s a story clearly told, readable, gritty, and touching. It’s always good to be reminded to trust our gut – and to remember that kids are so very vulnerable.

Loving Frank
The scandal that rocked society and defied convention
by Nancy Horan

A fictionalised account of the love affair between the architect Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney, wife of a client. The author is a longtime resident of Oak Park, Illinois, where Wright and Cheney lived with their respective families (9 kids were impacted by their parents’ separations).

I was gripped by this book: it is intelligent, capable, detailed, and it does not try to answer any of the unanswerable questions posed by the story: how can a woman be both a mother, and her own person? Why does fate bring certain disasters at certain times?

Mamah was a brilliant woman with a Masters in languages. Her devotion to a Swedish feminist, Ellen Key, is part of the story; her travels to Europe and Japan with Frank; her inhabiting of Taliesin, the house Frank built for them in Wisconsin, as she tried to come to grips with her roles in the lives and work of both Key and Wright, and her own motherhood and personhood. The mires of the day meant she was hounded by paps, and Wright’s work suffered as he was for a time shunned.

What nothing prepared me for was the ending. I really enjoyed the leisurely intellectualism on architecture and feminism, and the leisurely pacing of travels and domesticity; but then suddenly a horrendous calamity erupts, and I so wished it hadn’t. Looked at Wikipedia after and yes, just as the author describes… So I feel a bit stunned and horrified still.

Featured image by Ben White on Unsplash

These reviews were first posted on Facebook by the author