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Sam van Zweden

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Review: Mama Mia by Mia Freedman

Having much respect for what Megan from Literary Life has to say, I took this book recommendation. Grudgingly, mind you. I shuffled off to the library in search of Mama Mia by Mia Freedman, the ex-editor of Cosmopolitan and editor-in-chief of a  jumble of other ACP magazines. She has also worked in television and written columns for newspapers, and now blogs.

I’m not particularly fond of women’s magazines like Cosmo and Cleo. I’m sure they’re great for some people, but for me, they just make me feel like being a woman is a game that I’m playing but I don’t know the rules for. Which is a pretty lousy way to feel. Once I got past needing Dolly and Girlfriend to guide me through puberty, I got those things out of my life. However, Mia Freedman’s Mama Mia was recommended to me as a book with countless insights to the publishing industry, so I thought I’d better give it a whirl.

It wasn’t exactly a revelation in terms of publishing tips and tricks – I’m not interested in going into women’s magazines, but in terms of dishing the dirt on big Australian names, Mia Freedman has done pretty well.

That’s not to reduce the book to a gossip-fest: far from it. Mama Mia is equal parts about Mia’s career, and her life outside of her career, as a mother and wife. It made me laugh out loud, multiple times. It made me cry. Like real, tears-down-the-cheeks crying. I didn’t expect that.

The book is brutally honest, from Mia going into labour screaming to everyone around her “I need to POOOOOOOOO!” (that was a laughing moment), to wondering over her ‘failure’ at keeping her baby alive (tears here), followed by years and years of IVF.

The ‘mothering’ part of the memoir talked to me a lot more than the ‘magazines’ – however, the ‘magazines’ parts weren’t uninteresting to me, and I was surprised to find that there was only one part of the book that I was shaking my head at. “No, no I just can’t relate to that” – Mia talked about how all women bond over clothes shopping. *spew*

The tone of the memoir is conversational, and perhaps this is why there was only this one point that I felt I wasn’t a part of.

Mia Freedman has lived a life very memoir-worthy, and she’s written a book which speaks to readers as if they’re her friends. It’s honest, it’s funny, it’s heartbreaking, it’s accessible.

Overall, it’s pretty great.

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Teaser Tuesday

Teaser Tuesday is hosted by MizB at Should Be Reading.

  • Grab your current read.
  • Let the book fall open to a random page.
  • Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page.
  •  You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!

“We didn’t know what endorphins were but we quickly understood how narcotic the feeling was, and how addictive it became; from day one I was stoned from just watching. We talked about skill and courage and luck – we shared all that, and in time we surfed to fool with death – but for me there was still the outlaw feeling of doing something graceful, as if dancing on water was the best and bravest thing a man could do.”
From Breath by Tim Winton

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Comment July Challenge – Week 2 Highlights, and Used Book Woes

I’ve been a little slack this week. One day I only did three comments. Another day I did none at all… But that means there have still been 27 comments besides. Here’s a list of some of my favourites – articles, not comments.

“Book Launch: After America by John Birmingham, Ariel Books Paddington” on With Extra Pulp gives the usual personal twist to a literary event – a great read.

“My ideal writing desk” by Shari Green shares some of Shari’s ideas about the perfect place to write – I want the driftwood desk!

Steph Bowe’s “The Road to Publication”: talks about publication as part of a journey instead of an end-point.

Jenna Sten’s “Erotic Fan Fiction at the Wheeler Centre” on Virgule covers an event I went to this week but was too lazy to blog about – Jenna did it better than I would have anyway!

Ella’s “PHUN” on Cellophane Teeth celebrates some fantastic film trailers. My favourite is the dancing from Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

In other news, I’ve spent today book-shopping. I now have all my schoolbooks for next semester, apart from two. One of them is on order to be picked up Friday, the other… The other is just about impossible. “Beloved” by Toni Morrison is not available in Kill City Books, that used-book-shop on Flinders St with the yellow signage, General & Academic Books on Swanston, Tim’s Book Shop in Kew, Borders, Dymocks, Readers Feast, or Angus & Robertson.

Semester 2, 2010 school books

After returning home and having a Facebook status-whinge, I had a chat with the ever helpful Keith Redgen from Bluebird Books and Records, who is supplying me with the book I need, as well as a copy of a very hard-to-find book for a friend. If ever you get stuck, Keith’s got it 90% of the time.

It’s been a long day… I think I need to curl up with a good book!

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Teaser Tuesday

Teaser Tuesday is hosted by MizB at Should Be Reading.

  • Grab your current read.
  • Let the book fall open to a random page.
  • Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page.
  •  You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!

” ‘You can promise to be as sweet as you want, but picture this: the future is a hospital, packed with sick people, packed with hurt people, people on stretchers in the halls, and suddenly the lights go out, the water shuts off, and you know in your heart that they’re never coming back on. That’s the future.’ ”

From Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming (p22).

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What Alice Forgot Review

Sometimes you fall out with people. You don’t choose to, but you drift apart and eventually one day they’re not there any more.

When you talk to people about it you say, “Oh, they’ve changed.”

Only, they haven’t. Or they have, but you have too. We all change, and it’s so gradual that we don’t really notice.

Liane Moriarty’s What Alice Forgot looks at this idea.

Thirty-nine year old Alice Love goes to the gym and has a fall. When she wakes up she believes she is 29, pregnant, and still madly in love with her husband Nick. Not only is she not pregnant, but she now has three children and is on the verge of divorcing Nick.

There are flowers from another man in Alice’s bedroom. There’s a mysterious card in her bag from another unknown man who talks about “happier times”. Alice’s eldest child is an absolute monster, far from the harmless “Sultana” she harboured in her belly ten years prior to her accident. Alice Love is now in utterly unknown territory. And she’s horrified to find out that the 39-year-old Alice Love is an absolute bitch: not someone she likes at all!

This story is nicely told, with the narrative shifting between three points of view. One is a third-person subjective point of view from Alice, another is Alice’s sister’s therapy journal, and the third is the utterly endearing blog kept by Alice’s grandmother. While having three points of view in the story has the potential to go awfully wrong, Liane Moriarty has executed this beautifully. 

The story gripping, showing the reader peeks of the life that Alice has forgotten, masterful in its release of information. 

Liane has written a novel that falls through your hands like grains of sand – I thought “yes, just one more chapter”…”just one more!”…each night that I sat up reading it, and chewed though the entire thing in 3 sittings.

It takes a lot for a book to make me cry. But this one did.

It also made me think for a long time afterwards about the ways people change, and I wonder what myself five years ago would think of myself now?

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Neon Pilgrim Review

I’m officially on holidays, so I’m finally munching through some of the “to-be-read” pile. The first thing I picked up off that pile was Neon Pilgrim by Lisa Dempster, which I bought from the EWF Page Parlour a few weeks ago.

I should probably flag it here that I interviewed Lisa for Yartz just before the Emerging Writers’ Festival, and she seemed absolutely lovely. I’ve also been following her blogging for a while, so I went into this book with an already reasonably good opinion of Lisa and what she’s been up to. I have to say though, that this book boosted that by about a hundred percent.

Neon Pilgrim is about Lisa’s journey along the henro michi – a back-breaking trek, 1200 kilometres through Japanese mountains, all the way around Shikoku. No small effort.

I’ve never really read travel books before. Something about the term “travel literature” puts me off – I imagine middle-aged intellectuals relaying things like “the rich history” of countries with Western histories much older than Australia’s… While it’s all very interesting, it’s not something I’m keen on dedicating myself to for a whole book. And I’m sure this isn’t even what travel literature entails. It’s just what my mind has made it.

When I heard about Neon Pilgrim though, I felt like this might be something I could relate to, and get something out of reading. When Lisa started the journey, she was a 28 year-old, overweight and very depressed. Having visited Japan as a student, she had heard about the henro michi, and decided that this was what she needed to pull her out of depression.

The pilgrimage is said to be enlightening, each henro (pilgrim) is accompanied by the spirit of Kobo-Daishi, who the walk is done in honour of. The Japanese who inhabit Shikoku believe that by giving settai (gifts) to pilgrims, they too honour the spirit of Kobo-Daishi even though they cannot do the trek. So the journey itself is a respected thing, and pilgrims are helped out a great deal by those who live in the towns and cities that the henro michi passes through.

The book is written simply, there’s no complicated jargon or assumed prior knowledge of Japan or its rituals. The book includes a glossary of Japanese terms used in the book, but most of the time it isn’t needed, as Lisa makes meanings very clear.

Along the way there are fantastic crazy old men, deeply respected veterans who have done the pilgrimage hundreds of times, and kind people Lisa’s own age, who are all doing the pilgrimage for different reasons. There are bears, and spiders, and blisters. Every story along the way has its place, and the pilgrimage becomes a mesh of encounters and problems to negotiate.

I won’t say that the prose is amazing. It’s good – very funny at times, and at others you can really feel Lisa’s frustration. But I wouldn’t call it artful. Artful prose isn’t what this book is about though.

There’s an old Taoist saying, that “the journey is the reward” – while Lisa’s fitness improves, and she meets some wonderful people along the henro michi, the reward in terms of escaping depression is less tangible. I think this is one of the things I loved about the book – Lisa proves to herself that she can still get out of herself and tackle the world, but along the way she still hits that brick wall many times. She doubts herself – in fact, it’s not until temple 76 that she actually thinks that perhaps she will actually reach the end. At certain times in the journey the only way forward is to “step. Step. Step”. And I think this is how it is, and how it’s meant to be – getting through tough things like depression is like that, it’s not “cure!” and then everything’s great. It’s just one foot in front of the other.

At the end of the book there is no definitive ending. Yes – Lisa makes it to the end. But it’s only the end of the henro michi – the start of something much bigger. And I didn’t even find the open ending frustrating, I found it incredibly hopeful. While I know I probably won’t do a trek like this, I have taken a lot from the “Step. Step. Step.” attitude and the idea that accomplishing something is not the end.

Lisa Dempster, the smiley lady you will see at many a literary event, has walked 1200 kilometers and slept in some very crazy places. She has gone through some absolutely insane shit – go shake her hand next time you see her. Or go read Neon Pilgrim. Or both.

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Teaser Tuesday

Ladies and gents, I’m back in action! Today I handed in my final essay for the semester, and now I officially have four and a half weeks of holidays! And I have big plans. There will be blogging. There will be lots of catching up on the reading I miss out on during the semester – my to-be-read pile has grown into some absurd piece of architecture. I have plans to get a new project thing happening via this blog also, so look out for that during the next few weeks.

For now though, it’s Teaser Tuesday!

Teaser Tuesday is hosted by MizB at Should Be Reading.

  • Grab your current read.
  • Let the book fall open to a random page.
  • Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page.
  •  You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!

“It was seventy-five kilometres away, one of the longest distances between temples anywhere on the pilgrimage, and the walk had a reputation for being awful; supposedly it was the place where the majority of walkers drop out and return home. After my night at Saba-daishi, I began walking alongside the famously wretched Highway 55.”

From Neon Pilgrim by Lisa Dempster.

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Teaser Tuesday

Teaser Tuesday is hosted by MizB at Should Be Reading.

  • Grab your current read.
  • Let the book fall open to a random page.
  • Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page.
  •  You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!

“As she kept talking, the paramedics manoeuvred the stretcher into the lift and pressed the button for the ground floor. The doors slid shut on the woman lifting a pretend phone to her ear just like the treadmill guy, while at the same time a voice called out, ‘Is that Alice Love I just saw on that stretcher?’ ”

From What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty.

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Teaser Tuesday

Teaser Tuesday is hosted by MizB at Should Be Reading.

  • Grab your current read.
  • Let the book fall open to a random page.
  • Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page.
  •  You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!

  • “Although I told myself I was looking merely for a soothing presence, a glorified pot-au-feu, an animated merkin, what really attracted me to Valeria was the imitation she gave of a little girl. She gave it not because she had divined something about me; it was just her style – and I fell for it.”

From Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov.

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