Assorted Reviews #2

[alaterdate]

May books.

I read a snippet of Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado in an article (somewhere.... oh I remember it was related to my Anthropology of Health class) and it seemed so interesting. It was a part of "The Husband Stitch" which takes heavy inspiration from "The Green Ribbon" story about a girl with a mysterious green ribbon she always wears around her neck. I was really interested in the weaving together of women's issues (the husband stitch: a purported surgical procedure in which one or more sutures than necessary are used to repair a woman's perineum after it has been torn or cut during childbirth) and folk tales. I thought this collection of short stories might be something like Angela Carter's amazing short story collection The Bloody Chamber. It was not. It was... incoherent and I couldn't stand the writing style. It seemed so lazy tbh & I was disappointed. I was really hoping to like this book as much as Carter's and to be able to recommend it, but alas. Please do read Angela Carter's book tho! I read it a couple of years ago and LOVED it. I should reread it so I can write up a nice review. I think about it all the time.

I thought I'd give Machado another chance and read her memoir book In the Dream House, but goodlord it suffered from much of the same issues as the other book. Her writing style does not jive with me and it's all over the place. Most of the essay-like chapters seemed so meaningless too. Like an experiment in being fake deep or something. It got on my nerves. The summary used "Inventive" to stand in for lazy. It doesn't seem to me that a lot of creative thought was put into her books, it's mostly rambling imo.

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottleib was another book full of rambling. At least it was more coherent. This book is another memoir-y book about Gottleib's work as a therapist. I think it was supposed to be psued-self-help-y by dishing out "little nuggets of wisdom." I did find some of the name drops and theory drops to be interesting and highlighted them to look up later, but there was very little to like about this book. The author came off as annoying instead of funny and the stories felt so fake. I know she changed things for confidentiality purposes, but it was so unbelievable sometimes. Also, the author talked a bit about how therapists don't feel like they're allowed to act like humans, especially outside of the office, because if their patients see them being emotional they think the therapist is bad at their job. I can see that, it makes sense, but also this lady is kind of weird ngl. I found some of her actions distasteful, but I guess that didn't affect her work as a therapist according to the book, so good for her. The stories that were not about her (and were hardly even linked to things about her so idk why they're in her memoir^?, but whatever) were pretty heart-wrenching though so I did cry. But also it kind of seems like a yikes moment that the book relies heavily on them to be readable.

This is why I don't read memoirs