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Subtitled: Essays on Excess. Born into a family of hoarders, Mester is well-placed to describe the obsession, the addiction, and the weight of stuff both in her life and in society’s. She tells of spells in fat camp, visits to her grandmother’s house in Iowa which bulged with free and cheap stuff, and working in a beauty store at a mall where she was taught the art of upselling. The wonder of these pieces is their candor, humor, and understanding rather than sarcastic snark one might expect.
Abe and Ruth Winter have been together for 70 years. It’s not been easy because they weren’t well matched from the get-go, but marriages can develop a momentum, and they’ve managed to stick it out on Bainbridge Island in WA for all those years. When Ruth develops a devastating cancer, their relationship shifts radically, and Abe becomes her caregiver. Their well-meaning children offer advice, but the couple fiercely embrace the “in sickness” part of the vow. Evison scrolls back to various times when things lurched off course and created considerable hurt, through four children, the death of one, and other upsets that shadowed their union. A fine depiction of what keeps people together despite.
Chelsea, a detective in Washington State, is haunted by all the girls who’ve disappeared during the two decades when her own sister was among them. Now, two years after Ellie vanished, she reappears, but something’s radically off. She’s sullen, shut-down, and devious, which definitely dampens a sense of celebration or even relief. There’s an amazing twist at the end which explains it all. I’ve read a number of novels with very similar material, and this is one of the best.
At the start of this novel, Maddy is losing ground at college in NYC; she wonders what she’s even doing there? The school’s physician sees it as ordinary depression, but the drug she gets, Celexa, sends her spiraling into a giddy whirl of manic energy, delusions, and hospitalization. Then it’s back to her well-meaning parents in Connecticut and a thoroughly flat, joyless holding pattern; drugs for bipolar disease hollow her out. She gets a part time job as a barista, is closely tracked by her mother, but also manages to sneak out to comedy clubs wherein her salvation lies. She has a gift for standup, and eventually comes into her own, kind of. That’s the nature of the condition: it’s never gone but the right medications and attitude can lead to a functional existence. I found the book sometimes painful to read because I have friends with the condition, but my spirits lifted when Maddy broke free of conventional expectations and opened into her authentic life. Genova, who’s also a neuroscientist, does an amazing job of conveying mental illness graphically.
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