I know advertising supports these here 'tubes. So I apologize to Markos and all the other web-trepeneurs as I confess: I never click on ads. Really. Never. Even though I have a Mac, I iz scared that I'm going to end up somewhere dark and dangerous. Plus, after spending time on a website with DemocraticLuntz, I don't think I'm the only one a little scared of clicking on, well, just about anything.
So I don't really know why I clicked on the dKos ad for the novel Willow. But after yesterday's frenzy over the controversial SEIU ad tags, I thought I'd fess up to clicking, and being overjoyed that I did. It's a great book. More sophisticated and subtle than the ad copy promises. Follow me over the fold for a mini-review, which includes a few personal confessions [help me...I can't stop myself these days!] and the requisite musing on how these concerns might link to political and cultural issues.
I read a lot for my job [writer], but I have basically ZERO time to read for fun these days. I love a good novel, but IMHO good ones [much less great ones] are rare these days. Contemporary novels suffer from two main problems. The popular, million-selling novels riding the top of the NYTimes best-seller list are often just jaw-droppingly bad. Monkeys at a typewriter, throwing up the outline for the forthcoming big-screen version coming to a multiplex near you! I don't think editors--remember editors?--dare to touch the sacred prose of Nicholas Sparks or John Grisham. God knows I can't touch it without a barf bag nearby.
And lots of "literary fiction" is just too precious by half. Maybe by three-quarters. Ugh. Just tell a damn compelling story already! Create some characters for us to care about, and put them in a believable story. Or a magical story. Write a story, for Pete's sake! Skip the ultra-clever literary devices. We get it. You went to grad school. So did I. I organized a rockin' Halloween party and a kick-ass spring picnic--my arms were bruised from wrist to shoulder from five hours of volleyball. Obviously, you spent w-a-y too much time in the library.
In Willow, author Julia Hoban tells a simple but moving story, with a small, well-drawn cast of characters. High school senior Willow lives with her older brother David, a university prof, and his wife and infant daughter. Because seven months earlier, on a rainy night, their parents had too much to drink at a party, and gave 16-year-old Willow the car keys to drive them home.
Only Willow survived the crash. And now the guilt has driven her to cope with the pain by cutting. She's at a new school, and won't even take calls from her old friends. Her brother is overwhelmed by the responsibility of suddenly being Willow's parent, and by his own grief. Only one person really reaches out to Willow: Guy, who accidentally discovers that she cuts. He tries to understand it, and to understand her. As she tries to understand herself, and what has happened to her life.
The story focuses on the relationships between Willow and Guy, and Willow and David. But also on Willow and the razor. All these relationships are intense, and beautifully wrought. Even the connection between the mourning teen girl and the blade that is the only outlet for her pain. Hoban shows how cutting doesn't create pain for Willow, but numbs her to it. Cutting is her narcotic. It allows her to control her grief. To prevent her from drowning in the tsunami of loss.
I remember learning about cutting for the first time several years ago. After initially feeling shock and revulsion, I began to understand it. Rather more easily than most people, actually. As I fessed up in my first of what turned out to be a trilogy of recent WATB diaries, "Beauty: Skin Deep?," I was anorexic at age 12.
So I get the need to control--to subject your body to something when the rest of the world around you cannot be wrangled or managed. My parents' marriage was a mess. My school had separated me from my friends. I was big and tall in Hawaii, the place with the world's most beautiful people. My body was changing ahead of most of the other girls. I couldn't control these things. But I could control every mouthful of food that went down my gullet. And change my chubby cheeks and belly into hollow ones. And delay the onset of puberty, as it turned out.
The other reason cutting resonated with me--and this really is TMI, folks, and rather disgusting--I had terrible acne from the age of 10. It was something else that made me feel so ugly, and led me to anorexia. I was teased mercilessly. To this day, the horrific names I was called haunt me. I can't forget them; I can't even repeat them out loud, decades later. The treatments dermatologists adminstered then were harsh. Daily antibiotics, which I'm convinced damaged my tooth enamel and my immune system. Harsh cleansers. Routine visits to the office, where a nurse would use metal implements to "pick" and drain the lesions.
I became a "picker" myself. In retrospect, it was a compulsion. It provided a certain relief. One that parallels the relief that cutters seem to experience. Was it a form of self-mutilation? Maybe. I am scarred. Thank God, I never had cystic acne, so my scars are flat. And primarily on my chest, neck, back and arms. So my face is relatively unscathed.
And finally, 10 years ago, I found a skin care line that actually worked. [Don't feel right mentioning commercial products in a diary, but will recommend in the comments if asked.] Those products, plus using hormonal birth control for unrelated issues, kept things in check for a decade. I'm having some issues again now that I'm off the BC. But I now get compliments about the skin on my face. Compliments. People have no idea what that means to me. And I'm getting braver about wearing clothes that expose my body's scars. I finally realize that no one has any idea what they're from--it really just looks like uneven pigmentation.
The worst scars, of course, are inside. Willow addresses this. Scarring. Grieving. How our scars appear to others. To ourselves.
Requisite political/cultural musings? Maybe I'll leave those to you. This diary is way too long already. Sorry for all the TMI.