Sorry to have to say this, but Everything Happens for a Reason is a mess. This short book is a memoir of Kate Bowler's Stage IV colon cancer and how hSorry to have to say this, but Everything Happens for a Reason is a mess. This short book is a memoir of Kate Bowler's Stage IV colon cancer and how her diagnosis flies in the face of the "prosperity gospel"—the notion espoused by some Christians that as long as you believe in God and think positively, good things will happen for you, and therefore if something bad happens it's kind of your own fault. Was Kate Bowler previously a devotee of the prosperity gospel, or was she raised in that tradition? Why, no. She was raised in the Mennonite tradition. She's a professor at Duke divinity school and did her dissertation on the prosperity gospel, so she knows a lot about it, but has no actual personal lived experience with it at all. Analyzing a particular area of Christian belief in relation to her cancer might work for a short essay, but it doesn't work for a book-length memoir. Memoirs are supposed to be personal. Bowler discusses the prosperity gospel for so many pages, and after a while it just seemed pointless. She doesn't believe in the prosperity gospel herself, so what does it really have to do with anything?
The book otherwise just meanders. It touches on her Mennonite background and other religious traditions, talks quite a bit about how hot her husband (allegedly) is, goes over her past fertility issues and other health problems, mentions a high-profile article she wrote on her cancer diagnosis and the prosperity gospel and the various responses it received—aha! When I got to this part it all made sense: Bowler had written an article for the New York Times, it got a massive response, she got a book deal, and then had to stre-e-e-e-tch it out to book length. She's done this, but not successfully.
As other reviewers have mentioned, this is really much more a book about God and Christianity than it is a book about Bowler's cancer diagnosis. Given that she is a divinity professor, maybe I should have expected that. But the book started out with a harrowing section about her unexpected diagnosis and then went off in a hundred other directions, leaving me wondering how her surgery went and what her prognosis and treatment plan were. She doesn't come back to it until several chapters later, and even then she doesn't provide a lot of direct details—eventually the reader can suss everything out, but it takes longer than it really should for a book this short.
In the past year or two I've read several memoirs about people's trials and tribulations, and many of them have left me underwhelmed. When I post my middling-to-negative reviews on Goodreads, I usually get some insults from people who think not liking a memoir is tantamount to going to the author's house and criticizing her life choices to her face. I'm not going to sugarcoat it: I think this is a simpleminded attitude. An author and her book are not exactly the same. Writing a book requires making decisions about what to put in, what to leave out, what tone to take, how to organize everything, and on and on. All of that affects the reading experience, and if it isn't done well, I'm not going to appreciate the book. I think what happened to Kate Bowler is awful and I wish her the best, but I also wish I hadn't bothered to read this.
When I think back to memoirs I've really liked, such as The Liars' Club and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, I'm reminded that it's just not enough to have an interesting life. A memoirist also has to be serious about writing a really good book. I don't see a lot of that happening in the current crop of memoirs, and in the future I'm going to be much more careful about which new ones I read. I'm sure Everything Happens for a Reason will help some people, but purely as a reading experience it didn't hit any kind of mark for me....more
The entire time I was reading The Book of Separation, one particular question kept haunting me. Not a particularly nice or charitable question, admittThe entire time I was reading The Book of Separation, one particular question kept haunting me. Not a particularly nice or charitable question, admittedly, but it haunted me nonetheless. Specifically, If a person spends her teens, 20s, and 30s living in a restrictive culture and does her best to conform to that restricted culture, at what point has she forfeited her opportunity to become an interesting, mature, grown-up person?
Well, I told you it was a rather uncharitable question. I don't know if the author is hiding a lot in this memoir for the sake of not embarrassing her family or if she just isn't that good at expressing what's really going on with her, but the end result is repetitive to the point of tedium. Yes, Tova Mirvis, I get it, you're in a conservative culture. Yes, I get that your husband is a true believer. Yes, I get that you are not. But you stayed in it all that time! In the years when most people are attempting to figure out who they are, you outsourced the job to your orthodox community. Apparently every time you argued with your husband, you yelled "I'm done!" and then didn't leave. At a certain point you were a grown woman and you still did this. When you finally decided to "rebel," it took the form of hiding in the bathroom during Shabbat and checking Facebook on your phone. You were around 40 years old at the time. What am I supposed to be getting from all this?
I understand that breaking free from a restrictive culture isn't easy. I understand that it's not always about grand gestures but about a gradual pulling away. I understand that this doesn't always result in the most dramatic narrative, but that doesn't mean it's not worth telling, and the fact that we've heard these stories many times before doesn't mean they aren't still useful. I'm willing to concede all of that. But what particularly struck me about The Book of Separation is how little joy, how little true freedom, really comes across in this particular telling. Tova Mirvis mentions an idea she's heard before, something about how Orthodox Judaism can't prevent you from doing certain things, but it can definitely prevent you from enjoying them, and that's certainly the case here. Mirvis's guilt over her decisions suffuses the entire book. Even after she leaves the Orthodox faith, she seems unable to take pleasure in anything. Anything, that is, except for (nonkosher) pizza. She seems to pour all of her happiness and excitement at no longer being Orthodox into her enjoyment of pizza, and the narrative comes alive in a way it rarely does elsewhere. And again, I'm sure this is useful to some people, probably those who have also left a restrictive religious culture and also feel extremely guilty about it. But do those people really want or need to hear that their guilt will persist in following them everywhere, preventing them from truly enjoying their newfound freedom (except possibly when it comes to pizza)? What can we really learn from a woman who didn't leave her repressive culture until she was middle-aged, except that it's probably a better idea to leave when you're much younger?
Honestly, no judgment on the author herself, who I'm going to assume is actually a reasonably interesting and mature person, and who I certainly hope is, by now, less weighed down by guilt than she was when she wrote this book. But there's the life you're actually living, and there's the life you're able to get across in your writing, and the life depicted in The Book of Separation is so dreary I could never recommend it to anyone....more
Still Pilgrim was the seventeenth book in my October poetry project. This was a reread, and I liked it much better this time around. The first time, IStill Pilgrim was the seventeenth book in my October poetry project. This was a reread, and I liked it much better this time around. The first time, I found the poems rather stuffy and, as a lapsed Catholic, was uncomfortable with the Catholic imagery and themes. Upon this second read, I really appreciated the poems' structure, and I found the religious elements contemplative rather than off-putting. I'm very happy about this, because I want to like every book with an Edward Hopper painting on the cover. A begrudging three stars the first time around, four stars for the second read....more
When I first heard about this book I had a vague feeling that I didn't really need to read it. After all, I was raised Catholic, so I felt like I alreWhen I first heard about this book I had a vague feeling that I didn't really need to read it. After all, I was raised Catholic, so I felt like I already knew all about "faith-based" homophobia. After a bit of contemplation, though, I realized that I actually had no idea what goes on in "gay conversion therapy." While I could certainly speculate, in reality everything about it was a mystery to me. So I picked up Boy Erased and decided to find out.
I won't provide a lot of details on the therapy here; you can read the book and learn about them yourself. What I will say is that I did not anticipate how difficult it would be to read about this sort of thing. The idea that your family and community would greet your homosexuality as a grave, serious defect with the potential to wreck not just your own life, but your family's lives as well. The idea that you would want so badly to change or suppress this aspect of yourself that you would try anything. And the idea that there are groups out there taking advantage of these beliefs and emotions and doing so much damage in the name of supposedly helping people get closer to God. Conley does a very, very effective job of portraying all of this, and a sympathetic reader will feel what he feels (or at least, I did--although of course not at the same order of magnitude). Be prepared for that if you pick this up. This book is an experience.
If I had one criticism it's that I felt the writing was a bit overly descriptive and the story would have been better served by cutting back a bit. But that's a minor complaint. I learned a lot from Boy Erased and I hope it finds a wide audience.
8/31/2016: This book makes me think I need a shelf labeled "traumatic." Review to come....more
Rapture Ready was a little different than I thought it would be. Given that the author was a writer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, I thought thiRapture Ready was a little different than I thought it would be. Given that the author was a writer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, I thought this would be a humorous look at some of the excesses of far-right Christian culture, set on skewering the people who embody the worst hypocrisies of calling yourself a Christian while showing little compassion or understanding for your fellow humans. And don't get me wrong--the book was often funny, and certainly extremely conservative Christians get their share of the spotlight. But the book also gives a lot of time and space to moderate and liberal Christians, and even some of the conservative ones turn out to be more accepting when spoken to face-to-face. Rapture Ready also makes the case that Christian pop culture (mainly books and music, although other entertainment forms are addressed as well) can be just as interesting as the best of secular pop culture, and that it does the most effective job of representing Christianity when it leaves room for the doubt and questioning many believers experience, as well as for the best of Christianity--love, forgiveness, and a broader view of humanity.
Rapture Ready also does a good job of exploring the conflicts inherent in Christian pop culture: Are Christians better off being in the world, or separating themselves from it? Are Christian consumer goods a good way to get the word out, or just a display of crass materialism? Radosh doesn't provide definitive answers, of course, but he does ask the right questions and give the reader a lot to think about.
Unfortunately, the last few chapters, about teen abstinence programs and anti-evolution museums, made for a somewhat downbeat ending. Being reminded of the sorts of groups that don't just ignore facts but aggressively attack them, supposedly in the name of bringing more people to Christ, left a sour taste in my mouth that Radosh's conciliatory final chapter did not entirely dispel. Radosh has hope that secular people, moderate Christians, and liberal Christians can all come together to minimize the destructive elements of conservative evangelical culture. But this book was first published 8 years ago and, if anything, fundamentalist voices seem to be even louder and more extreme now (witness the religious-based fights against the Affordable Care Act, for example, or the politicians who claim that rape can't possibly result in pregnancy).
Still, I learned a lot from this book, I laughed quite a bit, and I did come away from it feeling some hope that positive change is possible. Radosh's intent is to increase understanding, and regardless of where a reader may fall on the religious spectrum, that's a worthy and admirable goal....more
I won this book via a First Reads giveaway here on Goodreads. I guess I entered to win it because I was curious about what Harvard Divinity School is I won this book via a First Reads giveaway here on Goodreads. I guess I entered to win it because I was curious about what Harvard Divinity School is like. I am not, however, the intended audience for this book--I lost my Christianity two decades ago and have never looked back. Not surprisingly, then, my feelings about the book are mixed.
The fact is that devout Christians, be they liberal or conservative, just look at some things differently than doubters do, and, as such, there is no point in my arguing with some of the ideas put forth here--again, I'm not the intended audience. But on one matter I can't help myself: Andrea works at a homeless shelter as part of a required MDiv field study, and many of the guests at the shelter have mental illnesses and/or mental disabilities and/or addiction issues. Andrea expounds for a little while on how much we can benefit from our interactions with these less fortunate members of the population. This idea tends to raise my hackles. It implies that certain people are put on this earth to suffer so that others of us might learn from them. I find this idea abhorrent, to say nothing of the fact that it's a very facile way to explain away inequality and injustice. Granted, this is a fairly small part of the book, but I never lost my uneasiness with the way Andrea talked about the shelter guests.
What else didn't I like? The writing, while not terrible, didn't have a distinctive voice. There was also something kind of juvenile about it, as if it were written for high-school students and not full-fledged adults. I particularly didn't like all the passages about her boy-craziness. Of course, how you come to decide who your partner is going to be is an important part of any life journey, but I feel like it could have been written about a little more maturely here. It sounds like Andrea broke a lot of hearts, resulting in some pretty serious consequences in at least one case, but she's pretty blase about it. That was rather offputting. Finally, she misuses the phrase "immaculate conception," which surprised me. I realize that Protestants don't revere Mary the way Catholics do, but her being conceived without original sin is a significant-enough part of the Christ story that you'd think any Christian minister would know about it. So that bugged me a bit.
As for what I liked about the book ... generally, Andrea herself comes off as likeable, and I did enjoy learning about Harvard Divinity School through her eyes. As a fan of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, I was also kind of tickled to realize that she worked at the same homeless shelter that was depicted in that book. Of course, her perspective and writing style are pretty different from Nick Flynn's, but that made it even more interesting.
What most moved me, though, was Andrea's writing about her faith. I've been searching for some kind of spirituality for a couple years now (again, not Christianity) and I loved hearing about her constant striving for a deeper faith, a deeper love, and a deeper understanding of how these things play out both within herself and in her interactions with the world around her. She mentions at one point that when she prays, she doesn't talk to God; she listens. That was something that struck a chord in me and that I suspect will stay with me for a long time. Ultimately, then, I am grateful that I read this book....more
