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MY BOOK WORLD Maté, Gabor, with Daniel Maté. The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture. New York: Avery, 2022.
Maté’s thesis is that Western medicine has assumed for a long time what is “normal,” and what is not. He contends that our physical and physiological lives are severely affected by what happens and what does not happen to us in our childhoods: “Children, especially highly sensitive children, can be wounded in multiple ways: by bad things happening, yes, but also by good things not happening, such as their emotional needs for attunement not being met, or the experience of not being, seen and accepted, even by loving parents. Trauma of this kind does not require overt distress or misfortune . . . and can also lead to the pain of disconnection from the self, occurring as a result of core needs not being satisfied” (23). This struck a chord (ha) with me concerning my childhood. My parents met my physical needs but didn’t have much sensitivity to my wishes to learn piano. I harped (ha ha) for four years on the topic until, at age ten, I was finally rewarded with lessons (and a $150 piano which I treasured). But their lack of interest in my “attunement” meant that they didn’t care much for my sensitivity as a musician, an artist, or human being. They kept trying to interest me in more “masculine” activities, meaning they did not accept me for who I was. It was a conditional “love,” if you want to call it that. My saving grace, through the years, thankfully, has been the help I received from three talented psychologists: one when I was twenty-four, one when I was in my fifties, and one I see currently in my seventies. Making myself more “loveable” to myself, I believe, made me less available to suffering major diseases or even middling chronic ones. Maté’s contention is that most all disease is caused by mental or psychological stress that alters the body, making its autoimmune failure more likely one will suffer illness. There is so much more that Dr. Maté offers to the reader in these 562 pages, but I do want to cite one statement he makes near the end of the book: “At present there remains powerful resistance to trauma awareness on the part of the medical profession—albeit a resistance more subliminal than deliberate, more passive than active. In the dozens of interview I conducted with medical colleagues for this book, including recent graduates, virtually one of them recalled being taught about the mind-body unity or the profusely documented relationship between, for example, trauma and mental illness or addictions—let alone the links between adversity and physical disease” (487). I wish all adults in the world could read this book and be pushed to take care of their total health, not just the physical being (if that)—seek out doctors who do see a connection between the mental and physical body and treat their patients accordingly. Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Rod McKuen WEDS: A Writer's Wit | John Boyne THURS: A Writer's Wit | Lorene Scafaria FRI: My Book World | Wright Thompson, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi [Emmett Till]
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MY BOOK WORLD McPhee, John. The Founding Fish. New York: Farrar, 2002.
This is the first I have read of the more than fifty books McPhee has published in his ninety-four years on earth, and I have to say it has been a revelation. I’m not one who fishes (maybe . . . for compliments, never the icky, slimy things that come out of the water), but I found this a fascinating history of the American shad. Its life cycle as both a saltwater and freshwater fish. Its boundless energy to overcome humanmade obstacles (dams for one). Its ability to rebound after a period of overfishing. Its delight as food (in spite of its many bones): “When Alexander Wilson named this fish sapidissima in 1811, he was referring almost certainly to the nutty-buttery succulence of the main muscle, but the roe is the tongue of the buffalo, the tip of the asparagus, the cheek of the halibut, the marrow of the osso bucco” (295). McPhee’s Appendix consists of nothing but recipes, one of which lists these ingredients: 2 pounds shad 1 pair roe 1 tbs. chopped parsley Pepper, salt (if desired) 1 tbs. butter Soft bread crumbs Clarified butter ½ cup sauterne 1½ cup chopped mushrooms 1 tsp. paprika (348) Yet there are historic objectors to the art/craft/sport of fishing: “The poet Byron said it best: “[T]he art of angling [is] the cruelest, the coldest, and the stupidest of pretended sports” (313). There you have it! McPhee covers both sides of the story, the equation, the diet! Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Ellen Glasgow WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Barry Hannah THURS: A Writer's Wit | Shirley MacLaine FRI: My Book World | Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture
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MY BOOK WORLD Sebold, Alice. The Almost Moon: A Novel. New York: Little, Brown, 2007.
This may be one of those novels that you don’t want to continue after reading the first sentence: When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily”(3). But then then comes the next sentence: “Dementia, as it descends, has a way of revealing the core of the person affected by it”(3). Interesting! you may think. Onward you go . . . and then you are hooked, as I was—queasy feelings subsiding. The middle-aged narrator, Helen, continues her story of caring for her mother for nearly three hundred pages, and honestly, you’re not sure what is going to happen. Will Helen leave the country, or at least the area of Pennsylvania where she lives? Will she off herself like her father did some years earlier? Will she tell her two young adult daughters she’s murdered their grandmother? Will her ex-husband (whom she tells first of the murder) help her cover it up or escape the police? Will she continue the affair she’s begun with the thirty-year-old son of her best friend? Whoa! You just can’t believe the behavior of this woman until the author skillfully wends readers through her family’s backstory. Then her life only becomes more complicated, and you may develop sympathy for her. It could happen to you! What will she do? you continue to think, until the very last pages. A true murder mystery—not one of those cozy contrived things. Only the “mystery” here may be why she really done it, and the author presents readers with a plausible and satisfying answer. Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Eva Figes WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Peter Ustinov THURS: A Writer's Wit | Isak Dinesen FRI: My Book World | John McPhee, The Founding Fish
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MY BOOK WORLD Taylor, Brandon. Real Life: A Novel. New York: Riverhead, 2020.
In this fairly recent title (a so-called campus novel), young Wallace leaves his home state of Alabama to pursue graduate school in biochemistry at a major university in the Midwest. In most respects the years-long experience does not go well. As a young black man, Wallace encounters subtle but resistant racism among his colleagues, even though, on the surface, things are cool. Compounding this problem is the fact that he’s out-and-proud gay. In one salty situation, he believes a woman has purposely ruined his experiment, putting him back months in his research. He just can’t prove it, and because of a lifetime of being put down, he doesn’t have the energy to pursue the justice of the matter. The major relationship he develops is with Miller, an ostensibly straight white man, a handsome man to whom Wallace is quite attracted. Author Taylor subtly but competently creates all the complications that such a relationship can have. Wallace, a bit insecure about his looks and build, feels weird about Miller’s attentions—causing him to send Miller mixed signals. In turn, Miller, rife with his own insecurities, doesn’t believe Wallace is sincere. Repeatedly, they send and receive communications that don’t make clear who they are or what their intentions are. These conflicts lead to a couple of dramatic scenes. One, after sharing the sordid stories of their past, Wallace leaves Miller’s bed in the middle of the night, angering Miller. Second, the two men engage in a fist fight that Wallace loses against the more muscular Miller. They seem to semi-settle their differences, but they certainly do not live together happily ever after. In fact, the denouement of the novel seems to occur when the author returns the cast of characters to the first day they arrive on campus—when everyone’s, including Wallace’s, expectations are high. It seems to be a subtle way the author establishes what real life is all about. The term is tossed about throughout the novel, but in this particular conclusion, readers understand that university life is real life, not just that period that is to follow commencement exercises. Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Margaret Ayer Barnes WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Charles Baudelaire THURS: A Writer's Wit | Anne Lamott FRI: My Book World | Alice Sebold, The Almost Moon: A Novel
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AUTHOR
Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA. See my profile at Author Central:
http://amazon.com/author/rjespers Archives
April 2025
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