Questions
I like to keep up with things my granddaughter is reading (my grandson loves mostly weird kid graphic novels, which I find less intriguing). This month I read two YA's--Tell Me Three Things by Julie Buxbaum and Turtles All the Way Down by John Green (granddaughter is on a major John Green kick). Reading the two in close proximity, I couldn't help noticing that dead parents are a key plot device in both books (the books are about much more but a dead parent is important to each). Then I started thinking about other YA or kids books with dead parents and wondering why. This prompted an interesting dinnertime conversation with the grandkids and their parents, with the kids getting very engaged in shouting out the titles books with dead parents (Harry Potter! Wizard of Oz! Cinderella!); the consensus around the table was that killing off a parent was a quick and easy way to provide a source of drama.
This isn't too far off what I read in an explanation of why Disney movies so often feature characters with dead parents. According to Disney producer Don Hahn, "One reason is practical because the movies are 80 or 90 minutes long, and Disney films re about growing up. They're shorthand. In shorthand, it's much quicker to have characters grow up when you bump off their parents. Bambi's mother gets killed, so he has to grow up. Belle only has a father, but he gets lost, so she has to step into that position. It's a story shorthand." (The other reason Hahn hypothesizes has to do with the death of Walt Disney's mother and isn't broadly relevant.)
Is this an effective device or a lazy shortcut? I tend to vote for the latter.
Comments
In February I read Ursula K. LeGuin's collection of poetry, So Far So Good, finished shortly before her 2018 death. I didn't love the poetry but I was intrigued by the list of financial contributors in the back of the book. It appears that the book was published through a version of crowd-sourcing (perhaps we might call it fan-sourcing). While I love that LeGuin's fans wanted to do this, it's sad that it would be necessary for a work by such an eminent author.
I also read Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann last month. It relates one of the most horrific stories of greed, betrayal, and evil-doing by humans that I have ever read. It's truly unspeakable--and it's only one of many terrible stories in our history. We should all be better educated about how the United States was built.
It's scary how much I forget. I look at the list of books I read this month and have already forgotten what some of them were about (this is especially true of mysteries). However, it was really weird to reread Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton this month and discover that I was remembering a totally different book (one of Nadine Gordimer's, I think). Sometimes I wonder if it is worth reading if I remember so little!
I love cookbooks, but I also like books about food that are contextualized within the author's personal life. Buttermilk Graffiti by Chef Edward Lee was exactly that kind of book, since his goal as he traveled to various locations sampling various ethnic/regional foods and talking with the people who make and eat them, was "trying to find my own America and where I belong in it." I enjoyed the book (except for a misplacing of Des Moines in Illinois) and was stunned by the amount of food Lee apparently ate on these forays around the United States. Just reading about it made me slightly queasy--but his writing also inspired me to think more deeply about my connections to food.
I finally read A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman and I don't quite understand why people like it so much. But I guess different people find their upbeat stories in different places. Some people like Fredrik Backman, some like Fannie Flagg; I like Elinor Lipman (she has a new book out--Good Riddance) and Elizabeth Berg. A chacun son gout.
Rant
Michelle Obama's Becoming was the first book I read this month; I enjoyed it a great deal and respect the former First Lady's candor. My rant focuses not on the book but on a review that I heard, in which the reviewer reported enjoying the parts about Ms. Obama's childhood but finding the parts about her public life disappointing. This immediately reminded me of a situation years ago in which I went off on my boss for saying he enjoyed the parts of the film Malcolm X in which Malcolm was a criminal but found it boring when he became politically engaged. The racism in finding black people as criminals entertaining and as activists boring seemed obvious to me. Perhaps it's more subtle here, but I suspect the reviewer found the story of Ms. Obama's childhood interesting because she doesn't expect African American children to have "typical" two-parent, achievement-oriented, middle-class upbringings--puh-leeze! Meanwhile, the story of a black woman (and her husband) achieving is boring. That, too, is racism.
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