Shakespeare and Co. Booksellers

I’m an incredibly dedicated eavesdropper, and, while memoirs don’t give me the satisfaction of picking up information on the sly, an honest, detailed account of another person’s life makes for all sorts of vicarious experience.

A few I’ve read recently: Diablo Cody’s Candy Girl pitches itself as having a “Midwestern girl becomes sex-worker” memoir. I learned quite a bit about the industry, particularly the financial end (for instance, clubs require their dancers to perform a quota of lap dances per night–it’s actually possible to lose money while working a long shift on a slow night), and Cody offers some interesting analysis and observations about her own changed appearance, her motivation for pursuing this line of work, and the distinct atmosphere and taboos in each of her workplaces. The tone is breezy and consistent, even if her voice was a bit brash for my taste.

The Goldfish Went on Vacation, a memoir that begins with author Patty Dann’s husband’s diagnosis of terminal cancer, and becomes a how-to (and how-not-to) address a young child’s grief at losing a parent. Dann is concise, plain-spoken, and she seems to have distilled years of emotional experience into manageable, bite-sized chapters. Fitting, as she also chronicles her attempts to communicate information about her husband’s state and fate as honestly and clearly as possible to her then-three-year-old son.

I’m sure this violates some client-therapist privilege, but psychotherapist Lillian Rubin offers a collection of patients’ stories “from the other side of the couch” in The Man with the Beautiful Voice. Rubin unravels her clients’ psychology in engaging and often detailed narratives, and provides enough of her own background, pedagogic values, and personal views of therapeutic techniques that she is a fleshed-out character joining every other narrative.

We have a new graphic novel in this week called Black Hole by Charlie Burns, who also does the cover art for The Believer. The storyline takes place during the 1970′s in Seattle, following the lives of several different teenagers. The twist is that a strange body-disfiguring disease has descended upon the student body, marking the few who catch it with strange deformities. This is a surreal and eerie coming of age tale, visually stunning, and one graphic novel I could not put down.

A review of Perri Knize’s Grand Obsession.