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"Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close," "You're Wearing That?," "Sex and the Seasoned Woman," and Other Featured Diversions Books

Posted March 28, 2006

This week’s featured Diversions Collection books include You’re Wearing That?: Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation, Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Journey into Manhood and Back Again, Sex and the Seasoned Woman, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, and Weight.

You’re Wearing That?: Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation by Deborah Tannen

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BOOKLIST: Talk is essential to women’s relationships, best-selling (You Just Don’t Understand, 1990) linguistics professor Tannen maintains. This book responding to readers’ feedback about the mother-daughter chapter in her I Only Say This Because I Love You (2001) argues that satisfying conversations between mothers and grown daughters can be the ultimate healing agents, a kind of Holy Grail for women. Or not. “Words are like touch. They can caress or they can scratch.” The illuminating extracts from mother-daughter colloquies that she cites bring to life both the soothing ointment and the ripped-open scars possible in interchanges on issues indicated by the chapter titles “Involvement or Invasion,” “Great Expectations,” “Incompatible Style Differences,” and “Difference Equals Distance,” as well as age-old sources of conflict for this extraordinarily intense kind of relationship.

Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Journey into Manhood and Back Again by Norah Vincent

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BOOKLIST: Vincent’s first experiment in cross-dressing came on a dare from an acquaintance who was a drag king. When she experienced the intoxicating invisibility and safety that came from wearing the disguise, she wanted to learn more. For 18 months, she disguised herself as a man, renamed herself Ned, joined a men’s bowling league, visited strip bars, and dated women. Along the way, she found that the freedom and privileges enjoyed by men were counterbalanced by a constant testing and severe limits on emotions. She also found women to be distrustful, ever ready to criticize men for being emotionally distant yet clearly preferring men who met stereotypical images of strength and virility. Vincent is frank about her experiences—the hard business of sexual transactions devoid of emotions, the easy bonding between men, fear of sexual attraction among men, and, ultimately, the explosion of her own notions of sex roles. She also explores the guilt she feels about her deception. Writing from the perspective of a gay woman who had a view of the male world that women don’t get to see, Vincent finds unexpected complexities in the men she meets and in herself as well.

Sex and the Seasoned Woman: Pursuing the Passionate Life by Gail Sheehy

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PUBLISHERS WEEKLY: Sheehy, a self-described seasoned woman, set off in search of others like herself. Her premise? There’s “a new universe of lusty, liberated women, some married and some not, who are unwilling to settle for the stereotypical roles of middle age.” Aside from the question whether the 200-odd women she contacts constitute a representative universe, her claim is hardly revelatory. Older women (especially Europeans) have known from time immemorial that age has nothing to do with desire and an urge to live passionately. What makes a difference these days is the opportunities afforded by online dating sites. Short on research, Sheehy, best known for Passages, makes do by stringing together colorful stories of the women she interviews, drawing inflated conclusions from their lives and claiming it all as part of yet another passage (will it ever end?) to Second Adulthood, with phases like “the Romantic Passage” and “Soul Seeking.” The book’s most chilling bit of information: you really do lose it if you don’t use it. But take heart, ladies; Sheehy provides the name of a doctor who employs a nonsurgical method of rejuvenating the vagina, making it just as pink and open as it was when you were… that’s right, young.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

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PUBLISHERS WEEKLY: Oskar Schell, hero of this brilliant follow-up to Foer’s bestselling Everything Is Illuminated, is a nine-year-old amateur inventor, jewelry designer, astrophysicist, tambourine player and pacifist. Like the second-language narrator of Illuminated, Oskar turns his naively precocious vocabulary to the understanding of historical tragedy, as he searches New York for the lock that matches a mysterious key left by his father when he was killed in the September 11 attacks, a quest that intertwines with the story of his grandparents, whose lives were blighted by the firebombing of Dresden. Foer embellishes the narrative with evocative graphics, including photographs, colored highlights and passages of illegibly overwritten text, and takes his unique flair for the poetry of miscommunication to occasionally gimmicky lengths, like a two-page soliloquy written entirely in numerical code. Although not quite the comic tour de force that Illuminated was, the novel is replete with hilarious and appalling passages, as when, during show-and-tell, Oskar plays a harrowing recording by a Hiroshima survivor and then launches into a Poindexterish disquisition on the bomb’s “charring effect.” It’s more of a challenge to play in the same way with the very recent collapse of the towers, but Foer gambles on the power of his protagonist’s voice to transform the cataclysm from raw current event to a tragedy at once visceral and mythical. Unafraid to show his traumatized characters’ constant groping for emotional catharsis, Foer demonstrates once again that he is one of the few contemporary writers willing to risk sentimentalism in order to address great questions of truth, love and beauty.

Weight by Jeanette Winterson

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FROM THE AUTHOR’S FOREWARD: When I was asked to choose a myth to write about, I realized I had chosen already. The story of Atlas holding up the world was in my mind before the telephone call had ended. If the call had not come, perhaps I would never have written the story, but when the call did come, that story was waiting to be written. Rewritten. The recurring language motif of Weight is ‘I want to tell the story again.’ My work is full of cover versions. I like to take stories we think we know and record them differently. In the retelling comes a new emphasis or bias, and the new arrangement of the key elements demands that fresh material be injected into the existing text. Weight moves far away from the simple story of Atlas’s punishment and his temporary relief when Heracles takes the world off his shoulders. I wanted to explore loneliness, isolation, responsibility, burden, and freedom, too, because my version has a very particular end not found elsewhere.

  • These recently published works, selected for your reading pleasure, may be borrowed for 14 days.

  • The Diversions Collection is located on the first floor of the Simmons Library, near the Circulation Desk.

  • To request a book that is currently checked-out, find it in the on-line catalog, then click the “REQUEST” button.

 

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