The whole world is raving about Tara Westover’s words for good reason. She takes the clarity of her academic writing style and drenches it in the melancholy and dread of the southern (or midwestern) gothic; creating a confronting and fascinating picture of her brutal life experience. Even though this is a memoir and I’ve watched several interviews with this woman, at times I felt I was reading Carson McCullers’ fictional demented characters who are butchered by the broken dreams and splintered souls of their loved ones. I kept having to remind myself that this a real someone’s youth.
Westover was raised in the middle of nowhere by a survivalist family who were manically preparing for the end of the world. At the age of 16, having received no formal education, she taught herself enough to get into university where she moved her way up to Harvard to complete her PhD.
Educated is an important book that delves into the difficulty of balancing family obligation with the obligation you have to your self-development and hunger for truth. There is so much to learn from this riveting memoir, but if the world takes just one thing, I hope it treasures the idea that self-education, freedom, and space to live and think, is a zillion times more effective and humane than forcing children into rigid time frames and cold classrooms.
The book a week challenge is an effort to self-educate. For anyone undertaking the book a week challenge, I recommend this book as inspiration. It will quench the hunch that you can teach yourself anything you might want to know. It will remind you that if you dedicate time to feeding your mind it will grow into something greater than you could ever have imagined.
This was not what I was expecting, but BOOM… I do love surprises. I’ve had a fascination with Ava Gardner ever since I discovered that she left Hollywood to live in Madrid for several years, embarking on love affairs with bullfighters and flamenco bars. It seems like such an odd turn for a massive movie star to make and I was curious to find out more about the silver-screen legend.
This is not your stock standard bio as Ava and her ghostwriter, Peter Evans, had a falling out and the notes of his time with Gardner weren’t published until they were both very dead, or «pushing clouds around» as Ava would say.
The fact that I feel like I’m on first name terms with a dead, Hollywood goddess just shows how good the writing is. Evans did a marvelous job of making the reader a fly on the wall throughout his odd interviews with Ava, who would confidently reveal fascinating fragmented memories but an hour later want to retract them, worried she would sound mean, slutty, sweary, whiny, or worst of all… boring. The lack of flow this created gets a little frustrating, you desperately want to know more about her life just as she grows insecure revealing it. However, all this is a window into who she was at 65 after two strokes, three husbands and god knows how many cases of Dom Perignon. Frustrating moments aside, the book is worth the read for Gardner’s genius one-liners alone, «I like to fuck, but it was an education, too» and «Mickey Rooney, my smallest husband and the biggest mistake of my life».
Many women will relate to moments in the story of the gal once referred to as «The most beautiful animal in the world» who (drunkenly)navigated her way through a male-dominated time and heartless industry An industry that sucked her in at 18 and said, “She can’t act, she can’t walk, she can’t sing, she can’t talk…she’s terrific”, leaving her in an overwhelming state of imposter syndrome that could only be medicated with the copious amounts of wine.
The book details how she grew up dirt poor, lost both her beloved parents before the age of 20 and how everyone in her family was shocked that she became famous. No one saw it coming and no one, not even Ava, really knew what to do with it.
She tells of the difficult relationships she had with her three ex-husbands. Mickey Rooney was incredible in the feathers, apparently, and every woman that came within a 5-meter radius of the man was quickly made aware of the fact. Not long after tearing her hair out over randy Rooney, her second husband, Artie Shaw, emotionally bullied her for not being intelligent enough, taunting her to the point that she got an IQ test just to make sure she wasn’t a complete moron. Turns out she was pretty sharp. She didn’t speak so much about Sinatra, almost as though she was still not sure what the hell had happened there, and they did keep a close long-distance relationship up until the day she died. On some of the late night calls that Ava would make to Evans, he could hear Sinatra faintly playing in the background.
I didn’t learn much about her escape to Spain, nothing solid, the partnership between Gardner and Evans broke down before she went into it. But it was clear that she loathed the superficiality of Tinseltown, and you can’t get much deeper than flamenco. Or maybe she was looking for some kind of tax break, who knows!
This was a gorgeous, easy read, and I fucking love her even more now I’ve finished it. I only wish she was remembered as the hilarious, straight-talking, perceptive soul that she seemed to be… instead of being immortalized in motion pictures as a dazzling doll.
If you like gossip, the romance of the golden age of cinema, and stories about women who could take you down in a fight if they had to, then this book is for you.
«You can sum my life up in one sentence…She made movies, she made out, she made a mess of her life, but she never made jam».
Ava Gardner worked hard on her singing, but the studio would always dub over it. Here is a clip of a beautiful performance with her own voice.
A BOOK A WEEK – Week Two. ‘No Friend But The Mountains’. Journalist and refugee Behrouz Boochani wrote this chilling account of his 4-years detained in Manus prison. He wrote the book on a mobile phone he kept hidden under his mattress during his incarceration.
I read this book as quickly as possible because I needed to get out of his harrowing experience. I could barely breathe. The pages were physically painful as Boochani is a phenomenal journalist and poet and his descriptions grab you by the scruff of the neck and whisper the hot madness into your ear until you’re choking on your heart. It was equal parts stunning and truly awful.
I believe it was my duty as an Australian to listen to his story because it is my story, too. My taxes paid for this torture. The kind of torture that has innocent men slicing their own skin open just to make sure they are still alive.
One thing the Australian government was not counting on was that a storyteller as perceptive and articulate as Boochani would be one of its victims, it didn’t count on his beautiful documentation of the systematic horror it so cunningly crafted. I’m truly gobsmacked and feel completely ignorant. I had no idea. I always imagined the Australian government just wasn’t concerned about these people. Just couldn’t be bothered taking proper care of them. But it was concerned, very concerned with driving them back to where they came from by means of making this prison a living hell.
Boochani doesn’t use names or detailed physical description for his fellow refugees but refers to them as archetypes – The Hero, The Cow, The Whore, The Comedian, The Smiling Boy, The Prophet, The Prime Minister. These inmates become all of us. Hearing of their conditions, of how they struggled to keep sane but were ultimately crushed is devastating. This is a masterpiece with Boochani creating his own genre that his translator describes as «Horrific surrealism».
The global refugee crisis is a CRISIS, we don’t know what to do. We are stuck. It’s complicated. But before you let any ideas cement in your mind…read this book.
Just finished Michelle Obama’s ‘Becoming’. Loved every single sentence. I’ll admit I didn’t think about reading it until everyone was going mad about it. Some readers are all like, «Oh no, I don’t read what’s popular. Please.» But I was curious to know what was setting folks on fire.
The thing that pushed me to finally buy the book wasn’t that this is the journey of a working-class black woman making it into one of the most public positions in the world or the fact that this woman redefined a very boring, very sexist and very white role. It was the fact she wore those gold spangly thigh boots on her book tour. I was like «Oh no she didn’t». I’m not even into fashion but they melted my brain and had my inner seal flapping its flippers and yawping. But back to the book. This should be on the school syllabus, inspiring young girls everywhere.
Reading this I felt like I stepped inside the clothes her mother made her as she studied her butt off. Felt what it might be like to be powerful and black in a white world, how vulnerable that might make a person. I fell head over heels for Barack Obama when we worked together at a law firm (lol) and then felt how hard it was to hand him over to the entire world. I have been floating in her astounding energy for a few days and am grateful for it. Do read it. It’s a great way to start the year.
One of the most powerful points in the book, can’t quote it word for word, but she describes beginning to deeply fear for her husband’s safety, wondering if they had taken the right path as there’s s a list of powerful radical thinkers who have been shot dead in America. Then she remembered that her husband is a black man and if he weren’t the president he could just as well be shot by a police officer for walking into a petrol station on the wrong day of the week. That got me right in the marrow. 11/10
Hello, my name is Abigail Austin and I’m a social media addict.
“It’s 2019!” I hear you say, “You’re not an addict, we live here now, idiot!”
Do we? Is this it? This cannot be it. My attention span is…look a drone! And my vocabulary is…something, something.
I’ve set myself the challenge of a book a week in order to open my mind and reduce social media scrolling time. Last year I made the conscious effort to read more books and I have to say it was one of the best years of my life. Distracted by the bright lights and dazzling empty content online, I had forgotten what magic and comfort a well-crafted sentence can bring to the end of a rough day.
Imagine how your soul would soar if you gave it Jane Austen, Hemmingway and Dickens to consume instead of the Kardashian’s new lipliner, and news articles that scream, «WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE SOON!»
Zuckerberg and his legion of nerds are taking your eye-time while smiling and telling you their sites are free. How egalitarian. Craftily going after the most precious thing you got…your attention. Take it back baby! Own it and direct it to some place wonderful.
Join me for the challenge! And if we fail? Well, in the words of Lady Macbeth, «We fail. But screw your courage to the sticking place and we’ll not fail.»I don’t know what a sticking place is, but that’s why I’m doing this!
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one.” – George R.R. Martin
Here is a list of the lives I lived last year if you are after some recommendations. COME ON!
A Book A Week 