Well, I guess it’s obvious that abuse, addiction, and recovery is my favorite social issue. It sounds like three things, but it’s really all one smooth loop: being abused, acting that abuse out on ourselves, and learning to love ourselves and end that cycle.

This week’s Weekly Geeks topic is to pick our favorite social issue and list books that we’d like to read about it. So I thought I’d combine it with Thursday Thirteen and come up with thirteen of them.

I felt sort of resistant at first. I want to be done reading books about abuse and recovery. I want to know everything and be an authority and be the one writing stuff that blows people’s minds. And for some reason, I think that those are mutually exclusive. How silly is that?

I tend to feel resistance to reading books about abuse, no matter how interesting they sound, for what I think are pretty common reasons. They seem scary – another case of associating talking about trauma with the trauma itself. And another case of the common problem many abuse survivors have of being afraid of our feelings. Like if I read a book about abuse, instead of feeling fascinated and validated, I’ll be overwhelmed by all the feelings I experienced while being abused, and drown in it.

And then, too, I have more than five years of recovery under my belt and I feel frustrated and bored by some books, the ones that just go over the same basic ideas
about abuse and recovery (you are not alone, make a safe place for yourself, punch a pillow, blah blah blah) or worse, parrot the same misconceptions (falsities like it’s always men abusing girls, very few boys are sexually abused, you can’t trust recovered memories, blah blah crazypants).

But as I keep rejecting the idea of writing about abuse-related books I haven’t read this week, the universe has kept on throwing them at me. It seems like every website I go to or email I open is saying “Remember this book you set aside to look at? Remember this wish list you made at Powell’s?” So I might as well face it: there are still books that I can get delight and clarity from on this subject. Damnit.

In no particular order:

1. Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse

This one is a classic. Jennifer Freyd is an amazing psychologist, who took the even more amazing step of speaking out about her parents’ abuse and writing this book which for once and for all answers the question of “why would anyone forget such a huge traumatic memorable experience?” Even when her parents threw a fit and founded the idiotic False Memory Syndrome Foundation.

2. The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment by Babette Rothschild

This came up when I searched for Betrayal Trauma. It looked interesting, so I clicked through and saw that readers have said it “thoroughly explains the importance of “body memories” in trauma processing and discusses many ways in which to help clients both elicit and integrate dysfunctionally stored cellular memories,” and that “After more than 20 years treating trauma survivors I all too rarely find a new book from which I really learn something that I can immediately apply to my work. This is such a book.” Sounds good to me!

3. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma: The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences by Peter Levine

I saw this book at Black Oak Books a while ago and really wanted to get it. (And Diesel Books too, come to think of it.) It looks very motivational and peppy, all about what awesome mad recovery skillz abuse survivors have to share with the world and what awesome things we can learn from animals about our own healing. Of course, I could be wrong, since I haven’t read it. It also looked like a fairly simple read, which is nice next to books with words like “psychophysiology” in the name.

4. A Young Person’s Guide to the 12 Steps by Stephen Roos

Actually I want to read this more for research because I am writing a guide to the 12 steps for kids. I suspect that mine is more for the 8-12 range, and I know that this one is aimed at teens because I’ve flipped through it in the store. But the steps have amazingly good structure and tools for dealing with the effects of abuse, and it’s always interesting to hear a new perspective on them. Plus, only 128 pages!

5. Clinician’s Guide to the 12 Step Principles by Marvin Seppala

One reviewer wrote, “The most interesting thing about this book is the unapologetic way in which the critical element of spirituality is addressed. For too long sprirituality has been a taboo subject in the cooly rational world of medical education. This book emphasizes that spirituality is the foundation upon which recovery from addictive illness is built one day at a time.” I’d love to see how they explain that to doctors and therapists.

Mainly, I think this sounds wicked interesting because I’ve worked in the recovery field for a while and I am constantly flabbergasted by how many people doing counseling for alcoholism, or running rehab centers or whatever, have no understanding of 12-step programs – even while they refer people out constantly to the few that they know about.It often seems to be more like “Well, I know you need this and these people will be able to explain why.” One of my goals is to educate people in the field about how they and their clients can benefit from the tools and information in 12-step programs, what the programs actually involve and how it all ties together holistically. So I guess I should read this book, huh!

6. The Mother I Carry: A Memoir of Healing from Emotional Abuse by Louise Wisechild

I read another book of hers, The Obsidian Mirror: Healing from Childhood Sexual Abuse, and really enjoyed her clarity about what was going on with her and her explanation of what she went through on this journey. Little did I know it was a sequel! (No, wait… it’s possible that THIS is the sequel. I guess I’ll have to read them to find out!) The Obsidian Mirror has a better first sentence: “Since it is inappropriate to discuss religion, I will begin there.” But both of them look funny, bold, and direct as hell, which are things I look for in personal writing about abuse.

7. Stop Walking on Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back When Someone You Care about Has Borderline Personality Disorder by Randi Kreger

I checked this out of the library and then stalled on reading it for pretty much all the self-faking-out reasons described above. Plus, I think that on some level, now that I have no one in my life with BPD, I want to avoid reading about it too – as if ignorance protects me! It is, in fact, exactly the opposite that is the case. The author has put together a lot of really helpful and clear information about borderline personality disorder and its effects at http://bpdcentral.com, which definitely makes me want to read the book more!

8. Understanding the Borderline Mother: Helping Her Children Transcend the Intense, Unpredictable, and Volatile Relationship by Christine Ann Lawson

My mother’s not borderline, but I still found this book helpful even simply when flipping through it in the store – especially in its descriptions of different “types” of borderlines like the Queen, the Waif, the Witch, and the Hermit. It really helped me identify when people in my life were undiagnosed (as far as I knew) borderlines, and make different choices around them. I’d like to read it all the way through!

(The link to abuse, for new readers, is that untreated BPD often leads people to become extremely abusive, and that borderline personality disorder is very much caused by abuse and neglect.)

9. I Hate You, Don’t Leave Me: Understanding the Borderline Personality by Jerold Kreisman

I want to read this because I have a copy and therefore I hope it will be good and useful… but I have my doubts. One review ended by remarking, out of nowhere, that “This clinically written primer leaves the reader with the impression that BPD syndrome is a catchall category.” Others commented on the fact that it leaves borderlines feeling hopeless because it was written before people knew about medication that could help – but surely by 1991 they knew about therapies that could help? and the book’s own description seems to claim that it will show people how to cope with and treat it. Sounds like it was groundbreaking at the time, when there were no other books on BPD, but hasn’t stood up well or been updated since. On the other hand, a lot of non-BPD readers said they found it very helpful in learning how to interact with borderline folks, and praised it to the heavens.

10. Sometimes I Act Crazy: Living with Borderline Personality Disorder, also by Jerold Kreisman

This is pitched as a follow-up book, published 15 years later. It got much better reviews; people who are borderline and people who love people who are borderline say that the anecdotes and personal stories in it really helped them identify with and understand the disease better. I’d like to read it because my main experience with BPD is as the victim of people who had it and had not begun healing from it, and it would be great to be able to understand the BPD experience from a compassionate place and have a better understanding of what helps with it.

11. Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers

Another book I have and have not read. I love history, I love old-timey writing, and I love hearing about the history of the recovery movement; why have I not read this yet? Maybe because it was buried under a stack of magazines.

12. Bluebird : Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists by Colin Ross

I always think that the title totally plays into those FMSF lunatics who want us to believe that therapists are creating repressed memories and multiple systems. Specifically, that all cases of either are caused by therapists. Which is not true at all. Instead, Bluebird is an intensively researched book about government ritual abuse, using primary source documentation (that is, documents that come from the people who were doing this stuff, generally via the Freedom of Information Act) to expose and explain gruesome attempts at mind control by different governments. One reader adds that “Ross has an entire diagram of the MK-ULTRA projects and sub-projects, where they were, who ran them and where the funding came from,” which provides some idea of how detailed he is in his writing about these things and how much time he spends connecting the dots. I’ve read some of it; not nearly enough, but it inspired me to the level of research I used when writing about Project Monarch/MK-ULTRA myself.

13. The Addictive Organization: Why We Overwork, Cover Up, Pick Up the Pieces, Please the Boss, and Perpetuate Sick Organizations, by Anne Wilson Schaef and Diane Fassel

I have this at home, borrowed from someone, and I have to say, I flipped through it and I was disappointed. It’s a follow-up to When Society Becomes an Addict,
which of course I’ve written about here and here, but it looks much drier – written in more academic language, and, in my edition at least, also in much smaller print! But it is supposed to talk about the same principles and how they play out in organizati ons, which is important for anyone who works anywhere or does activist work… so I’m hoping that giving it an honest try will pay off.

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This week’s Weekly Geeks theme is books we loved as children… which makes a great follow-up to Why Do We Read? Beastmama made a little meme for it which I’m using here.

1. What is the earliest book you remember loving?

Little House in the Big Woods. And maybe Cassie’s Magic Flower, a book my mother got me from the Lilian Vernon catalog which I still have and which appears to have made no mark on the internet whatsoever… amazingly. Or at least no mark on Google!

Cassie’s Magic Flower… which I don’t guarantee was absolutely for sure called that… was a big picture book about a little girl who lived in “Calico Corner”, where everything was black and white and dreary. And then one day, a star falls to earth and leaves some funny-looking seeds that grow into enormous full-color calico-patterned flowers.

When Cassie takes one, she turns Technicolor and everyone else makes fun of her and is mean to her. Except for a few kind souls who believe in her and her kooky dreams, or who are outcasts themselves. And she gives each of them a flower and soon they are leaving trails of color everywhere and bringing joy to the whole world with their colors. I loved the sense of strangeness of the town, and the magic, and the way it was drawn, and the way everything centered around a little girl with crazy dreams of awesomeness.

I won’t swear that Little House in the Big Woods was the one I first encountered. I went to a Montessori preschool where for a while they were reading to us out of that series every day, and I think it was out of that book. That’s the first one I remember loving, because I had a copy of it (that and Little Town on the Prairie, where they GET KITTENS!!!!1!!1one) and Laura was just about my age in the Big Woods, plus it had great stories within stories from Pa, plus it is the one where Aunt Delia’s buttons look just exactly like big ripe blackberries and I was a sucker for anything that sounded like food. Mmmm… suckers.

2. When you were younger, which book characters did you want to be in your circle of friends?

I didn’t think about it consciously in those terms, but I really wanted to be one of the silver-eyed kids in The Girl With the Silver Eyes, (by Willo Davis Roberts, who also wrote the previously-mentioned Don’t Hurt Laurie!). I identified with feeling like a freak, and being treated like kind of a freak, and I wanted so badly to have Super Sekrit Special Powers ™ to go with it! And I liked books where kids could run away from abuse or do something about it; these kids went behind their parents’ backs to band together and ran away where necessary and totally helped each other have community.

I also really liked the kids in E. Nesbit’s books. They lived in the turn of the last century, and they were all incredibly real and brave and adventurous and clever. She just had a fantastic ear for how kids think and talk and act, and it was a lot of fun to see how much I had in common with children who lived in this completely different world – not only filled with Psammeads and Phoenixes, but also full of social commentary on the class system in Victorian England. Oh, and time travel.

3. What books do you have nostalgia for as an adult?

 All of them?

I went through a serious, many-years-long nostalgia phase. I’m sure many of you can identify with it – that place of not being willing to let go of notebooks, books, scraps of paper, toys, keepsakes, clothes, whatever, from a past phase of life….as if those objects hold the memories of that time and letting go means losing the memories. Or betraying our past selves who loved and used those things. Or betraying the people who gave them to us. Or risking not having enough, like letting go of some appliance or outfit that we never use will result in immediately needing and wanting it desperately and not having our needs met!

There were so many layers to it. The fear of deprivation, because I had deprived myself of so many of my needs in the past. The fear of loss, because I had felt so much loss in the past. The fear of all the emotions, the fear and sadness and rage, that I had felt and hidden from myself in the past, exploding out if I disturbed the objects from that time.

And then, the memories. I realized eventually that a lot of my clutter was my way of archiving my past. Accumulating evidence. I had spent so much of my childhood dissociated, burying memories I couldn’t yet deal with, that I didn’t trust myself to remember anything. I needed proof to look at, whether it was a forgotten poem I’d written in high school or a half-kept journal from third grade. I felt like I needed to have hard copies of everything I might forget.

Of course all of this was subconscious. I didn’t know why I kept so much stuff, or why I worried that I would be sad or need something as soon as I got rid of it. I was so codependent with my stuff. I projected all my fears and sadness onto it, thinking half-seriously (maybe three-quarters seriously) that if I got rid of these things they would feel sad and be betrayed. That it would be mean to a once-enjoyed doll to give it away. It felt like nostalgia for EVERYthing, because I projected everything I had felt or experienced or wanted onto the stuff around me.

But of course, there were also books that were especially special to me. Still a lot of them, but off the top of my head: those Laura Ingalls Wilder and Elizabeth Enright books of course, the Betsy-Tacy series, a lot of books by Dianna Wynne Jones who is fabulous, the So You Want to be a Wizard series by Diane Duane especially… the All of a Kind Family, the Active-Enzyme Lemon-Freshened Junior High School Witch, Cheaper by the Dozen, The Family At One End Street, ummm…. I might have to come back to this list!

4. What books do you wish to share with the kids in your life?

The Little House series was one of the first, for sure. Re-reading them as an adult kind of blows my mind. There is so much more to them than I could see as a child. Intense political stuff, detailed how-tos for pioneer living….

I read the first several books to my son while I had shared custody of him. We were doing a little project where we’d read books from the 1800s and look at how different people’s experiences were depending on where they lived, what their background was, and when in that century they lived. So for example, we read some of the Little House books and then the first American Girl book with Josephina, and a book called A Boy Becomes A Man at Wounded Knee which takes place in modern times but talks a lot about the history of Wounded Knee. And If Your Name Was Changed at Ellis Island. With that one, we looked at the world map and saw all the different places that people came from, and talked about where our relatives had come from. I wanted to read him The Great Brain at the Academy next, about a scheming young con artist/genius going to a Catholic boarding school in 1800s Mormon Utah, but we didn’t get that far. (That’s another winner of the “if it sounds like food” bonus – my favorite part in the book is where he starts his own candy store, sneaking forbidden chocolate bars into the Academy, carving a key for a hiding place out of freaking SOAP, and making a tidy profit.)

He totally loved “the Laura books”, but I think his other favorite was “Return to Gone-Away,” another Elizabeth Enright book. Of course: who doesn’t love her stuff? I want to share SO MUCH with him. It is hard to have loved so many books and want to pass so many on. Like holding a firehose.

5. More philosophical question— how do you think your childhood reading shaped what you like to read as an adult?

I’ve spent a lot of time as an adult revisiting children’s books that I loved. And I’ve found that I still love new ones too. The Penderwicks, and the Bartimaeus trilogy, and those Hermux Tantamoq books especially come to mind. I tend to like chick lit, funny fiction, speculative fiction, very personal fiction, and adult non-fiction the best – which is to say that I want things that are either relaxing or exciting to read. Or both. I guess that that comes from how I read as a child, too; I like to be able to read as a nice relaxing adventurous trip away from daily life. And now I also get to read stuff that enhances my daily life, books that teach me new interesting things about how to live and about the world around me.

Bonus: speaking of the Lillian Vernon catalog (as we were waaaay back up at the top there) this song from Hedwig and the Angry Inch is now what I think of, and what starts playing in my head, every time that’s mentioned. (The youtube page has the lyrics written out, too.)

 

This week’s Weekly Geeks challenge was to adopt a policy of linking to other people’s reviews of a book I’ve reviewed. Like, if you blogged about The Number: A Completely Different Way To Think About The Rest Of Your Life, you could tell me and I would say “Hey! Somebody else wrote about this too, look at that!” As Dewey says, this is great fun because:

1. As a blog reader, I like that I can have my review linked in someone else’s blog.

2. As a blog reader, I like that if I’m interested in a book Darla writes about, there will be other reviews linked at the bottom of the page, so I can get other viewpoints. You can see how this works here.

3. As a blog writer, when I review a book, I often remember that I read someone else’s review at some point, but whose? And when? With Darla’s method, people tell her about their reviews, and she can see what they had to say about a book that is still fresh in her mind.

I think it sounds fun and builds community, so I’m in.

And in fact, I already have one; the whole reason I blogged about The Saturdays was that Dewey did! Which reminded me of that awesome book and author.

I don’t think any other Weekly Geeks have reviewed books I have (other than that one) but I did a little glance through the blogosphere to see if anyone else had reviewed some of the books I’ve talked about here.

D. Estitute at Sober N Clean talked about When Society Becomes an Addict, which echoes my Saint Patrick’s Day post a bit as well as, of course, When Society Becomes an Addict 1 and 2 My favorite part of their review was this little story:

A group of mothers would meet for a boozy lunch in a Dublin hotel and get the doorman to collect the children who would do their homework in the lobby while they got smashed next door. I didn’t ask if cars were crashed as a result of these sessions, but I bet many little hearts crashed when they saw their withering mum on a bar stool.

“We didn’t know the extent of the harm we were inflicting,” she said. Which is understandable. Because when we’re drinking, we don’t see ourselves.

Far from it, we think all is well. That’s the magic of booze — it casts a spell. Because alcohol tells lies — some are harmless and fun but others hurt how we want to see ourselves and behave towards those around us.

M’Lady Lemonbrick of galacticchick brought some incisive analysis to the party too:

Anthropologists, social scientists, indigenous commentators and others, for the past fifty years and more, have been documenting the many similarities between modern society and addicts, as well as the inherant pathology of civilisation. When Society Becomes An Addict, by Ann Wilson Schaef, is a starting point for the investigation of these similarities. There is no doubt that any society that believes it can poison its home, destroy the fertility of the soil, create products that will pollute the planet for tens of thousands of years, daily drive species into extinction and generally act in a fashion that indicates a complete disconnection and disinterest in- indeed, an active hatred towards- the landbase that supports it, is a society that to all intents and definitions is insane.

To ignore the underlying insanity and self-destructive longing of one’s own society is to invite one’s own destruction. To cover over the underlying unsustainability of any society by blithely trotting forth the ‘benefits’ of that society is to await slow death by starvation, toxic overload, environmental disaster or any number of essentially preventable outcomes. Certainly, Bach is beautiful music, but how much land degredation is Bach’s music worth? How many species? What about art- how much environmental destruction is modern art worth? The extinction of twenty species? The destruction of how much landbase? The deaths of how many indigenous people? Apply this analysis to everything you personally think is valuable about civilisation and see where your values really sit.

Locarb at The Zen of Ken contrasted a quote from When Society Becomes an Addict with an editorial from the Vancouver Sun:

It’s not that people no longer crave a connection with one another. They do, just not in person. The widespread popularity of chat rooms and social networks such as Facebook and MySpace suggests we’d rather talk online with friends and strangers than we would with our loved ones, face-to-face…. They’re even used by Alzheimer’s patients to help with memories. Ironically, hours can disappear with the click of a mouse, at the computer, on video games, e-mailing or just surfing the Internet.

And Eddie at [un]Common Sense revisited a wonderful four-year-old post about the book:

When we come into the present, we begin to feel the life force around us again, but we also encounter whatever we have been avoiding. We must have the courage to face whatever is present — our pain, our desires, our grief, our loss, our secret hopes, our love — everything that moves us most deeply. As we stop the war, each of us will find something from which we have been running — our loneliness, our unworthiness, our boredom, our shame, our unfulfilled desires. We must face these parts of ourselves as well.

We all share a longing to go beyond the prisons of our personal fear or anger or addiction, to connect with something greater than “I” (the “mini me”), greater than our small story and our small self. It is possible to stop the war and come into the eternal present — to touch a great ground of being that contains all things. For me, this is the true purpose and mission of life — to discover peace and connectedness in ourselves and to stop the war in us and around us.

That was a lot of fun! I think I’ll post a couple more overviews of other people’s reviews of the books we’ve blogged about over the weekend. I learned that I wasn’t alone (yet again!) and saw some amazing perspectives and insights on what that book was saying. And I got to discover fascinating new blogs!

Oh, so: if you’ve reviewed/blogged about Lee Eisenberg’s The Number, Elizabeth Enright’s The Saturdays (and the other Melendy books) Renee Fredrickson’s Repressed Memories: A Journey to Recovery From Sexual Abuse, Helen Fielding’s Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination, Lauren Catuzzi Grandcolas’ You Can Do It! The Merit Badge Handbook for Grownup Girls (or for that matter, any of the books about Girl or Boy Scout Badges and Signs), or Karen Kingston’s Creating Sacred Space with Feng Shui, drop me a comment and I’ll link you up! Phew… that was a lot.

This is not strictly abuse-related, but you can win a chocolate monkey. And everything should be chocolate monkey-related, right? Everything good, anyway.

DeweyMonster is starting a new meme called Weekly Geeks. The most basic of the basics about it are that:

1. Every week there’ll be a different theme. One week might be “catch up on your library books” week and the next might be “redecorate your blog week” or “organize your challenges” week or “catch up on your reviews” week. It’ll be fairly bookblogcentric, but not exclusively.

2. Everyone who joins agrees that they will try to check each week to see what the theme is, although they DO NOT have to participate each week, only when they feel like it.

It’s a good way for bloggers to build community and get visibility, and everyone who participates can suggest themes or even host it. If you advertise it in your own blog you can be entered to win a chocolate monkey (there, you see my motivation here!) and if you don’t want to do that, you can go enter to participate, mention that you hear about it here, and I’ll get entered again to win the chocolate monkey

And there’s a nice segue into our usual subject matter in Dewey’s next post, too, about a little book called The Saturdays.

I read this, and most everything else Elizabeth Enright wrote that I could get my hands on, about a million times when I was a kid. And since then too. The Saturdays is part of a series about the Melendy family: a father, a sort of housekeeper who stands in as a mother figure for them, and four kids ranging from about seven (Oliver) to I think about fourteen (Mona) when the series starts. It’s set in the 1940s; they live in New York City and then in the rambling New York countryside and go on massive, gorgeous adventures.

The Saturdays is probably their most lavish and wide-ranging set of adventures. The children decide to pool their allowances and send one of them off each week with all the money to do whatever they like with it. And, as in most good children’s books – especially the old-timey ones – these are the kinds of children that things just seem to happen to. Dewey reminisced about Mona meeting rich old Mrs. Oliphant and eating petits-fours in what I think was her penthouse; I remember Oliver going off to the circus by himself, and going on the boats in maybe Central Park, and nearly drowning, and having a fabulous time everywhere nevertheless. I think this might even be the one where Mona auditions for and ends up starring in a very dramatic weekly radio show. Yeah, that’s how long ago this was.

They were very lucky kids in a lot of ways, even though their mother had died when they were very young. Dewey’s review says it the truest and the most sadly:

“In several other ways, when I compare my own childhood to these children’s lives, I realize why the book appealed to me so much. The children are mostly close in age and close in relationship; they’re given an incredible amount of freedom; they have their own entire fourth floor playroom; their creative pursuits are tolerated and sometimes even encouraged….”

That just kills me, thrown in there like that. And, of course, that’s one reason that books like Enright’s are so appealing to so many generations. A lot of children’s books – especially modern ones – are either openly about child abuse on some level (abandonment, neglect, screaming, insults, threats to the children’s lives) or else, more rarely perhaps, strike that jarring note where they are trying hard to prove that the protagonists are in a Very Happy Family Damn It even while the signs of abuse are, mysteriously and seemingly inexplicably, everywhere. Like parents who insist that they are fantastic parents who just happen to have Very Diffcult Children. But Elizabeth Enright’s books have real children, who struggle with real problems (barely remembering or not having known their mother, living in a nation at war, moving to a strange new place) and yet who aren’t being abused. They live in a very happy world, despite its challenges, because they are trusted and respected, loved and supported.

The books aren’t perfect; I am not sure that the children would be so unaffected when their father, for a while, is almost never home and usually working or drop-dead tired if he is. But Enright’s books seem meant to have a little air of fantasy about them, and that balances out her slips. There are other books in her repertoire that are almost more fantastic and really have, to my recollection, no trace of any trauma, like the wonderful Gone-Away Lake series; those always seem a little bit removed from reality to me. (Intentionally, I think, as they take place on a weird nearly-deserted island during summer vacation and the children end up with their own abandoned Victorian for a clubhouse – I mean, come on!)

The Melendys are more realistic; we get to see how they did deal with child abuse at the time when they meet Mark and his violently abusive alcoholic stepfather, and find that his father chases social workers and anyone else from “the county” away from their farm at gunpoint, unchallenged. And even that has a satisfying, if somewhat sad, ending. Enright’s books are not only gorgeously written, but a nice safe haven away from all our normal traumatic childhoods.

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