I don’t know where this book gets off saying “A Novel” on the cover. Bookends is chick lit, pure and simple.

What’s the difference? Well, chick lit books are of course novels, in the sense that they’re fiction, but novels aren’t necessarily chick lit. Chick lit is very specific: it has a female protagonist; the purpose of the story is to hook her up with the guy who the author has, early on, chosen as the obvious perfect guy for her; it’s narrated by the protagonist; and the protagonist has almost no personality, only a collection of fun facts you know about her.

I’ll write later about Chick Lit Protagonist Syndrome, but suffice it to say that they’re almost universally wildly codependent, with very little self-knowledge, compulsive emotional eating, no idea whether the guy really likes them even if he comes in with “I Really Like You, Protagonist” tattooed on his forehead, and deep shame about themselves and especially their bodies (which are always telegraphed as very very beautiful despite what the protagonist thinks). Oh, and every man in the book is either gay, married to a friend of the protagonist’s, or a future love interest. There are no other options.

This one also can’t tell a story. Jeeezus. The pacing of this book is rocky; it starts out with several chapters about the characters in their early twenties, then rockets forward to the 31-year-old present with no explanation for the early chapters, then much later on brings back the one character who left the group in those early chapters. It’s obvious that she must be coming back, but only because it would be a terrible book if such a pivotal character were introduced and then totally dropped.

The story gets back on track with her return, only to drift off again toward the end as every plot thread has to get wrapped up, often off-camera. I can’t tell you how many of the characters’ experiences are just summarized for us by the narrator. There are times, in the last few chapters, where days and even weeks of intense character development are retold at a breathless pace. Like, she has the narrator tell us that her friend Si is telling us his friend Eva’s life story, and we hear the whole ENTIRE thing third-hand, and then we get this:

“And she really is [fine],” Si told me, in wonder, in awe, and then he said goodbye and put down the phone, because he had the rest of the night to think about what she’d said.

Come on: how would the narrator even know what he was going to think and do after he hung up? It ends up ringing false because (like any good codependent) the narrator has no boundaries. That is, Green is trying to write the story from the perspective of an omniscient narrator, but puts her in the body of a specific character who couldn’t know all this stuff and isn’t the right vehicle for it.

The problem here is that Jane Green has too many great characters with fascinating stories for one book – the way that she chose to tell it. Si’s story would have made a much better book. Or she could have told different chapters of Bookends from different perspectives, letting the overall story unfold as each character played their own part. That would have made an incredible book. Instead, the story is hamstrung by being forced through one rather passive woman’s perspective.

There are also too many stories happening – the opening of this new bookstore, Bookends, which is co-owned by the protagonist and another main character, and even lends the book its name, takes up a lot of time but barely serves to advance the plot at all. It’s a major undertaking, and a major success, and yet there’s no emotional impact to it: we’re told that it makes the other main character’s life very busy, which puts stress on her marriage, but it causes so few problems for the protagonist that it seems pointless other than as occasional comic relief.

So: chick lit. Because of the boundary problems, the Chick Lit Protagonist Syndrome, and the slapdash writing. I’m not saying that chick lit can’t be well-written, but this particular kind of slapdash fast-paced gallop through a storyline, with little pause for real emotional depth, is characteristic of the genre. I enjoyed Bookends anyway, but I don’t think I would read it again.

Cody’s on Telegraph

Originally uploaded by Steve Rhodes

Cody’s Books is a famous and beloved local chain that began in Berkeley in 1965. It’s been struggling for at least ten years, I think, despite (or, in my opinion, because of) trying to expand across several cities to at one point three whole locations. On Friday, with very little warning, it closed its final location.

It’s tempting to color this in as a story about multinational conglomerates crushing local chains, or about the painful losses caused by an ailing economy. But the fact is that Cody’s struggled with the same circular, self-sabotaging addict behavior that is so familiar to many survivors.

I’m no expert on Cody’s Books history; I’ve only watched and read about the drama for the short time (12 years) that I’ve lived in the area. But in that time, I’ve seen them shoot themselves in the foot over and over, each time crying out to everyone who will listen that they are just victims of gun violence.

First, they opened their Fourth Street location, a nice big store in a swankier part of Berkeley than their original spot – and, when it naturally drained some traffic from the first location, they complained loudly that their decreased revenues there were because of the homeless people on Telegraph Avenue. They began hustling the neighborhood and the city to “clean up” Telegraph, increasing the police presence on the street and instituting new policies trying to keep homeless people away from the area around the store.

The San Francisco store opening came next – an odd choice at a time when the business was already struggling financially. It stayed open for only 18 months in the high-rent, high-profile downtown location. Owner Andy Ross mortgaged his house to open the San Francisco location: a basement-level local bookstore, with just the door and sign at street level, in an area that caters to tourists who want the familiar and the visible.

When it hemorrhaged money and closed, Ross again searched for someone to blame. He seemed baffled by the possibility that any big store in the busy area could fail: “In spite of the location and the size, it just didn’t work. I can’t interview the customers who didn’t come. The customers who did come liked the store.” Well, that’s all there is to business, right? You see if the people who become your customers like you, and if they do, then you should make a profit? You spend all your money on a fancy spot and wait for it to pay off? No?

In the end, Ross concluded, the killer was… construction of a nearby Barney’s. Even though they chose not to stay open through the end of construction because they weren’t sure it would make enough of a difference.

That store closed April 20, 2007. All that was left was the Cody’s Books on Fourth Street, which – depending on your viewpoint – either closed or simply moved to Shattuck Avenue in April of this year.

APRIL.

The Shattuck location was open for TWO MONTHS before its abrupt closing. This was the most shocking development of them all, and the most telling. Nobody knew that the store was going to close. There were no press releases sent out; no signs announcing its departure; no inventory close-out sales; no attempts to find a new owner or new investors; and certainly no attempts to do anything differently.

It’s shocking because when the original store on Telegraph closed, the community was up in arms. People begged them not to close. Every newspaper, both the daily and the free weekly papers, wrote about it – often more than once. There were letters to the editor, calls for action, and a huge closing event where people came all day to pay their respects.

Which means that Cody’s had options. They had a huge fan base to call upon: not only whatever customers they normally had, but also the many bibliophiles and radicals all over who had fond memories of the store. They just chose not to call on that community at all.

The funny thing is that when the San Francisco store closed just over a year ago, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that “the Fourth Street location is thriving and Ross said he plans to keep it going,” and quoted him as saying, “The Cody’s brand lives strong in the East Bay, and that’s what we’re going to focus on.”

It’s frustrating because the store, inasmuch as a store can be, was the victim of addict behavior. It suffered from the classic signs of addiction, which of course are also classic signs of abuse. The Chronicle’s article about it today had a telling quote:

One local Pulitzer Prize winner, Berkeley author Michael Chabon, said of Cody’s closing, “I think it’s a terrible shame. It was a wonderful bookstore. It’s painful, sort of like watching someone suffering from a chronic illness painfully and slowly die. (Cody’s was) part of the fabric of Berkeley, the social fabric and commercial fabric.”

It was very much like that, and the chronic illness killing it was abuse. And, of course, addiction – untreated abuse – is a progressive disease. If you don’t deal with it, it will get worse and worse until it kills you. This is not only true for drug addicts or alcoholics; any abuse survivor who does not have a way of dealing with the effects of that abuse will have an increasingly numbed, deadened, painful, difficult life until they can begin reversing that damage with the tools of recovery.

There was even a twelve-step program for Cody’s Books. Business Debtors Anonymous is a sub-group of Debtors Anonymous which provides lots of clarity and guidance about what does and doesn’t work for people in business. They have a huge emphasis on being clear about spending, assets, business plans, agreements, and detaching from drama with customers, competitors, and employees. It seems as though Cody’s management was missing a lot of those tools.

There was the tunnel vision, that special form of denial where people look at everything as an isolated incident in a desperate attempt to make it controllable and deny the big picture.

There was the constant attempt to pass the buck, the refusal of appropriate responsibility for anything that was happening. “Appropriate” because it’s quite common for abuse survivors to feel tremendous shame and guilt for things that we’re not actually responsible for – while continuing to feel like powerless victims in our lives because we have no idea how to set boundaries, take care of business, or reclaim our power. And because we want to find proof that what happened to us is not our fault, and misguidedly look for that in our present day instead of in the past. It’s the homeless people’s fault! It’s because there’s not enough parking here! It’s because of the construction! It’s because of the internet! Because of the chains! Because the darn students aren’t buying their books from us anymore! Because people don’t read!

I read business books and business blogs like they’re chick lit, and let me tell you: from a business perspective, all those things are challenges, not business-killers. So revenues dropped from $30,000 a month to $10,000 a month between 1990 and 2000 – so what? As long as your doors are still open, that’s an opportunity to take inventory of what you could be doing better, and to come up with some really exciting and innovative changes.

Powell’s Books is a fantastic, if over-used, example of this: like Cody’s, they had a huge store and a huge following before the internet came along. And the market changed, and they changed with it; now they have a huge internet following, and more thriving stores. They evaluate what is working for them, and change what is not, and try new things, and evaluate those too.

Surprise: this corresponds exactly to what people in recovery do. It’s just like the twelve steps, where people learn to take inventory of what has and has not worked for them and make it right, without beating themselves up along the way.

Then there was the search for a quick fix: moving stores around, closing stores, selling the business, mortgaging the house, trying San Francisco, anything but change what they were actually doing within the business.

And the relentless negativity that goes with searching for someone to blame. They were literally surrounded by thriving independent bookstores: Moe’s Books, Half Price Books, Shakespeare & Co., Black Oak Books, Pegasus Books, and many more, in a community that still supports as many as three bookstores on the same block. And yet, they had this growing chant of complaints about how terrible everything was, which rose eventually to drown out even their ability to do business.

And, my favorite, the all or nothing thinking – either we have to be doing the same thing we were doing before, or we have to just close everything down and run. They could never seem to see any other possible solutions than keep trying what they were doing or close down.

This spiraled out of control, by the end, to the point where they left with a store full of books and a pile of paperwork on the street. On the street!

I was there today. I came with three friends, in part specifically to go to Cody’s. (Which, by the way, was in what we thought was finally the perfect location for it: right next to the university campus, on a huge street with lots of bookstores but none right next door to it, with tons of foot traffic and enormous windows to show them what it had, right next to BART and lots of bus stops, next to the Berkeley City College campus as well….)

We were surprised to find the still-full bookstore locked, with printed-out notices on the front doors explaining that they had shut those doors forever on Friday. And we weren’t the only ones who were surprised: during the course of hanging out on Shattuck for a few hours that afternoon, we saw at least a dozen other people try the doors or collect in front of the store staring at it in shock, at several different times. There must have been dozens of surprised would-be customers who went through this on Sunday alone. What the hell was Cody’s doing that meant that that kind of foot traffic wasn’t enough to support one store?

I’m guessing that at least part of it was the former owner’s lust for opening new stores. (Ross sold the business in September of 2006 but stayed on as president, which – along with the store’s continuous bad choices – makes me suspect that not much changed at Cody’s with the sale.) When the San Francisco store closed, the Chronicle quoted Ross as saying, “This is the second store I’ve had to close in two years. This is not what I wanted to do in my life. I wanted to open stores.” While clearly at least some of that cost came out of his pocket, I suspect that the business took a series of financial hits too, hits it was still trying to overcome.

From BDA’s Signs of Compulsive Debting in Business:

• We confused our personal finances with our business finances and drew from one set of funds to cover the other.

• We lived in a state of self-deprivation for the sake of our business. (Ross had to sell his mortgaged house after the SF store closed.)
• We did not or were unable to ask for help when we needed it most.

The most intense sign of the chaos, to me, was that stack of papers. One of my friends spotted a dumpster full of boxes as we were about to leave, and ran to snag them for her upcoming move, with my girlfriend’s help. A long while later, they returned with news: the boxes were full of discarded paperwork from Cody’s Books.

So, not only did they not even bother to pack up the books and clean out the store either before or after closing it, but they for some reason spent some time throwing out papers first? How very fishy.

Upon investigation, they found a wide selection of different kinds of paperwork. There were records of orders the store had made, of advertising and ad prices. There were in-store memos and recent store newsletters. There was at least one whole box of personal correspondence from customers, complete with names and addresses as well as any other personal information the customers had happened to give them. And there was another entire layer of sealed boxes, which they speculated might have been the bookstore’s way of getting rid of more sensitive information. Of course, in a way you don’t need to have more sensitive information when a person or organization is already telling you at top volume how crazy it is.

So that’s Cody’s coda. After decades of passionate work with books, they chose to go under unannounced, unnoticed, and unsung. Maybe over the coming days we’ll see a community response to their closing, or more explanation of it, or some kind of good-bye from the long-lived store. Otherwise, fans will have to get their closure from the awareness that the beloved bookstore was just another victim of the same patterns we see all around us every day: the effects of abuse in our society.

Mrs. S. said something I really identified with in reply to my last post. And I realized that my comment was turning into a whole blog post of its own, so I decided I’d better do it here. We can do lots of Sunday Salons, right? I don’t see any rules about this

So, she had written:

I have a similar issue when I’m travelling. Like tomorrow I have to spend about 3.5 hours ona train – so what should I read. The book I want to read next is heavy – so not good for travelling – so I need to pick another – but what if I finish it? Then I need a spare one – or what if I don’t like either of them once I’ve started?? EEk.

Now this is why I want to buy a Kindle… then I’d have 200 books in my pocket and no stress

Exactly! That’s the exact issue! I don’t think Kindle is the solution tho, at least for me. I mean, it’s one solution for that particular problem… although if I had had Kindle I think I would have then freaked out about whether any of the 200 books it had on it were going to be What I Wanted To Read or not.

The problem, for me, was… basically a lack of serenity. Not trusting that I could sit without books. Not trusting that I would feel okay if I didn’t have something to use to check out. It was a total carryover from using books to survive in childhood. I used them to escape bullying (and got bullied for that!), I used them to have my own life outside of my dysfunctional family, I used them to find my own voice and write about what happened to me… they were a great escape valve, but there was a point where I hadn’t yet truly escaped, where I was still clinging really hard to the books.

I think that there are layers of escape from abuse. There’s actually getting out, of course, but even after leaving abusive relationships or situations there’s still a lot more to go through to get the abuse out of our heads. Because it’s natural to internalize it to some extent. Especially as children. And often we get out of abusive adult relationships without knowing about the internalized stuff from our childhoods that brought us into an abusive relationship in the first place. And often we internalize a lot more of an adult partner’s abuse than we otherwise might in the process of trying to make the relationship work. Adapting and adapting and adapting to a partner (or boss, or friend, or whoever) who isn’t meeting us halfway. (and how much more so as children, when escape is so much harder?)

I think a lot of readers are like me: we have many many reasons to love books, and one is that they were a great escape. And when something saves your life like that, it’s hard to let go of – and it’s also hard to trust that it’s not necessary anymore. I don’t think I set out consciously to Not Need Books All The Time, in any kind of planned way. I set out to escape the abuse in my head: codependency, shame, control issues, dissociation. I worked on my trust issues, and learned how to tell who was trustworthy. I learned what my boundaries were and how to set boundaries with others. I learned what I really liked and disliked and what I felt at any given moment. I learned how to turn things over when I had done whatever I could to change them (or when there was no need to do anything). I learned to listen to and follow my intuition. I learned how I had harmed myself and others as a result of my abuse and to heal that harm so I could trust and love myself. A lot of things just fell away in the process; compulsive reading was one of them. I still read a lot; my relationship with reading has just evolved.

And that’s the kind of stuff that Life More Awesome is going to be about. Near-daily writing and weekly challenges for making our lives more awesome – in part, how to set boundaries, how to trust ourselves, how to love ourselves, how to deal with feelings and shame and control issues and all that other crap that gets in the way of truly enjoying life. That gets between us and serenity, so that we have to work around it, carrying around extra books and extra work and extra beliefs that don’t end up serving us. Taking those big rocks out of the stream of life.

The first challenge will be posted soon….

Wisteria commented a while back about how “you never want to run out of something to read. My biggest nightmare. Imagine the anxiety on top of anxiety. Yikes!!!”

I resemble that remark. Or at least I used to. Back in high school, I used to have red marks on my shoulders every night from my backpack. Not the kind of red marks that come from wearing a watch that’s too tight, which fade away quickly. Red marks that seemed to be worn into my skin because the damn thing was so heavy.

I just couldn’t let go of books. My backpack usually had a ton of scrumpled-up papers going back to the beginning of the school year, covered in chocolate stains, a couple of different bars and tail-ends of chocolate bars, some smashed soda cans I had rescued for recycling (I also had, for a while, a serious soda habit which got to the point where I was drinking caffeinated sodas to relax….), a couple of binders and school books, and then at least three books I was actually reading.

There’d be the two books I was in the middle of, and the book I wanted to read next, and then… what about that book in a totally different genre? I might want to read that today! These ones aren’t appealing to me that much right now – I need to make sure I have that one on hand! And those two over there, they’re both really different and I might feel like reading them. And what am I going to do if I don’t have them when I want to read them?! In they go, to join their friends The Books I Finished Last Week And Forgot To Take Out.

It wasn’t just high school, either. It was like that in college and into adulthood. Especially on trips, local or long-distance. I remember going – underage – to a bar to see Fairy Butch’s cabaret show, and getting teased about how horrifying it was that I came in with my backpack, looking like a little junior-high kid dropping by after school. I was like, “But I have to have my backpack! I bring it everywhere! What if I NEEEED something?!”

That was the key, for me. I was terrified of not having something I needed. Not having the book I wanted to read when I wanted it. Not having anything on hand or at home that I wanted to read. It wasn’t just the backpack: I put tons of energy into making sure that I would have Something To Read. I spent a lot on books, bought them compulsively, hung on to them even if I had never read them and didn’t really like them. I HAD TO have books to read. They were my favorite way of checking out, after all. What was I going to do if I couldn’t escape when I needed to?

Or anyway, when I thought I needed to. I slowly became willing to experiment with leaving the bag at home sometimes, with sometimes just bringing one book with me, with noticing what that was like. I found that the reality was that I never used most of what I was carrying around, and that I could always amuse myself if I had down time without a book on hand.

What really struck me was how much fear I had around not having the right book to read. I was scared that I would be struck with the urge to read something I didn’t have with me and then I would be sad. Obviously this is not about what it seemed to be about. I mean, that’s not terrifying; it’s not really even sad. It’s just a minor disappointment if I’m caught in the middle of a really good book I don’t have with me; not having a book it just occurred to me I want to read is even lower on the chart.

What was really happening was that I was just terrified of my feelings, and because I was using books to escape my feelings, I was terrified of not having the right book to read. Like they were magical and the right one could protect me. Which is how it seemed, since if I couldn’t get into the book I had – like if it was no longer one I wanted to read – I would just try to force myself to push through it and feel tons of buzzing anxiety. Or not read it and feel the buzzing anxiety of not knowing what to do with myself. Because I sure as hell wasn’t going to go pay attention to what was happening inside me!

Funny thing… now that I’ve learned how to feel my feelings, and sit with them, and become willing to do that, books are totally optional. They’re awesome and I still read a ton, but there are even times when I consciously decide not to pick up a book or turn on the TV because I’m having so much fun just sitting still and being with myself. Now that’s recovery!