Cluster Critiques

In Pieces by Sally Field

I though Sally Field was possibly the happiest person in the world. She was the girl we all wanted to be. Pretty, funny, happy, a cheerleader.  But in Field’s well-written, yet heart-wrenching autobiography, In Pieces, we are reminded that even famous people are occasionally forced to traipse through the cesspool of life.

Sally and her siblings grew up in a broken home until her semi-famous actress mother married semi-famous stuntman, Jock Mahoney, and Sally, like too many children, had to face a childhood unsuitable for a child. When she became a teen her assent to fame was quick and final, putting her on an unstoppable and treacherous treadmill to maintain celebrity and to vie for better roles. She seemed to always be desperate for money and stability, which is not something I would have imagined for such a famous actress. Maybe actors are just better at acting like they’re doing better than they really are. 

Not that Sally Field didn’t do well as an actress. She did. She won three Emmys and two Oscars, and starred in some great movies, including, “Forrest Gump," Norma Rae”, and my personal favorite, “Steel Magnolias”. She was also Burt Reynold’s lover for years, and remained his very close friend and confidant until he died (the story of which Field tells with touching humanity). But it doesn’t seem life was ever easy for Sally Field.

There was a part of me that felt Field’s story was nothing short of a cellular-level shoulder cry, an off-loading of a lifetime of too many sorrows and challenges, and not enough joy. But there was another part of me that felt Field was doing what she does best, acting. It wasn't that I didn’t believe her dramatic life-story of childhood abuse and exploitation, professional struggles, marriage difficulties, and classic mother-daughter conflicts, but at times, especially since I listened to the audio version of the book, which was read by Sally, I felt she was playing the role of her life, and playing it well.

Sally’s story, In Pieces, was interesting, well written, and in the audible format, well performed. I believe Sally Field is as genuine as she seems. I liked her book, and I like her!

Circe by Madeline Miller

Wow! What a soap opera – a Greek one at that.  Circe is the quasi-family saga of an unfavored daughter of a particularly nasty Greek God and Goddess, and who is condemned to an isolated island for mingling with mortals and dabbling in witchcraft. I have vague recollections of a book about the Greek Gods my mom had around the house when I was a kid, and recognized the names of some of the bit role players in Circe, including Zeus, Minotaur, Icarus, Medea, and Odysseus. What I don’t remember was how ridiculously dysfunctional the characters of Greek Mythology were – or at least according to Madeline Miller anyway. If Circe reflects the original writings, I think the adage, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely” must have been coined in reference to Greek Gods. 

I also don’t remember there being so much sex, unless I simply didn’t recognize it as such at my young age. Or maybe mom’s book was the “sanitized” version. Anyway, there’s plenty of it in Circe. There’s loveless, passionate sex, there passionate love sex, infidelity sex, rape and more rape, oh and I almost forgot, there’s even bestiality. 

There’s also gobs of misogyny, hate, cruelty, and just plain bullying between the Gods and Goddesses of greater and lesser status, and marterism, and revenge – LOTS! Oh yes, and sea monsters and turning men who are male chauvinist pigs into literal pigs. 

So, this all sounds like I didn’t like Circe, but I did. Not so much the story, which was just mildly amusing, and a bit sluggish at times, but rather Miller’s writing, which was imaginative and lyrical. Also, the narrator, Perdita Weeks, (audible book) has a beautiful voice and did an exceptional job making Circe probably more interesting then she might have seemed on paper. Here are a few of my favorite passages. 

“He showed me his scars, and in return he let me pretend that I had none.” 

“So many years I had spent as a child sifting his bright features for his thoughts, trying to glimpse among them one that bore my name. But he was a harp with only one string, and the note it played was himself. 

 “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open.” 

If you like clever nuanced writing, and don’t mind that the story drags a bit, you’ll like Circe.

The Library Book by Susan Orlean

I love it when I pick out an audio book to listen to on a road-trip and my husband says, “I don’t want to listen to that.  It sounds boring.” Then after being forced to listen to it for a while, upon embarking on a subsequent road trip says, “Why don’t you put back on that book about the library fire”. That’s what happened with The Library Book by Susan Orlean, which is about the 1986 arson of the Los Angeles Central library, which took firefighters more than seven hours to extinguish, destroyed more than 400,000 books and damaged more than 700,000 books. 

Sound boring? Maybe you’d be interested in the crime investigation aspect. Who started the fire? Why? How? I won’t spoil it by telling you much more than there’s a good bit of the book dedicated to the investigation, and I found it all mesmerizing. 

Then there’s the history of libraries in general, and in Los Angeles specifically. I can picture your eyes glazing over right now, and in the hands of most, that history could be sleep inducing. But author Susan Orlean has the enviable skill of turning seemingly mundane topics, like library fires and orchid thieves (reference Orleans fab book-to-movie starring Meryl Streep, The Orchid Thief) into heart-racing, tear-inducing, edge-of-your-seat stories. The sordid, crazy history of Los Angeles, even told in the context of the history of libraries in Los Angeles, was surprisingly intriguing. I loved The Library Book and was sad when it ended.