The End of Your Life Bookclub

I don’t often read non-fiction, but I was tempted by The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe. One the face of it, it could be a depressing read. Here’s the blurb from the book:

Mary Anne Schwalbe is waiting for her chemotherapy treatments when Will casually asks her what she's reading. The conversation they have grows into tradition: soon they are reading the same books so they can have something to talk about in the hospital waiting room. Their choices range from classic (Howards End) to popular (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), from fantastic (The Hobbit) to spiritual (Jon Kabat-Zinn), with many in between. We hear their passion for reading and their love for each other in their intimate and searching discussions.

As the blurb suggest, this book chronicles the relationship between a mother and her son (Mary Anne and Will) as they attend Mary Anne’s hospital appointments following her diagnosis with pancreatic cancer. They used that time to discuss books and it developed into a book club - consisting only of the two of them.

It was a touching read and a tribute of sorts to Mary Anne Schwalbe, although I suspect it is down to the individual reader to decide whether she was a saint, a control freak or something in between. I also enjoyed the book recommendations and the insight into the mother-son relationship. This book could have been a rather depressing book, but actually it was rather heart-warming and provided food for thought and book inspiration. You might want to have a pen and paper nearby to note down some book ideas.

Here are the opening words to get you started

We were nuts about the mocha in the waiting room at Memorial Sloan-Kettering's outpatient care center. The coffee isn't so good, and the hot chocolate is worse. But if, as Mom and I discovered, you push the "mocha" button, you see how two not-very-good things can come together to make something quite delicious. The graham crackers aren't bad either.

The outpatient care center is housed on the very pleasant fourth floor of a handsome black steel and glass office building in Manhattan on the corner of 53rd Street and Third Avenue. Its visitors are fortunate that it's so pleasant, because they spend many hours there. This is where people with cancer wait to see their doctors and to be hooked up to a drip for doses of the life-¬prolonging poison that is one of the wonders of the modern medical world. By the late autumn of 2007, my mother and I began meeting there regularly.

Our book club got its formal start with the mocha and one of the most casual questions two people can ask each other: "What are you reading?" It's something of a quaint question these days. More often in lulls of conversation people ask, "What movies have you seen?" or "Where are you going on vacation?" You can no longer assume, the way you could when I was growing up, that anyone is reading anything. But it's a question my mother and I asked each other for as long as I can remember. So one November day, while passing the time between when they took Mom's blood and when she saw the doctor (which preceded the chemo), I threw out that question. Mom answered that she was reading an extraordinary book, Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner.

Crossing to Safety, which was first published in 1987, is one of those books I'd always so intended to read that I spent years pretending not only that I'd actually read it but also that I knew more about its author than that he'd been born in the early years of the twentieth century and wrote mostly about the American West. I worked in book publishing for twenty-one years and, in various conversation lulls, got into the habit of asking people, especially booksellers, the name of their favorite book and why they loved it so much. One of the most frequently named books was and is always Crossing to Safety.

Raving about books I hadn't read yet was part of my job. But there's a difference between casually fibbing to a bookseller and lying to your seventy-three-year-old mother when you are accompanying her for treatments to slow the growth of a cancer that had already spread from her pancreas to her liver by the time it was diagnosed.

Rebecca

If you have yet to read Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, you are in for a treat. From the famous opening words “Last night I dream I went to Manderley again” you are drawn into the strange world of the soon to be Mrs de Winter. But she isn’t the first Mrs de Winter and it isn’t entirely clear what happened to the previous postholder of that position - or whether she will ever live up to the standard set by her predecessor.



It is a book full of ambiguity, not least because the narrator is the new Mrs de Winter and she definitely falls into the category of “unreliable narrator”. Throughout the book, she is trying to find her identity and yet we never even get to know her first name. Instead we only know her as Mrs de Winter, a name previously held by someone else – who was also the person whose name is given to the book itself.

This book will take you through many twists and turns. Although on the surface it is a glamorous life, the reality is more of a mystery. Ultimately, you as the reader will have to decide for yourself what is the truth.

A great read and one that I hope will also encourage you to read other books by Daphne du Maurier.

Books to mark LGBT History Month

February is LGBT History Month in the UK, and that means it is a good opportunity to mention some really great books that have an LGBT theme or element to them.



Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is a good place to start. It is the somewhat disturbing tale of a young girl, Jeanette, adopted by a couple one of whom, Mrs Winterson, is deeply religious. Mrs Winterson’s religious fervour leads to a somewhat emotionally abusive upbringing, but then Jeanette falls in love with, horror of horrors, a woman. Mrs Winterson is not best pleased.

Jeanette Winterson is often asked if this, her first novel, is autobiographical. This is what she says in response on her website:

Yes and no. All writers draw on their experience but experience isn’t what makes a good book. As the stand-up comics say, ‘It’s the way you tell ‘em’. Oranges is written in the first person, it’s direct and uninhibited, but it isn’t autobiography in the real sense. I have noticed that when women writers put themselves into their fiction, it’s called autobiography. When men do it, such as Paul Auster or Milan Kundera it’s called meta -fiction.

Indeed. If you do want to read a book that IS autobiographical then there is Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?.



Another good, although rather tragic, read is James Baldwin’s Giovanni's Room. The book is set in 1950s Paris and American, David, has a passionate relationship with Giovanni. Until David’s girlfriend returns to Paris… This is a really beautiful and moving book and well worth a read. Occasionally, I read books aloud to my partner (actually, I really must get back into that) and this is one of the books I have read.



For something, decidedly more light-hearted then Armistead Maupin’s Tales Of The City is a rather more humorous novel. It is set in 1970s San Francisco and is focussed around the lives of eight people and their life, loves and friendships. It is actually a really long time since I have read this book and I must give it a re-read. My mum actually gave me a copy of this when I was probably in my early twenties. I think she bought it while on holiday in San Francisco. I suspect that she was not entirely clear on its content. I shall say no more.