Hell within

 

The Ghetto Within by Santiago H. Amigorena describes a carefree man leaving Poland to start a new home in Buenos Aires in 1928. His mother expects weekly updates about his new life, but Vicente scoffs, and despite his Jewish heritage, Vicente and friends scoff at the old-fashioned ways of their Jewish parents. Early on, Vicente makes halfhearted attempts to convince his mother and other family members to flee Warsaw, and as the decade progresses, he mostly stops writing. By 1938, her letters stop, too.   

Vincente’s indifference and scoffing soon transform into despair as news about the war in Europe and atrocities gradually filter through. He receives two final letters from his mother, in 1940 and the other in 1941, describing deteriorating conditions and an uncertain future with Germans herding Jews into a ghetto, treating them worse than animals. In what would otherwise be an ordinary, peaceful life, Vicente’s spirit is crushed, tormented over his mother’s last communications, obsessing if she went hungry or still wore a favorite shawl. 

Vicente sinks into a deep depression, spending some time with family and friends but no longer speaking, instead mostly gambling to confirm his own failure as a human being. His wife and her family are understanding, trying to accommodate him. Rosita and Vincente, both with “the hesitant, pale, mute fragility that revealed they had been much loved as children,” simply cannot comprehend the full extent of cruelty.

He describes scanning the newspapers for any bit of news before receiving his mother’s last letter – “for signs, for cluses, for hints that might help him understand – and searching, like everyone else, for reasons not to understand…. Like every human being, Vicente had wanted to know and, at the same time, had preferred not to know.” He longs for ignorance and the ability to erase his memory. “It is perhaps one of the most singular traits of a human being: just as the body, when it has endured too much suffering, or has grown too weak, temporarily lapses into unconsciousness… so that it can survive, or rather so that something can survive – something that is at once still human and already less than human, something that is still ourselves and is already no one.” 

Forgetting is impossible though. Every morning is the same for Vicente, “the same memories, the same guilt, the same longing to forget.” He waned to forget words and sentences and meaning, longing for "a silence so powerful, so constant, so insistent, so relentless that all things would become remote, invisible, inaudible." He walks miles to be alone, hoping to escape his fears, but silence brings no relief. "[U]nfortunately, though stillness is the opposite of motion, there is no opposite to thought, nothing that counters the workings of the mind: not thinking is merely another form of thinking."  

Most of all, he hopes to flee the voice of his conscience, even as he tortures himself about his inaction. “Something must be done to counter the nothing that I can do. I can do nothing. I cannot do anything. I have never understood the difference.” 

One account of the camps describes an inmate who asked why after being given an order an the guard pushing the man and retorting: Hier ist Kein warum. Here there is no why: “these words summed up the determination of the Nazis in the camps to create a space that was utterly different, a space in which there was no why.” Vicente determines his life is worthless, also lacks “a why,” and so, “He became another, another devoid of meaning, devoid of hope, devoid of a future.”  He describes feeling alone, sinking, heading only toward a grave. He becomes a shell, neglecting wife, children, job and friends.

Later Vicente’s grandson assumes that his grandfather must have wrestled with the notion that escape made him a traitor. Amigorena himself fled dictatorship in Argentina for Europe: “I was not where I should have been.” 

But the grandson does not complain or accepts the life given to him. “I do not know whether, before he died, Vicente realized that remaining silent was not a solution,” Amigorena concludes. Instead, language is intertwined with memory, providing guidance as guilt and despair pass to subsequent generations. To avoid being complicit, survivors and their descendants must reject attempts to forget or deny the evil. 

Orphans

  

The Koran  prioritizes care for orphans: “And give to the orphans their property, and do not substitute worthless (things) for (their) good (ones), and do not devour their property (as an addition) to your own property; this is surely a great crime.”   

But children are helpless against greed, explains Fatimah Asghar in When We Were Sisters. After three girls lose their parents – the mother to illness, the father murdered – a maternal uncle takes control, not because of love or duty but rather he covets the government social security checks issued to each month.

He prohibits the girls from meeting his wife and two sons and instead sets them up in a small, filthy room in an apartment building that he owns, assigning equally vulnerable neighbors to provide day-to-day care. That daughters are less valued than sons is apparent from the start, and the girls sometimes maintain they are brothers or mother-sisters.

The uncle issues strict rules and, not wanting to be bothered by incidentals, teaches them how to forge his name for school paperwork. They attend school and can pursue activities as long as they are free. A neighbor reads the Koran with them, and when money runs low, the girls literally take to the street near the neighborhood mosque, begging for grocery money as orphans. The uncle is furious, yet also realizes that members of the mosque will gladly donate money to support the orphans. He uses those donations and the hundreds in Social Security payments to provide home renovations and comforts for his own family.   

The story is told from the point of view of the youngest, Kausar, who idolizes her two sisters, literally referring to them as gods. In turn, they regard her as useless and annoying. The young protagonist relays life disappointments, her serial abandonment and grief in a matter-of-fact way.

Early on, a Pakistani couple, undocumented and poor, selflessly love and care for the girls. The uncle's discovery that the girls sleep with the couple at night when frightened triggers a fight. The uncle scolds, “They’re not your kids,” and their beloved Meemoo retorts, “So whose kids are they?” Wary that the man's defiance might disrupt his schemes, the uncle accuses the couple of inappropriate behavior and kicks them out of their home. He then interrogates the girls about sex and relies on unstable young women to watch over the sisters.    

Once the oldest girl reaches puberty, the uncle stops arranging for caregivers, mostly leaves the sisters alone. The girls lie to classmates about home life, and teachers and neighbors fail to notice three girls struggling on their own, often hungry and unkempt. The oldest manages to hold the truncated family together, and the youngest admits, “I need an adult. And I don’t know how to get one.”    

On a lifelong search for a mother figure, Kausar contents herself with make believe: “We’re mothered by everything because we know how to look for the mothering, because we know a mother might leave us and we’ll need another mother to step in an take its place.”  With poignant and exquisite detail, the child describes relishing the warmth of the sun, shade from the tree, the smell of cookies, the street signs that guide when it’s safe to walk, a cloud of dust, or grass not yet trampled - all as mother's love.  Her constant anticipation distances her from others: “What no one will ever understand is that the world belongs to orphans, everything becomes our mother” and “All the mothers in the world reach out to the motherless.” A simple touch from siblings is overwhelming, and she thinks, “you’re held, you’re held, you’re held.”  

At one point, the youngest asks whether a sister still a sister when a mother dies? Kausar increasingly struggles to communicate fears, dreams and identity issues with sisters who are not much older than her. Each daughter dreams of escape, a better life, but the youngest has far less experience with love, motivation, trust – with basic routines and normality. She readily accepts chaos and cruelty from her interactions. At one point, she notes that Allah asks us to make language: “We assumed we meant the same thing when we spoke, because we said the same words. But. We were wrong. We were so wrong.”

Oddly enough, the youngest daughter gets along better with the uncle than her sisters do, and at one point, he urges Kausar to reconcile with a friend after an argument. “Don’t let the small things become the big things,” and she remembers that advice years later at his funeral. 

But a child who grows up without a mother can’t be depended on to understand what is small or big, right or wrong. 

Economic priority

Climate change is a major business risk, one that should be economic priority rather than afterthought.

The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Kiplinger’s and other business publications increasingly raise alarms. For example, Morningstar features a section on sustainable investing, with a recent headline noting “Can’t Fix Tomorrow with Yesterday’s Tools.”  Investopedia points out how the US Securities and Exchange Commission, since 2010, has required companies to disclose to shareholders any climate issues that could have impact on business operations.   

The costs of ignoring climate change are immense.  

● Businesses and consumers anticipate higher prices for energy along with goods and services.  

● Insurance costs are rising, and major companies are dropping coverage for properties in flood-prone regions like Florida, reports the Insurance Journal. 

● Retirees, in a notable shift, are examining flood-risk maps and avoiding properties in Florida and other areas prone to extreme weather, reports the New York Times. 

● Higher temperatures and water scarcity are reducing crop yields and increasing weeds, pests and fungi. 

● The medical research community points to climate change, as the “greatest threat” to global public health, according to a joint statement in 2021 by a group of medical journals, reports Deloitte Insights. Climate change is worsening infectious diseases as well as respiratory, neurological and gastrointestinal problems – and increasing costs. 

● Warning waters are prompting ocean species to shift to cooler waters and even causing some populations to crash.  

The list goes on. Severe weather events are occurring more frequently and communities must invest in disaster planning. 

Stopping climate change requires shifts in individual behavior, and a Morningstar interview described the Take the Jump campaign, urging people to partake in “Less stuff and more joy” with six simple actions that anyone can try:   

● Limiting flying and consider taking no more than a flight every three years.

● Reduce meat and dairy in diets

● Purchase no more than three new items of clothing each year. 

● Control clutter and stop purchasing unnecessary goods – and hold on to possessions longer and try repairing before disposal.

● Shift energy sources and providers and rely on more renewables. 

● Become an active rather than passive investor. Examine pension investments and urge managers to reconsider investing in companies that undermine quality of life. And if you own stocks, take stands by voting on shareholder resolutions.  The Climate Action 100+ flagged 14 proposals during the 2021 proxy season – and six received majority approval. The organization provides updates on proposals and the voting season, which starts again in earnest next year.  

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 

Battling the grotesque

Most readers quickly and rightly reject novels that detail abuse of animals, children or other vulnerable populations. Reading about systemic poverty and lack of opportunity – the slow neglect and breakdown of human spirit – should be equally disturbing. The Rabbit Hutch alludes to first while detailing the humiliations and weariness associated with the second. 

The debut novel by Tess Gunty explores how individuals slide into disturbing behaviors, influenced by surroundings, circumstances and other people. The setting is a dilapidated apartment building known as the Rabbit Hutch in Vacca Vale, a dying Indiana industrial town. Most occupants resent and avoid their neighbors. These include a quiet middle-aged woman who moderates comments for online obituaries and four young adults recently aged out of the foster-care system. 

The characters are flawed, insecure in this desolate environment. A visitor from Hollywood, the depressed son of a child movie star, suggests that other people are "dangerous because they are contagions. They infect you with or without your consent; they lure you onto paths you wouldn't have chosen.... if you collide with someone, you must be prepared to reside inside their psychology indefinitely, and this is the burden of a lifetime." These characters, struggling to communicate and launch meaningful relationships, do collide rather than connect. 

The discomfort over an inability to find companionship is not limited to dying communities, and the visitor from Hollywood concedes that his own conversations with others are a mess as "he doesn't know how to have clean ones anymore." While in Vacca Vale, he wanders into a church and agrees after a priest asks if he is there for a confession. After describing his fears and worst behaviors, the man questions the priest’s assessment. The priest admits to weariness and advises the confession might be his last. Unleashing regret, the man mourns “rot at the center of the Catholic Church,” Rather than effect change, the priest felt infected. “Abuse should be condemned. Birth control should be encouraged…. These are easy things, obvious things, unavoidably right and good, and yet I’ve come to believe that they’re never going to happen within this decaying institution. I’m sick of following orders, meekly playing the game, waiting for the rules to change themselves.” 

His complaints target one institution, yet capture the dilemma of anyone trapped within systems, playing by questionable rules while ignoring massive, obvious problems. The priest counsels the visitor that no person can be all good or all bad. “You’re just a series of messy, contradicting behaviors, like everyone else. Those behaviors can become patterns, or instincts, and some are better than others. But as long as you’re alive, the jury’s out.” 

Progress depends on breaking old patterns, avoiding old mistakes. 

St. Blandine

The apartment is the first for the foster children, three young men and a woman, Tiffany. She is intelligent, well-read, but she drops out of high school after a misguided affair. Despite or maybe because of her own history of hurt and neglect, she continues to study and learn, touting a library copy of She-Mystics: An Anthology and adopting the name of Blandine, a slave girl martyred for her Christian beliefs in the 2nd century. The teenager stands out as odd, fascinated less by religion and more by ethics, philosophy, and ancient saints who practiced self-abuse to achieve immortality and godliness. 

With a few exceptions, Blandine is wary of new relationships – "My whole life has educated me against investments whose rewards depend on the benevolence of others." And so she regards Hildegard, a mystic from the 12th century, as her only true friend, relying on quotes for guidance: “Even in a world that’s being shipwrecked, remain brave and strong” and “Humanity, take a good look at yourself. Inside, you have heaven and earth, and all of creation. You are a world – everything is hidden in you.”  

St. Hildegard von Bingen

Blandine ponders how the mystics, despite their gender and solitude, left their mark on history and human thought. And while she does not believe in God and regards the mystics as selfish and individualistic, she wonders how a modern mystic might challenge climate change, systemic injustice, the “plundering growth imperative,” and other obvious challenges in Vacca Vale. 

Ambition mixes with fear, and Blandine admits to often being “attacked by an awareness of how impossible it is to learn and accomplish all that she needs to learn and accomplish before she dies.” She denies herself a high school scholarship, the chance to attend college, appropriate roommates all while searching for virtue in a community seeping with inequality, corruption, insecurity and depression. Reflecting on her own life, she concedes that "It all looks so - so grotesque." She longs to transform her community but lacks tools to intercede. 

Another neighbor – Joan, the editor of online obituaries – is fearful and lonely, witnessing the pain of Vacca Vale on a more personal scale. One day while walking, she observing the impulsive ease of strangers demonstrating care for a person who collapses on the street. She understands that “human tenderness was not to be mocked. It was the last real thing.” 

The disjointed plot is relayed with exquisite sentences. The theme is strong – people can transform, breaking habits and moving the many obstacles they have placed in their own way by practicing kindness. A brief and awkward encounter between Joan and Blandine in the book’s earliest pages isn't the last. The two women discover a shred of connection – thank to persistence, hope, empathy – hundreds of pages later.

Abandoned

 

The Foundling, set in 1927 at a state institution in Central Pennsylvania, is modeled after the real Laurelton State Village for Feeble-Minded Women of Childbearing Age, that operated between 1920 and 1998. The institution's purpose evolved over the decades, but the goal during the early years was eugenics – to prevent troubled and “feeble-minded” women from reproducing.

Soon after opening, Laurelton had a waiting list to care for women deemed insane by husbands or abandoned by families, women who had large numbers of children by multiple men, as well as women who relied on prostitution or careers deemed as unsuitable. The state Public Charities Association supervised Laurelton along with prisons, orphanages and other facilities that cared for the “dependent classes,” explains a brief history in the West End Quarterly. 

“Throughout the early twentieth century, researchers, social reformers, and politicians cast a wide net for classifying people as ‘feebleminded,’” explains Micalee Sullivan. “The term lacked clear standards or definitions of who constituted ‘feeble-minded’ in the reports of the government agencies, as well as the report of directors at the Laurelton State Village. During the planning stages of the institution, an article described an institution that would ‘provide several groups embraced under the terms "idiotic," "imbecile," or "feeble-minded.'" 

Sullivan argues the institution’s history is complex, providing care and vocational training for women while also restricting freedoms. 

Pennsylvania Heritage praises Laurelton’s first superintendent, Mary Moore Wolfe: “Wolfe rejected the established medical traditions of the early 20th century that argued ‘mental deficiencies’ caused people to commit crimes and warranted locking them up forever. She believed ‘the problem of mental deficiency is not primarily a medical problem’ but instead was ‘an educational, and to a lesser degree, a sociological problem.’ Determined to make Laurelton Village a place of rehabilitation and not permanent segregation, Wolfe developed academic, vocational and moral training programs for the women living there.”

Laurelton sewing class, 1920s

The novel is more critical about such institutions and the power of those who profit from society’s most vulnerable. Protagonist Mary Engle feels fortunate to land a job as a secretary at the facility lauded as “progressive,” run by elegant Dr. Agnes Vogel, psychiatrist and one-time suffragist. Mary, raised in a Catholic orphanage after her mother’s death, squashes memories of seeking favors while enduring sexual abuse by an uncle during occasional visits. The orphan, learning more about the case histories of inmates, could only muse, “There by the grace of God …”  

The facility, not religious, is touted as “modern” – emphasizing rigid controls, long hours of hard work as ground crews, factory workers, dairy maids or housekeepers. Unlike Laurelton, the fictional Nettleton is described as offering no education or treatment. For favored staff members, there is luxury housing and meals, as well as alcohol purchased under the guise of “medicinal treatments” during the era of Prohibition. Local and state authorities pay little notice to the facility that boasts of self-reliance, requiring no tax dollars, while offering local jobs and revenue for local businesses.

Mary – a skilled professional – works tirelessly for Dr. Vogel, and the older woman eventually trusts her like a daughter, a closeness that creates distance for the secretary with other staff members and entangles her in corrupt activities including transport and misuse of alcohol. Mary soon detects physical abuse, harsh punishments and insults, but trusts that Dr. Vogel acts in the best interests of inmates. Skepticism grows as she meets more people her age, including a nurse in the facility, a journalist who is curious about rumors of cruelty, and eventually an inmate and one-time friend who grew up in the same orphanage where Mary was raised. The secretary struggles to act on her empathy for Lillian, the inmate, understanding that admission to a previous relationship with an inmate would result in termination of employment. Lillian, like many other inmates, is hardly feeble-minded, but the records do not reflect her education and capabilities.  

For weeks, Mary, torn over job security and her admiration for Vogel, avoids Lillian and rationalizes that that the other woman resists, simply not understanding the difference between right and wrong. As an orphan herself, Mary fears imperfection in herself and others, failing to understand that any attempt to assess others as feeble-minded or flawed reflects arrogance.  

Mary begins dating Jake, a journalist who questions eugenics and notions that some human beings are not meant to start families or participate in society. Jake is Jewish and Vogel is anti-Semitic, and Mary initially takes offense at his candid critiques of her employer along with the judges and politicians who support the institution. Relying on arrogance herself, she tries to dismiss his concerns for inmates who are institutionalized until they can no longer bear children: “Why would I waste time worrying about his ill-informed ideas when I, at age eighteen, already knew more than he’d ever know about how power and justice really work in this world?”  

Power corrupts, including onlookers who may benefit the least. As Albert Einstein noted, “The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.” As an orphan herself, Mary is timid and naïve, trying to rationalize the cruel inequities. At times, the book is too optimistic, offering minimal tension and obstacles in what had to be a treacherous workplace.

Mary and Jake manage to rescue Lillian, but Vogel and her political backers move on to more prominent positions, never investigated or condemned for forcing hundreds of young women to work as unpaid laborers, preventing them from pursuit of any type of normal life. Many women won their freedom only with menopause, and if they were lucky, families and friends helped keep past lives a secret.  Women raised in in rural Pennsylvania during the early 20th century feared and whispered about such places. Orphans, homeless, scorned wives understood they could be locked away for the best of years of their lives. And during the Depression, many families simply could not afford to assist or speak out. A century of change exposes the nightmarish conditions, regardless of good intentions, and readers can only wonder how citizens a century from now might assess today's under-funded schools, homeless shelters, prisons or immigrant camps. 

Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime, noted Aristotle. 

The real institution of Laurelton took on many forms over the years, finally closing its doors in 1998. The empty buildings and more than 265 acres were sold for $1 million in 2021. 

Photos courtesy of Pennsylvania Heritage and Architectural Afterlife.

Echo Maker

 

Mark Schulter is left with brain injuries after overturning his truck on an isolated road in rural Nebraska. His sister, Karin, gives up job and home, returning to their hometown near the Platte River to provide care. The brother describes his condition like living in a video game, where he cannot advance to the next level. Karin worries about him being dependent on her for the rest of his life, that she would “fail him, as she had failed to protect her parents from their own worst instincts…. She needed him to be way he would never be again, a way that she was no longer sure that he had ever been.” Mark is belligerent and frustrated, and she describes this as a “crushing new innocence,” even though he discarded potential long before his accident. 

Mark is convinced that his sister is an imposter, gradually suspecting that his home, community and friends are fake, all conspiring to cover up a government plot. Further, he fears he is the center of this plot, possibly connected with the annual mass migration of sand cranes to the Platte River. 

The birds mate for life, following reliable patterns, while humans lie to one another, use one another and themselves, while destroying their own communities, families and homes. The annual migration appears massive only because increasing development reduces the birds’ habitat. The same numbers of birds crammed into less space brings stress and disease. “They used to roost along the whole Big Bend: a hundred and twenty miles or mile,” explains Daniel, the brother’s childhood friend, an environmentalist, and a lover whom Karin once discarded. “That he spent time with her at all left her amazed, ashamed, and grateful,” she notes at one point, and later decides: “What could he possibly get from their new connection? Simply the chance to do things right, at last. Reduce, reuse, recycle, retrieve, redeem.” She later finds herself wondering “Could anyone trust anyone who trusted anyone so much?” The answer, with these characters, is no.

The characters are susceptible to gossip, conspiracy theories and memories of past wrongs. Karin suggests that “people liked people who made them feel more secure,” but that is not really true of her relationship with her brother or anyone else. She lacks self-esteem, with memories of physical and sexual abuse. “Everyone alive was at least as scared as she was. Remember that, and a person might come to love anyone.” 

Karin pleads for advice from a renowned neuroscientist who agrees to meet the brother. Both Karin and the doctor harbor doubts about their own motivations in providing care. 

The neuroscientist seems to have the ideal life and marriage, but it soon becomes clear that he does not really listen to his wife or daughter. His job is his life, his priority, and he’s devastated after reviewers attack his most recent book detailing his approach to assisting patients. The accusation: He is “milking others’ personal disabilities for personal gain.” And so he decides to return to Nebraska and reexamine Mark, wondering why the case unsettles him so, but not hundreds of others. “What has triggered such continuous surprise in him, the sense of awakening from a long sham?” 

At one point, the neurologist marvels at the brain being “Unable to recognize that it’s suffering from any disorder.” That description applies to every character in the book.

Crisis can erode or strengthen individuals. Some people step up and find the reserves to do battle. Others, like a former journalist, withdraw: “She had lost something of herself, or thrown it away, refusing to compete…” 

The novel's title, The Echo Maker, suggests that an individual does not develop personality and character on his or her own, that we constantly respond to the comments and behavior of others via our own reactions and responses – a continuing echo process that imprints our behavior, forging our character and sometimes forcing us to repeat mistakes over and over. The neurologist describes how One group of scientists discovered a mirror-neuron system the monkey-see, monkey-do neurons. We observe and copy the behavior of those surrounding us, for better or worse. 

There are many selves – the past and remembered self, the mirror and echo self for others, the self we strive to keep intact from the control of others: “Every burst of light, every sound, every coincidence, every random path through space changed the brain, altering synapses, even adding them, while others weakened or fell away from lack of activity The brain was a set of changes for mirroring change. Use or lose. Use and lose. You lose, and the choice unmade you.”

And so we should choose carefully among our associates, escaping those who might limit our potential.

We must decide if our values and goals, our individual personality, can remain intact within the confines of our families and communities. Are we doing what we can to lift others? And if not, perhaps it’s better to be alone. 

Lying for love

 

Two sisters, once close, take off from New York City for a monthlong vacation to Sunshine Falls, NC, the setting for a book by one of their favorite novelists. The younger sister, Libby, carries a checklist of activities for stepping out of their comfort zones. The two lost their single mom and Nora took on a mothering role. Nora admits she is set in her ways – orderly, demanding, grouchy – and she regularly procrastinates on her promise to start becoming “another Nora.” Nora tries to protect, pretending all is okay or fixing problems without Libby knowing: “I always want her to have everything she wants “– and a ‘tiny controlled version of things,” “the mess of it,” “all spills loose.”  

Both keep secrets, even lying in the effort not to alarm the other, and Nora, a book agent, admits: “I feel that heart-pinch sensation, like I’m missing her, like all our best moments are behind us.” She should wait until they are in their 50s or 60s. She tries to shape their lives like the stories she reads before sending them off for publishers. “Decisions, memories, activities are like constructing a story. “That’s life. You’re always making decisions, taking paths that lead you away from the rest before you can see where they end. Maybe that’s why we as a species love stories so much. All those chances for do-overs, opportunities to live the lives we’ll never have.” For Nora, her favorite books never offer the ending she wants, with characters confronting both loss and hope. Expecting another end is “a way to lose something you’ve never even had.” 

The sisters love each other and seek control like inept mothers, trying to make another human being happy by deeming to know what is best. But the problem with that control is that neither is pleased with the results. Sisters can be very, very different, and each must learn to live with that. 

The problem with small towns is apparent for Nora: “One minor lapse in judgment and you can’t go a mile without running into it.”  The closeness forces people to get to know one another and puts most on their best behavior. The two main characters are exceedingly cautious. Lengthy, quippy, contrived conversations prevent the couple from tackling topics with depth with constant interruptions for intimate or tough moments. At one point, Nora reflects that “Some books you don’t read so much as live.” Sadly, the dialogue gets in the way, taking on a stilted, tiresome quality, with characters, especially the editors, in the bad habit of mentally reassessing each comment and joke. Rather than relax, accept and enjoy time together, the couple obsesses about being viewed as boring, with one recalling a breakup line from the past: “If we stay together, every single day for the rest of our lives is going to be the same.” 

Nora works while on vacation on the author’s next book, featuring an agent who resembles Nora – a mean shark of a woman who is also “Tired, lonely, no real life.” And Nora increasingly worries about the distance and secrets and what her sister really thinks of her. “It’s one thing to accept that the person I love most is fundamentally unknowable to me; it’s another to accept that she doesn’t quite see me either. She doesn’t trust me, not enough to share what’s going on, not enough to lean on me or let me comfort her.” Nora comes to realize that the younger sister's memories of childhood are more painful than pleasant, including one when their mother broke down at a cash register because she could not afford a lime to make the girl’s favorite cookies. Memories, the narrative of childhood whether accurate or not, shape our moods, character and ambitions. 

I often advised students in a communications class taught to craft their lives and careers the way a writer selects details for a story. Consider the choices, aware of new paths and opportunities. Be prepared to adjust and revise. Build a set of memories and relationships to avoid dwelling on a life that could have been lived. 

Costs of corruption

 

Ghana ranks 73rd out of 180 nations on Transparency International’s Corruption Index – with 33 percent of people surveyed suggesting that corruption had increased during the previous year. A similar number report paying a bribe for public service. 

And yet, Ghana is one of Africa's least corrupt countries.

The Missing American by Kwei Quartey is about an elderly American widower who meets a Ghana woman on a Facebook group. Gordon Tilton falls in love and then wires several thousand after the woman claims her sister requires surgery. It’s hard to believe that any rational adult might fall for such a request. Most victims are intent on moving on and keeping the crime a secret. But Tilton confides in a journalist friend who suspects official involvement and urges him to fight: “this is what scammers rely on – your shame and embarrassment. They’re master manipulators. You’re not the culprit here, you’re the victim and it’s time to turn it around and become a survivor,”

Tilton heads off to Ghana alone to report the incident to Accra police and track the culprits known as sakawa boys. Unsatisfied with the investigation, Tilton proceeds on his own and goes missing. 

Emma Djan, 26, is a new detective. She lost her job as a police officer after an attempted rape by a commanding officer. A colleague advises her to apply to the detective agency, and she obtains a job at an Apple store to get by in the meantime. Weeks later, the agency’s owner calls, and during their first meeting the new employer demands honesty, punctuality, patience and curiosity: “second to lying, what I hate most is lateness.”  

Yet like it or not, lying is an essential skill for investigators, especially those immersed in a corrupt society. From the start, when Yemo Sowah  asks if Emma has job elsewhere, she lies and says no, eager to start the following day, working for Tilton's son to search for the missing father.

And later, the lies come easier. After tracking down Tilton, her boss tells her that the agency’s role in that investigation is complete. Yet Emma continues to pursue witnesses and ask questions. She cozies up to one of the sakawa boys, lavishing him with praise, coaxing him to talk about his connections.

Rogue curiosity and corrupt officials catching on to her lies nearly get Emma killed. 

The fast-paced book with multiple subplots also offers a brief, intriguing look at charitable endeavors. A wealthy Ghanaian woman organizes a documentary promoting an autism center and featuring one child’s artistic talent. She plans a shoot: “She would enter the scene, sit next o the boy, and explain how she often welcomed him and other children from the Center to her home (which wasn’t entirely true). The idea was to put an ‘international face’ to the appeal and boost the Center’s new website and crowdfunding campaign. [The] theory was that well-off people are more likely to donate if they could ‘see themselves’ in the video - if they could ‘relate’ to a well-heeled, fashionable woman contributing to such a noble cause.” 

Her reasoning? She frets about donor fatigue, and people in the West were weary of images of flies buzzing about the heads of starving children.

Charitable needs are great in countries throughout Africa. But internet scams and massive corruption erode trust and generosity, and donors find it easier to just say no. 

By one estimate, Ghana loses about US$ billion each year to corruption. The costs are high, as revealed in The Missing American.

Photo of new highway interchange in Ghana, courtesy of African Development Bank Group.

"What you could be..."

 

 

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr follows two children, one in Germany and the other in France, mostly between 1934 and 1944. Marie-Laure LeBlanc is blind and depends on her father who works for the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, for constant directions in moving about their home in Paris. Werner Pfennig, an orphan in the coal region of Essen, relies on books found in the trash to study mathematics and physics.

The two characters spend only one terrifying afternoon together, but there are earlier connections. Werner and his younger sister find a broken radio, which he repairs, so they can listen to broadcasts from around Europe, including a science program for children hosted by Marie-Laure’s grandfather. Ambitious, longing to do anything but work in the mines that killed his father, Werner tries to overlook the horrors of a fascist system, fearful when his sister speaks out. After the Nazis ban devices that access foreign programming, he smashes their radio, incurring his sister’s wrath.

Passing competitive exams, Werner is sent to a national political institute run by Nazis, a place where “every ounce of their attention has been trained to ferret out weakness.” Werner is protected by helping a professor research use of radio waves to locate transmitters. He befriends a wealthy, connected boy who loves nature and birds and refuses to humiliate others. Frederick recognizes that a cruel system traps them all and at one point advises, “Your problem, Werner, is that you still believe you own your life.” Werner “has the sensation that something huge and empty is about to devour them all.”

Werner is curious, keeping a notebook and logging all the questions he wishes to explore. Yet the fascist system, like extremist religions, is intent on control and preventing people from thinking for themselves. One instructor suggests: “Minds are always drifting toward ambiguity, toward questions, when what you really need is certainty. Purpose. Clarity. Do not trust your minds.” Later, on the front, another colleague marvels about Werner, “What you could be.” Werner finds himself missing the coal town he was so eager to leave and his sister: “her loyalty, her obstinacy, the way she always seems to recognize what is right.” She could see through  the Nazis’ angry propaganda: “How did Jutta understand so much more about how the world worked? While he knew so little?”

Marie-Laure, unable to see, is understandably fretful and anxious, full of questions about the impending invasion of France, and the writer is skilled in describing her surroundings through only the senses of taste, smell, sound and touch. Her father makes a model of their neighborhood and drills her on using her cane, counting drains and curbs, touching fences and tree trunks, to find her way home from unnamed locations. She possesses a few Braille workbooks along with a copy of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne. She comes to view the world as complex mazes: “The branches of trees, the filigree of roots, the matrix of crystals, the streets her father re-created in his models…. None were more complicated than the human brain… one wet kilogram within which spin universes.”

The father and daughter flee Paris for the coast and his uncle’s home, and the museum entrusts the man with a rare diamond, rumored to be cursed. Her father rejects such stories. “There is luck maybe, bad or good. A slight inclination of each day toward success or failure. But no curses.”

Marie-Laure and their housekeeper convince her introvert uncle to support the resistance. Werner’s unit detects the family’s hidden radio, and the two children connect in person and help one another. One survives and the other perishes. 

The war teaches that ordinary life – simple, normal secure routines rather than power or riches – is heaven. Those on either side who survive the war are traumatized. Every bite of food, any comfort, feeling like a betrayal to those who did not. Brutal memories sabotage pleasant ones, and grief about those who did not survive prick any scrap of happiness. Decades later, the character who survives wonders if the war’s dead and missing might travel the sky in flocks – “That great shuttles of souls might fly about… They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs and pass out through the other side, the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it. Every hour… someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world. We will rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.”

Ordinary beauty can be the most rewarding, and some we do not notice until it vanishes. 

Costs of abortion bans

The US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, for now giving states the right to allow or ban abortions. Thirteen states have trigger laws; more lawsuits will follow, with more rights expected to be curtailed by the conservative US Supreme Court. 

For now, the laws affect the states with the lowest abortion rates, below the national median of 20 percent.  Of the states with trigger laws, Louisiana, Tennessee and Texas have the highest abortion rates of the group, still less than 15 percent. For 2022, those rates meant more than 55,000 abortions for Texas, more than with 12,000 for Tennessee, and more than 9900 for Louisiana.  

The new laws, without efforts on family planning and education, will result in thousands of unwanted children and increased poverty. Abortions won't end, and the communities will soon learn the costs.

Women and entire communities will have to adjust. Allure of Deceit, set in Afghanistan, focused on how the Taliban’s rigid controls for women resulted in lies, abuse and misery.   

Source: Word Population Review

Ingredients for dystopia

 

To Paradise, set in four time periods, reads as two distinct novels about a United States in decline, increasingly fragmented over social and political issues, environmental degradation and limited resources. I would not have imagined enjoying this story by Hanya Yanagihara, yet am glad I gave it a chance.

Each of the four parts follows imbalanced partnerships among characters who share a mix of names: David who rejects an approved marriage proposal from steady Charles in 1893, and instead takes up with Edward, rumored to be a scoundrel; partners Charles, a lawyer, and David, from Hawaii, in 1993; partners Charles, a renowned expert on emerging diseases, and Nathaniel, knowledgeable about Hawaiian artifacts, who struggle with a radical son, David, in the mid-21st century; and Charles with his granddaughter, Charlie, in the dystopia of late 21st century. Connecting the four tales is a Washington Square home in New York City.

The first two parts read as a series of gossipy anecdotes - wealthy men feeling angst over lacking a sense of purpose. In each, a young gay man is considered “naïve” and inept, coddled by family and lovers. The David of the first wakes up each morning, hoping to join “the slipstream of activities that animated most people’s lives” instead of facing “only a day as ill-defined as any other, one he would have to endeavor to fill on his own.” HIs life is a prison, “something he was only waiting to use up….” 

Most of these characters pursue freedom while failing to realize that attempts to control others limits freedom for all involved. David of the first part achieves freedom by lying to his father and other would-be protectors. A narrator points out that the second part's David, yearning not to be a burden or disappointment, will only realize when he is older that no one is ever free: “that to know someone and to love them was to assume the task of remembering them…. that knowledge that your life was inextricable from another’s, that a person marked their existence in part by their association with you.” The second David resents his weak and indecisive father, for whom Hawaiian royal status was eliminated by developers and later statehood. The man, coddled by an angry, bitter grandmother, used by a manipulative friend, regularly waits for “the next day to begin.” 

By the third story, society is in rapid decline. Nathaniel and son David resent Charles for his role in creating tighter restrictions on society to prevent the spread of disease, and Charles is upset that the boy does not finish high school and impregnates an older woman. “It takes a special kind of cruelty to make a baby now, knowing that the world it’ll inhabit and inherit will be dirty and diseased and unjust and difficult…. What kind of respect for life is that?” After David and Nathaniel die, Charles raises the child on his own. 

Granddaughter Charlie, developmentally delayed, must navigate an increasingly rigid, impoverished society in 2094 that has endured a series of pandemics, but perhaps her limited understanding is a blessing. A medication during her childhood resulted in seizures, disability and a stunted personality, yet she adores her grandfather, the man who contributed to increasing controls including lockdowns, identity checkpoints, segregated neighborhoods, containment centers, and more, all in the attempt to protect society from disease. Charlie prefers routine, describing how even mystery stories, not knowing how they might end, made her anxious until the state bans such tales. Shortly before his death, the grandfather, recognizing the dystopia, arranges a marriage with a man named Edward, a partnership based on security rather than love. 

New York of 2093 bans television, internet, or foreign travel, and the grandfather is on constant watch for hints of resistance: “to live in a place like this means to be aware that that little movement, that twitching, that faint, mosquito-like buzzing, is not your imagination but proof of another existence, the country you once knew and you know must still exist, beating onward just beyond the range of your senses.” Accurate information becomes precious, and some will even kill for it. “Data, investigation, analysis, news, rumor: A dystopia flattens those terms into one. There is what the state says, and then there is everything else, and that everything falls into one category: information.” 

Those controlling the dystopia hope that people forget not only historic freedoms and rights but how “technology was once applied, and what it was once capable of doing, and how many ways we once depended on it, and what information it could provide.” Charles acknowledges his contributions to dystopia and wonders how people in places like Germany, Phnom Penh or Saigon knew when to leave: “I had always imagined that that awareness happened slowly, slowly but steadily, so the changes, though each terrifying on its own, became inoculated by their frequency, as if the warnings were normalized by how many there were. And then, suddenly, it’s too late.”  

As society evolves, the characters transform from aimless to resigned, defeated and surrendered. Each tale is left hanging, each character confronting mortality, about to make a decision in changing the trajectory of his or her life story. “You just do it out of practice – because that’s what a human does,” observes a friend dying from AIDS in the second part. Peter, best friend to Charles, admits his biggest fear about dying is realizing how much of life he wasted. “I’m scared because I’m going to die not being proud of how I lived.” 

The novel’s unusual structure contributes to the purpose. Complacency and comforts of earlier eras, attempts to control and protect, contribute to horrors that follow two centuries later. 

The luckiest

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles was a gift from a treasured friend, and finishing the novel was like saying farewell to another friend. At first, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov may seem like a wealthy dandy, but time and time again proves himself to be a calming force – charming and deliberate, observant and generous, optimistic and kind, all the while under house arrest at the Hotel Metropol in Moscow from 1922 to 1954. Rostov, fond of Russia, left London to face charges by the new government. The offense? A short poem that Russian authorities have deemed as a dangerous “call to action.” If Rostov leaves the hotel, he will be shot on sight.

The punishment requires moving from his luxurious suite, surrounded by his possessions, to a tiny room in an upper floor of the hotel. Forced to downsize, Rostov mourns until he realizes that no possession can match the value of a strong friendship and he suddenly marvels at how people find it easier to say farewell to friends than possessions. “For eventually we come to hold our dearest possessions more closely than we hold our friends. We carry them from places to place, often at considerable expense and inconvenience; we dust and polish their surfaces and reprimand children for playing too roughly in their vicinity – all the while, allowing memories to invest them with greater and greater importance.” The count then concedes that “a thing is just a thing,” examining his belongings one last time before “expunge[ing] them from his heartache forever.” 

The book is poignant for those shut in during the pandemic, those who abhor consumerism, and those near the end of life, when memories outnumber plans and dreams for the future. Rostov, well read and philosophical, is determined to live life as a man of purpose, and an optimistic one at that. He considers prisoners from literature who relied on hash marks to mark their days, noting how a year in prison could be mourned or celebrated. “For after all, if attentiveness should be measured in minutes and discipline measured in hours, then indomitability must be measured in years. Or if philosophical investigations are not to your taste, then let us simply agree that the wise man celebrates what he can." The trapped man may be imperfect, but he inspires because he never stops striving for improvement and is always open to friendship. 

Reduced status and cutbacks for the Metropol, representing the decline in Moscow's cosmopolitan culture, do not trouble the count. Upon entering the Piazza at Christmastime, he is momentarily disappointed at finding the room ungarlanded, the balustrades unstrung with lights, a single musician replacing the orchestra, and most of the tables unfilled, but then his optimism kicks in: “But then, as every child knows, the drumbeat of the season must sound from within.” 

The man is advisor, confidant and friend to all, finding reason to chat with everyone, staff and guests, including journalists, visiting dignitaries, and even Nina, a precocious pre-teen who purloined a passkey for the entire hotel, thus expanding their range for exploration and entertainment. Her brief visits over the years give him opportunity to watch her develop as a patriot. 

The hotel is a welcoming cocoon in treacherous and volatile post-revolutionary Russia with shifting regulations, heightened mistrust and vague communications. Take “comrade,” increasingly popular as a Russian greeting: “A word of semantic efficiency, comrade could be used a as greeting or a word of parting. As a congratulations, or a caution. As a call to action, or a remonstrance.” Mishka, poet and dissident, is the long-time friend who actually wrote the poem that landed Rostov in detention. He visits Rostov occasionally, mourning the demise of Russian culture, traditions and honesty: “Our churches, known the world over for their idiosyncratic beauty, for their brightly colored spires and improbable cupolas, we raze one by one. We topple the statues of old heroes and strip their names form the streets, as if they had been figments of our imagination. Our poets we either silence, or wait patiently for them to silence themselves.” 

Rostov, a long-time Metropol client who understands the meaning of impeccable service and traditions, eventually signs on as waiter at the Boyarsky, the hotel’s restaurant, teaming up with the chef and maître d’ in organizing events, tables and meals. He is skilled at sensing despondency and subterfuge, falsehoods and exaggeration, but resists giving up on others easily. “By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory that they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration - and our unwavering determination to withhold our opinion until we have engaged with them in every possible setting at every possible hour.” 

A former Army colonel – Osip – seeks a better understanding of the West and turns to Rostov, with his reputation for being well traveled and cultured, for tutoring. The lessons are subversive, relying on materials like Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and the film Casablanca. Osip, viewing the US and Russia in competition, is fascinated: “we an Americans will lead the rest of this century because we are the only nations who have learned to brush the past aside instead of bowing before it. But where they have done so in service of their beloved individualism, we are attempting to do so in service of the common good.”   

The early 1930s are unkind to free-thinking Russians. Nina, a married woman with a young child, returns to the Metropol to request that Rostov watch her daughter while she visits the imprisoned father in Siberia. Rostov complies, not realizing the favor is not short-term. Hotel staff and friends come to his aid, and the seamstress assures Rostov that he is up to the challenge: “If you are ever in doubt, just remember that unlike adults, children want to be happy…. they still have the ability to take the greatest pleasure in the simplest things.” 

Responsible for a child, he immediately discovers the joys of answering unending questions, and teaching by example, including stories from his own childhood and family home of Idlehour. One of those stories is about a clock that only rings twice a day, because Rostov’s father believed that no one should “attend too closely to the clock.” Thus, “if a man woke no later than six, engaged in a light repast, and then applied himself without interruption, by the hour of noon he should have accomplished a full day’s labor.” The noon bell signaled the end of work and time for “wise liberty”: “he should walk among the willows, read a timeless text, converse with a friend beneath the pergola, or reflect before the fire – engaging in those endeavors that have no appointed hour, and that dictate their own beginnings and ends.” And after a day lived well, there was no need to hear the second chime. One should be soundly asleep and to otherwise hear it “was most definitely a remonstrance” about laying awake and wasting valuable time. 

Rostov recognizes life in the hotel limits aspirations for his young charge, Sofia. When she regrets that the memories of her parents fade with time, the count advises, “no matter how much time passes, those we have loved never slip away from us entirely.”  He wants her to explore her talents and the vast unknown, and the count resolves “it is hardly our purpose at this stage to log a new portfolio of lasting memories. Rather we should be dedicating ourselves to ensuring that they taste freely of experience.” 

Long hours alone at the hotel allow Sofia to become a skilled concert pianist, providing the opportunity to travel to Paris for a concert, under the stern watch of party chaperones. Rostov prepares for them both to leave the Metropol, albeit with separate destinations, relying on a network of friends abroad and a stash of gold hidden away in the desk he kept over the years. When Sofia departs, he offers two pieces of parental advice: “The first was that if one did not master one’s circumstances, one was bound to be mastered by them; and the second was Montaigne’s maxim that the surest sign of wisdom is constant cheerfulness.” He admits that he will be both sad in her absence and joyful at every thought of her new adventures.  

Shortly before he leaves, Mishka witnesses Rostov’s wide group of friends at the Metropol and their kindness. “Who would have imagined,” the friend observes, ‘when you were sentenced to life in the Metropol all those years ago, that you had just become the luckiest man in all of Russia.” 

With the right frame of mind, the simple wanting of happiness, anyone can be as lucky as Count Rostov. 

Educated

Tara Westover was the youngest of seven children born to survivalist parents in Idaho who trusted neither public schools nor the medical establishment. The family avoided birth certificates, telephones, or insurance for the family vehicle – but the father eventually allowed the internet and a few activities for his youngest children like theater, singing and dance.  In her memoir, Educated , the author recalls that “Learning to dance felt like learning to belong.” Yet happy memories are few , and the family home was a place for injuries, violence, humiliation and shifting loyalties. 

As the youngest, Tara explains how she never knew her father as the carefree, happy man portrayed in an early photograph. For her, he was “a weary middle-aged man stockpiling food and ammunition.” She regularly had to remind her parents of her age, pointing out she was not as old as they assumed, as when at age 10, she had to treat an older brother who didn’t change out of gasoline-soaked pants that were later accidentally ignited and her parents scolded her for using ice-packed garbage bags on the burns.  

The fundamentalist Mormon parents insisted they homeschooled the children in basic reading and math skills, but Tara describes how she and her siblings spent most time helping her father in his makeshift scrapyard and the mother with her unlicensed midwifery practice that included collecting herbs and preparing folk medicines. The older boys left home as teenagers for jobs - driving rigs, welding or working scrapyards. But Tyler aspired to attend college, using savings to purchase a trigonometry book and other texts to study. The father, worried about the temptations and disappointments associated with an education, discouraged his children. “College is extra school for people too dumb to learn the first time around,” he retorted. Somehow Tyler’s conviction “burned brightly enough to shine through the black uncertainty,” and the brother did not return home again for another five years.

The family wields religious beliefs and shame as a weapon and means of control. Another brother, Shawn, appoints himself as a guardian over Tara, accompanying her to activities, shaming her for a maturing body, and lashing out with physical abuse when he doesn’t like her clothes or chats with boys. Tara knew that girls had fewer opportunities than boys, and girls could not be a prophet, but conversations with Tyler suggested that she had a “kind of worth that was inherent and unshakable.” Tara detests the shame she feels about Shawn’s accusations and abusive behavior, later admitting that “the only thing worse than being dragged through the house by my hair was Tyler’s having seen it.”  Others witnessing the abuse made her shame and pain more real. 

As a teenager, Tara increasingly enjoys experiences away from home with other relatives and friends, and begins to question her family's ways. The father is paranoid about the government and Illuminati, and Tara recognizes that when she tries to describe his fears to others, she sounds awkward and rehearsed: “the words belonged to my father” and “I was ashamed at my inability to take possession of them.” Tyler convinces Tara to study for the ACT and apply to Brigham Young College as a homeschooled student. “’There’s a world out there, Tara,’ he said. ‘And it will look a lot difference once Dad is no longer whispering his view of it in your ear.’”

At school, her lack of basic knowledge is stunning. In a class of Western art, she encounters a word she had never seen before – Holocaust – and unfortunately raises her hand to ask its meaning. The professor assumes sarcasm and quickly moves on while other students shun her for what they viewed as a vulgar attempt at humor. She immediately feels like a freak and wonders how everyone around her automatically senses her ignorance. I must admit to cringing at such a question and wondering why she didn't look the word up online. My husband and I both taught undergraduates for more than two decades, and agreed that we would have likely provided a brief definition in class - the Nazis murdered more than 6 million civilians, European Jews and other minorities, men women and children, during World War II - and would have asked to speak with her after class about her purpose in this question.  A teacher's duty is to unearth such deficits and provide the student with resources.

Ignorance leads to loneliness for those who mingle with the educated, and education leads to loneliness within the Westover family. When Tara returns home to work one summer, her brother called her vile names, “wh---” and “n-----.”  Early on, she tries to pass this treatment off as humor, but after college, the brutality makes her feel uncomfortable and angry: “I had begun to understand that [our family] had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others – because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward.” 

Her outlook on life had transformed completely, as Tara heard “a call through time” that shaped new conviction, separating her from the family’s tradition of humiliating others for pleasure. Refusing to go along, she mastered new forms of self-discipline that included thinking for herself, one that included the skills and culture shaping her early life. 

While in college, Tara attends a study-abroad program at Cambridge University and must apply for a delayed certificate of birth. Lacking documentation, she relies on an aunt’s affidavit to obtain a passport. During the program, she becomes curious about how historians and other gatekeepers of the past “come to terms with their own ignorance and partiality. I thought if I could accept what they had written was not absolute but was the result of a biased process of conversation and revision, maybe I could reconcile myself with the fact that the history most people agreed upon was not the history I had been taught. Dad could be wrong and the great historians … could be wrong, but from the ashes of their dispute I could construct a world to live in.”  

Growing up, she had always yearned for a boy’s “future” – to be a “decider” and to “preside.” As a graduate student, she is elated to discover works by philosopher John Stuart Mill, who "claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it was now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations…. Of the nature of women, nothing final can be known.” She explains her reaction: “Never had I found such comfort in a void, in the black absence of knowledge. It seemed to say: whatever you are, you are women.”

Years pass and visits to her family home both terrify and wear her down. She realizes that the disagreement with her parents would never end, and her PhD at Kings College later began with the question: “What is the person to do, when obligations to family conflict with obligations to friends, society or self?” 

The Westover parents eventually severe ties with Tyler, Tara and another adult child who pursued higher education that prompt each to question family traditions.  

Separation from her family brought Tara peace. “I shed my guilt when I accepted my decision on its own terms, without endlessly prosecuting old grievances, without weighing [her father’s] sins against mine.” Separation allowed her to focus on memories of the most pleasant, productive parts of her childhood. Otherwise, she freed herself from a distorted reality, misinformation and assertive ignorance. “You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal. I call it an education.” 

I began reading and writing about the high rates of illiteracy in Afghanistan in 2010, research that led to the publication of Fear of Beauty. Of course, the United States was not immune from forces rejecting education and science, intent on shaming and controlling others, especially women. “Some illiterate adults have grown up in families and communities that devalue and resent education, trapping generation after generation,” I wrote for the Jungle Red Writers blog in 2013. “Some students were bullied into rejecting reading, and others do the bullying themselves. Some grow up feeling alone and stupid only to discover a learning disability long after school years have ended. Others know that seeking help as an adult takes courage and fiercely rally their children and grandchildren to read and avoid a humiliation that’s so often a motivation for violence.” 

Irrational fear, like education, can transform society one family at a time, yet individuals can break the cycle.

Friendship

Some people are victims and others are predators and one’s status can be based on intelligence, appearance, wealth, age or more. Stereotypes prevent friendships and complicate investigations.

And then there are the vast majority of people who navigate life in between those categories, avoiding crime, cruelty and victimhood altogether. Irene, a calm and accepting elderly woman in A Slow Fire Burning by Paula Hawkins, understands how others view her, “fulfilling their expectations of the aged: sitting a chair in a room, alone, musing on the past, on former glory, on missed opportunities, on the way things used to be.” Irene is accustomed to others mistaking her dehydration, fatigue, occasional forgetfulness as dementia and hesitant to explain why she sometimes wanted to lose herself in confusion. “How on earth to make clear to him that while it as frightening, the feeling could also e, on occasion, thrilling? That she allowed herself, from time to time, to skip meals, hoping it would come back to her, that feeling that someone was missing, and that if she waited patiently, they’d come back. Because in those moments that she’d forget that William, the man she loved… was dead…. she could lose herself in the fantasy that he’d just gone out to work… and in a minute, just a minute, she’d hear his key in the door.”  

Hawkins zeroes in on friendship. One character, crime victim as a child, mourns losing her talent for friendship, and “once it was gone, it was a difficult thing to recover.” Hawkins continues: “Like loneliness, the absence of friendship was self-perpetuating: the harder you tried to make people like you, the less likely they were to do so; most people recognized right away that something was off, and they shied away.”

Older people often complain it’s more difficult to form friendships with age, too, and Irene offers a reason: “The truth was that you felt a certain way inside, and while the people who had known you your whole life would probably see you that way, the number of new people who could appreciate you as that person, that inside person, rather than just a collection of the frailties of age, was limited.” 

With her husband dead, Irene does the hard work of forming new friendships, even with those who might be flawed, including an alcoholic neighbor and a young woman with a brain injury. “The best thing about them, from Irene’s point of view, was that they didn’t make assumptions…. They didn’t take for granted that she would be physically incapable, or small-minded, or uninterested in the world.”

Irene appreciates companionship even though she had once read “that the happiest people on earth were unmarried childless women. She could see why – there was a lot to be said for that sort of freedom, for not being answerable to anyone, for living exactly how you pleased.” Love can trigger a ferocity that is hard to understand, as explained by a mother who recalls holding her son after he was born and “you imagine a glorious, golden future. Not money or success or fame or anything like that, but happiness. Such happiness! You’d see the world burn if only it meant they would be happy.”  

That mother and other characters in the book may view curious Irene as a busybody – but she understands love and loss. Of course, she is the character who solves two murders.