My favorite uncle (admittedly the bar was set very low) passed away last week; my mother, sister and I descended upon my aunt’s house in rural Arkansas for four days along with everyone else I share my maternal DNA with where we sat around the kitchen table drinking as well as sat in the living room drinking. It was in rural Arkansas that I learned Amaretto and orange juice is the best way to start your morning, the best way to make bacon involves adding brown sugar halfway thru the cook time and that while pulling out a hard cover novel while your relatives are eulagizing is frowned upon most people don’t mind if you stare at your phone for long swaths of time. Enter the Kindle mobile app on my phone!*
Rock Needs River: A Memoir About a Very Open Adoption
3 Stars
I received Rock Needs River for free through Amazon’s Kindle First program and it was worth every penny.
One summer day, I was lolling around in the bath, and, inexplicably, with no apparent trigger, I wanted a baby. I was nearing thirty. I felt an allover tug in my body, a missing of someone I didn’t know. Every single cell in me ached. The tears started dripping down my face, slipping into the bathwater
For a short memoir, barely over two-hundred pages, revolving around the adoption of her daughter McGrady spends a disproportionate amount of time discussing aspects of her life that don’t involve adoption. She discusses a lot of her past relationships, partly because in several of those relationships she tried to have a biological child with her partner, but it mostly feels like filler. Once McGrady got to the meat of the story, meeting her future husband and beginning the process of adoption, the narrative picks up. McGrady is eventually connected to Bridget and Bill, a young couple who are expecting a little girl within a month but know that a child will interrupt their plans to be musicians. Vanessa names her new daughter Grace.
Bridget and Bill’s story arc is complicated; they become homeless and move in with Vanessa after she divorces her husband but despite their access to their biological daughter they have no interest in being a part of Grace’s life. It is hard to get a read on their motivations because we only see them thru Vanessa’s personal lens and by the time she wrote this book it is clear she is fed up with them. Towards the end of the book, after Vanessa has kicked the couple out and they have moved to Texas, Vanessa goes to visit them and get their side of the story which is essentially a couple pages about how they felt taken advantage of be the system.
Overall Rock Needs River reads like a blog entry that McGrady is trying to pass off as a meaningful look into adopting.
The Opposite of Loneliness
2.5 Stars
Marina was killed when her (sober) boyfriend fell asleep while driving and crashed their car. She had just graduated from Yale and had lofty ambitions to become a writer. Following her untimely death her commencement speech went viral which led to her friends and family going through her journals and writing samples in order to put together the posthumous The Opposite of Lonelienss with a lovely introduction written by her friend and classmate, Anne Fadiman.
Marina wouldn’t want to be remembered because she’s dead. She would want to be remembered because she’s good.
To put it delicately The Opposite of Loneliness only exists as it is written because Marina passed away at such a young age. She has two strong essays but overall her stories range from bad to middling. This is because they were written by a college student and thrust upon the world without the tough conversations an editor would have with a new writer. Marina was clearly a talented writer with lofty goals and enormous talent, she is an infinitely better writer at 22 than I am now at 31, but I do wonder what Marina’s first collection of essays would have looked like on her terms. Would she be grateful to have even the roughest collection of her work out in the universe or would she be embarrassed that her legacy reads like a rough draft?
*this also worked for being a passenger in a car so I’m totally going to try and get away with this on my next road trip with hubby