Let me first begin by saying that I walked past this book many times, intrigued by the title but not wanting to buy it. Maybe this is a quirk of mine: there are some books where I’d have no or neutral feelings toward it and I’d buy it. There are books that I have gut reactions against buying it. Sometimes the gut reaction is about the author, sometimes it’s about the treatment of the subject matter. In this case, I don’t know the author and so have no existing bias. When I read the book jacket, I was intrigued by the subject matter (a mother’s journey raising a special needs child). But maybe it’s the title that turned me off.
Still, Borders is going out of business and everything’s 60-70% off. I can get a hard-cover book for $7.50. There was another book I looked at that was written by a grandparent of a child with cerebral palsy… but I got this one instead.
I spent yesterday evening reading it and finally finishing the book this morning.
I was surprised to see so many good reviews. Perhaps I have higher expectations — after all, she is a professor of words. Someone who has grown up amongst words and literature — and who is teaching the art as a profession — yes, I expected more from Priscilla Gilman. I was ready to give much slack to her use of Wordsworth poetry throughout the book, which distracted most of the readers on Amazon who gave her 3 or lower reviews (and I’d agree with them — at some places the poetry felt forced to fit and in my opinion, mostly unnecessary), but I wasn’t going to cut her a break on craft.
The story has incredible potential… all of us parents can relate to our romantic fantasies of having perfect children, by this I don’t mean robotic perfection, but perfectly “normal”. When this doesn’t happen, or when the early years are rife with “high needs” experience and for some of us, “special needs”, our fantasies come crumbling down and we start to feel confused, frustrated, and scared.
I found the prose and poetry continually distracting. In some places the tone comes across as defensive. While this is understandable from a parenting point of view and when it involves your child, it is ineffective from a literary perspective. I felt as if I was reading compilations of journal entries that weren’t edited enough for fluency. As a result, my experience as a reader was “frustrated” by the story rather than “connected” to the story.
I understood the need to elaborate on Gilman’s own childhood to serve as later comparator of her son’s difference, but at times the descriptions came across as sentimental and a bit saccharine, although I’ll admit this is subjective. What’s saccharine to me may be wonderful and touching to others. I can’t count how many times I’ve cringed at the adjectives used throughout the book. I’m still replaying “they walked jauntily” in my mind, as if to torture myself. This was more telling than showing; I got hung up on the roughness of craft, which distracted me from the story.
I think her choice to cover such a vast span of time was what made the book rough and “bumpy”. If she had kept this either between the period of first diagnosis to initial acclimation of her son at preschool, I think it could have been an effective approach. Ultimately I felt this book could have been condensed into a 25 page personal essay. One of the most outstanding treatments of a mother’s worst nightmare with the development of her child’s medical condition was “Cracking Open” by Patricia Brieschke, originally published by PMS poemmemoirstory (here’s a version, which doesn’t do the full version justice, but it gives you an idea of the craft of writing about a highly emotive story). Maybe because I’ve read what I’d considered one of the best approaches to an emotionally charged relationship such as one between a new mother and her newborn, I was spoilt for writing that could have been better but weren’t good enough given the treasure of a topic.
From what I’ve read of readers reviews ranked 2 stars — there were reviews from parents of special needs children similar to Gilman and they found the book pretentious and superficial. I disagree with calls of pretension — instead, I saw this as apologetic and defensive. These are issues that we writers need to get over ourselves before putting experience down on paper, or we’d subject readers to our private little therapy session.
I read some of the advanced praise on the back. Are those people reading the same book I’m reading? Even the one with poetry critic Harold Bloom (I just bought his little book about understanding poetry, because I do *not* understand poetry) talks about the book as a lyrical narrative. I’ve read many lyrical essays and this is not a lyrical narrative. Were there lyrical sentences? Yes, a few. But I’ve read lyrical essays where sentences poured smoothly into existence and I marveled at the music of the words and didn’t have to make a point of looking for the lyrical narrative as I did with this one.
Now… I’m not a “professional” critic: I’m going only by my meager education of having read about 25-30 “best of” essay collection from literary journals over the last month period, and looking at the writing technique. To my untrained eye, I recognize good writing, because of how it expresses the story, where it places the narrator relative to the story, and how it makes me as a reader feel.
I can’t say that this book won me over at the end. In my case, I wanted to like this — I really wanted to like this — from the very beginning, and there were sections that grabbed my attention, but toward the end I began to skim through the pages looking for major events and closed the book, disappointed.
3/5 Stars.
