Author: Jennifer Graham

The Madwoman and the Roomba, by Sandra Tsing Loh (W.W. Norton, 276 pages)

Can we say that it’s a little more than ironic that a woman who found fame leaving the stifling prison that was a 20-year marriage is now rhapsodizing affectionately about the “domestic mayhem” that is her life?

But that is where Sandra Tsing Loh has arrived 11 years after the publication of her celebrated Atlantic piece titled “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” which was an explanation of why she ended her marriage and an invitation for other people to do the same.

A year earlier, she’d found fame and acclaim for Mother on Fire, an acerbically funny memoir of parenting, and many of her fans were surprised to find her ringless a year later, although it did much for her career. I tend to be stoutly judgmental about such things, but I’m willing to forgive a lot for a laugh, including “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” and another mildly disturbing Atlantic essay in which she said she wished her 91-year-old father would die. That’s probably a character flaw in me, which is why I like Loh even as she tramples on my fundamental values. She has plenty of her own, on public display in two books that portend a long-running series, 2014’s The Madwoman in the Volvo, My Year of Raging Hormones and now, The Madwoman and the Roomba, My Year of Domestic Mayhem.

There is a pleasant afternoon to be had envisioning what comes next: The Madwoman in the Face Mask? The Madwoman and the AARP? The Madwoman and the Depends? Loh (pronounced “low”) has built a devoted following, so it’s a safe bet that Roomba won’t be the last. Loh, who the New York Times once crowned a worthy contender for “publishers’ holy grail, ‘the female David Sedaris.’” Like Sedaris, she is reliably funny and specializes in understated comedy built around the adventures of a strange family that feels vaguely familiar but, under the microscope, is really nothing like yours. (How unlike yours? Her father, for starters, had a rock song written about him by a band named Boy Hits Car. The song contains the line “Mr. Loh’s not afraid to be naked.” There you go.)

But she imagines herself this red, white and blue everywoman, trying earnestly to be one of “us” rather than one of the dastardly “them,” all the while showing that she’s not really poor and struggling, but just seems to have too many stupidly rich friends. As a technique, this is generally opaque, and she wears peasant clothes well in one of the stronger chapters in the book, titled “Stanford Swimming.”

In the essay, Loh makes comic hash out of an evening spent with friends at a New York estate that “looks like a large villa you’d find in Europe, protected by lush non-native hedges.” The friends, of course, are “thems” and if you hadn’t already figured this out, you will when the wine comes out and the friends say, winsomely, that it isn’t expensive but was on the Zagat list of “great wines under $40.”

“Charlie and I raise eyebrows amusedly at each other. For us the price cap on a bottle of wine is eight dollars,” Loh writes. The next nine pages are essentially “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” had Mr. Smith been sardonic, an easy-going, fish-in-a-barrel takedown of people who have personal cooks and tennis courts and sons who win swimming scholarships to Stanford. Loh, in comparison, says that she’s not even sure her teenage daughters can swim, and they come to the table, one looking like an L.A. gang girl “edging into drag queen,” the other a “painfully thin” child evocative of Ichabod Crane who is “less eating her salad than worrying it.” She worries that when lacrosse is mentioned, her daughters will think the conversation is about sparkling water.

“Stanford Swimming” is one of the longer essays in a collection that ostensibly runs the length of a year, Loh’s 55th. As Madwoman in the Volvo was about menopause, it’s more difficult to define what Madwoman and the Roomba is about, other than maybe trying to pay off a tax bill born of an IRS audit detailed in a chapter called “A very Hindu audit.” It’s here, among other places, that Loh’s everywoman credentials seem just a tiny bit overstated, as she exclaims worriedly about the IRS challenging $25,000 in business expenses and says she only gets massages when Groupon is involved.

There is a lot of exclaiming in this book. There also are a worrisome number of exclamation marks, making it seem that a stern editor wasn’t one of those business expenses, and an overabundance of Loh’s trademark dashes, which she seems to use as a calling card and a stand-in for ellipses. Example from a bit of dialogue: “‘You cannot lumber after waiters like an extra from The Walking Dead, knocking over priceless Louis Quatorze art along the way —’”

It’s a small quibble, and maybe you love it, but David Sedaris doesn’t do it.

At the end of the year Loh’s father finally dies, and at first she seems to have all the remorse and grief that you would expect of someone who has been grousing for years about why he had the nerve to live so long, given the “giant money leakage of his care.”

There is an important conversation to be had about whether science is extending life for too long, and Loh’s most shocking statements may be more shrewd calculations than heartfelt emotions; her undergraduate degree, after all, was in physics. But the reader still has the right to be shocked when, upon going to her father’s house soon after his death, Loh decides to take a selfie with her father’s corpse. Is this a thing? If so, it would seem more the action of a millennial than a baby boomer “at the dropping tail of the boom.”

It’s hard, however, to dislike any writer who calls a mortuary professional a “Styx crosser” regardless of other offenses. A-

BOOK NOTES
Since The New York Times once said Sandra Tsing Loh (reviewed above) was a candidate to be “the female David Sedaris,” it seems appropriate to see who else has earned this honor, and more importantly, whether they’re in paperback so we can take them to the beach.

Sedaris, of course, is the sly humorist made famous in 1992 by an essay about playing one of Santa’s elves at Macy’s, the broadcast of which is now an NPR holiday tradition. His books, which include Me Talk Pretty One Day and Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, seethe with weapons-grade humor softened by a folksy tone and a surprising depth of wisdom and lived pain.

Why do we need a female Sedaris? Hard to say because there is no equivalent search for a male Anne Lamott.

But the contenders, according to Google, include not only Loh but these authors:
Lauren Weedman,Miss Fortune (Plume, 304 pages)
Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There’d Be Cake (Riverhead, 230 pages)
Susan Reinhardt, Chimes from a Cracked Southern Belle (Grateful Steps, 384 pages)
Susan Jane Gilman, Hypocrite in a White, Pouffy Dress(Grand Central Publishing, 369 pages)
Faith Salie, Approval Junkie (Three Rivers Press, 288 pages)
Jen Lancaster, Bitter is the New Black, (Berkley, 416 pages)

To be fair, there are others, but some women seem to have given the title to themselves on their blogs. I make no guarantees as to how Sedarisian these women are, but note that Crosley has especially good reviews.

Or you could just wait for a new Sedaris book to come out. The New York Times recently reported that there are two in the queue, The Best Of Me, a collection of previously published essays, due out in the fall (pandemic willing), and Carnival of Snackeries, more selections from the diary he has kept for more than 40 years, scheduled next year.

What is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life, by Mark Doty (W.W. Norton, 288 pages)

Most everyone with a high school diploma has read Walt Whitman; if not the entirety of “Song of Myself,” then at least “I Hear America Singing” or “1861,” which seems even more prescient in the current arm’d year.

But for many Americans, Whitman fast receded after American Lit, and his iconic Leaves of Grass is best remembered for an infamous toilet scene in the AMC show Breaking Bad.

It seems a sorry fate to be forever associated with idle bathroom reading.

To the rescue rides Mark Doty, a poet and Rutgers University professor whose latest book is a searing and worshipful ode to Whitman, who he considers the first “truly American poet.” A gay man once married to a woman, Doty accepts as canon the widespread belief that Whitman was gay, saying that there is a “deeper level of scandal” that exists in Leaves of Grass, most visible to those familiar with same-sex longings.

Doty explores those longings — not only Whitman’s, but his own — in What is the Grass, which swells beyond the confines of conventional memoir to explore the importance of Whitman’s work and its surprising relevance to events of today. The book is a gorgeous contemplation of mystery and transcendence, and of the confluence of two men separated by a century and a half, but not by fact that one of them is long dead.

“The dead persist audibly in language,” Doty writes, displaying an admirable ability to take a truth that is plain and make its expression exquisite, like the difference between generic flour and King Arthur’s.

Whitman was a writer who, for much of his life, walked a pauper trail; at midlife, he was living in a small apartment in New York with his mother and five of his siblings. He essentially self-published Leaves of Grass in 1855; having worked in printing since the age of 13, he set some of the type for the initial 200 copies himself.

It was, Doty writes, a strange book of verse “at odds in format and content with essentially everything in print in its day.” Whitman’s name was not on the cover. There was no indication in the lackluster reception that one of those volumes would one day sell at auction for $305,000, as it did in 2014, or that future generations would say “its best pages breathe an air perennially new,” as Doty describes them.

Whitman was a splendid mass of contradictions; a man believed to have once spent an afternoon in the embrace of Oscar Wilde, he once denied being attracted to men when asked directly. He possessed, Doty writes, “a radiant sense of connection to the bodies of others,” yet was a “perpetual outsider.” Today, his sexuality is discussed in some circles with reluctance; it is an ethical conundrum whether to out the dead.

Doty, however, frankly discusses his own relationships, from the “painful comedy” of a marriage to a woman twice his age, to his explorations in sex clubs and more fulfilling long-term relationships. The stories, while frank, are not titillating or gratuitous; they are earnest disclosures of a seeker who wants to know why Whitman has so profoundly affected his life, and that of American literature.

While there is structural analysis of Whitman’s poems here, it is not the dry stuff of lectures, but the invitation of someone who deeply cares about a subject and wants the rest of the world to share his enthusiasm. In this he succeeds; a chapter in, and I’d gone looking for my own dusty copy of Leaves of Grass, a gift stiff from disuse.

While on one level a meditation on sexuality, What is the Grass is evidence of Whitman’s unifying theory, that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” In other words, Doty’s experience is not my own, nor was Whitman’s, but there exist other, more important, commonalities, such as reverence for beauty and nature and passion and books, the latter of which, Doty believes, collide at the intersection of soul and time.

“The dead are not lost, but in circulation,” Doty writes. Like the poet who haunts him, he celebrates the “self without boundaries” while paying homage to the pocked and needful bodies tethered to earth. Whitman, wherever his atoms, must be proud. It’s a masterful work worthy of its subject. A

BOOK NOTES

A few years ago, Time magazine reported that human beings now have the attention span of a goldfish, which can focus on something for about nine seconds without losing interest. That was quickly debunked by researchers who say that 10 to 15 minutes is more realistic.

And that is why the maximum length of a TED talk is 18 minutes, and why the ideal summer book should be not a novel or a 592-page White House memoir but a collection of essays or short stories.

When the heat sucks your energy like a bug zapper, there is pleasure in short bursts of reading equivalent to the time it takes to sip a frosty adult beverage. Consider these, which will not drain your energy or consume time better spent on the water or in the woods:

The Inner Coast: Essays, by Donovan Hohn: philosophical reflections on nature. Opening line: “I was, at age nine, a god of snails.” (W.W. Norton, 256 pages)

26 Marathons: What I Learned About Faith, Identity, Running and Life from My Marathon Career, by Meb Keflezigihi: inspiration from the long distance runner, Olympic athelete and Boston Marathon winner. Opening lines: “The first thing I see is the finish line behind me. For a moment I’m confused. Why am I lying on the ground with my head cradled in my hands?” (Rodale, 256 pages)

Nothing is Wrong and Here is Why, by Alexandra Petri: acerbic, partisan humor from a Washington Post columnist. Opening line: “You may feel that you understand what has been happening for the past four years, but I assure you, you do not.” (W.W. Norton, 240 pages)

The Best American Science and Nature Writing of 2019, edited by Sy Montgomery. Honestly, anything in the “Best American Series” works, depending on your interests; there is also Best American Short Stories, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Mystery Stories, Sports Writing, Food Writing, Comics, Essays, and most intriguingly, “American Nonrequired Reading.”

But we’ll go with this one, edited by Montgomery, since she’s a Granite Stater. Her opening: “Several years ago I was invited to speak to kids and teens at the Boston March for Science. On a cold, rainy day in early April, I looked out at a sea of young faces framed by dripping umbrellas and the hoods of ponchos, and spoke to them about tree kangaroos.” (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 384 pages.)

Breath, The New Science of a Lost Art, by James Nestor (Riverhead, 304 pages)

The pandemic has forced publishers to delay the release of dozens of books that didn’t seem appropriate to bring to market as a potentially deadly respiratory disease was spreading.

No such problem for Breath, journalist James Nestor’s examination of how generations of us became mouth-breathers, and how the practice is ruining our looks and our health. You with the sleep apnea. Me with the perpetually clogged sinuses. Nestor bids us to breathe only through our nose, “the gatekeeper of our bodies, pharmacist to our minds and weather vanes to our emotions,” and to adopt a pace of inhaling and exhaling that comprises what he calls “the perfect breath.”

There’s a formula that seems to show God likes math: Inhale 5.5 seconds, exhale 5.5 seconds equals 5.5 breaths a minute, for a total consumption of about 5.5 liters of air.

Some years ago, Nestor became interested in a subset of extreme athletes called freedivers, people who can hold their breath for more than five minutes and dive deep in the ocean without breathing equipment. His exploration of that culture led to 2014’s Deep, Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves. He also took a class in mindful breathing that, while boring at the time, resulted in more focus and calm the next day.

So he began studying super-breathers, people who believe that how we breathe is intimately connected to how healthy we are, and noticing the differences between them and ordinary people who can hold their breath for maybe 20 seconds without thinking they’re going to explode.

And he concluded that most of us don’t really know how to breathe, even though we do it 50,000 times a day. We breathe sloppily, through whatever orifice happens to be open at the time. We take short, shallow breaths, many more times a minute than necessary. We can breathe like this, but we’re not meant to, Nestor argues. And the combination of a soft, modern diet that doesn’t require energetic chewing, and poor breathing habits, is rearranging our skulls, not for the better, he says.

This is not a new idea. In 1862, an artist named George Catlin traveled through reservations of native Americans and documented their remarkable good health and straight teeth, which in his book The Breath of Life he attributed to breathing only through the nose. The native Americans, like other civilizations 1,000 years before Christ, were convinced that mouth breathing led to ill health. Mothers would watch their sleeping babies and gently pinch their mouths closed if they opened, so children would grow into adults who only breathed through their noses.

If this seems weird, you should know that there live among us modern humans who put a piece of tape on their mouths before going to bed at night, to achieve the same goal. For a while, Nestor was among them.

As part of his research, he became half of a two-subject study to monitor the effects of spending 10 days breathing only through his mouth, and then 10 days breathing only through his nose.

Nestor emerged from his experiment convinced that the ancients were right, that we sacrifice much of our health and vitality by ignoring the quiet, constant intake of air, which we take for granted until our capacity becomes diminished. Research has shown that we absorb 18 percent more oxygen when we breathe through our nose than through our mouth. Air taken in through the nostrils is substantively different from air processed through the mouth.

Believers include a Silicon Valley dentist who tells his patients that chronic mouth breathing causes periodontal disease, cavities and bad breath and suggests that they use “sleep tape” on their mouth at night to break the habit, and a woman convinced that breathing therapy can heal scoliosis, among other conditions.

The modern tendency to breathe with both the nose and the mouth has effects beyond our perpetually clogged noses. Our nasal cavity atrophies when it’s not robustly used, and even our lungs suffer when we’re not using them to their potential; they further deteriorate with age. But, according to Nestor, and the Tibetians, “The internal organs are malleable, and we can change them at nearly any time.” Exercise helps, and so does proper breathing, which can also decrease anxiety and improve sleep, among myriad other improvements, Nestor promises. It did for him, although he warns that there is no breathing exercise that can dissolve an embolism or heal cancer. In short, better breathing can improve your life, but not save it.

“The glories of nasal breathing” is not the sexiest topic, but Nestor is persuasive and his narrative sings, at least for the first hundred or so pages. Later, he drills down into techniques he calls Breathing+, which he admits is a sort of “respiratory gauntlet” and not nearly as appealing as shutting your mouth and counting to 5½.

But in a culture where some of us are so perpetually stressed and distracted that we forget to breathe for a half-minute — a phenomenon known as “email apnea” — we could use a breathing coach. Breath suggests that we should all shut our mouth, but for eating and brushing our teeth. B+

BOOK NOTES
For a couple of pleasant hours during the last week of May, it looked like the nation was going to turn its eyes to … birdwatching.
Before rage over the death of George Floyd exploded nationwide, rage over Amy Cooper’s tirade against birdwatcher Christian Cooper in Central Park had spun off a delightful Twitter diversion, #Blackbirdersweek.
The virtual celebration was begun by a Georgia grad student, Corina Newsome, who studies seaside sparrows. It was quickly eclipsed by other, more momentous events, but in times of trauma there seems something healing in putting down the phone and picking up the binoculars. And there are a couple of new books out to assist.
Celebrated nature writer Jennifer Ackerman’s The Bird Way is an examination of how birds “talk, work, play, parent and think” (Penguin, 368 pages). And Massachusetts naturalist David Allen Sibley has a new guide called What It’s Like to Be a Bird (Knopf, 240 pages). And Todd Telander has written a new Falcon Pocket Guide called Birds of New England (Falcon Guides, 192 pages).
Useful as they are, none of these are selling as well as the new Hunger Games prequel, Suzanne Collins’ The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.
Meanwhile, it’s not as useful as a $1,200 stimulus check, but Publishers Weekly, the venerable trade magazine about books and publishing, recently made its digital edition available for free to anyone who signs up on its website. It’s not clear how long this will last; the website says “free during the Covid-19 crisis.” But there’s an extraordinary amount of content that is usually behind a paywall, including current and past bestseller lists and a database of reviews going back to 1895. Not bad in exchange for an email address.
Another pandemic freebie is available from Audible, which has made a collection of children’s stories free “as long as school is on pause.” Go to stories.audible.com.