Category: Pop

(The Dial Press, 241 pages)

After Belle Burden and her husband bought a house on Martha’s Vineyard, they became interested in ospreys. Raptors that mate for life, the birds live near water, and a pair nested on Burden’s property, to the family’s delight.

The ospreys are a motif threaded through Burden’s new memoir, Strangers, born of a viral New York Times essay titled “Was I Married to a Stranger?” about how Burden’s husband abruptly moved out when she learned he was having an affair, leaving her to question whether she ever knew the man she’d been married to for two decades.

After the essay was published, Burden received shaming emails, some calling her a bad mother for casting the father of her children as a weapons-grade jerk. But she also got notes from people who said her story helped them get through their divorce. And she had always wanted to be a writer, a dream cast aside by early harsh feedback and a law degree.

Throw in Burden’s lofty pedigree — John Jay and the Vanderbilts are in her family lineage — and of course, publishers wanted her to tell more. The memoir has gotten widespread publicity, from People magazine to Town & Country.

But this isn’t so much a book about a celebrity divorce as it is a book about ordinary heartbreak. Burden begins by recounting the details of the evening when she listened to a voicemail from a man who said her husband was having an affair with his wife. She confronts James — the useless pseudonym she gives her husband (his real name is a click away on Google) — and he assures her the relationship is meaningless and will end. But the next morning he tells her he wants a divorce. “You can have the house and the apartment. You can have custody of the kids. I don’t want it. I don’t want any of it,” he says. Burden was leveled. As she tried to get answers from James, he grew colder.

As she wades into legal machinations of divorce, she reflects on their courtship and the life she had enjoyed until that point.

To the reader there are many red flags. James has a bad-boy history and a controlling nature: Three weeks after they started a romantic relationship, he said, “Tell me you love me” to her. When, after having three children and staying home to care for them, she gets a job offer, he decides the answer is no. He becomes increasingly obsessed with his work; she, increasingly obsessed with family life.

After James left, everything about Burden’s life was cast in a different light, even her custom of sending Christmas cards every year. When holiday cards began to arrive from married friends, she tore them up; they seemed boastful, she writes, and a painful reminder of what she no longer had. She vowed to never send Christmas cards again.

There is little in the way of mystery here, but for how the court case turns out — whether Burden gets to keep the two homes she bought with the entirety of her trust funds, or whether her husband, a hedge-fund manager, gets half of them. It’s important to note that James has told The New York Times that his recollections of some events are different from hers, as is his assessment of what kind of father he is to their children.

The real-time action in Strangers spans just the timeline of the divorce, from her husband telling her he was done to the finalization of the courts, the ospreys accompanying us all the way. This is a bit predictable, as is the self-actualization Burden reaches. No memoir of misery is complete without the realization that all the pain was somehow worth it. Strangers is well-written but also well-trod. B+

Featured Photo: Strangers by Belle Burden

(W.W. Norton, 291 pages)

Not long after Bee Wilson’s marriage of 23 years dissolved, a heart-shaped cake tin clattered to the floor at her feet. It was the tin she had used to bake her wedding cake, and later to bake birthday cakes for her children. Now she was unsure what to do with the tin and all the complicated feelings it evoked.

Wilson started to think about all the other items that filled her kitchen cabinets and cupboards, and the sentimental attachment that so many held. Many had been passed down to her from family members or arrived as gifts. It is notable, she writes in The Heart-Shaped Tin, that “kitchenware seems to be one of the main forms of currency between grown-up family members, whether given by a child to a parent or the other way around. What is really being exchanged is an idealised memory of the family dinner table.”

We all have the equivalent of Wilson’s heart-shaped tin, some item that, whether used or not, is absurdly precious. Mine is an antique Coca-Cola-branded bottle opener that was attached to the wall of my late grandmother’s home and now hangs in my kitchen. It is rarely used since I hardly ever buy bottled drinks, but I would fight to the death anyone who tried to take it from me.

In her book — part memoir, part history — Wilson delves into the reasons for these attachments, looking at her own family’s treasures as well as the treasures of other people around the world. She explores the psychological and societal factors that influence what we consider priceless or worthless, from a relatively cheap melon baller that her sons fight over, to an iron pan that a South American woman is so attached to that she sometimes takes it with her on vacation.

“We like to think that love is a natural phenomenon that happens all by itself, springing directly from our hearts. But to live in the modern commercial world is to have thousands of desires and longings inside us without our say-so. You wake up with an urge to buy a giant coffee in a paper cup decorated with a green mermaid and you have no idea why,” Wilson writes.

Wilson is an English writer whose previous nonfiction books have also involved kitchenware and food (see 2012’s Consider the Fork and 2010’s Sandwich: A Global History). Her latest is a surprisingly engaging tour de kitchenware that takes us from an ancient ceramic container found in Ecuador that challenged what we thought we knew about the history of chocolate consumption to the mysterious kitchen sieve that Queen Elizabeth I is holding in a 1583 portrait of her. The vast range of items discussed goes from vegetable corers to canisters, from glory boxes (a kind of hope chest or dowry) to burial plates, the blue and white ceramic plates sometimes buried with corpses in England in the 18th and 19th centuries. All together, it is a cornucopia of fascinating historical anecdotes.

Wilson also helps to explain why fine china has been so important throughout human history, to the point where even people of modest means would work to obtain a full setting, one piece at a time, in order to honor their guests. She writes of the legacy of guilt that such household items like this leave when you realize the china either never appealed to you or has outlived its purpose.

“Every time I opened the cupboard that contained the Kutani Crane vegetable tureens they made me feel faintly strangled,” she writes. “These dishes had been handed down to me not just by my own father but by his father. When I looked at them, I felt weighed down by two generations of filial obligation.”

Wilson is a master of the interesting aside, as when she explores the control that the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre believed is at the center of gift-giving. Nowhere is this a greater problem than in Japan, she writes, “which has a culture of gift-giving more extensive than any other advanced capitalist society.” The Japanese not only give lavishly to each other but are expected to give a gift after being presented with a gift. Moreover, next time you complain about the preponderance of “Hallmark holidays” in America, remember that Japan also celebrates Girl’s Day, Boy’s Day and Old People’s Day — all of which come with gifts.

Wilson also writes poignantly about the difficulty of getting rid of sentimental objects, even when you are psychologically ready to do so, and sometimes even when they are broken. She had finally packed up an expensive set of china, having decided to donate it to a thrift shop, when one of her sons protested her giving away those pieces of his childhood. She had better luck when she finally decided to give away the “Elmer the Elephant” plate her sons had eaten on as toddlers, but it wasn’t without pain.

It is possible “to hanker deeply after something which is neither pretty nor useful, just because of the person who once used it,” she writes. “The fact that no one needs it anymore is exactly what makes the wanting so fierce, because it reminds you of a time when you were needed too.”

I approached The Heart-Shaped Tin with some skepticism about whether Wilson’s premise could hold my attention for nearly 300 pages, but it did. Readers will continue to think about not only the stories the author tells but the stories contained in their own kitchens. B+

Featured Photo: The Heart-Shaped Tin: Love, Loss, and Kitchen Objects by Bee Wilson

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 171 pages)

Anyone with a passing knowledge of poetry knows of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the English poet who composed “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan” (the latter said to have been written under the influence of opium).

Far fewer know of his firstborn son, David Hartley Coleridge, frequently referred to by friends and family as “Poor Hartley.” Essayist Anne Fadiman plucks the lesser Coleridge out of popular obscurity in Frog (And Other Essays), a collection that offers an eclectic assortment of subjects, from the titular frog, a family pet that wound up in the freezer, to the men on a doomed polar expedition who produced a newspaper/literary magazine to help them endure the long and depressing Antarctic winters.

All are, in a word, a delight.

“Frog” is the first of seven. It chronicles the life and death of Bunky, who entered the Fadiman household as a tadpole shipped in a Styrofoam container. The brand was called “Grow-a-Frog” and it wasn’t until later that Fadiman learned of Bucky’s heritage: He was an African clawed frog who looked “as if a regular frog had been bleached and then put in a panini press.” Bunky lived, more or less happily, with the family for about 17 years, although Fadiman notes that she would sometimes “hear him softly calling for a mate he would never meet” when she got up for a middle-of-the-night snack.

Bunky’s story meanders. Fadiman leads us through short discussions of various family pets and varied anecdotes of Bunky’s limited life, some of which, she admits, now cause her regret. When he died, “I mourned for all frogs in too small-aquariums. All the fish brought home from fairs in plastic bags. All the turtles bought on impulse, vegetating in plastic lagoons. All the baby alligators flushed down toilets.” Her attempt to honor him in death, however, doesn’t go as intended, and he winds up spending an extended time in the refrigerator, because “It’s easy to forget you have a frog in your freezer when he’s behind the frozen tamales.”

“The Oakling and the Oak” is the surprisingly riveting tale of “Poor Hartley,” which shows that the travails of a child growing up in the shadow of a larger-than-life parent is a story that has existed since Adam and Cain.

Hartley didn’t kill anyone, but he was a disappointment to his father, even though he was not without talent himself, and his father was enamoured of him when he was a child. (“By the time he was seven, it is no exaggeration to say he had inspired some of the greatest poems ever written in English,” Fadiman writes.

In fact, it was that early outpouring of love that could have been a problem: “A penumbra of impossible expectation began to settle around Hartley’s head” and the poems his father wrote about him described the boy “as more spirit than mortal, a child who did not walk so much as levitate.” But STC turned out to be an absentee father, and Hartley turned out to be something of an irresponsible young adult; despite a strong intellect, he lost a coveted fellowship, in part because, as the college dean wrote, “he was often guilty of intemperance and came home in a state in which it was not safe to trust him with a candle.” It wasn’t long before father and son were not on speaking terms. He never married, and Fadiman describes a poignant deathbed scene where Poor Hartley, who loved babies but never had children, asked to hold a neighbor’s infant as he was dying. As is her wont, Fadiman leaves us wanting to learn even more about the various subjects she writes about.

In “South Polar Times” she offers evidence that “the value of a periodical cannot be judged by the size of its circulation.” Case in point: the newspaper/literary magazine produced by Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott and his team. “There was only one copy of each of its twelve issues, to be shared (depending on the year) by between thirteen and forty-seven readers.” Because the sun in Antarctica set in April and rose in August, depression was as much a problem as the cold. A publication featuring the work of the crew, all submitted anonymously, was one of Scott’s antidotes to misery (along with brandy and theatrical shows); contributors deposited their poems, essays and other articles into a mahogany box for consideration.

The originals still exist; Fadiman, having long held interest in arctic expeditions, once reviewed a compilation of them, marveling at the illustrations done by Dr. Edward Wilson, the Discovery’s assistant surgeon, who also happened to be a zoologist and artist. (Wilson was among the men who perished alongside Scott after discovering that Roald Amundsen had beaten them to the South Pole.)

Again, more books will have to be read, for having read Frog.

Not all of Fadiman’s topics are so poignant. In “My Old Printer,” she rues her unwillingness to part with old printers. (“Why couldn’t I treat my printer the same way I’d treat an elderly relative who, if spared the indignity of intubation, would succumb to a painless bout of pneumonia? Why couldn’t I just let nature take its course? It’s because I and most other people my age are cumbersome ourselves. We are hard to upgrade. We are not adaptable. Our memories are short on disk space. … We are all HP LaserJet II printers.”)

In “All My Pronouns,” she takes us through a brief history of pronoun controversies, from her Yale students adapting they/them to the Quakers who insisted on addressing everyone as “thou” even though the usage demoted in social standing some of the people who were addressed.

(In 16th-century Europe, she writes, “there were few more efficient ways to dishonor a man than to ‘thou’ him.”)

In “Screen Share,” she tells her pandemic story, which while interesting is no more or less interesting than yours — pretty much everyone over the age of 15 has an interesting pandemic story to tell these days.

She finishes with “Yes to Everything,” a tribute to one of her students (“Thin. Beautiful. Long reddish-brown hair. Long legs. Flagrantly short skirt. Nimbus of angry energy.”) who had been told by a visiting novelist “that making it as a writer today was virtually impossible.” It will punch you in the gut, is all I’ll say. Read with tissues. And don’t buy your kids frogs. A

Featured Photo: Frog and Other Essays by Anne Fadiman