Category Archives: family relationships

Forbidden Notebook

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Years ago a good friend advised me to destroy my journal pages soon after I wrote them, especially if I had used them to vent anger or frustration. Of course, I did not follow her advice. In the introduction to Alba de Cespedes Forbidden Notebook, Jhumpa Lahiri reminds the reader that “ whether intended for publication or not…(diaries and notebooks) are all dialogues with the self. They are instances of self-doubting and self-fashioning. They are declarations of autonomy…”

Recently I found a few old journals in a stack of papers I was going through to decide which could be shredded or tossed. When I read through them, I understood why Jane Austen had left instructions for her sister to destroy her notes after death. I realized I did not want anyone reading my thoughts from years ago when what seemed insurmountable then, feels irrelevant and unimportant now. So I finally took my friend’s advice and shredded them.

The book takes the form of a series of diary entries made by 43-year-old Valeria Cossati in Rome in 1950. She is wife to Michele and a mother of two grown-up children, Mirella and Riccardo. She also has an office job.

One Sunday morning she goes to the tobacconist to buy cigarettes for her husband when she notices a pile of notebooks in the window – “black, shiny, thick, the type used in school”. When she asks to buy one, the tobacconist tells her it is forbidden, as by law he is only allowed to sell tobacco on Sundays. She pleads and he gives in, insisting she “hide it under her coat” so the guard doesn’t spot it. At home Valeria continues to keep her notebook hidden from her family.

By the end of the novel, Valeria decides to destroy the journal, but she can’t eliminate so easily the self- knowledge she’s gleaned from writing it. She writes: “I know that my reactions to the facts I write down in detail lead me to know myself more intimately every day,..The better I know myself, the more lost I become. Besides, I don’t know what feelings could stand up to a ruthless, continuous analysis; or who among us, reflected in every action, could be satisfied with ourselves.”

The book written in 1952 has just been published in a new translation, and its focus on women’s rights and struggles still resonates today. Clare Thorp in her review for the BBC says: “The things that she discovers, she sees, it’s what we all struggle with still, and that was a little alarming. Immediately you’re just so pulled into it and engaged, it’s just amazing. I just feel like everybody should read this book.”

As Valeria struggles to find a safe place for her notebook and her private thoughts, it’s hard not to think of Virginia Woolf’s famous line of a woman needing a room of her own. In Valeria’s world, as with many women, there is no place for her husband and children to see her other than who she is in relationship to them. Having her own life and thoughts is unimaginable and unacceptable to them. The notebook becomes the place where she explores who she really is and is her only private space.

Flight

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Lynn Steger Strong’s Flight centers around a family gathering for the first Chirstmas after the matriarch Helen dies. Maybe it would have been better to read the story around the holidays after watching Home Alone, or maybe the misbegotten grief seemed artificial after having recently experienced it. I read through the book in a couple of days, but was left feeling empty at the end.

The three adult siblings, Martin, Henry, and Kate descend on a house in upstate New York to reconstruct a Christmas that will never be the same since their mother has recently died. Her recipes, her family games, her words of wisdom – all haunt the narrative as they struggle to avoid the usual family squabbles and tension. Helen’s house in Florida provides the bone of contention. Martin, the eldest and a professor recently placed on leave for his inappropriate comments to a student, and his wife, a successful but driven lawyer, want to sell and split the profits. Henry, an artist with a surreal attachment to the environment, and his wife, a former artist but now social worker to pay the bills, want to donate the land to the adjacent national bird sanctuary, and Kate, the youngest, wants the house for herself and her family to live in. Somehow, they thought Christmas would bring them all together and they would more easily come to an agreement. You may wonder what they were thinking, but this is fiction.

Mixed in with the angst and family tension are Quinn, a twenty-three year old recovering drug addict, and her daughter Maddie, both under the care of social worker Alice, who has never been able to have children of her own. This is Alice’s house, and she is a good Auntie, entertaining her nephews and nieces, making gingerbread slabs, buying sleds, and yearning to be a good surrogate mother to Maddie.

The conversations among the adults are anxious and sometimes unnerving, as they try to navigate their own issues as well as their place in a family. Most of the novel has the aspect of a weekly TV series, plodding along with everyday minutia, until Quinn leaves her young daughter alone to go out for a beer, and Maddie goes missing. The overnight search in the snow and forest brings out more inner turmoil among the adults, until a supposedly happy ending brings Christmas mercifully to an end.

The book would certainly provide good fodder for discussion at a book club with its epic family saga vibe and the unique character development offering perspective into sibling rivalry and loyalty. Let me know what you think of it after you read it.