Tag Archives: J. Courtney Sullivan

Daisy, Madeleine, Oona, Sartre and Others

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One of the good things about not being able to go anywhere is that you have permission to stay put and not go anywhere.  For me, it means I don’t have to make excuses when turning down invitations, and can feel content staying in to read or nap.  It’s not always easy to find a book when browsing is limited but good friends and family usually pass along a few titles, and there’s always my stash on my shelf, thin paperbacks I had planned to take with me on a plane before my travel stopped, or heavy hardbacks I keep putting off until I have the time or inclination.

What are you reading these days?     Here are a few I’ve read lately:

Daisy Jones and the Six

Someone suggested Taylor Jones Reid’s Daisy Jones and the Six was a feel good novel to read, so I downloaded the ebook.  Reid’s fictional oral history of a seventies rock band based on Fleetwood Mac and Stevie Nicks was a good distraction, but I couldn’t help stopping to look for the characters in real life, and listening to the real music.

With some of the best lyrics ever written, Fleetwood Mac’s songs resonate still and finding old favorites played live by the band over the years (thanks to you tube) did lift my soul.  Based on the lives of the band members, it’s sometimes hard to remember the story is fictional.  Using the construct of oral history, Reid lends more credibility to the story, and not all the characters match reality, but when she deftly records how the same incidents are remembered differently by the band members, I wondered what had really happened and had to pause to look it up.  Who knows what was going on inside the heads of Lindsay Cunningham and Stevie Nicks, but the Daisy Jones character comes close to having the reader believe Reid knew.

Friends and Strangers

This was another zoom book for me – a book discussion with the author sponsored by an independent bookstore.  I read Friends and Strangers quickly to be able to make the deadline of the meeting, so I may have missed some of the nuances, but J. Courtney Sullivan charmed me as she was interviewed by the bookstore owner in Cape Cod, with the sound of her young children playing in the background.

Ron Charles wrote an incomparable review for the Washington Post you can read by clicking on the link here.  Like many women, having been both a mother who depended on babysitters and a babysitter myself, I connected to both perspectives in the story.  But Sullivan hits on many more issues as she explores class differences,  age disparity in friendships, and immigration.

Hell and Other Destinations 

I have been having breakfast with Madeleine – not the sweet French girl who romps through Paris – but the formidable former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright.  In her latest memoir, Hell and Other Destinations, Albright has a conversation with the reader about the latest chapter in her life.  The lesson learned is a familiar one – it’s not over until you say so.

Although Albright has authored several books, I have not read one until now.  With the country reeling from the virus, the demonstrations, and the barrage of news, this seems like a good time to listen to a woman who has the voice of reason in her timbre.  Of course, I found the pictures in the center of the book first.  My favorites were Albright sharing a laugh with television’s Madame Secretary, Tea Leoni, and a young Albright ready for college in 1958.

Albright introduces each chapter with a humorous lesson-filled anecdote before chronicling her experiences. In 2001, Albright retired as Secretary of State but continued reinventing herself as an author, a professor, a speaker and a supporter of the Democratic Party.  She takes this memoir through both of Hillary Clinton’s runs for President, remarking on her friend’s abilities as she goes and using her famous line for her book title.  She ends in 2019 with Trump but before the pandemic changed everything.

Her career has had the benefits of networking and connections, but Sanger in his review for the New York Times noted her frustration in the current political climate when he ended with:

” {Albright} got a call in 2017 from Mike Pompeo, the incoming director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who would soon be promoted to her old office at State. Albright had long served on the C.I.A.’s external advisory board. ‘He thanked me for my service,’ she writes. ‘Then he fired me.’ “

Ooona Out of Order
Margarita Montimore’s age-swap story sometimes had me feeling off balance.  Oona time travels every year on her birthday but not chronologically.  At 18, she travels to her life as a middle aged woman, beginning her quirky adventure. Each year she hops through decades, picking up much-needed stock tips to maintain a life style without working,  but Oona is still a young woman on the inside while changing on the outside.
If you can resist trying to decipher why she is time traveling, and can ignore the obvious anachronisms, you will enjoy Oona’s struggle to adapt to the eighties and nineties and the twenty-first century while she is still mentally back somewhere in the seventies.  The moral of the story is of course to live in the moment and appreciate every day.

At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
I became a fan of author Sarah Bakewell while reading How to Live: or, a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer.  If you have not read the book, now is the time.  Check out my review HERE.
Over a few of my own cocktails while reading At the Existentialist Cafe, I found myself swept away by thinkers – so rare in these times – Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, Heidegger.  Don’t worry if you slept through Philosophy 101 in college and barely recognize some of the names. Bakewell’s narrative will have you appreciating how exciting it is to think and ask questions.

Saints for All Occasions

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9780307959577_p0_v6_s192x300  J. Courtney Sullivan’s Saints for All Occasions features two Irish sisters immigrated from Ireland.  One joins a cloistered convent; the other marries and raises the nun’s out-of-wedlock son.  Although their lives seem predictable, Sullivan uses their strict upbringing and their personal struggles to create a family saga across generations.

The story begins with the death of Patrick, eldest son, but his place within the family is quickly absorbed into the estranged relationship of the two sisters. As the story moves between the present and the past, Sullivan follows the sisters as they travel by ship to their new world, and teases the reader with their future lives.  Despite the long descriptions and the choppy dialogue, I kept reading to find out how their lives developed.  How did Theresa become a nun?  How did she get to Vermont? How did Nora have so many children when she had not consummated her marriage after two years?  Sullivan posing possibilities by her glimpses into their future, constantly opening new doors for her characters.

The title refers to a collection of holy cards Nora has kept in a box.  I remember my grandmother’s – bespoke cards for specific requests with the saint’s picture on one side and the prayer of entreaty on the other.  Some have entered popular culture – pray to St. Jude for the impossible or St. Anthony for lost items, but St. Monica as the patron saint for mothers of difficult children was new to me. The cards also include commemorations of the dead, usually distributed at a funeral. I have a stack of those bequeathed to me – some of relatives I barely remember.

For those of us who grew up in the Catholic religion of old and watched as it morphed into modernity, then was crippled by the exposure of priests’ crimes, Sullivan’s references will make a connection.  As the book ended, I wanted more  and realized I had become immersed in the characters’ lives.

Related Review: Maine

Maine by J. Courtney Sullivan

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Summers at the family beach house in Maine with all the brothers, sisters, in-laws, and cousins lovingly connecting – singing Irish songs, racing into the surf –  sounds ideal, but, of course, family gatherings always have an undercurrent.  In J. Courtney Sullivan’s Maine, it’s all about the dysfunctional relationships among the women and the beachfront property won in a war-time bet.

In the first half of the book, Sullivan prepares the foundation for the story, introducing each of the women in her own voice with her own chapter, revealing loyalties and jealousies, fears and traumas – they look fine but are all a mess under the surface.  Mother Alice is a hard woman to like; in old age, she’s retained her beauty as well as her prejudices about anything and anyone who does not meet her conservative standards.  Her daughters, Clare and Kathleen, have escaped her influence but try to retain a respectful silence while seething in private about her.  Anne Marie, the daughter-in-law, always trying to please, has Alice’s favor on the surface, but seems ready to crack under the pressure of being perfect.

Sullivan uses religion and Irish family ties as a caustic undercurrent.  Everyone prays, but the church offers little comfort and a lot of Catholic guilt.  Alice, trying to make up for an old sin against her sister, donates the Maine property to the church – without telling her children.  Her daughter, Clare,  gets rich selling First Communion medallions and other religious artefacts on the internet.  Daughter-in-law Anne Marie prays more than the others – when not obsessed with redecorating her dollhouse.  Kathleen, the black sheep – divorced and “living in sin” in California, has a worm farm and battles the old family curse of alcoholism. Her daughter, Maggie, is the frontrunner of the next generation: Maggie is pregnant and unmarried, Cousin Fiona is gay  – but no one is telling Grandma Alice.

Sullivan cleverly teases with secrets, forcing the reader to slog through chapters of angst, personal grudges, and family drama, hoping to uncover why Alice blames herself for her sister’s death in a fire, what horror happened at the patriarch’s funeral, when Maggie will tell about her pregnancy, how Alice will finally implode…    She reveals the family secrets slowly in flashbacks and finally offers reasons for the bitterness and despair.  Eventually, the women come together at the beach in Maine – Alice, Kathleen, Anne Marie, and Maggie – resolving the issues they have with each other and with themselves.

Like any Irish saga, this one is full of anxiety, despair, and drinking – but Sullivan offers her own brand of redemption and adds some humor.  Alice’s decision to leave the million dollar beach property to the church seems in character, and perhaps every family’s nightmare – that grandma will die and leave it all to the church – but, in the end, the decision saves everyone.   The story was too long, with too much anxiety for me, but the characters reflect women’s universal fear – will I become my mother?