Category: Uncategorized

Books in the Wild

Someone asked me the other day if I remember when Amazon only sold books. I told them I remember when there was no Amazon at all. I even remember when there was no Internet!

While I definitely like being able to find and order practically any book I want online, I still get a thrill when I find a “book in the wild,” that is, a book that I was not looking for but happened to come upon at a thrift store, yard sale, or flea market.

Here are three books I found in the wild in the last year or so that I really love.

The first is Pearl S. Buck’s Pavilion of Women. I found this at a yard sale and paid a quarter for it. It is an original Pocket Book, published in 1949. That makes it extra special as I love mass-market or pocket-book sized paperbacks (“shitty paperbacks” as I call them), and have an entire shelf dedicated to such editions. I read Buck’s The Good Earth in tenth-grade English and can still remember the first line: “It was Wang Lung’s marriage day.” Why that has stuck around for 36 years, I have no idea. The first line of Pavilion of Women is equally as riveting: “It was her fortieth birthday.” But don’t let the simplicity of that opening sentence fool you. This book is wonderful! It is the story of Madame Wu, a highly respected matriarch who decides on her fortieth birthday to ask her husband — whom she still loves — to take a concubine so she can focus on her own interests and personal growth. This book found me when I had just had my fiftieth birthday and was re-evaluating my own roles in life as a woman. It was exactly what I needed to read then. A truly serendipitous find! (Though, no, it did not inspire me to ask my husband to take a concubine.)

The second is Judy Blume’s Then Again, Maybe I Won’t, considered by many Blume fans to be the Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret for boys. I found this wonderful 1986 version (A Dell Yearling Book) at a thrift store for 99 cents. This one brought back a lot of memories. Originally published in 1971, I remember reading it in 1982 on the steps of my grandparents’ condo in Cape Coral, Florida. Like the protagonist Tony Miglione, I was caught up in confusing, unsettling circumstances beyond my control. Reading this book (and most of Blume’s books that spring) provided me some much-needed footing as I tried to navigate the changes happening in my own life. This book helped me feel less alone and gave me hope, showing me that others had lived through things that made their stomachs hurt all the time, too, and had survived.

The third book, Shalom Auslander’s Foreskin’s Lament, I found at a thrift store for $2.99 (a splurge!). I had never heard of the author, but the title reminded me of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, which I had read in the ninth grade after my American Government teacher mentioned it to me. (Mr. Maxwell, I don’t know what possessed you to encourage a 15-year-old girl to read Portnoy’s Complaint, but thank you; it was the first book — outside of Peanuts books — I ever read that made me laugh out loud.) Foreskin’s Lament also had me laughing out loud. Published in 2007 by Riverhead Books, this memoir is a true testament to the will to create that drives most writers. Despite a deep conviction that God would punish him mercilessly for writing and publishing the book, Auslander did it anyway. Such chutzpah! And what a gift his trembling, angst-ridden audacity has born. Even his Acknowledgements section is funny, which he titled “Whom to Kill.”

Have a book that you found in the wild that turned out to be a favorite? I’d love to hear about it!

Psych NP Publishes Debut Memoir

Columbus-based psychiatric nurse practitioner, Amanda Rush, has published her debut memoir, The Gathering Girl.

“Seven years in the writing, this book is my attempt to make meaning of the cumulative and relatively quiet damage wrought by my parents’ divorce, my mother’s mental illness, and a childhood in which I was generally left to tend to myself. I hope my book will inspire others whose lives have been impacted by adverse childhood events to re-examine their life narratives and move toward a place of healing.”

Amanda Irene Rush

Summary

When she was 12, Amanda’s best friend’s family gifted her a Christmas stocking stuffed with a carton of cigarettes. She was thrilled. The cigarettes meant she would no longer have to steal and smoke her mother’s uncool brand. And the stocking—though it didn’t have her name stitched along the top like everyone else’s—meant, for the moment at least, that she belonged. She hadn’t felt that way since before her free-spirited mother left her corporate-climbing father with 4-year-old Amanda and her older sister in tow. Before her father remarried a woman who never wanted children. Before her mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Before Amanda and her sister were left to largely fend for themselves.

More than three decades later, with the death of her parents as a catalyst, Amanda began sifting through the relics of her family’s fragile past. She wondered if the chance objects she and her mother and father had held on to—a faded doodle of a girl gathering apples, broken knickknacks, worn family photos and her parents’ journals—might unravel their long-standing and tightly woven narrative and tell a different story.

Searching through the eyes of “The Gathering Girl,” Amanda discovers an alternate truth buried within the deepest roots of her family tree. She demonstrates how the untangling of a twisted past can be both beautiful and brutal, and how the journey can ultimately lead to forgiveness.

Click HERE to Order a Copy Today!