Entering my Top 5 books of last year, we find a surprise new book published by a favorite author late in 2022, and another installment of my rock ‘n roll memoirs, this time by a local favorite.
#4 – Rat Girl by Kristin Hersh (2010)
Another great entry in my new favorite genre: the rock ‘n roll memoir by women. Kristen Hersh details a year in her life; modified entries in her diary, just as her band, Throwing Muses was about to take off. Along the way, there’s a bipolar disorder, a friendship with an icon of the golden age of Hollywood, and a pregnancy. This is what I look for in a rock ‘n roll memoir: reading about life as a working musician, while commenting on the larger world and the personal idiosyncrasies that make up a personality. Hersh’s observations about life and her unorthodox childhood are abstract, atonal, and whimsical, reminiscent of her music, but the deep bonds of friendship between her and her bandmates shines through.
#5 – The Unfolding by A.M. Homes (2022)
A.M. Homes fascinates me as a writer. Her novels are usually heavily satirical, and rarely tackles subjects I would predict would be interest to me. Yet her sharp-eyed take, often on middle America is often bold, insightful, and entertaining. In her latest novel, The Undoing she focuses on a singular moment of a behind-the-scenes power broker for the Republican Party known as the Big Guy. It’s election night 2008, and things definitely go as planned. Shaken to the core as Obama is announced President of the United States, The Big Guy and his family experience the upheaval in radically different ways, with our wealthy, rich patriarch setting in motion a super secret cabal of similarly wealthy, aging, white Republican that will secretly and slowly return America to it’s former greatness over the coming decades.
Homes spends a lot of time getting into the heads of these, frankly, uninteresting (to me) and stereotypical men, and I occasionally lost patience with the book having to struggle through the minutia of their conversations. Much more interesting, and what earned the book its ranking here are the Big Guy’s wife and daughter. Wife Charlotte, a smart, independent woman has been covering her squandered personal dreams, and long enduring emotional trauma with vodka for years, and chooses this moment to check-in to Betty Ford’s clinic and ger her life on track, a fact her husband is gobsmacked by, even as he tries to support her. Their high school senior daughter, Meghan goes through a transformation of her own… something many of us would call growing up… as she discovers some things about life, both macro, and micro and very personal that set her on a journey that in Homes’ on subversive way is the most optimistic arc of the novel.