When I saw a copy of this at the library, I was pretty excited. Originally, I had planned to review a digital ARC of this through NetGalley, but they pulled it from their list for whatever reason.
Nemesis, written by the same icon of Jewish-American literature who brought you Portnoy’s Complaint, examines the Jewish-American experience during the 1944 polio epidemic. We see the disease spread from urban New Jersey to rural Pennsylvania, ravaging in particular the Weequahic section of Newark.
Bucky Cantor, playground coordinator and athlete extraordinaire, spends much of this book running from conflict. He declines to join his friends in military enlistment, he runs from Weequahic when the polio epidemic intensifies, and he runs from Marcia, his fiancée, when he falls victim to polio himself. He seems to be, on many levels, impotent; he tells us so himself.
But is he really? Native American symbols abound in the latter half of this book, when the Poconos camp where he works engages in some Native American roleplaying. When polio strikes the camp, he believes himself to be the “invisible arrow” (a term borrowed from Native American epidemiology) that brought the illness to the camp from the city. Although doctors try to reassure him that the odds of this are slight, Bucky revels in “self-castigation,” and Marcia later calls him out on this inherent masochism. The “arrow” imagery insinuates potency, virility. It is all but phallic. So while Bucky is powerless to navigate his own relationships and quick to dodge potential conflict, perhaps the “invisible arrow” identity allows him to feel a certain measure of power. Perhaps it is not self-loathing, but self-indulgent.
Powerlessness is one of the prominent themes at work in this story. Parents withdraw their children from playgrounds and camps to protect them from polio. People yearn so deeply for a culprit, an epidemiological scapegoat they can identify and subsequently avoid, that they point fingers at restaurant hot dogs. Lawmakers consider quarantining entire communities to stop the spread the virus. People like Bucky flee the cities in hopes of avoiding infection. None of these measures proves to be particularly effective. No one can suppress the biological realities of polio.
Also of note is Bucky’s crisis of faith as the epidemic intensifies. He becomes something of an agnostic cliché, turning his anger on his god when polio hits close to home. His anger, his powerlessness, and a sense of self-blame more virulent than the polio itself ruin him. The disease ravages his body, but it is his mind that reduces him to the bitter cynic he becomes. Polio robs him of loved ones and of his once-athletic body, but he robs himself of a life with Marcia.
The book ends with a memory from Arnold Mesnikoff, the former student of Bucky who narrates parts of this story. Even after running into Bucky decades after the epidemic and witnessing his bitterness firsthand, he remembers him differently in the end. We are left not with the image of a crippled, impotent version Bucky, but a youthful, healthy one who could throw a javelin with expert precision. Bucky has no narrative control over this memory, so he cannot taint it with his self-loathing. So we remember Bucky as his students do: with fondness and admiration. The tragedy lies in what his life might have been if he had seen himself in this same light.
Dirty Secret - Jessie Sholl
Hoarding. A psychological phenomenon that has quickly become part of our cultural vocabulary. A mental illness that, if unchecked, can leave people homeless and friendless.
Unless you’ve had your head in the sand for the last two years, you’ve seen instances of this devastating disorder in the media. Both A&E and TLC air documentary-style reality shows featuring afflicted families, and various talk shows have devoted entire episodes to hoarding. However, as Jessie Sholl reveals in her memoir, Dirty Secret: A Daughter Comes Clean About Her Mother’s Compulsive Hoarding (Gallery Books, December 2010), this phenomenon is hardly a new one.
Books like Stuff (written by psychologists Randy Frost and Gail Steketee) examine the psychopathology of hoarding, drawing upon anecdotal material to illustrate its hallmark traits. Hoarding disorders can be slippery diagnostic eels, often comorbid with a host of other emotional disorders and untraceable to a single cause. They hit different people differently and for different reasons. Books like Sholl’s illuminate just how complex this illness can be.
What makes Dirty Secret so unique is its point of view. This is not the memoir of a hoarder, nor is it the clinical reflection of a hoarding specialist. It isn’t a book of tips for conquering hoarding behaviors or chronic disorganization. No, Dirty Secret tells us what it is like to be the loved one of a hoarder. The relationships between hoarders and their loved ones are often, for lack of a better word, messy. As Sholl tells us, hoarders are prone to lapses in decision-making and deficits in memory and spatial orientation. Sholl herself is the victim of poor decision-making: Her mother did not hold her until she was six months old because she was recovering from surgery; however, even after her recovery, the sight of her crying baby filled her with such crippling indecision that she often declined to hold her. She did not know how to react to her crying child then, and she does not know how to react to the gargantuan heaps of junk that threaten her well-being now.
Like a lot of hoarders, Jessie’s mother has always had big plans for her “stuff.” She collects items indiscriminately to give as gifts to loved ones. She has grandiose plans to get rich crafting cat beds. Despite having written down Jessie’s contact information several times, she must always ask for her address again when sending one of her “gifts.” And it is the gifts to Jessie that illuminate just how warped a hoarder’s mind can become. As a child, Jessie had a traumatic experience at a zoo with a snake. Her mother’s immediate response was to laugh while her child screamed. This is troubling enough. But over the years, she would collect toy snakes from various places and give them to Jessie as gag gifts, despite her daughter’s snake phobia. She persists in doing so even after being told to stop several times by an unnerved Jessie.
The thing is, her mother’s behaviors are so varied, ranging from confusion to bad decision-making to hoarding to obsessive compulsion to avoidance to delusions of grandeur (e.g., the cat beds), that it is hard to blame just the hoarding disorder. There appear to be a host of comorbid problems in play here. This, of course, makes it exceedingly difficult to treat hoarders like her and virtually impossible to cure them.
Jessie’s narrative reveals the frustration, fear, and despair associated with her mother’s hoarding. It also explores her struggle with RSI (repetitive stress injury), a disorder that made writing impossible for a long stretch.
Dirty Secret: A Daughter Comes Clean About Her Mother’s Compulsive Hoarding offers the American public a rare opportunity to experience hoarding from the point of view of a loved one. While the television documentaries give ample airtime to the loved ones, it isn’t until we read a memoir like this that we understand just how crippling this disorder can be. Long after the junk trucks leave with their spoils, hoarders and their family members must still dig out from under years of accumulated hurt and resentment. Lifelong behaviors and habits must change. Television viewers glean satisfaction from the before/after shots of these once uninhabitable homes, but they shouldn’t forget that, at this stage, the family’s work has only just begun.
[Disclaimer: I received an advance review copy of Dirty Secret from the author/publisher.]
My bookshelves
Books read in 2010:
Damage - Josephine Hart
On the surface, Damage is about a middle-aged man who has an affair with a younger woman. Pretty standard dramatic fare, right? But wait–there’s more. The younger woman in question happens to be his son’s fiancée, and the man in question happens to be a member of Parliament.
There is much more at work here than mere lust, or even mere love. No, it is sexual obsession that dominates this story, an obsession so pervasive that it propels the narrator to unspeakable lows. It propels the narrative toward its tragic conclusion.
Still, it isn’t dramatic excess that packs a punch in this story. It is an eerie and enduring emptiness. These characters are all, on various levels, devoid of humanity. The narrator has traipsed through a loveless fifty years of life, never once experiencing feelings of love or sexual passion until he meets Anna, his son’s newest girlfriend. His wife, Ingrid, seems content with their passionless union and, together, they put on a good show in public. They are both façades.
Martyn has meandered from one relationship to the next with women who vaguely resemble his mother. Anna has dragged multiple men through her psychological mud in a vain attempt to escape her troubled past. Sally, the only remotely functional family member, remains fairly remote throughout the story. Her romantic relationship with Jonathan is the only functional one in the book. Her narrative distance from the rest of her family allows her to transcend their collective emptiness.
We experience this story through the detached eyes of a cold narrator, who engages in some logic-defying mental contortions to justify what he is doing. But there is no escaping the consequences of his disturbing romantic entanglement with Anna. He remains firmly rooted in the delusion that he has found true love, that he can have a domestic life with this young woman. He even assigns himself godlike powers of taking on others’ negative feelings so that they can be free of them–all in the name of assuaging his own vague sense of guilt. At points, he even deflects blame from himself and onto the “devil.”
The writing style lends itself to this inherent emptiness. Sentence fragments and long strains of simple sentences give the story an abrupt, staccato feel. The chapters are short; the story flits from one scene to the next quickly, leaving the reader with impressionistic shards of rising and falling action, rather than a fully realized narrative exploration. We are on a crash course with ruin from the moment we begin reading, and the story takes no detours on its way there.
(Disclaimer: I received a digital galley of this title from Open Road.)
Evermore - Alyson Noël
** spoiler alert **
I had a review written for this, but I can’t bring myself to post it. It isn’t constructive, and I try not to pan a book without offering up at least something positive or helpful. I once self-published an ebook (which has been offline for “repairs”/a total overhaul for three years now), so I know firsthand how unbelievably grueling it is to write a book. I struggle with it daily, and am the first to admit that the original version of my story (and possibly even the current one) was, in parts, really bad. I’m still learning. Even Salman Rushdie and Haruki Murakami are still learning. So, keep in mind as you read this that, while I may complain heartily about a book, I’m always respectful of the mind-melting work that went into it.
There are so many things about this story that make me worry for impressionable young women reading it that I held nothing back in my original review. Beyond the numerous Twilight ripoffs and the protagonists’ own abhorrent behavior, this book (like so many others) romanticizes stalking and controlling romantic relationships. It glorifies dishonesty and cheating. It even, at one point, has the “heroine” driving drunk to school, an appalling act for which she suffers no real consequences–and, even worse, something she treats as a big joke.
I will share the lists from my original review and spare you the rest:
Behavior that, according to Ever and Damen, is totally copacetic:
–Using psychic powers to cheat on tests (and then criticizing mortal girls for doing the same, sans psychic powers).
–Using psychic powers to cheat at gambling and win hundreds of thousands of dollars.
–Stalking.
–Breaking and entering.
–Self-medicating with booze.
–Driving drunk.
–Lying, as long as it’s about “unimportant” things.
–Invading your significant other’s thoughts, allowing him/her no privacy.
–Controlling your girlfriend’s clothing, music, thoughts, and dreams.
–Ditching your girlfriend to “go surfing” when she turns you down for lovin’.
–Stealing another woman’s husband over and over, and then killing her for not taking it lying down.
–Flirting with other girls to make your lady love jealous.
–Plying your girlfriend with tulips every time you do something jerky.
–Breaking the code and going after your best friend’s crush.
–Not giving your girlfriend a choice to spend eternity with her family before making her an immortal like you (even Edward gave Bella a choice, which basically involved Bella convincing him for 1500+ pages that she had nothing to live for and just wanted to be like him–but, still, he gave her the choice).
Blatant Twilight ripoffs:
–The sequel is called Blue Moon. (“Come on!!! Are you serious?!” asks Mr. Mere.)
–New girl in new town meets new boy in new town. The two sit next to one another in class.
–Immortal boy thinks bland, somewhat unlikable first-person narrator is more extraordinary than any of the girls he’s met across time and space.
–Ever can read everyone’s thoughts but Damen’s.
–Damen is seventeen, immortal, rich, and drives a fast car.
–Damen never eats and his lips are “icy cold.”
–These characters are centuries-old virgins.
–Damen cuts school a lot, leaving Ever to plotz over his absence.
–Damen shows up randomly and without warning in Ever’s bedroom. Sexless sleepovers ensue.
–Ever has no parental supervision whatsoever. Even when she narrowly dodges expulsion for getting wasted at school, her adoptive aunt (Sabine) half-heartedly hides the booze in an unlocked cabinet rather than pouring it down the sink.
–Ever and Damen share a timeless love but, really, their central conflict is not being able to have sex. Though I’m not sure what’s stopping Ever–it’s never really made clear.
–Key scenes in meadows/fields.
–Damen to Ever/Edward to Bella: “I can’t stay away from you” (258). A blatant, word-for-word dialogue lift.
–Instead of catching a falling apple in the cafeteria, Damen catches Ever’s falling water bottle. Like Edward, he moves so fast that it’s a blur.
Things Damen can do:
(Note: According to Ever, Damen has a “neverending list of things he’s good at” (55). There are several paragraphs in this book that are just laundry lists of all the things that make Damen awesomesauce.)
–Anything. Everything.
–Painting, diving, surfing, soccer, guitar, piano, violin, saxophone, magic tricks, etc.
–He taught Picasso everything he knows about painting. No joke. Picasso and Van Gogh both painted him, and he was also BFFs with Leonardo da Vinci. His modern-day art teacher realizes “she’s never had [a student:] with such innate, natural ability–until now” (56). This is some serious Gary Stu (thanks, Ashley) characterization. On top of all this, he has signed books from Emily Brontë and William Shakespeare, and he knew Marie Antoinette and all four Beatles.
–He’s ambidextrous and, to quote Bella Swan, “impossibly fast.”
–He regularly cribs passages from various popular New Age texts, which combine to form a confusing mish-mash of manifesting, positive thinking, Transcendental Meditation, chakras, karma, and reincarnation. These concepts are not, as pop American pseudo-philosophy would have you believe, interchangeable.
–In other words, he bastardizes legitimate Eastern religions/philosophies to make them palatable to an American teenage audience. It happens all the time.
Miscellaneous other issues:
–Excessive use of participial phrases and miscellaneous copyediting errors.
–Using “nauseous” instead of “nauseated” multiple times to describe feeling sick to one’s stomach.
–Blatant product/celebrity placement (Sidekick, iPhone, iPod, Orlando Bloom, Johnny Depp, Evanescence, etc.).
–A plot more than vaguely reminiscent of The Twilight Saga, Fallen, Hush, Hush, Numbers, The Lovely Bones, and others.
I’ve heard that the subsequent books improve, so maybe they iron out some of the kinks of this first one. I think that I could have forgiven a lot if the core relationships in this book had been stronger. Sabine is too busy with her job to parent Ever at all. Ever is too self-involved to be a good friend to Miles and Haven. Damen is too controlling to be a healthy choice for Ever. Riley is too derivative of The Lovely Bones for me to take her seriously. I felt no real connection between any of these characters. And, once again, I’m left wondering if physical beauty is the only thing that attracts Ever and Damen to one another.
Mockingjay - Suzanne Collins
My spoiler-free, character-based review. It does, however, contain generic quotes from throughout the book, so be warned.
Title: Why Katniss Everdeen is not your typical YA heroine
Subtitle: In other words, why Katniss rocks
I am going to break this down one quote at a time. Indirectly, this book calls a lot of young adult authors onto the carpet for lazy storytelling and limp-as-a-dishrag heroines. It’s hard to say whether or not this was deliberate, but my first quote, exhibit A, makes me think it might have been.
Exhibit A: Haymitch: “‘I want everyone to think of one incident where Katniss Everdeen genuinely moved you. Not where you were jealous of her hairstyle, or her dress went up in flames or she made a halfway decent shot with an arrow. Not where Peeta was making you like her. I want to hear one moment where she made you feel something real.’” (74)
Read this passage. If you have ever so much as fantasized about writing a novel, memorize it. It is glorious. It is an APB to authors everywhere that a character needs to be more than a blank slate. A character needs dimension and clear motivation. She needs to evoke genuine emotion, rather than merely the adrenaline thrill associated with a first kiss or romantic scene. She needs to aspire to something more than boys. Don’t tell us she is awesome without providing the narrative goods to back it up. Don’t reduce your secondary characters to a mere claque that worships everything about her and reminds the audience at every turn that she is the most amazing girl who ever lived. Show us why she is amazing.
Exhibit B: “The very notion that I’m devoting any thought to who I want presented as my lover, given our current circumstances, is demeaning” (40).
Katniss is one self-aware young lady. In key scenes, she is not whining about her romantic melodramas, but actively seeking solutions. She waits for no one to save her–she is perpetually proactive. Moreover, unlike so many young adult heroines I’ve read recently, she does not begrudge others their happiness. Despite her belief that she is “manipulative,” she genuinely cares about others. She asks Prim how she is doing and actually lets her talk. When others are happy, she becomes a lens through which we witness that happiness, never subjecting us to self-indulgent whining about her own troubles. Take that, one-sided friendships (which occur often in poorly written YA narratives).
Exhibit C: Boggs: “‘Well, you’re not perfect by a long shot. But times being what they are, you’ll have to do’” (91).
This snippet of dialogue may not seem significant, but it is a tremendous leap forward for YA literature. A character can become popular without, as I mentioned earlier, a claque of characters giving her a standing ovation every time she so much as smiles. The characters in the Hunger Games trilogy are allowed to dislike Katniss and disagree with her openly, without fear of narrative retribution later for daring to dissent.
Exhibit D Johanna: “Jealousy is certainly involved. I also think you’re a little hard to swallow. With your tacky drama and your defender-of-the-helpless act. Only it isn’t an act, which makes you more unbearable. Please feel free to take this personally” (220-1).
This should really be Exhibit C2. Again, we have a character who doesn’t particularly like Katniss, and she isn’t a villain. She isn’t vilified to sanctify Katniss. She just is. This scrap of dialogue not only pokes fun at Katniss, but at a host of YA heroines who are, simply put, “unbearable.”
Exhibit E: “Because an angry, independently thinking victor with a layer of psychological scar tissue too thick to penetrate is maybe the last person you want on your squad” (251).
Did you hear that, Bella Swan? In a believable story, if you are cold and detached from your peers while sporting a vague superiority complex, people will not like you. They will not line up to be your friend as the teens of Forks inexplicably did. Katniss knows this. She understands the ramifications of her behavior, and doesn’t expect people to pat her on the back when she is in the wrong.
Exhibit F: “And what was I, really? A poor, unstable girl with a small talent with a bow and arrow. Not a great thinker, not the mastermind of the rebellion, merely a face plucked from the rabble because I had caught the nation’s attention with my antics in the Games” (294).
Katniss has more to recommend her than most YA heroines these days, but she never, ever toots her own horn. Above, she underplays the vital role she plays in the story. Peeta says it best: “‘I think…you still have no idea. The effect you can have’” (325). She doesn’t understand what Peeta, Gale, and the reader do: that she is the rare first-person heroine that has earned her spot as the narrator of the book. No one else can tell this story better. With so many other YA stories, I find myself thinking that other characters would have made more compelling narrators. Not so here. Collins got it right on the first try.
Now, for some headline-worthy quotes:
“‘Covers will be blown. People may die’” (Haymitch, 164).
“‘There will be no survivors’” (Katniss, 99).
“The Mockingjay will not lose her voice” (178).
So, without divulging any plot details, I will say that this book was phenomenal. There are quotes about warfare and society that I would love to share, but they contain vaguely spoilerous material. This series truly got better as it progressed. I gave Hunger Games three stars, Catching Fire four, and Mockingjay five. Congratulations, Suzanne Collins, on writing a trilogy that actually gained momentum as it went.
Linger - Maggie Stiefvater
** Spoiler Alert **
“Once upon a time, there was a girl named Grace Brisbane. There was nothing particularly special about her, except that she was good with numbers, very good at lying, and she made her home in between the pages of books. She loved all the wolves behind her house, but she loved one of them most of all.” (338)
Ladies and gentlemen, your heroine. Like a fine wine reduction, drain all the fluids/blood from her body (literally), and this is what she boils down to. Unlike a fine wine reduction, not exactly awesomesauce.
Four characters narrate this story: Grace, Sam, Isabel, and Cole. One of these things is not like the other. We have Sam, the haunted former wolf who must learn to be human and make peace with what his parents did to him. We have Cole, former frontman of a prominent band, wrestling with suicidal tendencies and a desire to be all wolf, all the time. We have Isabel, still reeling from her brother’s tragic death in Shiver.
And then we have Grace, the blank slate who, ultimately, steers this ship. This is her story, despite the split narrative attention to make us believe otherwise. The problem? She is, by far, the weakest character. It is by the grace (pun totally intended) of the three other characters that I gave this book three stars. They’re all so much more compelling. I would read an Isabel book.
But everyone loves Grace. Cole falls all over himself upon first meeting her, declaring that he “would do anything to be her friend and earn that smile again” (282). Earn that smile? Does it bestow blessings and good health? Does it solve differential equations? Does it cure nebulous werewolf diseases? Let’s not even mention how awful he is to Isabel, who apparently isn’t as amazing as Grace. In fact, he tells us, “She didn’t look disgusted, like Isabel had” (282)–effectively setting up Isabel as the heavy. A few paragraphs earlier, he also tells us exactly what he sees in Grace: “She was pretty in an undramatic way, and she had this great voice: very plain and matter-of-fact and distinctive.” Yikes. The reader needs something more to grab onto than this–Grace being vaguely pretty, having a great voice, and earning high marks in math and lying.
Also, when pondering Grace’s illness, Sam emphasizes that “Grace was the only one of her kind” (336). Of course. Always. Just like Bella (**Twilight spoiler alert**) was the only vampire to skip the painful transition period.
Also, like Bella, Grace contorts herself every which way to be with her supernatural boy wonder. She starts listening to alternative music, which she hates, because Sam likes it. She crosses college off her New Year’s resolution list rather flippantly so that she can shack up with him after high school and have a red coffeepot (I’m not making this up). She runs away from home to be with him after her unfair parents won’t let him sleep in her bed anymore. As much as I hated her parents, let’s get real–there is nothing normal/healthy about these Romeo-and-Juliet nightly sleepovers that have taken the YA romance market by storm.
By the end, I actually thought that Grace was going to die. This would have made sense, strangely. So many of the final scenes between Sam and Grace feel valedictory, as if building toward her death. If this story weren’t trapped in the “trilogy” mindset, maybe it would have gone down that way. Instead, she becomes a wolf in the hospital (thanks to Cole’s saliva–imminent love triangle, anyone?) and takes off for more coniferous pastures.
Not that Grace’s becoming a wolf is without storyline potential. It’s a pretty fitting reversal, and the only logical conclusion given that this is a trilogy. But her becoming a wolf means that she must rely on the men to find a cure. Grace is a good student. She’s smart. If this is her story, which I believe it to be, why couldn’t she be the one to find the cure? Why must she be the one who needs rescuing? Why couldn’t she be a Katniss (Hunger Games Trilogy) instead of a Bella (The Twilight Tetralogy )? Of course, I’m making a lot of assumptions about the third book, but the saga seems to be making a beeline toward Sam and Cole finding a cure so that everyone can live happily ever after. It would be awesomesauce if the third book proved me wrong. What I liked about Shiver was that it was the boy who needed rescuing for once.
A question: Why are all of the parents in this saga so terrible? We have Sam’s parents, who tried to murder him in a bathtub; Isabel’s trigger-happy, wolf-killing father; and Grace’s parents, who have straight-up neglected her for years and suddenly decide to try being parental in this book (with disastrous results). At least in Twilight, we had that paragon of parental win otherwise known as Charlie.
Now, for some quote-specific issues:
“‘This is why you are single’” (65) — Really, Grace? This is how you speak to your best friend? Funnier yet, she says this to Rachel simply because she’s acting a little goofy, a little offbeat–a little, I don’t know, herself? Also, is it a good idea to make teenage girls think that being single is a bad thing?
That said, Rachel can be somewhat over-the-top. A bit obscure, but when she refers to Isabel as “she-of-the-pointy-boots” (313), I was reminded of the annoying Damian Spinelli on General Hospital (yes, I used to watch soaps). He used to use similar nomenclature (and probably still does).
There are some clichés in here, most of which I overlooked, but “dark as pitch” (279) is one of my top 3 simile no-nos. Just don’t do it.
There are things that Maggie Stiefvater does really well. I give her major kudos for making Sam likable when so many other YA paranormal romance authors are cultivating harsh, abusive heroes. As I mentioned earlier, Sam, Cole, and Isabel are quite well-developed. The weak link for me, again, is Grace herself.
Just Listen - Sarah Dessen
This is not your average young adult romance. It has layers. Annabel isn’t always on her best behavior–she has flaws. Owen is edgy without being menacing. Frightening, emotionally abusive “heroes” have become a pervasive problem in young adult romances. It’s nice to see one break free of that formula.
If there is a walking stereotype in this novel, it’s Sophie, the controlling, unpleasant popular girl who dictates Annabel’s life through most of high school. She is the only character undeserving of my empathy. Sure, her parents once dragged her through their ugly divorce. Sure, her boyfriend is a tool of the highest order. But she treats everyone horribly. It is rare, even after the chickens come home to roost for her, that she shows any traces of humanity. Her most honest moment is after being rejected by Kirsten, Annabel’s older sister.
This novel tackles all of the important issues in fiction for teenage girls: self-esteem, body image, honesty, assertiveness, identity, love, family, and independence. It’s about speaking up for yourself. It’s about not letting other people walk all over you. And it’s also about a cute boy. For once, that’s okay–because this particular boy helps Annabel to become a more honest, independent version of herself.
I am a freelance writer and editor. Follow me on my journey toward some sort of identity in the metamorphic publishing world. My blog entries will focus on publishing, editing, and book reviews. I will also chronicle my quest to rewrite and publish my fiction manuscript, that sad paragon of narrative dismemberment currently in pieces on my hard drive.
