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artificialsatelliteJust finished two good but very different books - I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy and When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb.
I'm Glad My Mom Died
A memoir by former child actor Jennette McCurdy (from iCarly, which I never watched) centering on her abusive mother and her career.
Really heavy subject matter but not a particularly heavy read, though your mileage certainly may vary based on how affected you are by the stuff she writes about. I was continuously impressed by how easily and honestly she told her (extremely painful) story throughout the book. My own experiences with family trauma were not nearly as bad as McCurdy's, whose mom was the textbook image of the abusive, manipulative stage mom stereotype, but even still, a lot of the ways she described her enmeshment with her mother hit awfully close in ways that were... uncomfortable for me to say the least, but which I'm still glad to have taken in.
Another thing that struck me was the morbidly humorous way she relayed a lot of really awful shit that happened to her, and I found that it really resonated with me? That dry humor about one's childhood trauma is very familiar to me as someone who had a rough childhood but also as someone who knows other people who had a rough childhood, and there's something that feels very honest about it. (Which is not to say that a more emotional approach to such a story would feel dishonest by any means. It just, like I said, resonated with me in a very particular way.)
It was also nice (I can't think of a better word, sorry, I'm tired) to see someone talk about the complex feelings that come with loving someone who has been terrible to you, and how escaping an abuser (whether by deliberately leaving or through their death) leaves you feeling unmoored and can cause you to fall apart. In a lot of ways there's this expectation, I think, that once you're free everything's fine, but it's not. It's never just fine, and in my own experience leaving an abusive situation I found myself feeling more crazy and incapable of just dealing in the 6 months to a year following than I had in the most miserable period just before I left.
Points that really stuck out -- Jennette's mom telling her about calorie restriction like it was a fun little secret when she was eleven made me gasp out loud, but I've been told by friends I mentioned this to that they didn't find it particularly shocking, which made me feel grateful for my own mom despite all the other shit. The way she described feeling responsible for her mother's feelings at a young age and how she twisted her life around it hit uncomfortably close to home, and I think that's a way more common experience (to varying degrees) than people realize.
All in all, interesting read, I hope it was cathartic and empowering for her to write it, and I hope it is a comfort to her that lots of other people are now also glad that her mom died.
When the Angels Left the Old Country
Okay so, I'll start this off with my big confession, which is that I don't have a lot of interest in Good Omens and when I tried to read it I didn't get very far (though that was years ago, in fairness). So when someone recommended this one to me with the "It's like a Jewish Good Omens!" I was skeptical but I did give it a shot, and honestly? I really enjoyed it. What a fun and interesting book.
It's set in the early 20th century and focuses on the story of a Jewish angel and a Jewish demon from a tiny shtetl (so tiny it has no name other than shtetl) in Poland who are friends and immigrate to the US. The characters are all pretty charming, and I've heard that the demon character (Ash, short for Ashmedai) has a lot of Crowley-like qualities but I wouldn't really know.
There's something really compelling to me about the very Jewish portrayal of the angel character. IANAR (I am not a rabbi) and I'm only partway to being Actually Jewish so bear with me if I've got this wrong, but in Jewish tradition angels are not really full-fledged like, creatures in their own right? They're single-minded and exist to fulfill a particular purpose - I've seen them described as extensions of God rather than separate and discrete entities but I'm not sure how accurate or correct this is. Anyway, the angel is genderless and its name changes based upon its purpose or task at any specific time, and it's spent the last few centuries studying Talmud with Ash in their shtetl's synagogue. It's mentioned that if it wanders too far from home or from Ash it might end up with a new task or purpose and forget what it was and who it knew before, and that it can't hold multiple thoughts at once like humans can. (Over the course of the story it gains a real name and starts to develop its own desires and purposes as a result of plot stuff.)
Another thing I'm really into about the world-building is that it's explicitly stated that there are as many kinds of demons as there are kinds of religions. Ash talks about gentile demons in other villages (and encounters one in America), and I love this concept. (A long time ago I had a story I was working on that played with a similar idea but IDK if I'll ever return to it. Maybe.) I think it's a really interesting approach to accounting for the differences in religious tradition regarding things like demons, and allows the book and characters to be explicitly Jewish supernatural figures and as part of an explicitly Jewish understanding of the universe while acknowledging that Jews and the Jewish perspective and tradition are not dominant in their world (which is of course also our world).
The book weaves together real world concerns for the setting such as immigration, antisemitism, classism, labor rights, etc. with supernatural features like the two main characters, but also ghosts, magic, dybbuks, and other such things in a very effective (and again, very Jewish) way that I really enjoyed.
I'd definitely recommend it if you like the kind of story where supernatural elements intersect with serious real world stuff. Though it is very Jewish, I don't think you have to be really familiar with Judaism or Jewish tradition to enjoy it, though you might need to Google a couple of things to get the full picture as it does kind of assume that as the reader you know a certain amount and so doesn't always define specific Jewish words or concepts. That said, you can pick up most things from context... You don't need to know what specifically kaddish is to understand that it's probably something a person says for a relative after they die, based on the context it's presented in, for example.
Anyway, bottom line, both were good and I'm trying to decide what to read next. I have several books on hold with the library (on Libby, I never seem to have time to actually go physically acquire a book from the library) and several books I bought from ThriftBooks that are in my stack to read and also books that are supplemental material for my ITJ class, so I'm not short on choices, I'm just. You know. Bad at making them.
I'm Glad My Mom Died
A memoir by former child actor Jennette McCurdy (from iCarly, which I never watched) centering on her abusive mother and her career.
Really heavy subject matter but not a particularly heavy read, though your mileage certainly may vary based on how affected you are by the stuff she writes about. I was continuously impressed by how easily and honestly she told her (extremely painful) story throughout the book. My own experiences with family trauma were not nearly as bad as McCurdy's, whose mom was the textbook image of the abusive, manipulative stage mom stereotype, but even still, a lot of the ways she described her enmeshment with her mother hit awfully close in ways that were... uncomfortable for me to say the least, but which I'm still glad to have taken in.
Another thing that struck me was the morbidly humorous way she relayed a lot of really awful shit that happened to her, and I found that it really resonated with me? That dry humor about one's childhood trauma is very familiar to me as someone who had a rough childhood but also as someone who knows other people who had a rough childhood, and there's something that feels very honest about it. (Which is not to say that a more emotional approach to such a story would feel dishonest by any means. It just, like I said, resonated with me in a very particular way.)
It was also nice (I can't think of a better word, sorry, I'm tired) to see someone talk about the complex feelings that come with loving someone who has been terrible to you, and how escaping an abuser (whether by deliberately leaving or through their death) leaves you feeling unmoored and can cause you to fall apart. In a lot of ways there's this expectation, I think, that once you're free everything's fine, but it's not. It's never just fine, and in my own experience leaving an abusive situation I found myself feeling more crazy and incapable of just dealing in the 6 months to a year following than I had in the most miserable period just before I left.
Points that really stuck out -- Jennette's mom telling her about calorie restriction like it was a fun little secret when she was eleven made me gasp out loud, but I've been told by friends I mentioned this to that they didn't find it particularly shocking, which made me feel grateful for my own mom despite all the other shit. The way she described feeling responsible for her mother's feelings at a young age and how she twisted her life around it hit uncomfortably close to home, and I think that's a way more common experience (to varying degrees) than people realize.
All in all, interesting read, I hope it was cathartic and empowering for her to write it, and I hope it is a comfort to her that lots of other people are now also glad that her mom died.
When the Angels Left the Old Country
Okay so, I'll start this off with my big confession, which is that I don't have a lot of interest in Good Omens and when I tried to read it I didn't get very far (though that was years ago, in fairness). So when someone recommended this one to me with the "It's like a Jewish Good Omens!" I was skeptical but I did give it a shot, and honestly? I really enjoyed it. What a fun and interesting book.
It's set in the early 20th century and focuses on the story of a Jewish angel and a Jewish demon from a tiny shtetl (so tiny it has no name other than shtetl) in Poland who are friends and immigrate to the US. The characters are all pretty charming, and I've heard that the demon character (Ash, short for Ashmedai) has a lot of Crowley-like qualities but I wouldn't really know.
There's something really compelling to me about the very Jewish portrayal of the angel character. IANAR (I am not a rabbi) and I'm only partway to being Actually Jewish so bear with me if I've got this wrong, but in Jewish tradition angels are not really full-fledged like, creatures in their own right? They're single-minded and exist to fulfill a particular purpose - I've seen them described as extensions of God rather than separate and discrete entities but I'm not sure how accurate or correct this is. Anyway, the angel is genderless and its name changes based upon its purpose or task at any specific time, and it's spent the last few centuries studying Talmud with Ash in their shtetl's synagogue. It's mentioned that if it wanders too far from home or from Ash it might end up with a new task or purpose and forget what it was and who it knew before, and that it can't hold multiple thoughts at once like humans can. (Over the course of the story it gains a real name and starts to develop its own desires and purposes as a result of plot stuff.)
Another thing I'm really into about the world-building is that it's explicitly stated that there are as many kinds of demons as there are kinds of religions. Ash talks about gentile demons in other villages (and encounters one in America), and I love this concept. (A long time ago I had a story I was working on that played with a similar idea but IDK if I'll ever return to it. Maybe.) I think it's a really interesting approach to accounting for the differences in religious tradition regarding things like demons, and allows the book and characters to be explicitly Jewish supernatural figures and as part of an explicitly Jewish understanding of the universe while acknowledging that Jews and the Jewish perspective and tradition are not dominant in their world (which is of course also our world).
The book weaves together real world concerns for the setting such as immigration, antisemitism, classism, labor rights, etc. with supernatural features like the two main characters, but also ghosts, magic, dybbuks, and other such things in a very effective (and again, very Jewish) way that I really enjoyed.
I'd definitely recommend it if you like the kind of story where supernatural elements intersect with serious real world stuff. Though it is very Jewish, I don't think you have to be really familiar with Judaism or Jewish tradition to enjoy it, though you might need to Google a couple of things to get the full picture as it does kind of assume that as the reader you know a certain amount and so doesn't always define specific Jewish words or concepts. That said, you can pick up most things from context... You don't need to know what specifically kaddish is to understand that it's probably something a person says for a relative after they die, based on the context it's presented in, for example.
Anyway, bottom line, both were good and I'm trying to decide what to read next. I have several books on hold with the library (on Libby, I never seem to have time to actually go physically acquire a book from the library) and several books I bought from ThriftBooks that are in my stack to read and also books that are supplemental material for my ITJ class, so I'm not short on choices, I'm just. You know. Bad at making them.