I just finished reading a memoir that was a quick read but one that was really interesting. I love memoirs because they give you insight into someone else’s way of life but also tend to provide things that you can relate to in order to make the story feel like your own. That’s exactly the case with this memoir which is technically about growing up in the grips of a spiritual cult but ultimately about learning how to figure out who you are outside of the experiences you had growing up.

The woman who wrote the book, Jayanti Tamm, was born into Sri Chinmoy’s spiritual cult. Because procreating was forbidden but she was born anyway, he determined that she was brought into this world as his Chosen One. Growing up, she held a special place in the cult that placed a barrier between her and the rest of the world. She didn’t ask her parents or teachers for advice or material things; she had to ask her Guru.

As you can imagine, she eventually found herself disillusioned with the cult beliefs that she had been brought up to believe. Most of the memoir is about the experience of growing up in the cult and the transition from being an unquestioning child follower to a confused, unsure, questioning young adult.

Towards the end of the memoir, Tamm leaves the cult for a time and ultimately is kicked out of it. What we see here is the inner turmoil that one goes through when leaving behind the ways of childhood. Of course, most of us have not grown up in situations so extreme as cult life. Nevertheless, many struggle in smaller ways to reconcile their adult beliefs with what they were taught as children. That’s how this book manages to be relatable to us even though it’s specifically about cult life.

Interesting read!

Tags: books, cartwheels in a sari, cult, diary of a smart chick, jayanti tamm, memoir, reading

I try to read books that cover a diverse range of different topics and styles. Mostly I choose books that are relevant to the topics that I am currently most interested in or most affected by. However, sometimes I find myself picking up books that are not related to anything that I’m doing or dealing with it right now. And sometimes those end up being the most important touching books that I read. That seems to be the case with a book I just read called Comfort: A Journey Through Grief.

This is a short book that can be a quick read if you want it to be. It’s the true first-person account of a woman who lost her five year old daughter to a sudden illness. It is about what it was like to live through the three years following her daughter’s tragic death and to come out on the other side of that, wounded and forever changed but still alive and ready to live again. It’s a tough read in the sense that it is highly emotional but it’s an easy read in the sense that it unites the writer and reader through common human emotions.

There are many things that I love about this little book but I think what grabbed my attention most of all was the writing style that was implemented in it. The author uses primarily short sentences and also uses a lot of repetition of the same facts. Sometimes these facts are repeated in the same way and sometimes they are a little bit different. The combination of repetition and short sentence structure ends up being really powerful

One of the things that happens when we lose someone is that our lives become limited to the bare minimum of things that we must get done to survive. We don’t do any extras; we barely even shower or eat. The short sentence structure of the book reflects this minimalization our lives go through during this time. And something else that happens is that we go over and over events in our minds. Sometimes we replay them word for word, again and again, trying to gain some meaning from them. Sometimes we see them through a new lens, repeating them in our minds with a new level of understanding or a new perspective on what happened. The author doesn’t actually come right out and say that these are the things that she is going through but the structure of her story reveals this side of grief.

I am not currently dealing with a major loss. I am not currently struggling with the family issues that arise when such a loss occurs. However I was still touched by this book. I can only imagine how powerful it would be for someone who was going through a tough time. This one is highly recommended!

Tags: ann hood, book recommendation, book review, books, comfort, grief books, reading

I recently had the exciting opportunity to read and review the book “Original Faith: What Your Life is Trying to Tell You” by Paul Martin as part of his book tour with Women on Writing. This book is a spiritual self help book which manages to guide the reader through his or her own murky waters by sharing spiritual insights and asking probing questions. I was particularly interested in the process of writing that Paul went through as he wrote this book. He has experienced health problems in the past and I was curious as to how this impacted his views as well as his writing experience. Answers to those questions are found in the following short interview with Paul Martin:

1. What did you consider to be the most challenging part of writing “Original Faith”?

Overall, my writing process had a sense of ease and joy. The most challenging period may have been about a year’s worth of work, in about my third year of writing, when I took a major wrong turn. Writing was becoming more and more tiresome until I realized that if I myself was bored with what I was writing… well then, who wouldn’t be bored reading it! I saw that I’d been writing from my head as uninformed by my heart and my actual lived experience – not writing creatively at all.

1. You incorporate wonderful poems at the start of each chapter. How do you feel this adds to the book (or what do you hope readers will take away from these)? And at what point in the writing stage did you add these in?

The poems’ themes anticipate each chapter’s contents, adding variety to the reading experience and helping to engage readers at the level of immediate feeling. I worked them in at the end, which was fun to do. Since these poems and many others were written concurrently with the prose, they reflect similar experiences, imagery and thoughts, which made it easy to find poems to integrate with my text.

1. You describe writing down your experiences and revelations over time as they occurred. Would you say that writing aided you in understanding your experiences or were you simply trying to recapture them for memory?

For me, the act of writing very much helped me to understand my experiences. Jogging, my work with children, meditation – and sitting at my writing table – these were the major and ongoing sources of experience and insight that generated material for Original Faith. Much book content wouldn’t have become as clear as it did and some of it wouldn’t have been created at all if not for the regular activity of sitting down to write.

Often I’d be at my desk working on one concept when I’d find myself unexpectedly struck by an insight or by especially vivid language that related to another. This aspect of the writing process was a big factor in how the manuscript came together – and what a mess my desktop was…

1. Some spiritual writers believe that it is impossible to truly articulate their beliefs although they do the best that they can in their writing. Is this something that you have struggled with at all?

Original Faith is a guide to entering into a process by which our identity changes in ways that lead us to contribute more emphatically and consistently to the well being of others, in turn bringing us greater personal fulfillment. Initially, identity moves away from being ego-based toward becoming increasingly love-based. I found that I could express this aspect of personal transformation in considerable detail and in a pretty straightforward manner.

The second identity shift that I discuss involves the transcendence of identification with one’s own love. Here I found myself having to rely a lot more on analogy and metaphor. Often the best that I could do was to use language as a kind of pointer for providing a sense of direction.

1. What is the one key thing that you would like a reader to take away from “Original Faith”?

That faith is a fact. Whether or not we connect faith with a religious belief system, each of us is profoundly at peace with what we’re doing here, with living and dying into the biggest picture, the greatest context. To know all-hope and all-trust in (to paraphrase St. Paul) “the One in whom we live and move and have our being,” is to become aware of an unconditional fact concerning who we are – a dimension of our own being that we can know with certainty. This is so whether we conceive of the One as a Creator existing in distinction from creation or as all-being, nature or reality itself.

Paul Maurice Martin is author of Original Faith: What Your Life Is Trying to Tell You and blogs at www.originalfaith.com. He holds an M.A. in Religious Studies from the University of Chicago Divinity School and an M.Ed. in Counseling from the University of New Hampshire.

Tags: book review, original faith, paul martin, wow book tour

My review of The Dangerous Passion (a terrific book about the biology of jealousy) was included in a really awesome Book Review blog carnival. I’ve never seen a blog carnival that was done so well. Instead of mere links, it shows you images of the book and the author with a short snippet of the review. Very well done. There were two dozen books featured in the carnival so there are a lot of great recommendations. Check it out!

Tags: blog carnival, book review, books

Yesterday’s book mention was Love Sick, a memoir about a woman’s struggle with sexual addiction. Today I’m mentioning another book by the same author, Sue William Silverman, although I haven’t actually read the book yet. I learned from one of my email newsletters this morning that she’s just published a memoir writing guide and that she’s starting a blog tour today to promote that new book. It sounds really interesting so I figured it was worth sharing in spite of the fact that I haven’t yet read the book.

Silverman is the author of two different memoirs (Love Sick, of course and her first memoir – Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You – which is about her experience of sexual abuse). Her writing, at least as far as I’ve seen so far, manages to take the beautiful language that you find in good fiction and personalize it with her own story. I imagine this makes her book about memoir writing a good one.

The new book is called Fearless Confessions. She’s doing a blog tour all month long where she will be featured on different blogs. These blogs will offer giveaways, chats with the author, etc. Details are available here. Today’s blog that she’s on is the terrific WOW – Women on Writing Blog where there’s a video trailer for the book as well as a comments section giveaway.

Tags: blog tour, fearless confessions, love sick, reading, sue william silverman

I have just finished reading a book called Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey through Sexual Addiction which was written by Sue William Silverman. It is the first person story told as a day-by-day account of her four weeks spent as an inpatient in a sex addiction recovery treatment program. Through each day, she reflects upon the personal history that brought her to this place.

It’s an interesting memoir. Interesting is not the right word. Gripping is a better description of it.

Silverman shares the story of what it’s like to grow up in an abusive home that turns you into a victim of your own desires. She shares the experience of being a sex addict and what it did to her marriage. She shares the tales that pique the interest of the voyeuristic side of the reader.

More importantly, however, Silverman shares what it is like to be going through treatment for addiction. She shares her relapses and her fears about not getting better and her thoughts and feelings about being a person who needs to be treated for this particular problem. It gives insight into the experience of all addiction, not just sex addiction.

Powerful memoir!

Tags: book review, books, love addiction, love sick, reading, sex addiction

I recently picked up an interetsing non-fiction book from the library. It’s called The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is As Necessary As Love and Sex. As you can tell from title, it explores the idea that we have to have jealousy in our human lives. This is unique from most views on jealousy since the general thought on the topic is that jealousy is a bad thing and we need to expunge it from our personalities.

The book presents theories as to why jealousy exists. These theories are mostly rooted in the science of evolution. There have been reasons over time that it made sense to be jealous in order to protect our species. A very abbreviated version of the general theory of the book is that jealousy in the past may have prevented or deterred infidelity which increased the likelihood of successful mating and therefore the reproduction of the species.

The book points to numerous examples of this over time and suggests that this jealousy is ingrained into us at a biological / evolutionary level. It’s an interesting idea. The book takes us through a scientific exploration of what jealousy is, how it manifests itself today and what conclusions we can draw about this emotion. And it reveals the idea that jealousy does have an important place in our emotional lives even though we sometimes deny its validity.

The book can get very academic at times. It cites a lot of studies and statistics which I admittedly sometimes skimmed over because they were excessive. However, it also provides some really interesting information from a scientific perspective. It also provides neat facts about jealousy in different cultures. (I laughed aloud at the description of how Samoan women have been known to approach a woman who has had an affair with her husband and to bite her on the nose to reduce her attractiveness.) Worth taking a gander at if you’re interested in human emotion and relationships.

Tags: book recommendatino, book review, books, jealousy book, kathryn vercillo, reading

I have been reading Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert and really loving it. It’s the story of a woman who took a year off from her life to travel and self-reflect. I suppose I like it a lot because of my own desire to take a year off like this (which I mentioned yesterday in my post about going on sabbatical). But I also like it because it’s a great travel story which shows how traveling can bring us closer to ourselves. And I like it because the language and description in the book really resonate with me.

I’m taking my time reading this book so that I can really savor it. I read quickly and could’ve finished it in a day or two but I’m drawing out my time with it because I like it that much. It’s the first book I’ve liked that much in a really really long time. Since I’m not done with it yet, I don’t really want to give a full review or solid opinion on it. But I do want to share one passage that I particularly loved. It’s not the most romantic or exciting passage in the book but it’s one that so totally sums up how I think the average American deals with the problem of depression that I wanted to write it down:

“I took on my depression like it was the fight of my life, which, of course, it was. I became a student of my own depressed experience, trying to unthread its causes. What was the root of all this despair? Was it psychological? (Mom and Dad’s fault?) Was it just temporal, a “bad time” in my life? (When the divorce ends, will the depression end with it?) Was it genetic? (Melancholy, called by many names, has run through my family for generations, along with its sad bride, Alcoholism.) Was it cultural? (Is this just the fallout of a postfeminist American career girl trying to find balance in an increasingly stressful and alienating urban world?) Was it astrological? (Am I so sad because I’m a thin-skinned Cancer whose major signs are all ruled by an unstable Gemini?) Was it artist? (Don’t creative people always suffer from depression because we’re so supersensitive and special?) Was it evolutionary? (Do I carry in me the residual panic that comes afre millenia of my species’ attempting to survive in a brutal world?) Was it karmic? (Are all these spasms of grief just the consequences of bad behavior in previous lifetimes, the last obstacles before liberation?) Was it hormonal? Dietary? Philosophical? Seasonal? Environmental? Was I tapping into a uiversal yearning for God? Did I have a chemical imbalance? Or did I just need to get laid?”

What a succinct summary of the struggle with depression that intelligent people go through today!

Tags: books, depression, eat pray love, elizabeth gilbert, kathryn vercillo, Quotation, quote, reading, review, writing

Not every book here is a book that I would recommend to others. Mostly I think that that’s something that each reader should decide for themselves. These “books of the day” are just descriptions of the books that I’m reading that will hopefully give other people an idea of some books that may interest them.

One book that I didn’t like that I recently got from the library was Lust by Elfriede Jelinek. It’s the story of a woman who is living in an abusive relationship and who ends up falling in love with another man who also turns out to have some serious issues. The story itself is pretty good and the book is one that people must have liked because it was a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

So why didn’t I like it? There were two reasons:

1. It’s translated. I don’t know what the original version sounded like but the translation felt odd to me. It’s hard to describe but it reminded me a bit of Gertrude Stein who has a great style but who I find hard to read entire books of without it feeling too dense.
2. It’s violent. Some of the abuse and sexual abuse scenes in the book were just too violent for me. I must have a weak stomach or a too-vivid imagination because I didn’t want to keep reading through them.

If those things don’t bother you, you might like the book. It’s certainly unique and it does have a story to tell.

Tags: book review, books, elfriede jelinek, kathryn vercillo, lust, reading

I wish that I was a bigger fan of Jack Kerouac than I am. I’ve read a lot of biographical stuff about him and he seems like a fascinating character. I like the ideas behind his work. But for some reason I’ve just never been turned on by his writing style.

Nevertheless, I pick up books by him now and then and try to give him another chance. One of the ones that I did that with recently was Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha. I’ll be honest in saying that it didn’t capture my attention through the entire book. I have no problem putting down books that I’m not loving and that’s what I did with this one.

However, I did like this book more than some of his others and I think it’s an intriguing read for people who like Kerouac’s style and who also have an itnerest in Buddhism. It’s basically Kerouac’s version of the story of Siddhartha which is a key story that helps people understand the basics of Buddhism.

Definitely a book to consider even if I didn’t ultimately decide to finish it!

Tags: book recommendation, book review, books, buddha, kathryn vercillo, kerouac, reading, wake up