Woo, I can see again! Although I’m still in that new-glasses phase where the ground isn’t quite where you expect it to be.
(http://bamchallenge.wordpress.com/2008/05/01/challenge-5-mother)
I cheerfully tossed Andrea Buchanan’s Mother shock : loving every (other) minute of it and (perhaps less cheerfully) Susan Wicklund’s This common secret : my journey as an abortion doctor on my library hold list, intending to review one or the other. Neither of them has yet turned up, but coincidentally the library coughed up Identical Strangers: A memoir of twins separated and reunited instead and it is certainly a book that approaches the concept of “mother” from many angles.
Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein were given up at birth and were adopted into separate families, possibly because the adoption clinic’s consulting psychiatrist believed it was better for twins to be separated and possibly for the much less altruistic reason that she wanted to study certain aspects of heritability. The families were never told the children were twins, and it isn’t discovered until Elyse — in her 30s — embarks on a search for her birth mother.
You can imagine the issues of identity of self, of the family in which you were raised, of the family you’re now raising, of how to negotiate the new relationship with your twin, that would arise if out of the blue in your 30s it arose that not only did you have an identical twin, but the two of you may have been part of a bizarrely unethical scientific experiment.
Both twins write with amazing honesty (they alternate passages, so their individual voices remain distinct) about their experiences — I’m impressed that they were willing to put so much openness into their writing. It makes the book one part ruminations about self, family, and motherhood and one part mystery — why were they separated? Who was their mother anyway? It would be hard to say more without tossing in spoilers, so I’ll leave it at that. Recommended.
Ah yes, Europe’s Best, purveyor of frozen veggie blends.
Europe apparently extends further east than I previously suspected:
(http://bamchallenge.wordpress.com/2008/04/01/challenge-4-beauty/)
Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession with Cosmetic Surgery
by Alex Kuczynski
The initial tone of this book is wildly uncritical — she skims quickly past the notions that half the American population isn’t comfortable with their looks and are subjected to a constant barrage of images of surgically-sculpted perfection and gets right into the how-to without a backward glance at the deeper issues. Kuczynski is a journalist, not a scientist or an investigator, and she clearly goes for sensationalism over depth or meaning. For example, she leaves uncommented this interview with Dr. Suzanne Lepine, a Manhattan specialist in cosmetic surgery for, of all things, feet:
We live in a fifteen-second culture,” she said. “That’s how long it takes, I believe, for a man to look at you and decide if he will be in love with you. That is it. And if you’re wearing stiletto sandals and your feet look like hell, he’s not even going to give you the time of day.”
A man won’t love you, Levine reasons, or even give himself the chance of falling in love with you, if you have a bunion peeping out of your $500 evening sandal. Tough town, I said.
“Tough town, that’s for sure,” she said. “It sets its own standards. People overreact. I had one woman come in who wanted me to do liposuction of the toe. I mean, that’s even over the top for me.”
What happened to the patient?
“I told her to go see a shrink instead,” Levine said.
When I left, Levine asked me if I knew any good single men.
Yikes. Talk about the need for a psychiatrist and a smack upside the head with a book on feminist theory. To be clear: if a man rejects you on the basis of fifteen seconds’ worth of gazing at your unpedicured, unsculpted toes, your foot should be applied swiftly to his ass as you boot him out the door, not taken to a surgeon. (But I digress.)
In later chapters Kuczynski does a reasonable job at covering the risks of surgery and gives a fairly impassioned schpeel on the need for potential clients to check the qualifications of their putative surgeons; she doesn’t skip discussion of the risks at all. Still, she doesn’t ever really address anything beyond the who, what, how, and how much money of plastic surgery — the background societal issues remain unexamined. Which, to be fair, is probably beyond what might reasonably be expected from this book: Kuczynski set out to explore the world of plastic surgery, and given that parameter she’s done a fine job. It’s a very decent factual piece which would make a respectable accompaniment to some deeper analysis.
