Dancing Naked in the Mind Field by Kary Mullis is another book that I pull out to reread from time to time (joining Brotherhood of the Rose by David Morrell and The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum). Unlike those two thrillers, Dancing in the Mind Field is the memoir of a Nobel Prize (Chemistry) winner. I’ve read a number of science memoirs and usually once I’ve read them once I don’t use them for anything other than reference. Not this one. This one I can open and happily reread because aside from being a case study of the pure serendipity and rampant oddity that pervades science it is also engagingly written.

Dancing Naked in the Mind Field is an intimate look into the mind of one the most eccentric Noble prize-winning scientists of our time, Kary Mullis. His invention of PCR (polymerase chain reaction) underlies DNA fingerprinting, sequencing of the human genome, genetic engineering and innumerable other technologies that continue to reshape our world. He is fascinated by knowledge but skeptical of scientists.

Starting at the moment he solved the puzzle of how to make copies of DNA in a test tube (PCR), Mullis takes the reader back to his high school days of cooking up chemicals in his garage (sending a toxic cloud over the neighbourhood) and forward to the present. In the process he questions everything from the nature of the universe to the money behind the latest scientific pronouncements, and he does it in a way that is accessible to the layperson. Of course, he also describes an LSD trip and uses profanity from time to time (just so you know). Each chapter is its own little adventure so the memoir reads much more like a bunch of short stories than a linear narrative of his life.

I find it hard to describe Mullis’ writing style other than to say it is humorous and conversational. Here is an excerpt from page 123 when he first realizes that he has been bitten by brown recluse spiders and goes to the Merck Manual for guidance:

I checked out the Merck Manual, a reference book that no cabin should be without. Years ago I had been frightened by an exploding capillary in my eye. It had appeared as a pinhead of blood under the layer of eye skin called the conjuctival membrane and it had spread under the membrane across the white of my eye in the gruesome redness that only blood can express. The Merck Manual had calmed me down. The book said it happened once in a while and was not an indicator that it would happen again. The worst part was that it looked scary.

This time the Merck Manual was not so comforting. I seemed to have been in the company of Loxosceles reclusa, the brown recluse spider. The manual impersonally advised me that I was in for some serious shit.

The anecdote goes on for some pages (you can read it on Amazon by using “Look Inside” and searching for the last three words of the excerpt. If you want to  know what it’s like to be on an acid trip (without actually doing the drug yourself), search “I’m taking acid” in “Look Inside” on amazon. If you enjoy those excerpts you’ll likely enjoy the book.

If you don’t care about science, Mullis will give you reason to. If you do care about science, Mullis will give you insight into the messy way in which science is really done and the flawed people who do it.

You can find Dancing Naked in the Mind Field at amazon.com, amazon.ca, and amazon.co.uk as well other online and bricks & mortar sellers.

Owen Matthews has done a remarkable job of investigating and telling his family’s story in Stalin’s Children: Three Generations of Love, War, and Survival. The three generations are the author’s, his parents, and his grandparents.

Matthews’ maternal grandfather was executed during Stalin’s purges and his maternal grandmother was jailed, leaving their daughters Lenina and Lyudmila wards of the Soviet state. As a young woman, Lyudmila falls in love with a young British Sovietologist. Before they can marry, the young man is expelled from the country and they spend the next six years trying to reunite. When they do reunite in Britain, real life begins with its own trials. The author’s story is no less interesting than that of his parents and grandparents and provides the frame for the other generations.

I find it difficult to do this book justice in a review, but since I have been trying to write this review for over a week I decided finally just to give you what I have so that you know about Stalin’s Children.

Matthews is fortunate in having an interesting family history to tell, but the real strength of the book is the writing. Although Matthews is a journalist, the writing is often poetic and captures the feel of both the time and the people. I marked a few passages as I was reading that demonstrate this much better than I can describe it.:

As a journalist, Owen Matthews tries to find his place in the world:

I found the thrill I had been seeking by riding UN armoured personnel carriers past piles of shattered concrete and the beautiful, boyish debris of my first war. I walked down unlit streets filled with people strolling on a summer’s night like the damned in a Gustave Dore engraving. I read The Brothers Karamazov during a bout of shelling, imagining myself in communion with the darkest forces of the world. But then I saw a child shot dead by a sniper as he ran across a road, picked up off his feet by the impact of the bullet and thrown down lifeless like laundry tossed from a basket, and felt a surge of revulsion at my own voyeurism. On my return to Budapest I decided I could no longer face the Bohemian folly of cafe society, and began to seek something bleaker and more hard-bitten. (p. 136)

On the death of a Russian ex-girlfriend:

Even before her death I couldn’t think of her as anything but a child of her time, vibrating to the deep, doomed rhythms of a specific moment. I could never place her anywhere else but Moscow, or imagine her old, or bored, or cynical, or fat, or married. So that’s why it seemed right, somehow, that Russia swallowed her in the end. (p. 176)

In addition to living in Moscow and doing research there, Matthews made use of the incredible research materials that his parents created during their lives. Matthews’ parents wrote each other literally every day during their separation, documenting their long-distance love affair and their struggle to be reunited. Many of these letters are quoted in Stalin’s Children. Matthews’ father wrote several memoirs, which Matthews used to access details and thoughts that otherwise would have been lost over the years.

The narrative moves around in time, but always comes back to Matthews’ search and the present. The moving back and forth through time is done almost seamlessly so that you always know where you are and one era flows into the next. I’m glad I had the chance to review Stalin’s Children because it was fascinating to read about that place and time in history in such vivid and human terms. Though Stalin’s Children is the story of a single family, it is also the story of a country and its people.

You can find Stalin’s Children at amazon.com, amazon.ca, and amazon.co.uk.

I’ve been procrastinating about writing this review, even though I loved the book, because some of the things that Barbara Robinette Moss touches on are still raw for me. In fact, I used a quote from Fierce in one of my own essays because Moss put into words something that can be difficult to accept–that alcoholism often goes on for many generations in families and we are not the first to be hurt:

I thought about the generations of men on my dad’s side of the family. How far back would I need to go before I found the right person to slap silly? (204)

Fierce begins when Moss is 17, has finished school, and is beginning her adult life. She soon finds herself in a series of abusive relationships as she tries to raise her son to be “normal,” unlike her and her siblings. She deals with her family and relationships and her childhood issues, and eventually ends up going to therapy and AcoA meetings when she realizes she can’t handle everything on her own (this takes the better part of 20 years). Moss comes from poverty and chronicles her struggles as a single mother trying to achieve stability in all facets of her life and having to learn what that means each step of the way. I don’t want to say more about the events in her life because it’s better to read them as they happen.

This is another memoir in which the actual writing is part of the healing process, and Moss talks about this in her book. Moss is very candid, letting you travel her journey as she tries to understand herself, her parents, and her siblings who she tries to save from themselves. She shows her innermost thoughts as she recounts scenes familiar to many. The family gatherings where everything but the actual issue is discussed. The need to solve the problems of other family members. I have many passages marked where I thought “Exactly!” because even if I haven’t been in the situation, I recognize the thinking that led there.

Above all, Moss writes well and beautifully which makes her memoir a pleasure to read despite the events she relates. Her imagery is beautiful, like the description of the despair of dealing with all of the baggage of her family and childhood:

It seemed pointless to keep doing what I was doing. I had been trying to dig out of my ramshackle past with a teaspoon, and Dad’s death had heaped on a fresh load of rubble.(111)

I particularly like her honesty as she recounts approaching therapy when she was finally ready:

Fear sent me back to my second counseling appointment. Fear that I might actually die from this heartache, either by accident or on purpose. I was embarrassed that my life was so completely out of my control. I didn’t understand how I had gotten into such a hopeless situation. On my own, I couldn’t see a way out. (177)

This memoir shows what it is like to be sent out in the world from an alcoholic home. It is honest but without self-pity and well worth reading. I know I’ll be reading my copy again.

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Louie Anderson is an American comedian who uses his dysfunctional childhood as fodder for his
stand up routine. Anderson grew up in a family of eleven children with an alcoholic father

This memoir (he has written several) is a series of letters that Anderson wrote to his father nine years after his father’s death. In his letters Anderson asks the questions that many ACOAs are left with about their addicted parents:

• Did you love me?
• Why did you drink?
• How could I be less important to you than the bottle?
• What made you this way?
• Why did Mom/Dad continue to love you?
• Why don’t we ever talk about it

Anderson chronicles his search for answers in these letters as he remembers incidents from his childhood, deals with network executives who just don’t get it, and asks the rest of his family how they saw family life with their father.

pg. 18 (Network executives want to tone down the characters in a show Anderson is pitching about his family):

They said they wanted to soften it a little. I would have like to. That would have been nice growing up. If you could adjust your family like a television screen, turning the contrast and volume buttons at will. Your contrast and volume buttons were broken. Or stuck, stuck on high.

pg. 69

Mine is a private journey, a selfish one that is full of much more pain than I realized at the start. When I set out several months ago to discover what internal battles caused you to drink, I didn’t understand that I’d also have to take an equally hard look at myself. It hurts, Dad, it hurts a lot. But I’m in too deep to turn back.

I loved this book and cried all the way through it, yet in the morning I woke up with a new resolve to start asking my Dad about his childhood and life before it is too late.

The book is easy to read and Anderson is incredibly honest with himself and, by extension, the reader. The letters are short and the book lends itself to reading a letter or two at a time which may be all that some readers can handle depending on the memories that are triggered.

As memoir formats go, this is an excellent example of one done in letter format. Sometimes when you are stuck, it’s helpful to write a letter you’ll never send.

If the book has any drawbacks, it is that it is very specific to Anderson’s family situation, which is the function of a memoir (of course). This is not a self-help book, but it is insight into how another ACOA has lived and chosen to heal his relationship with his father, even after death.

I read this for a writing class that I’m taking, so it’s not my usual fare (but I’ve learned lately that reading outside the usual fare is a good thing–I never thought I would like sushi either until I tried it). This particular memoir just doesn’t spark anything in me though.

Lucy Grealy writes about her childhood battle with Ewing’s sarcoma, which resulted in half of her jawbone being removed, and her teens and adulthood spent reconstructing her face and constructing her self. I read this a couple years ago, and then read Truth and Beauty (Ann Patchett) which has become the companion book to Autobiography of a Face. Now when I reread Grealy’s memoir, I can’t unknow what Patchett reveals about Grealy in her memoir so it’s hard to see it as a single work. (I’ll be rereading Truth and Beauty in the next few weeks and post a review when I do).

One of the passages from Grealy’s book that caught my eye:

pg. 7

This singularity of meaning—I was my face, I was ugliness—though sometimes unbearable, also offered a possible point of escape. It became the launching pad from which to lift off, the one immediately recognizable place to point to when asked what was wrong with my life. Everything led to it, everything receded from it—my face as personal vanishing point.

I like the writing (see quote), but I just don’t find much that is universal in Grealy’s story and I find myself tiring of her life long before she did. Grealy disconnects herself so much from her emotions as a child that this distance is transmitted to the reader and I end up not caring as much as I should after spending 200 pages reader her life.

Something I did pick up on in the second reading that I didn’t see in the first, is Grealy’s dysfunctional view of how children should act:

pg. 29

…I found myself deeply embarrassed for the boy. How could anyone sink so low as to hide beneath a bed? This went against every belief I held dear. One had to be good. One must never complain or struggle. One must never, under any circumstances, show fear and, prime directive above all, one must never, ever cry. I was nothing if not harsh. Had I not found myself in this role of sick child, I would have made an equally good fascist or religious martyr

The way that Grealy deals with her childhood seems harsh, but it is the classic thinking of a child raised in a dysfunctional environment (her mother experienced depression requiring hospitalisation although this is mentioned only in passing).

Grealy focuses so much on herself that you are left with very little sense of the people around her—her parents, her siblings, her teachers, her doctors. The depth with which Grealy excises other people from her memoir becomes apparent in Ann Patchett’s Truth & Beauty which relates a different view of Grealy’s college years.

It’s not one of my favourite books, but the combination of Autobiography of a Face and Truth and Beauty gives insight into how truth is a matter of perspective and how you can tell the truth and yet lie by omission. If you read one of these books, you really should read the other as they are a set despite the fact that they are by two different authors (who were friends and even roommates for a while).