Tuesday, August 10, 2010

A Familiar Friend

Years ago, when I lived in Nashville, I picked up a copy of Pam Houston's Cowboys are My Weakness.  The stories spoke to me then; they still do.  Every few years, I sit down to re-read them.  It's like having a chat with a comfortable friend; one who understands the feelings that I never want to acknowledge, let alone put in to words.  Who simply knows.

For a long time, Houston didn't have other books; now she does.  I've been reluctant to pick them up because the bar is so high.  But I made the jump this summer and her follow-up to Cowboys, Waltzing the Cat measures up quite nicely.  The narrator, Lucy, is another one of those people who resounds with me.  When she says, "I mean if I saw me coming down the street with all my stuff hanging out I'm not so sure I'd pick myself up and go trailing after,"  I get it.

When another character, Leo, says of Californians: "The great thing about Californians…is that they think it's perfectly okay to exhibit all their neuroses in public as long as they apologize for them first," I laugh.

And toward the end of the book, when Lucy says, "…home might be…a place that could forgive you all your years of expectations, a place that could allow you - in time - to forgive yourself," I hope to hell that she's correct.

2 comments:

  1. I'm trying to read the latest Jodi Picoult book about a kid with Autism accused of murder. I say trying for two reasons: #1 It is difficult to read anything with children around and #2 The book is, as are her other books, gripping in some respects but at the end I always want those hours of my life back. I don't get it. I want to, have to finish it, but at the end I'm just disappointed.

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  2. Thanks for the recommendation, I may need to track these down.

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