Winter Reading
generally formal and distant,
creating a distinct break
between the classy professor
she is now and the punk
rock teenager she was back
then. She removes herself
from her own experiences
to cast a detached, analytical
eye on her past, stumbling
on the occasional cuss
word to distinguish the
“rebelliousness”
of
her
youth.
Though not incredibly thought-
provoking, the tales of teenage rebellion,
desire for individuality and fl uctuating
experimental phases are easy to relate to
for girls and boys alike. The real fun of the
memoir comes from laughing at Greenlaw
as well as yourself. Young audiences can
identify with the silly adolescent mentality
as they are living it, while older audiences
can chuckle about the rashness of their youth
with a hint of pride, as Greenlaw does. And
if you really want to make the most of the
novel, you can always read it with a British
accent. — Mariam Wahed
Blood and Shit
The Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah
Manguso. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22.
he Two Kinds of Decay recounts
poet Sarah Manguso’s struggle
with chronic idiopathic demyelinating
polyradiculoneuropathy (CIDP), a disease
T
that doesn’t even have a proper
name yet. But Manguso won’t
be inhabiting a weepy-eyed
pity city in her fi rst published
memoir. “With my own blood
in me,” Manguso explains in
her steady, refl ective, matter-
of-fact tone, “I couldn’t feel,
and I couldn’t move, but
with other people’s blood in
me, and with chemicals in
me, I could do those things.”
Gulp. For needle-phobes
and psychosomatic sufferers (myself
included), Decay may induce feelings of
lightheadedness.
What’s great about Manguso’s memoir
is that it doesn’t have a grand narrative arc
welded to its spine. Manguso begins her
book with such a simple premise: “Now I
can try to remember what happened. Not
understand. Just remember.” Who hasn’t
felt the urge to record momentous events
after they happen in the hopes that, in less
chaotic times, these idiosyncratic thoughts
might offer some insight? But what insight
Manguso gleans from her ordeal isn’t set
in stone from page one; instead she picks
away at her memories using sharp, poetic
prose and neat, chewable paragraphs as bits
and pieces of her past come into focus on
the page. Eventually she unearths nuggets
like “The only hard thing I’d done in my
life was recovering from a disease,” but
usually her revelations are sweeter, like her
belief that having sex with her college friend
was what led to the disease’s remission.
Congratulations, Sarah Manguso, for writing
the fi rst memoir that made me sweat. A lot.
— Chuck Adams
Getting It On for Science
Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science
and Sex by Mary Roach. W.W. Norton,
$24.95.
irst, it was dead bodies.
Next, the scientifi c
possibility of the soul.
Now, it’s sex: sex research,
to be more precise. Give
Mary Roach a couple more
decades, and she’ll have
turned out tomes on every
outside-the-norm aspect of
science you can think of,
and a few more for good
measure. Her personable,
conversational, wry tone
— and her willingness to
join in the studies when
human subjects board
guidelines keep her from observing others
in certain, er, acts — make Roach a fantastic
guide through the world of sex research,
from John B. Watson, the fi rst “to make the
case for bringing sexual arousal and orgasm
into the formal confi nes of a laboratory,”
to Dr. Ahmed Shafi k, a somewhat quirky
fellow who studies things like “the effect of
polyester on sexual activity.” (This involved
rats in small pairs of pants.) Naturally,
F
the more familiar names, like Kinsey and
Masters and Johnson, make plenty of
appearances as well.
Roach starts with the basics — what
actually happens during sex, and how
researchers fi gured that out — and moves on
to less straightforward topics, like the health
benefi ts of masturbation (and whether an
inexpensive, non-prescription vibrator can
do the job just as well as
the spendy Eros Clitoral
Therapy Device), and
how paraplegics can
have orgasms. Roach’s
footnotes and asides are
as funny, and as sharply
observed, as her main
text, but she never loses
sight of the more diffi cult
aspects of her chosen
topic, particularly where
human hearts, as well
as human bodies, are
involved.
— Molly Templeton
Notes From An
Overanalytical Journalist
Only Love Can Break Your Heart by
David Samuels. The New Press, $26.95.
avid Samuels begins this collection of
journalistic and personal essays with a
preface that proclaims “it has become harder
and harder for freelancers like me to have
any fun” before announcing his retirement
D
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