Pittsburgh in Words: Essays in Honor of the City's 250th Anniversary

I'm originally from Pennsylvania (the South Central portion, near the Maryland border... not Pittsburgh, although my parents are from Johnstown, which is closer) and I've recently heard (from my boss here in Albuquerque, who is from Pittsburgh) that Pittsburgh is a pretty cool place to live these days. I may have the chance to visit it in a week, because I'm going home to attend a wedding in Erie, and the next day I'm flying out of the Pittsburgh airport, which is about two hours away.

I found out through Creative Nonfiction Journal that this year is Pittsburgh's 250th anniversary, and so CNF has put together a website called Pittsburgh in Words to celebrate the city. The website hosts a collection of essays about Pittsburgh. It includes clickable tags so that you can find essays on whatever topic you happen to be looking for. I've had a fun time browsing the site, and thought I'd pass it on. I'll post an update if I end up visiting Pittsburgh this weekend!

Book Review: Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity, by Kerry Cohen

High on Sex, Low on Love: A Book Review of Loose Girl by Kerry Cohen


This book is basically the true story of a young woman who slept with quite a few random guys, without really giving two diddly-doos about what (or whom) she was doing or why. The title term "Loose Girl" provides a negative connotation for this behavior, and I guess the book could have been just as easily called "Slut" or some other provocative term. As a preliminary matter, then, I didn't really agree with the author's assumed notion that someone who has commitmentless sex is worthy of name-calling or necessarily lacking in self-esteem. To me there was really nothing new or shocking in the book and I think a lot of women (and men) have had experiences similar to those of the author. In fact I think people have done way worse (at one point she feels particularly worthless for doing it "doggy style" -- why doing the dirty in this position with a near-stranger is supposed to be any more slut-worthy than it is in regular ole missionary position was lost on me).

What made the story unique, though, and almost a little annoying sometimes, was the level of self-awareness and honesty with which the narrator told it. I think she only acquired this level of self-awareness after she had lived the story, perhaps while she was writing it, instead of having it all along, but that is something I wish would have been clarified more. I think the author (or her editor or whomever makes these important decisions nowadays) may have chosen to call it "Loose Girl" instead of some other derogatory name for "woman who has unattached sex" because she was in many senses floating around without a connection, without an anchor, just looking for something to hold onto. I wish she would have explored this metaphor more throughout the book, but, then again, there are only so many metaphors one can explore--no pun intended--when it comes to sex, and Kerry pretty much touches--no pun intended yet again--on all of them. To me, though, it didn't seem that the narrator was trying to fill her empty void with sex per se but instead with men. She wanted "boys" (as she calls them) to like her and think she's pretty and want to be in a realtionship with her. To me she was more of a relationship junkie or wanna-be junkie than a "slut."

Although I did have some issues with the book, it was a fast and gripping read for me, and definitely kept me interested. Kerry describes growing up in a well-to-do house with parents who were unable to connect with her or with anyone else for that matter. After her parents divorce when she is eleven, her self-absorbed and dramatic mother ends up going off to medical school in the Philipines, and she and her reserved and goth-like sister go to live with their emotionally distant father who exemplifies the empitomy of the term "boundary issues" and who is also just plain odd. Kerry doesn't have any role models or anyone to really connect to, so she turns to boys to fill her emptiness and to look for love.

I could really relate to how she hated that she needed other people so much. Again, I was wondering if she really knew this at the time or if a lot of it was reflection learned while looking back on everything. She seemed so self-aware throughout the book, to the point where at times the tone of her writing made her seem as distant and unsympathetic as the parents she hated. I can see how she learned a lot about herself looking back, and if I read the book in this vein, I liked it a lot more. But most of the time I just plowed through it--no pun intended--without analyzing it, because I liked the theme and the style.

I admired Kerry's straight-forward and honest telling of her story. It didn't seem like she held anything back and it in fact seemed like she was a bit disconnected from who she was or had been--which is something else I can relate to--so that she could tell her story as if she was talking about someone else. I could also relate to the way she wanted to be loved and accepted, without having the capacity to really love or accept someone back in the right way, therefore perpetuating her continuous cycle of bad relationships.

And that leads me to the next segment, which is, my disappointments about the book. As I mentioned at the beginning of my review, I don't necessarily like the notion this book seems to put out--no pun intended--there that there is something "wrong" with a girl who likes to have sex. I do get that Kerry thought, or now thinks, there was something wrong with her because of it, and I get that in her case she was searching to fill a void, and she felt she was too needy. Still, I thought she missed a lot of opportunities to stress her bigger issue, which was wanting an emotional connection, and that she down hard on herself in the places she did write about it, as if wanting to be emotionally close with someone you're physically close with is such a horribly wrong thing. I get that for her a lot of it was about wanting and not being able to connect to someone, like her parents. And I was totally aghast that she took absolutely no precautions to protect herself against things like rape, pregnancy or disease, even after many of these things happened to her or almost happened to her! To me that was the biggest sign of her lack of self-esteem and her totally out-of-controlness. I also get that she gave up a lot of other life pursuits because she was obsessed with "boys," and that for her it was like an addiction.

Still, I don't think she emphasized quite enough that her issue was actually with her desire to feel loved by someone else and to have boys like her--which is no different than a relationship addict or someone who stays in a bad relationship for the wrong reasons--and not really with the physical act of sex. She certainly seemed to get enjoyment out of sex in that she mentioned things like pleasure and orgasm, which to me (and hopefully to anyone?!) are good things, so I found myself thinking that her issue was far more emotional. Perhaps she heaped the emphasis on "sex" to glamorize the book and make it more trendy, when she was really just a girl wanting to be loved. I was more worried about her relationship problems--wanting a guy to love her, only to break his heart rather callously (yes, I can relate, sadly)--than about the fact that she liked the occasional or daily romp in the hay (don't we all?!). I guess her job wasn't to psychoanalyze all of this stuff, but, since she did do a lot more telling than showing (which was another one of my gripes with the book -- I kept wanting to scream "more scenes, please!"), and a lot of self-reflection which is another supposed no-no in memoir writing, I would have expected her to make these distinctions a bit more clearly.

I was disappointed with the ending (and this isn't really a spoiler if you read the author's brief bio on the back and realize she's married with kids now, and she's a therapist), not because I wanted some pat, cut and dry ending but because Kerry wrote that she loved her husband and was happy to be getting married and I just wasn't convinced. It made me sad for her because I felt like she was still searching for fulfillment outside of herself, except now she had resigned herself to settling down with one guy because she no longer wanted to be a "slut." She says that as a therapist now she doesn't believe people can change and she still deals with many of the same issues, but now she is just more self-aware. I really think that if she had spent more time single/alone, she would have continued her self-growth and perhaps changed for the better even more. Of course that's just my opinion, but her writing style about her husband was not convincing. There was little to no description, emotion or action that showed me why she loved him. And when she glossed over being a traditional bride all of a sudden and caring so much about invitation font and wedding dress styles, I wanted to scream at her, this isn't who you are either, you are fooling yourself. (Okay, maybe I was projecting after having fairly recently gone through the same wedding-planning-frenzy only to end up canceling my own wedding... so sue me.) It seemed to me that she wrote about her husband much the same way as she wrote about the other men she had been with -- disconnected, distant, blase -- and that made me sad because it was like nothing much had changed.

Other than those quibbles, I really enjoyed the book and it caused me to think a lot about the relationship between "promiscuity" and self-esteem, and other related issues such as the inability to truly love oneself or someone else. It's definitely a "sexy" topic (yeah, I said it) and I read in the author interview section at the end of the book that Kerry said she was surprised that no one else had written this book first, and I agree with her. I guess there are some others like it (the nonchalant tone reminded me somewhat of "Bare," that stripping memoir, which I didn't enjoy nearly as much as "Loose Girl") but this is a very candid expose which I'm sure it took guts to write and for which I admire the author. I give this book 3.5 stars and would recommend it to just about anyone, especially someone who has struggled to find love and fulfillment externally instead of internally. (By the way, I think other writers would enjoy reading this book because Kerry writes a lot about how writing changed her life and also about her experience in her MFA program.)

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Book Review: Lucky: A Memoir, by Alice Sebold

Disturbing Subject Matter but an Important Book: A Book Review of Lucky: A Memoir by Alice Sebold

It's hard to read, let alone review, a book about rape, but I think that this book it is an important one. Lucky
is a memoir about a college student who was attacked and raped in the park by her campus. Despite its difficult subject matter, Lucky reads smoothly. I feel that this is an accessible book for people to read who would like to understand better how to deal with rape, and to see all the ways that it impacts someone.

For me there were four distinct parts of this book (although the writer did not designate them as such – it just felt to me to read like that). The first part was the beginning, in which the actual rape sequence is told right up front. It is hard to digest but is written very clearly and directly. I really felt for the narrator in the next scenes, which immediately follow the rape, in which she goes to the police and is examined and has to tell her friends and family members what happened. At one point she describes something that I imagine must be almost as horrible as the rape itself – having to live the rest of her life as a rape victim:

“I knew exactly what had happened. But can you speak those sentences to the people you love? . . . That question continues to haunt me. After telling the hard facts to anyone from lover to friend, I have changed in their eyes.”

The second part of Lucky: A Memoir, for me, described the weeks and months following the rape. I found this part to be lacking because it seemed to me that the narrator wasn’t really dealing with her true feelings. I suppose that that is how it actually happened, though, and she did a good job of making me feel like I was right there with her in that time and that space, even though I often wanted her to do things differently. At times it seemed like she was pushing the rape out of her mind completely, and writing about her college classes and other things that any book about any college student would include. I wanted her to focus more on the issue, but perhaps she dealt with it by not focusing on it. In this part the theme of writing was introduced, which I did enjoy. Sebold dealt with her emotions by writing poetry and fiction. She took classes and seminars by Tobias Wolff and Tess Gallagher. Tess Gallagher is actually a pretty central character in the book, who accompanies Alice to court when she has to confront her attacker (although she’s disappeared by the end of the book without explanation, leaving me to wonder what happened).

The third part of the book, which I really liked, moved on to show how the narrator was intent on prosecuting her attacker. It was easy to cheer for her and she showed a lot of strength and wisdom. She describes the legal process well and at one point she mentions wanting to go to law school so that she can prosecute other criminals (she later decides to pursue teaching instead, and says it became her lifeline and salvation). It seems very fulfilling that the narrator finds some kind of justice and closure in the midst of all her suffering. At the same time, she is still human. I could tell that the rape had affected her and that in some ways it had changed her in a negative way. She seems to use men for own reasons and disregard what they must be feeling. She has a strange relationship with her father that she never quite explores in depth the way I wanted her to. (At times she has a close bond with her mother, who is always anxious and has panic attacks). Through all of these shortcomings, however, for most of the book she seems strong and like someone to whom most readers would be able to relate, despite the horrible thing that happened to her.

The fourth and last part of the book, though, takes a strange turn. I don’t want to include spoilers so suffice it to say that the narrator is no longer the intelligent, strong fighter that the reader had gotten to know and admire. This made me feel like my hunch was correct that she hadn’t been dealing internally with the aftermath of her rape. I was disappointed at her downfall but, more than that, it didn’t seem to make sense to me. I thought that the writer should have spent more time on the last part of the book and less time with the mundane intricacies of college life. I felt there were issues left unexplored in the book.

Overall, I “enjoyed” reading Lucky: A Memoir, although that is a strange thing to say about a rape memoir. I thought it was well-written and that it dealt with some very important social issues. I especially liked how it explored the subject of how different women deal differently with rape, and the need for there to be open dialogue about it. The writing in parts is flourishingly poetic, which was a strange offset for the subject, but it usually worked. I would like to read another book by Alice Sebold to see whether the tone works even better with a lighter subject matter (although, from what I understand, her novel Her Lovely Bones has anything but a light subject matter). I give Lucky: A Memoir three and a half stars and would recommend the book, but be forewarned that the subject matter is obviously difficult.

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Quotes from Lucky:

“No one can pull anyone back from anywhere. You save yourself or you remain unsaved.”

“Poetry is not an attitude. It is hard work.” (Quoting Tess Gallagher)

“Memory could save . . . it had power . . . it was often the only recourse of the powerless, the oppressed, or the brutalized.” (Referring to Tobias Wolff’s own story, This Boy’s Life)

“You never get over some things.”

From an interview with Alice Sebold that is published as a supplement in the back of the book:

Question: People often wonder if writing is therapeutic. If you’re writing about a trauma, does that help the pain of the trauma recede? Susie in the novel [a different book] says something like every time she tells her story, a drop of the pain goes away. But as a writer who’s written about your own trauma and then written a fictionalized version of a similar trauma, is writing therapeutic or do you think that that’s really the wrong way to approach it anyway?

Answer: My feeling is that therapy is for therapy and that writing can be therapeutic, but therapeutic writing should not be published. My job as a writer is to go through the therapy myself and, if I manage to get through it and I feel I have something to share from that, to share it with my audience or my readers. But I don’t’ write novels and seek to have them published so that I can get therapy from having written them. That’s really the responsibility of an individual to do outside the context of their published work.


My notes on the book: At one point, due to the trauma, Alice wakes up with night sweats and sometimes screaming – sounds like night terrors. Dorland Mountain Arts Colony – rural California. Hayden Carruth, Jack Gilbert and Diane Wakowski – poets. Olga Cabral (“Lillian’s Chair”) and Peter Wild (“Dog Hospital”). Raymond Carver. Robert Bly. Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin – feminist writers. She was raised in Paoli, Pennsylvania, near Frazer. She went to Syracuse College in New York. She lived in New York City for some years after college. She spends some time in California. She attends graduate school to pursue her MA in Poetry for awhile at the University of Houston.

Book Review: Career and Corporate Cool

Tries Too Hard To Be "Cool":
A Review of Career and Corporate Cool (TM): How to Look, Dress and Act the Part--at Every Stage of Your Careerby Rachel C. Weingarten

I'll give this book credit for marketing. It really attracts attention and looks like the total package, complete with pink letters on the cover! But inside, it reads like a bunch of articles in Seventeen Magazine. (It even has cutesy chapter titles like "Career-o-rama," and cartoon cutout-like drawings of fashionably dressed women at work). Instead of advising you on what to do on your first date, it tells you how to be cool and sophisticated at work. Because the writing is anything but sophisticated, I didn't find it very convincing. It was really hard for me to take a book seriously that is supposed to be about a professional, mature career image but projects the image of a 16-year-old.

The sub-title of the book is deceptive, because this book does't talk at all about "every stage of your career." Instead, it seems to assume that everyone has a glamourous job but still somehow needs to figure out how to fit in. Much of the advice contained in the book is just plain common sense. The description in the inside jacket (which I should have read before the rest of the book, and then maybe I wouldn't have bought it) states, "While an off-color joke generally won't play in a cubicle environment, it can be a job requirement for a professional comedian. Fortune 500 companies tend to frown on perceived sexual harassment in the workplace while massage therapists touch naked strangers on a daily basis." Oh really, Rachel, you don't say?

Speaking of the dear author Rachel, she writes the entire book with a super chatty tone, like a thirteen year old, I guess in an attempt to relate to the reader (who is supposed to be caring about their professional career). But I found it condescending at some points, and downright annoying at others. She touts her own horn to no end. On page 169 of the book, she is still reminding us how "cool" she is: "I'm not a doctor (thought I'm known as a heck of a spin doctor and freuquently revive brands that are on death's door), and I'm certainly not a nurse (though I regularly nurse clients' and colleagues' bruised egos, and nurture projects from concept to fruition.) I am a marketing strategist and consultant who works on
high-profile projects and glamourous launches and events." I don't know about most readers, but I certainly do not care how many times Rachel wants to remind me of what she does and how important her work is. What I want to know are tips to succeed in my own career.

And that's where her book falls completely flat, in my opinion. My biggest objection is that it's all fluff and no substance. It also seems to jump from one topic to the next unrelated topic and back again. For example, Chapter 3 is called "Culture Club" and the index at the front states that it will teach you how to "understand and adapt to your firm's unique corporate culture without becoming just another clog." But Chapter 3 has one section called "Follow your bliss," which belongs more in a section about choosing a job or profession, another section which advises you to "be yourself" (gee, thanks for the tip) and the last and longest section is about email etiquette.

Finally, Career and Corporate Cool (TM)just seems out of touch with reality. It doesn't contain many practical tips for the typical career girl. Instead, it seems to think we all live in Hollywood and have jobs that involve throwing elaborate parties for famous people. Under a section called "publicity," Rachel writes, "If your event is newsworthy, then promote it--but first create an outstanding and newsworthy story. Court and invte key media and create individual pitches and stories for their particular publications. Follow up with details that make the story juicy, fun, or relevant. For instance, yet another party on Oscar night might not be newsworthy, but an event that boasts 12 celebrity chefs, with 12 major designers creating the table decor, and boasts such an ubercool guest list that Jamie Foxx, the night's winner in the best actor category, gets turned away at the door along with throwns of celebrites--well, that's a great party story! The extremely pricy launch party for another luxury building in Manhattan? Not a thrill. The launch party for another luxury building in Manhattan, at which one attendee wins a multimillion-dollar penthouse apartment? Now that's a great story." (No, I did not make this paragraph up. That is seriously a paragraph taken from this so-called "career guide." Now you see why I had so many problems with it.) The book also includes a strange chapter on how to dress your guy for your successful events, which includes having his eyebrows waxed and teaching him how not to be afraid to go to the spa to get a facial. At that point, I would think even a teenage reader would be thinking, WTF?!

The only parts of this book that I didn't totally hate were the small splatterings of advice on organization and productivity. And the "what to wear to work" section was okay. But you can get much better advice on the former topics in Women for Hire's Get-Ahead Guide to Career Success (which I will review soon, because it is a much better career guide than Career and Corporate Cool (TM)!), and much better "fashion for work" advice in Dress Smart for Women. There is nothing in Career and Corporate Cool that isn't in any other career book. And there is a lot of annoying stuff that isn't in those other books. So my advice is to skip this book unless you happen to be buying it for a 17 year old who has the means to organize a launch party complete with a multimillion-dollar door prize.

My rating: 1.5 stars (out of 5) - I pretty much hated it.

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