Sept. 19, 2013 Love Rebab: a novel in 12 steps: Today I found this article by Maja Lundager in the Metro:
AuthorJo Piazza knows what it’s like to be a love addict.
“I was a complete neurotic dater when I was in my 20s. I used to Google stalk my boyfriends, drive past their houses, and I went completely insane during some breakups,” says the author of the new book, “Love Rehab: A Novel in 12 Steps.”
But Piazza knows she isn’t the only girl in the world who has done crazy things for love. While researching the book and her main character, Sophie, Piazza discovered actual love rehab centers where forlorn women are coached through their obsessions. They get help to overcome past relationships while also learning how to be independent.
“Sophie became this combination of my own experiences, my friends’ experiences and stories from around 500 women I interviewed at different rehab centers,”Piazza tells Metro. “I also contacted an anthropology professor. She told me the feelings you get from love are the same you get from cocaine.
When those feelings go away, you go through withdrawal in the same way [as when you quit drugs]. It’s a novel but there’s a lot of research behind it."
Piazza points to our generation’s preoccupation with social media as to why anxiety surrounds many women and their relationships. You can really keep an eye on your current boyfriend (or your ex) thanks to sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The life-snippets and images they promote let the imagination run wild.
“In rehab, women actually get to identify their addictions. They realize that everyone does the same things,” she says. “Most women in rehab don’t want to get out of their relationships even though they are really bad for them. They are scared of being alone, and that fear drives so many women to bad behavior.”
For Piazza, writing “Love Rehab” was her own cathartic experience. “While I was writing this book, I really evaluated my self and my relationships," she recounts. "I thought about what I had done wrong and right; in a lot of ways, this book puts me in a very good place. A place where I have met a good guy who treats me really well and with whom I haven’t had any drama — fingers crossed."
Jul. 24, 2018 "Confronting single life at 40 isn't all that bad": Today I found this book review and interview by Joanna Scutts in the Edmonton Journal: On its surface, Glynnis MacNicol’s memoir seems simple, even mundane: a straight, single woman turns 40 and faces the challenge of defining herself and her life in the absence of marriage and children. As a successful journalist living in New York, MacNicol is aware of the privilege that has allowed her to find fulfillment in work and friendship rather than conventional domesticity. But as the title of her beguiling autobiography — “No One Tells You This” — suggests, MacNicol struggles with the many unknowns that lie ahead. If her story doesn’t end with marriage and children, she wonders, “could it even be called a story?”
For MacNicol, like so many other women, 40 looms large as the biological cutoff for having children. She dryly articulates the way single women in their late 30s come to think of their lives as “a shifting math problem,” an experiment in how little time can be allowed to elapse between meeting a man and having a baby (“married next week, and pregnant the next morning?”). Eventually, she admits, “there was no way to make the numbers add up.”
So the calculus shifts again: Is this something she really wants? MacNicol’s business partner, single at 41, chooses to have a baby by herself, while MacNicol’s sister, married with two young children, discovers she’s pregnant just as she and her husband separate.
Sitting alone in the early morning while she holds her sister’s newborn, MacNicol forces herself to confront the visceral appeal of a child with the murkier question of what her life would look like without one. That means taking her own life seriously, as the product of deliberate choice, “not simply a makeshift thing I’d constructed as a for-the-time-being existence.”
MacNicol chooses to mark her 40th birthday by spending it alone at a hipster motel in a Queens beach neighborhood. She buries her phone in her bag and reflects on the difference between her own looming fourth decade and her mother’s, who by that age was a married, stay-at-home mother of two young children.
MacNicol, meanwhile, is extricating herself from a relationship with a married man, while carrying on an intense text-message flirtation with an unidentified celebrity.
Drawing this contrast between her mother’s life and her own feels like a throwback to an older generation of feminist stories, of 1970s daughters rebelling against 1950s values, but it’s a reminder of how those domestic pressures linger.
MacNicol adopts a tone of affectionate awe when writing about the important women in her life, the friends whose lives have intertwined with hers from her early days in the city as a 20-something waitress. This chosen family offers her support and companionship, but also a glimpse of the way that stories can twist and rupture. MacNicol portrays her mother as an articulate, curious and highly educated woman who nevertheless chose an intensely domestic life, all but closed to the outside world except through books, and was shadowed by agoraphobia and her husband’s mental illness. Now struggling with Parkinson’s, which “whipped through her like a match on dry tinder,” MacNicol’s mother offers an object lesson that real lives are not as tidy as stories, and the endings we assign, happy or sad, aren’t really endings at all. Over the course of the year that the memoir chronicles, these expected endings are in turn “unveiled to reveal the worst-case scenario.” Being a witness to tragedy — divorce, illness, stillbirth — places a guilty kind of pressure on the single protagonist, who worries that she’s becoming an “emotional vampire, borrowing other people’s misfortune and challenges as my own.” This sense of living outside the charmed circle of the nuclear family is persistent, but MacNicol comes to realize that this circle is much less secure than she has believed.
Life at that slight remove, she learns, can be liberating. On a road trip that runs via a dude ranch in Wyoming, MacNicol finds herself so awed and inspired by the landscape that when she gets home she arranges to fly right back and stay for a month, reasoning that this is exactly the sort of adventure she is supposed to be having, in a life beholden to nobody else’s plans.
A young man with a motorbike offers a brief diversion, but he and the other men in the book, including an Icelandic tour guide and a boldly dishonest Tinder date, are not serious long-term romantic prospects. When there’s no clock ticking, MacNicol discovers, men become simply a source of pleasure. With that awareness comes power, the power of “furies and witches and sorceresses and harpies,” complete in themselves and in charge of their decisions.
There is undeniable luck and privilege in being able to shape one’s own story as a single woman, as MacNicol is careful to acknowledge. Still, it can be hard to feel grateful for our luck in the abstract, so MacNicol focuses instead on what it offers her: the opportunity, indeed the obligation, to choose the life she wants. And not just once, but over and over again.
My week:
Aug. 17, 2018 "Two teachers disciplined for humiliating students": Today I found this article by Janet French in the Edmonton Journal. This is really bad behavior. Here's an excerpt. You can read more of if you click on the link. After you read it, you may be angry, depressed and in a bad mood:
The Alberta Teachers’ Association recommended the education minister remove two men’s teaching certificates for humiliating students and making inappropriate comments, say two disciplinary decisions released on Tuesday.
An Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA) conduct committee last year stripped teacher David A. Wilson of his association membership for life, and recommended the education minister cancel his teaching certificate after he summoned a group of elementary school students to vote on whether they thought one of their classmates was a girl or a boy.
The committee found Wilson guilty of six counts of unprofessional conduct for transgressions at two unnamed schools, where he also told Hutterite students they were too fat, bossy and ugly to get married, and forced a 13-year-old girl to skip rope in front of the class while he stared at her chest.
4 comments:
Dec. 19, 2016 "Weeding the bad seeds away from your kids": Today I found this advice column by David Eddie in the Globe and Mail. I can't copy and paste it here, so I will summarize it:
It was about a woman who has an 8 yr old daughter who became friends with another girl. The friend has both her parents in prison and has "behavioral issues at school." She is living with other family. The friend asks her everyday for a play date. The mom says she doesn't feel comfortable sending her daughter there to play, so she let the friend come over. The friend was well mannered and a lovely guest. She is torn that this girl has a poor life situation, but don't want her daughter to have a bad influence.
Eddie says: You're doing the right thing by having the kid over to your house and not send your kid over to her house.
"But why not wait until she is somehow a bad influence and your kid's health or well-being or whatever else are under threat?
Then snap into mama-bear mode and do what it takes to protect your cub. Until then, though, I'd just relax, feed the kid milk and cookies and enjoy the company of a lovely and well-mannered kid- which is rare enough these days."
Aug. 20, 2018 Detox Your Life career edition: I signed up for it and listened to it today. It's a good and helpful talk about career and life. https://brittaaragon.com/events/dylce/terri-cole/ Lawn chair: I also went to Wal-Mart and bought a lawn chair for $20. Aug. 21, 2018 How to find joy in today's 'Gotta Have More' society:
Do you struggle with always wanting more?
Do you often find yourself never feeling satisfied?
Thanks to our spectacular guest Geneen Roth, this episode of the Dating Den will help you to find the satisfaction you seek through three simple principles: living in the present, appreciating the orindary things in life, and loving yourself for who you are.
Geneen is the author of ten books, including three New York Times best sellers. She holds retreats to help women across the nation with their body image issues. She’s been featured on the View, Oprah, the Today Show and more.
She is the Guru of Gratitude and the Siren of Satisfaction, and now she’s here in the den to start you on your path to fulfillment.
The highlight of the week: 1. Detox your life 2. Sitting on the lawn chair 3. Work 4. I saw Jurassic World on TV. |
