Midlife Crisis Bingo Recap: Spring Chicken

I hope you all had a good Groundhog Day. I sure did. I appreciate the fact that so many of you were inspired to send me groundhog related photos and videos, though that means that you were screwing around on the internet rather than reading. Put down your phone (after reading this post, of course), and pick up your book!

 

It’s time for us to begin our 2021 Midlife Crisis Bingo wrap-up. As promised, I will share my recently completed Bingo card. I wrestled a bit with how to do this wrap-up, and I’ve decided to do many short posts rather than just a few expansive ones. I wouldn’t want us to have to strain our eyes or to stop looking at TikTok for too long. Today’s post is the first one on my card: Spring Chicken.

 

The category description: Kids these days are fresh and creative, and they help you solve your problems connecting to the internet. The world is in good hands. Read a book by an author younger than you are. (For many of us, this should be an easy task!)

 

Doesn’t it bug you just a little bit when you see young people getting their writing done and getting published and acquiring literary fame and fortune? I am bugged. And I get just a little judgy. I mean, what do these youngsters really have to say?

 

It turns out that they have quite a lot to say. For this square, I read Beautiful Country, a memoir by Qian Julie Wang. Wang details her years as an undocumented Chinese child in New York City in the 1990s. It is a visceral account of deep poverty, hunger, illness without insurance, experiences in American public schools, threats, aspiration, defeat, and resilience. If you’re one of those people who is drawn to stories about the power of books and reading, you’ll find that theme here. Wang’s reading life plays a big part in her development.

 

I generally don’t love memoirs by very young people because of my aforementioned judginess, but I thought this one was terrific.  I was an adult in the 1990s and remember the decade well, so it was interesting to think about this child’s experiences in parallel time.

 

Feeling like you have missed your moment is a hallmark of a good midlife crisis. So in a way, being jealous of younger writers makes me a success in midlife crisis-ing. Win! For fun, I just searched for people who published their first book after 50, and here are some notable ones: Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep), Frank McCourt (Angela’s Ashes), and Anna Sewell (Black Beauty). And here’s a fun 2018 article from LitHub on “late bloomers.”

Speaking of being older than very accomplished people, I have been watching the Olympics this week while eating Pringles on the couch. I find myself looking at the parents of the athletes and recognizing my generation there. Hello, peers! Those lessons you dragged your children to in 2010 have really paid off. My kids were very busy assembling trash into works of art at that time. Too bad there's not a gold medal for freestyle mess making. 

 

Also, a note to the 30-year-old athletes that the announcers keep burying (“It’s the end of the road for him!”), you do have many more years of good times left. Don’t worry.

Bingo Questions Answered! Plus, Reading Update From the Empty Nest

 

 

Hello, February!

 

I wanted to update you all on my progress through my midlife crisis. Both of my children departed the nest last month and journeyed to their sub-optimal Covid-era college situations. That’s right – my nest has no tiny birds in it anymore! Most of the time, I am happy to celebrate my lack of responsibility by having potato chips and bourbon for dinner while watching movies from the 80s. Also, Midlife Crisis Bingo has helped. 

 

 

Speaking of which, I appreciate that so many of you are Bingo-curious! Many of you have contacted me in an effort to clarify the rules. Here are a few examples:

 

1)    Can I read cookbooks?

2)    Can I read children’s literature?

3)    Can I read comic books?

4)    Can I read art books?

5)    Can I read sports books?

6)    Can I read really short books?

 

My answer to all of these things is YES! Read whatever the heck you want. Everything goes. There is no such thing as the Bingo Police. 

 

But hold up, my life partner just told me that I am a liar. When he asked me if he could read one book this year and put it in every single square, I said no. “Isn’t that a rule?” he asked, smugly. I have since made a set of punitive rules specifically for him. Moreover, I am making him fill out a nightly reading log and do a plot summary of each book he reads if he wants to get an A in Bingo. 

 

For the rest of you, I want to show you how most things that I read will naturally find their way to a square, especially in these early months. Here are the books I read in January. I will show you which squares (descriptions of squares are here) they could possibly inhabit. 

 

You can print this card here

 

Eat a Peach by David Chang: This is a memoir by the creator of the Momofuku restaurant in NYC. He discusses a variety of things, including what it’s like to be an Asian American restaurant chef in a historically white arena; the role of creativity in the restaurant business; and his own struggles with mental illness. Squares where this book could work for me: Spring Chicken; Hero and Sidekick; Free to Be You and Me; Life Unlike Your Own; Delicious; Truth Be Told.

One Grave Too Many by Beverly Connor: I have been kvetching a bit about reading too many books with too little plot, so I decided to have a plot sundae with all the toppings. I have a soft spot for police procedurals with female forensic detectives at the helm, and I found an old series that is new to me! This is the first book in the series. The main character is a specialist in mass graves who decides to exchange that depressing career for a gentler one in a natural history museum. Murdered bodies turn up anyway. Good times! Squares where this book could work for me: Free to Be You and Me; Most Comfortable Sweatpants; Get a Clue.

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu: This book won the 2020 National Book Award. Most of the narrative is in the form of a screenplay. The main character, Willis Wu, is an actor of Taiwanese descent. He is limited by the very few roles available to Asian and Asian American actors, roles that blur ethnicities into stereotypes. Underneath the story about film roles is the story about the actual roles that immigrants from Asian countries and Asian Americans fill in American society and the ways that structural racism constrains those roles. Squares where this book could work for me: Spring Chicken; Made It Big; Free to Be You and Me; Life Unlike Your Own; Hot Topic. 

 

The Year of Living Danishly: My Twelve Months of Unearthing the Secrets of the World’s Happiest Country by Helen Russell: This British author and her husband move for a year to a seaside house in rural Denmark and contemplate why the people they meet claim to be so happy. They encounter all sorts of unfamiliar and kooky Danish traditions. She also finds herself confronting the deep and vast state reach into its citizens' lives -- which is so supportive (education; health care; work/life balance promotion) and also constraining (taxes; rules). Squares where this book could work for me: Spring Chicken; The Great Escape; Long Trip; Free to Be You and Me; Life Unlike Your Own; I Wonder; Side Splitter.

 

Oona Out of Order by Margarita Montimore: This is a light, breezy version of a time travel novel. In it, the main character lives her life jumping between years, all out of order. You could go deep and ask questions about whether you’d want to change events if you already knew the outcome, or you could just let easy books stay easy. Squares where this book could work for me: Spring Chicken; Out of Time; Free to Be You and Me. 

 

Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie: This novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985, and I first read it in 1993. So this was a second go-round for me. The story focuses on two American professors as they embark on a sabbatical in London. It’s about roles and faking and hiding and acting and obscuring and crafting an image of yourself based on expectations. Squares where this book could work for me: Long Trip; Made It Big; Free to Be You and Me; Always Meant To.

 

The Magical Language of Others by E.J. Koh: This was an intensely powerful memoir of a Korean American young woman whose parents left her to fend for herself at age 14. She connects her personal experience of this trauma with the long history of trauma of her female relatives in Korea. This history alternates with actual letters her mother sent her during their separation. The letters are in multiple languages, and she explains how translation became part of her sense-making of her place in her own story. Squares where this book could work for me: Spring Chicken; Might Sting a Little; Free to Be You and Me; Truth Be Told.

See how easy Bingo is? Don’t overthink it. Just play! Please tell us about what you’re reading and which square(s) the book might fulfill. 

 

I will end by sharing one final question from a reader: What do I get if I do this? 

 

First of all, I appreciate your mercenary approach to Bingo. I’m guessing you want a pony. Unfortunately, I can’t afford postage on a pony. But if you play along, you might get some good conversation. You might make a new friend. You’ll get some camaraderie during a time of isolation. And one lucky whole-card-finishing participant will win a book at the end of the year. It might even be a book about ponies.

Review of Yes Please by Amy Poehler

I don’t read a lot of celebrity memoirs, because I generally don’t find celebrities all that interesting. I also chafe a bit when people write memoirs before they are old. (As a side note, when my kids were in fifth grade, they had to write memoirs.  Imagine an eleven-year-old writing, “Back when I was young…”).

That said, Amy Poehler’s memoir, Yes Please, came pretty highly recommended, and I needed a good laugh this week. I figured that it would be something like Tina Fey’s Bossypants, which I found funny and political. Those two women are certainly funny and political when they’re together.

The strange thing was that I don't think Poehler’s book is especially funny. But it isn't unpleasant either. In fact, what I appreciate most about it is her description of the creative life.  A good chunk of the first part of the book involves a discussion about how hard writing a book is. And a good chunk of the rest of it involves a discussion about what doing improv is like. If you’re wondering what’s involved in the artistic process of a comedy actor/writer, there’s something for you here.

I do think that there is a lot of filler. The parts about her childhood friends and even the parts about her own children distract a bit from the stories about her career, which are the heart of this project. I wonder if the framework of memoir made it so that she felt pressure to talk about all facets of her life, or if her editors pressured her to add in different kinds of life stories. I found myself wishing that the whole project were tighter.

But, ultimately, this book passed the time well.  It would be good for a plane ride or a lazy day by the pool. I wasn’t moved or changed by reading it, but I’m not sure that really matters in the end. It’s a celebrity memoir, after all.