edwards-grover

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/connect-end-career-martha-grover/"></div>When historians write about the last 20 years of publishing, they will surely note the ascendance of the memoir as a newly popular mode of long-form narrative. Starting with groundbreaking titles in the late 1990s by Dave Eggers, Mary Karr, and Frank McCourt, and continuing through artistically vital and popular works by Elizabeth Gilbert, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Roxane Gay, the memoir has come to replace the novel in many readers&#8217; hearts. Or maybe just my heart. As a devoted reader of novels for the past few decades, I&#8217;m more than a little flummoxed by my recently developed tendency to skip over the novels in my to-read pile in favor of memoirs. These latter works strike me as more intimate — in a 21st century, Facebook-kind-of-way — than their fictional brethren, and I&#8217;m more likely to steal time from other aspects of my life to delve deeply into them. One title in particular, The End of my Career by Martha Grover, from Perfect Day press, serves as case-in-point.
Central to the appeal of this memoir — though I had to search out the publisher online to find it labeled as such — are Grover&#8217;s very relatable travails as she navigates her way through early adulthood, passing through college, roommates, romance, and professions. The “career” in the title refers to her time as a house cleaner, and this vantage provides Grover her most ready angle for insight. “All of my clients, even the very tidy ones, were constantly apologizing for their mess, however small. Clean people hire housecleaners, not slobs. Slobs don&#8217;t care.” Such windows into souls — both the slobs&#8217; and the writer&#8217;s — are what I&#8217;ve come to expect from novels, and what turned me on to reading in the first place. That a memoir gets me there instead is fine with me.
Grover&#8217;s memoir recounts her post-college years as she explores how a sensitive, imperfect soul such as herself might create a life worth living. Along the way, readers bear witness to her realizations about her relationship to the world. For example, when her and her father lucked into a lavish cruise to British Columbia, Grover was struck by her first interaction with aliens, also known as rich people. “I&#8217;d no real perspective of wealth, having grown up sheltered, in a small Oregon town, not realizing that my childhood had been spent at the desperate edges of the lower middle class, on and off food stamps and unemployment.” In these moments, I relate strongly to Grover&#8217;s shifting worldview. Further adjustments are necessary after she encounters bad doctors, brain-dead jobs, oblivious bosses, creepy boyfriends, and just plain creeps. This cast of characters is filtered through Grover&#8217;s sensibility, and through her I feel like I know them.
Grover&#8217;s relationship with her father, a luckless electrician constantly in and out of employment, is one of the most compelling elements of the story. Grover&#8217;s love for him doesn&#8217;t preclude her being embarrassed by him, like when he all too easily reveals his credulity to Brazilian passengers on the cruise (“Wow. Brazil. That&#8217;s amazing!”) He can also drive her crazy, like when she attempts to kindle in him the basics of a 21st century understanding.
I ask my father to read an article about male entitlement and emotional labor.
“Can you just tell me what it says?” he says.
This passage is also representative of Grover&#8217;s humor, with its feminist edge often swimming just below the punch line. It doesn&#8217;t require a particularly close read to guess this guy has skipped out on his share of emotional labor.
Grover is a native of Portland, Oregon — also my stomping grounds — and its surroundings, and the changes to this area over the past decade take up prominent position in many of the chapters. The successful branding of this city as a cheap, quirky alternative to major Left Coast enclaves has predictably raised prices, sending many who made—and make—it special to its fringes. I too have witnessed the soul being sucked from our town, and also like Grover, from the vantage of a less-than-tony suburb. There&#8217;s a sense from these pages that Grover&#8217;s career isn&#8217;t the only thing ending, and her tale serves as a fond remembrance of a now disappearing place that so willingly let her wander, make mistakes, find herself.
Not that such direct knowledge of the setting is necessary to get something from her story. Grover&#8217;s interests and observations, such as the moral compromises of day jobs and the impact of escalating housing prices, are universal, and her willingness to tell the truth to herself and others encourages an intimate relationship with her readers no matter where they live. That is also the reason it doesn&#8217;t matter whether this work is a novel or a memoir. Grover&#8217;s ability to engage her reader trumps any categorization of her prose. She&#8217;s playing an entirely different game, one that only requires the author to connect.
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Only Connect: On The End of My Career by Martha Grover

Only Connect: On The End of My Career by Martha Grover

earthquake

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/can-relax-chiara-barzinis-things-happened-earthquake/"></div>In Things that Happened Before the Earthquake, you won&#8217;t find pages-long excursions about the texture of the carpet under the main character Eugenia&#8217;s feet, or details on the exact grain of the wood paneling in a Topanga Canyon cabin, or whatever thread a lesser writer might get stuck on her tongue and drag the reader along in her attempts to spit it out. Chiara Barzini’s prose feels like conversation. You also shouldn&#8217;t assume from this that the author is one of those social networking denizens who managed to turn her penchant for frank online talk into a book-length manuscript, because that&#8217;s even further from the truth. The effect of Barzini&#8217;s prose hearkens back to a more open era — maybe the 1990s, the novel&#8217;s setting — when books felt more like long exchanges between friends (magically, since the exchange was one-sided), and the reader&#8217;s only job was to sit back and empathize. I won&#8217;t bludgeon you with my approach or waste your time, the prose implies. You can relax. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/can-relax-chiara-barzinis-things-happened-earthquake/#more-5043" class="more-link">Read more</a>
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You Can Relax Into Chiara Barzini&#8217;s Things that Happened Before the Earthquake

You Can Relax Into Chiara Barzini&#8217;s Things that Happened Before the Earthquake

God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

Art Edwards’s reviews currently appear at Los Angeles Review of Books, Book and Film Globe, and The Kenyon Review. His recently finished novel is called Nineteen Ways to Destroy Your Rock Band.

Art Edwards

All the Eternal Questions: On Meghan O’Gieblyn’s “God, Human, Animal, Machine”

"The older one grows, the more one likes indecency." — Virginia Woolf

Memoir &amp; Essay

That Old Country Music

Romance as the New Literary: On Kevin Barry’s “That Old Country Music”

"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." — Mark Twain

Fiction

Inheritors

Diaspora Among the Ruins: On Asako Serizawa’s “Inheritors”

The Body Double

Convincing Fake: On Emily Beyda’s “The Body Double”

"The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter, eh?" — Dashiell Hammett

Noir

The Nickel Boys

The Carrot and the Stick: On Colson Whitehead’s “The Nickel Boys”

My Sister, the Serial Killer

Sister Act: On “My Sister, the Serial Killer” by Oyinkan Braithwaite

"For a long time now I haven't been I."
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Around the World

Art Edwards’s reviews currently appear at Los Angeles Review of Books, Book and Film Globe, and The Kenyon Review. His recently finished novel is called Nineteen Ways to Destroy Your Rock Band.