Drink: The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol by Ann Dowsett Johnston (2014)

The reason I borrowed this book was fairly simple. It was a Friday night and I was stuck at work with no hope of leaving soon. To take a quick break I checked out my library’s “new to the library” ebook section and when I saw the title Drink while wishing I could leave my office and have one, it seemed serendipitous. However, after realising the subtitle was “The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol”, I wished my motivation had been a bit more intellectual and a bit less about wine…

Like High Sobriety by Jill Stark (which I loved, review here), Ann Dowsett Johnston is a heavy drinker whose writing of this book was inspired in part by her own problematic relationship with alcohol. A key difference between the two, however, is the age of these writers – Stark was on the cusp of 30 while Dowsett Johnston is closer to 60. This affects how they frame their narratives: for Stark, the concern is what she might become if she continues her current drinking pattern while Dowsett Johnston is an alcoholic who is no longer drinking.

Both of these books place drinking within a cultural context (for Stark, Scotland and Australia and for Dowsett Johnston, Canada and the US) and the personal experiences of their authors are supported by sociological research. The research that Dowsett Johnston presents is alarming. For example, there is a consistent increase in the amount of alcohol college students drink when they go to university. For the teenagers who have a drinking problem before they go to uni, this increase means that their drinking shifts from problematic to alcoholic while, for others, it encourages and normalises binge drinking and negative relationships with alcohol. This is definitely an issue that needs to be addressed but, as is discussed in the book, how to best do this?

Dowsett Johnston’s focus is on women and alcohol. In part, this is because women are the group of society whose drinking has increased the most over the last 30 years and in part because she herself is an alcoholic. Some of the connections between woman and alcohol noted in Drink are interesting; for example, that women drink because of the pressure to “have it all” caused by their increased presence in the workplace without a decrease in their responsibilities at home. She also identifies a common trend with female alcoholics: they often suffer abuse or trauma at a young age, start drinking in their teens and, as they grow up, their drinking becomes worse.

The way Dowsett Johnston discusses these two contributing factors is my biggest problem with the book. While I think it’s both valid and true to say that the “have it all” myth is incredibly damaging for women, I got the strong sense that Dowsett Johnston was blaming women for this being so rather than addressing the social and cultural gendered expectations of women that contribute to the creation and perpetration of the myth itself. After identifying the trauma-teenage drinking trend, Dowsett Johnston interviews many many many many women whose stories all follow the same trajectory. I’m not sure if it’s because she felt obliged to use every interview she got or if she thought her reader was a bit simple, but after the third interview in which a woman with glowing eyes and clear skin detailed the horrible things that were done to her and that she did herself before becoming sober, I felt both depressed and (as awful as this sounds) a bit bored.

Dowsett Johnston is an experienced journalist and a skilled writer. While this means the book is well written, easy to read and its arguments are presented persuasively, it is certainly not an unbiased book. After spending a considerable amount of words discussing the alcoholic behaviour of her mother and the women I mentioned above - some of whom Dowsett Johnston scorns for wanting to remain anonymous – the drinking that Dowsett Johnston says was so bad that it led to her leaving a job and her relationship breaking down is only coyly referred to, leading me to question why the drinking of others is fair game for discussion but hers is not. I also found very problematic the endorsement of Alcoholics Anonymous given the organisation’s religious agenda and past treatment of women. So, while Drink is an interesting book, I think High Sobriety is a more honest evaluation of the issues of alcohol and society and I think Stark, while a less skilful writer and journalist, is also much more fair and less judgemental than Dowsett Johnston.

Three stars.

Paris Letters by Janice MacLeod (2014)

There is a certain type of story which I love love love (love love). It involves a woman, usually a journalist or a writer, moving to Paris and falling in love, both with the city and with the man of her dreams. These stories always involve lots of cheese and bread, amusing descriptions of adapting to French life (the kitchens are so small! Women are so good at wearing scarves!) and, always, at the end there is a moment when the journalist/writer realises she is perfectly, truly happy. My favourite of these stories is Sarah Turnbull’s Almost French. The year it came out I got three copies of it for Christmas (and I kept all three, I loved it that much).  Paris Letters sits in that same literary subgenre, with one key difference: rather than being a journalist or novelist, Janice McLeod is a blogger. As I shall show you, that has a huge effect on the final product.

Janice McLeod works in advertising in Los Angeles. She has a good job and a nice house, but she’s just not happy. One day, sitting at her office, she starts to think – how much money would it take to quit her job and live in Paris for a year? She randomly picks the figure of $100 a day and she saves up $65,000, quits her job and moves to Paris.

I like the idea of everything McLeod writes about, but I found myself increasingly irritated by its execution. For example, she picks a figure of $100 a day as the necessary amount she needs to have to live overseas. It would have taken like 10 minutes to google the average costs of living in Europe, but instead she just picks a number that feels right to her. What’s more, after seeing how she went about saving this money, it felt to me like she was constructing her story so it would read well, rather than telling the truth. She says that she saved money by cutting back on expenses and selling her stuff, in the process decluttering her apartment. But then, in one paragraph at the very end of the chapter, she reveals that in fact she made a bit of money on the stock market with help from some friends. So, how much of the giant amount she was able to save – US $65,000 – came from actually saving and being frugal and how much from playing on the stock market?

She gets to Paris and meets a butcher and falls in love. She was a vegan in California, but once she gets to Paris she is just…not a vegan anymore. No explanation, but I was left with the strong impression that if a bunch of McLeod’s friends started jumping off a cliff, she wouldn’t hesitate in joining them. At this stage, I realised that there was something a bit strange about how this memoir was written and, when McLeod mentions she was blogging her experience, I realised what it was – the book is written like a series of really long blog posts. It has the overuse of the word “I” and the telescope-like focus on the self that is typical of much personal blog writing. Now this is not necessarily a bad thing – this writing style can be hugely popular, as the success of blogs such as McLeod’s illustrate – but it’s not just one I enjoy very much. I realised I had incorrectly placed Paris Letters in the “foreign woman moves to Paris” subgenre instead of the “adapted from a popular personal blog” subgenre. Once I realised that, I enjoyed the book a lot more because, instead of questioning motivation and causality (like unsurprisingly, $100 a day wasn’t enough to live on) I just rolled with it. It would have been a better book if the secondary characters had been fleshed out more or if MacLeod had at any stage acknowledges the privilege that allowed her to do the things she did, but it was as a book-from-blog memoir, it’s fine.

Three stars.

Meatless All Day: Recipes for Inspired Vegetarian Meals by Dina Cheney (2014)

Sometimes, you open a cookbook and think, "This is it. This is the perfect cookbook for me." (Please tell me I'm not the only one who does this!) Reading this book was one of those rare times that I felt that an author's tastes and mine were perfectly aligned and I wanted to make every thing in it that I could. Immediately. And I did, and it was delicious.

Divided into three sections (breakfast and brunch, lunch and light entrees and dinner), the focus of Meatless All Day is on creating meals which are tasty, substantial and meat free. It opens with a bunch of tips for how to make your meat-free ingredients more tasty (drain your tofu, people. It took me years to discover this and it has changed my stir-fry life) as well as a list of power ingredients that add a "meaty" flavour or texture (in this case, meaty means satisfying or fulfilling). Focusing on fresh, flavourful ingredients, none of these vegetarian recipes use any faux meat at all, which is great.

One of the things I liked most about this book was that although the recipes were complete meals, components of the recipes could be switched around. For example, there is a recipe for quinoa-polenta cakes with a roasted red pepper sauce and white bean puree but the sauce could be served with the zucchini fritters with fresh mint and pecorino instead and the bean puree with just about any of the mains. I like cookbooks that facilitate flexibility and allow me to play around with flavours and textures.

The recipes, while tasty, are often a bit time consuming and ingredient rich, so this is not a four-ingredients five-minutes-to-cook cookbook but the pay off is delicious, great-looking food. As always, I would have liked to see information on the recipe about what is suitable for freezing (the constant request of this lazy yet organised cook). That said, I wholeheartedly recommend this cookbook for vegetarians and meat-eaters alike.

Ricotta Hotcakes with strawberries and maple syrup.

In the book this recipe is served with a delicious looking berry sauce but cooking one component of a meal is all I can handle in the morning, so I served mine with fresh strawberries and maple syrup instead. These were delicious - light, fluffy and sweet with a gorgeous hit of lemon. I can see them becoming a regular dish in my weekend breakfast rotation.

3 large eggs, divided
2 cups 2% milk
1.5 cups part-skim ricotta cheese
1 tablespoon lemon zest
2.5 cups unbleached all purpose flouwer
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1/5 teaspoons course salt
1 teaspoon baking powder

Oil, for cooking

1. With a hand mixer, whip the egg whites until the form soft peaks.
2. In a large bowl, whisk the flour, sugar, salt and baking powder. In a medium bowl, mix yolks, milk, ricotta and lemon zest until well blended.
3. Stir in the egg-milk mixture into the dry ingredients and mix until just combined (don't over-mix). Gently fold in the egg whites.
4. Heat oil in a fry pan over medium heat. Use a quarter-cup measure to spoon pancakes into the pan. Flip when then puff up and form lots of tiny holes and remove from the pan when they are cooked the whole way through.
5. Eat!

An Affair to Remember: My Life with Cary Grant by Maureen Donaldson and William Royce (1990)

I recently discovered my newest favourite thing: OpenLibrary. It’s an online library where you can download copies of books for free for a limited amount of time. These books tend to be older books – probably to do with copyright and royalties and all of that stuff – so, not really a great resource for those who like reading the newest stuff. But for people like me who are fascinated with Old Hollywood and the stories it tells about itself, this database is a treasure-trove of literature I would never have been able to access otherwise. It is an amazing delight and proof of the wonderful place the Internet can be.

My first pick was predictable: a Cary Grant story (who else?). It was An Affair to Remember: My Life with Cary Grant by Maureen Donaldson and William Royce, a first-person account of the romance between rock journalist Maureen and an elderly Cary Grant. For those less familiar with the life and loves of Mr Grant than I, Maureen was his second-last relationship (his final was with wife Barbara, nee Harris). Donaldson and Grant were together for about four years but never married.

The story opens with Maureen meeting Dyan Cannon (Cary Grant’s fourth wife and the only one to have a child with him) at a cocktail party. They were both dressed in the same style and Dyan noted that it was a style that Grant had encouraged them to wear while they were with him. Maureen then states that although Grant made her promise to never write about their time together, since he’s dead and she met his ex-wife at a party (and, implied, that a publisher offered her lots and lots of money and the services of a ghostwriter), it was time for her to share the details of their relationship with the world. And share she did…in great detail!

Maureen and Cary met briefly at a function in Beverley Hills. Eight months later, he sees her smoking and says to her, “How can a woman as pretty as you be destroying her life by smoking a cigarette?” He promises to give her an interview if she quits smoking and he then charms her into going on a date with him, although he expresses his misgivings at dating someone as young as she was (Grant was thirteen years older than her father). She is instantly smitten and determined to convince him to go out with her. She succeeds, and the rest is history – or, history as written here. This book is heavily dialogue-based, with Maureen transcribing conversations she had with Cary Grant. Given how unreliable memory is, I strongly recommend reading each of these exchanges with a grain (or bucket) of salt.

Maureen then outlines the (very) specifics of their relationship. Some of the stuff has been covered extensively before, like Cary Grant being both a tight-arse who saved the rubber bands from his daily paper and kept track of the number of toilet paper rolls used but also an incredibly generous person, buying expensive gifts for those he loved and appreciated. He wore women’s underwear because they were more comfortable and easy to wash than men’s underwear. But, the book also contained some new information. For example, Cary Grant was not the most well-endowed man Maureen had ever seen but was a wonderful lover who laughed every time he orgasmed. He was not affectionate and only wanted to have sex once or twice a week but, at least at the start of their relationship, was seeing four women at the same time (four to eight times a week is pretty impressive for a man in his seventies!). According to the picture Maureen paints of him, Grant was profoundly insecure yet very confident in the way that only a world-famous movie star can be – a living bundle of contradictions who was both difficult to live with and love but at the same time completely, totally irresistible.

One of my favourite things about classical Hollywood cinema is never having to watch a sex scene. I like seeing beautiful human beings in a state of dishabille as much as the next person but I’m happy with a fantasy world than ends on a fade-to-black (or, as in North by Northwest, a train entering in a tunnel). I’m not sure I’m ready for stories about Cary Grant getting kinky with some stones he’s picked up from the beach. It’s also hard not to feel like a voyeur when reading this book, especially since, as Maureen tells us repeatedly, Cary Grant was an intensely private person who did not want his personal details shared. I can’t help but feel if you loved someone as much as Maureen says she loved Cary, you’d respect their wishes even after they died. But then, I did borrow and enjoy reading this book, so I suppose I’m complicit in this whole celebrity-gossip cycle.

The relationship ends because Maureen meets and falls in love with a much younger man and/or because Cary Grant starts seeing Barbara Harris (the timeline of events is never made clear. My suspicion is that the latter event preceded the first.). After their break-up, Cary and Maureen stayed friends and remained in contact until he died, at which point she wrote this book. The market for Cary Grant books remains strong, with biographies Grant’s daughter Jennifer and Grant’s ex-wife Dyan Cannon all released over the last four years. Maureen Donaldson claims this story is “the truth”, but it’s really just another piece in the complex, entertaining, irresistable Cary Grant life puzzle.

Love Italian style by Melissa Gorga (2013)

Love Italian style: The Secrets of my Hot and Happy Marriage is not just a bad book – it’s a terrible book. It’s really, truly dreadful, but not in a car crash kind of way – in an awful “Should we call the police? kind of way. Let me explain what I mean.

As I may have mentioned before, I love reading celebrity novels, memoirs, cookbooks – any longform literary printing. Slap a celebrity name on the cover somewhere and I am there, credit card ready. Love Italian style is from Real Housewives of New Jersey alum Melissa Gorga and fits the trash-read bill perfectly. For those unfamiliar with Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise, it’s a cable TV series that focus on wealthy women behaving badly. The most recent series I’ve seen centres on the ongoing drama between Teresa Guidice and her brother and his wife, Joe and Melissa Gorga. You see, Teresa, her husband “Juicy” Joe and her brother Joe used to be best friends but then Melissa came along and stole Joe away. There’s been tables flipped, punches thrown at christenings, the whole family-drama works. Teresa Guidice’s cookbook Skinny Italian was very successful (and, apart from the random chapter on makeup, surprisingly full of really good recipes. Everything I’ve made from it is delicious), so it was only a matter of time before Melissa released one of her own. This is that book.

When Melissa was young, her father was the most important man in her life. Girls were horrible to her because she was so gorgeous and good at things (something about varsity cheerleading? I don’t speak American high school). She even got beaten up for her suspected promiscuous ways (she wasn’t promiscuous! She was a virgin! A woman’s virginity is precious and a gift to her husband). But she always had her dad to rely on…until he was killed in a single-car crash and she and her mother found out he’d lost all of their money. Melissa’s college fund was gone and her mother needed to go to work to support them. Oh, and by the way he was a serial adulterer who would leave the family without notice for weeks at a time when he wanted to “run wild”. What a great man.

Melissa’s giant teenage ego aside, that’s actually a really sad story. Melissa’s family friend volunteered to pay for her tuition so she was able to go to college but she had to work three jobs to cover her rent and living expenses. That must have been hard for her, so good on her for working hard to get an education. Then, while waitressing in one of her three jobs, she met Joe. Five months later they were engaged and five months after that they were married. Then the problems started.

Firstly, Joe didn’t want his wife to work. He believes it’s a woman’s role to cook and clean for her husband. He works hard, he wants a hot wife to rush to the door when he arrives home before serving him a home-cooked meal just like the ones his mother cooked for him (she took lessons from his mother so her food would literally be the exactly same). So, despite how hard she worked to get a degree, despite what happened to her and her mother when her father died leaving them penniless, Melissa doesn’t work. Not a good start. Also, if you were hot when he married you and you stop being hot by getting fat or frumpy, don't be offended when your husband tells you so - he's not being a dick, he's helping you. It's because he loves you so very very much. I think I need a shower.

Then, Joe starts becoming a bit more prescriptive about what he wants his wife to do. He doesn’t like her to talk to people at parties. He doesn’t like her to see her single friends. In fact, he doesn't want her to socialise at all if he's not there. He wants her to wear a wedding ring (she’s his property) but doesn’t wear one himself. He doesn’t let her spend the night away from home without him – he doesn’t like her to spend time away from home at all. So Melissa doesn’t. He’s her king, she does what he says. The relationship as described is not only not healthy, it’s abusive – Joe is controlling, dominating and occasionally violent.

The more I read this book the more disturbed I was by what I was reading. Melissa lists the actions she takes to avoid her husband’s anger. She has sex with him every day, even if she doesn’t feel like it, because when he gets angry he throws chairs and not having sex makes him angry (he calls sex “getting the poison out”. Romantic, right?). Her relationship to marital sex and fidelity is horrific. If you have bad news to give your husband, have sex with him first and then he won’t mind as much. And if you don’t have sex with him, the consequences are dire. She says, “Refusing to initiate is a Top Three reason men cheat. The ugliest girl in the world could come on to a man in that state of mind, and he might have to go for it. He thinks, At least someone wants me.” (side note, these are direct quotes from the books. The random caps and italics are in the original.) Who even thinks this way, let alone puts those thoughts on paper and publishes them?

I made it to p64 and then I had to stop (although I admit I did flick through the rest because I felt bad writing a review for a book I’d only read a third of). I recognise that this book may not be an accurate picture of the Gorgas’ relationship. Maybe it’s the story the publisher thought would sell best. That this book got published at all is really disturbing. I hope if any of it is true, then Melissa’s friends and family get her the help she needs. And even if it’s not, people need to stop reading, buying and borrowing this book.

One final thing – how pissed off would you be if you were Melissa’s mum right now? You raised her, went back to work to support her once your deadbeat husband who lost all of your money and screwed around on you died, and he gets the book dedication?