Hide & Seek - Book Review

Hide & Seek
A Neurotic's Hilarious Journey
by Wendy Aron

Let’s say that you have to go on a trip to a city in a foreign country. You’ve never been there and you don’t speak the language. It doesn’t matter whether you want to go or not; you have to go.

Now, you can take one companion with you and you’ve narrowed your choices down to three. First is your insanely rich grandfather. You love your grandfather and he loves you although you don’t have a lot in common. He’s promised that you will only have the finest on your trip – first class travel, the best hotels and meals in the finest restaurants.

Second is your brainy cousin. Again, you love your cousin and he loves you and you have as much in common with him as any two people of the same generation. The advantage here is that this cousin is a professor. He teaches the language and culture of the very same country where you are headed. In fact he goes there about once a year. He can pay his own way and promises to show you the most interesting and intellectually stimulating bits of the culture that you’ll be visiting for the first time.

Third is your friend. She makes you laugh.

Whom do you choose? It’d be a tough decision but I’m pretty sure that I’d take my friend.

This is Hide & Seek. I didn’t want to take this trip to Depression and I’m not particularly fond of being here. But reading this book is like being able to go there with my friend who makes me laugh.

Other books could tell me all of the different types of depression, what causes them and what treatments work. Of course we all read those books and they help a bit but a commiseratory laugh seems to help a heluva lot more.

Hide & Seek focuses on one year of Aron’s life in New York. The loose frame of the book is built when we learn that her therapist, upon whom she’s come to depend, might be moving to LA. Aron spends this year frantically trying all sorts of different solutions to losing such a valuable person in her life. She tries speed dating, assertiveness training, aromatherapy, etc. Each step in her journey is told in hilarious vignettes where she describes the bizarre solutions offered to her by even more bizarre people.

Aron’s had a rougher time of it than I have. My whiny little “mild” depression pales but when she says things like ‘we depressives react this way when that happens’ I can instantly identify. It’s nice laugh at depression with her; she lifts the darkness.

• Wendy Aron's Website


• Amazon Listing for Hide & Seek

Surviving Ben’s Suicide – Book Review

Surviving Ben’s Suicide
A Woman’s Journey of Self-Discovery
by C. Comfort Shields

Surviving, quite simply, is the story of a woman whose college boyfriend committed suicide. The narrative follows the story of Ben and Shields’s relationship, his growing depression and suicide, and how Shields spent years trying to make sense of it.

The story unfolds slowly as does the full picture of Ben’s mental struggle. In an almost ABAB pattern the chapters toggle back and forth across time over the bright line of his death. Time moves forward along each story line but the reader is left feeling jolted back and forth. It is a jarring effect but I’m not sure if it would be more enjoyable if it were written more linearly. The back and forth disallows the reader from settling comfortably into the story of young love or the healing at the end but it also provides some relief from the darkest parts of the tale.

But that’s technique; let’s talk about the meat of the book. There is no question that Ben suffered. If the fact that a healthy, intelligent man in his mid-twenties chose to kill himself doesn’t convince one the final chapters of Surviving make clear the severity of his emotional or mental problems.

It is also clear that Shields, the narrator, suffered. Not only did her lover and friend kill himself but just a few years before she had survived a bus accident that killed another close friend. The years of the late teens and early twenties when one is deciding what life will be is a bad time to deal with even one accidental death.

I found it difficult to connect with this book. I understood going in that it was about dealing with the suicide of a loved one but in the aftermath and even before Ben’s suicide Shields’s perspective seems to be the most important thing. Naturally this is intrinsic in a story told first-person but her preoccupation with how everything and everyone affected her is almost myopic. That’s not to say that Surviving isn’t a compelling read; it is. I’m only saying that Shields occasional preoccupation with how everything affected her is distracting. In my life it is far more likely that I’d be Ben rather than Shields so I suppose that this skewed my perspective a bit.

On the balance I’d have to say that I enjoyed reading this book. As Shields points out there is a definite stigma against suicide in our culture as well as a stigma against those who are “only” lovers and not married – something with which I’ve dealt. Surviving is certainly worth a read if you are seeking to understand suicide or inspiration for dealing with the death of a loved one.

You can check out some other reviews on Surviving Ben's Suicide's Amazon.com page.

a book I'm reading

It’s Saturday morning, about 6a. I’m the only one up. Usually my wife is up by now but she has to work a very long day on Fridays - 14 hours - so she deservedly sleeps in on Saturdays when she can.

I’m trudging through a book that is at the same time fascinating and frustrating. It’s one of the two that I mentioned earlier I plan to review for this blog. I’m always very torn when I don’t love a book which I’ve been given to review. First, the book was free so I feel like I owe someone a positive reveiw. Second the book was published and I have an idea of the incredible amount of work that went into doing so. Third, whether I like it or not, the writer has been judged on some level to be a better writer than myself - I haven’t published a book - so I have to wonder if I even had the right to not like it.

But I’m torn about this book for other reasons. It’s written in first person so to read it is to live in the writer’s head. I only point this out because with every page I am more and more annoyed with every character in the book, especially the narrator. Even so, I can’t help but be fascinated by the story and continually drawn to turn the page. On that level I have to admit that the book is a success.

I’m still not sure how I’m going to review it.

But that’s not what I wanted to write about. I wanted to write about an English teacher of mine who died during my junior year of high school. I’ll do that later. I’ve noticed that my entries here tend to ramble so I’m making a conscious effort to shorten them.

If I’m going to do that then I’d better stop this entry right now.

Upcoming Book Reviews

I forgot to mention that I've got a couple of book reviews coming up on this blog. Look for my review of Surviving Ben's Suicidelater this month and Hide & Seek: How I Laughed at Depression, Conquered My Fears and Found Happinesssome time in September.