Today on Omnivoracious, we're delighted to launch a month-long weekly advice column by Augusten Burroughs, who makes his move from memoirist to self-help strategist with This Is How (available May 8). He starts by answering a frustrated plea from a mom whose husband's foot-dragging makes the whole family cranky. Then he digs into the deeper reasons a "well known, happy, funny, kind, 25 year old" may have been dumped by their best friend.
My husband, the father of our two teenaged sons, works from home as a project manager for a large international corporation. During any given day, our lives will require that someone make a foray out of the house for band practice, food, lessons, doctors appointments, etc. Most of our outings are appointments where we are paying someone money for an actual unit of their time to be dispensed at an agreed up time.
This is the problem. My husband many, maybe even most times, in full knowledge of the rapidly looming time commitment, fires up a phone call, starts an email, sits down for a long personal moment in the bathroom. The rest of us are left seething until he presents himself ready to go. We now leave at the last possible minute, all cranky and out of sorts. If cars and traffic and every other variable aren't perfect, my husband's choices have left us NO wiggle room.
It's simply awful. I have tried to talk to him about it just because it angers me, but also because I don't think it sets the greatest example for our teens. Just the miasma of furor and unsaid words is poor parenting, I think.
What do we do? He has to be involved—so we need a way to get through to him. It's enough to drive me back to drink, which is a country I'm not welcome in any longer. Help. -- Cate
Dear Cate,
I wish I knew even more. Does your husband’s differing degree of respect for punctuality result in real-world problems? Do you end up being late frequently and missing scheduled appointments you’ve already paid for? Or do you pretty much always make it, but it was just so close you aged like a month from the stress of it?
If the answer is the former, I have more questions. Is your relationship healthy and strong and good in other areas? If you’re talking to him about this, that at least tells me the two of you do communicate to some degree, right? Because if you and your husband are a good pair and the family is working, this might be like when you buy something you truly, deeply love at the store and when you get home, you realize there are extra hidden costs: it doesn’t come with batteries, you need a subscription, you can’t wear it until you have electrolysis, whatever. And as annoying as this can be, if you’re otherwise happy, sometimes you just have to fork over the extra.
It could also be that you and your husband are equally matc
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Exactly 49 pages into this remarkable novel, I set it in my lap and thought, “(Expletive), this guy is good.” I wrote those words in the margin. And a few pages later I took a photo of the book and tweeted it, along with the same expletive and sentiment, before rejoining Billy Lynn and his fellow Bravo squad mates during one day of their bizarre Victory Tour, set mostly during a Thanksgiving Day football game at Texas Stadium.
Billy & Co. have become heroes thanks to an embedded Fox News crew’s footage of their firefight against Iraqi insurgents. Incongruously, they’re now being wooed by Hollywood producers, falling for Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, and sharing a stage at halftime with Beyonce. Guzzling Jack and Cokes and scuffling with fans, the Bravos are conflicted soldiers, and reluctant heroes. “Okay, so maybe they aren’t the greatest generation,” writes debut author (!) Ben Fountain, who manages a sly feat: giving us a maddening and believable cast of diverse characters who make us feel what it must be like to go to--and return from--war. Veering from euphoria to dread to hope, Billy Lynn is a brilliantly crafted and propulsive story that feels real and true. With fierce and fearless writing, Fountain is a writer worth every expletive and tweet about to come his way.
It also says a lot that our editors selected Billy Lynn ahead of beautiful new novels from two masters, John Irving and Toni Morrison; a Georgetown professor's story of climbing the world's highest peaks and surfing every ocean, only to finally wonder, why?; unexpectedly useful advice from Augusten Burroughs; and the Shakespearean fourth installment in Robert Caro’s epic biography of Lyndon B. Johnson.
Rounding out our top 10 Best Books of the Month for May:
- In One Person, by John Irving
- Home, by Toni Morrison
- The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, by Robert A. Caro
- An Uncommon Education, by Elizabeth Percer
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Before moving to Seattle I had spent six years in the mountains of western North Carolina, in a hippie-artsy-literary town that Rolling Stone once called Freakville, U.S.A. So it's been a treat to read two great books published this month that happen to have strong ties to my former home town of Asheville, N.C.*
Ron Rash's The Cove, selected as our top Best Books of the Month pick for May, is set during World War I in Mars Hill, just north of Asheville. It's a taut and hanting story about trust and small-town mistrust, and an unlikely love story. And then there's former Ashevillian Wiley Cash's debut, A Land More Kind Than Home, one of our top 10 fiction picks. It takes place in Marshall, another town north of Asheville, where a young boy and his brother must cope with a dangerous secret.
Both books give off a musky scent of dread and darkness, which is what I love about the best of southern writing. The past is always ghosting in the shadows--the Civil War, slavery, moonshine. But at the core of each book is love of family, love of the land, a clear sense of home.
I reached out to both authors to ask a handful questions. Ron's answers are below, and we'll post Wiley's answers this weekend.
In The Cove, the land is very much a character. How/why is the land and its history important to your writing?
Landscape is always a major character in my work because such an emphasis allows the reader to enter the fictional world more fully and, also, understand how the locale affects the characters’ lives both physically and psychologically. In The Cove I hoped to do more--to depict landscape as destiny. Laurel Shelton’s attempts to transcend her dark place in the world, if not literally then through her imagination, is what makes her heroic.
There’s both a timelessness and a timeliness to The Cove (xenophobia, patriotism, fear of the “enemy”)? Was that intentional?
Yes, I wanted to The Cove to resonate with contemporary concerns. “Tell the truth but tell it slant,” Emily Dickenson says, and that is something I wanted to do, for the reader to be reading along and suddenly, or perhaps not so suddenly, realize the connection. I wanted to address who is and who is not a patriot, in 1918 as well as in 2012, especially in light of those who advocate wars and those who end up doing the actual killing and dying. In the past as in the present, an inordinate number of those who end up doing the fighting are from Appalachia.
Favorite writer? Favorite book?
Picking a favorite writer is always a challenge. As far as novelists, I would have to choose Dostoyevsky because of the impact of Crime and Punishment. I first read the novel when I was fifteen and it was as intense as any reading experience I’ve ever had. For the first time in my life, I felt that I had not entered a book but instead the book had entered me. I go back to Crime and Punis
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The author of Serena is back with this "murky and deliberate" novel that "solidifies Rash as master of modern Southern Gothic," as our reviewer Jon Foro puts it. Set in an Appalachian town during World War I, The Cove feels both timeless and timely, a story about patriotism run amok and fear of the outsider. It is also a bittersweet love story crossed with a mystery. Whose skull is that in the well? "Ron Rash washes this novel's languid spaces with bucketfuls of atmospheric dread, pushing his characters into the currents of their fate with determined empathy," Foro says.
Watch this space in the coming days for an exclusive interview with Rash, and other exclusive content--interviews, excerpts, and photos--from the authors of April's best books.
In the meantime, the rest of out Best Books of the Month are filled with unique characters, both real and fictional--a hospitalized mother and daughter (Afterwards), a civic leader with dark secrets, a man in pursuit of perfect health, as well as ex-presidents, ornithologists, and eccentric creators and artists (Magic Hours). But what really ties this list together is the compelling sense of place, from a dark and lonely Appalachian valley (The Cove) to New Orleans and then the Korean War (The Coldest Night) to Seattle during the 1962 World's Fair (Truth Like the Sun) to a miniaturized Promised Land in the bedroom of a magical little girl (The Land of Decoration).
Learn more about all of April's Best Books of the Month, including new paperback releases, top kids and teens picks, and Editors' picks in categories like Biography & Memoir, Nonfiction, and Romance.
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Beer and beef, wine and chocolate, butter and olive oil - all the good stuff is properly represented among the nominees for the annual James Beard Foundation awards, which are given to cookbook authors, food writers, and chefs in numerous categories. The nominees announced today include three of Amazon's Best Books of the Month picks from 2011, including Blood, Bones & Butter, chosen as one of our Best Books of the Year.
American Cooking
- A New Turn in the South: Southern Flavors Reinvented for Your Kitchen, by Hugh Acheson
- American Flavor, by Andrew Carmellini and Gwen Hyman
- Masala Farm: Stories and Recipes from an Uncommon Life in the Country, by Suvir Saran with Raquel Pelzel and Charlie Burd
Cooking from a Professional Point of View
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The Art of Living According to Joe Beef: A Cookbook of Sorts, by Meredith Erickson, David McMillan, and Frédéric Morin
- Eleven Madison Park: The Cookbook, by Daniel Humm and Will Guidara
- Modernist Cuisine, by Nathan Myhrvold with Chris Young and Maxime Bilet
Baking and Dessert
- Baking Style: Art, Craft, Recipes, by Lisa Yockelson
- Cooking with Chocolate: Essential Recipes and Techniques, edited by Frédéric Bau
- Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home, by Jeni Britton Bauer