{"id":34,"date":"2010-05-04T08:18:00","date_gmt":"2010-05-04T08:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/thinplaces\/2010\/05\/penelope-ayers-updates-and-reviews.html"},"modified":"2010-05-04T08:18:00","modified_gmt":"2010-05-04T08:18:00","slug":"penelope-ayers-updates-and-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/2010\/05\/penelope-ayers-updates-and-reviews.html","title":{"rendered":"Penelope Ayers Updates and Reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Penelope Ayers<\/i> is now available on Kindle<\/a>. Unfortunately, the Kindle edition is not in the same place as the paperback<\/a>. Go figure (and if any of you are tech savvy and know how to fix this discrepancy, please comment!).<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
And to read a new review, and get introduced to an interesting blog (Holy Vernacular!) click here<\/a>.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
I also realized that I’ve never published here an old review of Penelope Ayers<\/i> that originally appeared on the website of the Lawrenceville School<\/a>:<\/div>\n
\n

Anyone who is even mildly drawn to those old subjects like life and death, duty and desire, God and family, or to more currently popular dyads like cancer and crisis or conscience and career, should read Penelope Ayers: A Memoir<\/i> by Amy Julia Becker. The book tells the story of the last years of a tragic and intriguing woman who faces an inescapably premature death. The book\u2019s formal shape is a memoir, and our author\/narrator is always present \u2013 keen-eyed, chatty, curious, needy, dutiful, and funny. Her own struggle and development as a person\/character is the primary vehicle of the book\u2019s narrative power.<\/p>\n

The story briskly hop-scotches its way through the clinical nightmares of an unfolding terminal disease: CAT scans, PET scans, surgeries, alpha-fetoprotein tumor markers, specialists, diagnoses, misdiagnosis, and the slow degradation of a human body. All the way, this grim decline is entwined in a rich back-story of a large, complex and conflicted New Orleans family that would, I believe, reassure the likes of Tennessee Williams that his, and <\/span>America\u2019s, flagship \u201cthird-world\u201d city hasn\u2019t been completely lost to the good-intentioned social engineers of post-Katrina relief squads. These people drink, dress-up, smoke and emote, and say things such as, \u201cI\u2019d rather not know that my break tags have expired.\u201d (The reader has to provide the Blanche DuBois drawl.)<\/span><\/p>\n

The book\u2019s cover, an old society flash photo of a catalytically gorgeous woman sceptred and dressed in the ceremonial gown of a Mardi Gras queen, casts an eerie shadow across the story. Was she even then a sort of sacrifice? Yet things never get slushy or self-obsessed, as they easily might. Perhaps that\u2019s because the narrator, Amy Julia, whose connection to the story is as the young bride of the unfortunate son of the dying woman, is an outsider from Connecticut. As she becomes more and more drawn into Penelope\u2019s life (with all its human secrets) and Penelope\u2019s death (with all its public humiliations) she increasingly needs to explore her own place in this most extraordinary and most common of events. She does this well, through a fine skill at dialogue. Conversations crackle with energy, and the story moves forward borne largely on verbal exchanges of a family in crisis. When she stops to reflect or explain, it\u2019s done with a careful severity that leaves the reader wishing for more rather than less.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Yet Penelope Ayers: A Memoir<\/i> has everything going against it. It\u2019s a first book, a family memoir (ho-hum), about white Protestant patricians facing a medical horror that is faced by many others. It\u2019s privately printed (as was James Merrill\u2019s and Jorge Luis Borges\u2019 first books), and, at least in this instance, it\u2019s reviewed by a friend. Living across the parking lot from the author and her husband as I do, it\u2019s hard to read her book with the same comfortable detachment I would a book off the rack at Barnes & Noble. But it strikes me that this one is much better than many I might find there. It is a skilled and professional job of telling a painful, yet redeeming story. It is surprising and lively. And yet it is strange and mysterious to me in a way I cannot explain, and may not want to.<\/span><\/p>\n

Somewhere at the start, the author quotes from the parchment scroll invitation received by her mother-in-law to be the Queen of the 1968 Atlanteans Ball on Fat Tuesday. After some mock bombast about \u201cpuissant Monarchs\u201d and \u201croyal Consorts,\u201d the invitation finishes with this admonishment: \u201cFail not in this your bounden duty.\u201d Bounden? The word, clear enough in its meaning, drove me to my online Oxford English Dictionary<\/i>. The most recent citation \u2013 in this sense \u2013 is from 1844. But its etymology appears to be a corruption of an older statement of promise, \u201cbond and duty.\u201d And its currency in the language apparently springs from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, <\/i>whose haunting liturgy features repeatedly in the last chapters of Penelope Ayers. <\/i>The line in the prayer book of 1559 is from the communion service and it goes, \u201cWe beseche the to accept this our bounden duty and seruice.\u201d<\/p>\n

So that was it \u2013 the mysterious quality of this memoir of a Connecticut woman drawn to the deathbed of a Mardi Gras queen (and the mother of her own husband and grandmother of her own children). This is the strange sub-textual tenor that informs the narrator\u2019s voice inPenelope Ayers<\/i> and seems so different from most contemporary literary acts: something to do with \u201ca bounden duty and seruice.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Penelope Ayers is now available on Kindle. Unfortunately, the Kindle edition is not in the same place as the paperback. Go figure (and if any of you are tech savvy and know how to fix this discrepancy, please comment!). And to read a new review, and get introduced to an interesting blog (Holy Vernacular!) click…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":88,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-down-syndrome"],"yoast_head":"\nPenelope Ayers Updates and Reviews - Thin Places<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/2010\/05\/penelope-ayers-updates-and-reviews.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Penelope Ayers Updates and Reviews - Thin Places\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Penelope Ayers is now available on Kindle. 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Two major life experiences have shaped her writing and her faith\u00e2\u20ac\u201dcaring for her mother-in-law as she battled cancer and welcoming her daughter Penny into the world after she was diagnosed at birth with Down syndrome. Both experiences expanded and enriched her understanding of what it means to be human and to receive each and every person as a gift.\u00c2\u00a0 A graduate of Princeton University and Princeton Theological Seminary, she is the author of Penelope Ayers: A Memoir, and the forthcoming A Good and Perfect Gift (Bethany House). Her essays have appeared in First Things, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Christian Century, ChristianityToday.com, and Bloom, among other online venues.","sameAs":["http:\/\/amyjuliabecker.com"],"url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/author\/amyjuliabecker"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/88"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}