Friday 5ive- September 25, 2020

Welcome to the Friday 5ive, a weekly blog post featuring five things that caught my interest this week.

1)  Last Friday night came the sad news that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away. She was particularly beloved in New York City, her hometown, and it really hit so many of us very hard. I visited the new Women's Rights Pioneers statue in Central Park, featuring the likenesses of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Sojourner Truth, and there were tributes to RBG that people had left as well.

2)   Also on my walk, I saw people working on landscaping at a large apartment building on the Upper East Side and it looks so beautiful, it really brightens up that street.

3)  This week I had my 500th ride on my Peleton bike. One of big treats is to take a live class and hope that the instructor will give you a shout-out. I thought I had a pretty good shot with 500 rides, but there are so many people who hit milestones riding now, it can be difficult. I was excited to get my shoutout from my favorite insructor, Jenn Sherman, and it was during a Yacht Rock ride (my favorite musical genre) and my favorite yacht rock song, She's Gone, by Hall & Oates. I took the class again today and laughed out loud when I saw the closed captioning had my name as Bye Chick Die- (it's really BikeChickDi, a play on my BookChickDi blog name). The scary name sounds like I belong to a violent biker gang.

4) I watched Unbeliveable on Netflix this week, an eight episode miniseries. Merritt Wever and Toni Collette play police detectives in Colorado who are the trail of a serial rapist. Kaitlyn Dever plays one of the first victims, a young woman who has come through the foster care system, and this attack and its aftermath nearly unravel her life. Merritt Wever is one of my all-time favorite actresses, she never hits a false note. The subject matter is very difficult, but the writing and acting are superb. It's based on a true story as well. The link to the trailer is here.  

5) I read three books this week. M.O. Walsh's novel, The Big Door Prize is about a small town that becomes mesmerized by a machine in the local grocery store that takes a DNA sample and gives you a reading on your potential- what you should be doing with your life (musician, magician, cowboy,
etc.). It turns the people in the town upside down, including Douglas, a schoolteacher, and Cherilyn, his wife. It's an interesting, unique premise for a novel. 

Darin Strauss' new novel, The Queen of Tuesday, is based on a family story. His grandfather once attended a party given by Fred Trump, and he met Lucille Ball at the party. Strauss' imagination takes off from there as he imagines a torrid affair between his grandfather and the most popular woman in television. We see a different side of Lucille Ball, and I liked the inside look at the creation and execution of I Love Lucy more than the affair. 

I finished the week strong with Yaa Gyasi's new novel, Transcendent Kingdom. Gifty is the daughter of two Ghananian immigrants who settle in Huntsville, Alabama. Her mother works long, hard hours as a home health aide, her father returns to Ghana when she is three years old. Gifty's brother Nana becomes a standout athlete at his school until he is injured and becomes hooked on painkillers. It's a beautifully woven story about family, faith, the life of immigrants, racism, and science (Gifty becomes a neuroscientist studying addiction). Anyone who has dealt with addiction in their family will recognize the pain of this family. I highly recommend it. 

Stay safe, socially distant, wash your hands, wear a mask, and make sure you are registered to vote.

Half a Life by Darin Strauss

Half a Life by Darin Strauss
Published by Random House ISBN 978-0-8129-8253-4
Trade paperback, $13

Darin Strauss was a high school senior just about to graduate when he hit and killed a fellow student with his car. The aftermath of that accident and how he lived with it are recounted in his evocative memoir Half a Life.


As the mother of two young men, this book was really a punch to the gut. Strauss was cleared of all legal responsibility for the accident in which a young girl turned her bicycle into the path of his car, but the moral responsibility lingered on for many years to come.

One of the hardest chapters to read was the one where Strauss and his father attended the funeral for Celine, the girl who was killed. His mother did not attend, and Strauss was not sure why. It was a brave thing for him to do.

He spoke to Celine's parents, and they seemed kind to him. Celine's mother did say something that would linger with him for almost twenty years. She made him promise that "whatever you do in your life, you have to do it twice as well. Because you are living it for two people".

The accident changed his life in so many ways. He became "squishily obliging", hoping that by being overtly kind to everyone he met that when they found out what he had done, they would think that he was so "decent and kind", and that it was terrible that something so awful happened to such a nice guy.

Celine's parents sued Strauss, an event that dragged on for five long years. Strauss didn't really know Celine very well, so he tried to learn everything he could about her, including why she turned into his car.

He took her mother's plea to heart, and tried to live his life for two people. Every experience he had, he thought of Celine while it was happening. It was emotionally draining, and he developed a severe stomach ailment.

There are so many moving stories in the book: attending his high school reunion, telling his wife on their fifth date what happened, returning the scene of the accident so many years later. Strauss writes so beautifully and honestly about the pain this incident caused and how it affected every single thing that happened to him afterword, it is impossible not to be moved.

This book reminded me of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking; it's about how death so deeply affects the lives of those left behind, whether you loved them or hardly knew them.

rating 4 of 5 stars