The Women in My Life

Watched The Women while Raven was out of town mostly for the experience of seeing a movie without a single man in it — started thinking on why we like women in quartets — from Little Women to the Sex in the City women… Haven’t read/watched it but even the Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, again, four girls. Maybe five is an unwieldy number (except for the Spice Girls?), two would be suggestive, and with three, every time you saw only two of them talking you would ache for the one who was left out? While there wasn’t for me a lot more to the movie to recommend it, I was grateful that the characters weren’t reduced to “the smart one” “the sporty one” “the funny one” that seems to happen a lot....

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Posted by Mara Collins on Jan 11, 2009 | 5 comments

What I can remember reading

I like less and less television, and I can read and nurse at the same time and it’s safer than cooking and nursing… So what I can’t explain is why when I got pregnant I couldn’t stand reading anything about mothering or midwifery. Actually, I do have an explanation — I needed to experience my own experience sort of unmediated by what I was reading, to not be an expert on everything happening to me because just being the mother is responsibility enough, and a lot of reading was just pure escape. I had a stack of books on the art of writing, a couple on new urbanism (recommend highly Suburban Nation) which makes me feel like living in a small, older house in a small, tree-filled neighborhood is somehow a moral virtue and not just an...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Aug 25, 2004 | 0 comments

Mothering Memoirs Overdose

Too much of a good thing? Enjoyed Ayun Halliday’s Big Rumpus and Marion Winik’s Lunchbox Chronicles but have this vision of a recovery group one day for adults whose every bowel movement was extolled and published by their mothers. Imagine the confessionals “Hi, my name’s Sam, and after my mother published an argument we had when I was fifteen in a prominent on-line magazine, I decided I had to get even by doing something she couldn’t write about…” So I took a break from agonizing over people who are insensitive to the parenting choices we all have to make and dove into Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, which was what I’d wanted all of Highsmith’s Talented Mr. Ripley books to be. Set in a small Vermont...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Aug 16, 2003 | 0 comments

Playing Catch-Up

What I remember reading in the last month or so Finally finished Mark Epstein’s Thoughts Without a Thinker, which for a relatively short book in relatively straightforward language just took me forever. Think I made reference to it in another blog entry. A quick read was Laurie King’s Keeping Watch — her website, by the way, has sort a nice little essay on why she writes mystery which helps me a little with some of the compulsion to avert my eyes when I’m admitting my taste in books. Keeping Watch has a Vietnam veteran as protagonist and somehow King’s description of his tour, while horrendous, was comprehensible to me in a way nothing else I’ve ever read about the conflict has been. Also quick and fun and in the murder...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Jul 23, 2003 | 0 comments

A Recommendation for Parents of Preschoolers and Future Preschoolers

Something I haven’t read in a while, and want to re-read… There are tons of advice books out there, and some are great, and some will fit your children, and some won’t. But getting to assist amazing teachers in a co-operative preschool has taught me almost everything I know about handling pre-schoolers. If you don’t have a preschool teacher to follow around and take notes on, though, I highly recommend anything written by Vivian Gussin Paley, a preschool teacher who has published these amazing memoirs of her expereinces in the classroom. The thing that really gets me is her tremendous humility — she’s quiet and listens to the kids, instead of just imposing all the things she knows on them because she’s big and...

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Posted by Mara Collins on May 21, 2003 | 2 comments

Night Work, by Laurie King

Sometimes my brain needs a vacation. I realized that I hadn’t read anything just FUN in a while so Sunday I hit Half Price Books , the acre-sized used book store closest to our house, and was lucky enough to find a paperback by my favorite mystery writer, Laurie King, that I hadn’t read before. Not that having read it before would necessarily make any difference, I’m really good at forgetting critical details… but just like some people don’t like to make the same mistake twice… well. It was fun anyway. The problem is I don’t want to do anything else until I’m done reading a good mystery, so I have to only indulge occasionally and make sure I’ve got no major commitments the next...

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Posted by Mara Collins on May 21, 2003 | 0 comments