No, seriously: check him out:
I wouldn’t venture to guess just how many literate Catholics really do experience their faith journeys as passages toward a certain light, but at least one memoirist, a woman named Ellen Finnigan, seems to have pushed the meat of her story back toward the dark middle. According to an Amazon reviewer, Finnigan “falls for a Nietzsche-quoting ‘bad guy’ and self-described hedonist. As they carry on an illicit office romance in the absurd corporate culture of a failing start-up, and he tries to convert her to bohemianism, she is forced to doubt and examine herself and her own weakly held convictions.”
In my subprime days, I knew my share of Nietzsche-quoting bad guys, and most of them were big, leaking douchenozzles. But this one, at least, seems to have done something rare — he seems to have given God a good run for His money. I haven’t read Finnigan’s book myself, but Amazon users are going wild for it. Maybe, a little unusually for a Catholic memoirist, the author knows what Willa Cather learned from writing Song of A Lark, that the getting-there part is more important than the goal, and deserves an infusion of real suspense. Finnigan’s title is a tribute to I-ing: it’s The Me Years.
[Thank you, Mrs. Darwin, for the heads up.]
Just below Bird’s Nest in Your Hair on my to-read stack, and just above Infinite Jest.
Please do not read my book, Angelico. I’m sorry but that would be a real invasion of my privacy.
Comment of the week?
Getting “Comment of the Week” at the Korrektiv would be the best Christmas present EVER!
Well, but I already own a copy, Ms Finnigan; it is, literally, beneath a copy of Bird’s Nest in a stack on my table. I had rather hoped to take it on my Christmas travels: One should always have something sensational to read on the plane.
How’s this for a compromise: You can specify the pages and paragraphs that I must absolutely, positively, never ever read.
What gives you the right to read any of it?! People are such voyeurs.
You pay your nickel, you get to peek.
Thanks for the Diary of a Wimpy Catholic link. I dig it. Interesting take on Mark Shea’s interesting take on the gay saint of Seattle.
On the “I” front, I have an idea for a memoir, or possibly a parody of a memoir. The title: TMI.
In that piece, Max ‘Wimpy Catholic’ Lindenman says what we’ve all been thinking.
Angelico (Can I call you “Gelly”?), I would of course be honored if you read my book instead of US Weekly on the plane. I just hope that if you hate it, we can remain internet friendz 4 evah, because I think you are the cat’s pajamas!
Ms Finnigan:
Re Gelly — Not only can you; you may. Whether you should is a complicated but entirely trivial question, not to be sweated.
Re The You Years — If it’s good enough for Betty Duffy, it’s good enough for me. In case there do turn out to be any hateworthy bits, I’ll just sublimate my disgust and/or anger into something constructive: No harm, no foul.
Re the feline nightclothes — I hold you, Ms Finnigan, in similarly high regard.
More important than getting over the Nietzche-quoting bad guys is overcoming Nietzsche himself. Which no one to this side of “Good Country People” has done, except maybe W.P.
TAGGED WITH: AN EQUAL AND OPPOSITE MADNESS
YES
UNRELATED (OR RELATED, IN AN INDIRECT WAY): YOU ARE SO LUCKY YOU GET TO LIVE IN CALIFORNIA.
#Bostoncold
Come visit!
Memories of Boston (or, more properly, Brookline, 1243 Beacon Street): ice cream sodas at Bailey’s, bagels at either the Bagel Nosh or Jaffe’s Pick a Chick. Parents going to movies at someplace called Coolidge Corner, I think? The rotating restaurant at Top of the Hyatt for brunch when grandparents visited. Hm. I’m sensing a theme.
I will eventually…. Though most probably we could meet in Kansas City (don’t you have family there? see, I read your book)
Careful, you’ll spook Ellen. But yes, KC is The Wife’s hometown. We were there last summer.
OK. Next time: GChat. But we should all be spooking each other all the time. PS I do not know any of those places except the movie theater in Coolidge Corner which indeed is very nice.
Hee hee! Plus, we could see the Citgo sign from our bedroom window, and we once walked to Fenway. I was five.
He would of been a good Catholic if it had been somebody there to spook him every minute of his life.
You’re such a douchenozzle, Angelico, to insist on reading Ellen’s book instead of relying on the Amazon reviews.
I don’t read memoirs. I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get both the memoirist’s ideas as well as the critics’ thinking. With nonfiction I can never forget that none of it really happened to me, that it’s all just experienced by the author.
TAGGED WITH: EVERY GENERATION IS THE WORST GENERATION SINCE THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION
‘You’re think I’ll write a tell-all and make you look bad.’
‘I’m worried that you’ll write a tell-all and make yourself look bad.’
From my earliest youth, LeVar Burton inculcated in me a healthy skepticism of book reviews.
‘Доверяй, но проверяй’, and all that.