Bread Alone is a novel about a woman going through a divorce. A friend of mine pulled her copy off her family-room bookshelf, and told me that she liked how the author incorporated recipes and bread-baking wisdom into the story of a woman re-building her life. I told her about my “bake bread” goal on 43-things, and my story about the results of my recent experiment in bread-baking. So, I took the novel home and was surprised at how many parallels there were between the story of the main character, “Wyn,” who must re-build her life after an unwanted divorce, and my own. Unfortunately, I was more depressed than hopeful after finishing the book. Everything just falls into place in the story, and within a year, Wyn has embarked on her new life, in a new city, with a new business, a new lover, and a new understanding of her parents.

I may try some of the recipes. And I do like the quotation that opens the book:

Upside down I may take shape.
I may become resilient.
Kneaded, turned on end
I will become less
And somehow more myself.
^{from BECOMING BREAD by Gunilla Norris}

A friend of mine loaned me a copy of this short book several months ago, and I’ve read it several times since then. I’m returning it today.

I wrote a story about it here.

I visited a friend yesterday who was recovering from an outpatient surgical procedure. She wanted to watch a movie, and chose Michael Moore’s “Sicko” from the cable “On Demand” menu. I stayed to watch it with her. She was disappointed, because she had thought it was going to be a comedy.

This movie is not a comedy. It takes on the very serious subject of problems with health care insurance coverage in our country. I had heard and read so much about this movie when it was first released that I almost felt like I’d already seen it before. This movie was very uncomfortable for me to watch, because I have many unanswered questions about my own health insurance eligibility since my divorce, as well as concerns for uninsured friends and relatives.

Many years ago, I heard David Sedaris on the radio, reading selections from his “Santaland Diaries” about his Christmas job as an elf in Macy’s department store. I thought it was quite hilarious. Then several years ago, I bought this book on tape as a Christmas gift for a good friend who loves comedy. After listening to the tapes, she didn’t seem very enthusiastic, and gave them back to me. Ever since then, I’ve worried about what was on the tapes, imagining something horribly obnoxious or obscene, that had really offended her. But I never actually got around to listening to the tapes myself. Finally, after finding the tapes earlier this month, I decided to listen to them. Thankfully, I didn’t find anything horrible or embarrassing.

A couple months ago, our book group discussed a story by Alice Munro called “Pictures of the Ice,” published in God Stories. This led me to borrow Selected Stories from the local library, which contains 28 more stories by Alice Munro. I’ve been consuming the stories haphazardly, by opening the book randomly before bed and reading until I fall asleep. Most of the stories are set in Canada, often in Ontario.

The very first story that I read was called “The Turkey Season.” I think it was memorable because I read it right before Thanksgiving, and it graphically descibes the work of a group of “turkey gutters” at a small turkey-processing operation in cold, snowy rural Ontario.

Several of the last stories I read contained descriptions of failed marriages or relationships that really moved me, as though the author was writing about me and my experience. One of the stories, called “Dulse,” tells a story about Lydia, a divorced woman who has just ended another long-term relationship and now is on vacation on an island off New Brunswick and noticing “that people were no longer so interested in getting to know her.” When she describes how she felt at the end of her last relationship, she is describing me at times during the past year or so. A short excerpt: ”...she could not make the connection between herself and things outside herself, so that getting up and leaving the car, going up the steps, going along the street all seemed to involve a bizarre effort. She thought afterwards that she had been seized up, as machines are said to be…”

A few weeks ago, I was leading a book group discussion of Peggy Paynes’ short story, “The Pure in Heart,” which is published in God Stories, about the mystical experience of a minister. I wanted to read The God of Intimacy and Action because it grew out of a mystical experience that Tony Campolo, one of the co-authors, had when he was visiting the town of Assisi in Italy and walked in the places where St. Francis had lived and worked and communed with God centuries ago.

I found the book contains some useful backround information about St. Francis and some other Christian mystics. I also found that the book had some useful information and suggestions about Christian spiritual practices. They write that “All of us, no matter who we are, are continually formed through the daily, even hourly, choices we make that lead to habitual ways of living.” I believe that they argue convincingly that the three spiritual practices of “prayer of examen” (self-examination); “lectio divina” (meditative reading of scripture); and “centering prayer” (silence or listening to God) are important and beneficial for Christians who wish to grow in love for God and others.

The Healing Power of Doing Good is authored by Allen Luks with Peggy Payne. I read this book because I was leading a book group discussion of Peggy Paynes’ short story, “The Pure in Heart,” which is published in God Stories. I wanted to find out more about Peggy Payne, and this book just happened to be available in our local library.

The Healing Power of Doing Good tries to make the case that doing good helps the helper as much as, if not more than, the helpee. The authors present research and case studies to support their arguments. They claim that all types of help are not equally beneficial, and that the type of help that offers the most healing benefit to the helper has the following characteristics: (1) direct personal contact with the person being helped; (2) frequency; (3) helping strangers; (4) helping with a shared problem; (5) backing from a supportive organization; (6) use of the helper’s skills; (7) making an effort; and (8) letting go of results. The authors also provide tips to avoid or overcome bad experiences and burnout.

The authors were preaching to the choir with me, because in my experience, helping others can be a route to healing for others and for oneself as well. I hope that this book will encourage readers to have similar experiences.

During a book group meeting several months ago, I made mention of William Styron’s book Darkness Visible, A Memoir of Madness, in which he describes his own experience with suicidal depression. A fellow book group member then loaned me her copy of A Tidewater Morning, a collection of three related short stories which William Styron says represent “an imaginative reshaping of real events” in his own life through the eyes of the main character Paul Whitehurst, who grew up in the tidewater area of Virginia near Norfolk.

In the first story, “Love Day,” Paul at age 20 is onboard a battleship filled with soldiers and sailing towards a WWII invasion of Okinawa in 1945. His descriptions of the excitement, discomfort, and outright terror of the experience match some of the stories told to me by my own father, who was sent on a similar mission to the Phillipines. In the second story, “Shadrach,” 10-year-old Paul describes a memorable episode that happened when he was in the the company of a ragtag but loving and emotional family, who were a contrast to his own uptight parents and his experience as an only child. In the final story, “A Tidewater Morning,” Paul at age 13 tries to cope with his mother’s death from cancer and his father’s grief. This third story resonated the most with my own experience, since I also lost my mother to cancer at age 13 and also had to cope with my father’s grief, and yet it left me strangely unmoved.

Even though Styron writes in Darkness Visible that he is convinced that his suicidal depression is in the end caused by chemical imbalance, he acknowledges that other factors, such as lifestyle, childhood, moral values, memory, and systemic stress, make a contribution. In Tidewater Morning, these three stories reveal many of the seeds of his adult depression.