My Favorite Booker Prize Winner: “Heat and Dust” by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

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Ruth Prawer Jhabvala won the Booker Prize for Heat and Dust in 1975, a long-ago year when elegant economy was preferred to the purple prose of baggy monsters. At a succinct 181 pages, Heat and Dust is a colorful small canvas as much as a novel. And her pitch-perfective simplicity strikes a chord that the brilliant Hilary Mantel, Peter Carey, and Lucy Ellmann cannot reach in their long, complex, beautifully-written Booker winners. (Please bring back the short novels!)

On a third reading of Heat and Dust, I am still enchanted by the seamless interweaving of two stories of Englishwomen in India. One story is set in 1923, the other in the early ’70s (Jhabvala’s then-present). The nameless narrator, a young woman captivated by the letters of her great-aunt Olivia, has come to India to research Olivia’s history. Her pretty great-aunt had followed her husband Douglas, a high-level civil servant, to India of the Raj, but she was soon bored by solitary days and the tedious social life with Douglas’s middle-aged English friends. She embarks on an unlikely friendship with the handsome, charming Nawab, the prince of the region. After she leaves Douglas to live with the Nawab, the letters home dwindle and none of her relatives see her again. The narrator wants to know what happened.

The narrator tells her own story of India in vivid journal entries, describing English and American tourists who became disillusioned on a quest for spirituality, and her close friendship with an Indian family, especially Inder Lal, a government officer and her landlord. He is trapped in traditional family life and an arranged marriage to a sad woman who has seizures. After various sight-seeing trips together, the narrator and Inder Lal become lovers, who laugh and confide everything to each other in the dark. There are parallels between the narrator and Olivia: both fall in love with India and form bonds with Indian men. One is a prince, the other a civil servant, but their characters are shaped by the same culture.

How important is love? To Olivia, it was everything. She enjoyed her exotic adventures with the Nawab and their deep physical relationship. The experience is different for the quiet narrator, who values friendship more than romance. She is tall and flat-chested, and children chase her through the streets and call her hijra, a word for the eunuch dancers who look like men but dress like women and sing and dance. She ignores the the catcalls, figuring rightly that they will soon get used to her. Under the protection of Inder Lal’s mother, she makes friends with neighbors and women at the market.

But her goal is to retrace the footsteps of Olivia. She visits the building that was once Olivia’s house. She especially appreciates her visit to a famous shrine, where the childless women pray to get pregnant. It was the spot where Olivia went on a memorable picnic with the gracious Nawab.

The narrator does not expect anything of India: she simply wants to know the country and the life of her great-aunt. She is not nostalgic for England, and understands there is no magic in India: she is fascinated by the beauty and strangeness (and sometimes ugliness), and the relationship of the present to the past.

I would love to go to India, in the spirit of the narrator, but the heat and dust, the difficulties of travel, the tragic sights of beggars, the language problem (perhaps courses online) would be a challenge. After the pandemic, in the distant future, maybe a package tour. Who knows?

I understand that this is probably no longer Jhabvala’s India. Born in Belgium in 1927 and educated in England, she lived for many years in India with her husband, and moved to the U.S. in 1975. You may know her as the writer of many screenplays of Merchant-Ivory films, including Howards End, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

What is your favorite Booker Prize winner? I have discovered so many great writers that way, though, honestly, I have fallen behind in recent years. Time to catch up?

Why Is an Indian Sufi Master on My TBR? and Three Literary Links

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I often surf the net and jot down titles of books I want to read. And then I look at the list and wonder why these particular books seemed so interesting.

Some books on the list do survive my next-day scrutiny. I yearn to read The Magic Doe by Qutban Suhravardi, translated by Aditya Behl. The book description says it is “an excellent introduction to Sufism and one of the true literary classics of pre-modern India.” I am mostly interested in the literary aspect of The Magic Doe: I am too practical for mysticism, and indeed I once started laughing during a lecture on Transcendental Meditation and had to leave. It seemed slightly cultish: some of my acquaintances moved to the lovely town of Fairfax, Iowa, home of Maharishi University. And I vaguely worried–some had donated money to the university–and I sometimes checked on them at social media to make sure they’re all right. (They always look radiant.) Like Kurt Vonnegut in his essay “Yes, We Have No Nirvana,” I am skeptical of TM, though I don’t doubt it has benefits for certain people.

And Now Three Literary Links

Something about Hester Prynne looks a little off!

  1. I am sure you will enjoy the following article: 50 Very Bad Covers for Literary Classics at Lit Hub. Emily Temple writes:

When a book passes into the public domain, it means not only that it’s available for adapting and remixing, but for reprinting and reselling with a brand new cover. Some of these covers are . . . pretty bad. Which, obviously, makes them very fun to look at.


I have collected a number of these very fun, very bad covers below. All of these covers are “real,” that is, attached to books that are at least nominally available for purchase, though many are digital covers for digital editions. You’ll find a number of covers from Wordsworth Classics, premier publisher of badly Photoshopped book covers, but many more from the wilds of digital independent publishing. Some are merely ugly; others make it clear that no one involved in the creation of the cover cracked open the book.

2. At The Guardian, I enjoyed the Top 10 Literary Matriarchs list compiled by A. K. Blakemore. I was pleased to see Livia from I, Claudius on the list. Now there’s a matriarch you couldn’t trust, if the rumors are true about the poisonings, etc,. but she was certainly powerful. To see her on the list shakes it up a bit!

Sian Phillips as Livia Drusilla in I, Claudius

3. Are you thinking about spring cleaning? The writer Helen Carefoot at The Washington Post says we are dealing l with enough pressure at home during the pandemic, and suggests we go easy on the deep cleaning.

She writes,

In a normal year, this might be the time to block out a weekend, pull up your sleeves, and lift a season’s worth of dust and grime off of every surface in your house. But with the emotional and financial tolls the pandemic has inflicted on so many, and with home having to function as a space for work, play and everything in between, it might be worth rethinking the mammoth spring-cleaning operation.

I agree!

My Weekend of Reading Kingsley Amis: The Staggeringly Dark Comedy, “Ending up”

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Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim is one of my favorite academic satires. But the critic Patricia C. Spacks lambasted Lucky Jim as unfunny when she reread it for her book, On Rereading. Well, she is a professor emerita, and perhaps didn’t care for the caricatures.

Not being an academic, I have no problem with the ridicule of university life (which I loved, but still, it is funny). I always identify with a good anti-hero, and find the bumbling Jim Dixon endearing and goofy: I think of him as the adult counterpart of Holden Caulfield, only with much more common sense.

Jim teaches medieval history at a provincial university and despises academic scholarship, especially the article he is trying to write, “The economic influence of the developments in shipbuilding techniques, 1450 to 1485.” And so he alienates a lot of people (accidentally). But this all turns out much better than you would think!

I somehow didn’t get around to Amis’s other books until recently, except for the Booker Prize-winning novel, The Old Devils, which is a dark comedy about a group of old (and I mean very old) friends who are retired in Wales. But last week I decided to catch up with some of the Amis books on my shelf. Ending up is by far (so far) the most impressive. But let me interject that I did not understand where this was going for the first fifty pages or so.

I thought this was a charming Barbara Pym-ish comedy about a group of old people who decide to share a cheap house in the country. How practical, I thought, and how sweet. And it is true that there a sweetness about the conscientious, unlovable Adela, who spends much of her time running errands for housemates and organizing occasions like Christmas.

The other characters are decidedly less sweet. Her raging brother Bernard is a former drunk who has liver problems and a penchant for vicious practical jokes His former boyfriend, Shorty, with whom he hasn’t had sex in 30 or 40 years, is more or less a servant, and resents Adela and their self-absorbed housemate, Marigold, who spends most of her time writing letters. The most neglected is their bedridden friend George, a former history professor who had a stroke and nowhere else to go. With the exception of Marigold, who has children and grandchildren, the inhabitants of Tuppeny-hapenny Cottage are on their own.

Whether or not you like this kind of dark comedy, Amis is a superb writer. Every sentence is gorgeous, graceful, and buoyant to the point of bounciness. He really delves the depths of these not on-the-surface very complicated people. In the following passage that describes the very ordinary but heartbreaking life of Adela, who has never had a friend.

Her career in hospital catering, taken up after she had been told, without further explanation, that she was not the right type to become a nurse, had brought her into contact with thousands of people until her retirement in 1961. None of them had become her friend, in the sense that none had agreed to go to a theatre or a coffee-shop or a sale with her more than a couple of times, and so she had lived alone throughout her working life. Now, after Bernard had made his astonishing offer, that she could housekeep for him and Shorty, she was among people and, with all the difficulties this seemed inevitably to bring, happier than at any time since her childhood. Her only fear was of falling helplessly ill and having nobody to leave in charge…

Very sad… and but for the grace of God… This grim comedy is a masterpiece, with a shocking and sudden ending.

Breaking My Camera at the British Museum & Other Musings

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A blue plaque in London

Once a year I take a selfie to chronicle my aging self. I do it because ten years from now I’ll look at it and think, I look so young!

We have drawers full of snapshots we have not put in albums. Travel has fueled the quantity of pictures. In London a few years ago, I took a lot of random pictures of blue plaques commemorating writers’ houses, bike lanes (my husband’s request), and a sculpture of a blue cockerel temporarily installed at Trafalgar Square.

In fact, I got a little camera-happy. Truth to tell, I broke my camera at the British Museum. I dropped it while snapping pix of ancient artifacts. I should have bought the postcards. Well… I did.

Tourism is so much fun. One lovely morning I found myself contentedly standing in front of Buckingham Palace, too late for the changing of guard, but perhaps better without. Then a group of people asked me to take their picture on an iPhone.

“I don’t know how to use this.”

Really, I didn’t. This would not end well.

I pushed a button. The wrong one, actually. “Sorry, you’ll have to get somebody else!”

Who took this pic of Mom and me?

After that I refused to take ANYONE’S picture. And, indeed, I come from a family of camera-shy women. My mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother declined to have their pictures taken, and, indeed, rarely deigned to use the camera. Someone else always took the pictures. Odd how these things get passed on, isn’t it?

But what a different era now! We document our lives in pictures on phones and the mysterious Cloud. We have selfies, selfie-sticks, blogs, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, Tumblr, Youtube, Booktube, and so much more.

I try to imagine my grandmother taking a selfie. Preposterous!

But there is a historical relationship between the present OCD phone addicts and the videoheads of yore. A few days ago, when Oprah announced that her new Oprah Book Club pick is Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead quartet, I realized Oprah may have been the first Booktuber! (Only it was TV.) Many a Booktuber could learn from her concise, enthusiastic style. Certainly achieving that is much, much more difficult than it looks.

Ah, if only we could travel again, without an iPhone preferably. I was thinking of India–under the influence of reading Rumer Godden.

Happy Weekend Reading!

Our DIY Year of the Pandemic

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I wouldn’t try this if I were you.

It’s just another day of DIY trial and error during the pandemic.

“We need to call the computer guy,” I say.

“Why?”

“The return key doesn’t work.”

“We can fix it. Google it.”

Pray, God, no more DIY. As a result of barring handymen from the house, we have made “innovative” repair choices this year. For instance, the toilet is held together with a hanger, and makes me think of a porcelain mermaid having an illegal abortion. I wear my I’M PRO-CHOICE AND I VOTE button whenever I flush.

Then there is the loose new faucet installed by an actual plumber. I don’t understand the connection between the pipes and the sink, but my husband occasionally crawls in the cupboard to hook up various wires which tighten the faucet. And it works!

I really, really want new carpets, or at least to rip up the old ones and leave the wooden floor bare. The cats have scratched off all the carpet threads by the door in their nightly forays to crash into the bedroom. They have left a little web of white nylon threads. But this repair project will have to wait till AFTER the pandemic, because my husband wants nothing to do with it.

Now he stares at my computer. “Hm, what’s the return button for?”

“Suppose I’m writing poetry and want to start a new line before the margin. Then you hit the return button instead of the space.”

“Oh, are you writing poetry?”

“No, I’m not.” I am indignant that he would think me capable of adding more bad poetry to the horrifying junk I’ve read lately in otherwise brilliant magazines. “I need it for prose, too.”

And then I tell him what I saw the computer guy do once: “He pops the key out and uses a special vacuum cleaner to get the dust out.”

“We’ve got a vacuum cleaner.”

“Maybe it’s not the same kind.”

But he’s already happily watching Youtube videos. Fortunately, the DIY stuff works at least half the time.

Hope for the Best, Expect the Worst

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My motto comes from a song in Mel Brooks’ hilarious movie, The Twelve Chairs: “Hope for the best, expect the worst.”

Hope for the best, expect the worst
Some drink champagne, some die of thirst
No way of knowing which way it’s going
Hope for the best, expect the worst!

The Twelve Chairs

I saw this film during a period of life when there were no worries. Everything was wonderful, everyone loved me, everything gave me joy! Brooks was so witty! Who knew that a comic song had such seeds of wisdom? This witty adage has helped me through many struggles, many illnesses, many crises.

Life during the pandemic has ripped apart our social routine. The winter was particularly depressing, not just the weather but the spread of Covid and the sense there was no place to go. No quick trip to the mall or afternoon at the movies. Perhaps a DVD of The Twelve Chairs…

I recently got the vaccine, and do feel safer, though I am very cross that NOTHING IN OUR ROUTINE HAS CHANGED. It’s still about masks, washing hands, and social-distancing. As more people get vaccinated, this will (we hope!) change.

President Biden said in his speech that perhaps the Fourth of July will be our Independence Day from Covid, if people continue to get vaccines at the current rate. No big public events, but small get-togethers.

And so we breathe a sigh of relief as we cautiously hope for that boring 4th of July picnic in the backyard!

Hope for the best, expect the worst.

Reading with a Cold: Alice Hoffman’s “The Red Garden” and Christopher Isherwood’s “Down There on a Visit”

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Here I am on a lovely spring day, stricken with catarrh. Never mind, I am an expert on the common cold. Apply Vicks to throat and chest, and then to the nostrils (forbidden on the label, but it facilitates breathing). Then choose some multi-symptom cold pills: make sure the label claims it treats EVERY symptom. You need a cure for the cough, the congestion, the body aches, the headaches, the dreaded flu, and hypochondria.

You also need herbal tea, which, if possible, somebody else should prepare. You don’t want to spend much time away from the vaporizer.

And if you’re lucky, you’re well enough to read. Here are two “reviewettes” of what I’ve been reading.

Alice Hoffman’s The Red Garden. Hoffman, who is the American mistress of magic realism, is a critically-acclaimed writer with millions of fans. (Here on Earth was a selection for the Oprah Book Club.) According to a bookish newsletter in my email, The Red Garden is Hoffman’s favorite of her books. And it really is a masterpiece. I was charmed by this collection of graceful, delightful linked stories about the small town of Blackwell, Massachusetts. Over the centuries, the town is populated by strong, romantic women and handsome men, beginning with the founder, Hallie. In 1750, Hallie saves the first group of settlers during a glacial winter by milking a hibernating mother bear in a cave while the others quiver in a makeshift shelter. (She tells the pathetic group that it is deer milk, because they are such wimps.) And Hallie has a preternatural link with bears afterwards, as do some of her descendants.

Christopher Isherwood’s Down There on a Visit (1959). Isherwood planned to interweave these brilliant writings with The Berlin Stories (on which the film Cabaret was based), but these perfect sketches work brilliantly as a standalone novel. In four settings, from 1928 to the 1950s, this record of Christopher’s observations focuses on pivotal characters. In 1928, 23-year-old Christopher is dared by a distant cousin, Mr. Lancaster, to travel to Germany on a steamboat. Christopher has just published his first novel, and wants to prove his masculinity and gather more material for novels. And gruff Mr Lancaster has a soft spot for him. In 1932 in Berlin, Christopher has an eclectic social life, a memorable orgy, and many gay friends, whom he follows to a primitive Greek island owned by an eccentric, solitary rich man. In 1938 in London, waiting for the war to begin, Christopher is appalled when his gay working-class German friend Waldemar shows up in exile with an English wife. Waldemar does not fit in with the Christopher of the late thirties. In 1940 in Hollywood, Christopher writes movie scripts and meditates with an English guru. Then an acquaintance, the exotic, stubborn, infuriating Paul, telephones to say he is about to commit suicide. Paul, who has alienated and disappointed everybody, is a lost soul. Christopher lets him move in and introduces Paul to his English guru. They spend hours meditating together and, for a while, Christopher and Paul follow an extreme vegetarian regimen. I love Christopher’s character, so charming and accepting of people. Fascinating structure, perfect writing, an experimental novel but at the same time easy to read. A book to read and reread.

Stay Well, and Happy Reading!

Meditations on the Women’s Prize Longlist

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The only book I’ve read on the Women’s Prize longlsit.

I happily rattled the virtual pages of The Guardian. The Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist has been announced. This year I’ll finally read the whole longlist, I thought. Well perhaps not, but I have already read Piranesi by Susanna Clarke: one down.

The longlist is very long. Seventeen books, only eight of which are published in the U.S. Now why these particular books, I always wonder? I ‘ll start with the diversity angle, because if they’re not diverse enough, everybody gets fired.

Four of the novels are by Black writers, one by an Indian American writer, and one by a trans (or is it Trans?) writer. In 2019 a trans writer raised a stink about not being considered a woman for the Women’s Prize longlist, so they changed the rules.

Bernadine Evaristo, chair of the judges, worries about being criticized for the lack of older authors on the list. She adds apologetically that Dawn French is the oldest on the longlsit at 63. She says, “In an ideal world, you want writers who are emerging and you want writers at every stage to continue to have good careers, so what happens when they get into their 70s and 80s? Is it that they’re suddenly not published, or they’re not submitted for the prizes? I also noticed that there isn’t much experimental writing being published, according to the books that have been submitted for the prize … Maybe publishers are just risk averse.”

I do not expect Evaristo and the judges to weigh every tiny statistic. Actually, Dawn French fills their “old woman” slot! But let me add that quite a few prestigious works of fiction were published by older women in the U.S. last year: 83-year-old Gail Godwin’s stunning novel, Old Lovegood Girls (possibly her masterpiece), 82-year-old Lily Tuck’s exquisite collection of stories, Heathcliff Redux and Other Stories, 68-year-old Alice Hoffman’s Magic Lessons, 65-year-old Gish Jen’s The Resisters (a great dystopian novel), and 66-year-old Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman, another masterpiece. And these are only the ones I read.

Not to be controversial but isn’t it just safer for the panel to ignore old women than the trans? Nobody will protest ageism. Or if they do, they won’t be noticed.

As Isabel Allende says in The Soul of a Woman: “This is the era of emboldened grandmothers, and we are the population’s fastest growing group. We are women who have lived long lives; we have nothing to lose and therefore are not easily scared; we can speak up because we don’t care to compete, to please, or to be popular; and we know the immense value of friendship and collaboration.”

I am not a grandmother, but I know what she means.

And here is the Women’s Prize longlist:
1 The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
2 Small Pleasures by Claire Chambers
3 Piranesi by Susanna Clark
4 The Golden Rule by Amanda Craig
5 Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan
6 Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi
7 Because of You by Dawn French
8 Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller
9 Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
10 How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie Jones
11 Luster by Raven Leilani
12 No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
13 Consent by Annabel Lyon
15 Nothing But Blue Sky by Kathleen MacMahon
16 Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
17 Summer by Ali Smith

A Librarian and a Writer (1929-2021)

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Lolly Eggers (1920-2021)

“Oh, no, not Lolly!” How could Lolly die?

It may be disrespectful of me to call her Lolly, but I feel I know her from her wonderful book, A Century of Stories, The History of the Iowa City Public Library, 1896-1997. It is more than local history: it traces changes in American public libraries over a century.

I was sorry to read of Lolly’s death. Since my mother died, it has behooved me to check periodically online to see if her peers are alive. Lolly, 91, was one of the last. And so I feel a little dazed.

Growing up, I was vaguely aware of Lolly. She was the mother of a schoolmate, which automatically made her boring; she was also the co-volunteer teacher of a somewhat saucy Junior Great Books group (none of us read Treasure Island, and we were dismissed). Then she finished an MFA and got a job at the public library . Unbeknownst to me until a few years ago, she was the director of the Iowa City Public Library for 20 years, 1974-1994. She lobbied to keep the library downtown when the Chamber of Commerce wanted to oust the library and use the space for businesses. And in 1980, under her watch, the I.C. library became the first in the country to have a computerized checkout and catalog system.

Iowa City Public Library

When I read about someone like Lolly, it makes me wish I were more like her. From birth (almost!) I was an avid reader, but I never planned a career. The library was within walking distance, and every week I checked out favorite books by Agatha Christie, Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Goudge, Rumer Godden, Kurt Vonnegut, Chaim Potok, Ira Levin, The Forsyte Saga, Fear of Flying, and let us not forget The Robe (the movie was practically required Easter TV ).

While I was reading everything in sight in girlhood, Lolly belonged to a book club that read Japanese literature. And when her kids were older she returned to school to to get that practical degree, an MLS, which she finished in 1969. If I had not stuck so firmly to the liberal arts and ignored the possibility that I would one day work, I might have followed Lolly’s example. It would have been stable, if not exciting.

Lolly Eggers

Her colleague, former library director Susan Craig, told the Cedar Rapids Gazette: “Lolly was very quiet, but with a core of steel in her. She was not a yeller … What she fought with was statistics and planning and thoughtful observation. She really moved the Iowa City Public Library into being a very modern institution that was respected around the country.”

Lolly was a history buff. In a video interview, she suggested someone should write a history of the small grocery stores. My grandmother and I used to enjoy going to Whiteway, which was downtown, across from the campus. Sometimes she had groceries delivered. And then one day Whiteway was gone. The small stores disappeared.

Lolly also wrote Irving Weber, A Biography. Weber was a local historian. There is a statue of him downtown.

So where is the statue of Lolly? In the works, I hope.

Smashing the Patriarchy: Isabel Allende’s Memoir, “The Soul of a Woman”

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I am a longtime fan of the Chilean writer Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, which was the first South American novel by a woman to be compared to the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. This is her best book, or at least the one I love most, a family saga that traces three generations of a wealthy family through stormy personal conflicts and political upheavals in an unnamed country in South America. The patriarch, Esteban Trueba, a landowner and far-right politician, cannot control his wife and female progeny, who unswervingly follow their own paths. But as the years go by, he, too, is appalled by the violence of the new regime, and the family comes together. This utterly stunning novel is laced with magic realism, humor, and enchanting lyrical descriptions.

Allende is closely connected to her characters. A feminist journalist, she fled from Chile to Venezuela after her father’s cousin, Salvador Allende, the first socialist president, was assassinated in 1973. She considered herself a journalist and wrote her first novel when she was 40: The House of the Spirits was published in 1982. A few years later a book tour changed her life: in 1988 she met her future second husband and moved to California. She has won numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal for Freedom, awarded in 2014 by Barack Obama. And in 2019, she married her third husband, with whom she has discovered the joys of a relationship at a Certain Age.

I read her new memoir, The Soul of a Woman, in the hope of learning what was autobiographical in her fiction and what was pure imagination. Alas, it is not quite the book I sought, though it is excellent in its way. It is part feminist primer, part collection of charming anecdotes. The anecdotes are lively and entertaining, but this book is not very personal. She sketches the history of feminism, lectures us on smashing the patriarchy, writes vividly and indignantly about ageism, and speculates on the difference between free love and non-binary sexuality.

Yet Allende knows exactly where she’s going with this book: the first sentence establishes her theme, connecting her identity with feminist politics.

When I say that I was a feminist in kindergarten, even before the concept was known in my family, I am not exaggerating. I was born in 1942, so we are talking remote antiquity. I believe that the situation of my mother, Panchita, triggered my rebellion against male authority. Her husband abandoned her in Peru with two toddlers in diapers and a newborn baby. Panchita was forced to return to her parents’ home in Chile, where I spent the first years of my childhood.

Such lovely writing! But soon she veers into politics. She becomes more explicit in her definition of feminism.

In my youth I fought for equality. I wanted to participate in the men’s game. But in my mature years I’ve come to realize that the game is a folly; it is destroying the planet and the moral fiber of humanity. Feminism is not about replicating the disaster. It’s about mending it.

Much of the book is also devoted to the work of the Isabel Allende Foundation, which she founded as a memorial to her daughter Paula. The Foundation is “dedicated to supporting programs that promote and preserve the fundamental rights of women and children to be empowered and protected.”

Barack Obama awards her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014.

I have to admit, I got bogged down in statistics, but I certainly admire her buoyancy and optimism. This memoir is beautifully-written, blessedly short, witty, and very political. Disappointing, in that I had expected a personal memoir.

And now I need to go back and read (or reread) her fiction.