The book exemplifies the difficulty about writing about this sort of thing. If you are the subject of the interesting experience, although you might have the inside knowledge, you might not be best placed to write about it. Perhaps because it is all too charged, perhaps because you can't write. On the other hand, if you are not the subject, you might be constrained by considerations of privacy. I can write what I like about myself, but not about someone else. And while one can write anonymized accounts, the process of anonymization might well damage the accounting. Or be constrained by lack of knowledge. In this case I found the writing rather tiresome at first, but it seemed to get better as the story progressed.
The story of a girl with two difficult parents, both biological, with the focus in this second book being on the father, who while having some good points, does not sound like a very good father, the not very good not being a question of fault, rather just the way things were. But I felt I could really see how a bad upbringing could be transmitted from one generation to the next. How the bad things in my upbringing might turn into bad things in me which might turn into bad things in my children's upbringing which might turn into bad things in them. This being one reason why some people with difficult backgrounds might think it better not to have children. It was also interesting to see 1) how abuse of an authority position damages both parties, in particular how the abused person might try too hard to appease the abuser. Develop habits of appeasement which can't easily be shaken off. A problem perhaps related to that of hostages who, over time, get uncomfortably (for us outside) close to their captors. And 2) how nearly normal a fairly abnormal person can be; how the abnormal bits can be quite confined in time, with the rest of the time the person functioning pretty much as everyone else. Outside the immediate family you might easily not notice.
Amused - perhaps I should have been shocked - to read that in Ohioan hospitals they have signs asking people not to bring guns in. As usual, Professor Google knew all about them. Less amused by the rather gross humour which, and the rather gross people who, seem to feature in much Ohioan life, at least as portrayed in this book.
Sufficiently interested by this second book to order up the first from Epsom Library - although this last required a bit of fiddling about as the author search facility of the Surrey Library Catalogue is not that clever, or at least not clever enough to be able to deal with me. From which we learn incidentally that while the library might have dumped at least one copy of the second book they are still holding multiple copies of the first.
PS: read in the NYRB about a new universal library on the internet yesterday evening, to pick up from where Google was forced to put down, for reasons to do, I think, with copyright - see http://www.dp.la/. I have not yet got a grip on how it works (it is said to be work in progress), but hopefully that will come. I was also made to feel old in that I remember, many years ago, reading the book which started the author of the piece on his climb to his present eminence. A book about massacring cats, published in 1984, bought that year and which is presently on the top shelf, having survived recent culls. A touch dusty.
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