Category: Non-fiction

Tara Westover was brought up in fundamentalist Mormon family in Bucks Peak, Idaho. Her memoir follows her childhood, her struggles with her domineering father and violent brother and the existential internal conflict she experiences in trying to break free of her background. From the outside, what happens to Tara appears a sort of brainwashing, from the inside, she feels she is in a loving family (she has a sister and five brothers) who follow the precepts of a loving God through the teachings of Joseph Smith. Westover does convincingly bring us into this family– they are isolated and close knit and live in a beautiful valley beneath the picturesque peak. When she was young her father joked and laughed, although he believed they were in the end of days, so he prepared stockpiles of food, fuel and guns. Her mother fulfilled the compliant role allotted to her, and made herbal remedies (for some reason the father felt that the medical establishment was evil).

As Tara grew up however, things became more extreme. Along with his suspicion of doctors, the father also thought schools were a thought control tool of the government, so the kids were home schooled, if they were schooled at all. The boys were supposed to work in the father’s scrapping, junkyard business. And when the father needed more labour, Tara, also was forced to work there. It was hard, dirty and dangerous and she was only eleven. The utter hypocrisy of the father doesn’t seem to dawn on Tara (the older sons are allowed to go away to earn their living trucking because they will have to support families, the role of women is to be mothers, yet the father forces Tara to labour in the junk yard).

A number of gruesome accidents provide the turning points in the narrative. Tara’s brother, Luke, is horrendously burned on the legs in a welding accident on the property and the father dumps him on eleven-year-old Tara to administer medical care, while he puts out the resulting brush fire. Every time someone is in extreme pain, the mother gives a tincture of skullcap and lobelia–Tara, herself, admits this provided no obvious relief. The next accident is to her older brother, Shawn, resulting in a head injury. This exacerbates an earlier injury caused when the father drove their van thought the night in a snowstorm and caused it to roll (the mother was also injured in this accident causing possible brain damage which might or might not explain her later belief that she had special powers from God to heal). The utter, helpless, compliance of the family is illustrated in the fact that a couple of years later, the father insists yet again they drive through the night in bad weather forcing his son Luke to do the driving, although he has worked all day and is tired – ‘the angels will fly with us’ the father says. Yep. Another accident, more injures to the family and Luke takes all the guilt on himself.

The immense pull of this book is the hard-to-accept fact that for all the father’s selfishness, unquestioning and unquestionable zealous faith in an Old Testament God, and his utter disregard for his children’s physical well-being – they all come back time and time again to live under their father’s tyrannical rule and, this is the unbelievable part, profess to love him. Because Tara herself makes excuse after excuse, turns blind eye after blind eye, the reader is left to feel the rage towards this repugnant, unhinged man that, really, she should have felt. However, it is not the father’s actions themselves that provide the final straw for Tara but, rather, her brother Shawn’s violent behaviour. Perhaps this too can be sheeted home to the father as Shawn was the victim of head injuries caused by the total lack of any safety procedures in the junkyard, and the father’s prohibition on seeking any medical help. Shawn’s sick violence and misogyny is directed at Tara once she reaches puberty. The mother pretends not to see these awful acts of harm to her own daughter.

I won’t spoil it by revealing how Tara gets out of it, but it is a long time coming, and by the time it arrives, for this reader, it was way too late. If you have ever wondered why women stay in violent relationships, this quite remarkable book takes you to that dark place. I was often frustrated at Tara (and her mother) but Westover brought me to the inside and made me see it from her point of view. Quite simply, you just cannot put this book down. It is one of the most compelling things I’ve ever read. I guess the reader is ‘educated’, as well.

I’m pretty much a fiction reader, although I have read non-fiction over the years, mostly biography and history. I remember reading a book on the early Christian saint, Columba. I was much taken with it but I have never been able to find that book again. I also read a biography of Isadora Duncan that started an infatuation of free-wheeling arty women of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century, leading on to Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf.

Lately, however, I’ve found myself gravitating to more non-fiction and admiring it for its writerly qualities. A book that opened my eyes was Cheryl Strayed ‘Wild’. On the face of it this was a relatively simple story about a trek along the Pacific Crest Trail in North America but Strayed made it into a riveting narrative that was tense, insightful, introspective and a wonderful invocation of place and exploration of embodiment. I couldn’t quite work out how she’d pulled it off.

After Strayed, I was dumbstruck by a book that I had dismissed because it was a bestseller (and Oprah and everyone loved it) – ‘Wild Swans’ by Jung Chang. What a staggering book this is – beautifully written and structured covering an incredible period in history (late imperial China through to post-Mao) with the unique insight of the author’s parents who were early party members (not even their loyalty or rank could protect them from the ravages of Maoism).

After recovering from this, I stumbled on to Helen Garner’s collection of essays, ‘Everywhere I Look’. Taught, acutely observed, these essays made me realise that the pleasure of language, used with art and precision, could apply equally to non-fiction as fiction, and an essay can yield all the punch and meaning of a short story.

I found this also in Maggie O’Farrell’s book ‘I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death’. While some of these brushes with death are more serious and dramatic than others, each essay is a master class in constructing a narrative. O’Farrell brings all her fiction writing skill to bear on instilling meaning, reflection, emotion, horror and humour in these gems of stories. The first one in the collection, which deals with her encounter with a man on a lonely path by a lake who turns out to be a rapist and murderer is like a novel in miniature – what wonderful economy of style to achieve this. O’Farrell recalls all these events from the present time and so can move back and forward in time weaving around them threads of meaning. She also creates resonances between the pieces so, for example, we find out in a later essay why Maggie was sickly and bullied in school in an earlier piece. She is unsentimental about her younger self, and the reader is sometimes frustrated at her actions, but after ‘Cerebellum’ I had to reassess my reactions.

I also thoroughly enjoyed Penelope Lively’s ‘Dancing Fish and Ammonites’ (bizarrely also published as ‘Ammonites and Leaping Fish’). Now eighty years old, Lively writes wonderfully on the trials, indignities, frustrations but also freedoms of old age. Again, a fiction writer whose prose is muscular, studied and a joy to read. She reminded me of why I love George Orwell’s essays so much (‘A Nice Cup of Tea’, for example) ­– wry, humorous and just so beautifully written. Lively also touches on her childhood (she wrote a wonderful autobiography around this time in Eqypt in ‘Jacaranda, Oleander’) and the essay here conveys what it was like coming back to cold and grey post-war Britain). Other sections of the book deal with her reading and writing life, and an extended essay on memory where she over-philosophises somewhat (the least interesting section for me) but, still, a writer at the top of her powers.

This book, a history of the Salem witch trials is the darling of the critics, and the dud of the reader. “J K Rowling meets Antony Beevor, Stephen King and Marina Warner” says The Times quote on the cover. ‘Schiff’s writing is to die for’ it effuses. Um, no. Schiff has taken a fascinating, utterly compelling subject and sucked the life out of it to leave a dried husk. Her convoluted, tortured sentences while perhaps, elegant, inventive and even witty on their own, when compiled one upon the other just serve to obfuscate an already extremely complicated and detailed account. No one can fault Schiff for her research: it is meticulous and wide-ranging. As well as getting the actual events of the accusations and trial, we get an account of the colony of New England, the land disputes and administration of Salem and surrounds; the family backgrounds and histories of the ministers, the judges, the governors, the scribe for the trials etc. etc. To complicate matters further, these accounts often form lengthy diversions interspersed through the narrative dragging the reader down intricate, detailed and boring rabbit holes. One wonders if the critics actually read the book they reviewed.

To be fair to Schiff, the lumpiness of the book is probably due to the type of documentary evidence available – we have the court records (though these are not complete and are often filtered through the opinion of the recorder), land dispute records, and histories of the officials (all men). There is a big gap in that there is little known about the teenage accusers (all female), and what is known is eked out by Schiff so that her take on the genuineness, or otherwise, of the girls is only revealed towards the very end of this lengthy account. Often the girls are described as though they are one shrieking, contorting entity.

I started out reading this book so angry and exasperated by what happened to the initial witches who were hanged – one was a beggar woman, and another sharp-tongued and opinionated: the type of women outsiders who fitted the medieval witch type a neighbour might accuse, but another, Rebecca Nurse, was a kind 71 year old church goer. Schiff goes to great length to establish that there were tribal enmities at work in the community in the form of lengthy land and inheritance disputes, and that this may be part of why some people (women and men) were accused, and how other people could be easily found to also testify against them. The Nurse clan did all they could to save Rebecca (such as getting up a petition), but to no avail.

At the beginning of the book it seemed incredible that the word of the accused girls could have been taken at face value. It all started with two young girls, ten and eleven, the daughter and niece of the local minister writhing and screaming, and saying they were being tormented. In the late 17th century, mishaps and misfortune was often attributed to witchcraft, and the church, including the puritan church, accepted the reality of the devil and demons. This meant the minister spent time at their bedsides praying and trying to work out who was bewitching them. The minister’s Indian servant, Tituba, was only too willing to interpret the girls’ visions. Schiff describes her as a ‘a brilliant raconteur’, her testimony ‘a hypnotic performance’ – her fulsome description of witches’ activities and rites set the scene for the accusations and confessions to follow. Schiff writes: “It was as if Tituba had handed out hallucinogens. The terrifying, psychedelic confession, rather than the voodoo of legend, was her contribution to the events of 1692.”

As the narrative progresses (as we begin to understand that leading questions are allowed in the court, that the gang of girls and young women accusers are able to writhe and shriek in court and say they are pricked and punched, they can fall to the floor when an accused looks at them, and to cry out that they see witches and their familiars – invisible to all except them – sitting on the rafters: all without being questioned themselves) you know that there is not going to be any common sense, compassion or fairness in the trials. One thing that riled me was the so-called ‘touch test’. The idea was that if one of the afflicted girls was touched by the witch, their symptoms would cease because the ‘power’ was reabsorbed back into the witch. Of course this test could be easily verified by blindfolding the girl and having a few different people touch her to see if only the touch of the accused worked but, no, they didn’t blindfold her, they blindfolded the accused!

The other truly exasperating thing, is that the court was run by educated men, and at this time it meant educated at Harvard. It was never really explained how such men closed their ears to any dissenting voices – they were forever sending letters to senior churchmen in Boston or New York senior asking for their advice on the matter, and then ignoring the advice. For example, they were warned not to rely on ‘spectral’ evidence alone – this is the visions of invisible witches, their familiars, accounts of being asked to sign the devil’s book etc. – yet often evidence used to convict was of this sort. The ridiculous touch test was supposed to be true evidence, and so was used extensively.

But all my outrage at the goings on was suffocated by the detail and diversions, and oblique writing of Schiff – you can’t continue to be angry when you are ploughing through convoluted prose trying to work out what the hell is going on. I also thought the throw away ‘wit’ of Schiff, her tongue-in-cheek jokes, ironic remarks etc., deflated the true horror of what I was reading. Perhaps this was intentional – a way for Schiff to deal with something so confronting and frustrating, and for the reader to deal with it too. It may also be used as a way of hinting her position while maintaining a seemingly objective stance.

“Villages scratched their heads over enchanted fireplaces, ambulatory trees, and misplaced saucers but were more circumspect about those oddities, participating in another New England specialty: that of leaving things unsaid. After the acoustical runaway of the witchcraft crisis – the voices rising to a fever pitch – 1692 left in its wake a thundering reticence.”

As hinted here, there is little satisfaction to be had at the end of the book. Schiff does give some explanation but it is too little, too late. What she does achieve is to throw the reader into a maelstrom of detail to show that there is no easy explanation – there are one or two unreconstructed villains but she presents most participants as honestly trying to deal with an inexplicable problem: the seeming outbreak of the devil’s work in New England. Most people involved, including the accused as well as the accusers, the clergy and the authorities, did believe in witchcraft. At the height of the scare, hundreds of people were accused and arrested.

It is understandable that once the first cohort had been hanged proclaiming their innocence, that the judges could not admit they were wrong, and so were obliged to go on finding guilt, and signing execution orders. It is understandable that the accusers might be hysterics and truly afflicted by pain and visions – the very constricted lives of women and girls at the time contributing to this. It is understandable that people were afraid and lashed out, and that they accused others first for fear of being accused themselves later. SPOILER ALERT But other things are unforgiveable: the torturing of teenage boys into accusing their mother and others, the pressing to death of seventy-year-old man who would not confess, dragging a woman from her sickbed into a cold, crowded, lice-filled gaol where she died; women left to give birth on the gaol floor; the manacling of a five-year-old accused girl, who saw her baby sister die in front of her, and whose mother was hanged (when this orphan was finally released after eight months she was insane and would remain so for the rest of her life); the corrupt appropriation of the property of the accused etc. etc. There was no redress for these many crimes and there were only a few confessions by those involved that they had put innocents to death. Only one of the accuser girls later admitted to fabrication; she had to do this to be allowed back into the congregation. It is interesting that, although this issue of fabricating the whole thing is pivotal to a modern understanding of the trials, it didn’t appear to be the crux of the matter for the people of the day. Except for the one confessor, none of the other girls were held to account: they grew up and led ordinary lives, apparently.

All in all, “The Witches”, is a frustrating read. I would have dearly loved Schiff to be a more straightforward writer, her literary hijinks just complicated things for me. I do admire her, though, for making me see things through the eyes of people living in another time and place, however uncomfortable that process was.

The photo on the front cover of Jane Hawking’s autobiography of her long marriage to Stephen Hawking shows a bookish long-haired Jane and a mop haired, handsome Stephen Hawking – both look cool and stylishly 60s. Yes, they did fall in love in the sixties – he a brilliant PhD student at Cambridge, she a languages student in London. The window for young love was terribly narrow as Stephen was given the motor neurone disease diagnosis in his early twenties – when he asked her to marry him he knew his prognosis, and so did she. The doctors gave him only a few years to live – they thought they should enjoy married life while they could; Jane tells us she loved him, and so of course she would marry him.

Her parents were less sanguine, and so were his, although, as it transpired they appeared to hand over responsibility for Stephen totally to Jane, and it was not long until that responsibility was particularly onerous.

One of the problems, perhaps, with this book is that it is, necessarily one sided – it’s Jane’s story. But that is the interest of it – it appears to be scrupulously honest, detailed, reflective and unflinching. We are given enough detail and context to make up our own minds.

In another writer’s hands, this account of a marriage, an astounding career, the visceral trials of disability, a family under strain and, ultimately, various degrees of betrayal, could have been prurient. But Jane goes to great lengths to show her love and dedication to Stephen, and to give credit to his work but we also see the increasing strain of it all, and how the struggling family is left to cope on their own (amazingly, it was not until very late in the piece that they got any nursing or home help at all).

On the face of it, they had an enviable life – Stephen was recognised early as a brilliant mind and he was given a number of posts at a college at Cambridge university. They lived in a heritage house in Little St Mary’s Lane close to the uni and the river, but the reality was the ‘posts’ Stephen held were paid miserably and the house was small, cramped and uncomfortable (he couldn’t teach so he didn’t go through the normal academic trajectory). Children soon came and Jane had to raise toddlers as well as assist Stephen who deteriorated quickly. Stephen insisted she go with him overseas to awards and conferences, to further his career, dragging the kids. She was privileged to go all over the world (the account of Soviet-era Russia is particularly interesting) but it was an incredible strain, and Stephen’s wishes were always paramount.

Jane makes much of how the wives were known as physics widows. Many of these women (Jane included) were qualified and intellectually gifted, but the physics always came first, and it would be beyond the pale to put your own interests before, you know, little things like: ‘the origin of the universe’, ‘black holes’ and ‘the theory of everything’. As the years wore on and Stephen became more severely disabled, he seemed to become more determined, more autocratic and demanding. Jane would be the first to say he was courageous in his suffering – before he had a tracheotomy, he had coughing fits during which he must have thought he was dying – but he appears to have utter confidence in his superiority and importance, and complete belief that Jane should devote her life to him, even above the children.

My reading is that Stephen was a complete tyrant, maybe he had to be to survive. On the positive side he loved his children, even though, and much to Jane’s bitter regret, he relied heavily on his eldest son (Robert) to help him physically, the responsibility depriving Robert of part of his childhood.

I couldn’t help but be on Jane’s side in this book. She was not a paragon of virtue but she did devote much of her young adult life, and middle age, to Stephen – she did manage to complete a PhD herself in this time but it took her over ten years to do so.

As is often the case in marriage breakups, when Stephen made a significant amount of money from the immense success of ‘A Brief History of Time’ Jane didn’t get to see the proceeds. As Stephen became more and more successful and famous, his body became more and more infirm – in the later stages of the marriage they could finally afford nurses to help look after Stephen. But for Jane this wasn’t a much-awaited respite but just more worry as the nurses squabbled, or were neglectful, or treated the family with contempt. Jane hated that the family, especially the school-aged children, had to relinquish their privacy.

The advent of the nurses also, unwittingly, brought about the end of the marriage. Stephen left the family for one of the nurses, Elaine Mason. By all accounts, Elaine appeared to idolise Stephen – she would berate Jane, accusing her of not giving up everything for Stephen, the great man. Jane, by her own account, was shell-shocked at Stephen’s request for a divorce, however, from an outsider’s viewpoint her (admittedly platonic) relationship with another man – Jonathan – over many years, must have allowed Stephen to feel he was justified in looking elsewhere. Jonathan did help the family with assisting with meals, chores, transport and physically helping Stephen but, if Jane and he were in love, it must have been obvious to everyone and humiliating for Stephen, although he never said so. Perhaps it took Elaine to point it out.

The whole Stephen/Elaine thing takes up very little space in this long book, and Jane doesn’t dwell on it. You can learn more online about the accusations of abuse and the subsequent divorce. For Jane’s part, she married Jonathan, renovated a house in France and wrote her own very successful book. Latterly, it appears that Stephen and Jane have become friends again – apparently Stephen thought the film made of their early life ‘The Theory of Everything’ was a pretty accurate account – perhaps flattered at Eddie Redmayne’s portrayal of him – that would be just like Stephen’s immense ego.