Reviews of "In My Boots" and "Strip"

The latest in my book-review-as-memoir series and a podcast link

I’m back to health finally, and I have a cool podcast for you to listen to, but first…

About 35 years ago, I stepped off a dock and onto a small sailboat with my new husband, Russel. We set off on a thousand-mile voyage, from San Diego south to Cabo San Lucas, and then north up into the Sea of Cortez. I had no idea at the time that I’d not only love that first sailing journey, but that I would want to keep going, and going. Our honeymoon trip lasted well over a year, and was followed by dozens more over the last 35 years. The voyage is ongoing and the honeymoon continues!

In spite of the many years that have passed since that first trip, I remember the first weeks very well—the mixture of excitement and anxiety that kept me from sleeping well, and the combination of joyful determination and gritted-teeth stubbornness that kept me going. There were so many moments of bliss, but there were days of robotic sailing through a fog of nearly overwhelming fatigue and sickness.

Reading In My Boots: A Memoir of Five Million Steps Along the Appalachian Trail by Amanda K. Jaros brought all the highs and lows of being a newbie to the life of outdoor adventure all back to me, though of course the mechanics of the life-changing journey were different, as you can tell from reading the subtitle. The first few pages yielded this gem of a paragraph:

“My mother had seen me off to college each fall for four years, including one study-abroad semester of my boarding a plane to Australia, and at every goodbye, she shed tears. I didn’t think this goodbye was much different, other than she thought she’d never see me again. I wondered what parting words were best in this situation. Thanks for the ride into the backcountry, Mom. I’ll call you if I break my leg and end up in the hospital. If I don’t get eaten by a bear, I’ll see you in six months.”

The author doesn’t try to sugarcoat her naivety, her lack of preparation, or her youthful cluelessness. Instead, she brings her readers along for the hike of her life with all the pains and joys inherent in such a journey. We meet some wild and wooly characters, share some laughs and a few triumphs with them, and survive some physical nadirs—I could almost feel the blisters!

Having found such inspiration in the book Wild by Cheryl Strayed, I wondered if another “girl goes hiking” story would be able to keep my attention for a whole book. I needn’t have worried. I laughed, I cried, and I kept going back to the pages, just as the author kept on putting one foot in front of the other, all along the Appalachian Trail. I highly recommend taking the journey. In My Boots comes out later this month and is available now for preorder and on Kindle Unlimited—lace up your boots and go!

Another book that flashed me back to my younger days is Strip by Hannah Sward. Though a very different sort of memoir, it also took me along for a gripping and sometimes harrowing ride. The author bares her soul about baring her body, and about her addiction to meth, and even the seemingly easy appeal of prostitution.

Long before I first set foot on Watchfire for that first voyage, I was an aspiring actress in Los Angeles and New York. And though I never worked at a strip club or did any sex work, I was always surrounded by, and well aware of, girls who did both. There were times when I thought “why not?” when asked to take off my top or all my clothes for an audition. I once did an audition topless, and I walked across a rehearsal room naked at an audition for Equus at the Old Globe, but I luckily didn’t get cast in either the film or the play, so I never had to decide whether to do that on film or onstage.

I did get cast in a film called “Slammer Girls” a low-budget women’s prison film which came out in the late 1980s and is out on DVD and available to stream somewhere. The lead character is briefly topless in it, and much of the film is in bad taste, but we extras were never unclothed so doing a bad soft core movie seemed worthwhile at the time. In fact I probably would have done the lead if it had been offered. Part of that is due to timing—in the 1980s, an actress being topless onscreen was quite ordinary—and it is also because I desperately wanted to get cast and work.

What I’m saying is that this story could have been me, and the fact that it wasn’t is probably mostly luck, but due to my mom’s bottomless belief in my talent. I didn’t want to disappoint her (or myself) and so I kept aiming high. Hannah Sward was basically motherless, and that made all the difference, in my opinion. Though of course it helped that I was never interested in meth or coke—I’m not saying I never did the drugs, simply that neither of them ever appealed to me enough to become a habit—I never needed uppers for energy, as that was always in ready supply, and I hated feeling jittery and not being able to sleep. And I’d seen in my own family what too much drink could do to a life, so I think I was hard-wired against addiction.

Beyond all of its author’s timely insights into our society’s weird obsession with sex, what Strip has going for it is brilliant writing—Sward is funny, insightful, and brave. She never shies away from looking deeper, but her evocative description told in lyrical prose brings her everyday world to life on the page from beginning to end. And the end is definitely uplifting and positive, in case you all wondered.

Speaking of uplifting and positive, I was recently interviewed by writer and poet Adam Greenfield of the San Diego-based Written Scene podcast and we had such a good time talking about writing and editing and story structure and a whole lot more. Check my episode out here.

Hasta pronto!