Lawrence.com

Joel (Joel Mathis) says...

Good stuff.

The book struck a pretty deep chord with me because my age is about the same as Evelyn's during the novel - Laura Moriarty really nails, I think, some of the particulars of growing up in Kansas during the Reagan Era.

When I was a kid, for example, "The Day After" was a big deal ... and I lived a couple of hours from Lawrence. Like Evelyn, my parents wouldn't let us watch the movie for fear we'd freak out about the possibility of nuclear doom. I didn't see it until 18 years later.

Apart from historical specifics, she also really nailed -- painfully so -- the pain of growing up not rich, the frustrations of living a plain life when other people around you seem to live glamorously.

Kids can really suck to each other. It's hard for adults to remember, usually, but LM didn't forget.

April 11, 2005 at 10:04 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

Joel (Joel Mathis) says...

Leslie: Will there still be a beer-and-book live discussion with the author?

If so, maybe that's the place to have another aspect of this discussion, about how male coming-of-age novels often gain access to the high temples of LITERATURE, while female coming-of-age novels get relegated to the Judy Blume section. (Credit for this theory goes to a college friend that I hung out with in KC over the weekend.)

I mention this only because my paperback copy of "Center of Everything" included a list of questions at the end -- something I hadn't seen since my high school lit anthologies. I don't think Laura Moriarty wrote a good young-adult novel; I think she wrote a good novel, period, about young people becoming adults.

But I might be stirring a pot that best remains unstirred.

April 11, 2005 at 11:41 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

liz (Liz Weslander) says...

I read this book a year ago, so forgive me if I'm a little fuzzy, especially with names.

I liked the book, and was sucked into the whole cheap apartment complex in a small town with nothing close by for entertainment except the McDonalds setting.

The scenes that stick with me a year later mostly revolve around the time when the pretty friend and the boy that Evelyn is in love with have the baby. I especially remember the scene with Evelyn and the boy in the car and wondering what would happen between them.

I was not as drawn to Tina and her struggles with Samuel when I was reading it, but after discussing the book I appreciated her more and understood the hope they represented.

You pose an interesting question about male vs. female coming of age. I assume you are referring to more recent fiction. Can you give a few more examples?

April 11, 2005 at 3:30 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

leslie (Leslie vonHolten) says...

I am also curious about the male vs. female coming of age story theory. Except for a few "classics" (Catcher in the Rye, Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man), I can't think of ... oh, yeah, there was that Fortress of Solitude book. Anyway, please expand this, Joel.

I wasn't drawn into the Tina & Samuel thread (I admittedly had written Tina off as a trampy mother without priorities, and I expected the cliche to be carried through) until Samuel's first day of school and Tina's breakdown when he was loaded onto the bus. It was wrenching; imagine never being away from someone for YEARS, and suddenly seeing him pushed into the great big world--a world that really hadn't done you any favors--against his will. It tore me up.

And that was when I realized that this book was about characters: Evelyn the protagonist succeeding depite the great odds; Tina growing and maturing, learning when to fight for principle (against her father) and not (accepting the wheelchair from the church); and Eileen carefully navigating the love and devotion to Tina and her faith and belief in what is right.

April 11, 2005 at 7:49 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

Joel (Joel Mathis) says...

Well said.

I'm afraid I'm not prepared to offer examples much beyond what you offered up, Leslie. As I said, it wasn't my theory ... but it certainly caught my attention.

And maybe I'm not trying hard enough, but I can't really think of any classic coming-of-age novels that feature young women -- at least, not any that are treated as proper adult literature, that haven't been ghettoized to the "young adult" section of the libraries and bookstores.

Unless, of course, you count "Catcher in the Rye." Hmmm. I'm not saying it's a great theory, only that it was suggested to me and I didn't have a ready argument against it.

April 11, 2005 at 8:31 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

leslie (Leslie vonHolten) says...

Jane Eyre.

April 11, 2005 at 8:37 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

ukulelelady (anonymous) says...

What I like best about the book is the humor. I'm not normally a fan of books that are marketed as "comic" novels, because the humor often seems really forced. I think good humor must be really hard to write.

Maybe the humor is what sets this apart from lots of coming of age stories. Evelyn never comes across as a victim or as a maudlin representation of the poor. The funniest aspects of the book have to do with how unaware she is of herself, how spazzy she is, how misdirected she is in her self-righteous, canned versions of morality. My favorite scene is when she's playing Around the World with Travis and says that the teacher tells her she can hold on to the desk if it will make her stop clapping and jumping every time she answers.

It's also bitterly funny when this child adopts Reagan's attitudes about welfare mothers in order to judge her own mother. The great bit is that the humor makes way for the real character growth, like when Reagan's scandal forces her to question some of her beliefs...she tries to defend his policies in her mind, but then ends with that line, "but I probably wouldn't feel that way if I lived in Nicaragua."

April 12, 2005 at 3:15 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

liz (Liz Weslander) says...

Toni Morrison does female coming of age stories.

April 12, 2005 at 9:17 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

Joel (Joel Mathis) says...

Ahem. My friend's other theory -- actually a fact -- is I haven't read nearly enough deserving female authors. I haven't read "Jane Eyre" and only one Toni Morrison book. So maybe theory is entirely the product of my sexist reading pattern....

April 12, 2005 at 9:46 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

mac (anonymous) says...

I enjoyed the attention to teen detail that we all paid attention to in the 80's in one way or another. (I paid attention to it, and was often denied it too...) Magnet earrings, OP, awful perms, music, soap operas, tapes, friendship pins, and the legendary Day After.

Also, the issues of teen angst with love/hate relationships was great. It's such a dual emaotional time of wanting to please everyone while wanting to kill them at the same time.

And poor Evelyn wearing that LIGHT shirt....

I love the fact that Rita, the dog, is the only borrowed from life character in the book. I burst out laughing when she ran into story... the joys of knowing an author!

The only coming of age male book I know is Lord of the Flies... and if we base all the boys on that, we're in trouble!

April 12, 2005 at 1:19 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

lauramoriarty (anonymous) says...

Hi everybody,
I wrote The Center of Everything, and it's great to hear everyone's comments. To ukelelelady, I think you stated perfectly what the book is really about, at least for me. For most of the book, Evelyn is a moralizing zealot. I think she uses fundamentalism as a coping mechanism (I think a lot of people do) to deal with all the frightening uncertainty in her life. When she's about fourteen, she's a pretty judgmental person, and I think she's only likable if you have a sense of humor and a sense of compassion. I hope the pleasure of the book comes from watching her slowly grow out of the black and white view of the world. And yes, her witnessing Reagan's mishandling of Central America is pretty important. She sees what happens when her hero sees the world in black and white (for Reagan, I think communism meant evil under any circumstances, so it followed that anything you did to fight it was okay, even if meant playing a shell game with Congress and ignoring astrocities we were funding.) Evelyn's communism, when she's at the height of her fundamentalist phase, is the non-Christian world. When the lines between good and evil in her life get blurry, I think after some initial confusion, her mind starts to open up.

April 12, 2005 at 1:38 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

lauramoriarty (anonymous) says...

RE Joel's point. I agree that academia teaches a lot of great female coming-of-age books: There's Jane Eyre, as Leslie mentioned. The Bluest Eye. To Kill a Mockingbird. I think academia really makes an effort to pay attention to all kinds of voices. My problem is the way books with female narrators are marketed to the general reading public. The list of questions in the back that Joel refers to was put out by the publishing company in hopes that it would spur people to choose the book for book discussion groups, which really means marketing books to women. Women make up the overwhelming majority of book club members, so when they're marketing to book clubs, they're marketing to women. I don't fault them for that - they've got formulas for how to sell books, and I certainly want them to sell all they can. But what I noticed was that there weren't any questions on the whole Reagan Nicaragua stuff that Ukelelelady pointed out, and it's a theme that I think is central to the book. It's ignored in the discussion questions, and there's much more of an emphasis on female/ family type themes. It's as if they're thinking, we want women to buy this book, so let's really play down the political/ philosophical stuff that women aren't interested in anyway.

April 12, 2005 at 1:40 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

lauramoriarty (anonymous) says...

Last comment, I'm sorry. I didn't know I could go over three thousand characters, and I wrote all this, and now I have to cut and paste!
Throughout the publishing process, I noticed how quickly the book was labeled as 'women's fiction.' From a money making perspective - the publisher's perspective, and to an extent, my own - this isn't a problem. Women buy a lot of fiction, and they are much, much more likely to buy a book by a woman and about woman than a man is. When we were choosing a cover and title for the book, I worried about options that would alienate male readers, and my agent told me I should just forget about male readers. They weren't going to read my book anyway, she said, not in the numbers that mattered. With some wonderful exceptions like Joel, I've found, and New York publishing companies have found, that men don't read (buy) fiction by women, especially if the main characters are women.

I think academia is actually an exception to this. I think both male and female profs and teachers are used to thinking for themselves and not just reading what's marketed to them.

I know there are other exceptions. I know there are men not in academia who read female fictions authors all the time. But I can count them on one hand. And I kind of wince at the terms 'chick lit' and 'chick flicks.' Even Toni Morrison, one of the most important and honored writers of this century, has her books places in 'black fiction' or 'women's fiction' in book stores. But Moby Dick, which has essentially no female characters, is not in men's fiction. Nor is The Lord of the Flies. I loved both Moby Dick and The Lord of the Flies and A Separate Peace and a lot of other books about boys and men, and I'm so glad I read them and that I didn't grow up with the understanding that I should only read books about women. I wish more men grew up understanding that they might want to read books by and about women. If they already have this understanding, as I know some do, I wish publishing companies would pick up on this and stop putting high heeled shoes and purses on the cover of every book written by a women, even if deals with serious issues.

Okay, got that off my chest. Leslie, I liked your comment about Tina learning when to choose her battles. I hadn't thought of it like that, but you're right. When the church gives her the wheelchair, she's mature enough to accept it as a kindness, even though she doesn't really like what the chuch stands for. Okay, that's it.

Laura

April 12, 2005 at 1:41 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

Joel (Joel Mathis) says...

Um, when I said "Catcher in the Rye," I meant "To Kill a Mockingbird." Don't ask me how I did that.

More comments to come, but Laura, I was fascinated by your insider's look at publishing...

April 12, 2005 at 2:59 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

monkeywrench (Tim vonHolten) says...

do women, in general, read books written by men? when i think of "women's fiction" i think of toni morrison, barbara kingsolver, zora neale hurston, maya angelou, etc. (thanks, oprah!).

i don't really have a specific point here other than marketing, although an evil necessary to just get people to read, does a disservice to people who might otherwise just want to read a good book. "the center of everything" is simply a good book. laura's meticulous research (or amazing memory) comes across in every obscure forgotten detail about the time in which the novel takes place. she avoids the "i love the '80s"-type traps that might have overshadowed the real meat of the story.

back to my original question: would more men read a novel about a girl coming of age if it was written by a man? would a nom de plume for ms. moriarty sell more books? could we start marketing the same book with different titles/author names? could it be this simple? or are men in general just less likely to read, period? what the hell ARE men reading?

i humbly suggest "the center of everything," by laura moriarty be changed to "hot midwestern teens," by Dirk Stetson.

April 13, 2005 at 9:41 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

Joel (Joel Mathis) says...

Or, to plumb another stereotype, do reading habits reflect the supposed differences that men and women have regarding intimate relationships? Is it that the men want hot, quick action (Tom Clancy) while women want entangling but emotionally satisfying commitments (Morrison, et al)?

I tried writing this last night, but the system lost it, so: I can name three friends (besides Tim) that I regularly talk books with: Mike Shields, Andy Hom and Arron Small.

The list of women that I talk books with is longer: Leslie (mostly online), Katie at Love Garden, Pat Kehde at The Raven, Cathy Shadid, Kitty at the Pig, and way more names that I'm forgetting right now.

The point is this: I don't know how other people choose their reading material, but I rely heavily on what my friends recommend (and whatever Dave Eggers says is cool). To the extent, then, that I read "women's" books, it's probably because of women's recommendations. The last two women-authored books I've read, I've read because of Leslie. I might never have read Zadie Smith (rrrrrrowr!) if it hadn't been for Jen Dreiling's recommendation.

I don't know if that has any bearing on marketing or anything, just an observation from my own life.

April 13, 2005 at 10:49 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

Joel (Joel Mathis) says...

That said: I think I haven't read nearly as many women-authored books as I could've. Laura gave me too much credit.

April 13, 2005 at 10:51 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

monkeywrench (Tim vonHolten) says...

and joel. . .

you inadvertently mentioned another coming of age novel by a "man."

although his coming of age involves "growing" from spoiled child of privilege to whining hipster manchild with questionable grasp of poverty levels, i suppose "a heartbreaking work of staggering genius" by dave eggers would apply.

April 13, 2005 at 12:35 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

lauramoriarty (anonymous) says...

For the record, I loved Heartbreaking Work. I would give my teeth to write like that.

April 13, 2005 at 1:27 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

leslie (Leslie vonHolten) says...

A quick anomaly to the coming of age discussion: The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri. A coming of age story about a boy, but written by a woman. I liked it.

April 13, 2005 at 1:37 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

Joel (Joel Mathis) says...

I did read "Interpreter of Maladies" by Lahiri last year. Good stuff.

Probably a whole discussion of how well each gender writes the viewpoint of the other gender, here, but I think I've hijacked Leslie's blog quite enough.

I'm with Laura, though. Eggers is good -- though I preferred "You Shall Know Our Velocity"; it seemed a bit more timeless to me. (Yes, I know that a memoir has to be rooted in a specific time; what can I say?)

April 13, 2005 at 2:01 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

leslie (Leslie vonHolten) says...

So one of my favorite aspects of Center of Everything (going back to the humor comment posted earlier) is the small details given to the teachers. Mr. Chemsky and his use of "so-called" and "allegedly," and Mr. Goldman's "balking." And I liked that Mr. Goldman left as soon as he could. I think Laura nailed the dynamic of teachers in small towns.

The evolution debate scene was perfect, too, esp. with the cameras going crazy when Pastor Dave raises his hands while wearing the God shirt. I loved that Evelyn knew why they were taking the photos.

April 13, 2005 at 2:34 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

lauramoriarty (anonymous) says...

I'm reading 'The Namesake' right now, and I also love it. I suppose you get out of the female marketing niche once you win the Pulitzer. Go Jhumpa!

I wrote the school board scene after watching a videotape of a very similar school board meeting in California. For the dialogue, I pretty much just took dictation.

The teachers are real teachers from my highschool. Maybe they taught at yours too?

April 13, 2005 at 9 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

lori (anonymous) says...

Okay, I finished the book, and I'm raring to get this going, but a face to face beer and preztels style discussion would be more my thing.

I actually made notes about different points I wanted to bring up, but since I'm stuck at work and the notes are at home, this is going to be totally random.

I love how the fundamentalists are portrayed. I grew up in small town, redneck central Kansas, and am more than familiar with many people who fit that sort of sterotype. I currently work with several people who fit the bill. I like that Eileen and her crew are portrayed in a humorous, gentle fashion. Yes, Dave is a complete freak. But he's also a genuinely nice guy. Yes, Eileen is married to a control freak, abusive husband; but she sticks by her daughter, even though she has "fallen." She supports her emotionally, and she cares for her grandchildren. We'd all like to think that the people who carry picket signs that are anti-evolution or anti-homosexual are evil, bad-hearted people with whom we have nothing in common. But the fact is, you meet those people one on one, and realize that most of the time they are more than their crazy signs and accordians. I think I might be the only person in my family who voted democrat, who doesn't go to church, and doesn't buy the line that homosexuality is a sin and is at the heart of all that is wrong in this nation. But I also know that my family would do anything for me, without question. They are good people, just complete freaks sometimes. So it was nice to see my peeps portrayed in a little more sympathetic, human fashion.

Regarding Tina; I loved Tina. I think she does of course grow during the course of the novel; my god, it covers 13+ years, let's hope the woman experiences some person growth. But I don't think she is quite as selfish and immature, even early on, as we are led to believe. The narrator is her daughter. How many of us, at the age of 10, understood that our parents had aspects of their lives that *didn't* involve us? I fully expected my mother's life to revolve around me; I'm her child for christsake! What else does she have to live for? Whenever my mom did something like refuse to take me to the skating rink because she and my dad had card party, I seethed with indignation. They were so selfish! Didn't my happiness count for anything? All their actions were viewed in terms of how they affected me. Not the family unit, not my parents personally, just me: the center of everything. I think part of Tina's growth is actually more of a reflection of Evelyn's growth, in her being able to see her mom as this complex woman with hopes, desires, strengths and weaknesses.

April 14, 2005 at 1:37 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

lori (anonymous) says...

I loved the conversation between Tina and Evelyn, after Evelyn didn't inhale. It was fantastic. I want to memorize it, and present it to my daughters as my own original spiel. It is so difficult, talking to your daughters, these young women who are so amazing and beautiful, so frustrating and fragile. The way Tina tells her how precious she is to her, it was perfect.

I also found it interesting, how much alike Tina and Evelyn are. It was funny to watch Evelyn scorn certain aspects of Tina's character, only to exhibit those same characteristics later. For one, they can be pretty hard on those they love. Tina is hard on Eileen, and her father. Evelyn in turn is pretty hard on her mother. Both are judgemental of people they don't like: Evelyn of her mom and her mom's "welfare queen" status and atheism; Tina of her mom's faith. It's nice to see both of them work through their little niches that they place people in.

Both of them are also sassy. I'm not sure I bought some of that or not, but mainly I think that is because I couldn't have done some of what they did. Tina neighing like a horse and then confronting her dad about calling her a whore, man that took guts I don't know that I have. I *know* I wouldn't have said the things that Evelyn said to Traci, when they were doing sit ups in the gym. I would have thought them; but I think I would have just meekly told her "okay, it was no big deal."

I obviously really enjoyed this book; I hope that we have some sort of real life get together to discuss it.

Lori

April 14, 2005 at 1:52 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

monkeywrench (Tim vonHolten) says...

oh my god, i'd forgotten about the "horse" scene. what a beautiful, unbelievably awkward, tragic, awful, hilarious moment.

April 14, 2005 at 10:50 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

crazyleaflady (anonymous) says...

I wondered whether anyone has read Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit? I loved the representation of Evelyn with her fundamentalist relatives, and it made me think of Oranges--as did ukelelelady's comments about Evelyn's comic unawareness of what she's parroting. Oranges is another coming-of-age novel by and about a woman, and WICKED funny: very much a comic story of coming to recognize the culture in which you've been raised, a culture that doesn't always have your best interests at heart. A rare story about fundamentalism in England, to boot. Not to get sidetracked, but I do think it's hard to do that kind of comedy right, and both the Center of Everything and Oranges do.

BTW, my niece loved Center of Everything, and she also loved Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone. Both protagonists seem to be torn between naivete and knowledge, and both authors capture that voice really well.

April 28, 2005 at 3:14 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )