THE REST OF US:
Dispatches From the Mother Ship
By Jacquelyn Mitchard
Viking, 255 pages, $23.95
About a year ago, I ran across Jacquelyn Mitchard’s magazine essay “A Star to Steer By,” which tells the story of how she was suddenly widowed at age 40, left with four young children and no reliable means of support. Friends told her to get a smaller house. Her father, suggesting she pursue a job in public relations at a ball-bearing company, told her: “Playtime is over. They’ll always need ball bearings.” But she kept thinking about a novel she had (literally) dreamed one night, a book her husband had believed she could write, and she decided it was time to risk everything to write it.
The book was “The Deep End of the Ocean,” which was bought by a publisher for a lot of money even before she finished it, was selected as the first novel for Oprah Winfrey’s book club, and became a huge best seller, establishing Mitchard’s reputation as a serious writer and her ability to live, financially, happily ever after.
The essay was one of the most powerful evocations of marital love and loss I have ever read. And it was no fluke.
In Mitchard’s newest book, “The Rest of Us,” a collection of her magazine and newspaper pieces (her column is syndicated by Tribune Media Services), she repeats this feat over and over, coaxing every essential emotion out of a range of experiences that include love, death, dieting and the adoption of children and dogs.
As she explains in her introduction, the “Us” in the title refers to “people like me, who alternate between the absolute conviction that we could, if need be, save France, and the desperate uncertainty about whether to get out of bed on a given Tuesday. Who believe wholly in the concept of a good, free, modern, public infrastructure and yet want to blow up the sewer system when we get our tax bills.”
Not Slats Grobnik exactly, but what Mike Royko’s regular guy might have been as a smart, big-hearted woman who’d spent a lot of time at a kitchen table rather than in a bar. Mitchard’s persona and subjects are different from Royko’s, but she shares his remarkable talent for dissecting a topic in an amazingly concise and unsnooty way and telling us exactly what we really think or feel about it.
Of course, any good columnist can serve up a convincing opinion. What makes this collection deeply moving is not just Mitchard’s skill at depicting her own point of view, but her emotional generosity in portraying other people’s. When her sensitive 4-year-old regards the bratwurst on his dinner plate and inquires gravely, “Is this dead?” the question sets off Mitchard’s meditation on how we think about what we eat; but we also get to see her husband “giving me an icy look that said plainly, If you tell him that this bratwurst might once have been a fluffy little lamb you will face a fate very similar to this bratwurst.”
In one essay, she poignantly acknowledges the pain of having had an alcoholic mother: “(T)here were times I needed her help, and I would look at her, staring out into the alley, beautifully dressed, with her afternoon wine in a jelly glass, and know that she was too fragile to count on.” But then another essay further on appreciates the ritual her mother had of tucking her into bed each night with talk of some small joy they could expect from the next day. She continues this ritual now with her own children, understanding that the gift her mother was able to give her was the quiet realization that, “There always would be a jewel in the ordinary clay of work or school.”
Mitchard also understands, and vividly describes, how female friends mother one another, why cleaning out the basement is sometimes an act of courage, and the way in which a grown man’s managing to catch his first home-run ball in the stands at a major-league baseball game can be an occasion of the greatest dignity and triumph.
There is tragedy here, as well, and you will probably cry at least once, but it will be that good, cathartic kind of cry at someone who has nailed with words the meaning of those moments that, in real life, usually just go on flying right out of the ballpark.
