We Need To Talk About Kevin

We Need To Talk About Kevin
by Lionel Shriver
c. 2003
Counterpoint: New York
400 pages

So this book was a Good Morning America book choice back when the cool thing was for TV shows to have a book of the month. The whole "Oprah's book club makes a relative unknown into a bestselling author" trend.

I'm not sure if Good Morning America worked out for Ms. Shriver as well as Oprah might have, I got this book for $1.99 on the Barnes and Noble super clearance shelf, but that doesn't really mean anything.

Anyway, I knew what the book was about to start. It's the story of a kid who ends up going on one of those school shooting rampages a la Columbine. That's not a spoiler, you know that the little boy grows up to be a killer from the beginning. It's a given.

Still the title and the vague remembrance of the discussion on GMA suggested to me that this was going to be a book about the more immediate signs, about the people trying to intervene and failing to prevent the absolute worst, about the hints that an unsuspecting mother should have seen, about the dangers of failing to heed the warning of putting off that "we need to talk about Kevin" conversation with a well meaning and concerned teacher.

And while, in some ways, I suppose it is about that, overall, it's not. This is a book about temperament. This is a book about psychopathy. This is a book about the fact that some of these kids are just born that way, or at least they might be. In this case it certainly seems that way.

Of course, I found that perspective very interesting from an academic standpoint. These are the kinds of kids that we are trying to figure out at work. It's these kids whose brains we're scanning with the hope of finding a way to identify them, and eventually finding a way to understand them enough to be able to help them before they kill 11 people with a crossbow. At least, that's the long term goal.

The book takes the form of letters, written by the mother of Kevin, our mass murderer, to his father. You are meant to think that mom and dad have just separated, I think, but you would have to be dense not to know that Dad is dead. I suppose that is a spoiler, but if you don't smell something wrong when she visits the depressed in-laws alone in the second chapter, then you might not figure it out when she finds him pocurpined with arrows in the back yard either. (It seems I'm feeling a little cynical this evening. Sorry.)

Anyway, in the letters, she describes Kevin's entire development, from birth and a constantly crying infancy though a malicious toddlerhood and so on. And the point, clear from the beginning, is that Kevin was just born this way. She talks about the way that he sees the world, suggesting that he was bored, that he just doesn't see the point of the whole life thing, but of course to me, this screams "neurological! This woman would be interested in our research!"

And maybe she would be, or maybe not, maybe it says something about me that in reading of the polarly opposite personalities that Kevin manages to present to his two parents from a very young age (dad thinks he's a saint, mom senses something much more sinister) I can't help but think what a wonderfully high score the kid would get on impression management.

But it's interesting to watch him develop. I admit that I was very involved in the book, that I enjoyed reading it and found myself not at all upset about time spent waiting for things while it was in my bag. There's something about the reflectiveness of the narrative, the back and forth between her accounts of her current visits with Kevin in prison and the story of his development. You want to understand him, you want to know what's going to happen, even though you already know.

I talked earlier about those books where you know how it ends, but you still need to see how they take it from here to there. This there is distant, particularly horrible, and even though he's a brat, a manipulative little twit from the very beginning, it still seems a long way from start to finish. You need a lot of story to get from crying baby and ruining handmade presents as a toddler, to collecting computer viruses and torturing your younger sister to a killing spree, there's steps in there that somehow I wanted to understand.

But really, there's nothing to understand, nothing that clearly drives him to it, no abuse or horror that causes Kevin to lash out at the world. I think that if I didn't have the perspective of someone who's working on research trying to understand and eventually to help kids that just don't have empathy, kids that don't feel bad when they do something wrong and will manipulate you until they get what they want I would have found this book singularly depression. If we can't figure out their brain chemistry, connectivity, activity and anatomy to maybe hopefully help them, then what's the point of all this. Kevin is not deprived. His parents are wealthy, and though his mother is not totally thrilled with this idea, she stays home with him full time, and his father dotes on him to a level that's almost inexplicable. I'm not saying that everything was perfect, Mom admits that she wasn't sure that she wanted him, admits that she didn't feel that instant connection that mothers are supposed to feel when they hold their children for the first time, and sure, maybe he felt that detachment and it contributed to his development, but this is not the victim of a horrible tortured childhood, at least not an outwardly tortured childhood.

And this is not a book about the failure of parents to recognize signs or the cruelty of children turning children into killers. This is a book about a bad kid. A kid that's destructive and manipulative from his toddler years. It's not like the help came a moment too late and the appointments for the conference that might have saved him were scheduled for that afternoon, until he shot the school up that morning. It seems, reading this account that Kevin was hopeless from the start. Sure, maybe he feels some regret at the thought of his upcoming transfer to adult prison, and yes, in the end maybe his mother still loves him in spite of it all, but this is not a story of hope, not a story of help, not a story in which you feel that if only someone had heeded the advice "we need to talk about Kevin" then maybe this all could have been prevented. It seems like maybe it couldn't have been prevented, that maybe he was too manipulative, too good at the divide and conquer between his parents, too good at getting away with it. It seems reading this that his desire to get away with it is innate. His desire to hurt and punish is something he felt from birth.

And if you believe that he was just born that way, that his temperament was a major, if not the major contributor to the events of Thursday, as it's repeatedly referred to, if you believe that maybe he was just born that way, then what does that say about the world? About humanity? About children?

If we can't prevent this, if this violence is just a part of some of us, and it's out of our control... It's not a pretty picture.

And with that, I'm going to get back to scheduling some target kids for scans... Because again, even here, I choose hope.

An Unquiet Mind

An Unquiet Mind

by Kay Redfield Jamison

c. 1995

Vintage Books: New York

219 pages

Kay Redfield Jamison is a psychologist (Ph.D. in Clinical) on the Psychiatry faculty of John’s Hopkins Medical School. She also suffers from bipolar disorder. (She insists on calling in “manic-depressive illness” which is no longer the official psychiatric diagnosis, and I like the term “bipolar disorder” better, and since she uses what she wants in her book, I am going to use what I want in my blog.)

This book is her memoir, recording her experience with her illness and with trying to live with it and through it. It’s a brutally honest piece that doesn’t dance around the issue, and at parts is a little severe in its descriptions of the problems that come with being bipolar. While I was reading it on the beach this weekend, Ben asked me to read some aloud. After I finished a paragraph about the violence and extremes of her manic periods, he said something along the lines of “Wow. Is the whole book like that?” It was not a cheerful section that he had stumbled upon.

I really do admire Jamison for writing this book, for facing her illness head-on in this manner. She talks about the risks that she is taking in the writing it, including issues of professional anonymity (she worries that anything she says on the topic at a conference, any question she asks another researcher will be colored by the idea that she is taking it personally) and maintaining clinical privileges despite her illness and the safeguards that she has to put in place to make sure that she never puts any of her patients in danger.

But as she says herself, we will never get over the stigmas that are associated with mental illness in our society if we don’t accept that it is possible to be a functioning and successful adult member of society even if you suffer from one of these diseases. And I think that this memoir is a beautiful example of that. Jamison does not candy coat how severe her illness has been, but anyone familiar at all with the field knows that she has managed a successful career in academic medicine, (not easy, no matter what your mental state) and written several successful books, two of which are currently on the “to read” list. (Including Exuberance, one of the books that led me to Teddy Roosevelt.)

And while at times the suffering she experienced is hard to read about, especially for those of us who have specific associations with this illness, the book itself is never hard to read. The prose is lucid and poetic, even when talking about the times when her life was anything but. And while Jamison does spend rather more time on the romances in her life, and how those men interacted with her illness, than I might have liked, she also discusses with shocking frankness topics that I found fascinating.

Her challenges with medication, (which for her is lithium) were particularly interesting to me. Bipolar disorder is known for having a low rate of medication compliance, and her descriptions of the reasons behind her own decisions to discontinue medication (all disastrous) were enlightening to me, especially since finding effective ways to treat this illness and increase medication compliance is probably going to remain as one of my long term research interests. She describes the crippling side effects of the medications (one of these: the inability to read and comprehend books and journal articles, would certainly push me to stop taking a medication, no matter how convinced I was of its efficacy) and the positive feelings and productivity of hypomania that are given up for the sake of avoiding the psychosis of extreme mania and the crippling pain of severe depression. I can understand her hesitance to give these things up, and that is something that I think I have always needed to try to understand.

The stigma that she faces is sometimes shocking. In one instance, a physician tells her that he doesn’t think that she should ever have children (she never did, although not because of that idiot’s opinion) because she has bipolar disorder, which is thought to be genetic. I was appalled, as she was, that someone in the medical field could be so prejudiced, so horrible. (If we stopped bipolar people from reproducing, I wouldn’t be here to write this damnit!)

But when she talks about the implications of the modern genetic research in the field, these points become more poignant. It is clear that bipolar disorder runs in families, and the children and siblings of bipolar patients are also far more likely than the rest of the population to suffer from unipolar major depression, but the genes associated with either of these illnesses have not been isolated. What will happen when they are? Would parents choose to abort a fetus that carried those genes if a prenatal test were available? While she cites research in which the majority bipolar patients say that they wouldn’t, I wonder what someone who did not have the disease might choose after they had watched it kill someone else in their family.

She mentions here too that weeding out the bad in bipolar disorder might also weed out the good. This is a topic that I think will be a big part of the research that I want to make my career in: these intersections between the advantages and disadvantages of certain mental illnesses. She argues that the illness “can confer advantages on both the individual and society,” and she claims that she herself would choose to have manic-depressive illness if given the choice (this is with the assumption that medication is available and that it works. She is very clear that without effective treatment, the disease would be unbearable, and that she probably would not have survived.) She realizes that claiming as her own something that has clearly caused her so much pain is shocking, but she explains her position with stunning clarity,

“So why would I want anything to do with this illness? Because I honestly believe that as a result of it, I have felt more things, more deeply; had more experiences, more intensely; loved more and been more loved; laughed more often for having cried more often; appreciated more the springs for all the winters; worn death ‘as close as dungarees,’ appreciated it – and life – more; seen the finest and the most terrible in people, and slowly learned the values of caring, loyalty, and seeing things through. I have seen the breadth and depth and width of my mind and heart and seen how frail they both are, and how ultimately unknowable they both are. Depressed, I have crawled on my hands and knees in order to get across a room and have done it for month after month. But, normal or manic, I have run faster, thought faster and loved faster than most I know. And I think much of this is related to my illness – the intensity it gives things and the perspective it forces on me. I think that it has made me test the limits of my mind (which, while wanting, is holding) and the limits of my upbringing, family, education and friends.” (page 218)

It’s interesting to me that anyone would choose to have such a debilitating and often fatal illness. (Suicide rates are very high among people with bipolar disorder, Jamison herself attempted suicide once.) And I’m not sure where I stand, because these ideas are tricky. Where does personality intersect with illness? Where is the line between health and illness lie? Do we run the risk of taking from people some element of their humanity when we treat their mental anguish as a physical ailment, even if that’s what it is? What Jamison makes clear here is that patients suffering from one of these disorders experience their illness as very intimately linked with the person they are. And I do think that a true understanding of that perspective, or at least as true as someone can get without actually having the experience, is very important for me, as someone who wants to work with this patient population for the rest of my life.

Speaking of work… She talks about the current areas of research (admittedly from a perspective ten years old, but one that is still relevant) in a way that made me really glad to have a future (and a present) as a part of it. This quote seemed particularly beautiful when read in the control room of a 1.5 Tesla fMRI scanner, (taking pretty pictures of people’s brains)

“There is a wonderful kind of excitement in modern neuroscience, a romantic, moon-walk sense of exploration and setting out for new frontiers. The science is elegant, the scientists dismayingly young, and the pace of discovery absolutely staggering. Like the molecular biologists, the brain-scanners are generally well aware of the extraordinary frontiers they are crossing, and it would take a mind that is on empty, or a heart made out of stone, to be unmoved by their collective ventures and enthusiasm.” (page 197)


I’ll close with a quote from the very beginning of the book. People who know me know that understanding Bipolar Disorder has a personal meaning for me beyond my research, and I found this passage particularly beautiful both from the perspective of someone that wants to spend a career in part learning about this disease, and from the perspective of someone who has seen it in action.

"The Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast, you must first make it beautiful. In some strange way, I have tried to do that with manic-depressive illness. It has been a fascinating, albeit deadly, enemy and companion; I have found it to be seductively complicated, a distillation both of what is finest in our natures, and of what is most dangerous. In order to contend with it, I first had to know it in all of its moods and infinite disguises, understand its real and imagined powers.” (page 5)

If nothing else, here Jamison has succeeded in making the beast, if not beautiful, as least a little more so. It becomes something human and understandable as opposed to something foreign and exciting, and that is quite an accomplishment.

Running With Scissors

Running With Scissors

by Augusten Burroughs

c. 2002

Picador: New York

304 pages

One afternoon, when the three of us from work took a side trip to Barnes & Noble, Krystal picked up this book from one of those little display tables (which will eventually be the death of both me and my savings) and told me that I would really like it, but that it was very bizarre.

And it was, and I did like it, but in a strange way. Reading this I got the same feeling that I sometimes get reading Chuck Palahniuk books: that feeling like you are doing something vaguely wrong and voyeuristic. Like you're rubbernecking at a really bad accident on the highway or something. Palahniuk frequently creates characters that are so messed up that just reading about their thoughts and actions makes you think "If those people sitting at the next table knew exactly what I was reading at this moment, they might be weirded out." At least I know I felt that way reading Haunted at Summer Institute last year.

This book has characters that behave in that same extreme socially unacceptable, shocking, horrifyingly strange kind of way. Only according to Burroughs, this is a memoir. He's not making this stuff up. Which only makes it feel more strange and vaguely dirty.

But kind of in a good way. Or at least in a way that made it so I literally could not put this book down (as in, I read one chapter at a particularly long traffic light.)

And so, like Krystal,I recommend it, with the "You'll like it, but it's rather messed up," kind of recommendation. If you think that you can handle (and this is the incident that Krystal described to me before I read the book) the family hovering over the toilet because they believe that God has chosen to speak to them through the shape and consistency of thier shit, (and I'm not even kidding) then this is the book for you.

Although I warn you, it's not for the faint of heart, or the easily angered, for there were certainly moments in which I wanted to slap several major characters upside the head and then lock them up for the remainder of their natural days. The psychiatrist that suggests that his thirteen year old patient could get himself out of school by staging a suicide attempt, and then provides him with the Valium and Jack Daniels to do just that comes to mind.

So yeah, it might be a little too bizarre for some people, and a lot too bizarre for others. But it is still a very good book. Even in the moments were I was repulsed, I was intrigued, and certainly involved. I suppose that anything that creates the kind of visceral reaction that I had to this book deserves a good amount of credit. Even when appalled, I had no intention of putting it down. And I now have every intention of reading Burroughs second memoir Dry once I get my hands on it.

So yeah, if you really like Palahniuk, I suspect that you will also enjoy this real life version, but if you read Invisible Monsters or Lullaby and were shocked by the strangeness of his fictional characters, I suspect that they reality of this book will be more than a little bit too much for you.

Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs

Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs

by Chuck Klosterman

c. 2003

Scribner: New York

246 pages

Another Andrew contribution to Maggie's incessant reading. This is a book of essays written from the perspective of a pop culture buff and talking about everything from how Lloyd Dobler has left him unable to ever satisfy a woman to how the Lakers vs. Celtics rivalry in the 80's represents not just the racial tension in America, but everything.

Important note: Andrew bought me this book, but he also had the audio book, and we listened to the first few essays in the car driving around this past weekend. I highly recommend listening to at least part of the audio book for this particular selection, and I am usually not an advocate of audio books. Klosterman reads the book himself, and clearly many of these essays were written with that 'read aloud' mentality. (I would bet that he edits by reading aloud almost performance style to make sure that things flow.) His voice and his delivery really drive home his points, and are rather funny. Even if you don't have the patience to listen to the whole thing (I didn't.) Listening to the first two will give you a good idea of the way in which the others are meant to be read. This really increased my enjoyment of this book, which is already really entertaining.

As I said before, this is a series of essays. All are amusing and entertaining as is, although I feel like I would have found them even more so if I was five or six years older. Klosterman is writing from the perspective of someone who watched his two straight hours of Saved By The Bell every afternoon (USA and TBS) in his college dorm room, and while I pretty devotedly watched that same programming, it was sitting in my kitchen afternoons after elementary and middle school. As he says "temporality is part of the truth," and our different perspectives made that experience very different in some ways.

I believe that I read a spin off of this first essay, which in the book is titled "This is Emo." (If other people read the Lloyd Dobler article, I think that it was in a newspaper, and it definitely had a large picture of the boom box moment that we all know and love, I would be very happy to find it because I want to know if it really is the same author.) The essay here discusses the fact that the musical and cinematic representation of love is fake and too perfect, and that the tendency of people in our culture to embrace that and allow it to shape how they imagine love to be has left us unable to be satisfied with real relationships.

The essay that I read before was focused on the Lloyd Dobler complex. This is the point that every woman (Klosterman says born between '65 and '78, but here I think that he is not giving us youngings credit) is in love with John Cusack. Of course, not really him, the character he played in Say Anything, Lloyd Dobler. And it's funny, and vaguely true. (Although I saw the intrinsic fabulousness of Johnny before I saw Say Anything, I still have to admit that some idea of this fabulousness comes from the fact that he comes off like the kind of person that Lloyd Dobler seems to be in that movie.) Klosterman's point in this essay is that we all aspire to something that's not real, and so we'll never be happy.

I don't see it quite as hopelessly as that, but then again, I have a happy, though long distance, relationship with someone who keeps buying me good books. But I can see his point, most particularly when he talks about silences. It seems that we as people feel that silence has two forms: profound and awkward. And while I think that there is a place somewhere in there for the idea of "comfortable silence" in the "I like having you here and don't really feel like I need to fill every one of these moments with worthless drivel" sort of way, I do find myself sometimes wondering if I should SAY SOMETHING whenever things get quiet on a long car ride with Andrew. Reading the essay kind of made me see how freaking silly that is, as Klosterman puts it,

"There's not a lot to say during breakfast. I mean, you just woke up, you know? Nothing has happened. If neither person had an especially weird dream and nobody burned the toast, breakfast is just the time for chewing Cocoa Puffs and/or wishing you were still asleep. But we've been convinced not to think like that." page 7

Good news Chuck, I think that you might have just convinced me to think exactly like that sometimes. Good work.

Some of the other essays didn't ring as true for me. I still don't feel like I understand cover bands or internet porn, but maybe I never will, but I still enjoyed his essays about them. And in spite of his assertions, I do still believe that the probability of events is frequently something other that 50/50.

But other essays had shining moments of "oh how true!" His comparison of Pamela Anderson to Marilyn Monroe to America was interestingly reminiscent of the passage that I talked about in my entry about A Prayer For Own Meaney. And his commentary on how it became cool to be depressed sometime in the 80s seemed to connect to my thesis (but I'm obsessed, so those connections happen a lot.) I enjoyed his analysis of why country music is so damn catchy, and I found his explanation of the Tori paradox from the final season of Saved By The Bell outright enlightening ("So THAT'S where she came from!")

And I would be interested to hear what other people came up with as answers to "The 23 questions I ask everybody I meet in order to decide if I can ever really love them" on pages 126-134. (Andrew and I have decided that we can make it, even thought I think that Einstein is interesting...)

I'll close with the quote that popped up in Jack's facebook profile, thus further proving that he and I will, at least sometimes, focus in on the same exact sets of 15 or so words out of all the words in a 200 page book. This one pretty much sums up the point that seems central to Klosterman, everything is connected, even the most random things, the trivialities of pop culture, are really examples of more complex ideas.

"In and of itself, nothing really matters. What matters is that nothing is ever really 'in and of itself.'"

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

c.1979

The Modern Library: New York

780 pages

Why would Maggie spend two weeks and almost 800 pages on Teddy? I'll tell you.

Theodore Roosevelt is a character in Caleb Carr's The Alienist and The Angel of Darkness (both of which are amazing books that you probably should read if you like mysteries, or psychology, or crime solver stories: think CSI when fingerprinting and ballistics were revolutionary techniques.) He is also one of the very first examples of an exuberant person in Kay Redfield Jamison's Exuberance: The Passion for Life (which I haven't finished reading, because I got distracted, but made T.R. seem that much more interesting.)

Both of this representations made me intrigued by T.R.'s legendary energy, productivity and diversity of interests, so I asked Andrew, because he seems to know such things, if he could suggest a good biography. He suggested Morris, which I (of course) promptly forgot until the next time that he brought me to a bookstore. Turns out there are two volumes of Morris on Teddy, (with a third apparently "planned" but not existing now or listed as forthcoming anywhere. Anyone know what happened on that point?). I picked up the first one, and Andrew bought it for me (because he is amazing like that) and here we are.

And now Teddy and I have bonded. To the extent that despite the fact that I spent two weeks on this one (unheard of!) I am fully ready to dive into volume two at some point in the not too distant future. Anyway.

Two reasons: 1.) Theodore Roosevelt is fascinating. Totally and completely fascinating. It seems that he never lived a dull moment, or stopped moving or doing for a single instant, at least not in the first 40 years of his life. (That is all that are covered in this book, which goes up to the moment that he becomes president when McKinley is assassinated.) This was something that I suspected before reading the book, but something that was driven home even further by this account of his life. It seems that almost everyone that met T.R. felt the need to comment on his dynamic presence. More than anything, reading this book made me want to meet him, just so I could experience that presence and see what sort of impression he would make on me, since it seems that just meeting him was memorable for a good number of those that had the priviledge. 2.) Edmund Morris is a really great writer, who allows Theodore Roosevelt to be fascinating in a dynamic and flowing sort of way that makes you feel more like you a reading a story and less like you are reading history to the point that you really don't want to put the book down for the sake of doing other things. The book shockingly easy to read. This is something that I was worried about before I started reading, a fear that was totally unfounded.

So Theodore Roosevelt is now, in some ways, my hero. Here is a man that managed a level of productivity and action that nobody else I know or have read about could even dream of. He's a prolific writer and a reader to a level that puts me to shame. He takes jobs and attacks them with a ferocious energy that makes him easy to respect and impossible to ignore. He's amazing. As Jamison pointed out, he is the pinnacle of exuberance. Someone that approached life with a sincere and truly amazing energy and love of the new experiences, work, play and exploration that life is made of. You can't help but like him, and the descriptions written by people that knew him make it so you can't help but want not just to meet him, but also to be friends with him. It's abundantly clear how Teddy managed to become a nationally known personality, even before the creation of the television. His personality and presence are just that huge.

On top of this, the book is absurdly well researched. The 780 pages listed are the 780 pages that I read, they are followed by more than 100 more of references and notes, none of which I read. I'm sure that if you are interested in the history of Theodore Roosevelt more than the personality of Theodore Roosevelt than all of that might be interested, but really, I just wanted to know more about someone that managed to get so much done and do it with such energy, drive and good humor, and if that's what you want to know about, the book does just fine without bothering to read the notes on every little factiod. But if you live for that sort of thing, they're there.

In short: Theodore Roosevelt is really interesting, and if you're going to read about him, it would seem that this is the way to go (the book did win the Pulitzer). I don't care if it's long and involved or if it took even me a while to read it. (We can be sure that T.R. would have taken only one day. He once said, "Reading with me is a disease" and was known to read two or three books in their entirety in a single evening, so no more calling me a super speedy reader, I have NOTHING on this guy. ) This book is good enough to make 800 pages of history go quickly and leave you wanting more, and to me, that's pretty impressive.

Just wait until I get my hands on Theodore Rex.