Rain or Shine

I keep a reading list on goodreads which comprises thirty runners-up for the Pulitzer Prize, 1980 to present. I have a rather high expectation when a book is on the Loser’s List. These are the stories that almost won the Prize! Marilynne Robinson is on it, as are David Nasaw, Christopher Durang, and the author of Tuesday’s title, Cyra McFadden.

I am prone to being too harsh on personal recollections as literature: memoirs, creative nonfiction... David Sedaris. I had the same problem here. This is a family memoir. Not focusing for long on any one personality, Rain or Shine reads like someone telling you the story of “your people," and though I genuinely liked some of the devices used throughout, I was never really compelled to like the people and so never understood why I should care about their story. This has a lot to do with my aversion to the romanticism of swaggering cowboys; I’ve had enough of that real-life stereotype but the people in this book, Cyra, her mother, her stepbrothers, all idolize Cy and the rodeo world. That muddy, rough life and it’s accompanying fantasies of rugged, macho men and delicate, yet manfully strong, beautiful women. I couldn’t stop rolling my eyes about their poor judgment long enough to care about them, and so they never felt real. That being said, Cyra McFadden does have a way of choosing just the right amount of outrageousness with which to paint them. In the way of truth being better, or funnier than fiction:

Years later, also in SanFrancisco, my stepmother startled me and a nearby table of diners…Her gynecologist, she announced loudly, had said to her, “Mrs. Taillon, you have the uterus of a young girl.”

The one character I felt anything for was a surprise—Ila Mae. Her letters to Cyra, Roy, and her sister Pat, are written with endearingly earnest though misguided intent and with the grammar and punctuation of someone who was worked too hard to finish school. Though the reason is very personally specific, Ila Mae rose from the pages in my gramma Ana’s form, writing and writing, always writing to keep in touch with a family grown out of her sight and out of her reach.

The back cover of Rain or Shine proclaims it to be:

“A firebrand account of growing up rodeo...it manages to embody the spirit of the mid-century American West."

-Gail Caldwell, Boston Globe

It does that. I just didn’t take to it. I didn’t like the late-century American West when I was brought up into it. A book embodying both that and all the glory of a male chauvinist household was always going to be a gamble. As well, sometimes it feels like all I do is cull other people’s memories, from things they say and from the things they delicately avoid saying. It’s no surprise then that I own and have read many memoirs, maybe too many to allow for appreciating any one of them in its own right. For many reasons—hype, my own past, an inundation of memoirs (like a flock of birds or a shrewdness of apes)—I was bound to not enjoy this book as others might. None of those reasons had to do with the writing style, which I would characterize as journalistically straight-forward, clear and clean.

Advice to you if you are anything like me:
Put down the memoirs and child and abnormal psych books and go watch an episode of the Simpsons.

Which, I intend to do right now.

Results
Book: Rain or Shine, by Cyra McFadden
Page count: 246, including Coda. Several pages of Plates.
Time: approximately 3 hours, including several phone calls, one avocado break, and an infuriating attempt to navigate my online bank’s BillPay system.

Wednesday: Anonymous Rex