Names for Love

                                     And did you get what
                             you wanted from this life, even so?
                             I did.
                             And what did you want?
                             To call myself beloved, to feel myself
                             beloved on the earth.

                                         'Late Fragment' by Raymond Carver
                                          One of two poems that are his epitaph

.

This week I finished another pair of books with such marked similarities of topic I was taken aback when I realized the extent of it.

Didion and Ackerman are both poets and novelists with decades-long marriages to writers (John Gregory Dunne and Paul West, respectively). Didion explored the sudden death of Dunne in The Year of Magical Thinking (an excellent book) and the subsequent death of their only daughter two years later in Blue Nights.  Paul West suffered a stroke that left him aphasic; One Hundred Names for Love details the intense therapy that restored (astoundingly) much of his speech and the impact of his illness on their marriage and their psyches.

Blue Nights is spare, lean, austere... catlike.  Approaches sidelong.  Ever watchful.  Never out-of-control.  Quiet and intense.

One Hundred, on the other hand, is a bounding Labrador of a book, eager to please, eager to SHOW YOU WHAT I'VE FOUND!  Ackerman employs simile and metaphor with unabashed zeal.  She and West had a relationship built around words, word games and writing- what do you do when the most fundamental - and most pleasurable- part of your relationship is gone?  How does the stroke victim recuperate from a blow that destroys expression of that most-human urge- to communicate?

[Given his vast vocabulary, West's recovery is full of bittersweetly amusing soundbites:

Unable to say simply, 'I'm cool because a breeze came through the screen door,' he says:

...A tiny zephyr roamed through the yard for about a minute and a half and it felt good."]

Disappointingly, Didion does not closely detail the events leading up to her daughter's many hospitalizations, and in fact, alludes only once to Quintana's profession, leaving the reader with only a shadowy idea of Who Was This Person.  Spelled out in beautiful, haunting, masterful prose, however, is how very much her parents loved her, and the tremendous, unfillable, still-unthinkable void left by her death at age 39.

Each is a moving portrait of lifelong love, loss and healing (or simply coping) and I recommend both very, very highly.  (Laura, with your speech therapy/pathology background I think you will find the Ackerman book especially fascinating, as will anyone with a writing interest.  Cue Susie :)

Here is the New York Times review of One Hundred Names for Love; Blue Nights on NPR and reviewed in the New York Times.