A couple of weeks ago I wrote about home-improvement books by David Owen, one of the successful adults with a somewhat troubled adolescence mentioned in my post on Sue Klebold’s book. Here’s another such successful adult, grown from the teenager who refused to let her parents into her room (but which was so messy that entrance was almost impossible anyway).
Perri Klass is now a pediatrician, memoirist, novelist, reading advocate, and knitter. I don’t like her novels much (I’ve read two of them, I believe), but I love her non-fiction. The above are just a few; she’s written several books about being a doctor, but you’d be surprised at how often knitting shows up.
Two Sweaters is specifically about knitting, and
Every Mother was co-written with her mother. How could you go wrong with a book that has the line, “Now it can be told: my mother traveled all through India without changing her underwear”? I quote from this book in my own and found it to be one of the most charming and delightful things I’ve ever read, unchanged underwear notwithstanding.
There are plenty of books about the medical profession and the science of medicine, but what sets the Klass books apart is the personality that she exhibits: wry, self-deprecating, humorous, totally and completely non-sentimental. I think we always gravitate toward the authors who echo ourselves in some way, and I get very tickled at various situations in which the strong-minded Perri thinks that she has caved in to someone in some way. How I sympathize! Her relationship with her mom somewhat mirrors the one I had with mine; both of our mothers were almost impossible to persuade into any kind of self-indulgent luxury, for example.
As I was trying to find the line quoted above from Every Mother I stumbled across the audiobook version available through my library system and have been enjoying a revisit to the book; it’s read by two different women, one for Perri and one for her mother Sheila, and I’m finding it enjoyable all over again. I’m even going to try a couple of the chicken recipes. I see myself in Sheila, with her guilt over ever leaving a dish in the sink, and in Perri, who is constitutionally unable to make dinner without dirtying everything in sight. I have never perfected the art of cleaning as I cook, but my guilt over the resultant mess is often not strong enough to propel me into cleanup. Just this morning I finally dealt with the hand-wash-only glasses that have been sitting on the counter since . . . hmmm. I’m not sure. Obviously my bellwether has been showing a certain laxness.
So perhaps I’d better stop this post and get on to the housework tasks at hand on this Monday morning. I can take the audiobook with me as I start the laundry and make a stab at putting away some of my stuff in the garage. Whatever I find myself doing, the (simulated) voices of Perri and her mother will be good companions.
I loved that mother/daughter book, too! Having to drink the OJ as soon as it was poured for fear that it would lose its nutritional value as it sat