If You Knew Suzy

This Spring I was the lucky recipient of one advanced copy of Katie Rosman's moving memoir, If You Knew Suzy.  As has been written about extensively here and here and here, the book centers on two tales: of the time Katie and her sister spent helping their Mom fight cancer, and of the year she spent after Suzy’s death researching her late mother's life. Funny and heartbreaking at once, If You Knew Suzy is many stories (like this one and this one) woven into one, the essence and detail of which continues to resonate with me even months after putting it down.  In fact, there’ve been more than a few times Suzy and Katie have popped into my mind, causing me to consider anew many of the themes addressed in the book.

You see in college, as those who have read the book will understand, Katie was for me much like Karen had been for her: a girl I purposely chose as my friend for her fun-loving nature and overall charismatic fire. I admired the way she could seamlessly merge seemingly disperate desires; she was the girl who could get people to rally to the bar on Sunday afternoon for cocktails, yet once there, crank out the New York Times crossword puzzle (easy for her even back then) or lose herself in the newest book she was devouring. And I still laugh every time I recall the day Katie burst through the door announcing she'd just been elected president of the University of Michigan's Golden Key Honor Society, saying, "It's so funny how people will vote for you if you're pretty, even if they don't know shit about who you are."  She could say this, of course, because we all knew her credentials were impeccable: she was intelligent, quick-witted, and at the top of her class (which made the "dumb blonde" joke all the more hilarious).  But mostly, I loved the irreverence and confidence of her observation that was, like it or not, very true.  Perhaps this is why she now reports on pop culture for the Wall Street Journal, a job that allows her to state the facts and draw connections between the various worlds she inhabits.


So, it came as no surprise to learn more about her background growing up--that it was full of such dualities.  She was the daughter of a woman who was simulteneiously hot and cool, a consumer and extremely spiritual, or, as Katie says in her book trailer, "a feisty and loving and crazy woman who happens to be my Mother."  Reading the book, I was reminded of Katie's willingness to say what other's might be too polite or afraid to say, for fear of ruffling feathers.  


But I was also reminded of something else:  that mothers are more than "just Moms:" they are women with lives that were lived long before we arrived on the scene--a truth that many of us who are just now entering that roll finally realize so intimately.  This is, for me, is the beauty of If You Knew Suzy.


Having been gifted the book early on, it was my plan to post a review of book soon after it’s debut.  But alas, like Katie, I have small children which means sometimes good things must sometime wait.  But now it seems the time is right, for after reading today's callous review in the New York Times, I can't help but feel that Suzy, Katie, and in many ways all women, have been misrepresented.  Please find below the complete text of my letter to Thomas Feyer, the editor of the New York Times, an excerpt of which I shot off this morning to letters@nytimes.com.  May they live to be a thousand!

Dear Editor,

To the point: In his recent review of If You Knew Suzy, Katie Rosman’s celebrated debut memoir, Dana Jennings gets it all wrong.  In fact it’s hard to imagine an interpretation of the book that could be more wrong on so many levels.  

Let’s start with what Mr. Jenning’s states as the problem: that Suzy comes across as “vain, materialistic, and manipulative.”  In the book trailer for If You Knew Suzy, Ms. Rosman openly states vanity and materialism are two of the book’s many themes, so calling these out as some kind of journalistic misfire is ludicrous.  What Mr. Jenning’s doesn’t pick up on is that Ms. Rosman places these firmly in the context of dualities:  Suzy IS materialistic, but how?  In the fact that she enjoys fashion, or that she collects expensive objects?  

Saying a love for fashion is materialistic is like saying a kid shouldn’t dress up like a dinosaur or have an imagination.  All creative people know that clothing is yet another extension of one’s expression. Why else do teenagers dress Goth or for that matter, executives in suits?  For the individual and the community one chooses to be a part of, clothing serves as a mode of communication. As the great Coco Chanel once said, “Adornment is never anything except a reflection of the heart. ” Why else do mourning widows and mothers of slain children wear black for a year, but as a way of honoring their loss and love?

As for Suzy’s affinity for beautiful things, entire professions (industries!) revolve around the very human desire to see ourselves in the world around us. As an architect, I was struck by Suzy’s fascination with art glass, a material formed by fire, yet so fragile; her attachment to fine things just as her body began to break down.  As Ms. Rosman wrote in the 2007 Wall Street Journal article that preceded her book, perhaps Suzy’s motivation in assembling sets of such frivolous pieces like antique sorbet dishes was in fact because it comforted her to think of her daughters one day—after her death—hosting ice cream parties for 12 of their best friends.  Surely the NYTimes, a paper that covers fashion and design so expertly, understands significance of clothing and objects of art?

Next, that Suzy is vain.  First of all, so what if she is?  I don’t know a woman alive who doesn’t rue the varicose veins that appeared on her legs after childbirth or the inevitable cringe during bathing suit season as one tries to suck in the tummy.  Could it be instead that Mr. Jenning’s simply feels some hostility toward this kind of woman?  I can’t help but feel the sense that he is annoyed, as if he prefers his ‘cancer books’ have heroines who act a different way.  To ensure it, he advises every author who approaches the topic to focus solely on the painful parts of the disease, to “look hard at cancer, to its treatment and after­effects, to share with the reader the “hard sweet wisdom” that Didion writes of,” (a particularly strange bit advice for Ms. Rosman, who spends a vast portion of her book describing her mother’s experience with doctors and hospitals.)

I suppose he wants more blood-and-guts as he implies their absence reveals Katie’s denial of what cancer is.  But sometimes the most heart-wrenching realizations can be found in seemingly insignificant things:  the smell of a perfume, the softness of sheets, and the pattern of a dress.  In her famous poem “Tulips,” Sylvia Plath fixates on the bob of that cheery flower’s head not because she’s superficial but precisely because in moments of intense pain ordinary things come into very tight focus.  Who cares that she wore Missoni to her biopsy?  Suzy did, because sometimes taking note of little familiar things can reinforce a sense of normalcy and make an overwhelming circumstance feel bearable.  Sometimes, taking part in obviously playful activities in the midst of tragedy (like Katie and Lizzie’s shopping spree) can offer a necessary reprieve during an otherwise unbearable event.  Just ask the residents of New Orleans who insisted on dressing up for Mardi Gras, floats and all, as their city drowned in the devastation of Katrina’s wake.  Such things do more than lighten the mood—they remind us that life goes on, that everywhere people are living, in spite of our grief and disbelief that anything will ever be the same.  Wasn’t this what Ms. Rosman meant when she wrote of her exchange with the nail technician?  That Mr. Jenning’s misses the irony and revelation of that situation is more than a bit obtuse; that he implies true understanding (and dealing with loss) can come in only one form is absurd.

Third, that Suzy is manipulative.  Again, perhaps she was in ways.  As Katie states early on, her mother didn’t always play fair and growing up, her house “was often a dark place.” Later, she even goes on to write a passage about her own life that shows how all that time with Mom may have actually come in handy: in describing her arrival to New York, Rosman recalls how she “cajoled, maneuvered, charmed, manipulated and begged” her way into the media milieu.  Yet I wonder: would Mr. Jennings have the same criticism of a man who used his powers to get what he wanted?  Or would it then be deemed “ambition?” After all, one can frame ‘manipulative’ in any number of ways: as calculated, conniving, or hilariously brilliant strategy, as was the case of Suzy’s yoga-advice for a young woman trying to live with a grumpy husband.  Whatever the case, such a trait—in Suzy, Katie, or anyone—doesn’t prohibit the experience of pain, of suffering loss, and the right to grieve in one’s own way.

But it’s the example that Mr. Jenning’s uses to make his argument that I take issue with, as it reveals just how much he’s missing the point with regard to Suzy's motivation.  “It’d be very healing for me if you had a baby,’ my dying mother said not once but several times (Can you believe she went there? Nor could I),” wrote Katie, in essence admitting just how far her mother could go.  But in my mind, it’s in these moments that we also see just how panicked Suzy must have felt—whether she was able to articulate it clearly or not.  Because Suzy, at that point, was doing exactly as Mr. Jenning’s instructs in his review:  she was tapping into even the most irrational hope that somehow, if she could just see the birth of a grandchild, she would somehow continue to live; in sheer desperation, she was telling the ‘white-boned truth'and trying to stay alive. 
 

But apparently Mr. Jenning’s is only concerned with what HE needs.  “When it comes to cancer books (a label, but the way, that I find insultingly simplistic), we need the thing itself, not the window dressing.” What he doesn’t seem to realize that while it is about cancer, If You Knew Suzy is also a book about mothers and daughters, the loyalty of sisters, the struggle of being a woman and a child, a woman with a child, or a child who realizes your Mother is just a woman, like you.  It is the story of becoming Motherless, recounting the story of watching a loved one die, and coming to grips with the life that the two of you shared—without sugarcoating the flaws.

That Mr. Jenning’s “craves” to “peer into” a certain kind of narrative that “brings back rumors” from the other side says more about him than it does about Suzy, Katie, or any of the readers who so strongly identify with the intricacies of the many stories within Ms. Rosman’s book.  One needn’t have such voyeuristic tendencies to relate to If You Knew Suzy, which for me read like the kind of story you might hear while on a long roadtrip with an old friend.  Ms. Rosman’s plain language and parenthetical asides create a kind of conversation with the reader, while her wry sense of humor (what Mr. Jenning’s characterizes as ‘chirpiness’) cuts an obvious undercurrent of anguish.   As a narrative, Rosman is able to layer decades of time and space into a rounded picture of the lives of three women, that yes, (as memoirs tend to do), center on the experience of the author.

Yet it is precisely Ms. Rosman’s expert ability as a journalist that gives her book an added twist, for how else would she have the know-how to ignite such a journey, a road many of us wish we could take in order to get to know our own parents better.  For while we all might be a little bit Suzy, I think we all wish we could be a little more Katie:  willing to find the time to address our pain directly; able to find the value in the ordinary trace of what’s left-behind; and fearless enough to share it with the world.

For many of us (not characters in books), the “potentially important stories” are those that shed light on the complexity within our lives, and ourselves.  This is the core of If You Knew Suzy, and the reason why so many people have already lauded its achievement.  That the New York Times has missed the mark on this one so fully will no doubt be read as sexist to some; but for me, I think Mr. Jenning’s review is more aptly described as sex-less.  For how can one not respond to the desire to ritualize one’s relationship with their mother by having their hands carressed; to clothe oneself in all the things she would send to make us feel pretty (like dresses in boxes) or cozy or hugged, like plea: if only we were in the same place!  What Mr. Jenning’s misses are that these things are not about spending money.  They are about the body: the ritual of feeling it, fighting for it, dressing and wrapping it, controlling and ultimately surrendering to it.