ISBN: 1586483633
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Avg Cusomer Rating: 4
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Summary: Wonderful and light
I didn't know what to expect from this book when I picked it up. The title "Writings on Politics, Family, and Fate" is the order of the book which works very well. I had not heard of Williams and was introduced to her beautiful profile writing in the politics section. Her profiles of Barbara and Jeb Bush, Vernon Jordan and the relationship between Clinton and Gore were outstanding. In the family section you learn more about Marjorie and her personal life and then in fate you learn more on her struggle with cancer. Its a wonderful, touching book on a remarkable everyday woman.
Summary: A personal history of illness & Washington
As others have described, the book is a compilation of columns, articles, unpublished works, and some extracts from slate.com. The early articles primarily focus on Washington political figures, while the later ones tend to be more personal. Williams spent the last three years of her life dealing with cancer and all the medical complications and ill advised "good intentions" of people around her. If you're expecting the cancer pieces to be sad or sentimental, they aren't.
Williams managed to put a lot into every piece--analysis, details and efforts to provide glimpeses at character. She is devastating, yet empathic, in her portrait of Barbara Bush, which is probably the best of the early pieces. Coming from New York publishing, she was a bit of an outsider at the beginning, although outsiders are unlikely to get job offers from Tina Brown. The sad thing is that her political writing gravitates toward the "inside the Beltway" conventional wisdom from the mid-90's onward. We get well-disputed assertions about Clinton and his sex life, the kind of political "balance" that tries to morally equate a earnest man's apology for a lie with someone who clearly can't tell the truth or face reality, and she displays the common inability to say that Bush has lied even after describing his lies (and shortly after reminding us how easily Al Gore was labelled by the media as a liar). Her last political piece is a standard issue is a standard issue hit job on Howard Dean, from the perspective of someone with "physician fatigue".
Her "conventional wisdom" pieces benefit from her attention to detail and efforts to synthesize detail, but they still suggest that she was co-opted in a way that seems rather sad, given her obvious gifts as a writer. By the end of the book, it's clear that Williams had many demons in her life and that much of her tightly written work was the result of agonizing over every keystroke.
Williams repeatedly shares with the reader a recognition that she has been "priviliged" in her life; however, that doesn't always equate with understanding the world of people who lack such advantages. This may be one reason why her Vernon Jordan piece falls short and why her effort to criticize Clinton's "Family Leave Act" seems a little bizarre. People without the means for hired help like to know they'll still have a job if they take some time off with a new baby.
If I seem harsher than other reviewers, it's partly because I suspect Williams would have expected some criticism. She wouldn't have liked it and wouldn't necessarily have been responsive, but she was probably harder on herself than any critic could be. Noah provides a bit less context than would be desirable, although a read through the acknowledgments will fill in some gaps about Williams' life. He also includes a couple real clunkers in this compilation, including a piece that oversimplifies the reductionistic "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" discourse about gender to the point of silliness and I doubt that it's satire. Noah also stops footnoting the journalistic pieces about half way through and winds up perpetuating the disproven "Troopergate" business, among other things. Grief probably explains a lot but a fitting tribute to a gifted writer deserves better editing.
The book will be a delight for fans or occasional readers. It provides an interesting short history of the last 20 years in politics and related issues and is a thought provoking cancer memoir.
Summary: Read this book
Marjorie Williams was a writer for publications such as The Washington Post, Vanity Fair and Slate. She was also a daughter, wife and mother. It is both of these sides of her being - the political writer and the personal life - that shine through in this collection of essays, brought together by her husband after her death from cancer in 2005.
The book is organised into three sections. The first includes some of her articles on political entities of their day - Gore and Clinton, Barbara Bush. These were the least rewarding for this read: while the writing was good, and pulled no punches, I couldn't really engage with the topics. However, this changed when I started reading the second section, which is includes political essays, but the politics of the personal - the politics of feminism, the politics of families, of marriage, of being a mother. Williams had a clear-eyed way of writing, where she could examine her own life without hubris, without victimizing, just acknowledgement.
The third section, while the most harrowing, was amazing. Here Williams writes about her diagnosis of cancer and her life afterwards. Despite the fact she writes about how this affects her as a mother, it is not sentimental. Nor does it attempt to make Williams look brave, or clever, or as an example of how to live with cancer. It is just the honest writings of a woman trying to live her life once it is turned upside down. And it is this writing that is most inspirational and revealing. So many writers who make a living revealing themselves and their families in an attempt to look smart, or simply to gain a readership, should be made to read this book and see the error of their ways. It is only a shame that she is not with us to continue providing an example on how can use one's life to examine the bigger issues in a thoughtful, non-hubristic way.
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