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booknotes: babette

15 Wednesday Oct 2014

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Ross Eliot with copies of 'Babette'

Ross Eliot with copies of ‘Babette’ (via GoodReads)

Back in the spring, I received a review copy of Babette: The Many Lives, Two Deaths, and Double Kidnapping of Dr. Ellsworth (2013) a memoir/biographical study by Ross Eliot. After six months of hectic life, I’m finally getting around to reviewing the book; my apologies to the author for my deleterious behavior.

In 1999, Ross Eliot was working odd jobs and taking community college classes in Portland, Oregon, when a member of the history faculty — Dr. Ellsworth — took an interest in him. In her seventies and living alone, Ellsworth was looking for someone to take up residence in a basement apartment and help out around the house, drive the car, and be a companion at meals as well as on frequent weekend excursions in exchange for room and board. Eliot accepted the challenge, and lived with Dr. Ellsworth, despite her many eccentricities, until a heart attack took her life in 2002.

Part memoir, part character study, Babette echoes such works as Alan Bennett’s essay “The Lady in the Van” (1989) or Stuart: A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters (2005). Like its predecessors, Babette centers around the complicated, marginal life of an individual with whom the author had personal acquaintance — but whose personal life details elude complete or coherent understanding. All three of these narratives also involve troubling questions of ethical responsibility toward the stories of others, and challenging questions of power imbalances within such author-subject relations.

[mild spoilers after the jump]

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forward intentions: an introduction

04 Thursday Sep 2014

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Reflections on local intentions in this eighth year of my Boston residency, and a long melancholy weekend at the end of summer, has pushed me to think about what my forward intentions actually are. Now that I’m done with grad school (*weeps with relief*), doing the whole “emerging professional” thing at a job a genuinely like, married with two cats, I’m like … so what’s next, life?

View from the Sylvia Beach Hotel (Newport, Ore.), 24 Sept 2013.

I never really had a plan, per se. I mean, I almost didn’t go to college? I was emotionally allergic to school and considered some sort of roguish apprenticeship instead. I wanted to run a writer’s colony in the U.P. (“upper peninsula” for you non-Michiganders), feed people and fix septic systems, maybe have a lot of time for hiking around with a compass in the back woods. Or maybe open a bookshop by the sea, with the writers tucked away upstairs in garret rooms overlooking the surf. Again: Tea, biscuits, quiet, thoughts, maybe a puppy and obviously cats.

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so I’m a grand-orphan now

08 Tuesday Jul 2014

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Image: Redwoods; Stout Memorial Grove, Jedediah Smith State Park (September 2013)

As some of you know, my maternal grandfather was diagnosed with lung cancer about a month ago, at the age of ninety-two. After a short, precipitous downhill slide, he passed away in the wee small hours of this morning at his home in Bend, Oregon. It’s exactly a month since his diagnosis which was, in turn, exactly a year after the death of my grandmother, his wife of over fifty years.

My thoughts are going to be with my mother and aunt today, as they make sense of the present. Though he was born and raised in Michigan, and in turn raised his daughters there, I’m glad my grandfather was able to die in the high desert country where he and my grandmother made their home in early marriage and returned in the 1980s upon his retirement.