Six Degrees of Separation: From ‘Romantic Comedy’ to….

It’s the first Saturday of the month, so it’s time for the Six Degrees of Separation meme, hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. The idea is that she chooses the starting book, and you then link six other titles to it, following your own chain of connections and associations. It is a truth universally acknowledged that I have never read the starting book, and this month is no exception. It’s ‘Romantic Comedy’ by Curtis Sittenfeld.

Never read it; never heard of it. So where to go? I decided to split the difference, and link to three love stories (I don’t know if I read ‘romances’ as such) and three comedies.

Three Romances…. well, Love Stories

1 Love Stories by Trent Dalton. A published author sets himself up on a Brisbane city street with a folding table and a blue Olivetti typewriter, with a sign reading ‘Sentimental Writer Collecting Love Stories’ and waits for people to come and talk to him. And talk to him they do – 42 of them – and he writes their love stories up for them, and for us. Most of them are only about three pages in length, although some are longer, and one extends over two parts widely separated in the book. Actually, I didn’t really like it that much. For me, it felt a bit like a newspaper column, and I found myself wondering if it were, whether I would seek out the column each day. I suspect not. I think that the earnestness and wide-eyed wonder would pall after a while. (My review here)

2. Alzheimers: A Love Story by Vivienne Ulman The book has ‘love story’ in the title, and there is certainly a love story here as a family negotiates the guilty, anger, sorrow and, yes, love that surrounds a family members subsiding into Alzheimers. It is a memoir, written by the daughter of a wealthy Melbourne family – the manufacturers of Glo-Weave shirts- as her father has to relinquish his wife to a nursing home and is wracked with guilt and belligerence, while she grieves her mother and their relationship, but is wary of being drawn into her father’s obsessiveness. (My review here)

3. There was Still Love by Favel Parrett A different perspective on love, set in Melbourne and Prague: love between sisters separated by distance and ideology; love between mother and child, and most of all love between grandparent and grandchild. And now that I’m a grandmother too, I understand this even more. (My review here).

Three Comedies

4. Unreliable Memoirs by Clive James. I remember sitting in the train reading this book, laughing until I cried. One of the funniest books I have ever read. No review- I read it years and years ago.

5. All That Happened at Number 26 by Denise Scott. I wish that ‘Scotty” was my friend. I just love her. Nothing really happens in the book- it’s more a series of anecdotes and yarns about family life, marriage, motherhood and daughterhood. Family is at the heart of this book, but there’s barbs too. She fears that now that her children have grown up that she has lost her well of family anecdotes, but I don’t think she need worry. She has that wonderful ability of sniffing out the ridiculous in life and she makes me feel good about being a 60 plus year old woman living in Melbourne. (My review here)

6. I Built No Schools in Kenya by Kirsten Drysdale. This is not high literature, and it is not meant to be. I found myself laughing out loud in places, and the whole thing rang completely true to me – even the dynamics of a family struggling with dementia, which is its own form of madness. She has an acute eye for the absurd, but also is a keen and thoughtful observer of what is going on around her. Of course, part of my delight in this book was that I was familiar with the setting in Nairobi, which I have visited several times. (My review here).

So that’s August’s chain. September is Anna Funder’s Wifedom. At least I’ve heard of this one!