The Jo-Mama Book Club and"One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop

The Jo-Mama Book Club and the Art of Losing

            The art of losing isn’t hard to master

            Although it may seem (Write it!) like disaster.

                                    Elizabeth Bishop

            It was Mom who inspired the book club my son and I founded in 2007, and not because she loved books, although she did.  When she was a child of ten, she was reading books with words in small print—books like Les Miserable (the one written by Victor Hugo not the one produced by Cameron Mackintosh), whereas I at the age of ten—in spite of having Mom as a model-- was reading Photoplay, Modern Screen, Motion Pictures and True Love Comic Books, with dialogue that was in all caps and always ending in exclamation marks.  Even as a teen, I avoided books (even those for the courses I was taking in school.  Maybe especially those) in favor of listening all night to long-playing records of musicals like West Side Story, My Fair Lady, Camelot, Kismet, and Gypsy…Mom’s vocabulary revealed a reader.  Mine revealed someone who’d memorized every lyric from every Broadway show.   I knew the word convivial only because Julie Andrews as Queen Guinevere sang about the “harmless convivial joys” of maidenhood.   I knew vacillating only because Henry Higgins used it in “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?”  Diffident was from Hello Dolly, (though I incorrectly guessed it meant arrogant rather than timid).  This vocabulary enrichment had begun after I  saw the movie Kismet, which led me to prosaic, panacea, iota, iambic, trochaic, onomatopoeia, multifarious, Burnoose, Mosque, kiosk, minaret, parapet, pertinence, miscellaneous, extraneous, caravan, Afghanistan, dromedary, Rahat Lokum, kumquat rind,  and Mesopotamia—and that was just one song.  There was also varicate, cogitate, genuflect.  But back to the (sigh) books and the point that I’m making:  Every word I knew I’d learned from musicals.

                It was, in fact, probably a Broadway show that led to the name of the Jo-Mama Book Club.   My son told me that he always called me Mom, not Mama, but when I quoted him, I’d say, “And Jonathan told me, ‘Okay, Mama, I’ll try your new dish.’ And then he took a bite and put his fork down and said, “It’s delicious, Mama, but I don’t think I’m quite the person to like it.’”

            “I call you Mom, not Mama,” he told me.

            When he drew this to my attention, I theorized that I’d gotten that vocabulary word from Gypsy.  In fact, before I had become Jonathan’s mother (mama, mom), I’d brought up my little sister Suzy to love musicals (which she did until she was old enough to realize I was a bad influence), and she and I often broke out into our own duets,  one  of which was “If Mama Got Married,” which has nineteen Mamas.  That’s followed by “Rose’s Turn,” which has another nineteen.

            My son was willing to incorporate my misquote of him into the name of our book club because that way it would have two syllables and sound more like the Jonani Duo, which seemed to be performing fewer duets.  Ours would be the Jo-Mama Book Club and maybe it would help my son and me feel a little bit less the loss of the Jonani Duo.

            The Art of losing isn’t hard to master

            Although it may seem (Write it!) like disaster.

            Those words were playing in my head even though they weren’t from a Broadway musical.  They were from a book my mother and I had discussed.  I always thought that the only time my mother and I were a duo was when we visited my brother David at Napa State Hospital and, later, at a Neurological-Behavior facility in Oakland.             But when these verses came back to me I remembered that my mother and I had read a book called Touchstones:  American Poets on a favorite poem, and we’d been particularly impressed by an essay Julia Alvarez wrote on Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” which I mentioned to Julia Alvarez at a book reading for Yo sometime around 1999.

            “I’m surprised you’ve read that!” she told me.  “You must be an amazing reader.”

            I didn’t tell her, “No, I usually just listen to musical comedies, but my mom got me to read this one.”

            “The art of losing isn’t hard to master” is the first line of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, and because it’s a villanelle, the first line is repeated—three times--and the last line of Julia Alvarez’ essay says that Bishop “provides a model for writers of how to deal with our losses by writing about them.”

            That’s what I was doing now in my writing, trying to prove that “the art of losing isn’t hard to master.”  But my son was dealing with the loss of  the Jo-Nani Duo  in a different way by suggesting that, with the loss of the Jonani Duo, we two have a book club and call it The Jo-Mama Book club. 

            We began our discussions in San Francisco with Canasta, a book of short stories by William Trevor.  Then when Jonathan moved to New York City, we continued to meet monthly online, having “chats” that lasted three hours and printed out into 15 pages each. 

            We discussed recent books like Siddhartha Makherjee’s The Emperor of Maladies:  A Biography of Cancer, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, The Invisible Gorilla by Chabris & Simons, One Day by David Nicolls and Katherine Schulz’s Being Wrong.  But we also read books we’d missed or wanted to re-read like Graham Green’s The Quiet American, :  Interpreter of maladies by Jhumpa Ludriri, and Forester’s Howard’s End.

            Then, after Mom had moved to Aegis, we read books about Alzheimer’s.  Still Alice by Lisa Genova, who got her doctorate in neuroscience, is a novel told from the point of view of a brilliant psychology professor at Harvard as she goes from the onset of Alzheimer’s to an advanced stage.    Martin Suter’s Small World is a suspenseful novel about a man whose Alzheimer’s brings short term memory loss but also enhances his long-term memory of some terrifying moments he’d experienced long ago. 

            But guess which book most resonated?  The book of the Broadway musical Next to Normal, which I kept recommending to friends going to New York City.

            “If you want a really good musical about mental illness—“ I’d say.

            “If you’re looking for a musical about a bipolar mother--” I’d begin.

            So few did. So few were.  So I alone sang along with the cast. 

            “My Psychopharmochologist and Me” and “Wish I Were Here” were just a couple of the prize-winning songs.  (Next to Normal won the Grammy for Best Score and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.)

            The lyrics included whole prescriptions.

            “Zoloft and Paxil and Buspar and Xanex, Depacon, Chronaphin, Ambien, Prozac,

            “Ativan calms me when I see the bills.”

            (Then, to the tune of “My Favorite Things,” I’d sing along.) 

            “These are a few of my favorite pills.”

            The doctor and bipolar woman try a variety of  pills, all of which have side-effects, until the patient says, “I don’t feel like myself.  I mean, I don’t feel anything,” and the doctor notes triumphantly, “Patient stable!”

            “My Psychopharmacologist and I”  worked for both my brother’s medication and my mother’s.  It was hard to get the balance just right, and when it was just right, it was hard to get it to last. 

            The final line from “My Psychopharmacologist and I” is this:

“One last thing.  Use may be fatal.  Use may be fatal.  Use may be fatal.”

                But  it wasn’t just because I could sing along that Next to Normal  resonated more than Still Alice.  It was because it described the fear my mother’s Alzheimer’s brought her—a paranoia Alice didn’t have.

                Almost all of the lyrics in Next to Normal were relevant to my mother’s fears, but the ones that played most often in my mind were these:

Like a refugee, a fugitive, forever on the run.
If it gets me it will kill me, but I don't know what I've done.

I'm some Christopher Columbus sailing out into my mind
With no map of where I'm going or of what I've left behind

            Jonathan and I made that our book club selection in June 2010, when I visited him in New York City and we saw the play Next to Normal.  We picked up the book of the musical at the Barnes and Nobles at the Lincoln Center, where Jonathan and his friend Umesh Shankar had played the clarinet duet from Mozart’s Don Giovanni mentioned in the book The Doctor and the Diva at a reading by the author.  That duet was after Jonathan and my mother had stopped performing as the Jonani Duo, and my mother was no longer part of the duo she and I had been visiting my brother but was, instead heading for her own locked facility.    

            Then,  as if Broadway weren’t enough, back came “One Art,” the last two lines that she and I had read together.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master

Although it may seem (Write it!) like disaster.

            I’m writing.