| Title | : | The Merry Recluse: A Life in Essays |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1582433143 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781582433141 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 304 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2004 |
Now, with 'The Merry Recluse: A Life in Essays', Knapp shows us that her vision through a wider lens is as brilliant as through a narrow one. These essays paint the fullest picture of this wonderful writer that we've yet seen, but they are also a full portrait of a writing life, showing how the same themes can engage -- and expand -- a writer over a lifetime. Knapp, who died in 2002, was considered one of the country's more intelligent and graceful voices in memoirs. This collection also shows her to be a witty, provocative observer of the world around her.
The Merry Recluse: A Life in Essays Reviews
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I love Caroline Knapp. I miss her, too; she died in 2002. Little did she know that her writing would leave such a lasting mark on a gay Vietnamese guy born and raised in Virginia, several years after her passing. I first encountered Knapp through her brilliant book
Appetites, an anorexia memoir with several layers, which I still worship as my bible. Now, two years later, I just finished The Merry Recluse, a collection of Knapp's writing about her alcoholism, her dogs, her anorexia, and so much more.
Knapp's prose conveys an enormous amount of insight with eloquence and style. She dissects the oppression of female sexuality, the consumerist nature of America, and what propels people toward addiction. Her intellect and thoughtfulness stick with me in my everyday life. Because her ideas came way ahead of her time, I often find myself curious about what she would think of today's hot topics. I find myself pondering I wonder what Caroline would think about selfies and their pros and cons or I wonder how Caroline would interpret women who sexualize themselves as a form of empowerment in pop music. This passage about living without anesthesia stands out as one of her deepest:
"Life without anesthesia often has the quality of vigorous exercise, as though each repetition of a painful moment, gone through without one's substance of choice, serves to build up an emotional muscle. When you drink away feeling - or starve or eat or gamble or obsess it away - you deprive yourself of the chance to really understand it, to come to grips with fear and self-doubt and rage, to truly battle the emotional land mines that lurk within. Addictions may protect you, but they also stunt growth, prevent you from walking through the kinds of fearful life experiences that bring you from point A to point B on the maturity scale. When you give them up, when you begin to get through those difficult moments, you find yourself flexing muscles you never knew you had. You find yourself growing."
Knapp also makes herself so vulnerable, showing her most intimate struggles and darkest doubts. She articulates her experiences with an intense amount of self-awareness. She cuts herself zero slack, and she analyzes herself with enough rigor and compassion to encourage much respect and hope. Her honesty has has inspired my own writing, pushing me to delve more in-depth, to challenge myself while still honoring my strength. This moving passage from a letter she wrote to her father exemplifies her courage:
"Alcohol is such a puzzle. When you're deep into it, it feels like the only solution, the glue that's holding you together. In fact, it is the basis of the problem, the glue that's keeping your feet stuck to the floor. Somehow, that morning, I managed to see that - maybe just in a spark, but the spark grew big enough to move me in a different direction.
The truth is so simple and so hard to see. I loved you, but I didn't want to be you. I loved alcohol but I didn't want to die your death.
Two months later, I quit drinking."
Beyond all of her talent and her self-knowledge, Knapp bares her humanity. She writes about her love for dogs, her obsession with shoes, and how she sometimes hates her shyness. She explores the emotions of solitude and loneliness with great detail, perhaps the only writer I have read to do so. Again, Knapp inspires me because she comes across as so erudite and fierce, while still acknowledging her imperfections. This passage from her essay "Time Alone: Navigating the Lines Between Solitude and Isolation" moves me so much:
"Being alone in all its varied forms - living alone, being single, spending time apart from one's spouse or family or friends - is a skill that requires practice. Solitude is hard work - it requires an impetus for self-care, an ability to soothe and amuse yourself. Cultivating a social life is hard work, too - it requires risk, an openness to vulnerability. It took Carolyn Hielbrun 60 years to master those twin arts. In her mid-40s, my friend Grace is getting there. After living alone for 20 years, she's able to hit a blend between privacy and companionship more often than not. Me, I've just begun the search."
Perhaps I love Caroline Knapp for selfish reasons. I, too, recovered from anorexia, and I share many more similarities with her: a penchant for self-examination and scrutinizing society, a low tolerance for anger, and an undying appreciation for the few close friends in my life. Over the years I have also experienced bouts of loneliness, times when I felt that no one understood me or cared about me, despite the large number of amazing people in my life, both online and offline. But Knapp has taught me so much about how to handle emotions of emptiness, and she herself - through my deep solidarity with her - has made me feel so much less alone and so much more connected.
I wish she were still here today. But I know I should appreciate the time she did have as well as the writing she did publish. I am so thankful for her. I hope she died happy, or at the very least, merry. -
Caroline Knapp is part of the pantheon of writers who know how to write. I admire her work tremendously—her insights, her turns of phrase, her sheer intellect, her honesty and wit. The following quotes are from her collection of essays and commentary, brilliantly titled: The Merry Recluse.
On life without booze…
From Life Without Anesthesia:
Anxiety looms and you think: This is why I drank. Sadness washes up: This is why I drank. Rage surfaces, or doubt or self-loathing: This is why I drank. Addictions, after all, are enormously self-protective. They’re coping mechanisms, antidotes to strong emotion. […]
Life without anesthesia often has the quality of vigorous exercise, as though each repetition of a painful moment, gone through without one’s substance of choice, serves to build up an emotional muscle. When you drink away feeling—or starve or eat or gamble or obsess it away—you deprive yourself of the chance to really understand it, to come to grips with fear and self-doubt and rage, to truly battle the emotional landmines that lurk within. Addictions may protect you, but they also stunt growth, prevent you from walking through the kinds of fearful life experiences that bring your from point A to point B on the maturity scale. When you give them up, when you begin to get through those difficult moments, you find yourself flexing muscles you never knew you had. You find yourself growing.
On Sunday morning coming down…
From On Loneliness
I have had a long, intimate relationship with this particular form: sometimes I think I was born with it, born with a particularly acute sense of myself as apart from the world, as somehow different or lacking. I can remember sitting in my bedroom on a spring day as a child, watching leaves rustle against the windowpane, aware of a feeling I was far too young to name: it was a sense of absence, I think, a belief that the world bustled on outside that window without me, that I was unable or perhaps unwilling to join in. It’s not that I didn’t have friends—I always had, and still have, many friends—but the loneliness of my experience tends to be immune from reality, from circumstance or logic: it lives within me, a small, persistent demon that stirs in my quietest moments, during unplanned evenings, on Sunday mornings. It is a sense of void.[…]
I’ve tried drinking loneliness away, exercising and shopping it away, scouring it away in fits of housecleaning. I’ve also had some success with all of these strategies, particularly the one involving bad men: there’s nothing quite so distracting as an obsessive love affair, and if a sour romance makes you lonely—well, at least you can blame the feeling on someone else.
On the man selling young girls experience…
From Harassment 101:
The professor in my case was someone I’d admired tremendously, someone whose counsel I’d sought and valued. He’d praised my work, inspired me to go into journalism. Me? I was just out of school, shy, unsure of myself, overwhelmed with the prospect of being let out into the world, scared. I had a terrible time letting go of my idealization, seeing him as wrong or out-of-line. I also worried that I’d been naïve, sitting there drinking martinis with this man and not acknowledging any possible romantic implications. And I worried about whether I’d done something to bring the incident on, sent out some kind of signal of availability.
More likely, I’d sent out other signals: insecurity, a wish to be seen as special, a yearning to be valued by people I held in high esteem. Those feelings are powerful, and I think some people (some men) are equipped with special radar for them; they pick up on precisely that hunger for approval and move in.
The day after he phoned me, we went for a walk near the campus and he talked about how “interesting” he thought I was, about my “fascinating mind.” […]
Looking back, I think what bothers me the most is the confusion I must have felt about what it means to be valued. This culture has such difficulty producing girls who feel good about themselves in terms that are not purely physical, who feel intrinsically worthy as whole people, and I see myself back then—21, scared, insecure—as utterly representative of the times. I knew a lot about being pretty (which seemed important), but not much at all about being powerful (which seemed abstract), so intellectual respect and sexual interest from men felt tied up together, inextricably linked.
On the complexity of female friendships…
From Grace Notes
Sounds familiar right? We women have a gift for closeness. So why was this friendship so wonderfully surprising to me? Contrary to conventional wisdom, sustaining a close, trusting friendship can be a dicey business for women—at least in my experience. This may be true by definition: institutionalized relationships like marriage and family are bolstered by social supports. Friendships, on the other hand, are subject to few rules, few measurable standards of success or failure. When things get rocky with a girlfriend, you don’t cruise the Yellow Pages for a Friendship Counselor. When a friend lets you down or goes through a major life change that makes you feel left behind (marriage, babies, moving cross-country), family members don’t urge you to “work” on the relationship. Friendship bonds can be very real and vital but they’re also among our most transient ties, and so a certain degree of attrition is natural and predictable: people change, they go their own ways.
On starving and obsessing, in pursuit of…
From Food as Enemy
At some point in any addiction, a behavior stops being something you use to control your feelings and turns into something that controls you instead. I probably crossed that line that summer. Whatever I was trying to starve away—loneliness, uncertainty, anger—gradually became less important that the starving itself. […]
One night I came home and found my roommates in the kitchen with a friend. They were sitting at the table drinking beer, sending out for Chinese food, and they were all laughing. I felt incredibly wistful for a second, watching them there. It was such a relaxed, normal picture, and I was so far removed from it.
But it didn’t matter. The rule was not to give in, not to give in, not to give in. It was the way I organized my life, the way I defined myself. So I went out running instead.
On her sister’s daughter…and everything…
From Letter to Zoe:
It’s odd for a person like me, who doesn’t have kids of her own and doesn’t spend much time around them, to feel such a range of potent feelings around someone as tiny as you. Kids used to scare me a bit—I saw them for the most part as little unformed psyches, just waiting to be irrevocably damaged—but I feel less of that fear around you—or, at least, the fear has given way to other, mo9re powerful emotions. A few weeks ago, I came over with a small gift, a bee knapsack, black and yellow with wings on it. you put it on and you marched around in it, and times like that you look so cute I have to physically restrain myself from scooping you up and hugging you to death. I stare at you sometimes like I’m watching a fire, mesmerized by your tiny presence, your perfect child’s skin, your two-year-old saunter. I spent most of my life assuming you had to earn the affection of others, that being loved required passing tests and jumping through hoops and proving yourself worthy. It’s amazing to me to see, in you, that it’s possible to be loved, and deeply so, simply because you exist. That is your gift to me, as precious to me as you are. -
A series of essays, The Merry Recluse gives us a peek into the author's struggles with anorexia, alcoholism, isolation, and the death of her parents. Having read all of her books, this heartbreakingly beautiful, and gut wrenchingly honest glimpse into the author's life is truly an emotional journey.
Also by this author:
Appetites: What Women Want
Drinking: a Love Story
Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs
Alice K's Guide to Life: One Woman's Quest for Survival, Sanity, and the Perfect New Shoes -
After reading Caldwell's "Let's Take the Long Way Home," the story of her soul-mate friendship with writer Caroline Knapp who died in 2002 of a brain tumor I wondered what Caroline herself had written. The title of this book spoke to me, "The Merry Recluse" because I could so easily become a recluse myself.
This is a compilation of many of the articles, columns and essays she wrote over the years, published after she died, and organized by topic rather than chronologically. I found myself checking the dates each piece was written, was it before or after her parents both died, how many years did the author have left in her own short life?
I was particularly caught up in her pieces on loss that she wrote after her dad died, and again almost exactly a year later when her mother died. She writes so simply and eloquently about her loss, it was as if she were speaking for me.
pg: 79 "The bad times are a bit fewer and farther between these days (it's true time does help) and when they hit I'm a bit better at getting through them. ...It can be a relief to cry but it doesn't really ease the pain. The worst of it, you understand, is that the only person who could really make me feel better in those moments, the only person I really want to turn to, is my mom."
She also writes about silly things women do, and why they do them, and how she's always felt she had to be the best at everything because that's the way her father brought her up, and how she'd like to be a normal person that does things just ok, that she'd like to take "slob lessons" to get over her compulsive neatness, and how she worries that her love of solitude might actually be sliding into isolation.
One of her columns that had me laughing out loud was called "Nothing to Wear" and I so identified with it. She wrote about "Spontaneous Wardrobe Failure Syndrome" or SWFS...when you look in your closet and suddenly there is nothing there that you want to wear and you can't imagine who you were when you chose those clothes. EXACTLY!
I also enjoyed the little sections when she mentions a friend, and walking the dogs with that person, because that person is Caldwell, and it's nice to hear about the other side of the relationship. Sometimes there was a story that had been told in the other book which I recognized and I got a warm fuzzy feeling to think that the incident was as important to Knapp as it had been to Caldwell.
Friendships like theirs are special, and somehow I felt like they let me in to share a little of it. -
I just love Caroline Knapp. This is the last book of hers for me. I read all the rest. I'm sad. I love her humor, her insight, her honesty and her stories. This book is different than her memoirs. These are little essays she had published all collected together in this book. Each chapter are her thoughts on a specific topic. Topics are from grief to having nothing to wear. A great writer that is truly missed.
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This book is a collection of essays Knapp wrote for various publications (the majority for the Boston Phoenix). Fantastic writing, as always, so it definitely deserves 5 stars.
However the organization of the book was awful! It's organized by theme, rather than chronologically, so there are pages and pages of somber essays, followed by a single chapter containing all of the funny ones. It was particularly annoying trying to figure out where Knapp was in her life at the time of the essay (which to me gives them more depth). Was this one during her battle with anorexia? Was she still drinking then? Or fresh out of rehab? You'd have to take note of the dates of each of these events and check before starting each essay.
Besides the annoying organization, this book was fantastic. -
A collection of published essays, my reaction to them bounced around about as much as the plublish dates (spanning 15 years) and subjects do.
I didn't connect well with Caroline Knapp. I don't connect with anorexia, alcoholism, too many Daves (many boyfriends throughout adulthood), corporate life, shopping problems, tight skirts, hoisery, and lipstick issues. But she writes well, with precise honesty and wit, allowing me to see through the eyes of someone with those experiences.
Some of her content is dated, and not in a pleasant way. I disliked how much she talks about body image and frequently uses the word "fat." "Large" is used as a negative vocabulary word in her writing. I'd like to think, or hope at least, that we've evolved in a way that body-shames less. Although maybe it's just expressed less publicly and is taboo in professional journalism now. The world is more publicly PC, but her words are probably still common in an unpublished level and in the minds of many. Who knows. And that's not to say she isn't right about society, and pressures and insecurities regarding body image.
It's definitely dated on wastefulness / throw-away matters. I cringed at that. We are greener and more environmentally aware than that now. I hope. Or again maybe not. Maybe authors just write greener now to deflect criticism. She's honest, that Caroline Knapp. Near constant smoking references dated the content, too.
At other times I found her topics more timeless and universal.
9/11. Ageism. Parental relationships. Grief. Recovery. Stuff.
Knapp was also a dog lover which many will relate to.
I've had this on my bookshelf a long time, and since my library reading flow is currently cut off, I'm reaching to those long ignored shelves. The title seemed fitting for the Covid-19 situation we're in with orders to shelter in place and social distance. She writes, too, about isolation and loneliness.
Overall, I appreciated having a book of short essays to be able to read and put down in a time when my attention and energy is unpredictable. It was a study on the essay form and memoir style, and this particular author who is praised for her use of them.
Lastly, her writing is eerily prophetic at times. Caroline Knapp died of cancer in 2002 at the age of 42.
I would have liked to read her thoughts and commentary on the two decades that have passed since her death. -
By the time I was introduced to Caroline Knapp's work in 2005, she had already been dead for several years. When I learned this, after reading and being astonished by her book, Pack of Two, I was heartbroken. I went on to read her other books, Drinking: A Love Story and Appetites: Why Women Want and found myself very sad that I couldn't read the newspaper column she refers to writing or any of her magazine articles.
The Merry Recluse fixes that problem, at least to some extent. Published several years after Knapp's death, the book is a collection of some of her most notable essays from her time at the Boston Phoenix and her magazine writing. For the most part, the subject matter is the same as that found in her books--her alcoholism, her anorexia, her relationship with her family, her relationship with her dog. One thing the essays get at that the books didn't as much, though, is Knapp's decision to live alone and to be what she terms a "merry recluse"--a person who is content and even happy with her solitude.
One of the reasons I was more impressed with Pack of Two than with Knapp's other books was that I had previously read intelligent discussions of alcoholism and anorexia, but I'd never read anything that took relationships with dogs so seriously or talked about them in such an intelligent way as Knapp does in Pack of Two. While reading the essays in The Merry Recluse that dealt with Knapp's living alone and being "reclusive," I felt the same way. The human need to be alone, and the desire of some of us to be alone much or most of the time, isn't something I've seen much discussion of anywhere, and Knapp discusses it with both humor and gravitas.
For someone who has not read Knapp's other books, reading some of the essays in The Merry Recluse is definitely a quick way to tell you if you'd enjoy her longer stuff or not, and which of her books you should start with. For me, most of it was not new, but it was still great to "hear" her voice again. Caroline, you are missed. -
I really enjoyed this book tremendously. Her writing is very emotional and easy to read. It really makes you think about the problems in your life and realize that some people really do have more on their plate than you do. I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a little bit of happiness and a little bit of pain because in every word throughout this book you get the opportunity to experience every emotion right along with the author.
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I “met” this author through the writing of her best friend Gail Caldwell. After reading Gail’s book, I had to get to know Caroline too. This book was put together after Caroline died, all too young, at the age of 42. It’s a collection of her writings from publications like the Boston Globe column she had for years to New Woman Magazine. I can see why she and Gail were such good friends, how Gail’s warmth and confidence perfectly balanced Caroline’s more tense and perfectionist personality. Some of the essays are dated but it just made me think of how much we are shaped by the times we live in and I wondered what her writing would be like today. If I could unzip my busy life with little kids and slip out of it for just a minute into another lifestyle, living alone in Boston with a dog and a writing gig and a best friend and a hobby of rowing on the Charles would be high on the list of possibilities.
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It is perhaps not exactly accurate to call most of these "essays" — the majority are columns.
As a working journalist, I say this with a heavy heart, but there's something a little insubstantial and fleeting about the column form, and it's a bit odd to see them presented in this way. Were I reading them in the alt-weekly where they originally ran, I would have thought them quite good, but here their quantity (prolific writing being a function of journalism's demands) begins to diminish their effectiveness.
I understand the impulse to collect them, especially given Knapp's untimely death, but this feels more like a DVD's special feature to a more fully realized work, such as "Drinking: A Love Story." -
4.5
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Knapp is an engaging writer, but I find myself more intrigued by the details of Knapp's brief life rather than by the essays she left behind. I love her relationship with Lucille, her beloved rescue dog, and I admire her frankness about her life. The three final essays on solitude and the essays on loss are quite well done. But the columns on shopping, fretting over the whims of society, etc. are just not my cup of tea. I admit I prefer collections to have one unifying theme, rather than the comic mixed with the serious. Still, Knapp is well worth reading--there's a companionable quality about her style that makes you want to listen to her voice through the pages, as if you're walking through the forest with her and Lucille.
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I liked this book for the wrong reasons. Caroline Knapp died in her early 40s, and I liked reading what she was thinking about before she knew she would die. But, it isn't profound or particularly well written. It is a collection of her writings from the column she wrote in the 80s and 90s, many of them focusing on her anxieties and obsessions, and I was moved by what she feared would happen to her in a future that never manifested due to her early death.
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The more Caroline Knapp I read, the more I like her writing style. Some of the essays in this collection are overkill. If I had been the editor of this book, I probably would have chosen fewer essays on certain topics, but I gravitate to her writing because the issues of which she writes are familiar and universal to a lot of women. It's an easy book to skip around in -- you don't have to read it straight through but can pick-and-choose without worry.
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In my endless pursuit to lighten my load of books, I have been picking up books that have sat on my shelves for years. I am sure I started this book years ago when it was originally purchased, but did not connect with it. On my second attempt I am pleasantly surprised, this is an amazing collection of Caroline Knapp's magazine/newspaper articles. Ms. Knapp's writing is funny, painful, sad, familiar, and personal. I loved this collection. It is sad to lose a great at such a young age.
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I'm shallow, I guess. I like my serious writers to be serious and my humorous writers to be humorous. Knapp is amazing when she's describing her grief and healing after family death, her struggles with alcoholism and her reconciliation of a childless life. Not so much when she talks about buying shoes.
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I wish I would have known of Caroline Knapp while she was still alive. Known best for her intimate "confessional" books Appetites and Drinking: A Love Story, Merry Recluse is more light hearted, full of short columns that she wrote for various news outlets throughout her career. She's full of insight and wit. I think I might have a girl crush on her.
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4.5 stars. I really loved the essay entitled "The Merry Recluse," as well as a myriad of others throughout the piece. Really well done.
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Some of these essays were so beautiful and touched on themes of the human experience in ways I hadn't seen done before. But many of them were very, very surface level women's magazine pieces on "never being able to find the right thing to wear!" and "guys can be such jerks, right?" and I feel like they maybe shouldn't have made it into this collection. At the very least, I feel like the essays maybe shouldn't have been sorted by category—having all of the essays discussing her parents' deaths all lumped together, for instance, ended up diluting their emotional impact because they started to seem very repetitive, and slogging through all of the less emotionally/existentially insightful pieces all one after the other made me want to skip whole sections. I did really appreciate Knapp's perspective, though—a lot of the essays made me feel at home and seen and I'm looking forward to reading her other (more polished) books.
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I have read all of Knapp's books and enjoyed every one immensely. This is a collection of previously published essays and articles gathered and published in book form after her death. She is known for writing deeply personal accounts of her life and experiences and most of this book remains true to that.
It is divided into sections by theme vs. chronology so you can see her evolution as a writer as well as a person.
About 85% of these essays had me saying " exactly "...and me too! There were a few that I disagreed with and a few I thought were just not well written or worth my time reading. Overall it was an interesting and resonating collection.
I only wish she had lived longer to write more. -
If you were around Providence or Boston in the 90’s you have undoubtedly read the Phoenix - Caroline Knapp was a regular columnist - “Out There” featuring Alice K- if you enjoyed her work then you should definitely find yourself a copy of this book- I found it used at the Book Barn in Niantic CT- how someone could part with it I’ll never know, but I’m glad they did!
Published after her 2002 death in 2004- most of the essays are from 90s but are honestly just as timely now as they were back then.
I tried to make this last as long as possible- reading a few essays at a time in between other books- and I was so sad when I finished it- I may reread her other best seller- Drinking, A Love Story - which I also highly recommend! -
A collection of posthumously published essays on various personal topics--growing up with a twin, anorexia, alcoholism, furniture shopping as therapy, shyness and isolation, the Zen of walking dogs, therapy, etc. Some particularly connected with--a defense of shyness, and the essay that gives the book it's title, which discusses happiness in solitude, as opposed to loneliness. Others, like humorous lists of work innovations or modern gods, didn't appeal. But the topics are so varied, readers are likely to finds hits as well as misses.
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Her newspaper and magazine columns are collected here, loosely grouped by subject matter. Despite her being a survivor of an eating disorder, I found her pieces on body image some of the least compelling, along with some of her silly pop culture comedic pieces. I liked the essays on solitude, alcoholism and dealing with the death of her parents to be some of the best. I want to read more by this author.
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Knapp's essays are uneven. I deeply resonated with her pieces where she confronted her food, alcohol, and exercise demons. I could feel the terror her shyness unleashed on her life since I also hid in the dark to avoid social gatherings. I enjoyed her stories about dogs, love, and loyalty.
I was humming along until I hit the sections, Out There and In Here. Many of these essays are her earlier work, too light and fluffy for my taste. My suggestion- read the first half of the book. -
I LOVE Caroline Knapp's writing, but I didn't enjoy her columns that were more humorous. That said, her writing about addiction, eating disorders, singleness, etc. are incredible. I'm a huge fan of her books "Appetites" and "Drinking: A Love Story" and have read both multiple times each so I just had to get this book of essays. So sad she died so young. There was a lot more greatness where this came from.
