Don't Let Me Be Lonely by: Claudia Rankine | My thoughts...

Sometimes I pick up a book solely for how it looks and feels, alone. Yes, I know--one shouldn't judge a "book" by it's cover, but I often do, sew me. The cover would have been more appealing if the field of roses and clear skies overhead wasn't thrown off by the huge Don't Let Me Be Lonely sign. If the sign is such a pressing issue (which, I am aware that it is indeed an issue because it displays the title) then it could have at least been in a different font perhaps? Anyway moving on from the fact that I didn't agree with the look and feel of the book--the content was worth reading.

Rankine wrote in such a way, that I could image everything happening in a step by step sequence as if I were there--though, every time I encountered a picture of a television set, I grew irritated, alright, we get it already, you don't watch t.v. and when you do it acts as a muse for your writing.

The passage I could most relate to in her compilation of....writing, is ironically the one that started off the book (pg.5). I talks about how she hadn't known anyone who had died until her mother had a miscarriage. My mother also had a miscarriage, three to be exact. Unlike the nonchalant shrug that the mother in the book gave in response to the questioning, my mother cried. It was painful, she had lost a life that she was excepting to care for, nurture, and watch grow into adult. She cried and displayed her emotion outwardly. What the mom in the book and my mom had in common, was the fact that they were both hurting.

One thing I love other than the fact that Rankine pulls the reader in to her reading as if they are actually with her during the events, is that she leaves us at random cliff hangers. She engages is into the content, deserts us, and leaves us thinking. A perfect example is (pg.103):

The Sunday I turn forty the delivery guy pulls the front door shut as I pick up the phone to call my parents and thank them for the lilies. "A lovely flower. I carried them on my (birth) day and now I place them in this vase in memory of something that has died," Katherine Hepburn in Stage Door. My parent' housekeeper answers the phone.

May I speak to my mother?

They're still at the funeral.

Whose funeral?

Is everyone you know alive?

While reading that the fact that "birth" was in parenthesis struck me as strange. After finishing the passage and analyzing it's magnitude, I realized the significance of the word being separated by the parentheses. One: Because the passage leaves one thinking about the inevitable; death. And Two: Rankine wanted to give the reader a heads up of what was to come in the learning process; while dissecting the piece. Another aspect of the small piece, is why didn't the narrator know that her parents would be at a funeral? Isn't it ironic that they are attending some unknown person's funeral on the BIRTH date of their daughter? Are this family as tightly nit as the flowers portray? Were they just sending the flowers because they didn't have the time to actually plan an outing with their daughter on her birthday; simply separated by distance? Where is the communication in this family? Who died? So many questions left unanswered to ponder.

In closing, I appreciate Rankine as a writer and am glad that I've been exposed to her writing, even if the style of the book isn't all that great--the content, the questions left in ones mind, the feelings evoked, is what matters.