The Perfect Book for Winter--You Can Stay Bundled Up All Day and Feel Like You Accomplished Something

I was reading The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch, which I’m finding hard to put down, but then Tonni’s book Overdue arrived at the front door, and I put down the sea.

Tonni was in my writing class a while back, and so I’ve very familiar with her writing, but not with the whole book she created, and good lord, it’s like glue. I can’t let it go.

Well, clearly that’s not exactly true because I’m using both my hands to type this for you, but the book is still stuck to me. I feel selfish keeping it to myself and needed to share it so I could get back to wholeheartedly reading during this very snowy Sunday afternoon.

The book starts with a young Tonni making guests at her parents’ party laugh by coming downstairs first in her mother’s high heels and lipstick, and then again with her shirt stuffed with toilet paper in attempt to look womanly, and then again with her shirt stuffed with sanitary pads, and finally, after being threatened with a spanking, with her pants stuffed with a pillow.

She held her breath during her spanking and blacked out. She wrote, “After that, my parents tell the story through the years that the time I was spanked, I held my breath, which made them reconsider spankings. And it’s true. I’m never spanked again, never hit ever, by anyone. Which would seem to mean that I’ve come out ahead. Trouble is, one of my favorite states of being, still, is to be silly, but I rarely get there. It’s a nearly impossible place for me to find.”

This is a book about a life more than it is a book about adoption, for those of you wondering if this book is for you. If you like people and music and nature and language, this book is for you.

Okay. I did my good deed for the day. I shared. Now I get to go back to bed to read.