Review of Susan Wooldridge's Foolsgold

From time to time, I'll be posting reviews of books I'm reading, so long as they're topically relevant.

Foolsgold: Making Something from Nothing and Freeing Your Creative Process. It's a long title, but it could hardly be more germane to what I'm doing. Plus, the cover has a cool picture of a woman in a red dress, dancing with a bunch of colored scarves. For several years now, I've been thinking about ways to combine bodywork and creative writing. So, I bought the book and read it.

Here's the thing: I identified way too much with the author of this book. I must have looked at the author photo on the inside of the dust jacket a dozen times, and every time, Susan smiled radiantly back at me, dark haired & clad in her bright turquoise t-shirt. She looked like someone I'd like to know. But her book kept annoying me.

So, this is going to have to be a a review in the reader-response tradition, because I can't hope to be objective here.

Each chapter in this book is divided into two sections: some personal reflections (memoir stuff, in which Susan tells us about her life), followed by some suggestions to the reader about what s/he might do with what's been “learned” by bearing witness to the author's experiences in the first part of the chapter. Susan might tell us about how she's coping with her father's death, or the end of her marriage of 30 years; she might recount an experience of walking by a creek and gathering bits of junk to glue into her blue collage boxes; or maybe she will describe what it's like teaching poetry to juvenile delinquents. Whatever it is, she ties it to a lesson – and man, those lessons pissed me off.

However genteel and appropriately first-person-plural Susan's imperatives might have been, they kept delivering the same message to me: “Do this if you want to be like me.”

First off, the idea of being like anyone else is a horror to me. Second (or maybe this is the same thing), I'm already too much like the author as it is. She lives in northern California; I spent 5 years there, and remember it vividly – those drives to the Sacramento airport on foggy winter mornings? Been there. She also lives in a co-housing community. Done that. She has two children, a boy and a girl. So do I.

She doesn't organize her writing very well, loosely stitching together a few ideas and then calling them a “chapter,” with no satisfying narrative arc over the course of the book. She naively assumes her readers will be fascinated by the details of her own personal transformation – her insights, her relationships, her symbolic daffodils, her love of words, her idiosyncratic struggle to understand what it means to be a human being. Hmmm. Sounds like someone else I know.

Also, she uses the word “heck” a whole heckuvalot: “What the heck does this have to do with the creative process?” (p. 104); “Where the heck do our words come from, anyhow?” (174); “To heck with poems, boxes, books, the 'product.'” (217). It's a verbal tic, and it makes me wonder, “Who the hell edited this book?”

All that said, Susan Wooldridge has some good advice. If I can get past my own projections, I might benefit from taking her words to heart.