Playing House

November 25, 2013
The latest from psychologist and prolific essayist Slater (The $60,000 Dog: My Life with Animals) is a slender, lyrically voiced collection of her essays, written over time, comprising personal experiences with sex, self-esteem, parenting, mental illness, and childhood family dysfunction. Slater's digressive style is one of her hallmarks, as is the confessional, glass-half-full deliverance of her travails and triumphs as a wife, mother, psychologist, foster child, and cancer survivor. Many of these vignettes are bold and entertaining; some of her indulgences, such as outing publicly her lack of interest in marital sex ("I have been gripped by sex the same as the trap grips the ferret's leg and he has to bite off his limb to set himself free. What kind of fun is this?") and the details of her affair while engaged to be married, teeter precariously between too much information and bad taste. Any shortcomings are assuaged by giving readers access to keen observations of nature and human nature, and her accumulated wisdom, which provide a compelling, highly relatable narrative. The more uplifting passages depict moments of newfound personal and spiritual enlightenment, such as when she discovered a relationship between mood and self-neglect, and that her depression lessened when her physical appearance improved.

October 15, 2013
A psychologist and nonfiction writer's frank meditations on how she formed a family and learned to love the people in her life. Slater (The $60,000 Dog: My Life with Animals, 2012, etc.) explores how she "[came] to the task of mothering" after surviving a "brutal" childhood. Her early experiences, which included a move from her dysfunctional birth family into a foster home, shaped her into an adult for whom control, rather than personal relationships, was most important. "I wanted more than a man, a best friend, a child or talent, I wanted a home, she writes," since ownership itself represented something "magical." Despite a "brooding and acerbic and self-consumed" nature and tendencies toward obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression, Slater managed to find love, get married and have children. But she still struggled with a number of issues, including attachment. With candor and self-deprecating wit, she describes the difficulty she had bonding with her infant daughter and the lack of interest she had in sex. A driven career woman, Slater eventually grew to love domesticity. She even became an expert in carpentry, a craft that brought her closer to her husband. For all his liberality toward gender roles in the home, he could not understand that "the domestic arts [were] a combination of mindless tasks and mindful executions." Slater also discusses her fraught relationship with her own body. She talks openly about combating the frumpiness that emerged in the wake of depression as well as her elective double mastectomy surgery to eliminate the too-large breasts that also carried the genetic threat of cancer. At once revealing and disconcerting, Slater's work celebrates the endless, though not always easy, rebirths that are possible through family life. A fiercely, lyrically honest memoir.

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September 1, 2013
Psychologist Slater has gained many fans over the years with her intensely personal writing and now rewards them with this extraordinary essay collection about the domestic perils she has navigated, from the time her chemist husband literally caught on fire and jolted them out of a marital malaise to her lifelong struggle with mental illness. Her sheer bravado and willingness to lay every aspect of her personal life bare are hallmarks of her writing style and are on full display in each of these pieces. A search for a lost libido, a depression-induced descent into hygiene lapses and self-described frumpiness, a gut-wrenching decision to abort a pregnancy her mental state cannot endureit's all here, and the author's willingness to take readers into these darker places of her life and relationships is not only admirable but lends itself to surprisingly addictive reading. A brilliant example of the resonant power of women's writing, Slater's emotional revelations will strike chords in readers unable to turn away from these difficult but sincere domestic truths. Slater's candid collection has huge book-group appeal.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)