TRUTH & BEAUTY by Ann Patchett

Lucy Grealy was an author and poet and a dear friend of Ann Patchett’s, ever since they were roommates at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.  This homage to Lucy and to her friendship with Patchett is very readable but not quite riveting.  Lucy was a very needy person who just wanted to be loved, preferably by a man, despite the fact that she had tons of very devoted friends—both male and female.  As a child she developed cancer of the jaw, and her life was an endless series of surgeries intended to improve her appearance and her ability to eat and speak.  She achieved acclaim as a writer when she published Autobiography of a Face in 1994, but no surgeon was able to reconstruct her face satisfactorily.  She suffered mightily, even having her fibula removed so that it could be used to supplant her jaw bone, but the results were never as advertised.  My only complaint about this book is that Patchett never gave me reason to love Lucy, who reminds me so much of the character Jude in A Little Life.  I empathized with Lucy, but she squandered not only her friendships but also her talent and her financial gains.  Devotees like Patchett were constantly at her beck and call—financially, emotionally, and in person.  I just couldn’t figure out why, unless all her friends needed to be needed, and I don’t think that’s the case with Ann Patchett, at least.  Ann obviously genuinely loved Lucy, partly for her mind, I suppose.  One very telling incident in the book is where Lucy went on a date with George Stephanopoulos after he answered her personal ad in the New York Review of Books.  She did not seem disappointed at their failure to hit it off, but the question on all her friends’ minds was whether he knew in advance about her disfigured face.  She unraveled when someone actually asked her.

JUST KIDS by Patti Smith

Patti Smith’s music was mostly not mainstream enough to appear on my radar, but this memoir garnered a lot of attention and accolades when it came out.  Her rags-to-riches story is amazing, as she traverses NYC in the 1970s, initially working in bookstores to pay the rent.  As a struggling artist and poet, alongside artist Robert Mapplethorpe, she namedrops Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Todd Rundgren and William S. Burroughs, to list a few.  Robert aspires to a higher social class, but sometimes Patti reaps the rewards of his endeavors.  She and Robert are lovers and then roommates after he acknowledges his homosexuality.  Patti then has other famous lovers, including Allen Lanier of Blue Oyster Cult and Sam Shepard.  As another reviewer noted, Mapplethorpe does not leap off the page as charismatically as he should, since his and Patti’s relationship is the thread that ties the entire book together.  When Robert gets low on funds, he takes to hustling, inspired to a degree by the movie Midnight Cowboy.  Finally, his photography earns him the attention he deserves, some of which derives from the controversial eroticism of his work.  Patti herself, on the other hand, has a spirit that drew me in and motivated me to listen to some of her music.  One of my favorite moments is when she cuts her hair in the style of Keith Richards’, to match her androgynous looks.  In fact, Allen Ginsberg buys her lunch at an automat, apparently because he thinks she is a man.  Unfortunately, the celebrity sightings and memorable anecdotes were not enough to carry this book for me.

EDUCATED by Tara Westover

I was reluctant to read this book, because I had heard so much about it.  In some ways, this memoir resembles Angela’s Ashes, All Over But the Shoutin’, The Liars’ Club, and The Glass Castle.  These are all very different books, but they all tell the story of the author’s remarkable journey from an appalling upbringing to success as an adult.  In Educated, however, the author particularly recounts her tortured ambivalence toward her family, which is governed by her father—a fundamentalist Mormon who eschews doctors and anticipates the end of the world at any moment.  The most shocking part of the story is the physical abuse that the author suffers at the hands of an older brother.  Plus, her father and another brother are severely burned in separate workplace accidents, and neither is treated by a medical professional.  The family deals in scrap metal, and there are numerous on-the-job calamities involving machinery and just plain negligence, in addition to two horrific car accidents.  Actually, many events in this book are shocking, and the author continues to put herself in harm’s way, in some cases because she has no other recourse, and in other cases, because she does not want to estrange herself from her family.  If there is a flaw here, it is that she fails to make me understand why she has such a hard time making a clean break.  She does not paint her parents as sympathetic characters—ever.  Her mother lies to her, and her father puts everything in God’s hands, denying personal accountability for any of the catastrophes, most of which are his fault.  I get that for the first seventeen years of her life she has no outside experiences with which to compare the strict framework that she has endured.  However, once she begins to become “educated” and to realize how much she has missed out on, I expected her to let go of her previous life without remorse. Bottom line, though, hers is a remarkable story, and she tells it beautifully.

INHERITANCE by Dani Shapiro

I did not really want to read this book and certainly did not expect to like it.  Memoirs are definitely not my thing, but my dread was quickly dispelled.  This book focuses on the author’s discovery via DNA testing that her now deceased father was not her biological father.  As Dani was much closer to her Orthodox Jewish father than to her somewhat narcissistic mother, this revelation about her paternity completely rocks her world.  The only flaw in this whole story is that Dani had loads of clues throughout her life and simply chose to disregard them.  To ignore how different her coloring and features were from her parents seems outrageous to me.  Perhaps, though, she had some subconscious doubt about her parentage that caused her to do the DNA test in the first place, albeit at the suggestion of her husband.  I loved several things about this book—the suspense, the writing, and especially the emotional wallop that it packs.  It brought tears to my eyes more than once, as Dani does some in-depth soul searching about what it means to be a daughter and to be loved.  Her conception using artificial insemination leaves her with questions that she may never be able to answer, particularly with regard to whether or not either or both parents knew that she was not her father’s biological offspring.  The book also addresses the fact that sperm banks can no longer guarantee anonymity.  Our access to DNA information is remarkable, and it can enlighten us as to where we came from; we just have to ensure that it does not redefine who we are at our core.

BREATHING OUT by Peggy Lipton

I’m not sure why creative people seem to lead such tortured lives, but it certainly seems to be the case.  If I have one complaint about this novel, it’s that Peggy Lipton’s misfortunes seem a little exaggerated. Certainly having been molested repeatedly as a child traumatizes her and creates a pall over her entire life, but most of her other wounds seem to be self-inflicted.  Growing up, her family life was not warm and nurturing, but her parents were fairly affluent and not abusive.  Emotionally, however, Peggy was not well-balanced, probably suffering from depression, and sought acceptance via sexual relationships that were not always healthy.  My favorite part of the novel were the old photos—with Paul McCartney, with the Mod Squad cast members, with Terence Stamp, with Lou Adler, with Sammy Davis, Jr.,  and with her family.  I was fascinated by all of these encounters and kept returning to the photo pages—not to see her companion but to see how she looked at the time.  Her most fulfilling relationship was with her husband of 14 years, Quincy Jones, and I would expect his memoir to be even more captivating.  The book is sort of a series of reminiscences with a slightly wavering timeline, and the writing is decent and flows nicely.  Her life may have been tainted by sadness but it was never dull, and neither is this book.

BEAUTIFUL BOY by David Sheff

David Sheff writes this memoir from the perspective of a father going through hell.  His smart and charismatic son Nic becomes addicted to meth, but both father and son are in denial about the seriousness of Nic’s drug habit. Bouncing from rehab to relapse over and over again, ad infinitum, Nic’s problems become his father David’s problems, and David’s obsession with Nic’s life has a profoundly detrimental effect on the rest of the family, including Nic’s much younger half-siblings.  At one point, thanks to a comment from another Al-Anon member, David realizes that if Nic were in jail, at least David would know where he is.  David’s life is basically an endless rollercoaster that parallels Nic’s progress and regression.  At some point he has to accept the fact that Nic’s recovery is in Nic’s hands. This book may be recommended reading for parents and family members of addicts, but I am neither, and I still found it to be riveting.  I also liked the fact this book is not a tearjerker at all, and I am someone who cries over rom-coms.  It is told in a clear-eyed fashion with many musings on what happened to Nic to cause him to become an addict and what David and his family could have done differently.  The bottom line is that no one really knows the cause or the solution.  I found it interesting that bootcamp-type rehab facilities are among the least effective.  The AA philosophies seem to be the most effective, but no addict is ever cured, so that the possibility of relapse looms threateningly for the rest of his or her life.  As hopeless as all this sounds, I found this to be a beautiful book.

WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR by Paul Kalanithi

I generally steer clear of memoirs, particularly about death.  However, this book has garnered so much press that I felt obligated to read it.  A friend passed it along, and I was happy to see that it was very small.  Paul Kalanithi learns, before he finishes his residency in neurosurgery at Stanford, that he has terminal cancer.  He accepts his fate with grace but also a sense of urgency, because there is so much that he wants to accomplish.  This book, though, is not just about his approach to his own death, but, more importantly, I think, it is about his approach to the mortality of his patients.  Paul is intrigued by the whole idea of the mind as a product of the brain, where the mind embodies all those traits and emotions that we regard as human:  hope, love, courage, ambition.  I know that the role reversal of patient and doctor is supposedly a central theme of this book, but I didn’t really see it that way.  Paul very much participates in his own treatment, without browbeating his oncologist, but he researches his diagnosis thoroughly enough to have a peer-to-peer conversation with her.  My favorite part of the book is probably his widow’s epilogue, in which she gives us details that Paul chose not to share.  I’m glad I read this book, if only to find out what all the fuss was about, but I had a rather lukewarm reaction to it.  I love that this book is his legacy, particularly for his family, and that, through this book, his influence is far-reaching.  However, I think the lives he improved and saved with his scalpel and his compassion in a short period of time are his most important legacy.

WILD by Cheryl Strayed

Authors who write successful memoirs almost always have a comeback story to tell.  Frankly, they all strike me as a little self-congratulatory, and this one is no exception.  Twenty-something Cheryl Strayed has never emotionally recovered from the death of her mother, and her grief has left her so bereft of good sense that she cheats on her beloved husband and becomes addicted to heroin.  To get her life back on track, she decides to backpack the Pacific Crest Trail alone for three months, despite a cavalier disregard for the need to train.  Her pack is so extraordinarily heavy that she cannot lift it without putting it on, and her boots cause blisters on her feet and blacken her toe nails.  In any case, she trundles on, facing threatening wildlife, snow and ice, intimidating hunters of the two-legged variety, and dehydration, with guts and optimism—most of the time, at least.  She’s not a whiner, but she is incredibly foolish, and somehow she survives, thanks to a fair amount of good luck, the kindness of strangers, and sheer willpower.  However, I can’t say that I ever warmed up to her.  For one thing, I found her story totally lacking in humor.  Her myriad mistakes are not funny at all; on the contrary, they’re quite depressing.  I admire her for making the trip and thus digging herself out of a debilitating funk, but, to me, this story is a little too much about Cheryl patting herself on the back.  She marvels at the fact that men still find her attractive when she hasn’t bathed in two weeks, but I’m more impressed with her refusal to give up or to give in to fear, although her nightmares about Bigfoot seemed a little nutty.  Still, after all she’s overcome, I guess she’s earned the right to strut her stuff.

ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK by Piper Kerman

Piper Kerman may not be one of the best writers in the world, but her work here is good enough.  And the subject matter is an eye opener.  I don’t even mind that she’s capitalizing on a serious mistake of her youth to produce this revealing portrait of a minimum security women’s prison. I have not seen a single episode of the TV series based on this memoir, but I now have a pretty clear idea of why it’s popular.  If you think a women’s prison is all cat fights among lesbians, you would be dead wrong.  Quite the contrary.  Most of the women Piper meets on the inside would be living productive lives on the outside if they were given half a chance.  Unfortunately, they have neither Kerman’s resources nor her extensive, caring, and extremely loyal support from friends and family.  Kerman makes sure that her reader understands that prison is not a happy place, especially for those women serving a decade or more with little hope for a better life after their release.  Kerman’s sentence of 15 months is not what brings her to the realization of the impact of her crime of transporting drug money. Rather, she sees how illegal drugs have kept so many women in prison, often distanced from their children, and that these women are often repeat offenders.  Kerman’s keen observations make a strong case for the cessation of the war on drugs, because the U.S. government is spending billions of dollars on room and board for women who pose no threat to society.  What’s even more striking is how these women form makeshift families in prison and do all they can to help their fellow inmates adjust and cope.  Theirs is a mostly congenial sisterhood where everyone has to bury their rage at the system so as not to jeopardize their ultimate goal--freedom.

BOSSYPANTS by Tina Fey

I've never watched 30 Rock, but then I guess not many people do, despite its critical acclaim. Although Tina Fey doesn't consider herself particularly adept at impressions, she certainly does a spot-on Sarah Palin. She also does some other funny voices, and for this reason, I recommend the audiobook, which she reads herself. (The last CD has photos and video clips as a bonus.) She covers a lot of ground, from being a late-in-life family addition to her contemplation of having a second child and how that decision impacts the fate of her TV show and its hundreds of employees. She's definitely a soaring example of how to laugh at one's self—from her myriad self-deprecating comments about her looks, to her interview with Lorne Michaels for a position as a writer for Saturday Night Live. I loved the irony in the fact that she has no particular difficulty shouldering her role as "bossypants" for 30 Rock but can't bring herself to scold the nanny for cutting her daughter's fingernails too short. There's also a healthy dose of feminism, broached with humor, ranging from Second City's preference for a male majority in their traveling improv groups, to her response to several pundits who proclaim that women are not funny. She's certainly proven them wrong.

BIRD CLOUD by Annie Proulx

I thought this memoir would be similar to Frances Mayes' Under the Tuscan Sun, and it was, in a way. Of course, this book is about the building of new house in Wyoming, as opposed to restoring an old villa in Tuscany, but many of the problems are the same: acquiring the property, poor workmanship, budget overruns, plumbing disasters, the difficulty of living in a space that is under construction, etc. In both books, the most reliable and skilled workers become almost like family. However, Bird Cloud opens with an overly long section about the author's father's family history, and this just seemed like filler to me. The middle section is about the process of designing and building the house, and the pace of the book picks up after the genealogy section ends. The final section is devoted to birds on the property, and I have mixed feelings about that section. I think she wanted to make a point about the fact that no matter how much effort and expense you put into building a house that is friendly to the environment, you are almost certain to disrupt some habitats. In one instance, a flock of birds (I forget the species) stopped feeding near the house because the landscapers replaced the weeds with a native grass. The finale is an homage to the bald and golden eagles that take up residence near the house and is immensely sad, while at the same time depicting their resilience. Certainly the fact that the house is unreachable in winter is a showstopper, but possibly her guilt over its impact on the wildlife may taint her love of the surrounding beauty enough to force her to sell it. We'll see…

ARE YOU THERE, VODKA? IT'S ME, CHELSEA by Chelsea Handler

Some of Handler's stories are just plain embarrassing, and I have to hand it to her for owning up, assuming all of them are basically true. On the other hand, in some cases there was just too much information. I didn't actually read this book; I listened to the audio version, and I think that's the way to go. She does a fake English accent to re-create a scene in a London restaurant, and her other vocal imitations evoke vivid images of everyone from her dad to her fellow inmates at a women's prison where she was incarcerated briefly for a DUI. She refreshingly eschews political correctness with her tale of a drunken, manipulative dwarf and stashes a lover under the bed while another lover dumps her. Her mouth lands her in various chases that end with scraped knees and dishevelment, including a rumble that she unwisely initiates – emboldened by her kickboxing training – with a group of Latinas,. She's scrupulously honest at times, including the admission of a re-gifting to a woman who lied about having a birthday, and on other occasions finds herself way out on a limb, after having begun telling some fiction on a lark. The best LOL moment is when she keeps a food journal for a nutritionist and recounts the exact number of items she ate at a shower, including more than a dozen jalapeño poppers and pigs-in-a-blanket.

ALL OVER BUT THE SHOUTIN' by Rick Bragg

Rick Bragg's memoir is like Angela's Ashes set in rural Alabama. His mother repeatedly has to bundle up her family and return to her mother's farm to escape the wrath of her alcoholic husband. For her three sons, anything is preferable to life with their father, where starvation is just around the corner, since his employability makes them ineligible for welfare. Like Frank McCourt, Rick Bragg's love of books helps lift him out of poverty. Bragg manages to inject a good amount of humor into his story as well, but I could have done without the bad grammar that just helps propagate the myth that all Southerners butcher the language. The book becomes less engrossing after the author reaches adulthood, working as a reporter for a string of newspapers. I have to say, though, that the most moving section of the book was his account of his mother's accompanying him to New York to receive his Pulitzer Prize.

THE PRIZE WINNER OF DEFIANCE, OHIO by Terry Ryan

I don't think Terry Ryan will win any awards as a writer, but I enjoyed this memoir just the same. Terry's mother, Eveyln, managed a household of ten children with no help from her hard-drinking Irish Catholic husband Kelly. Evelyn, though, refused to wallow in self-pity and instead demonstrated endless spunk in her quest to provide life's essentials and a few extra niceties for her family in the 50's. Armed with a passel of 4-cent stamps, Evelyn focused her surplus energy (how did she have any with 10 kids?) on contests in which the entrant supplied the last line of a jingle or described a product in 25 words or less. The book is filled with many of her winning entries and a lot more that resulted in zilch. It's interesting how the simplest line sometimes won, and sometimes the most obscure reference won. We discover what Evelyn already knew: the entry needed to fit the demeanor of the advertising company that was judging the entries. Evelyn couldn't resist sending in a few humorous ones to the stodgy judges and vice versa. She also had to be creative in avoiding sending in multiple entries under the same name. She won a big contest in her son's name that included a trip to New York to be on TV. She accompanied him on the trip, while the rest of her family tried in vain to watch from home on a TV that malfunctioned during a storm. Many of the contest windfalls arrived in the nick of time—twice just before eviction from their home. Each time she won a car, she had to sell it, since a family of twelve had no use for a two-seater sports car. Indeed.

THE LIARS' CLUB by Mary Karr

I wonder if this book would have been as popular if it had come after, rather than before, Jeannette Walls' blockbuster, The Glass Castle. Both authors managed to emerge from horrific childhoods, if not exactly unscathed, at least with their writing talents intact. Mary Karr never mentions a journal, and the clarity of her childhood memories is incredible. Of course, I'm making a broad assumption that her recollections are accurate. Her father was an east Texas oil worker, who despite some other serious shortcomings, was a decent provider for his family. Karr's mother was Nervous with a capital N, a euphemism for wacko, and spent some time in a mental institution after twice trying to take down her family by driving the car over a bridge. The final straw was when she burned most of her daughters' clothes in a bonfire and then, with butcher knife in hand, phoned the sheriff, telling them that she had killed her children, while they cowered, unharmed, under a blanket. And that's not all—not by a longshot. Both parents wrestled with significant demons from their pasts and were alcoholics, oblivious to the fact that Mary was sexually abused twice—once by a neighbor boy and once by an adult male babysitter. Hers was an eventful childhood, and obviously not in a good way. For example, Mary's sister Lecia was attacked by a Portuguese man-of-war, apparently not heeding their father's warnings and the dead creatures washed up on the beach. The parents, of course, were in a beachside bar at the time. The parents never exhibited any remorse for their neglect, benign or otherwise, and seemed to think that it was acceptable for Lecia, the "competent" daughter, as opposed to Mary, the "cute" daughter, to act as a surrogate mother. When the parents decided to split up, Lecia convinced Mary that they should stay with their mother, to take care of her. The parents obviously didn't see themselves as requiring this kind of oversight, and it's a seriously sad state of affairs when they actually do.

INVISIBLE SISTERS by Jessica Handler

I could never write a memoir because, for one thing, I had a relatively normal childhood, and, for another, I didn't keep a journal. However, Jessica Handler did keep a journal and had a very difficult childhood, being the "well" sister. I viewed this book as sort of a memorial to her two younger siblings, Sarah and Susie, who had very different but ultimately fatal diseases. The impact of this tragic coincidence on a family is almost unimaginable, and Jessica Handler documents her family's lives in a rather scattered manner, something like an out-of-order scrapbook. I can't say that this jumbling of events made the book hard to follow, since it's really a very fast read. Thank heavens, because I didn't really want to spend too much time in this household. It's not surprising that young Jessica used drugs and toxic friendships as her escapes from survivor's guilt and the widening chasm between her parents. I was also glad that this book was not as tear-inducing as I thought it would be, since the tone is really rather matter-of-fact. Handler's father is a very intriguing figure, a labor union attorney who moved his family to Atlanta in the 1960s and who had his own demons to face as he struggled to be the head of a family whose members were dying. Her mother appears to be rock solid through all the tragedy, but the failure on the part of both parents to encourage expressions of grief was ultimately destructive to their family dynamic. I'm guessing that pouring out her memories on paper was cathartic for the author, and in the interview in the back of the book she says that she was surprised at how much she laughed while writing it. Needless to say, she doesn't share enough of this humor with the reader. Her husband also has a very bizarre story to tell, and their complicated histories draw them together.

Amazon: 4.5 stars (19 reviews)

Barnes & Noble: 4 stars (3 reviews)

ECOLOGY OF A CRACKER CHILDHOOD by Janisse Ray

My husband and I have bicycled all over the southern part of Georgia, so that I particularly enjoyed revisiting the town of Baxley through this book and seeing it through the eyes of someone who grew up there. Janisse Ray's family owned a junkyard, and that seems somewhat incongruous in a book whose title includes the word "ecology." Oddly enough, the junkyard was a giant recycling zone of sorts, where discarded parts could be resurrected in other vehicles. It's a stretch, but I get it. The author alternates chapters about her childhood with observations on the deforestation and diminishing wildlife populations in the area. Her focus is largely on the longleaf pine, which was all but eliminated from the planet by construction, turpentine production and wood-burning locomotives. There's also a heartbreaking story about a captured gopher tortoise that will forever haunt me. Although, she was well-loved, well-fed, and well-educated, Ms. Ray did not have an easy life, having to dress and behave in accordance with her family's apostolic religious beliefs. Her family stories are mostly upbeat, though, except for that of the whipping her father doles out to all the children for witnessing an episode of animal cruelty without making an effort to stop it. Also, my husband and I obsessed for several hours over a math problem that appears in the book without its solution. Only in my household….

A LONG WAY FROM HOME by Tom Brokaw

If you like memoirs and are tired of hard-luck childhoods, this might be the book for you. It's not really a celebrity memoir, and it's certainly not a tell-all, as it ends with his marriage at 22. Brokaw was the golden boy of his high school—athlete (though not a star), student body president, and Boys' State governor. The only things he didn't excel at, besides sports, were music and Algebra II. He also had some difficulty getting the hometown girl he wanted, Miss South Dakota Meredith Auld, as she spurned him for "having a girl in every port" and for his irresponsibility during his senior year of high school and freshman year of college. He cleaned up his act, though, and even won over her prestigious parents, despite his own blue collar upbringing. His father was a heavy machinery operator for the Army Corps of Engineers, and Tom's mother worked at the post office and then later managed a shoe store. Brokaw was lucky in that he never lacked for good role models and mentors, including his very industrious parents. Still, his ego and affinity for partying almost derailed him at a time when he felt that he could do no wrong and would always be forgiven occasional lapses.

DON'T LET'S GO TO THE DOGS TONIGHT by Alexandra Fuller

This memoir, subtitled An African Childhood, zips along from adventure to tragedy and back again, without dwelling too long on the tragedies. The author and her family are white tobacco farmers during the violent transition period between white rule and black rule in Zimbabwe. The tragedies are the deaths of three Fuller children, one at birth, one from meningitis, and one by drowning. These types of deaths could have happened anywhere but seem almost inevitable in the hardscrabble world that the Fullers inhabit. The fallout is that Fuller's Mum, Nicola, sinks deeper into mental illness and alcoholism. Between bouts, Mum is capable and kindhearted, taking in strays and heading up an unofficial primitive medical clinic when necessary, saving the life of a slashed servant and going to great lengths to rehabilitate a tortured owl. When the going gets too tough, the family literally gets going, finding another estate to whip into shape in Malawi and then Zambia. Certainly they're poor, but Alexandra gets a glimpse of real poverty when she's asked to share a meal with a black family and realizes that her portion was intended to feed five people. The book is a study in contrasts in many ways. The sights, sounds, and smells of African wildlife are part of what keeps the Fullers there, despite the danger of mine blasts and guerilla gunfire.

MARLEY AND ME by John Grogan

Marley and Me is John Grogan's ode to his beloved yellow Labrador Retriever who predated all three of Grogan's children. Marley was a loving, happy, loyal dog but a constant troublemaker. He turned the garage into a shambles when a thunderstorm hit, was expelled from obedience school, swallowed an 18k gold necklace, and managed to escape a large steel cage. This is one of those alternately laugh-out-loud funny and tear-inducing books. As all of us who have pets know, though, you can't have one emotion without the other, since we usually outlive them. It's not just about the dog, either. Grogan bares all in his recounting of his wife's miscarriage, the unpleasant effort to get pregnant again, and her plunge into postpartum depression after a difficult pregnancy with their second child. Fortunately, one day she finally wakes up as her old self, and even Marley is back in her good graces. In one of his better moments, Marley stands sentry while Grogan comforts a young stabbing victim. Mostly, though, it's about Marley's many screw-ups and escapades, and it made me appreciate my cat, whose worst faults are chewing up shoelaces and noisy bathing at ungodly hours.