Assorted Nuts by Sandy Bax

Disclosure: The author of this book is someone I know, and some of the people in her story are close friends of mine. This made it hard to be objective -- but it's fair to say that this book stands out as incredibly honest and, at times, side-splittingly funny among what I've read this year. It's not a perfect book but I am awed that someone I know could have written an entire book from scratch just because one day she sat down and decided to start doing it. I am also flattered to have received a pre-release copy which really made me feel like a serious book critic.


The book is a memoir, one that is built around the author's daughter's wedding, but told almost entirely in flashbacks. Bax covers a range of topics, including her childhood, several marriages, having a child, substance abuse, and breast cancer. Nothing is too private for Bax to share in the book, which is probably her most important characteristic as an author - her complete transparency in telling the stories with all their details. Bax's voice is clear throughout, and knowing her, I know it's authentic. I found myself laughing out loud (to the chagrin of a car full of Amtrak passengers) at several parts, and appreciating how important humor had been to Bax throughout her life.


Bax is a great storyteller which is not true of every memoirist. There are reflective parts of the book where my attention wandered a little but I was always drawn back in by the next set of anecdotes, fresh and cleverly told. From stories about her childhood with her siblings to later interactions with her ailing mother (and everything in between), she has a way of telling a story that is powerful: the story represents a particular incident but also encapsulates a stage of her life in just a few paragraphs.


If there's one thing about the book I would have wanted to be different it's that certain parts of the book (most notably Bax's childhood and first marriage) were told slowly with plenty of detail while other pieces (such as the sections on breast cancer and alcoholism) were given proportionally shorter airtime. Given the bravery of the author in sharing intimate details, perhaps it was easier to write at length about the parts of her life that had happened longer ago. Whatever the case, I was invested enough in the story and the journey she was going through that I could have read an entire book about her life through her daughter's birth, then another book about the more recent years.


That said, the structure of the book, as a series of trips into different parts of her life as she's reflecting on all of this at her daughter's wedding, is a nice way for her to cover a lot of material without needing tell a continuous narrative. Now, I happen to know that Sandy just became a grandmother - again. Hopefully she is taking some notes on the experience that will one day become a sequel - may I suggest A Little Nuts - about the grandkids.



Congratulations, Sandy.