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Dinners with Ruth: A Memoir on the Power of Friendships, by Nina Totenberg

The title of Nina Totenberg’s memoir Dinners with Ruth immediately hooks the reader, but the subtitle nails the essence of this engaging narrative on the power of friendships. Through the lens of Nina’s professional career as a legal affairs correspondent and also her personal life, readers do learn much about Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s long public law career as well as a basic outline of her fifty-year friendship with Nina, but the book’s focus is on Nina.

The two women had a number of things in common. They were also very different. Nina was a daughter of privilege whose father, Roman Totenberg, was a world famous violinist. Ruth was born in Brooklyn to a humble family who lived in the shadow of an older sibling’s early death. Nina dropped out of college. Ruth excelled at Cornell University and Harvard Law School. Both were Jewish and the children of immigrants who had high expectations for their ambitious daughters. Both loved to shop and dress well.

Nina and Ruth were outsiders in their chosen fields and among the first women to storm the ramparts of male domination in the workplace. Both learned to brush aside catcalls, sexual harassment (before the term was coined) and were invective about displacing men in the workplace. They respected each other’s work, but were strictly personal friends. From time to time and more frequently as Ruth rose to prominence, Nina interviewed her in person or for radio broadcasts. Following Ruth’s public comments criticizing President Trump and then walking them back, Nina pointedly asked in an interview “why did you apologize?” despite Ruth’s obvious discomfort with the topic.

The two met in 1971 when Nina had just begun covering the Supreme Court and Ruth was an attorney for the ACLU. Their friendship blossomed when Ruth was appointed to the US Court of Appeals and moved to Washington D.C. with her husband Marty, who had used his connection with a prominent senator to secure her selection. Now they could more often meet for dinner and enjoy both husbands’ culinary skills, one of the few talents Ruth definitely did not possess.

Over the years both women were essential supports for each other through good times and bad –illness and death of spouses; Ruth’s appointment to the Supreme Court; Nina’s second marriage; Ruth’s 20 year challenges with cancer and other ailments; Nina’s refusal to reveal her sources to a Senate Committee following her ground breaking coverage of the Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill hearings; Ruth’s refusal to accept membership in a prestigious club, because Nina had earlier been black-balled.

The book explores numerous examples of how making and utilizing friendships and connections propelled both women’s careers. At one point Nina says Ruth had an instinctive ability to make connections, which often came into play when working toward consensus on the Supreme Court as well as personally, typified by her long term personal friendship with philosophical rival Justice Scalia. Nina also excelled in this arena, something she learned growing up. An early example: Nina’s mother wrote Eleanor Roosevelt seeking help to land a prestigious D.C. internship for Nina. Mrs. Roosevelt replied, and Nina got the internship. After she was hired at NPR as a legal correspondent and began regularly covering the Supreme Court, Nina cultivated friendships with justices, sometimes fairly easily as with Justice Powell and Justice Scalia and sometimes only after great effort as with Justice Brennan. Nina does note such connections among Washington’s governing elite, including White House poker games, would not be possible or tolerated today. Those were very different times.

Friendships often deepened over a meal. Supreme Court justices and other Washington notables were frequent dinner guests at Nina and husband David’s table. The couple also had a standing date for dinner and a movie with her NPR work friends Cokie Roberts and Linda Wertheimer and their spouses. David loved to cook for Ruth, especially after the death of her spouse, and even more after Covid-19 hit when Ruth began coming for dinner every Saturday night. Speaking for herself and David, Nina says feeding Ruth was “one of the great privileges of their lives.”

The friendship between Nina and Ruth expanded in the years following Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement from the Supreme Court when Ruth gradually found her voice and developed her powerful influence in furthering the cause of women’s rights. Largely thru social media she became The Notorious RBG. Nationwide popularity made RBG visible nearly anywhere she went, so Nina’s long standing friendship was her port of reliable and authentic connection until her death.

Totenberg uses an interesting device to develop her story – seventeen chapters, each titled with an aspect of friendship – Friends in Need, Friends in Joy, etc. Though this structure could get in the way and seem artificial, it actually keeps the focus on the overriding theme and creates an opportunity to reflect on the components of the friendships in readers’ own lives. Chapter Thirteen, Fame and Friendship, reveals the most detailed anecdotal information about RBG. For example, her prowess at horseback riding and especially at confounding males who underestimate her.

The book club enjoyed this memoir though some were left wanting more detail about Ruth Bader Ginsberg. They did appreciate learning that her firm belief a democrat would be elected in 2016 kept her from resigning during the Obama years. Her death on September 18, 2019 brought her very close to Biden’s election less than two months later. Readers were appalled at Mitch McConnell’s decision not to allow her to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda – a partisan ploy that only served to burnish Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s legacy as a lifetime champion of consensus and connection.

— Sue Martin

Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver

Demon Copperhead is about six when we first meet him, as he and his cousin Maggot ramble happily around the mountains and streams of rural Appalachia, contented residents of Lee County, Virginia, a community that is both solace and trap. Demon lives in a trailer with his mother; Maggot lives next door with his grandparents. The book follows Demon for the next 15 years as he becomes an orphan, tobacco picker, foster child, football star, drug addict, husband, widower, friend, lover, grandson, cartoonist, and nascent graphic novel author. It’s a life mirrored after Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, but with foster homes in place of orphanages, oxycontin instead of gin. Poverty, powerlessness, and child exploitation are much the same.

Our group had varied responses to the novel. At 548 pages of intense prose and chaos, it is daunting. Some found it mesmerizing and were sucked into the story, eager to keep reading to see how Demon approached his next trauma. Others needed to regularly take a breather, not wanting to face another bad decision and more destruction of Demon’s brittle life.

The book’s voice is its biggest strength. Demon narrates with the angst of a child, the naivete of a teen, and the hope of a young adult. He shares humor, pain, wisdom, and cluelessness in what is essentially a journal in which he is trying to figure himself out. Kingsolver nails it, showing us how a life of deprivation and degradation can lead to what more privileged people consider poor choices; for those in the middle of the storm, they simply feel like the best of multiple bad options. As the story builds and Demon’s life destructs, we begin to understand why he is how he is, why he does what he does, and how he ultimately becomes who he is. His voice is full of heart, but it is also heartbreaking.

The book won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

This is the seventh Kingsolver book we have read as a group, and we have watched as she has grown as a writer, starting with The Bean Trees, published in 1988. Most of her books contain themes of social justice and environmental stress. The villains in Demon Copperhead are the mining companies that degraded the land, extracting what they wanted and leaving the residents to live with their mess; the drug companies that knew how addictive pills like oxy were, but pushed them anyway; a frayed social network that has no place for kids in poverty; and a healthcare system that doesn’t reach rural America.

Lee County is its own social ecosystem in which you can’t hide from your past. Old acquaintances pop up in Demon’s life, some for the better, others for the worse. The Peggots are always somewhere in the background, showing Demon how home looks. Aunt June leaves the Doom Castle (her apartment in Knoxville) to practice medicine “back home,” and helps Demon find the care, and cure, he needs. Fast Forward, the football star who first introduced Demon to drugs, returns and causes one of the book’s most traumatic events. Emmy follows Demon on a downhill spiral. Tommy, the lost foster kid who seemed destined for a dead-end life, helps Demon discover his future. Mr. Armstrong and Miss Annie never waver in their support of Demon. And, of course, Angus is Demon’s truth.

For Demon, Lee County is home. He cannot envision living anywhere else, especially in a city apartment where people don’t even have lawns, let alone woods and mountains. His people may be a mess, but they are his. He loves them and learns that they love him too. Throughout the novel, he strives to belong and, finally, at the end he does. And we assume he will finally see the ocean—because Angus is in charge.

— Pat Prijatel

I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death, by Maggie O’Farrell

This is not your average memoir. With stark self-awareness and insight, novelist Maggie O’Farrell throws us into the middle of her life through 17 essays about life-threatening and often harrowing events that define how she became who she is. She lightly weaves her biography throughout, giving us enough of a glimpse of her personal trajectory to understand as much as we need to know about how she got from point A to point B and why. But the book is primarily a sensory exploration of how it feels to be Maggie O’Farrell.

Much of what happens in O’Farrell’s life stems from a case of encephalitis when she was eight, the effects of which she shows throughout the book. But she waits until the penultimate chapter to explain the disease, trusting her reader to stay with her. She shows before she tells. It’s risky, but it works.

Because of encephalitis, her brain can’t accurately place her in her environment, so she often fights for physical balance, her muscles cannot provide enough strength for childbirth, she can stutter at book readings, and simply walking up to the stage at an event is a feat in itself.

Her life sometimes defies belief, and she seems to take questionable risks, but she says being so ill so young changed her and made her embrace life with a passion few possess:

I am desperate for change, endlessly seeking novelty, wherever I can find it. When you’re a child, no one tells you that you are going to die. You have to work it out for yourself.

She has survived assaults that could have killed her—one of her attackers murdered another young woman shortly after he put his camera strap menacingly around O’Farrell’s throat. O’Farrell outwitted him by doing what she does with remarkable power: using her words.

Other brushes with death include three near-drownings, two more assaults, a child with deadly allergies, and multiple “missed miscarriages” in which the baby dies, but the mother has no symptoms of the loss. All this both forms and is a result of a personality that embraces risk, requires change, and is deeply introspective. In a relatively short book, O’Farrell shows how she was molded into a woman, a mother, and a writer of courage and intensity.

— Pat Prijatel