The Writing Class (Jincy Willett)
For a while I've been taking a Performance Singing class from the Adult Education branch of the city college. I've been taking singing lessons for a bit, and for some reason (well, I could go into the reasons, but why would you care?) ever since I started the lessons I've frozen up in front of an audience, and my teacher told me this was a good way to get experience singing in public (which it is).
The teacher is great; so is the accompanist. The students... well... there's a wide range. There's the would-be comic who is more interested in telling bad puns than improving his singing. There's the girl who gets very emotionally involved in her songs but no one elses's, and who brought twenty people to the final concert, only to disappear halfway through the concert with her entourage, leaving two people in the audience. There's the older lady with hair down to her waist (she's probably the only older lady with long hair I've seen in the last year) who does sensuous things with the microphone, which sometimes is quite cool and sometimes seems slightly embarrasing. There's the introverted geeky woman who sings unintelligible and badly accented French songs and who does weird things with her hands when she sings until you worry she's having a spastic fit. (That's me. I'm working on the hands thing, with some success, and on my accent,with basically zero success.) But... now that we've done this class for a while, I have a certain fondness for the others, and a certain emotional investment in their singing improvement, even though I'd never actually hang out with them socially.
This is all just to say that I really, really liked The Writing Class-- I think it's one of the best (fiction) books I've read this year-- and possibly a large part of that was having been through this Adult Ed class; someone who doesn't have that experience may not feel the same sense of resonance I did. Regardless, it's a really funny book. The main character, the teacher Amy, is rather standoffish, but I got to like her-- she doesn't whine, and she isn't bitter (though very cynical)-- and she has her own sort of weird standoffish -- redemption? salvation?
There is an excerpt at the place I found out about this book (the pre-excerpt text has some mild spoilers, nothing terrible) - if you don't find it hysterically funny, don't for goodness sake read the rest of it, but if you do find it hilarious, check out the book.
(She's written another book -- Winner of the National Book Award-- which I didn't particularly like, perhaps because I don't live in Rhode Island... maybe you really need to connect to the milieu that she writes about.)
The teacher is great; so is the accompanist. The students... well... there's a wide range. There's the would-be comic who is more interested in telling bad puns than improving his singing. There's the girl who gets very emotionally involved in her songs but no one elses's, and who brought twenty people to the final concert, only to disappear halfway through the concert with her entourage, leaving two people in the audience. There's the older lady with hair down to her waist (she's probably the only older lady with long hair I've seen in the last year) who does sensuous things with the microphone, which sometimes is quite cool and sometimes seems slightly embarrasing. There's the introverted geeky woman who sings unintelligible and badly accented French songs and who does weird things with her hands when she sings until you worry she's having a spastic fit. (That's me. I'm working on the hands thing, with some success, and on my accent,with basically zero success.) But... now that we've done this class for a while, I have a certain fondness for the others, and a certain emotional investment in their singing improvement, even though I'd never actually hang out with them socially.
This is all just to say that I really, really liked The Writing Class-- I think it's one of the best (fiction) books I've read this year-- and possibly a large part of that was having been through this Adult Ed class; someone who doesn't have that experience may not feel the same sense of resonance I did. Regardless, it's a really funny book. The main character, the teacher Amy, is rather standoffish, but I got to like her-- she doesn't whine, and she isn't bitter (though very cynical)-- and she has her own sort of weird standoffish -- redemption? salvation?
There is an excerpt at the place I found out about this book (the pre-excerpt text has some mild spoilers, nothing terrible) - if you don't find it hysterically funny, don't for goodness sake read the rest of it, but if you do find it hilarious, check out the book.
(She's written another book -- Winner of the National Book Award-- which I didn't particularly like, perhaps because I don't live in Rhode Island... maybe you really need to connect to the milieu that she writes about.)