Enough: Notes from a Woman Who Has Finally Found It
Written and Narrated By: Shauna M. Ahern
Length: 5 hrs and 11 mins
Okay, and at least I didn’t wanna throttle Ahern anywhere near as much as, say, Hollis…
I think I’m giving Ahern a pass where I’m judging Hollis (And others, there are plenty of other people who’ve written memoirs that have inspired my I-really-wanna-throttle-ya impulse) solely because near the opening of Enough, there’s a list of what she hated about her body. And trust me, it’s a head/hair to foot deal that’s filled with some of the most gut wrenching observations and loathing I’ve ever come upon. So how can I damn someone who’s already damned themselves with such incredibly vitriolic insight? It’d be kicking someone who’s not only down but is flailing in the gutter.
Still, there are plenty of essays in the book that left me scratching my head, especially when taken together, yes, but also when picked apart.
Ahern opens with the wildly traumatic stroke she suffered at age 48. Wellll, it would be major and traumatic and dramatic, except that it’s not. It’s a mild stroke, she’s cautioned to eliminate as much stress as she can, to maybe never get on a weight scale again… and that’s it. She opened the book, not feeling the left side of her face, being far away from a medical center, and that’s it. All well. So THAT didn’t go anywhere. And she tells us of her Gluten-Free cookbook gigs, of her Gluten-Free product business, both of which go nowhere (And the latter of which is run so incredibly sloppily, with zippo awareness as to what it takes to run a business). She brings up her husband’s alcoholism, he drinks 24/7, but he takes care of it, so that doesn’t go anywhere either.
So there are a lot of really, really big deals, but they wind up as >Meh< fodder for a memoir in the way she handles it. But what I really found troublesome was how much her mother gets blamed for an intolerable childhood while her father gets a complete pass. Oh, don’t get me wrong, she seems to be seething that her father never stepped in to save his children, but she never calls him on it, doesn’t write of it whereas she openly clobbers the beJESus outta her mother who, granted, was a wretched mother, but the mental illness that dictated her mother’s life is barely addressed. Ahern’s coping mechanism for that is to cut her mother off from contact (Which ya sometimes just have to do), but she never tries to suggest treatment or anything. And her mother sounds DISTURBED. Plus, there’s the whole Dad thing cuz I think it takes two to play the rotten marriage game, and that her father was a philanderer, dragged his agoraphobic wife to England for his own work, let his children be squashed at every instance is damning indeed. She should hold her father as accountable as she so obviously holds her mother.
Okay, the saving graces of the book. While the majority of the book plays upon Ahern’s feeling of never fitting in, of never being one of the pretty and popular girls, she does by the end come to the realization that those pretty and popular girls had difficulties of their own, and most of them grew up to be rockin’ and awesome women (Fierce, as she would put it). And finally, she revisits her body with reframing her beliefs about each aspect, to the point where the list is like a love song to her own body. I dunno, but that part, as someone who struggles with body image and who has a tendency of likening the self to, say, a COW (No offense to cows!), that part really resonated with me, and I applaud her and congratulate her on doing the hard work to getting to self-acceptance. It’s a lovely list.
But is it enough to save an uneven book that raises more questions about veracity than it answers? Dunno, but at least Ahern’s delivery adds a warmth that is oh so necessary, and that helps with the book being a decent listen.
Still, there’s an undercurrent of bitterness in this very bitter set of essays of how hard everything in life is. Sure, she gets to the point where she lets go of the: Pick me, pick me girl and embraces the: Fierceness through honesty thing, but all her very clever sayings feel like they’re being said to spite her mother; that she’s flipping SOMEone, or even Life, the bird. There’s not much in the way of joy here, mostly an: I’ve been stepped on too many times, and I’ll kill the next person who even looks cross-eyed at me, and that means you, mom!
But anyway, if you feel like you’ve been through the wringer with your own family of origin perhaps you’ll see your own struggles in Ahern’s. And her sayings are quite clever and empowering indeed. The Amazon book page has many of them proudly emblazoned on squares that decorate the page, so from that I’m assuming we’re to be able to get through any situation in life by spouting said quotes.
Hmm, I’m making it sound like I completely didn’t like it when actually I was pretty horrified by some of the things she went through. I s’pose I just wish she had just a taaaaaad more self-awareness, enough to cast responsibility where it’s due and to take responsibility for that which could’ve been changed or accepted with better grace.
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