Book Review: Among Other Things, I’ve Taken Up Smoking, by Aoibheann Sweeney

I read about Among Other Things, I’ve Taken Up Smoking on the “Discover Great New Writers” page at Barnes & Noble. The premise of the book is this: Miranda lives on a small island off the coast of Maine with her father. Her mother died when she was young, and her father spends most of his time translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses. A family friend named Mr. Blackwell helps to take care of her, doing most of the cleaning and cooking around the house. He teaches Miranda how to drive a boat so that she can attend school. When Mr. Blackwell and Miranda’s father have a falling out, she becomes more isolated. She takes over the household duties, and her father starts to spend more of his time drinking than he does translating.

When Miranda graduates from high school, her father arranges for her to move to Manhattan to work for a foundation that he helped to find when he was younger. Miranda moves there and makes two friends, one male and one female. She starts to discover that just because her father never noticed her much, that doesn’t mean that the rest of the world won’t. She has a relationship with both the female and the male friend, with the ultimate “winner” being the female. I was surprised when the book took that turn.

The big thing that I didn’t like was that Miranda just allowed life to happen to her. Early in the book, she has an encounter with a sailor who takes her back to his ship where they have sex. It was uncomfortable to read because the entire episode doesn’t seem to have any effect on Miranda. It may just as well have been that she went back to the ship and flossed each other’s teeth, rather than a random sexual encounter with a complete stranger. This sort of floating through life pattern follows her through the book. She lets her Dad pack her off to New York to live with, again, perfect strangers that really don’t want her there in the first place. She allows her boyfriend to take her to a family wedding where she feels completely out of place, and her girlfriend to buy her a dress for said wedding. From a reader’s point of view, you never really knew what to expect from Miranda other than she would do what everyone else wanted her to. It got a little old, and so by the time she finally makes a real decision (she skips out on the wedding, leaving only a note on the boyfriend’s bed, and returns to the girlfriend), the book was nearly over.

There were a few passages from the book that I really enjoyed. One of them is this, a conversation Miranda has at the end of the book with her girlfriend Ana:

“I told her how my father used to read to me; I told her how for a while I had lived in a world in which trees spoke and gods flew, and how I thought that if I waited long enough things would get marvelous like they did in the stories Ovid told, and become something else.

“But the thing is they’re not really happy stories,” I said. “I mean when I think of them now I realize they’re really about people who can’t change, like my father,
because they are too overwhelmed by the way they feel, and that’s why all
the magic happens, because they can’t change and something just explodes.”

“But then aren’t they happier?”

“I used to think so, but now I think maybe they stay the same. Or anyway, Ovid’s
stories aren’t really about what it’s like to be changed. They’re about how hard it is before you change, when everything feels like it’s going to explode, or it has exploded, and you can’t put together any of the pieces.”

“But isn’t that like being in love?” Ana said.

“I looked over at her, startled, and she smiled at me, like she was watching me learn.”

I probably won’t read this one again, but I could appreciate this book for the style of writing. I could have lived without the gay aspect, but it added a kind of symmetry to the book because you discover in the end that Miranda's father himself had been gay before getting together with her mother. I was also reminded a little of Ahab’s Wife a little, a book that I love, and so that made me like it more than I think I would have otherwise.