I enjoyed the essays in Driving with Dvorak immensely, although I am hard-pressed to say exactly why. While it's true that Brown and I are the same age, her experiences have differed significantly from mine. She married the first time before she had finished high school, at 17, and there have been two other marriages since then. There is a kind of chrysalis "unfolding" in the stages of her life. The essays trace the evolution of a girl trapped in a dysfunctional family, the result of mismatched parents and a brain-damaged brother. There is an at least partial explanation for that too-early marriage - raging hormones. Brown writes of her early teenage years, growing up in the south, in this way -

"In 1958, maybe still, the smartest thing a church could do with thirteen year-olds was to herd them together, give them a clear regimen , and steer their sexual restlessness, at least temporarily, toward Jesus."

Maybe this was one of those points where I could relate, having been "steered" at about the same age by perhaps well-meaning nuns into a year at a Catholic seminary boarding school, an experience that made me quite miserable until I escaped.

In another essay, "Showgirls," Brown describes a soujourn in Las Vegas where she's been invited to lecture to the International Society of Poets, that infamous organization that solicits poems from unsuspecting aspiring poets and then scams them into buying the the huge volume in which their offering has been published, along with hundreds of other awful poems, for 40 or 50 bucks a whack. I remember a friend of my daughter's in high school who had been taken in by this and carried around this heavy book for weeks to show people her "published poem." Brown had actually tested this group by submitting a poem: "Oh my darling sweetie/you have such smelly feeties/Please put on your socks/or you'll stop all the clocks." They accepted it. She gives telling and dead-on descriptions of the seniors she saw in Vegas, with their walkers and wheelchairs, cigarettes, drinks and oxygen tanks, dead eyes, robotically feeding money into slot machines. Right on, Fleda. I once spent the longest 4-5 days of my life in that noisy, soul-less place.

But mostly, throughout these shining, polished essays, she tries to unravel the mystery of her eccentric father, a failed but brilliant professor, now retired, and their life-long difficult, frustrating relationship. But perhaps a relationship with one's father is always a mystery, for both sons and daughters. Fortunately, Brown has maintained mostly positive ties with her two sisters, and together they ponder their aging and ever more erratic dad, deciding finally that perhaps, as one of his grandkids suggests, that "Granddaddy's a little autistic." Asperger's maybe - that would explain a lot.

A ramshackle cabin on a small lake in northern Michigan, built by Brown's paternal grandparents is an island of stability throughout the narrative. Primitive and in various states of disrepair, Brown and her sisters cherish this place in their adult years. And, following a successful career as an English Professor and celebrated poet in Delaware, Brown and her third husband retire to a century-old house in Traverse City, a place their friends back on the East Coast think of as "a vast Siberian wasteland." (My own kids, also back east, think the same thing.)In fact, Traverse City has become in recent years a new center for the arts, and I am sure Brown will find new friends and recognition there.

And oh yeah, the final essay, "Soft Conversations," immediately engaged me too. In it Brown speaks of her chronic tinnitus and escalating deafness and the difficulties it creates. More that I could relate to, since I've had the same problem for over thirty years. Author David Lodge's novel, Deaf Sentence, deals with this problem most effectively, invoking both humorous and not-so-funny aspects of it.

I know I'm not smart enough to "get" everything Brown includes in this collection of autobiographical pieces, but I feel like we could be friends. This is writing of the highest caliber, which reflects a life well spent in the study of language and human striving. I will recommend it highly. ( )