This was an engrossing tale about a restless young woman who really had to raise herself in many ways. Her resilience in overcoming many of the pitfalls she survived culminates in a message of love and forgiveness. I enjoyed the book but was left with questions about her restless impulsivity and how she would eventually resolve her inability to set down her own roots. Perhaps, another book is on the horizon! There are many things I love about Jen Knox’s “Musical Chairs” but my favorite part of the book is when her mother takes her to a support group for people addicted to drugs and alcohol. Knox is a child in this scene in her memoir and her innocence is heartbreaking. She dresses up meticulously, complete with gold-colored earrings, and asks whether they would get dessert after the meeting. But when she sits through the meeting and sees it involves sharing sad, sad stories, she asks what I think is a very adult-like question: “Well, what if someone had a sad story to tell, but it didn’t have anything to do with drugs? Could that person still come to these meetings?” When she learns the answer is no, she never goes to another meeting.Such a shame because she does have a beautiful story to tell. She’s a runaway who hits the road when she’s 15 after an argument with her father. It seems like a rash decision but when we get a closer look at her family’s history – how her great-grandmother Glory was also a runaway – it almost seems like it was her destiny to escape. It quickly becomes clear she gets high off the alcohol that is readily available but the author makes it clearer that the ultimate high is her moving on. At first, it is a little difficult to figure out what she is running from and she even acknowledges that she is not running away from something horrible – her parents don’t beat her. It is through her conversations with her schizophrenic grandmother that we begin to piece together the almost genetic blueprint of a runaway. The restlessness, the high of moving on, the running away from something, toward something, toward herself.The section on dancing has some parallels to the section on her initial decision to run away. Yes, she’s desperate for money and wants to go to college but that’s not the real reason she does it. She doesn’t have “daddy issues.” She admits she does the dancing because it seems glamorous and it fuels her adrenaline much the way running away does. It becomes doing something for the sake of doing it. There is no nice, neat reason for doing it. And that might frustrate the reader sometimes but not all actions can be drawn from a single purpose. Sometimes, fragmented pieces of experience, including family history, can propel us.Mental illness runs in her family and Knox opens her book with her harrowing panic attack, which is so accurately described it’s haunting. She then segues into her grandmother’s schizophrenic tendencies and we later learn her grandmother does things like covers her furniture with flour in hopes of catching prints. Her moments of lucidity, however, offer a window into Glory, the great-grandmother who ran away herself. And the author latches onto that lucidity in an attempt to discover herself. Her burgeoning, close relationship with her grandmother provides her ultimately with the insight that causes her to run toward something, instead of away from it.What I like to imagine is that she runs toward “Musical Chairs” when she tells her co-worker at the bookstore, “I just want you to be the first to know that this is my future.”
What do You think about Musical Chairs (2009)?
Musical Chairs is a surprising book. Lots of dry humor and odd circumstance. I recommend it.
—prachi
