cghegan's reviews
454 reviews

It’s nothing I didn’t already know or read about, but is being touted as something so revolutionary… I’m just not who needs to read tbis.

I’m a huge fan of Nina Totenberg and the NPR Politics squad, hence picking this one up. It’s fascinating to look at the behind-the-scenes emotions and experiences of someone you admire deeply, but at many points, unsettling. I found the Politico book review by Michael Schaffer pointed to this feeling best, writing: “Totenberg’s book seems to be cast as a corrective against some national misapprehension that Washington is about nothing but bickering and partisanship. But that misunderstands why so many Americans are down on the capital. Instead, the rage stems from a conviction that the city is full of insiders who are all part of the same contented club, forever scratching one another’s backs. That’s a perception that Dinners With Ruth does absolutely nothing to dispel.”

One of the bigger “key points” in this book was the subtext that what Totenberg knew about the Justice’s health could have changed history. And it’s still upsetting to confront what many have felt: why was the fate of so many Americans’ health and safety dependent upon the mortality of a single (powerful, yes, remarkable, yes, but elderly and frail) person?

On the level of craft, it seemed loosely organized and meandering in a way that felt like someone trying to fill space and piece things together. Which is odd considering someone who has had a remarkable life and collaborated and dined with so many remarkable people. At times, Ruth Bader Ginsburg feels like a side note. While memoirs certainly cannot contain the entirety of one’s experiences, the overall organization and what was elected to be kept made the title feel less like a memoir about a particularly powerful friendship, and more a memoir about how Totenberg worked to be at the table with powerful people.

In this incredibly thoughtful and well-written memoir, Elliot Page deliberately meditates and threads together a narrative of pain and the most intense self-discovery. It was a good memoir, a beautifully crafted book, but extremely difficult to read. Page has rendered his agony and self-loathing so well that it’s difficult to sit with and parse with him as he cycles through nonchronological threads, looping over and over through small moments in time to piece together meaning. It is well crafted, a quilt in twenty nine shades of blues, but it is wave after wave of agony and sadness, and moments that linger on joy or relief or self discovery have less focus and the same breath of life that Page can write into his moments of darkness and loss. All this to say: I’m beyond grateful this narrative exists. It is going to save someone’s life. But I advise exercising care when reading.