Disaster Preparedness: A memoir [Hardcover]

Heather Havrilesky (Author)

Book Description

Release date: December 30, 2010

A perceptive, witty memoir about the transformative humiliations of childhood-and adulthood-from a unique, already-beloved voice.

When Heather Havrilesky was a kid during the '70s, harrowing disaster films dominated every movie screen with earthquakes that destroyed huge cities, airplanes that plummeted towards the ground and giant sharks that ripped teenagers to shreds. Between her parents' dramatic clashes and her older siblings' hazing, Heather's home life sometimes mirrored the chaos onscreen.

A thoughtful, funny memoir about surviving the real and imagined perils of childhood and early adulthood, Disaster Preparedness charts how the most humiliating and painful moments in Havrilesky's past forced her to develop a wide range of defense mechanisms, some adaptive, some piteously ill-suited to modern life. From premature boxing lessons to the competitive grooming of cheerleading camp, from her parents' divorce to her father's sudden death, Havrilesky explores a path from innocence and optimism to self-protection and caution, bravely reexamining the injuries that shaped her, the lessons that sunk in along the way, and the insights that carried her through.

By laying bare her bumps and bruises, Havrilesky offers hope that we can find a frazzled and unruly, desperate and wistful, restless and funny and frayed-at-the-edges way of staring disaster in the face, and even rising to meet it head on. By turns offbeat, sophisticated, uproarious and wise, Disaster Preparedness is a road map to the personal disasters we all face from an irresistible voice that gets straight to the unexpected grace at the heart of every calamity.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A product of growing up in the destabilizing 1970s in Durham, N.C., journalist Havrilesky (Salon.com) has fashioned a series of funny, offbeat, girl-friendly essays that treat some of the iconoclasm of that era, namely the rupture of divorce, the failure of religion, and the supremacy of consumerism. The youngest of three, the author became aware early on that her parents did not get along, yet she also learned from seemingly normal (but suicidal) friends that life wasn't greener on the other side. Her mother evolved from being a faculty wife to getting a full-time job, while her father, a professor, enjoyed "a rotating cast of younger girlfriends" in his condo across town. The divorce of her parents (her mother first moved out for a spell to live in a rented apartment by herself)--made the siblings realize that nothing that adults told them from then on could be trusted. Moreover, Havrilesky's father died suddenly of a heart attack at age 56, leaving her wondering whether she had ever really known him. Havrilesky's winning essays venture into the perils of socialization and dating, always keeping a light, self-deprecating tone that attains at moments a wonderfully humane sagacity. (Jan.)
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From Booklist

As a kid of the 1970s, Havrilesky drafted plans and mapped escape routes in case any of the catastrophes depicted in the era’s popular disaster flicks happened in real life. Everything from alien invasions to house fires were covered. But what about growing up? There aren’t enough tin-foil hats in the world to prepare for the myriad everyday farces and small disasters that scar us emotionally in the course of coming of age. Disclosing her family history with both intimacy and sarcastic wit, Havrilesky focuses on her relationship with her parents, the aftershocks of their divorce, and her active pursuit of self—in cheerleading, boxing, New Age therapy, and some awkward romantic entanglements. While this memoir is dedicated to her fiercely independent mother, she creates a pensive, loving, and honest eulogy for her late father, the spontaneous adventurer. The end, refreshingly free of spite and full of hard-won optimism, is the true accomplishment of her work. --Courtney Jones

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover; 1ST edition (December 30, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594487685
• ISBN-13: 978-1594487682
• Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 0.9 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #575,058 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A poignant but sometimes frantic memoir January 26, 2011

By Bookreporter

Format:Hardcover

Ah, the 1970s! That glorious time before seat belt laws and bicycle helmets. In the 1970s we stayed out, unsupervised in our neighborhoods, past dark and ate sugary cereals every day for breakfast. We wore knee socks and rainbow shirts. And then came the boom of the '80s. America was rich and powerful, and we all felt the same way. The music was happy and the television decadent. But of course, growing up in the '70s and '80s wasn't always so wonderful. Even as the country prospered and we partied at discos, families were struggling in ways they always have: with anxiety, frustration and misunderstandings threatening to bury the love.

In her new memoir, DISASTER PREPAREDNESS, Heather Havrilesky examines family life against the cultural backdrop of the late '70s and the '80s in suburban America. There is both the self-created, internal disasters of a young woman coming of age and the painful disasters of a family breaking apart. All of it is written in a compelling and provocative way.

DISASTER PREPAREDNESS is more precisely a collection of 15 autobiographical essays than a chronological memoir. Each stands alone just fine, though altogether they paint an interesting and personal family portrait. In the first chapter, "Cousins," Havrilesky begins by recalling how she and her siblings made up an "alternative version" of the board game "Clue," where instead of trying to solve a murder they are trying to commit one. It is an odd but endearing picture of the children as they use pieces from the game "Sorry!" to act as witnesses to their crimes, creating a new set of rules for the macabre but funny version of the classic game.

But suddenly, readers are told, "around the same time my parents stopped making the slightest effort to hide their distaste for each other, we started taking long family vacations in the car each summer." This jarring switch in tone and topic is typical of the book, and though it sometimes feels frantic and unfinished because the segues are lacking, more often than not it serves Havrilesky well as she pulls readers in to the uncertainties and tensions of her family. When her parents finally do divorce, she begins to understand them as individuals, not just as two sides of a bad relationship. It is the moments when she examines her parents as people, apart from each other, that DISASTER PREPAREDNESS is at its best.

Havrilesky's mother was a faculty wife who married Havrilesky's mercurial father young. When Havrilesky was nine years old, her mother moved out of the family home into a studio apartment. The tale of the divorce is peppered with cultural nostalgia (the Bumble Bee brand tuna jingle, bookshelves lined with John Updike novels, etc.), but her levity cannot mask the seriousness of the subject. Again, it is her use of contrast that makes the book so interesting and occasionally frustrating. Her father, a bombastic and clever professor, often steals the show. And perhaps it is because, as we learn, he died of a heart attack at the young age of 56, that her focus on him is so raw, tender and forgiving. He is at once a bully and a hero in Havrilesky's honest and conflicted portrait. He, more than anyone, is the figure we want to know more about, to fully understand. But with his death, Havrilesky and her readers must attempt to understand him only through the deeds and words already done.

As the book progresses, it moves closer and closer to the image of her father Havrilesky is wrestling with, and that is its most compelling element. Despite all the other themes --- religion, sibling relationships, the break-up of marriages, and the forging of adolescent identity --- it's the examination of the father-daughter relationship that makes DISASTER PREPAREDNESS worth reading. It's also the poignancy of Havrilesky's memoir that makes you wish it was all pulled together just a bit tighter.

--- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars growing up is hard to do December 2, 2010

By Konrad Baumeister VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Heather Havrilesky's memoir of growing up in the 70s and 80s is a delight. Is it screamingly funny? Not, not really. But it is poignant, witty, real, topical, touching, reflective, insolent, feisty, and utterly like life.

Each chapter, arranged quasi-chronologically, could stand alone as a general look at one phase of life: childhood, dealing with intra-family squabbles, the tension and divorce of her parents, trying out for cheerleading, who you pick and who picks you as friends, losing one's virginity, the death of a parent, finding love at last, and just discarding fairy tales and coming to terms with what real life is - everything is here. It's told against a soundtrack of 80s music, high school rivalries, a rotating cast of ever younger girlfriends entertained by her father, etc.

Havrilensky's writing style brings all of these inherently tense and anxiety-fraught situations home with honesty, clear vision, a knack for the ironic and the sardonic, and something of a gimlet eye towards life. The funny and the weird, bad jobs, loser boyfriends, vignettes of childhood - she remembers it all, and the reader will recognize his or her own stories in the mix as well.

It's good stuff.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars quirky and charming January 19, 2011

By Chel Micheline TOP 100 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Lately I have been reading a lot of memoirs that really don't *need* to exist- it seems like just about everyone with a slightly off-kilter past (and isn't that ALL of us?) is writing a book these days.

However, I make a big exception to the rule when the memoir is written by someone with a true gift for words, and Heather Havrilesky is one of those people. While her life story isn't all that unusual or groundbreaking, the way she looks back on her suburban upbringing is refreshing and very humorous.

I found the first few chapters a little slow, but by the time Havrilesky got around to describing her romantic relationships as a teenager, I was hooked. I truly don't believe anyone has ever written a more honest and engaging chapter about what it's like to be in love as a young adult. It's not sappy, just completely honest. It certainly made me think twice about all the high school drama I experienced.

I highly recommend this book. While it's not an epic tale of mountains climbed (physically or emotionally), it's a funny and well-written group of memories from a very talented and funny story-teller.