Among Other Things, I’ve Taken Up Smoking

<$>(The Penguin Press, 257 pages)

by Aoibheann Sweeney

>N<$>O one thinks they’re weird when they’re a little kid. It takes the taunts of schoolmates or older siblings before a youngster gets self-conscious about the things that make them different.Miranda Donnal is a weird girl. Growing up on a small island just off the coast of an isolated Maine town, she spends most of her free time typing out her father’s scrawled longhand translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Miranda makes exactly one friend in her entire school career, and seems much more at home amid the mythic stories of the gods and nymphs that populate her father’s life’s work.

The cloudy details of Miranda’s unusual childhood make up the opening sections of Aoibheann Sweeney’s debut el, Among Other Things, I’ve Taken Up Smoking. Sweeney’s austere prose captures nicely the hazy way that we recollect our early lives, in a way that feels much more honest and real than the avalanche of memoirs currently crowding bookstore shelves.

And there’s much about Miranda’s early life that is, indeed, hazy. She can barely remember her mother, who died in a boat crash shortly after the family decamped from New York City to their small island. For a time after that, a local fisherman who Miranda knows only as Mr. Blackwell becomes a major presence in the life of Miranda and her father, more or less raising the girl while the emotionally distant Mr. Donnal spends most of his time hunched over his translations.

When Mr. Blackwell unexpectedly drops out of their lives, Miranda becomes even more aimless, drifting through high school and failing to make any post-graduation plans. One day, her father announces out of nowhere that he’s sending Miranda back to New York, where she’ll live and work at a small literary institute founded by his deceased mentor.

It’s in the book’s later chapters that Miranda finally undergoes her own metamorphosis. Forced at last to interact with the world at large, she slowly earns perspective on her own strange childhood, particularly the details of her father’s mysterious relationship with Mr. Blackwell.

The book’s ending comes abruptly, and some might prefer a less ambiguous resolution to Miranda’s struggle towards adulthood and self-knowledge. But Sweeney wisely goes for something a lot more like real human existence, where rarely is a life radically altered by revelations from the past.

This subtle approach pays off with the notion, when you put down Sweeney’s deceptively simple little novel, that one person’s weirdness is another person’s life.