Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Futilitarians
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: New Orleans
STATE: LA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.npr.org/2017/08/22/543933213/books-become-a-bridge-out-of-grief-in-the-futilitarians * http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/The-Futilitarians-by-Anne-Gisleson-11942893.php
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Antenna (nonprofit organization), New Orleans, LA, cofounder, 2005; New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, LA, instructor.
MEMBER:Existential Crisis Reading Group.
WRITINGS
Coauthor and coeditor of How to Rebuild a City: Field Guide from a Work in Progress; contributor of essays to Shifting, by Michel Varisco. Contributor to publications, including the Los Angeles Times, Believer, Oxford American, Cairo Review of Global Affairs, Ecotone, and the Atlantic. Contributor to anthologies, including Best American Non-Required Reading, Best Music Writing, and Life in the Wake.
SIDELIGHTS
Anne Gisleson is a writer and educator based in New Orleans, LA. She cofounded a nonprofit organization called Antenna and has served as a creative writing instructor at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA). Gisleson has written works that have been published in periodicals, including the Los Angeles Times, Believer, Oxford American, Cairo Review of Global Affairs, Ecotone, and the Atlantic. Her writings have also appeared in anthologies, including Best American Non-Required Reading, Best Music Writing, and Life in the Wake. Gisleson cowrote and coedited How to Rebuild a City: Field Guide from a Work in Progress and contributed essays to Michel Varisco’s book, Shifting.
In 2017, Gisleson released a memoir called The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading. In this volume, she discusses her involvement in the Existential Crisis Reading Group, as well as the events that led her to become part of the group in the first place. Gisleson and some friends in similar states of existential distress founded the reading group in 2012. She explains that many of them were still feeling the effects of the trauma they experienced during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Though the storm had occurred seven years early, it was still a part of their daily lives and thoughts. Gisleson and the other members of the Existential Crisis Reading Group hoped that, through literature, they could help themselves and each other understand their problems and hone in on the meaning of life. They chose books that dealt with the important things in life, read them, and came together to discuss them. the books were a mixture of classics, contemporary fiction, works of philosophy, memoirs, essays, and biographies. Among them were James Baldwin’s Ecclesiastes, William Shakespeare’s King Lear, and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. They even chose a film as one of the works to discuss. Meanwhile, Gisleson and other members of the group experienced other difficult situations. Within the early months of the Existential Crisis Reading Group, Gisleson’s father lost his long battle with leukemia. In dealing with his loss, she also confronted her feelings surrounding the suicides of her younger sisters, Rachel and Rebecca, who were identical twins. The two died, about a year and a half apart from one another, when Gisleson was in her late-twenties. Gisleson recalls her reaction to Rebecca’s death, which came first. She experienced depression and problems in her personal life after Rebecca killed herself. Gisleson was devastated again when Rachel, who had a young child, committed suicide soon after. She discusses the lives of her remaining siblings and also describes her father, a tough lawyer, who drank heavily but also worked pro bono on cases involving people on death row.
In an interview with Susan Larson, contributor to the New Orleans Advocate Online, Gisleson stated: “I’m really a product of Katrina. … I felt compelled to write, to tell a more complete version of the story—so much was being left out. It was as if I’d set out on a crusade, and I’d never had that fierce urgency before.” She also told Larson “What I found most valuable about the Existential Crisis Reading Group and the writing of the book was engaging with people. Literature can be a way of positive and deep engagement with other people. All book clubs have the possibility for that to happen.”
Carla Jean Whitley, reviewer in BookPage, suggested that the book “seamlessly melds together Gisleson’s story, New Orleans’ ongoing recovery and existential discovery. It also serves as something of a guide for readers wrestling with their own struggles.” A Kirkus Reviews critic described The Futilitarians as “an engrossing memoir” and “a graceful narrative that seamlessly interweaves philosophical reflections and intimate revelations.” Writing on the SF Gate website, Dawn Raffel commented: “Gisleson’s story isn’t an easy, read-in-a-couple-of-gulps proposition. It demands time and attention. It requests a bit of rigor. Yet it offers a generous companionship, the solace of being seen.” Raffel added: “Refreshingly, she doesn’t offer answers so much as ask good questions.” Jason Heller, contributor to the National Public Radio website, remarked: “The Futilitarians tackles hopelessness, but it never succumbs to it. Gisleson writes with wit, warmth and a spiritual devotion to books that never comes across as preachy.” Heller added: “This search for purpose and connection amid chaos and loss permeates even the most heart-wrenching moments of The Futilitarians—and it’s what turns the book from a meditation on reading to a celebration of being.” Reviewing the book on the New York Times website, Emily Fox Gordon asserted: “The fading away of the E.C.R.G. puzzles the reader. How did it happen? Did the death of Gisleson’s father in the month of the first meeting change the direction of the memoir? This is a serious structural flaw in an otherwise estimable book. Is it a … deal-breaker? No, because the memoir that lives inside the bibliomemoir is moving and complete and very much worth reading.” Referring to Gisleson, a critic on the Publishers Weekly website noted: “Her narrative is a wonderful look at friendship and grief, as well as an enlightening personal literary journey.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
BookPage, September, 2017, Carla Jean Whitley, review of The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading, p. 23.
Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2017, review of The Futilitarians.
ONLINE
Antenna Website, http://www.antenna.works/ (February 6, 2018), author profile.
National Public Radio Online, https://www.npr.org/ (August 22, 2017), Jason Heller, review of The Futilitarians.
New Orleans Advocate Online, http://www.theadvocate.com/ (August 21, 2017), Susan Larson, author interview and review of The Futilitarians.
New Orleans Times-Picayune, http://blog.nola.com/ (February 25, 2009), Susan Larson, author interview.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (October 6, 2017), Emily Fox Gordon, review of The Futilitarians.
NOCCA Website, http://www.nocca.com/ (February 6, 2018), author profile.
Oxford American Online, http://www.oxfordamerican.org/ (February 6, 2018), author profile.
Publishers Weekly Online, https://www.publishersweekly.com (August 1, 2017), review of The Futilitarians.
SF Gate, http://www.sfgate.com/ (August 18, 2017), Dawn Raffel, review of The Futilitarians.
Anne Gisleson
Anne Gisleson’s work has appeared in The Atlantic, Ecotone, and The Cairo Review of Global Affairs, among other publications. She teaches writing at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, and is the author of The Futilitarians.
Creative writing teacher Anne Gisleson finds comfort in non-fiction
Susan Larson, The Times-Picayune By Susan Larson, The Times-Picayune
on February 25, 2009 at 5:00 AM, updated February 25, 2009 at 12:35 PM
Kathy Anderson / The Times-Picayune
Since Hurricane Katrine, Anne Gisleson says she has little patience for non-fiction books.
ANNE GISLESON, 40
Creative writing teacher, New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts
How do you divide your reading between fiction and non-fiction? I read more and more non-fiction. And you know what? I think it was the storm. After Katrina, I had no patience or tolerance or interest in fiction. It just disappeared for a long time. It was almost a year before I could read a book of fiction.
How do you figure that? I think the intense reality around us was so pressing that fiction seemed frivolous. I needed facts and information -- just for edification. I was trying to figure out what was so important about New Orleans. Just trying to get a grip on that. I read a lot of New Orleans history.
And did you find edification? Comfort? I did. There were two Walker Percy books that helped: "The Message in the Bottle" and "Signposts in a Strange Land." Also, a friend gave me a copy of Percy's original "New Orleans, Mon Amour" from Harper's magazine back in 1968, the year I was born. Reading that essay, it was so enlightening. How prescient he was about things we are experiencing in this city. I've read all his books. I think he's probably my favorite writer. I just finished reading my last one, "The Last Gentleman." I'll probably start over now. I think he's someone I'll always have to go back to.
What appeals to you so about Percy? He has this balance of humor and spirituality and intellectual rigor and amazing writing. And for me, that's everything I need, right there. He's meaty. He has a rich sensual world he creates but he doesn't sacrifice the sensual for the philosophical or vice versa.
What other books have been particularly meaningful to you since the storm? Lafcadio Hearn. I read a lot of him. I love his portrayals of Creole life in the 19th century. Just how he described the French Market, it made me sad to think of how much culture we've lost. He was complaining over 100 years ago that New Orleans was becoming too Americanized and that Creole culture was losing out. And Walker Percy is lamenting the same thing in 1968.
And what fiction have you been able to read? Mostly Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He's one of my favorites. Even though he's got this epic, expansive imagination, he's also very grounded in real human life. He doesn't really stray from the tangible world. He's known for being a magical realist but I think there's something incredibly real about what he writes.
So Katrina was really a watershed for you in terms of your reading life? Oh, absolutely. Before the storm, I was much more interested in contemporary fiction. I knew what was being written, I read a lot of literary magazines, I knew who all the hot new writers were. And I totally ceased to care about any of that stuff after Katrina for awhile. It just seemed like the least important thing. I'm starting to get back to it now. But I feel like I lost a few years of reading because of it.
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Biographical Info
Anne Gisleson is the author of The Futilitarians (Little, Brown) and her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, The Oxford American, The Believer and many other publications. Her work has been selected for inclusion in anthologies such as Best American Non-Required Reading, Best Music Writing, Life in the Wake, and others. She co-edited and co-wrote How to Rebuild a City: Field Guide from a Work in Progress, about ground-up rebuilding efforts in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and wrote the accompanying essays for photographer Michel Varisco’s Shifting, a book about the beauty and degradation of the coastal wetlands. In 2005, she co–founded the literary and visual arts non-profit Antenna.
QUOTED: "“I’m really a product of Katrina,...I felt compelled to write, to tell a more complete version of the story — so much was being left out. It was as if I’d set out on a crusade, and I’d never had that fierce urgency before."
"What I found most valuable about the Existential Crisis Reading Group and the writing of the book was engaging with people. Literature can be a way of positive and deep engagement with other people. All book clubs have the possibility for that to happen."
Amid family and community struggles, readers form a group for 'Thinking, Drinking, Reading, and Grieving'
BY SUSAN LARSON | Special to The Advocate AUG 21, 2017 - 2:00 PM (0)
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Anne Gisleson, author of ‘The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving and Reading,’ photographed Wednesday, Aug. 9, 2017, at her home in New Orleans.
Advocate staff photo by SCOTT THRELKELD
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'The Futilitarians' by Anne Gisleson
CONTRIBUTED PHOTO
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Buy Now
Anne Gisleson, author of ‘The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving and Reading,’ photographed Wednesday, Aug. 9, 2017, at her home in New Orleans.
Advocate staff photo by SCOTT THRELKELD
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Anne Gisleson opens the door of her Bywater cottage, the visitor walks in, and then there they are — right in the middle of her new memoir, “The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading.”
This bright yellow living room, filled with art and books, is where The Existential Crisis Reading Group met for a purposeful year, looking for answers in poetry, philosophy and fiction. It’s a cheery, comfortable space that offers a shelter for the dreamer, the hoper, the searcher for answers to big questions.
In this memoir of a reading year, Anne Gisleson gives us a layered portrait of not just one woman’s rich and complicated life, but so much more: A family suffering unspeakable tragedy, a city struggling, a group of friends brought together to make common cause in making sense of life.
Over the course of the year 2012, relationships deepen or change or end, people move on, suffer successes and losses, but the search continues. There is abundant, maybe excessive, drinking. Break out the rye, readers, and pour yourselves a glass.
There is grief that would be soul-killing for anyone. Gisleson reckons with the earlier loss of her twin sisters, less than two years apart, suicides both, and the death of her father from leukemia shortly after the group gets underway. With her siblings, she undertakes those “death chores” we all face eventually, dealing with the aftermath of loss, doing the work of grief, comforting her mother, the nephew who was left behind, trying to see a way forward.
But through it all, there’s the thinking. Gisleson is a thinking woman. She has taken Walker Percy’s metaphor of the search and made it her own, calling it “the beautiful hunt,” after Belle Chasse. And in her hands, it is beautiful indeed, sparkling with fierce intelligence and sharp wit and unsparing honesty.
Such a quest would seem a natural endeavor for Gisleson, who grew up with seven siblings in a large, close and prominent Catholic family here. “My dad, (lawyer Keith ‘Eric’ Gisleson), was a fantastic storyteller,” she said, settling into a spot on her bright orange sofa. “What is being a lawyer but telling convincing stories?”
And many of the great stories in this book are about her father, known for his ability to “threaten and cajole,” as well as his compassion and loyalty to his clients, one of whom Gisleson travels to Angola to meet.
From its very epigraph, taken from Walker Percy, “The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life…,” “The Futilitarians” is a book that is informed both by Catholicism and Percy’s searching spirit.
“I haven’t been a practicing Catholic in quite some time,” she said, “But growing up the way I did, it’s bone deep. And I’m really grateful to have a spiritual life, a way of being in the world.”
Lovers of New Orleans stories will find much to admire here, with Gisleson’s vast knowledge of and experience of the city — she’s lived Uptown, in the French Quarter, in Algiers and the Irish Channel.
Her observations of the city are spot on, as true now as in 2012: “The trap of growing up in New Orleans: you’re often preoccupied with what’s been lost while clinging to a grand, cobbled present — part wreck, part fantasy, part regular civic striving, but always under construction.”
“I resisted New Orleans so much when I was growing up,” she said. “I had to tear down those adolescent walls and embrace it, acknowledge my love for it, and Katrina was a big part of that.”
“I’m really a product of Katrina,” she continued. “I felt compelled to write, to tell a more complete version of the story — so much was being left out. It was as if I’d set out on a crusade, and I’d never had that fierce urgency before.”
Her post-Katrina writings garnered critical acclaim as they appeared in The Oxford American, where Gisleson says she is grateful to have found “a literary home.”
Another literary home for Gisleson is the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, where the former student has become a teacher. She was the head of the creative writing department for several years and has taught part-time for the past 12. She is also a cofounder of the literary collectives Antenna and Press Street, so important in the post-Katrina era.
But that 1850s Bywater cottage, the home Gisleson shares with her husband, artist Brad Benischek, and their sons, Silas and Otto, is the real literary home of this memoir, a place readers will settle into for the duration and think of long after.
The Existential Crisis Reading Group still meets, perhaps less rigorously, less often, but that first intense year is the backbone of this exquisite memoir. The “reading” of the title ranges from Dante to Joyce, Elizabeth Bishop to Everette Maddox, Shel Silverstein to (of course!) Walker Percy, Arthur Koestler to Clarice Lispector. To a book person, it makes perfect sense. Where better to have an existential crisis than post-Katrina New Orleans, a city on the brink? What better remedy than a reading group?
So, in the end, did the ECRG, as Gisleson calls it, fulfill its function? Were there answers? Does she feel more hopeful?
“Hope,” she mused. “What I found most valuable about the Existential Crisis Reading Group and the writing of the book was engaging with people. Literature can be a way of positive and deep engagement with other people. All book clubs have the possibility for that to happen.”
But … does life still seem futile?
“That’s the great thing about being a Futilitarian,” she said, smiling. “You’re a lifelong member.”
**************************
Book Event
Anne Gisleson reads from and signs “The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Reading, and Grieving”
When: 7 p.m. Thursday (Aug. 24)
Where: The Saturn Bar
3067 St. Claude Ave.
Lagniappe: George Trahanis performs songs by Jacques Brel and Michael Jeffrey Lee plays existential ballads.
Anne Gisleson
Co-Founder
Anne Gisleson’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, The Oxford American, The Believer and many other publications. Her work has been selected for inclusion in anthologies such as Best American Non-Required Reading, Best Music Writing, Life in the Wake, and others. She co-edited and co-wrote How to Rebuild a City: Field Guide from a Work in Progress, about ground-up rebuilding efforts in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and wrote the accompanying essays for photographer Michel Varisco’s Shifting, a book about the beauty and degradation of the coastal wetlands. Her book of nonfiction, The Futilitarians is forthcoming from Little, Brown.
QUOTED: "seamlessly melds together Gisleson's story, New Orleans' ongoing recovery and existential discovery. It also serves as something of a guide for readers wrestling with their own struggles."
The Futilitarians
Carla Jean Whitley
BookPage.
(Sept. 2017): p23+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
By Anne Gisleson
Little, Brown
$27, 272 pages ISBN 9780316393904 Audio, eBook available
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
You might say New Orleans entered an existential crisis after Hurricane Katrina. People across the country
weighed in on the city's future: Should New Orleans rebuild? Or should it accept that life below sea level,
on the coast, wasn't meant to be?
Anne Gisleson and her fellow members of the Existential Crisis Reading Group could relate. In 2012, seven
years after the storm, the New Orleanians banded together to read and discuss works that addressed life's
big questions. Together, they would process through the grief and uncertainty that so often accompany
different phases of life.
For Gisleson, grief was not only civic but also deeply personal. In the group's first month, her father died of
cancer. Gisleson's two youngest sisters, twins Rebecca and Rachel, died by suicide about 15 years earlier,
18 months apart. "Losing a sibling, especially in youth, is a particular blow, a lateral loss of shared history
and DNA that lacerates your identity," Gisleson writes. "Your old narrative is shattered. Your new narrative
becomes shapeless, full of confusion and pain. Double that."
The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading seamlessly melds together
Gisleson's story, New Orleans' ongoing recovery and existential discovery. It also serves as something of a
guide for readers wrestling with their own struggles, with an appendix of works cited for further
exploration.
1/28/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Through each month's reading and discussion, Gisleson and her companions engage with big, sometimes
bleak ideas. And no matter the grief that drew each of them to the group, they remain focused on a shared
goal: living.
"This life is our cross," one member says during the group's interpretation of the Stations of the Cross
(which they dubbed "The Way of the Crisis"). "Here we are together to engage and discuss, duke it out,
support each other in our fight with this cross. Here we have gathered in our own 'Fight Club.'"
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Whitley, Carla Jean. "The Futilitarians." BookPage, Sept. 2017, p. 23+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502517425/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8f52a931.
Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A502517425
QUOTED: "an engrossing memoir"
"a graceful narrative that seamlessly interweaves philosophical reflections and intimate
revelations."
1/28/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1517166385770 3/3
Gisleson , Anne: THE FUTILITARIANS
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Gisleson , Anne THE FUTILITARIANS Little, Brown (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 8, 22 ISBN: 978-0-316-
39390-4
An engrossing memoir chronicles a search for spiritual healing.In 2011, happily married and the mother of
two children, journalist Gisleson (New Orleans Center for Creative Arts; co-editor: How to Rebuild a City:
Field Guide from a Work in Progress, 2010) was beset by a "persistent, daily, unsettling dread," a feeling,
"vaguely, that everything was wrong." When a close friend asked her to "sit down and talk through some
philosophical issues one-on-one," she suggested forming a group instead: other friends, too, seemed in flux
and on edge, and the author hoped that a monthly meeting, discussing relevant readings, would help. They
called themselves the Existentialist Crisis Reading Group, nicknamed the Futilitarians. Chosen by the dozen
or so members, readings ranged from Ecclesiastes to James Baldwin, King Lear to Fight Club and included
philosophy, fiction, essays, poetry, biography, memoir, and even a movie. (The author appends the group's
reading list.) As Gisleson conveys her responses to these disparate readings, she reveals the events of her
life that generated her "messy thoughts and feelings." When she was in her late 20s, her youngest sister,
Rebecca, committed suicide; a year and a half later, Rebecca's identical twin, Rachel, also killed herself;
and, more recently, her father succumbed to leukemia. Added to these was the devastation to her native
New Orleans caused by Hurricane Katrina. Rebecca's death left her shattered. "Unmarried, insecure, and
chronically confused," Gisleson writes, "I became paralyzed in my personal life, unable to make good
decisions to move things forward." Rachel's death compounded those feelings, preoccupying the author for
years. "I harbor a terrible, guilty suspicion," she writes, "that the deaths of my sisters, their disappearance
from the family structure," allowed the remaining siblings "to do things we might not otherwise have
ventured." Rebecca and Rachel, their life choices, and mental illness are central to Gisleson's story, as is her
father, an opinionated, hard-drinking lawyer whose pro bono work for death row inmates the author seeks to
understand. A graceful narrative that seamlessly interweaves philosophical reflections and intimate
revelations.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Gisleson , Anne: THE FUTILITARIANS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491934162/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=dfad6a55.
Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491934162
QUOTED: "Gisleson’s story isn’t an easy, read-in-a-couple-of-gulps proposition. It demands time and attention. It requests a bit of rigor. Yet it offers a generous companionship, the solace of being seen."
"Refreshingly, she doesn’t offer answers so much as ask good questions."
‘The Futilitarians,’ by Anne Gisleson
By Dawn Raffel Published 12:28 pm, Friday, August 18, 2017
"The Futilitarians" Photo: Little, Brown
Photo: Little, Brown
IMAGE 1 OF 3 "The Futilitarians"
In the middle of the journey of her life, Anne Gisleson felt lost — not so much in a dark woods, a la Dante, but at home in New Orleans with a metaphysical hangover. Her persistent dread was the aftermath of trauma: Hurricane Katrina piled onto the grief of losing two of her sisters. But friends were also grappling with the humbling disorientation of loss — divorces, deaths, midlife with its echo of endings, past and future.
Rather than grab the remote, a pill or the usual self-help nostrums, Gisleson went for the hair-of-the-dog-that-bit-you cure. When an angsty friend suggested they hash out some philosophical ideas, the Existential Crisis Reading Group was born.
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Each month in 2012, a fluid (and well-lubricated) group of pals convened to talk, drink and wrestle with life’s heaviest questions. (Alternate names for the group were the Futility All-Stars, and her favorite, the titular Futilitarians.) Epicurus and Ecclesiastes were on the menu, and so, of course, was Dante — and Tolstoy, Shakespeare and the near-oracular Clarice Lispector. Ancients and existentialists shared the table; contemporary poetry was food for thought. Gisleson’s kids lingered on the periphery, eager for edible tidbits — the Futilitarians were sometimes contentious but reliably well-fed.
The meetings themselves are absorbing enough to make you crave an invitation, thanks to Gisleson’s slyly gorgeous writing. But she also uses them to profound effect as a kind of scaffolding, linear poles through which to loop her personal story, moving back and forth in time. One of eight siblings, she grew up with a devoted Catholic mother and a hard-drinking, hard-driving father — a successful lawyer who relished lunches in the august Rib Room, fought (pro bono) for men on death row, and taught that “we had to be careful with our words because that’s all we have to make ourselves.”
In this high-achieving family, one brother became a lawyer, and a sister a politician, but the youngest, identical twins Rachel and Rebecca, struggled all their lives. Rebecca turned to stripping and was in a troubling relationship with a club owner when she committed suicide. A year and a half later, Rachel also took her life, leaving a young child. Neither counselors nor doctors nor love nor tough love could save them, although second-guessing sharpened the devastation.
“Losing a sibling, especially in youth, is a particular blow, a lateral loss of shared history and DNA that lacerates your identity,” Gisleson writes. “Your old narrative is shattered. Your new narrative becomes shapeless, full of confusion and pain. Double that.”
Around the time she emerged from the worst of the grief, she married, happily, to a man who’d known agony himself: His previous partner had died of a brain tumor at 33. No sooner had the couple come home from their honeymoon than they were forced to flee Hurricane Katrina. Upon their return, the years of salvage began, the streets an open wound.
New Orleans has a visceral presence in these pages, a malleable face, at times a defiant gaiety, colored indelibly by the Catholic holidays. Its stories seep through its pores. “The trap of growing up in New Orleans: you’re often preoccupied with what’s been lost while clinging to a grand, cobbled present — part wreck, part fantasy, part regular civic striving, but always under construction.” Which seems an apt description for personal identity as well.
The Futilitarian year began with its own deep reckoning. The morning after the group’s first meeting, on the Feast of the Epiphany, her father insisted on going to see his Death Row client, despite being fresh off chemo for leukemia, with no immunity. He fell ill and died six days later. His passing, and the act that hastened it, shaded much of the year.
Between meetings, she visited graves with her mother, broke bread with her siblings at her father’s table in the Rib Room, and followed his path into the bizarre bowels of the Angola prison — meeting both his final client, who’d been released from Death Row into the general prison population, and a Death Row client of her lawyer brother. The need to fight for a life after you couldn’t save two of the people you loved most isn’t lost on her.
Gisleson’s story isn’t an easy, read-in-a-couple-of-gulps proposition. It demands time and attention. It requests a bit of rigor. Yet it offers a generous companionship, the solace of being seen. Take her description of midlife — “with its throbbing ambivalence and urgent doubt, occupying the highest and most lavish tower in the unwalled city. You can still make the stairs, the brocades are still bright, the tapestries a little worn in all the right places. Surrounded by the tapering beauty of all the seasons, you can enjoy the panorama and the action in all the streets and squares, even with the encroaching knowledge you’ll have to leave the city altogether one day.”
Refreshingly, she doesn’t offer answers so much as ask good questions. Among her most striking insights is “the necessity of others in our search to find meaning in ourselves.” Those others might be friends who invite you to their home. They might be great thinkers, living and dead. And they might be discovered in communion with a book about some friendly futilitarians.
Dawn Raffel’s next book, “The Strange Case of Dr. Couney,” will be published by Dutton in 2018. Email: books@sfchronicle.com
The Futilitarians
Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading
By Anne Gisleson
(Little, Brown; 260 pages; $27)
QUOTED: "The Futilitarians tackles hopelessness, but it never succumbs to it. Gisleson writes with wit, warmth and a spiritual devotion to books that never comes across as preachy."
"This search for purpose and connection amid chaos and loss permeates even the most heart-wrenching moments of The Futilitarians—and it's what turns the book from a meditation on reading to a celebration of being."
Books Become A Bridge Out Of Grief In 'The Futilitarians'
August 22, 20177:00 AM ET
JASON HELLER
The Futilitarians
The Futilitarians
Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading
by Anne Gisleson
Hardcover, 260 pages |
purchase
On paper, few things may seem more navel-gazing than a memoir about being in a book club. But Anne Gisleson takes that ostensibly narrow premise and goes universal in her debut book, The Futilitarians. She writes about her time spent in a circle of friends who call themselves the Existential Crisis Reading Group — nicknamed The Futilitarians. Their portmanteau of "futility" and "utilitarian," while playful on the surface, isn't chosen lightly: They gather regularly to read and discuss books, as well as their lives, in post-Katrina New Orleans. And as their collective name suggests, they've learned to use the written word as a way to explore both the hopelessness and the constructiveness of their grief.
Well, it's mostly the written word. At one point, the movie Hot Tub Time Machine makes its way, hilariously, onto Gisleson and company's "reading" list — alongside books by James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Kingsley Amis and Clarice Lispector, among others. The group meets monthly; accordingly, The Futilitiarians comprises twelve chapters, each covering a meeting between January and December of 2012. It's a year of tumult. Gisleson, whose father is two years into his doomed battle with leukemia, is still reeling from the suicides of her twin sisters, 18 months apart. Her husband Brad is haunted by ghosts of his own. Together, and with Katrina continuing to echo throughout their city seven years after the fact, they've assembled a group of friends whose own troubled and occasionally triumphant lives could use some bookish reevaluation.
'The Futilitarians' tackles hopelessness, but it never succumbs to it. Gisleson writes with wit, warmth and a spiritual devotion to books that never comes across as preachy.
Hot Tub Time Machine aside, the group's growing bibliography becomes a gateway. Lubricated by cocktails and a go-for-broke desperation, they relate their reading choices to their own inner monologues — expressed at last — about who they are and why they're here. Chris is a jack-of-all-trades and master of none, whose libertine lifestyle makes Gisleson long for the freedom of her youth; it ties into one of the group's first assigned writers, Epicurus, and his ancient championship of pleasure. The mix of Gen-Xers and Millennials also includes Sara, a sage 20-something who plays the bass guitar and injects poetry into the mix — not just as a literary form, but as a way of life.
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The group's explorations don't remain strictly literary. Gisleson brings New Orleans itself into sharp focus, lingering lovingly on its places, its people and its history. The tragedy of Katrina is more than a backdrop; at one point the group uses the half-renovated ruins of a furniture store as the site of a turning point in Gisleson's grieving of her father. He was a lawyer who volunteered to help death row inmates at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, and the more she learns of the legacy of his altruism — as well as his addiction and mental illness — the more it sheds light on her own quest for salvation. Mortality looms over the men and women who call themselves Futilitarians, but so do hangovers, wry humor and New Orleans' resilience and renewal in the face of devastation.
The Futilitarians tackles hopelessness, but it never succumbs to it. Gisleson writes with wit, warmth and a spiritual devotion to books that never comes across as preachy. In the final month of the group's meetings, she stumbles across a quote by Simone de Beauvoir that encapsulates her yearlong experience in Existential Crisis Reading Group: "It is the existence of other men that tears each man out of his immanence and enables him to fulfill the truth of his being, to complete himself through transcendence, through escape towards some objective, through enterprise." This search for purpose and connection amid chaos and loss permeates even the most heart-wrenching moments of The Futilitarians — and it's what turns the book from a meditation on reading to a celebration of being.
QUOTED: "The fading away of the E.C.R.G. puzzles the reader. How did it happen? Did the death of Gisleson’s father in the month of the first meeting change the direction of the memoir? This is a serious structural flaw in an otherwise estimable book. Is it a ... deal-breaker? No, because the memoir that lives inside the bibliomemoir is moving and complete and very much worth reading."
Loss and Grief,
Channeled Through a
Book Club
By EMILY FOX GORDON OCT. 6, 2017
THE FUTILITARIANS
Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading
By Anne Gisleson
260 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $27.
Anne Gisleson’s “The Futilitarians” is an entry in the category that Joyce Carol
Oates has called the “bibliomemoir,” a first-person narrative that incorporates
reading in its structure. The author, a writer and teacher, offers a month-by-month
chronicle of a literary discussion group she founded and hosted in her New Orleans
home. The attendees are mostly youngish professionals of an artistic or intellectual
bent. When she, her husband, Brad, and their friend Chris conceived the project,
they had a philosophical approach in mind; the idea was to put an emphasis on
ideas. Gisleson wanted to call the group “The Futilitarians,” but the membership
settled on “The Existential Crisis Reading Group,” or E.C.R.G..
The reader can hear the ironic inflection; ever since “Annie Hall” it’s been
impossible to say “existential crisis” without smirking. Even as the moving spirit of
this worthy project, Gisleson had mixed feelings. It “could by turns seem
pretentious, goofy or totally necessary.” But the plan to let each member choose a
reading each month yielded a lively and eclectic list, from Epicurus to Arthur
Koestler to John Cheever to Clarice Lispector. And in a town as intensely convivial as
1/28/2018 Loss and Grief, Channeled Through a Book Club - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/books/review/anne-gisleson-the-futilitarians-bibliomemoir.html 2/3
New Orleans, who needed an excuse to talk and drink? (So much drinking! The
coffee table was “a forest of bottles.”)
In the first few chapters, Gisleson introduces the members of the group. Aside
from a few bold strokes — a man who practices “plumber’s yoga,” a chain-smoking
historian who smells of patchouli — they seem rather faintly drawn. We don’t learn
much about the lives of these people, and as the months go by, they grow less rather
than more distinct. Soon it becomes apparent that the E.C.R.G. is not the main act in
this show. It’s Gisleson herself who occupies center stage, and the drama she enacts
is the story of her own deep and particular sorrows. One of these is the death of her
identical twin sisters, the youngest among eight siblings, beautiful girls whose
learning disabilities isolated them in an accomplished family. Within a span of 18
months each hanged herself while under the influence of cocaine and alcohol.
Gisleson remembers them with a wondering, deploring tenderness that deepens
throughout the book. The other sorrow is the death of her father from leukemia just
as the E.C.R.G. is getting underway. He was a prominent lawyer, both secretive and
flamboyantly extroverted, a passionate opponent of capital punishment and a family
man with a habit of disappearing into dive bars. The twins, so easily forgotten in life,
are a painful mystery to Gisleson, and so is her father, whose contradictions come
into focus only after his death.
Meanwhile, the E.C.R.G. continues its monthly meetings, considering works by
Kingsley Amis (on drinking), Dante, Tolstoy and others. But for Gisleson, the
readings function mostly as conduits to the netherworld of her memories. Oddly
enough, this world is much larger, richer and more real than the world of the
Futilitarians. The dead dwell here, but also the living: Gisleson’s mother is
touchingly portrayed, as is Ronald, the death row inmate whom her father counseled
for years. And post-Katrina New Orleans itself is an essential component of this
world; it lives on the page in pungent detail, with all its disastrous losses and fragile
hopes.
The fading away of the E.C.R.G. puzzles the reader. How did it happen? Did the
death of Gisleson’s father in the month of the first meeting change the direction of
the memoir? This is a serious structural flaw in an otherwise estimable book. Is it a
1/28/2018 Loss and Grief, Channeled Through a Book Club - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/books/review/anne-gisleson-the-futilitarians-bibliomemoir.html 3/3
deal-breaker? No, because the memoir that lives inside the bibliomemoir is moving
and complete and very much worth reading.
Emily Fox Gordon is the author of “Book of Days: Personal Essays.”
A version of this review appears in print on October 8, 2017, on Page BR25 of the Sunday Book Review
with the headline: Read ’Em and Weep.
QUOTED: "Her narrative is a wonderful look at friendship and grief, as well as an enlightening personal literary journey."
The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading
Anne Gisleson. Little, Brown, $27 (260p) ISBN 978-0-316-39390-4
Gisleson’s memoir is a compassionate journey through personal grief, as well as a smart compendium of literature. After the suicides of her twin sisters (Rachel and Rebecca) and the destruction Hurricane Katrina wreaks in her hometown of New Orleans, Gisleson and her husband Brad bring friends together in what they called the Existential Crisis Reading Group, or ECRG. Gisleson, who’s written for the Atlantic and the Oxford American, documents a year in which she and the ECRG explore the meaning of life as they read, drink, and share ideas. What ensues is a dynamic examination of human suffering and human joy. They discuss an all-star lineup of literature—including the works of Kingsley Amis, Epicurus, Clarice Lispector, Shel Silverstein, and Leo Tolstoy, to name a few. Gisleson nicely evokes the Catholic teachings she learned from her parents; most moving, though, is her hard look at her twin sisters’ lives: both were fraught with mental illness and addiction, traits shared by their father, who was a death-row lawyer in Louisiana. Her narrative is a wonderful look at friendship and grief, as well as an enlightening personal literary journey. Agent: Emma Parry, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Aug.)