“I wrote … read … rjomaterta, a six-inch-tall wedge of layer cake … made of cream flavored with different liqueurs.” (She declined whale meat, lambs’ testicles, and a singed sheep’s head.) “Iceland Made Me” describes Smiley’s youthful travels, hitchhiking Europe with her first husband - but accounts of her time (with other international students) in Iceland sparkle. This quality of keen, cool analysis suffuses every piece. I am just a person who was never taught what not to try.” I know from my own experience as a parent that sometimes it takes disappointment … to disabuse you of your cherished notions of who you are, who your child is…” Moreover: “Sometimes, from the outside, my work and my life look daring, but I am not a daring person. The other was his absence itself: His damaged nature might have limited or hurt her. One … was his height,” which bequeathed Smiley a “free and strong” aura. But also: “y father gave me two precious gifts. Smiley’s striking self-possession, even as a child, may owe much to her own mother, a crackerjack journalist. Smiley absorbed this without apparent pain, having “stopped paying attention to the murmurs of compassion for me as a fatherless girl.” Instead she “viewed the fathers of my friends with some skepticism - they seemed … vapid, much less dynamic than the mothers.” “My Absent Father” tells how Smiley’s war veteran father (a disturbed, difficult, “Gregory Peck”-handsome prodigy) left her family when Smiley was 4. Yet all feel connected by Smiley’s remarkable vision, conveyed in crystalline language.
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