Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... McMinnville Public Library | 954.04 BROWN | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Salem Main Library | 921 Brown, Rachel 2005 | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
In the bestselling tradition of Running with Scissors and Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight - a hilarious, affecting memoir of the author's upbringing in an ashram in India.
In 1980, when she was seven, the author's parents, 60s-holdover hippies, leave California for an ashram in a cobra-ridden, drought stricken spot in India. Rachel is the only foreign child in a hundred-mile radius.
The ashram is devoted to Meher Baba, best known as the guru to Pete Townsend and thus for having inspired some songs by the Who, for having kept a lifelong vow of silence, and for having coined the slogan, "Don't worry, be happy."
Cavorting through these pages are some wonderfully eccentric characters - including a holy madman permanently doubled over from years of stooping to collect invisible objects; a senile librarian who nightly sings scales outside Rachel's window, only with grunts instead of notes; and a middle-aged male virgin who begs Rachel to critique his epic spiritual poems. Somehow, Rachel manages to keep her wits and humor about her when everyone else seems to have lost touch with reality. Astutely observed and laugh-out-loud funny, this astonishing debut memoir marks the arrival of a major new literary talent.
Author Notes
Rachel Manija Brown , after returning to America, became the youngest person ever to receive an MFA in playwriting from UCLA. She has written for television, worked in TV/film development for the Jim Henson Company, and has won awards for playwriting, comedy writing, and literary criticism. Her play, Driving Past , ws produced Off-Broadway. This is her first book. She lives in Los Angeles.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Adolescence is never easy, but add a move to a foreign country, immersion in a fringe "spiritual community" and attendance at a school where your classmates throw rocks at you, and it becomes downright disturbing. In this quirky, frank coming-of-age memoir, television writer Brown deftly recounts her childhood spent in an ashram in India in the 1980s, as the only resident child in a community of (mostly) Westerners who worshipped Baba, a self-proclaimed leader of a vague spiritual "way of life." Brown, known to her parents as Mani Mao, spent her days at Holy Wounds of Jesus Christ the Savior School, the recounting of which is initially quite humorous, but soon takes a turn for the worse as readers realize the unending physical and emotional abuse Brown endured due to her foreign status. (A particularly funny scene occurs when Brown returns to India years later and is chased in her car by children who throw rocks. "Had their older siblings passed down the Legend of Mani Mao?" Brown wonders.) While extensive on the depictions of "Baba," whom Brown never met nor felt any connection to, this is a poignant memoir that reflects a painful time with wit and insight. Agent, Brian DeFiore. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
As soon as your parents mention that they want to move to an ashram in India, dip into this memoir of the spiritual life's dark side. Born in the early '70s, Brown was raised in Los Angeles by parents still under the sway of master Meher Baba, though he had died in 1969. In 1980, they decided to relocate the family to his birthplace, Ahmednagar, to commune more closely with his spirit and with those who had experienced him directly. As a child, Rachel was thrust into a surreal life and experienced alienation writ large. Some members of the ashram spoke a perplexing language all their own: "Are you my mummy?" asked a 60-year-old member named Coconut of seven-year-old Brown. When she had no satisfactory response, Coconut offered that they were living in "the Kaliyuga Age" and that "anything can happen." Now a playwright, television author and comic writer, Brown here recounts her youthful trials: She was endlessly taunted by her schoolmates, beaten by her teachers, bored by the supplications to Baba. But she remains open minded: "We all have mental magnets for obsession, waiting to encounter an idea or person or practice of the opposite charge," she concludes. "I can understand the fascination, even if I can't understand its object." Along the way, she renders a well-hewed look at Ahmednagar: its free-ranging water buffalo and holy cows; its reeking sewage; its experts in removing ear wax; its vendors of "cones of powder in crimson, saffron, orange, purple, hot pink, forest green, and indigo" for women to dab on their foreheads. In short, "Ahmednagar was overwhelming and beyond analysis, like a new primary color." Reads like a novel and lingers in the mind. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Like humorists Augusten Burroughs and David Sedaris, Brown taps into the terrain of her unusual--and, at times, unsettling--childhood for this engaging debut. In the early 1980s, seven-year-old Brown, a self-described misfit whose nose was forever poked in a book, was towed by her hippie parents to Ahmednagar, India, home to followers of the late Meher Baba. (The longtime guru to rock singer Pete Townsend, Baba is also credited with the cloying quote, Don't worry, be happy. ) As the sole foreign child in a backwater town, young Brown's encounters ranged from curious to chilling: beatific disciples, kooky pilgrims, and mean-spirited classmates who hurled rocks at her. Brown, now an award-winning television writer and playwright in Los Angeles, intermittently flashes forward to document her life after escaping the ashram at the age of 12, a narrative strategy that slows the pace of the book. But her mordant accounts of her Baba-worshipping mother and daily life in India (from its blistering heat and belligerent bugs to taxi drivers who clean their windshields with baked potatoes) enlighten and delight. --Allison Block Copyright 2005 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Less a travelog than a childhood memoir, Brown's book is a witty account of growing up on an ashram in India. On the surface, life is anything but funny. The ashram is peppered with, well, kooks. Brown (the erstwhile "Mani") has stones thrown at her by her classmates at the local Catholic school, her teachers hit her, and her parents eventually divorce. And then there are the mysteries: was her mother abused as a child, was their guru really God (or just someone who thought he was), why does the ashram librarian growl outside her bedroom window? Mani copes through it all by reading and trying to emulate Indian warrior-heroes throughout history. Above all, what sees her through a traumatic childhood is her gift to tell a good story. Like David Sedaris with his accounts of growing up in a dysfunctional family, Brown, who received an MFA in playwriting from UCLA and has written for television, the stage, and print media, allows the reader to laugh and wince at the same time. Recommended for public and academic libraries.-Lee Arnold, Historical Soc. of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.