Book Review: Readings

Spike Gillespie will be at BookPeople on Tuesday, Sept. 16.

Surrender (But Don't Give Yourself Away): Old Cars, Found Hope, and Other Cheap Tricks

University of Texas Press, 208pp., $24.95

With so many pop essayists cramming their neuroses onto bookshelves nowadays, we could easily spend each hour trapped in a whole new quagmire of someone else's immaterial Prozac clutter. Even with every pretty cover and clever title creating illusions of originality, a visit to BookPeople's memoir section is guaranteed to be just as dull as the last -- that is, unless you have a good reason for being there. It's always more fun to read your sister's diary than a stranger's. Perhaps this is why Spike Gillespie has appealed to Austin readers for so long. She lives among us -- not far away in New York City, for example, hiding behind newfound coolness and hanging by a pen to spotty memories of North Carolina or some other uncool place she had to leave just so she could write about it.

Gillespie's upcoming Surrender (But Don't Give Yourself Away): Old Cars, Found Hope, and Other Cheap Tricks is a collection of 46 essays that originally appeared here in The Austin Chronicle, The Washington Post, The Dallas Morning News, and other publications. Replete with musings on credit-card debt and visits to HEB and Sixth Street, Surrender could be especially useful reading material for the aspiring Austin writer. Further discussions of how she might "Have and Have Not" made it in the writing biz could surface at Gillespie's appearance at the BookPeople release party Tuesday, Sept. 16.

A strikingly engaging public speaker, Gillespie is not the sort of author whose booksignings disappoint avid fans with the cruel reality of a cross-eyed Oz, speaking inaudibly from pursed, unexercised lips. Gillespie's refreshing fidelity to the promises of her writing stems perhaps from her clear, practical style. She writes like she speaks. And, as she puts it, she "loves careening through the language, as if on a list-free spree at Target."

And we could easily zigzag through Gillespie's essays, jumping randomly from the seats of $431.81 cars to the uncomfortable human cushions of what she calls "crushes." But it's much more fun to meet the un-air-conditioned clunkers and jousting, Renaissance Fair hopefuls in their rightful order. Although Gillespie wrote her essays in different times and places, the once disparate parts come together to form a nice, optimistic sum, where bizarre associative disorders, especially those involving the ghost of some guy's red Toyota pickup, don't seem so bizarre.

We begin with the story of Gillespie's very first automobile and then travel along with her through bits of her life culled into themes of religion, history, alcohol, and other "Driving Forces." But we linger most when Gillespie writes about sex (surprise). In the section, "Men I Have Not Slept With," Gillespie invites her father, a Japanese Santa Claus, a loving homosexual, and Neil Diamond to illustrate the surprising rewards of nonsexual relationships. "Crush," the final, defining essay of the collection surveys Gillespie's life as a series of "out of control ... stomach flips" beginning in kindergarten. If hope is what drives Gillespie to write and breathe, then a long history of pulverizing infatuations may not be entirely self-defeating. "As long as a crush remains a crush," writes Gillespie on her final pages, "a crush offers hope. False hope = Better than no hope."