Shared Reads: The Luxury of Daydreams by Amy McVay Abbott

            I ordered the book The Luxury of Daydreams by Amy McVay Abbott (WestBow Press, 2011) on the recommendation of a Patron and began reading it as soon as I was through with Thomas Pynchon. It was a quick and easy ready, as opposed to Pynchon who was a massive struggle, and I have to say I enjoyed it quite a lot.

            The book is a collection of short essays. The topics are easily relatable but deceptively rich. The author has a fine eye for place detail. Her coupling of Three Dog Night’s Joy to the World with the year 1971 will immediately connect with anyone who remembers 1971, even as a child, and with this one stroke she does far better than Pynchon did in placing the Reader in that particular year. I know a trip to the Dog ‘n Suds will resonate with many Hoosiers as my own husband sometimes waxes nostalgic about family trips to the Indianapolis Dog ‘n Suds after church on Sundays when he was a kid. She achieves similar transmission more universally with the phrase “TaB Float” and by somehow summoning Gaines-Burgers from the depths of memory.

            McVay Abbott is a Hoosier by birth and by choice and many of the most evocative essays center around her childhood growing up in rural northeast Indiana. These essays will give the Reader a true sense of Midwest morality and the sort of qualities that make for a virtuous Citizen without at all being preachy or condescending. The author makes her religious affiliations clear but not ponderously so and her essay on St. Peter is interesting and though provoking.

            The one essay that nags at this reader is The Pizza Boy where the author encounters the 18-year-old son of a friend from church who had died three years before. The author reveals that, “Upon her death, I promised Neil I would look out for him, and I have not.” The author confesses the she “lost her spiritual center for a while” and had left that particular church. The passage is made more unsettling five chapters later when in an essay titled Cleaning Her House where she reflects on how she and some other younger women had been cleaning the friend’s house when the call came that she had died. She writes of the jobs that were considered the purview of the older women of the Church, including attending to the “funeral dinners” and delegating tasks but now the younger women had lost “One of their own” and the tasks rightfully belong to them now even as we the Reader already knows she will end up leaving this Church a year later. 

            While reading this I, for a moment, wished I had been part of a group of people who would come clean my house while I was dying, just as other parts had made me wish that I had grown up as part of a close, loving family in a supportive, stable community, but then I thought I would much rather have someone who would honor her promise to look in on the young son I would be leaving behind and offer him whatever comfort I could, maybe include him in a family activity, have him over for a family meal, even if that promise had been made out of “fear” but I applaud McVay Abbott’s courage in writing this pair of essays.

            McVay Abbott is a disarmingly gentle writer. She includes an essay about three “embarrassing” stories her father likes to tell about her and ends it with, “My only recourse for this is to tell horribly embarrassing stories about my own child,” which she never does.

            In an essay titled Working on Christmas Eve, McVay Abbott writes about her then-boyfriend, now husband, working three jobs as he saved up enough money to attend Graduate School focusing on a third-shift rotation cleaning surgical suites at a hospital. The moral of the essay how much more they all appreciate life as “a full professor at a small, private arts university,” and that the, “victory is much sweeter savored over the memory of toil and hard work as a third-shift janitor.” Admirable, but in the essay we learn that her boyfriend had left Indiana to come to Florida to be with her just a month after his father was killed in an auto accident that left his mother gravely injured and the Reader is left with the feeling that there is a much more interesting story here than the easy homily the author chose.

            We do know the mother-in-law survived the crash as there is an essay about her death titled Requiem and Release which contains a particular peeve in which the author uses the word ‘delicious’ as a descriptor twice in the space of two sentences. Her mother-in-law “cooked delicious meals for us,” and once the author, “eagerly ate two huge helpings of her delicious pot roast.” Here is an instance where the author needs to stretch in order to show, not tell us. The Reader should be able to taste the food and be able to identify the qualities that made it so delicious, not just rely on the author’s word that it was.

            A much bigger issue I have is the author, or her publishers, used the hook that, “After a thirty-year career and eighteen years of mothering, she was at a loss and her child a thousand miles away.” Now I can understand McVay Abbott’s reluctance to delve into the highly personal, or the potentially embarrassing, when it comes to her husband or son. Perhaps she feels it is their stories, not hers, to tell. What this Reader has a more difficult time with is how Amy McVay Abbott really kind of side-steps around her own story.

            We know that McVay Abbott eventually found these life changes liberating and that they encouraged her to once again find a voice that she had shelved in favor of more immediate needs, but we also know from the text that the author also experienced something of a “dark night of the soul” and about this I would like to read more. This Reader is curious about how her sense of self was affected when three long-standing pillars of her identity, job, parenthood, and the Church, were disrupted with the job disappearing and her son moving a thousand miles away to attend college and the cumulative crises that caused her to question, if not her faith exactly, then at least the placement of that faith, and the processes she used to adapt to these changes. This Reader would like to know more about the corporate world she moved in for thirty years beyond the vague “sales” that the author gives us. I would like to know more about why the author decided to move to Florida after grad school, what it was like and what she did there. I would like to know why her son chose to attend college so far from home and how the author adjusted from having a child living under her roof full-time to one that just comes back for Christmas and summer breaks. The author teases us with tantalizing glimpses but never delves into these larger life issues but with this book under her belt, with its emphasis on childhood and passages, maybe she will give as more in her next book and that’s more of chance than I’m giving Thomas Pynchon.

            In all, I found this book to be something of a palate cleanser, easy to read and easy to like. I also think many more people would also find it enjoyable for its insights and memories and the refreshing good humor and sincerity found within.

This book is available for checkout in the Indiana section of the Owen County Public Library’s Vault. Check it out and discover the considerable pleasures to be found in The Luxury of Daydreams.

~ Laura Wilkerson
   Genealogy Department