A List
8/30/04

POLITICS, PERSONAL HISTORY BLEND IN SLU PROF'S NEW BOOK

CANTON - If you're of a certain age, a feeling of deja vu might come over you as 
you scan the nightly news. And if some of the themes have a familiar, 
vaguely-like-the-80's feel to them - and not in a good way - rest assured that 
it's not just you.
      In Scraping By in the Big Eighties (University of Nebraska Press, September 
2004), Natalia Rachel Singer combines memoir with political commentary to make the 
point that "history is being revisited upon us" in a trickle-down phenomenon she 
dubs "deja-voodoo."
      "My book is dedicated to everyone who lived through the eighties convinced 
that the whole world had gone crazy," Singer says, "and who are feeling a very 
uncomfortable deja vu now. My hope is that it will provide solace to the people 
who thought they were the only ones who felt this way. It's also dedicated to my 
students, who were born during the Reagan years and have never lived in the 
America I knew as a child, when, for all its flaws, the commitment to end poverty 
and injustice was a top-down mandate."
      Singer's plan, when she headed for Seattle in 1979, was to get laid off, go 
on unemployment, and become laid back. Meanwhile she would train herself to become 
a writer. "Rejecting the avid materialism of her generation and the violence of 
American culture," the editors state, "she vowed to surround herself with natural 
beauty, steer clear of her mentally ill mother, and contribute nothing to the 
fluorescent-lit, acronym-ridden, anesthetizing military-industrial complex. Her 
quest, which she hoped would bring her peace, safety, and creative fulfillment, 
actually put her increasingly in harm's way. It has, however, paid enormous 
dividends for readers who here have the perverse yet exquisite pleasure of 
following Singer's low-budget search for a bohemian haven during the last gasp 
of the cold war.
      "[Her] tortuous path, chronicled with self-deprecating wit and disconcerting 
candor, leads her to a duplex in Seattle, a Buddhist monastery in the Catskills, 
a ghost town on the Olympic Peninsula, a beach hut in Mexico, graduate school in 
western Massachusetts, and even a Left Bank convent, but it never frees her 
from her identity and obligations as an American, either at home or abroad," 
according to the editors. "Singer blends memoir with cultural history to critique 
Reaganomics, military buildups in the face of eroding social programs and growing 
national debt, the hypocrisy of so-called family values, and her own complicity 
in all of it. Scraping By in the Big Eighties is, more than anything, about 
taking politics personally. Lyrical, meditative, occasionally heartbreaking, 
and often darkly comic, this book about mistakes blithely made in decades past 
is nonetheless still timely today."
      Singer is an associate professor of English at St. Lawrence University.  
Her fiction and essays have appeared in Ms., Harper's, O: The Oprah Magazine, 
The American Scholar, alternet.org and dozens of other journals. The new book 
is part of the American Lives series, edited by Tobias Wolff, and featuring 
books of literary nonfiction.  
      Singer will sign copies of her book at St. Lawrence's Brewer Bookstore 
on Saturday, September 18, from 1 to 3 p.m., and is scheduled to appear on 
North Country Public Radio's "Readers and Writers on the Air" on September 9.

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