Thursday, May 25, 2017

The Long Run: A Memoir of Loss and Life in Motion by Catriona Menzies-Pike


The Long Run: A Memoir of Loss and Life in Motion by Catriona Menzies-Pike
ISBN-10: 1524759449 - Hardcover $25
  • Publisher: Crown (May 23, 2017), 256 pages.
  • Review copy courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher.

The blurb:
When her parents died in a plane crash, the last thing twenty-year-old Catriona Menzies-Pike knew how to do was grieve.  One day she'd been a punked-out art student worrying about her semiotics thesis, the next she was answering questions like Where will the family live?  What will you do with the house? The following decade was a period of searching--hard drinking, bad living--and though Catriona made it through in one piece, it often felt as if she was barely holding it together.

Something changed when, at age thirty, she signed up for a half marathon. Her enthusiasm surprised no one more than her, until she recognized that during the years of her coping with her parents' deaths she had already been "preoccupied with distance and endurance."  She realized running, a "pace suited to the precarious labor of memory," was helping her to process the loss in ways that she had been, for ten messy years, trying to run from. 

As Catriona excavates her own past, she also grows curious about other women drawn to running. What she finds is a history of repression and denial--running was thought to endanger childbearing, and as late as 1967 a Boston Marathon official tried to drag a woman off the course, telling her to "get the hell out of my race" -- but also of incredible courage and achievement.  Cartoon intertwines the stories of women who defied convention with her own journey of coming to terms, in what becomes a fierce and moving testament to our power to reshape the stories the world tells about us and the ones we tell about ourselves.

Review:
The Long Run is a memoir by a young woman in Sydney who hadn't identified as an athlete or a runner.  The books and articles that she'd read about running seemed to focus on ambitious, Type A people or on self improvement or weight loss.  Menzies-Pike shares her own story of how running opened up a "new geography" of her home city.  She discusses books about running from the point of view of a reader (as compared to reading the books as a runner).  With self-depreciating humor shines through whether she discusses what first women marathoners faced in 1896 or her family anecdotes or her own travel stories, Menzies-Pike delivers an engaging, well thought-out discussion.  Her book is about running but it is also about determination, perseverance, and taking control while keeping a sense of humor.


About the Author:
Catriona Menzies-Pike is the editor of the Sydney Review of Books. She has worked in digital media for a decade and her journalism and essays on feminism, literary culture, and politics have been widely published. She holds a PhD in English literature and has taught film, literature, journalism and cultural studies units to undergraduates since 2001. In 2008 she ran her first half-marathon, and five marathons and dozens of half marathons later, she's still running.