Review: 'The Watergate Girl'

The Watergate Girl: My Fight for Truth and Justice Against a Criminal President
By Jill Wine-Banks
Memoir
February 2020
Henry Holt and Co.
ISBN: 978-1250244321

A young prosecutor in 1973 prepares for the most important questions she has ever presented in court. The witness is angry at being forced to testify. But her information is essential to the case, to try to make sense of what happened.

It's Rose Mary Woods, Richard Nixon's secretary, on the stand to testify about the infamous 18 1/2-minute gap in a crucial tape recorded by Nixon. Getting ready to question her is Jill Wine-Banks. Woods is even more unhappy when she is caught lying as she demonstrates what supposedly happened to create the gap in the tape.

As Wine-Banks recounts in her memoir, The Watergate Girl, the crowd in the courtroom was stunned. Even more stunning to her, when she proposed that Woods demonstrate how she said the gap was created in her office, because what she said did not happen in the courtroom demonstration, attorneys for Woods and Nixon did not object.

Wine-Banks was one of three trial lawyers, and the only woman, on the Watergate special prosecutor task force for obstruction of justice and cover-ups.

As she recounts how she got to this moment, and how complex her feelings were about dealing with Woods, Wine-Banks also describes what life was like for a professional woman in the early 1970s. She shows how being hard-working and smart could pay off, but also the drawbacks to outshining any man who couldn't handle it. Unfortunately, one of those men was her first husband.

Whether it's personal or professional, Wine-Banks demonstrates that her first love was writing. She went to law school to gain gravitas in what she would be considered as eligible in covering in journalism. When she stayed with the law, journalism lost a powerful voice. But her background does show that she is a natural for what she is doing now as a television commentator.

Although her memoir does touch on these other things, and she gives a quick rundown of what she has been doing in the corporate world since the Watergate era, it is that period that is the focus of this book. The larger-than-life characters in the prosecutor's office and the political world, the suspense in not knowing what was going to happen next -- especially after the Saturday Night Massacre -- the relentless work schedule and the pressure to make sure all i's were dotted and t's crossed are all recounted vividly.

Wine-Banks has written a timely memoir that brings back the Watergate days for those who lived through that time, and provides an elegant primer to those who don't know what all the fuss was about.

©2019 All Rights Reserved TheLitForum.com Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: 'The Starless Sea'

The Starless Sea
By Erin Morgenstern
Fantasy
November 2019
Doubleday
ISBN: 978-0385541213

A story about stories, about lovers meeting in different guises and different settings, trying to destroy fate to keep it from away from time, a paradise for every book lover and a sea without stars in the depths of the world -- they are all in Erin Morgenstern's second novel, The Starless Sea.

It has been eight years since Morgenstern's first novel, The Night Circus, was published to acclaim. The new novel is another gift in world-building in which everything is created with grace, beauty and magic. Love of story and of the arts of creating and reading are sprinkled on every page:

Passionate love stories were manipulated into the vacancies between raindrops and vanished with the end of the storm. Tragedies intricately poured from bottles of wine and sipped thoughtfully with melancholy and fine cheeses. Fairy tales shaped from sand and seashells on shorelines slowly swept away by softly lapping waves.

This is what is contained in the world created by Morgenstern that exists in another dimension, another time, or in endless caverns under the ground of the world. There are those who look after the world, who have suffered much for the honor of doing so, and those who are granted access to that world whether by chance or design, who fall through doors or stumble upon them.

Zachary Ezra Rawlins stumbled upon this world. He nearly found it as a child when he came upon a beautiful door that didn't fit its surroundings. But he didn't turn the doorknob and walk through. Now a graduate student, he comes across an uncatalogued book, titled Sweet Sorrows, and that incident is in the book.

He is soon drawn into an adventure by people who seem to know him, although they are strangers to him. Doors that lead to this world of books and stories are involved. So is a storytelling pirate, a woman who fell into that world as a child, a dollhouse and the symbols of a sword, bees and keys. And an owl king. And lovers that search for each other over the years, as Time and Fate search for each other after they are separated forcibly. Tropes and stories circle back to older stories. Or perhaps later stories not yet told, but foreshadowed.

Because in the midst of the derring-do adventures, it is stories, how they are told and what they mean to those who hear or read them that are the heart of The Starless Sea.

Early on, in a gathering of students, the importance of story (in both written and gaming versions) is savored:

"Isn't that what anyone wants, though?" the girl with the cat-eye glasses asks in response. "To be able to make your own choices and decisions but to have it be part of a story? You want that narrative there to trust in, even if you want to maintain your own free will." "You want to decide where to go and what to do and which door to open but you still want to win the game," ponytail guy adds. "Even if winning the game is just ending the story." "Especially if a game allows for multiple possible endings" Zachary says, touching on the subject of a paper he'd written two years previously. "Wanting to co-write the story, not dictate it yourself, so it's collaborative."

And, later:

"Everyone is part of a story, what they want is to be part of something worth recording."

It's the same with stars, according to one tale within this tale about a man who sells stars:

"Everyone wants the stars. Everyone wishes to grasp that which exists out of reach. To hold the extraordinary in their hands and keep the remarkable in their pockets."

Also, when likening a story to an egg:

"You want to be in the story, not observing it from the outside. You want to be under its shell. The only way to do that is to break it. But if it breaks, it is gone."

To have one's life matter, to be cherished, to be known by someone else -- whether reader or lover or both -- these are the things that matter in The Starless Sea.

This novel is a faerie-blessed mythical tale of spun magic. But it also is a serious meditation on how a person matters to oneself and to at least one other person who learns of that person.

This is the stuff of "only connect" and Joan Didion's admonition for us to tell ourselves stories in order to live.

©2020 All Rights Reserved TheLitForum.com Reviews and reprinted with permission