Dispatch from motherhood’s front lines

IN her fifth book, “Above Us Only Sky,” Marion Winik again uses her personal life as the substance of her work. Here, Winik tells tales large and small, from a stirring piece about seeing her late husband’s features in her sleeping son’s face to a lighthearted diatribe against kids’ team sports. Throughout the book, Winik presents herself as the anti-soccer mom she is, full of unpopular opinions, droll observations and war stories from a life lived with passion and risk.

In the end, though, the collection is uneven, with moments of dazzling clarity, and others that highlight the prosaicness in her prose.

Divided into five subsections, “Above Us Only Sky” consciously moves between past and present, narrative and opinion. It begins, promisingly, with “Waiting for Daddy,” in which Winik connects a girlhood spent waiting for her father to come home to the impatient woman she is today. “We’re born for it, aren’t we?” she writes. “Waiting for our bosoms to sprout, our periods to start, our babies to be conceived, gestated, delivered, weaned, then waiting for the baby-sitter to show up so we can get out of here.” Winik nails the tension at the heart of being a woman, “ ... always the object, never the subject, except in our own confused minds. Until we go crazy from all the waiting, and rise up, seize the reins, take control, and become the convoluted freaks of nature you see all around you today, our femininity as full of holes as Swiss cheese, our macho dreams on the commuter train to hell.”

After such opening fireworks, “Above Us Only Sky” slips disappointingly into a series of lesser essays that bring neither fresh insight nor big laughs. There’s “Blonde Mommy,” a dishwater account of hair-dyeing and its effects on her kids; “My Typewriter -- A Requiem,” an ode to a Smith Corona; and “My Famous Family,” a pedestrian reminiscence of her childhood urge to have famous relatives. Most of these essays have had former lives in magazines, and many feel as feathery as a Cosmo puff piece. In fact, much of the collection seems thrown together, as if Winik were getting mileage out of old material she’s had sitting around. Amidst all these brief, scattershot pieces, we come upon the title essay, a long, painful account of a friend’s suicide 30 years ago. Yet while this piece movingly suggests that death is finite, and grace can be found only in the here and now, it ultimately sits like an outsized emu among a flock of starlings; ungainly and out of place.

Winik is never anything less than a solid writer, even when she is off her game. In gems like “The Mad Naked Summer Night” -- which describes the repetitive drone of cicadas as “a garage band of four-year-olds with sitars” and ketchup as “the blood of summer” -- her language is precise and tantalizing. Elsewhere, she is capable of deep and powerful prose, as in these notes on aging: “ ... children, borne and suckled and tended and cosseted and lost and mourned, on, in, with, from, and by your body, your body which is their very ground, the beloved home they struggle to leave like tortured expatriates, discussing you over drinks in a bar in Guadalajara.” After such a passage, a thin, half-written essay on ADD reads like she’s gone off her Ritalin.

I feel for Marion Winik. We both belong to a vast legion of mom-writers who daily try to wrest out of our hemmed-in, pinned-down lives some grist for our creative mills. The current popularity of the “momoir” is a testament to the need we have to tell our stories. We pen wry essays about potty training, our minivans, our bumpy marriages and our surly teenagers in the hopes of making a larger, more profound point. But as we dig through our experiences for material, we run the risk of hitting the hardpan of the mundane. This is where real craft kicks in. In her introduction, Winik states, “[T]he personal essayist looks for the truths that connect us all in the details of her own history.” She might have added that it is also the job of the essayist to lift that truth out of the ordinary and turn it over so we can be surprised by the very thing we recognize.

*

Erika Schickel is the author of “You’re Not the Boss of Me,” to be published by Kensington Books in 2007.