Traveling to Infinity by Jane Hawking

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS:

Print: COPYRIGHT: 5/1/2007; ISBN 978-1846880346; PUBLISHER: Alma Books, Revised edition; PAGES 415; Unabridged

Digital: Yes, available.

*(This version) Audio: COPYRIGHT: 7/1/2015; ISBN: 9781471298202; PUBLISHER: Clipper Audiobooks; DURATION: 19:21:20; PARTS: 17; File Size: 553201 KB; Unabridged; (Overdrive LAPL)
(Goodreads doesn't list the Audiobook)

SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
How I picked it: I saw the print version at the Newport Beach Public Library’s Friends (used) Bookshop and was intrigued.
What’s it about? It’s an autobiography. So, naturally, it’s about Jane Hawking. Of course, yes, it’s also about Stephen, her children, Robert, Lucy, and Timothy, and others.
What did I think? As usual, with books longer than 10 hours, I wondered if it could have been paired down a skosh. I was concerned, before I began it, that it would have an inordinate number of medical episodes, but it really didn’t. Of course, there were *some*, and I certainly got the sense of the terrors individuals and their families live with when dealing with this disease, but it’s not just about the disease, and it’s not particularly about science, though, of course, that’s there too.
From my perception, this was about a couple who, when they met, the world was their oyster; by the time they married, they had an inkling of what they were in for in terms of Stephen’s health, but living under the weight of yours or your loved one’s fragile health, not to mention its stigma, and developing ways to adjust to it, day in and day out, sculpts personalities, and tries the hearts of even the stoutest. It’s worth reading.

AUTHOR:
Jane Hawking
From Wikipedia: “Jane Beryl Wilde Hawking Jones (born 29 March 1944) is an English author and teacher. She was married to Stephen Hawking for 30 years.[1].”

NARRATOR:
Sandra Duncan
From IMDb:
"Sandra Duncan was born in 1947 in Crosby, Merseyside, England, UK. She is an actress, known for Brian Rix Presents ... (1960), Survivor (1987) and Macbeth (1980)."

*Apparently, NOT to be confused with the American actress of Peter Pan fame who was ALSO born in 1946, and, also confusingly, in a Texas city called New London.

GENRE:
Autobiography; biography; History; Nonfiction; Memoir
SUBJECTS: (not comprehensive)
family relations; marriage; amyotrophic lateral sclerosis; Lou Gehrig’s disease

LOCATION(S) (not comprehensive)
Cambridgeshire, England; Los Angeles, California; New York

TIME:
1962-early 2000’s

DEDICATION:
“For my family”

EXERPT: From Chapter 1:
“Wings to Fly
“The story of my life with Stephen Hawking began in the summer of 1962, though possibly it began ten or so years earlier than that without my being aware of it. When I entered St Albans High School for Girls as a seven-year-old first-former in the early Fifties, there was for a short spell a boy with floppy, golden-brown hair who used to sit by the wall in the next-door classroom. The school took boys, including my brother Christopher in the junior department, but I only saw the boy with the floppy hair on the occasions when, in the absence of our own teacher, we first-formers were squeezed into the same classroom as the older children. We never spoke to each other, but I am sure this early memory is to be trusted, because Stephen was a pupil at the school for a term at that time before going to a preparatory school a few miles away.
Stephen’s sisters were more recognizable, because they were at the school for longer. Only eighteen months younger than Stephen, Mary, the elder of the two girls, was a distinctively eccentric figure – plump, always dishevelled, absent-minded, given to solitary pursuits. Her great asset, a translucent complexion, was masked by thick, unflattering spectacles. Philippa, five years younger than Stephen, was bright-eyed, nervous and excitable, with short fair plaits and a round, pink face. The school demanded rigid conformity both academically and in discipline, and the pupils, like schoolchildren everywhere, could be cruelly intolerant of individuality. It was fine to have a Rolls Royce and a house in the country, but if, like me, your means of transport was a pre-war Standard 10 – or even worse, like the Hawkings, an ancient London taxi – you were a figure of fun or the object of pitying contempt. The Hawking children used to lie on the floor of their taxi to avoid being seen by their peers. Unfortunately there was not room on the floor of the Standard 10 for such evasive action. Both the Hawking girls left before reaching the upper school.
Their mother had long been a familiar figure. A small, wiry person dressed in a fur coat, she used to stand on the corner by the zebra crossing near my school, waiting for her youngest son, Edward, to arrive by bus from his preparatory school in the country. My brother also went to that school after his kindergarten year at St Albans High School: it was called Aylesford House and there the boys wore pink – pink blazers and pink caps. In all other respects it was a paradise for small boys, especially for those who were not of an academic inclination. Games, cubs, camping and gang shows, for which my father often played the piano, appeared to be the major activities. Charming and very good-looking, Edward, at the age of eight, was having some difficulty relating to his adoptive family when I first knew the Hawkings – possibly because of their habit of bringing their reading matter to the dinner table and ignoring any non-bookworms present.
A school friend of mine, Diana King, had experienced this particular Hawking habit – which may have been why, on hearing some time later of my engagement to Stephen, she exclaimed, “Oh, Jane! You are marrying into a mad, mad family!” It was Diana who first pointed Stephen out to me in that summer of 1962 when, after the exams, she, my best friend Gillian and I were enjoying the blissful period of semi-idleness before the end of term. Thanks to my father’s position as a senior civil servant, I had already made a couple of sorties into the adult world beyond school, homework and exams – to a dinner in the House of Commons and on a hot sunny day to a garden party at Buckingham Palace. Diana and Gillian were leaving school that summer, while I was to stay on as Head Girl for the autumn term, when I would be applying for university entrance. That Friday afternoon we collected our bags and, adjusting our straw boaters, we decided to drift into town for tea. We had scarcely gone a hundred yards when a strange sight met our eyes on the other side of the road: there, lolloping along in the opposite direction, was a young man with an awkward gait, his head down, his face shielded from the world under an unruly mass of straight brown hair. Immersed in his own thoughts, he looked neither to right nor left, unaware of the group of schoolgirls across the road. He was an eccentric phenomenon for strait-laced, sleepy St Albans. Gillian and I stared rather rudely in amazement but Diana remained impassive.
“That’s Stephen Hawking. I’ve been out with him actually,” she announced to her speechless companions.
“No! You haven’t!” we laughed incredulously.
“Yes I have. He’s strange but very clever, he’s a friend of Basil’s [her brother]. He took me to the theatre once, and I’ve been to his house. He goes on ‘Ban the Bomb’ marches.”
Raising our eyebrows, we continued into town, but I did not enjoy the outing because, without being able to explain why, I felt uneasy about the young man we had just seen. Perhaps there was something about his very eccentricity that fascinated me in my rather conventional existence. Perhaps I had some strange premonition that I would be seeing him again. Whatever it was, that scene etched itself deeply on my mind.
The holidays of that summer were a dream for a teenager on the verge of independence, though they may well have been a nightmare for her parents, since my destination, a summer school in Spain, was in 1962 quite as remote, mysterious and fraught with hazards as, say, Nepal is for teenagers today. With all the confidence of my eighteen years, I was quite sure that I could look after myself, and I was right. The course was well organized, and we students were lodged in groups in private homes. At weekends we were taken on conducted tours of all the sights – to Pamplona where the bulls run the streets, to the only bullfight I have seen, brutal and savage, but spectacular and enthralling as well, and to Loyola, the home of St Ignatius, the author of a prayer I and every other pupil at St Albans High School had had instilled into us from constant repetition:
Teach us, O Lord,
to serve Thee as Thou deservest,
to give and not to count the cost...
Otherwise we spent our afternoons on the beach and the evenings out down by the port in restaurants and bars, participating in the fiestas and the dancing, listening to the raucous bands and gasping at the fireworks. I quickly made new friends outside the limited St Albans scene, primarily among the other teenagers on the course, and with them, in the glorious, exotic atmosphere of Spain, experimented with a taste of adult independence away from home, family and the stultifying discipline of school.”

RATING:.
4

STARTED READING – FINISHED READING
12-24-2022 to 2-12-2023 ( )

Although, my heart is hurting a little bit from reading Jane Hawking's memoir, she is so beautifully honest about the hardships and successes of her marriage to Stephen Hawking. She really painted a realistic picture in comparison to the adaptation and cinematic portrayal of 'The Theory of Everything' which was just a wee bit sugar coated in comparison to this.
Professor Stephen Hawking was a great man but he would never have achieved many of the scientific breakthroughs that he did without Jane. It would have been so hard living in his shadow, with no acknowledgement and dealing with the emotional turmoil and abuse as her marriage suffered.
She made Stephen human.
A great read and a very human and realistic peek into their lives. Highly recommend ( )

I let out a long sigh of relief when I finished this book because it is so long and tedious. I was shocked to learn that it is “the abridged version of the original memoir” (405) which ran to over 600 pages! I guess I should be grateful my book club chose this version!

This memoir by Jane Hawking is the story of her life with the world-famous physicist, Stephen Hawking. She describes their first encounters, their courtship, and their 25-year marriage. The focus is on her struggles to cope with her husband’s increasing dependence as his body degenerated while simultaneously meeting the needs of their three children. In a postlude, she briefly describes their lives after their divorce.

The book needs a thorough editing. There is too much discussion of irrelevant material. For example, does the reader really need to know that Jane “found many similarities between the kharjas and the cantigas de amigo, which were possibly the result of Mozarabic migrations northward” (200) or that Castilian villancicos are full of medieval iconography symbolizing the multiplicity of the aspects of love (236)? Why is a two-page biography of Newton included (331-332)? In a memoir, I don’t expect to read that “In the thirteenth century, Alfonso the Wise of Castile expanded the role of Toledo as a major centre for translation” (103). After a while, the impression is that the author is trying to convince us of her erudition.

Then there’s the needless repetition. How often must we read about the difficulties she experienced trying to write her thesis, the problems she had with Stephen’s nurses, the fatigue she suffered, the thin veneer of normality they tried to maintain, or the innocence of her relationship with Jonathan? With the latter, a quote from Hamlet came to mind: "The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” At times the book reads like a series of lists: we get lists of friends, lists of places where she and Stephen travelled for conferences, lists of social functions she hosted, lists of concerts she attended, etc.

Undoubtedly, Jane faced great challenges and deserves recognition for her role in Stephen’s life. By caring for him and the family as she did, she aided his advancement in his pursuits. By just describing what she did, she would earn the reader’s respect and sympathy. The problem is that instead of letting her story speak for itself, she whines and complains. At times the book seems one long complaint. Everything has to come back to her. She is upset because she didn’t receive gifts when Stephen received honours. She wants sympathy because she had the shingles. She becomes so agitated when people question her about Tim’s father after she has brought another man into the household? This constant tone of “Woe is me” makes her seem selfish and petty and draws attention away from her unquestionable accomplishments.

What the reader is not given in the book is a real understanding of the relationship between Stephen and Jane. Listing her responsibilities and Stephen’s accomplishments does little to show how the two of them were together. Stephen does not come across very positively: he was intellectually arrogant; he was utterly absorbed in physics to the detriment of his family; he needed to be the centre of attention; he was dismissive of Jane’s interests; and he was uncommunicative. As I’ve already stated, Jane comes across as whiny. At the beginning, she describes herself as someone “who managed to see the funny side of situations” and was “fairly shy, yet not averse to expressing . . . opinions” (6), yet her sense of humour seems non-existent and one of her problems is her self-effacement. She also shows little self-awareness because she implies that she is a victim, that this life just happened to her, whereas she made a choice to marry Stephen knowing his diagnosis and the prognosis. I’m left with a question: did she marry Stephen because she loved him? Theirs does not seem to be a great love affair. From the beginning, their relationship seems detached, certainly not passionate. She seems to stay with Stephen out of a sense of obligation, more than love.

The book jacket mentions the author’s “candour” but I found her often evasive. For instance, when mentioning Stephen’s nurse, who became his second wife, Jane says, “Probably with her he had found someone tougher than me with whom he could again somehow have a physical relationship” (378). So Jane and Stephen were no longer intimate? Later, she says, “Flames of vituperation, hatred, desire for revenge leapt at me from all sides, scorching me to the quick with accusations” (379). All sides?

On the topic of editing, I may come across as petty, but I must point out the careless proofreading of the book: “they behaved with caution and towed the party line” (149) and “Irritatingly their gossip was as pervasive as the smoke from their cigarettes, I and found myself compelled to listen” (170) and “Both her age and her sex enabled her to avoid the some of the pressures” (226) and “In conclusion the author looked forward to the time when mankind would able to ‘know the mind of God’” (289). And how about sentences with seven prepositional phrases: “At Cern Stephen would be working on the implications for the direction of the arrow of time of quantum theory and of the observations from the particle accelerator (286-287). And what editor would allow the phrase “the elderly Indian squaw” (91)?!

The reason I tend to avoid memoirs is that they are inevitably one-sided. I prefer to get several perspectives since the truth usually lies somewhere in the middle of each person’s version of events. An article I read stated, “Jane decided it was time to answer her critics with a final definitive description of the marriage, purging the bitterness occasioned by the 'horrendously painful' divorce that tainted the first book” (http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/books/4627634/Hawkings-ex-writes-second-memoir). This begs the question: what bias taints this book? The film The Theory of Everything was apparently based on this memoir, but the film is not faithful to the book. Is the book faithful to what really happened?

Anyone looking for real insight into the relationship between Stephen Hawking and his first wife will not find it here. The book is a long and tiresome read; consequently, its effect is not to give the author the respect and recognition she craves and deserves.

Note: Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski). ( )

500 pages to tell a 200 page story. Mind numbing details, disjointed at times and tedious to read. Finished Part One (book has four parts) but abandoned the book in Part Two when I encountered page after page of useless information. Would like to read this story thru the pen of Walter Isaacson. ( )

Certainly I am not a fan of the (all too recent) past where women were even more-so expected to get married and procreate and give up their own hopes and dreams to tend to their man and little children. However, while I felt bad that there weren't enough safety nets in place to assist families such as the Hawkings, Jane certainly did have agency in deciding to get married and have children. Yet the entire book is one long complaint about how she didn't feel that she was able to carry out her own life, and how difficult it was being married and having children. The solution would have seemed to have been not getting married or having kids. But, I guess she was expecting her husband to die relatively soon after marriage, so maybe she didn't get what she bargained for.

I didn't feel this book had much to offer. If it had been framed of more of a crusade for disability rights, it would have been a much better book. But it wasn't really about Stephen Hawking, the writing about her career seemed like a bizarre interlude, and it wasn't really about physics... ( )