December
Know My Name. Chanel Miller. (Penguin Books, 2019.)
Looking back, the assault is now inextricable from the greater story.It is a fact of my life, the same way I was born in June, and I wasraped in January. Awful feelings may remain the same, but mycapacity to handle them has grown. I can’t tell you whathappens next because I have not yet lived it. This bookdoes not have a happy ending. The happy part isthere is no ending, because I’ll always finda way to keep going.
I meant to read this book months ago—put it on digital hold several times, found myself delaying the holds when the book became available, then finally accepting only to watch the book expire off the shelf without my having cracked it, even as I read other books.
It is hard to read a book about rape.
Chanel Miller details her experiences as a survivor, taking readers from the hours before her sexual assault, to the party on Stanford's campus where it happened, to the rooms and halls of its aftermath—including the hospital, police station, and court—and to the minutes, days, weeks, months, and years of justice-seeking and healing that defined her life after Brock Turner violated her. Readers gain a clear yet dizzying picture of the many indignities Miller endures in the wake of the assault—of the injustices and offenses she and her loved ones suffer as a result of the rapist and his defenders, the media, and the systems that fail to adequately penalize predators. When Miller writes, "We were fighting for closure, for justice. It was not for me, but at the expense of me, that we'd be able to get there," readers can begin to understand the atrocious iniquities Miller and other survivors must face when choosing to confront their perpetrators.
It is hard to read a book about rape but certainly harder to write one. Which is why Miller's memoir, a cogent, honest, and often beautifully rendered, reckoning of the most traumatic period of her life is all the more impressive. Why would she write this book, force herself to relive the horror in such minute detail, and share it with the world? Miller remarks, "After struggling for so long to move away from this case, it felt counterintuitive to immerse myself again. But I also understood that moving through was a way of moving on, that I needed to go backward before I could go forward again."
Throughout the book, Miller demonstrates how her voice was frequently twisted, diminished, eclipsed, berated, and silenced by parties that were not present or that were jeopardized by her truth. At times, the voices got inside, tempting her to abandon herself. She needed to heal from the assault and from the brutality of its aftermath, so she wrote. "I told myself, you are going to sit down and you are going to feel all of it. Dark, nasty things are going to crawl out of you. Images will reappear. The feeling of uncertainty and isolation you had at each stage will be felt again. You will feel sick, you will feel sad. This will not be fun, this will feel impossible, but it will be done. It must be done." In writing this book, Miller regains her voice so that it powerfully soars above the callous, shaming, blaming, belittling voices that took up so much space for so many years of her life.
But Miller does not stop with her own story, recognizing hers is one of many. She brings publicized cases from recent years to the page, amplifies the voices of other victims, and encourages the continuation of the fight "for our own happy endings. We fight to say you can’t. We fight for accountability. We fight to establish precedent. We fight because we pray we’ll be the last ones to feel this kind of pain."
There are several points towards the end of the book when I thought, This line would make a good ending, which only serves to emphasize the extent and unforeseeable duration of this fight. Here is one such passage, which is how, I think, I will end this review: "The barricades that held us down will not work anymore. And when silence and shame are gone, there will be nothing to stop us. We will not stand by as our mouths are covered, bodies entered. We will speak, we will speak, we will speak."
Leave the World Behind. Rumaan Alam. (Ecco, 2020.)
Ruth had learned only one thing from the current reality, and it was that everything held together by tacit agreement that it would.All it took to unravel something was one party deciding to dojust that. There was no real structure to prevent chaos,there was only a collective faith in order.
A colleague at the library recommended this book a couple of months ago. Or, maybe she didn't. In any case, I was surprised when I received the email notification that my hold was available. Leave the World Behind, I wondered; what in the world? When had I requested that? Such is the way time moves in 2020, such is my memory these days. I think she said the book was going to be made into a movie. That it involved the owners of an Airbnb suddenly disrupting their renters' vacation, demanding to be let inside their own home. This might have been all she said, all she needed to say; I was intrigued by the hypothetical situation--its cause, how it would play out. I did not know the book would be about the end of the world. (Or the potential end.) I did not know it would mirror the uncanny, scary, ongoing unease of 2020.
The story begins with a family of four headed out of NYC into the suburban and then semi-rural stretches of Long Island. They are a middle class family, comfortable enough to rent a private, wood-lined property with a few luxury amenities, including a swimming pool and hot tub, for a week. Their vacation begins like anyone's would--with swimming, lounging, a trip to the local grocery store for decadent vacation foods, snacks, alcohol. Everything's normal until one night, after the couple's teenage daughter and son are asleep, there is a knock on the door. A knock that unravels their contentment, that breaks the illusion that all is well in the world.
I won't give anything away. In fact, the omniscient narrator does their best to not give away too much either. Readers are given only the details they need to begin to panic along with the characters.
I recommend this book to those who enjoy suspense, who like traces of dark humor, who don't mind being uncomfortable. I do not, however, think anyone in the throes of depression should read this book. Parents, too, might find this book especially difficult now, in the midst of a pandemic, on a planet with steadily melting ice caps. (Though the book doesn't present any horrifying situations we don't already fear, it takes a certain amount of energy to face those fears, to turn them over for 241 pages.) Readers who can find and hold the warm pulse pushing through the horror in Alam's novel will be rewarded with a story they won't forget and insights into their own character.
November
Group: How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life. Christie Tate. (Avid Reader Press, 2020.)
That was how I’d always imagined the surface of my heart—smooth, slick, unattached. Nothing to grab on to. Unscored. No one could attach to me once the inevitable heat of life bore down. I suspected the metaphor went deeper still—that I was afraid of marring my heart with the scoring that arose naturally between people, the inevitable bumping against other people’s desires, demands, pettiness, preference, and all the quotidian negotiations that made up a relationship. Scoring was required for attachment, and my heart lacked the grooves.
I decided to read this memoir because my workshop-mate wrote it. But also because I recently finished Lori Gottlieb's Maybe You Should Talk to Someone and am a huge fan of books centered on personal growth and relationships. I began the book already knowing a bit about Christie's life. (I can't refer to her by last name only; it would be too formal.) Little did I know how much I would learn about mine. The book opens in a way that is hauntingly resonant: "The first time I wished for death—like, really wished its bony hand would tap me on the shoulder and say 'this way'—two bags from Stanley’s Fruit and Vegetables sat shotgun in my car." I used to wish for death a lot. I thought it would be easier. I didn't see the value in living. I still struggle with this, but not as much. I've come to realize that my thinking I'm not scared of death isn't entirely honest; I'm terrified of death. I'm terrified my loved ones will die and leave me here alive, alone. Maybe a death wish is just an inside-out reflection of a deep desire to live so fiercely, so honestly, life never ceases to be a marvel. Maybe it is scary to love something so much. Maybe it is brave to be here.
"Something about the way I was living made me want to stop living," Christie writes, and I don't know if what she's written is obvious to other people, but it wasn't obvious to me--this idea that life itself isn't a death sentence, that there might be something interfering, a malady twisting what should be a gift into a curse. I wondered what it was for her. Because I wondered what it was for me and suspected it was the same thing.
Christie joins a therapy group, and eventually another group and another, with all the groups led by Dr. Rosen, a modest man with keen insight and a strong backbone. In these groups, members are discouraged from keeping secrets--their own and others. They are expected to share the details of their lives so that they may not harbor shame, and they are given non-drug prescriptions, customized for their goals and situations. Consequently, Christie finds herself stretching beyond her comfort zone and gradually becoming more and more comfortable with revealing herself, asserting her boundaries, and communicating clearly. But it isn't easy. And she doesn't spare herself any embarrassment on the page. When she takes an emotional risk, she takes her readers with her. I am 100% aware, as a reader and a friend, that this book is part of her therapy, part of her living out loud. No apologies, no secrets, no shame. She is all in, and that's a big part of what I love about her and this book. If you take a chance on Christie and her book, I think you'll love them, too.
September
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. Ocean Vuong. (Penguin Press, 2019.)
It is no accident, Ma, that the comma resembles a fetus—that curve of continuation. We were all once inside our mothers, saying, with our entire curved and silent selves, more, more, more. I want to insist that our being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication. And so what? So what if all I ever made of my life was more of it?
I don't read much fiction. I usually choose nonfiction, I think, because I crave the intimacy of other people's experiences and fear the tidiness that fiction can offer. Nonfiction is already crafted; fiction is twice crafted, one more step removed from where I want to be. But I also know I'm not being fair. Fiction can be just as true, if not truer than, nonfiction. And I know that even when, in nonfiction, I think the author is writing with me, the reader, in mind, and that we are having a sort of unfiltered communion, I am deluding myself. Nonfiction is told through the lens of a persona. Anyway. All of this is to say that Ocean Vuong's debut novel reads like memoir and fiction and poetry all at once, and it might be one of my favorite ways of storytelling.
As I read this epistolic story about immigration, America, race, sexuality, abuse, war, addiction, desire, beauty, life, death, love, I contended with awe and envy. The writing, from line to line, is astoundingly, well, gorgeous. The novel takes the form of a letter from son to mother, as a nuanced and thorough answer to the question of why the narrator, Little Dog, writes. "I am writing to reach you—even if each word I put down is one word further from where you are," Vuong writes. And "I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with because. But I wasn’t trying to make a sentence—I was trying to break free. And much later, "It could be, in writing you here, I am writing to everyone—for how can there be a private space if there is no safe space, if a boy’s name can both shield him and turn him into an animal at once?" And, "I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son."
The book tells a story that cannot be told without the richness and depth of metaphor. So every sentence blooms, breathes, floats, dazzles, displaces.
I chose this book without knowing anything about it other than it had received much praise. I did not read the covers or any reviews. I had no idea it would be the first novel I ever read about a gay relationship. I did not know I would want to copy down every line into my journal so I can later turn the words over on my tongue like dew-dropped cherries. How could I read whole passages like the following and not want to be a better human, a better writer, a better lover?
He was a boy breaking out and into himself at once. That’s what I wanted—not merely the body, desirable as it was, but its will to grow into the very world that rejects its hunger. Then I wanted more, the scent, the atmosphere of him, the taste of French fries and peanut butter underneath the salve of his tongue, the salt around his neck from the two-hour drives to nowhere and a Burger King at the edge of the country, a day of tense talk with his old man, the rust from the electric razor he shared with that old man, how I would always find it on his sink in its sad plastic case, the tobacco, weed and cocaine on his fingers mixed with motor oil, all of it accumulating into the afterscent of wood smoke caught and soaked in his hair, as if when he came to me, his mouth wet and wanting, he came from a place on fire, a place he could never return to.// And what do you do to a boy like that but turn yourself into a doorway, a place he can go through again and again, each time entering the same room? Yes, I wanted it all. I drove my face into him as if into a climate, the autobiography of a season.
I wanted it all, too, the whole story. But I could not drive my face into the pages as if into a climate. I had to stop, often, to catch my breath. Vuong writes, "I read that beauty has historically demanded replication. We make more of anything we find aesthetically pleasing, whether it’s a vase, a painting, a chalice, a poem. We reproduce it in order to keep it, extend it through time and space. To gaze at what pleases—a fresco, a peach-red mountain range, a boy, the mole on his jaw—is, in itself, replication—the image prolonged in the eye, making more of it, making it last." This novel will no doubt last.
June, July, August
Only after learning to bear what is going on inside
can we start to befriend, rather than obliterate,
the emotions that keep our maps
fixed and immutable.
People have been talking about this book for years, and because of its positive reviews and its personal relevance, I decided to read it. Unfortunately, I picked it up after reading Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery and [some of—give me time!] Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s Women Who Run with the Wolves—brilliant books by brilliant women who have, unlike van der Kolk, left their egos off the page. Though van der Kolk’s persona tends towards subtle arrogance and obliviousness to his privilege, I'm glad I stuck it out.
The subject of the book is well researched. Van der Kolk relies on studies and patient reports/testimonials to support his claims about the various efficacies of the methods explored. I learned quite a bit about how trauma rewires the brain, as well as methods for—not necessarily rewiring the brain—but recognizing the issues created by the rewiring and developing ways to work around, or even with, the obstacles. Van der Kolk discusses traditional talk therapy, CBT, EMDR, IFS, SE, neurofeedback, theater, yoga, and other activities as therapies that have been used, some to better effect than others, in the treatment of trauma. As an experiencer of chronic childhood trauma, I've tried a number of techniques in my healing journey. So far, the most effective have been, as van der Kolk submits, the ones that encourage embodiment.
As a client of Rubenfeld Synergy, a mind-body modality, I spent a lot of time naming the sensations in my body and learning to associate those sensations with emotions. I was often frustrated with the idea that I had to "befriend" emotions and parts of myself that provoked disgust, rage, disappointment, fear, sadness. To get anywhere, I had to expand my compassion for Self. I had to stop interrogating my feelings, stop asking why, and start acknowledging that the existence of my feelings was reason enough for me to honor them and pay attention to what they had to teach me. My urge to protect myself was strong. I had many critical defenses. I was sometimes embarrassed. Sometimes ashamed. Sometimes embarrassed that I was ashamed. I was nearly chronically agitated by the seemingly irrational concept that feeling my feelings would heal me. But the truth is the more time I spent in session, the more I felt. And I wanted to feel. I wanted to feel alive.
Van der Kolk explains the phenomenon of feeling unreal, dead, dissociated, many times. Here is one time in which he explains how this dissociation happens: "In response to the trauma itself, and in coping with the dread that persisted long afterward, these patients had learned to shut down the brain areas that transmit the visceral feelings and emotions that accompany and define terror. Yet in everyday life, those same brain areas are responsible for registering the entire range of emotions and sensations that form the foundation of our self-awareness, our sense of who we are. What we witnessed here was a tragic adaptation: In an effort to shut off terrifying sensations, they also deadened their capacity to feel fully alive."
Now, I continuously aim to be mindful and embodied. I am curious about my emotions. I give myself the benefit of the doubt so I can trust myself. I am still learning about the sensations in my body. I am still "becoming," as the Skin Horse in the Velveteen Rabbit says. Little by little, I know who I am. And while van der Kolk's book can no more help me heal the trauma lodged in my body than a book about water can quench thirst, it is satisfying just the same.
In the library, time is dammed up—not just stopped but saved.
The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people
who come to find them. It is where we can glimpse
immortality; in the library, we can live forever.
I chose this book because I'm a Susan Orlean fan, a lifelong library patron, an avid reader, and a part time circulation assistant. Like so many of the books I read, I opened to page one without knowing the premise. I was enthralled when I realized the book would largely revolve around an event of which I had no inkling: the 1986 fire at LA's Central Library.
I'd never considered a library's demise by fire, despite having toured my local library's fire defense system. I've probably been living in the digital age too long; the notion that anything in a library could be irreplaceable hadn't really occurred to me before Orlean brought it to my attention. Of course, in 1986, there was plenty that hadn't been digitized. Even now, there are artifacts at libraries across the country that are one of a kind, originals with no copies. We trust libraries to safeguard our collective pasts. I suppose I'd never thought of them as museums, never considered what it might mean when they are ruined. Because Orlean is a journalist, she reveals a greater historical and political context for the destruction of books and libraries, revealing the cultural significance of literature and the places that house the artifacts that epitomize a place, a people, a time. She writes, "Destroying a library is a kind of terrorism. People think of libraries as the safest and most open places in society. Setting them on fire is like announcing that nothing, and nowhere, is safe." It becomes apparent why the 1986 fire was such a grievous loss.
I read Orlean's descriptions of the Central Library fire like fans of forensic television shows watch the reenactments of horrific murders. Rapt. Orlean writes, "In the building, the air began to quiver with radiant heat. Crews trying to make their way into the stacks felt like they were hitting a barricade, as if the heat had become solid. 'We could only stand it for ten, fifteen seconds,' one of them told me. 'Then we hotfooted out of there.' The temperature reached 2000 degrees. Then it rose to 2500. The firefighters began to worry about a flashover, a dreaded situation during a fire in which everything in a closed space—even smoke—becomes so hot that it reaches the point of spontaneous ignition, causing a complete and consuming eruption of fire from every surface. As firefighters put it, it’s the moment when a fire in a room is transformed into a room on fire. With the temperature as high as it was, there was a great potential for flashover, which would have made the chance of saving anything nearly impossible."
But as riveting as her writing of the fire is, the story is about much more than that event, or even the man who was seriously suspected but never indicted of arson. It's about more even than the Central Library. It's about Los Angeles. It's about the evolution of libraries. It's about gender, sexuality, money, power, mystery. It's about Orlean's relationship with her mother. It's about the slipperiness of truth. It's about faith and hope and endurance.
In many ways, the book is about mortality and purpose. Nearing the end of this interesting journey, Orlean reflects, "I realized that this entire time, learning about the library, I had been convincing myself that my hope to tell a long-lasting story, to create something that endured, to be alive somehow as long as someone would read my books, was what drove me on, story after story; it was my lifeline, my passion, my way to understand who I was." I come away from the book with my own quiet epiphany about why I write and why I am compelled to see my work in the greater world. Writing is an act of faith--that our lives matter. When we press our stories into the pulp of pages or the pixels on a screen, we are in effect saying that what happens to us matters, that we matter. And the published story itself attests to that belief. The fact that we read each other's stories, listen to each other's music, trace the lines of each other's artwork, preserve all of it, ensures that it does matter. If it didn't, why would we work so hard to save it?
Empirically speaking, we are made of star stuff. Why aren’t we talking
more about that? Materials never leave this world. They just keep
recycling, recombining. That’s what you kept telling me when we
first met—that in a real, material sense, what is made from where.
I didn’t have a clue what you were talking about, but I could see
you burned for it. I wanted to be near that burning.
I still don’t understand, but at least now
my fingers ride the lip.
One day the women in my writing group spoke of The Argonauts in such reverential tones that I knew I'd have to put it on my list. So it became the fourth Maggie Nelson book I've read. It is, like Nelson's other work, brilliant. Her signature move of constellating her personal insights with those of other brilliant minds makes its mark in this book that pole vaults through a galaxy of paragraphs on queer love, feminism, anxiety, grief, joy, writing, and motherhood--among other things.
Of course Nelson's writing is beautiful, as always, in its clarity and grace. She moves impeccably from thought to thought, taking leaps that a lesser writer could not land. And just when the reader is almost overwhelmed by her genius, she takes a step back and offers humble humor, a brief line such as, "I was ashamed, but undaunted (my epithet?)," which reaches gently like a warm arm around the back, inviting the reader to stay a bit longer, to keep tracing the constellations with her.
By the book's end, I had copied down many passages for later reflection and could happily, definitely say, "I still don't understand, but at least now my fingers ride the lip."
Empirically speaking, we are made of star stuff. Why aren’t we talking
more about that? Materials never leave this world. They just keep
recycling, recombining. That’s what you kept telling me when we
first met—that in a real, material sense, what is made from where.
I didn’t have a clue what you were talking about, but I could see
you burned for it. I wanted to be near that burning.
I still don’t understand, but at least now
my fingers ride the lip.
One day the women in my writing group spoke of The Argonauts in such reverential tones that I knew I'd have to put it on my list. So it became the fourth Maggie Nelson book I've read. It is, like Nelson's other work, brilliant. Her signature move of constellating her personal insights with those of other brilliant minds makes its mark in this book that pole vaults through a galaxy of paragraphs on queer love, feminism, anxiety, grief, joy, writing, and motherhood--among other things.
Of course Nelson's writing is beautiful, as always, in its clarity and grace. She moves impeccably from thought to thought, taking leaps that a lesser writer could not land. And just when the reader is almost overwhelmed by her genius, she takes a step back and offers humble humor, a brief line such as, "I was ashamed, but undaunted (my epithet?)," which reaches gently like a warm arm around the back, inviting the reader to stay a bit longer, to keep tracing the constellations with her.
By the book's end, I had copied down many passages for later reflection and could happily, definitely say, "I still don't understand, but at least now my fingers ride the lip."
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed. Lori Gottlieb. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019.)
As a therapist, I know a lot about pain, about the ways in which pain is
tied to loss. But I also know something less commonly understood:
that change and loss travel together. We can't have change without
loss, which is why so often people say they want change but
nonetheless stay exactly the same.
I heard about this author and her book through my writing group and was immediately curious. Who hasn't wondered what their therapist is thinking? Ever since I started going to therapy, back when I was in college, I have wondered how therapists do their magic. I even majored in Psychology, hoping to become one of these magicians. The closest I got was briefly working with autistic kids and their families, and later, youth in crisis and their families. I never felt confident in these roles, though my heart was in it. Eventually, I realized I am not made for a counseling role. And that's okay.
I have had several therapists in the past 16 years, and I have felt that each had superpowers. Not of the flying or invisible versions, but definitely of the mind reading kind. They seemed to know things about me I'd hidden from others, and even more startling and impressive, things I'd hidden from myself. Each of them helped me to see myself more clearly, to better understand the world, to accept myself, and to take emotional risks that empowered me. I will forever be grateful for their counsel.
I suppose I should get to talking about Lori Gottlieb's book, huh?
Well. In this book, the author, who is a therapist, finds herself in the midst of a midlife crisis when the man she plans to marry suddenly breaks up with her. Her grief leads a friend to suggest, "Maybe you should talk to someone," so she begins going to go to therapy. Lucky for us readers! We get to experience the internal workings of a therapist as she counsels her own clients but also as she becomes a client herself. I'm probably making this sound boring, but I promise, it's riveting. Gottlieb is candid, funny, and insightful. And I absolutely fell in love with her clients and with her therapist. I cried when they cried, laughed when they laughed. And though Gottlieb shares many of the theories and techniques used in psychotherapy, I am still largely mystified and in awe of the work she and others like her do and of the work we all do when we come to their couches.
This book is one of my favorites. I might be biased because it has brought me so much comfort during this shitty, shitty year, but I don't think so. This book, as I told one of my library patrons the other day, is a sincere comfort. It is intimate and sweet and also takes no prisoners.
Do I think folks who have never been to therapy and might not understand what it is would benefit by reading this book? Definitely. It is a clear window into a process that has often been misrepresented and misconstrued in popular culture. But I don't think Gottlieb's primary goal is to encourage folks to seek therapy. This book is not a pitch. It is, instead, a love story. A story about our shared humanity, our common struggles and needs, our vulnerability and bravery, our desire to be whole and at peace. Gottlieb writes, "If you'd asked me when I started as a therapist what most people came in for, I would have replied that they hoped to feel less anxious or depressed, to have less problematic relationships. But no matter the circumstances, there seemed to be this common element of loneliness, a craving for but a lack of a strong sense of human connection. A want. They rarely expressed it that way, but the more I learned about their lives, the more I could sense it, and I felt it in many ways myself." And I think that's what this book delivers--a sense of human connection, a balm at any time, but especially now. So I will continue telling people about it—talking to every someone who will listen to my pitch!
As a therapist, I know a lot about pain, about the ways in which pain is
tied to loss. But I also know something less commonly understood:
that change and loss travel together. We can't have change without
loss, which is why so often people say they want change but
nonetheless stay exactly the same.
I heard about this author and her book through my writing group and was immediately curious. Who hasn't wondered what their therapist is thinking? Ever since I started going to therapy, back when I was in college, I have wondered how therapists do their magic. I even majored in Psychology, hoping to become one of these magicians. The closest I got was briefly working with autistic kids and their families, and later, youth in crisis and their families. I never felt confident in these roles, though my heart was in it. Eventually, I realized I am not made for a counseling role. And that's okay.
I have had several therapists in the past 16 years, and I have felt that each had superpowers. Not of the flying or invisible versions, but definitely of the mind reading kind. They seemed to know things about me I'd hidden from others, and even more startling and impressive, things I'd hidden from myself. Each of them helped me to see myself more clearly, to better understand the world, to accept myself, and to take emotional risks that empowered me. I will forever be grateful for their counsel.
I suppose I should get to talking about Lori Gottlieb's book, huh?
Well. In this book, the author, who is a therapist, finds herself in the midst of a midlife crisis when the man she plans to marry suddenly breaks up with her. Her grief leads a friend to suggest, "Maybe you should talk to someone," so she begins going to go to therapy. Lucky for us readers! We get to experience the internal workings of a therapist as she counsels her own clients but also as she becomes a client herself. I'm probably making this sound boring, but I promise, it's riveting. Gottlieb is candid, funny, and insightful. And I absolutely fell in love with her clients and with her therapist. I cried when they cried, laughed when they laughed. And though Gottlieb shares many of the theories and techniques used in psychotherapy, I am still largely mystified and in awe of the work she and others like her do and of the work we all do when we come to their couches.
This book is one of my favorites. I might be biased because it has brought me so much comfort during this shitty, shitty year, but I don't think so. This book, as I told one of my library patrons the other day, is a sincere comfort. It is intimate and sweet and also takes no prisoners.
Do I think folks who have never been to therapy and might not understand what it is would benefit by reading this book? Definitely. It is a clear window into a process that has often been misrepresented and misconstrued in popular culture. But I don't think Gottlieb's primary goal is to encourage folks to seek therapy. This book is not a pitch. It is, instead, a love story. A story about our shared humanity, our common struggles and needs, our vulnerability and bravery, our desire to be whole and at peace. Gottlieb writes, "If you'd asked me when I started as a therapist what most people came in for, I would have replied that they hoped to feel less anxious or depressed, to have less problematic relationships. But no matter the circumstances, there seemed to be this common element of loneliness, a craving for but a lack of a strong sense of human connection. A want. They rarely expressed it that way, but the more I learned about their lives, the more I could sense it, and I felt it in many ways myself." And I think that's what this book delivers--a sense of human connection, a balm at any time, but especially now. So I will continue telling people about it—talking to every someone who will listen to my pitch!
The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial. Maggie Nelson. (Graywolf Press, 2007.)
I know what I want is impossible. If I can make my language flat enough,
exact enough, if I can rinse each sentence clean enough, like washing a stone
over and over again in river water, if I can find the right perch or crevice
from which to record everything, if I can give myself enough
white space, maybe I could do it. I could tell you this story
while walking out of this story. I could—it all could—
just disappear.
After reading Maggie Nelson's Jane, about the murder of Nelson's aunt, I naturally had to read The Red Parts. When Nelson wrote Jane (published in 2005), the homicide was a cold case, but then, suddenly, thanks to advances in DNA testing, there was a new suspect, and then a trial, which is the subject of this book.
Of course, the book isn't solely reportage of the trial, though it is that, too. Nelson grapples with the same questions her readers have, about why she chooses to attend the trial, and what she hopes to gain by going. She discusses her concerns that she is as much a voyeur as anyone else watching the trial. She writes, "Perhaps the shame I feel is a stand-in for the shame I think someone ought to feel. Or perhaps it's due to the fact that during Letterman's trial, I sat in the courtroom every day with a legal pad and pen, jotting down all the gory details, no different or better than anyone else. Details which I'm reassembling here--a live stream--for reasons that are not yet clear or justifiable to me, and may never be. But as I told my mother after her tumble in the kitchen, some things might be worth telling simply because they happened."
She speaks of inheriting fear, of watching how it has disconnected her mother from her body, of the horrific mental movies in which she is being murdered. "These images coursed through my mind at random intervals, but always with the slapping, prehensile force of the return of the repressed," she writes.
Nelson ponders society's framing of the worth of a life, how some lives, at their ends, are treated as having been worth more than others. She writes, "How does one measure the loss of anyone? Is measurement a necessary part of grief? Is a life less grievable if its prospects for the future--here imagined as a range of career options and the potential to bear children--don't appear bright? The people they would have loved--that was a nice touch. But what about the people they already had loved? Or what if they hadn't loved anyone, or no one had loved them?"
She shares her stance against capital punishment, a position that makes sense considering her belief that no life is worth more than another. "[Y]ou don't go to a vigil expecting to halt an action. You go to bear witness to what the state would prefer to do in complete darkness. And if your family has lost a loved one via an act of violence, you speak out so that advocates of capital punishment can't keep relying on the anger and grief of victims' families as grounds for their agenda."
Though Nelson's intellectual ruminations are interesting, the parts of the book I find the most valuable are the ones where she sinks into her feelings. Where, I guess I could say, I feel a bit haunted. When, for instance, she recounts sitting in the courtroom with a towel soaked in her dead aunt's dried blood: "The witnesses and detectives fold and unfold this towel many times, always with a certain solemnity and formality, as if it were a flag. But the flag of what country, I cannot say. Some dark crescent of land, a place where suffering is essentially meaningless, where the present collapses into the past without warning, where we cannot escape the fates we fear the most, where heavy rains come and wash bodies up and out of their graves, where grief lasts forever and its force never fades." It helps that Nelson is a poet.
And I think it helps that Nelson was going through a painful breakup at the time of the trial. "Falling out of a story hurts," she writes. "But it's nothing compared to the loss of an actual person, the loss of all the bright details that make up that person. All the flashing, radiant fragments that constitute an affair, or a love." A breakup is not the same as the loss of a life, of course, but it is an ending, one to which most readers can relate. Nelson's lost relationship, juxtaposed with the trial, makes it ever more clear what she and her mother and the world have lost with Jane's death. "All the flashing, radiant fragments."
Ultimately, the book is less invested in the outcome of the trial, in the "whodunit" and "why," than it is in questions of mortality, grief, the language of justice, and fear. Though we do learn the verdict, we don't need to know every detail of Jane's death; it was her life that mattered. It is our lives that matter.
I know what I want is impossible. If I can make my language flat enough,
exact enough, if I can rinse each sentence clean enough, like washing a stone
over and over again in river water, if I can find the right perch or crevice
from which to record everything, if I can give myself enough
white space, maybe I could do it. I could tell you this story
while walking out of this story. I could—it all could—
just disappear.
After reading Maggie Nelson's Jane, about the murder of Nelson's aunt, I naturally had to read The Red Parts. When Nelson wrote Jane (published in 2005), the homicide was a cold case, but then, suddenly, thanks to advances in DNA testing, there was a new suspect, and then a trial, which is the subject of this book.
Of course, the book isn't solely reportage of the trial, though it is that, too. Nelson grapples with the same questions her readers have, about why she chooses to attend the trial, and what she hopes to gain by going. She discusses her concerns that she is as much a voyeur as anyone else watching the trial. She writes, "Perhaps the shame I feel is a stand-in for the shame I think someone ought to feel. Or perhaps it's due to the fact that during Letterman's trial, I sat in the courtroom every day with a legal pad and pen, jotting down all the gory details, no different or better than anyone else. Details which I'm reassembling here--a live stream--for reasons that are not yet clear or justifiable to me, and may never be. But as I told my mother after her tumble in the kitchen, some things might be worth telling simply because they happened."
She speaks of inheriting fear, of watching how it has disconnected her mother from her body, of the horrific mental movies in which she is being murdered. "These images coursed through my mind at random intervals, but always with the slapping, prehensile force of the return of the repressed," she writes.
Nelson ponders society's framing of the worth of a life, how some lives, at their ends, are treated as having been worth more than others. She writes, "How does one measure the loss of anyone? Is measurement a necessary part of grief? Is a life less grievable if its prospects for the future--here imagined as a range of career options and the potential to bear children--don't appear bright? The people they would have loved--that was a nice touch. But what about the people they already had loved? Or what if they hadn't loved anyone, or no one had loved them?"
She shares her stance against capital punishment, a position that makes sense considering her belief that no life is worth more than another. "[Y]ou don't go to a vigil expecting to halt an action. You go to bear witness to what the state would prefer to do in complete darkness. And if your family has lost a loved one via an act of violence, you speak out so that advocates of capital punishment can't keep relying on the anger and grief of victims' families as grounds for their agenda."
Though Nelson's intellectual ruminations are interesting, the parts of the book I find the most valuable are the ones where she sinks into her feelings. Where, I guess I could say, I feel a bit haunted. When, for instance, she recounts sitting in the courtroom with a towel soaked in her dead aunt's dried blood: "The witnesses and detectives fold and unfold this towel many times, always with a certain solemnity and formality, as if it were a flag. But the flag of what country, I cannot say. Some dark crescent of land, a place where suffering is essentially meaningless, where the present collapses into the past without warning, where we cannot escape the fates we fear the most, where heavy rains come and wash bodies up and out of their graves, where grief lasts forever and its force never fades." It helps that Nelson is a poet.
And I think it helps that Nelson was going through a painful breakup at the time of the trial. "Falling out of a story hurts," she writes. "But it's nothing compared to the loss of an actual person, the loss of all the bright details that make up that person. All the flashing, radiant fragments that constitute an affair, or a love." A breakup is not the same as the loss of a life, of course, but it is an ending, one to which most readers can relate. Nelson's lost relationship, juxtaposed with the trial, makes it ever more clear what she and her mother and the world have lost with Jane's death. "All the flashing, radiant fragments."
Ultimately, the book is less invested in the outcome of the trial, in the "whodunit" and "why," than it is in questions of mortality, grief, the language of justice, and fear. Though we do learn the verdict, we don't need to know every detail of Jane's death; it was her life that mattered. It is our lives that matter.
Truth & Beauty: A Friendship. Ann Patchett. (HarperCollins, 2004.)
I do not remember our love unfolding,
that we got to know one another and
in time became friends. I only remember
that she came through the door and
it was there, huge and
permanent and
first.
As with so many of the books I read, I can't remember how I came to this one. I suspect someone in my writing group mentioned it or the author, or that I heard of it when I was reading Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face back in January and then forgot about it. I say "forgot about it" because I was shocked when I began reading Truth & Beauty and realized it was about Ann Patchett's friendship with Grealy. If my surprise wasn't a result of a memory slip, it had to be serendipity.
In this memoir, Patchett details her close friendship with author Lucy Grealy, from their days in an MFA program right up through the last days of Grealy's life. The book is an elegy and a scrapbook, a beautiful reflection on the love between these two women, detailed in remembrances and letters swapped between them.
The reader does not have to be familiar with Grealy to enjoy this book, but having read Autobiography of a Face, I was certainly that much more captivated by this behind-the-scenes story. In fact, I felt grateful to Patchett as I turned through the pages of their relationship, because she gave me a side of Grealy I wanted but did not get when I read her book. Patchett shines a wider light on Grealy, which casts beyond Grealy's cancer and her facial deformity. While I was intrigued by Grealy and her experiences and writing, I was even more captivated by Patchett's portrayal of her friend and their relationship. Through Patchett, Grealy becomes palpable, her character multifaceted. If Grealy wrote, in some regards, about not having a face, here, Patchett gives her one.
In reading Truth & Beauty, I was surprised to discover that Grealy was popular, well-liked, loved by many. In turn, I was taken aback by Grealy's failure to honor her friends in her own memoir. (I don't think I'm misremembering this.) It's possible, though, that Grealy didn't see and feel the magnitude of the love in her life, so didn't write it. And between the publication of her memoir and her death were six years, time that Patchett was able to capture and that of course couldn't factor into Grealy's own book.
While Patchett does shine light on her own feelings and insights in the relationship, the book feels more like a spotlight on Grealy. But Patchett's love, affection, and adoration for her friend sparks through in every word, and in that way, the reader is invited into her experience. And the experience? It borders on a Fried Green Tomatoes kind of love. It feels layered to me and deeper than most friendships or even sisterhoods. The relationship is full of love letters, in which, for instance, Grealy writes, "I can find no suitable words of affection for you, words that will contain the whole of your wonderfulness to me. You will have to make due with being my favorite bagel, my favorite blue awning above some great little café where the coffee is strong but milky and had real texture to it."
It is not an exaggeration to say that their love was tangible, Patchett's lap frequently filled by the impish Grealy, her bed sometimes shared, the two of them curled into each other like kittens. In one memorable span of pages, Patchett even carries her sick friend up and down flights of stairs, down streets, into taxi cabs. Carries her, like a mother might carry a child, or a lover might carry a lover.
But of course the relationship wasn't always so easy. It became especially trying when Grealy began doing drugs, apparently to stave off pain, and Patchett had difficulty watching her friend go deeper down this path. After Grealy's death, Patchett writes, "There was a time, just a moment that night in the Park Avenue Café, I had thought I could let her go. But now I know I was simply not cut out for life without her. I am living that life now and would not choose it. If Lucy couldn't give up the heroin, I could not give up Lucy." Honestly, we should all be so lucky to have someone in our lives who loves us as much as Patchett loved(s) Grealy. And I think that is part of what makes the book so beautiful and fulfilling: to, for the time it takes to read it, bask in the castoff glow of that love.
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. Roxane Gay. (HarperCollins, 2017.)
My story is mine, and on most days, I wish I could bury that story,
somewhere deep where I might be free of it. But.
It has been thirty years and, inexplicably,
I am still not free of it.
I'd been following Roxane Gay on Twitter for quite some time when I finally (I am ashamed of how long it took me) checked out one of her books. As I am wont to do, I didn't read the synopsis first. I thought the title was intriguing, especially because I rub shoulders with so many people who talk about "body beats" in their writing and "being in their bodies," and I am someone who has great difficulty being in my body, surrendering to being human, so I checked out the book.
I think I thought the book would be about desire. And it is--sort of. On its face, this is a story about the aftermath of an assault, about the repercussions of having your body invaded. Gay discusses how she began to add layers to her body, to build her physical self into a fortress, after she was raped. She knew that girls and women are most desirable when they are small. She did not want to be a target. So she gained weight. A lot of weight. And then more weight. And at times through her life, either because it was thrust upon her or because she herself desire it, she has attempted to shed this weight, this weight that is tied to the pain, the past, her story. Gay writes, "Part of disciplining the body is denial. We want but we dare not have. We deny ourselves certain foods. We deny ourselves rest by working out. We deny ourselves peace of mind by remaining ever vigilant over our bodies. We withhold from ourselves until we achieve a goal and then we withhold from ourselves to maintain that goal."
As I began reading, what struck me first was the immediacy of Gay's writing, the straightforward intimacy of her sentences, the simple truth from word to word. She does not dress up her language or flout her intellect with obscure allusions or a clutter of footnotes. She does not get into the "why" so much as the "what," and in doing so keeps herself and her readers grounded in the physical, in the body, and in her experience. This truly is HER story.
I felt a visceral relief reading this book, like I could almost hear Gay reading aloud, a strange lullaby. And while her story is her story, it stretches beyond her. Who isn't carrying a story they wish they could permanently bury? What woman hasn't been violated in some way, her body made to feel like it isn't entirely hers? Who hasn't resorted to defenses that serve in the moment but tend to be outgrown with time?
As someone who is also a victim and survivor of sexual violence, I listened hard go Gay's testimony, hoping she might hand me the keys to my own cage, naive as that idea is. "Years ago," she writes, "I told myself that one day I would stop feeling this quiet but abiding rage about the things I have been through at the hands of others. I would wake up and there would be no more flashbacks. I wouldn't wake up and think about my histories of violence. I wouldn't smell the yeasty aroma of beer and for a second, for several minutes, for hours, forget where I was. And on and on and on. That day never came, or it hasn't come, and I am no longer waiting for it." She continues, "A different day has come, though. I flinch less and less when I am touched. I don't always see gentleness as the calm before the storm because, more often than not, I can trust that no storm is coming. I harbor less hatred toward myself. I try to forgive myself for my trespasses." And I wonder, is this good enough, for me? Am I there yet? I have Gay's words written down so I can return to them, sit beside the author and her story, and know that if I don't feel it yet, someday I might let go of the ominous clouds that seem to shroud my future. Someday, I will drop into my body so deep, I will know the storm has passed.
Untamed. Glennon Doyle. (The Dial Press, 2020.)
Once we feel, know, and dare to imagine more for ourselves, we
cannot unfeel, unknow, or unimagine. There is no going back.
We are launched into the abyss—the space between
the not-true-enough life we're living and
the truer one that exists only inside us.
After reading Glennon Doyle's Love Warrior in May, I put myself on the wait list for her newest book, without even reading a synopsis. If Love Warrior was about a woman confronting her fears and endeavoring to become more honest in her life, this book is a true sequel. (And in some ways, a prequel.) In this book, Doyle arrives at the realization that she cannot make things work with her husband, and she also finds herself falling in love and building a new kind of family with a woman. Through all this, Doyle examines the messages that society pushes in order to maintain narrow, harmful standards for gender roles, and encourages readers, especially women, to break free of these restraints. She discusses her relationship with a higher power, her discovery of an inner "Knowing," and the power of imagination.
In many ways, this book is a feminist manifesto. Doyle writes, "For those of us who were not consulted in the building of the visible order, igniting our imagination is the only way to see beyond what was created to leave us out. If those were not part of the building of reality only consult reality for possibilities, reality will never change."
Yet the book is less polemic than memoir, in which Doyle delivers simple yet profound truths that a therapist might help a client uncover. She writes, "I understand now that no one else in the world knows what I should do....Every life is an unprecedented experiment. This life is mine alone. So I have stopped asking people for directions to places they've never been. There is no map. We are all pioneers."
And she relates a piece of advice given to her when she was in a tough place: "You're not doing life wrong; you're doing it right. If there's any secret you're missing, it's that doing it right is just really hard. Feeling all your feelings is hard, but that's what they're for. Feelings are for feeling. All of them. Even the hard ones. The secret is that you're doing it right, and that doing it right hurts sometimes."
I think what I'm trying to say is reading this book made me feel a little less alone and a little more confident in leaning in towards myself. I know we--I--don't need permission to live wild and untamed, but this book sure does feel like a permission slip that makes it easier to "unbecome" and "become." Do I recommend it? You bet I do.
I do not remember our love unfolding,
that we got to know one another and
in time became friends. I only remember
that she came through the door and
it was there, huge and
permanent and
first.
As with so many of the books I read, I can't remember how I came to this one. I suspect someone in my writing group mentioned it or the author, or that I heard of it when I was reading Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face back in January and then forgot about it. I say "forgot about it" because I was shocked when I began reading Truth & Beauty and realized it was about Ann Patchett's friendship with Grealy. If my surprise wasn't a result of a memory slip, it had to be serendipity.
In this memoir, Patchett details her close friendship with author Lucy Grealy, from their days in an MFA program right up through the last days of Grealy's life. The book is an elegy and a scrapbook, a beautiful reflection on the love between these two women, detailed in remembrances and letters swapped between them.
The reader does not have to be familiar with Grealy to enjoy this book, but having read Autobiography of a Face, I was certainly that much more captivated by this behind-the-scenes story. In fact, I felt grateful to Patchett as I turned through the pages of their relationship, because she gave me a side of Grealy I wanted but did not get when I read her book. Patchett shines a wider light on Grealy, which casts beyond Grealy's cancer and her facial deformity. While I was intrigued by Grealy and her experiences and writing, I was even more captivated by Patchett's portrayal of her friend and their relationship. Through Patchett, Grealy becomes palpable, her character multifaceted. If Grealy wrote, in some regards, about not having a face, here, Patchett gives her one.
In reading Truth & Beauty, I was surprised to discover that Grealy was popular, well-liked, loved by many. In turn, I was taken aback by Grealy's failure to honor her friends in her own memoir. (I don't think I'm misremembering this.) It's possible, though, that Grealy didn't see and feel the magnitude of the love in her life, so didn't write it. And between the publication of her memoir and her death were six years, time that Patchett was able to capture and that of course couldn't factor into Grealy's own book.
While Patchett does shine light on her own feelings and insights in the relationship, the book feels more like a spotlight on Grealy. But Patchett's love, affection, and adoration for her friend sparks through in every word, and in that way, the reader is invited into her experience. And the experience? It borders on a Fried Green Tomatoes kind of love. It feels layered to me and deeper than most friendships or even sisterhoods. The relationship is full of love letters, in which, for instance, Grealy writes, "I can find no suitable words of affection for you, words that will contain the whole of your wonderfulness to me. You will have to make due with being my favorite bagel, my favorite blue awning above some great little café where the coffee is strong but milky and had real texture to it."
It is not an exaggeration to say that their love was tangible, Patchett's lap frequently filled by the impish Grealy, her bed sometimes shared, the two of them curled into each other like kittens. In one memorable span of pages, Patchett even carries her sick friend up and down flights of stairs, down streets, into taxi cabs. Carries her, like a mother might carry a child, or a lover might carry a lover.
But of course the relationship wasn't always so easy. It became especially trying when Grealy began doing drugs, apparently to stave off pain, and Patchett had difficulty watching her friend go deeper down this path. After Grealy's death, Patchett writes, "There was a time, just a moment that night in the Park Avenue Café, I had thought I could let her go. But now I know I was simply not cut out for life without her. I am living that life now and would not choose it. If Lucy couldn't give up the heroin, I could not give up Lucy." Honestly, we should all be so lucky to have someone in our lives who loves us as much as Patchett loved(s) Grealy. And I think that is part of what makes the book so beautiful and fulfilling: to, for the time it takes to read it, bask in the castoff glow of that love.
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. Roxane Gay. (HarperCollins, 2017.)
My story is mine, and on most days, I wish I could bury that story,
somewhere deep where I might be free of it. But.
It has been thirty years and, inexplicably,
I am still not free of it.
I'd been following Roxane Gay on Twitter for quite some time when I finally (I am ashamed of how long it took me) checked out one of her books. As I am wont to do, I didn't read the synopsis first. I thought the title was intriguing, especially because I rub shoulders with so many people who talk about "body beats" in their writing and "being in their bodies," and I am someone who has great difficulty being in my body, surrendering to being human, so I checked out the book.
I think I thought the book would be about desire. And it is--sort of. On its face, this is a story about the aftermath of an assault, about the repercussions of having your body invaded. Gay discusses how she began to add layers to her body, to build her physical self into a fortress, after she was raped. She knew that girls and women are most desirable when they are small. She did not want to be a target. So she gained weight. A lot of weight. And then more weight. And at times through her life, either because it was thrust upon her or because she herself desire it, she has attempted to shed this weight, this weight that is tied to the pain, the past, her story. Gay writes, "Part of disciplining the body is denial. We want but we dare not have. We deny ourselves certain foods. We deny ourselves rest by working out. We deny ourselves peace of mind by remaining ever vigilant over our bodies. We withhold from ourselves until we achieve a goal and then we withhold from ourselves to maintain that goal."
As I began reading, what struck me first was the immediacy of Gay's writing, the straightforward intimacy of her sentences, the simple truth from word to word. She does not dress up her language or flout her intellect with obscure allusions or a clutter of footnotes. She does not get into the "why" so much as the "what," and in doing so keeps herself and her readers grounded in the physical, in the body, and in her experience. This truly is HER story.
I felt a visceral relief reading this book, like I could almost hear Gay reading aloud, a strange lullaby. And while her story is her story, it stretches beyond her. Who isn't carrying a story they wish they could permanently bury? What woman hasn't been violated in some way, her body made to feel like it isn't entirely hers? Who hasn't resorted to defenses that serve in the moment but tend to be outgrown with time?
As someone who is also a victim and survivor of sexual violence, I listened hard go Gay's testimony, hoping she might hand me the keys to my own cage, naive as that idea is. "Years ago," she writes, "I told myself that one day I would stop feeling this quiet but abiding rage about the things I have been through at the hands of others. I would wake up and there would be no more flashbacks. I wouldn't wake up and think about my histories of violence. I wouldn't smell the yeasty aroma of beer and for a second, for several minutes, for hours, forget where I was. And on and on and on. That day never came, or it hasn't come, and I am no longer waiting for it." She continues, "A different day has come, though. I flinch less and less when I am touched. I don't always see gentleness as the calm before the storm because, more often than not, I can trust that no storm is coming. I harbor less hatred toward myself. I try to forgive myself for my trespasses." And I wonder, is this good enough, for me? Am I there yet? I have Gay's words written down so I can return to them, sit beside the author and her story, and know that if I don't feel it yet, someday I might let go of the ominous clouds that seem to shroud my future. Someday, I will drop into my body so deep, I will know the storm has passed.
Untamed. Glennon Doyle. (The Dial Press, 2020.)
Once we feel, know, and dare to imagine more for ourselves, we
cannot unfeel, unknow, or unimagine. There is no going back.
We are launched into the abyss—the space between
the not-true-enough life we're living and
the truer one that exists only inside us.
After reading Glennon Doyle's Love Warrior in May, I put myself on the wait list for her newest book, without even reading a synopsis. If Love Warrior was about a woman confronting her fears and endeavoring to become more honest in her life, this book is a true sequel. (And in some ways, a prequel.) In this book, Doyle arrives at the realization that she cannot make things work with her husband, and she also finds herself falling in love and building a new kind of family with a woman. Through all this, Doyle examines the messages that society pushes in order to maintain narrow, harmful standards for gender roles, and encourages readers, especially women, to break free of these restraints. She discusses her relationship with a higher power, her discovery of an inner "Knowing," and the power of imagination.
In many ways, this book is a feminist manifesto. Doyle writes, "For those of us who were not consulted in the building of the visible order, igniting our imagination is the only way to see beyond what was created to leave us out. If those were not part of the building of reality only consult reality for possibilities, reality will never change."
Yet the book is less polemic than memoir, in which Doyle delivers simple yet profound truths that a therapist might help a client uncover. She writes, "I understand now that no one else in the world knows what I should do....Every life is an unprecedented experiment. This life is mine alone. So I have stopped asking people for directions to places they've never been. There is no map. We are all pioneers."
And she relates a piece of advice given to her when she was in a tough place: "You're not doing life wrong; you're doing it right. If there's any secret you're missing, it's that doing it right is just really hard. Feeling all your feelings is hard, but that's what they're for. Feelings are for feeling. All of them. Even the hard ones. The secret is that you're doing it right, and that doing it right hurts sometimes."
I think what I'm trying to say is reading this book made me feel a little less alone and a little more confident in leaning in towards myself. I know we--I--don't need permission to live wild and untamed, but this book sure does feel like a permission slip that makes it easier to "unbecome" and "become." Do I recommend it? You bet I do.
Bluets. Maggie Nelson. (Wave Books, 2009.)
204. Lately I have been trying to learn something about
"the fundamental impermanence of all things"
from my collection of blue amulets, which I have placed
on a ledge in my house that is, for a good half of the day,
drenched in sunlight. The placement is intentional—
I like to see the sun pass through the glass,
the bottle of blue ink, the translucent blue stones.
But the light is clearly destroying some of the objects,
or at least bleaching out their blues. Daily I think about
moving the most vulnerable objects to a "cool, dark place,"
but the truth is that I have little to no instinct for protection.
Out of laziness, curiosity, or cruelty—if one can be cruel to objects—
I have given them up to their diminishment.
It seems like everyone in the literary world has read Maggie Nelson. If they aren't talking about her 2016 book, The Argonauts, they're talking about Bluets. Well, after reading Nelson's Jane back in February, the first book of hers I ever read, I put myself on the waitlist for her followup book, The Red Parts, and Bluets. I wasn't sure what to expect with Bluets, but I was pretty sure it would be experimental, fragmented, figurative, and smart, like Jane.
Bluets is a book devoid of chapters. Instead, it is comprised of 240 propositions—fragments, a collage of snippets from various writers of varied fields, and her personal experiences. It is a metacognitive rumination on the author's obsession with—or passion for—the color blue, but of course, it is not just a book about a color. Few people would care to read it if that was all it were. It is a great, circling thing, a top spinning towards and away from lost love. Blue weaves itself into the fabric of Nelson's life, in expired bus passes stamped into the sidewalk or wrapped into elaborate bowers built by birds trying to attract mates, in ink etched into the layers of her lovers' skin, in cornflower-filled dreams, in paintings that enamor or repel.
I found myself wondering, as I read, why Nelson would number each passage rather than rely on simple section breaks. Perhaps with so many section breaks, numbering felt like a way to maintain order, to help keep place. I wondered, why stop at 240 propositions? Is there significance in that number?
The book reads a little like a long prose poem, a Maggie Nelson Waste Land that builds and builds while unraveling and revealing its blue heart, little by little. It is, I think, a book of grief, a book of reconciling with the loss of a lover. And it seems to be, at times, addressed to the anonymous lover she lost. "I want you to know," she writes, "if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world."
I copied many proposals into my commonplace book because I like their texture and nuance and appreciate the research and connections Nelson makes in the building of her own bower, this book that is a wild nest of pretty little scraps. She certainly catches my attention.
204. Lately I have been trying to learn something about
"the fundamental impermanence of all things"
from my collection of blue amulets, which I have placed
on a ledge in my house that is, for a good half of the day,
drenched in sunlight. The placement is intentional—
I like to see the sun pass through the glass,
the bottle of blue ink, the translucent blue stones.
But the light is clearly destroying some of the objects,
or at least bleaching out their blues. Daily I think about
moving the most vulnerable objects to a "cool, dark place,"
but the truth is that I have little to no instinct for protection.
Out of laziness, curiosity, or cruelty—if one can be cruel to objects—
I have given them up to their diminishment.
It seems like everyone in the literary world has read Maggie Nelson. If they aren't talking about her 2016 book, The Argonauts, they're talking about Bluets. Well, after reading Nelson's Jane back in February, the first book of hers I ever read, I put myself on the waitlist for her followup book, The Red Parts, and Bluets. I wasn't sure what to expect with Bluets, but I was pretty sure it would be experimental, fragmented, figurative, and smart, like Jane.
Bluets is a book devoid of chapters. Instead, it is comprised of 240 propositions—fragments, a collage of snippets from various writers of varied fields, and her personal experiences. It is a metacognitive rumination on the author's obsession with—or passion for—the color blue, but of course, it is not just a book about a color. Few people would care to read it if that was all it were. It is a great, circling thing, a top spinning towards and away from lost love. Blue weaves itself into the fabric of Nelson's life, in expired bus passes stamped into the sidewalk or wrapped into elaborate bowers built by birds trying to attract mates, in ink etched into the layers of her lovers' skin, in cornflower-filled dreams, in paintings that enamor or repel.
I found myself wondering, as I read, why Nelson would number each passage rather than rely on simple section breaks. Perhaps with so many section breaks, numbering felt like a way to maintain order, to help keep place. I wondered, why stop at 240 propositions? Is there significance in that number?
The book reads a little like a long prose poem, a Maggie Nelson Waste Land that builds and builds while unraveling and revealing its blue heart, little by little. It is, I think, a book of grief, a book of reconciling with the loss of a lover. And it seems to be, at times, addressed to the anonymous lover she lost. "I want you to know," she writes, "if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world."
I copied many proposals into my commonplace book because I like their texture and nuance and appreciate the research and connections Nelson makes in the building of her own bower, this book that is a wild nest of pretty little scraps. She certainly catches my attention.
The Other Side. Lacy M. Johnson. (Tin House Books, 2014.)
I say, This will be the last version of the story I ever tell.
I know how ridiculous this sounds. How foolish. How naive.
Because the truth is: I'm afraid of what will happen when it's done.
I'm trapped, I say. A prison I've built with this story.
I don't know how to escape it, I say. But I do know.
The story is a trap, a puzzle, a paradox.
Ending it creates a door.
I don't remember how I discovered Lacy M. Johnson. I'm following her on Twitter. Perhaps she tweeted something that another writer I follow retweeted. And then maybe a week ago she tweeted something that struck me, and I read her Twitter byline, and I looked up her book The Other Side because I liked the title, and as soon as I read the synopsis, I knew I need to read the story of how the author survived a kidnapping, rape, and attempted murder. How did she reach "the other side"?
I tore through the memoir, bookmarking pages full of lines that resonated, phrases that felt to me like soft driftwood or the clean, smooth curve of a bone. The story is not one of a singular traumatic event, but of a predatory relationship rife with violence. But it is also the story of a woman who reclaimed her body, who rewrote the story, who despite having lost so much, survived to tell about it and to choose a way forward.
I appreciate how she grapples with memory, how she reveals the mind's protections, the fragmentation and voids that the traumatized mind creates to help the victim survive unspeakable atrocities until she is ready to admit them into awareness, until she is ready to open the door to them, acknowledge them, understand her courage, and keep moving. She also explains that there are some experiences that defy language, that only the body, the skin, meat, and bone, can bear. She writes, "Sometimes I think there is no entirely true story I could tell. Because there are some things I just don't know, and other things I just can't say. Which is not a failure of memory but of language." And this resonates deeply with me, though I'd argue that a failure of language is a kind of truth, that the mouth or the pen's silence can speak at least as loudly as words.
I say, This will be the last version of the story I ever tell.
I know how ridiculous this sounds. How foolish. How naive.
Because the truth is: I'm afraid of what will happen when it's done.
I'm trapped, I say. A prison I've built with this story.
I don't know how to escape it, I say. But I do know.
The story is a trap, a puzzle, a paradox.
Ending it creates a door.
I don't remember how I discovered Lacy M. Johnson. I'm following her on Twitter. Perhaps she tweeted something that another writer I follow retweeted. And then maybe a week ago she tweeted something that struck me, and I read her Twitter byline, and I looked up her book The Other Side because I liked the title, and as soon as I read the synopsis, I knew I need to read the story of how the author survived a kidnapping, rape, and attempted murder. How did she reach "the other side"?
I tore through the memoir, bookmarking pages full of lines that resonated, phrases that felt to me like soft driftwood or the clean, smooth curve of a bone. The story is not one of a singular traumatic event, but of a predatory relationship rife with violence. But it is also the story of a woman who reclaimed her body, who rewrote the story, who despite having lost so much, survived to tell about it and to choose a way forward.
I appreciate how she grapples with memory, how she reveals the mind's protections, the fragmentation and voids that the traumatized mind creates to help the victim survive unspeakable atrocities until she is ready to admit them into awareness, until she is ready to open the door to them, acknowledge them, understand her courage, and keep moving. She also explains that there are some experiences that defy language, that only the body, the skin, meat, and bone, can bear. She writes, "Sometimes I think there is no entirely true story I could tell. Because there are some things I just don't know, and other things I just can't say. Which is not a failure of memory but of language." And this resonates deeply with me, though I'd argue that a failure of language is a kind of truth, that the mouth or the pen's silence can speak at least as loudly as words.
Trauma and Recovery. Judith Lewis Herman, M.D. (BasicBooks, 1992.)
"The pathological environment of childhood abuse forces the development
of extraordinary capacities, both creative and destructive. It fosters the
development of abnormal states of consciousness in which the
ordinary relations of body and mind, reality and imagination,
knowledge and memory, no longer hold. These altered states
of consciousness permit the elaboration of a prodigious
array of symptoms, both somatic and psychological.
And these symptoms simultaneously conceal and
reveal their origins; they speak in disguised
language of secrets too terrible for words."
I discovered this author, who now goes only by Judith Herman, when I was researching trauma and memory for my memoir, and when I learned that her book Trauma and Recovery was released in 1992, an apex year of trauma in my childhood, I decided that I wanted to read the original publication, rather than the revised 1997 edition or the updated 2015 version.
It's incredible to me that I never read this author, never heard of this book in all my years of attending therapy, that this critical text never found its way to me until now. But perhaps I wasn't ready for it. This book put words to my experiences, gives my feelings, memories, gaps in memory, struggles with relating, intimacy, and identity, a language, a container, meaning. I came to the book hoping to learn why my memory, beyond traumatic events, preceding such events and following them, for years and years, is so patchy, so discordant. And while the book does not go into detail about how prolonged trauma erodes the faculties of memory, it does make plain that trauma disrupts and warps the victim's operating system.
One of the reasons I decided to read the book is because the author spoke to chronic post-traumatic stress disorder--to victims of prolonged trauma rather than incidental trauma. I was not raped, was not in a devastating car accident, did not experience war first hand, etc. My trauma was more subtle, an everyday hum of potential, a sometimes jolt of actuality. It was so much a part of my existence when I was a child, I don't quite know what I lost. Herman perfectly captures this sensation: "People subjected to prolonged, repeated trauma develop an insidious, progressive form of post-traumatic stress disorder that invades and erodes the personality. While the victim of a single acute trauma may feel after the event that she is 'not herself,' the victim of chronic trauma may feel herself to be changed irrevocably, or she may lose the sense that she has any self at all."
This book has helped me to better understand where I've been as a victim, and where I am now as a survivor. I do, however, wonder if the more updated versions tackle trauma that is more covert, because even after reading this book, I feel as if the trauma I endured as a child does not fit the trauma described in the book. I would like to know more. Herman writes, "Unlike commonplace misfortunes, traumatic events generally involve threats to life or bodily integrity, or a close personal encounter with violence and death. They confront human beings with the extremities of helplessness and terror, and evoke the responses of catastrophe. According to the Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, the common denominator of psychological trauma is a feeling of 'intense fear, helplessness, loss of control, and threat of annihilation.'" Maybe because I was too young during the abuse to ever feel as if I had control, I never experienced a devastating loss of it. Maybe because much of the abuse I suffered was covert, I never felt overriding fear. I never felt scared for my life. I never categorized what my father did as violent (though now, as an adult, I understand that it was violent, that violence is not merely a physical phenomenon). I did feel, however, that something vital had been broken. I did feel like the world had shifted on its axis, that I had walked through a doorway I didn't want to know about. I did feel guilty and ashamed and uncertain. I did feel lost. As Herman writes, "In the aftermath of traumatic events, survivors doubt both others and themselves. Things are no longer what they seem."
Importantly, I understand now why the memoir I'm writing feels like a life or death imperative to me. Herman writes, "By making a public complaint or accusation, the survivor defies the perpetrator's attempt to silence and isolate her, and she opens the possibility of finding new allies. When others bear witness to the testimony of a crime, others share the responsibility for restoring justice." My father is dead, but his crime has not been sufficiently addressed. His crime that is the crime of so many other men, so many other fathers. It has not been enough for me to tell therapists and friends about the abuse. I am not reaching enough victims. I am not reaching the perpetrators or the bystanders. I am not reaching the society that can change the culture that perpetuates these crimes. I understand now why I feel so compelled to complete my memoir--to set my memories down so I no longer have to carry them. I'll own my story and share it, be one of the voices shouting from the unspeakable darkness.
"The pathological environment of childhood abuse forces the development
of extraordinary capacities, both creative and destructive. It fosters the
development of abnormal states of consciousness in which the
ordinary relations of body and mind, reality and imagination,
knowledge and memory, no longer hold. These altered states
of consciousness permit the elaboration of a prodigious
array of symptoms, both somatic and psychological.
And these symptoms simultaneously conceal and
reveal their origins; they speak in disguised
language of secrets too terrible for words."
I discovered this author, who now goes only by Judith Herman, when I was researching trauma and memory for my memoir, and when I learned that her book Trauma and Recovery was released in 1992, an apex year of trauma in my childhood, I decided that I wanted to read the original publication, rather than the revised 1997 edition or the updated 2015 version.
It's incredible to me that I never read this author, never heard of this book in all my years of attending therapy, that this critical text never found its way to me until now. But perhaps I wasn't ready for it. This book put words to my experiences, gives my feelings, memories, gaps in memory, struggles with relating, intimacy, and identity, a language, a container, meaning. I came to the book hoping to learn why my memory, beyond traumatic events, preceding such events and following them, for years and years, is so patchy, so discordant. And while the book does not go into detail about how prolonged trauma erodes the faculties of memory, it does make plain that trauma disrupts and warps the victim's operating system.
One of the reasons I decided to read the book is because the author spoke to chronic post-traumatic stress disorder--to victims of prolonged trauma rather than incidental trauma. I was not raped, was not in a devastating car accident, did not experience war first hand, etc. My trauma was more subtle, an everyday hum of potential, a sometimes jolt of actuality. It was so much a part of my existence when I was a child, I don't quite know what I lost. Herman perfectly captures this sensation: "People subjected to prolonged, repeated trauma develop an insidious, progressive form of post-traumatic stress disorder that invades and erodes the personality. While the victim of a single acute trauma may feel after the event that she is 'not herself,' the victim of chronic trauma may feel herself to be changed irrevocably, or she may lose the sense that she has any self at all."
This book has helped me to better understand where I've been as a victim, and where I am now as a survivor. I do, however, wonder if the more updated versions tackle trauma that is more covert, because even after reading this book, I feel as if the trauma I endured as a child does not fit the trauma described in the book. I would like to know more. Herman writes, "Unlike commonplace misfortunes, traumatic events generally involve threats to life or bodily integrity, or a close personal encounter with violence and death. They confront human beings with the extremities of helplessness and terror, and evoke the responses of catastrophe. According to the Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, the common denominator of psychological trauma is a feeling of 'intense fear, helplessness, loss of control, and threat of annihilation.'" Maybe because I was too young during the abuse to ever feel as if I had control, I never experienced a devastating loss of it. Maybe because much of the abuse I suffered was covert, I never felt overriding fear. I never felt scared for my life. I never categorized what my father did as violent (though now, as an adult, I understand that it was violent, that violence is not merely a physical phenomenon). I did feel, however, that something vital had been broken. I did feel like the world had shifted on its axis, that I had walked through a doorway I didn't want to know about. I did feel guilty and ashamed and uncertain. I did feel lost. As Herman writes, "In the aftermath of traumatic events, survivors doubt both others and themselves. Things are no longer what they seem."
Importantly, I understand now why the memoir I'm writing feels like a life or death imperative to me. Herman writes, "By making a public complaint or accusation, the survivor defies the perpetrator's attempt to silence and isolate her, and she opens the possibility of finding new allies. When others bear witness to the testimony of a crime, others share the responsibility for restoring justice." My father is dead, but his crime has not been sufficiently addressed. His crime that is the crime of so many other men, so many other fathers. It has not been enough for me to tell therapists and friends about the abuse. I am not reaching enough victims. I am not reaching the perpetrators or the bystanders. I am not reaching the society that can change the culture that perpetuates these crimes. I understand now why I feel so compelled to complete my memoir--to set my memories down so I no longer have to carry them. I'll own my story and share it, be one of the voices shouting from the unspeakable darkness.
May
Toil & Trouble. Augusten Burroughs. (St. Martin's Press, 2019.)
"A witch manipulates energy, near and distant. This is accomplished through
conjuring, a form of creation generated through extraordinarily
focused intent. It manifests within the witch
as a feeling of certainty."
I've read nearly everything Augusten Burroughs has written. I appreciate his range--his ability to seemingly effortlessly make his readers laugh or cry. And I am grateful for his honesty. Even when his humor uncomfortably (for me anyway) tips the scales to cruelty, I'm grateful for his honesty. I feel when I read him, I'm with a human being.
In this memoir, Augusten Burroughs shares his experiences as a witch, but he also explores his relationship with his mother, who he reveals was also a witch. Burroughs educates his readers a bit, tries to explain that being a witch isn't the same thing as being Wiccan, that being a witch is inherent, and being Wiccan is a choice, and that he is a witch but is not Wiccan. The book is not a primer on witchcraft, but is an examination of a life through a lens of magick (the appropriate spelling, Burroughs says). Magick is a tool Burroughs uses his whole life to help him know what might be coming, to guide him, to keep him out of harm's way. It also helps him feel connected. As a witch, he is part of a community of other witches, those he knows and those he has yet to meet, and this bond also informs his relationship with his mother. It acts as a glue in his youth before his mother makes choices that greatly harm the relationship, and later as a salve after a long estrangement from his mother and her death.
The book reads like a series of connected essays, with a narrative that is strung like gems on a necklace Burroughs might admire in one of his many online searches for stunning and rare jewelry. It is delightful to accompany Burroughs in his life, to be inside the moments where his intuition shines. Even non-believers can read and enjoy this book, choosing to believe that Burroughs simply has a lot of coincidence in his life. (Burroughs notes that one or two instances of coincidence in a period of time are to be expected, but frequent occurrences, as he has, are scientifically improbable.)
Anyway. I've recommended this memoir to the witchiest women I know and to those who believe life has more to offer than what is on its surface. I read it over the course of a day, and for a time during the ongoing pandemic, it helped to assure me that life is bigger than it seems, that there is magick and light even when everyday threatens darkness. There are gifts on offer, even in the most cursed times.
Love Warrior. Glennon Doyle Melton. (Flatiron Books, 2016.)
"You are not supposed to be happy all the time. Life hurts and it's hard.
Not because you're doing it wrong, but because it hurts for everybody.
Don't avoid the pain. You need it. It's meant for you. Be still with it,
let it come, let it go, let it leave you with the fuel you'll burn
to get your work done on this earth."
This book had been on my bookshelf for a while before I finally cracked it open in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. I can't remember how I acquired it, but I suspect I plucked it out of a Little Free Library or off a shelf at a library book sale. I'm not sure why it took me so long to decide to read it, but I'm grateful it called to me when it did. The pandemic put a kink in my reading habit. All the e-books I requested in February and March started becoming available and I kept pressing the button that would delay their arrival because I wasn't in the mood to read. But one preternaturally sunny day, I felt compelled to read on the deck. I needed a tangible book, and there it was, Love Warrior, sitting on my shelf looking at me with the gaze of an expectant puppy. Well, okay.
I didn't know what to expect. I hadn't read anything about the book, the author, or Doyle's previous work. I skipped reading the back, inside flaps, and front matter. The "Oprah's Book Club" selection sticker on the cover made me apprehensive. I needed a book I could sink my soul into, that would transport me to a place beneath the surface of things. I doubted a book supported by the masses could deliver. I was wrong.
Love Warrior begins with the author's wedding so that it seems it will be a romantic story centered on marriage. Fortunately, that's not what it is. Instead, the memoir takes the reader on a journey with the author whose real mission is to "unbecome" so she can be who she is. Hers is a quest to cast off the mantle of society's expectations for her (and for all women). She examines the ways she's self-medicated (bulimia, drinking, disassociating), considers her motives, finds a spirituality that is liberated from religion, and works hard to become a person who is fully alive in mind, body, and spirit.
For me, the book is highly significant. I, too, am a love warrior. I, too, endeavor to live more deeply, to unbecome so I can be who I am, to live in alignment and authenticity. I want to be fully me sans apology, excuse, or explanation. Doyle is an incredible role model, a true leader in the field of the hero's journey.
I got curious about the author about halfway through the book and decided to look her up online. Boy was I shocked. This woman walks her talk. Since the book came out, her life has changed in major ways, and she has accepted and welcomed these changes, despite how they surely set her up for ridicule, as they disturbed the image the world projected on her. I am so happy to have found her writing, which is as impeccable as her story is beautiful.
"A witch manipulates energy, near and distant. This is accomplished through
conjuring, a form of creation generated through extraordinarily
focused intent. It manifests within the witch
as a feeling of certainty."
I've read nearly everything Augusten Burroughs has written. I appreciate his range--his ability to seemingly effortlessly make his readers laugh or cry. And I am grateful for his honesty. Even when his humor uncomfortably (for me anyway) tips the scales to cruelty, I'm grateful for his honesty. I feel when I read him, I'm with a human being.
In this memoir, Augusten Burroughs shares his experiences as a witch, but he also explores his relationship with his mother, who he reveals was also a witch. Burroughs educates his readers a bit, tries to explain that being a witch isn't the same thing as being Wiccan, that being a witch is inherent, and being Wiccan is a choice, and that he is a witch but is not Wiccan. The book is not a primer on witchcraft, but is an examination of a life through a lens of magick (the appropriate spelling, Burroughs says). Magick is a tool Burroughs uses his whole life to help him know what might be coming, to guide him, to keep him out of harm's way. It also helps him feel connected. As a witch, he is part of a community of other witches, those he knows and those he has yet to meet, and this bond also informs his relationship with his mother. It acts as a glue in his youth before his mother makes choices that greatly harm the relationship, and later as a salve after a long estrangement from his mother and her death.
The book reads like a series of connected essays, with a narrative that is strung like gems on a necklace Burroughs might admire in one of his many online searches for stunning and rare jewelry. It is delightful to accompany Burroughs in his life, to be inside the moments where his intuition shines. Even non-believers can read and enjoy this book, choosing to believe that Burroughs simply has a lot of coincidence in his life. (Burroughs notes that one or two instances of coincidence in a period of time are to be expected, but frequent occurrences, as he has, are scientifically improbable.)
Anyway. I've recommended this memoir to the witchiest women I know and to those who believe life has more to offer than what is on its surface. I read it over the course of a day, and for a time during the ongoing pandemic, it helped to assure me that life is bigger than it seems, that there is magick and light even when everyday threatens darkness. There are gifts on offer, even in the most cursed times.
Love Warrior. Glennon Doyle Melton. (Flatiron Books, 2016.)
"You are not supposed to be happy all the time. Life hurts and it's hard.
Not because you're doing it wrong, but because it hurts for everybody.
Don't avoid the pain. You need it. It's meant for you. Be still with it,
let it come, let it go, let it leave you with the fuel you'll burn
to get your work done on this earth."
This book had been on my bookshelf for a while before I finally cracked it open in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. I can't remember how I acquired it, but I suspect I plucked it out of a Little Free Library or off a shelf at a library book sale. I'm not sure why it took me so long to decide to read it, but I'm grateful it called to me when it did. The pandemic put a kink in my reading habit. All the e-books I requested in February and March started becoming available and I kept pressing the button that would delay their arrival because I wasn't in the mood to read. But one preternaturally sunny day, I felt compelled to read on the deck. I needed a tangible book, and there it was, Love Warrior, sitting on my shelf looking at me with the gaze of an expectant puppy. Well, okay.
I didn't know what to expect. I hadn't read anything about the book, the author, or Doyle's previous work. I skipped reading the back, inside flaps, and front matter. The "Oprah's Book Club" selection sticker on the cover made me apprehensive. I needed a book I could sink my soul into, that would transport me to a place beneath the surface of things. I doubted a book supported by the masses could deliver. I was wrong.
Love Warrior begins with the author's wedding so that it seems it will be a romantic story centered on marriage. Fortunately, that's not what it is. Instead, the memoir takes the reader on a journey with the author whose real mission is to "unbecome" so she can be who she is. Hers is a quest to cast off the mantle of society's expectations for her (and for all women). She examines the ways she's self-medicated (bulimia, drinking, disassociating), considers her motives, finds a spirituality that is liberated from religion, and works hard to become a person who is fully alive in mind, body, and spirit.
For me, the book is highly significant. I, too, am a love warrior. I, too, endeavor to live more deeply, to unbecome so I can be who I am, to live in alignment and authenticity. I want to be fully me sans apology, excuse, or explanation. Doyle is an incredible role model, a true leader in the field of the hero's journey.
I got curious about the author about halfway through the book and decided to look her up online. Boy was I shocked. This woman walks her talk. Since the book came out, her life has changed in major ways, and she has accepted and welcomed these changes, despite how they surely set her up for ridicule, as they disturbed the image the world projected on her. I am so happy to have found her writing, which is as impeccable as her story is beautiful.
March
Nobody Cares. Anne T. Donahue. (ECW Press, 2018.)
"Everything may be shitty right now, but you know what?
Everything has always been shitty. There has
always been a shitstorm upon us. And,
as with shitstorms of yore, you
will prevail."
I discovered Anne T. Donahue's Nobody Cares when I became curious about P.S. Literary Agency. Looking at their website, I noticed this book of essays because the cover, which features an embroidery of the book's title, made me laugh. Donahue is witty and down to earth as well as honest in her recounting of the lessons she's learned, many the hard way.
She speaks to the common masses, but maybe in particular to women, as she debunks the myths that keep us from embracing our power, creativity, and dreams. With chapter titles like, "Anxiety, You Lying Bitch," and "Work, Bitch," you just know Donahue has experienced some of life's special dishes and come through the other side of the kitchen to help us sidestep the heat. I especially appreciate her acceptance of failure and her encouragement to wade through it.
Reading this book during the coronavirus pandemic, which has fallen in the midst of my own life upheaval, has been helpful to me. Donahue writes, "The thing about looping back is that it doesn't mean you're not moving forward. Life isn't Super Mario Bros. Sometimes you have to retreat, reassess, and rebuild." She's right. And to feel ashamed about any of this process isn't useful or logical. I'm going to keep moving. And the rest of humanity will, too. We'll get through these strange times together. Though we know not what may be on the other side, we're going there together, and it doesn't have to be bad.
Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls. T Kira Madden. (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.)
"Sometimes it feels like we are only this: moments of knowing and
unknowing one another. A sound that is foreign until it's
familiar. A drill that' a scream until it's a drill. Sometimes
it's nothing more than piecing together the ways in which
our hearts have all broken over the same moments,
but in different places."
I can't remember how I heard about T Kira Madden's memoir—probably on Twitter. But the title grabbed my attention, of course, and I moved the book to the top of my To Be Read list, checking it out of the library when it became available.
The writing immediately lured me in. Madden's sentences rise off the page like Michelangelo's figures rose from the marble. Her verbs are as surprising and fresh as they are apt. Her paragraphs are textured and alive. The book reads like a collage, as a series of vignettes that can stand alone but are even better together. The pieces punch, caress, rise, shift, pop, and grind.
I'll admit that the first half of the book challenged my patience at times. I wanted to know where Madden was taking me and if I absolutely needed to be present in all the moments offered. It's not that her experiences in those pages are gratuitous, but they are disturbing, and I think I wanted more of the adult Madden's take on these childhood situations much sooner than I got it. I wanted that safety, that distance, that hand to hold as I read about her dangerous situations with men, her complicated home life, and her coming of age challenges.
I was relieved in the second half of the book (I say second half, though there are three distinct parts; for me, I began to feel better about 150 pages in) when I began to glimpse that the characters in the book, who all seemed to be dealing with darkness, the likes of which have always scared me (drug use, predation, desperation, violence), might make choices that would lead them into the light. Additionally, I felt less guarded in the second half, more able to emotionally connect with the narrator and the situations. I found myself crying in places, sometimes surprising myself.
I really appreciate this book for several reasons: the fact that it's set in Florida, it's a coming of age tale, it's QUEER and not shy about it, it's about a father-daughter relationship, it explores the meaning of family without using a hammer, it's raw and real, and it's written in language as red and hungry as the "love the size of a fist. Something I could hold, something hot and knuckled and alive" that Madden tells readers she wants at the very start of the book.
Nobody Cares. Anne T. Donahue. (ECW Press, 2018.)
"Everything may be shitty right now, but you know what?
Everything has always been shitty. There has
always been a shitstorm upon us. And,
as with shitstorms of yore, you
will prevail."
I discovered Anne T. Donahue's Nobody Cares when I became curious about P.S. Literary Agency. Looking at their website, I noticed this book of essays because the cover, which features an embroidery of the book's title, made me laugh. Donahue is witty and down to earth as well as honest in her recounting of the lessons she's learned, many the hard way.
She speaks to the common masses, but maybe in particular to women, as she debunks the myths that keep us from embracing our power, creativity, and dreams. With chapter titles like, "Anxiety, You Lying Bitch," and "Work, Bitch," you just know Donahue has experienced some of life's special dishes and come through the other side of the kitchen to help us sidestep the heat. I especially appreciate her acceptance of failure and her encouragement to wade through it.
Reading this book during the coronavirus pandemic, which has fallen in the midst of my own life upheaval, has been helpful to me. Donahue writes, "The thing about looping back is that it doesn't mean you're not moving forward. Life isn't Super Mario Bros. Sometimes you have to retreat, reassess, and rebuild." She's right. And to feel ashamed about any of this process isn't useful or logical. I'm going to keep moving. And the rest of humanity will, too. We'll get through these strange times together. Though we know not what may be on the other side, we're going there together, and it doesn't have to be bad.
Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls. T Kira Madden. (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.)
"Sometimes it feels like we are only this: moments of knowing and
unknowing one another. A sound that is foreign until it's
familiar. A drill that' a scream until it's a drill. Sometimes
it's nothing more than piecing together the ways in which
our hearts have all broken over the same moments,
but in different places."
I can't remember how I heard about T Kira Madden's memoir—probably on Twitter. But the title grabbed my attention, of course, and I moved the book to the top of my To Be Read list, checking it out of the library when it became available.
The writing immediately lured me in. Madden's sentences rise off the page like Michelangelo's figures rose from the marble. Her verbs are as surprising and fresh as they are apt. Her paragraphs are textured and alive. The book reads like a collage, as a series of vignettes that can stand alone but are even better together. The pieces punch, caress, rise, shift, pop, and grind.
I'll admit that the first half of the book challenged my patience at times. I wanted to know where Madden was taking me and if I absolutely needed to be present in all the moments offered. It's not that her experiences in those pages are gratuitous, but they are disturbing, and I think I wanted more of the adult Madden's take on these childhood situations much sooner than I got it. I wanted that safety, that distance, that hand to hold as I read about her dangerous situations with men, her complicated home life, and her coming of age challenges.
I was relieved in the second half of the book (I say second half, though there are three distinct parts; for me, I began to feel better about 150 pages in) when I began to glimpse that the characters in the book, who all seemed to be dealing with darkness, the likes of which have always scared me (drug use, predation, desperation, violence), might make choices that would lead them into the light. Additionally, I felt less guarded in the second half, more able to emotionally connect with the narrator and the situations. I found myself crying in places, sometimes surprising myself.
I really appreciate this book for several reasons: the fact that it's set in Florida, it's a coming of age tale, it's QUEER and not shy about it, it's about a father-daughter relationship, it explores the meaning of family without using a hammer, it's raw and real, and it's written in language as red and hungry as the "love the size of a fist. Something I could hold, something hot and knuckled and alive" that Madden tells readers she wants at the very start of the book.
February
You Were Born for This: Astrology for Radical Self-Acceptance. Chani Nicholas. (HarperOne, 2020.)
"Understanding our astrological chart requires us to
understand ourselves, which takes work. We need
to develop a willingness to be introspective,
contemplative, reflective, and curious about
how we move through the world and
how the world may respond."
"Understanding our astrological chart requires us to
understand ourselves, which takes work. We need
to develop a willingness to be introspective,
contemplative, reflective, and curious about
how we move through the world and
how the world may respond."
Chani Nicholas explains how she came to better understand her values and drives by studying astrology. In turn, she encourages readers to study their own natal charts (which she provides for free on her website) and explains this ancient system in a simple way so that even novices can understand the basics. Nicholas covers what is familiar territory for most horoscope junkies—planets, signs, houses, and aspects—but offers accessible explanations that strengthen the meaning of the relationships between the parts, an angle that is often missing in other astrologers' approaches.
I have dabbled in astrology for decades but am still learning about myself through my chart and am still very much an amateur. What I most appreciate about Nicholas' book is how she explains how the sometimes seemingly disparate parts actually work together to form the complicated person that is you. I've never really identified with my Sun in Aries, for instance, because I don't see myself as being impulsive, fiercely competitive, sporty, lusty, or even overly stubborn, all traits that are commonly assigned the Ram. But Nicholas emphasizes the significance of the sun's placement, not just in a sign, but in a house and in aspect with other planets. She explains that sign is "how you shine," house is "the area of life in which you need to shine," and the planets that aspect the sun determine "who is influencing your ability to shine." So I shine by being action oriented, determined, and courageous (Aries) in partnerships/relationships (7th house), which is true. And the sun's aspects help me to see where some of my gifts and challenges are.
Another element of the book that folks might appreciate is the reflection questions sections that weave through the chapters. These help the reader to further apply the concepts to their personal experiences.
I have dabbled in astrology for decades but am still learning about myself through my chart and am still very much an amateur. What I most appreciate about Nicholas' book is how she explains how the sometimes seemingly disparate parts actually work together to form the complicated person that is you. I've never really identified with my Sun in Aries, for instance, because I don't see myself as being impulsive, fiercely competitive, sporty, lusty, or even overly stubborn, all traits that are commonly assigned the Ram. But Nicholas emphasizes the significance of the sun's placement, not just in a sign, but in a house and in aspect with other planets. She explains that sign is "how you shine," house is "the area of life in which you need to shine," and the planets that aspect the sun determine "who is influencing your ability to shine." So I shine by being action oriented, determined, and courageous (Aries) in partnerships/relationships (7th house), which is true. And the sun's aspects help me to see where some of my gifts and challenges are.
Another element of the book that folks might appreciate is the reflection questions sections that weave through the chapters. These help the reader to further apply the concepts to their personal experiences.
121 First Dates: How to Succeed at Online Dating, Fall in Love, and Live Happily Ever After (Really!). Wendy Newman. (Atria Books/Beyond Words, 2016.)
"I wasn't a dater. I was a serial monogamist...I did everything I could
do to attract them right into a committed relationship—good, bad,
inappropriate, or well-matched relationships alike. But there was
never a clear evaluation to see if we'd make compatible long-term
partners. I was interested in winning the prize and then evaluating
the prize once I'd won it to see if I wanted to keep it,
fix it, change it, or get rid of it."
"I wasn't a dater. I was a serial monogamist...I did everything I could
do to attract them right into a committed relationship—good, bad,
inappropriate, or well-matched relationships alike. But there was
never a clear evaluation to see if we'd make compatible long-term
partners. I was interested in winning the prize and then evaluating
the prize once I'd won it to see if I wanted to keep it,
fix it, change it, or get rid of it."
I didn't go out looking for this book, but it found me while I was browsing one of my library e-book apps, and after reading the sample, I put the book on hold, and as soon as it was in, I found myself devouring it. Sure, it's by a white, middle-aged, curvy, hetero, cis woman who is financially comfortable and living an urban life, but Wendy Newman acknowledges this and assures readers that much of what she has learned through dating and research can be applied to her diverse readers. It says something that, as a 35-year-old white gay cis woman of zero curves with a savings account and a part time job but no actual profession living in her mom's basement in a rural suburban small town where the dating pool is severely limited, I still find the book useful.
What I appreciate most, aside from the author's first date stories, which she uses effectively to illustrate her advice, are the author's scripts. She's like the dating role model I never had and could have benefitted from the entirety of my dating life. She knows how to set boundaries politely and with the right touch, and when. She knows the importance of self care and of knowing yourself. She offers step by step instructions on how to prepare to date, as well as tips for making an online profile shine.
The book is worth reading for the "unicorn list" revision process alone, in which Newman guides the reader into shaving down an impossibly long list of needs and wants into a concise contract of must haves and must-not-haves. "Would I rather be alone than with someone who isn't ____?" is a paramount question to ask of each item during the revision process.
Another point the author beats into readers is the importance of spending time together, face to face. The relationship does not start online or on the phone or in emails. She says it's not real until you're physically in the same space and that this step--to meet each other in real life--should be taken as soon as possible. As someone who has repeatedly made the mistake of waiting to meet a date, hoping to learn more about them first, I am wholeheartedly on board with Newman's advice. She's right. Why waste time? You can learn so much in the first five minutes of a face to face meeting, and what you learn/feel/sense/experience there can impact the course of the (potential) relationship more than anything learned any other way.
Jane: A Murder. Maggie Nelson. (Soft Skull Press, 2005.)
What I appreciate most, aside from the author's first date stories, which she uses effectively to illustrate her advice, are the author's scripts. She's like the dating role model I never had and could have benefitted from the entirety of my dating life. She knows how to set boundaries politely and with the right touch, and when. She knows the importance of self care and of knowing yourself. She offers step by step instructions on how to prepare to date, as well as tips for making an online profile shine.
The book is worth reading for the "unicorn list" revision process alone, in which Newman guides the reader into shaving down an impossibly long list of needs and wants into a concise contract of must haves and must-not-haves. "Would I rather be alone than with someone who isn't ____?" is a paramount question to ask of each item during the revision process.
Another point the author beats into readers is the importance of spending time together, face to face. The relationship does not start online or on the phone or in emails. She says it's not real until you're physically in the same space and that this step--to meet each other in real life--should be taken as soon as possible. As someone who has repeatedly made the mistake of waiting to meet a date, hoping to learn more about them first, I am wholeheartedly on board with Newman's advice. She's right. Why waste time? You can learn so much in the first five minutes of a face to face meeting, and what you learn/feel/sense/experience there can impact the course of the (potential) relationship more than anything learned any other way.
Jane: A Murder. Maggie Nelson. (Soft Skull Press, 2005.)
"the imaginary is what tends/
to become real, and when it does//
there's no paint black enough/
to cover it up."
"the imaginary is what tends/
to become real, and when it does//
there's no paint black enough/
to cover it up."
A few writing friends were discussing Maggie Nelson the other day, and though I'd heard her name for years, I hadn't read any of her writing so could not contribute to the discussion. They both seemed excited to read The Red Parts, which they described as the sequel to Jane: A Murder. So I decided to start with Jane, which reminded me almost immediately, in its form at least, of Michael Ondaajte's collage-novel, Billy the Kid. In this creative nonfiction "epistle," as the author deems it in what might be considered a prologue, Nelson documents the tragic death of her aunt, who was only 23 at the time of her murder.
But what is a death without a life? Nelson brings her aunt to life through Jane's journal entries from the 1960's, when she was a young teen and then a college student, and braids excerpts between dreams, snippets of news articles, letters from Jane's friends, conversations with family, literary quotes, and most notably poems Nelson has written documenting facts as well as imagined truths.
The book is beautifully written, an honest elegy for a family member the author never met but with whom she shares a love of language, among other things. I imagine some readers might find the lack of a clear demarcation between fact and the imagination troubling, but I believe a careful reading clarifies the distinction. Some of what is on the page can only be the result of the author's imagination, which can be deduced by process of elimination. For instance, the story begins with a section called "The Light of the Mind (Four Dreams)," which opens, "She had been shot once in the front and once in the back of the head. She wandered, trying to find someone to remove the slugs from her skull. She was not dead yet, but she feared she was dying." Even if the reader were to have missed the section title, they might successfully navigate the blurred lines. The matter of the gunshot wounds is fact. But the wandering in search of help and the fear of dying? These are possibilities. How can anyone know if Jane had time to seek help? If she was still alive after the first gunshot? Or—even—before it? How can anyone say she feared she was dying—that she had time for that sensation? And all of this becomes remarkably more evident once the facts of Jane's disappearance and her body's discovery are known, later in the book.
Perhaps I appreciate this blurry clarity because I don't believe that a person's life—their experiences, the meaning of their days—is entirely their own. How are Jane's niece's imaginings of her aunt's final minutes any less a part of Jane's life—as Maggie Nelson knows it—than the details that can be classified as fact? Especially when it's clear enough that Jane's life and death are being translated, not strictly transcribed? Aren't all our lives interpretations? We do the best we can to know another person, and so much of that knowing is based on our imaginings, though we may not like to admit it.
Why did Nelson choose to dive into her aunt's life, though she had never met her? She remarks at one point in the book that she and her sister wondered what kind of aunt Jane would have been. So, perhaps: It is hard to turn your back on what is missing; absence makes itself known and whispers in its black void voice of what was, what might have been; the universe abhors a vacuum, and so we do our best to fill it in.
A few writing friends were discussing Maggie Nelson the other day, and though I'd heard her name for years, I hadn't read any of her writing so could not contribute to the discussion. They both seemed excited to read The Red Parts, which they described as the sequel to Jane: A Murder. So I decided to start with Jane, which reminded me almost immediately, in its form at least, of Michael Ondaajte's collage-novel, Billy the Kid. In this creative nonfiction "epistle," as the author deems it in what might be considered a prologue, Nelson documents the tragic death of her aunt, who was only 23 at the time of her murder.
But what is a death without a life? Nelson brings her aunt to life through Jane's journal entries from the 1960's, when she was a young teen and then a college student, and braids excerpts between dreams, snippets of news articles, letters from Jane's friends, conversations with family, literary quotes, and most notably poems Nelson has written documenting facts as well as imagined truths.
The book is beautifully written, an honest elegy for a family member the author never met but with whom she shares a love of language, among other things. I imagine some readers might find the lack of a clear demarcation between fact and the imagination troubling, but I believe a careful reading clarifies the distinction. Some of what is on the page can only be the result of the author's imagination, which can be deduced by process of elimination. For instance, the story begins with a section called "The Light of the Mind (Four Dreams)," which opens, "She had been shot once in the front and once in the back of the head. She wandered, trying to find someone to remove the slugs from her skull. She was not dead yet, but she feared she was dying." Even if the reader were to have missed the section title, they might successfully navigate the blurred lines. The matter of the gunshot wounds is fact. But the wandering in search of help and the fear of dying? These are possibilities. How can anyone know if Jane had time to seek help? If she was still alive after the first gunshot? Or—even—before it? How can anyone say she feared she was dying—that she had time for that sensation? And all of this becomes remarkably more evident once the facts of Jane's disappearance and her body's discovery are known, later in the book.
Perhaps I appreciate this blurry clarity because I don't believe that a person's life—their experiences, the meaning of their days—is entirely their own. How are Jane's niece's imaginings of her aunt's final minutes any less a part of Jane's life—as Maggie Nelson knows it—than the details that can be classified as fact? Especially when it's clear enough that Jane's life and death are being translated, not strictly transcribed? Aren't all our lives interpretations? We do the best we can to know another person, and so much of that knowing is based on our imaginings, though we may not like to admit it.
Why did Nelson choose to dive into her aunt's life, though she had never met her? She remarks at one point in the book that she and her sister wondered what kind of aunt Jane would have been. So, perhaps: It is hard to turn your back on what is missing; absence makes itself known and whispers in its black void voice of what was, what might have been; the universe abhors a vacuum, and so we do our best to fill it in.
January
Autobiography of a Face. Lucy Grealy. (First Mariner Books, 2016. ©1994.)
"This singularity of meaning—I was my face, I was ugliness—
though sometimes unbearable, also offered a possible point
of escape. It became the launching pad from which to lift off,
the one immediately recognizable place to point to when asked
what was wrong with my life. Everything led to it, everything
receded from it—my face as personal vanishing point."
In this memoir, Lucy Grealy documents how childhood cancer and the consequent face-changing surgery that removed a portion of her jaw and left her feeling like an ugly outcast for, if not the rest of her life, a large part of it, impacted her understanding of herself and her experiences on this planet. Her writing is filled with poignant insights about the self, beauty, truth, pain, freedom, and relationships.
I came to read this book because of something Leslie Jamison wrote about it in her essay collection, The Empathy Exams. Jamison wrote about how difficult it was for Grealy to escape the wound that had become her face, how it seemed to define her whole existence, how, try as she might, she could not seem to heal from it. If I read it correctly, ultimately, Jamison decided the book itself was a form of healing or closure. When I read Jamison's book, I didn't realize that Grealy was dead, that she had, in fact, died of a heroin overdose at the age of 39, twelve years before the publication of The Empathy Exams, and only eight years after the publication of Autobiography of a Face. Knowing this, I would argue that Grealy did not escape her wound—but she made all she could from it.
Grealy's fundamental conflicts, while seemingly specific to her situation, are in fact universal. Who would she be with a different face? is a question she begrudgingly grapples with, while at times she meanders near the question of how her face has informed who she is. At one point towards the end of the book, she trembles close to the precipice of this penultimate question: What if a different face couldn't save her? She writes, "As a child I had expected my liberation to come from getting a new face to put on, but now I saw it came from shedding something, shedding my image." What if her face wasn't a problem? What if she no longer had to run from it? How would she live her life then? Who would she be? In other words, how much has she chosen to let her face define her life?
Grealy's epiphany—that shedding image, or ego, or preconceived notions of the self, our stories, may be the path to peace and true freedom—is one for us all.
"This singularity of meaning—I was my face, I was ugliness—
though sometimes unbearable, also offered a possible point
of escape. It became the launching pad from which to lift off,
the one immediately recognizable place to point to when asked
what was wrong with my life. Everything led to it, everything
receded from it—my face as personal vanishing point."
In this memoir, Lucy Grealy documents how childhood cancer and the consequent face-changing surgery that removed a portion of her jaw and left her feeling like an ugly outcast for, if not the rest of her life, a large part of it, impacted her understanding of herself and her experiences on this planet. Her writing is filled with poignant insights about the self, beauty, truth, pain, freedom, and relationships.
I came to read this book because of something Leslie Jamison wrote about it in her essay collection, The Empathy Exams. Jamison wrote about how difficult it was for Grealy to escape the wound that had become her face, how it seemed to define her whole existence, how, try as she might, she could not seem to heal from it. If I read it correctly, ultimately, Jamison decided the book itself was a form of healing or closure. When I read Jamison's book, I didn't realize that Grealy was dead, that she had, in fact, died of a heroin overdose at the age of 39, twelve years before the publication of The Empathy Exams, and only eight years after the publication of Autobiography of a Face. Knowing this, I would argue that Grealy did not escape her wound—but she made all she could from it.
Grealy's fundamental conflicts, while seemingly specific to her situation, are in fact universal. Who would she be with a different face? is a question she begrudgingly grapples with, while at times she meanders near the question of how her face has informed who she is. At one point towards the end of the book, she trembles close to the precipice of this penultimate question: What if a different face couldn't save her? She writes, "As a child I had expected my liberation to come from getting a new face to put on, but now I saw it came from shedding something, shedding my image." What if her face wasn't a problem? What if she no longer had to run from it? How would she live her life then? Who would she be? In other words, how much has she chosen to let her face define her life?
Grealy's epiphany—that shedding image, or ego, or preconceived notions of the self, our stories, may be the path to peace and true freedom—is one for us all.
Felon. Reginald Dwayne Betts. (W.W. Norton & Company, 2019.)
"& then/
we stopped, which is to say we realized: the thing you want/
can break you. We all knew that in time our legs would shake,/
that our bodies would betray us & admit that the heart,/
though not useless, lacks the thing needed for some miracles."
- Mural for the Heart
Betts slips poetry through the bars of his past, through the cell walls of the incarcerated, stories of shame, courage, longing, love, justice and injustice. One of the primary themes throughout the book is redaction. Betts actually blacks out portions of various legal documents filed to challenge the incarceration of people who could not afford to pay bail, so that only certain words are revealed. His Michelangelo-esque approach leaves readers holding hard, simple truths normally buried under biased laws and deceptive jargon that supposedly uphold justice. In turn, the reader wonders how justice itself is redacted, how humans relegated to cages are redacted, how social and political systems redact freedom, dignity, and humanity on the basis of race or class.
Perhaps what strikes me most is the author's willingness to be truly vulnerable, not only in his exploration of the experiences that led him to jail, his time there, and his reentry, but in terms of the minutia of the everyday. My favorite poem from the book, "Mural for the Heart," quoted in part above, details the story of a broken down truck and strangers coming together to push it before having to ultimately surrender to the fact that they could not, despite their desire, move it. "Have you seen/ a man push his body against a thing as if love alone/ would move it?" Betts writes, a metaphor for our deepest hopes and longings.
He explores his masculinity and fears around being seen as anything less than a man. In "Behind Yellow Tape," he writes, "All the stories I keep to myself tell how/ violence broke & made me, turned me into a man." Upon observing a gay inmate, in "Temptation of the Rope": "One day I watched him, full of fear for/ my own fragility & wondered how he dared// own so much of himself, openly."
In "Losing Her," he recounts a drunken night in which the woman with whom he was in a relationship locks him out: "I had lied/ to her for more days than Jesus spent in the wilderness." In "If Absence Was the Source of Silence," he touches on women's fear of men, on all the horrible things men have done to women, on how he will tell his sons "about what their hands might do, in long/ conversations about what the hands/ of men do. Their hands, my own." Ultimately, it's refreshing to read a book by a man who will own his part in the violence of the patriarchy, even as he shows his readers how desperately he'd like to be free of its machinations.
In "House of Unending," Betts pokes into the various spaces of the big house and the world outside it, revealing that there is no real world outside of prison, once you've entered that jungle of cages:
Did a stretch in prison to be released to a cell.
Returned to a freedom penned by Orwell.
My noon temptation is now the Metro's third rail.
How succinctly yet undramatically he condemns the prison system--a weighty marvel. These three lines speak even to those of us who have never been incarcerated because we are all locked up in some way. We live within the House of Unending injustice, systems that tip in favor of the privileged few and seemingly lean forever away from the rest of the masses. In "Ballad of the Groundhog," Betts puts a new spin on this rat-race, hamster-in-a-wheel life with a groundhog's demise at the fence of the prison complex. He remarks, "A groundhog, rabid animal, any human/ entangled in razor wire, wants// to be more." Indeed, we do.
___________________________________________________________
Note: This log only includes books, not all of the wonderful literary magazines I like to read online and in print.
"& then/
we stopped, which is to say we realized: the thing you want/
can break you. We all knew that in time our legs would shake,/
that our bodies would betray us & admit that the heart,/
though not useless, lacks the thing needed for some miracles."
- Mural for the Heart
Betts slips poetry through the bars of his past, through the cell walls of the incarcerated, stories of shame, courage, longing, love, justice and injustice. One of the primary themes throughout the book is redaction. Betts actually blacks out portions of various legal documents filed to challenge the incarceration of people who could not afford to pay bail, so that only certain words are revealed. His Michelangelo-esque approach leaves readers holding hard, simple truths normally buried under biased laws and deceptive jargon that supposedly uphold justice. In turn, the reader wonders how justice itself is redacted, how humans relegated to cages are redacted, how social and political systems redact freedom, dignity, and humanity on the basis of race or class.
Perhaps what strikes me most is the author's willingness to be truly vulnerable, not only in his exploration of the experiences that led him to jail, his time there, and his reentry, but in terms of the minutia of the everyday. My favorite poem from the book, "Mural for the Heart," quoted in part above, details the story of a broken down truck and strangers coming together to push it before having to ultimately surrender to the fact that they could not, despite their desire, move it. "Have you seen/ a man push his body against a thing as if love alone/ would move it?" Betts writes, a metaphor for our deepest hopes and longings.
He explores his masculinity and fears around being seen as anything less than a man. In "Behind Yellow Tape," he writes, "All the stories I keep to myself tell how/ violence broke & made me, turned me into a man." Upon observing a gay inmate, in "Temptation of the Rope": "One day I watched him, full of fear for/ my own fragility & wondered how he dared// own so much of himself, openly."
In "Losing Her," he recounts a drunken night in which the woman with whom he was in a relationship locks him out: "I had lied/ to her for more days than Jesus spent in the wilderness." In "If Absence Was the Source of Silence," he touches on women's fear of men, on all the horrible things men have done to women, on how he will tell his sons "about what their hands might do, in long/ conversations about what the hands/ of men do. Their hands, my own." Ultimately, it's refreshing to read a book by a man who will own his part in the violence of the patriarchy, even as he shows his readers how desperately he'd like to be free of its machinations.
In "House of Unending," Betts pokes into the various spaces of the big house and the world outside it, revealing that there is no real world outside of prison, once you've entered that jungle of cages:
Did a stretch in prison to be released to a cell.
Returned to a freedom penned by Orwell.
My noon temptation is now the Metro's third rail.
How succinctly yet undramatically he condemns the prison system--a weighty marvel. These three lines speak even to those of us who have never been incarcerated because we are all locked up in some way. We live within the House of Unending injustice, systems that tip in favor of the privileged few and seemingly lean forever away from the rest of the masses. In "Ballad of the Groundhog," Betts puts a new spin on this rat-race, hamster-in-a-wheel life with a groundhog's demise at the fence of the prison complex. He remarks, "A groundhog, rabid animal, any human/ entangled in razor wire, wants// to be more." Indeed, we do.
___________________________________________________________
Note: This log only includes books, not all of the wonderful literary magazines I like to read online and in print.
