If I knew the journey I’d be on once I opened the copy of Bonnie Garmus’s Lessons in Chemistry that my mom sent to me, I would have started reading it sooner. What I didn’t foresee is how Elizabeth Zott’s forceful way of being herself would lead me to the creative community of Maggie Doherty’s The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s, which evolved naturally into reading Kimberly Garrett Brown’s Cora’s Kitchen, a book by someone I love. I didn’t know how much I’d learn about the feminist struggle or the reminders I’d find about what it takes to create and protect a creative life. It’s been an excellent journey and I’d love to share with you the highlights.
Elizabeth Zott and the Force of Will
The hero of Lessons in Chemistry, Elizabeth Zott, is brilliant, accomplished, and under-recognized chemist in early 1960s America. While she has a deep understanding of chemistry, she is seemingly blind to a society that is trying to limit her from all angles—even though she brutally experiences those limitations over and over. I loved her hardheadedness (maybe my mom was trying to tell me something?) and the book was an all-too-familiar reminder of how many of the feminist (pronounced “women are people too, equally”) struggles of then still occur now. The story is engaging but this was not my favorite of these three books, I think in a lot of ways because while Zott stumbled her way to a better life by speaking to women’s intellect, marrying chemistry and cooking, and there were some happy triumphs, Garmus couldn’t rewrite the realities of society as a whole—sexist realities I’m still impatient to see resolved.
Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin, Tillie Olsen and the Creative Life
The Equivalents was the perfect followup to Lessons in Chemistry because it’s a nonfictional account of women’s experiences during the same era. For example, I learned by reading this book that (the fictional) Zott filled much the same role as Betty Friedan when she published The Feminine Mystique, prompting women to see that the oppression they felt was part of a larger pattern. But I also read this book for the creative community—something that grew here from something called the Radcliffe Institute, an entity that was created for extraordinary women to take time away from their household duties and get back to the intellectual and artistic pursuits they may have abandoned. The spine of this narrative is the (pre-existing) friendship between Sexton and Kumin, two poets, mothers, and wives and how they navigated their complicated friendship while building a sustaining creative community with each other and others at Radcliffe.
Of particular interest to me about this book was the role of Tillie Olsen, a working class writer who tested the limits of what the Radcliffe Institute could do. Because she was a main source of income for her family (which had no generational wealth) and lived on another coast, she wasn’t really what the Institute was set up to support. But her friends helped her find her way in and she advocated for writers like her from the inside. I’m thinking a lot right now about the ways class can be a barrier to a creative career and it was helpful to me to see the ways Olsen challenged that (and the ways she couldn’t). Along with reinvigorating her own career (that had fallen prey to the need to feed herself and her family), she was especially interested in championing the work of women of color, another group that was not necessarily at the top of mind for the Institute. I also loved reading about how Olsen’s own marriage was more equal, with two creatives trying to support each other while getting by (an experience that mirrors my own).
There was something about the way the women’s struggles were positioned in The Equivalents that was easier for me to exist with. I think part of this is that I could see particular progress in each of their real lives and think about how that might be applied to now. Halfway through this book I remembered that I’d once dreamed of setting up a creative colony or residency of sorts and it’s all I can think of since. I don’t have the funds but I have the passion and I know what even a week away at a residency like Centrum (deadline for application on Tuesday!) can do for a creative person, particularly one with family and work responsibilities.
Cora James and the Complexities of Patronage
Because women of color were really the ones with the least access to something like the Radcliffe Institute, I reached for Cora’s Kitchen next. I own this book because I went to school with the author and because we’ve kept up a friendship (although often too distant) ever since. I remember Kim describing the general idea of this book to me at a bar in D.C. during AWP in 2011 as I wept over my grandmother’s death that morning and Kim continued to pour me amazing wine. Although I saw her again at AWP in Seattle this year, I’ve had her book on my shelf for much longer than that and it was a joy to finally have the right occasion to open it.
Cora James is a Black mother and wife in Harlem in 1928. She works at a library and has an epistolary relationship with Langston Hughes, but she doesn’t really have time to fulfill her own creative dreams. Then she takes over her cousin’s job for a bit of time (because her cousin was beaten terribly by her husband) so her cousin won’t lose her job. What Cora finds during this time as a cook in a white household changes her life. The work is more menial but less constant and she is suddenly free to write for part of the day. The racial politics of the household are complicated and Cora makes an unexpected friend. Eventually Cora even finds a patron, someone who has the power to lift the burdens of running a family and a household (a burden her musician husband is not interested in sharing). The Awakening plays an important role in this book as Cora is also reflecting on literary models of women freeing themselves.
I won’t tell you more about what happens in the book because it’s beautifully complex and I’d spoil it by trying to reduce it. What I will say is there are moments I was afraid some of Cora’s relationships would be a crutch or that she’d fall into clichés, but Brown deftly navigates all of this, giving Cora the power and intelligence to create a life less ordinary for herself, despite the limitations of racism, sexism, and class.
Three Good Books, One Big Message
I guess I’m trying to work something out for myself. While I’m able to sign my own mortgage or get a credit card that’s not in my husband’s name, I still encounter sexism every day. While I have a very supportive partner with whom I can balance a family and the idea of creative lives for both of us, there’s never enough time or money to really dig into what we could be. While I’ve been grateful for the conversations about race that were pushed to the forefront during the pandemic, I’m devastated about how far we haven’t come there either. Wheel of progress long, etc. I am impatient for better. For women, for creatives, for people of color, and most of all for those of us who fall into more than one of those categories. I’m grateful to Brown, Doherty, and Garmus for reminding me I am not alone in my impatience and that I need to find ways to do more for myself and for others, when I can.
What are you doing to sustain a creative life? How do you keep your friends close? How do you pay for it? How are you helping others? Please inspire me in the comments.
Confession time. I am so indoctrinated into the Western way of storytelling with its Aristotelian plot arc that I forget I’m always looking for the next conflict and how that will get resolved. So when a book comes up that makes me fundamentally rethink that form AND it’s superbly written… well, let’s just say that reading The Night Parade: A Speculative Memoir by Jami Nakamura Lin was a deeply pleasurable education. To say that the memoir envelops stories about bipolar disorder, childbearing, and losing a parent to cancer feels reductive, because the book is so much more expansive than any other memoir I’ve read on any of these subjects. It’s a beautiful book that’s been upending my thinking ever since I first opened it last weekend.
Before I get into this excellent book, I want to share with you why the title makes me giggle happily. When my son was in preschool, he came home with the words “my body” to express his personhood. If he didn’t want to be touched or touched in a certain way, “my body” implied his ownership of himself. If he wanted to show off, he could say “my body” and smile and I’d smile right back at this most beautiful creature. My husband and I have carried the phrase forward as a loving goof about that second use case but it also serves as a reminder to us that he does own that little body. And we own ours, even if we never had the same language to express it. We’re in awe of that kid and in awe of this age of talking more clearly about our bodies in the world.
The Poetics of Wrongness by Rachel Zucker was referenced over and over at AWP this year, so I ordered it and added to the to-read pile in the middle of my office floor. But something called to me about this book so I lifted it from that messy stack of somedays just after finishing My Body. The title essay is incredibly good—another instance of layered, nuanced thought that is worth reading and reading and reading. But what I loved most about this book was reading”Why She Could Not Write a Lecture on the Poetics of Motherhood,” especially since I read it in the wee hours of Mother’s Day as I was hoping my son would not wake up quite yet.
This interrupted, all-over-the-place essay is of course very artfully structured to achieve this feeling, and there are nuggets of information in it about specific poets and their experiences as mothers. But most of all this piece is incredibly effective. At the end I felt seen and also wondered how mothers (or involved parents of any gender) manage to create anything at all for about two decades in the middle of their “most productive” years. I read whole sections of it to my husband that morning because he’s also an artist serving as a caregiver (and felt myself growing increasingly manic as the work piled up). The essay made me think about the choices we’re making and the choices that are being made for us. It made me remember that part of the reason I felt like I could write at all during my cherished Saturday morning writing time this weekend was because I had spent many hours during the week reading and lying in the grass staring up at the chestnut leaves expanding over my head.
Fantasy has never been my go-to genre. While I deeply respect the massive creativity that goes into building a strong fantasy world, my own brain doesn’t work that way and I often find fantastic novels hard to engage with—to surrender to. So when I say that I loved Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse with my whole heart, I mean this book leapt over all my fences, grabbed me by the hand, and dragged me (wonderfully) into a richly-imagined world I could not get enough of.
I’m slow to adopt new ideas so when I started reading about autofiction (telling a story that is close to your real life using fictionalized details) I mashed it together with metafiction in my head and moved on because it just didn’t feel like where my creative energy was at. But reading Hunger Heart definitely opened my eyes to what autofiction can do. Fastrup uses a “fictional” character to delve into a period of her life when she was in and out of mental institutions with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. The book is interesting (not just because the Danish health system is so much more humane than the American one) and well written and I can see how allowing herself to tell what is essentially a memoir in a fictional way really freed her as a storyteller. She always had the option, of course, of telling the true details about her life in her book, but autofiction lets her streamline events and change the surrounding characters enough so that the book flows well and so that she’s putting the (interesting and sometimes uncomfortable) spotlight on herself rather than her then boyfriend or kids.
All the blurbs on Vikram Paralkar’s The Afflictions reference Borges because, I think, the story takes place in a library where a librarian is introducing a visitor to a series of tomes on (imagined) afflictions. In truth, though, the book has a lot more in common with Calvino’s 
I’d actually been saving back I Have Some Questions for You because I love Makkai’s work and I wanted to give myself time to really enjoy the book. But we went away to Whidbey Island last week and it was the most compelling read I could take with me (and I ate it all up). This book is what prompted this blog post, honestly, because there was a lot I learned from this book. Set just before and during the pandemic, the action also includes significant portions of memory as the narrator, Bodie, reflects on the murder of her roommate while they were at boarding school in the 1990s. Bodie is revisiting that school as a teacher and reconsidering what may have actually happened. 
I randomly picked The Swimmers from my to-read pile after I Have Some Questions for You because I’ve loved Otsuka’s other books. What I did not know was that she was working directly with something I’ve been experimenting with for this book (despite great fear)—the choral voice. The Swimmers explores the collective experience of a group of swimmers at a public pool from a “we” point of view.