In the days leading up to Mother’s Day I treated myself to extra reading time, time I spent with two books that helped me think more deeply about the female experience: My Body by Emily Ratajkowski and The Poetics of Wrongness by Rachel Zucker. While I picked them up in an effort to shorten my (usually less beloved) non-fiction to-read pile, reading these two books in sequence enriched my experience of both and my experience of Mother’s Day, my manuscript, and the ways I want to move in the world going forward.

My Body by Emily Ratajkowski

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.

Ratajkowski thoughtfully expresses the same duality of self containment and observed self in the essays in My Body. A model and actor who spent significant parts of her early career as an Instagram influencer, Ratajkowski is very aware of beauty—what it means to be beautiful as well as what it means to use that beauty as currency. The essays explore everything from parental expectations to sexual assault to living an Instagrammable life on someone else’s dime.

What I liked most about this book, though, is how layered and nuanced Ratajkowski’s writing is. She’s beautiful and aware of (and honest about) the best and worst of that. She’s empowered in her body and also (unfortunately) experiences the limits of that power in a patriarchal society. She’s doing her best to be strong in the world and also one (at times very young) girl with no one looking out for her.

I’m trying to pick a favorite essay, but I can’t. I just know that I’ll be returning to this book again and again as I write about girls who are trying to find their ways in the world even when society feels like it’s working against them.

The Poetics of Wrongness by Rachel Zucker

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.

“It was thirteen days before she was supposed to deliver a lecture called ‘The Poetics of Motherhood’ at the Portland Literary Arts Center, and she had not written it. She had written parts of it in her head and she had written notes on small pieces of paper that she had misplaced somewhere in the apartment. She was even teaching a class in which she had delivered four mini-lectures in the first four weeks of the semester in preparation to write this lecture, but she had not written the lecture.” – The Poetics of Wrongness by Rachel Zucker

The essay goes on to detail the millions of things Zucker is doing instead of writing the intended lecture, all while trying to write the lecture. She invites a former student over to help her write the lecture and instead they write a list of all the things she needs to do before writing the lecture. She realizes she needs to triage but her son needs her because he’s trying to do too much so she takes the time to teach him about triage and helps him get through part of his list. She consults writers she would like to lecture about and she tries to get away to think but a myriad of life experiences keep intervening. What never manages to prioritize in the triage is writing the lecture. Which is to say that reading this essay is like being a mother. Progress is being made all the time, but not always toward what you wanted to finish. Needs arise all the time, and you have to figure out how to keep everyone alive. Help is available but the pile is still too big. And everything is interruptible. ALL THE TIME.

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.

I don’t have a point except that I want to thrust this essay into the hands of all the creative caregivers I know and say “you’re doing great. If you had time to write it all down you might realize just how much you really are accomplishing. Even if none of it is what you set out to do.”

There are many different ways to avoid writing, even (sometimes especially) when the project is hot and there is nothing standing between you and the few luscious hours you could spend working on your book. I like to tell myself that I procrastinate in these times because I’m trying to stoke that fire even higher—make the writing irresistible so I can really dig in. The likelihood, though, is that I’m spending hours reading or on Twitter because I’m anxious that whoever I am on that day won’t live up to the work I need to do. Which is why I was really pleased to discover that the past few books I’ve read have actually been feeding my work—that even while I thought I was reading for pleasure there was some part of my brain that was actually preparing to get back down to work. Let me tell you about what I learned from Hunger Heart by Karen Fastrup, The Afflictions by Vikram Paralkar, I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai, and The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka and how I plan to apply these lessons to my current work in progress.

The Space of Autofiction in Hunger Heart

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.

In my own book, Naked Driving to the Witches’ Graveyard, I’m currently writing about what it was like to be a teenager in the town I grew up in. None of the characters are me but they aren’t not me either, and I’ve been wondering as I write just how fictional I have to get with the whole thing. There are many decisions to be made still, but I appreciated seeing this example of how well autofiction allowed Hunger Heart to get to the heart of the story even if the truth was a little fuzzy.

The Structure of The Afflictions

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 Invisible Cities in the way it anchors back to that conversation with the librarian at intervals while exploring lists of these afflictions in between as Invisible Cities returns again and again to the conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. This got me thinking about narrative structure because no one has upended my expectations about structure quite as much as Calvino.

I’ve wrestled with the structure for Naked Driving to the Witches’ Graveyard a lot (sometimes drawing narrative maps as yet another procrastination tool—though a productive one). After a year and a half of writing and 32,000 words, the flow of the first section (of three) is pretty solid as one chapter explores the devolution of relationships over a year and then individual stories start to emerge. I have no idea how sections two and three will be structured, but I’m sure they’ll tell me eventually. It’s a very different book than Paralkar’s, but I’m grateful to him for reminding me that my structural obsession is a valid one.

Memory and Nostalgia in I Have Some Questions for You

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.

Naked Driving to the Witches’ Graveyard is also set in the 1990s, a time that a lot of women my age are reconsidering in the wake of the #MeToo movement. At first Makkai’s references to that time were so spot-on that I got the “does my book even matter” blues. Her references continued to be spot-on but my anxious brain was soon immersed enough in the story that my creative brain could remember that there’s room for all kinds of books and that while I might miss this wave of 1990s nostalgia in the publishing world, that doesn’t mean my book won’t be relevant—whenever I’ve actually taken the time to finish it. There are many other interesting things in how Makkai handles the memories and misconceptions her characters carry that warrant a read of your own. My own approach (for the moment) is to have a gently retrospective voice with all of the action set in the past which allows me to retroactively re-frame some of the thinking even while the characters experience things as they were. Check out this video below for a little insight into what my generation is trying to process around #MeToo.

.@BrookeShields talks to Drew about the "Me Too" movement and being sexualized in Hollywood at a young age.

Watch #PrettyBaby: Brooke Shields now on @hulu. pic.twitter.com/F2Y9scpEnM

— The Drew Barrymore Show (@DrewBarrymoreTV) April 11, 2023

A Chorus of The Swimmers

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.

“Most days, at the pool, we are able to leave our troubles on land behind. Failed painters become elegant brushstrokers. Untenured professors slice, sharklike, through the water, with breathtaking speed. The newly divorced HR manager grabs a faded red Styrofoam board and kicks with impunity.” – The Swimmers, Julie Otsuka

I loved the specificity here and the way Otsuka overlaps multiple individuals in this chorus without losing the particularities of each. The characters recur and we get to know them, somewhat, as individuals, though what is most important (from what I have read so far) is this shared experience.

Makkai did something similar in I Have Some Questions for You where she used the specific details of crimes against women to create an experience of the multiplicity as one greater event.

“It doesn’t matter which story.

Let’s say it was the one where the young actresses said yes to a pool party and didn’t know.

Or no, let’s say it was the one where the rugby team covered up for the girl’s death and the school covered for the rugby team.

Actually it was the one where the therapist spent years grooming her. It was the one where the senator, then a promising teenager, shoved his dick in the girl’s face. She was also a promising teenager. It was the one where the billionaire pushed the woman into the phone booth, but no one believed her.” – Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions for You

This has the effect of reinforcing the terrible volume and banality that we’ve allowed these events to accrue. This agglomeration is an effect I am working with in my own book, Naked Driving to the Witches’ Graveyard, albeit for different reasons.

“We’ve traveled far enough now, in distance (for those of us who could leave) and time (for all of us) that the memories of who we were and why are starting to fade from everything but our yearbooks, gathered dusty in shelves and dank basements. Red, black, and white covers full of pages of mostly black and white photos. All of these rural-beautiful faces, posed gauzy (those who could afford it) in the outfits they loved best. Each one a mother’s child longing to be loved, remembered. But that one raped our friend and that one ran someone over, that one was shot in the face by drug dealers out of state, that one shot by a man on her doorstep because she was nice to him. That one made it to Broadway and that one is a mom who never left town. That one joined the CIA, allegedly. One sold pharmaceuticals and another played pro ball. Astrophysicists, exchange students, another whose weird face forever condemned him to outsider. The special ed kids we never saw except in a hospital hallway thirty years later when our parents were dying. Missing from the “we made it together” photo of those who attended all twelve years was the kid who died of cancer, the one hounded out of school for being gay, the girl killed by a moose. Those who stayed versus those who left, a decision made for us based on the size of our parents’ worlds. Some came to the city. Some slipped into the hills, only to be seen again at their infant’s funeral. So many now untraceable, nicknames lost to obituaries of whole families who died young, despite their Scandinavian heritage. Most of these faces are lost to memory. All of us repeating archetypes who thought ourselves individual.” – Isla McKetta, Naked Driving to the Witches’ Graveyard

What are you reading now? How is it feeding your writing? Tell me everything in the comments below.

I firmly believe that art and artists have the power to save us—the power to see the future and contextualize the now in ways that help us to survive and even to live our best lives. Nikki Kallio is definitely blessed with this insight and reading her new book Finding the Bones shook something loose for me in the very best of ways. This collection of stories and a novella is both wildly creative and also carefully attuned to the dangers of now. It’s also downright spooky at times, in the best of ways.

Examining Our Not-So Distant Future

The first story of the collection, “Geography Lesson,” starts with a father looking for his daughter. It seems like something that could happen in any time, but Kallio includes hints like “at least they hadn’t left their human instincts behind,” to signal there is definitely more happening here. There is and what proceeds is a beautifully written exchange between that father and his daughter that could happen anywhere but gently reveals that they are in fact refugees from planet Earth. Kallio weaves in memories of the father of how he lucked onto this ship and geographic entries from a book the girl, Fiona, is reading that details places on a planet that used to be. If it sounds like sci-fi and cli-fi (climate fiction), it is. It’s also gentle and human and carefully observed. I was hooked on the book after this first story. What I didn’t know was how much the rest of the book was going to upend my expectations.

Playing with Darkness

The second story, “Shadow,” begins, “Patricia saw the bones poking through the snow before the dog did.” The entire story takes place in Patricia’s memories as she decides whether or not to approach those bones. The suspense is delicious as Kallio drops fears into our psyche and also recounts why Patricia, in particular, is afraid of those bones. The story is so masterful that I held my body tense as I read it and I was relieved when it ended. Well, relieved but also wanting to go back and read it again to see what I missed and experience the thrill of reading it all over again.

Each story in this collection is different, though bones are a recurring motif, but I guarantee you will never be bored as you traverse the multiple narratives and genres in these pages.

The Now and Later of a Global Catastrophe

The novella in this collection, The Fledgling begins in the midst of a global catastrophe where something is going wrong with the sun. We get glimpses of the horror that the world is descending into as Gin contemplates the demise of a relationship. It is very much not clear what is happening in this first chapter, but it is clear that things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. Chapter two then cuts to 25 years later when Elena, Gin’s daughter, is navigating the aftermath of “Malsol.” Kallio does a fantastic job of imagining what this after life is like and, to be honest, it was comforting to read about people who have survived apocalypse. The structure is similar in this way to Station Eleven, though Kallio’s story is very much her own as she imagines a world where people cannot go outside in sunlight, where many interactions take place online, and where whole swaths of the population have become “in-dwellers.”

You can imagine how this rang true to my own experience now, when my work day consists primarily of Zoom meetings and my only forays outside are to ferry my kiddo to school and back. Reading The Fledgling at this time was actually perfect for me because I’ve been getting ready to shake off my in-dwelling status and Gin’s life in the after is a good model for what I don’t want mine to be. The details, relationships, and implications are all well thought out and well written. It’s a story I hope I relate to less in years to come, but one that gave me the word “in-dwelling” which was a better place to spring into new life from than some of the other adjectives I’ve used to describe the last few years.

If you’ve enjoyed Appleseed, The Parable of the Sower, The Left Hand of Darkness, or California, I highly recommend Finding the Bones. It may not change your life as it did mine, but what if it does?