It’s no secret that I’m in the middle of an era of transformation. My husband and I started thinking about how to make a big change (and what that change might be) in January 2020. We were somewhat waylaid by a global pandemic and then general corporate upheaval. We started talking seriously again about change when I decided I’d had enough of that particular upheaval. But as much as I know what I actually want (a quiet life with my family somewhere with great community where my husband and I can both afford to be artists), I don’t know how to afford that. Which is a long way to say that Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín landed in my lap at a good time.

Village or Opportunity

In Brooklyn, Eilis is an intelligent young woman in post-war Ireland with very few prospects. Jobs are scarce and most of the energy of the young women in her village centers around getting married. Eilis is given the chance to move to Brooklyn where she encounters a whole new booming world. She has a job with the potential to move up, she has an education, there isn’t even (in the beginning) a marriage market to speak of. And there are exciting new goods to be bought for herself and her loved ones back home. All of her waking hours go to working or going to school, to the extent that I wondered how she would have time to build friendships or romantic relationships at all (I really was exhausted at times reading about the hours she kept, but also she didn’t have kids and I forget what that’s like).

It’s an interesting book because Eilis kind of floats through these experiences and even her choices feel more inevitable than chosen. But Tóibín does an excellent job of showing the juxtapositions between the two worlds and I really felt like I was with Eilis in many of her experiences (even the boat, ugh). I suppose the floating feeling mirrors the feeling of being trapped when we don’t see that there are paths we’re choosing between, consciously or not.

Slight spoilers incoming—if you don’t want to know, skip to the next heading. Eilis does manage to find a partner and then she’s called home to Ireland. The village she encounters suddenly shows what she’s been missing. She’s surrounded by community and a quieter life. There are even better job prospects than before. And Eilis has to choose which she wants.

What I See in Our Economy Now

The stock market is swinging high because corporate profits are high (in part) because layoffs are high. Everyone is being asked to do more with less. CEOs are doubling down on unproven technology (AI) because they see the potential for more profits and more cost savings. Those cost savings mean more layoffs.

It’s a squeeze. And it’s coming from all sides trying to get the most almighty dollars for someone, somewhere.

AI is a Bubble

Many AI projects I’ve seen are top-down demands rather than creative applications from the workers who could be working in partnership with the technology (and thus are best equipped to plan for implementation, if only they had the space to have a creative thought on how to do so). Don’t even get me started on the automated systems behind stock market bidding.

Diminishing Returns

Also, the potential wins are finite. The workers losing jobs won’t be in positions to buy the goods or services that keep our economic engine rolling. Nor do the white collar workers in the industries they were conditioned to covet want to suddenly become blue collar workers in completely other states, no matter how many jobs are opened up by the current administration ejecting the workers already doing those jobs. So the goods won’t get made, which is okay if no one can buy the goods. We won’t be able to import them, either, at least not at any price close to what we used to pay.

There is a diminishing return on the choices that are being made right now.

To Each His Own (At Our Peril)

It feels like things used to be different. Not in a hazy “heaven” sort of way, but in the idea that there was some collective responsibility. When a company was struggling financially, there were sometimes conversations about choices workers could make (reduced salary, etc.) to keep the company from having to lay people off. Now my friends tell me stories of highly profitable companies that are laying people off just to make the quarterly earnings report look that much better.

Fear Serves No One (Good)

This all strikes me as a bit desperate and short-sighted. At the same time I see workers who can afford it opting out of this extractive system to either make something of their own or wait and see what happens next.

What happens next is my big question. At some point, companies are going to need their best and brightest back in order to envision the creative possibilities that put them ahead of their competition. There was a glimmer of this in the middle of the pandemic when the gloom of the initial “what will even happen to the world” fears wore off and companies were willing to invest in growth through staffing up. So maybe this climate of desperation turns toward one of opportunity when this new global fear lifts a bit.

A Third Option

Still, I keep thinking there is opportunity to make something better now, not just for me and my family, but for all of us. We just need someone who can see what the next first step toward that is.

My son has a book called There Must Be More Than That! by Shinsuke Yoshitake that’s all about choices. At the end the mom offers the daughter two types of eggs and the girl blows up, “Not just boiled or fried! There are more ways to make an egg than that!” and then lists dozens of other options. I love this book with all my heart because it reminds me how much we narrow our lives by just choosing between what we’ve seen before.

I’m an artist. I’m usually good at looking things from new and unexpected angles. I haven’t cracked this one yet, but if you have ideas of how to build toward something better, I would love to hear them. Together we can make rolled eggs, scrambled eggs, an omelet, a painted egg, shakshuka, or even something no one has ever dreamed before. Even if we choose a boiled egg in the end, isn’t it better to at least imagine the possibilities?

If you want to learn more about either of these books, pick up a copy of Brooklyn or There Must Be More Than That! from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie bookstores in business and I receive a commission.

Is any identity more fraught with social expectation than motherhood? Our culture is as filled with images of gooey angelic perfection as it is with bitch queens who betray their children. My generation has put a special spin on the topic, doubling down on mothers who are aware of this duality and embrace the messy darkness (see Revolutionary Mothering and Nightbitch for a spectrum of how this is handled). There’s a freedom to talk about how hard it is to be a mother that humanizes the idols we’ve created, even if we’re not ready to let our own mothers off the pedestals yet. This week I read two books in the space of 24 hours that dove into this charged topic in ways that stretched and comforted me: Woman No. 17 by Edan Lepucki and It. Goes. So. Fast. by Mary Louise Kelly.

Woman No. 17 and Being the Mess You are Fighting

No one embraces and embodies the complexity better than Edan Lepucki, and Woman No. 17 delves deeper and with more nuance into the mother-child relationship than anything I’ve read in a long time. Motherhood is an obsession for Lepucki. From You’re Not Yet Like Me to California and Mothers Before, everything I’ve read of hers engages deeply with this topic from a wide variety of angles.

In Woman No. 17, Lepucki introduces a range of characters who are struggling with maternal bonds. Lady is a mom of a newly adult son and a toddler, both of whom she adores and both of whom she can’t get away from fast enough. Her own mother is only seen in retrospect, a woman so toxic Lady cut her out of her life except for a brief period of need during which Lady’s mother paid Lady’s lover (and father of her eldest son) to disappear. Lady hires a nanny, S, to care for her youngest while she writes a book that is supposed to be about her eldest son but is instead about her mother. S is a young artist who has decided to pose for the foreseeable future as a character similar to her own alcoholic mother while she explores various angles of motherhood through a myriad of artistic media.

“In those moments, I lost myself, forever and hallelujah, and it was like I was stepping back into the womb, tunneling farther away from that even, to before my mom had anyone but herself to fail.” Edan Lepucki – Woman No. 17

What got me about this book is how well Lepucki portrayed the duality of her characters’ desires. Lady wants to be with the husband she kicked out, while a part of her still craves being the person she was all those years ago with her ex. She’s fiercely protective of the normality of her disabled son and also looking for someone to blame for his disability. S wants to find herself in art by being literally anyone else. The list goes on.

“The thing Lady didn’t get, or the thing she’d forgotten, was that being a child was painful too. She was so wrapped up in losing Seth, in the treacheries of him growing up, that she couldn’t remember what it felt like to be the one on the other side. The burden of that. Sure, Seth had left her womb and never returned, but he was the one who had to do the leaving.” Edan Lepucki – Woman No. 17

What Lepucki captures here the torture of of thinking you should be one thing, living another, and not being sure of what you actually want in any of it. It’s a formula that works for any cultural expectation, but it’s especially charged (at least for me) when it comes to motherhood. For a variety of reasons, I don’t have the relationship I want with my mother (and it’s not an accident I was reading this book on her birthday). For a variety of reasons, I don’t see that changing. I am, however, actively working on my relationship with my son, and books like Woman No. 17 give me something to actively ping my own desires, actions, and expectations against, and I found hints of healing in the dysfunction because motherhood IS messy. Our expectations ARE unreasonable. And parenting IS hard. Sometimes just seeing the truth of that complexity makes it all easier to bear.

Read the book for your own messy parental relationships or just to experience a masterful portrayal of human ambiguity. There’s so much in here I did not describe. You’ll love it.

It. Goes. So. Fast.: The Year of No Do-Overs

I first heard of Mary Louise Kelly’s It. Goes. So. Fast.: The Year of No Do-Overs on the radio, duh, as NPR is often playing in my home and she is the much loved host of All Things Considered. I remember laughing at her anecdote about the school nurse calling her when she was on the tarmac in Iraq, insisting that she come and get her son. I remember also relating to the deep push-pull that inhabited her interview (and this book) between living for your children and living for yourself. That sounds selfish to me when I type it, and maybe that’s part of the problem as I’ve been trying for all these years to figure out how to be myself and a mother and an artist and a wife and sometimes Corporate Barbie. It’s a lot. It’s so much less, even, than Kelly is doing, and I loved having this insight into her world and her thought process.

“It is both a relief and a little disconcerting to realize that your kids are going to turn out the way they turn out, no matter what you do.” – Mary Louise Kelly, It. Goes. So. Fast.

The premise of the book is that she is trying to double down on being a present parent during the last year her eldest son will be at home. Her family seems loving, her children well supported, and still there is this tension of how impossible it is to get everything you want. I laughed with Kelly throughout this book, and I wept with her as well. Mostly I felt held, supported, guided, by a woman of my generation who is a bit farther down the parenting line than I am.

“This pain is the cracking of the walls as the room grows.” – Mary Louise Kelly, It. Goes. So. Fast.

It’s been a summer of wrestling around here where my son has been at home for three, camp-free weeks so far and I’m on a bit of a career hiatus while also doing freelance work that could take up most of my time. Each time I’ve been turned down for a job in the past few months (and in this market, I’ve been lucky to have as many interviews as I have), I’ve known that I’m lucky to get to spend that much extra time with him this summer, perhaps the last that he’ll awake with joy, ready to play Legos and “Let’s Make a Movie” in his bed (where we voice play everything from the ideation through the test screening and release of what’s sure to be Marvel’s next blockbuster). I love it.

And also I’ve stopped doing things that I used to do to take care of myself. Instead of the thirty minutes of yoga and Harper’s I used to allow myself in the middle of the day, I pack in one more round of edits so my mind can be free for play when I leave my office. But of course my mind isn’t free, because I allow myself no transitions and I’m simply tired when I get to him. I know better, but it’s hard to find the balance that lets me get done what I need to get done, take care of myself, and soak up every blessed minute of that sweet boy that I can right now. Kelly’s voice was like a balm to me and I was grateful to have saved this book for this time.

“Which choice would you be able to defend to a child? Which choice will allow your eighty-year-old self to sleep at night?” – Mary Louise Kelly, It. Goes. So. Fast.

I’d love to hear more about the complexities you’re navigating, whether in writing or in life, and what’s keeping you going (books or otherwise). Please leave a comment if you have a story or a book rec you want to share.

If you want to explore the complexity of parenting, pick up a copy of Woman No. 17 or It. Goes. So. Fast. from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie bookstores in business and I receive a commission.

As I write this, the stock markets are tanking. The bluster and bluffing of one world leader is categorically destroying the financial value of markets around the world. Which made this an interesting week to read Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher and William Ury. It’s also an important time to reflect on Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan which has sat beside me on my desk for over a month after I finished reading it, because I know it still has things to teach me.

Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In

I can’t remember if I bought Getting to Yes because I wanted to be better at salary negotiations or if I happened into it at a Little Free Library, but it called to me from the to-read shelf this week. It’s a simple book and effective in it’s framing. The writers even say at the end that the reader probably knows a lot of the things in the book instinctively, even if they haven’t put organized thought into it. I did learn a lot about my own tendencies with positional bargaining and how empathy may have saved me from the holes I dug with that over the years. What was most fascinating, though, was the “What If They Use Dirty Tricks?” chapter, which basically lays out all the ways someone could be negotiating with you in bad faith (and what to do about it).

“Good negotiators rarely resort to threats.” – Getting to Yes

That’s where the tariffs come in. I don’t think any of us think our “dear leader” is a master negotiator (except he himself). But it’s illustrative to see how he ticks all the boxes in this chapter, from phony facts to threats to extreme and escalating demands. It also helped me understand why some of the approach from the U.K. to the man has seemed so artful. They are using soft but firm negotiating tactics of their own, tactics that depersonalize the problems and work toward ameliorating core concerns. I also found hope for the Ukraine situation in the “Negotiate with someone like Hitler?” as I thought about this article in Harper’s about some of Putin’s core concerns that we never talk about.

It’s a great book to read for your interpersonal relationships, business relationships, and seeing how things could be done better. They can be done better, right? Because I’m ready for a lot less bluster and a lot more Booker.

Small Things Like These

Speaking of Booker and his 25-hour speech (of which I watched both too much and not enough), there has never been a better time to speak up than now. I think that’s why I’ve kept Small Things Like These beside me all these weeks. It’s a quiet story about one man’s simple life in an Irish town and how he discovers something horribly wrong that everyone seems to know about but no one is questioning. And no one wants him to question, either.

“He found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?” – Small Things Like These

Bill Furlong will surely pay for his actions in all the ways his wife predicts he will. But isn’t it better that he tried?

Fisher and Ury write that “principled negotiation can help make the world a better place.” I’ve kept this blog post on thirty actions you can take right now open on my phone to remind myself that even small actions matter. What are you doing today to make the world as you want it to be?

I was going to make this a New Year’s post, but really there have been so many markers of “new” in the past few months, from the election to me leaving my job of eight years, that January 1 didn’t really feel like a changeover date. Tomorrow does, and I realize in writing this that I’ve been preparing for a long time for whatever comes next. I often find myself drifting toward books that will help me cope with something my subconscious senses is on the horizon, and the pile I’ve accumulated recently is an interesting mish-mash of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, with a kids’ book thrown in for the real future. While I probably won’t start walking backwards as Tomás does in response to personal tragedy in Yann Martel’s The High Mountains of Portugal (a book I’m still reading), I am very interested in disrupting my norm to see what positive changes I can cause. Read on to find out what lessons about change (both self-imposed and not) that I’m taking away from the books that have jumped into my lap recently.

Saying the Important Part Out Loud with R.F. Kuang

There are many, many reasons to love Babel by R.F. Kuang, from the rich characters to the well-drawn action, but what hit me most about this book as I was reading it this fall was the way she turns history inside out by simply naming the things that were happening from an angle we are unused to. While to my knowledge there was not really a group of translators changing the world in the 19th century by inscribing spells into bars of silver (though it made for a great way to explore the power of language), she has a beautiful way of calling out the everyday assaults of empire:

“‘But I do know this. The wealth of Britain depends on coercive extraction. And as Britain grows, only two options remain: either her mechanisms of coercion become vastly more brutal, or she collapses. The former’s more likely. But it might bring about the latter.’” – Griffin in Babel by R.F. Kuang

Not only does this series of sentences spell out exactly the dark side of the British empire in a way I’ve never read before, it also speaks to the present and future of the U.S. in ways we would do well to consider deeply how to change. This is part of Kuang’s art, the weaving of a warning into a damned good story.

“‘You know the funny thing about Afghanistan?’ Griffin’s voice was very soft. ‘The British aren’t going to invade with English troops. They’re going to invade with troops from Bengal and Bombay. They’re going to have sepoys fight the Afghans, just like they had sepoys fight and die for them at Irrawady, because those Indian troops have the same logic you do, which is that it’s better to be a servant of the Empire, brutal coercion and all, than to resist. Because it’s safe. Because it’s stable, because it lets them survive. And that’s how they win, brother. They pit us against each other. They tear us apart.’” – Babel by R.F. Kuang

How long have we been pitched against each other by our political parties? I was relieved when the Democrats picked Kamala Harris to run, finally. The last time she ran, she became the first candidate I’d ever given money to, and I was excited about her governing to the middle. But she was hardly an outsider candidate, and in my view the Democrats have a lot to answer for to their constituents—specifically, I would have liked a choice. Which is to say that the people in power are more interested in maintaining power, however they can, than in genuinely meeting our actual needs. I would have been deeply disappointed to vote for Biden who took no meaningful stands on the women’s issues that are so close to my heart (and body as well as the bodies of 49.8% of our population). I won’t even start on the Republican Party, but I do believe strongly that there is a middle we are being steered away from seeing. And that in the middle lies a lot of answers that allow for social progress and for a wide feeling of safety at the same time.

“There was at least one reason to hope. They were running on momentum. The social forces that had prompted the Luddites to smash machines had not disappeared. They had only grown worse…Each year they put more men out of work, left more families destitute, and maimed and killed more children in machines that operated more quickly than the human eye could track. The use of silver created inequality, and both had increased exponentially in England during the past decade. The country was pulling apart at the seams. This could not go on forever.

And their strike, Robin was convinced, was different. Their impact was larger, harder to patch over…Britain could not function without them. If Parliament did not believe it, then they would soon learn.” Babel by R.F. Kuang

Collective action anyone? It is definitely time to assess what power we have and how we can effectively use it.

I have read online criticisms of this book that it is too packed with linguistic explorations, but to me that level of thought and involvement with language is only a bonus. You should read this book right now. And as you bristle against some of the things she writes, I want you to think about why and what your role has been in building our own empire. Then think about the world you want to build and how you can change your actions to bring that about instead.

Unbreaking the System with The Primary Solution

Nick Troiano is also of the opinion that the system is broken. In The Primary Solution he lays out a strong argument for how our current system of primaries disenfranchises voters and contributes to dysfunction at the party level and at the governing level because of the polarizing list of candidates it allows to move forward.

“A democracy that is controlled by its fringes at the expense of the majority, offering division over solutions, simply cannot endure over the long haul.” – The Primary Solution by Nick Troiano

Troiano argues that there is a vast, moderate section of the electorate who is not being served by the current candidates and that none of us are being served by the gridlock of the current landscape. Though my own politics are on the left edge and I am one of the 18% of voters votes in primary elections (which, according to Troiano, determines the outcome of 93% of all offices), I can’t disagree that the current state cannot continue.

My first experience of disgust for party politics was when I brought my then small child to caucus for Bernie back when we had caucuses in Washington. Our precinct captain explained the math of how the delegates were assigned and it was immediately clear that Hillary Clinton had been ordained the candidate of preference by party leadership. I was discouraged, but it was important for me to finally see that the party had the power and the privilege to make that selection, regardless of what their constituents want. I have to agree with Charles Munger, Jr., as quoted by Troiano saying, “We saw primary reform as the right tool to bring the parties back to their duty.” Imagine that—duty! The reforms Troiano explores, including ranked-choice voting and synchronized primaries, are hardly revolutionary, but if they lead to a more representative slate of candidates who can actually legislate and govern for the majority, I’m in.

The book was long for me, I think I would have preferred a white paper, but I did enjoy reading about the reasons why the ways Washington primaries have changed so much in the nearly thirty years I’ve lived and voted here. The Primary Solution is a must read for policy wonks and a good skim for anyone who thinks our government is broken and wonders what steps we can take to make it better.

Considering the After with Czesław Miłosz

I think we can all agree that World War II was some of the worst of what the world experienced during the last century. In my typical, “let’s read about the darkest thing we can find to see how people survive it” way, I was glad to read the forthcoming collection Poet in the New World: Poems, 1946-1953 by Czesław Miłosz and translated and edited by Robert Hass and David Frick. While I’ve enjoyed Miłosz in translation before (and structured Polska, 1994 around lines from “Rivers”), I was surprised to see that I’ve never really written about him. I’ve also read almost nothing of his from the period covered by this book, which is, I suppose, the point.

All the poems in this collection were new to me, which made it delicious to explore. I was excited by the twinning of irony and lament in “Child of Europe” with lines like “We, who taste of exotic dishes, / And enjoy fully the delights of love, / are better than those who were buried.” This poem felt so Polish to me in that feeling with the pairing of outward barb and the inward nod of complicity topped with regret.

I think a lot about audiences and who understands what when there are multiple layers of meaning, which made me wonder who would mistake lines like “Let the sweetness of day fill your lungs” for celebrations of autocracy, though Miłosz writes into that awareness when he gets to “A new, humorless generation is now arising, / It takes in deadly earnest all we received with laughter.” A stanza that made me think of the MAGA youth. He also writes of the doublespeak to come, something I learned to deepen myself while in Poland, with “Fashion your weapon from ambiguous words. Consign clear words to lexical limbo.” By the time he reaches, “Gone is the age of satire” my heart dropped for the poet that Hass describes as “recovering from a war of extraordinary violence, taking his bearings in a new world, and trying to locate and understand his task as a poet.”

”The ground everywhere is strewn
With bits of brittle froth—
Of all things broken and lost
Porcelain troubles me most.”
— “Song on Porcelain” by Czesław Miłosz

My heart was equally broken by the lines “My life broke into islands, / Through no choice of my own.” In “To Jonathan Swift” as he writes of exile. As we know, Miłosz survived the after and went on to write greater poems, but it’s clear that there was great cost to all the before and the in-between. I was reading “Reflections” about “A city ruined, and above it clouds / A ruined city and above it a column of azure sky” during the worst of the L.A. fires and thinking about the myriad challenges (expected and otherwise) we face now and in the future.

”And as someone else used to say,
You have the power. Influence the course
Of the avalanche. Moderate its wildness
And cruelty. This too requires courage,”
— “Treatise on Morals” by Czesław Miłosz

What I liked most about this book for myself was seeing the “after.” As Hass writes in the introduction, in 1944 Miłosz had walked away from a city in ruins. Something like 80 percent of the buildings in Warsaw had been destroyed by the German army…” He’s fighting with himself, though, to go forward with poems like “My Mother’s Grave” where he writes, “Help me, mother. Strengthen in the man / what you knew as the child’s ardors. / Let me not put down my burdens.” And he did continue to fight in his work, though from afar, which made me want to put “Notebook: Pennsylvania” with its family shunning their heritage in a new land beside Wisława Szymborska’s “The End and the Beginning” which is about cleaning up after war.

I was really hoping to be able to comment intelligently on the translations of these poems, but only the English text is included (which makes sense) and I haven’t tracked down the originals. My Polish is rusty enough that I probably would have made a hash of it anyway, but I might track down a few soon just to feel the words on my tongue again.

This book is out in February, and I’ll be excited to see what you find in it, where I’ve misread intentions in the layers of meaning, how you think about the ways life continues.

Adam Gidwitz Models Getting Frank with our Children

I wish I could give A Tale Dark and Grimm ten stars instead of five in Goodreads. This book is deliciously dark in a way that left my nine-year-old begging for more. He felt in control and in on the action and like he was tormenting me, but together we were exploring the edges of the dark and how we could navigate it together. Are coping mechanisms hereditary? It reminded me a lot of the day in March 2020 that my then four-year-old came home and told us about the virus. His teacher (herself a survivor of war in Afghanistan) had shown the children a video explaining what we knew then. And my son, having finally been let in on what the whispers of the last month were about, exuded so much confidence. That’s not to say that the months and years to come were always easy (ha!) or that we told him everything, but that we were all better prepared because we were prepared to treat him like a person with fears and ideas of his own.

While Remy and I were reading the first book in this series of Grimm fairytale retellings, he picked up the second to read with his dad (who has read the original Grimm). And the moment he and I finished the first, we picked up the third. They are gruesome, yes. They are also hilarious and the authorial intrusions remind me of the way I often interrupt our readings to gently (or not so gently) ask my son if that’s how he thinks things should be. Highly recommend these books, just plan ahead so you can finish a section before bedtime, that bit of resolution helps avoid nightmares.

It feels sacrilegious to hold the particular inauguration on MLK Day and I’ll probably spend the day with a book rather than the TV or the headlines. The day after I’ll be sharing some Lucille Clifton with my son’s class to teach the kids about how much can be said with a little and to get them thinking about their roles in the world to come. What are you reading and how are you preparing for what’s next beyond books? I’d love to hear all about it in the comments.

On Thursday I asked our pizza delivery man his name. While we’ve had multiple delivery people and don’t order pizza that often, this particular fellow has been delivering goodness to our house two to five times a year for over two decades. We had a name for him (he looks like Penn Teller, so we’ve called him—always with love but never to his face—Penn) and are polite, but it was finally starting to bother me that I didn’t know his name. What on earth does this have to do with books, you wonder, and were there any leftovers (yes, but I can’t share them as they’ll be gone by this afternoon). I’ve been thinking a lot about community since my son was born (and especially since the beginning of the pandemic) and two books that I read recently really helped me deepen those thoughts: Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison and Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter. Plus they’re both fantastic books, so let’s get into the book part of our chat…

The Worlds that Divide Us in Song of Solomon

Let’s be real, I was having a really hard time with this book for the first hundred pages or so. I was exhausted at night and only reading a few pages at a time, morning readings were slightly longer but always interrupted. I was not able to enter the very rich world of Milkman’s citified Michigan and I will definitely have to return to the beginning someday when I have the luxury of hours (and maybe a hot bath). One sentence, though, made me realize how deeply layered the whole book was and what I’d been missing by being a poor reader.

“I really do thank you,” Milkman opened the door. “What do I owe you? For the Coke and all?”

The man was smiling, but his face changed now. “My name’s Garnett, Fred Garnett. I ain’t got much, but I can afford a Coke and a lift now and then.” – Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison

I ain’t got much, but I can afford a Coke and a lift now and then. Said by a stranger who was helping Milkman out when he found himself in a jam, having left the city to trace his roots in search of (literal) treasure. Wearing a suit and city shoes he’d tromped through a stream and found himself muddied, torn, and in need of a lift. Garnett knows from the way Milkman carries himself and the way that he’s been talking that he holds himself above all the people there. But it’s the final insult of not being considered big enough to be generous himself that makes Garnett speak out in defense of his own dignity. Milkman can’t really hear Garnett in that moment but I sure did. That one sentence defined the world Milkman had entered but couldn’t see. A community rich with people who looked out for one another, friend or stranger. The kind of care Milkman needed so much in his life but could never see to let in.

I read this sentence the morning after I’d asked Craig his name and it hit me so acutely that this was part of the world I’ve been aching for all this time. A world where we see each other as humans who all want similar things: love and a life that isn’t harder than it needs to be for us and the people we care about. It’s the common humanity that we miss when we don’t make eye contact with people on the street, when we argue about red or blue without seeing who’s really winning when we fight each other, when we talk about wars without considering the civilians whose lives are destroyed in the process. It’s the common humanity I don’t contribute to when I don’t mention that I’m struggling while my mom’s been in the hospital these past weeks. She’s doing better now and I did actually reach out to a couple of people, which is progress to me, but we don’t have to be alone with all this stuff because we’re surrounded by other people who maybe would help us out for free if we gave them the chance—people we could help, too, by seeing their humanity.

Morrison goes deeper into this same divide later when Milkman reaches Virginia. I won’t quote the full passage here because the entire uncomfortable interaction spans several pages, but Milkman enters Solomon’s store and is trying to get information about where he’s going from Solomon and the men hanging out there. His car has broken down out front and he needs help either fixing it or buying another. He needs a woman and a place to stay. And while everyone’s really polite about it, “Milkman sensed that he’d struck a wrong note” and a coolness grows between Milkman and the men. Morrison lets us sit with that misunderstanding for a bit, feeling the exquisite discomfort that’s exacerbated by not understanding the why.

Milkman knew he had said something else wrong, although he didn’t know what. He only knew that they behaved as if they had been insulted.

In fact they had been. They looked with hatred at the city Negro who could buy a car as if it were a bottle of whiskey because the one he had was broken. And what’s more, who had said so in front of them. He hadn’t bothered to say his name, nor ask theirs, had called them “them,” and would certainly despise their days… – Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison

The paragraph goes on to beautifully describe the lives of these men and the insult they took from Milkman’s ways, but it’s that crux of “He hadn’t bothered to say his name, nor ask theirs” that showed how little they mattered in his day except to fill his own needs. I grew up in the north but with Southern parents and while I sometimes felt a wash of teenaged embarrassment when my dad chatted up every sales clerk we ever encountered, it’s something I’m learning to appreciate. We talk sometimes now about dynamics of power and how no one owes you their story, but what we forgot along the way is the small (consensual) intimacies that can enrich all our days and make the world feel a lot smaller in the best of ways.

Read this book, but do it when you have time to really sit with it. If one sentence can open up my whole worldview, imagine what it can do for you. And Icess, if you’re reading this, know that I thought of you in the end when the body count was high 🙂

The Decay of a Tech-driven Society in Ripe

What scares me most these days is those who seem to have forgotten the similar things in whose quest we were once bound. Who have traveled so far toward some imagined future that they’ve left all the best things behind. Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter encapsulates all of this in such a visceral way that I’ve kept the book beside me in the month since I read it as I try to sort out my own complicity in the system and responsibility for changing it.

Cassie works at a Silicon Valley startup and is new enough to that world to see it for the ways it goes against the world she came from, but she’s also been there long enough to be perpetuating it. She’s at work at all hours in response to a capricious and abusive boss but she’s also passing along that culture as she seeks to hire someone in Pakistan, a worker so eager to be part of the system that he’s willing to give up his family to move across the country because of a misunderstanding Cassie had with her boss. And Cassie is the main inspiration for a series of insidious plans to take down their rival company. The way Etter places her at this exact moment in time increases the intensity of the story and drives the action hard. Because we feel badly for Cassie and also because we’re appalled by her, the story feels richer than it would have with a more passive protagonist.

The city around Cassie is also exceedingly well rendered. From the man living below her window to increasingly unaffordable rents, to the luxuries Cassie and her friends allow themselves to salve their feelings about the lives they are living, it was all too familiar and also architected to make the reader feel uncomfortable enough about these tech Meccas we’re making to actually think about the worlds we’re building for a moment. Enough that when my husband mentioned Carly Simon’s “Let the River Run” when catching the sunrise glinting off the Seattle skyline the other morning I shuddered at thinking of what we’re worshipping in our new Jerusalem. It isn’t our shared humanity, but it isn’t too late, I hope, to find that again.

I strongly recommend you read Ripe as well. It’s the most insightful book I’ve read about where our cities (and the tech workers in them) are now, and it’s extraordinarily well crafted at the sentence level, too.

Well I’m off to re-watch Working Girl (did that to myself) and spend the next couple of weeks looking deeply into the eyes of the people I love most (and anyone else who will make eye contact). If you need a slightly more reassuring nudge towards pulling back to make the kind of world you want to live in, Begin Again by Oliver Jeffers brought me a lot of comfort in a hellish week at work. It’s a book for kids and anyone who wants to play a part, no matter how small, in making this planet a better place to be. My pledge to myself over the holiday break is to learn the name of at least one counter person at our new bakery, no matter how many pastries I have to eat to get up the courage to do that. If you have a similar pledge, leave it in the comments (along with your name) and I will happily be your accountability partner. I wish you, your loved ones, and your perfect strangers peace and much love for now, for always.