January 24, 2023

Gleanings

• I think I’m drawn, in most of the art I love, to the kind of ordinary darkness that everyone experiences: that every one of us, no matter what we might aspire to, is capable of failing to do what’s right, and that failure, no matter how we might explain it to ourselves, no matter how sorry we might be, could have catastrophic consequences anyway. This to me feels like the tragedy of the human condition, and it also feels like the source of some of the most beautiful, terrifying stories people have made.
• I’m going to be completely honest: If your girlfriend wrote into this column with this story, I would tell her she should break up with you. Not because you were “honest about your feelings,” but because gaining and losing weight, over and over and over, is part of nearly everyone’s life. It is so inconsequential in the vast tapestry of existence, and if getting fatter over the course of nine short months throws you into this kind of tailspin where you find yourself not only unattracted to her, but you feel honor-bound to tell her so, how are you going to handle it when the really hard stuff happens?
• What activities and actions and experiences and routines help me feel good, whole, content? What leaves me feeling empty, anxious, drained? As I explore what I FEEL (last year’s word), I gain clues to what I NEED.
• I would move into this book immediately if I could, or at least visit for a while. But of course, I already lived there once. Of course, this reading is wildly coloured by my life experience, as is anyone. Perhaps there will be a future school of criticism about the death of the reader, but I don’t know how that would be possible and also it would be too sad.
• It’s not a colour I like to wear because finding the right shade of orange in clothes is nearly impossible – but it’s everywhere in nature. Persimmons, apricots, clementines, strands of saffron in water. When I see it I swear I can feel my heart expand.
• Walking is not a form of exercise. It’s an act of contemplation, a ritual of communing with nature and self.
• “Equanimity,” says Salzburg, “can be described as the voice of wisdom, being open to everything, able to hold everything. Its essence is complete presence.”
• How, just how, in a world of 8 billion people floating amidst the vast cosmos, with layers and layers of histories and everyday moments and decisions, did the group of us from all over this world end up together in this very moment, in this very place … continues to mystify me with awe and wonder and gratitude.
• It’s not how many books or works you read (in whatever form) that counts. It’s that you read that counts – and it counts so very much.
• So I didn’t buy it and we went off to La Paz for five days. I thought I might see another bracelet I liked. I didn’t. But I saw that blue everywhere.
• Honesty is scary, and surprisingly freeing. It helps to try it out on people whom you trust, who’ve been honest with you, too. One honest conversations begets another. And so begins a chain reaction to something so liberating you wonder why it took you so long to blossom.

January 23, 2023

Digital for Good, by Richard Culatta

One of the best things I do is subscribe to Courtney R. Martin’s Substack, which is where I encountered her interview with Richard Culatta (headlined “‘Screen Time’ is Dumb”), introducing me to the ideas presented in Culatta’s 2021 book Digital for Good: Raising Kids to Thrive in an Online World, published by Harvard Business Review Press. Culatta is CEO of the International Society for Technology in Education, former Chief Innovation Officer for Rhode Island, and was appointed by President Obama to lead the US Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology, and I found his book such an inspiring and exciting read, reframing so much of how I’d come to understand my role in helping to shape my children’s relationships to technology. Rather than foregrounding potential online dangers, Culatta argues, we should be giving our kids the tools to be good digital citizen who are able to contribute to conversations, use technology for problem solving, community and connection. Rather than telling our kids they spend too much time on their phones, to select one example, we should teach them to be thoughtful in HOW they use their phones. Culatta recommends researching apps that are educational and interesting and recommending these as we might a good book, a tactic I’ve already tried with my eldest with really interesting and positive results, along with all kinds of other accessible “next steps” that follow each of his book’s chapters, which I’m also really looking forward to putting into play.

January 20, 2023

Fifteen Minutes

I have fifteen minutes before I head to the pool, but I wanted to check in here and write something, to write something without even knowing what I’m going to write, which is the advice I give to anyone who wants to blog but doesn’t know where to start. Start where you are and see where it takes you, and so here I am at the end of a busy week, but not too busy, because I don’t do too busy anymore. I used to go swimming before breakfast so my workday would not be interrupted but now I interrupt my workday all the day (I don’t have a full time job! Let’s act like it!) and it’s the precious hours outside it that are untouchable, time for decompressing, for relaxing, for reading. I got a new phone in November, my first iPhone and I really like it but the way in which it’s most improved my quality of life is that it didn’t come with an electrical plug so I charge it through my computer downstairs, instead of at the plug in my bedroom where it was still accessible even though I mostly never looked at it after 9pm. Now I never look at my phone in the evening, and in the morning where I’d once spend the first twenty or thirty minutes of my day scrolling Instagram and checking my email (time that went by in a flash) I now pick up the book on my bedside and start reading, and I’ve been reading so much more since this shift. My mind is also in a better place, and I think that’s no coincidence.

Along those lines, I finished a big project today (actually the first quarter of an even bigger project) which I feel really good about because last spring’s edition came out so much later because I’d struggling so much from November 2021 onward. Getting it finally finished today is a sign of what a much better place I’m in that I was a year ago, a fact I’m still marvelling at, how much better something can be that once felt absolutely impossible. And I’m wondering about this, about gauging my well-being by my productivity, but I don’t think that’s actually it. My productivity is a symptom of my well-being, rather than the opposite. And it’s such a relief.

This week I also achieved a professional goal I’ve been working toward for a really long time, and I’m taking the time to really steep in this moment. As much as I’ve come to understand the way I’ve avoided feeling difficult feelings (an act from which my anxiety has stemmed), I think I’m also not very good at feeling good ones either. And so I’m trying to do that, which is harder than you’d think, but also really such a pleasure, and I’m looking forward to sharing my news with you as soon as I am able.

January 19, 2023

Cyclettes, by Tree Abraham

I don’t think I could write a memoir through bicycles, though I’d like to consider it—the ten year gap following the birth of my child would be conspicuous though, and there’ve been other holes. I’d have to write about leaving bikes in the driveaway that my parents would back over. (When’s the last time I just dropped a bike somewhere? From Cyclettes: “In suburb childhood when we were done with our bikes, we could smash them down on the front lawn or driveway or any old place we pleased…The bikes were not a thief’s commodity; they were ours like a worn pair of shoes shaped to our foot’s print.) I’d write about our bicycles in Japan which we rode around with in the company of our friends (I think I rode in a car not even five times during that time) like a pack of suburban kids, and the freedom of those days (and also the impossible feat of the obachans who managed to ride in the rain while holding umbrellas). About the metal basket on my bike today, a bike we only got tuned up in the midst of the pandemic when it seemed impossible to go anywhere any other way, and how wonderful the world feels when my basket is packed with things like donuts, potato chips, or library books. I’d think about all the bikes I’ve had throughout my life and where some of them might be now—the bike from my freewheeling fourth year in university lived in my shed until last summer when we finally put it out in the garbage because the tires were shots, and it only had one pedal, having long ago been pilfered for parts.

I loved Tree Abraham’s Cyclettes, a beautiful amalgam of text fragments and image that is to bicycles as Leanne Shapton’s Swimming Studies was to swimming. Abraham takes her reader from her Ottawa childhood (showing stills from a video of her very first bike ride) through childhood and adolescence, and across the world as she works in international development, living abroad and travelling extensively, riding bikes, observing bikes. Following her path, coming of age: “My heart beats so strong it resounds as gong. I am flying. Only the bike can keep up with the exhilarated acceleration of my spirit.”

Her impulse is to go, to ride, to render the world whole and wide…until she arrives in New York City and finally stops, her first big ride to the beach, to the sea, full page spread of her handlebars and the beach—what a TRIUMPH. (Pun kind of intended.)

January 16, 2023

Modern Fables, by Mikka Jacobsen

Modern Fables started out strong and never quit, a collection of personal essays that begin with a wake (with whisky, which leads to a brawl) and concludes with a wedding (with watermelon vodka-cocktails, which leads to Jacobsen fucking the best man, and the dissolution of her friendship with the bride). And in between, a wide of stories that take no sides, but instead examine every side—on sports and mascots (you can read an excerpt at 49thShelf); about a white Albertan’s relationship to the Indigenous peoples upon whose land she lives (complicated by her psychologist mother’s shamanism); such an artful revenge essay on a shitty ex-lover who turns out to be a plagiarist but which is also a treatise on women’s work and textile arts, and Mrs. Ramsay’s brown stocking.

In “Kurt Vonnegut Lives on Tinder,” Jacobsen notes how an affinity for the Slaughterhouse Five author is shorthand for something on the popular hook-up app, and resolves to figure out just what that means. “Modern Fables” tells the story of a relationship with a seeming pathological liar, and also catfishing, and cats, and rabbits, and other dead household pets. “Me vs. Brene Brown” is another story of a love story gone sour, in this case between Jacobsen and Brown’s ideas about been empathy and shame, which seem revolutionary at first, but Jacobsen soon realizes she’s read something like them else before (oh, yeah, right, in almost every work of literature ever, not least of all The Scarlet Letter), not to mention how Brown’s work seems to preclude the possibility of a fulfilling life outside of a nuclear family, and what Brown’s folksiness might suggest about what she thinks of the intelligence of her readership. And finally, “David Silver,” taking on the 90210 actor and other notable Davids (including he who battled Goliath) in a rich and provocative piece on mental illness, convening with the spirit world, and the possibility of cosmic order.

I loved this book, a collection that relit my flame of passion for the personal essay, a collection up there with Susan Olding’s two, which are some of the finest in CanLit—in Freehand Books, Jacobsen and Olding share a publisher. These essays are gorgeous, brutal, stunningly crafted, and pack a punch, like a one-two, WHAM, and then another, and then another, you’re sad when it’s all done.

January 13, 2023

235 Days

235 days until Asking for a Friend is released! And in the meantime, my previous novels are still out there in the world, being read, and (in one case) wearing a moustache. Thank you to everybody who’s reading and sharing.

January 12, 2023

Gleanings

• Fiction is a remarkable way to conjure up a world you didn’t know. There’s a comfort in facing those questions; in imagining those answers. Simply going there put to rest so much unrest in me. I really do feel like something very deep in my psyche has been solved. 
• Foreign interventions in Haiti have failed because the bases for these interventions have had little to do with supporting Haiti’s sovereignty, the rights of its people, or alleviating its financial burdens.
• There are a whole bunch of skills that we teach our kids about how to be good humans in the physical world. We teach them what it looks like to be kind, to be safe, to help others, and to learn new things. But if we never explicitly show them what those skills look like in a digital space, transferring those skills online can be very hard.
• If I have any resolution this year, it’s to try to roll with what the world offers me, rather than to wrestle life into my control.
• It hasn’t made logical sense, not from a financial perspective, nor from an artistic perspective either, really; which is why I’m curious to know: will I still be able to make a beautiful book, with alive characters, built on an elaborate structure I see in my head, if I’m not obsessed, or in pain, or seeking to soothe deep anxiety? I’m hopeful. I am.
• And then, channeling some of the greatest  philosophers of our time, I started singing, “All You Need Is Love.” By the third round of the chorus, I was almost skipping, singing, “All you need is love!”
• Enough people were on twitter denouncing folks’ end-of-year summaries as “bragging” if they were too positive that I was reminded that it might not be so terrible if that site just immolates.
• Leonard wasn’t my first up-close experience with a mascot. When I was twelve, a mascot had punched me in the face.
• There is power in numbers, but united, in community, their strength lies in their common values and purpose.
• Endings. Beginnings. All pieces of the mosaic of our lives, some pieces that we can fit effortlessly into our life story, others more difficult, that require us to adjust and accept.
• Basically my mood for the next year is to hang onto what I call my Rome vibe at all costs. Because life really isn’t meant to be like that, the profound unhappiness I was dipping into on the regular.
• I woke up this morning, and like most mornings, had to re-orient myself to where I am. The rock-hard mattresses (a truly adequate description, as the girls look under the sheets to see if the bed is in fact, made of concrete) reminds me quickly that I am not at home.
• This has been an unusual year for Novel Readings, one in which my reading life was overtaken by my real life—or, since I firmly believe that “the world of books is still the world,” a better way to put it would be that my reading life changed because so did the rest of my life.
• There is shame, there is guilt, there are more than a few regrets. You are writing down the words, hoping they will make sense.
• Every year at year-end, I set goals for the upcoming year. It sounds kind of hardcore, but really it’s more of a reflection on things like, where do I want to be? what do I want to learn? what projects do I want to start and finish? how do I want my relationships to be? where do I want to travel?
• I feel the white sheet of the bed around me and think of Aida in prison. How different two friends’ lives turned out to be. 
• There are no rules for good writing. There are only guidelines which will serve you 75-95% of the time.
• Let’s read more books, sing and dance more, take more walks, print photos of family moments, make some art, write some letters, play more, go barefoot, and sit with silence from time to time. Surprise yourself.

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January 10, 2023

The Radiant Way, Again.

The case against rereading The Radiant Way, by Margaret Drabble, was that my copy was a battered paperback with a tiny faded font, the cover stuck on with Scotch tape, that the novel was nearly 400 pages long, and that my ambition to reread Drabble’s entire ouvre in order a few years back had fizzled into nothing. That I’d just spent an entire fortnight on holiday reading one splendid back list book after another, and perhaps this one wouldn’t measure up. That I have a small mountain of brand new books to be read and if I fail to tackle it, the pile could possibly overwhelm me.

The case for it, however: that this was, perhaps, one of the most pivotal novels of my life. A novel that helped me come into my own as a reader and to begin to come into my own as a writer, after years of having my reading selections determined by course lists and ideas about what the classics were. In 2004, I picked up The Radiant Way in a Japanese bookshop (Wantage Books in Kobe, though there is a stamp for something called Juso Academy Used English Bookstore on the inside cover), the first Margaret Drabble novel I’d ever read, and I fell in love with this work, and decided that this was kind of book I’d like to read and write forever. And yes, in 2020, I’d decided to read through all her novels again (I have them all—secondhand copies until The Red Queen, at which point I began to read her as new hardbacks instead of battered old Penguins) but it never worked out. The early Margaret Drabbles were never so resonant for me anyway, too dated by the time I read them, preoccupied by once-provocative ideas that had ceased to be so. Too fixed in the first person, shallow in their grasp—but then perhaps I was expecting too much from novels written by someone in their early 20s more than 60 years ago.

I preferred Drabble’s novels published in the 1970s to the early ones anyway, but 1987’s The Radiant Way was where it really starts for me, possibly because it’s where it DID start for me. And I wanted to read it again, to see if it would measure up to my first experience of it almost twenty years ago when I was twenty-five and on the cusp of so many things, idealistic and yet disbelieving that real life could ever happen. When I didn’t know the stakes of things.

So I picked it up. And then closed it—the tape! That font! And then I opened it again, and started reading: “New Year’s Eve, and the end of a decade. A portentous moment, for those who pay attention to portents.” And I do pay attention to portents, so kept reading, supposing this a most fitting book for early January, and immediately captured by the incredible omniscience of this story, and the Dalloway-esque preparations for the Headleand’s New Year’s Party, except that Liz is hardly going to buy the flowers herself. Wife, mother of five, prominent psychiatrist to the upper classes—she is far too busy for that.

And that was it, I was hooked, and I read this book with butterflies in my stomach, as giddy as the first time I’d ever picked it up, moved because everything I’d loved so much about it twenty years ago was still remarkable—that omniscience, the novel’s consciousness of its form, the playfulness, postmodernism, the blurry line between fact and fiction (there is a part about the advent of a new political party which “also attracted the support of a good many of the characters in, and potential readers of, this novel…”), how Drabble is attempting to use the novel as a container for society, for the universe:

“Liz, Esther, and Alix were talking, with much animation and many an apparent non sequitur, about London districts, property prices, houses, the police, no-go areas, rape, violence, murder, robbery, Tennyson and Arthur Hallam, Leslie Stephen and Virginia Woolf… There was, perhaps, a thread linking this rambling, discursive, allusive, exclusive, jumbled topographical discourse…”

But even more remarkable was what I hadn’t noticed the first time—the attendance of characters at the Headleand’s party, for instance, who appear in previous Drabble novels, which I hadn’t yet read in 2004. I was reading this time too as a contemporary of the three protagonists, Liz, Alix and Esther, friends from Cambridge who’d found themselves in very different milieus by middle age, whereas before I’d been twenty years younger—and this is very much a novel about middle age, about middle grounds (Alix, a longtime socialist who’s now disillusioned, wonders if “making up one’s mind involves internalizing lies.)

Mostly, what blew my mind about rereading The Radiant Way was how familiar it all was, and not just because I’ve finally become the age its characters are. But instead how much England in 1980 feels like here and now, the same preoccupations, fears and instability. Rising inflation, right-wing governments, people losing their faith in any wing governments, labour unrest, budget cuts, a sense that the old ways and allegiances don’t apply anymore, disruptive technologies, how the working people pay for this change while the wealthy profit. Crime rates, an obsession with crime rates, and grisly murders, and an unwillingness to address the causes of such crime, and (for the labour types) to address just how difficult people can be—Tories are bad, but also (“wanted, idle, pointless, awful”) people wreck stuff just because they can. The tension between notions of the individual and society, which becomes especially fraught in the Thatcher years and and is so again in our current age of a new-new-Right (“What I can’t see, said Esther to Alix, is what any of this has got to do with you. Or with me. It’s simply not our problem. We didn’t make it, and that’s that. I’ve never met a miner, and I’m sure a miner wouldn’t want to meet me./ It’s not as simple as that, said Alix.)

A book full of questions that we’ve still not yet begun to answer…and yet it gives me some comfort to know that it was ever thus?

Anyway, I absolutely couldn’t get enough of this timely, artful, remarkable novel…but thankfully Drabble followed it up with two more books to make a trilogy, and I’ll be rereading both of these soon.

January 9, 2023

Holiday Reads

Our holiday break started a day before it was supposed to, as a blizzard raged outside and cancelled school and I curled up with THEY CAME LIKE SWALLOWS, by William Maxwell, a novel set against the Spanish Flu Pandemic and made me wonder why the word “unprecedented” was used at all in March 2020, because it really wasn’t.

And I read and I read, books I’ve been picking up here and there over the last year and finally time away from work (and social media) gave me time to delve into them. Some new books, others authors I love whose backlists I still get to delight my way through (Sue Miller! Toni Morrison! Natalia Ginzburg!). Barbara Trapido, whose work I’m falling in love with. I read HAPPENING, by Annie Ernaux, 2022 Nobel Prize Winner. OMG, SONG OF SOLOMON! GIOVANNI’S ROOM! Connie Willis’s time travel epic (and I have its conclusion still before me).

What a satisfying stack this is, a stack that’s inspired me to read (even) more off the beaten track in 2023, to pursue my own curious avenues.

Also now my “to be read” shelf is as spare and orderly as it will be for at least another year, and so before the deluge of new releases begins, I want to take a moment and appreciate that.

December 22, 2022

A Box of Cloud

A year ago, a box arrived, a big box that was so light that it felt like we’d just had a cloud delivered to our doorstep, and at this point I was really suffering in a mental health crisis, and a cloud in a box felt like the gift of lightness. Even though we’d sent it to ourselves, eight big balls of wool because I’d determined that our family would spend the holiday break knitting scarves, such a calming and restorative occupation. And we did! And it was! By the new year we had four gorgeous scarves that attracted admiring comments from strangers when we wore them out and about (but not in a weird way). A great skill for our kids (and their dad!) to learn and we enjoyed the holiday knitting so much, we’re doing it again, this time to be donated to a shelter. I’m excited to get started. The wool was just delivered so it looks like the holidays are nearly here.