sadreads 11: touching beauty
Hi!
First, a statement of intention. I’m going to try to send these a little more often than twice a year, and I’m going to try to include links to recent things that I’ve done. If you can’t stand the thought of that (and I understand if so), then feel free to unsubscribe. But I guess I’m feeling pressured by the likely implosion of Twitter? I feel a little sad about the continued decline of a platform I’ve enjoyed using for purposes of connecting to other writers, discovering new work, etc – if you’re reading this, you might have even found me there. Anyway, I don’t know why I hitched my writerly wagon to that particular long-suffering nag. I guess it was for the lols.
When my book Path of Totality came out in February, I didn’t do any readings or events around it for a multitude of reasons. I was kind of emotionally fragile given the subject matter, and Covid levels were peaking, and February is not known for being super outdoor-event-friendly. But over the last year, I’ve found myself talking with other writers in a mutual interview format, and it’s been very interesting to see the threads that get pulled. I didn't even plan to make a series of these, but I realized recently that they kind of do form a pattern, so I thought I'd link to them all here.
Kate Durbin, in American Poetry Review: empathy porn, breaking taboos, and the desire for clarity in any form.
Sasha Fletcher, in Triangle House: the webcomic Achewood, the bad dream that is America, and the alchemy of feelings.
Grzegorz Kwiatkowski, in The Offing: historical genocides, political pop, and antinatalist parenting.
Johannes Göransson, in The Millions: mythic Scandinavia, grief and debt, translation as a creative practice, and our mutual disdain of ubiquitous healing narratives.
Now on to your regularly scheduled programming.
I’ve recently read a few different books that were obliquely or directly about the topic of motherhood. I’ll talk briefly here about three of them: Animal by Lisa Taddeo; Motherhood by Sheila Heti; and The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan.
Animal
I haven’t been as absorbed in the internal life of a character in years as I was reading this book. This is a plot-driven, gutsy novel about female rage as told by a totally remorseless narrator. The character, Joan, is haunted in every kind of way by multiple foundational traumas, familial and otherwise; destruction seems to follow her wherever she goes, with the book opening on an act of violence. Joan is in her late thirties, gorgeous to the point of weaponizing her beauty and pissed off about aging. She also pathologically sexualizes every encounter with even the most throwaway of men (“The young man at the cash register noticed me and then didn’t take his eyes off of me. I was in a white nightgownish dress, thin as smoke. He was picking a pimple on his chin and staring at me. There are a hundred such small rapes a day”). There are some fucked-up, bloody scenes in the book (including one I would heavily trigger warn if you have concerns around birth trauma), but I absolutely loved it. Joan is constantly escaping something as she moves toward the darkness she thinks she desires. As she says:
“You must remember that most people don’t like to hear when bad things happen. They can tolerate only a little here and there. The bad things must be comestible. If there are too many bad things, they plug their ears and vilify the victim. But a hundred very bad things happened to me. Am I supposed to be quiet? Bear my pain like a good girl? Or shall I be very bad and take it out on the world? Either way I won’t be loved.”
But nevertheless there is a kind of redemption. As a writer, Taddeo is not subtle, but I don’t actually care. I thought at first that this was simply a revenge novel, and I think even the character thought so, but it expanded by the end. It’s only slightly about motherhood, but in some ways it’s also about the neglected creature of oneself, and the missing mothering that makes us the way we are.
Motherhood
This novel by Sheila Heti explores the question of whether or not to become a mother as an artist. Heti uses a question and answer structure achieved with i-ching-like coin-flips, where she proposes a question, flips the coin, and one side means yes and the other no. You know how sometimes you read a book and you write down a lot of notes, and maybe go “hm, that was well said,” but the whole thing never coheres for you? That was this book for me. I have loved Heti's other work, and I'm ready to admit that I may not have loved this because I do not struggle with the question at the book’s premise, being already a mother. But this:
“Do I want children because I want to be admired as the admirable sort of woman who has children? Because I want to be seen as a normal sort of woman, or because I want to be the best kind of woman, a woman with not only work, but the desire and ability to nurture, a body that can make babies, and someone who another person wants to make babies with? Do I want a child to show myself to be the (normal) sort of woman who wants and ultimately has a child?”
This is tiresome to me. I don’t know if it would be tiresome were I not an inhabitant of my own particular life. But there are other parts that present more interesting questions:
“[Y]ou are never lonely while writing, I thought, it’s impossible to be—categorically impossible—because writing is a relationship. You’re in a relationship with some force that is more mysterious than yourself. As for me, I suppose it has been the central relationship of my life. I began thinking about fashion models—these women who, because of their beauty, get to travel the world, and are paid well, and can meet whoever they want, and attract desirable men. I can get some of the same things, too, and I’m not even beautiful, but I can lay my hand on beauty.”
I like this avenue of exploration much more than the question about motherhood: this ability to touch beauty through art. And I think this is possible even when you do have children – “writing is a relationship,” yes, but the relationship to writing coexists alongside the relationship one cultivates with one’s family. I don’t believe motherhood comes at the exclusion of other foundational relationships in life (nonfoundational relationships are another story though, lol). Motherhood makes things difficult. Yes, your attention is divided; yes, you are tired all the fucking time for years. But the whole notion that you need to choose is ridiculous, as is the idea that motherhood diminishes art in any way. I don’t think this book was entirely about that, but the parts that were about it were too numerous for me to find the whole thing enjoyable.
At the risk of sounding corny, parenthood for me has been a totally new facet of personhood. I think that in itself comes with a kind of generative power. When is the last time you saw yourself as something new? When did you last have an experience that changed the idea you have of yourself in some way? My short-term memory is shit – I sent an email today asking to put my daughter on a wait list for a preschool, and the admin replied that I had already done so months ago. I have no recollection of this! But sometimes prior to becoming a parent, I felt like I wasn’t even making memories anymore, which is sadder, I think. I'm not trying to prescribe parenthood onto anyone as a solution to any personal insufficiency. I chose this, and everyone has a right to not choose it as well. I just want to say that I think it's possible to touch beauty even while touching lots of child poop.
The School for Good Mothers
Jessamine Chan’s surveillance-dystopian motherhood novel has appeared on many lists this year, and with reason. It’s an anxiety-inducing page turner. The narrator, Frida, has one moment of lapse in judgment, leaving her daughter alone, and this leads her into a hellish legal quagmire that ends with her placement in a yearlong experimental program that teaches women to be good mothers in creepy, prison-like circumstances. Inside and outside of the facility, Frida wonders about her own inability to perform good motherhood, and this is, I think, a modern preoccupation:
“She thought that becoming a mother would mean joining a community, but the mothers she’s met are as petty as newly minted sorority sisters, a self-appointed task force hewing to a maternal hard line.”
The thing about Frida is that she is not a bad parent. The infraction that lands her in the momopticon is at least relatively understandable. Even her behaviors in the program – which give her lower scores in the program’s internal ranking system – are understandable.This novel really plays to the fear that the way you’re doing motherhood is somehow insufficient. I appreciated how it tapped into an aspect of my psyche that I wasn’t really concerned about before.
Anyway, that's it for now, and sorry this letter is a bit jumbled. Let me know if you’ve read these books and if you disagree with me, or send a note if you just want to chat. And have a good mid-November.