January weighed heavily on me, like a lead blanket, the ones they make you wear at the dentist before taking x-rays of your teeth, wedging the large plastic bits alongside your gums so that you feel like a bridled horse. That’s how January felt. Although it’s been raining for days in California, February has entered more softly, in plush house slippers and holding out a bouquet of wildflowers.
It’s an exciting creative time for me, although I always feel most creative in the spring and fall, winter is when I do a lot of deep thinking, deep reading, and staring at the wall while I come up with new ideas. I’ve started a new writing project, I think it’s a novel, that draws on my own deep well of personal experiences, the small tragedies of forgotten friendships.
Most excitingly, both of my novels, Foundations and The Drowned Woman are becoming audiobooks—and The Drowned Woman is already available for pre-order on Whiskey Tit’s website. You can even listen to a brief excerpt (I didn’t read it, but my lovely publisher did), they’re the perfect companions for a long drive.
In the weariness of January, I found myself going directly onto social media in the morning, searching for something that wasn’t overwhelmingly bleak to read alongside my morning tea. I decided to do my little part to support online and print news media and subscribed to The Atlantic and have tried to supplement my mornings with thoughtful articles rather than AITA posts.
A few recent things that have stayed with me:
“Everyone’s a Sellout Now”: This lengthy article tackles what it’s like being a creator in the midst of social media culture, the expectation that artists need a brand before they could get a record or book deal, and the Gen X and elder millennial pushback against feeling like a sellout. “Yet what they best represent is the current state of art, where artists must skillfully package themselves as products for buyers to consume. It’s precisely the kind of work that is uncomfortable for most artists, who by definition concern themselves with what it means to be a person in the world, not what it means to be a brand.”
This article on NPR about autoimmune diseases really hit home as I am currently dealing with some of the same frustrated feelings and hearing from other Hashimoto’s patients made me feel less alone, as did the discovery of the Xist molecule being a potential cause of increased autoimmunity in women.
A Trove of ‘Lost Basquiats’ Led to a Splashy Exhibition. Then the FBI Showed Up.”: I love to read about art world drama and this article does not disappoint as Bianca Bosker, author of Cork Dork, delves into the world of counterfeit art and forgeries. “The dispute has highlighted a fundamental predicament: The art world is crawling with counterfeits—estimates of the proportion of art on the secondary market that isn’t what it claims to be range from 40 to 70 percent—and it can be maddeningly difficult to distinguish a forgery from the real thing.”
Lately, I’ve been reading reissues of older novels and I often wonder how a book written in the 1950’s can tackle abortion in a more modern and emotionally intelligent way than any fiction I’ve read about the same subject published in recent years. Edith Wharton’s Summer also comes to mind. Are we so repressed? We are living in a world that is rapidly spinning back to the past, yet these novels show the insistent perseverance of past women, again and again, in a way that makes me take heart in the present.
Last month, I read Penelope Mortimer’s Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting, a 1958 novel that was reissued by McNally Editions (wonderful editions, I want them all). The protagonist, Ruth, is a wife and mother in her mid-thirties, yet is somehow made to feel much older, languishing in her British suburb while her husband is away working in the city, her two boys are at school, and her daughter Angela is all grown up and living a life Ruth can no longer penetrate. Ruth’s chief companion is her inner voice, though it’s leading her toward a bit of a mental breakdown.
“The first stage of the nightmare is losing the ability to believe in insignificance. Consciousness is sharpened to a point in which nothing is trivial but every moment, every detail, has the same unbearable quality of dread. In this condition of despair there are no crises.”
Just as Ruth is almost wholly overwhelmed by her feeling of desperate isolation, Angela reveals she’s pregnant and doesn’t want to be. Suddenly, the safe suburban cocoon is ruptured and these two women, who can barely access contraception, must figure out a way to get Angela an abortion.
Although it would be easy to call this an ‘abortion novel,’ Mortimer also effortlessly tackles social class, unhappy marriages, and the consequences of a misogynistic culture. Her prose is elegant and refined and gives the reader an ending that feels believable rather than all neatly tied up with a bow. I could have easily read 100 more pages.
Right now, I am reading Her Side of the Story by Alba de Cespedes. I read, and loved, her other novel, The Forbidden Notebook, it stays with me even now. I am halfway through the new one and every time I take a break, I feel like I am extracting myself from quicksand I am so engrossed in her writing. Translate everything this woman has written, immediately!