March 2022, and this isn't about the slap
...sorry and you're welcome
Usually when I’m not consistently reading, I feel bad. Not bad in a “what will people think of me” way, but bad like when you don’t drink enough water and feel weird halfway through the day. I feel the same way when I’m not watching TV regularly. I spent most of March co-managing the launch of a major fundraiser for the Northwest Abortion Access Fund. I didn’t have time to read because I was herding cats, building excitement, and trying to make sure I didn’t miss anything fucking big. Funding abortion this year is particularly important because most experts in the field think we’ll lose Roe v. Wade and well, everything is just really bad!
Like prob quite a few of you, I’ve really learned in the past decade that Not All Good Things Are Good. Growing up when it came to major natural disasters, I knew to give to the Red Cross. They were the helpers. They did Good. Until Hurricane Katrina and maturation and the slow realization that the systems aren’t set up to let even the organizations who claim to help…do that. I used to go hard for Planned Parenthood and while I don’t have a negative opinion about them in any particular way, what I have learned is that these big organizations are super limited in terms of what they can do on the ground. Planned Parenthood doesn’t need your money, abortion funds do.
I’ve been on NWAAF’s board of directors for a little over a year now but had my first shift on the hotline just a couple of months ago. Two weeks on the hotline forever changed how I think about providing support to one another. Calling people on the phone to ask them what they need, how much, by when, and then taking care of the details for them is incredible. I’m talking gas money through payment apps, groceries through delivery apps, hotels booked on our dime. When I was pregnant, I was miserable because I didn’t have my coping mechanisms (red wine, most of my friends, my boyfriend because he made it all about him) and I didn’t have my damn wits about me. I felt so hormonal and emotional and it is very hard to parse out your feelings when you’re unexpectedly, accidentally pregnant. If I had known about abortion funds in 2015, I would have been supported in the ways I needed to be supported. Rather than stressing about the money (pulled from my 401k), I could have focused on me and my body and my future. When you donate to NWAAF, your money goes into a pool of money that gets dispersed to actual people who call us and need our help. Your 100 bucks gets venmoed to someone who needs gas money. This is direct, mutual aid and it’s beautiful.
My funding team this year is built up of some of the rad people of color on NWAAF’s board and staff, which is just another incentive to put your sweet little dollars where they matter most, white folks!
Anyway, back to it. I was all over the place with what I read this month including WILLARD C. SMITH’s memoir. Oh, the timing.
[Books I Read]
The Book of Mother: A Novel by Violaine Huisman; translated by Leslie Camhi (2021) | Quick summary: Coming-of-age story from the perspective of a daughter desperately trying to understand her mother.
Y’all know I’m drawn to narratives about mothers and daughters or really mothers in general. This one was harsh, raw, and honest from not only a daughter’s perspective of who her mother is, but that same daughter’s perspective of how her mother became who she is. I enjoyed this book because I related to the women, even as someone who isn’t and has no interest in slipping on the the identity of mother myself. I also enjoyed so many killer sentences. I really felt myself in lines like:
“She could become overexcited or crushed, she could eat like a bear or like a bird, she was excessive in everything.”
I enjoy books that aren’t written for children but sometimes have a child’s point of view because we get rich and funny phrases like, “useless grown-up sentences” and a new all-time favorite:
“We hadn’t asked for any of this, above all, we hadn’t asked to be born to such a lunatic!”
and
“Clearly, the adults surrounding us were either scatterbrained and irresponsible, or blind, or overwhelmed. A bunch of morons!”
[fiction, novel, coming-of-age, family-and-relationship-focused, written by a white French writer, translated by a white, French essayist, medium-ish quick read]
But You Seemed So Happy: A Marriage, in Pieces and Bits by Kimberley Harrington (2021) | Quick summary: “If I’m an evangelist for anything, it’s for all of us to think a bit more deeply about marriage and why we care so much about it.”
That quick summary is actually a direct quote from Harrington’s memoir(?) but also sums up the book and why I picked it up. I sometimes wonder if y’all wonder why I read so much about marriage and divorce when I am, and never have been, either of those things. Probably because I was raised by a single woman who told me repeatedly that marrying a man was not worth it. I didn’t really care when my mom said that (more than once, and my aunt too) but it certainly implanted the idea that marriage does not need to be the center of my life. It wasn’t ever and still isn’t the center of the lives of any of the women in my family.
“You might discover that, surprise, surprise, cis-het marriage is an outdated and often unequal arrangement that we keep clinging to because it’s what everyone else is doing so why not? We haven’t evolved nearly as much as we like to think we have.”
I like to think about marriage and relationships and how so much of the discourse around those things are centered around white, cis, heterosexual couples. I like to think about Sliding Doors shit like Harrington ponders:
“What if we met during the only window when we would’ve gotten along? The only time we would’ve fallen in love with one another? What if it wasn’t destiny at all, what if it was just timing? Can you honestly say that if you met me at a party right now that you’d think we’d make a great couple? That you’d fall in love with me? Do you think you’d look across the room and think we were meant to be together?” “No.” “Me neither.”
Nothing in life has any meaning other than relationships — to each other, to the plants, to the creatures, to the land. Marriage is so weird and people are so weird about it. This book was great and the pandemic comes in full-force which adds a necessary perspective to basically any memoir about work, relationships, money, health, or, uh, anything else that humans need and rely on.
[nonfiction, memoir, relationship-studies, written by a white American essayist, pretty quick, funny read]
True Grit by Charles Portis (1968) | Quick summary: A young teenager avenges her father’s death.
I love the Book Riot challenge because it gets me to read things I probably wouldn’t pick up otherwise. For the challenge, “read a book whose movie or TV adaptation you’ve seen (but haven’t read),” I was going to pick a softball (for myself) and read Crazy Rich Asians after all this time but then my boyfriend handed me a copy of True Grit and it felt much more in the spirit of a reading challenge. While I’ve dabbled in the “western” genre with movies in the past couple of years and I saw the Coen Brothers’ version back in 2010 when I’d mainline movies to have an educated opinion on why it should lose the Best Picture Oscar to something I liked better. I think you can tell what I’m getting at which is that I loved True Grit. I’d be surprised if it wasn’t one of my favorite books of the year this year. I laughed out loud a lot, I could easily picture the characters in my head (not because I’d seen the movie 12 years prior but because they’re so well-written), and I gave a shit about them, especially the protagonist Mattie. As a young teen, she has no problem putting grown men in their place, telling them, “I have no regard for you” and huffing that “if you want anything done right you will have to see to it yourself every time.” I like that.
Ironically, the afterword in the copy I read referenced Roald Dahl. When True Grit came out, he’s recorded to have said, “I was going to say it was the best novel to come my way since…then I stopped. Since what? What book has given me greater pleasure in the last five years? Or in the last twenty?” I like that too.
[fiction, classic lit, written by a white American dude, pretty quick, funny read]
Boy: Tales of Childhood by Roald Dahl (1984)
This is why it’s ironic, because Boy was waiting in my queue next. One of the remaining positive things the Harry Potter series is credited for is a love of reading. Kids who had never enjoyed or read a book for fun found Harry Potter and it changed them. Not for me. I love that book series and it will forever mean so much to me but that is not the series that made me love reading. I just always loved reading but the first author I remember really loving is Roald Dahl. We all did right? Matilda, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach? I loved these stories — the book and the movies — and I loved the man who created them. I can’t tell you why I decided to read Boy in March 2022 at 34-years-old but it came at such a nice time. I hope I always remember reading this book, smiling like an idiot as I read Dahl describe literally anything. If someone less delightful wrote this book, it would have been boring but it wasn’t. It was perfect.
[nonfiction, memoir, written by a white English dude, medium-length, funny read]
[Books I Heard]
Will by Will Smith (2021) | Quick summary: Everything you’ve always wanted to know about Will Smith, the man.
Well, this is awkward. In the beginning of March, I listened to Will Smith’s audiobook, hungrily and thoroughly. I rewound bits. I paused to take song and YouTube clip breaks. I was immersed. I flew through 16 hours of Will’s life, feeling like he was talking directly to me, tearing up with pride at every milestone I already knew he’d achieved.
Will is one of the best memoirs I’ve ever read (/heard) and is easily the best audiobook I’ve ever listened to. The memoir is as raw and honest as it is funny and nostalgic. I am incredibly proud of Will Smith, who feels like a friend of mine. I couldn’t recommend this more.
The day after Will Smith bitch slapped Chris Rock in public, I made sure I bought a hardcover copy of his book in case something absurd happened like Target dropping the memoir from its shelves. And that’s all I’ll say about that.
[nonfiction, celebrity memoir, written by a Black American actor/comedian/producer/rapper, longer listen, read by the author]
My Body by Emily Ratajkowski (2021) | Quick summary: Honest investigation of what it means to be an insta-and-otherwise famous commodity.
A couple of years ago, The Cut published an excerpt from Ratajkowski’s My Body called “Buying Myself Back.” It was an enjoyable, frustrating read that stuck with me. While she admits the point of her book isn’t “to arrive at answers” about how she feels selling her image while feeling a certain way about it, I still think it was too soon. The article was powerful. The book was a little like, “okay?” I hope she writes another memoir in 20+ years when she has more insight and experiences to reflect on. (She’s only 30!)
[nonfiction, celebrity memoir, written by a white model/actress, shorter listen, read by the author in an incredibly monotonous voice that you have to speed up to deal with]
[What I Recommend]
If you’ve got mom stuff: The Book of Mother
If you are a person!!!: True Grit
If you aren’t a chump: Will
