In other news, I took a nostalgic wander through the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2018 list last week (I used to love doing that, and critiquing the list, and laughing that I had only ever read like one or two books on it). Middle age is schooling me.) Would you like to read and discuss it in January? Let's do. And even that job is kicking my ass this year. (I used to love baking Christmas cookies. Frankly, kids, I don't think I have the energy this month. So, originally for December, we were slated to book-club Garret Keizer's small book Privacy. Although I agree with several commenters here that some of her work could do with a good edit and that her book Bad Feminist was perhaps a touch over-hyped*, I am still finding much to like in her writing. I am not yet done with the Roxane Gay and still want to talk about her a little bit more. Thank you so much! Keep reading suggestions and comments coming-I think we should keep reading essays in 2019. I have enjoyed reading some different essay collections, and what I have really enjoyed is talking them over with you. One thing that has not sucked has been our Essay Project 2018.
It goes against my nature, but hell, I'm out of other ideas, so I'm going to think positively. And I hope that your 2019 (and mine) is a fabulous year. I gotta be honest with you: 2018 has been a bit of a shit show.įor me, for family members, for friends in my small and cranky circle the feeling emphatically seems to be that none of us will be sorry to see the backside of 2018. No matter what else she does I'll love her forever for that paragraph. I have been waiting for what feels like an eternity to find one other woman to speak this idea aloud. We should all be in this together, right? One of my favorite moments is when a guy, at that certain point in a relationship, says something desperately hopeful like, 'Are you on the pill?' I simply say, 'No, are you?" Suffice it to say, I will take a pill every day when men have that same option. *One such moment: in her essay "The Alienable Rights of Women," there is this paragraph: "If I told you my birth control method of choice, which I kind of swear by, you'd look at me like I was slightly insane. I'm going to re-read it periodically to remind myself how important it is that I try to raise the CRjrs to grow up to be people who won't take what women (or anyone) might be desperately sacrificing themselves to give.
I'm going to re-read it periodically because it is an unbelievably good essay. There is not really a happy ending to that story. I don't understand how desperately I sacrificed myself. I don't understand how he could be so terrible. As an adult, I don't understand how I allowed him to treat me like that. I was happy because he was happy, because if I gave enough, he might love me. At school, he continued looking right through me. Technically, we didn't have sex, but we did everything else. It was just meat and bones around that void he filled by touching me. If doing things to my body made him happy, I would let him do anything to my body. When we were together, he'd tell me what he wanted to do to me. It's a sad, silly story lots of girls know. "When I was in middle school, when I was young-old enough to like a boy but young enough to have no clue what that meant-there was a boy who I thought was my boyfriend and who said he was my boyfriend but who also completely ignored me at school. It even gave me moments when I could give what I call "snorts of angry sisterhood laughter."*Īs for seeing some things differently? There is her essay "What We Hunger For." Here is some of it: I've not read every single last page of the book, but what I did read in it often made me think, or helped me see things from a different angle. That was not the case (for me) with this collection. I think we're also agreed that the book got a lot (perhaps too much?) press and although I'm often the first to be completely bugged by a book that is overhyped, mostly that bothers me when I don't think such a book merited the hype at all. We've already had a bit of discussion on this book, and I think we're all agreed that the entire collection could have been edited a bit better (the book is 320 pages long and honestly, I think it could have been trimmed a bit, both in terms of tightening up each essay and also leaving a few out). Well, I have finished as much as I am going to of Roxane Gay's essay collection Bad Feminist.