Is there such a thing as a reverse hypochondriac? If so, then I was one, until corona. Aside from check-ups, I avoid doctors like (wait for it) the plague. My response to most medical symptoms is to ignore them until they go away or kill me; and since I’m still sitting here, that approach is obviously working very well.
But I sneezed last night, and in 30 seconds, I was mentally on a ventilator. I heard hooves and went right for the zebras. That’s not really a good analogy, though, because coronavirus is widespread enough now to be a horse. I feel better today. Well, physically I feel better.
Forget about coronavirus, though. Let’s talk about books. I wasn’t going to write about books until the end of the crisis but reading is just one of the things that I’m doing right now so it’s just as good a thing to write about as anything else. Here’s what I've read in the last two weeks.
Things I Want to Punch in the Face, Jennifer Worick. A waste of three hours, even during a quarantine when I have more time than usual. I don’t know why I keep reading these ostensibly hilarious books written by popular snark bloggers. A word of advice: If you’re going to write an anger truck collection of pet peeves, then you better make them a lot sharper and funnier than just about everything in this book. I’ve been blogging since 2008 and I know that even then, “I just threw up in my mouth a little” was already Internet-shopworn and so there was no excuse whatsoever for a New York Times bestselling author to repeat this disgusting and lazy phrase multiple times in a book published in 2012. Don’t ask me why I was reading eight-year-old blog-turned-book garbage in the first place. It’s been a long fucking quarantine.
Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women and Scribble Scribble: Notes on Media, Nora Ephron. These are actually two different books, in one Kindle edition. Every time I think I’ve read every Nora Ephron essay, Kindle taps me on the shoulder and says “Hey! You missed some!” Both books are so 1970s-topical that I didn’t know whom or what Nora was writing about half the time, but that’s why God invented Google.
I turned eight in 1973, and I was more keyed into current events than most eight-year-olds. I knew about Watergate, but I didn’t pay much attention to the more peripheral characters, like Martha Mitchell or Rose Mary Woods. Of course, now I have the benefit of hindsight and historic perspective on 1973, and I know that Rose Mary Woods was hardly a peripheral character in the Watergate scandal. Crazy Salad is a compendium of essays about a few particular prominent women of the time, including Rose Mary Woods; and about women’s issues large and small. Even though some of the essays (“On Consciousness-Raising” and “Baking Off”) are pretty dated now, many of the others are as relevant today as they were almost fifty years ago. If Nora were living, she could probably write an essay similar to the Rose Mary Woods essay, this time on Ivanka or Kellyanne. And sadly, a woman trying to break into the ranks of MLB umpires today would probably fare no better than Bernice Gera did in 1972.
Scribble Scribble: Notes on Media, which includes essays on journalism (print and TV) and entertainment, is just another example of Nora Ephron writing about events in my life years before they happen. One night last week, I was looking for a movie to watch and I stumbled across “Shirley Valentine,” a British movie from 1989. I had never seen it before, and I only watched a few minutes--it doesn’t hold up. The movie stars Pauline Collins as an unhappy housewife in working-class Thatcher-era England. I looked Ms. Collins up because she looked so familiar but I couldn’t place her, and that’s how I remembered that she starred in “Upstairs Downstairs,” which was the “Downton Abbey” of the 1970s. The very next day, I landed on Nora’s essay on “Upstairs, Downstairs.”
Coincidence? Oh really? Well explain to me how the essay just happened to comment on an episode in which a character died of Spanish Flu during the 1918 pandemic? Did Nora know that 40-odd years later, a person would be reading this essay after having seen one of the stars of the program in another production, which she was watching because she was bored during another pandemic quarantine? Uncanny.
And the parallels do not end there. During the time she was married to Carl Bernstein, Nora lived in an apartment building in Washington DC, which had its own mimeographed newsletter, distributed periodically to all of the building’s residents. I also live in a neighborhood that has its own paper newsletter (The Bugle, published and distributed quarterly). I even write for it.
Happens Every Day, Isabel Gillies. You know how sometimes you see a movie and then you find out that it was based on a book, and so you read the book? Well this book was not a movie, but its author performed in one. “Metropolitan,” a 1990 independent production about a group of privileged New York teenagers during Christmas break, is one of my favorite-ever movies. I hadn’t seen it in forever, but one bleak quarantine Sunday morning, I was flipping channels and landed on a showing. Full disclosure: I’ve seen it twice more since then. It’s such a good movie, and it seemed odd to me that I’ve never seen most of the actors in anything else, so I looked it up on IMDB to see what else the rest of the cast had been in and that’s how I found out that Isabel Gillies (who plays slutty Cynthia) is a writer.
Happens Every Day is a memoir about the heartbreaking end of Gillies’ marriage to an Oberlin professor, who left Gillies and her two toddlers for another Oberlin faculty member. I read it very quickly. Isabel Gillies is a wonderful writer; and her book manages to balance the tension between the raw, devastating, in-the-moment suffering of a woman whose marriage is crumbling with the 20-20 hindsight and perspective of a person who has healed and moved on to better things. Within just a paragraph or so, she can expand out onto the universal pain and sorrow and anger and fear of a mother about to be abandoned by the father of her children and then contract into the vital importance of a cup of tea at the end of a bad day. Isabel Gillies is serious about tea. We have that in common. Happens Every Day is funny and charming and honest all the way through. And I’m glad things ended happily for Isabel Gillies.
Wolf Hall. I wrote a little about Wolf Hall right here, and I think I’m too tired to write anymore. I just started the next volume in the trilogy, Bring Up the Bodies, in which another marriage is about to end badly.
Spoiler alert: The discarded wife is Anne Boleyn, and there won’t be a happy ending this time. Note to Isabel Gillies: You could have done worse. Note to Tudor-era single women: Don’t marry Henry VIII. In fact, don't even date him.
*****
I haven’t sneezed again since I started writing this on Monday. It’s Friday now and I have a headache, probably brought on by too much writing and reading and movie-watching.
I am invited to yet another virtual happy hour later this afternoon, and I could not be less enthusiastic about this. In fact, my enthusiasm level is quite low in general. It rained all day yesterday, forcing me to skip my daily walk. Maybe that’s all that’s wrong. I just need to get out of the house and breathe some outdoor air and think some non-corona thoughts. I have more books to read, and more movies to watch, and maybe even some more odd symptoms to look up on WebMD. Yes, a walk is just the thing. And some tea maybe.
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