Powerwash

I had to attend a Zoom meeting a few nights ago, God help me, and my camera didn’t work. I tried one thing and then another, and it wasn’t user error. The camera just didn’t work. 

My Chromebook is new. I just bought it in January and this is February so I think that still qualifies as “brand-new,” in fact. It occurred to me, as I tried one possible fix and then another, that I shouldn’t have to troubleshoot hardware issues so soon after I unpacked the box that the device was shipped in. But I deal with repair and maintenance issues the same way that I deal with health matters: I Google hotfix ideas; and if they don’t work, then I either ignore the problem until it goes away, or I learn to live with it. 

Yeah, I know. I never said that I was a genius. 

Apparently, you can wipe a Chromebook, restoring it to its factory settings, in about five minutes; and then you can set it up and configure it to your personal specifications in another five minutes. The wiping part is called a “powerwash,” and the online Chromebook community assures me that the whole thing is a snap. And I have no reason to believe that it’s not, because I set this thing up starting from factory settings just a few weeks ago, and that took all of five minutes. I do pretty much all of my writing on Google Docs, and I store all of my stuff on Google Drive, so I wouldn’t lose any data. It's a pretty low-risk operation, in my estimation. 

I was this close to pushing the proverbial button and power washing this thing right back to ground zero, and then it occurred to me that I had never actually powered the Chromebook completely down, and that maybe I should try that first. I have it set to sleep when I close it, but I never really turn it off. So I turned it off. And then I turned it back on. And voila--the camera worked, and the fire hose was not necessary. I was still tempted to power wash the Chromebook anyway, just to see what would happen; but then I thought, why tempt fate? Why mess with it? Why fix that which is not broken? 

*****

So I had another meeting earlier today, and the camera didn’t work. It wasn’t on Zoom, it was on another damn thing. I don’t know. I can’t, with the virtual meetings. Anyway, if the meeting had been a Zoom meeting, then I might just have assumed that the problem was on the Zoom end and not the Chromebook end, but this was a different meeting platform. It’s not meeting-related either, because I just tried the camera again with no meeting in sight, and you know what? It doesn’t work. 

I have yet another Zoom meeting tonight. Did I mention how many volunteer jobs I have right now? I have three, in addition to my actual paid job. And they all require meetings, and all of the meetings are on virtual platforms, so I need the stupid camera. 

I’m going to try Plan A again. I’m going to shut down the Chromebook until it’s time for my meeting. If the camera doesn’t fix itself, then I’m going to scrub this device like a car after a snowstorm, so that it’s squeaky clean and shiny. I’ll let you know what happens. Or maybe you’ll never hear from me again. Oh, technology. 

Grid

Last Monday was a work holiday, so I slept a little later than usual; all the way until 7:30 AM, in fact. Everyone else was off, too, but they all like to sleep late, so I had the house to myself. I made coffee, and I settled on the couch to stream a British detective show, and I thought about how much I appreciate a paid holiday, one of the greatest gifts of the labor movement of the 20th century. 

And then the power went out. 

It always feels so abrupt when the power goes out. Everything shuts down or off, all at once, before you even have time to react. And you notice how much noise you’ve become accustomed to, because a house without power is a very quiet house. 

My first thought was “Thank God I already made my coffee,” and then my second thought was that I’d text my friends to see if it was just me, or if the rest of the neighborhood was out. My friend Erin texted first, and that’s how we knew that it was the whole street. I checked the power company’s website. They already knew about the outage, a thousand customers were affected, and they expected to restore power by 9 AM. And they did. I was reading a book and texting with my friends, and the power came back on as suddenly as it had gone out. Everything sounded normal again. The whole thing was done and over in less than an hour. 

Last Monday was a nice day, and the outage wasn’t weather-related. It was apparently human-caused; an error that accidentally cut the switch or the transformer or the circuit or whatever the thing is that carries the power to the affected homes and businesses. The power company’s update on the outage admitted as much. Imagine that--they made a mistake, they admitted they made a mistake, they got to work immediately to fix the mistake, and then they actually did fix it, in practically no time. When the lights came back on, the coffee in the coffee pot was still warm. 

*****

I don’t want to get into the politics of what’s happening in Texas. Well OK, maybe for a minute. It was the Green New Deal! Really, Governor Abbott? And Ted Cruz--really? REALLY? OK, that’s all. 

Politics aside, I have been thinking about this a lot during these last few days, and not just because it’s been all over the news. It’s because I think a lot about everything we depend on, and how easily it can all fall apart. I flip a switch and voila--light! I turn the handle on a faucet and clear water streams forth, stopping only when I tell it to stop. My car runs out of gas and I go to the gas station and fill it back up; and we eat food, and then I drive my car to the grocery store and restock the kitchen. Most people take all of this for granted. I don’t take it for granted. That is not because I’m a better and more thoughtful person but because I’m a compulsive worrier. I worry about everything. I worry that things will fall apart, that the center won’t hold. 

OK, now that’s REALLY the last time you’ll ever see me paraphrase Yeats. 

It’s all very fragile, the whole thing--the power grid, water systems, the Internet, the transportation infrastructure that allows things and people to move freely from place to place so that we can drive our cars to nearby stores and buy everything we need. It can all go away, and very quickly. Just one disaster, one cyberattack, and the whole thing is kaput.  

Kaput, I tell you. Even now, I worry. Most people in Texas have power again; but apparently, many people who didn’t lose their power in the first place are receiving five-figure electric bills because the free market or whatever. It’s snowing again here, snow mixed with sleet that is making everything icy cold and that could easily weigh down the power lines and shut down the electric power; and that could easily make the roads impassable, thus making it impossible for delivery trucks to restock the stores that we all depend on for food and household supplies. 

*****

I like to think of myself as a resourceful, flexible, fearless person who can adapt to any circumstance, roll with the punches, and turn lemons into lemonade. But that’s totally ridiculous, of course, because I am exactly the opposite of that and if we find ourselves in a Texas-like crisis here in Maryland, I’ll start panicking and lose my shit within the hour. 

OK, maybe within a day. We have seen how I handled an unexpected power outage of less than an hour’s duration with total aplomb, and I bet that I can sustain that devil-may-care attitude for as long as six hours. After that, I make no promises. 

Uncanny Valley

 From Wikipedia, source of all knowledge: 

“In aesthetics, the uncanny valley is a hypothesized relationship between the degree of an object's resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to such an object.”

File that little definition under “I,” for “I learn something new every day.” I just finished reading Uncanny Valley, Anna Wiener’s memoir of her time working for tech start-ups in Silicon Valley. I stumbled across the definition of an uncanny valley, a thing that I hadn’t previously known existed, when I Googled the book title, because I couldn’t remember the author’s first name. 

*****

The young are different from you and me. Well, they’re different from me, anyway; and the meaning of “uncanny valley” (a very apt title, now that I know what the term means) is not the only thing I learned while reading this very good book. Uncanny Valley is a memoir, about a life that is very particularly the life of a young person in the early 21st century, and so it is chock-full of references to things and people and cultural trends that I didn’t know about. Things like third-wave coffee shops (hint: not Starbucks!) and black box theaters and dakimakura pillows. I was relieved to note that even the author had had to look that last one up when she first heard about it. (And it was weird, but at least it wasn’t please God return-me-to-the-bliss-of-ignorance, sight-seen-that-now-cannot-be-unseen weird, because I’ve been on the wrong end of that kind of Google search more than once, and I still have the scars). 

*****

“What is your North Star metric?” Well, mine is to live out an entire business day without hearing a single reference to a metric, direct or indirect (meaning no dashboards, no visualizations, no X or Y axes…) but that’s neither here nor there. When Weiner was a customer support specialist for the analytics start-up, this is the question that she asked her customers, because it was the question that she thought they wanted to hear; the question that made her sound like she understood their business and the technology that would illuminate its strengths and weaknesses. “I acted like I was cosplaying a 1980s business manager,” she writes, mocking her own desire to please and impress. At least I didn’t have to look up cosplay. This time. 

*****

In Silicon Valley, as in many other tech-focused environments, the non-technical person, the person who does everything but the coding, is a second-class citizen. These are the people who take care of the customers and the employees, pay the bills, write the ad copy and manage the social media, clean the floors, stock the kitchens with expensive snacks and generally keep the whole operation running so that the programmers can plug into their headsets, pull up the hoods of their hoodies, and write the code. As a non-technical person who has worked in tech environments for a long time, I have always wondered: Who decides these things? Who decided that a person who can code but who has no emotional intelligence should make three times as much money as a person who can’t code but who can read the room and then write about it? I tell you who decides: Men, that’s who. Men designed the system in which traditionally male roles are valued--and paid--more highly than traditionally female roles. 

This is not really the entire point of Uncanny Valley, though it does examine the subject of inequality and sexism in Big Tech. And although it’s a memoir, it’s not solely personal, either. It’s a micro and macro hybrid; the micro of Anna Weiner’s personal experience as a non-technical female person in a technical world and the macro of why somehow, for some odd reason, the system has decided that these non-technical people are not important, that their skills are not valuable. And of course, these non-technical people, the second-class citizens who earn less money and don’t get stock options, and are often employed as “contractors'' through third-party agencies that don’t provide benefits, are overwhelmingly women and people of color. 

But there’s more to it than that, too. There are two levels of macro in Uncanny Valley, and sexism and classism and the tyranny of “the meritocracy” is the lower of the two, the higher being the peril of this brave new world in which a handful of computer scientists and programmers in a handful of technical once-startup companies pretty much run the world. And they’re just getting started.

*****

Weiner writes about the pervasiveness of ad tech and the creepy Google search results that get up in your business and follow you around, pushing stories about whatever you happen to be reading or streaming or listening to into your feed; and magically serving ads for products that you’ve searched for in the past, each one becoming ever more specific and ever more targeted until you’re sure that a huge evil silicon chip is reading your mind. And it is. Who doesn’t have a story about Google knowing far too much about what we’re reading, or searching, or saying, or even thinking? Here’s one: Two years ago, when parties still existed, we went to our kids’ swim team’s annual parents party, which was 80s-themed. The younger parents barely remembered the 80s, but they were very enthusiastic about the theme. One mom was wearing a Swatch, complete with a Swatch Guard, a thing that I hadn’t seen or heard about since 1987 or so. I complimented her on her outfit and her attention to detail.

Yes, you know what happened next. For a week, my news and social media feeds were filled with Swatch ads and stories. I never once entered the word “Swatch” into a search field. I didn’t even have my phone in my hand when I was talking to the Swatch lady. But somehow, some way, Google heard me, and thought that I wanted to buy a Swatch, and helpfully offered me the opportunity to do that. 

Wait a minute. I’m writing this in Google Docs. So let’s see what happens. Let’s see if Google Docs tells Google’s search algorithms “Hey! She’s at it again! She really wants to buy a Swatch! Send her a coupon! Insert a Swatch story into her Instagram feed! 

I’ll report back on this. 

*****

As Weiner notes, not only does Big Tech read our minds, it decides what we should say, and when, and to whom, and how. This is a big deal right now, of course, with conservatives all over the country crying crocodile tears about “cancel culture” and “silencing of conservative voices.” Boo hoo. Every time I hear a Trump supporter cry about cancel culture, I think of Colin Kaepernick, rolling his eyes and thinking “yeah, cancel culture--it’s the worst.” 

In all seriousness, though, I agree with them to a certain extent, as much as I hate to admit it or to side with Trump worshippers in anything. Even though our current dilemma, in which large tech corporations have nearly unlimited power, is largely the fault of conservatives who spent the last 70 years or so resisting every attempt to control corporations and limit their influence, I still don’t want a tiny handful of overpaid, over-privileged, self-important software engineers determining the boundaries of free speech in the United States, and then using their social media networks and their collaboration platforms to enforce those boundaries. But that’s where we are right now. Now that immense corporate power is finally biting them in the ass, maybe conservative lawmakers,will come to the realization that it’s always a bad thing to allow a tiny group of people to amass nearly unlimited wealth and power. 

On the subject of Big Tech deciding who gets to speak and what they get to say, Weiner discusses her experience moderating content and chats for the open-source startup (it’s GitHub), writing “No one was equipped to adjudicate speech for the millions of people spending their lives online.” No kidding. That’s a big decision to make. It’s a big deal to censor another person. And as much as I think that Donald Trump deserved to be kicked off Twitter and Facebook and all of the rest of them, there’s a counterproductive downside, too. Weiner agrees. Commenting on tech executives’ tendency to spill their guts on the Internet and whether they might be better advised to just put down the phone and stay quiet for a bit, she touches on the question that many people have asked about Donald Trump. Is it maybe better to allow these guys to keep tweeting and posting and sharing all of their brilliant thoughts? At least then we know what they’re up to. 

*****

Uncanny Valley is a very good book that works as both a work-focused personal memoir and social criticism. Anna Weiner has something to say, and she’s a really good writer. I’m not sure why she insisted on maintaining the vague, no-names-please tone, when even a middle-aged layperson like myself had no trouble identifying the less-well-known companies and people with just a quick Google search. In one case, I didn’t even need to Google first--I guessed, and I Googled to confirm that my guess was correct. It’s even sillier when she writes about the very well-known firms, like the “search engine giant” (Google), or the social network that everyone hated (Facebook--and I do hate Facebook!), or the highly litigious Seattle-based software conglomerate (Microsoft). A stylistic choice, I suppose. 

Last year, I read Studs Terkel’s Working, a book of short essays about the lives of working people in mid-20th century America. Those people could not have imagined the world of work today. But one thing that hasn’t changed is that people want something more from their work than just a paycheck. “I would long for the sense of ownership and belonging, the easy identity, the all-consuming feeling of affiliation. And then I would remind myself: There but for the grace of God go I.” Weiner understands that it is a natural human tendency to look for connection, but she also knows that it’s wrong and even dangerous to rely solely on work for meaning in life. She understands that it’s far too easy to get in too deep, to become too devoted to an undeserving idea or institution or person. 

So where do you draw the line? If you are dedicated to your work, do you then run the risk of becoming a true believer in something that isn’t true? On the other hand, if you tell yourself that work is only work, that you’ll do only what’s necessary and required to earn your paycheck, do you then run the risk of becoming an automaton, and of missing the chance to serve and connect with others through work? How do you strike a balance between finding meaning in your work, and working only to make a living? 

Weiner answered that question for herself by leaving the tech industry rather than continue to enable and participate in a system that she knew to be morally suspect on many levels. Of course, thanks to an employee stock option windfall (small by comparison to other employees of the same start-up, she assures us) and immense talent as a writer, she had the option to leave the industry and start over. People who don’t have those fallbacks, and who have families to support, can’t walk away so easily. 

*****

If there’s one final takeaway from Uncanny Valley, it’s that Big Tech is both completely indispensable and completely unsustainable. With it, the center cannot hold; without it, things will fall apart. And that is the one and only time you’ll ever see me paraphrase Yeats. 

*****

Right now, I’m reading Let Me Tell You What I Mean, the new book of until-now unpublished Joan Didion essays. In “Why I Write,” Joan Didion writes (of course) about why she writes, and she claims that it’s partly because she doesn’t know how to think; not in abstracts, anyway. 

Part of me scoffs at this as utter ridiculousness because I’ve read enough Joan Didion to know that she knows how to think in concretes and abstracts and everything in between. But part of me knows exactly what she means, because I’m not an abstract thinker, either. I am also not typically a big picture thinker. I don’t always see the whole, only the sum of the parts. But even a vague and fuzzy thinker can see that the tech industry’s influence has grown exponentially in just the last few years; and that most of us are going to be affected by this in pretty significant ways. And most of those ways are not good. More of us will be driven into the so-called “gig economy,” scratching out a hand-to-mouth living so that the tech companies that employ us as contractors and sub-contractors and sub-sub-contractors, won’t have to provide benefits or job security or any of the other things that we have always associated with the employer-to-employee relationship. More of us will be driven to political or religious extremism, radicalized by targeted news and social media content. More of us will have a hard time distinguishing between fact and fiction. 

That’s the concrete part. The abstract is what we’re supposed to do about this. And I have no idea. 

*****

Uncanny Valley asks very big questions about important things: Work and its role in our lives, truth and falsehood, wealth and poverty, men and women, fairness and free speech, and more. That’s a lot for one relatively short book, isn’t it? 

Verdict

It’s Tuesday afternoon, almost evening. I was trying to finish writing something about a book that I just finished. It’s a pretty long post, and it just needs a conclusion, but I just ran flat out of words. I’ll try again tomorrow. 

Although it’s Tuesday, it’s the first day of the work week because yesterday was the Presidents’ Day holiday, which for some reason is under fire on Twitter. Apparently, there is a movement afoot to get rid of the Presidents’ Day holiday and replace it with an Election Day holiday. I am all for Election Day as a national holiday, but February cries out for a three-day weekend. Call it whatever you want, Twitter activists, just don’t take it away. 

Anyway, I needed the extra day this weekend, after an entire Saturday glued to the impeachment trial. Every TV in the house was on and tuned to MSNBC, and I watched on and off all day, from multiple different rooms in the house. When the defense wrapped up its ridiculous closing argument and my own Congressman, Rep. Jamie Raskin, gave the closing remarks and the thing went to a vote, we all sat still in front of the TV to await the verdict; even my younger son, who is completely uninterested in politics. 

I was cynical about the vote, and sure that I knew what the outcome would be. Still, I have to admit that when Senator Burr and then Senator Cassidy voted “guilty,” I allowed myself a brief moment of optimism. I thought that it might--just might--be possible that 17 Senators would vote to convict. But I knew what was going to happen. When it did, I was disappointed but not surprised. 

And then Schumer spoke, and I barely listened. And then McConnell spoke, and holy shit. It’s been three days now, so the initial shock has worn off. But it really was a shock. I was genuinely gaping-mouth shocked as I watched and listened live to Mitch McConnell finally, after four years, telling the truth about Donald Trump. 

Back to Twitter (from which I think I need a break). The political commentators, professional and amateur, whom I follow on Twitter are divided on the seven Republican guilty votes. One camp says that it’s too little, too late (true) and that most of the seven are either retiring or safe from primary challenges, for now. The other camp concedes the too little, too late point but argues that we should give them credit for doing the right thing, no matter what calculations might have informed their decisions. I’m in that camp. I don’t want to make the perfect the enemy of the good, and if we can get seven Republicans to do a good thing when it counts, then I will take it. And now, of course, all seven are under attack from their state party organizations and the pro-Trump media. There’s that terrible “cancel culture,” at it again. 

*****

Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday. I usually give something up for Lent; and that thing is usually sweets. And I’ll probably do that. But I think I need to walk away from politics again, at least for a few weeks. Maybe I’ll alternate days; a day with no media consumption, and then a day with no sugar. And forty days with no Trump. 

They DO have eyes...

I’ve always wanted to write something that would give me an excuse to use the term “murder of crows.” But did I want that excuse to be an actual murder of crows colonizing my front lawn? No. No, I did not. But we don't always get to choose the circumstances under which we get to write about crows. We don't invite them. They just show up. 

And two days or so ago, they did show up, in considerable numbers. I heard them before I saw them. They were screeching or squawking or whatever crows do, and I could tell that there were more than a few crows making that racket. So I decided to investigate, and holy crow. A murder of crows, whose specific number can be best described by the word “shitload,” were swirling around my front lawn, helping themselves to birdseed that was never intended for them and just generally making a nuisance of themselves. The sky was literally almost black on an otherwise sunny day. It was creepy, I tell you what. Creepy, and more than a little menacing. 

The crows swooped and dipped, landing on low branches and on the grass, pecking around for seeds or worms or whatever it was that attracted them in the first place; and then one of them strutted up the driveway, bold as brass, looking for all the world as if he were going to march up and ring the front doorbell. Maybe the bird feeder was empty, and he wanted to complain. Maybe he wanted directions. Maybe he wanted to ask if the house was for sale. 

What are the schools like? (Image: Wikipedia)

And it would have been, if those crows hadn’t cleared the hell out of here. But they did. They flew out almost as abruptly as they arrived. I don’t know if that’s because they got what they came for, or because they didn’t, but that’s their business. I wish them the best in their crowish pursuits, as long as they pursue those pursuits in some other location.  

Super Bowl Snow Day

Another snowy Sunday morning. A very light gray sky and very large white feathery flakes of snow, the kind that comes down heavily and piles up quickly and shovels easily, light and fluffy. The trees look pretty. It’s going to snow for a few more hours, I think. Then it’ll warm up enough tomorrow and Tuesday to melt some of it, before the real winter weather hits again, just in time for the holiday weekend. 

The Super Bowl is later today. I don’t care at all about any wintertime professional sporting event that doesn’t involve pucks and skates and ice. I do like the parties, though. We almost always go to a Super Bowl party, but well, you know. It’s the ‘rona. It’s always the ‘rona. We’ll watch the game and eat snacks and rank the commercials, and we’ll wait for next year. Just like everything else in 2020 and now early 2021, nearly 365 days in. There’s always next year.

Books and Pictures: 2020 Bibliography

I made a rash commitment to finish my book list over the three-day MLK weekend. And then all of a sudden the MLK weekend was here and gone, and as the next three-day weekend approached, I still was not finished. I always forget how much work this is. I write about some books right after I read them, and then I have to search my blog and my Google Docs folder to find what I wrote. That’s easy enough. What’s not easy is to remember what I thought about the books that I read but didn’t write about during the year. Thank God this isn’t my actual paid job. 

I wrote that paragraph well over a week ago. Now two people in my house have COVID, and the other two of us can’t go anywhere--I mean even more than we couldn’t go anywhere before. Being nearly totally housebound drove me to get this done so I can waste your time with my inane observations about things other than books. I spent a few days updating the blog with posts about specific books and authors, which I am linking to here, so that this list won’t be quite so God-awful long and meandering. I do try to be helpful.

Anyway, in very approximate chronological order according to my now very messy handwritten list, here are the books I read in 2020. 

*****

The Little Friend (Donna Tartt). This was my 2020 - 2021 overlap book. I wrote about it here. 

*****

Working (Studs Terkel). Working, which made Studs Terkel famous when it was published in 1974, is a series of stories narrated in the first person by a huge collection of people spanning a pretty big variety of professions, social classes, and education levels. Its full title is Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. That title is exactly right. Terkel adds short introductions of each subject, and occasionally adds his own comments and observations; but most of the book is people talking about their work and how they feel about it. Their voices come through very clearly. 

Here’s a question: What makes a job a good job? Pay, hours, working conditions, title, commute, benefits--all of those things are important. But Working makes clear that the work itself is the most important thing. If the work isn’t interesting or if the person doing the job doesn’t see its value to the world, then it almost doesn’t matter how much it pays, or how prestigious it is, or how pleasant the working conditions are. We have an innate need for meaning in our work. As one of Terkel’s subjects says, "That's the difference between being alive and being dead." 

*****

How to Ruin Everything (George Watsky). Certain smarmy younger people, including one to whom I actually gave birth, have expressed surprise that I read this book. I see no reason why this should be surprising. I hope Mr. Watsky writes more books. And I hope some millennial or Gen Z-er stumbles across this blog post and finds it hilarious that I refer to him as Mr. Watsky. 

The Best of Marlys (Lynda Barry). This is an anthology of Ernie Pook’s Comeek, one of the best comic strips ever. Last year, I bought Making Comics, and it made me remember how much I loved Lynda Barry, so I bought this best-of directly from the publisher, Drawn and Quarterly. I didn’t read it all the way through in 2020, so maybe it shouldn’t be on my list, but I’m counting it anyway because I’m pretty sure that I read most of these strips when they were originally published. When I was in my early 20s, my friend and I used to cut these out of the Philadelphia City Paper and mail them to each other, even though we lived in the same town and saw each other at least once a week. I found a few of them among my old letters when I was cleaning out cabinets. It was a different time, but Ernie Pook’s Comeek holds up. 

Does this picture make you hungry
 for a fried-baloney sandwich?

*****

The Princess Diarist (Carrie Fisher). I loved Carrie as an actress, but I love her even more as a writer. This is the book in which she famously revealed the long-suspected affair with Harrison Ford, who appears to have been a bit of a jerk. She shares long entries from her 1976 journal (she was 19 at the time), and they are astonishingly good. I write every day, but when I read writing that’s so effortlessly beautiful and incisive, I wonder why I bother. But then I go back and read some of my own work, and I know why. It’s because I’m good at this. So was Carrie Fisher. God rest her soul. 

*****

Sally Rooney:

• Conversations with Friends
• Normal People

For some reason, it is now fashionable on the Internet to talk about how overrated Sally Rooney is, and how ordinary and dull her two novels are. Disregard all of this talk when you come across it because Sally Rooney is a wonderful writer, and Normal People and Conversations with Friends are both beautiful books. I wrote about Conversations with Friends early last year, but I never got around to writing about Normal People. It’s not very long; or maybe it is but it didn’t seem long because of two things: I read it just after I finished Ron Chernow’s Hamilton, also wonderful, but VERY long. And because it’s so good that I didn’t want it to end, but it did end despite my best efforts to ration the last few pages so that I wouldn’t finish it too quickly. 

Normal People gets so many things right, but if I had to pick just one thing, it would be the beauty and pain and loneliness of a young person’s first time away from home; especially a certain kind of introspective young person, and really especially the kind of young person who doesn’t always understand the social signals in a new environment. I was nowhere near as bright or as sensitive as Normal People's Marianne or Connell; and I grew up in a place and time quite different from Ireland in 2011, but I was very much like Connell in one way. I was the child of an unsophisticated working-class family who encountered worldly, cultured, well-educated people for the first time when I went to college. Like Connell, I didn’t know how to fit in with them; and then later, I didn’t know if I even wanted to. Like both Marianne and Connell, I experienced real loneliness and depression for the first time as a young adult. And like both of them, I learned that “life offers up these moments of joy despite everything.” It still does. 

*****

Loving My Actual Life: An Experiment in Relishing What’s Right in Front of Me (Alexandra Kuykendall). I know that I read this because it’s on my list. If I’d especially loved or especially hated it, I’d have written something about it. Anyway, the message is right there in the title, and it’s a good one. 

Happens Every Day (Isabel Gillies). Early pandemic reading. I wrote about this one right here. I might read it again. It’s very good. 

The Reading Life (C.S. Lewis)

The Hope of the Gospel (George MacDonald). George MacDonald had been on my to-read list for a long time, so I’m glad I finally got around to reading him. Now I don’t have to feel guilty every time I read C.S. Lewis, who urged everyone to read George MacDonald. He was right.  

Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl (Jeannie Vanasco)

Goodbye to Berlin (Christopher Isherwood)

*****

Hilary Mantel: 

• Wolf Hall
• Bring Up the Bodies
• The Mirror and the Light
• Giving Up the Ghost
• Eight Months on Ghazzah Street
• Mantel Pieces

Hilary Mantel was my author of the year for 2020. 

*****

Not That Kind of Girl (Lena Dunham). I wrote this down, so I suppose I read it. IDK why. I guess I wanted to catch up with what young women were thinking about five years ago. 

*****

Helene Hanff:

• 84, Charing Cross Road
• The Duchess of Bloomsbury
• Underfoot in Show Business 

Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins as Helene Hanff and Frank Doel in the
1987 movie version of 84, Charing Cross Road. It almost doesn't matter if you
see the movie first and then read the book or vice versa. 

*****

Your Blue Flame (Jennifer Fulwiler). I like Jennifer Fulwiler, and it’s hard not to admire a woman who decides that she needs to go on tour as a stand-up comedian, and then just does it, successfully, on her own, with no backing or support from the entertainment establishment. I don’t remember much about this book other than the general premise, which is that you should find the thing that you’re meant to do--your blue flame--and then just do it and don’t let anyone stand in your way. To which I say, absolutely. Sure. Why not. You go, girl. Get it. Get after it. Crush it. Kill it. Slay.  

*****

Meg Wolitzer:

• This is My Life
• The Wife
• The Interestings 

*****

The Rent Collector (Camron Wright). A friend recommended this to me, and I read it, and then I felt bad about myself because I did not find the story as moving and inspiring as I was supposed to. What the hell is wrong with me? 

*****

The Life of Elizabeth I (Alison Weir) and Mary Tudor, England’s First Queen (Anna Whitelock). It was a year full of Tudors.  

Always a bad relationship choice. He only killed two of his six wives, but that's 33 percent.
Are are those odds that you want to mess with? 

*****

Hamilton (Ron Chernow). I can’t be the only person who saw the musical first and then read the book. Among many things for which I will remember 2020, some good, and most bad, Hamilton is among the very good. 

The Man Without a Face (Masha Gessen). I didn’t need any more proof that Vladimir Putin is a bad, bad man, but thanks to this book, I know that he’s even worse than I thought he was.  

Look Alive Out There (Sloane Crosley). What did I think about this book? I read it many months ago and I only remember two essays. One is about the author’s housesitting stay in an isolated mountain home in California; so isolated that when the homeowner is delayed by a few days, Crosley has to befriend the neighbors in the hope that they’ll invite her to dinner, because there’s no more food in the house and the nearest store is 20 miles away. And of course, she doesn’t have a car. Fortunately, the neighbors are friendly and they invite her to dinner. In fact, they’re too friendly, and it gets weird. The other one was about Crosley’s unsuccessful attempt to climb Cotopaxi. Well, she did climb it, but didn’t make the summit. She gets credit for trying. I wouldn’t have made it to base camp, whatever that is. But I don’t know that she gets credit for this book. I came away from it with no real idea of who Sloane Crosley is. And that’s her prerogative, of course, but I feel that a book of personal essays should reveal a little bit more about the person who wrote them. That’s just me. 

*****

P.D. James

• Time to Be in Earnest 
• The Children of Men 

P.D. James was one of my four favorite author discoveries of 2020. I wrote about Time to Be in Earnest here (and I’m still cracking up about my dolla dolla bills joke). Then I read The Children of Men. Time to Be in Earnest was my first P.D. James, but it's probably not the best exemplar of her work because it's a memoir, and she was actually a novelist. I think I need to read some of her detective novels, which is what she is best known for. The Children of Men, though technically called a novel, is really a morality tale disguised as a novel. And it’s a very good morality tale, with a relevant and urgent message; and it’s full of beautiful writing. But it’s not really a novel. That’s what I think, anyway. What do I know? 

OK, here’s what I know--it’s very rare for me to prefer a movie to the book that inspired it, and this is one of those rare cases. "Children of Men," the 2006 movie version, is great, and very different from the novel, though I read that P.D. James liked the movie version very much. Anyway, a book about the impending end of the world was either entirely appropriate 2020 reading, or very inappropriate, depending on your mood. I will be seeking out additional P.D. James, but probably not until 2022 or so. 

*****

Things I Want to Punch in the Face (Jennifer Worick). This book was among the many, many things I wanted to punch in the face in 2020. But whose fault is that? I'm the one who chose to pick up a book titled Things I Want to Punch in the Face; and then having picked it up, chose to actually read it. Maybe I should punch myself in the face. 

Crazy Salad and Scribble Scrabble (Nora Ephron)

How to Be an Antiracist (Ibram X. Kendi)

*****

Allie Brosh:

• Hyperbole and a Half 
• Solutions and Other Problems

*****

I just re-read the introductory paragraphs for this very long hot mess of a post (but seriously--can you imagine how much longer it'd have been had I not broken it into smaller posts?) and I see that I mentioned that this list was in "approximate" chronological order. Approximate indeed. I read the first Allie Brosh book in May or so, and then the second one in November (I think that's when it came out). I read How to Be an Antiracist in June or July. I read the face-punching book sometime during the early days of the 'rona, when I thought that we'd be out of lockdown in a matter of weeks and I didn't have a care in the world. Really, this list is in no real order whatsoever, much like the inside of my brain. I'm reading and writing again in 2021 and the one thing that I can promise is that next year's list will probably be just as crazy as this one. As always, don't say you weren't warned. 

Goodbye, January 2021. Don't let the door hit you in the ass.

Thursday, January 28. A week ago, we thought we were “on lockdown.” We thought we were “quarantining.” We were staying at home most of the time. We were going only where we really needed to go, when we needed to go; and we always wore our masks. Two people in our household (my husband and older son) work outside the house, but my younger son and I attend school and work (respectively) 100 percent from home. The outside-the-house people went to work and came right home and showered and changed; and the inside-the-house people didn’t make many unnecessary excursions. We thought we were pretty restricted. 

And then my husband and older son both got sick, and both of them tested positive for COVID, and so we learned what “lockdown” and “quarantine” really mean. I haven’t left my house for four days, not even to get groceries or take my daily walk.

*****

Friday, January 29. We’re on day 5 now. They are both starting to feel a bit better, though they’re both very tired. We’re all very tired. It’s Friday afternoon, and just about to get dark. We have about 15 minutes of rosy golden fading daylight on the coldest day of the season so far, and we’re all in various states of undress. I showered this morning, as I always do, and I put on a wool sweater with the flannel pajama pants that I wore to sleep last night. It’s cold enough today that I had to put a pair of leggings on under the pajama pants. So I’m right now wearing a wool sweater and long-sleeved t-shirt, pajama pants with leggings, and two pairs of socks with slippers; and I’m warm enough. I’m even comfortable. But I feel sloppy. I worked today, and I did just about as much work as I usually do, but I don’t feel the sense of satisfaction and accomplishment that normally accompanies the end of the workday. I feel like a person who sat around the house in her pajamas until all of a sudden, daylight faded and night fell and I was still in the clothes that I slept in the night before.

*****

Saturday, January 30. And now it’s Saturday morning. Guess what I’m wearing. Yeah. 

I will get dressed today; all the way dressed, and not half clothes and half pajamas. I know that this is the work-from-home look of 2020 and now 2021, but there are mental health downsides to sitting around in your pajamas all day. 

It’s freezing cold again; like legitimately 32-degree freezing cold, not the average winter chill that I tend to describe as freezing cold. We’re expecting snow. The other members of the household are even looking forward to it. And I guess I am too. It’ll be a change of scenery. It’ll look pretty and sparkly. Anyway, it’s cold enough today that many of the usual neighborhood walkers and runners will stay indoors and since I myself don’t have the ‘rona, I might venture out, masked and distant, for some fresh air and exercise. Maybe I’ll finally, finally, FINALLY finish that book list. I have time. I have plenty of time. I have all the time in the world. 

*****

Sunday, January 31. It did snow, and I did go out, crossing the street every time I saw someone coming. The snow continues to fall, and it’s pretty, but not sparkly. The sky is pale, almost-white gray, and there’s no sunlight to reflect off the snow and give it that magical sparkle that only lasts until the shoveling and the plowing and the snow-playing and sledding commence. I’m looking out my family room window and I see nothing but brown and white. Snow covers every branch and limb, forming a complex spidery pattern of white on brown against white again. There’s very little wind. 

I could, I suppose, have finished that book list yesterday. But I didn’t. I did work on it, so that’s something; something that I accomplished other than disinfecting surfaces and washing bedding and responding to text messages from concerned friends and family. COVID is a stern taskmaster, I tell you what. Maybe I’ll shovel today, or maybe I’ll venture out for a walk in the snow. Or maybe I’ll finally finish that list. I don’t know why I keep putting it off. 

*****

Monday, February 1. You were a long month, January. That was no way to start a year. It’s a new month now, 2021. Do better, OK? You're on notice. 

It’s Monday now and we’re still in the tunnel, but now there’s a light at the end of it. My husband had a follow-up COVID test this morning, which was negative. My son is still experiencing symptoms, but he’s getting better, so he’ll be able to have his follow-up test in a day or so, which means that our quarantine will come to an end in a few days. And you know what I did yesterday? I cleaned, and I cooked, and I disinfected stuff, but I also finally finished the book list. I also finished another book, and I’m going to have quite a bit to say about it. I wrote some things down, so I wouldn’t forget. I learn the hard way, but I do learn. 

The book is so much better than the meme...

It occurred to me, not too long ago, that the Internet sometimes takes things out of context. You’ve noticed this too, haven’t you? Sharp as the proverbial tack, that’s what we are. Sharp. 

*****

I finally read Hyperbole and a Half, ten years after everyone else read it and then filled the entire World Wide Web with ALL THE THINGS. After Hyperbole and a Half was published, “all the things” became the dominant Internet slang of the early 2010s. It replaced “threw up in my mouth a little” (good riddance) and “meh” (meh). It was everywhere. If you were too busy, you had to DO ALL THE THINGS. If you were emotional, you had ALL THE FEELINGS (or God help me, ALL THE FEELS). If you were a glutton, you ATE ALL THE FOOD. You get the point. 

Naturally, I resisted the idea of reading the book that was personally responsible for ALL THE ALL THE THINGS variations that littered every blog and every social media post for literally years. Years! But then one day last summer, H and a H showed up in my daily discount e-book newsletter, and I caved. I read it on Kindle, which is not the best way to read it. Some of the drawing captions are hard to read in the electronic format. 

Format aside, Hyperbole and a Half is quite wonderful, including the essay that spawned the ALL THE THINGS memes, which is hilarious (the essay is hilarious--the memes vary). But as a whole, Hyperbole and a Half is actually quite serious. When it tries to be funny, it’s hilarious; but when it’s serious, it’s as serious as can be. Right after I finished Hyperbole and a Half, I read The Reading Life, a compilation of C.S. Lewis’ essays and letters about reading. You might not think about Allie Brosh and C.S. Lewis in the same literary thought, but you would be wrong, because both writers are intensely religious, though I suspect that Allie Brosh doesn’t intend to be. 

In “Identity Part Two,” the last essay in Hyperbole, she writes “...I am someone who would throw sand at children. I know this because I have had to resist doing it, and that means that it’s what I would naturally be doing if I wasn’t resisting it. I would also shove everyone, never share anything, and shout at people who aren’t letting me do exactly what I want.” 

Well, duh. In those few words, Allie Brosh describes just about nearly everyone in the human race, now and ever, from the beginning of time to the end of the age, though she doesn’t seem to know this. She seems to think that most other people who appear to be good people, who present themselves as good people, are actually good people, all the time. She writes about the “system of lies and tricks” that she uses to convince herself that she’s not a bad person; as if she is the only person who has ever had to fight her selfish impulses, or force herself to do the right thing rather than the easy thing or the fun thing or the vindictive, satisfying thing. She writes about her constant struggle not to act like a shitty person, when she knows that she is a shitty person. She doesn’t seem to realize that everyone else is shitty, too. Shitty is the default human condition. 

*****

After the huge success of Hyperbole and a Half, the Internet waited with bated breath for Allie Brosh’s next book. It waited a long time by any standard; and an eternity by Internet standards. Her second book, Solutions and Other Problems, came out in 2020 and not only did I not wait around for a discount copy, I actually pre-ordered so that I’d have it in my hand on the day of publication. And I wasn’t disappointed. 

Solutions is like Hyperbole in some ways; very funny but very serious, even dark. It’s been long enough now since I read both books that I don’t really remember enough to distinguish one from the other. That is not to say that they are alike, because they’re not. Solutions just expands on the themes that Brosh introduced in Hyperbole. It’s more personal and revelatory; it goes a little deeper than Hyperbole. But there are still ridiculous dogs. I don’t have a dog, but I do love other people’s ridiculous dogs. Hyperbole and a Half and Solutions and Other Problems were among my favorite books of 2020. I will be first in line for Allie Brosh’s next book, even if it takes ten years. 

How to Be an Antiracist (book note)

I started writing this months ago, but now I’m determined to wrap up my 2020 book reviews, such as they are, so I’m going to finish it. 

Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist was the book of the moment last summer, and I’m all about being of the moment, so I read it. It’s very good, and it made me think about things that white ladies don’t always like to think about. But too bad for us, because it’s long past time for us to be a little uncomfortable. 

Although How to Be often reads as a little dry and scholarly, it’s also very personal and very honest and very self-reflective. When he was a young boy in Queens, Dr. Kendi was riding a bus home from school when a bully and his friends began to taunt and threaten a classmate. “I did nothing,” he writes. He doesn’t spare himself an inch. He doesn’t say “I was young and thoughtless and so I did nothing,” and he doesn’t say “I was outnumbered and scared and so I did nothing.” He doesn’t excuse himself for failing to defend his classmate, even though the incident happened when he was very young. 

He’s also honest about his own racism, against White people and against other Black people. As a high school student, Dr. Kendi won an oratory contest, with a speech that was highly critical of other Black teenagers. By exploiting negative stereotypes about Black youth and so-called “hip-hop culture,” he won the approval of authority figures, both Black and White. As in the bus incident, Dr. Kendi doesn’t excuse himself for this, though he could easily have fallen back on his youth and inexperience, or the prevailing thought at that time. 

*****

Both Black and White are capitalized throughout the book. This is a change from standard practice of just a few years ago, but most writers now are capitalizing Black and White as they apply to race, and I think that this change will be formalized soon enough. I would have chosen “anti-racist” rather than “antiracist,” and I’m not clear if the latter is just a preference against the hyphen with the anti prefix or a statement that antiracist should be a word of its own and not just an opposite of racist. 

These are pretty minor style considerations. But there’s another style choice that was a stumbling block for me, at least for a while. Dr. Kendi often refers to Black people as “Black bodies.” He also uses the word “people,” but more often he writes about Black bodies, living in the world. Part of me gets the distinction. The body is what’s visible. It’s like the old Eddie Murphy joke about Stevie Wonder: How does he even know he’s Black? Black people, like Asian people and Latinx people and Arab people, are targets for racism and discrimination firstly because they look different from the White people who have always had the most power. 

But again, as Dr. Kendi emphasizes, racism is not solely the provenance of White people. We’re just the ones who have gained the most from it. More and more of us acknowledge this now. Even a year ago, most White people I know bristled at the idea of “white privilege.” Now more of us get that white privilege doesn’t mean that our lives are easy. It just means that our lives, easy or hard, are not made harder by the color of our skin.  

People can learn. That’s actually the most hopeful message in a book that I think is pretty full of hopeful messages. Racist isn't necessarily a permanent state; it’s a thing that we can change. Racism is a state of mind that we can choose to recognize and resist and overcome. People are racist or antiracist based on what they do or say or believe in a given moment. They can change. We can always change. 

*****

Still, I kept stumbling over the references to “Black bodies.” A person is a thing separate and distinct from a body. A body is just the physical container for a person. It’s the outer packaging. Referring to people only as bodies, I thought, diminishes their humanity, makes them less than they are. 

And then, at the end of the book, I finally got it. After his young wife, a newly graduated M.D., recovered from breast cancer, Dr. Kendi himself was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. Breast cancer and colon cancer are both rare for people in their thirties; it’s extraordinarily rare (and unfair) for a married couple of that age to suffer breast cancer and colon cancer back to back. This is why Dr. Kendi writes about “Black bodies.”  Racism corrodes the body as well as the mind. It doesn’t just give rise to violence; it is violence. A lot of the impacts and effects of racism, from slavery to lynching to segregated spaces to police violence are physical. They cause physical harm; they damage or kill the body. 

Leave it to a clueless white person not to get that until someone beats her over the head with it. But I do get it now. I can still learn.  

Hilary Mantel: (parenthetical) Author of the Year, 2020

If I were to create a dashboard or a visualization of my reading history for 2020 (in theory, I mean--I will spare you in reality), then it would be all about Hilary Mantel. I read six of her books last year: Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror and the Light (the Wolf Hall/Henry VIII/Thomas Cromwell trilogy); AND Giving Up the Ghost, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, and Mantel Pieces. I wrote about the Wolf Hall books several times. I feel like I know Thomas Cromwell. I don’t want to hang out with him or anything, but I know him. 

After I tore through the Wolf Hall trilogy, I read Giving Up the Ghost.  Then I wanted to read another novel, so I read Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, which was loosely based on Hilary Mantel’s own experience as an expatriate living in Jeddah. She wrote somewhere else, perhaps in an essay, that the day she left Saudi Arabia was one of the happiest of her life. And if her life there was anything like the eight months depicted in this book, then I don’t blame her. 

Eight Months reminds me very much of a Muriel Spark novel. This is very high praise, coming from me. Hilary Mantel reminds me of Muriel Spark in general; but specifically, Eight Months reminds me of the novels The Hothouse by the East River and The Takeover, and the story “The Go-Away Bird.” Eight Months is a first-person narrative told by Frances, the young wife of an engineer hired to work on a major building project in Jeddah in the early 1980s. Frances is a modern Englishwoman who struggles to adjust to her position as a woman in Saudi Arabia. She is also a person who is constitutionally unable to keep her feelings to herself, and unable to see things except as they are. She lacks the ability to deceive herself or to talk herself into accepting the unacceptable. Events occur and situations develop that a less observant person would fail to notice and a more astute and cynical person might notice but decline to acknowledge. But Frances is not capable of failing to notice; and having noticed, failing to act. People like Frances tend to struggle in places and times when the truth is not particularly valued. And I don't know that Hilary Mantel intended the book to be allegorical, but I think it is. I'll leave you to decide what it's an allegory for. 

*****

My last Mantel for 2020 was Mantel Pieces, a collection of essays and reviews. And reviews of reviews, if that’s a thing; and it is, if Hilary Mantel says it is. This collection includes what was apparently a famous essay about the bodies of royal women; both in general and in particular; and especially Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge. The press coverage about this essay focused more on Kate Middleton herself and far less on what Hilary Mantel actually wrote about her, which was a little bit about Kate Middleton herself and a lot more about how famous women’s bodies are assessed and critiqued and generally treated as public property.  Hilary Mantel doesn’t suffer fools or foolishness; but she also has no patience for criticism that is cruel for cruelty’s sake. I don’t know how better to describe this than that she takes a jaundiced eye toward jaundiced eyes. Having now read Hilary Mantel’s fiction, autobiography, and essays, I am naming her as my author of the year for 2020. This is an honor that conveys absolutely no prestige or financial reward, but I do congratulate Ms. Mantel anyway. A win is a win.

Meg Wolitzer: 3 Novels, 2020

2020 was a memorable reading year for me; not least of all because I discovered four new authors. That is to say, I finally read four authors who have been around for many years (two of them are now dead). I catch on slowly, but I do catch on. 

The four authors are Hilary Mantel, Helene Hanff, P.D. James, and Meg Wolitzer. I list them in order of preference. And don’t read anything into fourth place for Meg Wolitzer. She’s pretty great, and she’d be first on lots of other lists. But this is a high-octane group, and someone had to come last. Anyway, this post is about Wolitzer. I read three of her books in 2020: This is My Life, The Wife, and The Interestings. 

*****

I read This is My Life sometime during the summer, and I was sure that I'd written about it. And I did actually write about it, but I never published that post. I just read it over and realized that it was kind of half-baked, which makes it exactly like everything else I ever write, so here you are. 

As I read This is My Life, I wondered to myself how I, a middle-aged suburban American woman, had managed to live as long as I had without reading a single Meg Wolitzer novel. This one came up as a Kindle recommendation, probably because of the Nora Ephron connection. Kindle knows how I feel about Nora Ephron One of Nora’s first movies was an adaptation of This is My Life, which was originally published as This is Your Life. Meg Wolitzer apparently re-released her novel as This is My Life, because people tend to do what Nora tells them to do. Nora has been dead since 2012, but she's still the boss. 

I remember seeing a TV review of "This is My Life" (the movie) when it was first released. I don’t remember if the review was part of a movie review show or maybe an entertainment segment of a news show, but I do remember that the snide male critic did not like the movie. I don’t remember the substance of his criticism, the reasons why he didn’t like the movie. I just remember that when discussing the cast and their recent credits, he dismissively referred to the movie’s star, Julie Kavner, as “Julie Kavner, of nothing in particular.” I wasn’t listening to him in the first place but if I had been, he’d have lost me right there, because Julie Kavner, of course, was Rhoda’s sister, and that is a long way away from being “nothing in particular.” And you know what else? I don’t remember the critic’s name, nor the name of the silly inconsequential show that foolishly broadcast his stupid opinions. I know who Julie Kavner is, but that critic was just some guy, from “nothing in particular.” He will remain anonymous here; not least of all because I don't know his name. 

Anyway, back to the book, which I loved. This is My Life is a deceptively simple and unpretentious story of a single mother and her two daughters, who are young girls when the story begins and young women when it ends. The point of view transitions back and forth between Opal and Erica Engels, daughters of Dottie Engels, a hugely successful stand-up comic whose broad, self-mocking fat lady humor is enormously popular in the 1970s, and then becomes all of a sudden quaint and unsophisticated and old-fashioned in the 1980s. Dottie doesn’t understand the cultural shift that suddenly renders her irrelevant. She doesn’t understand the new young comedians on “Rush Hour,” the SNL-like late-night show where Opal becomes an unpaid intern; and when her agent can no longer book her to perform on stage or on television, she becomes the TV spokesperson for a new line of mass market fashion for larger women. 

Dottie is a larger-than-life figure, and the reader learns about her almost exclusively through Erica and Opal, who each try in their own way to separate themselves from Dottie and forge their own identities. But they can't. They can't be who they are supposed to be without acknowledging their mother's DNA, her role in shaping their personalities and their destinies. As hard as they try to get away, they return to Dottie again and again, in their thoughts and in front of their television sets when Dottie’s commercials begin to appear; and then finally in person, when Dottie suffers a heart attack. 

This is Your Life was published in 1992, just long enough after the 70s ended and the 80s began that Wolitzer could convey the dramatic shift in the tone of popular culture between about 1975 and 1984 with the benefit of distant hindsight. The character of Dottie Engels was probably inspired by Phyllis Diller or maybe Joan Rivers or Rose Marie or maybe a combination of all three. In 1975, the world still thought that Phyllis Diller was funny; in 1984, she was a shlocky relic of the past. Phyllis Diller didn’t change, though. Audiences changed and critics’ ideas of what was good and bad and funny and unfunny and relevant and irrelevant changed, leaving comedians like Phyllis Diller and Rose Marie and the fictional Dottie on the dust heap of pop culture history. Things change slowly, over many years; until something accelerates that change and makes it seem very sudden. That's how I read it, anyway. 

I never saw the movie version, but I intend to remedy this. I'll report back

*****

The Interestings (a great title) was one of the last books I read in 2020. When I read This is My Life, one of the first things I thought is that Meg Wolitzer tells a story by just telling it, right from the very beginning. The Interestings is both similar to and different from This is My Life. It’s similar because the main characters’ personalities and voices are clear right away, almost from page one. It’s different because the story develops a bit more slowly. But just when you begin to wonder if anything is going to happen to these characters, things start to happen. 

The Interestings are a group of talented, mostly privileged summer camp friends. The novel follows them from their teenage summers at an exclusive arts camp in the Berkshires through middle adulthood, so it takes place over a long period of time. And it also reads as though it was written over a long period of time, like maybe Meg Wolizer stopped and started and forgot some plot details when she picked up the manuscript again. There were some tiny holes, some minor inconsistencies here and there. Dates and times and “wait a minute, how did we get here from over there?” kinds of inconsistencies.  And then there are one or two times when Wolitzer explains away a contradiction, as if to tell the reader “Oh, I meant for that to happen; that little missing link was intentional.” But it’s a very good and compelling story. I missed the characters when it was all over. 

*****

I read The Wife in between This is My Life and The Interestings, because I loved This is My Life and I wanted more Wolitzer. I liked The Wife much less than This is My Life, but not so much that it put me off Wolitzer for good. The Wife is a rather bitter story, as of course it would be (no spoilers but if you read it you’ll understand what I mean) but that’s not why I didn’t like it. Humanity is bitter sometimes, and novelists are supposed to tell the truth about humanity. 

In The Wife, a woman who is married to a famous author spends most of her life supporting his illustrious literary career and ambitions. The book has a big twist at the end, and I still feel stupid for not having seen it coming, because Wolitzer drops pretty broad hints throughout, pretty much from the first page. So maybe my annoyance with myself colored my judgement of this book. But I don’t think that’s it, either.  I think it’s just not as good as This is My Life and The Interestings. And that’s why I don’t really think of these little book notes as reviews, because I don’t really have much more to say than “I really liked this book” or “I didn’t like this book very much.” 

Or maybe I do. Back to The Wife. There’s a streak of meanness in the book; but this also doesn’t completely account for my overall negative feeling about it. Meanness alone is not a bad thing, from a literary perspective. Again, novelists are supposed to tell the truth about humanity, and humanity is as mean as a snake sometimes. And I don’t find it necessary to like a character, even a main character, in order to like a book. But I do need to feel that I know how the author feels about that character, and I couldn’t really tell how Meg Wolitzer felt about Joan Castleman. I haven’t seen the movie yet. I might watch it, just to see if it’s one of those rare cases in which the movie is better than the book. I suspect that it will be. 

Now that I think about it, I still don’t necessarily like The Wife; not in the sense of enjoying reading it and missing the characters when I leave them. But it has something important to say about the importance of truth, and the corrosive nature of lies; how perpetrating and living with a lie can damage a person or a family. 

Or a whole country. 

But I digress. 

Anyway, two (let’s say two and a half) out of three is good enough for me, and my 2021 to-read list includes several more Meg Wolitzer novels. I’ll read them, and write about them. Eventually. 

*****

Note: This year, I'm going to try to do a better job writing about books as I read them, rather than all at once a year later. Not only is it hard to remember details many months after you read a book, but when you're writing about several books in one post, you have to italicize titles multiple times. This is no small effort. 

Dressed for the occasion

 

Like everyone else in the United States with a mobile device and a social media account (in other words, everyone except the former President), I joined the “Put Bernie Anywhere” fun this week. My effort appears below. I know, I thought it was hilarious, too. I wanted to put Bernie on my living room couch, too, but I know what will happen if I try that. I’ll spend two hours trying to tweak the photo and crop out the background to make sure that Bernie is positioned perfectly. And then I’ll notice some flaw; maybe a crooked picture on the wall, or a cushion that’s crushed at an odd angle, and all of a sudden, I’ll have spent an entire afternoon on an internet joke. But I digress. 

I am once again asking Bernie Sanders to get off my lawn.

*****

Jackets rank almost as highly as handbags on my obsession list. I think about jackets all the time. When I’m out walking or at Mass or at the grocery store (almost the only places I go right now), I notice other people’s jackets immediately. A jacket is almost like a portable home, like a turtle’s shell, for its wearer. Jackets have pockets to carry things, and a shell or insulation or both to protect against the cold and wet. With color and stylistic details, jackets combine with the wearer’s outfit and accessories to express something about that person, either intentionally or unintentionally. I never get tired of looking at people and their jackets. 

*****

Thanks to the damn ‘rona, I am now addicted to British murder mysteries and police procedural dramas. I can’t get enough of British police detectives getting in and out of cars, interviewing witnesses and suspects, checking their smartphones while they drive on the wrong side of the road, always wearing jackets. 

And by the way, stay the hell out of the UK. People are always getting murdered there. 

Female police detectives in British TV shows always rotate among at least three or four jackets, mostly utility-style jackets with lots of pockets, alternating occasionally with dressier, more formal jackets. Even before the pandemic made it necessary for me to work at home all the time, I was definitely a utility jacket person. My life is, then and now, a utility jacket life. But I do like to imagine myself in an Armani blazer or a Burberry trench; or maybe something even fancier, like a Chanel jacket or a perfectly fitted full-length dress coat. 

The point is that few jackets can do everything. I think sometimes that I’d like to have just one jacket that is suitable for all occasions and all weather conditions and all moods and all circumstances. I have at least a dozen jackets, and they cover most of my requirements, but not all.Maybe that’s why I keep shopping for jackets. 

*****

Bernie Sanders, however, seems to be perfectly satisfied with one jacket. I think the famous Inauguration Day jacket is a Columbia. I recognized the sleeve label. Columbia is the most utilitarian of American jacket brands. I have several Columbia jackets, and they are well-made, reasonably priced, and practical. A Columbia jacket keeps you warm when it’s cold and dry when it’s wet. They’re also not very stylish. You can’t have everything. 

My son and I talked about Bernie and his jacket and his crazy hand-knit mittens. The jacket, I suggested, was a gesture of solidarity. Bernie Sanders is not a poor man, but he understands the realities of poor and working-class life in the United States better than most politicians; and many poor and working-class people make do with one jacket or coat, for all conditions and occasions. People who criticized Bernie for failing to dress for the occasion are missing the point. He was representing a large percentage of Americans who, if invited to the Inauguration, would have had to wear whatever coat they happened to own, appropriate or not. 

That, however, is not why everyone loves this picture so much. First of all, it’s hilarious. As one internet joker put it, it looked like Bernie was stopping by the Inauguration, but it wasn’t his whole day. He just grabbed his Columbia jacket off the hook by the garage door, threw his keys in his pocket, and went out to run errands, including a quick stop at the Capitol to watch the swearing-in. No big deal. Whatever. 

But there’s more to it than that. Everything about that picture suggests a man who is completely comfortable with himself in every circumstance. He’s not thinking about himself at all, in fact. He’s in a particular moment, on a cold day, and his clothes and body language reflect practical preparation for the circumstances, and nothing more. He looks neither self-conscious about being too casually dressed, nor self-satisfied about refusing to adhere to traditional Inauguration Day dress standards. Except for warmth, he really doesn’t care about what he’s wearing. Who doesn’t aspire to that kind of insouciance? Who doesn’t want to be that cool? 

*****

That’s what I’m going to think about, next time I feel like I need just the right coat or shoes or dress or handbag for an occasion, if there ever is another occasion, if this pandemic ever ends. 

Still, if I ever attend an Inauguration, I’m going to buy a dressy coat.