My Favorite Mitford

My 21-year-old son is very political, probably too much so for his own good. He is perpetually outraged by the injustice of the world, and I suppose he should be because the world is unjust and getting more so all the time. Still, I worry about the boy's mental health. And yes, I am aware that I am the last person who should be commenting on anyone else's mental health. 

Anyway, because he is very well informed about current events and not quite as well informed about history; and because he is of course very young, he doesn't really believe me when I tell him that the world has been in greater peril, and relatively recently. He’s convinced that world economic and social and political conditions have never been worse than now, and when I try to remind him about the 1930s, he rolls his eyes. “The Depression and World War 2,” he’ll say. “I know.” The phrase “boomer logic” entered the chat at some point, proving my earlier claim that the boy just doesn’t know his 20th century history because if he did, he’d know that his parents are Gen Xers, not Boomers. 

*****

This is what I am thinking about as I read Hons and Rebels, Jessica Mitford’s famous memoir of her childhood, youth, and marriage to Esmond Romilly, distant cousin to the Mitfords and nephew of Winston Churchill. Jessica, known to her family as “Decca” admired Esmond from afar (although they were cousins, they had never met) when she read about his exploits as a Loyalist volunteer in the Spanish Civil War. Later, she finally met Esmond at a house party of the kind depicted in Wodehouse or Waugh novels or PBS Masterpiece Theater programs like Upstairs Downstairs or Downton Abbey, because that is the kind of life that the Mitford sisters lived. The two young aristocrats fell in love, almost at first sight, and they ran away together. After a brief stint in Spain, the newlywed Romillys went to the United States, arriving in 1939 just before the whole world was about to explode. 

Jessica Mitford was a great writer. Hons and Rebels moves easily from the intimate details of Mitford family life with the very quirky Lord and Lady Redesdale as parents, to the political and social cataclysms of the late 1930s. If my son thinks that 21st century Democrats can’t get on the same page, he should read Jessica Mitford on Stalinist vs. Trotskyite infighting in the American Communist Party in the wake of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. Those people were trolls before trolls were even invented. 

Esmond and Decca both came from absurdly privileged backgrounds, but that didn’t make their lives especially easy. As one of the youngest, and a girl, in a large aristocratic English family, Decca had few options other than to live the life of a debutante and “Honorable,” or to rebel as she eventually did. Decca and her sisters, though extremely well-read and bilingual (English and French, of course) had practically no formal education, a lack that Decca felt keenly and resented bitterly. Esmond, educated in the famous or infamous depending on your perspective English “public school” (anything but public) system, was separated from his family at age 8 or so and left to the tender mercies of headmasters and older boys, who freely brutalized their younger schoolmates. 

*****

Jessica Mitford was remarkably honest and clear-eyed about herself, her beloved Esmond, and the unfairness of the British class system. Even though she missed her sisters, especially Unity (“Boud”), she expressed practically no sentimental attachment to her family’s way of life, and she didn’t make excuses for Diana and Unity, who were wholehearted and enthusiastic Nazis. Don’t @ me on this until you read their letters. 

Esmond Romilly was killed in action early in the war, leaving poor Decca widowed and pregnant (the Romillys had already lost their first child, who died as an infant). Had he lived, maybe he would have remained an idealistic rebel, even in middle age. Or maybe he would have reverted to type. Maybe he and Decca would have returned to England, bought a country house, and voted for Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Esmond would only have been in his late 50s then. We’ll never know. 

But I don’t think it’s likely, if Decca was any indicator. Conventional wisdom claims that young radicals often turn conservative, even reactionary, when they get older, but Decca Mitford remained a radical for the rest of her life. She was a member of the American Communist Party, and she spent a good part of her career sticking it to the man, fighting against segregation, writing exposes about the funeral industry and polemics against everything from segregation to fancy spas to snooty restaurants. She was the real thing. Unlike a lot of privileged radicals, Decca seemed quite ready to give up her own privilege in order to make the world fairer and more equitable for others. But like a lot of other radicals, privileged and otherwise, she seemed not to understand that politics was neither the only way to go about this, nor even the best way. Her enthusiasm for Soviet-style Communism was stupid and misguided and wrong, but she certainly wasn’t the only left-leaning intellectual of that time who believed in Communism’s false promises. And at least she tried. She tried to do something to make the world more just. 

In Casting Off, the fourth of the five Cazalet Chronicles novels, one of the Cazalet brothers, responding to another brother’s complaints about England’s newly emerging postwar welfare state, recalls the First World War and remembers the guilt and shame he felt as an Army officer and son of an upper class family when he encountered truly poor people for the first time among the enlisted men who would fight under him on the battlefields of France. Many of these men were badly malnourished, bearing scars of untreated injuries or diseases, with rotting teeth and bad eyesight and stunted growth and a whole range of other maladies associated with extreme poverty. He remembers thinking that they barely seemed human to him when he first encountered them. He acknowledges that the welfare state has its flaws and that it will undoubtedly cause inconvenience for people of his class. But thinking of those men, he knows that something has to be done; that the status quo ante cannot continue, not after the working classes of England have sacrificed two generations of their young men to war. 

Reading Hons and Rebels, it doesn’t seem that Decca Mitford really felt much class guilt. She seemed to accept that the circumstances of her birth were beyond her control, for better or for worse. Her lifelong dedication to social justice seems to have been the result of an ingrained sense of fairness (although she did also seem to enjoy trolling her family, just a little bit). This is the question, then: Why do some rich people feel that sense of responsibility to others, and so many others manifestly do not?  Why do some people recognize that their good fortune is a gift that must be repaid while so many others believe that they deserve their privilege; that they earned it all and owe nothing to anyone? Is it innate, or is it cultural? Nature or nurture? A look at the Mitford family would suggest the former since none of the other sisters seemed particularly interested in social justice, although Unity and Diana were certainly political enough. Just another reason why Decca was the best Mitford. 

Cities of Girls

Did you ever read a book by mistake? I've done this more than once. Two years ago, I reread Bergdorf Blondes, which was apparently so unmemorable the first time that I did not actually remember having read it previously, except when I noticed that the ending seemed very familiar and wondered how the author had gotten away with such an obvious plagiarism, but then I realized that I had actually just read the same stupid book again. 

This time, what I did was to read the wrong author altogether. Someone on the Twitter posted something about an Elizabeth McCracken novel, which got me thinking about how I'd never read any of Elizabeth McCracken's work, and I decided to remedy that right away. And I got a digital copy of City of Girls and was about 25 pages in before I realized that Elizabeth Gilbert wrote City of Girls. And I still haven't read any of Elizabeth McCracken's work. 

I’m not sure how I mixed up McCracken and Gilbert, which are not really similar at all. UNLESS of course, the Twitter person tweeted that McCracken and not Gilbert wrote City of Girls and I searched for it only by title and didn’t realize until later that I had the wrong Elizabeth. That’s probably it. That’s totally it. 

I’ll do anything to avoid actually writing about something, won’t I? Ridiculous. 

Anyway, I’m finished with City of Girls now. That title is reminiscent of late 90s/early aughts chick lit (much like Bergdorf Blondes, which is also all about NYC girls), am I right? Like a pink book jacket illustrated with a mid-century-looking fashion advertisement drawing, and the title in an elegant (or playful) black script. I expected a book about a girl working at a fashion magazine, oppressed by a haughty and dictatorial boss, who spends her scarce free time drinking too much with her hilarious but heedless best friend, maxing out her credit cards, and scheming out a plan to get her rich and handsome scoundrel of a boyfriend to marry her. Spoiler: He does not marry her, but she realizes that she’s better off without him. She leaves her terrible job for a much better job, gets her life and her finances in order, and goes on to achieve great professional and personal success, while the former boyfriend leads a stultifying suburban life with the beautiful but dull woman whom he married instead of our heroine. If you are not familiar with the genre, I just abstracted a novel that incorporates every chick lit story line into one paragraph. That was a tour de force, don’t you think? 

Anyway, City of Girls was pretty good; rather, it’s not bad. It’s all told in the second person, meaning a first-person narrator tells her story to another person, not directly to the reader. In this case, the other person is the daughter of a man whom she (the daughter) suspects had an affair with the narrator. No spoilers, but the narrator has to tell the daughter her whole life story in order to make sense of the supposed affair. 

The protagonist and narrator, Vivian Morris, is an early 20th century archetype; an upper-class wild girl who rebels against her wealthy family and their bourgeois plans for her life. She fails out of Vassar and is banished to New York City to live with her bohemian aunt. In New York, Vivian lives a predictably wild and colorful life and then a less-predictable, still-unconventional but much more quiet and peaceful life. Both Vivian and the man whose daughter hears her story, make youthful mistakes that haunt them for many years after, but Vivian moves on and makes the best of her life, while the man, a WW 2 veteran, is paralyzed by guilt complicated by his physical and psychological battle scars. The story’s ending is neither particularly happy nor particularly unhappy. But it doesn’t matter because the story probably isn’t the point. 

Elizabeth Gilbert famously wrote Eat, Pray, Love. I don’t think I ever read it. No disrespect, it’s just not my kind of thing. Maybe I should read it because Gilbert is quite a good writer but maybe just not a novelist. City of Girls, it seems, is less a novel than a sort of poetic and beautifully written commentary on the prisons we build for ourselves, and how some of us escape those prisons early, some escape later, and some sad souls never escape at all. Really, this is why I think the book is only not bad. I liked it but there was something about it that wasn’t quite right. When I read a novel, I like to be all in, and I wasn’t all in on this one,  and I think I know why. I think that Gilbert was more interested in the message than the story. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a bad novel; it’s just that it could have been much better if the story and the characters led, and the ideas followed. 

I thought about getting out of the early to mid-20th century and back to the present day, but then Jessica Mitford’s Hons and Rebels came up in my queue, and I’m right back where I always am, in the immediate pre-war 20th century, when the whole world was about to fall apart and only a few people seemed to really know what was about to happen. I feel like one of those people right now, and I wish I didn’t. 

Bibliography 2022

I know you’ve been anxiously awaiting my 2022 book reviews. A word to the wise: “Review” is a loose term. Lots of things could be called a review. Anything from an observation to a comment to a rumination could be described as a “review” vis a vis books. 

Normally, I write something about every book I read during a year but I didn’t quite manage to do that this year. And I started writing this post with a story about thinking that I had paid a bill then realizing that I hadn’t after fighting with the company whose bill I had neglected to pay. Because I did the same thing with a book, too. I started to write something about Cloud Cuckoo Land and then something about my own words seemed familiar to me so I searched my Google Docs and realized that I had already written about it, at some length. It’s only two things but I’m a worst case scenario kind of person. If I wasn’t, I’d probably laugh these two things off. I’d consider them unrelated incidents. But being me, I see these two occurrences as illustrative of my growing tendency to do or not do things and then to forget entirely the things that I did or think that I did the things that I did not do. It’s troubling. But I can still read and write, so here we go.

These are most of the books that I read in 2022. It is as always an odd and haphazard little collection, most of the books chosen for no reason other than that they happened to interest me for one reason or another. 

*****

Irreversible Damage, Abigail Shrier. I don’t know about this book, in several senses. I read it at the beginning of 2022, and I don’t really remember it that well, except for its rather urgent tone. Abigail Shrier is a journalist who became alarmed at what she saw as an epidemic of young people claiming to be transgender, especially young girls and women claiming to be trans men. 

I haven’t studied the science behind gender theory. And I won’t, because I’m not a scientist. Shrier’s assertion that it used to be extremely rare for children and teenagers to claim trans identity is certainly true. It’s also true that this is fairly common now, in the sense that almost everyone knows or knows of someone who is trans or whose child is trans. 

Here’s where her thesis breaks down a bit for me. Shrier believes that the recent emergence of trans children is a cultural phenomenon attributable to mass hysteria. One girl comes out as trans and a whole slew of others follow, like lemmings to the sea.  I don't think it works that way. 

*****

Fear and Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard. I read this early in the year, and it took me a long time. I remember sitting around on the pool deck at high school swim meets, reading a page or two during warm-ups. As with every other work of philosophy I’ve ever read, I retained practically nothing, and can tell you only what every Cliff's Notes explanation could tell you, which is that Fear and Trembling is an examination of faith through the story of Abraham and Isaac, a story that has always troubled me. It is difficult to have faith in a God who would demand that a person sacrifice his only child, and that is why I have always chosen to take the story of Abraham and Isaac (and almost everything else in the Old Testament) as allegorical. Anyway, I read it very slowly, a little at a time; stuck with it until the end, and was profoundly relieved when I finished it. That’s probably what Kierkegaard intended. 

*****

Cloud Cuckoo Land, Anthony Doerr. A very memorable book. I have no idea how I could have written a whole post about it and then forgotten about it.

*****

Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Rule of the Unruly Woman, Anne Helen Peterson. I never can remember the whole title of this book, so I think of it as the Unruly book. You can probably just read the title, and you’ll get the point. That is not to say that it’s a bad book. It’s very well written and very well researched. And I don’t dispute the premise that women are expected (still) to be thin and pretty and sweet and generally pleasing to men. I guess I’m just tired of thinking about this, having lived it for over half a century. 

*****

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, Hilary Mantel. The title story in this compilation of short stories is one that only Hilary Mantel could have written, an imaginary what-if story about a gunman killing Margaret Thatcher from the apartment window belonging to an innocent bystander who admits the assassin, who claims to be a news photographer, into her home. All of these stories, in fact, just like everything else Hilary Mantel ever wrote, could only have been written by her. I still can’t quite believe that she’s gone, and that there will be no more essays and stories and historical epics. The Wolf Hall trilogy helped get me through the summer of 2020. It’s been long enough now that perhaps I’ll just read the Thomas Cromwell saga all over again. I know how it ends but of course, I knew how it would end the first time I read the books and that didn’t stop them from being wonderful. Rest in peace, Hilary Mantel. 

*****

A Place of Greater Safety, Hilary Mantel. "You know how fear spreads? Danton thinks there must be a mechanism for it, a process that is part of the human brain or soul. He hopes that, by the same process, along the same pathways, courage can spread, and it can go out from him. Mme. Recordain sat in a high-backed chair and surveyed the opulence of the Minister of Justice's palace. She sniffed. They began digging trenches round the city walls."

This is Hilary Mantel, stirring and inspiring and terrifying in about 75 words. Danton is Georges Danton,  Minister of Justice in revolutionary France. Danton knows what the trenches are for; he just does not yet see their direct relevance to himself. He doesn’t yet see that the sans culottes will soon need a place to dispose of his body. Danton knows how fear spreads. He knows that courage can spread, too, but he doesn't know how. Courage can inspire more courage but it can also inspire fear in those who are already fearful, especially people in power. 

The end of A Place of Greater Safety was just like the end of Wolf Hall and the Mirror and the Light, reminding me that no one but Hilary Mantel could have made a foregone historical conclusion nearly unbearably suspenseful. Everyone knew what was going to happen to Anne Boleyn (Wolf Hall) and then to Thomas Cromwell (The Mirror and the Light), just as I knew exactly what Robespierre was going to do about Danton and Desmoulins. Heads rolled. This is well-documented historical fact. But Hilary Mantel made it page-turningly suspenseful. 

Suspenseful and sad all at once. Mantel takes us inside the still-attached heads of the doomed and makes us feel - really feel - their realization that the last-minute reprieve is not coming. We experience the fear and sadness of people who know with certainty that their lives will end at a known time, and that that time is very soon, and that the end will not be peaceful. Rest in peace, Georges Danton and Claude Desmoulins. Rest in peace, Hilary Mantel. 

*****

Rememberings, Sinead O’Connor. “All I wanna do is just sit here and write it all down and rest for a while.” What an astonishing book, and an astonishing life. Sinead O’Connor is one of the greatest pop singers of the 20th and 21st century. An outstanding lyricist (the quote is from “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” one of my favorite songs), she is also an outstanding memoirist. She had an incredibly difficult childhood, with an abusive, mentally ill mother and an absent father; and she has the kind of personality, colored by mental illness, that makes her constitutionally incapable of making things easy for herself. She is a fighter; the kind of fighter who throws herself into and up against any and all pain and injustice. The most famous example, of course, is the 1992 SNL appearance when she tore up the photo of Pope John Paul II. “Fight the real enemy,” she said, looking right into the camera. And then all hell broke loose. 

It’s hard to imagine now, but almost everyone was outraged at the “disrespect” to the Catholic Church, of all things. Note that I am a Catholic, but I wasn’t really in the Church at that time, and knowing what I did about the Church’s actions in Ireland, I cheered for Sinead. Shockingly, few others did. SNL banned her for life. Joe Pesci, the host of the show, threatened to punch her. Even Madonna took a potshot at Sinead, and Madonna’s work was far more transgressive and even sacrilegious than Sinead tearing up that picture. The Pope isn’t Jesus. I remember at the time thinking that I’d never thought one way or the other about Kris Kristofferson but I became a fan of his because he was the only celebrity who stood up for Sinead O’Connor. 

Possibly the most heartbreaking part of this book that contains so many heartbreaking stories and memories is Sinead’s observation that children of abuse tend to have a hard time with their siblings as adults. As a younger sister, Sinead knew that her older siblings wanted to protect her but they could barely protect themselves. As an older sister, Sinead was in the same terrible predicament with her younger brother; she is still guilt-ridden at what she considers her failure to protect him when she was only a child herself. Apparently, Sinead and her younger brother bore the worst of the abuse. By the time that Sinead’s mother’s mental state deteriorated to the point at which she no longer could or would control her violent temper and outbursts, the older siblings were old enough to fight back or to get out of the house and stay out. The siblings all share terribly painful memories and don’t see one another very often. And yet the most beautiful chapters are the ones dedicated to each of the individual siblings, whom she still loves. Heartbreaking. Highly recommended. 

*****

Bagman, Rachel Maddow. I had this on my 2023 list but that was a clerical error on my part because I read this when I was in Florida, and that was the end of December. 

Did you know that Spiro Agnew was possibly the most corrupt member of the Nixon administration, even worse than Nixon himself? I knew that he’d been forced out of office because of corrupt dealings but until I read Bagman, I really had no idea how corrupt. He was Mafia corrupt. He was Byzantine Empire corrupt. He was Trump corrupt. He was so corrupt that the Nixon Department of Justice felt duty-bound to force him out of office knowing that the President faced likely impeachment and possible removal from office and they believed that an Agnew presidency would be an existential threat to the United States. I won’t recount the details (not just because I don’t want to spoil the book for you but because I’m just not very good at recounting details) but this was as shocking as a 50-year-old political scandal could possibly have been, at least in our wide-eyed exceptional American experience. And it reads like a Rachel Maddow monologue - this is a feature, and not a bug. 

*****

Corrections in Ink, Keri Blakinger. For a few years, on the surface, Keri Blakinger was the epitome of white upper middle class American girlhood. A champion figure skater and a Cornell student, she was likely an object of admiration and envy for many people. But nothing is ever as it seems on the surface. Mental illness drove Keri to self-destructive behavior beginning with an eating disorder and spiraling downward into drug use, petty crime, sex work, and abusive relationships. It’s kind of a wonder that she lived to adulthood. She did survive, but ended up in prison for several years - Ivy League to incarceration, the ultimate American downfall. Happily, she came out of prison clean and sober and capable of using her considerable intelligence and brilliant writing talent to tell her story and document the injustices of the prison-industrial complex. She now writes for the Los Angeles Times, after a time at the Marshall Project, and is a tireless critic of privately run prisons, unjust (and unfairly applied) drug laws, and the death penalty. Her story is compelling and really well told - sad, sharp, and funny all at once. Highly recommended. 

*****

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith. I cannot imagine how I, a bookish girl who grew up in mid-century America, never got around to reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. And I’ve been meaning to read it for some time. Caitlin Flanagan mentions it frequently, and even without her recommendation, I was conscious of this major gap in my reading. I finally picked it up and read it late last year and I’m so glad I did. First of all, it’s so very different from what I expected. I imagined Francie Nolan to be an idealized rosy example of innocent but brilliant girlhood - like an urban American Anne of Green Gables. And nothing against Anne, whom I love and always will love, but Francie Nolan is an infinitely more complex and nuanced and interesting character, whose early life is almost unbearably hard but whose intelligence and wit take her to places that I didn’t imagine were possible for a poor Irish-Catholic Brooklyn girl in the early 20th century. Betty Smith was an amazing writer, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is an almost-perfect novel. 

*****

Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino. Just the opposite of Cloud Cuckoo Land. I was sure that I had written something about this very sharp and funny book of essays, but a search reveals that I did no such thing. And I read this many months ago so I don't really remember much about it, except that the titular trick mirror has something to do with social media and how people create idealized and downright false personal narratives and how others judge their own lives against these false ideals. I remember being impressed by the writing, not necessarily the thinking, behind most of these essays, and that is not a criticism. Tolentino writes about important things; it's just that most of what she has to say has been said in one way or another. But she's a fine writer. 

*****

Hons and Rebels. Jessica Mitford

*****

The Nineties, Chuck Klosterman. Here's one that I did write about, at length and in detail, but what I wrote is not ready to publish. However, I am done with this book list for now, so I'm going to have to depart from my usual practice and publish a review in 2023 of a book that I read in 2022. In fact, it could take me until 2024. The thing is already five pages long, with a bunch of bullet points at the end, and I could very well take the rest of this year to finish it. I have a lot of feelings about the nineties. And the book was very good, by the way. 

*****

Cool, Calm, and Contentious, Merrill Markoe 
Poison Penmanship, Jessica Mitford. 

I wrote about both of these right here, for no reason other than that I finished them back to back. But Markoe and Mitford go together very well anyway. 

*****

City of Girls, Elizabeth Gilbert. A book that I read by mistake. 

*****

Miss Aluminum: A Memoir, Susanna Moore
Invisible Ink, Guy Stern
The Lion Is In, Delia Ephron
So Sad Today, Melissa Broder
Big Summer, Jennifer Weiner
Excellent Women, Barbara Pym

Six books, one post. It's kind of a long one. 

*****

Brooklyn, Colm Toibin
Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge, Sheila Weller
You're on an Airplane, Parker Posey
Life on the Line: Young Doctors Come of Age in a Pandemic, Emma Goldberg

I read this little odd grouping of books when I was on vacation in August, so I also covered them all in the same post. 

*****

I read a few others that I won’t bother to list. A few of these not-to-be-listed books were just not very good. Not every book is a literary masterpiece, of course, but just because I wasted the time reading a bad book doesn’t mean that I need to waste additional time writing about it. And then there were a few others that I know I read because they’re on my list and I don’t put a book on the list until I have finished reading it but I don’t remember a thing about them so I can’t write about them. 

And also because it’s almost the end of February for crying out loud and it’s time to finish the half-baked reviews of books that I read in 2022 and start on my incompetent reviews of books that I’m reading right now, in 2023. So mark your calendars for my next book list. Preview: Zadie Smith will feature prominently. It’s going to be a good reading year, I tell you what. 

Writing about reading about writing

I’m not reading as much as I used to, or usually do. I’ve usually finished about 20 books by this time of year; instead, I’ve barely finished a dozen. I don’t know why. I don’t have any less time than I usually do, except for the commute. I just can’t concentrate. I’m very easily distracted. 

I started writing about some of this year’s books. That’s taking forever, too. I publish my book list later and later every year and at this rate, I’ll be lucky to finish this year’s book notes in 2023. That’s fine; it’s not like I’m on deadline. 

I'll eventually get around to reading more, and writing more (to be perfectly fair, though, I write all the livelong day: I just don't do it here). Right now I am just about to finish Jessica Mitford's Poison Penmanship, a collection of her famous muckraking journalism, with commentary by the author. Yes, she basically wrote a book about her own writing. Only a Mitford gets away with that. It's very meta, and quite brilliant. 

Jessica was the subversive, rebellious, Communist Mitford and her writing (especially the writing about the writing) makes it clear that she never stopped sticking it to the man; not for one second. She went after an odd assortment of targets: the funeral business (most famously), the segregated South, fancy spas, the university where she briefly taught, a pretentious NY restaurant that overcharged her for a meal – it's quite a range. 

Side note about the restaurant, a now defunct establishment called The Sign of the Dove: The incident that Mitford writes about happened in the mid 70s and the whole idea of a trendy restaurant with a twee name oppressing its patrons reminded me of the famous line in “When Harry Met Sally” about the undue influence of restaurants on NY culture: "Restaurants are to people in the 80s what theater was to people in the 60s." Of course, Nora Ephron wrote that line and it turns out that Nora was the New York magazine editor who commissioned Mitford's piece on The Sign of the Dove. This surprised me not one bit. Nora would have hated that kind of overhyped restaurant and of COURSE, she also knew Jessica Mitford. She knew everyone. 

*****

I finished Poison Penmanship about ten days ago, and started on what I thought would be a very quick read, Merrill Markoe’s Cool, Calm, and Contentious (I think the title doesn’t have the serial comma, but I find myself unable to type a series of three or more items without that comma). I love Merrill Markoe. I still have a paperback copy of How to be Hap- Hap- Happy Like Me, her 1995 book of humorous essays about her crazy dogs, her jerk boyfriends (including the very thinly disguised David Letterman), and my favorite, her philosophy on health and beauty. In the essay “My Year of Health and Beauty for You,” Merrill explains how every woman can achieve the smooth otherworldly glow of a Vogue supermodel (supermodel culture was at its very peak in 1995) through the simplest of means: a better gene pool. “Next time you are born,” Merrill wrote, “try to get better parents.” Revolutionary advice, that. On the topic of hairstyling, Merrill writes that she once wasted hours of valuable time attempting to style her hair, lamenting her failure to achieve the optimum combination of length, shine, volume, texture, and color, all while appearing to have made no effort at all (another peak 1995 value–look perfect but also look as though you didn’t try). Reflecting on that wasted time and effort, she suggests that readers look at pictures of themselves at age 2, and just stick with the hairstyle they had as toddlers. 

Yes it was funny but I promise you that I followed that advice. I never permed my hair again after that. I got rid of my curling iron AND my flat iron. I started cutting my fairly long hair to shorter or medium lengths ranging from mid-neck to just below the shoulders. I embraced the use of headbands and barrettes and clips (and ponytails when my hair got long again), and I started leaving my house with wet hair all the time, not just when I was on vacation. To paraphrase Merrill, I looked at my two-year-old self with my thick, very slightly wavy, very slightly wiry, plain brown hair with its weird bends and cowlicks, and I decided to CHOOSE thick, very slightly wavy, very slightly wiry, plain brown hair with weird bends and cowlicks as my hairstyle. And although every so often, I try to style my hair a bit and embrace a more polished look, the “me at age two” look is the one that I have stuck with more or less for the last almost 30 years. 

But I was writing about a completely different book, was I not? That right there was some meta insight into why it takes me ten days to read a book that most people read in an afternoon. I myself used to read that kind of book in an afternoon. I can’t even write a simple paragraph about a book without a meandering turn through an entirely different book. And can I tell you that I stopped writing this paragraph mid-sentence to go and fold laundry? Well, I did. Adult ADD, as I keep telling everyone, is real. 

Anyway, back to Merrill’s book. The one that I’m reading now, that is, not the one that I read 27 years ago. The essays are funny, of course, because Merrill Markoe is very funny, but they are very serious, too. Her advice on how to spot a malignant narcissist is spot-on, and obviously very timely what with the last six years or so. And her account of her rape by a stranger who broke into her apartment when she was in college was heartbreaking and upsetting and horribly familiar. It’s different for everyone, of course, except that it’s also exactly the same. Just like adult ADD, PTSD is also real. And just like with the ADD thing, I know this the hard way. 

*****

It’s Wednesday night now, and I’m home waiting for someone other than me to make a call on our Wednesday night swim meet, which is about 80 percent likely to be cancelled (thunderstorms) and 100 percent likely to start late if it proceeds at all. I wouldn’t mind an evening off, but I do love Wednesday night meets. 

Anyway, I’m almost finished with Merrill, and I’ll probably read more Mitfords next. Jessica’s Hons and Rebels is next up in my queue. This too should be a quick read, but I’m beginning to think that there might no longer be any such thing for me. I can’t stop checking Twitter and NPR and MSNBC and the Washington Post to see what new outrage the J6 committee will reveal. My attention span is similar to that of a gnat, and it’s all Trump’s fault.