It’s been a unique year so far. I left my job of ten years to be with my mom during the final months of her life. I arrived home in April after her death and have since been contemplating what I would like to do next. It has been a luxury and a bit dizzying in a terrifying sort of way to have so much time and space for pondering. While pondering, I hiked daily on the trails behind our house, made fifty jars of apricot jam from fruit from our tree, completed a draft of a book manuscript (No publisher yet), and read incessantly.
Lest this is beginning to sound overly noble, I have also watch every season of The Great British Baking Show and wrestled with my internet tendencies until I finally removed Facebook, Twitter, Words with Friends, and all news apps from my phone. (Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism helped with this decision.)
I have also been in the middle of four or five books at any given time. I will have a very long recommendation list to make at the end of this year! But a few have stayed with me long after I read them, and so I thought I’d get started.
Heavy: An American Memoir, by Kiese Laymon is one of the most honest and beautiful memoirs I’ve ever read. Laymon’s writing is vulnerable, lyrical, and wise. I kept changing what I thought the book was about—eating disorders, race, feminism, abuse, thinking, writing, tenderness, family, education, mothers, Mississippi, America. It is memoir written in the form of a letter that weaves all of these themes into a song. I listened to the audio version which I highly recommend.
Laymon writes in a way that brings into focus the conflicting forces (internal and external) between examining the past and the cost of not doing so:
This summer it took one final conversation with Grandmama for me to understand that no one in our family and very few folk in this nation has any desire to reckon with the weight of where we’ve been. Which means no one in our family and very few folk in this nation wants to be free.
Also on the topic of reckoning, it occurred to me at some point this year, I may have never actually read James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. It was one of those books I felt like I read because I read so many things that referred, quoted, alluded to it. Once I picked it up, though, I knew I hadn’t. It is a book I will never forget.
From Baldwin’s first letter, addressed to his nephew:
Take no one’s word for anything, including mine—but trust your experience. Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go. The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear. Please try to be clear, dear James, through the storm which rages about your youthful head today, about the reality which lies behind the words acceptance and integration. There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them.
And from “Down at the Cross: a letter from a Region in My Mind”:
All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.
I picked up Sallie Tisdale’s Advice for Future Corpses and Those Who Loved Them: A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying and read it in the weeks after my mom died. I think the subtitled undersells it. Yes, it is practical, but it is also elegant and true.
Tisdale a palliative care nurse, a Buddhist practitioner and teacher, as well as a writer, says,
Together, these strands have given me a measure of equanimity about the inevitable sea of change that is a human life. They have fed each other and taught me to tolerate ambiguity, discomfort of many kinds, and intimacy – which is sometimes the most uncomfortable thing of all.
I find myself continually returning to books by Rebecca Solnit. This year I’ve read A Field Guide to Getting Lost, which I loved. She beautifully puts words around the things I feel I always meant to say:
With that long line of footprints unfurling behind me, I couldn’t get literally lost but I lost track of time, becoming lost in that other way that isn’t about dislocation but about the immersion where everything else falls away.
But the book by Solnit that I bought for ten people already is Cinderella Liberator, a children’s book that she wrote for her niece, Ella. The fact that this ended up on a favorite list probably has to do with my mother, who would’ve loved this revised rendition of the fairytale in which (Spoiler Alert!) the prince and Cinderella end up friends, and Cinderella opens a cake shop with room to shelter refuges fleeing wars in other kingdoms.
And then there is Solnit’s lovely language throughout.
But there isn’t actually a most beautiful person in the world because there are so many different kinds of beauty. Some people love roundness and softness, and other people love sharp edges and strong muscles. Some people like thick hair like a lion’s mane, and other people like thin hair that pours down like an inky waterfall, and some people love someone so much they forget what they look like. Some people think the night sky full of stars at midnight is the most beautiful thing imaginable, some people think it’s a forest in snow, and some people…Well, there are a lot of people with a lot of ideas about beauty. And love. When you love someone a lot, they just look like love.
And it is probably no wonder that all of the titles included on a list of books that moved me are love stories. Maybe not in way that is entirely clear at the outset. But this past year has taught me that, yes, walking side by side with the things that scare us most– whether death or grief or intimacy or our own failings–is a form of love. Baldwin might even name it love “in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”