Tending to Endings

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.”

These are the books I read this year that I would enthusiastically recommend.  Within each category, they are loosely ranked by preference, but I left anything off that I didn’t want to tell at least someone—you should read this book! Some categories were more difficult to rank. For instance, Tara Westover’s and Michelle Obama’s books were very different…but you should read or listen to both of them!

If I had to pick overall favorites for the year it would be Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby for non-fiction and Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being for fiction. As always seems to be the case for me–my favorites have something to do what speaks to me at a particular time in my life as well as being exceptional writing and or storytelling.

I always consider saying more about each selection, but I am not very good at capturing what I love about a book in a sentence or two, and brevity would be necessary in a list this long. Feel free to ask questions about these choices or share your own great reads. I love to talk about books.

Fiction

A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki

The House of Broken Angels, Luis Alberto Urrea

Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens

The Idiot,Elif Batuman

Pachinko, by Min Jee Lee

Everything I never Told You, Celeste Ng

The Probable Future, Alice Hoffman

Speculative Fiction 

The MaddAddam Triology: Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, Madd Addam, Margaret Atwood.

The first two Lady Astronaut Novels: The Calculating Stars& The Fated Sky, Mary Robinette Kowal

Young Adult

The Hate U Give, by Angie Thomas

Poetry

Trailhead, Keri Webster

Literary/Creative Nonfiction

The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit

Heart Berries, Terese Marie Mailhot

The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch

Memoir/Autobiography

Educated, Tara Westover

Becoming, Michelle Obama

Stop-Time: A Memoir, Frank Conroy

My Life on the Road, Gloria Steinem

More Nonfiction 

Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit

Epicurean Simplicity, Stephany Mills

Lasso the Wind, Timothy Eagan

Dust Bowl Girls, Lydia Reeder

Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann

How to

A Poetry Handbook, by Mary Oliver

The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr

Satire

How to Be Black, Baratunde Thurston

Medical Nonfiction

In Pursuit of Memory, Joseph Jebelli

Inspired by friends who have posting books that have influenced them, I generated a list of poems that have helped me and stayed with me so long that they feel like they are a part of me.

The first poem I remember knowing was The Swing, by Robert Louis Stevenson, which my mother recited to me often. I knew it by heart long before I could read. “Up in the air and over the wall/Til I can see so wide,/Rivers and trees and cattle and all/over the countryside.” I loved that it captured both the motion and the perspective change.

I fell in love with ee cummings in junior high due to the enthusiasm of a creative writing teacher. I have carried many cummings poems over the years, but [ i thank You], read at John’s and my wedding is the one that comes to mind most often. “(I who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun’s birthday,…)

I was a T.S. Eliot fan in high school. The poem I remember reading and rereading was The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock “We have lingered in the chambers of the sea/By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown/Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”

I learned of Elizabeth Bishop in a college poetry class, and One Art was a sort of theme song for awhile. “…the art of losing’s not hard to master/though it may look like (Writeit!) like disaster.”

In college someone (thankfully) introduced me to Margaret Atwood. I found Spelling in one of my anthologies. The line that spoke to me then was “A child is not a poem,/a poem is not a child.” Later—having both children and poems in my life—it is this one: “A word after a word/after a word is power.”

My sons and I memorized Robert Frost’s Mending Wall sitting in the rocking chair together when they were very young. They liked the lines about elves and the old-stone savage. I like the opening, a kind of  lyrical thesis that said (to me) the opposite of what most people thought the poem was about. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall./ That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,/ and spills the upper boulders in the sun.”

I often receive sound advice from William Stafford’s poetry including The River, Freedom and especially A Ritual to Read to One Another, “For it is important that awake people be awake,/ or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep.”

I read Wendell Berry’s, In the Country of Marriage at my parents’ 40^thwedding anniversary celebration. They are now in their 55^thyear of marriage, and this poem is still with me. “Like the water/of a deep stream, love is always too much.”

I believe I first heard Naomi Shahib Nye’s poem, Kindness, on Kristen Tipett’s show, On Being and I am so grateful for it. “Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,/you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.”

Jane Kenyon’s Otherwise comes to mind often. I also carry with me, Let Evening Come, “Let it come, as it will, and don’t/be afraid.”

A friend gave me Marie Howe’s book What the Living do, just when I needed it. The poem that comes forward most often is My Dead Friends, “I have begun,/when I am weary and can’t decide an answer to a bewildering question/to ask my dead friends for their opinion/and the answer is often immediate and clear.”

And finally, many Mary Oliver poems are with me, always. Dogfish, and of course, Wild Geese and The Journey and The Rabbit. I think the first Oliver poem I held close was In Blackwater Woods, “To live in this world/you must be able/to do three things:/to love what is mortal;/to hold it/against your bones knowing/your own life depends on it;/and, when the time comes to let it go,/to let it go.

Laura Stavoe

My first response to Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby is that I don’t understand why people haven’t been chasing me down the street with a copy yelling, “you have to read this!”  I’ve come upon Solnit’s name recently, but mostly in terms of activism and in reference to a well-traveled article on the internet called “Men Explain Things to Me,” which is very good.

But if Solnit is an activist, she is even more so an artist. She does things that an editor would tell you not to do. You cannot pull together in one book, fairytales from a multitude of cultures and the biography of Mary Shelly and your mother’s memory loss and a trip to Iceland and a Colorado River rafting adventure and your own this-could-be-cancer treatments and a pile of rotting apricots and the history of leprosy and the science of fermentation and soil and weather. It’s too much. Pick one, Rebecca, I hear my inner-writing teacher tell me. And, yet, Solnit weaves all these and more together in such a way that they become not so much a tapestry, but a flower, whole and lovely and seamless as though it grew that way inevitably, naturally.

Solnit writes one of the least self-centered memoirs I’ve ever read. And she accomplishes this even when she is writing about something as personal as the radiologist finding a tumor in her chest. There is something in the intimacy of her writing that makes me know I am reading, not so much about her, but about us.

I underlined more in this book than I have in any book since college, usually because Solnit said things that I would’ve like to have said, had I the words, “Of course I have always been mortal, but not quite so emphatically so.”

Here is another of my favorites, “Sometimes I get mail for people who lived in my house before I did, and sometimes my own body seems like a home through which successive people have passed like tenants, leaving behind memories, habits, scars, skills, and other souvenirs.”

And here is one, one more, “Trace it far enough and this very moment in your life becomes a rare species, the result of a strange evolution, a butterfly that should already be extinct and survives by the inexplicabilities we call coincidence. The word is often used to mean the accidental but literally means to fall together.”

And yet, when I go back to read all of these passages, I’m aware that one of the reasons they worked so perfectly was their connection to whatever came before and after, that flower.

And so, this me chasing you, copy of The Faraway Nearby in hand.

Laura Stavoe

I’m not sure what compelled me to listen to Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, which I ended up enjoying enough to then download the second book in The Madd Addam Trilogy. I’ve never been drawn to science fiction or fantasy. Even as a child, I preferred The Little House books over The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.

I honestly don’t know what has drawn me suddenly to this particular dystopian, speculative fiction. I worry a little that it is because dystopia is so close to reality that it no longer seems quite so sci-fi-y. As Snowman says in Oryx and Crake, “He doesn’t know which is worse, a past he can’t regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there’s the future. Sheer vertigo.”

And of course, there is the fact, that it is Margaret Atwood telling the story. Certain authors have been constants throughout my adult life—Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Mary Oliver, Toni Morrison. They bring me comfort, apparently even when they are writing about the world going to pieces.

What did I love about this book? I loved that we got to see the before and the after of the world as we know it through a guy named Jimmy who didn’t get into the best colleges. I love that Jimmy named himself for this new world The Abominable Snowman as an act of rebellion against his friend Crake, who banned names of magical creatures and who is largely responsible for Snowman’s predicament. And Snowman (by the time the story starts, he has dropped the modifier) is quite aware that a snowman is both playful and vulnerable and never self-made. I loved that even though the book was about some of the ugliest things in our culture, it is also about friendship and love and loss; and it is about things that are not lost, even when we humans really screw up. As Snowman says, “After everything that’s happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is.”

Laura Stavoe