The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us

 

This is the genius of Judy Blume. It’s the single most important aspect of her legacy. Her work as a children’s writer did something nobody else could manage: it helped ensure feminism’s longevity…A movement requires a multigenerational buy-in to maintain its momentum. And over in suburban New Jersey, a soft-spoken stay-at-home mom was listening. Writing cutting-edge books for kids, Judy Blume became the Second Wave’s secret weapon.

There are several biographies of Judy Blume out there — most written thirty or more years ago — and author Rachelle Bergstein quotes from all of them. But what makes The Genius of Judy a special read is the way that Bergstein, with the benefit of looking back across the intervening decades and their shifting social and political climates, is able to give us the context in which Blume filled her literary niche and was able to positively influence countless young readers. From S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders paving the way for more realistic young adult fiction to Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying giving voice to the modern woman’s existential malaise, Bergstein sets Blume in her cultural moment, explaining what a necessary force her books were for allowing girls to understand and take control of their own bodies. That’s no small thing; it’s everything, and it’s somehow under threat again today. The Genius of Judy traces Blume’s releases — sharing the stories of their inspiration, their plotlines, and reception — while also giving us the story of Blume’s life throughout the years; from unfulfilled suburban housewife to free speech activist. As a Gen X woman, Blume’s novels were hugely influential in forming my own outlook, and I have to admit, I took her for granted: I never once considered that for me to read these books, someone out there had to be thinking deeply on what was needed and taking risks to get them published. I truly appreciate the context that Bergstein supplies here and that I had the opportunity to revisit, and better understand, these formative reads from my youth. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Are You There God?, Deenie, and Forever form a triptych, with eleven-year-old Margaret, thirteen-year-old Deenie, and seventeen-year-old Katherine creating a progressive portrait of the new American girl. All three are smart, spunky, and in touch with their bodies. They’re all white, middle class, and from the suburbs — Judy wrote what she knew — but together, they embody an ideal for Blume that transcended race or class. The trio offers a vision of how the up-and-coming generation could digest the feminist and sexual revolutions. They’re good girls with a twist; they’re all in touch with sexuality, but they have futures.

Those three novels were hugely influential to me as a girl in the late 70s, and mostly because I read each of them, years apart, at the exact right time — I needed the information and was ready to absorb it — and I remember that something about reading them felt transgressive; as though I was uncovering secret information about my body (how shameful!) that had been actively hidden from me. But I wasn’t reading Judy Blume anymore in the 80s (I never have picked up her adult novels; I think I want to preserve my memories of Blume in an unexamined amber of nostalgia) and I was oblivious to the periodic, and ongoing, bans that her novels have been subject to since then. Bergstein tells a fascinating story of those who have attempted to remove novels from schools and public libraries — from the Reagan era Moral Majority to Florida governor Ron DeSantis — and Blume’s efforts, in conjunction with the National Coalition Against Censorship, to keep not only her own novels but other often often-banned books (Slaughterhouse-Five, Catcher in the Rye, etc.) available to those who want them. Whether or not you’ve been reading Judy Blume, she’s been fighting behind the scenes to promote feminism and fight censorship.

In the end, Bergstein acknowledges that Blume’s books have fallen out of fashion — even the 2023 theatrical release of an adaptation of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is a nostalgic blast from the past — and she laments that despite the YA book market exploding with lots of frank and explicit material (Forever, which shook teenaged me, is so sweet in retrospect), there’s something essential in Blume’s novels that is missing in today's cultural landscape:

What’s still missing from a lot of contemporary sex ed is an exploration of the way sex intersects with relationships, experts say. Even today, very few parents and educators are prepared to discuss the way dynamics of care and safety and vulnerability all contribute to true intimacy, which is crucial for a satisfying love life. That’s what Judy innately understood how to do. She taught us about our bodies and our hearts through her stories. Periods are something that happens to a whole friend group. First teenage love affects the entire family. Boys experience heartbreak, too! Truly safe intercourse requires talking and planning. You can’t go back to holding hands.

I’m so glad I read this book: I am delighted to have both learned so much more about Judy Blume’s true legacy and to have had this journey back to my own younger self; in so many ways, Judy Blume set key stones in the foundation of who I am and I hope that the young readers of today find their way to similarly good, foundational material.

I am mostly nostalgic for Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and Forever — because each of them did come to me at the right time (before I experienced their core experiences) and years apart — and I don't even remember how they fell into my hands (I think I stumbled onto Margaret, maybe in fourth grade, and maybe my high school best friend, Kasia, loaned me Forever?) Reading about Deenie here, I definitely didn't remember that it was a controversial book that normalised masturbation, but I totally remember Deenie's scoliosis and back brace (and the crush who wanted to touch her breasts but got a hand full of hard plastic medical device instead; c r i n g e.) And I was surprised to be reminded that I had read so many other Blume books, too, even if they weren't core memories for me: Blubber; Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great; Then Again, Maybe I Won't; The Pain and the Great One; and Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself.  It's simply fascinating, now, for me to consider that these books — many of which would see Blume accused of pandering and pornography — seem kind of retro and sweet, but they actually shook the world. Is anyone writing this thoughtfully for young readers today? Or is there nothing between Captain Underpants and Haunting Adeline? (Beacuse that's how it seems from my vantage behind a bookstore till.)

Elaine

 

A woman who cannot, or will not, accept the conditions of her servitude naturally and gracefully, deserves what has happened to me.

Entry from Elaine’s diary, February, 1956

The publisher’s blurb describes Will Self’s Elaine as “Perhaps the first work of auto-oedipal fiction” as it is a heavily novelised treatment of the private diaries of Self’s own mother, Elaine. (Brief research shows that Self has a brother and was raised in London, whereas the “Billy” in this novel is an only child, raised in Ithaca, New York, etc.; this is not straight auto-fiction.) I don’t normally love when a male author writes from the female POV — and particularly in a case like this where gender-based power imbalance is the main focus — but with access to his mother’s diaries and a front row seat to her life, Self has more than usual insight into his “character’s” psyche (and the case could be made that perhaps he approaches his mother’s story with an outsider’s objectivity that has allowed him to explore her life with something like clinical detachment unavailable to other women?) Ultimately: this is a compelling story of a 1950s American housewife, thwarted in her own ambitions and suffering mental illness, who isn’t quite emotionally stable enough to endure the swinging parties of her husband’s Ivy League faculty crowd without humiliation. With elevated language, intimate psychological exploration, and unusual literary devices, Self is an obvious master of his craft; and with a mother whose story is at once both unique in its details and broadly typical of its time, this is a novel that feels both revelatory and necessary. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms. ALSO: I usually put my quoteblocks in italics, but here I present them as found because Self’s use of italics is too integral to the novel for me to mess with.)

Her hysteria is mounting — and as Evelyn Tate’s screen door snaps shut, Elaine says it a third time: Can it be . . . that the acme of success . . . for me . . . is being able . . . to do my job as a housekeeper? Each phrase is separated by a troubled gasp — but it doesn’t matter how fast she babbles or deeply she breathes, the panic has the better of her: I’m going to collapse, she thinks, then be swept up into the sky with my goddamn nightie up around my shoulders . . . The last anyone will ever see of me is the first anyone did: my bare behind, waiting to be smacked.

Suffering from migraines and panic attacks and unresolved childhood trauma, Elaine Hancock routinely relies on her husband, John, to help care for both her and their nine-year-old son, Billy; but as even Elaine’s former therapist noted that John and Billy’s relationship was “unusually close”, Elaine is often made to feel both chained to and surplus to their family arrangement. Dreaming of being an author, Elaine fills her time alone by writing stories in her secret notebooks; but as she can tell that her writing is “worthless and banal”, Elaine burns her fiction, only hanging on to her diaries, filled with secrets and schedules and sexual fantasies. And these are sexed-up times: Between feeling disgust at her husband’s clumsy overtures and like a second-tier prize at Cornell faculty parties (where folks swap spouses for slow dances and drunken necking), Elaine is ripe to fall hard for the manly new Sociology professor when he and his glamorous wife both join the faculty; a crush that will not end well. Spanning the period of about a year, with Elaine thinking back on earlier episodes from her life, this novel explores all of the ways that society, and Elaine’s own mental fragility, conspired against her fulfilment and happiness.

That’s the plot, but as for the format, the most striking feature is Self’s use of italics:

Dressed in slacks and a sweater she descends . . . she descends, dressed in slacks and a sweater — in sweater and slacks dressed, she descends: each thought corresponds to a word or words, right? Mix ’em up and you get a wordy sorta salad, like the mess in my head . . .

In a recent(ish) interview with The Sydney Herald, Self explains that although he is a Professor of Modern Thought at Brunel University in west London, he has stopped teaching literature because, “I cannot find students that are capable of understanding what literary influence is. They simply haven’t read enough and don’t have the [required] fine grain of understanding.” So at the risk of demonstrating my own failings, I’ll share that whenever I saw these paragraphs that contain italics, I assumed they were references to other sources. I recognised some references to Steinbeck and Shakespeare, The Odyssey is gestured to beyond the setting of Ithaca, Paradise Lost beyond it being the focus of Elaine’s husband’s academic career; I felt clever when I recognised Venus in Furs. But I didn’t recognise most of the italicised bits, and while some phrases like “bitter as the cud” prove to be from poems a better read person might know (Wilson Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est), phrases like “red and scummy patches in a stainless steel kidney dish” and “a chill cold blast of sunlight” don’t have any google results. Are they simply all phrases from Elaine’s diaries, the “wordy sorta salad” that made a “mess” in her head? Whether they were the results of her own reading and study or original phrasing, that’s what I decided to go with, and it did serve to make Elaine an even more intriguing character. Having studied under the poet Ted Roethke, discussed writing with Nabokov and Bellows at faculty events, and serving an invaluable role as transcriptionist and editor for her husband’s academic writing throughout her marriage, Elaine is understandably frustrated to be entirely judged (even by herself) by her competence as a housekeeper.

Yes, she’d been unhappy — upset, often, as well. But in those far-off days of a fortnight ago, with her complaisant old man, her girlish crush on his colleague, and her catty best friend, Elaine had been a goddamn poster girl for the Modern American Woman: posed in her kitchen, skirts stiff as crinolines, smile plasticized, a penis in one hand . . . a spatula in the other.

This is the kind of novel one can imagine being taught — all those literary references tracked down by students more relentless than I in pursuit of their sources — and the type of novel that’s submitted for awards. But unlike some novels that bore or soar right over my head for the sake of being different, Self has crafted Elaine to be unique in form while totally relatable in substance. I felt I got to know his character “Elaine” (whether or not she is very faithful to the known facts of his actual mother) and hers is a story that I am glad to have been told.

We Burn Daylight

 

Tut, dun's the mouse, the constable's own word.
If thou art dun, we'll draw thee from the mire,
Or — save your reverence — love, wherein thou stickest
Up to the ears. Come, we burn daylight, ho!

 

Mercutio from Romeo and Juliet

Although author Bret Anthony Johnston states in his Acknowledgements at the end of We Burn Daylight that this “is not about David Koresh”, this is the story of a charismatic leader — named Perry Cullen, aka “The Lamb” — and the doomsday religion that he founds on a shambolic ranch outside of Waco, Texas, which was eventually subject to siege and deadly raid by government forces in March of 1993. Told in short, alternating chapters by a pair of fourteen-year-old “star-crossed lovers” (hence the source of title) — Roy is the upstanding son of the local Sheriff, and Jaye is the (barely) more worldly daughter of a woman who was drawn to the Lamb from California; both Roy and Jaye being good, innocent kids, hungry in that familiar adolescent way for love and validation — and although the reader knows where the escalating standoff between law enforcement and the residents of the highly armed ranch must lead (and to be sure, there is plenty of foreshadowing along the way), this is a heart-wrenching, pulse-pounding, deeply philosophical exploration of faith and social constructs and the real limits of freedom. Johnston’s prose is clear and propulsive — the cold, barren landscape is masterfully captured without a hint of sentimentality — and his characters are real and relatable; even those who would knowingly follow what others might call a “cult”; even the so-called cult leader himself is simply following his own fate. Thirty years after the raid on the Branch Davidians, it might be easy to blame the debacle entirely on government overreach, but here Johnston explores the events that led up to that day — the growing unease of the local community (I hear he has illegal weapons, I hear he’s impregnating underage girls), the mounting paranoia within the ranch (These are the end times, the prophesied opening of the Seventh Seal), and a government that feels its authority under scrutiny (with recent fiascos in Montana and Idaho) — there’s an inevitability to the ensuing tragedy that feels Shakespearian in the end. This was an outstanding reading experience (especially for someone like myself who watched the raid on the Branch Davidians with confused horror as it played out in the day), and it could have rated five stars, but I did not like the way that Johnston wrapped his story up. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Hidy there, everybody. Good afternoon. Or evening. Sorry to be tardy, but we’ve had ourselves a dustup at the ranch. As you’ve heard by now, people have taken to calling me the Lamb, which is sure nicer than other names I’ve been called. Anyway we’ve had these pork choppers flying at us. I don’t mean to tease. I appreciate y’all tuning in, I do. Well so, okay, it’s the eighteenth day of February 1993, the year of our Lord, and I’m talking at you, through your radios, in your homes and cars and places of commerce, about the revelation of Jesus Christ. That’s the big to-do.

As creepy and delusional as The Lamb may seem, he doesn’t actually appear to be breaking any laws: His visions have called for him to propagate the “New Light, which seemed to be children who would inherit the earth after the Wave Sheaf scrubbed it of sin”; which does involve him sleeping with everyone of breeding age, including underage girls (with theirs and their parents’ consent; so not technically illegal in Texas), and although the community does make their money by reselling weapons on the gun show circuit (and by having a popular shooting range on the ranch), the weapons are all registered, and is absolutely in keeping with the local ethos of “God, Guts, Guns”. The local Sheriff, Eli, sees nothing of concern on routine visits to the ranch, CPS sees no reason to remove any of the children when they follow up on reports from concerned citizens, and even “the taxman” is kept at bay by the group’s tidy bookkeeping and tax exempt status. Even so, the feds will eventually want to have a look inside, and that’s exactly what the prophecy of the Wave Sheaf predicted: and it’s hard to put normal pressure on a people who want be deemed worthy of “translation” to the afterlife.

But all of that happens in the background as Romeoyal and Julietaye tell the alternating stories of their backgrounds, meeting, and adolescent instalove. And in Johnston’s hands, their stories really are compelling, as mundane as they probably are: these are two recognisably nice young people, suffering under recognisably universal pressures at home and at school, and like probably all fourteen year olds, all they want is to meet someone who will make them feel worthy; loved and seen; you can’t help but root for their happiness. Yet there is something forbidden, or at least foreboding, about this love, and as it is difficult for them to actually meet in person, this is more the story of fantasy and yearning than actually getting the chance to hold one another and experience those first hesitant touches and kisses (this is a sweet love story with nothing graphic). Even so, we understand this is a tragedy, and as the siege of the ranch draws out into weeks, this becomes the tense story of Roy glued to the news coverage, looking for signs of Jaye’s expected release, and the even more harrowing tale of what life is like for Jaye within the compound:

And still more noise — the walls absorbing what they could, the helicopters and yelling and sobbing and coughing, my breathing coming too fast and the awful high-pitched gurgling of our chickens as they were being shot and people pleading with God and barking orders and information: Get down ! Over here now! They’re still coming! I can see them and they’re still coming! Then a single shot and the sickening muffled thunk of its impact, a sledgehammer into a sandbag. Then an enormous gasp — like someone breaching the surface of water after too long below. The gasping continued and turned wet, and a man cried out, “No! No no no no!” Then, as if all the agents were ordered to aim at the same thing and hold down their triggers at the same time: The dinner bell tolled tolled tolled tolled until it dropped to the frozen earth and silenced.

In a stroke of narrative genius, Johnston also has intermittent transcripts from a modern day podcast called “ON THE LAMB”, which sees its host interviewing people who had been involved in the raid, trying to learn what lessons might have been gleaned by thirty years of contemplation on those events. This includes an interview with a defensive retired Special Agent:

What happened was tragic, no question, but there’s also no doubt about who bears responsibility: Cullen. We can debate tactics and strategies, tanks and tear gas, but if Cullen hadn’t abused those kids, we wouldn’t have been there.

But even the attorney general testified there was no evidence of child abuse.

The responsibility is Cullen’s. He did this. The tanks went in because he wouldn’t come out.

And an interview with one of the few survivors among the Lamb’s followers, recently released from prison:

Didn’t they run out of ammo? Isn’t that what being outgunned means?

I think it means we had some help.

God, you’re saying.

What’s the alternative? Some Bible thumpers defeated Uncle Sam? That so much planning and training and equipment was no match for little old us? Sounds fishy, but what do I know? Either way, it sounds like something I can shake hands with.

And an interview with Roy’s long-suffering father, retired Sheriff Eli Montaguereland:

We aren’t built to matter. That’s the surprise here. That’s the big finale. Tell the story a million times, a million different ways, but the ones who were punished and the ones who were pardoned ain’t switching places.

And it all serves to satisfyingly explore both how something like this could have actually happened in the “Land of the Free” (without needing to be 100% faithful to the truth of Koresh and the Branch Davidians) and what it all means in the end:

Did we win or lose? Are we damned or saved? We occupy a liminal, leftover world, and we live off scraps. We build our religion, our very existences, with salvaged and stolen parts, waiting for the next fire. To survive is to know what no one else does: Nothing is forever. Not an alibi or shelter, not bloodline or prayer, not nation or sacrifice or any glad-hearted dream of God.

A well-written and compelling narrative, with a sweet and relatable love story at its heart, this isn’t quite a retelling of Romeo and Juliet, but it is definitely Shakespearian in its tragedian format and philosophical heart; this leaves me with much to think about and I’m looking forward to exploring johnston’s earlier work.

Unrooted: Botany, Motherhood, and the Fight to Save an Old Science

 

The knowledge base of natural history is under threat as research funding is increasingly focussed on fast-paced, short-term experimental work over the slower-paced, longer-term observational work necessary to build and maintain it. I felt compelled to write this book because it seems to be a problem that everyone in biological research and almost no one outside of it is aware of. Like many of the extinctions quietly proceeding around the world, it just isn’t something we hear about. We as citizens and stewards of this planet owe it to ourselves and our children to be aware not only of the issue but of the opportunities we have to contribute to its solution.

Unrooted is one scientist’s story of what led her to the field of Botany, the changes she witnessed within the grind of academia as she pursued her PhD, and the impossibility of finding employment in her field after proudly earning her doctorate (a situation made dramatically worse once she became a mother). Erin Zimmerman writes in a clear and engaging voice — whether describing the electric jolt of reading Charles Darwin’s own handwriting on a specimen’s label at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, or the indignity of having to squirrel herself away in a musty change room to pump breast milk as a postdoc, this is a beautiful blend of memoir, science history, and an impassioned defence of the importance of her disappearing field of expertise. This is exactly the sort of thing I like — I learned a lot and was affected, heart and mind; I couldn’t ask for more and wish Dr Zimmerman nothing but success. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Sitting down to my stack of herbarium specimens and alcohol-preserved flowers every day felt like losing myself in a good book. Scientific research topics can seem narrow to the point of absurdity, like an entire career spent on a single species, but ask any scientist, and they’ll tell you that there really is a lifetime’s worth of discovery there. It speaks to the complexity of our universe that even the thinnest slices can be so expansive. To me, sustained, close attention to a little-regarded slice of that universe felt spiritual, like time spent in quiet worship before a vast and intricate cosmos, trying to know it just a little bit better.

Technically a taxonomist (Zimmerman could spend whole days in close scrutiny of plant parts, sketching what she saw with the delightfully anachronistic use of pen and ink) with an eventual focus on Dialiinae (in the legume family, but more exotic than just peas and beans), Zimmerman’s work was not unlike that of the early collectors like Joseph Banks and Alexander von Humboldt. What was particularly fascinating to me was to learn that Herbariums around the world are filled with thousands of samples dating back to the days of these early world-wide adventurers, some of them hundreds of years old, which have never been through the hands of a trained taxonomist (and even if some of these sample types have already been described, each unique sample — with its known date and location of collection, along with anything peculiar to the sample itself — would contain a wealth of information about climate, the environment, and challenges to growth). But as Zimmerman made her way through her postgraduate work, she watched as the discipline of Botany was folded into generic Biology departments, those researchers who were known in the field as taxonomists were changing their focus to computer-aided dna analysis (because that’s where the funding is), and even her own future husband dropped out of academia to pursue an education with a guaranteed job at the end. Zimmerman makes the case that the sort of work she did — slow and methodical, at the human scale — is imperative for making the kind of discoveries that make people care about the world and its disappearing species; as Damon Little of the New York Botanical Garden said, “If something doesn’t have a name, you can’t conserve it.” (It is estimated that there are 350 000 or more unknown/unnamed plant species.)

I appreciated everything Zimmerman shares about her experience as a woman in science — from some incredible female mentors to the male supervisor who patronisingly spoke to her with a hand on her knee — and her historical overview of women in the field (from sample collecting seen as a gentile hobby for gentlewomen, to men erecting an ivory tower around the field when they decided to make Botany a “serious” science), and as she watched the pathway to tenure become ever narrower in her field of expertise (less than twenty-five per cent of PhDs will eventually find themselves with a tenured position), the reality of motherhood seemed to close that door to Zimmerman for good.

There was no one dramatic incident that extinguished my desire to be in research. What I’d faced was an environment in which I was under strong pressure to never need accommodation, to never let anyone see that I had other loyalties in my life. It was a death by a thousand tiny cuts. And that’s what makes this story important, because I suspect that’s how it is for many of the nearly half of all women in science who leave after becoming mothers. Each time you’re made to feel unprofessional for having caregiving responsibilities, each time you’re made to feel like a burden for requesting minor accommodation . . . it wears you down a little more. You believe that you are the problem. And when the reward at the end of those years of hard work and low pay are far from assured, it doesn’t take a PhD to figure out you might be happier and better off elsewhere, no matter how much you loved the actual science and the questions you were trying to answer.

Unrooted ends on a positive note — Zimmerman has found a career in science writing that allows her to balance her work and family responsibilities — but she continues to stress that Botany matters in our threatened world. I loved everything about this — the science, the exposé of persistent sexism and grant-chasing in academia, and Zimmerman’s personal history — and would recommend this to anyone who enjoyed Lab Girl or Braiding Sweetgrass.

The Third Realm: A Novel

 

Valdemar wasn’t a Nazi, even if a lot of people thought he was. When he spoke about the Third Realm, it wasn’t the Nazis he was talking about but something people had believed in the Middle Ages, that the First Realm was the age of God, the Second Realm the age of Christ, the Third Realm the age of the Holy Spirit.

My sensibilities haven’t really jibed with Karl Ove Knausgård’s writing (I didn’t get past the first volume of his much-lauded “Min kamp” series), and while I need to admit that I didn’t realise that The Third Realm was the third book in a new series when I decided to give it a try, I also have to state that I liked this a lot (and that there doesn’t seem to have been anything lost in starting the series here; this seems to be an alternate view of the same fantastical events from the first book, The Morning Star, with many of the same characters, and enough backstory that I never felt lost.) This reads as Sci Fi: a new star has appeared large and bright in the sky (but is it actually a star?) and it seems to be having some strange effects on Earth below (or are they all coincidences?) And like all the best of Sci Fi, Knausgård uses his concept to explore the human condition — consciousness, madness, the basis of reality — while exposing moments of relatable truth in mundane interactions, writing engagingly of the fells, fjords, and mountain pools of the Norwegian setting, and propulsively describing strange and uncanny events. My mind was piqued and entertained throughout, and I can definitely see myself going back to catch up on the other books in this series. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

The psychosis occurs when the mania exhausts itself, when the encounter with reality is the only thing left for it (and mania fears reality more than anything else). The psychosis is like one of the three doors in the folk tales, the one that must never be opened no matter what. It mustn’t be opened. Everyone knows. And yet it always gets opened in the end. When faced with nothing and something, you choose something first.

The novel begins with Tove — a painter, on seaside holiday with her family — who has a history of psychosis, and has decided to stop taking her meds. This leads to dark depression, terrifying voices, and when her mind shifts to mania, an upsurge in creativity with inspiration from Norse mythology, Jungian archetypes, and unbridled eroticism. Her husband suggests that she’s a “neosymbolist” or a “postmythologist”, with Tove retorting that while he’s interested in categorising, she focuses on decategorising. And I think that’s important because anytime an author writes a conversation like this, I assume he’s speaking for himself: throughout The Third Realm Knausgård has various characters discuss and create art, architecture, and music, and whether it’s a memorial building, third wave black metal, or a bipolar artist painting nude self-portraits, these characters consider and reject cultural touchstones (trolls, crofters, and underground halls) and strive for something more authentic and unformed. Tove says of her work (and I’m assuming this is Knausgård commenting on his own writing efforts):

I wanted my drawings to smell, to stink, to seep and bleed, writhe and squirm. But I hadn’t succeeded. I told myself it was the fault of drawing itself, the very form of expression. The pen stroke served only to encase and bring under control, rationalising everything and thereby rendering it tame.

So the plotline of this novel — often fantastical, with the mysterious new star seemingly affecting affairs below — seems very free form, with people going about their routine lives (drinking wine and eating prawns and putting the kids to bed), while outside these ordinary walls, other people are going missing, enacting bloody rituals, having strokes, and refusing to die. For every weird happenstance (a young woman who opened the door to her landlords’ hysterical son now wonders if he was even real, people seemingly stopped dying as soon as the star appeared, a round-faced stranger keeps popping up who seems to know everyone’s business) there are rational people investigating, and explaining, what’s going on: the detective, the journalist, the neuroscientist. While I started by calling this Sci Fi (because of the star — or is it a comet? A UFO, as one character muses?), this novel kind of defies categorisation; Knausgård seems less interested in neosymbolism than in decategorisation; in unshackling his ideas from the chains of the mode of their expression (which, yes, could be argued to be what he was aiming for with the “Min kamp” series, too, but autofiction on the minutiae of his ordinary life was less interesting to me). This shackling — the inability to express oneself without resorting to the artificiality of language — is the key conflict of the human experience, and this ironic discord is present down to the level of our brain tissue, as seen on an MRI:

It was like looking into the unknown. It was a language, but one so foreign and incomprehensible it might just as well have been delivered to us from outer space. The truly unfathomable thing was that it was ourselves we were looking at. That what was made manifest to us was our very coding of the world around us and all that we were. The mystery was that from the inside it didn’t feel like code at all, but the world itself.

The nature of reality (and especially its inconstancy between different minds), the division between life and death (and what comes after), what makes a moral life: these are all important questions being explored by this novel. But as the star continues to shine, and people continue to mysteriously suffer strokes, there is excitement in the plot as some of those sufferers awake with a message:

“The ddoor …” he said.
I held his gaze.
“... is oop …”
“He’s saying the door’s open,” said Mum. “Yes, you’ve said so a number times already, Mikael, but I really haven’t a clue what you’re talking about!”
She gave a laugh and glanced at me.
Her cold eyes were full of unease.

It turns out that starting at book three in this series was a good thing: I find myself compelled to go both backwards and forwards with this strange story. Happilt jibing with Knausgård on this one!

Tell Me Everything

 

They stood there for a few moments, not looking at each other, and then Lucy finally looked at him and said, “I am so glad to see you.” The day was sunny, and Bob put his sunglasses on. And then off they went for their walk. Lucy said, “Tell me everything. Tell me every single thing. And don’t leave anything out.”

I find something so soothing about Elizabeth Strout’s voice, and as she keeps returning to the same handful of characters over the course of her writing, I always get the feeling of catching up with old friends when I sit down with one of her books. Tell Me Everything has the feeling of a capstone narrative — all of Strout’s characters are now living and interacting with one another in Crosby, Maine — and as they visit together, telling each other stories — mostly old stories of lost loves, heartache, and women done wrong — it would be easy to dismiss this as unserious or trivial; gossip and blether. But as they talk together, and really listen to one another, it seems a demonstration of uncommon grace and I came to feel that there’s likely nothing more important than dissecting human connection through such discussions of the human heart. I don’t know if this would be as satisfying for a reader who hasn’t spent many long and pleasant hours in the company of these characters before, but for me, it was sublime. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

A thought had taken hold of Olive Kitteridge on one of these days in October, and she pondered it for almost a week before she called Bob Burgess. “I have a story to tell that writer Lucy Barton. I wish you would have her come visit me.”

That’s right: Olive Kitteridge (now ninety and living in a retirement community), Lucy Barton (still living in the big house by the sea with ex-husband William), and the Burgess boys (Bob having stayed home in Maine, now married to the Unitarian minister, Margaret, and Jim still living with his wife, Helen, in New York) are all in regular contact with one another. And as Bob and Lucy have their walks in the woods and Olive and Lucy have their living room chats, one thing seems to be certain: The Boomers are not okay. The seasons are noticeably out of whack, there’s an unfathomable homeless encampment behind the Walmart, there are drug and housing crises — not made better by rich out-of-towners like William and Lucy buying up property during the pandemic and deciding to stay on — and everyone’s adult children have moved far away. As they approach retirement, these folks are exhausted and stooped with care, forever haunted by failed marriages, unhappy childhoods, and what might have been: life is hard for the sin-eaters and the linchpins, those with repressed or false memories, and those who find themselves living with ghosts in their marriages. There’s a criminal case at the heart of the plot, and over the course of the novel we are caught up with the lives of all of the kids and ex-spouses, but Tell Me Everything is mostly about the grace-filled moments in which our familiar old friends Olive, Lucy, and Bob talk and really listen to one another.

Once again, there’s a conversational lightness to the tone, as though it’s Elizabeth Strout herself, shrugging off her parka as she settles onto the uncomfortable couch across from us, who can’t wait to tell us these stories of lost loves and heartache and the beautiful strangers she has encountered. New sections often start “Here is what had been happening to Pam: ... Then this happened, and it was ridiculous: … Her defense — as you might recall — was that…” And I found this technique to be charming and engaging; an invitation to participate personally in the moments of grace. Again: I know that sounds lightweight, but true experiences need not be heavy.

Lucy stood up and pulled on her coat. “Those are my stories,” she said, and then bent down to put her boots back on. “But you’re right. They are stories of loneliness and love.” Lucy stepped into the tiny kitchen for a moment and returned with a paper towel and she bent down and soaked up the drops of water on the floor left from her boots. Then she picked up her bag and said, “And the small connections we make in this world if we are lucky.”

Strout might not have come up with the meaning of life here (indeed, the question itself caused a rare spat between Lucy and Bob), but she certainly demonstrates how to find meaning in life, and I feel lucky to have formed such a deep connection with her body of work. Sublime.

Soundings: Journeys in the Company of Whales: A Memoir

 

The whaling captain’s wife gave me a beer, which came in a small can and a piece of whale heart to eat. The meat was chewy, did not easily shred or disintegrate into fibres. It was clearly part of a whole, carried a message about entirety. After I swallowed it, I sat still and quiet. It took me down into the ocean, sounding, down below the light where benign goliaths swam by.

Adding to the trend of memoir through scientific investigation, environmental journalist Doreen Cunningham, at the lowest point in her life — unemployed single mother, living in a women’s hostel on the island of Jersey, with no prospect for improvement — made the rash decision to take out a large loan and bring along her two year old son on a loosely-planned adventure: to follow a pod of grey whales, from their birthing grounds off the Mexico coast, to their feeding grounds in the Aleutian Islands. Although she had no prior interest in grey whales specifically, Cunningham was entranced when she learned that theirs was about the longest annual migration of any mammal. And she had a secondary motive: to make her way back to the small Alaskan village of Utqiagvik and the man she had met and fallen in love with there, seven years earlier. Soundings is the narrative of these two adventures — with frequent interspersals of the story of Cunningham’s childhood on the island of Jersey, up to the challenging relationship with her son’s father and subsequent custody battle — and I found the whole thing to be charming. I liked Cunningham’s voice, I admired her chutzpah, and although her connection to whales felt a little bit tenuous, as an environmental journalist, I appreciated her explanation that whales are signal species, and their fate is our fate. I loved everything about this.

From there everything happened quickly. A string was pulling me, out of the window, into the sky, across the sea. The next day I left the hostel and moved into a friend’s attic room. I got a loan, organised visas. We would follow the mothers and babies from Mexico to the top of the world, I told Max. They would swim, and we would take the bus, the train, and the boat alongside them. I told myself I would relearn from the whales how to mother, how to endure, how to live. Beneath the surface, secretly, I longed to get back to northernmost Alaska, to the community who kept me safe in the harsh beauty of the Arctic and to Billy, the whale hunter who’d loved me.

In Cunningham’s narrative “now”, we tag along as she attempts to wrangle an energetic toddler onto buses, trains, and charter boats along the western coast of North America; forever just making connections, cursing foggy views, and always just a day or two behind the migrating whales. This narrative is thoroughly human and relatable. In her intermittent story of seven years prior, she was on sabbatical from the BBC, with a bursary to help her study anything she liked, and initially, she intended to travel across the top of Alaska and Canada, asking the Indigenous peoples along the way about their lived experience with climate change. But when she arrived at her first stop of Utqiagvik and was invited by its Iñupiaq people to witness an upcoming bowhead whale hunt, Cunningham decided to stay put, soon finding a warmth and acceptance from these people that she had never before known. This narrative thread is engaging and exciting, with gorgeous nature writing of the frozen north, as well as a blossoming love story. The third thread — with stories from an unhappy family life and the fractious pony that was her only childhood balm — we learn something of what made Cunningham the woman she would become. Along the way, she shares facts about whales and climate change — although this really isn’t a science-forward book — and for me, this sort of adventure-as-memoir really works.

Here comes the grey whale from the beginning of time, say the fossils. They pose a question too: All this you know, now what? Human thought and intention are part of the global ecosystem, the most powerful driver of change, the most powerful obstacle that both we and the whales have encountered through millennia. We are writing the next chapter of the story of all life on earth.

This is more lyrical than one might expect from an “environmental journalist” (Cunningham is working at the BBC once more, encouraged that there’s no longer a policy in place to give time to a sceptic every time an actual climate scientist talks), and if the following doesn’t turn you off, you might enjoy this as much as I did (I’ll admit it’s a bit precious, but I like her):

I am woman, human, animal. I bore my child in water. We sang to the whales. We listened to them breathing. We listened to the sea. This book is what I heard.

 Enjoyed by audiobook while recovering, face down, from retina reattachment eye surgery

Because Doreen and Billy watched the Inuit film The Fast Runner while they were together, I decided to enrich this experience by following the book with that movie. And what a great idea that was: maybe not set in Alaska among the Iñupiaq people, but this story set in the high Arctic -- with authentic costumes and English subtitles -- gave me a real sense of the wonder that Noreen must have felt on both of her whale-hunting adventures. 

Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis

 

Most of the world’s wetlands came into being as the last ice age melted, gurgled and gushed. In ancient days fens, bogs, swamps and marine estuaries were the earth’s most desirable and dependable resource places, attracting and supporting myriad species. The diversity and numbers of living creatures in springtime wetlands and overhead must have made a stupefying roar audible from afar. We wouldn’t know. As humans have multiplied to a scary point of concern about the carrying capacity of the earth, wetlands were drained and dried for agriculture and housing. Today 7.8 billion people jostle for living space in a time of political ferment, a global pandemic and now a war, trying to ignore increasingly violent weather events as the climate crisis intensifies.

Fen, Bog and Swamp is Annie Proulx’s love letter to the earth’s disappearing wetlands and a warning that, as extreme weather events increase, our impulse to drain “useless lands” for development is action we take at our own peril: just as Hurricane Katrina wouldn’t have hit New Orleans so hard had the natural mud-bearing outflow of the Mississippi River not been impeded for decades, Indonesia is currently removing their shoreline-protecting mangrove forests in order to plant oil palms — and at what future cost? With beautiful writing, engaging literary references, and urgent information, I found this to be both rewarding and necessary.

Early northern Europeans lived and prospered among glacial meltwater wetlands for thousands of years. And what if those old people who venerated springs, pools and wetlands as holy places could look into the future and see us? Surely they would be unable to comprehend humans who dirtied, drained and destroyed water sources, who dammed and polluted rivers, who choked the great oceans with debris and plastic.

Proulx begins by defining and differentiating between the three titular types of wetlands and then features a section on each. In addition to describing the natural world supported by each of the three, I was intrigued by the fact that Proulx seemed to really focus on the people who have historically lived in each ecosystem. She describes Doggerland (an area of land that once connected Britain with continental Europe, now submerged beneath the North Sea) and then moves on to the Fenlanders who occupied the hillocky fens of eastern England, with a rich and self-sufficient culture, from Mesolithic times until the Enclosure Acts (which put all common lands into the hands of the wealthy few). When writing on bogs, Proulx describes the generations-long tradition of using peat for home heating (recently banned) and the ancient “bog people” found interred in Celtic lands; the hints given of their shamanic culture by artefacts left behind. In the section on swamps, Proulx primarily writes about those in the United States; over fifty per cent of which have been drained, primarily for agriculture. The good news is that in every one of these areas, efforts are underway to rehabilitate at least a portion of the wetlands.

Painters, sculptors, photographers, poets, archeologists, storytellers, ecologists, botanist succumb to the allure of the bog world, where moss makes its own ecological habitat, trees dare not put down roots, predatory sundews and pitcher plants eat living swamp meat, where bog cotton “breathes” through its air-channeled stems. Everything seems to lurch slightly, to sink and rise fractions of an inch. Decomposing plant material underwater sends up stinking gas that produces the mysterious light that wobbles through evening mists — the famous will-o’-the-wisp or ignus fatuus (fool’s light). In sunlight there is the swamp sparrow’s rapid iteration like a gear in your brain spinning loose. The profoundly unfamiliar setting is not so much a place as the sudden shock of perception of threatened existence, a realization streaked with anxiety.

I enjoyed Proulx’s frequent referencing of art (those old paintings and scientific diagrams that capture something of lost landscapes) and literature: From Kate Marsden (intrepid missionary-nurse who wrote in 1891 of underground “zombie fires” in the Siberian wilderness) and Alexander Pope (whose eighteenth century idea of genius loci urged landscape designers to keep in mind the “genius” or spirit of natural areas) to the settings of fens and moors that feature in the more familiar writings of Conan Doyle, Saki, and Nabokov — even the fact that Robert Frost had contemplated suicide in the Great Dismal Swamp when his marriage proposal had been rejected — Proulx repeatedly, and urgently, makes the point that the wetlands have always loomed large in the human imagination. On the upside, the fact that these stories exist can remind us to lament the lost landscapes: The relatively small Limberlost Swamp in northeast Indiana served as the setting for Girl of the Limberlost, and it was a love for this 1904 novel that prompted locals in the 1990s to purchase some of the original swamp acreage and begin to rehabilitate it. Hope, and seeing where action has had a positive effect, is the first step to change:

It is easy to think of the vast wetland losses as a tragedy and to believe with hopeless conviction that the past cannot be retrieved — tragic and part of our climate crisis anguish. But as we see how valuable wetlands can soften the shocks of change, and how eagerly nature responds to concerned care, the public is beginning to regard the natural world in a different way.

Lovely, urgent read.

Enjoyed by audiobook while recovering, face down, from retina reattachment eye surgery

Very Cold People

 

 

On the phone Vera sounded both shrill and hoarse, as if she’d just been shouting or crying. She spoke fast, as if she’d practiced, “I am sorry for your loss but I wanted you to know that I think that you are very cold, cold people.” I said I know, but she had already hung up.

Very Cold People hit close to home: I am also from very cold, cold people. As a coming of age story, I recognised the beats; the shame of poverty — material and spiritual; you can be happy without money, but without love and affection, you cannot — and in every way that matters, this felt very much like my own story. I’ll note that author Sarah Manguso has an MFA (from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, no less), and while that tends to recommend against an author for me, Manguso is also a poet — as well as a later in life debut novelist — and I reckon these facts work against her having been shorn of all her unique edges. I love the edges, I was moved by the language and emotional pull, and I believed every bit of this.

In all of my earliest memories I am alone in my crib. I have no memories of being held. But I do remember closing my eyes in absolute pleasure while my mother stroked my head. Did she do it more than once? I asked her to do it again, all the time, and she always said no.

Ruthie is an only child, growing up in the ‘80s in Waitsfield, Massachusetts — class-conscious land of the Cabots and Lowells — and as she has a Jewish mother and an Italian father, Ruthie is as not-quite-white as the house she lives in, recently painted the colour of dirty snow. Ruthie’s family is poor — all of her clothes are factory seconds, their books and knick knacks come from the dump — and it would all be okay if Ruthie’s father wasn’t often absent; if her mother wasn’t mean. As Very Cold People unfolds, Ruthie is recalling her challenging childhood (I like to visit with the exhausted girl who once was me) and her one saving grace seems to be that she always had friends, even if she gives the impression that she had been an outcast at school. With a mother grasping for respectability — and trying to control her daughter while also effectively ignoring her — Ruthie is forced to find her own identity in the world. But as she gets older and watches her better supported friends also fail to thrive, Ruthie begins to see that this world is built on dirty secrets; perhaps even reaching back into the past.

All the Waitsfield girls, in their little rooms, lie down, and wait and breathe. Their scalps sweat into their pillows. Their hearts slow down as they drift off. The girls are walking to school. The sides of their noses itch. They scratch them and collect flakes of dead skin under their nails. They are keeping secrets. They feel special because they have been told they are. Each of them, one in a million.

Ruthie eventually grows to understand her mother a little better, but even when the family’s finances improve (and they move to a dilapidated house that had once belonged to a minor Cabot), she still feels that poverty that’s more closely tied to the spiritual than the material (What's curious to me now is that I didn't know at the time that I was suffering, so deeply involved was I in being saved.) I haven’t wanted to give too much away in this review, and I can acknowledge that I may be rating this higher through emotional identification, but it totally worked for me; beginning to end.

Enjoyed by audiobook while recovering, face down, from retina reattachment eye surgery.

I decided not to go into too much detail on goodreads as to why I identified with this book so hard, but here's an example of cold: As I was recovering, face down, after my retina reattaching surgery, my mother happened to call, and I was glad to be able to casually tell her what was going on in my life (never would I ever expose myself by calling her up to say, "Hey, I'm about to have surgery that I'm really nervous about, but I just wanted you to know...") So I told her that I had had this surgery, that I need to lay face down for four days, and that I wouldn't be able to drive or fly for two months because of a gas bubble in my eye that might EXPLODE. She said, "I never heard of such a thing" and continued on with what she wanted to talk about.

Cold, cold people. And it never ends.

Strangers on a Train

 

Bruno was not the ordinary stranger on the train by any means. He was cruel and corrupt enough himself to appreciate a story like that of his first love. And Steve was only the surprise ending that made the rest fall into place.

I immediately followed the reading of Strangers on a Train with the viewing of the 1951 Hitchcock film adaptation, and I can confidently say: if you’ve only seen the movie, you don’t know this book at all. Everyone probably knows the murder swap concept at the heart of this story (criss cross!), but where a novel improves on a film is the room for introspection and the revelation of private thoughts, and in Patricia Highsmith’s hands, this is a thrilling exploration of privilege and psychopathy; of what forces might drive even a decent man to murder. Great stuff! (I am proceeding as though everyone knows the basic plot.)

Bruno slammed his palms together. “Hey! Cheeses, what an idea! We murder for each other, see? I kill your wife and you kill my father! We meet on the train, see, and nobody knows we know each other! Perfect alibis! Catch?”

Cheeses! Bruno is such an unlikeable character — idle rich and wants his father dead just because he’s withholding Bruno’s inheritance until he makes something of himself — that even a stranger on a train has got him pegged, Despair, Guy thought, the desperate boredom of the wealthy that tended to destroy rather than create. And it could lead to crime as easily as privation. What Guy can’t see is the nasty Oedipal bits, where Bruno is in love with his mother, impotent with the ladies, and more than a little in love with Guy himself. Meanwhile, Guy is estranged from the young wife who cheated on him three years earlier, and now that she’s pregnant with yet another man’s baby, Guy is stunned to learn that she plans to refuse his divorce and follow him to his big architecture job in Palm Springs for the support and respectability. Guy sure is mad at Miriam — especially since he wants to marry the upper class, long-suffering Anne — but he doesn’t want her dead, does he? Guy is plagued by philosophical upset.

But love and hate, he thought now, good and evil, lived side by side in the human heart, and not merely in differing proportions in one man and the next, but all good and all evil. One had merely to look for a little of either to find it all, one had merely to scratch the surface. All things had opposites close by, every decision a reason against it, every animal an animal that destroys it, the male the female, the positive the negative.

Although Guy never agreed to the twisted plan, Bruno decides to carry through with his end of the murder — just as a gift to that good fellow he met on the train. But even though never contacting one another was integral to eliminate motive, Bruno can’t help but call, write, telegraph, and show up on the doorstep of the horrified Guy; eventually insinuating himself into the social life of Guy and his new bride Anne, always asking when Guy was going to hold up his end of the deal; eventually threatening to reveal everything.

In the nights when he could not sleep, he enacted the murder, and it soothed him like a drug. It was not murder but an act he performed to rid himself of Bruno, the slice of a knife that cut away a malignant growth. In the night Bruno’s father was not a person but an object, as he himself was not a person but a force. To enact it. Leaving the Luger in the room, to follow Bruno’s progress to conviction and death, was a catharsis.

Another upgrade in the novel is a bland and frumpy private detective, Arthur Gerard of the Confidential Detective Agency, who never quite looks like he’s paying attention to the action, but who never misses a beat. Anyone planning the perfect crime would do well to avoid Gerard. Cheeses! Criss cross!

Enjoyed by audiobook while recovering, face down, from retina reattachment eye surgery; it felt good to switch things up by throwing a movie into the mix.