The Book Connect or Read These Books Together Pt. One
If you just read the synopses for these two books, Transcendent Kingdom and Godshot, they seem radically different.
Transcendent Kingdom features a young Black middle class woman who is trying to make peace with her family’s personal tragedy in the midst of a national opioid epidemic by pursuing scientific answers. On top of all this, she’s also learning new ways to exist with her grieving mother.
Godshot features a poor white little white girl being raised by a single mother in a religious sect who has to grow up too fast and figure out a way to question and then exist.
However, and perhaps it's because I read them relatively close together, I think they complement each other really nicely. Loosely inspired by the great Shea Serrano’s new podcast “The Connect”, I’m going to run down things these two books have in common:
They are both coming-of-age stories that feature a daughter-mother duo;
The mother in question is deeply involved with religion;
The previously mentioned devout daughter has a crisis of faith prompting her to reevaluate her relationship to religion;
The authors invite us to think about motherhood, agency, and community;
The books’ settings are in rural places; and
At some point the books also both take place in California.
If you’ve read these two books are there any other connections I’m missing?
On Women and Cannabis
I started reading this book wanting to learn specifically how cannabis usage could be beneficial for women and it does that in a really helpful way by defining terms one might have heard and breaking options down in a really helpful way. However, I also fully expected a book about cannabis in 2018 to acknowledge how racism has played and continues to play a part in who gets to participate in cannabis capitalism or even just enjoying recreationally. Despite that jazzy cover and title, I was not the target audience for this book. I live in a state that allows for recreational cannabis use (🙌🏾) and an area that is trying to figure out what racial equity in the cannabis industry looks like given decades of racist drug enforcement policies.
I read this book deeply feeling it wasn’t for me, despite my interest in the topic. It was clearly meant for middle-aged women and/or caregivers to breakdown the misconceptions around cannabis use and normalize it for a certain group of people, but from my POV that’s already happened. How much more impactful this book could have been if the author or publisher added historical context.
I read it as a Black woman who was taught that cannabis was the Devil’s weed and a gateway to a life of debauchery and sadness. Clearly that’s wrong (even though studies do show that using cannabis too early in life isn’t great for brain development). I now use it regularly in facial moisturizer and I have to chuckle at how normal it is in my life and social circle. I’m glad I’ve grown up to learn more and that individuals and organizations are working to educate about cannabis usage. It’s just imperative that those conversations include race. I hope there’s a book in the works by a Black and or Latinx woman in the works that centers how women of color can approach cannabis into their wellness journeys.
Recommended Reading
Why Isn’t Marijuana Legalization Doing Any Good for People of Color?
Organizations Working to Make the Cannabis Industry more Inclusive and Equitable
Millennial’s Lament
“We cannot live outside the systems and structures, but, it turns out, I cannot live within them either anymore”
-Want x Lynn Steger Strong
Our protagonist in Want struggles with economic anxiety.
Not the kind that makes people vote for a racist and deplorable person, but the variety that compels someone to declare bankruptcy, work two jobs, and seek escapes and solutions in unlikely places.
Our (mostly unnamed) protagonist has lost track of her adolescent best friend, lost her professional narrative and professional security and is wrestling with her place in so many systems: the charter school where she works, parenthood, marriage, and capitalism to name a few. In her story, I saw shadows of friends and peers who also did all the right things, got the multiple degrees, and yet life doesn’t look like what we were promised or sold.
Want explores the different types of lack that can affect us in this part of the 21st century, lack of community, lack of being understood, and especially lack of stability which means money. She deals with this lack by escaping into books or movies, or other indulgences she can’t really afford and by trying to reconnect with her old best friend.
So what happens to dreams deferred for an individual for a whole generation? A lot of it depends on your race, gender, class, and other dimensions of diversity. Our protagonist, whose name you learn near the very end of the books, lives outside of her privilege in a lot ways, but even the dire economic circumstances she finds herself in are mitigate by her Whiteness. Through flashbacks to her adolescence and current quotidian life Steger Strong shares a story that is at once intimate and also universal.
“We were just privileged enough to think that we could live outside the systems and the structures and survive it, but we failed.”
It was a fascinating experience reading this book in the summer of 2020 when so many people are reconsidering the systems they benefit from and those that consequently, intentionally hurt others.
A few things:
Read this novel along with Lynn Steger Strong’s "Two in Five" column with the Guardian that depicts the decline of the middle class.
This book would pair nicely with It Was All a Dream: A New Generation Confronts the Broken Promise to Black America. It’s an exploration of how Black millennial navigate the lie of the “American Dream”.
One thing that I haven’t been able to shake is that our protagonist allegedly was a year older than me, but the text said 9/11 happened her second week of college. It’s a minor mistake that I’m sure can happen to anyone, but this tragedy is a fundamental event anchoring millennials to their/my/our generation.
To Be Young, Confused, and Black
My twenties were the best of times and the worst of times.
Graduating into a recession and deferring decisions about what to be when I grew up (still there, to be honest) coupled with the multitude of decisions about who and how to be made it a difficult time. Add navigating relationships, situationships, and entanglements, and there were some rocky times. Reading Luster brought me back to the worst of times, yet I couldn’t put it down.
Our girl Edie is having a rough go of her twenties too.
From the first few pages (and from many other reviews) we know that Edie is messing around with a married older white man who claims to be in an open relationship (and actually is?!). Edie/Leilani’s observations about their differences and standing in the world hooked me through her frank, cutting, and at times hilarious prose. Throughout the novel, Edie explores her relationship with her older, married lover, muddling through her job until she finds herself unemployed and unhoused and suddenly invited into the house of her married lover AND HIS WIFE.
I was enthralled by Leilani’s prose, but when this plot twist dropped (which appears in most reviews and the book cover jacket) my mouth dropped, but then when the couple’s daughter is introduced I almost lost it. Leilani manages to weave observations about black colleague solidarity, artistic fulfillment, and so much more with prose that floats.
The poor decision making, the discontentment with her job, it all resonated too much.
Edie is lonely and confused. Her loneliness and confusion compounded by being a millennial in these weird times. I was Edie in varying measures throughout my twenties and Emira (Such a Fun Age x Kiley Reid), and even had to check to see if I saw myself in Queenie (Queenie x Candice Carty-Williams).Their narratives are important not only because they are well-written books, but because they are expanding the types of Black women who get to see themselves and their experiences on the page.
“I can be a beach read, I can get rid of all these clauses, please I’ll just revise.”
I’m here for Edie and Emira and all the other twentysomething Black girls trying to figure it out. Here’s to more of our stories.
I’m rooting for us.
What to do with all this time?
“I do feel comforted to discover I’m not the only person on this earth who has no idea what life is for, nor what is to be done with all this time aside from filling it.”
Photo of Intimations x Zadie Smith
I’m not sure where I fall on Zadie Smith the author or public figure.
I liked NW well enough but was ambivalent about On Beauty. I really didn’t enjoy Swing Time and have felt some kind of way about some of Zadie’s essays that have to do with the specificness of Black American life. All that being said, she’s still very much a writer I will read and even seek out. When I heard that she had written and published something during All of This, I knew I wanted to read it. I was fortunate that my public library system (the award-winning San Francisco Public Library system) had it and that I was able to check it out so quickly.
Intimations is a short collection of six essays that range from exploring those first uneasy weeks of the new normal to people she encounters navigating this new world we all find ourselves in. It’s an opportunity to listen in on a famed writer’s internal monologue and it was affirming to listen to many of my feelings and spiraling thoughts, reflected back to me, tidier, and more potent, in Zadie’s incomparable prose. One of her essays, “The American Exception”, was previously printed in The New Yorker and provides a good sampling of the other five essays in this collection. It’s both inspiring and frightening to read commentary on the still-unfolding global merde show. I’ve struggled with how to make meaning, if not sense from this [insert your favorite adjective to describe 2020] time.
The fact that Zadie was able to fight through a fog of complacency and despondency to put pen to paper makes me want to find a way to contribute, in my small way, to the archives of what inevitably will come from this time. It likely won’t be in the bagels I’ve sworn myself to perfect, or even in the little pieces of art, I’ve tried to make to make sense of the madness of 2020. Like Zadie, “I can’t rid myself of the need to do something, to make something, to feel that this new expanse of time hasn’t been wasted. Still, it’s nice to have companions watching this manic desire to make, or grow, or do something that now seems to be consuming everybody.”
I finished this quick audiobook emboldened to keep trying to create during this time, comforted to know that I’m not the only one struggling with what to do with all this time…
More
The Care and Keeping of Best Friends
“There is no autopilot mode for a Big Friendship. You just have to keep showing up. Active friendships require active maintenance.”
As someone who didn’t meet my husband until my late 20s, my friendships, particularly my female friendships were the big, important relationships in my life over the past nearly two decades. I’m grateful to have 5 best friends. You might be thinking that best friend is singular, but let Dr. Mindy Lahiri educate you:
The 5 women I consider my best friends live in 5 different cities throughout the United States and the one time all of 5 of them have been in the same place was at my wedding two years ago. At a time when I’m not sure when I’ll be able to see them all again in-person, I cherish that weekend all the more, but it can be hard to prioritize investing in these relationships and showing up outside of the big, monumental moments in our lives. I was excited to learn from these two Big Friend Pioneers. Like Gayle and Oprah, Anne and Leslie, Aminatou and Anne are vocal about their platonic love of each other and I love to see it. I’m not a frequent listener of their podcast, “Call Your Girlfriend”, but as someone who is online more than I should be, I was familiar with their work and legend.
This short, but potent, book is not really for those hoping to learn how to make friends as an adult (although you can pick up tips if you’re looking!) and instead focuses on sustaining a deep, valuable friendship. I appreciated how open the two were in sharing about the good, bad, and trying of their commitment to each other and how their narrative weaves qualitative and quantitative data to provide a guide to embracing and investing in Big Friendships. The chapters isolate and highlight certain aspects of their friendship as a way to clearly help them process their evolving shared narrative. The resulting book is a dedication to their practice of committing to a Big Friendship. I found myself highlighting, underlining and dog-earing sections I know I’'ll need to reference when friendship tune-ups are required. In 2020, their chapter on the unique challenges that can happen in interracial friendships is especially timely and value, you can read an excerpt here.
Before shelter-in-place began, I found myself feeling emotionally distant from one of my besties. Despite these feelings, I didn’t do anything about it. It was easy to downplay the feelings as temporary or just a phase, but they existed. As I was reading this book, I found myself tearing up, remembering why I connected with this best friend in the first place. When I was finished reading it, I ordered her a copy from my former favorite independent bookstore in her area. I’m grateful that this book provides a map on how to stay in the land of deeply loving your friends and I’m excited to force my best friends, I mean gift my best friends this book as a declaration that I want to keep doing life with them.
P.S. This is definitely a book I’d recommend to (fictional) Issa and Molly.
"Keep That Same Energy"-A Modern African American Proverb
May 26th began the most exhausting week of my Black adult life and that’s saying a lot since as NPR’s Code Switch noted we’ve had nearly A Decade of Watching Black People Die.
The heaviness of It All coupled with the necessity of having to “go” to work (and close out an event that had swiftly pivoted to a digital format) made for a surreal and heavy week.
Throughout this era of Black death on display, I have often felt alone in my grief and pain at the nonprofits where I worked and struggled with how to show up as the professional I had to be. An internal turning point for me came with the murder of peaceful church members in Charleston, South Carolina. I was supposed to be having fun at a work field day the day after their murder and couldn’t deal with the fact that my colleagues were acting as if everything was okay, because it very much wasn’t. I excused myself from the festivities and went home to process. That was only in 2017, and yet feels like a lifetime ago.
2020 feels different because a critical mass of white people has also noticed. Smarter people than me can give reasons behind why this time is different, but part of the heaviness that I’ve carried over the last weeks was because police brutality and anti-Blackness have been happening and it hurt that people were arriving hella late to this consciousness party. I wish I had the option.
Text messages from acquaintances offering food or condolences went unanswered. Black squares on social media were ignored. Messages of solidarity from corporations got noted (Ben & Jerry’s, forever about that action) or side-eyed as appropriate (National Football League). There can be consolation in feeling camaraderie in one’s pain and rage, but it’s not enough. I hope that those who took to the streets or have recently plugged in will keep that same energy moving forward.
Diversify your bookshelf permanently and define your own canon.
We all have to do our own work to define and diversify the literary canon. Black authors existed before the protests of the past few weeks and they will continue to create work that is worthy of your support. I promise you that if there’s a subject you’re interested in learning more about, a Black person has written about it. Do the work of finding the writers that resonate with you and support their work and do it again and again until it’s a habit and not a one-off reaction to current events.
If you want to go a step further, learn about how the publishing industry grossly undervalued Black voices by exploring the hashtag and conversation #PublishingPaidMe.
Don’t let the last few weeks be the last time you patronize a Black-owned establishment.
When it’s safe to do so, patronize your local Black-owned restaurants in person. Listen to The Sporkful podcast episode “Can a Restaurant Be for Everyone?” and consider why before All of This you perhaps didn’t feel comfortable going to certain neighborhoods for food. Then, go a step further and learn about food justice organizations in your community working to ensure that communities of color in your home community have access to healthy, nutritious foods.
Do the tedious work of being civically engaged.
I’m guilty of not being as civically engaged in ways that matter most before All of This. When I was younger, my mom would bring us to school board meetings and I would tune out. In retrospect, she was laying the blueprint for the at times boring, but vital work that being a community member comprises. In addition to voting, staying informed of the myriad of choices that elected and appointed officials have that affect your life and your neighbors are important. If there are any silver linings to my area’s shelter-in-place order, it’s that the barriers to staying informed about public commissions have been significantly lowered. I’m fortunate to be able to work from home and have on commissions of interest in the background. I’ve committed to listening to my local school board of education meetings, as well as, our police commission meetings.
Keep learning.
In 2013, saying “Black Lives Matter” was provocative to some, taboo to others, and an affront to still others (let the record state that I don’t care about the last group). Fast forward to 2020 and it’s totally different. Public opinion will continue to change and we owe it to ourselves to learn, process, and iterate.
May Breonna Taylor, Nina Pop, Tony McDade, George Floyd’s, and the countless others’ names be a blessing.
Freedom and Libraries
“Isn’t it awful not to be able to go to
a public library and get an interesting book
without being put out and given
a hateful look ”
“Freedom Libraries: The Untold Story of Libraries for African Americans in the South”
I checked out this book, along with 5 or 6 others, from my neighborhood library in the Before Times. At that time, in late February, there was no way I could have known how dear that singular library trip would become to me. When I attempted to read this book a few months ago, I struggled to get through the introduction. When I picked it up again last week, it resonated on a totally different level.
Over the course of nearly 100 days of sheltering-in-place and thinking about the places and rituals I treasured and being forced once again to contemplate and process the U.S.’s legacy of anti-Black racism, I’ve been drawn to books that center things that bring me joy and libraries have been a consistent source of joy throughout my life. I’ve moved around a lot and one of the rituals that helps me feel like a place is home is getting my library card. My most recent one (shown), from the San Francisco Public Library system, is illustrated by the amazing illustrator, Christian Robinson, and I love that it shows a little Black girl reading.
At first glance, I didn’t understand the book’s cover image, but on closer look, it’s clear that at least one of the people is holding a shotgun: the image is of two men protecting a Freedom Library in Holmes County, Mississippi.
The short book highlights Freedom Libraries and the people who built them from imagination, determination, and sheer will and focuses on Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and surprisingly to me, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I had never thought about segregation in libraries, but duh, that’s what public life was before the hard-won success of the Civil Rights movement. This short, but potent, book introduced me to Freedom Libraries and the insanely brave young people who went down South to set them up during the Freedom Summer of 1964. In addition to introducing new Freedom Fighters to my pantheon, it situated familiar names such as Stokely Carmichael and Michael Schwerner in a different timeline and context for me. By the time I was finished reading, I had a somehow even deeper love and gratitude for my own literacy, my parents cultivating my love of books, and the critical role formal and informal libraries play in an informed society.
During a time when many cities will be facing unprecedented budget cuts, I hope individuals and communities will protect and defend their libraries by prioritizing their funding.
Libraries are worth fighting for whether literally or figuratively.
Recommendations
Research your city or town’s library budget and figure out how you can advocate for funding.
If your public library has a “Friends of [Your Town’s] Public Library”, like the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library, become a member and get involved.
Volunteer for a literacy organization such as Reading Partners.
Buy books about diverse characters. Now and always.
1921. 1962. 2020
“The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors...”
On “Breast and Eggs”
“On ne naît pas femme: on le devient.
One is not born, but rather becomes a woman”
I haven’t read a lot of contemporary Japanese fiction, but after reading about Mieko Kawakami and reading the book review in the NY Times, I checked to see if my public library had it available in an electronic format and waited.
Originally published in 2008, but now available in English, “Breast and Eggs” explores womanhood, experiencing poverty, and self-actualization in modern Japan through small family interactions, female friendships, and motherhood.
Natsuko Natsu (who has to consistently reassert that her name isn’t a nom de plume), is a determined young woman who is continuing to flesh out how she understands herself, her body, and the world. In Book One, we meet Natsuko’s little family consisting of her older sister and her sister’s daughter. The mother is obsessed with getting work done on her breasts and the daughter is willfully mute. Throughout the awkward few days, each person’s role within poverty and in “womanhood” is explored. Some of the most devastating pieces of prose for me was Natsuko’s niece pondering why life has to be so hard as a poor person who is also a girl.
Book Two dives deeper into Natsuko’s interior life and her conflicting desires to be a successful writer and potentially to be a mother. Throughout this section, the tension of whether motherhood is noble (to whom) or worth it (again, to whom) is explored by a variety of characters and Natsuko’s world, and thus the reader, is opened up to people of different classes and options who view motherhood and being a woman in different ways.
I’m at the age where close friends and acquaintances are beginning and continuing to bring children into their lives. I brought my ambivalence about participating in motherhood to this novel, as well as, thinking about friendships among women. This novel will resonate with a variety of women at different life stages and offer a glimpse into the interior lives of the women you encounter through your casual encounters.