'The purest ecstasy I can conceive'Plus: my book is an NPR best non-fiction pick, making sense of boomer moms, the Rubik’s cube of pleasure, the pull to unearth family secrets, and more.
I’ve been putting together a digital commonplace book devoted to writing and craft thoughts. A long while back, I wrote about my physical commonplace book, my catalog of obsessions, which I have been neglecting. This digital one is (ugh) an app on my phone, but it’s such an efficient way to thematically organize everything that gets an underline or margin star in my reading. Each quote is added with a theme or two, like “structure” or “beginnings.” Probably about half of my notes so far are from Sven Birkerts’ The Art of Time in Memoir, which I just adored. My favorite section deals with lyrical memoirists, like Annie Dillard and Virginia Woolf, who he describes as “philosophers of being.” They are driven to get “hold of vanished experience,” and toward “ the sensuous apprehension of once-vivid circumstances and states of mind.” These writers are not after the memories that we intentionally file away as part of the constructed story of our life. They are interested in those “sudden shocks,” as Woolf puts it, moments of “being” amid “the cotton wool of daily life.” Famously, Woolf wrote in Moments of Being that “behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art.” Woolf recounted her earliest childhood memory:
I wrote about one of my earliest moments of being in My Mother’s Daughter, in a scene where as I’m flying to meet my sister Kathy for the first time:
Now I really just want to know everyone’s earliest moments of being. Tell me tell me. You all seemed to like the micro essay + early link roundup that I did last week, so I’m trying it again. Most of what I do here is free, but paid subscribers make this newsletter possible and they get the full roundup below. Free subscribers can upgrade now to knock down the paywall. My book is an NPR best non-fiction pickMy Mother’s Daughter: Finding Myself in My Family’s Fractured Past is an NPR staff pick for favorite books of the year so far. It’s also one of Amazon Editors’ best memoirs of 2026 so far. I’m not sure if these “so far” lists are new or if I didn’t land on any of them with my first book, but it’s become a joke in my household. So far. Like… no one else publish any good books for the next six months! Why are boomer moms… like that?I’m on the Culture Study podcast talking with the great Anne Helen Petersen about my book, boomer moms, and everything that we inherit from our mothers in a world that hates them. We take some great listener questions, too, about “boomer moms who loathe feminism, who’ve dealt with un-present partners, who struggle with bitterness, who reproduce the criticalness of their own parents, and who really, really want to give gifts,” as Anne puts it. The gravitational force of family secretsIt was a treat to talk with Nicole Graev Lipson, a brilliant thinker and writer, and author of Mothers and Other Fictional Characters. She observes that every page of my book “burns with the author’s desire to unearth what she can thus far only sense,” and in an interview for her newsletter we talk about the draw of the family secret that so many of us experience—or what I call “the insistent pull to surface what has been pulled underground.” Nicole also shouts out Dire Straights, which I co-host with Amanda Montei, as having “some of the most scary-smart and original feminist commentary out there,” which is a nice excuse for me to mention that we’re currently scheming and brainstorming for Season 2, which is coming in August, but all 30 episodes of Season 1 are currently available! Giving permissionKaitlyn Elizabeth wrote a beautiful essay responding to my book and sharing about her own sister, 12 years her senior, who her mom had as a teenager. Kaitlyn riffs on inherited shame and the connection between her mom’s past and her own career as a therapist:
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how writing and reading give us permission to transform our shame, too. The memoirist is often offering a model of what that transformation can look like. But the writing itself can be essential to the transformation—again, it’s surfacing what has been pushed underground. I find myself peering around that partition with my writing clients, and in a way that feels not unrelated to therapy. This collaborative work is not just about questions of craft, it’s also questions about self and life and becoming. I love it... Subscribe to TCF Emails to unlock the rest.Become a paying subscriber of TCF Emails to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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