A Little Life

You think A LITTLE LIFE is going to be something it’s not: one of those post-college coming-of-age-in-Manhattan books that takes you along through drug-addled friendships, boozy conversations, new babies, failed marriages, and the like. The start of Hanya Yanagihara’s 813-page novel certainly smacks of books like A FORTUNATE AGE, by Joanna Smith Rakoff, and even Mary McCarthy’s THE GROUP – complex, layered stories that chronicle that path of a group of friends as they navigate the adult world.

But A LITTLE LIFE isn’t A FORTUNATE AGE. It’s not THE GROUP. In fact, I suspect many would be hard-pressed to find an easy contemporary for this complex, tragic story. It’s a singular, unforgettable, searing work, one that navigates the realms of trauma, physical pain, and grief by means of expert language and gorgeous, visceral scene. For the last third of A LITTLE LIFE, I wept, turning the pages and wiping my eyes as the story unfolded, gruesome and true. 

The central figure in A LITTLE LIFE is Jude, the one who holds his group of male friends together.  He’s the victim of a childhood trauma, one that is revealed to the reader in fits and starts, snippets and scenes, until we finally grasp the horror, the breadth of such abuse, in the book’s closing pages. Jude holds his secret tightly, and his friends come to accept this. When he’s crippled with pain, paralyzed on the floor, they hold him close; they take him to the doctor; they don’t ask questions about the cuts on his arms. His friends are his saviors, and he, with his understated beauty, his generosity, his humility, is also theirs. 

At the end of the book’s second chapter (there are just seven), Jude remarks, “The only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are – not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving – and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself.” Jude’s best friend, the attractive and compelling Willem, is this friend: kind, generous, forgiving. He’s Jude’s foil, the picture of health and good fortune, and the relationship between the two is what carries the book forward, propels it through the decades to its final agonizing close. 

In A LITTLE LIFE, “Friendship [means] witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs.” At one point, Willem wonders, “Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going.” Willem and Jude’s friendship is like this: the most important relationship in each of their lives, and one that remains sexless, but not without love. 

As handsome and charming as Willem is, it’s Jude who steals the reader’s heart. Jude, who keeps his pain knotted tight inside himself, who never complains aloud, who feels, all the time, like his legs will give out—it’s Jude who’s the true hero in A LITTLE LIFE, the one who survives, who even thrives, despite the obstacles he’s faced. Jude hates himself, hates his failing body, his terrible past. He can’t enjoy sex, can’t enjoy his physical body: He sees himself as flawed, “a piece of junk.”

For this reader, Jude’s pain was the most compelling part of the book. I’ve taken my body for granted my whole life, and yet it’s brought me to countries near and far, to the tops of frozen peaks and to the shores of vast oceans. It’s folded itself into cramped buses, cabs, rickshaws, boats—all so that I could see the world. Swimming, walking, skating, climbing, hiking, skiing, rowing, biking, running: verbs have always been the vocabulary that’s defined my life, punctuated the other, more literary life I’ve also led. It took A LITTLE LIFE to teach me to treasure these things, hold them close, thank my legs and arms for taking me through another pain-free day, another day when I could forget about my body and get down to the business of living. 

A LITTLE LIFE is about enduring pain. Jude’s pain was never a friend, but it was always a companion, something he could count on, something he spent his life managing. And yet even in pain, Jude eked out success: As a prominent lawyer, he spent his final years with the man he always loved. The two gardened together, created beautiful spaces for themselves, those final years together all cool, shimmery pools and frosted cocktails in the afternoons. The book ends in tragedy, but it’s so imbued with beauty that you almost don’t even notice. It’s only when you finish reading do you realize you’ve been weeping for hours, and your face and hands are stained with tears. You’ll stand, aware of how your body hurts or doesn’t hurt, and you’ll see the world anew, pain-infused and beauty-bound, a brand new place each day. 

There There

When I Googled Tommy Orange, I found photos of a guy around my age. He’s wearing a baseball cap and a black sweatshirt, and he’s unsmiling, staring straight into the camera. Sherman Alexie comes up on the same Google search, and Louise Erdrich, and Joy Harjo – the handful of Native voices our nation’s publishers have chosen to elevate. Scroll farther down the Google Image results, and photos of Tommy Orange disappear. Now, the feed fills with pictures of white guys in puffy orange vests, pictures of orange sweatshirts that say “Tommy Jeans,” even a picture of a fuzzy felt orange fruit, complete with a felt leaf hat. Tommy Orange is new to the scene, and his Google results prove it. 

Still, his is the new voice of an old soul, the voice of someone who’s bound to stick around, make a splash, put new ideas about what it means to be Native into our collective head. His can be a weary voice, or a joking voice, or a voice imbued with an unnamable grief. It’s a voice saturated in new turns of phrase, a voice simultaneously youthful and wise. THERE THERE tells the story of urban Natives, and the prologue begins with a reflection on a bloodied past—“They did more than kill us. They tore us up.” Orange remarks that “getting us to the cities was supposed to be the final, necessary step in our assimilation, absorption, erasure.” But “we did not move to cities to die,” he explains. Instead, “the city made us new, and we made it ours.” For anyone still imagining each Native with a wolf at his shoulder and a feather in his hair, THERE THERE will upend that perception – one that’s sometimes true, but increasingly not.  

In the city, Orange’s characters reinvent what it means to be of the earth. The city became home, because “the city sounds like a war, and you can’t leave a war once you’ve been.” In the city, “Everything here is formed in relation to every other living and nonliving thing from the earth...Buildings, freeways, cars—are these not of the earth? Were they shipped from Mars, or the moon?” In Orange’s world, “Urban Indians feel at home walking in the shadow of a downtown building.” The city’s become home, where “the land is everywhere or nowhere.”

THERE THERE tells the stories of twelve different Natives, roaming the West Coast as they make their plodding way towards a long-awaited Oakland, California powwow. Some are going to make money; others to perform, to dance, to don the regalia that’s been gathering dust in their closets. Some are going to find the parents who long ago left them behind, and who now are feeling sorry, feeling guilty. As the story progresses, the connections between each of the twelve characters reveal themselves; they are interconnected, and their journeys have crosses many times, without their even knowing. 

In one of the book’s final chapters, Tony Loneman, one of the twelve, puts on his regalia, then takes a train to the powwow. “No one on the train knows about the powwow,” Orange writes. “Tony’s just an Indian dressed like an Indian on the train for no apparent reason. But people love to see the pretty history. Tony’s regalia is blue, red, orange, yellow, and black. The colors of a fire at night. Another image people love to think about. Indians around a fire. But this isn’t that. Tony is the fire and the dance and the night.” An older white woman asks Tony about his regalia, but when he invites her to the powwow, she demurs. “People don’t want any more than a little story they can bring back home with them…to talk about how they saw a real Native American boy on a train, that they still exist.”

THERE THERE is often searing, frequently beautiful, and ultimately tragic. That’s how so many Native lives look today: Conflicted, complex, and sometimes brimming over with love. There’s a grief beneath the surface, and there’s hope. There’s fear, doubt, and shame. There’s an unnamable legacy, ugly and beautiful both. To be a Native today means so many things, so many different things: It means to be alive, to smell the air, to put both feet on the ground and keep moving. 

Hunger

I saw Roxane Gay last February at the American Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference in Washington, D.C. It was cold and gray that weekend, and I wore wool the whole time. I was walking with my friend Austin, making our way out of the conference hotel and into downtown D.C., and all of a sudden, Austin whispered, “Roxane Gay,” and he pointed with his gaze.

  

I knew what Roxane Gay looked like, of course—I’d seen the pictures online and in her books’ jackets. But nothing prepared me for Roxane Gay in the flesh, just a few feet away from us, leaning against a wall and smoking a cigarette. She was dressed in dark colors, denim and black, and though I’d sensed nothing a moment before, I now felt her presence like a spirit in the room with you when you’re sleeping. I gasped. She was the woman who’d written the stories that broke me down, made me weep, made me remember for years afterwards. She was a legend, a literary goddess, and here she stood, smoking a cigarette and leaning against a wall, just a few steps away from where we walked. We hurried past, not the type of fans to gush or hug or be a bother, but I was chilled for the rest of the night, stunned by what I dared to feel coming off of her: this latent power, warm like the sun.

*

I couldn’t believe it: Roxane Gay’s Hunger was on the shelf, and no one had snapped it up yet. I love our library, especially when it feels like no one goes. I checked it out, tucked it into my bag, and had it open by lunchtime, sandwich and lemonade forgotten. “We should not take up space,” Gay writes on page thirteen. “We should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men, acceptable to society. And most women know this, that we are supposed to disappear, but its something that needs to be said, loudly, over and over again, so that we can resist surrendering to what is expected of us.”

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body is Gay’s courageous, beautiful, terrible story of her coming-of-age, her sexuality, her roaring twenties and fumbling thirties, her rise to fame, and always her body, her body, and her hunger. The book feels like you’re reading someone’s diary. It feels, uncomfortably and blessedly, like an invasion. This is the best, rawest, most troubling, most healing kind of memoir there is, and it’s the kind I can’t yet make—she tells us everything, she lays her life bare, she opens her heart and dares to let us take it. The intimacy of this book is a revolution, and should be required reading for all women and men, all mothers and fathers, all teachers and civil servants. Everyone who resides in a body in this world owes it to herself to read Hunger.

In her memoir, Gay divides her experience into the before and the after – the innocence and then the fall from grace that followed a trauma I won’t describe – read the book, Bad Feminist, or other reviews if you really want to know. Or, just take a guess. You’re probably right. Anyway, Gay swallows the worst day of her life like an edible secret, and everything falls apart – her confidence, her blossoming physical beauty, her open trust in her family. Food becomes a way to hide, the weight a disguise that renders the body invisible, genderless. Gay’s short chapters span the topics of cooking and food preparation, breakfast and binging, flying on planes and sitting in too-small chairs, and, of course, the weight-loss reality-TV shows that populate most networks. In one of the book’s most poignant passages, Gay describes Rachel Frederickson, the Season 15 Biggest Loser winner who weighed in at 105 pounds on live television. “In the two months after her big reveal,” Gay writes, “Frederickson gained twenty pounds and reached, apparently, a more acceptable but still appropriately disciplined size….those of us who deny ourselves and discipline our bodies know better. Rachel Frederickson was doing exactly what we asked of her, and what too many of us would, if we could, ask of ourselves.”

Reading Hunger was a little bit like reading Americanah, by Chimanada Ngozi Adichie—the reading process was also a process of learning how it is to be black in America, or, in Gay’s case, to be too big in America—for armchairs, for planes, for the public’s comfort. The stories she tells break my heart and smack me in the face, because of how little I’ve seen, and what I’ve been willing to ignore—in airports, in college, and even in my own classroom. Chairs that don’t fit, clothes that are always too small, doorways that are always too narrow. Strangers who take food from your grocery cart and put it back on the shelves. Nurses who wince when they weigh you. After a while, it all gets internalized, “and then I start to hate myself for my unruly body that I seem incapable of disciplining, for my cowardice in the face of what other people might think.”

In the end, Hunger is a story of triumph, even if the book isn’t framed that way. “I often wonder,” Gay writes at the close of her memoir, “who I would have been if this terrible thing had not happened to me, if I hadn’t spend so much of my life hungering so much.” And by the very end, she’s asking her reader to look within: “Does anyone feel comfortable in their bodies?”

I closed the book this morning, tears in my eyes, and I thought about the day I’d seen Roxane Gay standing outside the Marriott Hotel in downtown D.C. I thought about the experience I had at that conference—all the walking, the standing, the waiting, the sitting, and how easy it was for me to fit. I thought about my own body and the times I’ve hated on it, run it ragged, dragged it too far, pushed it to make it thinner, starved it. Beat on it. All the ways I’ve hated my body over the years.

I can still feel the way the writer’s strength hit me like a warm gust of wind, though she hadn’t looked at us, hadn’t moved at all. In fact, if Austin hadn’t said her name, I might have walked right past without noticing the tall, denim-clad woman smoking a cigarette by herself.

A Ranch Bordering the Salty River

Stephen Page’s twenty-poem collection, “A Ranch Bordering the Salty River,” explores the second half of a life, as Page’s narrator navigates the transitions from city to country, from intellectual toil to physical labor, and from youth to middle age. 

In language rich with natural imagery and tense with the poles of joy and disillusionment, Page has written a collection that leaves an indelible imprint. These layered stories-in-poems render birth extraordinary, death ordinary, and the natural world a disappearing muse, a forested siren the narrator yearns to know. Ever relevant and always beautiful, “A Ranch Bordering the Salty River” contemplates the possession of land alongside the inscrutable mystery of the natural world. 

Pachinko

It’s summer, and the gig is up: I love me a luscious novel. Non-fiction has a certain pertinence, a relevance, and so to me, reading it feels like eating healthy food. Writing it feels like doing the right thing. My life, our lives, the details of what we’ve actually seen and done and heard—it feels necessary, non-fiction. But I need novels like a different kind of food: butter, or sea salt, or a really dark chocolate. A novel is my oil drizzled over mozzarella cheese. And this week, I tasted such a fine one.

In a word, PACHINKO stunned. Best to plan on calling in sick for a few days, or else taking a few much-needed “personal days”—PACHINKO merits the dedicated time. Min Jin Lee’s masterful novel spans nearly a century, tracing one Korean family’s journey from the port city of Busan, where the matriarch, Yangjin, runs a boarding house, to Japan’s gleaming cities, where the family must painfully relocate.

PACHINKO is a book about duty and pride, and what matters most to Lee’s finely fleshed-out characters has to do with both. Yangjin is the heartbreakingly selfless mother, devoting her body and hands to her family and home until her final days, when at last she may rest, close her eyes, and wait for death. Sunja, her only child, follows her heart as a teenager and pays the price for the rest of her life: a rapturous affair with a wealthy older man leaves her heartbroken and pregnant, but Hansu never leaves her life. Nevertheless, duty-bound, she must make a choice that will curse her years down the line.

In PACHINKO, each figure’s got a duty to uphold—and shirking that duty could mean death. For Sunja’s husband, Isak, duty’s about paying back a debt—Isak marries Sunja because she saves his life, despite the shame of her illegitimate pregnancy. He owes her one. And Sunja’s firstborn, Hansu’s son, disappears in an effort to become the perfect Japanese. Only at the book’s close does the omniscient narrator vocalize Sunja’s frustration at the confines of Korean society: “All her life, Sunja had heard this sentiment from other women, that they must suffer—suffer as a girl, suffer as a wife, suffer as a mother—die suffering.”

Books like these—a whole legacy borne on a single woman’s back—remind me of my grandmother, Helmi. Born in Finland, she took her older sister’s ticket to America when her sister lost her courage—and my grandmother took her identity, too, living in the States for decades as Eva, her sister’s name. My grandmother brought along with her nothing at all, and with that she created all that I see before me, and everything I know. Her rugged hands and crooked back gave me my pampered life.

PACHINKO’s first line is telling: “History has failed us, but no matter.” It’s a line that startles the reader, and yet it’s one she forgets as she reads on, through Sunja’s birth and wracked life, through her first son’s suicide and the loss of her motherland. Yet the line is worth reconsidering: If history matters little, then what does? Are we to succumb? Does the beauty of family transcend any sociopolitical backdrop? What lessons might a statement yield? History has failed us, but no matter.

In an era of Donald Trump, made-in-China, and the modern mystery of North Korea, PACHINKO offers something wrenchingly human. How fresh it felt, to read about characters who missed their beautiful North Korea; in their descriptions of sunlit islands and rippling seas, I missed it, too.  The introduction of new characters at the book’s lengthy dénouement detracts somewhat from the visceral first two sections, yet PACHINKO remains a one-of-a-kind epic, evocative of Pearl S. Buck’s THE GOOD EARTH and, more recently, Madeleine Thien’s DO NOT SAY WE HAVE NOTHING. By the novel’s masterful close, there’s no doubt that Junot Díaz was right: “PACHINKO confirms [Min Jin Lee’s] place among our finest novelists.”

The Rules Do Not Apply

My stylish friend from New York had Ariel Levy’s memoir, THE RULES DO NOT APPLY, at the top of her list. So, when I saw the book perched on the shelf at our down-home, trusty library, I figured I’d best snap it up. I may live in the boonies, but NYC non-fiction keeps me fresh.

Of Levy’s memoir, I devoured it in the course of a few days. Cheryl Strayed read the thing in “one long, rapt sitting.” There’s a compulsion to the book’s style, an almost-addictive quality also present in Cat Marnell’s NYC tell-all, HOW TO MURDER YOUR LIFE. Levy’s memoir shares other qualities with Marnell’s; both analyze addiction, writing, and how to sustain the two. But where Marnell’s book languishes in the booze, the pills, and the name brands, Levy’s transcends a hip Manhattan life to encompass the realm of motherhood, the life of a New York City lesbian, and the landscape of a wild Mongolian steppe. Levy’s book is about living as an urbanite, a social climber, a hipster intellectual. It’s also about living as a daughter, a wife, a traveler, a philosopher, and a mother—even if that motherhood only lasted for a moment.

Ariel Levy, a longtime contributor to The New Yorker, won the National Magazine Award in 2014 for her essay, “Thanksgiving in Mongolia.” The essay, published with The New Yorker in 2013, describes Levy’s decision to travel to Mongolia for an assignment – at five months pregnant. Empowered by the strength of her own body and the heat of her skyrocketing career, Levy promises herself the risk is worth it: “I would teach my child the power of fearlessness,” she writes. “I would tell him, ‘When you were inside of me, we went to see the edge of the earth.’"

What happens over the course of The New Yorker essay – and THE RULES DO NOT APPLY – is brutal to read. Ultimately, Levy loses her child on the floor of a Mongolian bathroom in a hotel room. She’s alone, and for a few moments, the baby is alive. She snaps a picture with her phone. Afterwards, numb with grief, she shows people the photo of the tiny baby, born too early to ever have survived, and the essay ends with her guilt, her sorrow, and her shame. Just when you think you’ve got everything, the essay seemed to be saying, the rules suddenly apply.

THE RULES DO NOT APPLY: A MEMOIR is “Thanksgiving in Mongolia,” expanded. In just over 200 pages, Levy explores her career as a journalist and, eventually, a New Yorker contributor. Complexity abounds in this memoir, whose style mirrors a chronicle by Joan Didion or Cheryl Strayed—the narration jumps in time and place, but remains anchored a singular, traumatic incident. From stories of Levy’s grandmother, Tanya, a bold Russian immigrant, to details of assignments from all over the world—Africa, Los Angeles, Maureen Dowd’s apartment—Levy shows us how she fought for what she wanted, and how, for the longest time, she had it all.

The book’s strongest passages explore with courage Levy’s long-term relationship with Lucy, a brazen, assertive gold star who takes the narrator under her expert wing. THE RULES DO NOT APPLY is punctuated with examinations of the wealth dynamics at play in the relationship, the roles each woman assume, and, most fascinatingly, Lucy’s decline into alcohol addiction. In that realm, THE RULES DO NOT APPLY is reminiscent of Sue William Silverman’s extraordinary memoir LOVE SICK: ONE WOMAN’S JOURNEY THROUGH SEXUALADDICTION. Both narrators explore the role of addict from the viewpoints of the psychologists they’ve worked with; the result is a revelatory discussion of addiction, made more personal – and hugely more interesting – by the medium—the essay or memoir form. 

THE RULES DO NOT APPLY belies its name, for the book, in the end, is about how the rules really do apply, however hard we try to escape their scope. Slurring words really does mean she’s drunk. It really does get harder to get pregnant as you age. And as Maureen Dowd shrewdly tells our narrator, “Everyone doesn’t get everything.”

Running Wild

The first time I heard Robin MacArthur read, I was twenty-five and in my third semester of graduate school. Robin was a semester ahead of me, and she intimidated me, though I realized years later, when I got to know her, that she shouldn’t have, and that she definitely didn’t want to. Still, there’s something distinctive about Robin, something uncannily familiar and exotic, worldly and down-home, intimate and unattainable, all at once.

Her writing is like that, too: it’s many things at once, like the best writing is.

That first time I heard Robin read, none of us had published anything yet. Still, it was clear that Robin was going places. She read “Running Water,” an essay about her grandmother’s rugged life on a rambling old farm, and I cried at the end, amazed at the beauty of Robin’s writing and also the sadness, the grief at the end of the story—grief I realized years later was actually joy. When I became Robin’s friend, I asked for the story for the literary journal I manage, and miraculously, Robin still had it, unpublished and all. “I’ve always had bad luck with publication,” she said, her shrug perceptible through the emailed note.

*

The second time I heard Robin read might have been a year after the first. She’d had a baby and returned to the program, and now, we were graduating at the same time. For her final reading, Robin chose “The Heart of the Woods,” the second story in her new collection, HALF WILD.

I’ll never forget hearing “The Heart of the Woods.” It was beautiful, surely, just like “Running Water,” but there was a darkness to the story’s core that I still can’t get out of my mind. As Robin read, the afternoon faded into dusk outside. The story is about a woman who has found success in a Vermont town. Her father, still poor, lives in a trailer she visits one day—a trailer tucked back into the heart of the woods. In spare, wretched, lovely prose, Robin shows us these lives, rippled with past anguish that penetrates every moment. The story’s ending isn’t a slap, or a push, or a stab: it’s a slice with a very sharp knife. It’s something dark and sick and sad, and in the end, like all of Robin’s extraordinary stories, it’s the most beautiful thing the reader has ever seen.

Yesterday, I saw an old friend from the same graduate program, and I mentioned Robin’s book. “The book is about loving a place and wondering how you can leave,” I explained. “No, the book is about transcending a place, whether you leave or not,” I decided, correcting myself. My friend nodded, considering, and I changed my mind a final time. “The book’s about a hating a place,” I said finally. And to hate something you must love it fiercely. This is HALF-WILD: A kind of love that sometimes looks like hate. A place’s cruel grip on your heart. As resonant and tightly plaited as a novel, HALF-WILD’s eleven stories tell of those who both adore and despise their lives, their choices, their families and, most deeply, their land.''

Awed, tearful, and mightily proud, I raise my glass to Robin, who showed us that it really can be done.  

Patagonian Road: In Print!

It's official, dear readers!

PATAGONIAN ROAD is due to hit presses in the spring of 2017, with a soft release in February and an official, real-deal, bigtime release in April! Thanks to Andrew Gifford at the Santa Fe Writers Project for believing in this project.

While you await my pages, do feast your eyes upon the preliminary cover, as well as the tantalizing copy that we hope will lure in readers near and far.

Thanks for the years of support, dear readers. It's finally happening!

Spanning four seasons, ten countries, three teaching jobs, and countless buses, Patagonian Road: A Year Alone Through Latin America chronicles Kate McCahill’s solo journey from Guatemala to Argentina. In her struggles with language, romance, culture, service, and homesickness, she personifies a growing culture of women for whom travel is not a path to love but a route to meaningful work, rare inspiration, and profound self-discovery.

Following the route Paul Theroux outlined in his 1979 travelogue, The Old Patagonian Express, McCahill transports the reader from a classroom in a rugged Quito barrio to a dingy rented room in an El Salvadorian brothel, and from the storied neighborhoods of Buenos Aires to the heights the Peruvian Andes.

A testament to courage, solitude, and the rewards of taking risks, Patagonian Road proves that discovery, clarity, and simplicity remain possible in the 21st century, and that travel holds an enduring capacity to transform.

“McCahill is a blues traveler, singing for citizens of the world who have no public voice. She depicts beauty within despair, allowing us to hear a comforting melody in an unsettling breeze and see the gorgeous colors within a bruise. If a feeling of loneliness pervades her essays, so do feelings of wonder and pleasure. It’s simply impossible not to share her joyful and frequently bewildering sensations of travel.”
— Sascha Feinstein, author of Black Pearls

THE NIGHTINGALE: Luminosity

Kristin Hannah's sweeping WWII novel, The Nightingale, offers a narrative scope reminiscent of Anthony Doerr's All The Light We Cannot See. The novels are similar; both detail the horrors of war as well as the human beauty, the strength, that always prevails. Both tug at the heartstrings, leaving readers sobbing, sympathetic not only for the victims but for the brutes, the Nazis, many of whom were victims themselves, prisoners to a dangerous idealism and with families of their own at home. Both The Nightingale and All the Light are rare books, magnificent sagas that span time and space, generations, cultures, and languages. They're books that leave the reader grateful for the written word, for the power of story, and for the relative safety we Americans inhabit today.

Yet Hannah's work is different than All The Light, or any other war epic that chronicles men's experiences. Cold Mountain, The Things They Carried, Birds Without Wings, All Quiet on the Western Front, For Whom the Bell Tolls; these are the great war stories of our modern age, the many books about the soldiers on the front and the women who stayed behind. Yet so few attempt what Hannah has succeeded in executing: a well-written, expertly-researched chronicle of the women only, not the ones who "stayed behind" but the ones who watched their men, neighbors, and friends get torn away, who waited for the war to end and meanwhile protected their houses and land, their farms and children, paying for that protection with whatever they could muster: their words, their meals, their bodies.

The Nightingale follows the lives of two sisters, Vianne and Isabelle, both French. From their small town of Carriveau, Isabelle jets around France, stealing through war-ravaged Paris and across the icy Pyrenees, hustling fallen Allied pilots across the mountains to the safety of Spain. She falls in love; she comes under fire; she gets shot at and interrogated, imprisoned in a special concentration camp for female traitors. Vianne, meanwhile, holds down the fort, protecting her children's lives with her own, watching as her town is decimated by soldiers. Her body is ravaged by hunger, illness, and rape. She commits an accidental betrayal, and her best friend is taken away to be murdered. She carries a Nazi's baby, gives birth, and never tells her husband the truth. Some secrets are better left untold.

Of war, Vianne remembers at the end of the book, the men tell stories and the women get on with it. Such is the style of The Nightingale; perhaps women have even more to lose in war than men, and so it's easier - healthier - to forget whatever traumas were endured than to keep them alive. Though Hannah is a storyteller more than a poet, her writing poses lingering questions that will resonate with any reader, of any gender or age: What constitutes a full life, and what constitutes a fair trade? What makes living worthwhile? Which secrets should always be kept? What do we as a society forget as the years go by, and what are we destined to relearn?

Get thee to a library, dear reader, and put your name on the list for The Nightingale. You may have to wait, but I can assure you, my lovelies, that it will be worth it.

When Breath Becomes Air

WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR is a finely written, wretchedly beautiful account of one neurosurgeon’s struggle with lung cancer. By now, I’m sure you’ve heard the premise of this sensational book: Thirty-six-year-old Paul Kalanithi spends his whole life training to fulfill his destiny: to become a neurosurgeon. Different paths lead him to the profession – studies in English literature, philosophy, biology, and ethics bring him, eventually, to Stanford, where he’s poised to become one of the best neurosurgeons in the world.

And then his life changes: lung cancer just when things are finally starting to get good. Now the book becomes beautiful, truly shimmering. Death becomes not the enemy but the inevitable end, the thing which gives all else its meaning. And so what begins as a biography, a list of admirable milestones reached and challenges overcome, turns into something different, a story raw and yet perfectly controlled, a humble account of the time one young man faced his death.

For Kalanithi looks death straight in the eye. In the book’s tugging Epilogue, Kalanithi’s wife Lucy writes, “Paul faced each stage of his illness […] not with bravado or a misguided faith that he would ‘overcome’ or ‘beat’ cancer but with an authenticity that allowed him to grieve the loss of the future he had planned and forge a new one.”

Reminiscent of Jill Bolte Taylor's MY STROKE OF INSIGHT, Kalanithi’s descriptions of the mind – and his symptoms – are remarkable, and remarkably interesting. As a neurosurgeon, Kalanithi knows just where to press in the brain to make someone feel unutterably sad. He knows what makes people speak in numbers, not in words, and he muses upon the value of language to a life – what is living without words, for example? What does it mean to survive without the ability to listen – or to speak? When does death become a blessing? When does the doctor make the choice to pull the plug?

WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR is a gift to the world. As Lucy writes in the Epilogue, Kalanithi would certainly have saved many lives had he lived. He would have comforted and cured and guided and grieved so many times, in a relationship “that sometimes carries a magisterial air and other times, like now, was no more, and no less, than two people huddled together, as one faces the abyss.”

With a mastery of language and an appreciation for the work that came before—explorations of prose by T.S. Eliot and Graham Greene, and even analysis of the Scripture itself—Kalanithi writes not only from a doctor’s perspective, a scientist’s, but also from that of an artist and a lover of beauty. The book, though considered unfinished, is nevertheless flawless, so tightly bound and emotionally wrought as to be unforgettable.

Most poignant about Kalanithi’s narrative is his examination of Lucy’s and his decision to have a child. Despite the death sentence of his cancer diagnosis, Kalanithi and Lucy conceive a daughter. Eight months after she’s born, Kalanithi dies. His final words – both to the reader and to his child – are these, which I’ll leave you with, dear reader:

When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.

May we give thanks for every day, because each one is a gift, and we’ve only got so many. 

Woodsy Girls

Aspen Matis's GIRL IN THE WOODS (William Morrow), a new memoir about a young female hiking the PCT, appears at first glance to closely follow the parameters of Cheryl Strayed's chronicles of hiking that same route. Yet, in ways both good and bad, GIRL IN THE WOODS is a different animal; it's younger, rougher, less polished, at once more and less raw. It's less careful, more reckless, more boundless. It's more naive.

There are lots of reasons not to like GIRL IN THE WOODS. Skim reviews on Amazon or Goodreads, and you'll see. For this is the story of a white female who has everything: a ritzy Massachusetts upbringing, a life filled with books and clothes and trips, parents who are still together, a college acceptance at one of our nation's tops. The book is also the story of a novice who ventures into the woods unprepared and almost dies. And it's the story of a girl who didn't dress herself until she was sixteen, didn't wash dishes until she was 19, didn't cook, didn't clean, didn't know how to brush her hair. She's a pampered protagonist, and her writing is youthful, borderline sloppy, peppered with comma splices and phrases repeated.

Yet it's also a story of devastation, and of feeling insatiable, and of staying alive. It's about being alone, and not being alone, and being afraid to be alone, and ultimately wanting nothing more than to be alone. At the beginning of the book, I rolled my eyes at the comma splices, and by the end I was rolling my eyes at the love story, how easy it came, how perfect. 

But in the middle, I was crying. I was gripping the book with both hands, reading fast, letting hours slip by, phone calls going unanswered, meals going uneaten. Matis did what all memoirists dream of: she took something horrible - her rape - and she made it into a gift. She made it into something true, and real, and, very frequently, solemnly beautiful. 

I read the book in a day and a night, and then I went outside into the New Mexican night and inhaled deeply: pine, stars, a sprawling sky, the lights of Albuquerque in the distance. 

I thought of the PCT: that rugged, storied trail. Matis wrote of the men there, the prevalence of men hungry for women, the hunger they all felt on the trail. I thought of the "trail angels," who provided food and booze and weed and clothes and baths. I thought of the days Matis ran the trail, wild with thirst, her heart pounding hard, her life on the line. I thought of the comfort she gave up, the suffering she took in exchange. All of those days on the trail. 

GIRL IN THE WOODS, however flawed, remains worthwhile, rare, a fleck in a very dark night.

Random Family

I don’t usually like being chucked into a book, and I spent the first few chapters of Random Family, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s ambitious, saga-esque work of non-fiction, wondering why LeBlanc hadn’t written an introduction. She doesn’t interpret; she doesn’t try to inform beyond the lives of her characters. She doesn’t examine the system directly; she doesn’t give background information about laws, or neighborhoods, or people, or policies. She just throws you right into it: the daily ups and downs of life in the Bronx for an everyday teen. The story starts with the beautiful Jessica, so young and already months away from getting pregnant with the first of five children. From there, the story skitters and jolts from character to character: the wild, drug-using Lourdes, Jessica's mother, and her crazy brother, twelve and already out on the streets, breaking night. There's no pause, no situating. The narrator is invisible, unknown.

But after a while, I started to get it. This is immersion journalism; these are LeBlanc's characters’ lives. In Random Family, the struggles of half a dozen poor New York City teenagers are chronicled with grace and honesty. These kids – adults, really, because kids in the ghetto grow up at age five – were raised by the street, and they’re rugged and clever. The men deal drugs and the women have babies. A lot of the characters, men and women both, get arrested and go to jail; they get beaten and recover. They get kicked out of their moms’ houses. Their moms become grandmothers at thirty. Their babies get molested as toddlers. The book breaks your heart, and it makes you gasp, exasperated, at all the little mistakes – mistakes the system facilitates. All the little choices that make life harder, and all the little things that compound bad choices: no time or money for birth control, quick and expensive loans, abundant cigarettes, booze, and weed - and worse. A shitty transport system means a shitty life if you don’t have a car. Cheap sugar means rotten teach by three.

I realized an introduction wouldn’t do this book justice. It wouldn’t be fair. I could come to my own conclusions: that this was the story of an America I’d never seen, where girls became moms at twelve, and three-year-olds passed around blunts and bootie danced. Men had multiple wives, and gunned each other down in the streets. This was a story about a system stacked against the people who lived there, a system designed to see them fail. 

Random Family is a chaotic tumble of breakdowns and letdowns, betrayals and grief. It’s pain paired with joy: the beauty of the teenagers, their clothes and jewelry and hair and makeup, and the  beauty of the love in the ghetto: between parents and children, between lovers, between friends. People take care of each other’s kids; people share what little they have. People do their best to keep each other alive.

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

Halfway through Random Family, I looked up and found myself on a Southwest plane, half-full and on its way back from Atlanta. I’d been at an expensive educational conference, and I was exhausted, though I’d learned a ton: about accelerating students, interpreting data, and the obstacles young men of color face at community colleges today. I was wearing a nice outfit, and my new laptop slept in my bookbag.

I held Random Family in my hands and thought about all that I had, growing up: summer camp, a grassy yard, a dog and cat, a laundry line. A street that I could bike down. Friends I could explore the woods with. Skis and a ski pass; figure skates. Soccer balls; a tennis racket. A subscription to Highlights and a bookshelf of books, all mine. I thought about all the choices, big and small, that brought me to this moment. Some of those choices I made for myself, but most were already set for me, because of who my parents were, my grandparents. Because of the color of my skin, my class, my caste, all of my inheritances, I was one of the lucky ones, and I had had it so good. I hadn't done anything to earn that. I held LeBlanc’s Random Family in my hands, and I cried: it was so late, I was so tired, and there was just so much suffering in this world. I felt so suddenly guilty. Plus, our country is so sharply broken, and it probably won’t ever get fixed. There are so many of us who will go through our lives – on planes to conferences, in our cars to school – never knowing how bad things could be.

Dear readers, if you haven’t already, please go to the library and check out Random Family. I can assure you it will change your life. Don’t let the absence of high-level explanations dissuade you, because those don’t exist in the ghetto, and this book is true to that world. In its title and in its telling, Random Family depicts a realm just up the road, or just downstate - not far from you. Desperation lives around the corner. This is America, Random Family proclaims: severely fucked up, but wretchedly beautiful nevertheless.