Tag: book recommendation

Writing

Build back mediocre

Amanda Gibson

Until today, the most recent photo on my instagram account was of a book hanging out near some jazzy tulips in my yard. As it’s February in Chicago… it’s clearly been a while since I posted that. Bookstagramming, reading, writing, and any other form of creativity (let’s also lump “feeling joy at all that didn’t come from a pint of Jeni’s Brambleberry Crisp” in there as well) all disappeared for me this winter. Or at least they hibernated somewhere very deep and inaccessible.

I know I’m not alone in this. So many people, creatives and non-creatives alike, have suffered from languishing, malaise, depression—whatever we feel like calling it—throughout the pandemic, but especially during this second winter of isolation and amplified anxiety. When we write or read, we feel what characters are feeling; it’s what makes the experience so thrilling. But I’m spent, emotionally, like so many others, so the thought of consuming or transmitting more emotions… does not appeal. It’s why I’ve re-binged every episode of Great British Bake-Off this winter. No feelings. Just CAKE.

With spring (ostensibly) around the corner, there’s the promise of pandemic restrictions and fears easing up again, and possibly a lifting of emotional burdens, opening us up to be those lightning rods for creativity again. But after two years of near-emptiness, how do we come back from that? How do we return to the activities we once loved, when our dusty insides have been closed off from them for so long?

Paralysis has been my response to that question. To-be-read piles towering ever closer to the ceiling, unvisited Word documents, cobwebbed social media feeds. Can’t do it. Won’t do it.

But I recently read Mike Schur’s new book, How to Be Perfect, which is a highly accessible guide to basic moral philosophy, brought to you by the creator of The Good Place. One of my favorite messages from this book is the idea that we will constantly fail at being morally “perfect,” but we have to try because even though no one will ever get there, that the point of perfection does not exist, trying gets us closer. Closer to the idea of the person we want to be in society, closer to the other humans ambling around beside us, closer to ourselves.

Try, and fail, and try again, and fail better.

So I am writing this post to try, to actively do, and to fail myself a little closer toward creativity again.

Motherhood, Reading, Writing

Some thoughts about forgiving our mothers and ourselves

Amanda Gibson

I unintentionally read two books last month that were both, at their core, about toxicity in mother-daughter relationships. Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half and Adrienne Brodeur’s Wild Game are very different types of stories. TVH is a novel about two light-skinned Black twin sisters who choose different paths in life—Desiree living life as a Black woman, and Stella choosing to pass as white. It moves forward through time until we see how their choices impact the lives of their daughters. Wild Game is a memoir by a woman who, when she was 14, got wrangled into being a co-conspirator in her mother Malabar’s affair with a family friend. The affair goes on for more than a decade, fully absorbing Adrienne in the drama and lies throughout her adolescence.

I might not have dwelled too long on either of these stories if I hadn’t read them back-to-back. But both Stella and Malabar tell extraordinary lies to keep their secrets safe, and it comes at great cost to their daughters.

It’s sort of a given by now that our mothers will hurt us in some way at various points in our lives. Little comments about our appearance, the choices we make, and the people we love can all add up to big, swollen pain. Times when they paid too little attention, times when they clamped down too hard. As we age we begin to see them as human, capable of both vast love and error. Even so, we swear to do better by our own children.

For me personally, sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. My biggest regret so far in my daughter’s short life has been calling her shy in front of another adult when she was about two or three years old. I can’t remember a time during my childhood when my outgoing mother didn’t apologize to others for my shyness, causing me to intuit that shyness was a bad thing, meant to be overcome, compounding layer after layer of anxiety about my anxiety. Even though I now carry with me the knowledge that introverts are important and necessary members of society, I still experience that gut-twisting fear in large groups that I’m not talking enough, not contributing enough.

My daughter has run up to me on a few occasions and asserted that the cats hiding from her in the closet are “a little shy, like me!” I don’t really think she comprehends that she has grown out of her shy phase and is now just a cyclone of wild, talkative energy. But when she claims to be shy, I don’t correct her. Instead I tell her, “And that’s ok. I am too.”

I will surely misstep in a myriad of other ways as she grows. I hope I can find the strength to apologize. So many of my friends have commented on the apologies we rarely, if ever, received from our mothers. An acknowledgment of our suffering, even if it was petty and small. Maybe that was a standard of parenting toward the end of the last century—like a car accident—never admit fault. Or maybe that’s just part of being human, a natural resistance to being in the wrong.

In The Vanishing Half and Wild Game, neither Stella nor Malabar ever offer their daughters the apology or the reckoning they yearn for. But still their daughters love them and chase their approval and try to know them. In some ways this seems sad. As a daughter, I mourn the lack of righteous comeuppance for these women. In other ways, I think thank god. As a mother, I will have room to make missteps and, most importantly, room to atone.

Reading

Review of Glennon Doyle’s feminist memoir “Untamed”

Amanda Gibson

Glennon Doyle’s Untamed was my Book of the Month Club pick for May, and I’ve been delaying writing a review for it because I have mixed feelings about it, but those are the important ones, so here it is:

I loved the beginning. She drew me right in with her short essay-like chapters about feminism, marriage, and motherhood. I could relate to so much. Then there were parts in the middle where she sort of lost me for a bit. She spent a lot of time repeating the same tidbits of self-exploration. And I love me some self-exploration, but eventually, I need out of my head and your head and back into an actual scene.

There are several chapters that focus on religion and spirituality, and as a sometimes-agnostic/sometimes-atheist, I resisted those at first. But she also presents religion in the most accessible way I’ve ever seen it presented—comparing God/spirituality to a liquid and religion to the glass that holds and confines it. This stirred something in me since most of us who have bad tastes in our mouths over these subjects are opposed to the rules and prejudices inherent in the institutions of religion, rather than spirituality itself.

There are some preachy this-is-what-you-should-say-to-your-children-and-to-everyone-else moments, which occasionally rubbed me the wrong way, but there’s also SO much good advice in here. My favorite takeaway from this book is the concept of “sinking into your Knowing,” which is the place where we find truth inside ourselves to do the next right thing (cue the Frozen 2 song).

She also delves into the concept of the perfect woman, who is beautiful, smart, funny, the perfect size, perfect wife, perfect mother, perfect friend, and who has all of her perfect shit together. But this woman doesn’t exist, Doyle points out. We’re all scared and lonely and suffering and sweaty and misshapen and longing. So when we aspire to be this mysterious perfect woman, we’re all just chasing ghosts.

Finally, Doyle explores racism in a way that is especially appropriate right now, pointing out that’s it’s not enough to simply say you’re not a racist—you must recognize the poison in your own blood that was put there by living in a racist society, and then actively root it out.

This book felt important. The kind of book you realize you should have read with a highlighter. So I may return to reread it some day and do just that.