Les Vacances

You know, for the past couple of years my life has usually been one of two states, my own private semiconductor: me, alone and absorbed in something interesting and (relatively) happy, OR me, in some social situation, wishing I was alone. 

But the past ten days or so have been the opposite— I’ve had a lot of family around (summer is one long round of company when you live in Montana), and that has been mostly fabulous, interspersed with some really lovely times with friends. But the inside of my head has been a shit show. Not frighteningly so, but enough that I’m thinking I need to figure some things out. I need to get my head on straight, as we used to say back in the— when was it? Eighties? Nineties? Lord knows. I never manage to stay gone long. Have a good weekend.

Edited to add: one of the best things about having a long-term blog is that you can go back and read it later and sometimes you get a bit of advice from your previous self that is surprisingly still relevant.  

A few last thoughts on that list

Of course they get to put whatever books they want on their list, and since I’m not an intellectual, there’s no reason to expect that my reading tastes will line up with theirs. But what I don’t get is the multiples. Three by George Saunders and none by James McBride? Two by Hilary Mantel and none by Louise Erdrich? Two by Elena Ferrante, Jesmyn Ward, and Alice Munro, but none by Lauren Groff, Kevin Wilson, or Bryan Washington? Unless you count Jemisin, was there any genre fiction at all? not even Stephen King. I don’t read horror so the only novel I’ve read of his is the Kennedy one, but even I would have pushed for something of his to be on the list. I ended up with 25 that I’d read, maybe another ten authors that I’d read but a different book. But only two suggestions for books that I want to read that weren’t already on my TBR list, which is disappointing. Weirdly disappointing. 

And p.s. this was written with only one scroll-through of the entire list, so if Lauren Groff or any of the others I mentioned are on there and I missed it, apologies. 

7ToF: appropriately enough for the dog days of summer, I'm trying to bore you to death

1. We have reached a new milestone of senior citizenship: we went to see a movie this week and we both fell asleep DURING THE PREVIEWS. Not gonna lie, that's a little scary, but we were both tired from a busy day, so maybe not really a surprise. We woke up for the movie, fortunately. It was Inside Out 2, which was good--if you liked the first one, you'll like this one, too. It's a kids' movie, but it's also a decent approximation of how our brains work, so it's kind of fascinating. The first Inside Out was about a little girl who has to move away from her friends and her hockey team, the sequel is about her transition to being a teenager. Thumbs up from us.

2. I'm still trying (not always successfully) to cut down on plastic use, so I am happy that we've found an alternative to the big orange bottle of laundry detergent. I've been loyally using Tide since Melanie was a baby and it was the only thing that would get the formula stains out of her clothes in one go. But those big orange bottles were becoming more and more disturbing to me. I tried some Earth Breeze detergent sheets once a couple of years ago and they left some kind of residue on the clothes, so I gave up on that. 

But then over the winter I read that no matter what it says on the package, if you're going to use detergent sheets, you have to dissolve them first because they don't have enough time in water to dissolve during a normal wash cycle. 

So, in case you want to try it, here's my method: I keep an empty salsa jar by the washing machine, fill it about 2/3 full with warm tap water, tear up a detergent sheet and drop it in, put on the lid, shake it up, and let it sit for at least ten or fifteen minutes. Then pour the mixture straight into the bottom of the washing machine and proceed as usual, but with no detergent in the dispenser. 

It works great. And of course, once you get in the habit, you can go ahead and refill the salsa jar right after you empty it, so then by the time you get to your next load, it's ready to go. Other than a couple of times I needed to remove some grease stains, I haven't used Tide in months. I'm still using Earth Breeze, I haven't tried any of the other brands since these seem to work just fine.

4. So in my reading report post last week, I started off with a description of how bad my taste is. I was mainly just making myself laugh, but also trying to defuse the whole I AM A TASTEMAKER thing, because it just seems so pretentious. I don't know what I'd write about if I didn't tell you what I've been reading, but it also seems kind of presumptuous to assume you want to know. 

What I didn't notice until after it was published was that it was kind of a backhanded insult to the books I then said I loved-- hey, I have terrible taste, and these are the books I like. I’m kind of an idiot.

5. Which brings us around to the #top10books thing that has exploded on Bookstagram this week (and probably Threads and X, too, I'm just not on those platforms anymore). The New York Times polled a bunch of TASTEMAKERS and now they're publishing their list of the Top 100 Books of the Twenty-First Century, and since you already know I am sideways making fun of the whole book snob thing, you may be unsurprised that I rolled my eyes so hard when I saw the article. Also, they're posting them twenty at a time every day this week, and I just....... *shrugs* It just seems like such blatant click bait for book nerds and wannabes, and also for people who feel guilty that they're not reading the "right" books or enough books or whatever. Like you're supposed to create a checklist and read all the books "they" have determined are the best ones to read. (I just sound grumpy, don't I.)

6. AND IT WORKED, because probably all book lovers, including me, love book lists, and I am following avidly. The first twenty included a bunch that I'd never heard of, but that's actually a good thing because they're including books besides the American prize winners and bestsellers that we already know about. I'm writing this on Wednesday, so the first sixty are out. I've read exactly thirteen of them, which seems a little sad, plus a few more that I've read by one of the authors, but not the particular one on the list (like Wolf Hall instead of Bring Up the Bodies). Three more of them were already on my TBR list for this summer.  

See? I'm doing it. I sound like the kid in the front row of English class, trying to prove that I'm a good reader because hey, I've read some of these books!!! I really have!!! Now I'm rolling my eyes at myself.

7. So of course, *she says sheepishly* I made my own list. They asked over 500 people involved in writing and publishing to give them their top 10 books published since 2000, and then created their list from that. Here are my top 10, in no particular order, with the caveat that I can just about guarantee that by the time their list is finished, I will remember some others that I will wish I had chosen. In fact, this is already slightly different than the list I posted on Instagram. So maybe next week I will update. Or maybe not. How much (virtual) ink has been spilled on this already?

Deacon King Kong by James McBride
Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton
Caste by Isabel Wilkerson
All Systems Red by Martha Wells
The House in The Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune
A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

I'm tempted to list the ones I almost included but lucky for you my inner editor is yelling no! just stop! (but they're Less, Station Eleven, and The Great Believers). I'm reading Americanah right now and it very well could bump one of the others off my list, but I still have over 300 pages to go, so hard to say. 

I'm so curious to see if Harry Potter is included in the NYT list (the first couple of books were published in the 90s, but all the rest in the 2000s), because I almost included Goblet of Fire in mine, and certainly that series permanently changed the shape of publishing. JKRowling has earned a lot of enemies over the past few years, but just about all the young families I know (in person, not online) are still reading them with their kids.

Yeah, I know, sometimes I even bore myself. This is so long, I deleted #3, did you notice? It was about brownies. Not kidding. 

Have a good weekend. We're headed to central Montana to see the grandbaby, so I'm writing this early and scheduling it. Stay cool. At 8pm, it's still 91 degrees here. *gasp*

some brief thoughts about healing from childhood sexual abuse

TRIGGER ALERT: please take care of yourself if conversations around childhood sexual abuse are triggering for you. It's a hard, complicated topic, and you get to handle it however you want. Any time the topic comes up in the news, you have the right to turn it off, avoid it, and refuse to engage. This post is about my own way of handling it, but my way or anyone else's way doesn't need to be your way.

I was already thinking about editing and republishing  a post I wrote back in 2014 --about my response, as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, to the news cycle around the person I called FFD in the post (famous film director, it was Woody Allen). Then yesterday I saw the news about Alice Munro's daughter's public statement about her abuser, Alice's second husband, and it seemed like a sign. 

This is not in any way intended to be a commentary or response to Andrea's news. Her story in many ways is similar to mine, and I am entirely on her side. I just want to support all victims in finding their own way to respond. When someone goes public with their story, as Andrea has--and if it helps her heal, it is the right choice for her-- there can be enormous pressure on people who have chosen not to go public. 

So I just want to state something that doesn't always get said: you get to handle your response however you choose to do so. Don't let anyone, not a concerned family member, not an outraged friend or spouse, not even your therapist, tell you that you must do certain things in order to heal. Sometimes their response is about their need to be angry on your behalf, not about what is best for you.

----edited version of 2014 post below, to read the original, click here

If you've been around awhile, you may remember that I wrote a post a couple of years ago about what it was like to be a survivor of sexual abuse while all of that mess at UPenn was happening, and how difficult it was to have it thrown in your face all the time. Guess what? Thank you, Woody Allen, it's happening again (and now again with the Munro family).

But there are a few parallels between Dylan Farrow's story and my own history, so I've been re-thinking some of my own decisions. Is it necessary to go public to heal? My abuser was also a public person, although on a minor, local scale compared to Woody Allen. It's a difficult call to make. 

If you say nothing, then (obviously) no one knows. There is a feeling that the perp is getting away with it. Or that you are letting your fear of confrontation slow down your healing. 

But on the other hand, if you're a private person, making a public statement and causing a public scandal is its own kind of trauma. I'm a very private person, so I decided long ago that I would rather deal with my healing in private than make a big public statement about my abuse.

As Dylan has stated, it is enormously difficult to maintain your trust in your own perceptions, your own experience, when that experience is being denied again and again by the people around you, people who have no idea what happened, but who respect and admire the perpetrator. 

Once I did finally tell my therapist about it, I was obsessed with my recovery for two or three years. I needed to be. That's how you work through it. There was a long time when I thought that the fact that I had been sexually abused as a child was the most important thing about me, the defining thing that made me who I am. But eventually as I worked with a therapist, attended a support group, and read and read and wrote and wrote, I began to heal.

At some point when I was in my late 30s, I realized one day that I hadn't thought about my abuse in weeks. It made me so happy. It still comes up --here I am, you know, typing this-- and every once in awhile it gives me a few really bad hours or even days. But it doesn't consume me anymore, and it sure as hell doesn't define who I am.

Besides my support group and my therapist, I did tell some people about it, but other than my immediate family, I never told anyone who knows my abuser. I was fairly sure I was his only victim. I was dealing with this as an adult, so I could rationally think through the fact that most abusers have a pattern, and the pattern of behavior he exhibited with me was something that almost certainly couldn't have happened with anyone else--and that's all I'm going to say about that. If I'd been worried that he was still abusing other people, maybe I would have decided differently. 

I'm not sure I buy parts of the conversation about what it takes to heal from abuse, and I certainly don't buy "if you don't say anything, it means he got away with it." Someone who abuses a child is dealing with demons the rest of us can't even imagine--I know that because I could feel them. He didn't get away with anything.

For what it's worth, I did eventually confront him, and he absolutely, categorically denied that anything had ever happened between us. The confrontation was an enormously difficult thing to do, and it was entirely unsatisfying. My word against his word, my hazy memories against his firm denial. 

If I had it to do over again knowing how it would have turned out, I'm not sure I would do it again. I guess the one benefit is that now I know what he would say--before I confronted him, I had no idea how he would respond. A part of me secretly hoped that he would break down, confess all, and feel terrible about it. But that didn't happen.

I think there is a script among some therapists: You need to do x, y and z to heal. You must confront your abuser, you must publicly speak your truth. But you know, that puts a lot of burden on the victim, especially if the victim is a private, introverted person. It makes you vulnerable to hate and backlash from people who have no idea what's going on, and it sets you up to be ridiculed and accused-in-return by your abuser. It also requires a big public exposure, which is in itself a form of punishment for an introverted person.

For me what has been more important is to learn to trust my own experience, my own knowledge of what happened to me. And to learn to send a silent, mental FUCK YOU to him whenever it comes up. I'm leaving justice and karma to someone else. That was difficult early on, but 2024 me can tell you: I almost never think about it any more. It comes up maybe once or twice a year--and that's not nothing, of course. It made a huge difference when he died several years ago. I am often glad he's gone, and maybe that's my own form of revenge.

If you're going through this, I hope you have help and good support, and someone you can talk to. And also I hope you feel empowered to heal in your own way, in whatever way seems good to you. Take your time deciding. You can always change your mind and go public later, but once you've done it, you can't go back.

Reading Report: April-May-June 2024, and just how bad my bad taste is

1. I have epically bad taste. I know that supposedly there's no such thing as bad taste anymore, but I claim it anyway. I loved Barry Manilow and ABBA and the BeeGees, Def Leppard and Celine Dion, Coldplay and I love that Creed song and even a couple Nickelback songs. My favorite movies are (not necessarily in this order) Galaxy Quest, While You Were Sleeping, LOTR, Howl's Moving Castle, and a bunch of Marvel movies. I watched Independence Day this week.

I'm just letting you know before you take any reading recommendations from me.

2. I've always been a re-reader. When I was a kid, I must have read the Narnia books a dozen times each. It might have started because most of our books were library books, and the Narnia books were some of the few children's books we owned copies of. I'm not sure. But at any given moment, I'm usually reading a fiction book, a non-fiction book, and I'm re-reading something I loved. My favorite books for re-reads are ones that give me the warm fuzzies, but are complex enough that you discover something new every time you read them. That's not to say nothing bad ever happens, or that the characters are all sweet and kind, they just have to be flawed in a lovable way. Or something like that.

3. Martha Wells has frequently kept me sane over the past couple of years, going back to lockdown. Most of my current favorite re-reads are by her--the Murderbot books, the Raksura books, and Witch King, which came out last summer, and I have already read three and a half times. In terms of reading experience, I prefer her shorter stuff (mainly the Murderbot novellas, but I've also read some of her Raksura short stories). Her full-length novels tend to be a little dense on the details of world-building for my taste. But the characters she creates are in my heart forever, no matter how cliché'd that sounds. She writes characters that make me want to hug the book when I finish. At this moment in my so-called reading life, few things make me happier than re-visiting Moon, Stone, and Chime (the Raksura), or Sec Unit, Dr. Mensah, and Pin-Lee (Murderbot), or Kai, Ziede, and Bashasa (Witch King). And if you're re-reading, you can skim right over anything you want.

4. The Death of the Necromancer (1998), an older book but the most recent one I read by Wells, is similar. The story is a little too dense with detail for my taste. In fact, when I originally reached (about) page 50, I decided I didn't have the patience for her world-building at this particular moment and skipped ahead to read the last 50 pages. (I know, I know, but my reading faults are a different post.) I should have known better. I was so intrigued by some things that happened at the end, and by Nicholas and Madeline, that I ended up going back and reading the whole thing anyway. It is so rare to read about a couple in a book that absolutely is not a romance novel--they are already together when the story starts, the word love is never mentioned, and there are only a handful of scenes with the two of them alone, none of them amorous-- but they are necessary to each other, even when they're apart or fighting. I loved them, and also Arisilde, Reynard, Crack, and all the rest. If you like fantasy, and especially if you like ornate world-building, highly recommended. It's a heist/revenge plot, which is not usually my thing-- but again, the characters. <3

5. The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control by Katherine Morgan Schafler. This is a weird book. That's not to say you shouldn't read it, because she has some great insights. How am I not going to love a book that says, about the interior life of a perfectionist, a personality type that is almost universally reviled, "all your most complex needs, longings, desires--all those lush, rolling, verdant, dewdrop-dotted hills of wanderlust inside you, all your curiosities big and small..." I mean, this woman loves perfectionists, and thinks that if our power is unleashed, we can change the world. I kind of love that. She sees anti-perfectionism, the continual advice to scale yourself back, to lower your expectations, to be more "realistic" and accepting of imperfection, as a not-so-hidden attempt to curb women's ambition and drive. She also makes a distinction between adaptive (healthy) perfectionism and maladaptive (unhealthy) perfectionism that is helpful.

But on the other hand, her writing style is all over the place, and about every third thought is not completed. It's maddening to read. By her definition, I think I am more of an idealist than a perfectionist, but I have my moments, and I've been known to ratchet up my expectations to spectacular heights from which I then crash in a sobbing heap (in private, later). So I'm not exactly her target audience, but I'm learning enough that I keep reading. I checked it out from our library's website, but I might actually break down and buy it, because I'm not going to finish it in two weeks (I have 3 days left and I'm about halfway through).

6. Here are some others. This isn't all of them because this post is already too long.
* Tribe by Sebastian Junger- 5 stars (it's less than 200 pages and everyone should read it)
* Lit by Mary Karr- 4.5 stars. The third of her three (so far) memoirs, this one is about getting sober. Fabulous writing, tough going at first while she is still drinking. Her struggle with acknowledging a "higher power" is especially relatable. I might need to re-read this one.
* Easy Beauty by Chloe Cooper Jones 4 stars- A philosophy professor who is physically disabled talks about life and philosophy and motherhood.
* Heaven & Earth Grocery Store (not as good as Deacon King Kong but still 5 stars from me)
* Goodbye, Vitamin (Khong) 5 stars- loved this story of a young woman returning home to help care for her beloved, flawed father who is in the early stages of dementia
* Funny Story- Emily Henry's annual romcom 3.5-4ish stars, there's a little too much armchair therapy in Henry's novels for my taste, but I read and enjoy them every year.
* A Painted House, 5 stars- my first Grisham novel since I don't usually read thrillers. I believe it's semi-autobiographical fiction (ie, not a thriller), about a boy who lives on a cotton farm and his family and the itinerant workers who pick their cotton. It was a book club book or I would prob not have picked it up. Ended up really liking it.
* The Centre (Siddiqi) 4 stars- really great unlikable-yet-lovable narrator, but the last third or so kind of flails around. Worth it for the first two thirds.
* Over My Dead Body (Evans) 4.5 stars- just for something fun, an over-achieving surgeon finds herself hanging around after she is murdered in order to right some wrongs, a few of which she is responsible for.
* The Great Divide (Henriquez) 4 stars- interesting historical fiction about the building of the Panama Canal. Actually manages to stay historical, which was refreshing, but that means you know at the end that nothing good is ahead for some of the characters.

7. My decision to stop writing Goodreads reviews lasted all of a month. When I went back to work on this post, I couldn't remember the books because I hadn't written anything about them. I think it was nice to take a break, anyway. 

That's all from me, maybe too much from me. Have a great weekend.