While Reading and Walking

On my reread of the Neapolitan books, I was more frustrated with Lenú (Elena) than in my first time through. The blinders she puts on, the way she refuses to see how things are, is frustrating when you, like Lila, know the consequences of the neighborhood. She fails to see how the people of the neighborhood, for example, are more at risk from the hammer of the Solaras, compared to her, a reasonably well-known, visible writer. She fails to see why Lila won’t push herself to succeed outside of the neighborhood.

I saw more of Lila this time. Her fear of reaching for what she wants when it will only fail or hurt others. Of reaching for something that will never turn into anything good. The way she channels it into Lenú, into trying to drive Lenú out of the neighborhood, out of everything that she feels tied her down. All while Lenú simply wants “to become.” To become a center, a magnet, like Lila, to feel that her words matter and give the world some sort of meaning.

I also noted and was fascinated by Lila’s asexuality on this read. While it’s never named, her aversion to sex is notable, and tangled in her discomfort with her body. Her horror of change, her horror at pregnancy, her fear of violence, all seem to shake her, worry her.

Don’t forget to get your daily dose of sunshine!

I love that this wedding guest dress was also a lowkey Belle cosplay!

On October 4 at the Newberry Library, Lauren Groff (Fates and Furies) and Rebecca Makkai (The Great Believers) came together for a conversation about craft. The event was part of the Writers on Writing series presented in partnership with StoryStudio Chicago.

Groff is currently on book tour for The Vaster Wilds, which she says is a historical fiction triptych made up of three books “singing in different registers about how we got where we are.” In 2019, she threw all three books into her editor’s lap and “ran away crying.” She wanted to “send three books across time, sort of skipping a stone,” all in their own ways examining women in religion and nature.

For both writers, each book is purposefully very different from the last. Makkai even feels that she has to almost detonate the last book with the new one, shift completely. Themes might emerge from their books, but it’s not something they actively push for—you tell a story, and the bigger vision will appear. Groff tries not to over-intellectualize her books for risk of “killing” them. As long as you “write into your urgencies,” she says, patterns will inevitably appear across your work.

Groff has a unique drafting process, which she attributes partially to her OCD and the need to work both with and around it. To break her perfectionism, she writes her drafts long-hand, straight through, no editing. She can’t read her own handwriting, so there’s little rereading: when she’s done, she puts that draft in a box, and starts over. What she remembers is what will be important—what she cuts provides a meaningful backbone to what she keeps. “By breaking, I’m building,” she says. Each draft builds on the last.

Makkai noted that Groff scatters omniscience throughout her books, using it in unexpected moments. “For me,” Groff explains, “omniscience is a way of disrupting the linear timeline.” If a protagonist lives step by step, an omniscient voice breaks through vertically, like spikes, shaking up the storyline, reminding the reader that the character is just one person in a big world. 

Omniscience isn’t a popular point-of-view these days, and Groff has a theory about why. “I’m attracted to omniscience always, and I actually think it’s because I was raised in a Godly family,” she says. People are afraid of God nowadays, and their secular distrust and faith in the individual experience lead them to believe that 1st person POV is the most stable, truthful one to use.

Makkai’s students nowadays are drawn to polyphonic, multi-person perspectives in their novels, incorporating more and more voices. She wonders if, to Groff’s point, as we as a society decide that only the individual can faithfully transmit their own experience, and we work to privilege more and more voices, if students are attracted to including as many voices as possible rather than shift into what they might feel is a more prescriptive 3rd person POV.

Sometimes, writing a book itself can be a religious experience. Every time Groff writes a novel, there’s a point when “the world is sort of shrinking into the book, and then, the book blooms outward”—and suddenly everything you see is part of the book. Makkai says that she knows her book is ready and good when she’s clearing her mind during yoga, letting all thoughts go, and what’s left is the book. 

When life is messy, I go to my local bookstore and pretend it isn’t for a little while.

“All the while, I’ll await my armored fate with a smile / Still wanna try, still believe in good days”—SZA

📸: dc_polaroid

Don’t worry, I don’t just pack too much work into one week… sometimes I also pack too much fun into one weekend. Wedding on Saturday, SZA’s #SOStour on Sunday!

Living all of my Belle fantasies! (The bees were obsessed with me.)

On bad days I remind myself that in the past 12 months, I’ve read in Buenos Aires and at the end of the world, in Shinjuku, Tokyo and on a bullet train from Himeji to Osaka, in front of the Atlantic Ocean in NJ and in front of the Pacific in CA, under redwoods and beside great lakes. I am blessed.

My October has already been a mess and it’s not even October yet!! Explain that!! Anyway here’s me reading under redwoods before I got Covid in August.

My grandparents’ house helped me fall in love with books. I hope to have built-ins stacked this precariously someday!

I have some new followers, so….Get to know me! Here are 11 fun facts:

• If I wasn’t doing what I’m doing now, I would love to be a travel planner.
• I’ve kept a journal faithfully since 8th grade.
• English peas are one of my favorite foods. The big ones, that you have to shell.
• USWNT star and soccer commentator Carli Lloyd has me blocked on twitter.
• I showed horseback riding when I was young, and won a 3rd place ribbon on a horse named Dee.
• One of my biggest pet peeves is people who are weird or picky about tap water.
• I’m basically white and European, but my breakdown is ¼ Dutch/English, ¼ German, ¼ Spanish/Greek (Sephardic Jewish), and ¼ Russian/French/Polish (Ashkenazi Jewish).
• My favorite travel destination was Amritsar in Punjab, India. Close 2nd goes to Mexico City.
• I played soccer as a goalkeeper for a decade and was a varsity rower through all of college (we rowed on the Chicago River!)
• I make very good challah bread, thanks to my grandmother’s recipe.
• I’m obsessed with the smell of fresh lilac.

I need to spend more time going to museums and just staying to read.

whilereadingandwalking:

“don’t care what i look like / but i feel good / better than amazing & better than i could”

I love this Janelle Monáe lyric. As a big girl, people tend to care what I look like. I don’t care what they see, as long as I feel good. And as a chronically ill girl, every day is a negotation between how bad I /could/ feel. So any day when I feel good at all, I feel better than I could feel. Both of those sentiments have made me embrace myself and wear what I want in recent years. I’m not going to waste my feeling good days on other people’s opinions.

Today I’m feeling meh, but I’m feeling way better than I could, and I feel great about the sunflower summer look I put together. I’m off to see Janelle Monáe on her tour. I have her book on hand and am ready to dance!

@janjan1221 : Girl how u deal with the fat comments n self security? I’m having a hard time even my mom tells me I’m fat 🤦🏻‍♀️ like I don’t wanna be skinny fuck off lol

It isn’t easy. It really isn’t. Some days are worse than others.

Reading has helped me with a lot of it. Digging in, instead of out. Digging into why people are so hateful towards fat people. Aubrey Gordon’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Fat helped me articulate a lot of it, and knowing the ins and outs of the cultural mindset around thinness and fatness is of course infuriating, yet also really helps, because I’m able to better understand where the comments come from, and where the anger comes from. She unpacks concepts like ‘concern trolling’ (I’m just worried about your health) and how people have turned thinness into a moral virtue, when in reality, our bodies are generally, scientifically, the size they are and will always be.

Similarly, it helps to know the science, the facts, and the proof around me. When I was a varsity athlete eating a diet of fruit, oatmeal, pasta, and raw veggies, with a mile time under 8 minutes and 6 practices, 3 games a week, doctors still lectured me about my BMI being too high. While my body image would take a long, long time to catch up, I realized early on that their idea of a healthy weight was physically impossible for me to ever achieve. The thinnest I’ve ever been as an adult was when I was having panic attacks daily, eating near-nothing, and working out twice a day every day before school began. It was incredibly unhealthy. It was the closest I got to my “ideal BMI"—and I was still 15 pounds over.

I’ve known rail-thin people who don’t exercise. I’ve known two people who started getting compliments on "how good they looked” when they’d lost an incredible amount of weight from being near-deathly ill. I’ve seen a friend gain a lot of weight because she was finally healthy after years of struggling with an undiagnosed disease. She has never been more healthy, but is no longer “skinny.”

But I’ve seen, and I know, that people don’t care about that. They don’t listen. They don’t actually care about your health—your blood pressure, cholesterol, thyroid, activity level, flexibility, vitamins, nutrition. They see a body type and size and make their judgments from there.

I’m mid-size and chronically ill. But when I make posts about fatphobia, I generally get hateful comments. Heck—when I make posts about near anything that the internet finds controversial, people go for my weight immediately. People think that weight is about willpower. Is about moral virtue. The pandemic revealed this too.

Because I think it’s easier now that I’m sick and have read so much about chronic illness and body politics for me to see that people are scared to confront the truth, which is that most things about our body, disease, and death are unknowable and out of our control. Using fatness as a scapegoat allows people to ignore all the terrifying things that could overwhelm us about our health. It lets people think they’re safe—or at least safer. And with family, I think it lets them think that they can help protect us.

That was a long and complicated way to say that it helps me to know. The comments will continue to sting. I will continue to fear that my weight will make doctors misdiagnose or dismiss me. I will continue to feel a little more self-conscious in looks that some thinner people might not even question because I know what people will think about me.

But I’m breaking the cycle of trauma. I won’t hurt myself, or others, like others have hurt me. I won’t perpetuate those ideas. I will try to make sure the people I love also don’t perpetuate those ideas, or work to break their own self-destructive cycles however I can. I will try to use my platform, whenever and however I can, to help inform others and encourage them to also pick up self-compassion. Sometimes I use it to share my worst stories and inform others about how language or certain practices can hurt.

Some days, brushing off the comments involves hyping myself up. Some days, it means refusing to care because I have too much shit to deal with and whether my belly is showing is not a top priority. Some days, I just remind myself that while eating better and being active are priorities for my chronic illness and feeling good in my body, skinniness is not. And some days, honestly, truly? I let myself be inspired by pure and petty spite for the haters.

Love visiting one of my all-time favorite indie bookstores @ Talking Leaves in Buffalo, NY