In the past 18 months, I’ve spent a lot of time lamenting the brokenness of… literally everything. The other day, I had dinner with a friend who was told by a colleague that she was going to die of mercury poisoning (she loves eating fish). I told her we were all going to die of something—my CoD could be microplastics, a 3rd avenue sinkhole, or maybe heat exposure on the subway platform… How horrid! How morbid!
For a really long time, my default was to rage at the state that the world is in, of the Earth that’s been bequeathed to my generation, and the unjust systems that have continuously been upheld to benefit entrenched interest and little else.
But I’ve recently had a change in mindset. I’m not going to completely abandon my anger, but I will be focusing more of my efforts on love. Of remembering who I want to protect and cherish through hard, unfair times, and using that knowledge as the fuel to keep me going. This, to me, feels humane and sustainable (and also better for my health).
Leslie Jamison recently raised a fabulous question: How do you write love? Two books: Sarah Sentilles’ memoir STRANGER CARE and Laurie Frankel’s novel ONE TWO THREE both write love, sustainable love. Under the embracing subject of motherhood, both books tackle themes of fractured communities and broken systems that we fight to fix, even if that fight is often in vain. As scary as it is, pain, truth, and love are intertwined so tightly that it makes me wonder whether we can truly love *hard* when there’s nothing in our way. Both Sarah and Laurie know how to write love while still connecting with all of life, perfect even in its imperfection, but even more importantly, inspiring us to evaluate how we might better care for each other.
There’ve been fabulous reviews for both books, and I wish more people knew what was being said about these two titles. There is a lovely interview between Leslie Jamison and Sarah Sentilles, one which made my chest feel hot but also light and hopeful. I want to highlight a particular passage from Sarah’s perspective in this interview:
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE
The moving story of what one woman learned from fostering a newborn—about injustice, about making mistakes, about how to better love and protect people beyond our immediate kin
I changed when I became Coco’s foster mother. And I changed when we were asked to let her go. I walked through my days with a broken heart, terrified, with a sense that some essential part of me had been excavated, that what had been removed would never be recovered. Because some things cannot be repaired. Only transformed. And carrying those feelings—hauntedness, brokenness, grief, helplessness, despair—and trying to navigate my days anyway, awakened me to the fact that everyone is walking around that way. If they’re not yet, they will someday. And that is true for every bird and moose and whale and tree and refugee. We love. We lose. We love. We warm the bottle. We cut the lawn. We drive carpool. We protest. We stand in line at the pharmacy. We write.
There’s a comment at the end of the piece that says, “WoW. ‘Nuff said,” and I think that sums it up perfectly.
For Laurie’s novel ONE TWO THREE, we received a great New York Times review and another from The Washington Post. Here are my favorite sections from each:
What does it say about the unsettling times we live in that a story about a small town and its entire population being poisoned by an unscrupulous chemical company comes off as sort of… wholesome? […] The full and simple pleasures of Frankel’s luscious prose lull the reader into rooting for the good people of Bourne and these plucky heroines.
Told through the voices of Mab, Monday and Mirabel it becomes richer, funnier and more poignant. Their adolescent ideas about their fellow residents (who include a wonderful elderly neighbor nicknamed Pooh), their hopes and dreams for their futures (Mirabel has no illusions about her own) and their determination to fight for justice make this one of the summer’s freshest novels. “One Two Three” tells us a more complicated story than its title implies, all the while reminding us that big changes can be made through small steps.
From Laurie Frankel, the New York Times bestselling author of This Is How It Always Is, a Reese's Book Club Pick, comes One Two Three, a timely, topical novel about love and family that will make you laugh and cry... and laugh again.
So, how do I love? That’s a multitudinous answer, but one of my methods is reading and recommending books that rejuvenate me. Let me share book recs that will have you experiencing a boost of serotonin (sad serotonin also counts), that’s what I say! Books are a way to understand and connect back to the rest of the world—to share that experience with someone else is, I feel, more powerful and healing than the credit we actually give. Anyway, I hope I’ve made a convincing case and that you, dear reader, are lacing up your sneakers to jog to your local indie bookstore. If you’re in the mood for memoir, you have STRANGER CARE. If you want fiction, you have ONE TWO THREE.
In any case, get ready to be awed by the literary prowess of both Sarah Sentilles and Laurie Frankel.
— Marin Takikawa