Book review: I’m Telling the Truth but I’m Lying, by Bassey Ikpi (Amazon / Book Depository) It’s difficult to distinguish which lies from my childhood are my own and which belong to my family. Which lies I told myself to close the gaps in my brain and which were told to me to silence my questions. Which lies were the only things that could quiet … Continue reading A Brave, Heartbreaking Look at a Life with Mental Illness
Book review: Midnight Chicken, by Ella Risbridger (Amazon / Book Depository) There is a German word, kummerspeck, that translates literally as ‘grief-bacon,’ and metaphorically as ‘comfort eating’. This book is the grief-bacon book…This is the book I wanted to read when I was sad, but it’s also a book for good days. I’m not going to make it a regular thing to review cookbooks, because … Continue reading How Cooking Made Living Seem Possible
Book review: The Light in the Dark, by Horatio Clare (Amazon / Book Depository) The struggle is intensifying. It is like being sealed into a grey snowball which keeps gathering defeats. However much I wash, I seem to smell of dirty winter trains and exhaust… Winter is a miser at the moment, giving nothing but bills. The result is inarticulacy… The words and the lightness … Continue reading A Mind of Winter: Chronicling Seasonal Darkness
Book review: Bluets, by Maggie Nelson (Amazon / Book Depository) Last night I wept in a way I haven’t wept for some time. I wept until I aged myself. I watched it happen in the mirror. I watched the lines arrive around my eyes like engraved sunbursts; it was like watching flowers open in time-lapse on a windowsill. I fell in love with Maggie Nelson … Continue reading Rhapsodizing Blue
Book review: Journal of a Solitude, by May Sarton (Amazon / Book Depository) I am way outside somewhere in the wilderness. And it has been a long time of being in the wilderness. Writer May Sarton retreated to a cottage in New Hampshire for one year, where she holed up and wrote and confronted the seasons, both of the year and of her life. Journal of a Solitude is the diary … Continue reading The Complicated Necessity of Solitude
Book review: What Made Maddy Run, by Kate Fagan espnW columnist Kate Fagan wrote a highly-praised and publicized article, “Split Image” about the 2014 suicide of Madison Holleran, a brilliantly promising, Ivy League student athlete. The article explored how and why this talented, successful, ambitious, and vivacious teenager attending the University of Pennsylvania as a track star student-athlete would want to take her life. In January 2014, … Continue reading Teens Under Pressure: The Dark Side of College and Competition
Book review: This Close to Happy, by Daphne Merkin Writer and literary critic Daphne Merkin, a former staff writer for the New Yorker, has suffered lifelong depression. She’s been trying to write a memoir about her illness and attempts to cure, or at least contain, it for more than a decade. It was finally published in February. A not unimpressive accomplishment, which becomes obvious as the narrative sifts … Continue reading Being Okay with Being Unhappy
