In Brandi Sellerz-Jackson’s On Thriving, she uses a conversational, direct tone and tremendous empathy to guide readers on how to move from existing to thriving.
Brandon Stosuy is a master of pulling together the inspiring words of artists: He has gifted us with the stellar online magazine of interviews The Creative Independent, and three elegantly designed creativity guides. Now he returns with Sad Happens: A Celebration of Tears, a book of reflections, illustrated by Rose Lazar, about the experience and catharsis of sadness and weeping, a “collective, multifaceted archive of tears.” As in his previous books, Stosuy sources from his vast artist network: Many contributors here are music-biz folks, including The National’s Matt Berninger and the ultimate #sadgirl Phoebe Bridgers. “The shared emotion of Sad Happens has real power,” writes Stosuy. “It gives us permission to open up, let down our guard, embrace those things that make us feel vulnerable. By sharing, we see that crying is universal, and that tears should, in fact, be celebrated.” Tears come when they will, like it or not: during the “emotional exorcism” of massage for writer Nada Alic, while singing for Gelsey Bell, and while flying for Hanif Abdurraqib. The effect of reading these candid takes on sadness may elicit your own, and maybe that’s a good thing. While paging through the book, I remembered once texting my teenage daughter to see what she was doing, and she said, “Listening to the boygenius album and crying. Don’t worry, I’m making the conscious choice to cry.” And I felt a little sad, then, that I rarely cry. I used to, a lot; but now an SSRI suppresses the tears. There should be a word, I think, for “feeling like crying, but thanks to medication, you can’t.”
Brandon Stosuy collects candid takes on sadness from Phoebe Bridgers, Hanif Abdurraqib and a bevy of other luminaries in Sad Happens.
For much of her career, Nell Greenfieldboyce has written about science for NPR, reporting on a range of topics, among them a giant collective of octopuses, asteroid dust, the color of dinosaur eggs and signs of life on Mars. In Transient and Strange: Notes on the Science of Life (Norton, $27.99, 9780393882346), Greenfieldboyce adds the personal to the scientific, threading the two together to create a memoir in essays.
In the book’s opening essay, “The Symbol of a Tornado,” Greenfieldboyce recounts a phase that most parents will recognize: the quest to calm her preschool-age son’s nighttime fears. When he first asks her about tornadoes, she eagerly lays out the facts—a misstep that only intensifies his anxiety. The essay braids substantial reporting on the history and science of tornadoes with her earnest fumbling as she tries to help her kids feel secure in an insecure world.
Some of Transient and Strange’s essays hew closer to science writing—in one, she charts the scientific community’s resistance to accepting black holes—while others go more deeply into personal essay territory, excavating pieces of her youth. The sweet, quirky “Automatic Beyond Belief” ties an ancient toaster to her parents’ faith, the stability of her childhood and her predictions about what her children will remember about their younger years. The 50-page essay that closes the book, “My Eugenics Project,” is a standout. It describes Greenfieldboyce’s strategies for coping with the knowledge that she and her husband might pass a devastating genetic mutation on to their children, her obsessive quest to solve this problem and how it has affected her marriage and family.
Throughout, Greenfieldboyce doesn’t spare herself or put on a wise affect; we see and relate to her foibles and fumbling. Transient and Strange is a book that you can read as the memoir of a woman who’s measuring the shape of life at its midpoint, and also as a series of essays riffing on a range of science-related topics. Either way, it’s a thoughtful, heartfelt and idiosyncratic collection.
Nell Greenfieldboyce’s thoughtful, idiosyncratic memoir in essays twines the personal with the scientific.
In Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Myth, Natalie Haynes shoves aside the male-centric lens through which we’ve long viewed goddesses like Aphrodite, Demeter and Artemis, whether in history, literature, art or music. She steps into that breach armed with a sharpened gaze and copious research as she reveals to readers how these otherworldly women have been misrepresented and misunderstood in the past, and explores the ways in which they inspire and inform us in the present. BookPage asked the acclaimed author/scholar/comedian/broadcaster about her fascinating career and what she thinks we can all learn from the undersung women of the ancient world.
In last year’s Pandora’s Jar, you brought the likes of Medusa and Jocasta to the forefront. And now in this book, you turn to the goddesses in all their power and glory. What drives you to interrogate and explore how women were portrayed in myth and in art?
I can’t imagine not being interested in the portrayal of women: We’re half the world! And since almost all literature and art that survives to us from the ancient world is by men, it provides a fascinating canvas to explore. How did men imagine women, and how did they imagine powerful women, when they knew no such people in real life? What kind of goddesses would these men worship? I really wanted to explore the goddesses, the temples built to them, the stories depicting them, the art embodying them. So that is how Divine Might happened.
What was the most surprising, challenging and/or gratifying thing you discovered in the course of your research, in terms of seeing echoes of the ancient past in our present society and culture? Do you now have a favorite goddess?
The most challenging thing I discovered was just how little impact the goddess Hestia—once central to worship of all the gods in ancient Greece—had made on the modern world. There were so few examples of her in contemporary fiction and art that at the beginning of her chapter, I wasn’t sure I would be able to write it at all. But it turned out to be a really beautiful process, finding her where I could, and trying to explain how and why she had disappeared. I don’t have favorites—I change my mind with every chapter!
“Female anger is frightening to men. Always.”
Artemis may well be the most widely known goddess, with loads of mentions of her female-archer guise in ancient art and current pop culture. But while her strength and skill are routinely celebrated, you assert that at her core, “She is a true predator . . . fixed on death.” Will you share a bit more about what you found to be the most intriguing contradictions in terms of how Artemis has been portrayed and viewed?
I’m interested that Artemis is such a popular goddess here! I always assume Aphrodite/Venus must be the best known, just because of the sheer cultural penetration (and a planet named after her too.). Artemis is a puzzle because she is syncretized with so many other goddesses: every area in the Greek world seems to have known her by a different name and worshiped a different aspect of her. This is how you end up with a goddess who protects young girls, but also shoots and kills them, and a virgin goddess who is closely linked with the goddess of childbirth. I think it’s appropriate that she is so hard to pin down, though. Artemis belongs to the places away from cities and towns: She is a goddess of wild places, forests and mountains. We don’t really belong in her world; she is most at home with wild creatures. So we either accept we can’t understand her, or we become a little wild ourselves.
What differences do you see in art created by men versus women?
I think the more women make art, the more we’ll see different interpretations of what it means to be a woman. I was thinking about it today reading a review of Britney Spears’ new book: How she chooses to present herself seems completely different from how her management/family chose to present her when they controlled so much of her life. There’s a terrible poignancy to how long she has had to wait to be allowed to be her full self. And—more cheeringly—look at the Taylor Swift juggernaut. She remakes herself with each album, sometimes more than once. It’s a master class in depicting powerful womanhood in hugely varied ways. She’s inspiring millions of girls as she does it, so I think we could be in for an exciting time ahead.
You describe in colorfully unflinching detail some of Hera’s “spectacular and creatively unpleasant revenges.” And you note that modern culture often turns this exasperation into fodder for comedy rather than, say, a reasonable explanation for rage. Why do you think—even in myths that spoke plainly about murder, rape and other terrible things—Hera’s and other goddesses’ anger was assiduously avoided and downplayed?
“. . . women’s stories are every bit as valuable and compelling as men’s, every bit as important as I believe them to be.”
Female anger is frightening to men. Always. And it’s much easier to deny that if you claim that it’s irrational, that it comes out of nowhere, that it’s the consequence of being crazy or cruel. Otherwise you’d have to accept that structural inequality is irritating and make an effort to change it for the better. Sometimes I feel like Bruce Banner in The Avengers: “That’s my secret, Captain. I’m always angry.” He doesn’t wait for an alien invasion to be mad, he lives there. Well, me too.
Your first book, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life, was published in 2010, and you’ve since written several books—fiction and nonfiction—that challenge our assumptions about the ancient world. Have you met with any pushback to the new perspectives you’ve offered? How has your work and your life as an author changed since your first book?
I am told by academic friends that I am generally appreciated in their profession for encouraging so many students to pursue classics and ancient history. I’ve no doubt there are some scholars who hate me—that’s just a statistical reality—but I can’t honestly say I give them a moment’s thought. Who has the time?
Comedy + classicism is a pairing that’s worked quite well for you, to say the least! Which came first? When were you first inspired to combine the two? Does your BBC podcast “Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics” inform your books and vice versa?
Ha—I guess I would say I was funny before I was a classicist, but I was a classicist before I was a comedian. I started doing stand-up during my undergrad years. Since then the two have swirled around me most of the time, I suppose. The first few years in comedy were pretty low on classics (not much call for jokes on the ancient world in the late ’90s comedy circuit). But now these two fields have really merged for me. I love doing the live shows and making the BBC podcast. I’m extremely lucky!
What are you most hoping readers take away from this book?
I’m hoping that readers will come away from the book thinking that women’s stories are every bit as valuable and compelling as men’s, every bit as important as I believe them to be. I hope they’ll have a newfound respect for the huge power of these goddesses and the centrality of their role in the ancient world.
Is there anything you’d like to share about what’s next for you, goddess-y or otherwise?
Next up is season 10 of the podcast, I’ll be recording it in the spring. Still choosing who to include. And the new novel is about Medea, so that is going to be an intense time, writing her. But I wrote my dissertation on Euripides’ portrayal of Medea and Hecabe, so I have been squaring up to take on this story for decades. It feels like now is the time. Let’s hope I’m right.
In 2018, Japanese writer Shoji Morimoto began renting himself out to his 300 Twitter followers, as long as the request involved doing nothing on his part. Within 10 months, his follower count ballooned to 100,000; now it’s over 400,000. Morimoto’s account of this effort (or lack thereof) is Rental Person Who Does Nothing. In it, he recounts some of the more than 4,000 times he’s been hired in his quest to fulfill his “wish to live without doing anything.”
After abandoning a corporate job he despised for freelance writing he soon concluded was simultaneously dull and stressful, he started the service he calls “Do Nothing Rental” as a means of assuaging his mid-30s angst. For a variety of reasons he outlines in the book, Morimoto decided not to charge his followers any money for fulfilling their requests, other than reimbursement for travel expenses, confessing that for now, at least, he’s living off his wife’s salary and savings.
Under the handle of @morimotoshoji, he fields requests—all of which require only passive involvement by his somewhat flexible definition—and then shares some of the best stories of his experiences on his feed. Rental Person Who Does Nothing details a variety of them, such as the time he accompanied a woman to the courthouse to file her divorce papers, the day he joined a man for 13 circuits of Tokyo by rail, and the conversation with a client who confessed that he had once been involved in the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult, notorious for its nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in 1995. The tone throughout is consistently light and self-effacing. “I couldn’t do anything,” he writes, “so I started doing nothing.”
For all his wry humor, Morimoto makes some trenchant points about social and cultural issues like friendship, the elusiveness of human connection, artificial intelligence and the role of money. With the U.S. Surgeon General recently identifying an epidemic of loneliness in this country, one wonders whether a similar “do nothing” service might be valuable here.
With wry humor, Shoji Morimoto describes his unique occupation, in which he’ll do anything with a client as long as it involves nothing but his presence.
Erika Howsare’s The Age of Deer invites us to consider the practical, environmental and spiritual relationships we share with a most ubiquitous species.
As an elite college athlete, Jacqueline Alnes started experiencing mysterious, excruciating neurological episodes in which she could not speak, walk or see clearly. Finding no help from doctors and little support from her demanding running coach, Alnes was forced to quit the activity that her identity revolved around. Desperate for answers, she turned to an online community espousing the benefits of a fruit-based, raw food diet. She found herself drawn in, eschewing all other food piece by piece.
You’d be forgiven for suspecting that Alnes is about to pitch you on a life-changing wellness regimen that ends in health. But The Fruit Cure: The Story of Extreme Wellness Turned Sour is more intriguing. It’s a cautionary tale about falling prey to too-good-to-be-true solutions to complex medical issues.
Fruitarianism didn’t restore Alnes’ body to health; it led to disordered eating that gave her a sense of control when she felt powerless. This struggle is what makes The Fruit Cure a deeply compelling read: Alnes dives deep into the shame humans have felt about their imperfect bodies since ancient times. She poignantly conveys the ways in which doctors and charlatans alike have taken advantage of those desperate to meet a physical ideal or simply be released from pain and medical anxiety. “My desire for a cure,” Alnes writes, “outweighed my ability to think critically about the sources of my information.”
Alnes also explores a decidedly more modern concept: the nature of parasocial relationships, like the one she developed with the online fruitarian figureheads who called themselves Freelee and Durianrider. She obsessively watched their videos on social media, “a tilt-a-whirl of fruit-forward, anti-fat content.” Their cult of personality made it easier to believe outlandish claims, like that cooked food pollutes the body. The spell was eventually broken for Alnes when she stopped binging on social media and started reconnecting with family and friends. “The more I lived in the world, away from my screen,” she writes, “the voices saying eggs were chicken ‘menses’ and dairy was an animal ‘secretion’ grew quieter.”
Alnes, now an English professor, writes with honesty and a clear curiosity about how her own experience reflects larger societal trends. The Fruit Cure is a spellbinding reminder of how susceptible we are to quick fixes, and, ultimately, how our communities can save us.
Jacqueline Alnes’ memoir, The Fruit Cure, is a spellbinding, cautionary tale about falling prey to fad diets to resolve medical ailments.
In The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History, Manjula Martin offers her mesmerizing, beautifully written account of living through and trying to come to terms with the harrowing impacts of the climate crisis.
Her memoir recounts the 2020 wildfires that surrounded her Northern California hillside home under the redwoods, causing her and her partner, Max, to evacuate. Martin’s writing is so immersive that readers will feel the stress of living through “two months of near nonstop emergency mindset,” as she scrolls fire maps, listens for warning sirens and sleeps with her phone, keys and go bag by her side.
In 2017, Martin and Max moved from San Francisco to a Sonoma County neighborhood of former vacation cabins that was “by all accounts, a fire trap.” But the land nurtured her in illness when a routine removal of a birth control device caused an abscess to form, resulting in astonishing, ongoing pain that eventually necessitated a hysterectomy. The land became a refuge that “helped me to heal to whatever extent I could be considered healed”—and she desperately fears losing this place.
Martin is uniquely positioned to write this book. She was born in Santa Cruz in the mid-1970s in a trailer next to a half-built geodesic dome nestled under the redwoods. Her parents were part of a community called the Land, devoted to yoga and the teachings of an Indian monk. She probes the many thorny issues of California’s land history and conservation efforts, especially those tied to colonialism, capitalism and white male supremacy. Lacing the memoir with a well-researched history of fires in the region, she shows again and again how colonizers and settlers lit the match and stoked the flames.
In the spirit of Rebecca Solnit and Terry Tempest Williams, Martin’s knowledge of nature and the land illuminate every page. With The Last Fire Season, she joins the ranks of esteemed, provocative nature writers who use their own experiences to examine our past and our future. She concludes, “To inhabit the new shape of these cycles of damage and renewal would require new ways of being. . . . [A] constant state of reckoning with the beauty and pain of what we had done to our home.”
Manjula Martin’s searing memoir, The Last Fire Season, recounts her experience living through the 2020 Northern California wildfires in mesmerizing prose.
Maria Ressa’s book is a political history of the Philippines and an intimate memoir, but it’s also a warning to democracies everywhere: Authoritarianism is a threat to us all.
Fourteen-year-old Till was murdered in a nondescript barn in the Mississippi Delta. But few know the barn still stands today, or fully understand its history. Thompson believes we should.
