April 23, 2024
The Time of My Life: Dirty Dancing, by Andrea Warner
If you’ve read my second novel Waiting for a Star to Fall, in which Dirty Dancing features as a plot point (“Brooke had never seen an abortion in a movie before, and it was surprising, because Dirty Dancing was over thirty years old. So it should have been a throwback, but it was something very new: the character who wants an abortion. There is no other alternative, it doesn’t even make her sad, and she doesn’t change her mind at the last minute, or have a miscarriage as a convenient trick to avoid being an agent in her own destiny. She isn’t even sorry… [And] it seemed symbolic that no one had to live in shame. You could be a fallen woman, and then get up on a stage and dance. This was a huge revelation for Brooke, who had never even considered the possibility, the number of ways a script could go.”) then you’ll know that this movie means a lot to me, and Andrea Warner’s The Time of My Life: Dirty Dancing, a contribution to the ECW Pop Classics Series, only deepened my affection and admiration. Warner explores the movie’s roots as based in “the classic Jewish value” of tikkun olam, its celebration of liberal idealism before the ’60s got complicated, the subversiveness of a film whose entire plot hinges on abortion (screenwriter/producer Eleanor Bergstein was deliberate about that!) at a moment when American women’s reproductive rights seemed assured, and how its iconic soundtrack is the bedrock of the film. Andrea also fangirls in typical Andrea Warner fashion, sharing her own personal connections to the story and also critiquing the film for its shortfalls, how it appropriates Black culture and lacks intersectionality—demonstrating both this is a film substantial enough to be worthy of critique and that LOVING ALL OF ANYTHING (in the way that Baby wished Jerry Orbach could love her) means grappling with the ways it disappoints us too.
April 22, 2024
All In Her Head, by Misty Pratt
Misty Pratt is contending with all kinds of threads in her first book All In Her Head: How Gender Bias Harms Women’s Mental Health, including her own personal story of struggling with mental illness, and that of her grandmother—Chapter One begins, “I was five years old the night my grandmother lost her mind.” Pratt is also a researcher whose approach to her subject is based in science, such a basis only underlining that approaches to treating mental illness so often are not, but then neither are many alternative therapies, and that while mental illness is real, women’s experiences are also affected by a society rife with sexism and inequity, violence against women, and the pathologization of femaleness. Maybe it’s not just “all in her head,” but also sometimes it is, or else it’s in her body, or her family, or her workplace, and that’s not nothing. All this tangle of understanding and experience resulting in loud binaries like SSRIS for everyone vs. anti-psychiatry movements, but Pratt manages to blaze a path through the noise to suggest a kind of middle-ground to contend with the inherent complexity of mental illness (that anyone who’s thinking about it has to be contending with all kinds of threads or else they’re kidding themselves) which necessitates care and precision in applying treatments, as well as the message that women themselves are not broken. Pratt notes that puberty, pregnancy/childbirth and menopause are all times of great hormonal shifts when girls and women are especially vulnerable to mental illness, and imagines how different things might be if this reality was seen as normal as it actually is. Which is not to say that women have to suffer through these periods of their lives, but instead that patients deserve care without the message that there is something broken about them as people, and that researchers and doctors could put the pieces of the puzzle together to affect a more holistic understanding of just what women’s mental health might look like (and how anti-depressants affect them—Pratt cites a study stating that females are exposed to “higher blood drug concentrations and longer drug elimination times than males.”)
Pratt spent years trying to wean herself from anti-depressants, only to have withdrawal symptoms knock her right back down again, and she received very little guidance throughout this process, doctors telling her that she should just stay on the medication because it was simpler that way, because her children needed her to be functioning, internalizing the message that she was flawed and broken, that her mental illness was a genetic inheritance that had to define her. But this would turn out not be the case…
There is not cure for mental illness, Pratt writes, but that doesn’t mean that healing isn’t possible. And she shares her own journey to a deeper understanding of her experiences with psychiatry and medicine, making shifts in her life, working with good therapists, learning that feeling (and even feeling BADLY) is a normal part of being, that her anxiety isn’t just all in her head but also the result of living in a world where terrible things can happen but also that it doesn’t have be debilitating or a guiding force in her life.
And don’t worry, her conclusion is not prescriptive—after decades of people suggesting she try yoga or meditation, she knows that these one-size-fits-all cures are rarely helpful. And while there will be readers who might struggle with their lived experiences of mental illness running counter to Pratt’s (people who are all too happy to continue with their medication, for example), this is very much the point of the book: that everyone’s trajectory of mental illness and wellness will be different.
But through the lenses of gender and gender bias, those different trajectories can all be better understood so that patients can learn to tell a different kind of story, one of wholeness, strength and worth.
April 18, 2024
Book By Book: An English Journey
I wrote about our trip to England via the books I read on our travels, and you can read it on my substack. It was really long and kudos to anyone (everyone?) who reads all the way through. Check it out here.
April 17, 2024
Gleanings
- You will find me in the book aisle. In the book shop. At the book stall. By the book sale. My books are my favourite non-living things. There’s something about collecting a library of books that feels sturdy … like I’m shoring up my house for whatever may come,
- he photos that families didn’t want, all the “mistakes” that at 20×24 were too expensive to just throw away. That’s the gold, I’m realizing. The raw, clumsy, beautiful and unpredictable moments that glue a family together, that make them who they are. That’s what we hold on to. That’s what we stick to our fridge. That’s what we’ll leave behind long after we’re gone.
- But in light of new research I’ve recently learned about, I’m wondering if gratitude might also have the power to push us in the direction of a healthier democracy.
- Are my passions really my passions or have they been just a band-aid for this ache? It’s time to find out what she likes to eat and make a feast.
- Why give yourself away? The question lands differently in my ear now—I hear giving as ongoing life-affirming generosity that returns to you a thousand fold, because now I believe that my self is formed of a deep well, a source that is infinite, and that source is love.
- I seem to return to wanting to paint a rainy day, a lone woman with an umbrella, walking away from the viewer, towards something, purposeful in her stride. She knows where she is heading.
- With the privilege of the financial security that comes with middle age, I have the stage where my involvement can be targeted more towards social good. And that feels good. There is no question.
- But these are days of light. I’m finally open to them after weeks of wondering how to move into a new season, the news grim, some personal issues keeping me awake at night, and no way to find joy in my daily work. Days of beauty. In our old abandoned orchard, a cherry tree is blooming; a plum by the cucumber boxes is about to flower, its scent of sandalwood and honey held in each tiny bud.
- Sometimes our souls are in good shape, and sometimes not so great. If we can roll our eyes at our suffering, we’re probably going to be okay. So I tell myself.
- What I’m trying to say with this is that my heart bursts and breaks, daily. Sometimes I don’t know what to make of it all, of this, of us, and mostly I don’t know how to write about it.
- So then to my blog: a way to make visible the invisible and to bear witness.
April 15, 2024
The M Word Turns 10
It’s been a decade since THE M WORD arrived in the world, a book that was born because I couldn’t see a reason why stories of motherhood should not include those of women who wanted children they never had, those who never wanted children at all, parenting stepchildren, being mother of children who’d died, experiences of miscarriage, maternal ambivalence, abortion, adoption, single motherhood, motherhood via IVF—AND MORE—could not all be included within a single volume. And what a volume it is. I love this book, and am so grateful to its contributors—including the inimitable Priscila Uppal, who died in 2018—for their generosity in sharing tender and intimate stories with such candour, insight, and brilliance.
Happy Anniversary and thank you to Heather Birrell, Julie Booker, Diana Bryden Fitzgerald, Myrl Coulter, Christa Couture, Nancy Jo Cullen, Marita Dachsel, Nicole Dixon, Ariel Gordon, Amy Lavender Harris, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Deanna McFadden, Maria Meindl, Saleema Nawaz, Susan Olding, Alison Pick, Heidi Reimer, Kerry Ryan, Carrie Snyder, Patricia Storms, Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang, Julia Zarankin, and the amazing Michele Landsberg.
I’m so proud of this book.
Order a copy wherever books are sold!
April 12, 2024
BOOKSPO Episode 6!
What a delight to bring you this conversation with Emily Austin about her beautiful and hilarious new novel INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT SPACE, how some interesting feedback on her first novel inspired her to deepen her own understanding of love, and how ideas from bell hooks’ ALL ABOUT LOVE found their way into her fiction. Listenhttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bookspo/id1733542694 at Apple Podcasts or on Substack.
April 11, 2024
Back Again!
In case you missed me, I was busy buying books all over Northwest England, and having a grand time while doing it. Full report to come in my newsletter on Monday—make sure you’re on the list!
April 1, 2024
BOOKSPO Episode 5!
This week on BOOKSPO I’m talking with Waubgeshig Rice about his new novel MOON OF THE TURNING LEAVES—which came out in Canada last fall and was just published in the United States—and how he was inspired by Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 novel BLOOD MERIDIAN to craft a narrative in which the land guides the story. List at Apple Podcasts or on Substack.
March 29, 2024
Katherine Heiny Gave Me Permission
I’m so happy with my latest essay on Substack (which puts me 1/4 of the way toward my goal of writing an essay every month!). It’s called “Katherine Heiny Gave Me Permission”, and I hope you like it too.
This is my last free substack essay—beginning in April, they’re available to paid subscribers only. Because I really appreciate my blog readers for being here all along, I have three free one year paid subscriptions to give away, and two are still available. If you’d like to receive one, email me at klclare AT gmail DOT com and let me know!
March 28, 2024
Gleanings
- and I realized that my quiet writing has a relevance to those who are willing to listen. And even if it doesn’t, I need to do it.
- A lot of writers, I can only assume, would feel like they can’t write about a thing unless they’re an expert about the topic, but there’s a lot of activity that happens in the act of learning. That’s where the factual stuff in both of our stories feeds the emotional content.
- How do I know so much about these Mills & Boon romances? Because I snuck into my sister’s books of course. Later I also snuck into my father’s bookshelves and read all the juicy bits from his Harold Robbins books (The Carpetbaggers comes to mind) and Jacqueline Susann (Valley of the Dolls) and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying along with Leon Uris’s Exodus and others. It was my dad who ignited my love for books and stories early, with his bedtime storytelling. He was born a storyteller.
- Contrast isn’t about what’s better or worse, or right or wrong, it’s not about comparing one thing to another — instead, I think about vibrancy, colours, shadow, texture, depth and height, the common structures of my everyday, and how routines and patterns might be shifted to bring even more enjoyment, pleasure, delight to my mind.
- When I told my boyfriend that I wanted to die, he hung up on me. I was seventeen and sitting in my basement, winding a phone cord round and round my fingers.
- But even with words to wrap around it—English, Welsh, and otherwise—I am so often so unsure of what those I love are thinking, seeing, forgetting, remembering. That doesn’t mean they’re disappearing. It means they’re only partially perceptible to me.
- It’s a litmus test for me to know who my people are and it almost always works. For some people it’s astrology. For me, it’s the blind recklessness of youth and how it did or didn’t define us. How we grew ourselves from the filth of our regret. Found purpose from our accidents. Failed and got back out there.
- First customer is looking for a hand puppet for a gift. I show her a giraffe and she says pointedly No Giraffes! and I wonder what happened there.
- There is something special about living on an island. I see it in the faces of strangers when I mention we live on an island. They look at us with astonishment, surprise, and sometimes, envy. They ask a hundred and one questions. Is it expensive to take the ferry? What is health care like? Are there wild animals? Does everyone know each other’s business? Have you been welcomed into the island community? What is there to do on an island?
- It was the flashing bitcoin sign in the window that caught my eye, maybe because I’d heard that crypto is sky-rocketing. I’ve walked past this corner shop over a hundred times, and until last week, I’d never noticed how charming it is.
- For me, this moment was a clear provocation for us to think about Mina’s own project. Is it possible to tell the story of Peter Manuel’s crimes in a way that doesn’t take anything more away from its victims, that doesn’t itself cause fresh harm? Is there a way for us to read about the case that is neither uncaring nor, like the weeping woman, intrusive? It isn’t our loss, after all; it isn’t our daughter. What right do we have to want to know all of this?
- And this is a lot of what my book, Apples on a Windowsill, is about. The details of a life, of still lifes — that intersection. It is also in the category, relationship-lit, and the narrative which can be pieced together in the (un)connected/standalone essays has to do with how the F do women make a creative life for themselves. Like, what is the narrative now, what are the possibilities? And also what are the obstacles in the 21st century…
- We must harness everything we have, everything we do. We must use every part of our books as bridges, leave no margins. We must build belonging.
- “People label our country undeveloped or developing,” a sweet human shared with me last night, “we say yours is developed because there is much material wealth, but what about the people … are the people developed? Developed countries, with many undeveloped people.”
- It’s cooler in Melbourne today, the tail end of Summer has swished out of sight and Autumnal weather is shuffling in. Just one more hot day, perhaps, and then we’re fully Fall. I hope. I woke up very early but stayed snuggled down, making the most of that snug feeling that’s been absent for so many months.