★★★☆☆ | Essays | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
I’m on an essay kick, and this annual “Best American” series always provides a wide range of thought-provoking takes. Unlike past years, where I tended to pick and choose what I read, for this latest volume, I read each essay in order, skipping none.
Out of 22 essays, there were only a few that I scratched my head over, wondering what it was that the editor saw in the piece. Most I enjoyed, and a few were very, very memorable. My favorites:
Mere Belief by Sallie Tisdale: an essay about the fragility of memory and the notion that every time we recall a memory, we change it.
I have always been bothered by memoir writers who are obviously making stuff up, but I am now also bothered by the possibility that we are all making it up, all the time.
The Ones We Sent Away by Jennifer Senior. An extraordinary essay about the practice of sending mentally and physically disabled children to asylums in the 1940s and 1950s. Ultimately, this is a heartbreaking recounting of a family member held hostage by a series of horrifying institutions. This one sunk home because I, too, had an aunt who was committed to a mental institution during this same era.
If Not Now, Later by Yiyun Li. An essay that circles around the suicide of the author’s oldest son, using gardening and literary allusions to cloak her loss and ongoing grief.
A couple of months after Vincent died, a colleague asked me where I was “in the process of grieving,” assuming, I supposed, that there would be, and should be, a conclusion of mourning at some point. That phrase struck me as inaccurate; she might as well have asked me where I was “in the process of living.”
and:
One gardens with the same unblinded hope and the same willingness to concede as one lives, always ready to say, If not now, later; if not this year, next year.
As They Like It: Learning to Follow My Child’s Lead by Nicole Graev Lipson. A well-written essay weaving together Rosalind from As You Like It with the raising of a likely transgender daughter. Connecting Shakespeare and the transgender movement isn’t something I’d ordinarily relate to, but Lipson does this deftly, with an emotional aspect which surprised me.
A Rewilding by Christienne L. Hinz. A wondrous essay that interweaves the author’s choice to let her suburban lawn become a wild oasis with being a black woman in a white man’s world. I love her parting advice: be a weed; grow and multiply.