A theme that’s catching my attention right now.
Dear Friend,
I’m beginning to sense a theme to this season of midlife that I’m in, raising teenagers while mourning the loss of my mother, starting new ventures while letting go of others. It’s a period when the beautiful, wondrous, and joyous co-exist with sorrow, loss, and disappointment. The awareness of holding or embodying multiple states at once is a big one. Everything I’m noticing this week seems to hang on this theme:
A dear friend and colleague just gifted me a book that I didn’t know I needed, and now that I’ve read it, I want to gift it to a handful of others: A Short Course in Happiness After Loss (and Other Dark, Difficult Times) by psychologist Maria Sirois, a psychologist who writes and speaks about post-traumatic growth, combines the science of positive psychology and various wisdom teachings to look at how we are still able to thrive when facing life’s harshest moments. As the cover image (and the gorgeous art of kinsagu) suggests, we humans are capable of holding wholeness alongside our brokenness. (Thank you, CJ <3)
There’s something both whole and broken in pretty much every heterosexual marriage I know, even the “progressive” ones.1 Fifty-one years after Erica Jong published her second-wave feminist classic Fear of Flying, a ground-breaking novel of sexual liberation from a woman’s perspective, I’m finding myself drawn to the slew of divorce memoirs by Gen X and Millennial women who leave oppressive marriages to men, take pains to reconstruct their lives out of the broken shards, and leave us asking the question: is the institution, by nature, oppressive in and of itself for women who become mothers? After reading Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful, I poured through Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife: How I Left My Marriage and Started My Life and am now reading Leslie Jamison’s Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story. I’m halfway through a galley of Ada Calhoun’s forthcoming novel Crush (Feb. 2025) in preparation for an event we’re doing together at Bookends & Beginnings in Evanston on March 1 (locals: save the date!). While I don’t yet know how it ends (and wouldn’t spoil it for you if I did), the novel is a middle age reckoning that explores “the danger and liberation of chasing desire, illuminating new ways to embrace freedom, ambition, and partnership.” It’s no longer about sexual liberation but gender liberation. In each case, I find myself craving the sequel. I’m hungry to learn more about who each of these women becomes.
It’s been dark and dreary in Chicagoland, so I just keep stringing up more and more fairy lights. Here’s the view from my writing desk:
I wish you all a new year in which you honor the wholeness alongside the broken, and one with far less broken than whole.
We word on,
Deborah
I refrain from comment on same-sex and other forms of marriage; I’ve only been obsessively observing the hetero ones lately, both IRL and in books.