~*~*~*~*~*what delia read recently~*~*~*~*~
8: All True: Unbelievable by Amy Fusselman
I left this book under a blanket in a hotel in Ohio on my way to my best friend's house in Philly. On the way home, we had to go back to the hotel to retrieve it. I couldn't not finish the book, I was only halfway through, and it's not a book I could easily re-buy or check out from the library -- it is unavailable, not around in homogeneous book-places. So we went back there as a pit-stop on the drive home. My sister and I walked into the hotel and used the bathroom and filled our water bottles, but the receptionist was nowhere to be found. People started lining up behind us with their suitcases. They were waiting for rooms to sleep, and I was waiting for a book that is only 130 pages long. Finally the hotel receptionist came out, very flustered. She asked me a lot of questions about my missing object and walked over to an office cabinet and rifled through it. She pulled the book from a shelf bubbling with plastic bags of people's stuff they had left. The book was tucked in there like a line of mortar between the bricks of people's stuff. When she handed it back to me, the book had a piece of paper taped to the cover, over the "8", with the date I had left it and our old hotel room number: #333. On the back of the slip of paper was a snowman but I don't know why.
In the car on my road trip journey, with my sister on our way to our best friend's house, a trip planned to try to find joy, music, and companionship, I had realized the book was under the blanket like 30 minutes after we drove away from the hotel. It wasn't worth it in the moment, to drive back. I realized I had lost something very important to me. When I first started reading it, in my apartment days before the road trip, I had jolted awake in the middle of the night and had to summarize everything that happened so far in its pages to my partner in bed beside me. Unbelievable. All true. My whole body changed when I realized I had left it on the stupid hotel bed. The book is about the body and how other bodies and actions outside of ourselves make us change. It is about so many things: motherhood, ice-skating, non-traditional therapy, motorcycle lessons, childhood trauma and childhood power, monster trucks, the book editor's disbelief of the book, weird cab drivers, paraphrased Beastie Boys lyrics, Christmas. Everything goes together because it's all about time, and repetition of events, strings of actions, and "some kind of built-in spiritual longing."
Reading Amy Fusselman's writing is comforting, funny, true, and makes me cry. This book is written in fragments and the pieces all float together in a collage or like the seasons going by and sometimes the transitions are stark and you have to think more about it later. This book is very life-like. This book makes me want to write and it makes me want to live. I won't leave it in Ohio again, but if I did, I'd go back for it again, I really would.
Happily: A Personal History with Fairy Tales by Sabrina Orah Mark
Fairy tales are stitched to real life like the shadow is sewn to Peter Pan's foot. Sabrina Orah Mark utilizes the horror and magic of different fairy tales as a pebble path to follow and attach to to make her own telling of real life's horrors easier: a loved one's cancer diagnosis, the death of a grandmother, George Floyd's murder and the pandemic, raising two black Jewish sons in America, dealing with the complexity of being a stepmother to stepdaughters, interviewing for unattainable professor jobs, losing a plague doctor doll, taking care of a stepdaughter's tarantula. Each of these memoiristic topics gets their own fairy tale as its twin.
The chapters, short and sweet and prickly, work with these mirrors of storybook characters and real people. In the book's strangest moments, reality's description starts to blur into fantasy and dreams and magical objects that will make the spell of life go away. Writing the story down, Orah Mark is honest when she is afraid of her writing, when she is worried for the safety of her loved ones, when she does not understand how to go on. Like a splash of cold water during an anxiety attack, her mother's snarky dialogue chimes in throughout the book to whack us back into the comedy of life's shittiness: "Who the hell cares?"
As a fellow Jewish American, I felt really connected to this book's relation to Jewish culture and stories, such as the golem, the Passover plagues, and the chipped walls of painted fairy tales in the Holocaust museum. I think fairy tales relate to religion very much -- a book of stories to grasp onto when life doesn't make sense, to help us learn, to survive. Sabrina Orah Mark's imaginative writing style and honesty propel this book for me, far more than the entanglement of the tales. She knows how to pick out details that bring out authentic human experience, like describing a cinnamon dust that appeared after a high five between her and a security guard. I don't really understand this image, but it also felt true. In daily life, strange unexplained things are happening all around.
The original fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm are full of torture and tricks and death. Later on in history, the stories were sanitized and put through giant blinking Disney eyeballs for children's blissful sheltered consumption. I can tell Orah Mark is conflicted: wanting her children to have a childhood in a sheltered cloud, and also knowing they are surrounded by "ghost people." I know that Happily is dedicated to her sons, who are very present in this book. Maybe Orah Mark is teaching them – or maybe they are teaching her – the necessity of confronting the world's darkness, but also pointing out each strand of light (straw of gold, falling hair.)
Although sometimes I felt like Happily tried too hard to tie it all together neatly, lining up all the fictional and real characters in a row like a soccer game "good game" at the end of a chapter, I commend Sabrina Orah Mark for writing about what was plaguing her life. Writing about her life, alongside the fantastical plot lines and witches and Pinocchio, perhaps made her life feel more real.
"I used to think being a writer meant being a kind of guardian, a good guy. Maybe that was when I had enough of me to spare. Now I know better. It's about being dead and alive. An asylum and a danger. A rattle and a lullaby. Mother and un-mother. Saved and forgotten. A feral angel. A wing and a paw. Broken and sutured. I'm sorry. You're sorry. You hurt me. I fixed you. I lost you. You found me."
