first complaint of 2022!
Unfortunately my brain won't let me write anything else until I address this directly, so I have to start by saying that my recent radio silence is the result of an episode of online harassment that has focused on this newsletter. Like most people who've "put themselves out there" online for a long time, I've dealt with this kind of thing periodically, and it's a sad commentary on the state of ... everything ... that dealing with this kind of thing periodically seems inevitable to me. It really shouldn't be, but it is, and all I can do is block, report, and move on. It's probably not a great idea to admit to having been affected by it, but every time I've sat down to write a newsletter this week, I've started and then deleted a few sentences and then given up. When I write anything, but especially when I write these emails, I don't consciously imagine my reader, and I'm always surprised when a friend mentions something she read about here. But I guess subconsciously I imagine these emails being read by people I trust, who at the very least mean me no harm. I mean, how else would I write them? Without that feeling of baseline safety, it turns out it's very hard to write. That fantasy takes a while to reconstruct.
I was struck by something that Ragen Chastain said in a recent interview with Anne Helen Petersen, about how she deals with trolls. "The conclusion I finally came to was that if trolls discover something that will stop me, then that’s exactly what they’ll do." Her activism is more objectively important to the world than my feeling free to write a newsletter describing my latest reading or my trip to the dentist or whatever, but I also think it's important, if only to me, not to let myself be stopped.
ANYWAY. That's just to say that this feels stilted and weird to me right now, but we must soldier on.
**
I went to the dentist this week! I had to get an old silver filling that had cracked replaced with a smooth new ceramic filling, which is exactly the kind of not-quite-urgent but still necessary thing I've been neglecting since March 2020. I made the decision recently to stop going to my old-school midtown dentist, who I love but who is semi-retired, and instead to seek out the bougiest young dentist I could find. When a friend described her dentist's office as being "like the Wing," I made an appointment as soon as I could. If, in your area, you can find a young female dentist with an office that looks like someone put dental equipment in a Dwell spread, I really can't recommend this minor lifestyle change highly enough. My basic ass brain, it turns out, requires nothing more than a decent Spotify playlist and earth tone geometric prints to perceive minor mouth surgery as basically a spa treatment. It also helped that this appointment was the first non-errand reason I'd left the house solo in more than two weeks. Ilya's winter "vacation" was prolonged by a few days because of an ear infection and our administrative failure to get him a flu shot, so leaving the house to go to the dentist was also a respite from 24/7 Ilya. I love Ilya, but he has been staying up til midnight lately demanding granola bars and repeated listens to the "flower girl" song from Encanto and enough is enough.
Anyway, I got lavish praise from my dentist for being a "good patient," which I am choosing to believe she doesn't say to everyone, and also got the specific sense of accomplishment that you only get from taking care of something mildly unpleasant but necessary. And also, during the five minutes while the novocaine took effect, I lay back in the chair and read The Pillow Friend by Lisa Tuttle.
Sara Kramer of NYRB classics recommended me this book, as well as another Lisa Tuttle that I haven't cracked yet. The premise of TPF was catnip to me immediately: a girl named Agnes Grey is given a doll by her ne'er do well aunt, her mother's twin sister, who tells her that the doll comes alive and tells her stories at night. As you might expect from that description, this book is very weird, in both expected and unexpected ways. It has some elements of horror and some elements of feminist allegory, like Angela Carter or early Margaret Atwood. There's also some tonal inconsistency that, in the context of the plot's reliance on slippage between "reality" and Agnes's perception, is sometimes just confusing. But on its simplest level it's a bildungsroman, even a kunstleroman, as Agnes grows up to become a writer, then a muse, then a creator of something more outlandish than a mere story (though maybe it is just a story, or a symbol for one.) There's also a lot of sex, as you'd expect in a book about a haunted doll that makes wishes come true. I think maybe if this book was republished today it wouldn't be considered "science fiction," because "literary fiction" is now allowed -- maybe even expected? -- to have some supernatural flourishes, unless it's "autofiction," the last bastion of straightforward realism. Even as recently as 1996 the rules about genre were so much more rigid.
This is my official "first book of 2022." I have resisted doing any tallying or accounting of 2021, though I've really enjoyed other people's tallies. I never remember to keep track of my reading, which luckily is now only a personal failing rather than a professional one. I had been enjoying letting my brain splay itself out and be soothed by the reassuring rhythms of cozy mysteries and thrillers toward the end of last year. But now I am ready to get a little bit more rigorous, I think, though I'm still having trouble with anything that isn't riveting. Anyway, I'm going to try to do a better job of keeping track. That is my one resolution. I really overloaded myself with new-me life projects circa my birthday and keeping up with those promises to myself is more than enough to keep me busy/guilty without adding anything else new to the mix.
Life continues, under sub-optimal conditions. With any luck no one will test positive next week, no one's school will close, my co-working space will reopen, and I will get back to work on my book. I think possibly I will also have two things I worked on over the Fall go up online next week, so that will give me the little burst of ego-validation that I count on in order to fuel the machine. I hope the same for you, or whatever your equivalent of those things are.