Refilling the well with a nice, lighthearted murder
Happy New Year! I hope the final stretch of 2022 was good to you. I’m emerging from a mostly delicious holiday cocoon, somewhat irritated that it’s time to get back to waking up to alarms and doing work and being generally responsible for things, but mostly ready for it.
In mid-December, one of the workshops I lead ended, and the other two went on break until the New Year. My kids began their winter break on the 16th so I didn’t need to wake up to get anyone off to school. My latest novel is off of my plate and out on submission with editors, so any active work is in my agent’s court, not mine. I had, for the first time in recent memory, two full weeks with no work at all and very little by way of obligations of any kind, a chance to actually rest and recharge at a time when I needed it badly.
Usually downtime means camping out in my reading chair to devour a book or two (or three). Books are what feed me, and reading is what gives me that indulgent feeling of doing exactly what I want to be doing. Movies and TV shows aren’t so much my thing...I was going to say recently, but I think it’s been about ten years or so now that I’ve had a hard time finding shows and movies that hold my interest. I’m not sure why that is, because I acknowledge that there’s plenty of good stuff out there. We have no shortage of choice. But if I start to watch something and want to keep going, it’s usually British people baking, or I’m on the (literal) treadmill (the latest season of The Crown is exclusively for my runs, for example), or I’m quite sick. Otherwise I just get this itchy, irritated feeling like I’m wasting my time. I fully acknowledge that this is a me problem. It also makes it hilarious that I agreed to try my hand at screenwriting a few years ago by a director friend’s request. Guess how someone writing for film who doesn’t often watch movies went. Go on. Guess.
(Okay...a brief aside for exceptions, before folks start yelling at me in the comments. Things I watched and loved in recent years that come immediately to mind: Severance, El Ministerio del Tiempo, Fleabag, Game of Thrones until the final season which I watched anyway, because I kept hoping it would be good, Alone... As far as Alone goes, I guess put “survival shows where I just pretend that many of the participants aren’t likely white nationalists” on the same list as British people baking. I will always, always want to watch it. On the other hand, I’ve recently given up on White Lotus and Fleishman Is in Trouble ten minutes or less into the first episode of each, and I know lots of smart people who love them both. Which is to say that my habitual aversion to filmed media has nothing to do with quality. It isn’t a snobbery thing, but something irritating about my particular brain.)
So. My point, which I swear I have...
I had all of this time off without obligations, and I sat down in my reading chair on that first day off, and I could not focus for shit. No book felt right. So I treated myself like I was sick and tried to watch a movie. Specifically, I tried Knives Out, because I remembered folks on Twitter really liking it, and also I was curious about Glass Onion but have a thing about not wanting to skip ahead in a series. And you know what? Knives Out was exactly what I needed, and I had a great time watching it. Go figure. And then the next day I watched Glass Onion and had a great time with that, too. Weird, right? Then I remembered that when I’d been feeling particularly sad and shitty last month I’d watched the first season of Only Murders in the Building* a half an episode at a time while eating a quick lunch at my desk (gee, Cari, why were you so tired?) and found it sweet and funny and comforting.
Maybe it’s still true that I mostly like to watch TV when I’m sick, but the illness this time was simple exhaustion. By the time I led my final workshop of the year, I felt totally wrung out. Not just from teaching, and not just from writing and revising the novel that’s now out with editors (cross everything, please), and not just from parenting, and not just from surviving the past six years or so of one “unprecedented” situation after another...but all of it. I was just so fucking tired. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to snack. I wanted to watch lighthearted murder mysteries. And so I did. And it worked.
It’s my habit to turn to books to refuel, but this time it was those two movies on two consecutive days that did the trick. They reminded me of the winter break when I was in seventh grade. My grandfather gave me a stack of his Agatha Christie paperbacks and I read one a day. I loved them, but I never returned to them after that winter. I’m planning to correct that. I’ve already borrowed the audiobook of Murder on the Orient Express from the library, and I’m planning to do a bit of a Christie binge. I’m a big fan of Tana French’s books—specifically the Dublin Murder Squad series—and I love all of Kate Atkinson, including the Jackson Brodie books, so it’s not that I haven’t been reading mystery at all. But my experience of reading those paperback Christies was one of fun and adventure. The dangers in them didn’t hit close to home. Nobody died in a way that I could imagine happening to me. Now, mind you, I was thirteen when I read them and recall precisely nothing about those books. I won’t be surprised at all to have a very different experience this time around, at forty-nine, with more knowledge of all of the ways that the world can try to kill you.
If there are any other movies or shows that I’m missing that you think might fit the bill, please do let me know in the comments. I’m rested now, and ready to get back to work, but I’m not done with the idea of that type of playful mystery. It’s sparked something that I hope to carry into my next novel. More on that to come in another post.
Ease gently into the new year, my friends. I hope it’s a good one for us all.
*Remind me to tell you some other time about how nice Steve Martin was to my dog once.