À la carte (June 30, 2024)
An offbeat novel I couldn't put down, a pleasantly eerie essay, a podcast on a troubling trend, a foot cream
An offbeat novel, if you like Elif Batuman & Sheila Heti’s Motherhood.
The third illness in four weeks is tearing through our household—it’s hitting me as I type. This time it started with my daughter rather than me, but as the one who is most often inclined to suck the green snot out of her nose, my demise was inevitable.
The one upside of being constantly sick with a small child is that it encourages us to slow down. In our case, that has meant a little less socializing and more time on the couch reading. This past week, I devoured Katya Apekina’s sophomore novel, Mother Doll, which follows The Deeper The Water, The Uglier The Fish, which I remember reading in LA during my last stint of fununemployment in 2019.
Notwithstanding its title, Mother Doll exists somewhat apart from the canon of motherhood lit that I am often touting here and on my Instagram. Yes, there is a pregnant narrator who becomes a mother. Yes, it features a matryoshka-like lineage of mothers spanning four generations. But these mothers are also daughters, and the concerns of daughterhood—what we inherit from our matrilineal lines, what we can forgive our mothers for—take up as much space as those of motherhood, if not more. Like the novel’s author, the protagonist Zhenia immigrated from Russia to the United States as a young child. Zhenia’s grandmother is dying across the country when Zhenia is contacted by a medium who professes to be channeling her grandmother’s mother from the afterlife. From there the novel veers into magical realism quite naturally, as the great-grandmother tells the story of her life as a young revolutionary in Russia who had to abandon her daughter. Apekina’s magical realism has a light touch. The presence of a dead interlocutor is comical more than self-serious, and brings exuberance to a novel that would be somewhat plodding and suffocating if it focused only on Zhenia, who is listless and lost pretty much until her baby arrives. But the novel’s grappling with the Janus face of motherhood—how we need to look back in order to look forward—has a poignancy that brought me to tears! As a mother of a daughter, I’m already bumping up against the aspects of motherhood that trigger me to reflect on aspects of daughterhood.
An essay on the preternatural
Before Mother Doll, I finally got around to reading Leslie Jamison’s 2019 essay collection, Make It Scream, Make It Burn. Despite being a self-proclaimed Jamison-head, I never got around to reading this compilation of previously published essays when it came out, I think because I was still on the library waiting list when the pandemic hit and then, well, the pandemic distracted me. Reading the collection now, in the wake of Jamison’s recent divorce memoir Splinters, which documents her split with the writer Charles Bock and initiation into single motherhood, many of the essays are now bittersweet (particularly the essay about becoming a stepmother to Bock’s daughter, whose intentional absence from Splinters I now find particularly throbbing). But I love Jamison for her Didion-esque reportage as well as her personal essays. An essay on young children with inexplicably specific “memories” of previous lives and the professionals who study them, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live Again (with its titular nod to Didion) is the perfect example of where Jamison shines—a peculiar topic, somewhat heartbreaking subjects, and her own innate curiosity:
“But I felt defensive of reincarnation from the start. It wasn’t that I necessarily believed in it. It was more that I’d grown deeply skeptical of skepticism itself. It seemed much easier to poke holes in things—people, programs, systems of belief—than to construct them, stand behind them, or at least take them seriously. That ready-made dismissiveness banished too much mystery and wonder.”
I don’t want to give too much more away, but the essay was originally published in Harper’s, under the title “Giving Up The Ghost,” which you can read here for free.
A podcast
I thoroughly enjoyed a recent episode of Anne Helen Petersen’s Culture Study podcast on the Sephora teens. I knew that the teens were hanging out at Sephora, but it was news to me that nine-year-olds now have … multi-step expensive skincare regimens? I appreciated AHP’s efforts to probe below the surface level explanations for this disturbing trend—social media and targeted advertising—and consider the broader erosion of childhood and spaces where children can play. I think if I didn’t have a daughter, I would be able to shrug off the fact that elementary schoolers are concerned about wrinkles as a vaguely troubling cultural moment, but as a mother, I wonder how I will explain my own skincare routine to my daughter, let alone my use of make-up. My husband keeps reminding me that I will need to talk speaking disparagingly of my appearance. The thought that my perfect daughter will have moments when she doesn’t feel beautiful is still too much to bear. But to have to confront that moment in perhaps seven, rather than twelve, years???? It is almost enough to make me want to move to Mars. Assuming there is no Instagram on Mars.
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A foot cream
It was a bad news week and in true late capitalism fashion, I will distract you from the seemingly downward trajectory of democracy with a footcare recommendation. Calluses on my feet have been the bane of my existence for years. I don’t know what it is about my pronation situation, but there are certain spots on my toes that are just impossible to keep smooth. Add a lot of barefoot working out on a yoga mat, walking in sandals, no time to get a pedicure, and my feet are often … not my finest asset. I’ve tried a lot of different products over the years, including the hyped Japanese “Baby Feet” chemical peel, which caused my feet to shed little pieces of skin all over the house (for weeks!) until they were silky smooth. My husband was incredibly freaked out (and grossed out) by the whole experience, and made me promise not to do it again while I was pregnant or breastfeeding (fair), and so I’ve been struggling to find a safer at-home remedy. After a deep dive on The Strategist, I’m trying a new tub of CeraVe, which I added to my Dermstore cart this week to reach a free shipping minimum. I will try to remember to report back, but so far, I’m a fan. It doesn’t leave my hands feeling gross, it absorbs quickly and doesn’t make my feet feel too goopy against the bed sheets, and there’s something about reaching into a tub that is appealing. Committing to moisturizing my feet every night before bed feels like a very tiny way to commit to taking care of myself as a new mom.