Yum & Yuk

I recently finished The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer. It was intimate yet expansive, well-constructed and satisfying. Yes, the characters can be a little precious and precocious, but it was a great read, and by the end of the (not short) book, I was entirely trusting of where and how Wolitzer was leading me. Next I read "Me Before You," which I also found very readable. It's not as well constructed or complex as "The Interestings" but it was a great long weekend read.

Really thought-proviking, and I love the interview with her: "Hannah Price’s series, City of Brother Love, features portraits of men in Philadelphia captured just moments after they’d harassed her on the street."

Yes yes yes, a thousand times yes: The Insidious Power of Not-Quite-Harassment.

Image: “I Want Everything to Be Okay chronicles a year in McNinch’s goal to live a sober life. The 98 pages are filled with updates on her life: her interaction with roommates, friends, her cats, and her work. This is no 12-step tract, her life is as imperfect as everyone else’s. I Want Everything to Be Okay is this artist’s diary, with some days filled with dialog and others a landscape or simple sketch. I am not surprised that McNinch is revered as a founder of the autobiographical comic. Her style is impressive and unflinchingly honest, whether she is discussing her yearning for alcohol or her acupuncture treatment for depression.” Can't wait to read this. source.

A powerful, important personal essay: Coming Out Again: The Politics of Shame, Silence and Story: "[A]lthough I had offered a tight narrative arc -- from self-hatred to self-acceptance -- I had left out how often and easily I am rendered powerless and in danger just three blocks from my own home. I had left
out the part about how, when this happens, there remains a small but powerful voice inside me that insists that this is somehow my fault, that it's me and not the bigots who are wrong, that somehow my difference invites danger, that I am a burden to my partner and the people who love me. I had left out the part about how, even today, I still carry with me pieces of the lies that I learned very young. I know that isolation is the thing that keeps these lies in place and grants them power. I know that telling our stories, breaking that isolation, is the only way to transform that dynamic....we must tell our stories to change the minds of strangers who might do us harm, so that one day we'll be safe to walk down our streets, but that we must keep telling our stories, wholly and completely, to those who love us, so that they can hold and support us and sustain us today."

"Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don't believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason." - Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (I haven't read this book yet, but I'm really looking forward to it)