For several years now, I’ve refused to buy hardcover books. I don’t like the added expense, of course, but mostly, I just don’t like the extra bulk and really don’t like how they feel in my hand: too much like textbooks or hymnals. I don’t need to be reminded of either when I’m trying to read something fun. As a result, I’m consistently a year or two behind everyone else with my reading, a (discount) price I’m willing to pay. David Sedaris has long […]
Spooky and beautiful and unprotected from the raw bloodiness of the world
Yolandi and Elfrieda are sisters raised in an isolated, stifling, patriarchal community of Russian Mennonite immigrants in rural Canada. Their parents buy Elf a forbidden piano to give her an outlet, and she pours everything into her music, leaving home at 17 to study in Oslo, eventually becoming a world-renowned concert pianist. But her life is weighed down by the crippling pain of depression, and she ends up in the hospital after yet another suicide attempt. In All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews, everyone […]
Do you want to kill yourself? Laura will listen!
Laura works at a suicide helpline called End of the Line. They’re supposed to offer comfort and support and listen to people who are depressed and contemplating suicide. They’re not necessarily supposed to talk people out of killing themselves, but they are supposed to offer them some positive options and words. Laura just realllly likes to hear people die. Like to the point where she basically talks people into killing themselves while she’s on the phone with them to hear them die. Laura keeps the […]
Suicide Is One Hell of a Drug
I have no idea who or what service recommended to me Abby Fabiaschi’s I Liked My Life and Jennifer Niven’s All the Bright Places. I had them both on hold at the library and both became available at the same time. Both books are also about suicide, so I have been spending a lot of time with the subject over the last 10 days. As someone who lost his father to suicide, I went through the same set of emotions that the principal characters in […]
What if she doesn’t want to remember?
You know how sometimes you keep trying to read a book, but you aren’t feeling it so you put it down indefinitely and then when you pick it up again, you can’t believe how much action there is and you just plow through the end as if you’d never put it down? Beachcombing for a Shipwrecked God was like that for it. It’s the first book I started reading in 2017, and one of the last that I finished. I don’t think I read a […]
She was the first beautiful thing I ever got stuck on.
Is it me, or is obsessive compulsive disorder having a bit of a moment? It could be me. I struggled with symptoms for 15 years without saying a word to anyone, not knowing it had a name. I’d heard of OCD, but just the pop culture version – obsessive hand-washing, obsessive cleanliness, and I didn’t have either of those problems. I finally realized that unbreakable routines, magical thinking, intrusive thoughts, motor tics, needing to do things an unusual number of times until they feel “right” […]