Love Wins: The Lovers and Lawyers Who Fought the Landmark Case for Marriage Equality - Debbie Cenziper, Jim Obergefell

There's a few things that I love the come together in Love Wins. 

1) The Law - it's not perfect but it's ours and in some respects it gives people who would otherwise be disenfranchised, power to make real and lasting change (but also see Dred Scott v. Sandford ugh). 

2) Narrative nonfiction - I love journalism that is told like a story. And this is done so well in podcasts but sometimes gets very very dry in book form. Not this one. This one was intriguing and moving and very well put together. 

3) Cincinnati - my hometown with all its warts and problems still feels special to me now that I am far away with no reason to return. 

4) LOVE - In 2004, I angrily stared at my absentee ballot from Ohio. Wondering how it was possible that a constitutional amendment proposing targeted discrimination was even considered. But it was. And it passed. The idea, the simple idea that you meet someone, you fall in love, and you decide you want to spend the rest of your life with someone - make a symbolic commitment - is really not that hard to understand. The fact that two people of the same sex want to do this is irrelevant to the inquiry. Or it should be. 

I didn't know John Arthur and James Obergefell's story. How they met, fell in love, and committed to each other over and over, until after the Windsor case, decided to get married, even in the midst of John's battle with ALS. Having read Every Note Played by Lisa Genova this year (read that review here), ALS is something I feel I'm more familiar with than ever before. Understanding the creeping devastation and loss it requires of its afflicted day after day. 

Most of all, the Obergefell v. Hodges is a love letter, a legacy, from James to John every day and into the annals of history. And that is beautiful.

Also, hat tip to narrator George Newbern who is an excellent audio book reader. 

4/5 Stars. 

This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America - Morgan Jerkins

This is the third nonfiction book I've read by a WOC this year (black woman to be specific) and I'm so glad to be hearing these new voices and growing in understanding of a life experience I am not closely familiar with. So This Will Be My Undoing was a deliberate pick by me to do better, to be more aware and to really just appreciate the story of someone who I might otherwise never had heard from.

I loved Morgan's essay which explored living in Harlem and what Harlem meant and how she saw it. I loved thinking about spaces outside of a white gaze. I am accustomed to looking at culture through my own white lens. My own (flawed and often unconscious) judgments are based on the white norms I have accepted and reinforced. The ways in which I expect people to ask, the conformity I expect them to accept is based on expectations that have their origin in white supremacy. 

Maybe the first step of allyship is to really listen to the stories of POC and specifically WOC and specifically black women. I'm there. I'm doing that part. And now it feels not quite enough. Like this is the baseline. This is the absolute minimum. Morgan talks about going to Japan as a middle school and then undergrad student. And during that time there she would walk into a store and the attentive sales people would help her and ask if she needed anything. This was such a mind blowing experience that she couldn't wait to see her own mother experience it as well. 

Wait, back up. Yep, that's what I wrote. This brilliant, beautiful, multi-lingual woman was feeling truly seen, by a sales clerk. Shit, America we are doing something dreadfully wrong if we can't even up our game to baseline dignity and respect for women of color by saying hello and asking if they need help when they enter our shops. Phoebe Robinson told a similar story about going to a Michael's store and standing at the framing counter waiting to be helped. (You can read my review of Phoebe's book, You Can't Touch My Hair here). She wasn't even acknowledged and several other customers walked in later and were helped in front of her. So, yes. This is a problem. This is a embarrassing basic problem. We need to not only see WOC, but we need to allow them to take up whatever space they need AND be fine with it.

4/5 Stars. 

Warlight - Michael Ondaatje

I've been sitting on this review all day because I felt a lot of things while reading Warlight that I wasn't sure I'd be able to succinctly describe. After a few days I'm more comfortable about how I felt about the book so here goes:

First off, I'd like to say that I listened to the audio version of this book and I believe this was a critical and exquisite mistake. Exquisite because the vocalist did a fantastic job and had a wonderful voice. Critical because the language of the novel, the dreamy quality and the trustworthiness of the narrator led to a really hard narrative to follow in audio format.

The story opens with our narrator, Nathaniel, thinking back upon a very formative period in his life during his early teen years when both of his parents left him and his sister, Rachel, in the care of strangers. Their father, an emotionally distant, blurry figure who, as an executive at Unilever has been called to relocate to the company's Singapore offices for a year. Their mother, Rose, has decided to accompany him for the year, sending the children to boarding school. Their London home is to be looked after by a boarder whom the children refer to as "The Moth." During the months after their father's departure and the start of school whereby their mother will leave, the children grow close to their mother, whom they have no real connection with, having lived with their grandparents during much of the war years.

Once they are ensconced at boarding school, both Nathaniel and Rachel determine they hate it and sneak out to return to their home. The Moth promptly visits the schools and has the children converted to daytime only students. It is once they are back home that Rachel discovers their mother's steamer trunk, carefully packed with all those Singapore gowns, tucked away in a corner of their basement. Both children feel bereft and abandoned. With no way to get in touch with their mother they are left to wonder at the true depths of their abandonment and their parents' deception.

Left to their own devices, Nathaniel and Rachel grow close to The Moth and his case of vaguely criminal friends who frequent the house. Nathaniel especially grows close to a once successful amateur underground boxer nicknamed The Pimlico Darter. While The Moth encourages Nathaniel to get his first real job, The Darter teaches Nathaniel about the back waterways and alleys of the Thames while they smuggle racing dogs of questionable provenance. Un-moored, Nathaniel strikes up a relationship with a girl whose real name he never knows and manages to become close to her while still keeping her at a distance.

And all of this was very interesting and Ondaatje's writing is really fantastic, but then... well the story changes and Nathaniel starts telling the story of his mother, for reasons I don't want to say in this review for risk of spoilers. And given the wonderful distance and mystery Ondaatje spends the first 1/3 of the book creating, the credibility of the knowledge of the last 2/3 is stretched and destroyed by what Nathaniel is able to share about his mother.

The novel is really 1/3 a telling of a child's story from a child's point of view, and 2/3 a telling of a child's story from an adult point of view. It brings up questions and vulnerabilities that are touching and deeply moving and asks us to look at our parents anew from the distance of hindsight and the earned wisdom of adulthood. But it doesn't undo the damage done and the hearts broken in accepting a new perspective.

So all this is to say there were things I really really loved about this book, but when it's all put together it left me wanting a more believable mechanism for getting to the heart of Rose's story without damaging Nathaniel's credibility.

3.5/5 Stars.

Ploughshares Winter 2018-2019 - Edited by Ladette Randolph and John Skoyles

The Winter 2018-2019 edition of Ploughshares really brought the short of short fiction. Most of the short stories are ten pages or less. And the poems in this one are interspersed. For only 221 pages, this one packs a lot of different feels. 

I've been doing this Ploughshares thing for a while now, so I'll stick to what was best, but know that every edition is solid and worth the time. 

What was the best of the best were the Emerging Writers Winners. While I enjoyed reading many of the stories and poems in the collection, it's these three that I return to again and again in my mind. Like running a new stone in between thumb and forefinger until it's worn smooth and I know the shape of it.

I'm not sure how the winners are deemed "emerging". For instance, in fiction, Anne de Marcken has been writing for quite some time. Her story, "Foil" she says took her twelve years to right. It's artistry is evident in the first sentence:

"My mother gives birth to me again and again, multiplying my body to outnumber the deaths she foresees, until I can do it myself and can no longer tell the difference between the first me and the many who follow."

I mean, what? The story is short but you have to stay with it - to feel it, again and again. Here's another which is a repeated theme and which is an example of the language I love here:

"My silence is lit by the stroboscopic flutter of an entire generation of moths clambering at a bare bulb. If I were a bare bulb, which I am, I would know what it feels like to be mistaken for the moon, to suffocate." 

The language is so strange but beautiful but not in a pretentious way that I found myself reading, re-reading and re-reading the paragraphs again and again. 

The same mood can be said for poetry winner Alycia Pirmohamed for her collection of poems that explore the second-generation distance between the origins of her ancestors and her own genetic make up. The poems are chock-full of metaphors that poetry judge Roger Reeves says are "at once embodied and cerebral, emotionally rigorous and intellectually arresting." I can't describe that better so I won't try. I'll just leave you with this phrase from "Ways of Looking":

"This mosque is a cut of apple-I mistake each slice for a mouth"

You can continue here after you're done puzzling on that one.

Lastly, the Nonfiction winner, Laura Price Steele's essay "These Bodies Will Undo Us" is such an open, honest reflection of her relationship following her partner's transition. This story has three things going on, the partner's transition, a hunting trip to Montana, and an ill dog. And for whatever reason it all just works. It's probably because of these arresting insights:

"It surprised me just how much of myself I had to cut away to avoid the subject, how my new tentative friendships seemed drained of the lifeblood they required to survive. The more I spoke about myself, the more misshapen my life became. Just saying that I had moved to the city where my husband found a job felt deeply dishonest, as if I was tapping into a long line of history that was not mine to claim."

4/5 Stars. 

A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of the Columbine Tragedy - Sue Klebold

I've been putting of writing this review. Reading A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of the Columbine Tragedy left me feeling pretty raw. 

In April 1999, I was well ensconced at my freshman year at college. I had graduated from an all-girls Catholic High School in Cincinnati. The fact that I had once been to Colorado to visit the US Air Force Academy is about as familiar as I was with Columbine, in that I knew it was also in Colorado. Like basically anyone else at the time (which seems quaint now, by the way), this kind of act seemed beyond imagination to me. How could something like this possibly happen? I have never been the kind of person hungry for macabre details. Honoring victims by hearing their names and reading their stories yet, but I don't want to know the details of their last moments. And I'm extremely uninterested in providing the perpetrators of such acts with a platform to spew their demented hatred.

But then this. This book. Which does nothing of the above except to lay open bare the fallout such an action has on the family left behind. I, like probably a lot of people at the time, gave barely any thought to the Klebold's except to assume they did something terribly wrong to raise and not recognize such a predator in their midst. But with age comes something like wisdom (if by wisdom, I mean that I actually realize I'm not quite as smart as I thought I was, and I get a lot of things wrong). 

So here I was, willing to accept that Sue Klebold may have something vital to say. And willing to listen because as the mother of a six year old boy, who will someday be a teenager, who will one day go to High School, who will hopefully someday leave that high school without having to fear for his life, or consider taking his own, or someone else's - I may learn something important.

And I did. Learn something important. Maybe not specifically about me per se, but about the depths of deception people go to hide pain and anger. About how the children you have are known and utterly unknown to you at the same time. I should have known this. A lesson from my own teenage years, about what I shared and what I hid. Something not unlike the carefully cultivated social media identities we all create. Glennon Doyle said in Love Warrior that she spent a lot of time sending out her "representative" to interact with the world, protecting her true self. My own representative got me through high school. Sometimes still gets me through awkward parent events. 

Dylan Klebold sent his representative out into the world, allowing only a journal and perhaps Eric Harris to know the depths of his despair. Certainly his parents were never aware. Only now, Sue Klebold realizes there were definite signs she missed - things she passed over as typical teenage mood swings. She reassured herself that everything was fine. And inside her boy, the child they referred to as their "Sunshine Boy" was dying. And in his place, a callous unfeeling person took root. A person who wanted to die, who cared so little about living, the manner of his death (who he took with him) meant nothing. 

That a mother would still grieve her child, even after such a hideous act, seems obvious. I am constantly telling my children that I love them no matter what. No matter how they act or what they do, to reassure them when they've lost control of themselves that my love can be an anchor to hold them in place or bring them back, help them fight against the currents. But it's not enough. Sue Klebold has told me it's not enough. Because she knows. And the price she paid (and many children paid) for that knowledge is unthinkable.

4/5 Stars.