reviews

[REVIEW] In the Key of New York City: a memoir in essays by Rebecca McClanahan

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Red Hen Press, 2020

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REVIEW BY CATE HODOROWICZ

I’ve never lived in New York City, though I’ve always loved it from afar. Visits to friends in Brooklyn, a few work jaunts into Manhattan, a research trip one summer to the UN. The subway and sidewalks were always crowded, the department stores a wreck of frenzied humanity, and the streets in August reeked of garbage, sewage, sweat, relentless sunshine, and the peculiar humidity that rises from concrete. My young daughters once saw rats the size of large housecats running along the subway tracks, and in that same afternoon, they tasted Korean food for the first time, ran through rain puddles at Rockefeller Center, and asked the whys and hows of people who slept on park benches.

New York is a place of both/and if ever there was one. I’ve heard stories this March and April that suggest the same: emergency rooms overflow; not enough masks, gloves, or gowns for hospital workers; not enough respirators; not enough anything at the grocery store; friends and lovers and coworkers and strangers dying alone, alone, alone. Streets and shops closed down, people closed up in apartments. Yet at 7 pm, windows open and all the quarantined bang pots and pans to thank the front-line workers. When hospitals discharge a COVID patient, or when someone makes it off the respirator alive, music fills the hallways: Journey, The Beatles, Jay-Z, and Alicia Keys.

New York is the heart of the publishing industry, and this season—the rest of this year, really—is a terrible time to release a book: bookstores have closed except for online orders; authors can’t travel to promote their titles; it’s been said we’re heading into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. And some might say it’s an awful moment to publish a book about New York since this latest crisis will leave awful scars, and the New York in a book about bygone days will be unrecognizable, a place of the past. The book, those same critics might say, won’t do anything to help us come to terms with the New York of now.

I humbly disagree.

Rebecca McClanahan’s In the Key of New York City: A Memoir in Essays from Red Hen Press, offers a timeless portrait of New York’s contradictions, which is to say, it provides a salve to the upheaval of now and acts as a reminder of the city’s constancy throughout tribulations. The book hinges on what seems a familiar premise: a writer fulfills a dream when she moves to Manhattan in the late 1990s. But this story is different: the writer and her husband arrive in the city not as starry-eyed young adults, but as a middle-aged couple. They plan to stay for just two years, but they remain for eleven, only moving away when family needs require the change.

One might think McClanahan’s experience of New York is idyllic, or perhaps a deep love affair, given how long she stays. But it’s quite the opposite. McClanahan, “a long-married woman who spends her mornings with the Oxford English Dictionary, looking up words like squirrel,” chronicles the specific loneliness of living among millions on a tiny island. It’s not loneliness she enjoys: neighbors keep to themselves even as their most private sounds permeate the walls of McClanahan’s sublet; she and her husband struggle to find employment and friendship; and as a writer, her work keeps her mostly at home.

Perhaps because the glamor of youth has slipped from McClanahan, her narrator is reliable, reflective, and curious. As a result, this is a book without guile, conspicuous consumption, or name dropping. In the Key of New York City sings a song of loneliness that is also the song of middle age, a time when many of us realize that embracing seclusion, rather than fighting its pain, frees us to live more fully. McClanahan doesn’t come to this easily, however: “so be it—is [a phrase] I’ve never actually spoken aloud, but I’m trying to practice thinking it, in hopes of entering a state of acceptance about the daily and nightly occurrences that are out of my control. Which is to say, nearly everything.”

It takes years of struggle to combat her discomfort. In an effort to ease that grief, McClanahan notices the lives of those around her—she strikes up conversions with homeless people who live in the parks; she meditates on the lives of hospital workers and the working class. She revels in her next-door neighbor’s daily opera practice. Notices the sheen of pigeon feathers. Saves a squirrel in the days leading up to 9/11. McClanahan is quite aware of what she’s doing: “Even as my reasonable mind is having its say . . . my other self is leaving on its own journey.” Tenderness isn’t a word one usually associates with New York, but it’s because of this that McClanahan’s empathy resonates, even as the speaker is better with tenderness for others than tenderness for herself. In some ways, McClanahan’s speaker is like the city itself – engaged in a push-and-pull between a tough exterior and a soft inner core.

New York’s literary bones would appreciate this book’s structure, which mirrors McClanahan’s existence: larger, contemplative essays intersperse with brief, interstitial studies of people, moments, and objects, just as her long stretches alone are punctuated by walks in the park or rides on the subway. The first half of the book pulls the reader into a portrait of the city, but then come two deeply personal and painful essays—one about marriage, one about cancer—that wracked me more deeply than the two pieces about 9/11 and its wake. I wasn’t there when the towers fell; like most of the country, I watched from afar, stupefied and confused. I have, however, been deep into marriage trouble and a shattering health diagnosis and the honesty of those two essays brought me to tears this morning as I re-read them.

Personal reactions aside, the true physical and metaphorical center of the book, “Tears, Silence, Song,” unlocks the book’s preoccupation with music as a salve for pain. Yes, the kind of music that belongs to opera and Broadway, as well as McClanahan’s back story as a serious student of choral music, but also the music of words, which McClanahan plays to great effect throughout the book. In one of my favorites, “Sublet,” the cadence and sounds of prose become poetry:

“Enjoy for the moment, then let it go—the fiery carp, the brilliant day, the black-eyed children with the dimpled hands, the coins on the ginkgo trees swirling down, down. Our lives are sublets anyway, and too quickly gone at that. And what better place to live out our leases. Curb your dog, your dogma, love your neighbor, your neighbor’s dog. We’re at the peak of our lives. O Sole Wio [sic]. Catch and release.”

But McClanahan learns her most important lesson about music from a choral director in her childhood. When she sings a lament too sweetly, he tells her, “’The important thing to remember . . .  is that it is doloroso. Rachel is mourning. She is in pain. Don’t make it pretty.’”

This approach might be just the tonic New York needs. McClanahan’s essays make very little about any kind of hardship pretty. Instead, they give us the truth: the loneliness of sorrow is a shared condition. She asks,

“If we all voiced our deepest selves to one another, what would become of us? I imagine first a vibration, then a distant hum that approaches slowly, indistinctly, as each of our voices finds its pitch, its timbre, culminating in one unearthly, communal roar—all the world’s love, hate, terror, joy, and fear gather in momentum until our ancestors, sensing the vibration, rise from their graves and join in.”

Far be it from me to announce anything definitive about a place like New York that defies categories. But there is this: no matter where we live, we are all, in our own ways, students of loneliness and suffering. But we are also students of beauty and imagination. In the Key of New York City tells us that both songs, sung at the same time, define what it is to be human. To drag our hearts through yet another crisis. New York is just a foil, really. We’re all this lonely and alone. It’s just that we notice it more when we’re in a crowded place with no friends or family. Even so, McClanahan suggests, we can live well among strangers, in our imaginations, in the tiny sublets of our lives.

At the end of the years in her real sublet, McClanahan refuses to say Goodbye to all that. Now that New Yorkers are sequestered in their homes, terrified of the virus that has spread across its vast surfaces, there is an important strength in this book’s refusal to join the literary trend of abandoning New York, that dear glittering, lonely, cheek-by-jowl city. For if those who love it abandon it, who will be left to chronicle its glories and terrors?

In the Key of New York City was originally slated for May 1 publication; as I write this in early May, the world is full of uncertainty. No one is sure when or how we’ll be able to approach normalcy. Red Hen Press, the book’s publisher, delayed-release until September. By September, that month we remember as one of destruction, I hope fortune changes: that the city’s hospitals are less full and some life has returned to its avenues. I hope we all continue to beat those pots and pans until, as McClanahan says, the “ancestors … rise from their graves and join in.”

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CATE HODOROWICZ’S essays and reviews have appeared in The Georgia Review, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, The Gettysburg Review, The Rumpus,  Hippocampus, and elsewhere. Her work has earned a Pushcart Prize and notable mentions in Best American Essays.

[REVIEW] The Black Ghost by Alex Segura & Monica Gallagher

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comiXology Originals (2019)

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REVIEW BY JOHN VERCHER

If you had told me that I was going to love a new comic that was Lisbeth Salander meets The Spirit; that was a dash of Dick Tracy, a smattering of Stumptown, and a sprinkle of Alias; that had elements of Eisner and Rucka, a little bit of Luna Brothers, and even a hint of George R.R. Martin? I’d have laughed in your face and told you that sounded like a derivative mess. And I’d have been dead wrong. You, of course, would have been talking about the fantastic series, Black Ghost, written by Alex Segura and Monica Gallagher.

Instead of some seasonless word-and-picture potato salad made up of disparate elements that don’t belong together (raisins, anyone?), this collaboration from two gifted comic book veterans feels more like a comfortable homemade recipe where all the ingredients come together—the influences from great writers and artists of the past and present blending perfectly. Instead of copying their inspirations, they pay homage to them while creating something wholly unique and original.

Black Ghost follows the travails of Lara Dominguez (a Latina heroine who’s the lead in her own title? Don’t mind if I do!), a reporter/teacher/vigilante on the come up. We’re dropped into her story in medias res—and she’s immediately kicking ass. The writing from the get-go is crisp and economical, abandoning the exposition and introducing us immediately to our heroine who’s got heart and snark to spare.

Lara has been obsessed with tracking down a vigilante dubbed The Black Ghost—a modern-day version of Eisner’s The Spirit—and that singular focus has brought her dangerously close to losing her job, as she’s passed up the stories her boss actually wants her to work on. Adding to her compulsion for the Ghost is an Anonymous-type entity, Lone, who contacts her through her computer, giving her clues about criminal goings-on where the Ghost might appear—or where she might have a chance to hone her burgeoning fighting skills.

Segura seamlessly infuses his noir roots into the story—simmering beneath this drama, Lara is dealing with the unsolved murder of her brother, Tomas, a community organizer in Miami. It is the motivation behind her drive to bring other criminals to justice—but his death also triggered the contact from Lone. She is not oblivious to the coincidence, and the mystery deepens.

Issue #1 takes a George R.R. Martin-esque turn on the final page—that’s right! Someone you thought was indispensable gets Red Wedding-ed (no spoilers here)! The savvy of Segura and Gallagher’s writing chops make the event feel natural and not done simply for shock value. It’s a compelling end to a riveting first issue that manages to give us an origin story without talking down to the reader.

Issue #2 is where things get a little darker and a little grittier where Lara is concerned. There’s nothing more compelling than a character in trouble, and, man, Lara is in some shit of her own making. The second chapter dives deeper into Lara’s internal torment, and how she quiets it—or attempts to—with booze and other people’s warm beds. The Bendis/Alias influence is apparent here, but unlike Jessica Jones, Lara is hindered by her reliance on alcohol, not enhanced by it. It becomes quite clear in this issue that it is a kryptonite she can’t resist—as much as we want her to.

While she clears the cobwebs, Lara discovers that the mugging she saved her student from in the last issue is more complicated than she first suspected—a lot more so. If only she had time to deal with that instead of clinging to the last threads of her job before she’s fired. Did I mention Lone is getting a bit more aggressive in his encouragement of her vigilante activities, and that’s she having an increasingly difficult time with Tomas’s death and what it might mean?

This is to say that if you think chapter two slows down for you to catch your breath—think again. While Lara’s story gets more textured and layered, it only adds to the emotional heft and propels the narrative instead of turning it into a slog.

This is to say nothing of the art of George Kambadais and the coloring by Ellie Wright. The cartoonish style recalls the art present in the Luna brothers’ works (The Sword, Ultra, Girls), while the bright primary colors harken back to the era of Dick Tracy. While these styles might seem out of place in a noir-influenced comic that doesn’t shy away from profanity and violence, Kambadais renders facial expressions, body language, and action in a way that, in combination with Segura and Gallagher’s script, conveys the gravitas in every scene.

If the first two issues are any indication, comic fans are in for one hell of a series. I can’t wait to see what this team does next.

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JOHN VERCHER is a writer currently living in the Philadelphia area with his wife and two sons. He holds a Bachelor’s in English from the University of Pittsburgh and an MFA in Creative Writing from the Mountainview Master of Fine Arts program. His fiction has appeared on Akashic Books’ Mondays are Murder and Fri-SciFi. and he is a contributing writer for Cognoscenti, the thoughts and opinions page of WBUR Boston. Two of his essays published there on race, identity, and parenting were picked up by NPR, and he has appeared on WBUR’s Weekend Edition. His non-fiction has also appeared in Entropy Magazine. You can find him on his website www.johnvercherauthor.com and on Twitter at @jverch75.

[REVIEW] The Book of X by Sarah Rose Etter

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Two Dollar Radio, 2019

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REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

Sarah Rose Etter’s The Book of X is a strangely poetic, heartfelt, dark, and wonderfully creepy exploration of womanhood dipped in surrealism and wrapped in a bizarre love story where physicality plays a central role. Packed with writing that inhabits the interstitial place between horror, literary fiction, science fiction, and dark fantasy, The Book of X is a unique narrative that pushes against the boundaries of the genres it draws from while simultaneously carving a new space for itself in contemporary fiction.

Cassie, like her mother before her, was born with her stomach twisted in the shape of a knot. Despite the deformity, she spends a somewhat normal childhood with her parents and older brother on the family meat farm. She usually stays home with mom while her father and brother go to the farm to rip chunks of flesh from the earth to sell at the market. When Cassie starts going to school, her life is sometimes disrupted by people who discover her physical abnormality. Cassie grows up and learns that finding a boyfriend and making friends are no easy tasks when your body is considered grotesque by most people. After surviving school, she leaves home and moves to the city where she finds a desk job. While living in the city, Cassie meets a few men, but it never works out. Meanwhile, the knot in her abdomen starts causing her pain and she begins to visit various doctors in hopes of finding a solution. The struggles with her body seem to be a physical manifestation of the struggles she is forced to face in her new life. Her boss is abusive, the city is depressing, and her family is far from perfect. The meat from the farm brings less money every day and her parents’ aging becomes obvious to her. Finally, her father dies and that sends her back home. Her return to the farm, an experimental surgery, and a new man who enters Cassie’s life under less than ideal circumstances force her to reconsider her life as she learns to enjoy imperfect love and comes to terms with her identity and body. 

Etter created a unique world in The Book of X. Most of the narrative deals with everyday events like going to school, going to work, financial woes, a rough mother, and coping with rejection and depression. On the other hand, the story is infused with surreal elements?a store that sells men, meat farming, strange medical procedures?that somehow make perfect sense within the context of the story. Reality and weirdness inhabit the same spaces effortlessly and without clashing against each other. The result is a novel with a gloomy, depressive core that is also somehow hauntingly beautiful and wildly entertaining in its strangeness.

While this novel is unique and Etter’s voice is entirely her own, there were passages that reminded me of a variety of works, all of which are among my favorites. For example, the combination of sadness and strangeness brought to mind the novels of Alejandro Jodorowsky. Also, the book features short chapters made up entirely of dark imagery, strange visions, and nightmares that haunt Cassie. These passages are strong enough to cause discomfort in the reader. Also, they reminded me of the bizarre sense of discomfort and fascination I always feel while watching Begotten, an American experimental film written, produced, edited, and directed by E. Elias Merhige that has no dialogue and is entirely made up of dark, gruesome, religious, disturbing imagery:  

“He opens the lid wider. More light creeps into the box, and I can see bodies slithering beneath the water, slick, scaled. Suddenly, a small face comes into view beneath the surface: two eyes, strange nose, a mouth.”

While the darkness that permeates The Book of X is one of its most powerful elements, the narrative is also infused with poetry that comes at the reader unexpectedly, kind of like finding a gem while looking for lost papers in a dumpster. That said, the poetry is also imbued with an unrelenting melancholy that crawls into your chest and refuses to let go, settling between your ribs and camping out for a few days: 

“My throat is so full of love and sorrow that no more words come out. I can’t breathe and I know nothing, looking into the heart of the future, the relentless oncoming of death.”

Etter is a talented storyteller and The Book of X is proof of that. This is a book that is many things at once. On the surface, it is a narrative that explores a disfigured woman’s life and how cruelty and adverse reactions to those who are different are at the core of humanity. However, just under the surface, it is a sorrowful story about a lonely woman whose biggest wishes are to achieve some degree of normalcy in a world that has shown her how ugly normal can be and a look at the ways in which our nature as social animals drives us to relentlessly pursue companionship even when doing so repeatedly leads to suffering and rejection.

“In the afternoon, I read a book on the couch. I can barely catch the sentences, I can only imagine Henry’s lips, the history of the entire world in a kiss various genealogies of flowers blooming each time our mouths touched, how first I smelled lilac, then rose, then hyacinth, wet from the garden.”

The Book of X shines because it brilliantly enters into multiple conversations with various genres and shows how writers can use elements from whichever genre they please while respecting the rules of none of them. Etter’s many conversations, and the way she creates something entirely new, effortlessly bridge the gap between bizarro fiction, surrealism, horror, literary fiction, and noir without ever adopting any of their limitations. Furthermore, all of it happens while she creates a delightful dark and brutally honest narrative that shows what it means to be a woman in the world and that explores the ways in which what we are is brutally and/or tenderly shaped by the way others perceive us. In a way, this is a book created to expand the canon of what can be considered feminist literature, but it is also a celebration of storytelling that proves making up your own rules is sometimes the best way to create something unique and memorable.   

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GABINO IGLESIAS is a writer, journalist and book reviewer living in Austin, Texas. He is the author of Zero Saints and Coyote Songs. He is the book review editor for PANK Magazine and a columnist at LitReactor. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

[TINY REVIEWS] Esteban Rodríguez on Cruz/Randall/Glasglow

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WORDS BY ESTEBAN RODRÍGUEZ

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Dregs by Cynthia Cruz (Four Way Books)

In her fifth collection, Cynthia Cruz’s Dregs explores the remnants of human destruction and how one must navigate the maze of social ambiguity associated with the collapse of everyday structures. Cities are besieged, winters reign and weep inside the world’s inhabitants, and the speaker, absorbed in this half-lucid dream of longing and death, enters, page after page, an array of abandoned settings, searching for meaning where there appears to be none. With a concise, lyrical, and surreal poetic style, Dregs reads as a kind of post-apocalyptic catalog of how we’ve been “Forever changed // By the sickening poverty / Of sorrow.” Just over fifty pages, Dregs is a relatively quick read, but the images are haunting, and with death lingering at the end of every poem, Cruz is sure to leave you pondering your own existence long after you’ve put the book down.

 

Refuse by Julian Randall (University of Pittsburgh Press)

Winner of the 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, Julian Randall’s Refuse explores identity, binaries, masculinity, sexuality, family, and the politics and social constructs that govern our relationship with ourselves and others. These poems don’t attempt to sugarcoat its themes and subjects, but they don’t sacrifice lyricism, emotion, and a much needed urgency at the expense of chipping away at a greater truth. Additionally, Randall captures moments that become meditative explorations of what it means be black (and biracial) within the frame of societal expectations. For example, the poem “Fright Night Lights #20” details a football teammate’s pectoral tear while bench pressing. The speaker helps his teammate to the office, but while at the office, as the staff studies them, he begins to fear the “slow guillotine   the brief blade / of a white woman’s smile” and how quickly that gaze can become something both distressing and dangerous. The collection is bold and unapologetic, a debut that shows Randall’s promising career as a poet and a curator of the issues that deserve to be confronted and revealed to a wider audience.

deciduous qween by Matty Layne Glasglow (Red Hen Press)

Selected by Richard Blanco as the winner of the 2018 Benjamin Saltman Award, Matty Lane Glasglow’s deciduous qween is a vibrant collection that examines the queer world around us and how environments influence and shape our understanding of identity, sexuality, and of the perceptions we have of our bodies and character. In many of the poems, Glasglow takes small moments from the past and meditates on their importance in the present. In “deciduous qween, II,” for example, the speaker reflects on his first performance “prancing around [the] living room / in a Mickey Mouse onesie,” and through lyrical musings on that event, is able to accept who they always knew they were:

That afternoon, I felt sparkling silver gleam

sprout from my skull like all my bones were

precious metal, & I just wanted to let them

shine, to let anyone hold my body in the light

so I could look like I was worth something.

deciduous qween delves deep into this question of worth, the value of knowing who we are and who we want to be. To quote Eduardo C. Corral, “Vulnerability, brashness, grief, and astonishment leap off the page,” and there is no doubt that you too will find yourself within the pages of this book, and with the same glamor, glory, and glitter and make these poems important and memorable, you’ll have no choice but to “Let your crown shine.”

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Esteban Rodríguez is the author of Dusk & Dust, forthcoming from Hub City Press (September 2019). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, The Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Puerto del Sol, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He lives with his family and teaches in Austin, Texas.

[TINY REVIEWS] Esteban Rodriguez on feast gently by G.C. Waldrep, American Radiance by Luisa Muradyan, and Holy Moly Carry Me by Erika Meitner

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When Gabino Iglesias approached me with the idea to write a poetry column for PANK, there was absolutely no doubt that I was on board. Immediately, I sorted through the pile of books I was reading, picked three and began writing. My aim here, and of the column as a whole, is not to provide traditional reviews, but rather short overviews that will hopefully engage future readers to poetry collections they might enjoy. I won’t guarantee that the collections chosen will always be recent (published within the past year or so), since poetry and certain books are, after all (and excuse the cliché here) timeless. Nevertheless, for this first installment, I chose three fairly recent collections that embody today’s social, political, and spiritual landscape. They have cemented their place in the literary world not only by being awarded the William Carlos Williams Award, or the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, or the National Jewish Book Award in Poetry, but by being books that one can return to, as I often found myself doing when writing about them. Let’s hope you find as much enjoyment in these works as I know I did. Cheers!

feast gently by G.C. Waldrep (Tupelo Press)

In his sixth collection, G.C. Waldrep explores the tensions and harmonies between the body and spirit, presenting poems that are both beautiful and devastatingly urgent. Like his previous collections, Waldrep interweaves the universal with the personal, writing in a manner that is philosophical, spiritual, and conversational all at once. The seventh anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan provides a meditation on language and its shortcomings. A real-life funeral expands on the role chance plays in one’s death, and how God reveals secrets we are only briefly privy to. Other poems read like fables (“To the Embalmers” immediately comes to mind), and we are left witnessing the tragedies and daily miracles of the world feast gently so skillfully depicts. Waldrep’s poetry is at times demanding, but if given the right amount of care and attention, you’ll find that you are all the better, and wiser, for it.

 

American Radiance by Luisa Muradyan (University of Nebraska Press)

Winner of the 2017 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Luisa Muradyan’s American Radiance reflects the complexities of the immigrant experience, and, through humor, pop culture allusions, and lyrical playfulness, highlights the exodus from one’s homeland and what it means to assimilate in America. Muradyan’s poems are not only concise, but funny, drawing on a plethora of figures (Prince, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Macho Man Randy Savage) that guide us through moments that are nostalgic, bittersweet, and at times utterly heartbreaking. Muradyan’s juxtapositions are clever and surprising, and with poems like “We Were Cosmonauts” (which narrates the speaker’s journey from Moscow to the U.S., while drawing comparisons to a game of Tetris), we see her poetic range, and see how moving a collection can be when it combines humor, history, folklore, and experiences so many can relate to.

Holy Moly Carry Me by Erika Meitner (BOA Editions, Ltd.)

In her fifth collection, Erika Meitner wrestles with the anxieties of modern-day suburbia. Holy Moly Carry Me is an outstanding and relevant collection that never shies away from exposing the tensions one faces in America, detailing, for example, what it means to be a mother raising a white son and black son in today’s political climate, or what it means to live in a region of the U.S. (Appalachia) not fully understood by others. Meitner has the ability to use seemingly unremarkable moments, such as a trip to the Dollar General, to examine relationships, identity, gun violence, teacher salaries, the middle class, poverty, and the responsibility to ponder these questions from a place of relative privilege. This collection is a testament that the mundane isn’t ever truly mundane, and that when it comes to our societal structures and the way in which they influence our behavior, there is always room to explore the truths that lie beneath the surface.

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Esteban Rodríguez is the author of Dusk & Dust, forthcoming from Hub City Press (September 2019). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, The Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Puerto del Sol, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He lives with his family and teaches in Austin, Texas.

[REVIEW] Animals Eat Each Other by Elle Nash

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(Dzanc Books, 2018)

REVIEW BY MANDY SHUNNARAH

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Frankie, a young mother. Matt, a Satanist tattoo artist. And a girl with no name but the one they give her: Lilith.

In mythology, Lilith is a she-monster, a demon in the night, a wanton woman on a mission to seduce men, and a stealer of babies when she’s not giving birth to ghostly children of her own. Yet, in folk Judaism, Lilith is Adam’s first wife––before Eve was fashioned from Adam’s rib––who left him after rejecting the tight trappings of obedience. She was not created from Adam, but as his equal.

Thus sets the stage for Elle Nash’s debut novel, Animals Eat Each Other, fresh off the press at Dzanc Books. The nameless protagonist accepts the role of third wheel in a friction-filled three-way relationship with Frankie and her boyfriend Matt. Her presence in the relationship strains Matt and Frankie in ways they thought they were able to endure, but the jealousy and manic infatuation they each feel for Lilith in turns is a danger to all involved.

It would be too simplistic an explanation to say the protagonist doesn’t love herself, though there is a reason why she so willingly gives up her own name––one the reader never learns––and readily adopts the name Frankie and Matt give her, taking on the persona of Lilith as if embodying the name and letting the name fill her to its edges like water fills a tub. She physically becomes this person they want her to be. Lilith loses herself, or what little self she is allowed to develop between her emotionally absent mother and Matt and Frankie’s predation on her. In her effort to fit into a family unit, she succumbs to their ever-changing whims and adapts her personality to please them.

As I read the novel, it occurred to me that how you interpret Animals Eat Each Other says more about you as the reader than about the book itself. The case can be made that Lilith brings her troubles upon herself (through her pursuit of sexually available but emotionally unavailable male partners, through her pursuit of emotionally available female partners that she herself is emotionally unavailable with, through her copious drug and alcohol use and unwillingness to consider a future beyond the next instant gratification) but to follow that line of questioning is to neglect to ask why Matt and Frankie manipulate her and prey on her vulnerability.

They shame Lilith for being intelligent and graduating high school with a 4.0 GPA. Frankie cajoles her into putting on a dog collar and walking around Walmart while Frankie yanks the leash. Matt convinces her to let him give her an at-home, freehand tattoo even though we’re made to believe his skills (much less the cleanliness of his equipment) are subpar. Despite them demanding her attention and body and time, they impose rigid rules on their sex and family life to keep her at bay. They are bewildered and angered by her attempts to draw closer.

Because the novel is from Lilith’s perspective, the reader might wonder why she does what she does, appearing on the surface to court trouble and bring the ill she endures upon herself, when in fact it’s Matt and Frankie whose forces are acted upon her. They are the ones owing an explanation and who should be called upon to answer for themselves. However, that would imply logic to their actions and abuse––whether emotional or otherwise––so rarely follows an objectively logical thought pattern.

The crux is that Lilith is self-aware enough to know that she can do better than Matt, but in her desperate need for acceptance and to be a part of a family unit, she’s willing to accept his mediocrity and even finds the idea of being able to woo him away from Frankie thrilling. Like many women whom our patriarchal society has led to believe are incomplete without the establishment or pursuit of a heterosexual romantic relationship, she is pressured to accepted this man’s mediocrity and is expected to suppress herself to be with him. As Lilith learns, if you don’t know who you are yet, you can be anyone. But that leaves you susceptible to being molded to fit forms you don’t want to fill.

Lilith knows when she’s been made into a caricature of herself for Matt and Frankie’s pleasure, like when she’s faking orgasms and when she’s pretending to be interested in Matt’s discussions of Satanism just to be the sole recipient of his attention for a few moments. Lilith goes along with what Matt and Frankie want and she knows they’re using her and manipulating her, but she doesn’t seem to mind––even though she’s conscious of how wrong their treatment of her is. It makes the reader wonder, what’s she getting out of this? Is avoiding figuring out her future and making decisions for herself really worth all this? How much of herself is she willing to give up?

Lilith’s relationships with other people––whether sexual or platonic––are often transactional, focused on what she can get from them or what they can do for her. Like Patrick, who Lilith uses to gain information on Matt, looking for vulnerabilities in their relationship that she can exploit to lure him away from Frankie. And Sam, Lilith’s boss, who she only wants when she needs sex or attention.

Lilith exploits the other people in her life yet with Matt and Francis she’s caught in her own trap. When she’s manipulating others, Lilith carries an air of being “of the people and above the people” simultaneously––a braggadocio that comes from being smart enough to lie with ease while not being afraid embark on a new sexual conquest as a means of elevating herself above her friends, even if the conquest is not one she cares about objectively in the absence of the thrill of the chase.

In the end, Lilith is dealt a taste of her own medicine. Having isolated herself from nearly everyone who cared for her, she’s left without a support system or plan for the future when Frankie brutally dumps Lilith on the couple’s behalf and forces Matt to go along with it or risk losing Frankie and their child.

While this is a fitting ending, the karmic revenge isn’t as satisfying as one might anticipate. Not because Nash’s writing doesn’t do the scene justice––it does––but because it shows that no one wins when we’re not honest with ourselves and about ourselves. No one wins when a woman puts an abusive man at the center of her life, especially at the demise of nearly all others in her circle. To blame Lilith as the sole cause of the novel’s turmoil is to exonerate the men who are not merely complacent in the destruction of these relationships (between friends as well as romantic partners) but enthusiastic instigators of the drama.

There is nary a character without fault, but our protagonist’s failure to be above reproach should not make her the only party in need of absolution. Lilith is not a witch to be burned at the stake; she’s a pawn in patriarchy’s game that shames women for their voracious sexual appetites while rewarding or ignoring men’s.

Unlike the protagonists in most novels, Lilith hardly changes throughout the book, but by the end, you get the sense that it’s possible she might:

Maybe I was the wrong type of woman, the type that did not deserve to be treated with such tenderness but with the full force of sexualized violence, or a violence that men reserved for other men. I enjoyed so much of the choking, the roughness between us, the bending myself to please him, but also considered that I did not like myself. I could not decide if the two situations, my hate for myself and my desire for pain, were related. To be equal with others you have to add or subtract from yourself, and I found myself unable to do either.

Like many situations that arise as a result of inhabiting a woman’s body, she finds that regardless of what she chooses or if she’s unable to choose, she’s trapped in the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” dichotomy.

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Mandy Shunnarah is an Alabama-born writer now living in Columbus, Ohio. Her essays, poems, and book reviews have been published in or are forthcoming from The Citron Review, Barely South Review, Entropy Magazine, Southern Women’s Review, The Missing Slate, New Southerner Magazine, and Deep South Magazine. Read more on her website offthebeatenshelf.com.

[REVIEW] Against Memoir by Michelle Tea

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(Feminist Press, 2018)

REVIEW BY MANDY SHUNNARAH

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Editor’s note:

Mandy asked to have these notes published with the review. They are crucial to understanding the text and the review, so I decided to have them before the piece:
The term “womyn” is used to describe second-wave TERFs, or trans-exclusionary radical feminists, who are cisgender and primarily white.
The term “womxn” is used to describe intersectional feminists who accept and/or experience gender fluidity and do not subscribe to the gender binary.
When the terms “radical feminist” and “radical feminism” are used, it is not a nod to or endorsement of TERFs, but rather feminists that are often deemed too unpalatable, too violent, or “too much” to capture the attention of the mainstream feminist movement.

Michelle Tea is not one to mince words. In her latest essay collection, Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions and Criticisms she tells you exactly what you’re getting and they come in dedicated sections on Art & Music, Love & Queerness, and Writing & Life. It is, arguably, this kind of directness that the modern third-wave feminist movement is sometimes lacking, to its detriment.

Against Memoir is a blend of memoir, journalism, and social anthropology. Tea has an insatiable curiosity about people who go largely ignored in the mainstream. Her book discusses transphobia at the lesbian haven Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, contains a eulogy for radical feminist and would-be Warhol murderer Valerie Solanas and a tribute to the lesbian biker gang HAGS, as well as the challenges of being a queer parent and trying to have a baby via fertility treatments in a system intended for straight people. The essays don’t shy away from topics like first loves, prostitution, drug use, the struggle of getting sober, dysfunctional parents, sexual assault, adolescent sex, alcoholism, summers spent getting fired from first one job then another, and finding the right shade of hair dye after several unfortunate attempts. Against Memoir is a memoir of a feral childhood and a life spent in queer counterculture doing damn well what she pleased.

Tea has been giving voice to these populations whom popular feminism has often left behind long before it was popular to do so. She’s been writing since 1998 with the publication of her first book, a novel titled The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America. In total, she’s published 14 books including Against Memoir and edited four anthologies.  She’s currently the Amethyst Editions editor at Feminist Press.

Tea embraces a kind of radical feminism that, despite our progress, many are afraid to touch. Hers isn’t the rah-rah, feel-good, commodified feminism that’s easily marketed and sold. This is the feminism of sex workers and butch dyke biker gangs and womxn who are not afraid to forcibly remove men from the streets, responding to patriarchal violence with violent reparations of their own. This feminism isn’t cute. It doesn’t look good mass-produced and printed on a t-shirt. This is the feminism the patriarchy fears most; the feminism of womxn who were ahead of their time.

There’s nothing “cute” about this necessary feminism or the people it serves––they’re not the underserved population that the general public generally wants to rally behind. I imagine people getting a mailer with their pictures and pre-printed address stickers and their stories, particularly those of sex work and drug use, not garnering empathy even from those who would self-identify as charitable––and dare I say feminist––people. And this is precisely why Michelle Tea and the people she loves who appear in these essays occupy the fringes of society. Not because there’s something wrong with them, but because society at large doesn’t know what to do with people who reject convention, choosing instead to live life on their own terms outside of patriarchal norms, and thrive in the underground.

All too often, feminism is sugarcoated and made palatable to the masses. This in itself is a system of oppression because it appeals to the prejudices of the day and pushes only as far as the more acceptable forms of discrimination allow. With the inevitable byproduct of having the most polarizing members of the movement forced to wait in the wings, this makes for slow progress.

In the essay “HAGS In Your Face,” Tea describes the biker gang womxn as “the deepest, wildest, truest feminist they frightened other feminists, so feminist they could shit-talk the movement and write it off as trifling because they were living the most hardcore feminist lives that only someone like Valerie Solanas would have recognized and understood. And me. I understood too.”

In the same way Tea’s feminism lacks candy coating, so does her writing style. It’s clear and direct; it is without fluff and doesn’t bother with poetry. Her writing is unabashedly colloquial and makes radical feminism accessible without compromising its steadfastness.

Against Memoir boils down to an exploration silencing: who is given a platform for their voice, both inside and outside of the movement; whose voice is uplifted and represented; and who is palatable enough to garner grassroots support and inspire new feminist recruits. I don’t get the impression Tea stakes her feminism on her ability (or desire) to win people over. Her feminism is hard-won––something she gained through the trials and tribulations of lived experience––and the acceptance of her radical feminism into mainstream feminism should not hinge on the whims of others who know nothing of the particular oppression to which she bears witness.

Likewise, Against Memoir is about representation: who has it, who needs it, and who deserves more of it. The groups where Tea found herself and her feminism, the groups about which she writes, and the community she’s helped foster in these fringes fit comfortably in the last slot. And that’s what makes Michelle Tea’s work essential––in a time when “feminist” is a buzzword, her words are a bellwether.

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Mandy Shunnarah is an Alabama-born who now calls Columbus, Ohio home. Her essays and book reviews have been published in Entropy Magazine, The Citron Review, Barely South Review, The Missing Slate, PANK Magazine, New Southerner Magazine, and Deep South Magazine. Her poems are forthcoming in Southern Women’s Review and Heavy Feather Review. Read more on her book blog offthebeatenshelf.com.

[REVIEW] Of This New World by Allegra Hyde

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(University Of Iowa Press, 2016)

REVIEW BY TIMOTHY DeLIZZA

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Allegra Hyde’s debut short story collection Of This New World is one of those rare collections that, despite not being interconnected, manages to cumulatively add up to far more than the sum of its parts.

Each piece is looking at humankind’s centuries long quest for the creation of a utopian communities, large and small, and a compassionate look at how our inherently flawed nature prevents us from sticking the landing in any of these attempts.

You don’t think of it often, but this utopian urge is really an ever-present trait that is under-discussed as an innate urge, and which is better displayed through disparate stories: from creations myths to the shakers to now to colonies on Mars.

Typically in Hyde’s collection– as in life – a male egotist visionary with rigid views, a belief inspiring belief that if his way is followed it will work this time. Others then get caught up in this idea and develop collective blindspots. My favorite in the collection, Shark Fishing, follows an eco-society on an island in The Bahamas founded by one such visionary ex-military man turned idealist. The resulting attempt exactly captures both the earnestness and cynicism that goes into study-abroad “service trips.”

In fact, as I read, a long forgotten memory resurfaced from high school — I couldn’t have been more than fifteen, maybe younger — but I set about trying to write a manifesto for the creation of a Utopian society. I wish I could find it now, but I recall it was full of incredibly poorly thought out and scattered ideas.?? To name a few: there would be no central government at all, just local (town level) organizing boards and every person would be required to have a gun so that if a foreign country tried to invade they’d need to go door to door — there was no head to be cut off but the protection would be purely defensive because there were no standing armies. Also, most of childhood would be spent learning art or classes purely of students choosing, sometimes taught by other children just a few years old. Like I said, these were terrible ideas. I named the whole thing after a woman I barely knew but had a crush on. This woman, mind you, wasn’t even particularly political, and would have most certainly and wisely disagreed with all its contents. I never showed the manifesto to anyone and abandoned the project when I couldn’t figure out who, in my new system, would take on the job of sanitation worker (my epitome of a lousy job at the time).

The writing in the collection also provides a masterclass in realized moments: A haggard Vet in a Santa hat wanting to get out of a conversation, using the pretext of hearing a small ruckus behind him to leave a conversation and never come back. A former friend is met, surrounded by a row of her ex-boyfriends “each an unknown upgrade of the next” who she has managed to stay friends with and who that hang around for the rest of the story like a Greek chorus as the plot explores the tight, near ideal bond of teenage female friendship and the pains of the bond’s dissolution at adulthood.

All these touches happen without losing sight of the main theme: that so fixed is the idea of utopia in our bones that we keep searching in poorly considered ways, with often well-intended (at least to start) motives and that those brief communities are almost always doomed. This unifying idea for a collection really interconnects and reinforces itself much more deeply than collections with mere reoccurring characters or localities.

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Timothy DeLizza lives in Baltimore, MD. During daytime hours, he’s an energy attorney for the government. His novella ‘Jerry (from Accounting)’ was published by Amazon.com‘s Day One imprint. His work can be found here: http://www.timothy-delizza.com/

[REVIEW] Trench Town Rock by Kamau Brathwaite

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Lost Roads Publishers, 1994

REVIEWED BY DEBORAH TAFFA

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In “Trench Town Rock,” Kamau Brathwaite accounts for the broken third, people who live out a violent inheritance in a world where the criminals are no longer discernible from the officials who are assigned to stop them. The title is a nod to Bob Marley, as well as the Jamaican neighborhood where both the author and the singer spent time formulating their messages. In an interview Marley once said, “There is America, there is Russia, there is Rasta.” The statement forces the reader to look beyond everyday power structures. What exists in this third state? How is society evolving in the forgotten corners of the globe? Rastafarians are a minority with a weak political voice; their strongest avenue is art. Like Marley, Brathwaite reminds us that the artistic voice has the imperative in an otherwise broken society. Brathwaite embodies the harsh reality of his culture with unconventional strategies that make the reader feel his experience viscerally—jammed words, run-on lines, misspellings, and varied font sizes—to create louder and softer sounds. He uses myriad sources from the world he portrays: news clippings, radio transcripts, and West African mythology. He mixes and matches his indictment to show us the disintegrating state of postcolonial Jamaica.

Brathwaite awakens the reader to the dangers of life in Jamaica from the opening page. The narrator is asleep when a murder takes place in his apartment complex. The reader understands quickly what is at stake, feels it in his body through the use of telling action, font size, and unconventional spelling. Brathwaite brings us into his bedroom and we are “aweakened by gunshatt.” We hear the Jamaican voice in our head, feel his fear as he fumbles “into the dark with its various glints & glows: mosquito, very distant cockcrow, sound system drum, the tumbrel of a passing engine.” Sound is mixed together with darkness and suddenly, without punctuation, we launch into “TWO SHATTS” and the text grows bold and large to replicate the startling sound of a gun fired. When the police arrive they scurry in like insects, the line that describes them running on “with salaams & slams & semi-automatic acks, revolvers slung from belts and holsters or tucked like asps into their waist-line trousers; & evvabody walkin fass fass fass . . . “The language mimics the emotion and action. The message he wants to convey—busy movement around the scene of the crime—enters the reader’s vision with a scurrying transience. His stylistic conveyance continues throughout the book without getting tired because of the variety of information he presents.

Relentless images involving unsolved crimes and violence carry the reader forward. There is a dead man with “beautiful long hair curled around his body making snakes like dance/like dancing . . .” The snakes sway menacingly and remind us of a time when the people on this island were considered no better than animals. He describes a dead policeman by first describing him as a “big, dark, meaty guy” before reversing to negate X his presence in the world. “But I can’t tell you what he looked like: features, the human face, I mean: both eyes shot out/stabbed in, his nose unhinged, a huge gash in the right side of the throat, his tongue there black & smooth . . .” He cancels the man’s presence in the world with the words “can’t tell” before the passage folds back towards the police: “yet all his skin & flesh still firm & natural like if he flash & living still & not a ant or insect (here he uses a carefully planned line break) coming even near his blood & no one say a prayer . . .” The margins on this page, combined with the line break and indentation, imply that the police are the insects. Brathwaite makes use of a line break to convey dual meanings: the police return as insects, yes, but there are also actual insects crawling all over the crime scene, insects taking advantage of what has been spilled. Insects steal what is wanted and desired even as the body is still warm.

The way the society turns on itself, the way people betray each other for small gains is examined in the second half of the book. A woman gets her arm chopped off for her bracelet, people dig around dead bodies in a car crash for shoes and coins. The community has become so desensitized to death; death has become such a part of their mental landscape, the crowd witnesses with an unblinking eye. In turn, Brathwaite portrays this fact with such shocking calm that the reader feels a rising horror. By the time we get to the end of the book’s first section and Brathwaite writes, “so that these crimes we all embrace the victim and the violate the duppy and the gunman so close on these plantations still so intimate the dead/undead,” we see. The words— plantation, the embrace, the dead/undead—are specifically chosen. The vocabulary is laden with associations that have the strength to imply we are embroiled in this world’s historic errors, bound and complicit, not able to escape our responsibility and wonder.

A bit of history is introduced in a radio interview in the section labeled “Straight Talk.” A one word page follows—it says “ttortt.” Double tt’s, both sides confused and potentially responsible—the government official in the conversation refers back to the 80’s when crimes were at their previous height. The new surge of violence has everyone thinking about revolution and revolt. At one point in the interview Brathwaite interjects during an argument, “[Perkins had in fact retailed a similar story just before McKenzie phoned]” and the reader sees that they are fighting less over differences than they are posturing for gain. Who gets credit for telling the story? In a society where power means money people lie. People manipulate the political possibilities in order to benefit their own interests. “McK” begins to sound like shorthand as his name gets shortened, like a preacher he says I “want to bring you back, Mr. Perkins, to 1976, Mr Perkin when those very same people, Mr. Perkins . . .” The repetitions of a Sunday school class and a discussion is launched about observing and reporting. The reader sees that these men are discussing reality versus truth. The reader sees that the discussion about observing and reporting has a subtext: the problem is a question of reliability or the manufacturing of reality through the organization of facts. The truth is that no one has the answers anymore.

Finally Brathwaite himself is a victim of violence. When he calls his manager for increased security in his apartment the guy tells him he is “concern” but then basically tells him to stop complaining or leave. “If I continue to feel threat at MMA, I ‘should’ (I quote) ‘look into the possibility of alternative (sic) accommodation (sic).” No one cares. How do these impoverished postcolonial countries establish a new, functioning community when the criteria for what is good and stable have been lost? It is fitting then, after pages of news clippings that illustrate more violence, Brathwaite turns toward a Jamaican story from West Africa about “Anansi.” Anansi is a trickster, a rebel, the sneaky one who manifests a spirit of rebellion and is able to overturn the social order when he so pleases. For oppressed people trickster conveys a message from one generation to the next: dignity can be had, freedom can be found, only if a person keeps trying. Brathwaite’s essay sits on the margins. It comes back at us again and again. It uses large and small font, unconventional spelling, dashes and brackets, clippings and dates, transcripts and memory, sound that mimics the cadence and volume of violence. He uses everything at his disposal in the attempt to keep trying. He is Anansi. He uses Anansi strategies in his structure, story, and spirit.

 

 

[REVIEW] Eat Only When You’re Hungry by Lindsay Hunter

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Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017

REVIEWED BY MATT E. LEWIS

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Lindsay Hunter knows a thing or two about old wounds. The characters of her previous novel Ugly Girls, a Florida-based female coming-of-age story, are angry and complicated – dripping with all the cringing, emotional contradictions of puberty. Hunter once again uses the Floridian landscape as a pressure cooker for the characters of her new book, Eat Only When You’re Hungry, to vivid effect. But before we migrate down south, the story begins with Greg and his wife Deb, living in a strangely bucolic version of West Virginia. Despite the financial ruin and rampant drug addiction in most parts of the state, Greg is able to spend his retirement in a calmer neighborhood, most likely by his own design. We quickly learn that despite being obese and addicted to fast food, Greg has inherited his Mother’s snobbery toward the ‘unwashed masses’, much like the domineering mother of Bojack Horseman, whose venom and emotional trauma echoes down generations well past her own. Ironically, or maybe inevitably, Greg’s own son, GJ, is a junkie and perpetual loser, mooching off Greg’s ex-wife Marie in Florida. But when Greg gets the call from his ex which claims that GJ has disappeared, Greg rents an RV and takes off for the Sunshine State, in a hero’s journey that quickly dips into scathing self-examination, and finally a poignant dirge for the life he could have lived.

Of course, things don’t go as planned for Greg. Things deteriorate from the very start, when he leaves the comfortable womb of routine and immediately delves into a limp-dicked episode at a truck stop strip club. This is just the beginning of a pattern we see Hunter creating for the character from the start. On the one hand, we sympathize with Greg, who is often at the mercy of his own food addiction, depression, and traumatic upbringing. But there are just as many passages detailing how Greg’s violent actions and choices have shaped GJ’s own trauma. As in life, there is no hero or villain, just a cycle of behaviors that we try to fight against but often lose. Hunter drives the point home with Greg’s own awareness of his destructive behavior. Rather than a one-dimensional character trapped in a pattern of denial, Greg knows exactly where the blame rests for the fate of both himself and his son. “The mercy in that child’s heart, Greg knew he’d never deserved it. Would never deserve it. But if GJ was still a child, there might be mercy still,” he ruminates on moments when GJ didn’t yet understand what was happening, and takes it as hope that there could be possibility for change. But the other interpretation is that the time for enacting any kind of change has passed, and Greg must live with the shitty environment he’s created for him and his loved ones.

In addition to this generationally-repeating trauma, we also see Hunter deftly capture one of the most prevalent moral dilemmas – the child as a junkie. Though encouraged by the abuse and emotional distance of his father, GJ is an embodiment of all the classic symptoms of addiction: thefts, broken promises, ducking in and out of the lives of his loved ones without warning. The most heartbreaking aspect of this is that Greg does not feel one-sided, black and white contempt for his boy – rather, he understands and relates to him all too well. His mistreatment and disdain of him comes from a place of his own self-hatred, which he transfers to GJ, despite being sympathetic to his situation. “Home was a refuge of silence, where there were no expectations and no pressures. So Greg could understand why it felt so good for GJ to lie to himself, lie to Greg and Marie, about his plans for the future, and then never find the wherewithal to follow through.” In a way, Greg and GJ are two of a kind, both regretting their lost opportunities in life despite ending up on vastly different planes of social status. They are bound together by the common thread of addiction, with Greg’s weight and diet carrying as much impact on his health as GJ’s drug habits. Both are prisoners, and both have lost.

Trying to think about how these characters can resolve their lives misses the point. What Hunter has done in Eat Only When You’re Hungry is write a lovingly detailed ode to contemporary tragedy, one that looks ugliness in the face and accepts it as a fact of life. Calling this novel a ‘tragedy’ would be a bit of a misnomer – there is redemption toward the end – but not the kind of deus ex machina, jump-the-shark resolution we’re all used to seeing. In Eat Only When You’re Hungry, people are capable of both bad and good; they fight their impulses and are controlled by them. The answer is not that we always have a choice, or that our impulses are beyond our control, but that we live in a world with both and it’s our job to make sense of it. That empathy should be practiced not just with the people we meet ‘fighting a hard battle’, but with ourselves, too. Forgetting to do so can cause grave consequences for the people you love and who try to love you. Like addiction, habits are not easily broken, but require constant practice, vigilance, and patience. Lindsay Hunter has given us her parable of Greg, who even in the midst of his life spiraling out of control, remembers the mantra that at one time, gave him hope.