Farewell, My Pelf!
It’s the 11th again, and like last time I’m inspired by an essay I read online. This time it’s Vinson Cunningham’s Grub Street Diet. It’s a beautiful piece about sustenance and loss, about great grief and the ritualistic eating that soothes in its wake: “By nature, I eat and drink to celebrate, to mourn, to reward myself, and sometimes, sure, to ward off unwanted thoughts.” There’s a lot to mull over, including some wistful thoughts about corned beef hash. But what I can’t stop thinking about is the part about the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet. According to Cunningham,
in her poem ‘Verses Upon the Burning of Our House, July 10th, 1666,’ [Bradstreet] turned an awful fire — which consumed not only her family home but a whole library of books — into some of my favorite lines of verse, all resignation and terrible acceptance:
And when I could no longer look,
I blest His name that gave and took,
That laid my goods now in the dust.
Yea, so it was, and so ’twas just.
It was his own, it was not mine,
Far be it that I should repine.
Cunningham loves Bradstreet’s “simplicity and flourish.” He thinks of her as an artist in the same category as the chef April Bloomfield, who “cooks like someone who has been through the fight of her life and, at high cost, survived, somehow loving herself better on the other side.”
After reading the lines Cunningham quoted, I found and read Bradstreet’s whole poem— bold words “Copied Out of a Loose Paper” four centuries ago. It concludes:
There’s wealth enough, I need no more,
Farewell, my pelf, farewell, my store.
The world no longer let me love,
My hope and treasure lie above.
(I had to look up pelf— maybe you did too.)
Since reading Bradstreet’s poem, I’ve been semi-successfully warding off unwanted thoughts of loss by borrowing her poetic flourish. Farewell, my pelf! But I strongly suspect it’s easier to resign oneself to Acts of God than to Acts of Man.
IVF
My podcast dreams and political nightmares came true when the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that embryos have the same legal status as children, and the legendary Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast invited me on to talk about my experiences with IVF.
Of course the reproductive challenges facing us in the US pale in comparison to what others are enduring. Since I recorded the episode, I learned about Rania Abu Anza, a woman in Rafah who endured 10 years of infertility and three rounds of IVF only to lose her husband and 5-month-old twin babies to an Israeli airstrike, along with 11 other relatives, with 9 more missing under the rubble. I transcribed her lament to her lost children as she holds them in her arms, but it feels sacrilegious to post it. Listen to her if you can.
CRITICAL BITES
I’m not a good enough writer to manage a tonal shift of this magnitude, so I’ll just acknowledge that and keep going.
I’m still behind on writing about romcoms, but I’ve been reading and writing about some hot-off-the-press books, including the new Marilynne, the new Armistead, and both current NYT divorce bestsellers.
Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson
I reviewed Marilynne Robinson’s wild and willful new book for The New Republic. It was a dream to write something and get thoroughly edited, factchecked, copyedited, illustrated, and paid. I want this luxe experience for everyone! I’m grateful to Eva Mroczek for taking time over winter break to teach me pretty much everything I know about the Hebrew Bible, and to LauraJean Torgerson for special help with understanding what was happening with the Abraham and Isaac story. Any infelicities remain my own.
I’m doing an online event about Reading Genesis for TNR’s “The Book You Should Read Right Now” series on March 18th at 4 pm Eastern! Get your ticket here.
Mona of the Manor by Armistead Maupin
I read this in a day on a rainy commute and felt grateful that this series born the year of my birth is continuing on into my middle age, even if (a bit like me) it is lapsing into the past more than plunging into the present. Mona is a historical novel set in England in the days when George Michael was hanging out on Hampstead Heath, featuring a faintly anachronistic subplot about a lesbian who gets instantly canceled for being a TERF (I feel like she wouldn’t have been canceled quite so quickly back in the day?); a rehashing of the Jim-Jones-lurking-in-the-park plot of the early Tales of the City books; Cherokee cheekbones; a Noble Romani; and a waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop, anticlimactic quality, because [SPOILER ALERT] Tales of the City readers know Mona is going to die of cancer, and in this book Mrs Madrigal has a premonition that Mona’s not OK and comes all the way to England to see her, and yet nothing comes of it, at least not in this book. Mona’s fine, the end. In sum: I will read every novel Armistead Maupin writes, and I hope he has an eleventh in him.
Splinters by Leslie Jamison
I read Splinters in the splinters of my day, before, in between, and after prepping and teaching three classes and holding office hours, with short breaks for phone calls with friends, followed by a facetime with my bf and then my current lullaby of old Big/Aidan episodes of Sex and the City. This way of reading it felt appropriate for the kind of book it is—interstitial and fragmented, yet propulsive and all at once; simultaneously immersed in quotidian routines and escapist desires; in dialogue with formative stories about what it means to be partnered, single, ashamed, hopeful, restless, happy. It felt a bit like one of those epic post-Covid reunions with a friend you’ve lost touch with for a while, where you get years of plot developments and reflection in one tumbling conversation. It’s full of curiosity and a capacity for surprise. And it’s got a bit of a Dorothea in Middlemarch plot for those who like that (I do). It stirred up so many thoughts I'm not ready to write about yet but will keep mulling over, about love, motherhood, and midlife joy.
This American Ex-Wife by Lyz Lenz
I've never been a wife, ex- or otherwise, but This American Ex-Wife still felt uncannily close to home. Lyz Lenz and I grew up in more or less the same world, the world of evangelical purity culture, and if I had gotten married by age 22 as she did (as my mom did, as my grandma did, as my great-grandma did), I might have had a story something like hers— deep belief in marriage as a religious institution followed by total disillusionment.
Something especially powerful and necessary about Lyz’s story is that it shows all the waves of feminism crashing over her at once, in a way that is so much truer than histories of marriage told in singular linear historical time. Those of us raised in the unapologetic patriarchy of evangelicalism may have been born after the sexual revolution, yet it arrived in our lives decades later, along with (in Lyz's case) a version of Betty Friedan's problem without a name. We have lived centuries of history in our own bodies. And stories like this one are needed to supplement literary Brooklyn divorce stories (which I also love): not just because we live in the age of TikTok trad wives, but because my Queens College classrooms are full of young people growing up, as Lyz & I did, with cultural expectations around marriage that are closer to Jane Austen than they are to Park Slope.
Splinters is a love story predicated on the secular 21st-century problem of excess freedom: marriage is an attempt to structure the daunting infinitude of possibility, to choose your own singular adventure. This American Ex-Wife is a tale as old as time, or at least as old as Ibsen. Splinters is considered, distilled; emotion recollected in tranquility. This American Ex-Wife is still hot with rage. It is a brand plucked from the burning, streaked with ash, glittering with sparks.
LITERAL BITES, aka RITUALISTIC EATING
What I’m making every day: Spring Salad
Bed of spinach, fish from a can, green beans from a can, sliced cooked beets from a can, sliced raw radishes, diced avocado, fresh tomato wedges, Kalamata olives, Johnny’s Great Caesar! salad dressing imported from Tacoma.
What I’m trying to learn to make: Meen Molly
So far my versions are never even a fraction as good as Angel Indian’s: I’m aiming for a lurid turmeric yellow that makes you blink like sunshine, plus smooth soothing aquatic coconut creaminess. Someday, maybe.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’d like to thank Isaak Cuenco-Reyes for four years of high-quality editing and inspiration, and (hopefully, Lord willing, knock wood!) many more to come.