"best day ever"

Does anyone else have July 21 marked on their calendar? In honor of the big event, I'm reposting something I wrote in 2017. 

Growing up, I had one Barbie doll. She wore roller skates and a neon yellow sports outfit. However, she was often relegated to the back of the closet since I much preferred playing with “My Friend” dolls.  

When my daughter was in kindergarten, she began asking for Barbies. Most were modeled after the Disney princess characters, but she also favored Barbies who were going to the beach. When we packed up to move last year, she gave the whole collection away. She has held on to her generation’s 18” doll.  

So I was curious, but not invested in, the story of Ruth Handler, the brains behind Barbie. Barbie and Ruth: The Story of the World's Most Famous Doll and the Woman Who Created Her by Robin Gerber opens with Ruth Handler in court. Her company, Mattel, is being accused of shady financial practices.

This dramatic opening sets the stage for Handler’s life. Gerber rewinds from the 1970s to Handler’s early years in retail. We learn how her business acumen, along with the creativity of her husband Elliot, launches her into business.

After a few years in the toy business, Ruth decides to create a doll that allowed girls to “project their dreams of their own futures as adult women.” As Gerber says, “Boys and girls did not just play with different toys; they grew up to be men and women [like Handler] who created different toys.”

Just as fascinating as reading about Barbie’s birth, was learning the story of how toys grew from being a Christmas commodity to one that is sold year-round. Television played a big role in making this shift as it changed the timing of the sales and manufacturing of toys. Designers also had to take into consideration how a toy would look on television.

After leaving Mattel and struggling with breast cancer, Handler created her second business. She developed and sold a product called “Nearly Me” - a silicon breast prostheses.

Whatever your opinion on Barbie’s suitableness as a role-model, it’s hard to disagree with Handler’s. Despite her later legal troubles, she became a leader in a male-dominated field and created an iconic toy that has made it onto kids’ Christmas (and Birthday and Tooth Fairy and Last Day of School) lists for generations.  

Oof

Fans of Laurie Frankel and Miriam Toews rejoice. If you appreciate their dark  humor, you’ll revel in We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman.

Ash and Edi have been best friends practically from birth. Now they must face Edi’s impending death. Edi says her goodbyes to her young son and husband and moves into a hospice facility near Ash’s family. Over the next few weeks, a revolving cast of characters visit Edi, bringing lip balm, bagels, and approximations of “The Cake” - a lemon pound cake she tasted once and has never been able to replicate. When Ash isn’t keeping Edi company, she’s juggling her own cache of lovers, trying to persuade her daughter to go to class, and sharing meals with her ex, Honey.

How do you say goodbye? How do you reconcile loss with life? Whose idea was it to name a candy horehound? All these questions and more are broached with love and humor. Death is messy. Life is messy. And sometimes all you can do is embrace the corporeal to deal with it.

Oh, and near the end, there’s a bit about petrichor. Always a good sign of a good read.

“heaven could just be a fog machine in Orlando”

I rediscover the podcast On Being every few years. This time around, I stumbled onto a series within the series called The Future of Hope. The first interview was between journalist Wajahat Ali and theologian Kate Bowler.

This led me to Kate Bowler’s memoir Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved. At the center is how she responds to the news, as a young mother, that she has stage 4 cancer. As a professor of theology at Duke Divinity School (as well as a student of the prosperity gospel), she is surrounded by prayer, yes, but also plenty of empty platitudes.

If you’ve ever wondered what to say, or what not to say, to someone experiencing loss, that in itself is a good reason to open this book. But as you read, you’ll also find yourself reflecting on suffering, the perspective of time, and, with good humor, a little hope.  

"we will experience times of great inner emptiness"

Last fall, I was invited to join a book club with some Benedictine oblates. This month’s selection was The Forgotten Desert Mothers written by one of the Benedictine sisters, Laura Swan.

As Swan writes in the preface, “Women’s history has often been relegated to the shadow world: felt but not seen. Many of our church fathers became prominent because of women. Many of these fathers were educated and supported by strong women, and some are even credited with founding movements that were actually begun by the women in their lives.”

Swan begins by outlining the cultural context of these women as well as a description of what is meant by desert spirituality. She then shares and comments on the sayings of more well-known desert mothers such as Syncletica and Theodora, and catalogues the brief biographies of nearly 40 lesser known women who chose this ascetic life.

Especially as we experience the liturgical desert of Lent, these women have much wisdom to share on humility, grief, anger, overindulgence, and self-awareness.  

“When I encountered the ammas,” Swan writes, “they made sense of the desert in my life.”

Similar =

The Libby app has a new (to me) button labeled “similar approximately equal sign.” So far it’s been more approximate than equal. After staying up all night finishing Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, I, of course, wanted to find something similarly engrossing. Kudos, Libby, for pointing me to Laurie Frankel’s Goodbye for Now. However, I don’t think I’ll be picking up Hot Response by Ruby Scott anytime soon (though I’m sure it’s engrossing in another sense of the word).

So here’s a very brief similar to list of my own making:

If you were intrigued by The Bletchley Women, you might try books by Beatriz Williams. Start with Our Woman in Moscow and then dive into her books about the Schuyler sisters.

If you want to recapture the whimsy of One Day in December, try Jenny Bayliss. My hold on The Twelve Dates of Christmas came in sometime in mid January, but I’d be happy to read that one and Meet Me Under the Mistletoe even in August.

If you were inspired by Carrie Soto is Back, try Head Over Heels by Hannah Orenstein. And then go behind the scenes of a professional, albeit amateur, matchmaker in Playing with Matches. Oh! And then you have to read Meant to be Mine if you like a good fatalistic rom-com.

"All My Puny Sorrows"

With the release of the movie Women Talking, you may be curious about the book from which it's based. You could read the book or (about its author here or here), but I also recommend reading one of her earlier works, All My Puny Sorrows. This is a repost from 2015.  

“Our house was taken away on the back of a truck one afternoon let in the summer of 1979.” So begins the novel All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews. In it, Yoli’s family can’t seem to catch a break. In childhood, it’s because her family balks against the rules of their conservative Mennonite village in Canada. They harbor a forbidden piano to foster her sister Elfrieda’s musical talents. When not at the piano, Elf spray paints the letters AMPS (“all my puny sorrows”) around the village in further rebellion.

In Yoli and Elf's adult years, the family suffers from Elf’s unhappiness. Elf’s career as a concert pianist is overshadowed by her multiple suicide attempts.Yoli has been traveling back and forth from Toronto to support her mother and brother-in-law and sit at her sister’s bedside. When not at the hospital, Yoli can be found sitting on her friend Julie’s porch. It is here the novel provides cathartic humor to balance the sadness of the rest of Yoli’s day. 

Toews brightens the pages of this devastatingly sad novel with Czech violinists, Italian agents, huffy nurses, and eccentric aunts. The brightest character, however, is Yoli. Her struggles to see her sister’s point of view, her texts with her teenage children, her endless to-do-lists, her trysts with mechanics and violinists, and her sometimes flinching optimism all carry the reader onward - even when the Kleenex box is empty.

"the whole world opened up"

Now is Not the Time to Panic by Kevin Wilson

To be a teen in the 90s in small-town Tennessee means going to the community pool, watching daytime TV, or driving listlessly to all the usual haunts. For Frankie, whose triplet brothers don’t shy away from mayhem, it also means having access to a photocopier they somehow procured. She and her new friend Zeke, an artist, revive the copy machine and decide to use it to create something artistic. She writes the words, a manifesto of sorts. He illustrates. And they both splatter the page with a constellation of blood. 

After they begin papering the town with their flyer, all kinds of conspiracy theories emerge, causing unease, and then panic, as rumors spread farther afield. By the end of the summer, the havoc they’ve unleashed dismantles their friendship as well. 

Twenty years later, a journalist reaches out to Frances, a semi-successful YA writer, about her involvement. Frances must decide whether to tell her story, reckoning with her past, or keep silent.

Wilson never disappoints with his exploration of the phenomenon of combustible human relationships. If you haven’t yet read his work, The Family Fang and Nothing to See Here are must-reads too.