July 2024: Greetings from Alaska
On Roxane Gay, the NYT Book List and Alice Munro
Greetings from Seward, Alaska, where I’m hiking with three college friends. We’re eating dried mango, peanut M&M’s and reindeer sausage, pulling our hair back in ponytails, and celebrating our milestone birthdays. As we meet up for breakfast, and wait for each other for dinner, it feels a lot like college. (Although yesterday, we hiked next to Exit Glacier and spotted a bear and a marmot; that did not feel like college.) We’ve been talking about politics but mostly gazing at the scenery. It is sweet relief.
I have a story up on The Girlfriend, How I Finally Discovered My Late Father’s Vulnerability. Maya Rudolph did a great Q&A about what it is like to return to Saturday Night Live as a wise, funny mother. I finished Roxane Gay’s fabulous memoir, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, in which she writes in depth about the decades-long impact of being gang raped when she was 12 years old, Somehow, she has maintained her sense of humor. I’m now reading Percival Everett’s novel, James.
The NYT Book Review asked 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers what their favorite 100 books of the 21st century were. Have you read any of them? All of them? The list reminded me of why I read certain books. After my father passed away in 2005, I read his copy of Robert Caro’s The Path to Power; seeing the title again reminded me how books can connect us to people we have loved and lost. At that time, I was in a tiny book group with another writer who had almost total recall of every book she’d read. Together, we discussed novels about families—Atonement, The Corrections, The Goldfinch, Middlesex—and kept each other company as we laughed and navigated early suburban motherhood The NYT encourages screenshots of books you’ve read and want to read. Share yours with us!
Finally, Alice Munro, who set the standard for dramatizing complicated, ambivalent feelings about motherhood and family life, was revealed to be more complicated and ambivalent than we’d realized. Many of you reached out via social media and email to share your feelings about Munro. See your comments below and see you in August.
Sally Quinn: My husband was slowing down. He needed protecting (Washington Post)
