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If you’ve been here for a while you know that I’m writing a book. At this point, I’m many years down the road on this project and I’m at the stage where I’m printing the entire book out, highlighting sections of it according to theme, and pasting those pages all over my home-office walls.
It’s a system that I was inspired to do after seeing my friend the writer Julia Cooke doing something similar on her Instagram. I have no idea if our process of color coding is the same (and I’d venture to say it isn’t), but something about seeing her process of pasting her entire book on her walls inspired me and led me to do the same. It’s been generative to see all my words on the wall and be able to wrap my arms around the project in this physical way. (A side note about Julia, she is teaching a course this May called “Research for Writers.” It looks fascinating. If that’s your bag, check it out.)
I interviewed an old friend this week — our conversation will be available for paid subscribers this week — and during our chat we got to speaking about how much a parent should involve their children in their careers, or not. Should we bring them to the office? Tell them we’re distracted by how to solve a work problem? Clue them in on what it is that we do all day?
My children are still very young, far too young to have a real sense of much other than the playground, but I will say there was something thrilling about watching them take in the pages pasted to my office wall and turn to me and say definitively, “mommy’s book.”
My own mother always worked. Until she retired she was a costume designer, and I loved going to her studio with her and seeing another facet of “mommy.” There were racks and racks of clothing to explore — and because she worked on TV shows, those racks were organized by character. Each character with their own definitive style. There were drawers of slips and socks and jewelry for me to organize (a thrill, no lie) and an area for wardrobe fittings with the very best lighting and mirrors you could ever imagine. There were lots of people who clearly respected and listened to and liked my mom. There were also Animal Crackers — a delight we never had at home.
On the weekends my mom would read show scripts for the coming week, and I loved reading the scripts too. First sounding out the letters when I was really young, and then following the storylines when I was old enough to know what was what.
My mom maintains that she kept her home life at home and her work life at work, but I remember it being a little more porous than that — and as a kid that never struck me as a bad thing! It made me understand my mom better — I was her world, but there were other things in her universe.
After my sons were born my instant impulse was to shield them from anything about me that wasn’t directly about them. It’s a strange impulse really, to only show them one side of myself when, as the adage goes, we contain multitudes. I’ve since changed my thinking to want to expose them to pieces of my life that might not be about them; like “mommy’s book.”
My hope is that by doing this it will offer them what my mom exposing me to her work life offered me: a window into the reality that people are never just one thing. And the suggestion (though I know it won’t hit home for many more decades) that I am a complete person.
Links I’d talk about over coffee
Leslie Jamison on the explosive cultural popularity of the term ‘gaslit.’
I had 10 Things About You on VHS as a kid, and watched it 75 million times. So of course I devoured this interview with Julia Stiles about how Kat Stratford influenced her entire career. (Gift article)
This quote hit me hard, “80% of all of the unpaid work necessary to maintain a household and care for its family members is done by women. The cost of that comes to about $3.6 trillion a year. This is shocking, considering that women also make up half of the paid labor force.” Read the rest of the piece here.
The syllabus for the course that the truly brilliant Jhumpa Lahiri teaches on diaries.
put into words exactly how I feel when people implore me to enjoy every millisecond of my children’s babyhood. “What’s so wrong with being tired, frustrated, and angry? Why do you have to mind-game your way out of reasonable and necessary emotions?”Last Sunday Read’s most clicked link: The bamboo baby plates I love (which are currently unavailable on Amazon). I found them here though.
A parting recommendation
After telling a friend what my book is about — Cuba/memory/what gets lost in exile — she recommended the 2018 documentary The Rest I Make Up which tells the story of the very brilliant Cuban-American playwright Maria Irene Fornes. The film follows Fornes as Alzheimer’s steals her memories. For anyone interested in the theater, female artists, Cuba, or memory, this gets a deeply heartfelt recommend.
Couldn’t agree more
Even as a very small child you would tape sheets of paper all over our house with letters and words that you had written. So when I got home from work, our walls were covered with sheets of papers you had written with crayons of many colors. Glad to see you haven't lost the old habit.
xxmom