When I was a kid, summertime meant reading for me. The town public library had a summer reading program where you could sign up to read as many books as possible and your construction-paper name would be moved along a construction-paper rainbow from left to right as you read more. (At least, that’s what I remember – I just have flashes of the rainbow in my memory.) This was, of course, before the days of Kindles and audiobooks. I loved to read, and I was not just a wee bit competitive, so I always landed on the far right of that rainbow.
Forty years later, it seems like an outright fantasy to have the time to read like that again. This summer, though, I had a bit more time than I’ve had in years past, thanks to having absolutely no good streaming choices for TV and to having a kid who, at 11 years old, is increasingly independent and self-sufficient. (If you’re a parent of a younger kid, hang in there – I promise you do start to get some time back!) And I read a lot this summer. Bliss.
What I’ve always loved about reading is that you get the chance to immerse yourself in another world, another experience. You can escape your own life, you can colonize Mars, you can travel through time, you can find your One True Love, you can be a criminal mastermind, you can be a witch, you can be an atomic scientist. As I’ve gotten older, though, I’m increasingly drawn to books that represent and depict stories that are similar to and reflective of my own life experiences. Perhaps it’s women start to disappear from the collective recounting of experiences as we get older. It feels more of an “aha!” to read about experiences like my own now than it did 15 years ago. Or maybe it’s just a factor of age, that I’m looking backward more often than I’m looking forward these days.
This year we’ve seen a bumper crop of books about women, divorce and middle age, and I’ve inhaled them all. Talk about stories reflecting my own experience! But I read four books this summer that will likely be in my list of “Best Books Ever” for a long time. To get to read just one of those books is a treat, but to get all four – in one summer! – feels downright indulgent. I am not a book critic, and I know your time is important, so let’s just skip through these quickly, shall we? Because the stakes laid out in these books are not just isolated circumstances; they are about what kind of country and society we want to create and inhabit.
In the memoir “The Leaving Season,”
chronicles the collapse of her marriage and then her divorce. Among so many divorce memoirs right now, this one is my favorite. It’s real, it’s hard, it’s painful, it’s liberating. My divorce story is quite different from the author’s, but the realness of it, the sadness of a complicated marriage and ensuing divorce and co-parenting, is all too familiar. “The pain of divorce is really the pain of grief. You grieve for the death of the fantasy you believed, you hoped for, the one you so desperately wanted to be true. And everyone can smell it. … It is the smell of abject sorrow, of the pain of being so completely, utterly, undeniably wrong. It is also the cold sweat fear that if you could be so gloriously, dumbly, incredibly wrong about your choice of life partner, you could never trust yourself to be right about anything else again.” And it’s liberating. By the end, the author sets off on a journey of her own with her children, untethered to a bad marriage and free to chart her own course.Sarah Manguso’s novel of divorce, “Liars,” is less wistful and more fucking angry. And I fucking loved it. She tells us a story of a woman married to an emotionally manipulative, gaslighting narcissist, who – after she has done every ounce of emotional labor in the relationship and every ounce of parenting for their child, after she “followed him wherever he went, anchored to his money dream” – betrays and leaves her. Each lean sentence reverberates with cold rage, and I repeatedly found myself shaking my head in solidarity. Fire.
Then we come to the novel that almost every woman I know was talking about this summer, Miranda July’s “All Fours.” What can I say about this book that hasn’t been said already? A woman confronting her aging steps out of the boundaries we’ve arbitrarily set for women past the age of bearing children and ultimately finds herself sexually and creatively. Hilarious, moving, awkward, hopeful. I’m aware there’s a backlash to this book, but I don’t care. I cried and hugged this book to my chest for several minutes after finishing it.
And finally,
’s memoir “I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself” gives us a picture of what a fully realized woman in her 40s can be and do when she gets to decide exactly what she wants her life to be. The author, single and child-free in her late 40s, recounts a pandemic-era stint in Paris where she, well, enjoys herself mightily and without apology. MacNicol wrote an essay in the New York Times about her life choices, and when I shared it with a friend while evangelizing this book, they responded appropriately “If an alien landed and read this, they’d be like, wait, who isn’t doing this with their lives?” I’m not child-free, but I am single and in my late 40s, and this book gave me a glimpse of how I’m beginning to conceive of the next chapter of my life. Read it and be inspired.It’s been a bruising 10 years for women. Underneath the Notorious RBG coffee mugs and “Barbie” think pieces is a decade of backlash. #MeToo was an important and necessary movement, but we paid for it (and I’m not entirely sure what institutional change we have to show for it). Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016 was painful not just because there would be no first female president, but because she lost to that man, a now-adjudicated rapist who bragged about sexually assaulting women. Brett Kavanaugh was sworn in to the highest court in the land (whatever that means these days) after a farce of a confirmation hearing. The pandemic finally pulled back the blinds to show us that women were doing everything, that childcare was in crisis, that women were leaving their careers to manage the home front, that women were struggling, and no one did anything about it. Then, of course, the Dobbs ruling. The ultimate backlash: losing the right to our own bodily autonomy. (I highly recommend this New Yorker article from 2022 about the backlash that never ended.)
These bruising 10 years are the backdrop for reading these four beautiful books this summer, for seeing my and real women’s lives represented in full. Each book was a middle finger to the last 10 years in some way. Each book was a set of crossed fingers for the future.
These bruising 10 years are also the backdrop of this remarkable election season we find ourselves in. The joy we’re seeing and experiencing is, in some ways, a joy born of desperation from the last 10 years. I don’t mean that Kamala Harris is a choice of desperation; I mean that we have been desperate for joy and hope for too many years. A giddy euphoria and blast of adrenaline that maybe, just maybe, we’ll be able to make this better.
These bruising 10 years and these four books show us exactly what is at stake in this election. Abortion. Birth control. IVF. No-fault divorce. Affordable child care. Equitable marriages and relationships. Being relevant and worthy at any age and without regard to your reproductive status. In short, the full recognition that a woman is a human being with a body and a brain and a desire to control her own life and destiny (as men have always had the ability to do).
Couch-cretin JD Vance cares only about women as breeders and caregivers of children and husbands. They are otherwise disposable, useless, worthless. Like Vance, I also went to law school (sorry, not Yale, but I’m told NYU isn’t exactly a slouch in the law school department either), and I encountered plenty of men like Vance, men who wrap their racism, misogyny and nationalism in a veneer of pseudo-intellectualism and arcane theory. Men who have an utter dearth of curiosity and imagination about lives that aren’t like their own. Men who, at the heart of it, are scared, insecure man-children.
So yeah, Vance and his ilk are “weird,” in the parlance of the day. But his world view is terrifying. His world view makes no room for the lives real women live and that we see in these books of the summer. His world view doesn’t allow for the conversations I know real women are having, about the decision to have or not have kids, the perils of perimenopause, the bullshit of emotional labor and burden of parenting, the narcissistic men in our relationships; AND the liberation of divorce, the beauty of being in midlife and single and getting to say “what do I want the rest of my life to be,” the aspirations of living one’s life on one’s own terms.
These past 10 years have left me tired and hardened. Not bitter (I still have some hope!), but definitely hardened. These books have helped soften me. I want to be softened more. I want to feel a joy born out of jubilation, not desperation. Let’s get there.
A note on We’re A Lot for the fall
I had planned to deeply ponder over the summer what I wanted We’re A Lot to be and how it might change or evolve this fall. Alas, that simply didn’t happen. I was enjoying not thinking for a bit. And then the election was brilliantly upended, shoving to the backburner pretty much everything else in my head.
I live in a reliably solid Blue State, and during close elections, I sometimes envy those in swing states who seem to have more opportunities to get involved and make a real difference. For those of us in states that don’t really matter to the Electoral College (oy, what a system we have) but who desperately want to do something, it can feel a bit uninspiring and frustrating. So, I’m donating, buying Harris Walz merch, writing postcards to swing state voters, and hopefully getting out on the ground in nearby swing state Pennsylvania. It feels like a very tiny drop in a very large bucket.
I do, however, have my voice. I’m not a political reporter or commentator, and there are so many brilliant thinkers and writers who are immersed in this election and in politics. I’m not one of them, and wouldn’t dream of trying to be. I don’t have millions of followers, or frankly anything close to a “following” at all. I’m just me. But I am passionate, inspired, and not completely ill-informed. I’d hate myself if I didn’t take the opportunity to contribute in any way I can. So until Election Day (Tuesday, November 5, if you’re wondering), I’ll be focusing on politics more than usual in We’re A Lot. I hope you’ll keep reading.
Let’s fucking go.
Welcome back. I think I'm the only person I know who hasn't read the Miranda July book. Perhaps when I power through these freelance projects, will finally pick it up.
Nikki, I always look forward to reading your beautifully-written articles and this one is no exception. Thank you for the book recommendations (although for me, they are definitely looking back!). I share your fervor and determination to get Kamala Harris elected and I’m giving and helping in whatever way I can. ❤️