To put it bluntly, my mother died in June and I haven’t felt much like writing about some of my more absurd niche interests (American left-wing politics). Thank you to everyone who’s offered condolences. At the moment the sentiment that’s most comforting to me is one that probably also seems too flippant for most people to say explicitly—something along the lines of “A parent’s death is a difficult but normal part of life that people eventually recover from, and some gallows humor is possible and even encouraged during this time”—but I’ve also been incredibly moved by people telling me stories about their own parents or extending certain observances that I didn’t grow up with myself (for instance: when Frank’s mom, who was on a trip to Paris, told me she had lit a candle for my mother at Sacre Couer, I cried a lot, even though we’re not Catholic and therefore probably ineligible for any of the benefits of candle-lighting). Thank you, all, again.
For obvious reasons I didn’t do any book promotion last month, so here’s an overdue plug: I wrote a book and I hope you’ll read it. For what it’s worth, I write like a normal person, not like an academic, and the book is easy to read. I also happen to cite a lot of sources, which I mention because I recently learned that major publishers routinely dissuade authors from including too many (or any!) endnotes and sometimes even make them pay out of pocket for the extra pages that endnotes require. Luckily this wasn’t the case with Verso; they let me get away with 50+ citations for each chapter. To put it another way, I don’t say anything I can’t back up.
My book incidentally came out the same week that the Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer, among other respectable publications, ran a syndicated summer reading list that recommended plausible-sounding yet totally nonexistent titles (“Tidewater Dreams by Isabel Allende”) and was discovered to have been generated by AI. Given this state of “books” “coverage,” I’m very grateful to Geoff Shullenberger for his thoughtful review from May, and, of course, to Josh Citarella, who let me class-reduce for an hour on his podcast. If you invited me to speak on your podcast last month and got radio silence, sorry and thank you. Please ask me again in the fall if you feel compelled.
I wrote in a short tribute to my mother that she was beautiful and charming and that I loved her a lot, all of which are true. It’s also true that our relationship was complicated and often fractious.
Earlier this year I came across some viral treacly Mother’s Day post on Instagram that read “I would choose my mom to be my mom in every lifetime. Again, and again, and again.” With apologies to anyone whose family is wholesome enough that they genuinely feel this way, what the fuck? The very thing that distinguishes familial love from friendship or romantic love is that we didn’t, and couldn’t, choose, and that despite this ostensible infringement on our autonomy, we still try over and over to do right by each other, even if we fail far more than we succeed. As Catherine once said in some remarks on the family, the idea that choice can sustain us is an illusion; we ultimately have obligations to our family members that extend beyond enjoying or choosing their company. “It doesn’t mean that you’ll be happy with your family forever, it doesn’t mean that your family will be nice to you, it doesn’t mean that your family will understand you, it doesn’t mean that you can express yourself with your family,” she said. “But someone gave birth to you and that person is bonded to you by blood.”