Heart the Lover, Awake, Money Heist, Vox, This American Life, Ultimatum, Deportations

I will now reveal what a heartless reader I am: I did not cry once while reading Heart the Lover by Lily King (even though friends and many reviewers say they sobbed throughout the whole final third). I did think it was an excellent novel, which is more than I can say for King’s highly acclaimed earlier novel Writers and Lovers, a book I did not enjoy and whose hype I couldn’t understand.

Although Heart the Lover is both a prequel and sequel to Writers and Lovers, one doesn’t need to read either book to understand the other. This novel looks at Casey’s college years, during which she is nicknamed Jordan after the golfing character in The Great Gatsby because her friends discover she gave up a golfing scholarship. As Jordan, she first falls for an egocentric bully named Sam and then for his sweet friend Yosh. This period of their lives, where everyone thrives on absolute ideals and intellectual debates, is poignantly recollected. The book then time jumps to Casey’s adult life, when she is now married (to neither Sam nor Yosh) and has two children. She hears from Sam, who is calling to tell her Yosh is sick. The book asks us to consider what it’s like to face losing for the second time the one who got away—plus to consider whether our youthful assumptions might have been ill-conceived.

I have been absolutely loving memoirs the past couple of years, a genre I didn’t used to enjoy very much. I especially love them as audiobooks in which the author reads her own story, and I really enjoyed listening to the author’s voice in Awake: a Memoir by Jen Hatmaker.

This account felt like the down-to-earth version of Strangers. In Strangers, uber-wealthy Belle Burden’s husband cheats and leaves her without warning after a 25+-year marriage, dumping her and insisting she have full custody of their kids. In Awake, the same disaster occurs, with the husband remarried within one year, but Jen is surrounded by a large community of friends who bouy her up and give her story a much richer dimension. Hatmaker was a podcaster and Christian influencer (plus she and her husband Brandon had an HGTV home-renovation show in the 2000-teens), but even before her husband cheated on and left her, and before her eldest daughter came out as a lesbian, she was already recognizing that a lot of the church’s teachings were not going to work for her. Here she talks about confronting racism for the first time after she and her husband adopted two children from Ethiopia:

When she was made an overnight single mother, she reevaluated everything in her life and came up even farther left than she started. Her awakening is a pleasure to watch unfold, and along the way she offers some good advice on overcoming co-dependency. In the audio version of the memoir she includes some notes from others and has those others read the notes themselves, which adds to the narrative. She is just full of unsquelchable joy, and we are lucky she shared it with us in this book.

I also read an embarrassingly bad book: You Shouldn’t Have Come Here by Jeneva Rose, a weird combo of sexy romantic fling and serial-killer horror story. A Reddit thread I read (after I’d wasted my time listening to the book, unfortunately) called the novel “cringey,” noting the repeated use of such phrases as “blue blue eyes.” I do not recommend this one. I avoided feeling my feelings for a whole day while this played in the background; I rolled my eyes at the bad writing but kept listening anyway—and afterward felt like I’d gorged on junk food. Not a good feeling. Save yourself!

On a better day, I enjoyed reading a hardcover copy of the 2018 novel Vox by Christina Dalcher (not to be confused with the semi-pornographic 1993 novel Vox by Nicholson Baker). This newer Vox is a speculative, feminist dystopia story about a world much like our own that has been taken over by right-wing Christians. The cover blurb compares it to The Handmaid’s Tale, which makes sense, as both books take place in a near-future where misogynistic Bible passages have been used to restructure society, but in this book, all women and girls are only allowed to speak 100 words a day. (Every woman wears a bracelet that counts every word she speaks and zaps her if she goes over her daily allotment.) Although for some reason I found this distopyian premise a little harder to believe than the ones in Handmaid’s Tale (where women are sorted into breeders, wives, sex workers, and domestic workers), the story is well-written and held my interest. Just when I thought I’d get bored with a whole book of silenced women, the main character, a former brain researcher, is called back to the job and allowed to talk in order to help her find a cure for a brain injury that has stricken the president’s brother. This was a good novel with a satisfying conclusion.

Renee and I made it through the second season of Netflix’s Money Heist, a great show full of action and suspense. My friend who recommended the show said she was stopping after the second season, as season three starts a new heist, but I think the writers have earned my continued support, so we’re going to keep watching. I am enjoying how the show is growing more political as it talks about the difficulty distinguishing who are the good guys and who are the bad.

I’ve also discovered that one reason the dubbing seems so seamless is that Netflix is using AI to change the characters’ mouth movements to match the dubbed words!

However, after a couple of episodes of Season Three, where we had fun seeing the people who have crossed over to become “one of them” (the robbers), we wanted a palate cleanser so started watching season four of The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On. In this “reality” show, couples who can’t decide if they should shit or get off the pot gather together with other couples in the same situation and do a lot of not-yet-wife swapping to see if they can find someone better than the partner they came in with. It’s a ridiculous premise and the results are usually pretty silly, but we enjoy watching these beautiful people, who are probably all on the show for “the wrong reasons” (i.e., to get famous, rather than to find true love). This show is just more junk food, but we find it pretty irresistible.

Renee and I finished the latest season of the radio show Serial, which is about a man on death row who may or may not be innocent of the crimes for which he’s going to be put to death — but who definitely raped some children, for which he got a sickeningly low sentence and was out in seven years to rape again. (He admits he raped children; he just denies he raped and killed anyone and left their body in the desert.) This show made me realize how wishy-washy my opposition to the death penalty is, as I do not care if this monster is put to death.

I listened to the latest episode of This American Life, 895: Labels, which included a moving piece originally published in The Believer read aloud by its author. The writer reflects on how descriptions are usually only used to explain what is different about someone. He then goes on to talk about his wife who died of cancer and the labels he and other grieving-spouse support-group members use to describe their lost loved ones. His delivery of this gorgeous essay is very moving and I highly recommend the whole podcast—not least because the first section of this episode focuses on one of the 300,000 Haitans who just lost TPS status and is no longer allowed to hold a job in the U.S. This is a tragedy of epic proportions, and the same thing is about to happen to nearly 300,000 El Salvadorans living here, as well. These are all people who were in the U.S. legally, so once again Trump is breaking his promise to go after the worst of the worst by making half a million peaceful, hardworking people suddenly illegal and subject to deportation—even though their home countries are no safer than when they came here.

Equally tragic, the U.S. has now deported more than 20,000 people, many of whom were successful in their efforts to seek asylum here, to third-party countries—countries where the immigrants don’t know anyone and have no support—because they can’t send them back to their home country and don’t want to let them stay in our country. More than 30 nations have made a deal with Trump, often for millions of dollars, to allow us to send them a certain number of migrants. Sometimes these migrants go into detention in the third-party country. Other times they are allowed to go free but have nowhere to live, no job prospects, and no one to help them. Here’s an Amnesty International one-sheet on how this is working and why it’s illegal.

And while I’m focusing on tragedies: Puerto Rico is suffering from an extreme drought and water rationing. People who live there (all of whom are U.S. citizens) are having their water turned off in rotation for 48 hours at a time. Puerto Ricans have also had rolling blackouts since Hurrican Maria hit the island in 2017, with the average Puerto Rican having no electricity for about one month out of each year. However, everyone agrees it’s easier to live with no power than no water.

Despite all this tragedy, last night I had the pleasure of seeing Brandi Carlile for the second time at Tanglewood as she promotes her eighth studio album, Returning to Myself. She puts on a great show, is obviously having fun out there, and has a beautiful group of harmonizers and talented musicians backing her up. She’s been on tour with the same set of male twins—Phil and Tim Hanseroth—for 25 years, and they have a lovely rapport on the stage. (I just discovered that one of the twins is married to Brandi’s little sister—and she mentioned during the show that her brother-in-law was doing the lights and that her children were with her on tour, so it’s a real family affair they have going on.) Here she is from last night’s show singing one of my favorite older songs of hers, about what it’s like to become a mother, when you give up “selfishness. sleep, and ever being alone again in your own mind.”

And Brandee closed the show by bringing back on stage her opening act, Jensen McCrae, and singing a 20-year-old song, “Dear Mr. President,” in harmony with her:

Sadly, this song is as relevant today as it was when the Indigo Girls joined Pink in singing it in 2006— except now the line asking “How do you sleep while the rest of us cry?” rings hollow. We don’t have to wonder how our president sleeps because we know he’s a sociopath who doesn’t give our problems a single thought (plus he only sleeps in meetings as he’s up all night tweeting).

What have you been consuming — or creating? I’m up to page 170 in my mini-series screenplay about childhood polio in the early 1950s and am continuing to repaint my backyard seascape. This time I’ve added the strawberry moon and my toes in the sand.

And I participated in the launch of the seventh edition of the Well’s Mindful Poetry Moments Anthology,

which contains one of my poems:

Please let me know if you’ve read/heard/watched any of what I mentioned and what you thought of it—and please tell me what you’d recommend I see/listento/read next!