You know that feeling of reading a book and getting walloped with gut-level yeses over and over, like finally someone has rendered in exquisite detail this amorphous experience you’ve been living for, well, maybe, forever?
So it went with Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing and the World, by my brilliant friend Julia Cooke. I won't summarize it here, because I’ve written a review for The New Republic that I’d love for you to go read right now.
A taste:
These women’s lives are less movements from A to B to C than revolutions around persistent longings and ways of seeing the world. The tensions—between stability in family relationships; motherhood; career ambition; and the need for movement, for finding meaning outside—never dissipate, nor are they reconciled. Cooke doesn’t overwrite their lives with political or ideological codes, instead asking us to find a kind of relief in their complexity, in the way their relentless seeking took many forms, at turns quiet, interior, loud, fearless, wild, humbled, gentle. They cycled through many identities and often did not recognize their former selves.
Go check it out and let me know what you think!
Thanks for being here, friends.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.