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Posts in "Books"

I’ll be 39 in a little over a week, so I decided it was time to just lean into becoming my mother. 📚

Finished reading: White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo 📚

Want to read: The Power of Ritual by Casper ter Kuil 📚

Want to read: Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia 📚

📚 Dr. Kelly J. Baker's "Grace Period" resonated strongly with me.

A couple of weeks ago, I finished reading Dr. Kelly J. Baker’s book, Grace Period: A Memoir in Pieces. I read it very quickly, over the course of maybe two or three days. I would stay up late reading it and walk around the house in a bit of a daze, squinting at my phone (I read it via Kindle Unlimited and have no Kindle, so).

I read the book hoping it might illuminate post-ac options for me, particularly the path of a freelance writer. I found that it struck me on a much more visceral level than that.

It’s interesting that it touched me so deeply, because Dr. Baker and I are very different. Dr. Baker came into academia with a dream of being a tenure track professor. She worked as a contingent instructor and a full-time lecturer, spending six years on the academic job market before determining she needed to take her “grace period.” I came into the PhD program focused on getting good at both conducting and understanding research, without my heart set on a specific professional outcome. I assumed there would be no tenure track job for me, and as I watched my tenure track, highly respected advisor deal with all that this professional life entails, I determined that it wasn’t something I was interested in.

AND YET.

In spite of that, so much of this book resonated with me.

Baker talks a lot about love, the way we are supposed to love our work, discipline, scholarship. She says,

I both adored and loathed my training. I see-sawed from romantic highs (seminar discussions, research, theory) to tortured lows (self-doubt, impostor syndrome, research). I almost quit multiple times. Yet I trudged through, because love is about compromise, or so they say. (p. 28, Kindle edition)

This resonated with me so strongly. I had my first PhD meltdown, as I call them, in the first week of my program. I remember it well. I was working on my back deck, enjoying some unseasonably tolerable weather on our hammock, and I realized that in the first week I had already fallen dreadfully behind. “I can’t do this,” I thought. I even told W. that maybe I should quit.

“Maybe I should quit” and “I’m going to get kicked out” were constant refrains from me that first year.

And yet. When people ask me if they should do a PhD, I say “YES TOTALLY!” followed by “No, definitely not.” Because you totally should; when else are you going to have time to prioritize deep learning? But you totally shouldn’t; it’s almost impossible financially without a supporting partner. (Two of my fellow SILS PhDs that I can think of and I myself have lawyer husbands, and I don’t imagine any of those three could do this otherwise.)

The love we feel for this deep learning, as Baker points out, allows us to be exploited. The minimum graduate stipend in my program is about $7000 below the minimum cost-of-living for one person in the town where the university is located. That exploitation, Baker says, “doesn’t make us love our work less. Instead, it often pushes us to love that work more—to consider it something deeper, a vocation instead of just a job.” (p. 30) I’ve fought against this sense, pretty successfully, but I suspect that’s because I’ve already experienced that vibe as a K-12 educator and I’m so burned out from it that I won’t let it happen again.

Baker writes about how most years, her birthday was a day to mark all the ways in which she failed in the past year, but after she began her grace period, “My birthday became a day that showed I made it through another year. For once, that was enough. It always should have been.” (p. 78)

My birthday is two weeks from now. I do use it to reflect on the past year often, but mostly, I celebrate it with great fanfare, because it is worth celebrating that I made it through another year. Both Dr. Baker and myself live with mental illness; sometimes I feel that I’m connected to life by a very fragile thread. For that thread to hold up for a whole year is always a cause for celebration.

I’m working from my Kindle notes and highlights here, so things are getting a bit fragmented and disjointed.

As I mentioned earlier, the chapter “Writing Advice” as a whole felt worth noting to me. In particular, how no one had suggested to her that writing could be a career. Me either, no one who I trusted on career matters, anyway. Baker writes,

At 18, 19, or 20, I wished someone took the time to tell me that my perspective was unique. That the only person who could write like me was me. That I shouldn’t try to be someone I wasn’t. That background, the place where I landed, made me who I was. That this place that birthed me might not be New York City or San Francisco or Boston and that was okay. That this place, that no one had ever heard of, created me and pushed me to be a writer. That I shouldn’t try to be someone I wasn’t. That I could emulate other people’s writing styles on the way to finding my own. That there was something about my voice that needed to be heard. That writing would give me the chance to speak and be heard. That my voice mattered. That my writing mattered to me and that was enough.

Finally, Baker says some things that remind me of my favorite Kitty Pryde quote from Astonishing X-Men. Baker notes:

Maybe I’m seeking something big when I should focus on something smaller, like a chubby toddler hand in mine.

I used to hate waiting, but now, I wonder if waiting is where living resides.

Life is about how we weather our transitions.

Reading all those bits inspired me to reply to her in this Twitter thread:

So. This is a book that shifted a lot for me. I highly recommend it to anyone at all connected to academia or just trying to figure out what’s next.

Want to read: A Song Below Water by Bethany C. Morrow 📚

Want to read: The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea by Maggie Tokuda-Hall 📚

📚 Naomi Alderman's "The Power" and the end of the #girlboss era

I read Naomi Alderman’s The Power very quickly (well, what passes for quickly now that I’m a mom) over the past week or so. I found it riveting; it was the first fiction book in a while that actually kept me from going to bed at a reasonable time.

The framing device is that one writer, a man living 5000 years from now, has written a historical novel set in roughly our time, and has asked his colleague, a woman and another writer, to read it and give him feedback. A quick bit of epistolary writing introduces that set up; the book then immediately jumps into the novel proper. In the history of this world, sometime around our time, teenage girls began to discover that they had the power to discharge electricity from their bodies similar to the power electric eels have. They are also able to awaken the same ability in adult women. And, as you might imagine, this changes the world a fair amount.

It’s an interesting book to read in the middle of a pandemic and widespread protests; each step of the way you see how the world is changing due to this new power, how a paradigm shift happens. It often felt like I was reading about right now, though of course the details are different.

What’s more interesting to me, though, is how it begins as a bit of a power fantasy.

I mean, just imagine. Imagine being able to walk down a dark street alone and not fear for your safety.

I didn’t realize until I had read this book that I never feel safe doing that. (What a privilege to have this fear at the back of mind than at the front, I know.)

As I read it more, this seemed more and more like a power I would like to have. Oh, I wouldn’t use it except in self-defense, I would tell myself.

I don’t want to spoil much, but as you might imagine, a lot of things that currently are things we expect of men become, in this book, things that women do. (What’s that saying about absolute power? Oh yeah, it corrupts absolutely. Though maybe it doesn’t, according to the study described in the linked article. But in this book, it definitely does.)

Layer upon layer of recognition settled in as I read the book, even close to the very end, constantly saying “Oh, THAT is a parallel to THIS thing that happened in our world…” and as I read, it reminded me of a recent Atlantic article, The Girlboss Has Left the Building (as well as The End of the Girlboss Is Here in the Medium publication Gen).

When I read the Atlantic piece, I highlighted this quote:

…when women center their worldview around their own office hustle, it just re-creates the power structures built by men, but with women conveniently on top.

And that’s what we watch happen again and again in The Power. It begins as a fantasy and ends as a dystopia.

More quotes from the Atlantic article:

Slotting mostly white women into the power structures usually occupied by men does not de facto change workplaces, let alone the world, for the better, if the structures themselves go untouched.

Being belittled, harassed, or denied fair pay by a woman doesn’t make the experience instructive instead of traumatic.

Making women the new men within corporations was never going to be enough to address systemic racism and sexism, the erosion of labor rights, or the accumulation of wealth in just a few of the country’s millions of hands—the broad abuses of power that afflict the daily lives of most people.

And Amanda Mull, the author of the article, concludes:

Disasters disrupt the future people expected to have, but they also give those people the space to imagine a better one. Those who seek power most zealously might not be the leaders people need. As Americans survey a nation torn apart and make plans to stitch it back together, admitting this, at the very least, can be an easy first step in the much harder process of doing the things that actually work. Structural change is a thing that happens to structures, not within them.

I have never been all in on the hustle, but I’ve had a waxing and waning admiration for girlboss behavior. The idea of making your way to the top appeals to me; the idea of treating your employs poorly - of firing them for becoming pregnant, harassing them, berating them - that appalls me. The Power is entertaining as can be, and also a reminder to watch myself. Watch myself for the ways that, when I want to dismantle a structure, I might end up reinforcing it instead. Watch myself for the ways I can use what power I have to help rather than to hurt.

Still would love to walk down the street at night with no fear. I don’t think the dismantling of the structure that prevents that will be finished in my lifetime.