June 2020

When Mary Laura Philpott’s essay collection, I Miss You When I Blink, came out last year, it was hailed as the type of book that audiences desperately long for but rarely get to enjoy — like a “relentlessly funny” and “infinitely relatable” blend of “Nora Ephron, Erma Bombeck, Jean Kerr, and Laurie Colwin” all rolled into one. After months of having it on my list, I finally decided to pick it up this month, and, let me tell you, I was not disappointed. I Miss You When I Blink is truly as wonderful as everyone says.

With hilarious, vulnerable, and introspective insight, Philpott shatters the illusion of the so-called “perfect life,” charting her own evolution from a type A/straight-A student to a young mom who one day realizes that her idea of “cracking the code” isn’t as immovably defined — or as satisfying — as she once thought. “The to-do list,” she writes, “was supposed to get smaller and smaller as you checked off everything you meant to do and approached the finish line of bona fide adulthood. Instead, you got to the end of the list and didn’t feel like you’d arrived anywhere. You felt more disoriented than ever.”  

As she unpacks, unmasks, and revokes the notion of “having it all,” Philpott gets to the heart of so many of the questions we face when trying to create an authentic and purposeful life: Why does the horizon of our wants and needs seem perpetually far away? Why do we frame our life choices under a paradigm of “either/or” with no room for nuance or flexibility? And why do we feel an urge to obsessively “linearize” our histories, as if our life choices were as predictably straightforward as the headlines on a resume? As she opens up about everything from dogs, neighborhood squabbles, ex-boyfriends, and awkward celebrity encounters to her depression, her two pregnancies, and her difficult decision to relocate her family to Nashville, she remains honest, vulnerable, and unequivocal, never shying away from calling a spade a freaking spade. It’s okay, she tells us, to feel occasionally untethered (as if “someone has turned off gravity and you’ve been spun into space”) just as it’s okay to abandon traditional touchstones of “success” in order to do what you want to do. Sure, some people aren’t going to like it, and some people may even try to bring you down. But as Philpott reminds us, those people are not genuinely interested in your best interests – they’re just unhappy crabs stuck in a miserably crowded, perfunctory bucket; and “if they’re going to be in the bucket,” Philpott writes, “they want everyone to be in the bucket.”

If you’re ever feeling like you are in such a bucket, then do yourself a favor and pick up I Miss You When I Blink. It will make you feel like you have a friend — and give you that extra boost of courage to do something good for yourself.

Winner of the 1989 Nobel Prize for Literature and the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day is an absolute masterpiece — immersive, compelling, and thought-provoking, sprinkled with unexpected bits of humor and vulnerability. A thoughtful (and arguably less saccharine) antecedent to Downton Abbey, it tells the story of the “perfect” English butler, Stevens, who has decided to visit his former colleague, Miss Kenton, after the death of his master, Lord Darlington. Stevens’s “journey” is as literal as it is figurative, blending colorful sojourns across the English countryside with illuminating reminisces into his ostensibly blithesome (yet troubling and tragic) past. Stevens maintains that Lord Darlington was a “truly good man at heart, a gentleman through and through,” though we know he had problematic connections to the Third Reich. For every sinister Nazi Darlington associated with and every anti-Semitic notion he embraced, Stevens insists on his master’s innocence, applying the mythology of aristocracy as an exonerative pardon.

Out of this insistence emerges the book’s central theme of dignity. To Stevens, dignity translates to a total denial of the self. “The great butlers,” Stevens believes,

“Are great by virtue of their ability to inhabit their professional role and inhabit it to the utmost; they will not be shaken out by external events, however surprising, alarming or vexing. They wear their professionalism as a decent gentleman will wear his suit: he will not let ruffians or circumstances tear it off him in the public gaze; he will discard it when, and only when, he wills to do so, and this will invariably be when he is entirely alone.”

As Stevens follows this code and jettisons his independent self, he becomes like an actor, perpetually assuming some manufactured pretense while utterly devoid of any conviction, purpose, or emotion of his own. While Lord Darlington fires the Jewish members of his staff, Stevens fails to push back, trusting in his master’s judgment as well as the assumed incomprehensibility of such lofty “matters of state.” “There are many things you and I are simply not in a position to understand,” he explains to Miss Kenton.

As Remains goes on, however, Ishiguro brings other notions of “dignity” to the surface that problematize Stevens’s loyalty to his master. In the end, the reader is left wondering whether Stevens wanted to serve Darlington or whether he wanted to be him. Certainly, even as Stevens starts to reckon with the indignity of his own subservience, he remains unable to interrogate his master’s actions, suggesting that he may never be able to shake the pretense of his role or confront the truth of his own life.

I will not tell you how Remains ends, but what I will say is that it makes an indelible imprint on the heart. There is, I believe, a little bit of Stevens in all of us. We can all cling to what is comfortable in favor of what is messy or difficult. We can all be blinded by money, status, and beauty. And we can all retroactively revise or romanticize our histories in ways that make us feel safe, worthy, and blameless, even when all the evidence points to the contrary.

Ezra Klein begins Why We’re Polarized with the question that has gnawed at so many of us for so long: How the hell did Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election?

From the beginning, Klein tells us that this question is actually not the one we should be asking. Far from bringing any clarity or understanding to 2016, it is an inquiry that serves only to intensify our tribalistic allegiances, clouding our judgement and muddling our perspective while harmfully anathematizing “the other.” “Rather than asking how Trump won,” Klein suggests, “we should be asking how Trump was close enough to win.” Certainly, he writes, the 2016 election was not an anomalous “glitch” in the system, but a rather “typical” modern-day contest between a Republican and a Democrat — a battle rooted in ever-increasing ideological hostility, cultural irreconcilability, reactionary partisanship, and deep political polarization.

In his debut book, Klein provides an instructive and compelling guide for understanding why the “typical contest” between Trump and Clinton was as polarizing as it was. Historically, he writes, the Republican and Democratic parties were much more alike. “Each party is to some extent a reflection of the other,” wrote Thomas Dewey in 1950, “[and] this is perhaps part of the secret of our enormous power, that a change from one party to the other has usually involved a continuity of action and policy of the nation as a whole on most fundamentals.” Yet today, both parties have become more ideologically entrenched, more scornful of compromise, and more threatening to the opposing side than ever before.

Theoretically, Klein tells us, “we join parties because they share our values and our goals, and we trust that their policy judgments will match the ones we would come up with if we had unlimited time to study the issues.” But with today’s divisions, partisanship has become what Klein describes as a “mega-identity,” encompassing and intensifying a range of other identities like religion or race. Meanwhile, people within parties have become much more beholden to the identity of their respective groups. These trends have played out in each party, though in different ways: Democrats have been able to wield more cultural “cred” (which, though laudable, can be exploited and weaponized), while Republicans feel “increasingly dismissed,” often in ways that galvanize feelings of fear, resentment, and defensiveness.     

Ultimately, Klein argues, it was this same fear, resentment, and defensiveness that catapulted Trump to power. After Obama’s victory in 2008, the notion that the Right was being “left behind” or “pushed out” started to gain more credence with conservative audiences: “White people,” bemoaned Rush Limbaugh in 2010, are “the new oppressed minority” who will soon be “moving to the back of the bus”; “the demographics are changing; it’s not a traditional America anymore,” echoed Bill O’Reilly in 2012. By 2016, Klein argues, Trump was in a position to win not because of Comey or Russia or sexism but because he approached the election as a master marketer, correctly discerning — and effectively capitalizing on — Republican fear. To quote Michael Tessler, “Trump met the party where it was rather than trying to change it. He was hunting where the ducks were.”  

Grounded in these observations, Klein’s Why We’re Polarized is much more a “diagnosis” than a prescriptive blueprint for the future, though he does leave his readers with a few potential solutions to consider. For one, he encourages us to take a step back from news that amplifies our tribalistic identities in favor of mediums and platforms that prioritize balanced and introspective awareness — be cautious, he warns, of “how politics makes us feel.” Importantly, he also advises us to be more mindful of the opportunities afforded by local politics, where citizens tend to have more of a voice and are likelier to find common ground.   

Klein’s Why We’re Polarized is the most instructive and illuminating book on our current political climate I have read. That being said, I found myself unable to shake the fear that it was just another voice in the “echo chamber” Klein so vociferously decries. Was Klein, the founder of Vox.com, a Californian, a vegan, and a self-avowed liberal, the best person to write a book about political polarization in 2020? The answer to this question, I would argue, is debatable.

Do not get me wrong — Why We’re Polarized is an excellent and essential book. I just wish that it had been more inclusively branded — that it was less a book for liberals and more a book for everyone. In that book, perhaps, we could uncover the “prescription” for America’s future that Klein, self-admittedly, cannot.

In The Vacationers, novelist Emma Straub delivers what may be best described as a “brilliant beach read” — a sun-soaked, salty-aired drama filled with loads of humor, wit, wisdom, and emotional complexity. It tells the story of the Post family’s trip to the island of Mallorca, a Mediterranean Eden of sunshine, lemon trees, olive oil, and sheltered coves, where Franny, Jim, and their kids, Bobby and Sylvia, must live for two weeks under one roof with Bobby’s “significantly older” girlfriend, Carmen, along with Franny’s best friend, Charles (and his husband, Lawrence). Upon the motley crew’s arrival, we learn from Straub that “things have changed” within the Post family. As opposed to delivering an escape from reality, the Post family’s vacation seems to make their dysfunction more pressing and unavoidable: When they are home, Straub tells us, Jim, Franny, Bobby, and Sylvia are able to suppress these problems and manage their roles as “masters of self-delusion”; but when they are on the island, their mirrors reorient and multiply, forcing some difficult inter-generational reckoning.

As the New York Times-bestselling author of Modern Lovers and All Adults Here, Straub is so good at interweaving the light with the heavy. Filled with hysterical commentary on everything from plastic surgery and obscure muscle groups to protein powder, sunscreen application, and the “pathetic travesty” of European clubbing, The Vacationers is often laugh-out-loud funny. Yet it is also incisive and profound, particularly as Straub examines the book’s themes of infidelity, divorce, and unrequited love.

Straub is also SO good at leaving the reader hungry for more. While developing a sufficiently informative “context,” she never reveals more than what is warranted by the occasional and momentary flashback. At times, this can come at the expense of the reader’s understanding of Straub’s characters (particularly Jim and Franny). But, then again, I can’t help but think that there is something wonderful and delicious about meeting the characters just as they are — as if we were on vacation with them ourselves, swept up in a summery suspension of time and space.