Review: So Lucky, by Nicola Griffith

The first sign of trouble was easy to ignore. Mara tripped on the day her partner of fourteen years moved out, and thought nothing of it. But it was only a week and a half before the more serious fall in her kitchen, a doctor's visit, and a diagnosis: multiple sclerosis.

The next few days were a mess of numbness, shock, and anger: a fight at her job as the director of an HIV foundation over a wheelchair ramp, an unintended outburst in a spreadsheet, and then being fired. Well, a year of partial pay and medical coverage, "as gratitude for her service." But fired, for being disabled.

Mara is not the sort of person to take anything slow. Less time at the job means more time to research MS, time to refit her house for her upcoming disability, time to learn how to give herself injections, time to buy a cat. Time to bounce hard off of an MS support group while seeing an apparently imaginary dog. Time to get angry, like she had years ago when she was assaulted and threw herself obsessively into learning self-defense. Time to decide to fight back.

I so wanted to like this book. It's the first new Nicola Griffith novel since Hild, and I've loved everything of hers I've read. It's a book about disability, about finding one's people, about activism, about rights of people with disabilities, and about how people's reactions to others with disabilities are predictable and awful and condescending. Mara isn't a role model, isn't inspiration, isn't long-suffering. She's angry, scared, obsessive, scary, and horrible at communication. She spent her career helping people with a type of medical disability, and yet is entirely unprepared for having one herself.

I'm glad this book exists. I want more books like this to exist.

I mostly didn't enjoy reading it.

In part, this is because I personally bounced off some themes of the book. I have a low tolerance for horror, and there's a subplot involving Mara's vividly-imagined fear of a human predator working their way through her newly-discovered community that made me actively uncomfortable to read. (I realize that was part of the point, and I appreciate it as art, but I didn't enjoy it as a reader.) But I also think some of it is structural.

There is a character development arc here: Mara has to come to terms with what MS means to her, how she's going to live with it, and how she's going to define herself after loss of her job, without a long-term relationship, and with a disabling disease, all essentially at once. Pieces of that worked for me, such as Mara's interaction with Aiyana. But Griffith represents part of that arc with several hallucinatory encounters with a phantom embodiment of what Mara is fighting against, which plays a significant role in the climax of the book. And that climax didn't work for me. It felt off-tempo somehow, not quite supported by Mara's previous changes in attitude, too abrupt, too heavily metaphorical for me to follow.

It's just one scene, but So Lucky puts a lot of weight on that scene. This is a short novel full of furious energy, pushing towards some sort of conclusion or explosion. Mara is, frankly, a rather awful person for most of the book, for reasons that follow pre-existing fracture lines in her personality and are understandable and even forgivable but still unpleasant. I needed some sort of emotional catharsis, some dramatic turning point in her self-image and engagement with the world, and I think Griffith's intent was to provide that catharsis, and it didn't land for me, which left me off-balance and disturbed and unsatisfied. And frustrated, because I was rooting for the book and stuck with it through some rather nasty plot developments, hoping the payoff would be worth it.

This is all very individual; it doesn't surprise me at all that other people love this book. I'm also not disabled. I'm sure that would add additional layers, and it might have made the catharsis land for me. But I personally spent most of the book wanting to read about Aiyana instead of Mara.

Spending the book wishing I was reading about the non-disabled character, the one who isn't angry and isn't scary and isn't as scared, is partly the point. And it's a very good point; despite not enjoying this book, I'm glad I read it. It made me think. It made me question why I liked one character over another, what made me uncomfortable about Mara, and why I found her off-putting. As a work of activism, I think So Lucky lands its punches well. People like me wanting comfort instead of truth is part of how people with disabilities are treated in society, and not a very attractive part. But at the same time, I read books for pleasure. I'm not sure how to reconcile those conflicting goals.

So Lucky is a Griffith novel, so the descriptions are gorgeous and the quality of the writing is exceptional. Griffith gives each moment a heft and weight and physicality. The relationships in this book worked for me in all their complexity, even when I was furious at Mara for breaking hers. And Griffith's descriptions of physical bodies, touching and feeling and being in each other's spaces, remain the best of any author I've read. If the plot works better for you than it did for me, there's a lot here to enjoy.

I can't quite recommend it, or at least as much as I hoped I could. But I think some people will love it.

One final note: I keep seeing reviews and blurbs about this book that describe it as an autobiographical novel, and it irritates me every time. It's not autobiographical. Yes, Griffith and the protagonist both have MS, are both lesbians, and both taught self-defense. But Griffith has put lesbians, self-defense teachers, and people with MS in many of her books. Mara runs a charitable organization; Griffith is a writer. Mara's relationships are a mess; Griffith has been happily married for nearly 25 years. I'm sure Griffith drew heavily on her own reactions to MS to write this novel, as novelists do, but that doesn't make Mara a self-insert or make this fictional story an autobiography. Disabled authors can write disabled protagonists without making the story non-fiction. It's weirdly dismissive to cast the book this way, to take away Griffith's technique and imagination and ability to invent character and situation and instead classify the book as some sort of transcription of her own life. And I don't think it would happen if it weren't for the common disability.

This is identifying people as their disability, and it's lazy and wrong and exclusionary. Stop doing this.

Rating: 5 out of 10

Review: Overwhelmed, by Brigid Schulte

Subtitled Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, Overwhelmed is part of the latest batch of reading I've been doing on time management and life organization. The focus of this book is particularly appealing: Why does life feel so busy? Why do we feel constantly overwhelmed with things we're supposed to be doing? Did something change? If so, what changed? And how can we fix it? Schulte avoids many of the pitfalls of both science popularization and self-help books by personalizing her questions in an appealing way. She is overwhelmed, she wants to escape that trap, and she goes looking for things that would help her personally, bringing the reader along for the ride.

The caveat to this approach, which I wish were more obvious from the marketing surrounding this book, is that Overwhelmed is focused on the type of overwhelm that the author herself is dealing with: being a working mother. Roughly two-thirds of this book is about parenting, gender balance in both parenting and household chores, time stress unique to working mothers, and the interaction between the demands of family and the demands of the workplace.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with this focus. I'm delighted to see more time and attention management books and workplace policy investigations written for the working mother instead of the male executive. Just be aware that a lot of this book is not going to apply directly to people without partners or kids, although I still found it useful as a tool for building social empathy and thinking about work and government policy.

Schulte starts the book with a brilliant hook. Overwhelmed, fragmented, and exhausted, Schulte had kept a time diary for a year, and is turning it over to John Robinson, a well-known sociologist specializing in time use. Schulte memorably describes how her time diaries have become confessionals of panic attacks, unpaid bills, hours spent waiting on hold, and tarot readings telling her to take more quiet time for herself. But Robinson's conclusion is ruthless: she had 28 hours of leisure in the week they analyzed during the visit. A little less than average, but a marked contrast to Schulte's sense that she had no leisure at all. Based on his research with meticulous time diaries, Robinson is insistent that we have as much or more leisure than we had fifty years ago. (He has his own book on the topic, Time for Life.) Schulte's subjective impression of her time is wildly inconsistent with that analysis. What happened?

In the first part of the book, Schulte introduces two useful concepts: time confetti, to describe her subjective impression of the shredding of her schedule and attention, and role overload. The latter is used in academic work on time use to describe attempting to fulfill multiple roles simultaneously without the necessary resources for all of them, and has a strong correlation with depression and anxiety. Schulte immediately recognized the signs of role overload in her own conflicts between work and parenting, but even without the parenting component, I recognized role overload in the strain between work and volunteer commitments. Simplified, it's a more academic version of the common concept of "work-life balance," but it comes with additional research on the consequences: constant multitasking, a sense of accelerating pace, and a breakdown of clean divisions between blocks of time devoted to different activities.

The rest of the book looks at this problem in three distinct spheres: work, love (mostly family and child-rearing), and play. Schulte adds the additional concepts of the Ideal Worker, Ideal Mother, and Providing Father archetypes and their pressure towards both gender stereotypes and an unhealthy devotion to work availability and long work hours. I found the Ideal Worker concept and its framing of the standards against which we unconsciously measure ourselves particularly useful, even though I'm in an extremely relaxed and flexible work place by US standards. The Ideal Mother and Providing Father concepts in the section on love were more academic to me (since I don't have kids), but gave me new empathy for the struggles to apply an abstract ideal of equal partnership to the messy world of subconscious stereotypes and inflexible workplaces designed for providing fathers.

Schulte does offer a few tentative solutions, or at least pushes in a better direction, but mostly one comes away from this book wanting to move to Denmark or the Netherlands (both used here, as in so many other places these days, as examples of societies that have made far different choices about work and life than the US has). So many of the flaws are structural: jobs of at least forty hours a week, a culture of working late at the office or taking work home, inadequate child care, and deeply ingrained gender stereotypes that shape our behavior even when we don't want them to. Carving out a less overwhelmed life as an individual is an exhausting swim upstream, which is nigh-impossible when exhaustion and burnout is the starting point. If you're looking for a book to make you feel empowered and in control of eliminating the sense of overwhelm from your life, that's not this book, although that also makes it a more realistic study.

That said, Schulte herself sounds more optimistic at the end of the book than at the beginning, and seems to have found some techniques that helped without moving to Denmark. She summarizes them at the end of the book, and it's a solid list. Several will be familiar to any time management reader (stop multitasking, prioritize the important things first, make room for quiet moments, take advantage of human burst work cycles, be very clear about your objectives, and, seriously, stop multitasking), but for me they gained more weight from Schulte's personal attempts to understand and apply them. But I think this is more a book about the shape of the problem than about the shape of the solution.

Overwhelmed is going to have the most to say to women and to people with children, but I'm glad I read it. This is the good sort of summary of scientific and social research: personalized, embracing ambiguity and conflicting research and opinions, capturing the sense of muddling through and trying multiple things, and honest and heartfelt in presenting the author's personal take and personal challenges. It avoids both the guru certainty of the self-help book and the excessive generalization of Gladwell-style popularizations. More like this, please.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Review: Riders of the Storm, by Julie E. Czerneda

Riders of the Storm is the second book in the Stratification sub-series in Czerneda's larger Trade Pact universe, and a direct sequel to Reap the Wild Wind. Czerneda is telling a larger story in multiple parts, so this isn't a series to read out of order.

Reap the Wild Wind broke apart Aryl's world view (along with everything else about her life) and gave her contact with a larger universe than she thought existed. Riders of the Storm builds on that, doing middle-book setup and stabilization and bringing the shape of the trilogy into clearer focus. But it takes its sweet time getting there. First, we get an interminable slog across snowy mountains during a winter storm, and then a maddeningly slow exploration of an oddly depopulated Om'ray settlement that none of Aryl's clan knew about (even though that shouldn't be possible).

This book does get somewhere eventually. Aryl can't avoid getting pulled into inter-species politics, including desperate attempts to understand the maddeningly opaque Oud and unpredictably malevolent Tiktik. There's less contact with varied off-worlders in this book than the last; Aryl instead gets a much deeper connection and conversation with one specific off-worlder. That, when it finally comes, does move past one of my complaints about the first book: Aryl finally realizes that she needs to understand this outside perspective and stop being so dismissive of the hints that this reader wished she'd follow up on. We're finally rewarded with a few glimpses of why the off-worlders are here and why Aryl's world might be significant. Just hints, though; all the payoff is saved for (hopefully) the next book.

We also get a glimpse of the distant Om'ray clan that no one knows anything about, although I found that part unsatisfyingly disconnected from the rest of the story. I think this is a middle-book setup problem, since the Tiktik are also interested and Czerneda lays some groundwork for bringing the pieces together.

If Riders of the Storm were just the second half of this book, with Tiktik and Oud politics, explorations of Om'ray powers, careful and confused maneuvering between the human off-worlder and Aryl, and Enris's explorations of unexpected corners of Om'ray technology, I would have called this a solid novel and a satisfying continuation of the better parts of the first book. But I thought the first half of this book was painfully slow, and it took a real effort of will to get through it. I think I'm still struggling with a deeper mismatch of what Czerneda finds interesting and what I'm reading this series for.

I liked the broader Trade Pact universe. I like the world-building here, but mostly for its mysteries. I want to find out the origins of this world, how it ties into the archaeological interests of the off-worlders, why one of the Om'ray clans is so very strange, and how the Oud, Tiktik, and Om'ray all fit together in the history of this strange planet. Some of this I might know if I remembered the first Trade Pact trilogy better, but the mystery is more satisfying for not having those clues. What I'm very much not interested in is the interpersonal politics of Aryl's small band, or their fears of having enough to eat, or their extended, miserable reaction to being in a harsh winter storm for the first time in their lives. All this slice-of-life stuff is so not why I'm reading this series, and for my taste there was rather too much of it. In retrospect, I think that was one of the complaints I had about the previous book as well.

If instead you more strongly identify with Aryl and thus care about the day-to-day perils of her life, rather than seeing them as a side-show and distraction from the larger mystery, I think your reaction to this book would be very different from mine. That would be in line with how Aryl sees her own world, so, unlike me, you won't be constantly wanting her to focus on one thing when she's focused on something else entirely. I think I'm reading this series a bit against the grain because I don't find Aryl's tribal politics, or in-the-moment baffled reactions, interesting enough to hold my attention without revelations the deeper world-building.

That frustration aside, I'm glad I got through the first part of the book to get to the meat because that world-building is satisfying. I'm thoroughly hooked: I want to know a lot more about the Oud and Tiktik, about the archaeological mission, and about the origins of Aryl's bizarre society. But I'm also very glad that there's only one more book so that this doesn't drag on much longer, and I hope that book delivers up revelations at a faster and more even pace.

Followed by Rift in the Sky.

Rating: 6 out of 10