February 2022 – Koba English

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

Most years I participate in an online card and gift exchange community. Starting in November or so, people post their wishlists and people send whatever cards and gifts they have the means to send. I received Maybe You Should Talk to Someone as part of this exchange (they saw it was on my GoodReads “to read” shelf), and there’s no faster way for a book to climb to the top of my reading agenda than to be either a library book or a gift. It turned out to be the kind of lighthearted easy read that works well in the post holiday blahs. Maybe it says something about me that a book about people in therapy, including parents who lose a child in car crashes and a dying cancer patient in her early 30s, feels like a “lighthearted easy read.” Gottlieb does an excellent job of conveying other people’s stories with respect and kindness, balancing the very serious and heartbreaking parts of life with the ones filled with beauty and joy.

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone focuses on three areas: a few of Gottlieb’s patients, Gottlieb’s own biography, and Gottlieb’s experience as a patient when she starts seeing a therapist after a difficult breakup. Everyone will get something different out of it, of course, but for me the most interesting parts were the behind-the-scenes looks at Actually Being A Therapist, like the philosophy behind how offices are set up and how other people approach and treat their therapists.

I say “other people” because I also see a therapist, so the natural inclination is to compare how they interact with their therapist to how I interact with mine. Lots of people, it turns out, leave voicemails for their therapist between sessions? Or send emails with random “hey this is cool” links? Even Gottlieb does this with her own therapist at one point so I assume she doesn’t think this is weird. But I find it incredibly weird—my therapist is obviously supposed to be compassionate and supportive and all of that, but it’s not her job to be a friend—but maybe I only find it weird because I’ve had exactly three sessions in as many years. (Thanks Covid!)

My only complaint about the book is that I feel like Gottlieb (or maybe more specifically, the publisher, since I don’t think authors control the marketing or the back-of-the-book blurbs) hypes up how unconventional her therapist, Wendell, is. In practice it just seems to be that he has his furniture arranged slightly differently, whereas I was expecting a therapist version of, like, Patch Adams or Dead Poets Society. But that’s not really the point of the book so it’s minor complaint that I’m willing to put aside at the end of the day. The more important thing is that this is the book that gently nudged me towards booking a long-overdue appointment with my therapist, and that will hopefully help normalize and destigmatize therapy.

The House by the River

Cover of The House by the River, by Lena Manta, translated from Greek by Gail Holst-Warhaft

I’m glad that Lena Manta isn’t my mother.

That’s really the only takeaway I have from this book. It seems to be a novel-length riff on “your mother will always love you and be there for you no matter what, also she was right all those years ago but she’ll never say I told you so because she’s just such a saint, but maybe she’ll write a novel instead.”

Theodora meets a much older man when she’s twelve, falls in love a few years later, and then marries him as soon as she turns eighteen. They have five daughters and then her beloved husband dies from stepping on a rusty nail and refusing to have his gangrenous leg amputated because he definitely has some PTSD from fighting in World War II that includes an abject, if poorly articulated, fear of amputation. This is the only remotely interesting piece of characterization in the book.

Theodora raises her daughters as a single mom and doesn’t consider for a moment remarrying (because she’s too old….at the ripe old age of 34). All of her daughters grow up to be breathtakingly beautiful (of course), leave home and in one way or another meet terrible tragedies and eventually come home, chagrined and heartbroken. The daughters who tried to have careers and interests outside of Blissful Domesticity are duly punished, whether it’s a career or an affair (or, in one case, both), but no one comes out of things unscathed. The ones who got married followed in their mother’s footsteps and married older (in one case, much older) men.

It’s possible to distinguish one daughter from the other in the beginning of the book, when they’re still young, but that’s perhaps mostly a function of the narration being fairly distant. As adults, when things switch to a closer third person perspective for each daughter, they become interchangeable. Even as they live somewhat different lives, their internal monologue is indistinguishable from the other because the writing is robotic. Not terse, not sparse, not subtle. Robotic. Robotic and repetitive. I think literally every single sister is described as a “volcano” during their first formative sexual experience.

Each sister has a tragic, melodramatic chapter about their life outside of the village, setting them up for the inevitable fall that will send them back to their mother who loved them and only wanted to protect them, after all. Of course, how stupid they were for thinking they could ever leave home! Their mother had been right all along! Structurally it feels like the book is trying to build a story about resilient women and the power of sisterhood, but it never rises beyond mere melodrama. All of this is why I’m glad Lena Manta isn’t my mother because I expect I would get a lot of guilt tripping over not calling enough, not visiting enough, why don’t you have some more food, when are you going to give me grandchildren, etc.

The only highlight in this book, and the part that was interesting enough that I actually slowed down to savor the reading, was the part of the book that took place under the Nazi occupation of Greece and the subsequent civil war. A whole book about Theodora trying to raise her family and keep things together would have been far more interesting, particularly in a novel by a Greek author of an age to have parents who lived through that history. Instead Manta breezes over that in favor of melodrama that swings between merely uninteresting (oh no, an affair!) or outright cringeworthy (egregious White Saviorism; hamfisted Mafia tropes).

Like so many other people, I got this book for free on World Book Day, so I suppose I can’t complain. You get what you pay for.

Caged

I didn’t intentionally set about to read Caged for Black History Month, but I suppose that’s kind of what happened.

I read it in two sittings over the course of a single weekend. The play is distilled from scenes and dialogue written by 28 members of a literature course at a maximum-security prison in Newark, New Jersey. They then sifted through that material and refined it, working together to bring to the fore the story and struggles of protagonist Omar Moore, trying to protect his little brother Quan and provide for his son Zaire, until he gets put away for 17 years for a crime he didn’t commit.

The thing that comes to mind while organizing my thoughts about this was the small dust-up eight years ago over Cuts Through Bone, an award-winning new detective novel that caused a minor dust-up over the fact that the author, Alaric Hunt, was incarcerated, serving a life sentence for murder—in a bid to distract the police from a jewelry robbery, he set a fire that took the life of a young grad student.

Another thing that comes to mind is Annie Dookhan, the lab tech who falsified untold mountains of evidence in drug cases. The astonishing thing in all of that is the sheer volume of her fraud—how many lives have gone down a similar track as the New Jersey Prison Collective, or Omar, or any of the other characters in Caged, because of her actions?

And the final thing that comes to mind is the absolutely worthless hew and cry being raised over the ludicrous idea that people want to censor Joe Rogan. Here’s the thing: Joe Rogan gets to be a media figure and have a show and be a “voice” in “the conversation.” Even if Spotify took him off their platform he’d turn up somewhere else, like a bad fucking penny, and we’d still be stuck talking about him. He’d get to live his life as a free man (how much weed has he smoked in his life that was up until very recently not legally obtained?) and, I don’t know, write a book or go on speaking tours or whatever else. None of that is censorship.

Contrast that with how we (in the US, anyway) treat and talk about the incarcerated. I’m not trying to imply that there is a conspiracy to keep their voices out of the conversation; my point, rather, is that cultural norms mean there doesn’t have to be a conspiracy. It happens of its own accord. Because most of us operate under a “just world” fallacy and because the lives of middle-class suburban Americans aren’t usually touched by the kinds of crimes, life circumstances, or bad luck that send someone to prison (and when they are, they do their best to hide it), the unexamined belief we carry for most of our lives is “people who commit crimes obviously choose to commit them, so prison is what they deserve, and as a whole they’re a subset of the population that’s not worth thinking about and that doesn’t have anything worth saying.” That’s the most powerful censorship of all—not banning someone’s ideas or burning their books, but structuring society so that everyone else forgets that some 2.2 million Americans even exist.

We’ve always been at war with Oceania.

Caged was a good play. I would love to see it performed because I would love to see the set direction as it’s described in the text. But I think the most important thing about it is how it has found a way around that internalized censor and put the voices of the incarcerated out there for public consumption, to speak directly about their experiences and life in a system that has tried to erase them.