two books I read this week, and one I didn't

spoilers ahead + a poem by Ruth Awad

Exhibit A

Even under the best of circumstances, the magnolia drops its blooms after only a week. Much of my neighborhood currently looks like this:

Exhibit B

“It was an uncertain spring.”

This is the first sentence from Virginia Woolf’s 1937 novel, The Years. It’s a novel I’ve never read, or, if I have, I remember nothing about it. The Years opens with a certain Colonel Abel Pargiter visiting his “mistress” (Wikipedia’s word) Mira in a “dingy” suburb north of London. According to Wikipedia, Pargiter has four almost- or mostly-adult children and a wife named Rose, who is ill and dying. I stopped reading the Wiki entry there, so I don’t know what becomes of Pargiter, Mira, and the four children. However, I think it’s safe to assume that the “uncertainty” Woolf’s narrator refers to is both the weather and the health—emotional as well as physical—of the various members of the Partiger family.¹

Exhibit C

“It was an uncertain spring.”

The first line from The Years came to my attention because it was also used as the first line in one of the books I did read this week, Sigrid Nunez’s 2023 The Vulnerables, a novel about a woman who is called to house- and parrot-sit for a friend of a friend during the COVID pandemic. Her housesitting job is complicated, however, by the arrival of a college student who, it turns out, is an *actual friend of the homeowners. After being kicked out of first his college dorm due to the pandemic and then his parents’ house due to a snarky liberalism that the parents won’t tolerate, the young man decides to take refuge in the friend’s apartment and the companionship of the parrot, a stance which effectively forces the narrator to quarantine with him. A good chunk of the novel reveals the great lengths the narrator goes to in order to avoid running into him in the three-bedroom apartment. (One of the bedrooms belongs exclusively to the parrot.) The two humans take turns using the fancy kitchen and roof top deck. Eventually, though, the two develop a friendship—forged by their shared adoration of the parrot and fueled in no small part by the man’s constant supply of edibles.

Exhibit D

“It [is almost always] an uncertain spring.”

I’ve never been a big fan of spring. Maybe it’s the transition, the in-between-ness. Maybe it’s the lingering confusion of Daylight Savings Time. Maybe it’s the restless energy of new growth that demands my attention—bossily, like a toddler. I feel always a little bit off-kilter during the spring, the way I used to feel after a bout of vertigo. I have heard people with migraines talk about the aftermath of a migraine in much the same way—hard to pinpoint the precise location of the distress, but insistent all the same. I guess I’m not alone—some studies show an increase in suicidal behavior, manic episodes, and hospitalizations for psychiatric conditions.

If you or someone you know is in need of support, please call or text 988, which is—for now, at least—still operating as a joint venture between SAMHSA and vibrant.org.

Exhibit E

The other book I read this week is Bette Howland’s memoir W-3, detailing the time the author spent on the psychiatric floor of a large Chicago teaching hospital². Following a long and undiagnosable illness, the narrator—a mother with two young sons—swallowed a bottle of pills and then immediately called her doctor. Emergency services reached her just in time for a lifesaving intervention. She stayed in the ICU for several weeks, after which she was transferred to “W-3,” shorthand for the psychiatric ward.

The memoir is essentially a diary of patient life on W-3. Among other things, the memoir documents the lack of privacy, the lack of fresh air, the all-night racket, and the eerie quietness of early morning. The narrator frequently adopts a plural “we” stance in order to write about the collective experience of the patients—the listlessness; the dismissal by the medical staff; the bouts of mania and inertia; the fixation on food; the fixation on what to wear; and whether or not to ask for sleeping pills at the end of each day.

At the end of the book, reunited again with her sons and living in a newly rented apartment, the narrator stays up all night, painting the walls and furniture with the gallons of white paint she bought. When she tries to sleep, the night terrors begin: “Night after night, as soon as the lights were out, the darkness went on the move; it rolled past me like a landscape—rough, hilly, thorny with no underbrush…. I knew that I was moving through panic and terror—…and if I started struggling and thrashing I might never get out.”

Disappointingly for my purposes, I don’t think Howland’s manuscript relies on any calendar markers, so I cannot point to the book as additional proof that lots of us struggle more than usual in the spring. But what is interesting about Howland’s writing is the absence of personal details that brought her to attempt to end her life. She’s less interested in the individual “whys” that lie behind every story and more interested in the fact of the “whys” in the first place: “[I] hated giving any account of myself. I was sick to death of the facts of my life…. Histories like mine, of long debilitating illness, vague recurrent symptoms, hospitalizations, were common enough on W-3; these things go together.”

Exhibit F

I’ve never felt so enthrall to my own “vague recurrent symptoms” that I have needed to be hospitalized for psychoemotional distress. And yet: I certainly recognize parts of myself in the patients of W-3. I share their deep-seated ambivalence about what it means to be human. I grapple with how improbable it can feel to force oneself to go on living when faced with the absurdity of life³—not only our individualized griefs, but—moreso!—our wars; our cultural violence; our myriad, human cruelties. I recognize how easy it is to turn to something—anything!—when panic and terror sink their teeth into a soft soul and meet little to no resistance.

A synthesis, of sorts

And here, I think, I have found what connects W-3 with The Years and The Vulnerables: are we not all just reaching for something to get us through the night? An affair, edibles, a wing-clipped parrot, an unlikely friendship, a bottle of pills. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Filling a blank page with our brand new words, drawing our backyard sycamores, taking photographs of tiny purple phlox as they poke through the dirt, feeling a dog’s hot breath against our palms. All coping mechanisms are not created equal, of course. Some are generative. Some are destructive. The destructive ones wreak move havoc, as opposed to quieting the chaos. (Just look at the hard consonants in that sentence alone! Ouch!) The destructive ones frequently take others down with them. And yet I think that, on some level, and to varying degrees, what they share with the creative ones is the primal need to make it stop, or, at least, to make it less.

Supporting Evidence

“Reasons to Live,” by Ruth Awad

Because if you can survive
the violet night, you can survive

the next, and the fig tree will ache
with sweetness for you in the sunlight that arrives

first at your window, quietly pawing
even when you can't stand it,

and you'll heavy the whining floorboards
of the house you filled with animals

as hurt and lost as you, and the bearded irises will form
fully in their roots, their golden manes

swaying with the want of spring--
live, live, live, live!--

one day you'll put your hands in the earth
and understand an afterlife isn't promised,

but the spray of scorpion grass keeps growing,
and the dogs will sing their whole bodies

in praise of you, and the redbuds will lay
down their pink crowns, and the rivers

will set their stones and ribbons
at your door if only

you'll let the world
soften you with its touching. 

After all, what is the “violet night” of Ruth Awad’s poem if not Howland’s “panic and terror”?⁴ Awad’s narrator bravely names all the ways they have found to take refuge from the assaults of the long, lonely, disorienting hours when everyone else seems to sleep. And yet Awad’s narrator says nothing new. Poets and novelists have been writing for centuries about the solace of the trees and sunlight, the comfort of animals (Nunez’s parrot, or the dog from The Friend), the power of water to heal and nourish—in other words, we are all writing about the struggle to find enough grace and beauty in the world to compensate for its pain and terror.⁵

Final thoughts

When I first moved to my current clime, four hours south of Chicago, I was struck by the clearly demarcated four seasons that operate here—as opposed to Chicago’s multitudinous ones! Here, spring comes sooner and acts more like a traditional spring; fall comes later and lingers longer. On the one hand, the lengthier spring gives me more weeks to feel imbalanced. More weeks of itchy eyes and pillows of pollen wrapping everything in a constant haze of green. On the other hand, the longer spring means more opportunities for generative practices. More opportunities to meet the panic and terror with less struggle, and less thrashing. More opportunities to “let the world / soften [us] with its touching.”

Thank you for reading, friends. Thanks to all the new subscribers who are here this week. Thanks especially to all who made it this far! I am so grateful to all of you.

xoxo, F

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1. Before closing the tab, however, I did discover (spoiler alert!) that Rose dies.

2. It must have been The University of Chicago, although it’s never explicitly named.

3. Albert Camus, from The Myth of Sisyphus, which I hope to address in another essay at another time!

4. It occurred to me I wrote some of my own “reasons for living” a few weeks ago.

5. The urgency of this need consumed the entirety of Woolf’s career, until it didn’t.