Happy New Year!
A short dispatch—it’s been a long day.
The transition to a new calendar year is arbitrary, I know, but this year it does feel significant, and very welcome. I feel so fortunate to have survived and kept my kids healthy and relatively happy, and I’m grateful for the sense that today marks a new beginning. Of what exactly, I do not know.
I made panna cotta with winter citrus this week from the Gjelina cookbook—an unusual recipe that calls for Greek yogurt. The recipe began with instructions to mix gelatin and water and to let the gelatin "bloom" for a few minutes, but then there was no further mention of it. I got really stressed out worrying about when and where to add the gelatin and water mixture, which hardened quickly, and I started thinking about the job of a recipe editor, who must ensure continuity between the ingredient list and the instructions, which are a narrative. I ended up adding it as I poured the warm cream over the yogurt and it dissolved and set perfectly and was good. But this only-once-mentioned gelatin troubled me. If I ever become a recipe writer or editor (a job I think I’d truly love), I will make sure every ingredient fulfills its destiny.
I then thought about whether this is applicable to other kinds of narratives. Do we always need to follow each ingredient to its conclusion? I don’t think so. I quite like finishing a novel and realizing there are loose ends the writer chose not to tie up.
The panna cotta came about after I posted on Instagram soliciting recipe ideas to handle a surfeit of Meyer lemons from my tree (a happy problem), and people made some excellent suggestions. Having a lemon tree seems like something from a fantasy of a California life. Never did I imagine myself as someone who would have a lemon, let alone many lemons, which would necessitate a tree, to paraphrase Wayne’s World. But now my list of lemon recipes is long. Today, outside with a dear friend and fermentation maven, who brought me homemade beet kvass earlier this week (!), I preserved five jars worth. The scene was the type I would see on Instagram and find charming if I was feeling magnanimous and annoying if my house was messy or I was in a bad mood, like who does this bitch think she is. I am that bitch, it turns out. Who do I think I am? Someone who is really rather earnest about canning and preserving and appreciating the abundance around me. Gag me with a wooden spoon.
I felt very emotional this week when it was announced that Argentina's congress had voted to legalize abortion. I got an alert on my phone around 11:00pm and lay smiling in bed for a few minutes, feeling the significance—no, the weight, which I felt in my body—of such a decision in a country of 45 million people. I looked online at photos of the women who’ve marched for this, clad in their movement’s signature green, and thought about what that freedom means. They have been granted a touch more of humanity and they wore the news like ecstasy on their faces.
One statistic that stood out to me in a New York Times piece about the decision is that between the years 2016 and 2018, 7262 girls between the ages of 10 and 14 gave birth. Seven thousand two hundred and sixty two. Thinking about this statistic—which is to say, thinking about the widespread rape of young girls—put me in mind of a question posed by legendary critic Ellen Willis in an old article called “Putting Women Back into the Abortion Debate,” which I went and found: "Can it be moral, under any circumstances, to make a woman bear a child against her will?" I don’t know why I remembered that question. Willis talks in the essay about becoming a mother herself and how it solidified her position as an advocate for women’s right to choose. (I would love to read a collection of essays about how becoming mothers shifted women’s thinking about abortion—does one exist?) She believed it cannot be moral. I believe that it cannot be moral, is not moral. And I am relieved to think that pregnancies like this (10 to 14 years old; my heart hurts) will no longer necessarily be forced to be carried to term in Argentina. I am horrified to think they ever were.
The surging emotion I felt also made me realize how rare it is to feel solidarity with women around the world in a positive way. In recent months, I've thought—and talked and read and written—a lot about the other kinds of solidarity women currently feel. The bad things. Setbacks, rollbacks, disappointment, sadness, resignation, anger and grief. Solidarity in being asked to shoulder disproportionately the burdens of this moment.
I realized it is rare to feel a swell of unadulterated feminist hope, particularly one not tethered to or hijacked by some larger doubt or pressure to perform doubt. It was a swell of sisterhood I was feeling, the kind I used to feel as a riot grrrl in the 90s. Was I only able to feel that because I don’t know the Argentine context very well and am looking at inspiring photos at a remove? Is it because this is an unequivocal achievement for womankind and can just feel simply good, unlike other more uneven victories around issues like #MeToo? Anyway, I savored the feeling. It’s one I yearn for, as American feminism feels like it grows evermore diffuse. I’ve looked at a few of these images from Argentina every day, as I’ve read more news stories. Like everything, they also have the potential to make me sad. The women, all ages, colors, and sizes, look incredulous that they have been recognized—one iota more—as thinking people, as people at all. That they should be so surprised, so moved by that, is of course on some level devastating.
In general, it's been a strange time for thinking about other people. (Remember the nightly rounds of cheer and applause for frontline medical workers? I’d forgotten that until now—this year has been a decade.) I think about how rare a time like this is—not like a war, which knits only a few countries together in the name of a nominally united cause, and requires that a few others be knitted together in nominal opposition—but a genuine predicament affecting the entire human family.
Never before in my life have I been able to imagine that people in literally every other place on earth are facing some of the same challenges as me, albeit in different ways. A child in Phnom Penh or Pisa or Palma or Pskov. An old man in Mogadishu or Minneapolis. All confronting a common problem. All annoyed by their face masks. AIDS cast a similarly terrifying shadow, but (largely because of flagrant government inaction) it didn’t feel urgent everywhere all at once. This does feel urgent everywhere all at once, except I guess in the places where it was rather quickly brought to heel. I'm far too cynical to believe that this is unifying, and structural inequality is too much in evidence everywhere to even begin to think we’re “all in this together” or some shit like that. But still, in some very literal sense, we are all in this shitshow of a situation together. Just as a passing thought, I find that very odd.
But even as pandemics have the unique capacity to flatten certain differences, they make others more stark, and just as they force the whole “global community” to confront a single problem, they also make most forms of community near impossible. The pod-ification of our social worlds (our poor kids’ social worlds, jesus), the further atomization of families living under this grim regime—that distresses me greatly. People keep telling me that we’re going to experience a roaring twenties once the virus is under control. (I’m like oh, you mean Prohibition, organized crime, the Klan?!?!) I do relish the idea of going to a loud sweaty party or a dark bar. But as we teeter on the precipice of real climate horror, I also feel afraid thinking about all the selfish, greedy people on this planet feeling even more entitled to hedonistic waste.
I will post more about books next week. There are so many to talk about. In the meantime, enjoy the first week of the first month of a new year! And thank you for reading this.
A few good things I read this week:
This incredible NYT piece from 2018, "What is Glitter?" (which reminded me of the iconic 1980s Sesame Street video about making crayons—my sisters and I loved it)
This absolutely bonkers piece about Mormon mommy bloggers in Jewish Currents
This great piece by Anna Weiner about Substack itself. Funny to read this two weeks after starting a newsletter here—a good reminder that everything is awful!