I thought this summer would be the summer I finally tackled The Odyssey—the summer of reading the most fabled story about homecoming, the story that launched an uncountable number of wordsmiths on their journey to describing home. How fitting (albeit very on the nose), I thought, to read a book about homecoming while living in the first geographic location I called home, the Missoula valley. But that isn’t the story I seemed to need right now, or this summer, or at least not such an explicit story of homecoming.
This summer instead has been the summer of strong women memoirs and a biography— Stray by Stephanie Danler, Untamed by Glennon Doyle, Ninth Street Women - Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement that Changed Modern Art by Mary Gabriel, Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman, and The Fixed Stars by Molly Wizenberg. As I traveled into a new decade, crossing over from 29 to 30, I found myself gravitating toward stories of women in their late 20s and 30s who are still figuring it out. Stories of women who paused and were strong and said, “this is not for me, this is not what I want out of this life.” Stories of women who stumbled and fumbled and tried and succeeded in finding their footing again. Stories of women who stayed, longer than they knew they should, in friendships, or relationships, or partnerships or jobs, but eventually found the bravery to leave. Stories of women who have tried again—women who have rebuilt and reconceived their place and sense of home. That’s the type of homegoing I needed to see—a homegoing back into the very first home, the ever-present home of the self. That’s the type of homegoing I’m working towards too, while also slowly thinking about the physical home that I hope to one day build and share. But first I needed this type of fluidity, I needed examples of women whose lives did not follow the trajectory that they had hoped or planned—women who came out the other side of uncertainty stronger and more sure in what they wanted because of the lack of linearity they’d lived through.
We need to share more stories like these. We’ve needed them for a while, but as we continue to tread the uncertain terrain that is 2020—as we look at a landscape that has creased the linearity of our lifelines for an unknowable amount of time—we need to share the stories where paths have diverged and folded, because life has never been linear and yet the stories shared usually follow a steady through thread. We need stories that braid, or perhaps more likely traverse a string of sailor knots with the occasional erroneous extra loop that has to be paused for and untangled. I was always terrible at the knot unit of Girl Scouts, so maybe it’s fitting that it’s taking me a bit of time to untwine and retie some of my own lines.
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As I’m ever-adding to my to-read list I’m curious – what are you reading right now? What themes are you gravitating toward?