This tendency towards nostalgia is alluring, but, as Crane points out, it runs the risk of augmenting our memories through a rose-tinted filter. Dig deep enough, and most of us would probably find that our first relationship wasn’t as hearts-and-flowers as we like to think.
Marni Appleton’s bittersweet debut collection of short stories focuses on the experiences of millennial women – their obsessions, friendships, betrayals and crushes. Appleton is good on mother-daughter relationships. In the title story, Ana is alienated by the realisation that everyone around her is pregnant. As she obsesses about the breakdown of her friendship with Chloe, tormented by her upbeat social media posts, we realise there is more going on: Ana is projecting her pain about her bipolar mother and conflicted emotions about having children.
To what extent are our identities shaped by genetics compared to our social environments? Is the science around this reliable, or has it been influenced by the biases and power imbalances – both overt and covert – that structure our societies? Such questions have long intrigued researchers and societies more generally, and they are taken up afresh in a recent book by Shoumita Dasgupta, Where Biology Ends and Bias Begins. Dasgupta undertakes an ambitious project: disentangling the legitimate findings of biological and genetic sciences from the deeply embedded social biases that usually distort their interpretation. The book makes a critical intervention against genetic essentialism – the belief that complex human attributes, including race, gender, and identity, can be reduced to simple genetic determinants.