When I arrived at the Princess Academy, I was led into a dimly lit tearoom. I was 17, which meant that I had no idea what to expect from my first real job interview. The tearoom was elegant and cozy, adorned with soft cushions and teardrop crystals. Tangy-sweet hot cider in a gold-edged teacup sat on the table in front of my chair.
The owner of the shop — the queen of the castle — breezed into the room. Queen Amanda. She was wearing what I can only describe as princess daywear — a lace-up embroidered vest over a loose white blouse and a pink-striped skirt. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it had never occurred to me that there was such a thing as casual princess clothes.
Take for example taste aversion in rats. It is well known that rats avoid certain toxic foods even if they don’t become nauseous until hours later. Simple association fails to explain this. Could it be that rats consciously go over the recent past in their minds, thinking back to every food encounter to determine which one was most likely to have made them sick? We certainly do so ourselves after food poisoning and gag at the mere thought of the particular food or restaurant that we believe caused a shock to our digestive system.
The possibility that rats have a mental workspace where they review their own memories is not so far-fetched given the growing evidence that they can “replay” memories of past events in their brain. This kind of memory, known as episodic memory, is different from associative learning, as when a dog learns that by responding to the command “sit,” he will be rewarded with a cookie. To create the association, the trainer has to give the dog the reward right away—an interval of even just a few minutes is not going to be helpful. In contrast to this kind of learning, episodic memory is the capacity to think back to a specific event, sometimes long ago, the way we do when we think of, say, our wedding day. We remember our clothes, the weather, the tears, who danced with whom, and which uncle ended up under the table.
I’d like to be able to tell you that knowing what I’ve learned reporting this piece, I have sworn off long-distance travel.
But actually this summer, we’re going to Greece, with a stopover in Paris. Carbon footprint of plane tickets: 10.6 metric tons, enough to melt a small-apartment-sized piece of the Arctic.
Those of us in food media understand this appeal as much as anyone, and the restaurant industry has given us plenty to work with. These days, I’m seeing male-chef redemption stories everywhere; I get as many PR emails tossing me tales of reformed bad-boy chefs as I do about turmeric. On Healthyish and Bon Appétit, we’ve run a handful of accounts of transformation, or at least self-improvement, from chefs like Naomi Pomeroy, Missy Robbins, Gabe Rucker, Sean Brock, and Andrew Zimmern. Most of these articles were written from the chefs’ perspectives, and that was an intentional choice. As an editor, I’ve always felt that the best way to tell a transformation story is in the words of the person who has transformed. These posts all got a lot of eyeballs and, more importantly, a lot of responses from readers telling us how much they could relate.
But I’ve come to understand that there’s a pretty big problem with these personal narratives, which is that they are, by definition, one-sided. We know who’s telling the story. But we don’t stop enough to ask who, by extension, isn’t being heard.
Perhaps innocent suffering does create saintliness in those who witness it, so that motherhood, friendship and marriage can be briefly unambivalent. Certainly this is why this book feels more hopeful than harrowing. I cried many times while reading it, more often because I was moved than sad. Segal has found a way to record love without sentimentality: love that enables the exhausted, underpaid nurses and the shattered, frightened mothers to survive.
“Identity exists where the Complication and Unraveling are the same,” wrote Aristotle in his treatise on literary theory, “Poetics.” The primary task of traditional novelists has always been as such: to test the character of their protagonist through the events of a plot. As the proverbial instruction goes, they must get their hero or heroine up a tree, throw some rocks at him or her, and get him or her down, with an epiphany, or at least some larger meaning, in hand.
In two debut novels, Kristen Arnett’s “Mostly Dead Things” and Nicholas Mancusi’s “A Philosophy of Ruin,” the tree each writer has lodged the protagonist in is the bizarrely tragic death of a parent who has left, in addition to a vivid corpse, considerable financial debt. It is not an original inciting incident, though inciting incidents need not be original. It is what proceeds from them that tests the substance of both hero and writer: how they find meaning in means of survival.