When my portion of the library loot arrived, it was also a chance for me to peek into those pages past. I started cracking open books like a certain titian-haired sleuth cracked codes and solving mysteries. I hoped to rediscover the lessons and the lives that gave me my first window into so many of life’s joys, mysteries, and heartaches.
“Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave,” wrote American novelist Anne Lamott twenty-five years ago. Resting on this assumption, I cross-examined the forgotten yet familiar pages from my youth with an eye toward what must have been new, revealing, and formative to my ten-year-old self.
At just over 100 pages, “The Ancient Hours” may seem a slender meditation on a life that jumps the guardrails of right-and-wrong, but it packs a wallop: The actual culprits may be the folks in the pulpit and pews, fanning away the poor in spirit with their “thoughts and prayers and thoughts and prayers and thoughts and prayers.”
Ego belongs to the writer, she declares in her pensive and surprisingly poignant memoir of her years at Virago, “A Bite of the Apple.” Editing is “a backroom job” — and has anyone ever seemed giddier at that prospect? This book glows with the gratitude of doing this work, and in doing so, finding oneself occupying a front seat to feminist history.
In his prologue, Mitenbuler suggests the story he’s about to tell will go from rude to rarefied, but one of the most fascinating things about the history he recounts is that animation, like so much of American culture, continually scrambled all sorts of categories and expectations.
So much of who we are is birthed of ritual,
& this, the holiest, a mystery to you, how
calloused hands can minister such tenderness.