At last week’s American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, held as a virtual event with more than 1,000 participants, one impressive competitor made news. (And, despite my 143rd-place finish, it unfortunately wasn’t me.) For the first time, artificial intelligence managed to outscore the human solvers in the race to fill the grids with speed and accuracy. It was a triumph for Dr. Fill, a crossword-solving automaton that has been vying against carbon-based cruciverbalists for nearly a decade.
We don’t have to keep transitioning. It can be equally transformative to stay put for a bit, giving us the chance to know ourselves in the context of stability, rather than just the context of pursuing something. When we’re home, we can take inventory of who we are. It’s not quitting the adventure early to just want to settle in and stay for a while—nor is it dismissing the ideal of exploring to remember we can explore in all kinds of ways, in our communities, in how we build our homes, in how we feel about ourselves in different contexts. It can feel like coming home to ourselves.
In some ways, the book follows the classic trajectory of pain and redemption; it is, yes, a “misery memoir” insofar as Heyman is elevated to a level of grace and transformation after enduring a litany of hardship, but though the concept of being saved by the “wild unknown” may seem hackneyed, what distinguishes Fury is the quality of the writing.
Painting Time is a celebration of mastery, which is nothing more, she writes, “than an aptitude for failure, a consent to the fall, and a desire to start over”. But how exhilarating that fall can be, how heady that desire.
has wobbled onto this page,
the ink staining the spine,