My launch, however, was enjoyable. I read with an author I’ve long admired. There was a decent-enough turnout on Zoom, all things considered. My expectations for the night were low, my hopes sober (so they couldn’t be dashed). I’ve had my share of disappointments since the book’s release, as any first time author does, but on the night of my launch, I didn’t cry because I was unhappy, disillusioned, or depressed.
I cried because I read a story about my sister.
Should you immediately recognize the name Andrew Haswell Green, the historic civic leader and protagonist of Jonathan Lee’s new novel “The Great Mistake,” perhaps it’s because of the New York City institutions he founded, which astoundingly include Central Park, the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Natural History and the Bronx Zoo. He is even, arguably, responsible for uniting the city’s five boroughs. But more likely you haven’t heard his name at all. Despite his tireless work for the city he moved to in 1835, Green didn’t seek laurels.
“The Great Mistake” speculates one reason for that: Lee’s fictionalized version of Green is a gay man whose anxieties about his education and social class tangle so tightly with his sexual orientation and personal ambition that it’s a wonder he manages to accomplish anything at all.
Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat is a genre-bending autofictional book about one woman’s “crush”—on a poem written three centuries ago. In the narrator’s first encounter with the “Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoghaire,” written by the eighteenth-century Irish noblewoman Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill after her husband was murdered, and while she was pregnant with their third child, the author is a schoolgirl who draws pierced hearts in the margins of the canonical poem when she reads of Eibhlín Dubh drinking “handfuls of [her lover’s] blood” in grief. When the author returns to the lament yet again, she too is pregnant with her third child.
Amidst so much isolation and loss over the past many months, Kaminski’s laudable effort cleaves a space for us to listen a bit more attentively; to learn from the accretion of errors we’ve both inherited and bequeathed as a species (and not just in terms of my misplaced musical associations from the ’90s); and to empathetically navigate a way forward through the world she so heartbreakingly articulates and envisions.
Let my music be found wanting