Whenever I listened to an English radio play as a child the sound effects included a spoon endlessly circling bone china. English characters were always going out and coming in, but mostly they stayed inside and drank tea, even in the grisliest true-life murder dramatizations. Our plots unfolded in small rooms. It’s an English thing; neat little houses, inclement weather. Agatha Christie was particularly obsessed with egress. ‘It was a fine old library with the only other door leading out to the pristine tennis courts.’ And as we tended not to point guns at each other, our fictional killers generally dismissed firearms in favour of doctored pots of chutney, electrified bathtubs and poisoned trifles. They escaped without leaving footprints and relocked doors with the aid of string.
When so much time is spent inside it’s hardly surprising that we start thinking about elaborate ways of killing someone. Our crime novels may be domestic but are definitely not ‘cozies’. Endings are bleak, murderers admirable, victims deserving of their fate.
Apart from technology, it is hard to think of any aspect of daily life which has changed so radically in one generation as the way we eat. For a child growing up in the London suburbs in the 1970s with parents who were open to the new culinary influences from the continent and beyond but in a cash-strapped, unconfident, British way, food was both a comfort and a terror.
The first thing to know about “Sex Cult Nun,” and to get out of the way, is that the lurid title doesn’t remotely capture the flavor of Faith Jones’s thoughtful, carefully recounted memoir. Not to imply the book is not disturbing. There are many images you will wish you could forget, and descriptions of sexual mores and practices that call into question basic human values. But there are no nuns, and Jones’s life was anything but chaste, though not by choice.
Whitman means to tell us, You are not alone. His boat-ride reverie culminates in his poem’s final lines: “We fathom you not—we love you—there is perfection in you also, / You furnish your parts toward eternity, / Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.” That should come as a comfort whether you live in Brooklyn or anywhere else.
My father’s hands were roped with scars
from burns at work. He had trouble
bending his fingers. The ache.