I didn’t argue with my parents when I was younger, but recently, I’ve started to openly disagree with their big-bad-wolf narrative. It’s led to some heated arguments, but not so heated that I risk being written out of their will. Eventually, last fall I decided I could change their minds. My parents have softened over the years, and I’d managed to convince them that all my boyfriends with tattoos weren’t serial killers. Why couldn’t I do the same with wolves?
My plan involved exposure therapy. But in order to make it happen, I knew I needed to take them to Yellowstone.
In fairy tales, magic often has humorous, complicated or unforeseen consequences. Heroes and heroines are done and undone by the gap between a spell’s intent and its effects: Characters are mistakenly grown and shrunk, transformed from animal to human or vice versa. Spells can also be about bartering and sacrificing: The offer of legs comes at the cost of voice, or future firstborn children are gambled against current happiness. A wish fulfilled always threatens to reveal itself as a curse.
Read in these terms, Sabrina Orah Mark’s “Happily: A Personal History — With Fairy Tales” is perhaps best thought of as a 26-chapter spell book for the times. It is structured as a series of essays in which Mark conjures up reflections about the intersections of her life as a mother, third wife, stepmother and daughter in this enchanted and broken world of ours. In each case, she examines her own life through the lens of fairy tales, demonstrating how we can draw on their moralities and imageries to make sense of ourselves and our relationship to others.
Harvard Square veterans inevitably utter the same lament: “The Square is not what it used to be.” Author Catherine J. Turco demonstrates that it was ever the case — from the felling of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s spreading chestnut tree to widen a road in the 1840s to the current domination of international chain stores on Brattle Street. Harvard Square: A Love Story combs through 19th- and 20th-century newspaper archives and the annals of various Harvard Square business associations to prove that Harvard Square has always been “not what it used to be.”
Domestic shopping is a singular experience, a private activity carried out in full view of the public. It is one of the few tasks often conducted alone in the presence of many other people who are also alone. The types of institutions where ordinary citizens do this, Ernaux writes, has a huge impact on the way a community or society is formed. To her, superstores like this one “cannot be reduced […] to the ‘chore’ of grocery shopping. They provoke thought, anchor sensation and emotion in memory.” Such a store is both alienating and inviting, oppressive and inspiring, but it is one of the most basic experiences of the average middle-class person’s everyday life. “Politicians, journalists, ‘experts,’ all those who have never set foot in a superstore, do not know the social reality of France today,” Ernaux writes. The 2022 Nobel laureate collected her notes into a diary, Look at the Lights, My Love, originally published in 2014 and now released in its first-ever English edition this year, in a translation by Alison L. Strayer for Yale University Press
Gopnik, a longtime New Yorker critic, isn’t the first author to emerge victorious from the American tournament of achievement only to discern its spiritual emptiness. But his contribution to an antidote feels original, and mercifully within reach. We need to refamiliarize ourselves, he thinks, with the profound and enlarging experience of truly mastering things, or at least attempting to do so.