Why is there alcohol there in the first place, you may ask? Because each process requires that wine grapes be fermented and turned into actual wine first. Only then can the alcohol be removed to produce NA wine. Didn’t I warn you about the contradictions?
A lot of things have changed in the half-century that’s passed since then. I stopped letting boys (then men) treat me badly. I stopped falling for bad, cool, heedless guys; instead, I married a good one. I started writing books instead of sad love poems; I became a college professor, an advice columnist, a college professor emerita. I had a child and we were thick as thieves and then she grew up, left home, started a career. Married her own good guy. Began a second, new, more rewarding and more taxing career. She’s 30 and she has her own full, complex life—she’s busy. In what slivers of downtime she has, there are friends to see, interests to pursue, trips to take. Sleep to catch up on. My texts to her start to pile up. Weeks pass—months pass—between phone calls.
Don’t text her, I tell myself. You texted her the other day—don’t send another text.
Over a decade into motherhood, I now see that there are concentric circles to my hesitation to voice positive feelings, layers of potential relational, political, and personal harm I would fear I would unleash if I came clean. I worry about making others who struggle with motherhood feel bad; I worry about undermining the fight to get mothers and other caregivers more systemic support; I worry about turning back the clock on feminism; and I worry about outing myself as sentimental, and therefore intellectually unserious and uncool. Making it all the harder is that this fear doesn’t feel like a product of my tendency to second-guess things, but rather pretty realistic.
As i sat down with The Angel of Indian Lake, Stephen Graham Jones’s new and final entry in The Indian Lake Trilogy, I was curious: how would Jones up the ante on a trilogy that had already touched on nearly every horror and slasher trope in existence by the end of its second installment? Apparently, the answer was simple: light the whole world on fire, raise the dead, and unleash as many monsters as possible on Jade Daniels, the trilogy’s final girl and protagonist.
Oh. And set the whole damn book on Halloween.
Murrin writes perceptively about love, desire and the limitations placed on women. While the denouement is melodramatic, this is a compelling, compassionate page-turner.