Here’s a fun game we can play. I’m going to give you some quotes from a few recently published novels. Some of them are vaguely associated with an infamous downtown scene in New York. In this scene everyone’s either young or cool or beautiful, and they’re all skinny and smoke cigarettes, and they laugh at all the fussy pieties of the world, and they’re all constantly online while also constantly going to parties. According to the young, cool and beautiful people, they’re trying to find a new and authentic literary voice in an age of social and technological disintegration. They’re trying to carve out their own space, away from the prissy bullshit of the mainstream literary world, where they can write something real. They’re enraptured by the surging raw nowness of the internet, and they think literature that tries to rise above that is just blinding itself to the way we actually live today. They want to bear witness to their times, and yes, they want to have fun and look good while doing it, because otherwise what’s the point?
All of this testing not only costs our healthcare system and patients in time and money—insurance reimbursements and patient copays—it can also do real-world harm to our patients. It increases the possibility of false positive results, which may lead to still more testing, creating a vicious cycle. It can drive misdiagnosis, followed by unnecessary prescriptions and even surgery. It can expose patients to unneeded radiation from X-rays and scans, and anemia from repeated blood draws. It can also cause unnecessary anxiety, with patients spending sleepless nights worrying about their health, and taking precious time away from their lives to make endless hospital and doctor visits.
So what drives us to overtest?
The main element tying all of them together is Novik’s writing and storytelling style, which is luscious and vivid and at times deeply emotive in a way that sticks with you long after certain stories are finished. It means that when you turn the page to a new story, you’re never quite sure what you’re getting into – save for the fact that it might make you really feel something.
Good Dirt is a taut and entertaining multi-generational saga, weaving past and familial ties in short chapters, always with a blazing sense of the present. The ostensible subject Wilkerson seems to want to tackle is the ways in which personal trauma, family lore and history can shape an individual’s sense of themselves, and their place in the world. But the novel’s sustaining appeal comes from witnessing Ebony learn to love again. The novel is really a love story at its core – the love between Ebony and her parents, and the love she’s trying to let go of for Henry. Wilkerson manages to coax even the darkest scenes in the family’s past with a genial sensibility. It’s an impressive feat, and reminded me of the singular ecstasy of inhaling a well-written book.
Two starving boys, fleeing the Nazis in 1945, sharing a single raw egg.
This poignant image serves as a symbol of a Jewish family’s survival and resilience in “How To Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty” by Bonny Reichert.
In the memoir, she attempts to reconcile the privileges of her middle-class 1970s upbringing with the wartime deprivations faced by her father and his cousin.
What makes Shon Faye’s memoir about love so refreshing is that it resists heteropessimism, and tries to do something more hopeful. Faye is a trans woman who spent years convinced that she would always be an “exile” from the closed world of heterosexual romance, but the idea she puts forward in this book is that this sense of exclusion is not unique to her. Faye argues that, collectively, we ask too much of romantic love: we expect it to solve all of our problems and when, inevitably, it doesn’t live up to the hype, we feel excluded from the “happy kingdom” of successful partnership. Instead of blaming men for love’s disappointments, Faye analyses her breakups to try to imagine better ways of approaching relationships. This is a memoir but it is also a kind of self-help book. Faye is trying to teach herself – and her reader – how to love in a different way.