Grief is an intensifier. It doesn’t often – despite what films and television would have you believe – cause you to act massively out of character. Like motherhood or any other huge life upheaval, its actual effect is to strip away the nonsense and leave your essential nature, your core, not just intact but now unobscured by everyday concerns and frivolities.
So it was no real surprise to find myself, in the immediate weeks after the death of my beloved dad in 2023, flinging myself into books. I would have done so literally, if I could. I wanted to gather my physical books into a wall – or better yet, a cave – around me that would both protect me from this new reality and let me cry in peace within it. Failing that, I took mental refuge in them instead.
That Dave Eggers published such a heartfelt defense of radical honesty in personal writing in type so tiny I can barely read it, in material he deleted from later editions of the paperback, feels just about right. I hope Eggers never has to answer another question about A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius in his life. But I’m grateful for the big, huge mistake he made by writing it, and I hope that people keep on reading it, long after we’re all gone.
Burgers are delicious, of course, and offer something familiar on a menu that might be intimidating to guests who are picky or less than adventurous.
But they also lower a restaurant’s per diner check average, muck up the kitchen, and require a ton of work. Many restaurants with complicated, intricately built menus, have become glorified burger joints when diners decide the burger is the thing to get.
Some of Held’s intertwined stories last a while, other shoot past us like comets, leaving only a trail of themselves behind. And yet if the stories Michaels wants to tell are “sometimes too intimate to know,” her project as a novelist is try anyway, to do whatever she can to capture in words the elusive nature of our strongest emotions–anger and fear and loneliness and, above all, love.
It is a human summons, the human summons: “Freely you have received, freely give.” Dante Di Stefano’s Standard Time answers that summons, as typified by the penultimate poem in the book, explicitly addressed to the reader, in which the receiving and giving includes this exclamation: “I love the simple music / of these infinite mouthings // (not my own, but ours always).”