Month: March 2021

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We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson

“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.”

Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Horror is not my genre. It never has been. I’m not one of those people who finds scary movies cathartic or enjoys the rush that comes from getting spooked. I honestly hate it. That said, every once in a while I’ll watch a movie or pick up a book that’s creepy without being outright scary. Like, I can watch A Quiet Place, but I’ll never watch Friday the 13th. I’m not going to read Carrie or The Shining, but I can handle a book like We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

If Jackson’s name rings a bell, it’s likely because you read The Lottery in high school literature class. It’s a classic. Or maybe you’ve seen The Haunting of Hill House, which was adapted by Netflix a few years ago. Her work has been around for a long time and influenced a lot of more contemporary horror writers.

Okay, let’s get down to business. I really liked We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but I was (foreseeably) very unsettled by it. In case you didn’t gather from the opening lines of the book, quoted above, Mary Katherine Blackwood is a psychopath. The whole story is told from her perspective and she’s a delightfully creepy unreliable narrator. Jackson makes it very plain that Mary Katherine (or Merricat, as she’s called by her sister) is disturbed while also imbuing her with charm and likeability. I found myself sympathizing with and rooting for Merricat, even though she said things like “I’m going to put death in all their food and watch them die,” and “I would have to find something else to bury here and I wished it could be Charles.” Yikes.

Basically, the premise of this story is that the Blackwoods, a wealthy and established family, were all poisoned with arsenic one night at dinner. Only three family members survived: Merricat, who had been sent to her room without dinner; Uncle Julian, who survived but whose health and mind were never the same after the poisoning; and Constance, who had prepared the dinner and who hadn’t eaten the arsenic-tainted sugar. Constance had been acquitted of the murder, but the townspeople still believed her to be guilty and ostracized the already unpopular Blackwoods from village life. Merricat is the only one who dares to go to the village anymore, and while she’s there she’s treated with derision. The local boys taunt her as she walks by:

“Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea?
Oh no, said Merricat, you’ll poison me.
Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep?
Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!”

While I read, I kept thinking about how sad that the townspeople treated Merricat this way. If they thought Constance was guilty, then they saw a young girl living with her murderous older sister and mocked her instead of trying to help her. How sick is that? They’d decided long before the murders that they’d hated the haughty Blackwood family, and so they were unable to look upon a tragedy with any sort of compassion or empathy. This occurs again and again throughout the book. Something objectively terrible will happen to the Blackwood girls and the villagers rejoice in their suffering.

It made me reflect on a similar tendency in today’s world. Most of us have a “team” with which we identify, whether political, racial, religious, or other. When we divide ourselves into teams or sides, we pit ourselves against the “other.” It’s us versus them. In the case of Shirley Jackson’s fictional village, it’s the villagers versus the Blackwoods. And when we pit ourselves against the “other,” it’s often easy to forget that the “other” is human. We get swept up in the bad feelings and we neglect to honor the dignity and humanity of people who are on a different team, whatever that may be. It’s the kind of thing that leads us to mercilessly mock a politician who makes a gaffe or write spiteful comments on an internet post of a celebrity discussing her recent miscarriage. We can only delight in the suffering of others when we separate ourselves from them. When we single them out as different or less than.

Shirley Jackson’s work is masterful in We Have Always Lived in the Castle because she shows us that people are the real monsters. In this story, there are very few innocent people. Almost everyone is willing to hurt other people. Almost everyone is out for themselves. It’s chilling, and though the events are fictitious, the people, the monsters, are real. They’re you. They’re me.

If you’re looking for something that’s creepy but won’t keep you up all night, We Have Always Lived in the Castle may be the book for you.

Happy Reading!

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The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World, Melinda Gates

“If you want to lift up humanity, empower women. It is the most comprehensive, pervasive, high-leverage investment you can make in human beings.”

Melinda Gates, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World

Some of the best books I’ve ever read have been at the recommendation of a friend. If you’re a book lover and you don’t have a book-loving friend to commiserate with, get one. Get a friend that picks up books you normally wouldn’t. I read Melinda Gates’ The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World because a friend (with whom I have what we call “a book club of two”) told me that she’d really enjoyed it. This probably isn’t something that would have caught my eye otherwise. I know who Bill and Melinda Gates are, obviously, but I’ve never felt much interest in them. And while I’m a feminist, sometimes books about feminism can feel ironically condescending.

The Moment of Lift was not, in my opinion, condescending. It’s a close look at the Gates’ charity work and how that work has evolved as their (and specifically Melinda’s) understanding of world issues has deepened.

Melinda Gates never sets herself up as someone who has all the answers. In fact, she quoted her mentor Hans Rosling as saying that rich Americans throwing money at problems just make things worse. In her book, she’s very cognizant of the fact that she and her husband have the responsibility to avoid having a negative impact on the world through their ignorance of the issues. It seems to me like she gets down into the nitty gritty of the data and is willing to learn from people who are more knowledgeable than she is. That is so crucial to good humanitarian work, and I was pleased to see her emphasis on it.

She (mostly) didn’t center herself. As I’ve been learning about activism and anti-racism, one thing that I’ve become the most aware of is something called the “White Savior Complex.” It’s basically the idea that white people, by virtue of their whiteness, assume that they have all of the answers and should be the heroes of every story. (For example, high school and college students who go on voluntourism trips to rural African villages to “help” when they don’t have any real, useful skills. But they take some pictures with some local children, talk about what a difference they made, and go home to the praise of their family and friends, having made little or no positive impact.) An Instagram account called @nowhitesaviors has really opened my eyes to how pervasive this is and has forced me to examine some of my own biases. But I digress. The point is that The Moment of Lift could have featured Melinda Gates as a white savior, but I think that she does a decent job of putting the focus on the people who are on the ground doing the actual work in the cities and villages she writes about. She celebrates their ideas and their successes, noting that in some cases they were doing work she didn’t realize needed to be done, but was so much more effective than the work she and her husband had planned to fund. Gates paints herself as the person who bankrolls their good ideas and watches them work miracles, not the one who personally saves the day.

I was impressed by how Gates shared her feelings about family planning and how she struggled to reconcile her beliefs about birth control with her Catholic faith. It humanized her. Instead of reading about someone who never doubted or wavered, I was reading about someone who was grappling with difficult questions, had to make tough choices, and had to deal with the consequences of her choices.

I also appreciated the fact that Gates took the opportunity to mention the impact of relationships with other women. The way she talked about her friends echoed my own feelings for my gal pals. I, like Gates, have been befriended and blessed by some truly amazing women, and it was wonderful to see someone like Melinda Gates open up about how meaningful those relationships have been for her.

If you’re at all interested in humanitarian work, you should run a bookstore, library, or electronic device and get this book. If you’re interested in learning how to better support and empower women, do likewise. If you’re looking for a biography or memoir of Melinda Gates, that’s not really what this is. It’s more of a reflection on past work and a call to action. If that sounds like something you’d be interested in reading about, give this book a try.

Happy Reading!

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The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

“Our people are good people; our people are kind people. Pray God some day kind people won’t all be poor.”

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

I have the goal of reading one major work of literature every year, preferably one that I’ve missed out on in the past. A few years ago I read War and Peace. Don’t worry, I’ll do a whole post about that one sometime. This year’s book was The Grapes of Wrath. It’s a book that seemingly everyone reads in high school, but somehow it never came up on a reading list for me. This year I decided I’d finally tackle it.

The Grapes of Wrath is the story of a family, the Joads, who are kicked off of their tenant farm in Oklahoma and head west to California in hopes of a better life. They see a handbill advertising good wages, and they develop the somewhat quixotic idea that they’re going to be able to get work, save up, and buy a cute little house. Instead, they find that they’re forced to live in squalid conditions among thousands of other migrant workers. They’re treated with suspicion and dislike by the people of California, and they get zero respect from the people who hire them.

I kept having the same thought over and over as I read this book: “Nothing ever changes.” Some of the struggles that were discussed in The Grapes of Wrath are the things people are still grappling with today—police brutality, unfair labor practices, corporate greed, and lack of a safety net. I was also struck by the hatred with which the migrant workers were treated. A lot of the same things that were said about the Joads and their ilk can be heard today. Only the targeted group has changed. “They’re thieves and criminals.” “They aren’t like us. They’re not like regular people.” “Look at how they live. Why would we allow people who choose to live that way to stay here?” “I don’t want my children going to school with them.” Does that ring any bells?

Seriously, how have we not come further in the past 90 years? How are we still having these conversations? And why do we feel the need to demonize people who may be different from us? The Grapes of Wrath just proved to me that we haven’t learned much at all in the last century.

Something that I really loved about Steinbeck’s writing was that this book was about the Joads, but in reality it was about every family that migrated west during the Great Depression. Every other chapter, the focus shifted away from the Joads and talked about things more generally. When Steinbeck writes the conversation between a family being kicked off their farm and the man who’s being paid to run a tractor through their home, it’s a conversation between unnamed characters. They don’t need names, because that same conversation happened in thousands of households all across the U.S. These sort of everyman chapters were really touching to me. They made everything seem bigger. The Joads were the stars of the story, but they weren’t anything special. Steinbeck highlights the fact that what happened to them was simultaneously happening to so many others. The Joads weren’t the exception. They were the rule.

I wasn’t a huge fan of most the characters themselves. Tom was okay, and his mother was a good woman, but everyone else just seemed to be making life harder for themselves. I guess that reflects real human experience. We’re not often saints who silently suffer our fates. We’re more often than not a bunch of idiots just trying to get by. But much as I have decided to unabashedly hate Soo-Lin Lee-Segal from Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, I want to inform you that the Joad’s youngest daughter, Ruthie, is the literal worst. I hate her character so much. I was an obnoxious twelve year old, but no child will ever be as awful as Ruthie Joad. That’s a hill I’m willing to die on.

Steinbeck really allows the women in this novel to shine. (Except for Ruthie. Ruthie’s awful.) As the men start to falter and lose their way, it’s the women who step up and get things done. Mother Joad, specifically, takes over as head of the family and makes sure that everyone is taken care of. The men grumble about it, but she stands up for herself and tells them that they’re more than welcome to lead the family, but someone’s got to if they won’t. I loved watching Mother Joad’s confidence grow throughout the novel. She was truly a force of nature. I wonder how many Mother Joads there were during that time period. I wonder how many Mother Joads there still are today.

Anyway, The Grapes of Wrath was for sure not an uplifting book, but I’m glad I read it. It put a lot of things in perspective and reminded me of the importance of treating all people with respect.

Happy Reading!