Behind the Moon
There was a tidbit on a recent This American Life episode (the one titled “Lists!!!”) that described all the lists this woman keeps on her phone. They were more than the usual to-do lists that we probably all have. Instead, one of her ongoing lists was something along the lines of “Things I Do That are Off-Brand for Me.” It made me laugh. Partly because this was a much younger — and much more unattached — person than I and one of her “off brand” items was that she hadn’t kissed anyone famous. We like collecting good questions — ones that are fun to pull out with friends that might illuminate something we might not know about each other — and this is one we’ll add to the arsenal for sure because it raises some good sub-questions such as: Do I *have* a “brand”? But also, finding something off-brand about oneself is actually kind of hard! (We did finally come up with some tepid answers.)
This book — Behind the Moon by Madison Smartt Bell — is probably a bit off-brand for me. He’s best known for a trilogy of novels about the Haitian Revolution; I learned about him after doing a deep dive into Percival Everett’s work. Someone on Goodreads described Behind the Moon as Stranger Things but in a different setting (in this case, South Dakota) which is actually very spot on. A teenaged girl, after a reluctant go at teenage debauchery, runs from a not-great experience and falls into a cave. Simultaneously, her birth mother has a sort of spidey sense that the girl she gave up for adoption might be in danger. There is a shaman involved. Lots of parallel world stuff going on.
I recently saw the movie Kinds of Kindness with a good friend. “What in the world did we just watch?” colored the post-film discussion. Very off-brand movie for us? But the conversation full of wondering and confusion is maybe part of the point for these things.
So, in conclusion, I think doing off-brand things is what keeps us on our toes. That’s my story… because I’ll probably keep finding myself in these situations…
{PS: Behind the Moon was named as an O Magazine ‘Top Book to Read’ in Summer 2017, which really does feel off-brand.}
originally published on instagram