We All Want Impossible Things
The late 90s was this golden era of women writers in their 20s/30s who projected a sort of “intellectual but quirky” image. Or maybe I just thought that because I myself was in my 20s in the late 90s. This was before blogging was really a thing; instead, they penned columns and essays for publications like SELF, Harper’s, Salon, Slate. Maybe you know the genre I mean: Meghan Daum, Katie Roiphe, Amanda Beesley. (That last one is perhaps super random but she wrote a column about getting engaged and married amidst her mother’s early Alzheimer’s diagnosis that turned into a book. Anyone?) Reading these women’s prose was like perusing emails from your wittiest & funniest & most insightful friend. (Because, yes, we all used to send and receive lengthy emails providing full life updates and musings.)
The one I loved the most, though, was Catherine Newman. I’d put her in the same category, but I first discovered her via her blog Bringing up Ben and Birdy on babycenter.com (!?!?!) It was now the 21st century, and some of these women had moved on to the next assumed stage of adulthood and were writing about parenting. Newman’s book Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family captivated me as a new mother.
So now I’ve rediscovered Newman thanks to her first “grown up” novel, We All Want Impossible Things. And … it is totally like having your wittiest & funniest & most insightful friend write an email to you, except that email is a novel. Ash and Edi are forever-since-childhood best friends, and now Ash has brought this soul sister to a hospice near her home because Edi is dying of ovarian cancer. Indeed, this sounds like a downer, but instead, it’s the kind of book that makes you grateful for lasting friendship as well as, weirdly, the certainty that we all die. It’s funny, it’s tender, and I read it in 1.75 days (to be precise).
This is the kind of book I could read over and over if I needed a pick-me-up. Just like I would do with the emails that I used to exchange. (Geez, wish I still had ‘em!) I think we all need a book or 2 like that.
{Signing off for now…xoxo}
originally published on instagram