Wreck
I finished Wreck by Catherine Newman and Season 3 of Shrinking in the same week and what that means is that I feel like pulling a Roberto Benigni and running up and down my street screaming “Life is Beautiful!” while simultaneously crying my eyes out.
I’ve loved Catherine Newman ever since her old blogging days (!) and her memoir Waiting for Birdy wherein she very accurately explains that keeping one’s baby asleep in a cloth carrier is akin to having an anaconda strapped to one’s chest while sweating profusely. (Paraphrasing from memory here; she said it better, but however it was written, it HIT HOME.) I’ve loved her ever since she wrote regularly for FamilyFun Magazine even though she is way too cool to be writing for a magazine called FamilyFun because FamilyFun makes me think of Family Circle which then makes me think of Family Circus which then makes me think of some rascally kids from the 1950s tee-hee-hee-ing all the way home. She’s not that — at all — but somehow she can parachute into all these tender family things while still maintaining her vivacious and hip and totally chill personality. It makes you want to strap on a parachute and do a tandem dive with her right by your side, tee-hee-hee-ing all the way home. (Because she will *absolutely* make you lol.)
And I’ve loved Shrinking ever since…well, we just started it like a month ago and now we’re all caught up, so yup, we whizzed right through it. (Btw, Derek reading All Fours is sending me.)
Both Wreck and Shrinking are about grief (and the different ways we experience it depending on how proximate we are to it), figuring out what it means to be *you* in new circumstances and eras, and the web of people we share space with whether that’s a home or a community or I guess just even Planet Earth. Consume them both for a 1-2 punch if that’s your thing.
If you’ve watched Shrinking then you know what I’m talking about when I say that reading Catherine Newman’s writing focuses you on the meaningful ways that we can decide to show up — or not — for others and that, really, life is actually quite simple: We’re all fumbling through as best we can…might as well share the journey with other fumblers.
originally published on instagram