A few weeks ago, my phone rang. I almost never answer phone calls, and I didn’t answer this one, but I did read the transcript of the voicemail, which was compelling in that it seemed like a scam, but also maybe didn’t? Instead of the typically dire warning about a lapse in my car insurance (I don’t have car insurance and I don’t have my own car), it was a notification that I’d left my driver’s license (I do have a driver’s license) at the 23rd Street CityMD and that I should schedule a time to pick it up. But, my driver’s license was in my wallet, so the potential that this was a new kind of car-related scam was not low, exactly. And yet, even though the 23rd Street CityMD wasn’t my CityMD, the one time I had been there, over two years ago, was also around the time — the only time — I’ve ever lost my driver’s license. I called the number.
It was my license. The woman I spoke with said if I didn’t want it, she could shred it, but if I did want it, I had to pick it up within two weeks or she’d get rid of it. I told her it had already been there for two and a half years, but she was unfazed. “You have two weeks to claim it.”
I’d last been to that CityMD on a sticky August morning, a few weeks after the digital media company where I worked had been bought by another, bigger digital media company. It was long enough into the acquisition for me to realize that I was going to need to look for another job soon. On the subway that morning, on my way to the new office, I started feeling itchy. By the time I reached my desk, a furious rash was snaking its way across my chest, down my arms, over my hands and toward my fingertips. My coworker took one look at me and said, “Let’s go to Urgent Care.”
That day is kind of a blur thanks to my ensuing steady consumption of Benadryl and steroids. The official diagnosis was that there was no diagnosis, it was idiopathic. Apparently, the root cause of most allergy attacks — even anaphylactic ones — never gets determined. But, my coworker and I figured it out: I was allergic to work. Or, at least, I was allergic to that work, to that workplace, and to the work it would have taken me to make working at that workplace work.
I left that job two months later. I left the job I took after that about three months ago. I’m at a new job now, in a different field than the one in which I used to work, though my work is sort of the same. This means that rather than learning a new language, I’m attuning myself to a different dialect. My new office is even closer to the 23rd Street CityMD than the other one was, which was convenient when I went to pick up my old license a couple days after the phone call.
I walked right by the entrance. The entire front of the building was covered in plywood and scaffolding; it was hard to see a way to get inside. The construction must have been why they’d only just found my license; with everything getting moved around and pulled apart, all sorts of things probably resurfaced from wherever they’d been hiding. I was going to tell my theory of its reemergence to the receptionist who gave me my license back. I was going to explain to her that I had actually lost it well over two years ago. But I didn’t. It was late in the day and there was no real reason for her to be interested in something that maybe wasn’t that interesting at all. So after she pulled my license from the stack of dozens she kept in a little gray box at her desk, and held it up to me, asking, “Is this you?” I nodded, took it, and left.
The old license and my current license are virtually identical. Only the issue date is different. The photo’s the same; it was taken when I was 19, but I’ve never had it replaced. For as many things in my life that have changed from two-and-a-half years ago, many others have stayed the same. I didn’t know what I wanted to be doing then, I don’t really know what I want to be doing now. (I definitely didn’t know what I wanted to be doing when I was 19.) One difference, though: I carry Benadryl with me everywhere. Just in case work gets to be too much.
Margaret the First, Danielle Dutton (available here)
“I had rather been a meteor, than a star in a crowd.” Never has naked ambition been more appealing (or lyrical) than when wielded by Margaret Cavendish, whose desire for fame, for recognition, is so vibrationally palpable that this little book seemed to buzz as I tore through it, barely keeping it steady in my hands. Margaret (very much a real person, and known in her time as “Mad Madge”) was lucky enough to be born into a wealthy and loving family in a stately home in the English countryside, but unlucky enough for it to be the early part of the 17th century, when England was riven by a civil war, and women of her status were not supposed to want much more than to give their husbands an heir. But Margaret couldn’t help but want more: “She wanted to work. She wanted to be 30 people. She wanted to wear a cap of pearls and a coat of bright blue diamonds. To live as nature does, in many ages, in many brains.” Through her writing, Margaret did just that — no small feat for a woman of that era, when English women were routinely accused of witchcraft. And she’ll continue to do so for many years to come, thanks to Danielle Dutton’s facility in weaving Margaret’s actual words into this narrative, offering glimpses of her genius, shimmering like finely polished gemstones amid the soft depths of Dutton’s own luxuriant prose. A sensory delight (though not always delightful, as I now can’t unsmell what it must have been like to be a guest at the court of King Louis XIV in the fetid summer of 1644), Margaret the First is as unforgettable as its subject always longed to be.
Joan Is Okay, Weike Wang (available here)
Ambition’s endpoint, it would seem, is achievement, but what happens to a person who has attained success, yet feels depleted rather than fulfilled? And what about those people whose ambition was never really their own to begin with, but was rather something inherited, then worn like an ill-fitting set of scrubs? Joan, an ICU doctor at a hectic hospital in New York City’s Morningside Heights, is praised by her superiors at work, but knows all too well that “the price of success is steep and I’ve never been able to distinguish it from the feeling of a sacrifice. If I could hold success in my hand, it would be a beating heart.” Sounds messy. What’s messier than Joan’s professional life, though, is her personal one. Absent friends other than the kind of intrusive NYC neighbor who feels like a sitcom trope unless you’ve ever had one yourself (mine went by one name — Rossellino — and had pet ferrets and an obsession with Danny Aiello), Joan is also untethered from her family. Her parents, who came to the U.S. from China before Joan was born, moved back as soon as Joan entered college. Her older brother, Fang, who joined his parents in the U.S. years after Joan herself was born, works in finance and lives on an estate in Greenwich, Connecticut, with his wife and three sons; Joan does her best to avoid communicating with him. But when tragedy strikes first her family and then the world, and both her personal and professional identities start to twist into something unfamiliar if not wholly unwanted, Joan confronts her persistent feelings of alienation, and contemplates what it would really take to feel like she had a home, and how maybe that was the one thing she’d been working toward all along.
When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamín Labatut translated by Adrian Nathan West (available here)
For those of us who routinely lose hours disappearing into Wikipedia wormholes (hi), When We Cease to Understand the World is a test of willpower and endurance. By which I mean: How many pages can you read before turning to Google to verify if what’s happening in this fictional account of all-too-real events is historical or imagined? (FYI: I didn’t make it through even one sentence before succumbing.) I hope this doesn’t sound like a chaotic or disruptive reading experience, because it’s actually anything but; it’s a profoundly moving, troublingly beautiful interrogation of what happens when human ambition detaches from humane concerns. Divided into five sections, progressively leaving fact further and further behind, When We Cease to Understand the World is a story of geniuses and monsters — of people. Benjamín Labatut focuses on pivotal moments in the lives of a handful of 20th century scientists, those times when — due to a need to escape a bad seasonal allergy attack or a chance encounter with a young girl at a tuberculosis sanatorium — sublime discoveries were made, the kind that had the power to create and destroy all at once. Labatut takes readers from the far reaches of the cosmos, to the stadium seating of university lecture halls from which world-renowned scientists heckle one another, to the depths of dug-out trenches in battle-torn Belgium, the air thick with poison gas. He focuses on the kind of men who, when they realize that “science could not only understand reality, but manipulate it at its most basic level,” are neither sufficiently terrified nor awed by that prospect, but rather see it as a challenge, no matter the consequences.
The Other Black Girl, Zakiya Dalila Harris (available here)
Every love story might be a ghost story, but every workplace story is definitely a horror story, as Zakiya Dalila Harris makes crystal clear in The Other Black Girl. One of the hallmarks of horror is a sense of disorientation; you can never be fully sure that what you’re afraid of is real, if the goosebumps that outline your spine every time a certain person looks at you are based in anything more than bad vibes. But then, Nella doesn’t feel this way the first time she sees Hazel walk into the office of Wagner Books, where Nella had been the only Black editorial assistant, constantly subjected to her coworkers microaggressions, and wondering if she can ever get ahead if she has to do it all alone. It doesn’t take long, though, for Nella’s dreams of having a professional ally be dashed, and for it to be apparent that Hazel is playing her own game, with rules that are as unsettlingly familiar as they are fantastical. Harris navigates different genres — from nuanced workplace drama to cultural critique to terror-infused absurdism — with facility and humor, and an impressive number of plot-based zigs and zags that never feel unearned, even if they spiral out into a conspiracy that takes the narrative into a very different direction than what the book’s opening seemed to promise. Then again, the classic bait-and-switch is something employers have used to lure in prospects for ages, so maybe its deployment here makes perfect sense, and is a lesson for one and all.
The Life of the Mind, Christine Smallwood (available here)
Adjunct professor and patient of not one, but two therapists, The Life of the Mind’s Dorothy is the kind of person who is in equal parts fascinated and repelled by her own desires, and finds herself time and time again, in the position of “wanting more and also wanting to have had much less.” She sees her friends succeed in ways she has not, endures her professional cohort garnering the type of acclaim she still find elusive, and inhabits her body as it behaves in ways over which she has no control. She is an achingly familiar type of overthinker, a quality of hers that makes this book perfect, I once wrote, “for anyone who — consciously or not — narrativizes their life, and sometimes gets filled with an overwhelming sense of dread that they've lost the plot.” This isn’t so much an anti-ambition novel, then, as it is a post-ambition novel, in that Dorothy understands two very important things about achievement: It’s never going to to take precisely the shape you want it to have, and that reaching one goal only leads to the search for another. It’s bracingly funny, stealthily tender (but never maudlin), and makes singing karaoke at home sound exactly as good as it actually is (very), and leads to Dorothy having an important epiphany: “It didn’t have to be her who did what could be done so well by someone else.” Relatable.
Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer (1943-1954), by Jeffrey Cartwright, Steven Millhauser (available here)
I’m of the opinion that judging a book by its cover is a totally fine (often good!) thing to do, and feel the same way when it comes to judging a book by its title. This book’s title is a particularly tantalizing one, hinting, as it does, at all sorts of sordid things: America, writers, an abbreviated life! And, wow, does it ever deliver. Edwin Mullhouse is a high-wire act of satire, a story about genius, about childhood (but emphatically not about “gifted children”), and about the “scrupulous distortion” that exists in all great works of art and the way in which its only through this lens that an accurate reflection of truth can be approximated. At the center of this book is young Edwin, an object of fascination for his next-door neighbor, Jeffrey, who is determined to capture Edwin’s brilliance in that most pedantic of literary endeavors, the biography. Peculiar, mordant, and thoroughly obsessive (although, as Jeffrey points out, “what is genius… but the capacity to be obsessed?”), this novel, which was shockingly out of print for decades, is a pellucid look at love and betrayal and a warning to writers, I think, about all the ways ambition can warp artists, and lead them to do the sort of things that make for great art, but not, you know, a very nice life, which is maybe the only ambition worth having anyway.
But also…
“Work is a complicated subject, because we don’t want to derive our only meaning from it and yet it is inescapable.” Alicia Kennedy’s On Productivity has been rattling around in my head for the last month. If you’ve not yet subscribed to her newsletter, you should. Her weekly recipes are wonderful; I’ve made this Pineapple and Black Pepper Crumble (it’s available to non-subscribers) to great acclaim, and also love her Mushroom Pâté. (From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy)
Maybe your only ambition is simply to find the perfect throw pillow for your couch? I could once relate! Now I will only ever buy throw pillows (and blankets and linen napkins and placemats) from Suay. I love the color selections, the durability of the fabric, the strength of the construction, and that they’re made from deadstock fabrics and low-impact dyes. Cozy up. (Suay)
“Even with foresight and the most careful attention, you cannot plan on grace, or force closure; you cannot practice someone’s last words in advance. People die as they live and live as they are.” Rachael Bedard’s exquisite essay on what it means to prepare for death offers not only the profound insight she’s achieved through years of work as a palliative-care physician, but also a thrumming emotional weight, as it centers around the recent death of her beloved grandmother. (The New Yorker)