Friends 'til the End if the End is the Middle

I know, I know.  What's up with the winter reading material?  Summer just started, and it's too early for Christmas in July.  But I have a good excuse for turning to holiday homicide.  It's because I was fleeing Sally Rooney.

Yes, Sally Rooney, acclaimed author of Normal People and Beautiful World, Where Are You, both of which I enjoyed, especially Normal People.  But when I got halfway through Rooney's debut, Conversations with Friends, which is about a college student having an affair with a married man, I had to put it down.  

The college student -- Frances -- is bleeding and in pain (whether or not as the result of sex with the married guy is unclear) and needs to be rushed to the ER.  Now, as you may know, I have a history of not doing well with books about blood.  Add psychological torment, and I'm a goner.  So I closed the book before I could feel that first nauseous twinge and reached for Mary Daheim's The Alpine Winter.  It was the only new, known quantity left on my shelf.  Also, if there's a story that'll cheer me up, then it's one about finding a body after eating turkey and unwrapping mittens.  Books -- much like life -- are all about tone.  And the tone of a yuletide murder peopled by even-keeled characters is preferable to the one of a girl in pain losing her mind.  

Still, I don't like being bested by a book.  It's only happened to me twice, once with The Help and once with a bargain book whose name I can't remember.  (Somehow, some way, I even managed to finish The Bell Jar.)  And I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't curious about how things pan out for Frances.  So maybe someday I'll pick up the thread of Rooney's Conversations again.  (I didn't throw it out like I did The Help.)  But for now I'm ensconced in Alpine and its small-town eccentricities.

Because sometimes cold comfort is the warmest kind.  

And some friends are best left behind.

Wardrobe Woes and Close Call Clothes: Yarns That Pull at the Heartstrings

We all know that clothes tell a story.  And that there are pieces we always hold on to.  So I was intrigued when I found Emily Spivack's Worn Stories during a routine Zulily browse.  From the very first page, I knew that it was no rose-colored, mall-montage reminiscence.  Although, I should have figured that out from its dark pun title and hole-scarred sweater cover.  The garments of the real-life people in Spivack's anthology tell tales of hard-won survival.  There's the man who kept the blood-stained shirt he was wearing when he got shot, the woman who survived the Holocaust and then had a suit made from the last bolt of tweed from her parents' shop, and the woman who couldn't part with the Harvard Medical sweatshirt that an otherwise terse doc gave her to keep warm when her mother was dying.  

These clothes aren't cute or glamorous; some of them are downright ugly.  But I get what's going on here, and it makes me think of the way I still have my brown corduroy coat and how, subconsciously or otherwise, I brought it with me when I got my first COVID shot.  It also makes me think about (albeit more attractive) clothes that marked other challenging times.  Like the polka dot Express skirt I wore on my first day of college when I fainted while reading The Bell Jar.  A female janitor rushed over (I was having breakfast in the student center) to see if I was okay.  I said that I was fine, that sometimes I passed out when I read about blood.  I don't have that skirt anymore, though.  It didn't seem like something I should hold on to.  

Writing is so weird.  When I sat down to blog about this book, I had no idea that that would come out.  But it makes sense.  Because however unpleasant it is to read others' "worn stories," I can't deny that they help me process my own.  

That said, this book also has a sprinkling of lighthearted anecdotes.  Like this one about a guy scoring a pink squirrel sweater:

"When I found this sweater at a junk shop in England, I was drawn to it, not just because I was an outcast kid growing up in Colorado who had squirrels as friends but, more importantly, because the brand was Avocado.  See, in my youth I was a peddler of avocados.  My grandfather was in the produce business in downtown Los Angeles, and in the summers of my younger teenage years, I'd work for him." 89

This storyteller (yeller?) is Dustin Yellin, a "Brooklyn-based artist and the founder of Pioneer Works, Center for Art and Innovation."  Not that I've heard of him, but he sounds cool and, anyway, maybe you have.

That said, may all of your ragged old tees and jeans empower and/or comfort you as much as this motley mix of apparel has empowered and/or comforted the souls in Worn Stories.  Which is to say, when you catch a stranger staring at the Florida-shaped stain on your poncho, laugh and go full Forrest Gump-slash-American Pie and say, "This one time when I was in Tampa . . ."

They'll either listen or they won't.  But either way you'll have a new story.  

And maybe a new stain on your poncho.