Happily

October 1, 2022

Stand-up comic, actor (e.g., Netflix's Cobra Kai), and host of the No. 1 food podcast in the country, Green Eggs and Dan, Ahdoot uses an essay format in Undercooked to explain how food became a crutch and finally a dangerous obsession for him, starting with his brother's untimely death. Before he died of cancer, Braitman's father rushed to teach her important things like how to fix a carburetor and play good practical jokes; long after his death, she realized the cost of What Looks Like Bravery in suppressing her sorrow at his passing; following the New York Times best-selling Animal Madness. In Forager, journalism professor Dowd recalls her upbringing in the fervently Christian cult Field, founded by her domineering grandfather, where she was often cold, hungry, and abused and learned to put her trust in the natural world. Hospitalized from ages of 14 to 17 with anorexia nervosa, Freeman (House of Glass) recalls in Good Girls her subsequent years as a "functioning anorexic" and interviews doctors about new discoveries and treatments regarding the condition. In Happily, which draws on her Paris Review column of the same name, Mark uses fairytale to show how sociopolitical issues impact her own life, particularly as a Jewish woman raising Black children in the South. Philosophy professor Martin's How Not To Kill Yourself examines the mindset that has driven him to attempt suicide 10 times. Award-winning CBS journalist Miller here limns a sense of not Belonging: abandoned at birth by her mother, a Chicana hospital administrator who hushed up her affair with the married trauma surgeon (and Compton's first Black city councilman) who raised Miller, the author struggled to find her place in white-dominated schools and newsrooms and finally sought out her lost parent (60,000-copy first printing). From Mouton, Houston's first Black poet laureate and once ranked the No. 2 Best Female Performance Poet in the World (Poetry Slam Inc.), Black Chameleon relates an upbringing in a world devoid of the stories needed by Black children--which she argues women must now craft (60,000-copy first printing). A graduate of the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa, Mount Holyoke College, and Columbia University, Ramotwala demonstrates The Will To Be in a memoir of early hardship (her mother's first-born daughter died in a firebombing before the author was born) and adjusting to life in the United States (75,000-copy first printing). In Stash, Robbins, host of the podcast The Only One in the Room, relates her recovery from dangerous drug use (e.g., stockpiling pills and scheduling withdrawals around PTA meetings and baby showers) as she struggles with being Black in a white world. Author of the multi-award-winning, multi-award-nominated No Visible Bruises, a study of domestic violence, Snyder follows up with Women We Buried, Women We Burned, her story of escaping the cult her widowed father joined and as a teenager making her way in the world (100,000-copy first printing).

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November 14, 2022
People turn to fairy tales because they want to understand the “muddy terrain of the human psyche,” writes poet and Paris Review columnist Mark (Wild Milk) in her probing memoir-in-essays. Mark uses fairy tales as framing devices to unpack a range of topics including motherhood, marriage, racism, and mortality. When thinking about how to protect her Black Jewish sons from racism and anti-Semitism, she turns to Pinocchio’s Geppetto, who “in the world of fairy tales” is “the mother of all mothers.” Bluebeard’s wives offer a way to parse the “many lives” Mark’s husband had before they married (he has two ex wives). Tom Thumb, the boy who is “caught inside a swallow cycle,” reminds Mark that she fears this “dear, sick country” will swallow her sons, and Rapunzel’s long hair prompts her to think about her 20-year-old sister, who was diagnosed with cancer and needs a wig. Mark’s sharp analysis captures the “cultural resilience” of fairy tales, and her writing hums with lyrical self-reflection (“I was the rattle-ghost that disrupted my friend’s kingdom”). Readers will find this full of insight. Agent: Sarah Bowlin, Aevitas Creative.

December 1, 2022
A mother explores the resonances of fairy tales in her modern life. After collections of poetry and short fiction, Mark now experiments with memoir, using the plots, characters, and sometimes-terrifying outcomes of fairy tales to frame her experiences. She is a Jewish mother raising Black children in the South; a third wife and tentative stepmother; an exhausted home-schooler during lockdown; and a fairy-tale expert looking for a job in academia: "Your final task, I imagine the dean saying, is to make a rope out of these ashes. Do it and the job is yours." In an essay about raising Black sons, she recalls the precautions a friend gave her 9-year-old for going to the store: Keep his hands out of his pockets, take off his hood, and hold his receipt in his hand. She imagines the list continuing. "We have given him invisibility powder," she writes, "we have made wings for him out of the feathers of ancient doves, we have given him the power to become a rain cloud and burst, if necessary, into a storm." In an essay titled "Sorry, Peter Pan, We're Over You," Mark writes about how her son informed her that even though she ordered a Peter Pan costume from Etsy, he's decided to be Martin Luther King Jr. for Halloween. Here, as at many other junctures, her mother appears to deliver pragmatic commentary. "Some idiot kid" probably told him he can't play Peter because he's Black, she notes. "Trust me...I know how this stupid world today works." The essays previously appeared in Mark's column for the Paris Review, and each takes up a different fairy tale, or set of tales, making clever, lyrical, sometimes-disturbing connections. Overall, there is more observation and analysis than storytelling, and each essay does sort of the same thing. If you wolf it down, the gambit becomes repetitive. Sprinkle these clever essays like breadcrumbs through the forest of your days.

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February 15, 2023
In personal essays grounded in her life as a writer, Jewish woman, mother to two sons, and a daughter herself, Mark (Wild Milk, 2018) reveals the interconnected truths of the stories we know as well as those we don't. ""We turn to fairy tales not to escape but to go deeper into a terrain we've inherited, the vast and muddy terrain of the human psyche."" Drifting, kite-like, from the mundane to the scholarly, her expansive view looks to Andersen, Grimm, and Disney and to the work of Walter Benjamin, Angela Carter, and Bruno Schulz, the Polish Jewish painter whose fairy-tale murals on a young boy's bedroom wall did not protect him, as they were promised to, from Nazi hatred. Mark, whose Paris Review column, ""Happily,"" gathers many of these essays, writes with profound curiosity, attentive awe, and a poet's magnifying vision. A broken-beyond-repair iPad becomes a whole country, dropping glass shards. Since it's time, ""one thousand o'clock,"" the author and everyone she knows gather a piper's payment. Seamlessly, Mark's imagination makes new the ancient and oft-told.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.