Looking back and ahead, etc.

Dear friends,

Happy new year! It was a quiet weekend for us—canceled plans, friends and relatives in quarantine, a general sense of disbelief to be facing a third pandemic year. For me, as I hope for most, 2021 was better than 2020. But it wasn't better *enough*. Let's all hope that 2022 is better enough.

What I wrote in 2021: some highlights
* A review of Rumaan Alam's Leave the World Behind, a novel I didn't love as much as many others did, mostly because I felt it didn't fulfill its promise. Alam took issue with some elements of my review; our exchange is here.
* An op-ed for The New York Times in the wake of the controversy over Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth, in which I argued against the current system of literary biography—in which agents and estates often give selected biographers privileged access to archival materials—and proposed a more inclusive model.
* A review of Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World, a dark and unnerving work of biographical fiction about Werner Heisenberg and other scientists and mathematicians, whom—Labatut implies—may have foreseen the disasters of the twentieth century.
* And this essay—discussed in my last newsletter—about my intellectual and personal research over the past year into exactly what may have happened to my maternal grandparents after they were deported by Stalin during World War II.

I did less reviewing this year than I have in most years past, partly because I'm trying to focus on my book about Anne Frank, but also because I did more teaching. At Columbia, I taught a version of the course on criticism that I've been teaching for the past half dozen years or so, as well as a newer course in experimental biography that I call "Writing Other People's Lives." The readings for this one, ranging from Henry James's The Aspern Papers to Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, address both the process and the ethics of biographical writing.

What I read in 2021: notable books that I didn't write about
* The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship, and Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age by Amy Sohn.
This is Amy’s first nonfiction book (she’s a friend), and it absolutely blew me away. It chronicles the story of Anthony Comstock—the man who made it illegal to send pornography, contraceptives, or even sex education materials through the mail—and the women reformers who rebelled against him, often at great personal cost. The women’s stories are fascinating, but more than that, the book makes a convincing case for the centrality of sexual autonomy and birth control to women’s liberation—and for the radical possibilities of female pleasure.
* The Heroine with 1001 Faces by Maria Tatar.
What if we reframed the concept of heroism to include typically female pursuits—storytelling above all? More than a rebuttal to Joseph Campbell’s famous formulation of the “quest” narrative as the definition of heroism, this book draws on ancient and contemporary sources to demonstrate both the revolutionary power of women’s speech and the shocking ways in which its suppression is embedded into the foundations of western culture.
* Secrets of Happiness by Joan Silber.
A few years ago, I was assigned to review a novel called Improvement by Silber, whom I had previously never heard of. After finishing the book, I tore through all of her backlist, wondering how a novelist of such incredibly talent could have flown so decidedly beneath the radar. (See Tatar above, I guess.) My favorite book of hers is probably Ideas of Heaven, a short-story cycle, but this one, which traces the members of an unconventional family through their disconnections and connections, might be a close second. 
* All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days by Rebecca Donner.
A gorgeously written, deeply inventive biography tracing the story of resistance fighter Mildred Harnack (the author’s great-great-aunt) against the backdrop of daily life in Hitler’s Germany. Epic in sweep, written with a novelist’s pacing and attention to detail and a historian’s sense of social and political forces, this book opens up new possibilities for biography.
* An Odyssey by Daniel Mendelsohn.
When his father decides to sit in on his Odyssey seminar for undergraduates, Mendelsohn discovers the ways in which their relationship echoes in the Greek epic about (among other things) a father and son. As I consider ways to write my own family memoir, I’ve been reading a lot of them, and this was one of my favorites.
At the same time, through no fault of its own, the book made me resentful. Mendelsohn has one of the key texts of western literature at his disposal in helping him understand his relationship with his father. Where is the great work of literature about mothers and daughters, the book that will help me understand my relationship with my mother, which would be the center of my own memoir? Send me suggestions.

Where I'll be
* I'm teaching another Zoom course via the 92nd Street Y, this time on politics and literature. Here's the description:
 

Can This Novel Be Saved?
Jane Eyre is a document of British imperialism. Heart of Darkness depicts Africans as savages. To Kill a Mockingbird embodies the white savior complex. Lolita glorifies pedophilia and rape. If you follow contemporary literary culture, you’ve heard critiques like these—and you may not know quite what to make of them. Is it possible to appreciate a work of art while finding aspects of it politically or morally offensive? Should socially retrograde novels be cast aside to make way for a more diverse and inclusive literary canon? Is it mistaken to judge classics by contemporary standards? In this class, we’ll reread the four novels above and consider their position at the crossroads of politics and literature while thinking through these essential questions.

 
I'm very excited about this one—these are questions I've been thinking about for a long time. Class dates are Jan. 20 (Jane Eyre), Feb. 24 (Heart of Darkness), March 17 (To Kill a Mockingbird), and April 14 (Lolita). Register here. 

* On Jan. 27, Holocaust Remembrance Day, I'm doing a Zoom event to celebrate the publication of Always Remember Your Name, a memoir of Auschwitz by Tatiana and Andra Bucci, who were girls of only six and four when they were deported to the camp. (I wrote an introduction to the book.) The sisters will be present, along with translator Ann Goldstein and Eleanor Reissa, author of The Letters Project. Register here. 

Thanks for reading! Here's some bonus writing advice from my six-year-old.

As ever,
 
Ruth
 
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are considered, by some, to dream.”—Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House