Seeking Ferret

Wild Faith by Talia Lavin

Recced by lirazel and I wanted to like it, but i found it really frustrating. The meat of it, and the part with the most original reporting, is the last few chapters where Lavin discusses the stories she got when she put out an online call for evangelical Christians to talk about their experiences and many of them shared stories of trauma caused by common evangelical teachings about corporal punishment for children and wives being subject to their husbands. This writing is genuinely harrowing and I think serves mostly effectively as a call for change.

But most of the rest of the book is scattershot ranting, full of lazy conflations and conspiratorial thinking. She uses the Christians who eat shrimp are hypocrites argument along with many other bad arguments. The book is full to the brim of unnecessary bodyshaming of the Christians she doesn't like. It spends a lot of time making fun of evangelical Christians for believing in the devil as if other Christians don't. It spends a bizarre amount of time, given that Lavin is a secular Jew who doesn't believe in any Christian interpretation of scripture, critiquing evangelical textual hermeneutics as if the problem is that they're reading the Bible with the wrong textual strategy. As a Jew who is perfectly happy making fun of Christians most of the time, this book kept insulting my intelligence and I resented it.

Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots

I found this book mostly kind of morally bewildering. I've seen a lot of online reviews call it morally grey, but if it is, it's not morally grey the way I normally understand it- tension between conflicting moral principles, struggle between doing the right thing and inaction, ambiguity about who the bad guy is.

In this book, there are Villains, who do things like build death rays and mind control devices and use them to threaten cities. They are opposed by Heroes, who do anything to stop Villains, even if it results in collateral damage. There are civilians, who just try to go about their lives. And then there are Henches, who work for Villains in mundane capacities like driving them around or fixing their internet or maintaining their payroll.

And I dunno, it strikes me that Henches are just Villains? Maybe I'm too black and white to understand Walschots's version of moral grey, but I personally think if you're working for a guy using a death ray to threaten civilians you're also a bad guy. You're responsible for some part of the pain the Villain is inflicting.

That made it hard for me to find a pov into the novel, because Anna's certainty that she is right and superheroes cause more harm than they mitigate is the book's apparent moral center and I couldn't accept it even as some sort of antiheroic idea, and trying to read the novel thinking the book disagrees with Anna and is interested in watching her descent into amoral supervillainy structurally doesn't work. It didn't help that Walschots was allergic to any kind of long form infodumping, I never could quite make sense of any of the backstory involving all the central superheroes and villains, and I definitely never found the worldbuilding keystone that would underpin a setting where Anna had a point.

The Golem of Brooklyn by Adam Mansbach

chestnut_pod ran an op to get all of Jewish dreamwidth to read this book, and I am the latest victim.

And I don't know, it is funny and fun and fast moving and intriguing, but it also feels half baked on multiple levels. It runs on momentum to such a degree that it never has time to stop and take a breath, and so chestnut_pod writes of finishing and spending 30 minutes in silence processing the ending, as a sign of its complexity and philosophical depth, but I wonder to what degree that's just stopping to think and say what the fuck did I just read?

I think there's a lot that is interesting about the ending, but I felt by that point Mansbach has invested narrative capital in so few characters that to me it seemed more pythonesque than anything substantially thoughtful. And truly there is something fascinating about writing a revenge fantasy murder spree of klansman by a mystical creature in a pythonesque madcap style, but also what the fuck did I just read?

I don't know, I feel like I have an essay in me about Inglourious Basterds and Hunters and The Golem of Brooklyn and the way contemporary Jewish revenge fantasy tries to make unambiguously immoral behavior feel... safe? Is that the word? Safe because we know it's fiction and we don't really believe, or at least are willing to pretend it's not true, that violent art creates killers, and so we can imagine a world where killing anyone who dislikes us is a tikun and not a deep moral stain.

But there's another kind of safety in pretending or imagining we are strong. The weird safety paradox that Mansbach does a decent job of grappling with, but which still kind of undermines his plot, is that modern klansmen are chickenshit when it comes to their Jew hatred. There are so many more antisemites than Jews and weapons available are so sophisticated that if American Jew haters actually got their act together they could do what Hamas did last October, kill a thousand Jews in a day. Instead they march in these dumb rallies, making them seem weak, making them seem like they're not really a threat. If the klansmen were like Hamas, the question of whether the Golem should be violent would be moot. This book only works because we still don't, in our gut, actually believe that America could start rounding up Jews and I don't know what to tell you, they absolutely could. And there isn't much we can do about that, a single Golem and a few million Jews is nothing against the full weight of American Jew hatred.

So there is something unsatisfyingly tame to me about this book, it's a book about violence that seems wary of acknowledging the primal pleasure of violence, and its comcomitant costs.

The Forbidden Book by Sacha Lamb

A young Jewish woman flees an arranged marriage in czarist Russia by dressing up in a man's clothing, only to find that the man was murdered and is now inhabiting her body uneasily as a dybbuk.

To sort things out, they must assemble a ragtag crew of outsiders and solve the murder, which leads to two kinds of forbidden books- politically sensitive anti-government tracts, and a mystical book of angels that encodes a different vision of the political order altogether.

This was maybe slighter than When the Angels Left The Old Country, and didn't have quite as memorable characters, but I liked it a lot, and I liked the final resolution of the angel plotline a lot.

At a reading last month, Lamb described the book as capturing a sort of Trans awakening where the main character slowly realizes that this male soul she is now carrying completes something for her. YMMV on that, it felt more like a romance than a transition to me.

Asunder by Kerstin Hall

People were buzzing about this in the Worldcon discord and then as I was reading it I was wondering if maybe I got duped, if maybe the buzz was from friends of Hall or something. But I eventually realized I had subconsciously read cues early in the book that had me expecting the book to be interesting on different axes than it actually was. I had thought the book was telling a story about politics and difficult choices, but that was mostly just scaffolding, what the book was really about was the somatic experience of a soul possession, and Hall does this extraordinarily well. She makes this thing, which often is represented as this purely spiritual thing, into a deeply embodied experience, amplified by a magic system that is powerfully and weirdly organic. It's really cool and justifies the buzz.

The Inheritance Games Series by Jennifer Barnes

Advertised as a modern take on the Westing Game, in which a corrupt billionaire uses his will to play games with his heirs for a variety of not so justifiable reasons, and also all of the heirs are incredibly hot, horny teenagers.

It does not live up to the Westing Game for puzzle quality or emotional heft. I was very frustrated with the puzzles, Barnes seems to think a good puzzle is just one where you have to try every combination of the lock to open it. The shady billionaire who fucked up his grandchildren part of it is better done, but often shades too extreme or too coincidental to be fully satisfying. I wanted less murder and more complicated family dynamics.

But the adventure plotting was fairly fun. I just kinda made me laugh because people have been posting a meme of authors you have read 5 books by, and I raced through the five books in this series in a couple weeks and I doubt I'll remember much about it by next year. 5 books is just not a useful metric for how I read.

The Wishing Game by Meg Shaffer

Recced to me by a friend after I bitched about the Inheritance Games, this book is much more explicitly pegged to Willy Wonka as opposed to Sam Westing, but I think it does scratch the same itch. The puzzles are mostly riddles rather than puzzle hunt puzzles, but all of the characters are very well rendered, the stakes are clear enough to feel fair while slippery and ambiguous enough to be satisfying narratively, and it was really enjoyable emotionally.

Maybe it's just because I've recently been playing and replaying The Ghost and the Golem, which has explicitly mutable metaphysics. The story repeatedly asks how you how you respond in situations where you don't have a traditionally active narrative choice, and often something like, "I stop and say a quick prayer" is a choice. If the story's metaphysics are purely rational, this does not affect the metaphysical reality but merely informs character. If the supernatural is real, the extent to which the prayer affects reality depends on the specific metaphysics, whether there is an active, interventionist God or if prayer mechanically manipulates the spirit world. But The Ghost and the Golem's storytelling adapts to your choices, so to some extent whether your prayers matter to the universe and how depends on whether you want them to matter.

I thought a lot about this as I read When The Angels Left the Old Country, which I know I'm late to, but I only managed to finish Good Omens this year, after many frustrating unsuccessful tries, and I wanted to have read it first. Good Omens has a very specific metaphysical vision of the universe, where God is Ineffable and human choices unfold in a matrix of incomprehensible prophecy and apparent randomness that we must make the choice about whether to consider purposeful. By turning this into a Jewish story, the metaphysics become a lot more fluid. Prophecy is no longer a constraining element of the story. But I think the story is still very interested in this question of an active but ineffable God. The Angel's changes throughout the story, as it gains a permanent name and a temporary hanger-on, are constrained by metaphysical rules that we are not privy to and which might evolve circumstantially based on what HKB"H requires in the situation. This is fascinating to me.


I'm also very interested in another metaphysical conceit that Lamb cribs from Gaiman, but not from Good Omens. The idea that supernatural beings have a sense of place but migrate with their believers is much more an American Gods vibe, and I found myself questioning how well it fits within a Jewish take on Good Omens. Good Omens is in a way a very international story told deliberately in a very parochial way. The Apocalypse is a worldwide phenomenon; the Antichrist is a local phenomenon. We are given hints through the text that the chaos of the End Times is broadly affecting people the book's characters are only dimly aware of, that the theological reach of the forces of Good and Evil is not constrained by borders or oceans. I struggled a bit to make sense of the idea that God would need to send European angels to protect the Jews in America. Maybe I'm overreading the ambiguity, certainly Lamb plays very nicely on Ash's expectations of demons in the New World with the demons in Ellis Island, so perhaps there are angels already in America and Uriel's journey is more about Uriel's specific set of missions rather than about New York needing more angels. But this is a metaphysical conceit that I don't always love, it feels too polytheistic to mesh nicely with the rest of the theological world building and I'm not sure I like its thematic resonance in this story, which is not at all preoccupied with what the spiritual lay of the land was before Jews started to come to America.


This is a stupid thing to be bugged by, but I wanted to like the way the angel would become Maariv or Shacharit, it felt like a nice idea of how angels interact with time, but... there's aggadah in the Talmud (Chullin 91) that angels only pray once a day, or maybe once a year. I'm sure Lamb was working from equally relevant tradition, the book clearly does not lack in textual underpinning, but I wanted acknowledgement of the contradiction at least.

Troll by Johanna Sinisalo

I bought this at Helsinki Worldcon but only got around to reading it a few months back. It is really beautiful and raw and powerful. It's about a man who adopts a troll, and the complicated borderline between humanity as something separate from nature, vs. humanity as a part of nature.

The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer

The horrible anti-semitic part is really short and the rest of the book is incredibly charming! It deconstructs some Regency tropes in really effective ways, and the characters are all great and hilarious. Still horrible and anti-semitic, though.

Lady Eve's Last Con by Rebecca Fraimow

Everyone on DW has already reviewed it, but it's an absolute delight of a Jewish lesbian space con artist romp and kosher duck made my year.

The Thursday Murder Club and The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman

Adorable, and slightly uncozier than I expected. Well plotted, too. Murder mysteries about retirees who get together to solve crimes, and confront both their own mortalities and their personal histories in the process.

Come and Get It by Kiley Reid

Thought-provoking and very well characterized. A story about dealing with racial and class and gender-driven toxicity on a college campus in the south.

Wonder Woman: Warbringer by Leigh Bardugo

Kind of exactly what you'd expect from Bardugo writing Wonder Woman fanfic? Preoccupied with all the things I find most fascinating about Diana, her weird blend of naive optimism and intelligence, her complicated and personal connection to the divine, her relentless drive to do what's right even when she doubts.



Currently reading Leigh Bardugo's The Familiar and Lev Grossman's The Bright Sword, not far in either but liking both so far.

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

A very satisfying and fun read until the last few chapters, where Austen's wry, parodic narratorial voice delivers a profoundly anticlimactic conclusion, apparently intentionally. Austen explains that she cannot tell us anything about Eleanor's husband because he's not a character in the story, preventing us from making sense of the saving deux ex machina, for example. So she's very clearly doing it because she's telling a story about the expectations of a reader and how those can lead a reader astray in the world. I think I might enjoy it more on a reread, where I can see how Austen pushes us towards anticlimax more clearly.

I was describing the book to my girlfriend and she compared me to Catherine because I am certainly invested in narrative and the power of narrative, but I like to think I am not as naive as Catherine.

The first scenes at the Abbey are fantastic, it is so funny and yet illuminating to see how Catherine approaches the sights and sounds of this oft-dreamed of location and tries to reconcile them with her imagination.

Yellowface by RF Kuang

Savage parody of the publishing industry that reminded me of the work of Percival Everett (Erasure; A History of the African-American People (proposed) by Strom Thurmondand Ishmael Reed (Reckless Eyeballing) but up to the minute in terms of modern publishing culture.

Kuang writes in a short afterward that her novel is a story about loneliness, and I think that's really interesting. She pulls off a fascinating trick by using first person narration from a woman perpetrating a horrible moral breach. It's very hard to find her sympathetic, but it is not at all hard to empathize with Kuang's portrait of her loneliness, as well as the reflected portrait of Athena's loneliness. I was struck many times by the paradox that the narrator and Athena are among each other's closest friends and yet they know so little about each other.

Oh, gosh. In the interview scene from the book The Devil Wears Prada, Andy (Full name Andrea Sachs) is asked if she speaks any foreign languages. She says she speaks Hebrew, and her future boss Miranda (full name Miranda Priestly) says that she was hoping for a useful language, like French. It later emerges that Miranda is the child of an impoverished London Orthodox Jewish family who rejected her family heritage out of a desire for success in the secular world. And changed her name from Miriam Princhek to Miranda Priestly, to boot! Priestly! This identity stuff is not super-subtle. When not mis-calling Andy Emily after the name of the former (very goyish) assistant, Miranda insistently calls Andy "Ahn-dre-ah", a sort of Frenchified desemitification which is more of Miranda's nominative rejection of both her own Judaism and also Andy's. Miranda's whole mission could be explained as trying to teach Andy that if she becomes less Jewish, she can succeed in the world of Western letters and literature. In the novel's conclusion, Andy rejects Miranda's abusive tactics, but she does not abandon her hopes of succeeding in New York magazine culture.

That's the paradox of Andy. Her family is deeply, substantially Jewish- in the sense that they eat an 'expertly ordered' spread of bagels and lox every year the night before Thanksgiving. And you know, that's not what comes to mind first for me when I think of my Jewish identity, but clearly being Jewish matters to Andy and her family, and that's enough to make her represent a threat to the New York establishment. Her name, the name that so threatens Miranda, is Andrea- certainly a fairly common name for secular American Jews (there were two Andreas in my Hebrew school class), but it's not like we're talking Rivka Sachs here. But it doesn't matter. No matter how full of Jews the New York elite is, our toleration is always conditional. Miranda knows this to her core, and even Andy sort of knows it. So the question Andy is faced with is how much of her deepest self she has to give up. She rejects Miranda's answer, she rejects giving everything up. But she still accepts that she has to give something up. America is designed to force Jews to compromise ourselves. Boy do I feel this.

The funniest part of this Jewish narrative in the book, to me, is that Miranda's boss, the head of the Elias company, is named Irv Ravitz. There's a couple scenes where Miranda goes to meetings with Irv Ravitz and comes back grumpy, and I think it's very funny that Miranda went to all this effort to change her name and erase her Jewishness out of a deep seated conviction that the visibly Jewish cannot rule the secular world, and then she ends up at the beck and call of a man named Irv Ravitz. How it must rankle, especially because Miranda is still not wrong. Weisberger absolutely gets the many paradoxes and indignities of being Jewish in America, and in particular being a Jewish woman. The unwritten rules are never fair.

Also, the whole thing is striking given that the book is widely considered a roman a clef on Lauren Weisberger's experience working as an assistant for Anna Wintour, who is a Christian upper crust Briton who is not in any way, shape or form Jewish. Weisberger made this deliberate choice to imagine an alternate version of Anna Wintour who is covertly a self-hating Jew. This subtext did not need to be there. I find that utterly fascinating, trying to figure out what Weisberger is trying to say about the world of high fashion media by this choice.

Like, is the point that Weisberger realized that she can never be Anna Wintour because she, as a Jewish woman, would have to become Miranda Priestly instead? Is the question of Andy's trajectory as seen through the lens of Miranda as a potential endpoint so important to the novel that Weisberger got stuck on the unattainability of a Jewish woman ever Becoming Anna Wintour, and instead had to write a story where she asks whether Andy could ever become the Jewish version of Anna Wintour? Man, that is bleak.

[Aside: I'm a little nervous about doing this aside, but here goes! Doing the math based on the timeline of her career, Miranda Priestly was born to this impoverished London Orthodox Jewish family with 11 children probably in the early 1950s. (Anna Wintour was born in 1949, I'm comfortable saying Miranda Priestly was also born in 1949). So there are two possibilities, either she was born to an established impoverished London Jewish family (unlikely) or she was born to a family of Survivor refugees from Poland (much likelier). That makes Miranda's story of rejection of her family's heritage much more consonant with the history, and much sadder. Many of those Survivor families never talked about the Holocaust with their children, but they wore it in their every action in a way that drove away their children, who knew instinctively that their parents could never be happy people. You can easily see how a family life like that could help lead to a woman like Miranda Priestly. I have no idea if this is what Weisberger intended but it makes an awful lot of sense. But the most uncomfortable part of this reading is the scene where Miranda stays in 'the Coco Chanel Suite' at a fancy hotel in Paris. Yikes.]

In the film, all of this is gone. Miranda and Andy are played by non-Jewish actresses Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway, Andy now has a supportive Midwestern family (she's still called Andy Sachs, though!) and a goyish chef boyfriend and Miranda's upper crust British heritage is apparently authentic. And I hate when Hollywood does this, and they do it over and over and over again, taking texts designed to interrogate the emotional choices forced by Jewish identity and turn them into something less than that, when there are millions of authentic Christian stories out there already. The film felt really flat to me even before I realized the missing Jewish subtext, because nothing it says about fashion is really profound or interesting. Wikipedia has a surprisingly long section on the 'cerulean speech', most of which I think is nonsense, but the final paragraph of the wikipedia article assesses what is so sinister about the nonsense- that Streep delivers that pile of self-centered bullshit dispassionately, with total lack of interest in what Andy makes of the speech, as the ultimate putdown. This is why the movie doesn't work, because it's trying to make you care about the growing, complicated relationship between Andy and Miranda, but Miranda is just a bitch. There's nothing interesting about her being a bitch, capitalism is built on exploitation of labor and Miranda exploits her assistants because she knows Andy is trapped and she doesn't care about Andy as a person, just as a cog in the machine she runs. The most sinister line in the film is when Streep tells Andy that Andy can be like her; It's the moment that shakes Andy to her core and prompts her rejection of the entire lifestyle. There is nothing human about any of this, the moral choice that movie runs on is whether it's acceptable to hurt other people just to benefit yourself. It's not. There, I've said kol torah kulah while standing on one foot.

There's a very funny cold open to an episode of The Office where Michael is watching The Devil Wears Prada a half hour at a time and until he hits the end he thinks that Miranda is the hero of the movie and keeps imitating her at work by asking Pam to perform absurd feats of assistance. It's funny because it recognizes the obviousness of the moral vacancy of Meryl Streep's character, that the whole movie is wrapped up in the idea that Meryl Streep is so profoundly charismatic that many people can ignore that she is just boringly meanspirited.

There's nothing really more morally interesting about the book, it's still a simple book about how capital abuses labor and labor tricks itself into thinking that its work has independent value, but that's okay because the book has these interesting layers of identity play instead of moral dilemmas. Andy has two friends left over from her sojourn in the mires of being Jewish at Brown University- Lily who is now a miserable grad student in Russian literature at Columbia, and Alex who has parlayed his Ivy League experience into a soul-sucking job at Teach for America in a failing Bronx school. They are very specific people in a way that the film versions of Alex and Lily are not. Both of them look at Andy and are horrified at the amount of work she is doing, and that is a basic joke on its own- when a literature grad student thinks you're doing too much meaningless drudgery, something has gone terribly wrong- but it's also a question about identity, because young upper middle class Jews are not afraid of work, but they want their work to mean something. That's the contrast Weisberger is trying to set up, here are three young people who are miserable with their work lives, but there's a difference between them.

In the end, I think Weisberger sees Andy's sojourn with Miranda as a cul de sac that ultimately does lead her to rethink her values and execute an escape: Jacob dwelling with Laban.

Tam Lin by Pamela Dean

I know this book is a big favorite of some people on my reading list; Before reading it I pretty much knew about it entirely from cahn's "Into the Life of Things", which is a great fic but is maybe not a great advertisement for what the book is actually doing? In particular, Sophia is such a fully realized character that I didn't realize how tenuously she exists in the original novel.

Instantly, with the first scene around Melinda Wolfe's office, I was pleasantly reminded of Emma Bull's The War for the Oaks, the way the world of the fey unexpectedly intrudes at an intersection with mundane architecture. Which is unsurprising when you realize that Bull and Dean were in a writing crit group together when the book was being written. But whereas The War for the Oaks becomes progressively more and more aggressively magical as the plot moves, other than those Melinda Wolfe scenes, and some of the Robin in the forest stuff, there isn't much that is visibly fantastical for most of Tam Lin, until the ending. Mostly it's a very finely written book about the intellectual and emotional lives of a small group of college students at a Minnesota liberal arts college in the 1970s. Which is sort of fascinating to me as a view of a parallel life? I've always said that the Magicians is my fantasy college experience, and I've also always said that there's a parallel universe where I'd decided that Cooper wasn't where I wanted to be, and transferred elsewhere and became an English major. So it's almost like, if my life had gone differently, instead of identifying with Brakebills I might've identified with Blackstock?

I liked some of the Shakespeare stuff, but eight pages of the experience of watching Hamlet may have been too much for me. Jo Walton's essay on the book (and by the way, Walton's confession that this is one of her favorite books comes as absolutely zero surprise to me, Tam Lin's influence is writ all over Walton's work) says that the weird pacing struck her as being in deliberate imitation of the folk ballad, but I still wonder if a more concise, and more conventionally plotted, version of the book could've told the same story more effectively.

As a novel about the magical potency of pregnancy, it definitely read differently to me for being in the quote unquote Post-Dobbs era. If there is little visible magic in the book, there is at least the magic of birth control pills, which Dean writes about almost as if they are an alchemist's potions, and the magic of at least the possibility of access to legal abortion, though I think maybe it's striking, given how long and expansive the book is in general, how little time Janet spends thinking about this option. Possibly Dean thinks that by this point in the novel we should understand intuitively where Janet is coming from, but it felt a little weird. Nonetheless, access to contraception is definitely written as a blessing of freedom and obligation that her characters do not take for granted, in a way that perhaps we are learning to not take for granted again.

Anyway, very good book, very strange book!

Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers

Reread (Listen to the audio, actually) for two reasons:

One, as a retreat to a familiar favorite Oxford novel after reading Babel and The Royal We, but honestly I don't have much to say about that. I don't have very strong feelings about Oxford or the Oxford novel. naraht had an interesting comment on some of the Oxford inaccuracies in Babel.

The second reason is that my 20th high school reunion is happening in a month and I am having feelings about that. I haven't gone to any previous reunions; My tenth was scheduled, like Prom and many other important social events when I actually was in high school, on a Friday evening. Don't worry, I'm not still spiteful about that. :P But they scheduled our 20th for a Saturday night so I can actually attend. There's a lot of reunion literature about returning and wanting to project a certain image of yourself to your old classmates, but that's not really a concern of mine. I was a weird eighteen year old nerd in high school, and I am now a weird thirty eight year old nerd, and in twenty years I expect I will be a weird fifty eight year old nerd. I was never afraid to be at least a significant fraction of myself in front of my high school classmates, no matter how little they liked me as a result.

But that's why I think I find Gaudy Night such an interesting touchstone for reflection. Harriet is certainly concerned about reputational issues, but more than anything her reunion gaudy is an opportunity to ask herself "Is the self I am now consistent with the vision I had for my future when I was a student, and if it is not, am I okay with that?" She looks at her former classmates with a concern not to how they judge her, (moreso, an exhaustion about how they judge her) but with a concern to how they all represent different paths she could have gone down from the same starting point. And I have to admit I am very curious along the same lines to see how the many classmates I have lost touch with have fared. There's only a very small handful that I have been in contact with, and even that has been sporadic and/or Facebook-mediated. I left high school behind, with gratitude for the good parts and with a clear sense that I was leaving something behind that had limited me. So it feels a little paradoxical: On the one I hand I feel genuinely excited to see some of my classmates again, on the other hand it feels somewhat selfish and petty to want to see them again given that I don't anticipate any rekindling of friendships, just the satisfaction of curiosity. I suppose there are worse reasons to go to a reunion.

One early datapoint of where people have ended up: A few weeks ago, the reunion committee passed out a list of my classmates who have passed away in the last twenty years, asking if anyone knew anyone else who should be added to the memorial list. I hadn't heard about any of the deaths, and I spent a couple of days googling obituaries and just feeling aimlessly sad about people I'd known as early as elementary school, but who admittedly I'd always known I would lose touch with as soon as we left school.

The central tension in Harriet's reflections on her Oxford experience and its aftermath is on whether women can have both personal and professional success, or if they have to sacrifice one for the other. There is a sense that this question is particularly fraught for women because they are judged suspiciously even if they do manage professional success. But I resonate with the question anyway. Does a successful life require success in both, or success in the right one, or what? If I had made different choices about balancing the two spheres, would I be happier and more successful now?

It'll be interesting to see how I feel coming out of the reunion.