Life, interrupted (and Bits #36)
Things to read, watch, listen to, chew over, through my current curve ball
Hi! Sorry for going awol. It’s been a blurry few weeks. In my last letter, I wrote about how my tiniest sniff had had an accident. He was piano, as my mother would say, but as we were sent home from hospital after 7 hours, off I jollied to a fancypants Substack dinner at the Sir John Soane Museum. Shortly after sending that letter, we were back in hospital, because he wasn’t eating or chatting or moving. It turned out (and it’s best not to dwell on this), that the hospital hadn’t X-rayed the entirety of his leg, and he’d been in agony for 2 days, with a broken femur. I radiate guilt inwards as I write that, and also relief, that I chose bullishness that day. I don’t know if I believe in maternal instinct1, but I believe in gut instinct, and my advice to anyone with a tiny child in pain is to go back, to always go back, to always risk being a nuisance.
Thus followed 4 days in hospital, as we waited for B’s spica cast—an outrageously impractical pair of rock solid shorts. He barely slept during that time, exercising all the confusion and fury you’d expect from a toddler who has been placed in a concrete vice, 6 months after he discovers how much he adores football, climbing, scootering. A spica cast is usually used for hip dysplasia in babies, it’s rarer in toddlers (used for pelvis, femur and hip breaks) and the toughest part, aside from his pain and how hard it is for him to sleep, is not being able to explain to him that he won’t always be in this cast, that lying across two bean bags (because he’s cast at an angle, so he can’t fit in a high chair, or a car seat, or go near sand or water for that matter; his hair has become so matted he now wears it in a top knot to prevent me having to chop all his curls off) is a temporary measure for his ‘owie’ leg, and not a permanent one.
I tell him over and over again that in 6 weeks he will be running around—as he rollers around the kitchen on a sort of bellyboard I bought off the internet, inspired by a video of a dachshund on a skateboard—although I doubt at newly 2 years old, he understands. He wants only to be carried (they say the camera adds 10 pounds; my pelvis would argue that a spica cast does, too) or to be pushed around the neighbourhood in his pushchair, which he calls his pushy, which he pronounces pussy, usually at top volume, often at 2am, PUSSY MAMA PUSSY DADDA, because he’s living in an upside down world now. My husband clocked up 27,000 chafing steps on Sunday.
I’m used to working through sleep deprivation—I went back to work when all 3 of my children were newborns, and have navigated regular, intense bouts of insomnia over the last 7 years—but these past few weeks have led to a new type of brain fog, a sort of cognitive statis that I’ve genuinely never experienced before. Last week my husband told me that Gen X women were switching to Reform and I replied well yeah, reformer is much better than mat. But then, I asked him to buy some crème fraiche for the risotto and he went off to buy FemFresh (thankfully he couldn’t find any, and the sausage risotto survived), so I’m not the only one losing my marbles.
Despite feeling capable of very little right now beyond caring for Blaise (who needs one-on-one care) and trying to quell the unease of our older two, I am profoundly grateful for how life-affirming this has been: how lucky I am his injury was not worse, that his disability is temporary, that we have been held with kindness by family and friends, as we fumble our way through thanks to Reddit (a more valuable resource of info for spica casts than the hospital). If you need any tips or learnings on spica casts, please do e-mail me. I’d love to help anyone else going through this.
Onto the Bits! Dispatched in quick-fire, because the eloquence is not eloquenting2 at the moment.
I love—and I mean love—Naoise Dolan’s writing. I somehow only just clocked that the author of Exciting Times and The Happy Couple has a Substack. This essay, on why emotional depth can be better conveyed intellectually, than physically—covering ‘emotional banality’, autism and the author’s deliberate eschewal of “relatability-based pandering”—is strikingly incisive and original.
This is an extraordinary piece of personal writing: Yehudis Fletcher for The Times mag on growing up as an Orthodox Jew, being disowned after a breakdown aged 15 (and then sexually abused by her foster parent, a Talmudic scholar), being married off twice by the age of 19, before finally living as the lesbian she’d always known she was. If I didn’t have a tower of unread non-fiction as tall as my 7-year-old, I’d be buying Fletcher’s memoir immediately.
It makes me shrivel like a snail doused in salt when I learn that a writer’s diaries have been published posthumously without their specific instruction to do so. The shame! Of bad writing, as much as petty and private disclosure! I recommend Gaby Wood for The Observer on the controversy behind the recent publication of Joan Didion’s diaries. Also good, Lynn Steger Strong for The Atlantic and Leah Haber for The LA Times.
A little intra-industry, a Vulture critic reviewed by a New Yorker critic, but I sucked up S. C. Cornell on Andrea Long Chu’s “acerbic criticism of liberals” in predictably eager fashion. Long Chu is one of the most renowned art critics writing today— her merciless and very good piece on Hanya Yanagihara changed my relationship with A Little Life.
Adored Alan Hollinghurst on the history of queer London for The LRB. Reminded me afresh that I really must read The Line of Beauty.
It’s been doing the online rounds, which is meta given the subject matter: Jia Tolentino on her broken brain for The New Yorker. (In it she cites Richard Seymour’s book, The Twittering Machine, which is brilliant.) The moral of the story might be an obvious one (put your phone down/ resist the incentivised hallucinations) but Tolentino’s writing is always a thrill.
Speaking of The New Yorker, people were very exercised by this series of at home shoots with ‘notable New Yorkers’. The mix is intentionally provocative: Spike Lee, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Colson Whitehead, Emily Ratajkowski and Anna Delvey (shot in the financial district!), amongst others.
Ocasio-Cortez shot by Gillian Laub for The New Yorker Couldn’t have been in a better place to gobble up The Four Seasons, Tina Fey’s ‘midlife’ comedy about four marriages told across four holidays. I thought it was sweet, tender, insightful, comforting, truthful and droll. Colman Domingo and Marco Calvani (as an interior designer in denial of his poor health, and his overly attentive, flamboyant Italian husband) are really brilliant. (I also hate-watched s5 of You, which I refuse to talk about).
