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The Grim Reader: Naomi Klein’s Doppleganger

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Is Doppleganger the right book to add to The Grim Reader series? It has a breadth and scope that is deeply necessary. It is personal. It is political. It gives voice to all kinds of issues from our ecological crisis to rising fascism. So, yes.

On the surface, the book is about the unfortunate mix-ups Naomi Klein has had to endure between herself and Naomi Wolf. Wolf used to be a well regarded feminist academic, but at some point, she took a turn in another direction. The book that brought her widespread attention, The Beauty Myth, was good. Although it didn’t add anything new to the understanding of how beauty is used to hold women back (this was already well trodden ground), Wolf was a new, young, and welcome voice on the scene and gave the argument a new (and beautiful) face. I used her work when I taught Women’s Studies at the college level.

Meanwhile, Klein, became a well known feminist progressive, environmental activist, and political activist. She is the writer behind No Logo and The Shock Doctrine. She tried for years to shrug off the mix ups between the two Naomis. Although harmless at first, as the years wore on, Wolf veered into territory that was anathema to Klein and mix ups became more embarrassing. Over time, Klein became interested in (and possibly obsessed over) how someone like Wolf could change her world views so radically.

Klein’s exploration into Wolf’s transformation brings her to a profound book about mirror images, doubling, or doppleganging. In a way, Doppleganger is a book about how we all contain multitudes. If you’ve ever asked yourself how your Uncle Jim or your mom or someone who you used to know as a great helper-parent in your neighbourhood school or volunteer at the food bank became a FOX News watching, conspiracy-minded, MAGA hat wearing, flag waving, vaccination fearing, Pierre Pollievre supporting, maybe even gun-toting, freedom screaming, convoy supporter, this book is for you. It actually helped me understand how it happens.

I have to admit that even I mixed the two Naomis up, a fact that I am embarrassed about now. I had thought that the incredible foundational error that Wolf made in writing one of her books, Outrages, was an error Klein had made in one of her new books. Oops. But because, in my mistaken mind, it was Klein, I shrugged it off as an “everyone makes mistakes” moment. It did not, to me, change anything about the brilliance of her earlier books, No Logo or The Shock Doctrine. But now that I know it was the other Naomi, can I extend the same grace to Wolf and say that this big mistake she made doesn’t change anything about The Beauty Myth? 

Sure. I guess.

It’s definitely harder because of Wolf’s turn to the right and the new company she keeps, like Steve Bannon. But it is important to give people like Wolf a little grace. How else can they come back?

One of the things Klein finds is that the difference between herself and Wolf and their increasingly divergent ideas is the difference between having a world view that is community oriented versus one that is more individually focussed. As Wolf’s shine wore off, she was all about finding another platform on which she could remain a darling. And find it she did. As a sociologist, I appreciate Klein’s observation that individual goals lead to different outcomes than more community-minded goals. I might even rephrase it to say that the difference between being Naomi Wolf or Naomi Klein is that Klein has a sociological imagination (with thanks to C. Wright Mills) and Wolf does not, or at least, does not anymore.

Klein writes, “These doubles share one thing in common: all are ways of not seeing. Not seeing ourselves clearly (because we are so busy performing an idealized version of ourselves), not seeing one another clearly (because we are so busy projecting what we cannot bear to see about ourselves onto others), and not seeing the world and the connections among us clearly (because we have partitioned ourselves and blocked our vision). I think this, more than anything else, explains the uncanny feeling of our moment in history–with all of its mirrorings, synthetic selves, and manufactured realities. At bottom, it comes down to who and what we cannot bear to see–in our past, in our present, and inthe future racing toward us.” And in ourselves. We all have an authoritarian toddler within us screaming for control. Most of us learn to get past that and live with others in a society working towards mutual benefit.

It is that simple. And that complex. And the road Klein takes herself on to get herself and her readers here is fascinating. Quoting prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba, Klein reminds us “Everything worthwhile is done with other people.” And we are going to have to understand all kinds of people to do anything worthwhile.

On a personal note:

I read Doppleganger while in the midst of a critical health crisis. I started reading it at home, had it with me for a week in the hospital and finished it when I got home again. In that period, I had been told my illness was terminal. Then the doctors found a way to save me. I post this two months later, after three more hospital stays, one of which included open-heart surgery. The fact that I can be (hopefully) cogent again is promising. I have yet one more very difficult surgery ahead and my current hospital stay will not be my last.

All of this is happening in a time when SARS-CoV-2 has been allowed to run rampant, as though it isn’t a killer disease, a disease that can affect every organ of every body, a disease that is chronic for many, a disease that is the source of a mass disabling event. I navigate this while trying to deal with my own non-covid related situation. Mitigations have been dropped in favour of keeping a society looking “normal,” that is, like it is 2019. As though we can choose the changes that happen around us constantly and reject some of them. As though we can keep our heads in the sand.

As of April 8, there is no longer a mask mandate enforced in BC hospitals. Some of my own doctors don’t wear masks and it makes me wonder if I can trust their medical knowledge. But the demands of capital have won out over the needs of sick people. It all became political and public health is now a joke, existing in name only. This is also considered within the pages of Doppleganger.

What’s happening to me personally is life and death. What’s happening to all of us collectively is life and death. The trend towards authoritarianism, the casual eugenics, (well, it’s ONLY those with co-morbidities that are dying, it’s ONLY the frail and elderly, it’s ONLY the disabled) and the genocide(s) taking place across the world are all related. Klein knows this. She looks at Hitler’s Germany, and specifically the life’s work of Hans Asperger who went from being someone trying to help children who were a little different live full lives to someone who was selecting which “disabled” children would die within the Nazi’s genocidal machine. Klein  writes, “Asperger’s jarring career trajectory demonstrates that, in just a handful of years, the same institutions and some of the very same people can shift from an ethos of care and curiosity toward a vulnerable group to one of callousness and genocidal cleansing. As if a switch has been flipped.”

I’ve noticed this with a lot of people throughout the pandemic. So has Klein. The admittedly weak and nascent efforts at community protection we saw in the beginning of 2020 completely turned around. Now wearing a mask or getting a vaccine is thought of as a bad thing by an apparently vast swath of people. Or maybe they are a particularly loud minority. Whoever they are, they have won. Protecting each other is a long-gone ethos. She cites examples of people on the vaccine-feaing, invermectin-promoting side saying the weak should die. And as a person who is now one of the weak, effectively barred from participation in much of society because no one is willing to wear a mask anymore or put any effort or resources into creating cleaner indoor air, I can tell you, it sure feels eugenic to me. As I mentioned above, even my own doctors don’t always wear masks. I’m sure they care about me (at least abstractly) and they have put a lot of their skill and effort into keeping me alive, but they just don’t see how careless they are.

Caring and careless. At the same time. For example, I have no doubt that some of those same people who were banging pots and pans in support of health care workers in early 2020 wouldn’t deign to put a mask on to save the health and life of a health care worker today if they had to go into their doctor’s office or to the hospital. Nor will they wear a mask to save their own life. Or mine. In short, we are “both this and that.”

And this is the key realization of Klein’s opus. Both individual people and even states can be “victim and victimizer at the same time.” One of her most extraordinary and helpful conclusions is that what makes the difference between going “there” and not going “there” is one’s attachment to a sense of community or society and an understanding of class. My sociologist soul rejoices at this conclusion.

Klein writes, “The disability justice advocate and author Beatrice Adler-Bolton refers to the mindset that has animated so much Covid denialism as ‘deaths pulled from the future’–which she defines as the judgement laden posture that frames ‘deaths from Covid-19 as somehow preordained’ because the people doing most of the dying were probably going to die prematurely anyway. Covid just moved up the timelines a few years, so what’s the bid deal?” Klein states clearly, “this is fascist thought. More specifically, it is genocidal thought. It recalls the ways in which colonial massacres were rationalized because within the ranking of human life created by pseudoscientific racists, Indigenous peoples, such as the original residents of Tasmania, were cast as ‘living fossils.’ … Indigenous peoples were, in this telling, the pre-dead, with extermination merely serving to accelerate the inevitable timeline.”

I am not keen on being shunted aside as the pre-dead. I’d appreciate being able to keep every day I might have to experience this troubling body and all of the joy and love it is capable of manifesting.

The planet itself and our eco-systems are disabled now. Our work must be care-based in this “time of planetary shocks and layered disasters.” Our most prevalent state is “chronic impairment,” says disability rights theorist Sunaura Taylor. Klein quotes her saying, “As a disabled person I recognize this as disability… What we live with in the present and will for decades to come, even under the best-case scenario, is mass ecological disablement of the more than human world, a disablement that is utterly entangled with the disablement of human beings. Given this, it seems vital to consider what forms of care, treatment and assistance this age of disability will require.”

On the final page of Doppleganger, Klein writes, “Negotiating that doubling [that is, the doppleganger]–between our younger selves and our older selves, between our public selves and our private selves, between our living selves and our dying selves–is part of what it means to be human.” My living, disabled self has a huge stake in all of it.

This is where Doppleganger lands for me. The mini-thesis inside the bigger thesis is about disability. I am in my age of disability in a world that is already disabled watching another mass disability event play out among humans during the sixth great extinction. I watch these events through wildfire smoke and sometimes through a hospital window. While there are still hospitals. There is something powerful and necessary about facing what’s real. I think constantly about words like accessibility and inclusion. I think about what they mean for me, for the forests. I think about what it means to truly respect every living thing, as it is, to know that it has an inherent purpose all of its own, even when damaged. Naomi Klein is still thinking about this. Her Doppleganger is not.

Read Dopplegnager. Tell me what you think.

 

On Tyranny: The Grim Reader

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Today’s entry into The Grim Reader is a slim little volume called On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder. And when I say slim, I mean it. It’s an essay, really. It clocks in at 126 pages but the book is only 6″ x 4″. Tiny. Yet, it has a lot to say.

I’m breaking the rules because On Tyranny is not about climate catastrophe. But tyranny will only add to the catastrophe we face, so I’ll allow it. Also, it’s my blog, and these things will happen from time to time. So today, maybe it’s “The Slim Reader,” not “The Grim Reader.” (That was a really bad joke.)

Many of us born and raised in Canada after WWII are reluctant to think we have been touched by tyranny. I spent decades living in Alberta, Canada. In the early 90’s, I was teaching in a small town where some of the leaders of the brand new Reform movement lived. I was a young thing from Toronto and not having any of it. The brand of politics that has flourished in Alberta since then, nurtured on a poisonous and steady diet of oil, gas, and exceptionalism is not anything I want to be part of.

Inevitably, the politics in Alberta have not stayed in Alberta. They affect the rest of Canada. And that’s not because Albertans are right (no pun intended). It is in our human natures to try to be reasonable and accommodating. We are social animals. We want to stay with the group and keep the peace. We want Confederation to work. No one wants to break up the family. We want to get along. We are people who compromise (in a good way). We want as much “normal” as we can get. And as “normal” shifts, very often, we shift with it. (See Overton Window.)

This might be especially true in Canada where the motto, “peace, order and good government” is one many of us grew up with. We believe in it so deeply, we can’t imagine losing it. Our institutions will protect us, we think. But as Snyder notes, it is the other way around. We have to protect our institutions.

It’s important to note that peace, order, and good government were never true for marginalized people. Indigenous people certainly wouldn’t have accused Canada of having valued peace, order, or good government. Maybe more like “colonization, suppression, and control.”

Anyway. Here’s another way into Snyder’s work. We all know that ridiculous uncle who comes to dinner and drinks too much and spouts off and ruins everything. Then dinner is over and we all have a bad taste in our mouths. But we pretty much get to forget about him until the next gathering, the next holiday, the next wedding, or the next funeral (which, with any luck, will be his but these people seem to live forever even if they drink and eat cheeseburgers every day).

But imagine if you had to have dinner with that uncle every night? Ask an Indigenous person about that. What was it like for them when settlers took over? Imagine if the drunk uncle takes over as host and he sticks you at the children’s table? What then?

Snyder’s advice on what to do when tyrants try to take over is wide-ranging. These are also history lessons. From a warning against “anticipatory obedience” to new authoritarian measures, to urging us to “stand out” in our defiance, these lessons are critical now. He writes, “The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.” One person can make a difference. This is the truth that people in power, that tyrants, don’t want you to believe, They want you to feel useless and depressed and despondent. They want you to go along with whatever it is they are doing because what’s the use in trying? We all know you can’t fight city hall.

But that’s not true. You make a difference. I make a difference. Stand up. Speak out.

Don’t worry about what that drunken uncle thinks of you. He’s ruining dinner for everyone, and we all know it. And it’s not his kids’ fault. Don’t blame them. Or his wife. It’s harder for them to stand up to him. They’ve got more to lose. The same is true for your average Alberta citizen who is kind and generous and would be the first to stop and help you if your car broke down, take you home while you wait for the tow truck and offer you a piece of pie and a cup of coffee.

It’s up to you. It’s up to me.

To be clear, Snyder does not talk about drunken uncles. He does talk about Churchill. Churchill stood out in WWII by refusing to give in to Hitler. He didn’t call Poland or France or Austria far away foreign countries that had nothing to do with him. He understood that the fate of those countries was tied to England’s. How did that end? Germany and Hitler were defeated. Churchill did not concede in advance, as others had done. (And please don’t reply with a history lesson. Just read the book and know that I am not doing Snyder’s argument justice with my brevity.)

Snyder also does not talk about Indigenous people and the history of white settler colonialism specifically. But, I feel certain that he would agree that it  was and remains tyrannical and that decolonization is an important means of acting against all tyranny.

Another of Snyder’s lessons is to “Be kind to our language,” by which he means don’t mindlessly repeat memes and clichés. Make an effort to say what you mean in your own way, if only to force yourself to think about it. (Thus, my drunken uncle analogy.)

Snyder’s lessons, while specific to tyranny, apply to all kinds of things. For example, he writes, “You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case.” The desire to retain “normal” at all costs has cost us all. The pandemic rages on, bringing with it more death and mass disability. We continue to fail to make adequate progress on a just transition away from fossil fuels. COP 28 was held in a petro-authoritarian state and pocked with oil industry lobbyists. Sigh.

What would Snyder do? There is so much good advice. Be in the real world, on the street. That’s where change happens. The real work is done in the real world, not on the internet. (I am aware of the irony. But he also says we have access to mass communication tools and we should use them.)

“Make eye contact and small talk.” Talk to cashiers and neighbours and the receptionist at the dental office. Ask them about themselves. Listen to learn. Don’t fail to listen because you are busy thinking about the next thing YOU want to say. Be curious. Connect. Care. What do you have in common? What is it that you both care about? Maybe some day you will talk to them about what they are willing to do to save something important to them and important to you. Maybe some day, you will work on that together.

Snyder’s grimmest moment is when he writes about the average guy, who under the thumb of a tyrant, finds it is his job to shoot people and watch them fall into a mass grave. Or maybe his job is to bulldoze the dirt over the bodies. In another world, he might have been a plumber or a cop. Hey, it’s happened before. It can happen again. He warns people to “Be reflective if you must be armed.” Police forces historically have been put into the service of tyrants with terrible results. Grim indeed.

But also inspirational. His last lesson is, “Be as courageous as you can.” He writes, “If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny.”

On Tyranny is must read. I’d be interested to know what parts of it speak to you.

Late add: Thanks to a reader who let me know there is a newer graphic edition which is haunting. Look for it.

 

 

 

 

Top Ten books

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I keep a running list of the ten books I would have if I could only have ten books. This year, I’ve replaced four books, so this has been a pretty remarkable reading year.

Or, I’ve changed.

It’s probably a little of both.

These books are like friends, and I have to be able to call on them at a moment’s notice. Just knowing they are on the shelf makes me feel better.

Here’s the current list:

Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer (So much wisdom and kindness that helps me to see a way to be in the world with gratitude and reciprocity.) *

The First Free Women, Matty Weingast Ed. (It’s like a companion book for me now, with such wisdom, and it feels so good in my hands. It’s missing from the picture because I’ve given it away–AGAIN–this time to a friend who just lost her mother. It’s the kind of book that can help with that.) *

Season of Fury and Wonder, Sharon Butala (Which replaced Butala’s The Perfection of the Morning, and thankfully, I don’t really have to choose between these two books since this list is not necessitated by lack of space or the need to keep everything I own in a back pack.) *

When I Was Young & In My Prime, Alayna Munce (Gosh, I loved it. I have to read it again, but for now, it’s on the list because–again–of the kindness that is evident throughout and the insight into the frailty of humans. *

Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout (Oh, how I love a difficult woman.)

The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields (I’ve studied it backwards and forwards, I wrote my MFA craft thesis on it, and never tire of it. A complex telling, a fascinating character, and such insight into the human condition. What is not to love?)

Fall On Your Knees, Ann-Marie MacDonald (An epic, multi-generational story in which the plot twists and turns. The characters live on in my heart.)

Pathologies, Susan Olding (I return to this book time and again in amazement.)

A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving (I have only read it once and have always meant to read it again, but now I am afraid that I won’t love it as much as I once did, that it will seem inevitable to me, and somehow tired, but it stays on the list.)

In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje (It’s the hometown setting–Toronto in all it’s glory, the historicity, the complexity of the telling and the flaws, the beautiful flaws, which in the hands of a writer like this makes one wonder if they are flaws at all.)

(* new addtions this year!)

Late addition: How could I have forgotten The Summer Book, Tove Jansson? My MFA mentor, Sandra Scofield, had me read it and I am so grateful. I just took it down from the shelf to read again as summer ends. It is lovely. So make that eleven books.

What am I reading? Alayna Munce and Joan Thomas

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It’s such a pleasure to read a good book. I’ve got two to recommend: Alayna Munce’s When I Was Young & In My Prime and Joan Thomas’s Curiosity.

I don’t know what the heck I was doing in 2005 that I missed When I was Young & In My Prime. I’m trying to think back. Oh yeah, I was recovering from cancer. So I guess that explains it. But this book is everything I love—a multi-generational tale told in multiple points of view. This is exactly what I studied throughout my MFA, and how I missed it then is another puzzle. It will forever be listed in the same category as The Stone Diaries and Fall On Your Knees. So it’s THAT good. But it just goes to show, some of the best books just don’t get onto our radar.

What do I love about this book? Munce is a poet and it shows in her exacting and evocative prose. She allows her characters to make mistakes, to grow, to fall back, to grow again. They are so real. There is such a great depth of kindness depicted here. For example, the main character has a job bathing seniors in the nursing home. It is the every-day-ness of kindness that I love in this book, the call to deep human connection and the depiction of the frailty of it. I love the failure of the characters to always know exactly what should come next. This is to true to life.

Munce also has an interest in how memory works in this book, a a particular obsession of mine having lost most of it. The way she depicts the loss of memory, both from an individual’s mind and from collective history is thought provoking and so very real.

I had a friend recently say, “We don’t know how to die anymore.” She meant that we have forgotten or lost sight of the rituals around death. We don’t know how to let someone go. We’ve lost the grace in it. Munce is a writer who knows that grace. I feel the loss of the main character’s grandfather as though he were my own. To create empathy so skillfully is a true accomplishment.

And on the FAF scale (feminist as fuck scale) it ranks a 5 out of 5.

Joan Thomas’s latest novel, Five Wives is what I should be reading, but I had to go back first to Curiosity. This book slays.

Image of Hardcover of Curiosity

It is the imagined story of real life Mary Anning, who sold curiosities from the sea that she found in the cliffs by the town of Lyme Regis. It is set in the time before Darwin’s theories were accepted and her discoveries are inexplicable given the understandings of the day. Ammonites and other fossils are sold as charms, with equally charming stories about what protections they offer the buyer. A particular find referred to as “Devil’s toes” is a favourite of mine, and I have no doubt that it is also historically accurate. That is the kind of faith Thomas earns in the reader.

What Thomas gives us is a ripper of a tale: an impoverished girl making her living, making her way, going beyond her station—however you want to put it—within a world where men continually use her discoveries and her knowledge for their own advancement. She is never given proper credit. As Thomas notes in the Author’s Note, the effort to establish Mary Anning’s scientific credentials did not begin until the 1930s. Yet she emerges as a figure more worthy of the reader’s respect than any of those “scientists” in the fields of geology and “undergroundology” that are all around her. She dreams of being recognized by the Royal Society, but such recognition will never happen and she becomes a kind of Pygmalion character, too fancy in her learning and speech to be fully accepted by townsfolk and too poor to ever be accepted by the upper class.

The book gets a five star FAF rating from me. Like all the best historical fiction, it is oddly contemporary in its concerns. Women still struggle for the recognition their work deserves. And the class issues gives it that “intersectionality” that is part of real life. The author has a sociological eye that I appreciate. Her characters are set in a society in a time and place and we learn what the rules are and how they are all constrained by them.

What is particularly compelling to me is the way in which Thomas weaves the details of her research into a compelling story that never feels weighed down by that same research. From the use of common terms of the time and the occasional drift into contemporaneous dialect, to the research of figures like Lamarck and the actual letters and imagined letters of Henry De La Beche, to the explication of theological issues of the day, it all serves to move the story and enrich our sense of the characters. It is a tour de force.

I have had this book in my possession since 2010, but it was not until now that I read it. This happens sometimes. Now, on to Five Wives! But first I have to edit my own book. Here’s hoping it doesn’t take me ten years to get back to Five Wives.

Suggesting Comps (and self-esteem)

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The most difficult thing I’ve been asked to do as I prepare to publish my first novel, Patterson House, is to offer comps, or comparable titles, to the publisher, Inanna. I’ve been trying to sort out why this has been so hard.

I’m widely read in my genre. I wrote the kind of book I like to read. So it’s not that I am unaware of other historical, multi-generational, family sagas. I know of many. I can list them in seconds. I think the problem is that they are all so good. I’m talking about classics like my all time favourite novel, The Stone Diaries, by Carol Shields. Or Fall of Your Knees, by Ann-Marie MacDonald. These books are almost sacred to me, I love them so much.

Not only are they comparable because of genre, they are comparable because of their use of multiple points of view. It was natural for me to weave multiple POVs into my story. I had to fight to retain them in the draft I worked on during my MFA. I was told repeatedly to keep it simple. I did not. How can we know anything without looking at it in multiple ways? (And the more ways, the better.)

These books are also comparable because they are sociological–that is they are as much about the society around the main characters as they are about the characters themselves. I come from a school of thought that says everything is political. Because everything is.

But it would be hubris in the highest degree to compare my work to this work. The most I can say is that these books inspired me. And they did. They made me want to become a writer. I can hear someone out there saying, “Well, she’s no Carol Shields, I’ll tell you that.” It’s okay. I already know.

I did a little searching and read a blog post by Paula Munier about comps that I found quite helpful. Maybe you will too. Between that and a friend suggesting The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver as a comp (again, another big name I can’t possibly use), I came to realize that I could focus on theme. Maybe something like women finding new models of motherhood or the intimacy of women’s friendships and the great loneliness of life without them. Munier’s post taught me that it might be acceptable to list a well known best-seller, but only one, and then add a mid-list author (a phrase I despise for it’s dismissiveness) and another first time novelist to the list.

Again though, I seem stymied. For example, I admire Katherine Ashenburg’s gorgeous debut novel, Sofie & Cecilia. Like my novel, it is historic. We are working out similar themes–what it costs women to maintain marriages and families and to retain their respectability, and the pain experienced by women who are unable to use their talents. But Ashenburg was published by Knopf and her novel had huge success. All deserved. I can’t compare my effort to hers. (I highly recommend you read it. It’s beautiful. Her deep knowledge of Swedish art is just one astonishing feature of her novel.)

So what is my problem?

What I’ve discovered is that my inability to suggest comps is, more than anything, a self-esteem problem. And who can solve that?

Concussions and Confined Settings

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I’m reading concussion stories, and my colleague Elaine Morin pointed out Lauren Groff’s excellent story in the New Yorker, The Midnight Zone. It’s full of truth and suspense and fractured thoughts and a fractured head and it took me, inevitably, to the reading of an interview with Groff, which was (sadly, for my purposes) more about motherhood than concussions, although both topics are writerly obsessions of mine, the former being a thirty-year obsession and the latter much newer.

(I read that last sentence three times, by the way, and it is technically grammatically correct. It is representative of the tangential way my mind works these days, and I’m keeping it as is. Welcome to the inside of my head.)

In the interview, Groff makes a great point about setting. The setting of the story is confined to a small cabin. Danger lurks outside, but also liberation. Asked about this, she says, “it’s psychologically easier to live if you believe you have an exit plan. It’s easier to run ten miles if you tell yourself that you can walk when you get to eight; it’s easier to work for four hours without a break if you keep the door to your office open; it’s easier to live with how we’re killing the planet if you believe the completely insane notion that humans will colonize Mars.”

She’s so right. And I love the way she extends the situation of the story to the much larger world. But back to concussions. Three years (plus) into this brain injury, I am still keeping the door open. It’s easier to live that way. It’s behind me, back there somewhere, even as I stare down the very real possibility that this is as good as it gets for me. Concussion and confinement go together. Concussed people avoid light and sound and people and life. I wonder if Groff made that connection? Do you ever wish you could talk to a writer and ask these questions, go deeper into something you find fascinating in their work?

Suffice it to say, I am now a Groff fan. Maybe one day I will get to talk to her about how she knows so much about brain injuries. Until then, I’ll keep reading concussion stories.