maryannmackey

[maryannmackey]

I am exhausted trying to weigh the balance of a good man. Life is complex and so are humans. I am myself not good all the time. I don't want to walk the tightrope of acceptable female behavior just so a man will one day come alongside. And I don't want my only comfort to be a crown of cold righteousness. I am not interested in being the long-suffering better half. I am not interested in being the corroborating witness of anyone's goodness. I want to be messy and complicated and screw up and try again.

The longer I grapple with the question of 'What is a good man?' the more I realize I've gotten it all wrong. I've centered the men in the question. And wasn't that what I was trying to get away from in the first place? In refusing to cook, I was trying to decenter the needs of a man, a fully capable adult man, from being the orbit of my life. And in the conversation, I had to recenter the needs of so many other men who saw themselves in the story, felt uncomfortable, and wanted to push back against the reality of what I was saying. They were, once again, centering themselves, their needs, their emotions.

I am often struck by the contradictions of the data that show men are happy in marriages while women often struggle. If their partner is struggling, wouldn't that make them not happy? If marriage costs women more in health and happiness, but men benefit- aren't they actually not benefiting? If their happiness rests on the unhappiness of their partner, shouldn't that lead to unhappiness?

bell hooks wrote, 'Love is the practice of freedom.' And as hooks and so many other radical thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Angela Davis argue, the freedom of one person should not rest upon the unfreedom of another. The goodness of men should not rest upon the goodness of women.

I do not know what makes a good man. But it's not a question I'm interested in answering anymore. I've been asking the wrong question. The question is not what is a good man. The question is how can we be allowed to be equally and fully human. We've been making it an individual rather than a systemic issue. A 'What's wrong with me?' or 'I'm a good man' rather than looking at how the structure of heterosexual relationships is oppressive. How can we celebrate the martyr mother archetype and denigrate the selfish woman who blows it all up so she can live free? When the men DMed me, I would reply that I wasn't lord god and chief executioner. I was just a human. And I just wanted to be as equally human as they were.

-This American Ex-Wife - Lyz Lenz

#Books of 2024 #Book Four #This American Ex-Wife #Lyz Lenz

[maryannmackey]

The Senator had invoked God at the top of his text, a numbingly common move in these settings, and sounded comfortable, even natural, doing it, which was becoming somewhat more rare. He seemed to have resolved an older generation's jittery and overscrupulous tension about church and state. He'd figured out how to say aloud and with good cheer and without seeming to be some nationalist-imperialist pervert what had been implicit for too long: that now we had a country that could more or less plausibly claim- as much by dint of its world-shredding misdeeds as by its misty glories- not to serve God but to be God. Render unto Caesar and rest your conscience. Without any off-putting intensity, the Senator insisted, above all, on faith. 'In my heart I know you didn't just come here for me,' he said. 'You came here because you believe in what this country can be.'

'Your Love Keeps Lifting Me' played him off the stage. The campaign, just beginning, was still a scarcely glimpsed frontier. I can't say that I thought he would win.

-Great Expectations, Vinson Cunningham

#Books of 2024 #Book Three #Great Expectations #Vinson Cunningham

[maryannmackey]

'You and Tobias are hopping around in the sprinkler. The sprinkler is a magnificent invention because it exposes raindrops to sunshine. That does occur in nature, but it is rare. When I was in seminary I used to go sometimes to watch the Baptists down at the river. It was something to see the preacher lifting the one who was being baptized up out of the water and the water pouring off the garments and the hair. It did look like a birth or a resurrection. For us the water just heightens the touch of the pastor's hand on the sweet bones of the head, sort of like making an electrical connection. I've always loved to baptize people, though I have sometimes wished there were more shimmer and splash involved in the way we go about it. Well, but you two are dancing around in your iridescent little downpour, whooping and stomping as sane people ought to do when they encounter a thing so miraculous as water.'

-Gilead, Marilynne Robinson

#Books of 2024 #Book Two #Gilead #Marilynne Robinson #so many stunning sentences in this one #I loved it

[maryannmackey]

'But what about the history?' I heard myself say aloud. 'What kind of god would be happy with seeing hundreds of thousands of people expelled from their homes?'

'Rachel!' said Miriam angrily.

She had her pointer finger in her mouth and was biting her nail. I noticed that her thumbnail and ring finger were bitten too, up past the skin. When had she started biting her nails?

It dawned on me then that Miriam might not know how the Palestinians had been expelled- that she might never have learned about it. I wasn't taught this in my Jewish education either.

Mr. Schwebel met my eyes. It seemed he was aware of what I was talking about. Then he looked back down at his plate quickly again and put his fork into a tender piece of beef.

'There's something that the Palestinians call the Nakba,' I said. 'It refers to when they were driven from their homes into exile- when Israel became a state. It sort of puts a different perspective on Israeli independence. I mean, I was taught that the Palestinians went to war with us. But I don't think that's true. If you're kicked out of your home, I don't think you're going to war if you retaliate. You're just defending your home.'

There was silence at the table. Adiv got up and went to the bathroom. Miriam was still chewing on her pointer fingernail. I wondered if I had somehow transmitted the habit to her, if she'd caught it from me.

'That isn't true,' said Mrs. Schwebel. 'I don't know where you got that information, but it's wrong.'

I'd never been a good debater, and I could not point to one place where I'd gotten my information. The Internet, mostly. Students for a Free Palestine. Arguments between stoned people at college parties. Half an audiobook called Disputed Yesterdays: the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Made Simple.

'What part?' I asked. 'That they didn't live there first? That they weren't kicked off their land? That when someone attempts to reclaim what belongs to them, it's not an attack but a defense?'

'All of it,' she said. 'The land belonged to Britain. It didn't belong to anyone else. It did not belong to the Palestinians any more than it belonged to the Christians who lived there. The British gave it to us. It was given as reparation for the Holocaust, because we had nowhere else to go and we should never have nowhere to go again.'

'But there were Palestinians living there,' I said.

'So they were relocated,' said Mrs. Schwebel. 'So what? That's history. It's just how it is.'

'Is it?' I asked.

-Milk Fed, Melissa Border

#Books of 2024 #Book One #Milk Fed #Melissa Broder

[maryannmackey]

Every week in creative writing, we read two short stories: one by an actual writer, and another by one of us. The published stories were usually OK, but everything we wrote was awful. Why did we have to talk about it? All the suggestions felt random and performative. It was like we were all looking at a malformed sweater and saying, 'maybe it would be better if it was a different color, or if it was actually made of ice.'

The most interesting part of class was when the teacher, Leonard, talked about what it was like to be a writer. I had never met a professional writer before, apart from my parents' endocrinologist friend who wrote spy novels under a pseudonym.

Leonard said that being a writer meant that you lived your life on the outside looking in. Whenever Leonard went to people's houses, the men would be in the living room, talking about football, or the stock market. Leonard couldn't survive five minutes in there; he always ended up in the kitchen with the women. They were the ones talking about stuff he actually cared about: gossip, basically, about real or fictional people. Women were kind, so they never kicked him out, though he had no kitchen skills, beyond chopping things and opening jars.

I, like all the girls and most of the boys in the class, smiled at this description- at how the women tolerated Leonard, despite his incompetence. But my smile felt a little mechanical. Why were the women always in the kitchen, and what was it that Leonard had forfeited by being with them? Why was he a writer, and they weren't, when they cared about the same thing? Why wasn't he better at cooking?

-Either/Or - Elif Batuman

#Books of 2023 #Book Twenty #Either/Or #Elif Batuman

[maryannmackey]

'Look- ' he said, as if he was gearing up to say something more. As if he wanted to really get into it. 'I've seen enough,' I said, interrupting him before he could.

Because as annoyed as I was now, I had a feeling it would be a thousand times worse if I had to stand there and listen to Cal try to justify why he'd let me take all the heat back then. Why he'd felt emboldened to walk away without a second glance, to continue working with Ryan, to pretend like ehe was removed from it all.

I didn't way to hear him say 'You have to understand' or 'Things were complicated' or 'I had my sisters to think about.' Even if all of it was true, it didn't matter.

'I'm going to go,' I said.

'Okay,' he said.

It was better this way. We'd gotten too close to the first. Pretending like we could chat about the good old times as if we were just friends catching up. We weren't. There was too much history. Too much anger.

-Once More With Feeling, Elissa Sussman

#Books of 2023 #Book Nineteen #Once More With Feeling #Elissa Susan

[maryannmackey]

Once she had had a door within her that she could lock against the bad thoughts.

In her sickness, the door had been broken open.

Let there be pain, and there was pain.

It rose up hideous, her anger at the minister dragging along his wife, his daughter, the girl, in his greed for riches. And neither the child Bess nor she was ever asked if they wished to come.

For what is a girl but a vessel made to hold the desires of men.

-The Vaster Wilds, Lauren Groff

#Books of 2023 #Book Eighteen #The Vaster Wilds #Lauren Groff

[maryannmackey]

Miri expected school to be canceled on Monday morning but there was no announcement on the local radio station. She wished she could stay in bed under the covers with the quilt pulled over her head. She'd slept fitfully last night, waking every hour, finally winding up in Rusty's bed, the two of them watching over reach other. She'd never get rid of the stench in her nostrils, no matter how she washed them, sticking the soapy washcloth up as far as it would go, making her sneeze twenty times in a row. She'd tried telling herself it hadn't happened. If she went to the river today there would be no sign of a plane. It had all been a bad dream.

Even before she got downstairs the aroma of freshly baked coffee cake wafted up from Irene's kitchen. And if it hadn't happened, why would Irene be up and baking this early?

'For the Red Cross, darling,' Irene told her, while Blanche Kessler, home-service chairman for the Elizabethtown chapter, packed the cakes into boxes.

'To serve at the hospitality table,' Blanche Kessler said, 'outside the makeshift morgue behind Haines Funeral Home.'

If she still had any doubts, they vanished when she got to school. They were all buzzing about it in the hall, outside their homerooms. Where were you when you heard the news? What were you doing?

-In the Unlikely Event, Judy Blume

#Books of 2023 #Book Seventeen #In the Unlikely Event #Judy Blume

[maryannmackey]

books i read in 2023: happy place by emily henry

“you are in all of my happiest places. you are where my mind goes when it needs to be soothed.”

#Books of 2023 #Book Sixteen #Happy Place #Emily Henry

[maryannmackey]

One afternoon while the kids were at school, I was cleaning the house, listening to an episode of Nora McInerny's podcast, Terrible, Thanks for Asking. Her guest, Eve Rodsky, told a story about being on a trip with several close friends when everyone's husbands were calling or texting. Where were the snacks? Did they need a birthday present for the party? What time was soccer? Instead of staying overnight on that trip as planned, many of her friends went home, because it was easier to do the work themselves- finding the snacks, getting the gift, managing soccer- than to walk their husbands through doing it, or to deal with the anxious calls or snarky texts.

She came back from her trip and started to make a spreadsheet of all the tasks that were her responsibility in her marriage - all the things on her plate, big and small. It ended up growing into a massive spreadsheet, which she emailed to her husband as a way of opening up a conversation about the division of labor in their home.

I can't do that. It's too late to do anything about the inequity in my now-kaput marriage. But I made a list of tasks anyway. I wanted to see in black and white what I'd been doing in the marriage. Reader, I was going to show you the list, but I decided against it. You don't need the list.

Looking at it, I thought, No wonder so many divorced men get remarried right away and so many divorced women stay on their own. I saw something I'm still trying to process: My life looked surprisingly like my mother's. My mother didn't go to college, married at twenty, and had me at twenty-four. I went to college and graduate school, published my first book and got married at twenty-eight (at which age she already had three children), and had my children in my thirties. Still, still, my life looked a lot like hers.

-You Could Make This Place Beautiful (A Memoir)- Maggie Smith

#Books of 2023 #Book Fifteen #You Could Make This Place Beautiful #Maggie Smith #Loved this one #Love when poets write books

[maryannmackey]

Congratulations to PHIL DUNSTER on his first Emmy Nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a a Comedy Series for TED LASSO Season 3

#shining star of season three for sure #so cute how excited the rest of the cast is for him

[maryannmackey]

Camila: The first time I heard it, I cried. I mean, you know the song. It would have been impossible for me to not feel bowled over by those words. He had written me others but... this one... I loved it and I felt loved listening to it. And it was pretty, too. I would have loved that song even if it wasn't about me. It was that good.

Billy: She got teary and then she said, 'You need Daisy on it. You know that.' And you know what? I did know that. Even as I was writing it. I had known it. I wrote it to be a piano and vocal harmony. Before we even got into the studio, I was writing for Daisy.

#Books of 2023 #Book Fourteen #Daisy Jones & the Six #Taylor Jenkins Reid

[maryannmackey]

Around the time I topped and cut my first tobacco, we noticed the cigarette ads stopped playing. No idea why. If we'd known it was people thinking tobacco was dangerous for kids even to see on TV, with their eyes, we'd have found that dead hilarious. Our schools had smoking barrels. Teachers smoked on their breaks, kids at recess. The buyers were telling us the cancer thing was a scare, not proven. Another case of city people trash-talking us and our hard work, like anything else we did to feed ourselves: raising calves for slaughter, mining our coal, shooting Bambi with our hunting rifles. Now these people that would not know a tobacco plant if they saw one were calling it the devil.

If Philip Morris and them knew the devil had real teeth, they sat harder on that secret than you'd believe. Grow it with pride and smoke it with pride, they said, giving out number stickers to that effect.I recall big stacks of them at school, free for the taking. Grow and smoke we did, we were smoking away our grocery money. We drive around the 'Proud Tobacco Farmer' stickers on our trucks will they peeled and faded along with our good health and dreams of greatness. If you're standing on a small pile of shit, fighting for your one placebo stand, God almighty will you fight.

-Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver

#Books of 2023 #Book Thirteen #Demon Copperhead #Barbara Kingsolver

[maryannmackey]

Book Lovers - Emily Henry

#Books of 2023 #Book Twelve #Book Lovers #Emily Henry

[maryannmackey]

'I don't get why you'd write scripts for romantic comedies if you think romance is cheesy nonsense.'

'That's just it, though,' I said. 'I don't write from a point of clarity. I write out of confusion.'

'Then how about this- can you define cheese for me? Because I still haven't figured out, after two decades, where the line is between cheese and emotional extravagance that's acceptable. What makes a song or a movie or a moment in real life land on one side or the other? This is part of why the Cheesemonger sketch hit a nerve for me.'

I was quiet for a few seconds, and finally said, 'That's a good question. But the line is subjective, right? Kind of like the Supreme Court definition of obscenity being 'I know it when I see it.''

'What's a song you think is legitimately, non-cheesily romantic?"

'At the risk of being predictable, there's an Indigo Girls song called 'Dairy Queen.'

'But isn't that about a relationship that doesn't work out?'

'Romance doesn't require a happy ending.'

-Romantic Comedy, Curtis Sittenfeld

#Books of 2023 #Book Eleven #Romantic Comedy #Curtis Sittenfeld

[maryannmackey]

'Were you being reckless,' she asked, after Heather had swallowed a few mouthfuls,' or were you dong something you really wanted for a change?' 'I-' Heather started, eyes wide. She was ready to argue, but her friend interrupted again.  'For real. Think about it. Because I don't think you were being stupid. I don't think you've ever been stupid. And okay, so you broke a rule, but it was a bad rule. And you don't always have to follow the bad rules. They're, like, bad.'  Heather gave her a watery smile despite herself.  'I know, I should have been a lawyer, right?' Carly smirked. She looked at Heather intently. 'It wasn't really like being with Jack. Was it?'  Heather chewed on her lip for a moment and thought. About Marcus's bark of a laugh, about his apology the night he'd shown up with food from Cafe Luxor. About how many different ways he'd asked her what she wanted, and then given it to her. Unbegrudgingly. Enthusiastically. Because he wanted to give it to her, not because he wanted something from her.

Pas de Don’t- Chloe Angyal

#Books of 2023 #Book Ten #Pas de Don't #Chloe Angyal

[maryannmackey]

My parents were married when they had me, just to different people.  It's my opening line, when you ask to learn more about me. I sit back and wait for the nervous laughter- the reaction we all turn to when we don't know what to say. 'A child of passion.' I wink and smile. What a gift, to be born of two people who couldn't help themselves.  If we don't know each other well, that's all I give. Shift the focus of the conversation back to you.  If we get to know each other a little better, I might allude to a loud, dark childhood. I'll have written and published a few essays that do the same. Flashes of the past, but nothing more. Just enough that you know it wasn't pretty.  If we become friends, over the years I'll bring up stories that I've buried, ignored but not forgotten, taking them out from deep within the vault inside me, useful for its powerful lock and thick walls but all the more heavy because of them. These stories are about my mother and her sadness, my father and his coldness, and the affair that seemed to start it all. Not the affair they had together, which made me, but a later one.

Dirtbag, Massachusetts - Isaac Fitzgerald 

#Books 2023 #Book Nine #Dirtbag Massachusetts #Isaac Fitzgerald