A ray of light

Thanks to Sara Evans for the inspiration. As PaulaJ has pointed out, “our excitement threshold is very low at the moment,” and given lockdown #3, migraines, and the fact that my 18-year-old car may be blowing its head gasket, I am pretty much flattened.

The ray of light comes from great books, thanks to recommendations from you lot. I recently finished The Girl with the Louding Voice, as I’ve said, and then I tore through Jackie Kay’s Trumpet, a real page-turner right to the very end. Now I’m reading Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half and finding it rich and fascinating. I didn't expect stories of transmen in both the latter two, and while Kay’s is more stylistically gripping, Bennett has woven a hell of an epic about identical twins, one of whom passed as white, and their children. She expounds on two subjects of great interest to me, race and gender. I was up till 3 a.m. last night, unable to put it down. 

A couple of passages from Vanishing particularly delight me: “This was his gift, a short memory. A long memory could drive a man crazy.” Indeed it is my memory that sometimes drives me to the brink.

And this: “…all of the neighbors she met were people whose dreams had already been dashed. Cinematographers working at Kodak stores, screenwriters teaching English to immigrants, actors starring in burlesque shows in seedy bars.” Most of my friends, all my life long, have been people with brilliant futures behind them.