This past week, in between doing countless online surveys to help pay for groceries (an attempt at using my plentiful free time constructively), I managed to finish a couple of books.
The first was Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, a collection of essays purportedly about disability justice for the QT-BIPOC community, but more accurately a series of not entirely relevant personal anecdotes interspersed among examples of more or less successful initiatives, with little insight into how things could be improved. I have to be very honest, although its aim couldn't be nobler, it nearly defeated me, and I would have metaphorically launched it across the room had it not been on my list of potential works for translation. (Yeah, that's going to be a no.) Its most inexcusable offence is that, as a collection, it has no coherent structure; the essays are not arranged in any discernable order, whether thematic or chronological. However, it's made worse because the writing is abysmal: filled with jargon, repetitive, using a litany of attributes for every individual, group, service, initiative and event mentioned, it reads like a promising first draft.
As a queer disabled person, I did find some of the topics addressed interesting, such as disability and suicide, the care collective model, the concept of "disability doulas" to coach newly disabled people, and the inclusion of madness in the disability space. With rigorous reworking and editing of its contents, it could become essential reading for disabled individuals of any colour or sexual identity/orientation; as it stands, it's a mess.
I mentioned last week that the daily life of nuns fascinates me. Out of curiosity, I searched my library's catalogue and found the brilliantly titled And Then There Were Nuns: Adventures in a Cloistered Life by Jane Christmas. Written by a former journalist, this is a memoir of her exploration — when she was in her late fifties, twice divorced and newly engaged — of "the Voice Within" through stays in three religious institutions. Besides deciding whether to enter a monastic life (and therefore break her engagement), she also hoped to deal with the trauma caused by the sexual assault she had suffered some years previously. I was genuinely puzzled by her repeated claims to have felt the calling to be a nun since she was 15 when her behaviour demonstrated time and time again her stubborn resistance to the rules that underpin this vocation. As a result, her final decision did not surprise me in the least.
I liked reading about the people she met, although she showed herself highly judgmental towards many of them. Her lack of self-awareness, baffling in a person of her age and life experience, had me shaking my head on more than one occasion. However, I can only agree with her strong stance in favour of female priests and bishops, as well as her wish to see women in more important and powerful positions than mere handmaidens for the church. And towards the end of her memoir, she calls for the following: "Let's talk about rape for a moment, shall we? Because it needs a public airing, and it doesn't help that when we speak about rape the conversation is more about shame than outrage." To which I say, "Amen, sister!"
I'll conclude this post with some good news and some bad news: I won a Goodreads giveaway... and coincidentally, it's another nun memoir! Also, I heard back from one of the publishers I emailed a couple of weeks ago, but unfortunately they no longer accept pitches... Oh well.