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Happily
Happily: A Personal History, with Fairy Tales | Sabrina Orah Mark
4 posts | 3 read | 1 to read
A beautifully written memoir-in-essays on fairy tales and their surprising relevance to modern life, from a Jewish woman raising Black children in the American Southbased on her acclaimed Paris Review column "Happily" The literary tradition of the fairy tale has long endured as the vehicle by which we interrogate the laws of reality. These fantastical stories, populated with wolves, kings, and wicked witches, have throughout history served as a template for understanding culture, society, and that muddy terrain we call our collective human psyche. In Happily, Sabrina Orah Mark reimagines the modern fairy tale, turning it inside out and searching it for the wisdom to better understand our contemporary moment in what Mark so incisively calls this strange American weather. Set against the backdrop of political upheaval, viral plague, social protest, and climate change, Mark locates the magic in the mundane and illuminates the surreality of life as we know it today. In Sorry Peter Pan, Were Over You, Mark grapples with a loss of innocence when her son decides he would rather dress up as Martin Luther King, Jr., than Peter Pan for Halloween; in The Evil Stepmother Mark finds unlikely communion with wicked wives and examines the roots of their bad reputation; and in Rapunzel, Draft One Thousand, the hunt for a wig maker in a time of unprecedented civil unrest forces Mark to finally confront her sisters cancer diagnosis and the stories we tell ourselves to get by. Revelatory, whimsical, and utterly inspired, Happily is a testament to the singularity of Sabrina Orah Marks voice and the power of the fantastical to reveal essential truths about life, love, and the meaning of family.
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merelybookish
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My #bookreport.
📗 Winter Rose by Patricia A McKillip. A Tam Lin retelling. Agree with reviews that say language is beautiful and story is confusing.
🎧 Happily by Sabrina Orah Mark - a series of personal essays using fairy tales to explore motherhood, writing, race, grief, etc. Some are brilliant.

#Weeklyforecast - a break from fairy tales. 😉
📗 some Alice Munro ❤️
🎧 Finally getting to Cold Comfort Farm

BarbaraBB Some Alice Munro 🤍 5mo
47 likes1 comment
review
Kazzie
Pickpick

Interesting concept - memoir through lens of fairy tales. Some worked better than others, but real and honest. The exploration of the step mother trope was very well done

review
underground_bks
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Pickpick

Orah Mark, step/mother in a mixed & blended family, begins this memoir-in-essays seeking perspective on her life in the magic mirror of fairy tales, which at first offer structure & meaning but, as 2020‘s pandemic and protests unfold, it‘s their surreality that provides a parallel. At times frustrating, always clever, never cliché, Happily is a worthwhile read for fans of any of the 3 genres Mark mixes together in this magic potion of a book.