Welcome to Litsy!

Did I learn more about hammers, saws, shims, & — weirdly — pig‘s genitals than I ever wanted to know? Yes. Am I still unable to identify a Phillips-Head Screwdriver? Also, yes. But I‘m glad I read this wonderfully-written memoir about a woman‘s professional, emotional, & intellectual journey from journalist to carpenter. Her yearning for transformation, self-knowledge, & tangible reality all shines through.👇🏻

“Now and then, the bullshit gets stripped away, and the accumulated anger and hurt and confusion give way for a glimpse at a different truth. And what I saw was that [my Dad] was trying his best like all of us, eager and excited to share his enthusiasms about birds and fish and books, keeping the feeders stocked with sunflower seeds, fumbling like all of us to bring himself and his distracted love into focus.”

“There is a dullness in all forms of work, a “violence — to the spirit as well as to the body,” as Studs Terkel put it in Working. There are repeated tasks and empty time and moments you wish you were swimming. These are unavoidable, even in jobs we love and feel proud to have; these are natural, even if you‘ve found your calling.”

“In Ovid‘s Metamorphoses, the gods are the reigning agents of change, and repeatedly “give and take away the form of things.” People are transformed into owls, bears, horses, newts, stones, birds, and trees. Without the gods to guide us, to cast their spells of transformation, how do we become something other than we were?”

1. Tagged book is part memoir, part carpentry handbook, and part love letter to the city of Boston. It‘s especially a good read if you‘re thinking of changing careers.
2. Mystery! Though she has some clunky moments, for me right now it‘s Louise Penny.
3. Thomas Friedman, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Rachel Held Evans (RIP 😢)
#wondrouswednesday

Loved this short memoir about a woman who quits her day job to apprentice as a carpenter. Loved its nods to Boston neighborhoods and housing.

Choosing my next read. Which would you pick?

I‘m *sort of* reading the top one...& sort of not. I took a break to read a quick YA book & now I‘m not 100% sure I‘m in the mood for such intellectual, snappy metafiction.

Fun pick on #read99women today from AN UNKINDNESS OF MAGICIANS author Kat Howard: the carpentry memoir you didn't know you needed. Love it! http://www.greermacallister.com/blog/2020/3/7/read99women-kat-howard

These are unavoidable, even in jobs we love and feel proud to have; these are natural, even if you‘ve found your calling. It‘s when those meaningless moments pile and mount, the meaningless moments that chew at your soul, that creep into the crevices of your brain and holler at you until ignoring them is not an option. Deadening moments that lead to the hard questions, the ones that swirl, in the broadest sense, around time and dying.

As Virginia Woolf wrote, “It is fatal to be a man or a woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.” This feels deeply true to me, an abiding desire to have both sexes mingled in one body and one mind, a mental fertility.