I was sent roses this week by my mother-in-law, and they’ve opened up cartoonishly over the past few days. There’s something so flagrant about roses that it’s easy to forget that they’re also beautiful, mathematically so, swelling open together and dying while I watch. These are saturated at the edges and pale at the hearts, pink and orange and a slightly unhealthy mauve, the color of the shadows under my eyes. There’s a tree outside our living-room window that I’ve been watching bud and come into leaf over weeks, brightening and brightening with the sun and this slow, uncertain spring. Nothing particularly special about it, except a freshness you can almost taste. After all this time inside I’m feeling starved for natural beauty like this, the joys of spring—overwritten, overwrought, overdone, but urgent nonetheless. It’s a craving that I’ve found impossible to feed through a screen, although going out still feels sort of irresponsible and illicit, and it’s hard to breathe properly through a mask.
Today is my first American Mother’s (Mothers’/Mothers?) Day, the impetus for the roses, and dinner tonight from our beloved local Italian that reopened for takeout just in time. Despite very much enjoying roses and wine and heart-emoji texts from friends and, y’know, having a sweet and healthy baby, I’m kind of a crank about these normative holidays, with their unimaginative rituals and casual cruelty to everyone whose family relationships are fraught or fractured for whatever reason. I don’t, as a rule, blanket-hate social media, by which I mean Instagram and Twitter, but on days like this I can see why people do, since the worst of it is on display, the low-level competition and strenuous performance of life as it is supposed to lived, according to some script you never chose. I feel strange even claiming today as mine, since our parenting so far has felt so wholly shared. I know at some point our roles will differentiate and our relationships with X will evolve, but right now mama still feels like a weird nickname somebody else assigned to me, that I’ve accepted a little grudgingly. Not mine yet.
A few things I have been enjoying and thinking about:
My friend Sarah (and a ton of people on Twitter) shared this gorgeous, sharp-edged piece by Sabrina Orah Mark in the Paris Review, about parenting and writing and academic hoop-jumping, the whole process of contorting yourself for a future that shimmers and vanishes when you try to grab it. (Dorothy: A Publishing Project, which published her novel Wild Milk, posted a great picture of all the orders that had come in since that piece went live. This is how it’s supposed to work.)
I’ve been making my way slowly through the BBC/Hulu Normal People adaptation, fascinated to see an interpretation of a book I spent a lot of time reading and thinking about last year. I’ve been trying to get past how the characters look, because one always mentally casts a novel, and actors are obviously always better looking than, well, normal people. Rooney’s characterizations reveal without describing: Marianne’s face, blank “like a piece of technology,” her eyes blinking cursors; Connell as wholesome “as a big baby tooth.” It’s standard to protest that the supposedly outcast girl is too pretty, but to me, she mostly looks too physically fragile. I always saw Marianne as intimidating—brainy, quiet, unsmiling, and imposing. Ungainly, rather than pliable like the popular girls. The actor playing Connell, on the other hand, isn’t fragile enough—he’s 24, and looks even older.
But what actually bugs me is the way the adaptation takes out so much of the politics. My take on the novel, somewhat imperfectly expressed in this piece, is essentially that Rooney is using the structure of romance to explore the political potential of human connection, updating most openly George Eliot and E.M. Forster. The way that an intimate bond, far from being narcissistic or selfish, actually opens lovers up to a sense of responsibility in, and to, the wider world. But the adaptation doesn’t really do that. The political elements of the novel—the rigged class system, the flailing of young people in a late-capitalist economy that has sold them out—are muted here, always folded back into the personal. (It’s a tiny but telling thing, that by casting an Asian actress to play Connell’s new girlfriend, the show implies that his flinching at Marianne’s boyfriend’s anti-Asian racism is personal as much as political, which diminishes it for me.) Anyway, maybe I’ll change my mind when I’ve seen the whole thing. Maybe even write about it properly! In the meantime, this piece by Michelle Orange is the best thing I’ve read about it.
I’ve seen a few articles talking about the sex in this show, and while I’m not sure that it always works—there’s still inevitably something awkward about TV sex, over and above the awkwardness that’s being performed—this piece at Vulture is interesting, going in depth on the way the show used an intimacy coordinator, and the kinds of rules and safeguards that are becoming standard in a post-Weinstein world. These standards for good sex scenes, as articulated in the piece, fascinated me:
They’re realistic but surprisingly graphic, raw and genuinely sexy, never pornographic but quite explicit, and never too “clean” or overly cinematic.
It’s an almost impossible line to walk, even if everyone watching agreed with what constituted “pornographic” versus “genuinely sexy”—what is allowed, artistically, versus what is gratuitous. (Garth Greenwell is maybe the best person out there at articulating this question of art and sex, and this piece is prompting me to finally read his novel Cleanness before I have to return it to the library.)
I hope you have a great week, and thank you for coming on this journey from Mother’s Day flowers to pornography with me. Joys of spring, indeed.