Straitjackets and Lunch Money by Katya Cengel

At ten, Katya Cengel stopped eating lunch so she could give her money—a dollar a day—to her father to help salve his economic woes after her parents divorced. This act of sacrifice, first, a source of pride, brought on an eating disorder that threatened to end as well as change her life. At 56 pounds and shrinking, she was admitted to the Roth Psychosomatic Unit at Stanford’s Children’s Hospital. One of her early comments, already ironic, is: “Grownups are strange. They make me go to the cafeteria, but no one makes me eat. So, I don’t.” At Roth, when you don’t eat, you get fitted with a straitjacket.

Cengel’s first memoir, From Chernobyl with Love, recounts her experiences as a young journalist covering Latvia and the Ukraine after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the late 1990s. Many of that book’s reviewers noted not just the quality of Cengel’s insights but her fearlessness. How did such a relatively new reporter write with such sangfroid about political upheaval? Her gripping, often disturbing new memoir, Straitjackets and Lunch Money, suggests an answer.

About her first day and night at the hospital, Cengel writes:

I was tied down, hooked up, connected to all sorts of machines. On my left side was some sort of heart machine and on my right was the hanger for my tube feedings. On top of me were heavy itchy blankets that flattened me to the bed. . .. For the first time in months, I felt safe. I drifted off, staring at the yellow curtains around me, listening to the voices, knowing there were people looking out for me.

At home—either Mom’s house or Dad’s—feeling safe was increasingly rare. Not eating became a way to be in charge of something.

It wasn’t that hard, really. Because I wasn’t much fun anymore, no one wanted to be around me. Not eating had become more than a way of saving money for Dad; it was a way out. The hunger I had felt earlier was gone, replaced by a bottomless pit that wouldn’t let food in. Even when I wanted to eat, I couldn’t. The less I ate, the less energy I had. I stopped doing things, even by myself.

I wore a baggy green sweatshirt with a whale on it. I could hide inside it. [The sweatshirt] covered my goose bumps and the long hairs that stood up on my arms. It seemed like everywhere except my head had more hair than it used to.

Though she comes to feel safe at Roth, this does not mean Cengel surrendered agency of her body or changed her eating behaviors easily or all at once. It does mean that competent, mostly caring adults were monitoring her condition and intervening when lack of nourishment pushed her close to the brink of unconsciousness.

As the child and the memoir settle in, Cengel serves readers the experience of her survival inside the institution whose effects on the bodies and minds of those incarcerated like her are frightening and fascinating. She treats us to canny assessments of her caretakers as well as candid descriptions of her not-always-successful efforts to make friends. Most of all, she puts us inside her own shrinking, shivering body and her own sharp, sometimes devious mind. For Cengel, as well as her fellow patients, finding ways to succeed at self-destructive behaviors—or to fantasize about succeeding—is an obsession that’s hard for her to shake. She narrates being there and being her with the immediacy and intensity of a novel.

I opened my eyes and mumbled something about not being cold, and why couldn’t they just put more blankets on me or turn that dumb heat machine up.

“Your temperature has gotten too low. It’s not safe. Come on, it won’t be that bad,” Sweet Nurse said.

She took me from my bed and wheeled me into the bathroom where I was lowered into a warm bath. The two nurses didn’t turn away. They sat by the side of the tub splashing water on my bare chest. Sweet Nurse splashed the water lightly, biting her red lips as she saw the unhealed sores and hollow areas on my body.

“It’s not going up,” Sweet Nurse said, once again pulling the thermometer from my mouth.

“I know. There isn’t anything else we can do but keep her in here, just hope it changes,” Boss Nurse replied, her rough hands patting my head for the first time.

Things did change. Cengel survived. After four months as a Roth patient, after making a largely unconscious commitment to continue living, Katya returned to her two homes and took care of herself despite her family’s dysfunction. Thirty years later, writing this book, the fearless journalist opened the door that closed behind her when she left Roth. In part, her quest was to better understand why she rewarded her abnegation with food, in part, to see how medical and psychiatric treatments for young anorexics and bulimics have evolved since then. 

She recalls that whenever anger overtook her, she was strapped in the straitjacket again, “almost suffocating me in the overpowering emotion.” Other recalcitrant patients locked up like her were force-fed using a tube inserted through the nose. The experience was so unpleasant that most “inmates” surrendered to their Ensure. One turning point in her story comes when Cengel admits to being secretly glad her caretakers resorted to extreme measures to save her life.

Gradually, most patients get well, but some get worse, or worse yet, leave Roth, backslide, and return. (Eighty percent returned to and stayed with their families. Cengel never went back, in part, because she adjusted to her mother and father using “a turkey baster to feed me the Ensure.”) Having tentatively committed to survival, Cengel accepts nourishment and thrives with its results—more flesh, fewer wrinkles, a bit more strength. 

Her parents may not have learned, may not have been able to afford the intermediate care facilities—rest homes and convalescent communities—where many Roth patients spent time between hospital and home. But without such programs, Cengel did eat healthily and gain weight. After college, she became a skilled writer and a war reporter. With this painful, honest, and enlightening book about her mental illness and self-starvation, she learned, in the end, that the treatment center no longer uses straitjackets to immobilize the children who refuse to eat. They, like her, have also grown up.

Woodhall Press
$18.95 Paperback | Buy Here

North Country: A Pedagogical Almanac by Carolyn Dekker

As North Country: A Pedagogical Almanac opens, author Carolyn Dekker with her dog Beckett,
a border collie, is driving north to Hancock, Michigan, in the Upper Peninsula, which juts into
Lake Superior. Dekker has a new job teaching English literature at Finlandia University. She is
fresh out of a relationship and soon to begin another; she has traveled alone from New England
to embark on her a new life; though nervous and excited, she is mostly looking ahead. She sees
the Quincy Mine, structures that once housed a vibrant copper mine during mid-1800s, a stark
site that graces the cover. She writes, “Views that draw the eye upward have a way of lifting the
heart, too. This steep terrain told me at first glance that I could love this place.” This collection
of essays describes Dekker’s journey to fit in and love the people and the place, nestled in the
north country.

The subtitle, A Pedagogical Almanac, reveals the book’s central concern—teaching college
classes and the methods she uses. During one class discussing two pomegranate poems by
Andrea Scarpino, poet laureate of the Upper Peninsula, Dekker discusses the pomegranate,
describing a way “to normalize [the students’] unfamiliarity with exotic commodities.” She
states that if she were a “construction worker’s kid, what do I know about a pomegranate?” Aware of her students’ backgrounds, Dekker is adept at connecting with their intellectual,
financial, and emotional condition.

She realizes their hardship, buying textbooks for her students, gathering book donations from
students and faculty, and starting a project she calls the Textbook Justice Library from which
they can borrow any text they need. This helpfulness is also evident in her teaching style. During
a class discussion of Rebecca Solnit’s essay “The Mother of All Questions” and Virginia Woolf’s
A Room of One’s Own, Dekker brings along her new puppy, who she has named Solnit. Dekker
writes, “Solnit roves happily from table to table as I take the plunge into the personal and ask my
students if there’s . . . some rigid model for life that they would rather slay than mold themselves
after.” Dekker understands that even with college kids to analyze the expectations of these kids
she can more easily accomplish that goal by having a puppy to hug.

Is North Country a memoir? A little bit. Is it literary criticism? Yes, because she cites and
responds to many books like hers. Is it nature writing, social commentary, a discourse on our
system of higher education? Yes, yes, yes, but also not clearly identifiable as such. No single
thread is fully developed across the whole book. Its hybridity touches on Dekker’s passions:
family, literature, teaching, outdoors, martial arts, parenting, horses; it often seems, however, that
she’s trying to do too much. Ultimately the book wanders and lacks cohesion.

In nineteen chapters, North Country ranges from one August to another August; several months
get two or three chapters. It seems that the book covers one year. But no. Each chapter is named
for a year, but the book actually spans five years: August 2015 to August 2020. On top of that, it is not strictly chronological. Though the chapters move from one month to the next, in order, the
reader is bounced back and forth across the five-year time span. If Dekker had rooted us solidly
in the town of Hancock or in detailed discussions of literary criticisms, for instance, she could
have taken those leaps in time between and within chapters without disorienting the reader.

For example, in Chapter Four about time-travel narratives, Dekker mentions a husband. Who is
he and when were they married? It’s not clear until a later chapter how this relationship fits into
Dekker’s life and the timeline of the other events in the book. Dekker writes about her expanding
family: her new husband, two teenage stepdaughters, the shock of an unexpected but beloved
grandbaby, a puppy, a horse. The characters are thinly drawn, and they appear and disappear
haphazardly. I’m a sucker for a puzzle, so I found myself flipping through pages trying to piece
together the who, the when, and the where. Ultimately, though, I was frustrated by the lack of
consistency and clarity.

In one strong chapter, Dekker grapples with what to do about teaching Sherman Alexie’s work
the week after a sexual harassment scandal involving him breaks. She wonders whether or not to
teach the Native American’s work, asking questions of her class and herself. About Alexie’s
collection, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, she applies the Bechdel-Wallace Test
about how women appear in literature: Do any of Alexie’s stories have two female characters
who have a conversation about something other than a man? “Not one story passes,” she writes.
In addition, she asks, “Who needs another Sherman Alexie when there are so many other voices,
writers who remake language, worlds, and genres with a brilliance and courage that makes more
room for all of us to live inside?” She lists other writers who do: Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, Margaret Noodin, Stephen Graham Jones, Rebecca Roanhorse, all more worthy to teach
than Alexie.

Dekker writes vividly about winter in Hancock: “Outside my office, the wind blows fine
snowflakes in white swirls across a landscape of waist-high drifts.” She acknowledges the
sounds, the cold, the light: “The snow on the front walk squeaks underfoot as we walk to the
car.” “In February, every day is startling, hurt-your-face cold.” “Our mornings on the ski trail are
drenched in gold light that slants through the trees from the rising sun.” While writing about the
CopperDog 150, a dogsled race in the Upper Peninsula, she shares, “My heart took flight with
the teams. The curves of their backs under the harnesses were saying yes to life, and the reach of
their claws and their wide-mouthed dog smiles were stretching out to grab and enjoy every mile
and moment.”

After the deep cold of the winter months, what is summer like in Hancock? The reader doesn’t
get to know because Dekker takes us to France with her stepdaughter in two long chapters after
which we get a chapter another off-ramp on horse pedigree. In that seventeen-page chapter, only about ten paragraphs made sense in this book. The chapter opens with her horse, Ruby, having a medical emergency. As Ruby recovers, Dekker dives into the Arabian pedigree and her own history with horses. Finally, Dekker writes, “Since becoming a horse owner in the north country, I have come to know the calculus of horses and land on a more intimate level.” The chapter wraps up with Dekker using Ruby to connect to the community: “We give riding lessons to a young family friend who experienced a paralyzing illness, and it’s a joy to be close to her in her first months of recovery, to watch her progress from using a wheelchair to crutches to a cane.”

Dekker’s writing shines when she’s evoking her experience as “an intensely physical person,”
especially when she’s moving in or interacting with nature. Gardening: “I pry at the ground until
I bend and then break my trowel.” “This gardening is a rare and necessary pleasure, a physical
enacting of the decisions with immediate results when so much of my life in the intellectual work
of course design, lesson planning, and grading leaves little physical manifestation.” A hike in the
woods: “I’m going to the woods to be with the spring flowers, but also because I believe it’s
good for a woman to sometimes go where only a good dog can follow. I want to walk alone a
while, to examine the shape of the connections I feel to this place and to my partner and family.”
Such writing leaps off the page and draws the reader in.

In the last chapter, Dekker writes, “The pandemic will be the end.” It’s August 2020 and she
means the end of in-person university classes. Staff continues planning for the fall semester, but
the future is far from certain. “We could shutter up and blow away overnight,” Dekker writes.
Indeed, as of fall 2023, Finlandia University has stopped enrolling students; the institution may
be dissolving. Alongside teaching preparations, Dekker collects wood for winter and spends time
gardening: “Attending to the garden helps quiet the roil of my mind. I carry buckets of rainwater,
cut dahlias, harvest tomatoes, basil, beans, and peas.” In these and other interactions with the
land, Dekker prepares for “whatever the next season brings.”

North Country is an ambitious work of creative nonfiction in the now-common hybrid form. The
book would have benefitted from a tighter focus and greater clarity, but her care and concern for her students, family, and the wonders of her new home “on the northern edge of beyond” is
admirable and instructive.

Black Lawrence Press
$21.95 Paperback | Buy Here

Secrets of the Sun: A Memoir by Mako Yoshikawa

Mako Yoshikawa is on a mission. In her memoir, Secrets of the Sun, she sets out to resolve the enigma of her father, Shoichi, a physicist and man plagued by bipolar illness. Through vivid snapshots, Yoshikawa obsesses over the mystery of her father, a brilliant scientist in the field of nuclear fusion who failed to achieve greatness.

That Shoichi also happens to be dead both simplifies and complicates his daughter’s task. Simplifies it because she can ask questions of her father’s “women,” those he was in relationship with as well as his daughters, the author’s sisters and Yoshikawa, who he claims to have loved the most, that is, if he truly loved any of them. She can also talk to his colleagues about whether he regretted his choice to devote himself to research that in the end proved futile. The complication is, had her father been alive none of the subjects she speaks to would have disclosed much of anything. After his death, some open up, but not a lot is revealed. For instance, when Yoshikawa asks her mother if her father regretted working on fusion, the conversation circles back to the same unsatisfactory conclusion her mother often hides behind. “He was a good man, inside.” Had he been available while writing the book, Yoshikawa could have asked her father to clarify his “goodness.” But that option is gone.

With Shoichi’s death is where this fast-paced memoir begins, days before Yoshikawa’s wedding. Yoshikawa is getting ready for her rehearsal dinner in Boston in 2010 when she receives a call from a police officer in New Jersey. A 44-year-old novelist and creative writing instructor, Yoshikawa thinks the call will be about another breakdown her father has had, a familiar tale. She expects to hear he’s been found roaming the streets half naked, not that he died the night before of natural causes.

As Yoshikawa embarks on a new stage in her life as a wife, her father’s passing pulls her back into an old one as a daughter. Since Shoichi had been physically abusive and never admitted it, Yoshikawa distanced herself from him. Vanished from her life, she questions why she kept him at a distance; she wants to confirm that she made the right decision to seek, at least, in writing, some kind of resolution.

Thus begins her quest to understand her father, hoping it will help her understand her childhood and her relationship with her mother and sisters. Yoshikawa examines her father’s early years in Japan, which coincide with World War II. She searches for clues to his character in his wealthy upbringing, overthrown by hunger and loss that came during and after the war. Later she interviews the many women with whom he was intimate, including her mother. Did he at least love her? She writes,

Because if my father had never loved the wives and girlfriends who loved him and nursed him and stayed by his side, what hope was there for me, the daughter who’d fled his home and returned as seldom as she could?

Because Shoichi was a physics genius, many whom Yoshikawa turns to trying to decipher him seem to overlook his other faults. Early in the book there is a telling exchange between Yoshikawa and her stepfather Jimmy. They are trying to craft a statement about Shoichi’s passing. Jimmy suggests they say something about Shoichi being “groundbreaking” for his research in nuclear fusion. Yoshikawa thinks up another possibility: “Groundbreaker who broke.”

The broken part is the part Yoshikawa knew best as his daughter. He may have been a renowned physicist, but he was a failure as a father, a heavy drinker whose anger was unleashed on his family in shouts and blows. Nevertheless, Yoshikawa realizes that despite her efforts to distance herself from him, he was, and will always be, a part of her life. This revelation makes her redouble her efforts to comprehend this man who showed so much promise before he began to suffer from mental illness in midlife. Why he became ill, what brought it on, and whether it was the mental illness that made him abusive are all questions she wants answered.

Yoshikawa pushes to learn the truth while fearing it at the same time. As her youngest sister cries about their father’s death during the rehearsal dinner, Yoshikawa brushes it off, telling her soon-to-be husband that her sister was not close to their father. Competing for his attention still bewitches her. Along the way Yoshikawa tackles other equally charged issues, including the prejudice and racism her Japanese-American family experienced and, surprisingly, her father’s penchant for cross dressing.

She first saw her father at home wearing a woman’s nightgown when she was a child. Later she learns from one of his female partners that he wore dresses and women’s underpants as well. It’s another thing the family does not talk about. When Yoshikawa asks her father’s female partner why he did it, all she remembers him saying is “they better,” a sort of arrogant threat. Trying to come to terms with this comment, Yoshikawa explores the issue of clothing and how it camouflages us as we try to fit in. She compares our use of clothes to how cuttlefish change colors. “Clothes can also serve as an adaptive strategy: a means of self-protection, of intimidation.”

When family and friends disregard his violent behavior, which included hitting his wife and children, Yoshikawa is left empty. If his mental illness is to blame, Yoshikawa has nowhere to direct the anger that has built up in her after years of his abuse. This leads to several beautiful truths about the complexity of communicating with the mentally ill, one of which is: “Talking sense into a schizophrenic: an endeavor so futile it could be an idiom, like tilting at windmills or squeezing blood from a stone.”

Insights like these into human nature manifesting in familial relationships make this slim volume about more than just one woman and her relatives, focused on an enigmatic father. Indeed, by exploring his past Yoshikawa understands more about Shoichi the man, which helps her forgive—a tall order—Shoichi the father. By the end, it’s less her father’s mental illness that makes him a mystery, but rather how his difference and strangeness are all too human, a finding the author struggles to accept. “He was elusive and capacious, as all of us are, every memory I had of him refracting, shifting over time and with the light.”

Mad Creek Books
$19.95 Paperback | Buy Here

The Wandering Womb: Essays in Search of Home by S.L. Wisenberg

S.L. Wisenberg, the author of several memoirs and editor of Another Chicago Magazine, has compiled a collection of twenty-eight essays, most of them new. In The Wandering Womb: Essays in Search of Home she discovers a world of unexplored personal connections while also diving into Judaism, women’s history, and human nature. Throughout, her voice is candid and confident.

Wisenberg nimbly essays with precise details and agile, elegant writing as she journeys through memoires that reveal their lasting significance—from her sneaking into a college sorority rush, at twenty-two, to later-in-life descriptions and reflections on Judaism, breast cancer, women’s bodies, asthma, the Holocaust, and persistent memories of her childhood. It’s a lot. Somehow Wisenberg makes room for it all. That’s the advantage of a collection—each essay exploring one theme or topic at a time.

Yet, despite mostly focusing on separate subjects per essay, she laces varying topics among several individual pieces. In “Younger Men, Older Men,” for example, she concedes that she still wants to be saved by a young man after her relationships with younger men have played out: “I am looking for one young man to save me, to sweep me from my life.” Wisenberg links this notion of salvation via a man’s rescue to her Judaism:

As Jews, we do not believe in redemption offered by a man who bled for us and came down from the cross for us so that we could mourn and be cleansed. I’m not waiting for the coming of the messiah. But as women, that is the dogma we are raised on, that one man can sweep down and save us . . ..

With the sheer number of subjects, I sometimes wondered, am I lost? Have I missed a narrative thread? When had she mentioned her mother? On page forty-six she begins “Spy In The House of Girls” with “My mother was president of her sorority at the University of Texas, and when I was a freshman at Northwestern in the mid-seventies, she wanted very much for me to take part in sorority rush.” The first forty-five pages did not establish her mother’s presence or influence (even when discussing her grandparents’ histories at length), and I found this disconcerting. Should I have noticed details about her mother in an earlier essay? Since Wisenberg’s essays are not in chronological order, at times I found dates and characters difficult to follow, though she discloses in her author’s note: “In most pieces I’ve tried to locate the reader in time by noting my age when events took place or by giving the year as a reference point.”

Wisenberg challenges Judaism’s relationship to women in the essay “Mikvah. That Which Will Not Stay Submerged.” “It’s as if the rabbis,” she writes, “have been writing all over our bodies for centuries, crafting their arguments on our skin . . .. They have been examining women’s drips and discharges and dispatches and holding them up to the light.”

What’s more, she rebukes the faith with questions: “And when it comes to family-purity laws, how can even the newest of a New Age feminist ritual make up for the historic misogyny of Jewish law?” With knowledge of Jewish orthodoxy and its practices, she contemplates the Mikvah and its use by orthodox women (she is not orthodox, though her parents were raised in orthodox homes). In one essay, she serves up fifteen titled sections describing the orthodox practice, its law, its history, customs about menstruation and bodily fluids, with helpings of personal experience. Ultimately, though, she criticizes Jewish law and its practices regarding women and their bodies, and like a hammer whacking a nail, her feminism bangs on Orthodox traditions.

Her voice is authentic, her honesty brutal. She wonders again about her gender and Judaism: “What is the new ritual to acknowledge the fact that the religion was not made for us, for me, that we have to manipulate it and change everything so that it’s meaningful, and that that’s a sorrowful and exhausting task?”

As a feminist, a Jew, and someone who lost thirty or more relatives in Poland during the Holocaust, I share a legacy with Wisenberg. We also agree about Judaism’s misogyny. However, as a reviewer, I wondered if these similarities would allow me the necessary distance. Instead, I found my background makes me sympathetic, not uncritical. And those readers who have not shared her experiences will find her reflections and admissions compellingly powerful in their intimacy and candor. What’s more, most readers will share her insecurities about the need to fit in. Recalling her desire to rush a sorority in “Spy in the House with Girls,” she confesses her weakness: “. . . deep down, I still wanted them to like me. I still wanted to be Queen of the Prom.” (Me too!)

After disclosing details about her grandfather’s loss of his family to the Nazis, Wisenberg reflects on a trip to Auschwitz. “I went to Auschwitz because it seemed the place had been with me always. But when I was there, I couldn’t feel the weight of history. I couldn’t bring what I know of the genocide to the vast landscape of it.” This reminded me of my visit to Dachau in my forties. Unable to wrap my mind around “the vast landscape of it,” I became ill. Walking through the camp, I was feverish and weak. The moment I stepped into my hotel room all the symptoms vanished. I don’t believe I was ever sick—physically.

“In Judaism,” Wisenberg writes, “we are taught to take our biblical ancestors’ experience into our bodies.” I may have done just that as well. The knowledge of my ancestors’ deaths travelled into Germany with me. With my feet on the soil at Dachau, I couldn’t reconcile the knowledge I carried with me to the massive, suffocating truth while standing in the place where it happened.

Her ideas about the craft of writing are insightful, and she demonstrates her deftness with metaphor. About her writing, she says, “it pulls my feelings from me, or pulls me toward them, illuminates my internal train ride through unknown landscapes.”

The book’s title is curiously memorable. Wisenberg’s second essay, “The Wandering Womb,” describes that the term is found on a papyrus from the Kahun Gynaecological Paprus (circa 1820), where the text “advises its readers to look to the wandering womb.” In another ancient document is this: “Hippocratic physicians wrote that . . . women who were ill might be plagued by a wanderlustful womb, which had loosened itself from its mysterious moorings to cause trouble in the parts of the body where it had set up shop.”

Here I felt tossed among ghastly truths about the state of women throughout history. To her credit, Wisenberg stays with the ghastliness. “The womb as animal,” “The womb as empty bowl, like a beggar’s bowl.” In addition, she explains ongoing myths: “telling of vaginal teeth or fangs devouring the penis.” But she also adds humor: “It must be added that Plato also considered the penis to be a separate living thing. (Who wouldn’t?)” I smiled.

Wisenberg’s life so far has left her (and us) with insights worthy of our contemplations. In fact, after reading the collection, how wonderful it felt to be wrapped up by her many, women-centered, ­­­and thought-provoking threads.

University of Massachusetts Press
$22.95. Paperback

The Beloved Republic by Steven Harvey

When Steven Harvey was eleven, his mother died by suicide. Three weeks later, his father married a woman with whom he’d been having an affair. The family never spoke of her death, and for much of his life, Harvey blocked this and other bad memories of his childhood. When he was sixty-one, he felt moved to open a box of his mother’s letters he had inherited. At the same time, he purchased a set of children’s encyclopedias he and his mother had loved, The Book of Knowledge. He captures this experience in a poignant essay, which alternates between his recovered memories, the complex and vulnerable mother he meets through her writing, and his reflections on several encyclopedia entries. The final essay, “The Book of Knowledge,” I see as the keystone essay in Harvey’s newest collection, his fourth, The Beloved Republic.

In the book, Harvey assembles essays written over twenty-five years. Predictably, the essays cover a wide range of topics—family, music, nature, philosophy, history, politics, favorite writers, etc. Nevertheless, the essays also coalesce around clear themes, which Harvey highlights through his intelligent placement and, I assume, revision of the essays for this collection. Harvey argues for the value of what he calls a “nonfiction miscellany.”

As essayists put together such collections over decades, they do not explore a concept or a set of related concepts; rather, they reveal who they are, and perhaps, why they are here. . . . [T]he rewards can be great as the reader joins the writer on the quest to discover willy-nilly what one life is about. There is an intimacy in this method, a sense that the parts are cherished, glowing by their own light without ulterior motives.

It is the day of Harvey’s mother’s death. No one has yet told Harvey the news, but a group of somber adults has gathered in his home. He senses something is terribly wrong and huddles in a storage space under the stairs, staring at the nails above his head, a personal constellation.

This moment is emblematic of a central theme of the book: our essential aloneness, even abandonment, by an indifferent universe. Harvey shares, “That coffin lid of stars that still haunts me.” He underscores this message in the essay “Orphaned Souls.”

Almighty forces are at work in the universe governed by laws that rule down to the puzzling properties of the tiniest subatomic particle, but they don’t give a quark about us. They may have given birth to us, but they abandoned us on the doorstep of an enormous nothingness that extends at least as far as the eye can see. This is the article of my faithlessness.

Yet the essays in this collection do reveal a kind of faith, guiding stars perhaps, that allow Harvey to navigate—with some sanity and grace—an often hostile universe. He believes in the power of stories and the beauty of language to companion, nurture, and connect us. He devoted his long career as an English professor to classroom communities with stories at their heart: “Literature, I tell my students on the first day of class, is a lullaby to our orphaned souls.” Literature, he continues, “frames our otherwise unutterable fears, giving them voice, and by speaking them we know that we have each other and are not alone with our burdens.” He knows this is true because a literature class his freshman year of college changed his life. He knows this because “when I read aloud to the students, I feel the power of shared words to bring balm.”

Harvey also believes in staying awake to the beauty, the transcendent, in our ordinary lives. Many of his essays focus on these moments and often use religious terms and metaphors to describe them: hiking to the top of a favorite mountain with his sons, interviewing a famous old-time fiddler, helping to rescue a baby sperm whale washed ashore. Harvey weaves his wife, Barbara, throughout the collection as a consistent, wise, and calm companion; his quiet gratitude for her shines through the pages.

But the election of Donald Trump—and the hatred, racism, and chaos that time unveiled—caused a shift in Harvey’s writerly focus. For most of his life, Harvey believed that essays were not a venue for political activism. “The writer’s job is to mystify ideas, not clarify them.” But that changed in 2017 when Harvey toured the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C. As Harvey tells the story in “The Personal Political Essay,” he felt a stirring, a longing to use his writing skills to respond to “a democracy drifting toward authoritarianism.” The cliches and partisan rhetoric shouted at rallies, he concludes, may rally the troops, but rarely have the power to transform. He revisits the personal-political essays he had loved in his youth, by Baldwin, King, and Thoreau, and notes that “the essential move in a personal political essay,” is in providing moments of “inwardness.”

For the reader, the intimacy of watching and participating in the thought process is a privilege, and once we live through the conditions under which the thinking happened, generously produced by the essayist, we are more apt to see the idea anew and modify our own position and even change our minds, or, if we agreed with the ideas from the start, feel less lonely in our convictions. This is the great gift that the personal essay offers our mean-spirited politics: the power of intimacy.

He concludes that we need personal essayists who contribute nuanced, humble, and authorial voices to the political dialogue. He makes a new commitment.

I will still write personal essays full of questions and ambiguities, I’m sure, but I will no longer shy away from those that require an unequivocal political stance. It may seem surprising that a political personal essay would turn lyrical, even poetic, given the urgency of its message, in a grubby and corrupt world, but that is precisely what we need during troubled times, an aria getting us through the night and pointing in the morning toward the Promised Land.

Harvey stays true to this promise, and his most recent essays entwine the personal with urgent cultural issues. In “The Other Steve Harvey,” he uses the fact that he shares the name with a Black celebrity as a frame to share his own reckoning with racism. In “The Arc of Universe,” Harvey reflects on King’s famous line, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” in a smart, touching essay. He combines a visit to a glass studio, anecdotes about King, the history of archery instruction, reflections on Stonewall, and the story of physicist, an eclipse, and Einstein’s theory of relativity—all anchored by the story of his daughter coming out as bi-sexual.

As a student of history, Harvey is a realist, perhaps even a pessimist, about our ability to alter our frightening environmental and political trajectory. At the same time, he believes that modest, ordinary, compassionate people—finding ways to connect through art—make a difference. “Those who do this work form the ‘Beloved Republic,” a phrase E.M. Forster coined for the peaceful and fragile confederacy of kind, benevolent and creative people in the world of tyrants, thugs, and loud-mouthed bullies.”

In those first hours after his mother’s death, Harvey was lost and alone in his sanctuary under the stairs, a constellation of nail-stars above his head. That seminal experience, I suspect, contributed to his rejection of traditional religious doctrine. At the same time, I think the loss may have also helped cultivate his exquisite empathy, his ability to notice moments of beauty and connection, and his profound commitment to ease suffering. His book of “nonfiction miscellany” captures a life lived, not in grand gestures, but in small, consistent acts of courage, creativity, and integrity in community with others.

In his titular essay “The Beloved Republic,” Harvey makes this heartening promise to those who feel worried and wearied, helpless in the face of “war and tyranny,” that by devoting ourselves to lives of steady kindness, creativity, and friendship we are joining an invisible, benevolent army.

Artists, intellectuals, and scientists can resist by joining movements, taking on causes, or fighting wars of resistance, and many do, but they can also bring about slow but inexorable change by doing what they do best: make art, argue philosophy, teach children, and do the slow, exacting work of science. That is the star that guides them when the cruelty seems endless.

The Beloved Republic by Steven Harvey
Wandering Aengus Press
$20.00 paperback | Buy Now

Tarn Wilson is the author of the memoir The Slow Farm, the memoir-in-essays In Praise of Inadequate Gifts, winner of the Wandering Aengus Press Book Award, and the craft book: 5-Minute Daily Writing Prompts: 501 Prompts to Unleash Your Creativity and Inspire You to Write (soon to be translated into Chinese!). Her essays appear in numerous literary journals, including Brevity, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, River Teeth, Ruminate, and The Sun. She earned her MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop.