Curious, Healing

Books about healing, business, and fun

feminism

“How We Show Up” by Mia Birdsong

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Subtitle: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community
Recommended to me by: Nora Samaran

This is a deeply hopeful book grounded in research and personal stories. The American Dream of individualism, resource extraction, and white supremacy creates separation and suffering. Mia Birdsong explores alternatives that people have created to value connection, cooperation, and community.

As a Black woman, Mia centers Black, queer women and other marginalized people such as people who have experienced homelessness. She appreciates the connections that people weave while surviving oppression, that can lead us all in a direction of ending oppression.

While the American Dream says that we should get our needs met in heterosexual nuclear families, this book celebrates all the different kinds of friendship that can also meet needs for intimacy, safety, and mutual support. Raising kids is easier and healthier for everyone with a larger circle of responsible and trusted adults. People who are ageing can support one another.

Whether in crisis, celebration, or everyday life, we can all weave more connections in our lives where we are seen and loved for who we are.

Highly recommended!

Author’s website. It turns out Mia Birdsong lives right here in Oakland!

Available at bookshop.org.

“What It Takes to Heal” by Prentis Hemphill

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Subtitle: How transforming ourselves can change the world

I had to return this to the library before I finished the last few chapters, but it all rang true to me, with clear analysis of the effects of racism and trauma, and clear calls to action for the ways we can move forward and heal the damage. Making the world a better place requires both internal healing and external connections. The organizations working toward social justice struggle with healing the ways people interact with each other inside the organizations as well as taking action out in the world.

Prentis includes stories about their experiences with racism, as well as their experiences with organizing for a better world.

Highly recommended.

Author website: prentishemphill.com

Available at bookshop.org.

“The Boston Girl” by Anita Diamant

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Recommended to me by: thistle in grey

I picked this up because I enjoyed “The Red Tent” a long time ago. They have in common gripping characterization and story, careful research, and being centered on Jewish women. The writing is note-perfect and pulled me forward through the whole book.

This is the sweeping story of Addie Baum’s life, as told to her beloved granddaughter from the vantage point of being 85 years old. She was born in 1900 to struggling immigrant parents from Russia who settled in Boston. She seizes any bit of luck, care, opportunity, and friendship that comes her way, and works fiercely to make her way and succeed. She offers luck, care, opportunity, and friendship to people struggling around her when she can. She both flees and stands by her family.

She faces a lot of grief and loss. The book tells the stories, but does not linger on the pain. Perhaps it makes sense from the vantage point of being 85 years old. Perhaps a relief for the modern reader when the losses touch too close to home, like those from the 1918 flu pandemic (although this was published 5 years before the start of the Covid pandemic). At times it felt dismissive, although “face forward and don’t think about it” must have been the mantra of the times.

As a Jewish reader with immigrant parents who settled on the East Coast, I appreciated the resonances in the book, even though my parents arrived half a century later and did not struggle with poverty in the same way. I wonder sometimes what it’s like to be part of the dominant culture and have almost everything resonate like that.

Highly recommended!

Available at bookshop.org.

“White Women: Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism and How to Do Better” by Regina Jackson and Saira Rao

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Subtitle: With a Guide to Start the Unlearning
Recommended to me by: Third Eye Books giveaway

On International Women’s Day in March 2023, I heard that Third Eye Books was giving away an anti-racist book for white women. I clicked on the link to receive one. After a few weeks, I realized it never arrived and looked back at their website. They had received 50,000 orders! I thought they would only send books to the first few (hundred) people who ordered, but just in time for Juneteenth 2023, the book arrived.

From the introduction:

“Race2Dinner was founded in 2019 as a dinner experience with Regina Jackson, a Black woman; Saira Rao, an Asian woman; and eight-to-ten white women. […] These dinners require white women to participate in direct, difficult conversations. It is not for the faint of heart.”

The preface speaks directly to white women.

“You know what you’re doing. But you pretend not to. […] So yes, we’ll explain to you how you’re racist. Even though we’re pretty sure you already know, whether you’re ready to admit it or not. […]

“White men may be on the throne. But you white women are shining it, fluffing the cushions, catching the coins that fall from their laps. […]

“YES. ALL. WHITE. WOMEN”

I kept reading with my eyebrows raised. A whole book of being yelled at did not sound pleasant or educational, no matter how true or justified the message. After the extended preface, the book shifts to tell the story of several of their dinner parties, and the way the conversations get derailed the same way over and over, all over the country. No wonder they’re yelling.

Saira Rao describes growing up as the daughter of Indian immigrants in a white community, aspiring to the perfection that white womanhood requires, but undermined from the start by her brown skin. The need for perfection and the endless backbiting and judgment undermine the white women around her as well. Anti-racism is only possible when mistakes are allowed, because unlearning racism and white supremacy is a difficult, mistake-ridden process.

White fragility, white tears, white allies, white saviors, white violence. They emphasize that silence is violence. Silently witnessing racism makes us an accomplice to it. We need to stand up and name what we see and speak against it, even though we are shamed and punished for breaking step with white supremacy.

Recommended as a refresher if you have already done a lot of anti-racist work. I don’t think this book would be palatable to someone just starting out.

Available at bookshop.org.

“When the Angels Left the Old Country” by sacha lamb

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Recommended to me by: Soph and Becca.

This is a book about an angel and a demon (and some humans). A Jewish angel, a Jewish demon, and Jewish queer humans, emigrating by ship from a tiny shtetl in Poland to New York.

The angel is obviously, essentially Good, and at the same time it can be oblivious, and its actions can have evil effects. The demon is selfish and encourages wickedness, and its actions can have ultimately good effects. They are conflicted within themselves, argue endlessly with each other, and love and need each other deeply. This complexity and debate around questions of good and evil, intent and action, are quintessentially Jewish, in contrast to a single clear polarizing answer.

Of course some immigrants were queer, and of course some of them would fall in love with each other. As a Jewish queer human myself, it was surprising and delightful to feel recognized in the world of this book, permeated with Yiddish phrases and Jewish mysticism.

The prose is a pleasure to read, tumbling from one scene to the next and only occasionally allowing the uncertainty and danger to ratchet too high. The outcome is satisfying neat, even if full repentance is a little unexpected.

Highly recommended!

Available at bookshop.org.

“Flying Solo” by Linda Holmes

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Recommended to me by: lightreads

Lovely atmospheric book set in a coastal Maine town with a main character who is a single woman and likes it that way. Mostly cozy and fun, although there was one scene with intense gaslighting where I had to skip a couple of pages to continue reading.

Now that I think back on it, I didn’t notice any LGBT characters at all. The great-aunt should have turned out to be a lesbian the whole time! There was a Black woman minor character who said from off-stage, “You know I don’t go places where my presence increases the Black population by over 10%.”

So, a light, fun read if you’re white and straight, or don’t mind reading a book about white, straight people. I read it as an ebook from the library, and it was well-suited for that.

Available at bookshop.org.