Curious, Healing

Books about healing, business, and fun

feminism

“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 Powell’s Books.

“The Manager’s Path” by Camille Fournier

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Subtitle: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth & Change

I expected this book to be boring, but it’s engagingly written and connects with my experience of working in tech. Camille Fournier writes from her own experience as a CTO (Chief Technical Officer) at several companies and includes quotes from other tech leaders, both men and women.

She starts with mentoring, which almost every technical person is expected to do eventually, and works up through tech lead, manager, director, up to CTO and VP of Engineering. She advises anyone who wants to be a manager of software engineers to spend enough time learning to code (5-7 years) to have those skills solidly available going forward.

I’m a software engineer who has mentored people and led projects, but will not be climbing the corporate ladder any higher. It was interesting to hear about the concerns that arise at higher levels. The need to figure out who is unhappy, why teams are not working well together, who is managing badly, and who might leave suddenly. The need to make good decisions about future directions on insufficient data. The need to develop intuition and keep taking in information to guide those decisions.

As she talks about mentoring interns and managing individual contributors, she includes all technical roles. Her primary advice is that relationships and communication are crucial even though programming might appear to be a solitary technical occupation. Not only do successful projects require communication with other engineers and the manager, they require communication with the stakeholders who say what to build, and the sales and marketing people who help it go out into the world.

She talks a lot about the importance of one-on-one meetings between managers and the people they manage to build trust and address problems early. She recommends skip-level meetings, where a director who manages managers also meets with individual contributors.

In addition, positive relationships are crucial to success in the working world. Not only do they make work more pleasant, they help people collaborate and share information. People who like working together help each other get jobs in the future.

I can clearly see this is true over the 30 years of my career. I built positive working relationships naturally, and I’m still not sure the advice makes sense until one experiences it. It’s not about fake, forced networking with people one doesn’t like – it’s about staying connected and friendly with people one does like to support one another going forward. In school, success artificially depends only on individual actions (although I think kids do more group work nowadays), but most accomplishments out in the world depend on interconnected people building things together.

The pronouns in this book bothered me. Rather than using she/he or they, Camille Fournier switched between using he for some examples and she for others. An intern was he while being described in general, and then she when performance problems came up. After that the pronouns were more even-handed, but I was very aware of them all the way through, braced for women to be portrayed negatively. As far as I remember, they/them pronouns were not used for anyone.

Recommended to anyone who works in a technical field, and especially anyone who wants to become a manager.

Links from the book:
The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman aka Joreen, a classic essay on why managers are necessary.

On Being A Senior Engineer which includes the suggestion to use senior influence to sponsor (rather than mentor) underrepresented people in engineering. Recommend them for positions. Highlight their accomplishments. Praise them publicly. Also refers to What Does Sponsorship Look Like by Lara Hogan.

Available at Powell’s Books.

“What Fresh Hell Is This?” by Heather Corinna

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Subtitle: Perimenopause, Menopause, Other Indignities, and You

Recommended to me by: Captain Awkward

This book is for anyone with a uterus who is moving toward or in menopause, whether due to aging or medical procedures. Heather Corinna’s writing is funny, profoundly inclusive, and tends to run long, as seen on her teen sex ed website Scarleteen. She likes to cover all the possibilities and include all the possible disclaimers.

She writes about the history of how menopause has been perceived and treated (or not) in the past, mostly by men. She interviewed experts (mostly women, many BIPOC) on a variety of topics and includes quotes from them, opening up a cornucopia of further reading.

She makes self-care suggestions along with compassion for their difficulty. She acknowledges the irony of recommending better sleep to help with hot flashes which often disrupt sleep. Stress and trauma tend to worsen perimenopause effects, adding another reason to reduce stress and work on healing trauma.

She covers both negative and positive effects of menopause. Contrary to popular myth, it does not bring life and love to an end. It does prompt an evaluation of what is and isn’t working in one’s life and can lead to sweeping changes.

Highly recommended to anyone who might walk this road or knows someone who is walking it.

Heather Corinna’s website.

Available at Powell’s Books.

“Recollections of My Nonexistence” by Rebecca Solnit

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Recommended to me by: Reading her other books, and her talk at Powell’s Books on zoom with Jia Tolentino on March 9, 2021.

Rebecca Solnit is a powerful, clear, lyrical writer. I thought her memoir might be literary and opaque, but instead it is luminously down to earth.

It contains brief descriptions of violence against women as she describes her ongoing dread that one day she would be the target. She shares the process of finding her voice amid the pressure to remain silent and unheard as a woman.

She describes living in a lovely studio apartment in San Francisco for 25 years, and the gentrification she witnessed in her neighborhood over that time. She invites us along on her widening explorations of the western US and the connections she made with environmentalists, anti-nuclear protestors, and Native Americans defending their land.

At the end of the book she comes back around to violence against women, and the writing of her explosively popular essay Men Explain Things To Me, which inspired the term “mansplaining.” She points out that the #MeToo movement was a tipping point built from many women speaking up and gaining power and gaining allies. We don’t know what may follow from our small actions against big problems. Keep taking the small actions that are available to you.

Highly recommended.

Available at Powell’s Books.

“Big Friendship” by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman

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Subtitle: How We Keep Each Other Close

Recommended to me by: Body Impolitic

Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman name the difficulties of putting words to their friendship, and then as the professional writers they are, they go ahead and do it. I was worried that this book would be superficial or didactic, or both, but instead it is an engagingly told story with depth and detail, along with engagingly presented research into maintaining friendships.

They name Big Friendship, Shine Theory (invest in helping people shine rather than competing with them), and the friendweb they create together. They don’t shy away from discussing the hard parts of an interracial friendship.

They talk about stretching to maintain a friendship, and the difficulties of evaluating when stretch becomes strain, and what to do when the stretch feels unequal or too much.

They talk about Deborah Tannen’s term “complementary schismogenesis” (originally from Gregory Bateson) when two people get further and further apart as they try to model what they want from the other person, like one person talking louder and louder and the other talking quieter and quieter rather than asking the other person to speak up or speak more softly.

They reference For the White Person Who Wants to Know How to Be My Friend by Pat Parker.

Ultimately they went to couple’s counseling and learned to talk about their differences as well as the ways they are the same.

Highly recommended.

Available at Powell’s Books.

“As We Have Always Done” by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

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Subtitle: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resurgence

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist who has taught and lectured across Canada. With story and analysis, she carefully lays out how Nishnaabeg ways of living, learning, and experiencing are intrinsically suited to reestablish their communities and place-relationship that have been intentionally disrupted and stolen by colonialist settlers.

A single quote out of context doesn’t do justice to the way she steps out of whiteness to center the Nishnaabeg way of thinking and doing, but here is a taste.

Governance was made every day. Leadership was embodied and acted out every day. Grounded normativity isn’t a thing; it is generated structure born and maintained from deep engagement with Indigenous processes that are inherently physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. Processes were created and practiced. Daily life involved making politics, education, health care, food systems, and economy on micro- and macro-scales. […] The structural and material basis of Nishnaabeg life was and is process and relationship—again, resurgence is our original instruction.

The book addresses kwe – the embodied experience of being an Indigenous woman – and the ways capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy have suppressed and damaged that experience. It also includes 2SQ – people who are Two Spirit and Queer.

I feel changed by reading this book. It affirms that there are right ways, sustainable ways of living, and Indigenous people still know and practice those ways. It supports my own search for connection to place and right ways to live. It reminds and teaches me that Indigenous people are brilliant modern thinkers and doers, interrupting the stereotypes of “primitive,” “lost,” and “in the past.”

Highly recommended!

Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation (pdf), an article by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson published in Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson website

Available at Powell’s Books.