Little Labors by Rivka Galchen (May 2019)
Little Labors is a collection of short essays from Rivka Galchen’s early years of motherhood. It’s full of interesting observation, commentary, and insight that often covers much more territory than the official topic. Ultimately, the book demonstrates a personal manifestation of Galchen’s recipe for becoming a writer – find new meaning in everyday experience.
I liked her assertion that people who believe they can change how others think are prone to frustration. A very truthful thought, at least based on my experiences, and I look back on the day I stopped worrying about changing minds as a personal day of emancipation. I felt a similar way about her remark that people should not judge others based on competitions – again, from my experience little insight is gained when comparing one to another. I know a little less about her comment on how babies give some parents a reason to live while for others the baby means dying is no longer permitted. What I can say is that I do recognize the difference, at least in general, and I always hope people in the latter category find the means to book safe passage to the former.
The most interesting comments about parenthood came through her observations about speech. From her perspective, speech is the start of misunderstanding, a thought that clashes ominously with a different comment that identifies understanding as the crucial precursor to loving difficult people. Who could be more difficult than a just-speaking baby? I suspect this is further complicated by how the power of speech reveals children to be primarily concerned with their own wants and grievances – in other words, speech reveals that children were little adults all along. Perhaps in this context the original thought was backward – speech exposes misunderstanding. I suppose I’ll learn one day, maybe.
As a closing thought, I’ll point out Galchen’s comment that happy memoirs are rare. This led me to wonder why someone might assume a memoir should be happy (and why this kind of assumption is extended to so much else about our experience). I see a good life as a healthy combination of many emotions, happiness included, so to me a memoir that can be described in terms as simple as one emotion is likely missing some perspective that would be important for the reader.
One up: I liked the observation that a parent of a baby can sometimes go entire days without speaking to another adult. Taken on its surface – the point of view of the parent – this is undoubtedly true. If we look at it from a different angle, though – from the general possibility of one adult going a day without speaking to another – I think there are a lot of assumptions built into this observation that make the phenomena seem far more unusual in theory than it is in practice.
One down: This book is a good example of the dangers of making too many contemporary references in a work – I think Galchen mentions Louis CK on at least ten nonconsecutive occasions. But I shouldn’t throw stones - for who would come to visit this glass-thatched blog of mine?
Just saying: Yes, Galchen does write a lot about The Pillow Book. In fact, her depth of analysis and understanding of the famous work made me question my own reading of the same and left me wondering whether I need to read differently – perhaps with more curiosity about the work or with heightened focus throughout the read.
