#jenn shapland

[judgingbooksbycovers]

Thin Skin: Essays

By Jenn Shapland.

Design by Tom Etherington.

[whilereadingandwalking]

Thin Skin: Essays by Jenn Shapland is an excellent collection about what it means to be sensitive, to be "thin-skinned," to open your eyes to the reality of just how permeable everything truly is. From the chemicals that seep into our bodies due to negligence to the false boundaries of white suburbia ad its "safety" to the struggle of trying to get work done, especially creative work, when the world is barraging us on all sides, Shapland digs into the places where boundaries dissolve and ask what is wrong with her that she has to expose uncomfortable truths, call things out, that she can't shake off things, has to spread it, has to deal with the pain of knowing.

Shapland's essays turn in on themselves, shift and curve. She takes us on what seems like a digression but that turns into the same question, the same fear. The strongest essay by far is "Thin Skin" itself and its argument that being "tough" is being obtuse, that we have to stop pretending, that we have to look the truth in the eye despite the fears it will cause. "Strangers on a Train" and "The Toomuchness" both unpack false senses of safety, of impregnability, of what we should be sacred of, of what we can survive.

The final two essays were slightly less strong. "Crystal Vortex" was a good but scattered discussion of being creative in a world so rooted in productivity and final products. "The Meaning of Life" unpacks how women are told the true purpose of life is motherhood, and how little she wants to have children. I thought this was the shallowest essay, not because it didn't get there in the end, but because I think much of the analysis was things I've heard before disguised as new analysis (ex. "It doesn't get a lot of airtime, but the witch hunts were one of the foundational events in the construction of the society in which we live"—it gets a lot of airtime, particularly on feminist signs and t-shirts).

Overall, I recommend this beautiful essay collection. Even the essays that weren't as good were still thought-provoking, interesting, and compelling. I'll return to these essays again.

Content warnings for death/grief, institutionalized racism/classism, rape culture, suicide.

[authorstalker]

My December, January, & February Reads

Will I ever have time to read again????? Here's a pathetic roundup of the past three months.

Thin Skin, Jenn Shapland - One of the most beautiful book covers I've ever seen. The essay topics are a real bummer—radioactive waste, consumerism, the struggle to find meaning—and as someone who loves contemplating life's horrors, I had a great time reading this collection.

Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind, Molly McGhee - This would kill as a TV adaptation. Apple, since it seems like we're never getting Severance season two, here ya go!

Winter Storms, Elin Hilderbrand - I have no critiques; a perfectly pleasant, festive read.

Big Swiss, Jen Beagin - An incredibly fun time, pulled me right out of a reading slump. It's hilarious and I haven't read anything like it—thank you, Jen Beagin!

[denimbex1986]

'In Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” the military asks the architect of the Manhattan Project what he’ll do with Los Alamos now that the bombs have been dropped. “Give the land back to the Indians,” he says. The brass scoffs. The work at Los Alamos will only intensify. There’s no returning the poisoned land.

Jenn Shapland’s new collection of essays, “Thin Skin,” circles the metaphor of being “thin-skinned,” which she defines as meaning to “feel keenly, to perceive things that might go unseen, unnoticed, that others might prefer not to notice.” Her previous book, “My Autobiography of Carson McCullers,” was a case in point: a brilliant dual biography focused on McCullers’ true sexuality and Shapland’s coming into her own identity as a lesbian.

In the opening essay that gives this follow-up its title, Shapland turns to what she notices in New Mexico. The Manhattan Project not only gave the world nuclear war, it pushed Indigenous and Latino people out of their homes and ruined the land and water. Of nearby Santa Fe, where Shapland lives, she writes, “What capitalism offers us: a stage set on which to live our lives without knowing whom we crush. In some ways it is the ultimate colonial insult, to adopt a bastardized version of an ancient cultural lifeway as an aesthetic to draw more white people. The city itself is a lifestyle brand.”

In “Oppenheimer,” a three-hour film, the “Indians” are mentioned twice in passing. The ravages of toxic waste and the horrific aftermath of atomic war are never seen. Shapland’s book is the film “Oppenheimer” should have been, one that reflects on the Manhattan Project’s lasting impact on the world community. With a writing style that recalls the work of Eula Biss and a goal in solidarity with “Who is Wellness For?” by Fariha Róisín, Shapland opens “Thin Skin” with devastating statistics tying nuclear waste to cancer rates before turning to people, speaking with tribal leaders and even with her own parents...

“Thin Skin” asks readers to consider themselves and the world they occupy — not the future, but the present. The choices we make for this world are for ourselves. “We can leave other things behind besides children,” Shapland writes. “Other forms of longevity exist, even if they are unquantifiable.”

At one point in “The Meaning of Life,” Shapland runs into a group of women in their 60s and 70s traveling and having a ball. “When they do not have children, or the burden of someday having them, or the need to prepare their lives to have them, they are at least free to be children themselves.” The alt-right, in response to “Black Lives Matter,” says “All Lives Matter.” “Thin Skin” motivates us to act like we believe it.'

[postcardwhore]

Books my partner got me for my birthday! ❤️

[lauvra]

It doesn’t take long for me to feel strangely connected to the things I’m reading, to the drafts and the handwriting, the voices that emerge in the margins. I get emotionally invested very quickly. Even without a clear avenue through the papers, I’m pretty damn sure that you’re not supposed to get your own snot all over the materials. That’s definitely a rule. This is where the willpower comes in. Keep it together, I tell myself. You are a machine. You are processing information. Everything can be reduced to a discrete data point. Yes, I’m a reader and a scholar of this author’s work. But I’m nobody’s fan girl. I didn’t think this would be so hard, so fraught. Just as I’m about to get carried away by a wave of weird sentimentality, I see a familiar phrase from The Pale King smiling up at me as I fit the draft into its folder: “the human heart is a chump.” No kidding.

Excerpt from “The Human Heart is a Chump”: Cataloging The Pale King, by Jenn Shapland

[amaised44]

[aroadamparrish]

“I wondered how a person could spend their whole life fighting a losing battle. Then I remembered what [Marian Naranjo] told me about “war words.”

‘We have become so accustomed to honoring war. When you start reading articles, or writing your own or whatever, go back and revise. How can I have said this without adding these war words in it? How can I be a more balanced person with my presenting?’”

- Jenn Shapland, Thin Skin

[22ly]

“Libraries, archives, and museums all find themselves at the intersection of materiality and the mystical. Perhaps this is why we’re so quiet when we enter them.”—Jenn Shapland, “Finders Keepers” in Tin House.

[whilereadingandwalking]

August is almost over, and so is a hot summer. I’m even more excited for fall than usual!

📸: Donna Chesman

[sharperandmoreprecious]

hiiiii holly .. did i send u numbers in the past probably but here are my own questions. what book would you recommend for a road trip. what book had a great concept but terrible execution. if you had to read the same book every week for 2023 which would it be. what book should i read next.

yall want to hear me talk about MORE books?? i am flattered, im cradling these asks gently in my hands road trip: the first that came to mind was peace like a river, by leif enger. it is a heartachey and magical journey that is unreasonably beautifully written. but if we're talking about audiobooks to play in the car, i have a crush on imogen church whenever she reads ruth ware's books, even when i don't love the ruth ware book. but i like the death of mrs. westaway and one by one. great concept, terrible execution: imagine a book pitched to you as "a couple struggling with their relationship goes on one last mountain hike to try and patch things up... but when their tour guide mysteriously dies, both believes the other person is responsible. and theyre determined to get the other to confess before they part ways." i heard that and went out and bought it immediately. its called fish swimming in dappled sunlight. and i had a real hard time with it.

rereading the same book every week in 2023: look you know i gotta say little weirds by jenny slate. she keeps me sane. or bone gap by laura ruby... i get catharsis from it every time. and for you?? hm. tell me your top 5 from last year and i'll have better recommendations... but salt slow, if you hadn't read it already. last true poets of the sea is a gay YA retelling of twelfth night that i loved. maybe why be happy when you could be normal by jeanette winterson, in terms of memoirs that split me open like jenn shapland's <3

[midnightcowboy1969]

Christmas wishlist thus far:

Computer mouse

Wise Blood by Flannery O’Conner

Wicked by Gregory Maguire (it has the women kiss)

My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland

Wool undergarment ?

knitted socks (only socks ever)

tbc

[kittykatinabag]

Everyone go read Thin Skin by Jenn Shapland.

This collection of essays has made a ton of ideas that I've been mulling over the past few years actually coherent in a brilliantly story-driven way. While reading, I had to pause multiple times to either stare at the ceiling because what I just read connected so many dots or because I got emotional and had to wipe away the tears and process everything for a moment before moving on.

In particular, one of the last sections is about living childfree and how society views that idea and the greater idea of letting people with uteruses have bodily autonomy, how having even just one child in an industrialized nation like the US skyrockets an individual's impact on climate change via the common measurement of a carbon footprint, and the conscious and unconscious othering of childfree women within their social groups as the other members of the group start to have children.

So many of these thoughts have filtered through my head, especially as I've gotten older and my resolve to not have children has not diminished in the slightest since I was ~12 years old, yet more and more of my peers start to have children and my parents are still convinced that one day I'll change my mind. Even though it's been 17 years, and I've reexamined this resolve multiple times throughout those 17 years at different points in my maturity.

It's just so good. I don't even want to give any more details because it's best experienced by reading it.

[fuojbe-beowgi]

"The Exercise That Changed My Relationship With My Body" by Jenn Shapland via NYT Magazine https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/25/magazine/pots-postural-orthostatic-tachycardia-syndrome.html?partner=IFTTT