Rabbit Rabbit #27: And My Life is Still
drip coffee and summer reading
This morning, I ordered a drip coffee for the first time ever. Is this 25? I thought I’d catapult over the edge of consciousness, but instead I bought two long overdue blouses and finished a very good book. The book in question is Chloé Caldwell’s new memoir, Trying. It’s about her experience trying to have a baby and failing, over and over again. It’s also about the disintegration of her marriage following her husband’s admission of cheating and sex addiction, as well as her job at a clothing boutique in Hudson, New York. None of these things resemble my own life, but reading Trying was like looking at my pores up-close in the mirror. It captured a feeling too close to the bridge of my nose to be able to identify.
I messaged Caldwell on Instagram before I finished the book to tell her I was reading it alone in the backyard garden of a French bistro on my block in Bushwick. (That’s where I was drinking the drip coffee.) The night before I had spent in a dark hotel room watching over a sleeping one year old baby from London who I’d never met. Before her mom, who I’d also never met, left for a 40th birthday party, the two of us sang an excruciating rendition of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” in unison (of course it was in unison, what was I going to do, harmonize?) as part of “bedtime.” It’s always funny when you’re singing a song with someone in an unserious way and you sort of go off-key on purpose at random parts to make sure they know you’re not trying hard to sound good. I had to read aloud Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? in front of her too. I kept wondering if I was being emphatic enough. Anyway it just made me think about how lots of young women spend so much time taking care of other people’s kids for money. I wonder how it ends up impacting our own ability or desire to mother. I have no idea because I’m not there yet.
I thanked Caldwell for her memoir and then name dropped the wrong bookstore where she had just given a reading. She replied, “I love this” with four green hearts and then corrected me about the venue. She’ll be back in Gowanus on September 11th; I can’t wait.
At the end of the book Caldwell writes, “Some people say God is a woman, but I think God is a writer.” Yes and amen. She reminded me to get back to it. You get good at what you do, her late father told her. Mine would say the same.
Trying is the second book this summer that I’ve consumed ravenously in a 24-hour period. The first was Practice by Rosalind Brown, which is about an undergraduate English student at Oxford named Annabel trying to write an essay about Shakespeare’s sonnets and the little mishaps and distractions that befall her as she goes about her meticulous routine. Trying and Practice feel like cousins to me. Both of their blunt, one-word titles suggest an attempt at something, repetition, perhaps insanity. Indeed, the question of insanity arises in both books, a few times. The narrators in both books want a specific end result –a baby, a grade A essay– and drive themselves up the wall trying to achieve them, tapping into strange and mystical realms. Caldwell gives up caffeine and takes reishi mushrooms. Annabel makes muesli like it’s her Olympic event. Both of them do yoga religiously. (I have to get back to the yoga studio. $22 for drop-in.) The ritualization of the every day, with the hope that something good might come out of it. With the belief that something good will come out of it. Is that what being a woman is?
I’m thinking of Carrie Coon’s monologue in The White Lotus finale – “I have no belief system.” Work, love, and motherhood gave her no justification for her choices and mistakes. It is time, she epiphanizes, that anoints her life with meaning.
What to make of 25. What I’ll first say is I could do three more of these, easy. I remember almost all of it. A quarter of a century, frontal lobe solidification, my “mid-twenties.” The age I turn always needs breaking in, like a kindergarten teacher with her new class in September. We’re not acquainted yet. We’ve not established a rhythm. We forget the rules and each other’s names. It still feels a little icky nine days in. I already lied and said I was 24 to someone. I miss being Cassandra at the Wedding age. I’ll own it soon.
Trying and Practice are about time in their own ways too. Practice slows down time, breaks it into molecules and then atoms. An itch on the inside of Annabel’s sweater becomes two pages. Trying finds its own meaning with the passage of time. Caldwell writes her life as it unfolds, breaking the fourth wall often to remind us that a book takes years to write. Her editor becomes a character in the memoir. The pages feel like journal entries but not in a self-indulgent way. Rather, it’s honest in a necessary way. “It is only now, the day that I am handing in my book, my final chance, that I change my mind,” she writes of choosing to include her stepdaughter in the narrative after being slapped with a restraining order. Oh yeah, the book I’m holding whose pages I’m nonchalantly flipping wasn’t always. Nothing we can hold in our hands was ever always.
Until today, coffee was one of my life’s antagonists, something I believed would always leave me sick, shaky, and bedridden like all the times before. Maybe it was the oat milk buffer, or the fact that it was drip and not cold brew or espresso. But it felt like a triumph. I will never get addicted to it (not my style) but I am thrilled by the idea of a new version of myself that was born at 25– someone who says, “sure!” when they ask, “can I start you with some coffee?” because it’ll be the perfect way to start that morning.
Recs: This piece by Vinson Cunningham for The New Yorker about CBS and Paramount’s decision to cancel “The Late Show” with Stephen Colbert, the novel Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth, & Andrew Bujalski’s 2002 film Funny Ha Ha, which I LOVED and totally didn’t know was from 2002. I thought Kate Dollenmayer was doing Greta Gerwig, but it was the other way around.
