How to work through the post-election ennui era?

Coping with books and friends and Timothée Chalamet, icymi. And some reading recs and book club update, too.

Hello, thank you for joining thousands that read MR every month! You can subscribe here

Paid subscribers get access to subscriber chats, all our interviews and thoughtful essays, book club, and other paid content that helps keep us sane in these times. You can subscriber for only $4.50 a month, using the links below.

It’s a great time to support independent feminist journalism.

Thinking about all the white women who voted for that guy.

This week I wrote about how I find myself in a tender place right now. I’m fine! And then I’m not.

You too?

There are a lot of ups and downs for me, and, it seems every single person writing on the internet. Mostly, I just want to crawl under a warm blanket, and that is what I’ve done whenever I got the chance.

Usually I’m pretty good at channeling righteous anger into words and Things to Do, but lately I’m in a more quiet and tender place.

There are a few things making me see some light right now, though. I wrote about how my friends and neighbors, in the midst of this election and heinous anxiety, managed to open a gorgeous bookstore.

Where there was once a dry cleaner, there now is a mauve-pink space with gorgeous floor-to-ceiling custom shelves. There are skylights and big, brass art deco chandeliers to read by. There is a coffee bar inlaid with turquoise tiles.

dutchbabybakery

A post shared by @dutchbabybakery

I went to the opening, and the place was packed. There were all my neighbors—it seemed every family in the neighborhood had turned out.

And on the shelves, there was Borges, there was bell hooks, there was James Baldwin. There was Octavia Butler, there was Judith Butler. There was Diana Gabaldon, there was Terry Pratchett. There was something for everyone.

In the children’s section my daughter plopped down onto the middle of the floor to read Wild Robot. And my heart caught in my throat when I caught sight of Charlotte’s Web with the same cover as the copy that my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Mackris, read to us.

During this last year of paralysis and fretting, my neighbors laid the plans to make this good thing. It was inspiring.

Inside the pleasant hum of the bookstore, my neighbors were saying good morning and talking excitedly and pausing in corners to ask what the other was reading.

This is how we will do it. I thought to myself. We will keep being together, and we will keep reading and keep learning.

Susie Kaufman of seventysomething, who has been through a few crisis cycles in her time, taught me this week that in times like these there is the “Do Something” response, and the “Grieving” response, and we are seeing a lot of those right now. But those are not the only options.

Kaufman points out there is also Thinking, and its correlate—the “Learning” response.

She writes: “Americans are poorly educated and notoriously ahistorical. There is so much we need to learn about democracy. How it has been known to sicken and die, how to nurse it back to health and infuse it with new life.”

I have heard several people say that this time reminds them a bit of the early pandemic lockdown. People might be as bad or worse than usual online, but in person, we are a little kinder with each other, a little more patient with strangers, a little more wanting to draw our loved ones close.

This made me start to think that maybe we are more prepared for this moment than we think we are.

For the last eight years, we have been moving through one crisis to the next. It’s not really that fun to live through historic times, it turns out!

But we have also learned and changed a lot in that time. Part of why the tenderness of this time reminds me of the pandemic is a heightened sense of awareness around bodies and suffering and the care that holds everything together, in spite of it all.

We have been awash in daily reminders of the tender vulnerability of our bodies, and how they are the site of everything wonderful, and everything tragic. It’s almost unbearable at times.

But it also reminds me about this research about post-partum, one of the most tender times in a human lifecycle, that I wrote about here. Researchers have found that the tender post-partum time of learning to care for a baby is when the adult brain is its “most plastic.” The brain is actually able to re-organize itself.

But get this: it’s not just those giving birth—there’s growing evidence that brain changes can happen to anyone who is doing intense care work.

Fathers, adoptive parents, grandparents, and even nurses in the NICU might experience shifts that make them “more effective guardians” and activate brain regions linked with empathy and understanding. (It also activates regions attuned to risk, which helps explain my, um, intense safety neurosis when my child was a newborn.)

This New York Times piece by Jenni Gritters explains how the brain actually “prunes” itself and changes its appearance to the point that researchers can easily identify post-partum brain scans from those of peers.

So here’s my unsupported theory: This collective heightened awareness around care and suffering has been a lot to bear, but what if it might also change us, or even our brains, in ways that work for our good?

An article in Lancet claims that there is evidence that the pandemic “triggered enormous displays of pro-social behavior” with neighbors coming to the aid of each other while isolated in quarantine, and supporting community front-line workers.

All of those enormously successful Go Fund Me campaigns, which depressingly reveal the shortcomings in our systems? They also reveal some deep lines of empathy and a desire to relieve suffering, often between people who don’t know each other.

I know, I know, all of that happened and yet here we are now. Another thing I keep thinking about right now is how change doesn’t happen as fast as we want it to. How hard that is to sit with. For some of us, much of the change we want to see won’t even be in our lifetimes. This can be a lot to swallow for those of us who were raised on myths of White Saviorism and American Exceptionalism. Like, this really was not part of the plan!

This week Amanda Montei wrote about Adrienne Rich, and how she wrote about “the challenge and promise of a whole new psychic geography to be explored” and “the difficult and dangerous walking on the ice, as we try to find language and images for a consciousness we are just coming into.”

I feel more tender, and more galvanized, around the things that I care about, than I did a decade ago. Maybe more of us feel that way all the time.

You can read the entire piece here:

Other things getting me through right now

The universe giveth and it taketh away. And earlier this week, Timothée CHALAMET was IN MY BUILDING filming a movie. It has been low-key Chalamet fever in my neighborhood all week with lots of sightings.

I may or may not have veryyyy slowly walked past his trailer after getting coffee (def not stalking at ALL) and caught him coming out of his trailer with his bodyguards. Eeee!

@entertainmenttonightTimothée Chalamet looks completely unrecognizable on set for his upcoming A24 film, 'Marty Supreme' 😳 #timotheechalamet #a24 #nyc

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

A 70-year old neighbor made my day when she noted all the excitement of the film crews setting up and I told her that there were some real A-listers. When she asked who and I started to explain who Timothée Chalamet is, she shouted: TIMOTHEE CHALAMETTTT! Oh my god! And had a proper fangirl freakout. And. Isn’t it just great to know that there are some things that still bring us together, transcend generations, and bring us joy? We still have Chalamet, y’all.

We got to watch some rehearsals and some takes in our lobby, and a producer invited my daughter to raid the candy stash of the crafts services truck. The A24 crew was actually so nice! Our street was converted into a 1950’s time capsule with vintage cars and lamp lights. It was like a carnival if a carnival had A-listers and 100 people running around with walkie talkies. It was a bit of fun that we all needed.

Here’s my kiddo watching rehearsal in our lobby!!

---

Meg Conley

always gets me in the feels and has something wise to say, and this piece was what I needed this week.

Tressie McMillan Cottom

is always who I go to when I need to make sense of things, and I loved this one on Tradwives and Trump.

Finally, a book that I bought at the bookstore is “Charlotte’s Web,” which I’ve been cuddled up reading on the couch with my daughter. In the intro, Kate Dicamillo writes:

Every word of the book shows us how we can bear the triumphs and despairs, the wonders and the heartbreaks, the small and large glories and tragedies of being here.

We can bear it all by loving it all.

How you doing, what’s getting you through?

Reading a book with friends feels like exactly what I need right now, and for our next MR book club I’m proposing “Margo’s Got Money Troubles” by Rufi Thorpe.

It’s described as an“exceptionally tender, sharp, and funny story about young motherhood and unplanned pregnancy and love, that also involves professional wrestling, and yes, OnlyFans.” I bought it at my new favorite bookstore on the rec of my bestie and MR reader and book editor, and it had me at page one.

Would you be up for it?? Watch for a chat thread with details.

---

If you’re enjoying our work, hit the “like” button, comment, share it with someone else—that helps our work find more readers!

Now is a great time to support independent feminist journalism that actually centers women and women’s experience!

You can support our work with a paid subscription starting at just $4.50 a month.

---

MATRIARCHY REPORT is written by Lane Anderson and Allison Lichter.

Lane Anderson is a writer, journalist, and Clinical Associate Professor at one of those universities for coastal elites. She has won fellowships and many SPJ awards for her writing on inequality and family social issues. She has an MFA from Columbia University. She was raised in Utah and lives in New York City with her partner and young daughter.

Allison Lichter is associate dean at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. She has been a writer, producer and editor for radio and print, covering the arts, politics, and the workplace. She was born and raised in Queens, and lives in Brooklyn with her partner and daughter.