Mom's Shelf #1: Magical Realism and Stephen King

Emerging from my newborn cocoon, shuffling to the changing table to the beat of Pink Pony Club.

Oct 07, 2024

October is writing a love letter to the sky in azure ink and I’m finally stepping outside to read it.

Fresh out of the hospital after delivering my daughter, I stumbled on a video of Chappell Roan singing “Good Luck, Babe” on late night television via YouTube. I wondered how long it would take me to feel that sense of personhood again — the kind of personhood that is exploding with passion, overstimulation hidden beneath layers of glittery eyeshadow and a head full of curls, singing words likely penned on a night like the one I was experiencing from the still quiet of my bed, my newborn baby barking like an elephant seal in her sleep next to my tired hands.

Over three months have passed and I have since opened my own curtains again. Personhood is returning. My home is my stage. I’m discovering newness beyond the new of me. I am becoming both mother and human, sharing the body that I have returned to and decorating my ears and my eyes with things that give me a little more zing. A little more pizzazz. A little razzle-dazzle on the brain.

It’s a Femininomenon!

Glimmers I’m finding outside of motherhood lately: magical realism, Stephen King, and Chappell Roan.

Glimmers in Books

1 — The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab

Have you ever read a book so beautiful that the prose makes you cry in almost every chapter? I present you with The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.

V.E. Schwab, you’ve really done it. Magical realism meets existentialism. Pure magic.

I accidentally prayed to the gods that answer after dark and now I’m stuck with the realization of having finished this book knowing that it will be impossible to read anything else after it in the near future. This reading hangover is brutal.

“The day passes like a sentence. The sun falls like a scythe.”

Are you kidding me? Sublime.

““Do you think a life has any value if one doesn’t leave some mark upon the world?” Remy’s expression sobers, and he must read the sadness in her voice, because he says, “I think there are many ways to matter.” He plucks the book from his pocket. “These are the words of a man—Voltaire. But they are also the hands that set the type. The ink that made it readable, the tree that made the paper. All of them matter, though credit goes only to the name on the cover.””

I love you, Remy.

“Time moves so fucking fast. Blink, and you’re halfway through school, paralyzed by the idea that whatever you choose to do, it means choosing not to do a hundred other things, so you change your major half a dozen times before finally ending up in theology, and for a while it seems like the right path, but that’s really just a reflex to the pride on your parents’ faces, because they assume they’ve got a budding rabbi, but the truth is, you have no desire to practice, you see the holy texts as stories, sweeping epics, and the more you study, the less you believe in any of it. Blink, and you’re twenty-four, and you travel through Europe, thinking—hoping—that the change will spark something in you, that a glimpse of the greater, grander world will bring your own into focus. And for a little while, it does. But there’s no job, no future, only an interlude, and when it’s over, your bank account is dry, and you’re not any closer to anything. Blink, and you’re twenty-six, and you’re called into the dean’s office because he can tell that your heart’s not in it anymore, and he advises you to find another path, and he assures you that you’ll find your calling, but that’s the whole problem, you’ve never felt called to any one thing. There is no violent push in one direction, but a softer nudge a hundred different ways, and now all of them feel out of reach. Blink and you’re twenty-eight, and everyone else is now a mile down the road, and you’re still trying to find it, and the irony is hardly lost on you that in wanting to live, to learn, to find yourself, you’ve gotten lost. Blink, and you meet a girl.”

Blink — I’m inspired.

But here’s my favorite:

“There are a hundred kinds of silence. There’s the thick silence of places long sealed shut, and the muffled silence of ears stoppered up. The empty silence of the dead, and the heavy silence of the dying. There is the hollow silence of a man who has stopped praying, and the airy silence of an empty synagogue, and the held-breath silence of someone hiding from themselves. There is the awkward silence that fills the space between people who don’t know what to say. And the taut silence that falls over those who do, but don’t know where or how to start. Henry doesn’t know what kind of silence this is, but it is killing him.”

UGH!

I’ll leave you with one more:

“And she is all that’s left, a solitary ghost hosting a vigil for forgotten things.”

If anyone has any recommendations for books that read as seductively as this, please let me know immediately.

2 — Salem’s Lot by Stephen King

My friends and I picked our collectively first Stephen King book for our Fall Book Club and I couldn’t have been more pleasantly surprised. This must be the month of elegant prose because despite me (wrongly) anticipating Salem’s Lot to be a grisly horror chocked full of spooky imagery, King’s prose hooked me immediately and I instantly fell in love with his writing. Also, vampires.

“Corey Bryant sank into a great forgetful river, and that river was time, and its waters were read.”

Most of my favorite passages were in “The Emperor of Ice Cream” chapter:

And the entirety of Chapter Ten, The Lot (III):

10/10 glimmering prose.

Glimmers in Music

The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess by Chappell Roan

You will absolutely find me in the front row on this woman’s listening train. There’s a sure-fire way to remember I, Cleaner of Baby Poop and Maker of Milk, can still bop and pop. And it’s by blasting “Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl” at maximum volume on my way to Costco to buy more diapers.

There is no Itsy Bitsy Spider being played yet in this house.

Happy October, readers — I hope it’s filled with glimmers for all of you.

Xo,

Violet Carol

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