I’m writing to you from the Palm Beach International Airport, where I’ll spend the next two hours watching planes land while I wait for my sister’s arrival. We’re down here to surprise my dad, who turns 75 (!) on Sunday. My mother, who is absolutely shit at keeping secrets, is likely milling around her palatial one-floor home at this very moment, saying conspicuously casual things to my dad like, “What do you anticipate will be your exact location in approximately three hours? Why do ask? Oh…just curious, I guess.”
Sometimes I reflect on the fact that at one time in my life, waiting in an airport for two hours would have seemed like some kind of chore. But as I’m traveling solo this weekend, the time is something of a gift. Whether or not it’s true that with age comes experience, I’m quite sure that with children comes a general lack of peace and quiet—and thus a greater appreciation for those things, however and whenever you can get them.
Try as I might, I can’t actually remember the last time I saw birth family without the company of my husband and kids. I’m looking so forward to being just a daughter and sister this weekend, while the beloveds who define my other identities of wife and mother are tucked away at home (in the grand company of visiting family members who will undoubtedly make up for my absence and then some).
I suspect I’m not alone in recalling the strange, interstitial years of my late teens and early twenties, when “coming home again” after being away at college was awkward, uncomfortable, strained. We’re too new at being adults ourselves, then—or too close to the children we once were—to appreciate the unique luxury of belonging to other competent adults. Now I find myself in the sweet spot of having adult-ed long enough to enjoy being parented myself, while being young and lucky enough that my parents are healthy, thriving, and fully independent. This season won’t last forever, and my awareness of its brevity makes this weekend all the more precious.
I hope your weekend brings space to linger in the now, just as it is, and just as you are. Our time is precious—and so are you.
xRF
First Line Frenzy® Round-Up
Between prepping for my trip, running the kids around to every extracurricular under the sun, and doing my actual job, I didn’t have time to record a new round of FLF Reels this week! If time to do so while I’m in FL presents itself, I may just—but I may not, because this is technically a vacation. Either way, fresh FLFs will arrive by next week!
In which we are conscious of word choice. No.426 (adult thriller/suspense): After she admitted to the murder of an entire family, Malory sat proudly in the psychiatrists office with a manevalent grin, without even a hint of remorse.
In which we think about our end-user, and their potentially nascent understanding of punctuation. No.427 (MG fantasy): Why she’d chosen this particular day to saddle up her hamster, none of her many gnome relations could agree on; but one thing was certain: old Ömma Hillessen was going on an adventure.
Book of the Week
This book! Wow, wow, wow. Time summed it up rather neatly with its “razor sharp” blurb. Yellowface by R.F. Kuang will surely go down in history as one of our most important, incisive satires of modern authorship, publishing, and social media. I couldn’t stop listening to the audiobook, brilliantly narrated by Helen Laser. Equal turns unsettling, transfixing, funny and dark, this is the rare gem of a novel worthy of every bit of its (considerable) hype.
From the publisher:
Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But Athena's a literary darling. June Hayward is literally nobody. Who wants stories about basic white girls, June thinks.
So when June witnesses Athena's death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena's just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers during World War I.
So what if June edits Athena's novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song--complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? Doesn't this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller? That's what June claims, and the New York Times bestseller list seems to agree.
But June can't get away from Athena's shadow, and emerging evidence threatens to bring June's (stolen) success down around her. As June races to protect her secret, she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.
With its totally immersive first-person voice, Yellowface grapples with questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation, as well as the terrifying alienation of social media. R.F. Kuang's novel is timely, razor-sharp, and eminently readable.