Jones resists sentimentality and is as unsparing on herself as she is on other people, yet she writes with such graciousness too. Her doctors assume she can never get pregnant, and fellow philosophical doctoral students argue over whether she should exist at all. She shifts between ruminations on ancient notions of beauty, from Socrates to Plato, and her own background, having grown up as the only child of an idealistic white father and more practical Filipino American mother amid all of these assumptions about what her life should look like because she is disabled. Leaving her young son and husband at home in New York, she travels to Italy and Cambodia, ostensibly for dissertation research but really as a way to sate her wanderlust and desire for something novel. In this moving, incisive memoir, Jones, a professor and writer born with sacral agenesis, a rare condition that affects her mobility and leaves her in chronic pain, charts the process of coming into her own and taking up space after a lifetime of reminders - some shockingly overt, others implicit - that her disabled body makes her marginal. As a writer, Polley runs towards the danger at every moment, unafraid of being likable, coming upon great truths about the human condition in the murk, and it’s totally unfair that she can now add great writer to her intimidating list of accomplishments. In “The Woman Who Stayed Silent,” Polley recounts her sexual assault as it related to a major Canadian #MeToo case - it’s a difficult but gratifying read, and sheds light upon the impossible binds of trauma and the law. Estelle TangĪs an artist, memory has been one of filmmaker Sarah Polley’s major subjects, and the six essays in this book are united by her careful, prismatic examination at the gulf between what we feel in the moment and how we feel in the aftermath, spanning subjects such as motherhood and daughterhood, what we’d today call burnout performing as Alice (in Wonderland) onstage, the exploitation of life as a child actor, and the difficult beauty of the birth of her first child, intertwined with the memory of her late mother. It’s elegant and unlikely and familiar all at the same time. Sea of Tranquility does both, planting seeds of catastrophe amongst vivid characters who want the same thing people always have: to love and to keep living. “An interesting question,” Olive says to a listening audience, “is why there’s been such interest in postapocalyptic literature over this past decade or so.” In 2022, we barely need to address a query like that - we’re living through unprecedented crises that threaten our very future and looking for messages that can soothe and light the way. Mandel uses the classic quandaries of time travel to explore the equally classic question of what moves us to live how we do. She meets a stranger who seems extremely interested in her work the same man travels back to 2020 and to 1912 investigating a kind of existential glitch that has manifested throughout the years. In the year 2203, author Olive Llewellyn wonders whether she’s made the right choice, promoting her new book amid rumors of a spreading virus.
(She wrote the book during the earlier stages of the pandemic.) John Mandel (who has written four other novels, including the acclaimed Station Eleven) interweaves four disparate realities spanning centuries and geographical locations, which are nevertheless unmistakably touched by our present.