Sad
The Guardians is a very short book that can be read in an afternoon or two, broken into brief paragraphs of thoughts, memories or speculations as related to Manguso’s friend Harris who committed suicide by jumping in front of a train during a psychotic episode. Bud Smith, a writer I like, describes this book as a poem to a friend which we are lucky to read, the blurbs on the book are breathless with praise about The Guardians portrait of grief and love for a friend. The Guardians subtitle is “an elegy.” An elegy is a serious reflection or lament for the dead. Serious reflection, ok, but lament? I’m not sure. This is the first Sarah Manguso I have read and perhaps I picked too much of a deep cut to start off with. I found the book quite cold, it left me cold. Manguso mentions several times that Harris’s family wrote her to tell her how much she meant to Harris, how deeply he loved her. She says she asked them for permission to write this book. I kept wondering, the closer I got to the end, how I would feel if I lost a sibling and someone beloved by them asked me if they could write a book for them and then…this was what resulted.
A fair portion of the book is an exploration of Manguso’s guilt around Harris’s death as she was abroad and out of touch for the year previous. This is heightened by her conviction that Harris was possibly suffering from a side effect of anti-psychotic medication she herself has experienced, which often causes violence and suicide. If she had been there, been in touch, she could have told Harris to switch medications. This is such a horrible way for her to feel, such a huge burden to take on. But then the rest of the book she picks apart her own grief, examining it as if grief is self-serving, an egotistical affliction. She says the only thing she learned from Harris’s death is that her own death by suicide is now statistically less likely (but I’m pretty sure if someone you know kills themselves, the opposite is true?). A lot of the book is meandering around Harris, discussing her life in NYC after 9/11, her trip to Italy, meeting and marrying her husband.
What she shares about Harris is seemingly random, I got no sense of him, other than that he was a prodigy musician who was famous in their friend group for having a big dick, or what their friendship meant to either of them, why they were so close, what they loved about each other or the time they spent together. I had a sense that she either deliberately picked the most meaningless memories of him to share, perhaps as a form of protection, or that maybe this was an exercise in stream of consciousness writing? I don’t know. The one time I got a real sense of what she felt for Harris is when she talks about a fight she and her husband had in which she said she was going to see a psychic and he said that was stupid and she just kept crying and saying, I want to talk to Harris.
I don’t want to be a grief tourist, I’m not looking for graphic details or dramatics, I’m just looking for something I can understand about life and this felt like it was holding something back. Manguso seemed willing to be vulnerable about some aspects of herself, like her mental health, while desperate, but unwilling, to be vulnerable about her love. Maybe this book was meant to capture the chaotic mind in grief, the self hatred, the detritus. Maybe I just didn’t connect with it. There is another very short book about the unknowableness of grief by Mary Gaitskill, Lost Cat, that I would highly recommend and will maybe write about in another newsletter.
Famous
Hons and Rebels is a memoir by Jessica Mitford (pictured third from right) about growing up as one of the infamous Mitford sisters and also about her marriage to her first husband. Nancy Mitford is the famous writer of the sisters, and I didn’t realize Jessica also wrote until I stumbled across this memoir while trying to find an audiobook of Nancy’s biography of Zelda Fitzgerald. The Mitfords were sort of the Kardashians of the 1930s. Like Anjelica Huston, they grew up in a surreal Wes Andersonish environment of eccentrics and nannies and various estate homes and London apartments. The interwar period is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting in modern history and the Mitfords had a front row seat to many of its extremities.
Their parents were aristocrats who…eccentric doesn’t even cover it. The father, far beyond my ability to summarize here, has been parodied in many of Nancy’s novels. The mother didn’t believe at all in medicine, and would deliberately do the opposite of whatever doctors told her. For example, when Jessica broke her arm, ripping off the cast and encouraging Jessica to swing the broken limb around as much as possible. Some favorite moments were when elder sister Diana got engaged to a Guinness and everyone worried that her marrying into a family with that much money might come off as a little gauche and Nancy, writing her novels in a downstairs drawing room, cackling with delight at her own cleverness. They had an uncle who was singularly fixated on the depleted nutrients in British soil and carried around a book he’d written of letters to the editor detailing his concerns about soil driving Britain into ruin. I haven’t laughed this much reading a book in a long time.
The Mitfords didn’t believe in educating girls, so the girls were almost never allowed to leave their home in the country until they “came out” in society and, thus unsocalized and isolated, became weirder and weirder. They were sporadically and randomly educated by whatever nannies could stand their insanity long enough and the girls developed a secret language, bizarre private games, intense obsessions. For Jessica this obsession became radical left politics, for her older sister Unity, this became fascism, which eventually spread to Diana. There’s a core of sadness in Hons and Rebels, Jessica was close with Unity growing up, admiring her contrarian nature, and could not reconcile the Unity she knew with the Unity who befriended Hitler. By her early twenties, Jessica was estranged from most of her family, married to a nephew of Churchill’s who had also rejected aristocracy and embraced left politics, they ran away together to fight in the Spanish Civil War.
Eventually Jessica and her husband immigrated to America. One of the funniest passages in the novel involves the initial rejection of a visa by an American immigration officer, and then on the advice of an American friend who said “you didn’t use the right key words,” they go back in and give a rousing speech about their belief in individualism and free enterprise and the immigration officer is so moved, he grants them a visa. It’s a very funny and charming memoir.
Hair Masks
Do hair masks do anything? I’ve tried so many. I have very dry, curly hair. Something about the way a curl forms like curses you with dry hair, so that’s cool. I’ve often been told at salons that I should do a hair mask regularly to help hydrate my hair, so I do one like once a week. Idk if I have ever developed a strong attachment to any of them. I’m very lazy about wanting to deal with my hair, so I tend to do everything in one go— scalp oil, shampoo, condition, mask. When maybe I should be splitting it up more or something throughout the week, or doing a hair mask for like a couple hours (which I don’t want to do)? 😩
I’ve watched aprox 1 trillion hair care videos on YouTube, almost always I hit a point in the video where I think, “yeah, I’m never going to do that.” What I want is Kate Middleton hair and that means what I want is a professional person to style and care for my hair and blow it out. I do understand that heat tools are my best bet for hair that at least looks like it isn’t dry and frizzy but I cannot and will not blow dry my own hair, I have thirty pounds of hair and it will take me an hour and I hate the sound. I have a hot hair brush and that’s the closest I can get to doing more for my hair post-shower than putting it in a hair turban to dry. There’s a stubborn part of me that believes if I find the right hair mask, I will wake up in the morning with hair like a waterfall of silk. Anyway here’s hair masks I’ve tried broken into categories:
Truly did nothing: Gisou Honey Hair Mask, Ouai Thick Hair Treatment Mask, Kérastase Curl Manifesto Masque
Seemed to help a little but then I wanted more: Christophe Robin Aloe Vera Melting Mask, Olaplex No 8 Bond Intensive Moisture Mask (so expensive and a teeny-tiny bottle!), JVN Deep Nurture Hair Mask (I got this as a sample and used the entire sample in one go, idk if this amount is realistic for weekly use without quickly using up the entire bottle)
IDK if it’s working but it smells so good I don’t care: Dizziak Deep Conditioner (this is truly the best smelling hair product I’ve ever used)
I bought this but haven’t tried it yet because I either forget to put it on 20m before I shower or that I should put it on overnight because I don’t normally shower in the morning: Philip Kingsley’s Elasticizer Extreme
I put Kevin Murphy Killer Curls on my hair after I shower, while it’s wet, and a special gel for curls that I am ashamed to link because it is so expensive I can’t believe I actually bought it. I try to refresh with JVN Leave-in Conditioner and Sam McKnight Happy Endings but I’m never happy, it still looks dry and frizzy. Is anyone happy with their hair except Kate Middleton? And is she even? That would be my one question for her, not her insight into various royal beefs, but are you truly happy with your hair. Maybe what I want is a problem to endlessly shop for and not an actual solution, who knows.
I just want to be lazy but with beautiful hair!
(Keihl’s Magic Elixer is legit for dry scalp tho)