Little Ironies Catherine Lim Pdf

[Jackie Bullinger]

Write More, Be Less Careful is a newsletter about why writing is hard & how to do it anyway. Subscribe to get more encouragement, inspiration, and practical advice sent right to your inbox.

What a revelation! I am in my 20s and realizing somewhat unexpectedly that one of my deepest desires is to become a caregiver and center my creative/other pursuits around care work. I have worried some about the potential incongruences there, and so appreciate Catherine's perspective on how generous caregiving can spill over into every area of your life. Thank you.

Hello there! Welcome to Write More, Be Less Careful, a newsletter about making space for creative practice in a busy life. I\u2019m a poet and an essayist, and my most recent books are the poetry collection Pocket Universe and the anthology The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, which I edited with the poet Emily P\u00E9rez. My next book, The Good Mother Myth, will be out in January 2025, and you can pre-order it now!

This is a good creatures interview, a series that explores the intersection of caregiving and creative practice. If you know (or are!) a good creature whose work we should feature, send me an email\u2014you can just reply to this newsletter.

Today\u2019s interview is with , who you may know from her gorgeous novel We All Want Impossible Things or her memoir Waiting for Birdy, both of which made me cry-laugh-cry so much I simply could not read them in public. (Her newest novel, Sandwich, is out now, and I\u2019m probably cry-laughing reading somewhere as you read this.) Or maybe you know her from her many years of writing the absolute kindest etiquette advice at Real Simple, or her absolutely incredible house tour at Cup of Jo? Or maybe you\u2019ve cooked all the chickpea recipes and made all the mocktails at her lovely newsletter, Crone Sandwich? In any case, if you already know Catherine Newman\u2019s work, I\u2019m sure you\u2019re already excited to hear from her, and if you don\u2019t, you\u2019re in for a treat.

Below, we talk about caring for little kids when they\u2019re sick, collecting bits of conversation and juxtapositions as a way to ease the path into writing, and how the anxiety onslaught of having little kids cured Catherine of her \u201Cangsty existential questions.\u201D

When the kids were little and we were so stretched and busy and scrabbling to trade them off back and forth and keep all the many balls and flaming rings in the air all the time while also feeding them nonstop mac and cheese and removing turds from the carpet, they would sometimes get sick\u2014and by \u201Csometimes\u201D I mean \u201Call the time\u201D because of the way little kids are\u2014and I would channel my own mother. She had this gracious way of taking care of us that made us feel not like we were a problem to solve but like we were permanent treasures in need of some temporary coddling. She\u2019d bring us poached eggs on toast on a tray or she\u2019d buy our favorite popsicles (Wacky Pops) or even a pack of butter-rum Lifesavers because she had this mantra, which I think is uniquely British: \u201CA little of what you fancy does you good.\u201D We\u2019d watch hours of Green Acres and The Price Is Right and she\u2019d check on us and put a cool hand to our foreheads, and I felt completely safe.

I thought about this a lot when the kids were small and ill: the fact that they were unwell people whose lives I could brighten, and not just an unruly puzzle piece that wasn\u2019t fitting into my day. I thought about this, too, when my best friend was dying\u2014that what she often needed was a lot of little treats and a certain quality of attention that looked more like me quietly mending socks by her bedside than scrolling on my phone (I wrote a novel about that experience).

I also, in hindsight, see that there were 2 major differences between my mom and me: 1) She\u2019s English (I\u2019m only \u00BD English and also \u00BD New York Jew, which is a very different caretaking ethos that is way bossier and involves a certain sweet and eggy preparation called gogl-mogl); 2) She didn\u2019t work outside the house at the time that we were sick little kids\u2014even though caregiving was itself a creative practice for her, and one she was brilliant at. So I\u2019m aware of how I may have held myself to impossible standards, and yet still I\u2019m so glad I had the model of utter graciousness. And because what I\u2019ve always written about is actually the caregiving itself, there\u2019s never been a disconnect between caregiving and creative work. In fact, it\u2019s been completely the opposite.

I try to write down all the funny or interesting things from my daily life\u2014odd conversations or utterances, painful ironies or comedic juxtapositions\u2014and when I\u2019m ready to write something (an essay, say, or even a novel), I print these out and start thinking about what the story they\u2019re telling might be. The novelist Carolyn Chute, who wrote, among other things, The Beans of Egypt Maine, once said in an interview that she writes by gathering ornaments and then figuring out the shape of the tree she wants to hang them on (that\u2019s not an exact quote), and I think that\u2019s what I do too. This has been an ideal practice for me as a creative caregiver because it means I get to mine my life and relationships for material rather than needing to retreat to a separate space where I am creating entire worlds. Another word for this is cheating.

Caregiving has completely quieted the angsty existential questions I had in my 20s. My kids were born alongside a clear and absolute raison d'\u00EAtre (pardon my French), and that raison d'\u00EAtre was keeping them alive. But also, because it was so consuming\u2014the having of babies\u2014I thought about it a lot, and some of this thinking was just chaotic, amorphous, pointless postpartum anxiety (They\u2019re going to die. I\u2019m going to drop them down the stairs. They\u2019re going to choke on an acorn. They\u2019re going to die.) and some of this thinking was more like what you\u2019d call actual ideas, and which seeded much of my writing about parenthood. What caregiving took away from me was my sense of myself as a person who did not suffer from a mental illness called generalized anxiety disorder. I just laughed writing that, but it is literally true.

Catherine Newman is the author of the memoirs Catastrophic Happiness and Waiting for Birdy, the middle-grade novel One Mixed-Up Night, the kids\u2019 craft book Stitch Camp, the best-selling how-to books for kids How to Be a Person and What Can I Say?, and the novels We All Want Impossible Things, and Sandwich. She has been a regular contributor to the New York Times, Real Simple, O, The Oprah Magazine, Cup of Jo, and many other publications. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Catherine is on tour for her new book Sandwich and you can find out where she\u2019s headed (and how cute her cats are) on Instagram at @catherinenewman or, ideally (if she remembers to update it) on her website catherinenewmanwriter.com. (I\u2019m hoping to see her in Manasquan on June 25, so if you\u2019re going to be there, too, or could be persuaded to come hang out, let me know!) She also writes the Crone Sandwich newsletter on Substack, which (ed. note!) you should subscribe to immediately.

I think you have to understand the context of the early 19th century. This is the great era of technological development, industrial capitalism. There are these great opportunities that people see, either West or South.

So they are leaving what in some ways were very nurturing communities, but also very confining communities. I think we have a tendency sometimes to romanticize what the 18th-century world was like, that people lived in these self-sufficient communities where everybody knew each other, and they married the neighbor's daughter or son. In some ways this was a very positive experience, but it could also be very negative. I mean, this is where witchcraft trials came from in the 17th century, these kinds of communal tensions where people are living very close together and know each other very well.

So in some ways, what you're seeing is transportation networks making it possible for people to strike out and forge new communities in search of economic opportunity. But you can also imagine that there are some people who are just tired of the intensity of the face-to-face local communities in which they lived, and they want to reinvent themselves. ...

People who grew up in the 18th century were pretty much determined in who they would be in the future. If you were a farmer's son, you would grow up to be a farmer. If you were a blacksmith's son, you were probably going to grow up to be a blacksmith, or maybe you would be apprenticed to someone in the neighborhood and you would be a tailor instead. But your future was pretty well determined for you based on your family's history.

The established church loomed very large in all of these communities. So I think one thing that modern Americans have completely forgotten in all of our celebration of religious liberty is that in colonial America, almost everyone was legally required to go to church and to pay taxes for the support of an established church. ...

Now, by the 18th century, you didn't physically have to be there anymore, but you did have to pay your taxes to its support. And if you didn't, you could be fined, and if you didn't pay your fine, you could be imprisoned.

So there's a certain kind of religious hegemony that exists in these places, where you have to worship a particular way. Now, there are lots of people who don't. There are lots of people who decide that they want to become Baptists or they want to become Quakers, but they do that at a great personal price. They're persecuted by their neighbors. For the Baptists in Connecticut, for example, in the 18th century, many of them go to jail rather than pay taxes to a church that they don't want to support and that they don't attend. ...

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