Richard W. shared a stream on July 24, 2022
Much Ado About Nothing

Much Ado About Everything

Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 10 seconds

Jon, Jan, and MikeLast night, I enjoyed watching the NJ Shakespeare Theatre‘s outdoor performance of Much Ado About Nothing. The final performance of the season is Sunday, July 31.

Nick, my oldest grandson and a friend of his, joined me for a lovely evening.

It was the first time I had attended the outdoor stage since Jan died. Last year, I planned to go by myself, but the weather canceled the performances I could attend.

Jan and I have always enjoyed this play. Jan especially liked the tempestuous Beatrice’s comment.

O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the marketplace!

The play is also a good metaphor for my grief journey. A year ago, I worried about everything.

This much ado about everything was not helpful. It would lead me down rabbit holes of despair. Support groups, therapy, and Andrew Huberman’s neuroscience research have helped me focus on Jan’s genuine love for me and decades of positive memories.

Love never dies.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. All donations are tax-deductible.

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Final Hugs

Managing Grief’s Roller Coaster

During my grief journey, my emotions have been all over the place. I have been sad, lonely, happy, and on rare occasions, experienced something close to happiness. This classic roller coaster was stressful and frightening in the early days. Focusing on Andrew Huberman’s neuroscience research on grief has helped me feel liberated and calm. The […]
Richard W. Brown July 19, 2022

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The Friend: A Novel

Read: September 2022

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The Friend: A Novel

by Sigrid Nunez

The Friend: A Novel by Sigrid Nunez is a moving story of love, friendship, grief, healing, and the magical bond between a woman and her dog. When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. I understand the positives and negatives of having a dog help with grief, but I cannot have one where I live.

One line that resonated with me was,

You can’t hurry, love, as the song goes. You can’t hurry, grief, either.

Far too often, widows are in a hurry, not unlike young lovers. We need to learn patience and remind ourselves that the more we love, the more we will grieve.

I often said that Jan would replace me with a dog if she survived me.

I recommend this book.

The Goodreads summary provides a concise overview,

The woman’s own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatized by the inexplicable disappearance of its master, and by the threat of eviction: dogs are prohibited in her apartment building.

While others worry that grief has made her a victim of magical thinking, the woman refuses to be separated from the dog except for brief periods of time. Isolated from the rest of the world, increasingly obsessed with the dog’s care, determined to read its mind and fathom its heart, she comes dangerously close to unraveling. But while troubles abound, rich and surprising rewards lie in store for both of them.

Elegiac and searching, The Friend is both a meditation on loss and a celebration of human-canine devotion.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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Jaded: A Novel

Read: April 2024

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Jaded: A Novel

by Ela Lee

Today, I started reading “Jaded: A Novel” by Ela Lee. The main character’s name is Jade, which isn’t even her real name. Jade began using it as her Starbucks name because all children of immigrants have a Starbucks name. “Jaded” is a must-read book for fans of “Queenie” and “I May Destroy You.” It offers a blistering—and sometimes darkly funny—account of consent, power, race, sexism, and identity in a broken society.

Jade has accomplished everything she ever wanted.

She’s a successful lawyer, a dutiful daughter, a beloved girlfriend, and a loyal friend. However, everything starts to crumble when she wakes up the morning after a work event, naked and alone, with no idea how she got home. Jade is caught between her parents, who can’t understand, her boyfriend, who feels betrayed, and her job, which expects silence.

Jade thought she was everything she ever wanted to be. But now she feels like nothing at all.

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Table for Two: Fictions

Read: April 2024

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Table for Two: Fictions

by Amor Towles

Today, I began reading “Table for Two: Fictions” by Amor Towles. As a fan of his previous work, “A Gentleman in Moscow,” I was excited to delve into some of his shorter fiction. The book contains six stories from New York City and a novella from the Golden Age Hollywood. “Table for Two” is another captivating addition to Towles’s collection of stylish and transporting fiction written with his signature wit, humor, and sophistication.

The New York stories, set primarily in the year 2000, explore the profound consequences that can result from fleeting encounters and the intricate dynamics of compromise that underpin modern marriages. These narratives are sure to evoke strong emotions and leave a lasting impression.

In the novel “Rules of Civility,” the resilient Evelyn Ross departs from New York City in September 1938, intending to return to her home in Indiana. However, as her train reaches Chicago, where her parents eagerly await her, she spontaneously decides to extend her journey to Los Angeles. “Eve in Hollywood,” narrated from seven different perspectives, reveals how Eve forges a new path for herself and others in a gripping noirish tale that traverses the movie sets, bungalows, and dive bars of Los Angeles.

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Cloud Atlas: A Novel

Read: September 2024

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Cloud Atlas: A Novel

by David Mitchell

Today, I started reading Cloud Atlas: A Novel by David Mitchell, one of The New York Times’ 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary, voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins treating him for a rare species of brain parasite.

The novel careens, with dazzling virtuosity, to Belgium in 1931, the West Coast in the 1970s, an inglorious present-day England, a Korean superstate of the near future where neo-capitalism has run amok, and, finally, a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history. But the story doesn’t end even there. What sets Cloud Atlas apart is its unique narrative structure, which boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. This journey reveals how the disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.

As wild as a video game, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon. The novel’s diverse settings and cultures, from 1850 Chatham Isles to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii, appeal to readers across the globe, offering a rich and varied reading experience.

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Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

Read: March 2023

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Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

by Margaret Atwood

Old Babes in the Wood: Stories by Margaret Atwood is a collection of remarkable tales, which delight, illuminate, and are quietly devastating. I especially found the stories about Nell and Tig compelling and engaging. Widow describes a letter Nell almost wrote to a friend after Tig is gone. Nell sounded like me when she said, “the warping or folding of time. In some parts of this refolded time, Tig still exists, as much as he ever did.”

The letter Nell is writing to a friend she will never be sent because it speaks to the harsh reality that grief imposes upon us.

Margaret Atwood writes as Nell,

Have I gone into the dark tunnel, dressed in mourning black with gloves and a veil, and come out the other end, all cheery and wearing bright colors and loaded for bear?

No. Because it’s not a tunnel. There isn’t any other end. Time has ceased to be linear, with life events and memories in a chronological row, like beads on a string. It’s the strangest feeling, or experience, or rearrangement. I’m not sure I can explain it to you.

As much as it might have appeared that I was in a dark tunnel after Jan died, I was not and am not now. There is indeed no defined end to the grief journey.

We all must learn how to live without our loved ones. The pathway I have chosen may not work for anyone else.

The earlier Nell and Tig stories are memories about their lives, reminding me of how I wrote about how Jan and I met and eventually married.

I have always enjoyed reading Atwood‘s writing, including The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments. I highly recommend Old Babes in the Wood: Stories by Margaret Atwood!

Old Babes in the Wood was my twenty-third book of the year and fulfilled my Goodreads 2023 Reading Challenge, but it will not end my reading this year. 

The Goodreads summary provides an overview,

Margaret Atwood has established herself as one of the world’s most visionary and canonical authors. This collection of fifteen extraordinary stories–some of which have appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine–explores the full warp and weft of experience, speaking to our unique times with Atwood’s characteristic insight, wit, and intellect.

The two brave sisters of the title story grapple with loss and memory on a perfect summer evening; “Impatient Griselda” explores alienation and miscommunication with a fresh twist on a folkloric classic; and “My Evil Mother” touches on the unbelievable, examining a mother-daughter relationship in which the mother purports to be a witch. At the heart of the collection are seven extraordinary stories that follow a married couple across the decades, the moments big and small that make up a long life of uncommon love–and what comes after.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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Sarah's Key

Read: January 2022

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Sarah’s Key

by Tatiana de Rosnay

Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay is the untold story of the roundup of the Jews in Paris in July 1942. The novel focuses on how the French were complicit in rounding up thousands of Jews in 1942. It is also a reminder that we can never allow another genocide. I finished this book the day before Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, the date on which the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and death camp complex was liberated in 1945.

Ten-year-old Sarah is brutally arrested with her family in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, the most notorious act of French collaboration with the Nazis. But before the police come to take them, Sarah locks her younger brother, Michel, in their favorite hiding place, a cupboard in the family’s apartment. She keeps the key, thinking she will be back within a few hours.

Paris, May 2002: On Vel’ d’Hiv’s sixtieth anniversary, Julia Jarmond, an American journalist, is asked by her Paris-based American magazine to write an article about this black day in France’s past. Julia has lived in Paris for nearly twenty-five years and married a Frenchman, and she is shocked both by her ignorance about the event and the silence that still surrounds it.

The twin narratives of Sarah and Julia hold the first two-thirds of the book together and make it a page-turner. Sarah’s memory reminds us during the final third of the book and ensures that the complete story of the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup and its lasting impact are told.

As Goodreads describes the novel,

In the course of her investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connects her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl’s ordeal, from the terrible days spent shut in at the Vel’ d’Hiv’ to the camps and beyond. As she probes into Sarah’s past, she begins to question her own place in France and to reevaluate her marriage and her life.

Writing about the fate of her country with a pitiless clarity, Tatiana de Rosnay offers us a brilliantly subtle, compelling portrait of France under occupation and reveals the taboos and denial surrounding this painful episode in French history.

I highly recommend the book.

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