I know “going down rabbit holes” is a euphemism for wasting time, but sometimes I think those rabbit holes lead to beautiful wonderlands.
I recently read There There for the first time. It’s been out since 2018, and I kept meaning to read it but somehow never did. Tommy Orange’s new novel Wandering Stars, is sort of a sequel, so I finally picked up his debut, and loved it.
I like to think of myself as a fan of Native American literature, but considering how much is out there and how little of it I’ve actually read (like never having read There There), that’s probably a whopping overstatement.
I did read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee a long time ago, and my teenage mind was blown. It was one of the first books I read that flipped the perspective, that centered history on someone other than a white person. Understand, this was probably 1985, a very different time. These were the days when Shogun was all about the white guy, date rape was a movie genre, and MTV didn’t play any “urban” music unless the performer’s last name was Jackson.
Down we go
It had been so long since I’d read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, I Googled it and that led to some interesting discoveries. Like the 1971 Dustin Hoffman movie “Little Big Man” is not the movie version. Two totally different Native American works that I’d somehow merged in my head.1
Secondly, and more surprising (to me, anyway): Author Dee Brown was not Native American (and not female). He was white (and a man). Consider the flak a white man would catch for writing a book like this today.
Why was this reverie about my teenage awakening to the Native American genocide making me think about Peter Matthiessen? Was I thinking of At Play in the Fields of the Lord? A truly magnificent book, by the way. If you like Barbara Kingsolver, put this one on your list. But it’s set in Peru, so that didn’t seem right.
So naturally I Googled Matthiessen, which led me to his obituary, and then I realized the book I was trying to remember was In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. I'd spaced completely on this nonfiction book about Normal Peltier and the American Indian Movement. I loved carrying it around, I felt so cool, so radical chic. I loved to explain things to my mom that she absolutely already knew, but lovingly listened to me tell her about them anyway.
I think I might re-read The Snow Leopard, that’s the book that really did me in. Matthiessen has a way of writing about nature that is so viscerally descriptive. I really felt as if I was right there with him, trekking up those cold Himalayan trails. The book is ostensibly about a search for the rarely-seen snow leopard, but it’s really about the tragic loss of his wife. When I read it, I was oblivious to the devastation of grief. Now, alas, I am not. I wonder if it will still hit me the same way. Maybe it’s cheesy? I’ll let you know.
Matthiessen’s obituary reminded that he was the stepfather of Sarah Koenig, of Serial. At this point in my rabbit hole-ing, my past and my present tied themselves in a lovely bow because I'm currently listening to the new season of Serial, about Guantanamo.
I could barely read about Guantanamo when it was front page news. It was simultaneously too distressing and too boring. Here we are, 20 years later, and Serial has peeled back all the inedible rind to get to the juicy core. They approach a journalistic endeavor with the souls and skills of great fiction writers. Storytelling is such an abused and overused term these days. Every ad agency calls itself a troupe of storytellers, every brand is convinced it has a story to tell. ‘Storytelling’ is up there with ‘moist’ as cringiest word of the decade. But I gotta say, those Serial folks, they know how to tell a story.
Up we come
Ok, back to my rabbit hole. We’ve almost reached the tea party. The Sarah Koenig connection led me to her “How I Get It Done” —the fluffy New York mag feature where a notable/celeb talks about the pilates they do at dawn, the $400 face cream that's vital to their well-being, and the wholesome vegan breakfast they make for their tiny children each morning. Koenig flips it on its head. She instead talks about how much she procrastinates, her pernicious mommy guilt, and how much she adores and relies on her Serial co-creator.2 And all of this brings me to the best part, which is how the New York magazine piece finishes and why I saw fit to take you on this loopy journey. Under the heading of “What I wish I knew when I was starting out” Koenig says this:
“None of us knows what we’re doing; that is the human condition. We’re just making it all up, and that’s fine. But not having a feeling of mastery, walking through the world every day — that’s not failure; that’s life.”
I never would’ve arrived at this wonderful message had I not followed that mad rabbit down the hole. May your wasted time prove to be just as fruitful.
A housekeeping message: If you liked this post, please give it a heart. I think that’s helpful to my “algorithm” but moreso I genuinely feel every one that pops up, and I’m grateful.
If you don’t know the movie, perhaps it’s time to commence your own rabbit hole.
This was a particularly winning passage for me because I also happen to adore her Serial co-creator, as she’s my friend.