life is full of scolds, don't listen

especially not to the ones in your head! Also, Death of an Author and new Jen Weiner

2025 totally keepable, would make my life better resolution: quit listening to the scolds, especially the ones in my head.

What’s a scold? Someone who thinks you should be doing something differently, is somewhere between appalled and disdainful that you do not know better, and actively wants you to feel bad, even though they probably will not admit it.

Example: a commenter on the NYT Cooking site’s non-meat-based meal that includes parmesan cheese who says “Parmesan isn’t vegetarian.”

Now, that person is probably pretending to themselves that they are doing everyone a favor. (Why is Parmesan not vegetarian? Traditionally Parmesan cheese is made with rennet, an enzyme used in making some cheeses but not all of them, comes from calf stomachs.) But really, they think they’re catching the NYT author out, hopefully making them feel bad, showing off their greater knowledge of all things vegetarian and probably feeling quite morally superior.

This is NOT about what we choose to eat or not eat, people. Know what a kind vegetarian doesn’t say to the friend who just served them a dish that may or may not include Parmesan, which itself may or may not be made with or without rennet bc some is and some is not?

Hey, asshole, here’s why the food you tried to make for me is not good enough.

I’m leaving out the cliched temporarily vegetarian teenager, who could say just about anything, and of COURSE there are ways to convey this information without scolding. There are ways to convey lots of things (how to recycle, why we might shop local, why a social media post was insensitive, that some people might not agree with this thing you’ve always believed without thinking) without scolding. But if the information made you feel lower than a worm’s belly in a sinkhole?

You’ve just been scolded, and you do not have to listen.

This brings us to a book I finished and loved this weekend: Death of the Author, by Nnedi Okorafor. Among many many other things, this book is about a Nigerian-American author whose giant loving pile of siblings and parents communicates almost entirely in scolding, which has turned into the way her brain talks to her as well, and if you don’t start hearing the ways those voices are demanding you conform and behave in order to make the people around you, who maybe even love you, more comfortable then you weren’t listening.

The sci-fi provenance of this one may give you pause, but if you liked Klara and the Sun, you can take this, promise. It starts as the fun and gloriously satisfying story of a writer’s unexpected success, weaves in her successful story, which is (like the author’s other work) in the sci-fi fantasy realm but crosses quickly into mainstream, and then gets a little more futuristic—but it remains grounded in things like our own doubts and fears, the ways we get caught up in our family’s demands and expectations and how hard it is to know what we ourselves want when the other voices in our lives and heads are so loud.

Truths: it’s LONG (I’m a fast reader and I didn’t mind one bit) and I boggled continually at the loving brutality of the author’s Nigerian family from my limited, euphemism-laced cultural perspective, and wished I had some ruler by which to understand who they were in that context—normal? intentionally over-the-top? something else? —they do not have to represent all Nigerians, but the Nigerian-American experience was so woven into the book that I wished that I could believe I was getting the nuances. But if you like the sound of it—a disabled Nigerian American woman pens a wildly successful Sci-Fi novel, but as her fame rises, she loses control of the narrative—a surprisingly cutting, yet heartfelt drama about art and love, identity and connection, and, ultimately, what makes us human—it delivers.

Other book news: I got an advance copy of Jennifer Weiner’s The Griffin Sisters' Greatest Hits! I gobbled it up. It’s so, so readable, a total page turner. If you’ve been a fan of hers in the past, even if you’ve skipped a few, pre-order this one to give your future self a tasty treat.

That’s it from me this week!