STRIKE, n. There’s a lot of news in the US about striking labor unions right now, so naturally I’ve been wondering why our word for “the cessation of labor in order to force bosses to respect workers” is “strike.” Strike, as a verb and a noun, has a lot of meanings, but probably the chief one in most varieties of contemporary English is “hit.”
“Hit” seems like a possible starting point for the labor-union meaning—the workers are dealing a blow to the bosses—but there’s also a branch of “strike” meanings that are more like to remove, to take down, to strip off. Sailors strike the sails of a ship. Theatre crew members strike the set. When workers strike, they put down their tools. The Online Etymology Dictionary identifies this lineage as the most likely one for the kind of strike I’m talking about—first usage 1768—and notes that this idea of putting something down, lowering something, is connected to “the verb’s original sense of ‘make level, smooth.’”
I had no idea that “strike” originally had anything to do with smoothing or leveling. The verb is Germanic, and its corresponding weak form became “stroke,” which I also didn’t know was related, but seeing strike/stroke side by side, that feels right. I’m such a wide-eyed tourist when I read about Germanic languages, despite speaking one natively. Some day I’ll read a whole book on the history of English.
Anyway, drawing a (smooth, level) line through something is “striking” it from the record, and sometimes stroking something (an animal’s fur, for example) makes it smooth, and going on strike is an attempt to make things fairer—to level the playing field?—so I’m enjoying that connection.
I’m also enjoying an unexpected coincidence with the French word for strike, which is “grève.” French strikes are named after the place where nineteenth-century workers used to assemble for protest, the Place de Grève in Paris. It’s now called Place de l’Hôtel de Ville, but it was originally named “grève” because it was a flat area covered in sand on the banks of a body of water, in this case the Seine, and that’s what a “grève” is. Not quite “a place made level or smooth,” but almost.
On the topic of labor unions and of interest to the bookish community, Half Price Books Workers United is on strike. They’ve been trying to get fair wages for a year and a half and management still isn’t listening. Booksellers deserve to get paid what they’re worth. If you’re a reader, reviewer, or author with a presence on Instagram, let the union (@hpbworkersunited) and the company (@halfpricebooks) know you support the workers.
In small-r romance, here’s what I’ve read recently.
Discussion of death, grief, and pregnancy loss (stillbirth) in this section.
Before I Let Go (m/f, both cis and het, contemporary) by Kennedy Ryan. Whew. This book. One of the best romances. Let’s take a minute.
You know how sometimes a song is a crying jam, something you put on because you need to cry and it can flip that switch in your brain? This book is a crying jam. But it’s a genre romance, so it ends happily.
I’ve been thinking about a tumblr post, which I’ll paste here because I’m not sure it’s accessible if you’re not logged in, where tumblr user vympr wrote (August 6, 2021):
i love reading sad books bc when your own grief is stopped up inside you like a clogged drain you can grieve for a character on a page and understand that you're also grieving for yourself a little bit
and tumblr user petrichara responded (December 20, 2021) with this quote from Anne Carson’s preface to her translation Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides (2006):
There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you—may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn’t that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life. Within it you watch [yourself] act out the present or possible organization of your nature. You can be aware of your own awareness of this nature as you never are at the moment of experience. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of his own life in order to give you a story of yours.
So there is a slip here from reading books to watching plays, which are of course not the same, and Anne Carson is talking specifically about actors, not fictional characters, but I think we can keep the basic gist: Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone?
What if a book could do it for you? What if a book—skillfully written and with a promised happy ending—could do it for you? What if Kennedy Ryan’s Before I Let Go could do it for you?
Before I Let Go is a contemporary Black romance set in Atlanta, starring Josiah and Yasmen, a divorced couple who own a stylish, successful soul food restaurant. Two years after their divorce, they are still running the restaurant together and more or less amicably co-parenting their two kids. They’re also dealing with a lot of complicated feelings about each other, a potent cocktail of heartbreak and anger and yearning and lust. Their divorce came at a time of terrible grief for their family. In quick succession, they had just lost Aunt Byrd, who raised Josiah and whose cooking was the force behind the restaurant’s success, and their third child, Henry, who was stillborn. These losses isolate Josiah and Yasmen from each other because they approach grief so differently—Josiah shuts down and wants to focus only on work, and Yasmen feels her sorrow so deeply that she falls into a passively suicidal depression. She can’t help manage the restaurant any longer, and the restaurant struggles, so financial struggles worsen their family situation.
These are heavy burdens. It’s a lot for one family and a lot for one book. I don’t think I would have been able to pick this book up, knowing that it contains a stillbirth, except that I have such trust in Kennedy Ryan. She’s a writer who confronts difficult topics fearlessly and compassionately, and Before I Let Go is powerfully hopeful and full of love.
I can’t, of course, review this book without describing the grief, but it would be irresponsible not to convey to you that it’s also warmhearted and joyful. It’s funny and very, very sexy. Yasmen and Josiah’s kids and family and friends support them and love them and crack jokes about them and quietly or loudly root for them to figure it out. There’s a glowing portrait of their Atlanta community, too. All in all this book feels like a really fun place to hang out, which is a feat considering that it made me cry more than once. Not like, two-tears-getting-caught-in-my-lashes crying, which is what I usually mean when I say a book made me cry, because I am an emotionally dehydrated husk of a person, but full-on, something-broke-open-inside-me crying. For real.
A book that can do that and still be joyful? Like I said: a feat.
So much of that is the skill in the writing, which is just absolutely alive with voice from the opening paragraphs:
Do people remember the exact moment they fall in love?
I do. Yasmen brought me homemade chicken noodle soup when I was so sick it hurt to blink. Tasted like day-old dishwater. Not sure how you mess up chicken noodle soup, but my girl managed it. She watched me expectantly with those long-lashed doe eyes. God, I’ll never forget her expression when I spat that soup out, but it was so bad and I was too sick to even play it off.
For a second, Yasmen looked distressed, but then, despite feeling like someone dragged me over hot coals and needles, I laughed. Then she laughed and I wondered if this—finding someone you can laugh with when everything hurts—was the stuff happily ever afters were made of. Not the sugarcoated kisses and hot-air balloon rides and romantic walks under a full moon. My whole body throbbed with whatever plague infected me, but that day Yasmen made me happy. In the midst of a raging flu, she made me laugh.
And I knew.
I love when it feels like a character is confiding in me. There’s such powerful immediacy in that. Josiah feels like a friend right away, and also he’s sharing such juicy stuff. Go on, tell me more.
The juxtaposition of opposites here—feeling terrible, laughing anyway; pain, happiness—is key to the whole book. So is the imperfection. Yasmen’s gesture of care should be ruined, since her soup “taste[s] like day-old dishwater” and Josiah spits it out, but he loves her not only for trying, but for failing. Her mistake is cherished because it’s hers (“my girl managed it”), because it’s something only she could do.
And then there are all the little personal touches that mark Josiah’s voice. He’s romantic and even poetic (“long-lashed doe eyes”), but not enough to “play off” how bad the soup is. He’s funny, bouncing from sugarcoated kisses to “whatever plague infected me.” And most of all he’s bowled over by his unexpected feelings in this unromantic, unpleasant moment. The rhythm of the sentences is beautifully arranged, the short (“I do,” “And I knew”) contrasting with the long (“For a second… I laughed”). Josiah’s love is emphatic and certain, but it’s also inextricable from the bad times, and the rest of the book complicates, but ultimately reinforces that.
Second chances are hard to get right in romance—if a relationship ended once before, why should we believe that things will go differently? The reason for the initial break-up has to be convincing, but we also have to have sympathy for everyone involved. And when the characters reunite, we have to believe they’ve changed enough that this time, it’s for real. This time, it’ll last. Done successfully, second chance is, for me, one of the most powerful tropes in romance, one that delivers the heart and heartbreak in equal measure, but it’s a big risk. Too much heartbreak and the whole thing falls apart.
I shy away from risks as a reader. One of the draws of genre romance is that I always know how it ends. But I know the need for crying jams, for tragedies, for sad books too. Some of us prefer our sadness pure, ending in mourning and tears, and for myself I happen to like the sad tears in the middle and the happy tears at the end. Either way, art helps. I will absolutely not be going down into the pits of myself all alone, thank you—only with a safety harness and a rope made of extra-strength Happily Ever After and Kennedy Ryan lighting the way.
In books that are neither Romance nor romance, I read Sir Callie and the Champions of Helston by Esme Symes-Smith, which is a middle-grade fantasy novel with a nonbinary protagonist. I don’t read many middle-grade books because it will be a long time before my own kid is at that reading level, but this one was such a clear homage to Tamora Pierce’s Alanna series, something I loved as a kid, and when I saw that Symes-Smith’s author bio included the phrase “met their wife on Tumblr,” I had to buy it for myself. Great news: it’s adorable. Got dragons and sword fights and secret passages, good parents and really really bad parents, and kids standing up for themselves. If you’ve got a middle-grade fantasy reader in your life, they’ll love it.
And in things that only book-adjacent, but perhaps of interest to readers of this newsletter, here’s a BBC Radio 3 program from 2020 with sex historians Fern Riddell and Kate Lister (who tweets as @WhoresofYore) and historian Robin Mitchell, whose book Vénus Noire: Black Women & Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France sounds like a fantastic read, and who recounts her experience seeing the body cast of Sarah Baartmann in a way that I found really moving.
That’s all for this time. Happy October (!) and I’ll be back in your inbox in two weeks.
