Nothing makes me bawl like a book in which characters fiercely look after one another. Maybe that’s because my dad bailed on us when we were little, never to return. Or maybe it’s because my mother was a hospice nurse, setting an example of caretaking in the hardest moment a family will face. Or maybe, it’s good old-fashioned co-dependence–some of us find our worth through being needed. Whatever the reason, I’ve been drawn to literature of radical care since my earliest reading days.
My collection, The Book of Kin: On Absence, Love, and Being There, is a series of linked essays that span twenty years. The essays speak to each other about connection, isolation, community building, seeing, and of course, care– as ingrained habit, as rebellion, as a quiet fuck you to abandonments. Living things need other living things to care for us and about us, but that doesn’t mean it always happens.
Hanif Abduraquib says, “That anyone loves us at all is not a given.” We’re born alone and we die alone, this we all know. But in between we make thousands of daily choices about if we will give a damn and for whom and how: a rooster, a community, prisons, our kids, students, a neighbor. And from our caring stems our deepest failures and richest successes. Something else I’ve learned from reading and writing about care, my own especially, is that it’s imperfect, hard to sustain, and still, the only work that really matters in the end.
Charlotte’s Web by EB White
This children’s book made such a strong impression on me as a kid, I think it added pathways in my brain from what I knew of love to what I might expect, and in doing so, allowed me to adopt EB White’s voice as my shadow father. Fern saves the piglet, Wilbur, from certain death, then bottle feeds him. Eventually, Charlotte the spider, must save him, deploying the other animals on the farm to scrounge food for him. Every kid reading this deserves to be adored like Wilbur, a being so beloved that your friends will go to any length to save you, to conspire to keep you near, to celebrate you, to declare you before all the world, “Magnificent!,” “Humble,” “Radiant,” and even, yes, “Some Pig!” After Charlotte saves Wilbur, it’s her turn to go and they must say goodbye. Right after she dies, her hundreds of children burst from the egg and fly off on gossamer strands. It kills me, that chorus of tiny voices scattering as they leave—Goodbye! Goodbye! Goodbye! The full cycle of true friendship in one story, not without the bittersweet end. It’s not a book that says loving will fix everything or won’t hurt, but that the love we give endures in those that come after us.
Illumination in The Flatwoods: A Season Living Among the Wild Turkey by Joe Hutto
Author, Joe Hutto, happens upon a clutch of wild turkey eggs and can’t in good conscience leave them in the Florida wilds without a mother. So he takes and hatches them, then endures a tender, surprising, and heartbreaking relationship to the chicks that he raises and ultimately releases back to the wild. If you’re thinking that you don’t care to read about turkeys, I’m here to tell you that’s because you’ve never read about turkeys.Turkeys can be adoring and violent and (dis)loyal, like love itself. This is one of those sleeper books that has a quiet cult following, and for good reason.
Brotherless Night by VV Ganeshananthan
This is, by all accounts, a historical war novel. But it concerns itself very much with the humans who live and die inside conflict, chief among them the young protagonist, Sashi. Sashi may be one of my all time favorite characters in contemporary literature. She’s a young, bright medical student alive during the Sri Lankan Civil War. Coming of age in the midst of conflict, while worrying for her brothers and falling in love, Sashi navigates love and complex care of strangers, family, and country under the most extreme circumstances. Add to that a country full of disappeared sons and the mothers who march to demand their return, and you have a novel that shows how fierce and fearless feminist care can look in times of resistance.
What Debt Demands by Kristin Collier
Unbeknownst to her, author and high school teacher, Kristin Collier, had fraudulent student loan debt in excess of $200,000. Her memoir explores not just the student loan industry, but what this debt did to her future, her relationships, and her body. In doing so, she raises questions around the cost of education for all. Collier adjusts her lens from the micro to the macro, showing the cost of indebtedness to an individual body, but also to our civic body–our educators, nurses, and other folks who take care of us all at great cost, but thanks to tuition and school loan debt, struggle to survive themselves. I predict this book will usher in a paradigm shift in the way we view higher education, indebtedness, and collective care.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
I read this book for the first time during the pandemic, when I desperately needed to feel connected to something larger than my sad self. Indigenous botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer–whose prose is as centering as her message– wrote something the world needs in Braiding Sweetgrass, which humbly asserts that “all flourishing is mutual,” and that it comes about through reciprocity. Said another way, plants take exquisite care of us when we take care of them.This book is a gentle and wise and sacred reminder that every living thing is connected and that care is circular, not linear.
We Will Not Cancel Us and Other Dreams of Transformative Justice by adrienne maree brown
Because humans are messy as fuck, there can be no care without occasional harm. Punishment is not the answer to that harm, brown makes clear in her slim, patient, and profound book, it is and must be repair. That simple call may be the hardest lesson we learn in this life. And it may just be the last and hardest lesson most crucial to transformative justice and to love–of communities, of systems, and each other.
About the Author: Jennifer Eli Bowen is a writer, arts instructor, and editor. Her work has received a Pushcart Prize, The Arts and Letters Prize, and the Tim McGinnis Award, and her writing has appeared in The Sun magazine, The Iowa Review, Orion, and Kenyon Review. The founder of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, she lives in St. Paul, a block in any direction from sidewalk poetry and snow.