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.
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