Thin Skin: Essays

I've been sitting with this one for a whole day and I'm still struggling to come up with a decent review, so, here, have a rambling mess and my assurance, for what it is worth, that this collection of essays is far more coherent and intelligent than my review.

This collection made me feel seen, reading it felt like sitting with a friend who just gets it, not that she knows what we need to do to fix it all but she's knows what's up and she can commiserate and she won't think your silly for knowing and spending a lot of time considering the details of your cats' personalities or for the numerous and sometimes contradictory anxieties we all seem to struggle with.

What else does she just get exactly? Well for starter she really gets that quintessential millennial feeling of wanting to be an “old person” now, of wanting to slow down, to tend to our own garden (be it actual or figurative) but also that urge, that itch and urgency of being productive at all times and the contradiction of it all that we can't escape.

She also gets that capitalism is impossible to avoid and impacts every aspect of our lives and relationships no matter how hard we try to be a proverbial island. That the unavoidable influence of capitalism on our lives is lifetimes in the making and that she doesn't need to tiptoe around saying it. I could go on but I think you get the idea.

I received an eARC of this book through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Intense; a helluva ride. At times impenetrable, then shifting eerily to what felt like vignettes from my own lived experience and sometimes even innermost thoughts. Mostly somewhere in between. Early on I started thinking of it—with apologies to Milan Kundera—as The Unbearable Heaviness of Being and it stuck, felt more and more appropriate as I kept reading, and I mention it not to discourage you but to prepare you: Shapland’s neuroses are weighty. I needed frequent breaks to digest or sometimes just breathe. (Maybe she’d find mine equally weighty. Let’s not find out.)

Five long essays, each with a central theme and many tangents. Toxins, pollution, environmental racism, health (Los Alamos figures prominently in this first chapter, a curious serendipity given my having read 109 East Palace immediately beforehand). Fear, racism, moving through the world as a woman. Consumerism. Self-awareness and mindfulness. And, most interesting to me, the cultural obsession with having babies. Yes, she goes there, explores it from all sorts of directions, bluntly and with some perspectives that were new to me—possibly because I’m male, although I think it might be that I am less tolerant of fools than she is.

Shapland impressed me at this year’s Santa Fe Literary Festival; her stage conversation showed great vulnerability and wisdom. Her writing reinforces my impression of her as a remarkable person, insightful and gifted. Even despite the incomprehensible parts (mostly cultural references I’m too old for) and despite her annoying fretting about the opinions of others (she’s young, I think and hope she’ll grow out of it), this is a phenomenal book that I’m going to be recommending loudly to my friends. Even those with (wonderful! amazing! and I mean it!) children.