I was putting my 7-year-old daughter to bed and noticed that her Kindle — usually either in her bed or next to it — was gone.
“Oh, it’s in the closet!” she said when I asked. I smiled, picturing her making a nest of dresses that had fallen off their hangers, creating a magical closet reading hideout. I opened the closet door to get the Kindle for her, and she popped up in bed.
“No!” she screamed. “Don’t take it out of the box!”
“The box?” I asked.
“I put it in a box and shut the door,” she said. “I read something I didn’t like.”
Perfectly logical, honestly. “Something scary?”
“No,” she said, her face falling. “A dog died.”
Later, at 1 am, I finished a chapter of The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan. As I took a 5 minute break to cry — as I had at the end of nearly every chapter in that book — and thought WHY AM I DOING THIS TO MYSELF, I realized someone smarter than I am would probably have locked this book in the closet 100 pages ago.
I think the lesson here is clear: it’s okay to lock books in a box in your closet when you can’t handle them.
More on The School for Good Mothers (and the grand reveal of the book that got locked in the closet) in a sec, but first, my favorite books of 2022:
Other books I probably should have locked in a closet (to be clear I consider this a good thing):
We All Want Impossible Things — at the end of November I had the flu and was up all night alternating between coughing and laughing and sobbing while reading this book, about a woman spending her best friend’s last few weeks in hospice with her. It was…perfect.
Our Missing Hearts — Oh look, another semi-dystopian book where a mother gets separated from her child. Why do I do this to myself?? And why does Myself enjoy it so much??
This Time Tomorrow — this one — about time travel and the 90s and a dying father — is confusing in my memories: on the one hand there were plenty of times I felt like I needed to bury my feelings about it in the closet, but I also read it over the summer while swinging in a hammock so it will forever carry that carefree, sun-kissed energy. (Is this the least helpful book review ever? * EYE * got to read this book in a hammock, so you should read it.)
Central Places — (this book comes out today; I got a copy through NetGalley and read it in one jet-lagged night over the summer) As someone with complicated feelings about visiting the town I grew up in, this book was almost too relatable and therapeutic, even though my story and Audrey’s have next to nothing in common.
Books I didn’t want to lock in the closet, but still consider some of my favorites:
Pachinko — I mean, there is nothing to say that hasn’t already been said about this masterpiece. I became so attached to this story that I tried to watch the Apple TV Plus show afterward and cried every time I saw the characters looking joyful in the intro and never actually made it through the show (yes I know about the skip intro button and I refuse to use it for this one.)
Brown Girls— I’ve never read anything like this (written in verse in first person plural) and it really worked for me.
Sirens and Muses — For me, this book about the art world was the perfect fusion of plot driven, literary, and thought-provoking.
Now Is Not the Time to Panic — The complete and total awkwardness of being a teenager + an exploration of how something could go viral in The Late 1900s?? So many of my interests combined.
In The School for Good Mothers, Frida, the mother of a toddler in the near future, has a “very bad day” where she is so overwhelmed that she ends up leaving her toddler at home alone. After an infuriatingly frustrating counseling/court process, she’s sent to The School for Good Mothers which, if we’re going by what’s pictured on the cover, looks like an Aritzia dressing room — which is its own form of torture because you have to step out into a communal dressing room to see yourself in the mirror (what is this, Hollister circa 2001??)
The mothers at the school are emotionally terrorized (and not because they have to try on fast fashion in front of other people) and thus, so am I, the reader — so much so that I leave my warm bed at 1:07 am to hold my sleeping daughter’s hand and remind myself that she’s real and hasn’t been taken away from me.
While I’m there, I notice the half-opened closet door, and I remember the book my daughter locked in there. Bleary and still halfway in my book’s universe, I wonder if I should be punished for letting my daughter download books on her kindle without approving them first. A good mother’s daughter would never have been “looking for pictures of cute puppies” and instead stumbled upon a novel about (spoiler alert for a book from 1980 called “Stone Fox”) a little boy who enters a dogsled race to save his grandfather’s potato farm but the dog’s HEART BURSTS in the middle of the race.
Why wasn’t I there to comfort her? I repeat the mantra the mothers at the School For Good Mothers are forced to repeat, “I am a bad mother but I’m learning to be good.”
I close her closet door, cover her in a blanket, get in bed, and find something more comforting to read than this book, finally landing on the wikipedia page for Havana Syndrome.