RETURN OF THE ERIKA

Officially back from hiatus! For those of you interested, there is no change or clarity on my health stuff, but my doctor is at least good at helping me fend off my employers who are behaving in ways that are only barely legal. I've started breaking my silence on the issue with my family which has been a somewhat mixed bag, but mostly made up of behaviors that has me looking into firing them. The wedding went incredibly, and I managed to work a Firefly reference into my vows and troll my parents with my musical choices for the ceremony and everything went perfectly.

Now onto what you lovely people get to expect from me in the future! I'm not doing 50 Shades Freed. I know, boo, hiss. I kept trying to read it and I just--I just couldn't. I have precious few spoons and reading it just ate up too many of them. I will read through it and write about it, but that is somewhere in the vague future. I had also initially said I was going to do Eat, Pray, Love when I came back from hiatus. I've changed my mind on that too. I wanted to do a book I knew, a book I actually enjoyed, a book that was problematic, and a book that in its own way meant a lot to me.

I dug through my shelf and plucked a few books that I had loved when I was younger, but afraid to go back to since I came to since I had thrown myself into feminism. I found myself staring down a pile of books almost entirely by Chuck Palahniuk and Nick Hornby. Having stayed away from Palahniuk for longer, I narrowed it down to the three of his that I owned and liked the best when I was younger, and immediately tossed Fight Club off the pile because there is absolutely nothing I can do there that hasn't been done already, and done better. I stared down Survivor and Lullaby. Survivor was tempting, I remembered the themes better in it, and there was a lot to be said for the lone female character even from the fragments I recalled. Still, non-linear story telling does not lend its self well to chapter by chapter deconstruction unless you really know the book and I hadn't touched it in six years.

I eyed Lullaby, its white cover with black text, innocent save for the small neon yellow bird on its back. There was another reason I hadn't read Palahniuk in years, and that was that he and his books were inherently tied to my ex of significance, P, and a very specific time in my life. Like a lot of kids, my friends and I looked for ourselves in fiction around us to feel a little less like freaks. P and a few of our friends looked exclusively in Palahniuk books, and when I joined that circle, I was assigned a character. P had claimed Carl, the narrator of Lullaby (an assessment I never agreed with) and enthusiastically agreed with the Marla of our group that I was Helen, the female lead (also an assessment I never agreed with, or understood). We carry our own baggage into books, and I don't think I can avoid doing it with a deconstruction of one. So there it is, feel free to rifle through, because odds are I'm about to.

Lullaby posts will run on Thursdays so come back on January 9th for the first post.