Hi friends,

The Fairyland Series by Catherynne M. Valente is one of my favorite series of all time. You may have heard me wax poetic before about the beautiful language, the clever construction, the wild imagination of this work, and all of that is certainly true. But I also love it for the warmth and heartbreak of its themes, for the way it takes classic fairytale elements and presents them as whimsy while calling them out as violence.

In this series, we meet twelve-year-old September, willingly whisked away by a Green Wind because she's sad and heartsick, her father off fighting an unnamed war, her mother gone to join the workforce. September's decision, and really her entire disposition, is repeatedly described by the omniscient narrator as heartless. Heartless in the way a child can be, because her heart hasn't fully grown in yet. Because it takes a kind of heartlessness to be courageous. Because she doesn't yet understand what it costs to leave, or what it costs to come back.

As the series progresses, we watch September age and grow, and among the many tragedies she must weather is the pain of being ripped from one home and deposited into another, only to find that her friends have changed, that Fairyland itself has changed, and that, of course, she has changed. I love these moments throughout the story, and in general I love themes that explore how we build ourselves as people. The work of identity is often just the work of crafting the story we tell ourselves and others about who we are. And I remember being gripped by how Fairyland insists that this is a story we should check in with. How have we changed? Have we revisited our dreams recently? Have we scrubbed up our courage lately?

“This is the tub for washing your courage,” Lye said, her voice as even and calm as ever, performing her task, grief packed away for the duration of a bath.

“I didn’t know one’s courage needed washing!” gasped September as Lye poured a pitcher of water over her head. Or that one needs to be naked for that sort of washing, she thought to herself.

Lye poured a bucketful of golden water over September’s head. “When you are born,” the golem said softly, “your courage is new and clean. You are brave enough for anything: crawling off of staircases, saying your first words without fearing that someone will think you are foolish, putting strange things in your mouth. But as you get older, your courage attracts gunk and crusty things and dirt and fear and knowing how bad things can get and what pain feels like. By the time you’re half-grown, your courage barely moves at all, it’s so grunged up with living. So every once in a while, you have to scrub it up and get the works going or else you’ll never be brave again.

I have never once read that scene without feeling it land somewhere new.

I bring all of this up because I saw Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey this weekend, and somewhere in that dark theater, watching a man row toward a home that no longer exists, I started thinking about September. (And about the song "Southbound Train" by Jon Foreman. "Oh, I guess they'll say I've grown / I know more than I wanted to know / I've said more than I wanted to say / I'm heading home / Yeah, but I'm not so sure / That home is a place / You can still get to by train.")

Part of what I think Nolan is telling us is that Odysseus can't go home, but not only because the journey is long or because the gods are cruel, but because the place he's been rowing toward for years exists mostly in his memory, and the man doing the rowing isn't the man who left. Odysseus's cleverness won the war, but it also broke social contracts, and that and the violence of war not only changed him, but meaningfully changed the world. He took advantage of the invisible agreement that made home home in the first place. His journey is toward a place that cannot be the same, undertaken by a man who cannot be the same.

I've been quiet this year. Some of that is for reasons personal and private, but at least one reason is this: the shape of my offline life has changed pretty drastically, and I have been doing the slow, unglamorous work of rereading the story I tell myself about myself.

I'm staring down the barrel of 40. I feel fundamentally different than I did even one year ago. And I know this is not a grand revelation—we change as we age—but there's something to be said about the journey between versions of yourself. About the work of redefining home. About checking, every so often, that you aren't still operating on outdated parameters for a life that no longer exists.

I love stories that explore how lonely that stretch of water can be. You're detached from the people who knew the old versions of you, and not yet found by the people who might love the new version best. And there's a strange guilt in it, too. It can feel like betrayal of the previous you who swore she would never (or so she said), who always wanted to (or so she planned), who promised (something you no longer want). I have even been doing this work inside a body that has changed significantly, which is its own disorientation: existing in a body so different from your self-image that you catch your reflection and have to do the math.

Maybe that's what this year has been, then. Not a homecoming. A scrubbing. Getting the works going again. Odysseus gets an ending, after all. September gets a home and a family reunited. I'm mid-journey, and I suspect most of us are, most of the time. But I'm coming to believe that home isn't the place that stayed the same while you were gone. Home might be the thing you rebuild, on purpose, with the person you are now, parameters updated, courage freshly scrubbed, honest about what broke and what you broke and what can be made again anyway.

Speaking of stories about home, what it costs to build, what it costs to maintain, and what happens when we're finally forced to confront the harm done in its name, Our Sister's Keeper by Jasmine Holmes is out in the world now, and watching it find its readers has been one of the truest joys of my year.

If you've read it already, thank you, and please keep spreading the word. Reviews, posts, shoving it into your friends' hands, all of it matters more than you know. If you haven't read it yet: East Cobb is waiting for you, and it has some questions about what home is worth.

♥️

Marines