HAPPILY

A mother explores the resonances of fairy tales in her modern life.

After collections of poetry and short fiction, Mark now experiments with memoir, using the plots, characters, and sometimes-terrifying outcomes of fairy tales to frame her experiences. She is a Jewish mother raising Black children in the South; a third wife and tentative stepmother; an exhausted home-schooler during lockdown; and a fairy-tale expert looking for a job in academia: "Your final task, I imagine the dean saying, is to make a rope out of these ashes. Do it and the job is yours." In an essay about raising Black sons, she recalls the precautions a friend gave her 9-year-old for going to the store: Keep his hands out of his pockets, take off his hood, and hold his receipt in his hand. She imagines the list continuing. "We have given him invisibility powder,” she writes, “we have made wings for him out of the feathers of ancient doves, we have given him the power to become a rain cloud and burst, if necessary, into a storm." In an essay titled "Sorry, Peter Pan, We're Over You," Mark writes about how her son informed her that even though she ordered a Peter Pan costume from Etsy, he's decided to be Martin Luther King Jr. for Halloween. Here, as at many other junctures, her mother appears to deliver pragmatic commentary. "Some idiot kid" probably told him he can't play Peter because he’s Black, she notes. "Trust me...I know how this stupid world today works." The essays previously appeared in Mark’s column for the Paris Review, and each takes up a different fairy tale, or set of tales, making clever, lyrical, sometimes-disturbing connections. Overall, there is more observation and analysis than storytelling, and each essay does sort of the same thing. If you wolf it down, the gambit becomes repetitive.

Sprinkle these clever essays like breadcrumbs through the forest of your days.