Red at the Bone, Jacqueline Woodson

Elizabeth Catlett, Portfolio Cover, 1970s

(February 3) Recommended on the Goop Instagram as follows: "In 2001, sixteen-year-old Melody is walking down the stairs at her grandparents’ house in Brooklyn for her coming-of-age ceremony. Sixteen years earlier, her own mother Iris, pregnant, missed her party. Cutting back and forth in time, and from character to character, Jacqueline Woodson explores all the different moments, all the beginnings that lead a family to a particular moment in time. It’s a novel about history, class and status, and the ways we try to escape and cling to our identity. We still can’t believe a story so epic fit into just 200 pages", a perfect summary.

I liked it fine... the cutting back and forth through time and all the slightly different repetitions of key events in the lives of different characters gives the novel the quality of a Cubist painting like Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), like you're actually able to see motion in a static thing, or, here, feel the passage of many generations in 200 pages. Of course it's interesting how the generations differ from each other even though they mirror one another.

I definitely felt I was given authentic tastes of Black culture in Brooklyn from the '60s through to the '90s.

Signs: The Secret Language of the Universe, Laura Lynne Jackson

Roelof Louw, Soul City (Pyramid of Oranges), 1967

(January 17) Heard about this on Goop and read it mostly to see how it lined up with Abraham-Hicks philosophies. At first it didn't look too correlated at all: it was like Jackson believed the thing we need to know the most is that we are not alone, that loved ones who have passed on are not gone for good, that we are being helped from beyond the grave by individuals that we once knew.

Their help, according to her examples, is usually not of a practical nature, but rather is in the form of signs that affirm an event or decision. An example was a stack of oranges Jackson was presented with after a talk went well, which, because of peculiar associations with deceased loved ones, had a lot of significance for her.

A disconcerting element was that most of the examples of people having experiences with signs from the Other Side seem to be Jackson's long-time personal friends, and a great deal of the advice coming from the Other Side seems to be about whether or not to have a child (the Other Side wants people to have the child 100 per cent of the time, interestingly).

So the book follows this trajectory for quite a while, kind of trying to prove anecdotally that there's an afterlife, when, suddenly, it switches to a discussion of energy shifting (vibrational life, in other words) and goes into what is all very much an Abrahams-Hicks vein... how gratitude leads to manifesting and so on and so on. So surprising!