Sabrina Orah Mark, Happily: A Personal History—with Fairy Tales

At the end of this year, which had a truly Gothic amount of plot in it, we’re anticipating more wildness in the months to come. Into the Woods after the demise of the narrator. Over the holidays and in between time with family and friends, while reading lush and piercing work in process and building my winter course, I’ve been reading Sabrina Orah Mark’s beautiful Happily: A Personal History—with Fairy Tales. She interweaves motifs and histories of Jewish and other tales with family stories and cultural readings, and grapples with how to both interpret and survive the world around us. Mark, whose poetry and short fiction live in the realm of tales and dreams, here digs into the sources and nature of these tales.

Essays in this book appeared as part of her “Happily” column for The Paris Review. In the early lockdown stages of the pandemic, so many of us read “Fuck the Bread. The Bread is Over.” That piece is in here as one of 26 stories/essays (along with a prologue and an epilogue). The pieces stand on their own, and Mark also threads her life as daughter, mother, stepmother, and wife through the book, one dropped-in moment giving context to later (and earlier) pieces. “There are doors no third wife should ever open,” she writes in “A Bluebeard of Wives.” In a meeting at her synagogue, after the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh, someone accuses her of keeping her children in a bubble because she doesn’t talk to them about it. She says, “My children ask me if their Black father was ever a slave. They ask me if they will ever be turned into slaves. They ask me if I would ever be turned into a slave for being their mother. As Black Jewish boys, my children will never be in a bubble. But if there was a bubble big enough, I’d move there in a second.” Everyone gets very quiet. “Tell me where the bubble is. Where’s the bubble?”

She chases that impossible bubble all through the book as she reinvents and re-envisions the tales and as she tells (or alludes to) stories that her family would rather keep private.

A student asks me if I ever wonder if I should just stop writing. “Is it really worth it?” she asks. “All this vulnerability? All this exposure? Possibly hurting everyone you love?”

I tell her language is what I have, and I think without it I’d grow tentacles, and sharp little teeth would poke through my skull. She laughs. “I’m serious,” I say. “If I stopped writing, I’d go sea witch.”

The student asks if certain things should be left sacred, like the children. Mark wonders, “How can I write about motherhood without writing about my children? Who would play their part? The birds in the trees? A stranger? The shadows?”

Her painful dilemma: wanting to keep the children in a bubble while also feeling compelled to write truths that expose them. But perhaps also free them. Wanting to protect them. Fighting her own mind and the sharp little teeth. Something writers face. Are we going to ask permission? (I do, not every writer does.) A friend of mine says her father didn’t speak to her for a decade after her memoir was published, and she’d thought her portrait of him was a kind one.

Mark’s family revelations often come with no explanation or follow-up, as mysterious as the tales she links them to. In “Children with Mothers Don’t Eat Houses,” she writes,

In the Grimms’ “Hansel and Gretel,” it’s not the breadcrumbs but the moonlit pebbles that point the children home. The breadcrumbs, eaten by birds, are the vanishing path that lead Hansel and Gretel to an edible house inhabited by a ravenous witch. At first, Hansel and Gretel gently nibble at the house, like mice. Then Hansel tears off a big piece of cake-roof. Then Gretel knocks out an entire sugar windowpane. The children are insatiable because what they are really hungry for is a mother and their mother is gone. Children with mothers don’t eat houses.

As the pieces continue, Mark’s continual reporting of conversations with her mother shows us how entwined they are, but the book also gives a sense of their disconnections. The absences. Having a mother and also not having that mother:

For my whole life, my mother has periodically stopped speaking to me. For months. For weeks. Sometimes only for days. The reasons are as old as the oldest fairy tale. As old as pebbles. I have betrayed her by disagreeing. I have spoken up for myself. She has slipped from the center of my attention. And now she has stopped speaking to me again. For days my chest feels like it’s filling up with dry leaves. My head is bricks and glass. A shattering takes up residence in my body. I am middle-aged, and her silence still does this to me. I want sugar. I want to sleep.

In less than three paragraphs, the witch in “Hansel and Gretel” goes from mother to un-mother. First she feeds the children her house. Then she plans on eating them. She is as “old as the hills” because she is as old as all the un-motherish parts of all the mothers—since the beginning of time—added up. She is the stepmother’s hatred of Hansel and Gretel grown older and more feral. A hobbling, hungry hatred. A blind hatred with a “keen sense of smell.” What nourishes the witch are the children she despises.

“It’s always good,” says my mother, “to be a little bit hungry.”

When I was twelve and my twin brothers were nine, we three lived by ourselves in our own apartment in New York City. We had a television on a cart we’d wheel around the living room waiting for The Wonder Years to come on so we could disappear into a family. And we had a frying pan. We had small hands that our grandfather would close around thick wads of cash. We had a father we saw on Thursdays and every other weekend. We had a mother in the penthouse, eight floors above us. We went to yeshiva. We studied Talmud. We stole school lunch.

Mark—mother, stepmother, and daughter, poet and reader—is hungry, full of questions. She uses collage and juxtaposition instead of answers, though the questions get more numerous and urgent over time. Here, she doesn’t give us the fight with her her mother, but her interpretation and metaphors (“my chest feels like it’s filling up with dry leaves. My head is bricks and glass.”) She wants what we want (not to be shattered, and then, when we are, sugar and sleep).

She jumps from family to tale and then back. Mother. Witch. Unmother. Stepmother. In the story above, as in her elliptical writing about the stepdaughter who lived with them seven months, I think she’s both child and witch. Her mother didn’t feed or live with the children in this story. Mark doesn’t answer a reader’s questions (why can’t the children also live in the penthouse? Did she never come downstairs or they go up?) But the older she gets, the more life breaks into this world of wolvish independence. She has her own children; she cannot live in a bubble.

In our contemporary world, with the narrator gone and the giant stomping through the forest, any illusion of a bubble has disappeared. This book darkens as it goes on, and the darker it gets, the more it erupts into surrealist imaginings and reimaginings of the family stories, of the fairy tales. The old tales, the real versions, are often dark enough to start with. And that feels like the truth (part of the truth). I’m in the mood right now for very dark and wild stories that remind me we have no idea how any of this will end. Or who else we might meet in the woods as we set off to see our friends.

News

Writing

Recently, I’ve been working on shorter pieces in the marshy territory of fiction and “personal history” (I like the term Mark uses for Happily). Here are two pieces that just came out in LEON Literary Review (“Hiding Places” and “The Dinner Guest”). These pieces may be part of something longer in the end. And I wrote about holding on and letting go in Rachel Khong’s moving first novel Goodbye, Vitamin, for Alta Journal and the California Book Club. And after a second round of edits and copyedits for my next book, Marriage to the Sea, it’s gone off to proofreading and book design. My editor has come up with a couple of great cover images that capture the spirit of the book, so I’m excited to see what happens.

Submission call

The Big Moose Prize

My spouse, Ron Nyren won Black Lawrence Press’s Big Moose prize a few years ago for The Book of Lost Light. BLP was wonderful to work with and is doing great work in the literary world, including heroically rescuing other presses after the SPD meltdown. Here’s the description of the Big Moose Prize (they also have other prizes and other calls for submission at various points in the year):

Each year Black Lawrence Press will award The Big Moose Prize for an unpublished novel. The prize is open to new, emerging, and established writers. The winner of this contest will receive book publication, a $1,000 cash award, and ten copies of the book. Prizes will be awarded on publication.

The Big Moose Prize is open to traditional novels as well as novels-in-stories, novels-in-poems, and other hybrid forms that contain within them the spirit of a novel.

MPP contributor news

It’s always exciting to see new and forthcoming work from past MPP contributors (and if I’m missing anything, please let me know). Last month, after my reading of Ali Smith’s Autumn, I did a roundup of full books. This month, I want to highlight shorter pieces: Maw Shein Win has work from her beautiful Percussing the Thinking Jar in the next issue of The American Poetry Review. And Beth Alvarado’s “Time in the Shape of Hills,” a gorgeous essay about walking the Camino de Santiago with her son, in January’s issue of The Sun. Meanwhile, I’m linking to an earlier essay published there, “Stars and Moons and Comets,” which you can also find in her amazing essay collection, Anxious Attachments.

Sharing with you a video that a brilliant writer friend sent me. A story of being lost in the woods that also brings a lot of comfort.

Hedgehog in the Fog - Russian cartoon + English subtitle

Welcome to the new readers joining us this month, and welcome back to everyone who’s been with the Marvelous Paragraph Project, whether for a short or longer time. Thank you for reading and being there. And thanks to those of you who wrote this year with thoughts about the books or just to let me know that you are finding these MPP pieces helpful. May there be comfort and great stories for you and everyone you love this year.