“How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia,” Geek Love‘s protagonist and narrator Oly-a dwarf with albinism and the least marketably “freakish” of the Binewski family-says. (The book is, of course, horribly funny.)
Love and family are twin nightmares, but they’re also the whole world, so you might as well laugh. Fear is reasonable-but don’t worry everything’s going to be not-okay. It made me feel less alone in my pandemic-compounded new-parent fear. It was the feeling that not-okay is the human condition. It wasn’t only that reading about matriarch (and storied geek) “Crystal” Lil’s prenatal regimen of radioactive isotopes made me feel better about all the coffee I drank while pregnant. “Comfort” is a strange quality to ascribe to a book about a family (the Binewskis) whose parents chemically engineered birth defects in their brood for maximum “giftedness,” but that’s what I found in the pages of Dunn’s masterpiece. The baby, a novice eater (a novice everything) took her time, and I might be immobilized in the dark for an hour, feeling as if I were the only one in the world who had ever had a baby. The best time to read was the middle of the night. So I channeled all my energy into one-handed swipe-reading. But having Twitter open so close to her unfused head felt wrong, too. The truth, of course, is that it’s boring to focus all your attention on a not-quite-baked baby, no matter how precious she is. I had a vague feeling I should be focusing all my attention on her-or at the very least not twitch-checking Twitter every 90 seconds out of some hazy fear of Missing Out.
I spent so many hours trying to move as little as possible so as not to disturb the being who was either tentatively attached to me or asleep on my chest or slowly blinking at a lamp, scowling like she already knew she’d been born into the nightmare of the anthropocene. When she was born, I learned about the specific chasm of dead time having a newborn opens up. (Also: Do I have time to brush up on my Ancient Greek or should I have been reading her Ion in utero ?) The day my induction was scheduled, I raced through the last 50 pages of The Last Samurai, which I had never gotten around to reading before. In the last days of my pregnancy, I despaired of how long it would be until I could finish a book again.
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