Scan barcode
emily_m_green's review
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.0
Thank you to Random House Book Club and Goodreads Giveaways for the review copy of Happily: A Personal History—with Fairy Tales by Sabrina Oren Mark, which I received in exchange for a fair and honest review.
In Happily, Mark uses fairytales to discuss personal experiences and public concerns. She considers characters and retellings, gender roles, and the lessons the stories are meant to teach.
While Mark uses fairytales to discuss many different topics, the subject she returns to the most often is family. Her mother enters as a voice on the telephone, her children have the wisdom of youth, her husband as the intonation of support and affection. However, Mark also discusses her struggles as a third wife and stepmother. Knowing that your beloved has had lives before you is always a haint in the background, but ex partners and children make for much noisier ghosts, especially when their history is more complicated than your own.
Happily, for all the difficult and weighty topics it discusses, is not overly heavy, in part because the book chapters are so short. Each chapter is an essay that’s scarcely a breath.
The essays make use of a lot of tactics that poetry uses: allusions, layering of stories, repetition, and bringing together of disparate pieces. Her essays are beautiful collages.
Would I teach Happily? Yes. The essays are excellent instruction of what essays can do and how they can disrupt a typical narrative structure.
In Happily, Mark uses fairytales to discuss personal experiences and public concerns. She considers characters and retellings, gender roles, and the lessons the stories are meant to teach.
While Mark uses fairytales to discuss many different topics, the subject she returns to the most often is family. Her mother enters as a voice on the telephone, her children have the wisdom of youth, her husband as the intonation of support and affection. However, Mark also discusses her struggles as a third wife and stepmother. Knowing that your beloved has had lives before you is always a haint in the background, but ex partners and children make for much noisier ghosts, especially when their history is more complicated than your own.
Happily, for all the difficult and weighty topics it discusses, is not overly heavy, in part because the book chapters are so short. Each chapter is an essay that’s scarcely a breath.
The essays make use of a lot of tactics that poetry uses: allusions, layering of stories, repetition, and bringing together of disparate pieces. Her essays are beautiful collages.
Would I teach Happily? Yes. The essays are excellent instruction of what essays can do and how they can disrupt a typical narrative structure.
tigger89's review
reflective
medium-paced
3.5
When I picked up this title, I wasn't familiar with Sabrina Orah Mark or her column. I do, however, enjoy reading about fairy tales. I wasn't sure what exactly to expect from this collection of memoir essays, but I was pleasantly surprised.
Every essay had an event or theme from her life being related to one or more lessons from a fairy tale. This might be a general musing on mothers and stepmothers in story and life, a discussion of hair loss being related to Rapunzel, or wicked wonderings about the role of mother-as-fairy as a child begins to lose their baby teeth. A few of them felt like they'd been a bit shoehorned, but most were interesting. I particularly enjoyed that she often cited multiple versions of the same story, noting where they differed and where they agreed in relation to the point she was making. The tales explored stayed largely within what we'd consider to be the western canon, which may be disappointing to some readers who were looking for more diversity. While there are frequently references to Jewish tradition, it's not quite the same thing.
The most distinct thing about the essays is their seamless blend of the real and the fantastical. She might be relating an event that happened to her, then suddenly halfway through the scene it begins to feel implausible, as if we've slipped sideways through the fabric of reality and wound up inside a story. It took me a few chapters to catch on and embrace this method of storytelling. There were a many times when I read along for several sentences, unsure whether I was in reality or fairyland. Ultimately I enjoyed it more than I didn't, but I know this won't be for everybody.
These are incredibly personal essays. She frequently discusses her family — parents, sister, husband, children, and step-children — which is to be expected in memoir. But where it gets a bit uncomfortable is at certain points in the chapters when she mentions her writing alienating those close to her, presumably due to her including them in the works. Obviously there's a conversation to be had around boundaries and oversharing when you're emotionally close to someone who makes their life public, in whole or in part. As the consumer, our assumption is that the creator has done the necessary work to have those conversations, avoid sensitive areas, and secure any necessary consent. But her admission that she'd run into troubles with this before left me uncertain, devoid of context, and feeling almost voyeuristic at times. I certainly hope nobody was harmed by any content included in this volume. But ultimately I'm not sure I trust that was the case, which left me feeling conflicted.
Time for The Question! Does the tarantula die? Some of the essays have to deal with her stepdaughter's pet tarantula.The tarantula survives just fine.
Every essay had an event or theme from her life being related to one or more lessons from a fairy tale. This might be a general musing on mothers and stepmothers in story and life, a discussion of hair loss being related to Rapunzel, or wicked wonderings about the role of mother-as-fairy as a child begins to lose their baby teeth. A few of them felt like they'd been a bit shoehorned, but most were interesting. I particularly enjoyed that she often cited multiple versions of the same story, noting where they differed and where they agreed in relation to the point she was making. The tales explored stayed largely within what we'd consider to be the western canon, which may be disappointing to some readers who were looking for more diversity. While there are frequently references to Jewish tradition, it's not quite the same thing.
The most distinct thing about the essays is their seamless blend of the real and the fantastical. She might be relating an event that happened to her, then suddenly halfway through the scene it begins to feel implausible, as if we've slipped sideways through the fabric of reality and wound up inside a story. It took me a few chapters to catch on and embrace this method of storytelling. There were a many times when I read along for several sentences, unsure whether I was in reality or fairyland. Ultimately I enjoyed it more than I didn't, but I know this won't be for everybody.
These are incredibly personal essays. She frequently discusses her family — parents, sister, husband, children, and step-children — which is to be expected in memoir. But where it gets a bit uncomfortable is at certain points in the chapters when she mentions her writing alienating those close to her, presumably due to her including them in the works. Obviously there's a conversation to be had around boundaries and oversharing when you're emotionally close to someone who makes their life public, in whole or in part. As the consumer, our assumption is that the creator has done the necessary work to have those conversations, avoid sensitive areas, and secure any necessary consent. But her admission that she'd run into troubles with this before left me uncertain, devoid of context, and feeling almost voyeuristic at times. I certainly hope nobody was harmed by any content included in this volume. But ultimately I'm not sure I trust that was the case, which left me feeling conflicted.
Time for The Question! Does the tarantula die? Some of the essays have to deal with her stepdaughter's pet tarantula.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Death, Emotional abuse, Antisemitism, Pandemic/Epidemic, and Cancer
Minor: Pregnancy and Racism
ceallaighsbooks's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
fast-paced
5.0
“The reason fairy tales last is that they allow us to gaze at ourselves through a glass that is at once transparent and reflective. They give us a double gaze to see ourselves from the inside out and the outside in, and they exaggerate our roles just enough to bring into focus the little pieces of monster that grow on our hearts.”
TITLE—Happily
AUTHOR—Sabrina Orah Mark
PUBLISHED—2023
PUBLISHER—Random House
GENRE—memoir, essays
SETTING—modern day u.s.
MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—motherhood &
stepmotherhood, marriage (specifically being your partner’s third spouse), fairy tales, Jewish culture & identity, life in america, queer author, the cov*d pandemic, a loved one with cancer, mother-daughter relationship, writing / being a writer, heritage & inheritance, navigating generational divides in your family
WRITING STYLE—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️—my absolute favorite thing about this collection
CHARACTERIZATION—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
STORYTELLING/FLOW—⭐️⭐️⭐️
BONUS ELEMENT/S—Absolutely loved her exploration of all the different themes commonly found in fairy tales in the context of her own life and experiences, especially against the backdrop of the particular idiosyncrasies of modern life.
PHILOSOPHY—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
PREMISE—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
EXECUTION—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
“The citizens of fairy tales have lived under these laws long enough to know the tale they're in has stitched a ‘y’ to the end of ‘fair’—it's a weirdly shaped wing that carries fairness away. The word ‘fairy’, from ‘fata’, is rooted in fate but lifted by magic. Here comes the wind.”
My thoughts:
This was my most anticipated read of 2023 and was also one of those books that I really wanted to inhale but kept trying to slow down my reading pace because I would be so sad when it was over. I have been a fan of Sabrina Orah Mark’s fairy tale-inspired memoir-ish essays since I started reading them on The Paris Review five years ago so when I saw that she was finally publishing a book of them I immediately had to preorder it.
And this book exceeded my expectations with its gorgeous writing and beautiful use of fairy tale themes, imagery, and reimaginings.
I also especially loved all the reflections on her childhood, growing up Jewish in NYC and how learning (& unlearning) fairy tale lessons informs her navigation of motherhood.
I was surprised to see so 👏🏻 many 👏🏻 essays 👏🏻 were about being her husband’s third wife. At first it started to feel repetitive until I realized that that was because this is an experience that just has an effect on so many different parts of her life and is one of the things that she has turned to writing in particular in order to work out all the complex feelings and situations that come with being a person’s third spouse. It was the same with the motherhood essays which felt kind of repetitive (to me) too after a while but were still all very intentionally written.
“Like marriage, the cultural resilience of "Bluebeard" is mystifying. And like a fairy tale, marriage belongs to a never-ending circulation of happily-ever-afters in the shape of a cliff.”
My favorite essays were: “I Am the Tooth Fairy”, “The Silence of Witches”, “Bah, Humbug”, “Sleeping with the Wizard”, “U Break It We Fix It”, and “An Epilogue: After Ever”.
I would recommend this book to readers who are interested in fairy and folk tale themes and subjects and enjoy memoir essays. This book is best read slowly, maybe even one essay a day, first thing in the morning or before bed.
Final note: I feel like I’m horrible at writing reviews for my favorite books. I never make them sound as good as they are. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Oh well. 😂 Can’t wait to see what Mark writes next!
“It's a shard of glass that fits with my shard of glass perfectly. When I put the two pieces together, it looks like a transparent hand reaching out to help someone up. I want to jump for joy. We have only one hundred million billion pieces to go.”
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
CW // animal cruelty (she describes the lemmings thing from that horrible 1958 “documentary”) (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)
Further Reading—
- “A Psychotronic Childhood,” by Colson Whitehead, published in The New Yorker, May 2012—TBR
- THE SECRET COMMONWEALTH, by Robert Kirk—TBR
- Helen Oyeyemi
- Gregory Maguire
- HOW TO BE EATEN, by Maria Adelmann
- HAG: FORGOTTEN FOLKTALES RETOLD, edited by Carolyne Larrington
- THE BLOODY CHAMBER, by Angela Carter
- LETTERS TO MY WEIRD SISTERS, by Joanne Limburg—TBR
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal death and Animal cruelty
rachel_from_avid_bookshop's review
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
inspiring
reflective
tense
medium-paced
5.0