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A review by lolaleviathan
Tiny by Mairead Case
5.0
There is a tiny dog in my house who we call Tiny as a nickname and he responds to it and he has probably grieved a lot in his life and it has made him tough, but not too tough.
I bought my copy of the book TINY at Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia. I guess TINY had been on my radar before, but I didn’t remember that. I just bought it because it had epigraphs from Tracy and the Plastics, Billy-Ray Belcourt, and Donna Haraway.
while reading TINY I had that song stuck in my head where Sharon Van Etten says, "I used to be free. I used to be seventeen." In some ways, I was freer as a teenager than I am now. In other ways, I'm freer now. I've experienced a lot of loss since then. This book, TINY, speaks to both these selves, me now and many teenage mes, many mes in between.
In high school, I read Antigone and was told that Greek tragedy was designed to make the viewer experience catharsis. TINY definitely did.
Antigone/TINY examines individual human loss and the systems that loss is embedded in, without oversimplifying the relationship between bodies and systems. Since of course as Kurt Vonnegut wrote, "even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death." TINY helps me imagine a relationship to death, to grief and mourning, that is about individual bodies and selves, that isn't about blame or cause and effect or even fitting loss into a narrative other than: I loved this person. they are dead. I am alive. I remember them.
now let's go dancing.
I bought my copy of the book TINY at Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia. I guess TINY had been on my radar before, but I didn’t remember that. I just bought it because it had epigraphs from Tracy and the Plastics, Billy-Ray Belcourt, and Donna Haraway.
while reading TINY I had that song stuck in my head where Sharon Van Etten says, "I used to be free. I used to be seventeen." In some ways, I was freer as a teenager than I am now. In other ways, I'm freer now. I've experienced a lot of loss since then. This book, TINY, speaks to both these selves, me now and many teenage mes, many mes in between.
In high school, I read Antigone and was told that Greek tragedy was designed to make the viewer experience catharsis. TINY definitely did.
Antigone/TINY examines individual human loss and the systems that loss is embedded in, without oversimplifying the relationship between bodies and systems. Since of course as Kurt Vonnegut wrote, "even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death." TINY helps me imagine a relationship to death, to grief and mourning, that is about individual bodies and selves, that isn't about blame or cause and effect or even fitting loss into a narrative other than: I loved this person. they are dead. I am alive. I remember them.
now let's go dancing.