Can I thank the Benjamin Drevlow for introducing Ina-Baby to my world? Which is to say that Ina-Baby is an intensely focused look at love. A kind of love. A love in real time. And a breakdown on how love happens, comes together and falls apart. How we get to know the people in our lives and how our lives slowly intertwine with those we love. Their stories becoming our stories. Their family and history and trauma becoming our family and history and trauma. But also how love can slowly slip away, lingering at our fingertips and then gone like it wasn't ever there at all. Further, even if we can all see something of ourselves in all love stories, all love stories are unique in their own way, because we all love what (and how) we love, need what we need, manage what we can manage and suffer in our own ways. And Ina-Baby is all that. Ina-Baby is also about what it looks like to view love, or anything, in reverse. Doing so provides the clarity that comes with being at the end of something, looking back and assessing all of which we don't know when we're in the middle of it. There is also the grief the comes at the end of anything that meant something to you and in a way, it is the feeling of grief that I want to thank Ben Drevlow for most of all. I haven't been able to read much for pleasure during this pandemic. This is no great loss in the face of all the types loss so many are facing. However, reading is my first and longest running pleasure and escape, and there has been no time in my life before this where I was incapable of summoning the energy, much less the desire to read. That said, I did read an article (I've had no problem consuming the news) that suggested that we're all feeling a grief over the recent state of the world and that reading while grieving such a profound and collective loss may be a challenge many of us cannot overcome. It may also be that I've led to0 privileged a life to have grieved in this way before. And all things about this pandemic (as well as the subsequent protests around George Floyd's murder, police brutality and racism) have only served to remind me just how privileged I've been. However if grief is the explanation for my inability to read up until now and Ina-Baby has served to help lift me out of it, than Ina-Baby has not only changed my life, but with so much to grief to work through these days, it may very well change your life as well.
Also, as motivated, most definitely check out the most recent This Book Will Change Your Life post: These Books Will Change Your Life - How To Write An Autobiographical Novel by the Alexander Chee and Death Valley Superstars by the Duke Haney here.