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It’s not panic, exactly. It’s almost–panic, a tremor of a fear that is beginning to surge but is not yet quite established. It’s hearing an echo, a whisper in a nervous crowd. One person coughs on the train, everyone stares. Reactions shaped by a lifetime of narratives about the End—the disaster that changes everything, the disease that triggers a cataclysm. We know how this story goes, right?

A few weeks ago, before this became this, I picked up Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, a tight and expressive science fiction classic that was new ground to me. The disaster in the book is climate change, and the response causes a cataclysm. It’s a lean, careful story that is proud of itself but never showy: this apocalypse is built with hints rather than eruptions. 

In Butler’s universe, one community gathers to save itself then—when everything is taken away—a new group gathers to worship. Their God is change, an idea which feels new to those inside the story but is utterly familiar; an uncaring, unsparing power bigger than all of us. Change is constant and bleak and unrelenting, but it’s also a river you can ride. Even if you lose yourself to it, you aren’t necessarily lost. 

Just before Sower, I’d read another book about God: Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. This time it wasn’t new—I’ve read it before, although, as I worked it through I honestly couldn’t remember the first time around.

It’s a parable of its own, really. A series of letters to God, although not quite the same God. Change happens to Celie, again and again, a series of quiet cataclysms that the outside world chooses to ignore. And then, when change seems like it’s , circumstances shift and she gets the chance to be a kind of change all of her own. The God of The Color Purple seems very different from Sower, but perhaps it’s also exactly the same: a force that keeps acting on everyone because it can’t do anything else. 

And in between them both, I suppose I saw a lesson. Our reaction to what happens is as important as what it is; the way we stare into the disaster that shapes what it can do to us. These aren’t stories about apocalypse. They are about survival. They need you to have made it out in order to recount what happened. And that, that is how this story always goes.

Every week or so I write about a book I’ve read, as well as throw in some extra links. To get these reviews as soon as they come out, sign up at brb.substack.com.

The thing about being poor is that you never quite realize it until something happens—a moment of shame that puts you in your place, or an embarrassment that flushes your truth out for everyone to see. 

The thing about being really poor, though, is that you realize it all the time.

We veered between different points along the spectrum, traveling one way and another driven by the ups and downs of an economy nobody really understood and that was entirely out of our control. At its best, we were upwardly mobile with eyes on the future. At its worst we were bankrupt and homeless. I think a lot now about how my parents, who were just kids themselves really, made their way through. Life on the estates was good but never simple, although I never quite understood what was happening until I was older—we were too proud, maybe, or I was just too unaware of what life outside looked like to make a comparison. It was only when I went to university that I really understood I was poor.

In The End of Eddy, a memoir by Eduoard Louis, he knows it from the start. Eddy’s family is angry, ground down by alcoholism and disability. He’s the youngest of a brood growing up with nothing in a world where most people have everything (Louis grew up in the 90s and 2000s: this is not ancient history.)

When the book came out, it got the same kind of dewy-eyed “staggering insight into rural poverty” notices—a Hillbilly Elegy for the France of Le Pen and, later, gilet jaunes.

But this book isn’t the tale of France; it’s not even not the story of a dirt poor, rural French family. It’s the tale of the gay son who needs to escape his life to find something different. 

The End of Eddy has its own strange momentum. The writing is raw in places, although more in the sense of being unfinished than heartfelt. It’s direct; horrifying at times, but never quite beautiful. Eddy is full of rage and conflict and betrayal, and I liked that I didn’t find him likeable, which feels perverse to write down. The thing is, nobody is a hero here, although maybe when Eddy describes discovering what the world wants to do to him—emotionally, sexually, physically—you are at least on his side. His poverty is not a surprise, but it’s what that lets the world do to him that crushes you.

Every week or so I write about a book I’ve read, as well as throw in some extra links. To get these reviews as soon as they come out, sign up at brb.substack.com.