This collection of written work provided a sense of belonging. Reading it was akin to having a heart-to-heart conversation with a close friend who deeply understands the issues at hand. The author may not have all the answers to solve the problems, but she can empathize and relate to the struggles. The author doesn't judge the reader for spending a lot of time thinking about the idiosyncrasies of their cats' personalities or for the many anxieties that often conflict with each other but rather offers a comforting and understanding presence.

Shapland's debut, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, received a lot of attention when it came out a few years ago and was one I was looking to try after I had had the chance to read more of McCullers' fiction. So I jumped at the chance to try her latest collection of essays (I mean who could resist that gorgeous cover?!).

The blurb describes this collection of essays as "ceaselessly curious", and I found that to be an apt description. The essays felt quite broad in scope and ambitious at the outset - for example if a meaningful life is possible under capitalism - but they were all expertly crafted, weaving the personal with the political, creating a memorable collection to add to the personal essay canon.

Bouncing around subjects such as queerness, indigeneity, and colonization, Thin Skin by Jenn Shapland is at its core a study of the boundaries between ourselves and our bodies and a world edging closer to apocalypse. Shapland’s five essays take as their core theme the environmental disaster that we seem to be approaching more violently with every passing day. There’s a great breadth to her curiosity so that the result is a book that stretches beyond these thematic limits, even as it’s limited sometimes by a lack of desire to dig more deeply into the diverse issues it confronts.

The first essay discusses Shapland’s experience living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, close to (and environmentally condemned by) the Los Alamos nuclear testing facility. The essay is compelling in large part because of long quotations by different people affected by environmental contamination, including Shapland’s own father, who grew up in the shadow of industrial agriculture. There is a deep paranoia running through the essay—largely warranted!—but which hamstrings my desire for Shapland to play investigative journalist. “I don’t know if this is true where I live,” Shapland writes of her claim that city planners have planted only male trees, which in turn creates more pollen, “I would have to ask an arborist and he would probably deny the whole thing, gaslight me, but it feels true.” Shapland is convinced of her own points without doing the due diligence required to investigate them, calling her other more incisive contributions into question.

The strongest essay is the last one, which focuses on Shapland’s decision to not have children. “Why can’t we not want children for ourselves?” she writes. “The need to imagine the possibilities for lives without children is paramount.” For queer folks, children have been seen as a way to “normalize” relationships that have been pushed to the margins of society (even as, as Shapland insists, queer people have existed forever). But how could we create a society where having children is not the only way to “make a family”—where childless people are not seen as somehow faulty or lacking?

Shapland’s book asks big questions and jumps from big topic to big topic with a hurried insistence. The result is that sometimes her takes seem flippant and her process incurious. That said, she accurately captures our moment in time, where everything seems tied in with the disaster of our planet, and the boundaries between our bodies and the world seem thinner than ever. There’s a great book in there, somewhere—I’m just not sure it’s the one we’ve got.

What I liked: sense of place (Santa Fe), ecological journalism, investigation of environmental injustices, interviews with Native Americans, the cover, author's disclosure of anxiety and other mental and physical health struggles.

Overall I liked this book. Sometimes the essays felt a little long.

I've been sitting with this one for a whole day and I'm still struggling to come up with a decent review, so, here, have a rambling mess and my assurance, for what it is worth, that this collection of essays is far more coherent and intelligent than my review.

This collection made me feel seen, reading it felt like sitting with a friend who just gets it, not that she knows what we need to do to fix it all but she's knows what's up and she can commiserate and she won't think your silly for knowing and spending a lot of time considering the details of your cats' personalities or for the numerous and sometimes contradictory anxieties we all seem to struggle with.

What else does she just get exactly? Well for starter she really gets that quintessential millennial feeling of wanting to be an "old person" now, of wanting to slow down, to tend to our own garden (be it actual or figurative) but also that urge, that itch and urgency of being productive at all times and the contradiction of it all that we can't escape.

She also gets that capitalism is impossible to avoid and impacts every aspect of our lives and relationships no matter how hard we try to be a proverbial island. That the unavoidable influence of capitalism on our lives is lifetimes in the making and that she doesn't need to tiptoe around saying it. I could go on but I think you get the idea.