I WENT looking for the devil, but James Baldwin found me first. I had good reason to be looking: not only because I was a wobbling Catholic (beware of any other kind) but also because I was almost born prematurely in a movie theater in 1974 as my parents sat trembling to The Exorcist. I’d always known this; it was one of the first things I could remember my mother telling me: “Never watch that movie. It nearly made you a preemie.”
All through the erratic tacking of my teens and twenties, and through shifting degrees of unbelief, I stuck closely to my mother’s paranoid warning—until my early thirties, when deliberately not watching a devil movie seemed worse than cowardly. It seemed a bit silly.
As it turned out, it was The Exorcist that was silly. I could not comprehend what had spooked my nineteen-year-old mother into false-birth pangs. We Catholics, lapsed or not, are a superstitious, demon-happy lot; it doesn’t take all that much to get our demonic cogs going. After I failed to be harassed by The Exorcist, I went in search of Satan-related material to aid myself in understanding that failure. I say that James Baldwin discovered me at this time and not the other way around because I hadn’t gone looking for him and yet there he was, waiting for me. I’m told that God and love often function this way: They find you. Lost in the stacks of Boston University’s Mugar Library, I turned into an aisle and there, out of place at eye-level, was Baldwin’s impeccably titled little book The Devil Finds Work (Dial Press, 1976).
Ofcourse I knew Baldwin as the author of the much anthologized short story “Sonny’s Blues,” and I knew his reputation as a necessary American intellect, but he was among the many necessary intellects I had not yet got around to. Reading The Devil Finds Work was for me one of those scarce encounters when a reader understands that he’ll never be safe from a writer, that he must go in search of that writer’s every sentence, imbibe him whole.
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Literary MagNet
When Greg Marshall began writing the essays that would become his memoir, Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew From It (Abrams Press, June 2023), he wanted to explore growing up in Utah and what he calls \"the oddball occurrences in my oddball family.\" He says, \"I wanted to call the book Long-Term Side Effects of Accutane and pitch it as Six Feet Under meets The Wonder Years.\" But in 2014 he discovered his diagnosis of cerebral palsy, information his family had withheld from him for nearly thirty years, telling him he had \"tight tendons\" in his leg. This revelation shifted the focus of the project, which became an \"investigation into selfhood, uncovering the untold story of my body,\" says Marshall. Irreverent and playful, Leg reckons with disability, illness, queerness, and the process of understanding our families and ourselves.
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AS I read each story in Ada Zhang’s brilliant collection, The Sorrows of Others, within the first few paragraphs— sometimes the first few sentences— I felt I understood the characters intimately and profoundly, such that every choice they made, no matter how radical, ill-advised, or baffling to those around them, seemed inevitable and true to me.
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IN HER LATEST BOOK, THE LIGHT ROOM: ON ART AND CARE, PUBLISHED BY RIVERHEAD BOOKS IN JULY, KATE ZAMBRENO CELEBRATES THE ETHICAL WORK OF CAREGIVING, THE SMALL JOYS OF ORDINARY LIFE, AND AN ENGAGEMENT WITH THE NATURAL WORLD WITHIN HUMAN SPACES.
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