“New Mexico, my refuge, has historically been treated as a wasteland, a ‘sacrifice zone,’ by the U.S. government,” writes Jenn Shapland in the title essay of her collection Thin Skin. Not only was the land degraded as a result of the Manhattan Project (which developed the first atom bomb and was led by Robert Oppenheimer, events recently enshrined in Christopher Nolan’s biopic) but its native population, the Diné and Pueblo peoples, was displaced. Even the names of the bomb-testing sites involved appropriation: They were called kivas, the Tewa word for “sacred meeting spot.” In the book’s strongest essay, Shapland reckons with the environmental legacies of the 1945 detonation of the bomb in her adopted home state, giving voice to New Mexicans who are coping with the “downwind” effects of nuclear testing and relaying her own experiences of trying to make a home as a queer woman in a state that is undergoing “the equivalent of a fallout.”
In addition to being grounded in a strong sense of place, many of these essays are linked by what Shapland calls her “systemic sensitivity.” As she elaborates in her first essay, “The layer beneath the skin that contains ceramides, which keeps the bad stuff out and holds moisture in, is more like a lazy macrame on me.” If she washes her hands too often, she becomes susceptible to rashes. Her medical condition also manifests as a philosophical orientation to the world, making her especially attuned to the “thinness of the membrane” between her and other creatures, “between health and illness. Life and death.” In an essay tracing the life and legacy of the early environmental activist Rachel Carson, Shapland makes a compelling argument for embracing a politics of “pleasure and fecundity” that emphasizes “the richness of possible relationships with extant beings.” By extricating herself from the academic rat race, moving to Sante Fe, adopting a queer lifestyle, and choosing to raise cats instead of children, Shapland opts for a “multispecies family.” In contrast to heterosexual relationships, which felt to Shapland like a series of doorways, a queer lifestyle is “an open field, an expanse in which to be, to become.”
This overflowing sympathy — this urge to testify against oneself — makes for an almost critic-proof book
There’s an appealing free-range quality to these essays as well, which zig and zag among a range of ideas as if in a particle accelerator. Shapland moves fluidly from Marie Curie’s fateful work on the nature of radioactivity to her own upbringing as “an extremely sheltered kid” in Chicago to her visit to the Memorial for Peace and Justice in Alabama (“the first memorial to lynching in American history [and] also a chronicle of white womanhood”). A keen sense of curiosity irrigates the essays — a willingness to overturn conventional ideas. In the essay on the fragility of white women, Shapland writes, “If it’s white women whose safety we will do anything to protect, white women who we falsely believe are most threatened, most at risk, that suggests that we also believe deep down that white women are the ones who most deserve to be hurt and killed. Our fears are caught up in our desires, and our desires are shaped by what we are taught to hate.” If this is true, one might make the case that desires, and by extension, our fears, are malleable; the claim is not too different from postcolonial scholar Gayatri Spivak’s idea that education is about “the non-coercive rearrangement of desire.”
But for all its cogent points about being porous to possibilities and cultivating transgenerational relationships, the book occasionally sounds a glib note, as when she asks, “What are women’s magazines but tiny prisons, glossy surveillance states for our psyches?” The same holds true of her critiques of capitalism, as when she grouses about how, under the totalizing logic of capitalism, “things with ostensibly good intentions are so easily co-opted into malignant or degrading things.” The book is also generously scattered with the literary equivalent of land acknowledgments. “To what extent is my own research a form of extractivism, a digging and unearthing that is painful to […] the people I interview?” she asks in the opening salvo of an essay that sets the earnestly apologetic tone for the rest of the book. Elsewhere, she observes that “To claim the outdoors is to take up space in a world that asks Black and brown and Native women to make themselves small and inconspicuous, that asks some not to exist at all.” In another essay, she preemptively repents — I mean, notes — that “as a white woman in an affluent country my existence contributes to both the destruction of the planet and the violence of white supremacy.”
This overflowing sympathy — this urge to testify against oneself — makes for an almost critic-proof book; there’s no charge you could lodge against the author’s limited viewpoints that she has not already arraigned herself for. Incidentally, it’s a tactic that has seeped into the groundwater of contemporary essays written by women. Call it the interiority complex: Recent nonfiction books by the likes of Katy Kelleher (The Ugly History of Beautiful Things), Eula Biss (Having and Being Had, and, to a lesser extent, Jenny Odell (Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock) all succumb to this urge, all but prostrating themselves before the idea that “conditions that have allowed me to prosper during my lifetime were created purposefully by people who were, like me, white,” to quote Kelleher. In their affinity for apologies, these authors embody nothing so much as Robert Frost’s quip about a liberal as “a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.”
Some have argued that ambivalence has been baked into the essay from its earliest forms, yet, as Jackson Arn stated in a virtuosic piece, the essay is “most compelling when it’s arrived at, not assumed from the start.” One could say the same about apologies: Baldly stated and reiterated in Shapland’s essays, they verge on being “too much,” to borrow the title of one. When she mopingly notes for the nth time, “I am taking up space when I publish a book. I am using up valuable resources” — an idea that tellingly could have been slotted into any of her other essays — one wants to grab the author by the shoulders and shake her out of her apologetic stupor. For one thing, the use of valuable resources is often justified by a valuable finished product. How valuable is this book? Your mileage will vary; people put off by bromides like “acknowledging and reckoning with death […] can reframe what it means to live” might want to steer clear. For another, if we are to take Shapland at her empirical word, writing a book seems hardly to rank compared with the emissions savings of other lifestyle choices such as avoiding air travel, recycling, not owning a car, and not having children. Shapland includes all of these activities, minus book writing, on a chart in one of her essays — remaining childfree dwarfs the other categories by several orders of magnitude. Yet perhaps the greater danger in dwelling incessantly upon one’s privilege is that it becomes a diuretic for political action — naming one’s privilege becomes the alpha and omega of radical change.
At the end of the collection, Shapland approvingly cites Sophie Lewis’s tract on family abolition, which is predicated on nothing less than “a total overthrow of the system of capitalism.” She professes admiration for Lewis’s “extreme position, her refusal to hedge” and avers that “I take her work as a challenge to undermine the idea of family, to question it, to define it for ourselves.” It’s a nice idea, but to crib from Marx, she has “only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” ❖
Rhoda Feng is a freelance writer based in New York whose work has appeared in 4Columns, The Baffler, BOMB, the White Review, Bookforum, Public Books, and The New Republic, among other publications.
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