Lady Business: The endurance of grief; Good reads, and better endings

Hello, and welcome to Lady Business, a newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 137th issue, published January 16, 2022.

Happy 2022, everyone. In mid-December I wrote most of a newsletter that did the traditional end-of-year wrapup thing, mostly about the stories and professional accomplishments I was proudest of. And then I never sent it, because—well, I was burned out; Omicron was canceling everything and making the pandemic terrifying again; after my year of covering the ongoing economic disasters affecting American women, the caretaking legislation that could actually address some of those crises had just died; and 2021 was the worst year of my life, personally, in ways that are still reverberating, so—my enthusiasm for much end-of-year reflection withered un-newslettered.

It’s difficult to continue publicly discussing grief and bereavement without seeming exhibitionist or sympathy-seeking. But I’ve come to deeply understand what I’d previously only known theoretically: the months after the first shock of loss can be even lonelier and more difficult than the initial days and weeks. Which leads to this fun choice in many interactions: Do you remind everyone of your grief, and risk appearing exhibitionist/sympathy-seeking/etc? Or do you just muddle through quietly, and risk being judged as diminished, muted, worse at work/life/whatever?

Anyway, it was good to have a couple of weeks with loved ones and away from that exhausting dilemma. I also spent most of my holidays devouring novels, especially of the futuristic-to-dystopian variety, after struggling to find joy in reading fiction during the past two years, when the pandemic and the work-from-home bunker and the always-online lifestyle it ushered in sapped much of my desire to read for fun. Some of my favorite recent reads include:

—The first four novellas of Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries, delightful beach reads about a genocidal robot that gives itself free will—and then decides to spend its time watching Netflix. (And maybe saving some humans, if it must.)

—Marissa Levien’s The World Gives Way, a debut novel about a doomed spaceship carrying the last of the human race, which did a really lovely job of writing about the stages of grief without ever naming them as such.

—The Fifth Season, the first of N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy and one of the best books I’ve read in recent years. It reminded me of a more adult, more realistically brutal, more explicitly race-conscious Hunger Games: It’s also about children who are enslaved and brought to a gleaming capital, to live and die for the convenience of wealthy elites, in a world reshaped by violent climate change. I can’t wait to read the next two books in the trilogy–and to watch the eventual movie adaptations. (The book also sent me back to this New Yorker profile of Jemisin from 2020, ahead of the publication of The City We Became.)

—I did not reread Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, which I found both compulsively readable and completely ludicrous a few years ago, but I devoured this blistering, and extremely well-argued, New York critique of Yanagihara’s new book and ongoing torture-porn fascinations. (“Reading A Little Life, one can get the impression that Yanagihara is somewhere high above with a magnifying glass, burning her beautiful boys like ants.”) 

—And James S.A. Corey’s Leviathan Falls, the ninth and final novel in The Expanse series that served as the basis for one of my favorite current TV shows. I … really did not like this ending! For a few reasons: It felt dictated by the authors’ pre-conceived plot structure and desire to tie things up poetically, rather than by organic character motivations and decisions. (Shades of How I Met Your Mother!) It introduced and spent too much time on too many new characters, rather than telling the stories of the people they spent the previous eight books (and several novellas) making readers care about.

But mostly: The Expanse, like the Game of Thrones it is so often compared to, is about politics, generational conflicts, and individual characters in a world threatened by larger supernatural forces (the White Walkers in GoT, the superpowerful alien “protomolecule” and “Goths” in The Expanse). I’m very interested in the politics, the conflicts, and the individual characters. I absolutely do not care about the underlying mechanics of the supernatural macguffin—and unfortunately, that’s what a good 40% of Leviathan Falls tried to make me care about.

Fortunately, my disappointment in the book series’ conclusion has been alleviated by my satisfaction with the television series’ far superior ending this week. Some of that is timing: Amazon canceled The Expanse after its sixth season, roughly analogous to the end of the sixth book, before the TV show could catch up to the thrilling but ultimately disappointing final third of the story. But some of it is the TV show’s track record of improving on the books at almost every turn—especially in terms of fleshing out and giving more story to its female characters. (And props here to book authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, who share the James S.A. Corey pseudonym; they’ve been deeply involved with the TV series and deserve a lot of credit for making their own story better on the second pass.)

Naomi Nagata, who got especially shortchanged in Leviathan Falls, in the TV show’s final two seasons becomes more of a protagonist than her amiable reluctant-hero boyfriend, Jim Holden—and gets the finale’s closing monologue. Chrisjen Avasarala, the weary establishment politician whose book role is mostly supporting, got to be powerful, vulnerable and flawed in a million shades of grey (and, perhaps in an acknowledgement that even futuristic female politicians can’t escape fashion scrutiny, increasingly fabulous jewelry). Camina Drummer, the administrative aide turned pirate turned resistance leader turned galactic president, condensed several book characters’ arcs to become the TV show’s stealthy, tragic heroine. And I loved how the TV show dramatized one of the sixth book’s best moments: When Holden, appointed to lead a new organization representing Drummer’s long-oppressed people, resigns to give her power instead. “I’m an outsider, and I always will be—and there’s a problem with that,” he acknowledges. 

The ending of The Expanse TV show wasn’t perfect. Amazon cut the final season from its usual ten episodes to six, for reasons that seem budget-related; the resulting story was rushed and condensed in places, although I appreciate how many quiet scenes between longtime characters the writers still made time for. And the show’s creators—as well as most fans—clearly hope to continue the on-screen story at some point. Maybe by then they’ll have figured out a way to give The Expanse a better ending. But if they never get that chance, I’m very happy with this one. 

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