Jenn Shapland lives with her partner in Santa Fe, N.M., a place that inspires a variety of pleasant images of an artsy, isolated, desert refuge, a hideaway as shapely and luminescent as a Georgia O’Keeffe painting. Energy vortices, skulls bleached by sand and sun, colorful hot-air balloons — the whole retreat-from-the-rat-race bit. They themselves were seduced by the opportunity “to make a new life happen in a small city surrounded by mountains.” The Craigslist ad for the loft they rented read “MAGICAL / ART / LIVING.”
And true enough, Shapland’s provocative essay collection, Thin Skin, suggests she has indeed found a life there that is independent and comfortable — emotionally if not financially. But each of the book’s five essays emphasizes the point that escape and separation from humanity are fraudulent concepts, no matter how far away you think you’ve gotten from it all. People — especially women — are forever enmeshed in a host of complications related to environment, capitalism, and power. “Peaceful Southwest desert landscape” is just one narrative you can wrap around Santa Fe, to which Shapland presents a host of others: A place of environmental neglect in the wake of nuclear tests; a story about a desperate need for safety in the face of sexism; a home for misconceptions about barrenness of the earth and of women’s bodies.
We are living, Shapland insists, in “utter physical enmeshment with every other being on the planet.” And in the same way that our lives, history, and places interweave with one another, the tone and implications of each of the book’s five essays interweave as well. “Thin Skin” considers the Southwest’s down-winders from nuclear-weapons tests, which bleeds into “Strangers on a Train,” which contemplates narratives that promote a false sense of safety; “The Toomuchness” explores how we cope with anxiety through our possessions, while “Crystal Vortex” considers our need to buy into a capitalist system to claim them; “The Meaning of Life” — confidently ambitious title, that — questions whether propagating the species, and creating narratives about “proper” womanhood to do that, do more harm than good, considering all the wounds she has exposed in the previous four essays. If our dreams make us eager to live in the desert, if we need to escape the abuses of a sexist society we’ve done little to unravel, what are we even doing here?
Living, of course, but perhaps not as much, or as responsibly as we ought to. “The Meaning of Life” dedicates a lot of space to the childfree movement, which Shapland offers both as a counternarrative to the idea that women serve the world best as mothers, and as an argument for saving the planet. This is just one of a series of what Shapland describes as “coping strategies for capitalism,” which puts her in a vigorous tradition of feminist and anti-capitalist writers, from Susan Sontag to Ellen Willis to Audre Lorde to Rachel Carlson (a much-invoked spiritual inspiration for Shapland) to Eula Biss (an oft-invoked literary one) and Simone Weil (ditto).
Still, Thin Skin doesn’t feel like it’s working well-worn ground. That’s partly because while she’s a fine critic, the sangfroid of critical distance is absent: Instead of absenting herself from a collective humanity that’s operating in error, she insists on drawing herself (and us) closer to it. So, enough with the woo-woo chatter about pilgrimages to sacred ground: “No patch of ground is anything but sacred. No patch of ground is anything but soaked in blood. Everything is part of the path.” Enough with benisons about simple living: “Minimalism is a privilege, and far more people live with lack that is unwanted.” Enough with barrenness as a metaphor: “The cultural fear or rejection of barrenness, of childlessness, reminds me of the way some people react to the desert landscape. They assume that it’s blank, lifeless, that nothing grows here. But if you know what you’re looking at, it’s a really life-affirming place.”
But how, then, do we affirm life if we know we have over-lived, wasted, abused, raped? (“The two things most often ‘raped’ in the English language are women and the land. Virgin soil, Mother Nature’s bounty.”) Shapland is skeptical that we — that is, Americans — can. Manifest Destiny is an enduring narrative; our institutional structures remain built around power and consumption. Shapland notes that the Japanese have a word for remorse over wasting something, and Americans do not. And ultimately Shapland proposes the only thing a writer really can do, which is a plea to rethink the words we use — mother, barren, waste, separate — and the narratives we establish around them.
Some of the examples Shapland provides for this predicament are familiar. Witch hunts, she reminds us, were not attacks on religious heresy but on childfree women in the name of “increasing the labor force, i.e., producing more babies.” Some are clever, as when she considers the moths that have tunneled into her wardrobe: “Moths are responsible for the existence of silk … They made the Silk Road, so they basically invented shopping.” Can we dismantle consumerism? Probably not. Eradicate sexism? We haven’t done it yet. But the tone of Thin Skin isn’t one of despair: Look at Rachel Carson, Shapland suggests, and how environmental tragedies were undone. Look at your own body, she says, and how separate it is from nature, how locked it may be in somebody else’s story.
And think of art, Shapland suggests, and how it makes a virtue of lack of structure, how it lets our imaginations bleed into reality. But art needs to be consciously claimed; art, too, is a counternarrative. “Aimlessness is not something I was taught to value, not something our society values or recognizes as a thing,” she writes. Thin Skin is in part a document of how she was able to turn her own aimlessness into made things, books and essays. But she fears that we’re losing our ability to heed that aimlessness, to heed counternarratives: Carson’s landmark book, Silent Spring, wouldn’t make much of a dent today; people would deny the damage and their complicity, just as they do now. All she can do is insist that we still take stock: “Rather than avoid situations that might make us afraid, we can examine our fear, sit with it, ask what it is trying to tell us about the world and whether or not we believe it.” What we fear is the story; our counternarratives, individually or collectively, will save us.
[Published by Pantheon Books on August 15, 2023, 288 pages, $24,00 US hardcover]