A Year in Reading: Megan Giddings

I keep thinking about a weekend in January that felt as if the entire year was contained inside it. On the Friday, my husband I drove back to Michigan, the sky gray and the air pressure low and the grocery stores crowded with people buying water and wine and bread for when the snow started. I was reading to him on and off through the drive my favorite sentences from Meng Jin‘s Little Gods. The next day, the storm had started, and we were at a memorial service. The officiant didn’t really talk about our loved one, he somehow instead used it as an opportunity to talk about gender roles “being a good wife, a good mother, an ideal female”; someone found a way to turn this moment meant to heal into a discussion about race in the state of Michigan. I felt wild and exhausted. I read the program over and over, trying to be anywhere else. Don’t let this happen to me when I die, I thought, and felt a little ashamed to be thinking about me, then, there.

Then, we drove directly through the storm. Cars slid into ditches. We were alone together and listening to the only thing that felt right, ‘s . People veered off the road. Ambulance and police sirens flashed, then disappeared into the snow, the permanent gloaming from the storm. The next morning, we went to our niece’s baptism. We read about how in the Catholic church, a baptism is an exorcism. I had forgotten that fact and I couldn’t stop reading about it after. People kept talking to us about how we had experienced the full