Just finished reading Banana Yoshimoto's "Kitchen", which deals with mourning, rituals of love and comfort, and kitchens/cooking in this really lovely blunt and honest and even occasionally humorous way. It was a great thing to be reading this weekend.

This is such a helpful way of putting this -- I was talking about it with friends last night but couldn't find a way to properly articulate the sense of exhaustion from watching the same cycles of public grieving and critical responses, over and over again. Or, conversely, public celebration in response to political victories (rainbow profile pictures, etc.) -- the first to grieve and celebrate always seem to be torn down. Isn't it hard enough just to be human in times like these?

I've just finished the entire series, and I've been hoping to talk about them with someone! By the end, I was actually most interested in the parent/child relationships -- maybe that's more fleshed out in book four, though? The Elena/Lila relationship is so deeply real and ugly and nuanced -- have known some Lilas as well. I've also tried moving on to Days of Abandonment, which contains a lot of similar themes re: grief/violence/female ugliness/etc., but it's so much in such a short time, it's been harder for me to get through.