Jenn Shapland

A GOODREADS MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK • Examining capitalism’s toxic creep into the land, our bodies, and our thinking, this incisive new work is “a visceral exploration” (Katherine May, author of Wintering) from a National Book Award finalist and a powerful literary mind. "A wrenching, loving and trenchant examination of feminism, nuclear weapons production, healthcare, queerness and American life" —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel For Jenn Shapland, the barrier between herself and the world is porous; she was even diagnosed with extreme dermatologic sensitivity—thin skin. Recognizing how deeply vulnerable we all are to our surroundings, she becomes aware of the impacts our tiniest choices have on people, places, and species far away. She can't stop seeing the ways we are enmeshed and entangled with everyone else on the planet. Despite our attempts to cordon ourselves off from risk, our boundaries are permeable. Weaving together historical research, interviews, and her everyday life in New Mexico, Shapland probes the lines between self and work, human and animal, need and desire. She traces the legacies of nuclear weapons development on Native land, unable to let go of her search for contamination until it bleeds out into her own family’s medical history. She questions the toxic myth of white womanhood and the fear of traveling alone that she’s been made to feel since girlhood. And she explores her desire to build a creative life as a queer woman, asking whether such a thing as a meaningful life is possible under capitalism. Ceaselessly curious, uncompromisingly intelligent, and urgently seeking, with Thin Skin Shapland builds thrillingly on her genre-defying debut My Autobiography of Carson McCullers (“Gorgeous, symphonic, tender, and brilliant” —Carmen Machado), firmly establishing herself as one of the sharpest essayists of her generation.

Essays

Thin Skin

Lindsay

To be sensitive is sometimes to err, to overreact, to be too finely calibrated or tightly strung, to be overly cautious. But to be thick-skinned is to be what? Obtuse. To see the hurt and gloss over it, dismiss it, laugh it off.

In his book about millennials, Malcolm Harris writes, “Free time can always turn to productivity, so when productivity is properly managed, there is no such thing as free time.”

The call to motherhood is external, but it is powerful, and naturalizing that call—calling it an instinct that just kicks in—helps keep the structures of heteronormative society intact. What is a biological clock? A euphemism for mortality? Or worse: a fear of no longer being a “viable” woman?

This is the catch-22 at the heart of feminism: that by pointing out, in this case, the systemic imperative to have kids, by detailing the pro-natalist culture in which we are raised and continue to live, I imply that none of us is really acting with agency. Not because of some biological clock, but because of the structures that reinforce motherhood as a norm for female identity. Those who refuse motherhood are also reacting to these systems. There is no free place from which to decide. It places us all on shaky ground. And yet if we don’t revisit the history, dissect the structures in which we are entangled, the long trajectory that brought us to the reversal of Roe, they have the power to prescribe not only our desires but our reality.

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