Previous installments of This Week in Reading can be found here .

I am now back in the bosom of the United States, without having been vomited on by my child (batting .500 over the last four trips), so if Gravol has any interest in sponsoring a post about how not to be vomited on by your child, I would be happy to put you in touch with our publisher. That stuff works . It also knocked her out such that she slept through a 1.5 hr delay and being moved from her stroller to a car seat on the plane. Gravol saves lives and souls.

As a result, I was able to tear through David Oshinsky’s Polio: An American Story , which I had started ages ago and never finished, for no real reason. You know how that happens? You’re all “this book is excellent, and I am enjoying it,” and the next thing you know you’re knee-deep into something else, and simply have to assume that a successful polio vaccine was eventually developed because you rarely run into people with polio?

No, let’s be serious. Oshinsky’s book is great for many, many reasons. He refuses to overblow the actual epidemiological significance of polio; polio having always held the public in greater terror than the actual numbers and likelihood of paralysis in polio sufferers warranted (the horrors of 1952 notwithstanding), and is absolutely brilliant on charting the way polio existed as a villain in the public consciousness. The work of the March of Dimes, the exceptional percentage of the American population who contributed financially to research efforts, the role of class and race, etc. It’s also a thrilling tale of the work of vaccine development. The inside-baseball on Salk and Sabin and Koprowski in their pursuit of a workable vaccine, and, for me, at least, the poignance of making hard decisions about trials. When does it become unethical to continue using placebo groups? Can one possibly describe a body of institutionalized, minor children as “volunteers” in a trial? It’s a social history, in addition to a medical one, and it’s one you should all read. It also makes you want to shake the anti-vaccine weirdos who claim that polio was already on the way out due to “hygiene/clean water/blah,” but, you know, most vaccine-related materials will spark that reaction.

Now, man books. I am a strong partisan of buying men’s magazines on flights “for the articles.” Not, like, Maxim, which is ridic, but Esquire and Men’s Journal often have really great stuff. I mean, I’m a Vanity Fair girl, to the bone (which is why William Langewiesche’s people sometimes email to alert me to his most recent doings – grocery shopping, park-bench-sitting, list-writing, possibly inserting false details to prevent me from showing up and dangling my arms around his neck and mouthing tell me more about ferry disasters into his handsome, handsome ears), but the recent issue of Esquire with Matt Damon on the cover had this gorgeous short work of fiction by Adam Johnson which I read in a total state of rapture and envy. Read it now! It also had a DROP MIC-esque takedown of the neurosurgeon who claims to have briefly visited heaven , and, well, Matt Damon saying some actually mildly interesting things about the nature of celebrity. It was great, is what I’m saying. The July issue of Esquire is great.

Oh, here’s the Matt Damon bit I liked:

When it happens to you, it’s not that you change. Everybody says you change, and you do eventually. But what happens, almost overnight, is that nothing and everything changes at the same time. You’re aware that everything that mattered yesterday still matters today. Everything is the same, and intellectually you understand that. But the world is completely different — for you. Everybody has changed their relationship to you, but you still live in the same world. So when people talk about the surreality of fame, that’s what they’re talking about. That’s what it was for me. It’s walking into a restaurant and everybody turns their head and starts whispering — and you’re like, ‘But I ate at this restaurant last week.’ And so the world is still the same — it’s just never going to be the same for me. And that’s a real mind-fuck. The world is one degree stranger. It’s not like the houses have suddenly turned to gingerbread and you go, ‘Oh, it wasn’t like that before.’ You live in the same house, you go to the same market, you get coffee in the same place. It’s just that somebody has hired an unlimited amount of extras and given them very specific directions — for you. It’s as if a director has gotten there before you and grabbed a bullhorn and said, ‘Okay, when he comes in, if your name begins with A through M, count to ten and then notice him. N through Z, notice him right away.’ It’s very strange.

Now, man books, but seriously this time. I read Paul Carr’s account of getting sober without AA, which was pretty interesting, because I always enjoy people talking about getting sober without AA, which is a real thing that happens. This one did the thing I find particularly aggravating though, because just as you want to eye-roll at people who are complete AA-zombies and believe anyone who doesn’t do AA is going to drink again and is deluding themselves, Carr absolutely does that for not-AA. He is super, super contemptuous of AA, which is definitely a dick move considering that many, many people owe their sobriety to AA, but I also liked some of what he had to say (he is also just very entertaining, in that men’s magazine booze-and-boobs-and-fast-cars-and-the-opposite-of-unicorns-and-glitter style of being very entertaining). I like the idea that if you’ve been sober for ten years and then have a glass of wine at a wedding and then go back to not-drinking, there is no real reason to decide you have to restart an arbitrary clock of sobriety. That being said, there are alcoholics who can pull that off, and there are alcoholics who will absolutely be sleeping under an overturned boat twelve hours after that wedding-glass-of-wine. I guess, really, the issue is that “I dunno, you do you?” makes for a terrible book that no one will ever buy, even though it may actually be The Answer to everything.

So then, because he talks about it in his sobriety book, I bought The Upgrade , which is his account of realizing it would be cheaper to sell all his stuff and discount-surf between hotels instead of continuing to pay rent on his London apartment. It’s very funny. He is not sober yet, so it involves a lot of hilarious drinking stories which are no longer hilarious when viewed through the lens of knowing he was a hot mess? I don’t know. Like I said, I genuinely enjoyed reading both of these books, in a goofy way, and it made me very conscious of how some writing just seems incredibly gendered to me. A woman is unlikely to write a lot of fun stories about waking up completely naked in a hotel corridor. Those stories will not be that fun. There’s a carelessness to his prose which I found myself envying, not as a writer, but as a person. Live on the edge of danger! String freelance gigs together! Never worry about where your next pap smear is coming from! Trash expensive rental cars!

(For the night is dark and full of terrors.)

See you next week.

Works Referenced:

Paul Carr , The Upgrade: A Cautionary Tale of a Life Without Reservations ( Goodreads | Amazon )
Paul Carr , Sober Is My New Drunk ( Byliner | Kindle Single )
David Oshinsky , Polio: An American Story (Indiebound | Amazon )