Reasons to eat the damn cookie (book review on Anxious People by Fredrick Backman)
The perils and liberations of every day being the same.
This is not a reflection of 2020. The year where everything seemed to crash and burn leaving us with a lingering splash of disbelief and hysteria. As I write this on December 30th with two nights away from 2021, it all feels extremely anticlimactic.
This is a story about cookies.
Just before we propel into a new year I devoured the novel Anxious People by Fredrick Backman. It was a page-turner. The majority of the story takes place in one scene: an apartment open house that turns into an unintended bank robber hostage situation. Also, a bridge becomes an important location both literally and symbolically.
The absurd characters and bizarre plots truthfully display everything that’s ordinary about us. The bitterness we carry in our stomachs, stupidity of risking everything for something, stubbornness of our defensive assumptions, and precision of the weight placed on our shoulders. Most important of all, our ability to reinvent ourselves despite the occasional stormy wind striking us backwards.
I was struck by Fredrik Backman’s rich writing style that says everything while simultaneously concealing information we presumptuously assume isn’t missing. There’s a lot missing in this pandemic reality we’re in. Maybe it’s the lack of sensory information we have when learning, working, or socializing over Zoom. It becomes exhausting the lack of realness in a moment — nothing tangible to remind yourself that something has occurred.
The same could be said about the past. The other day someone in their mid-50s shared with me how their 30s have become a complete blur in recollection. Did it happen? Well, it must’ve, but wow where did the time and memories go?
Recently I’ve watched Pixar’s Soul and the Stranger Than Fiction movie. These movies and this particular book coincidently all have gentle messages around the inevitable mortality of our lives. This anxiety has got to be shedded somewhere. The stressors and anxiety that sometimes fully encapsulates our work and identity. Our treacherous climb up the ladder. The documentation of the mundane and simple pleasures are ferociously important — or at least we should try to make it something worth paying attention to.
Even when we weren’t confided to our homes in a global pandemic most of us had a loosely repetitive life. Something like sleep, eat, work, and socialize in different physical locations. What will we remember? When there’s the illusion of the end what sticks out? It might be that crowded bus with the reoccurring strangers who you’ve never known personally but have shared the same daily bus route. Or your thesis for that one really important thing you poured years into.
SO I’M GOING TO EAT THE DAMN COOKIE. Maybe do origami and to my detriment start with the complex tutorial of a “five intersecting tetrahedra dodecahedron.” Get into a staring contest with a stubborn crow at the beach with my mask concealed face. Dare to tuck my laptop away and read a book. Quietly jump onto the NYT cooking band-wagon. Let out a good laugh with friends and family. Do this all even if it might not be particularly “useful” because truly this is it.
I’ll reference Anxious People as a borderline self-help book that might make me break the barriers containing my own anxieties. Yet, what do I know? Perhaps the truth I talk about is just the story that I know of. Aren’t we all “idiots”?
Thanks for reading my short essay and book review. Happy New Years.