And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories and Other Revenges by Amber Sparks

And I Do Not Forgive You (2020) is a collection of stories, reflections, lists, and essays by Amber Sparks. It’s a thought-provoking and humorous read. The stories have fantastical, surprising, gruesome, and imaginative twists. Most of the stories feature unique female protagonists. Sparks is a Gen X writer with a strong feminist perspective, who describes herself as a "morbid weirdo" in her acknowledgments. I discovered her writing on Twitter where I often identify with her tweets, and I decided to read one of her books.

The collection contains the following 22 stories:

Mildly Unhappy, with Moments of Joy
You Won't Believe What Really Happened to the Sabine Women
A Place for Hiding Precious Things
Everyone's a Winner in Meadow Park
A Short and Slightly Speculative History of Lavoisier's Wife
We Destroy the Moon
In Which Athena Designs a Video Game with the Express Purpose of Trolling Her Father
Is the Future a Nice Place for Girls
Our Mutual (Theater) Friend
The Dry Cleaner from Des Moines
The Eyes of Saint Lucy
We Were a Storybook Back Then
Rabbit by Rabbit
Through the Looking-Glass
The Noises from the Neighbors Upstairs
Our Geographic History
Death Deserves All Caps
A Wholly New and Novel Act, with Monsters
When the Husband Grew Wings
The Language of the Stars
Mildly Joyful, with Moments of Extraordinary Unhappiness
Tour of the Cities We Have Lost

Some pieces of writing are quite lengthy, but most are short and succinct. My favorite stories included "Mildly Unhappy, with Moments of Joy," a painful recounting of a broken friendship where one party is ghosted by text message, and "A Place for Hiding Precious Things," which was a modern fairy tale about a princess whose fairy godmother helps her escape her lecherous father. I also enjoyed "A Short and Slightly Speculative History of Lavoisier's Wife" where Sparks recounts the contributions of Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier who has been minimized in history as her husband’s "helpmeet."

And I Do Not Forgive You is a great read, especially if you’re a Gen X, feminist, morbid weirdo, who loves history, ghost stories, and fairy tales.

Purchase and read books by Amber Sparks:



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Reading the Signs

I love reading the signs in various forms of artwork when I'm walking around Portland, Oregon.

Here's the beautiful "Troubled Hearts Can Heal" mural by Adam Brock Ciresi.



Another piece of art I like a lot is this neon sign with the message, "There's so much beauty it could make you cry," inside Tender Loving Empire.



The signs at WILDFANG change often. I like this message about euphoria that was up this past weekend.



I like this thoughtful quote by Angela Davis at the Blackfish Gallery: "I'm no longer accepting the things I cannot change...I'm changing the things I cannot accept." When I pass it, I always pause and reflect on it.



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Musk Mallow

It was a mellow, musk mallow weekend.



Here's a process pic:



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Wildfire Skies

A haiku.

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Mosses and Trees at the Olympic National Park

I was inspired by this one word tweet by @OlympicNP to share a few photos I took at the Olympic National Park last year in July. The park is incredibly beautiful, and I had such fun there with my husband exploring the mossy forests.









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Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

Transcendent Kingdom (2020) by Yaa Gyasi is the story of 28-year-old Gifty, a graduate student at Stanford working towards her Ph.D. in neuroscience. The story flits back and forth in time from the present day to memories of Gifty’s childhood and college days.

Gifty grew up in Alabama with her mother, father, and older brother Nana. Her parents immigrated to the United States from Ghana when Nana was young. Gifty’s father faces racism in the US and struggles to find work, and eventually he abandons his family to return to Ghana. Gifty’s mother works long hours as a caregiver and is a devoted member of her church.

Gifty is a quiet, studious young girl who wants to be good and writes to God in her diary. Her brother Nana is popular, outgoing, and good at sports. In high school, Nana becomes a star basketball player. Sadly, Nana’s basketball successes end when he injures his ankle and is prescribed OxyContin. Nana becomes addicted and dies of a heroin overdose. Gifty is 11 years old at the time. Her mother sinks into a deep depression and attempts suicide. During her mother’s recovery, Gifty is sent to Ghana to spend a summer with her aunt. Later, Gifty attends Harvard where she studies molecular biology. Before she heads to Cambridge, Gifty decides to reinvent herself and leave her past behind her.

In the present, Gifty is researching addiction and reward-seeking behavior in mice. She grows attached to an injured lab mouse with a limp. While Gifty denies that her life experiences led her to study the neuroscience of addiction, she’s not being honest with herself. It seems to me that she’s attached to the mouse because its injury is like her brother’s. The mouse also displays signs of addiction in Gifty’s experiments. When Gifty’s mother suffers from another depressive episode, Gifty’s family pastor calls her. She asks the pastor to fly her mother to California where Gifty will care for her.

In the past, Gifty has had trouble with relationships. She purposely destroyed a meaningful relationship with Anne in college when Anne tried to learn more about Gifty’s family. Gifty quite cruelly cut Anne out of her life entirely. Later, Gifty is involved with Raymond during her first years of grad school, and when he tried to get more serious and talked about meeting her family, Gifty sabotaged their relationship.

In the present day, Gifty is struggling to care for her mother while doing her final experiments and writing a paper. When her classmate Han notices her crying, they grow a little closer, and Gifty eventually tells him about her brother. She also begins to trust another colleague named Katherine, and Gifty tells Katherine about her mother. These small steps indicate some form of healing and newfound willingness to begin sharing her past with others.

Gifty’s final experiments are successfully. When Gifty alters the brain activity of the limping mouse, it restrains itself from seeking reward. At last, Gifty has an answer that she’s long been seeking. She reflects on her discovery in the passage below:



The end of the novel is abrupt. There’s a quick afterward to let the reader know that Gifty succeeds in life and that she has a prestigious job running a lab at Princeton and a happy relationship and home with Han. Her mother died in her own home. It was somewhat dissatisfying that there was such a gap in information about how this comes about in the arc of the Stanford narrative. Han and Gifty have planned to go out to dinner, but their early relationship is not well established for the reader. There’s also no explanation of how Gifty’s mother recovers to return home. The novel spends more time in the past than in the present day.

One of the strangest things in reading the novel for me was all the similarities I shared with Gifty. I too studied molecular biology, and I got my Ph.D. doing neuroscience research on addiction. I have an immigrant family. Long ago, my boyfriend-now-husband and I had a print and online magazine with the name “Transcendental Deliverance.” I made the same triangular move around the US as Gifty from the South to the Northeast to the West coast. Some of the minor anecdotes even rang true to me. Once, like Gifty, I avoided a man who was creeping me out by hiding in my campus library until I was sure he was gone. I found these similarities so curious and strange.

I was glad to read this story, and I really enjoyed Gifty’s voice and reflections.

Purchase and read books by Yaa Gyasi:



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