Fairytales a Lens to Gaze at Ourselves: A Review of Sabrina Orah Mark’s Happily
I am obsessed with creating a safe, loving house for my children. I bake them bread that is warm and fills their bellies. I want to stuff them full of love. I want to do this because they are my children and they should know they are loved, but also because their father and I no longer live together and love each other and I want them not to think they are a part of that dissolution. They are, of course. They lived in the house where we screamed. They sat on the stairs and watched our faces reflected in the windows when they were supposed to be asleep. I want them not to feel caught between two homes, but of course they are.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the bread, my children and their shattered nuclear family, as I read Sabrina Orah Mark’s Happily: A Personal Story with Fairytales. There we see a woman, also a product of divorce, searching for a home. She tries to build a home with her husband, someplace to give her children the safety she did not have as a child, the safety she does not have as an adult. She feels constantly caught in the in-between, on the verge of displacement like “a child warmed by a small pile of brushwood that will soon go out.” She fears (rightly) that world does not/will not allow her sons safety either. They are Black Jewish boys growing up in the South wondering whether “their Black father was ever a slave,” whether “they will ever be turned into slaves.” On top of that, they are coming of age in the midst of a pandemic.
Each piece within this memoir-in-essays is woven together with fairytales. The practice seems as natural to Mark as breathing. The world for her is alive, constantly transforming. Animals speak, glass shards shatter and float in the air. What we’d normally call magic, winds through Mark’s days naturally. She writes, “The reason fairytales exist and thrive is because our bodies recognize them like they are our own.”
Mark grew up in a Jewish family, attending Yeshiva, observing Shabbat. Fairytales, for her, are parallel to the stories of the Talmud. Imagination, whispering thoughts and hopes into the void, is parallel to prayer. The Holocaust, after all, looming large for those of us raised Jewish, is so horrific that it seems like it should be an evil mythology rather than the truth. In other words, for Mark, fairytales are a lens through which to understand the world. But more than that, by analyzing them, fracturing them, and piecing them back together within and beside our own narratives, they convey the complexity of the world.
In some ways what Mark looks to build in her life is a reflection of a fairytale she never mentions: the little house with the white picket fence, two and a half kids, two parents. A stable home. In our culture, although a lot has shifted, that dream still exists in the ether. And for those who grew up without that stability, the drive to create it can be so overpowering that they “run away from everything that is familiar.” Mark left her childhood home to find another, more stable one. In Happily, paths exist between those who love us and our homes. She started along a path no different from the one between Little Red Riding Hood’s house and her grandmother’s house, the path that Hansel and Gretel follow to the witch’s house, the ground Snow White runs through the forest to find the seven dwarves.
But the safety Mark yearns to build in her adult life is upended by her sister’s cancer, the pandemic, systemic racism, her inability to protect her sons. It is upended by the choice to build a home as the third wife of her husband. She says, “I married him knowing he arrived with two ex-wives . . . I married him knowing, but I didn’t know the wives would keep growing in a locked room in my heart.” She swims inside the complexities of being “a mother, a step-mother, a step-step mother.” Mark is brutally honest. “It’s easy to dismiss stepmothers [in fairytales] as gruesome and cruel,” she writes. “But I also read the stepmothers’ desire to tenderize, serve and cook the child as a way to replant the child into the body of the family. It’s a way for the stepmother to grow the child of another in her own soil.” This then, would remake the children as products of the father and the new wife. It would be a way to make the family whole, a way to cope with the fact that she wishes she were “the only wife” instead of her husband’s third. She is seeking a way to erase the path between the houses.
Sometimes even the fairytales fail Mark. The practice of writing, her way of making sense of the world, also brings her anxiety. She loses friends over what she writes, her stepdaughter is angry at being exposed. She says what she shouldn’t, she leaves out what she meant to say. Mark says, “I’m sorry. I meant to write something happy about what we learn from talking animals in fairytales, only to realize we learn nothing from them because in fairytales animals remember everything. And now I’ve ended up writing about oblivion instead.” There are other times, like when her grandmother dies, when she can’t find comfort in the stories. She tells her children, “she is dead.” No pretense. No make-believe.
But instead of abandoning these stories she reminds herself that fairytales are not “a will or lab results.” They are not a definitive answer. They cannot save her boys from racism or her sister from cancer. Instead, she remembers, they “they allow us to gaze at ourselves, both from the inside out and the outside in, and they exaggerate our roles just enough to bring into focus the little pieces of the monsters that grow on our hearts.”
I always have bread to bring my children home. I associate this with sustenance, nurture, but never with a way to lure them back. But bread in fairytales makes an unreliable path. In truth, the bread I bake my children is a promise for stability I can’t actually deliver. Yet Mark offers us hope. Fairytales, words, breath (G-d), are the paths to hold onto. For my children and me, for all of us coming from shattered and rebuilt homes, maybe the goal is not actually to arrive in the perfect safety of home. Maybe the act of laying the path, building the connections between stories and facts with our own imaginations, is where the beauty lies.
