Review: Sabrina Orah Mark's 'Happily: a personal history with fairy tales'
Issue one
“The future has an ancient heart.”—Carlo Levi
In her memoir Happily: A Personal History—with Fairy Tales, award-winning poet and author Sabrina Orah Mark draws a future from this “ancient heart.” Only this future is bleak and filled with melancholy. It is the beginning and the end, the embodiment of the aleph on the golem’s forehead, the parchment in its mouth spelling either “truth” (emet) or “death” (met). “Because in Hebrew the only thing standing between truth and death is an aleph,” writes Mark. “…the aleph is represented by silence, and its ‘value designation’ is ‘mother’.”
It is in this silence that Mark explores her experiences as a Jewish mother raising two Black boys in the American South. Aleph resembles the branch that fell during the 2018 Pittsburgh shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue. It is the symbol Mark teaches her son Eli during the pandemic on the sixtieth day of homeschooling. It is the sound present in the pronunciation of her son Noah’s favorite toy, a bunny named L.F.
Mark speaks into these silences in her memoir’s 26 interconnected essays, which examine such subjects as racism, anti-Semitism, isolation, loss, and fear—themes that are then exemplified and expanded through the familiar lens of fairy tales. “Like stretches of ancient roads, I connect pieces of fairy tales to walk me through motherhood, and marriage, and America, and weather, and loneliness, and failure, and inheritance, and love,” writes Mark.
Why fairy tales?
We turn to fairy tales not to escape but to go deeper into a terrain of the human psyche. The reason fairy tales last is that they allow us to gaze at ourselves through a glass that is at once transparent and reflective. They give us a double gaze to see ourselves from the inside out and the outside in, and they exaggerate our roles just enough to bring into focus the little pieces of monster that grow on our hearts.
In Mark’s world, the monsters not only exist in her heart, but they can be found around every corner; they exist in physical form as teachers, lovers, parents, stepdaughters, neighbors, clerks, terrorists, and tarantulas. They can also be found in black spots on x-ray film, ghost people, milk letters, plague doctors, and dream trees. Threats abound in the shadows, both in the past as well as in the future.
Most of these essays first appeared in The Paris Review column Happily, which Mark began writing in 2018. The individual essays are elegant and stunning, but they take on an even greater meaning when read together as a whole. Rooted in the fairy tale tradition, there is a dreamlike quality to the stories and the presence of the threads that tie them together.
In fairy tales, there are paths made of needles and pins, crumbs and pebbles and yellow bricks and beanstalks and golden tresses and the notes of a magic flute and girls running for their lives,” writes Mark. “The thread a girl pulls through a lost boy’s foot to sew his shadow back on is a path, too.
It is fitting that Happily comes sleeved in blue, the woman on the cover drawn in black and white. Mark carries that absence of color in the fears and frustrations illustrated on the page, but then she flips expectations by layering in elements painted in full color. This is especially true when it comes to objects mirroring the jacket cover of Happily. Blue is the color Mark’s husband patiently paints the front steps: Echo Blue, Cosmic Dust, Overcast, Blue Promise, Haze; it is the color of the spoon used to feed bone broth to her cancer-stricken husband; it is the color of a feather marking the path of a girl who springs fully formed from a tree, a girl who “doesn’t speak because she is from a future fairy tale where no one speaks, not even the animals”; it is the color of the exoskeleton shed by her stepdaughter’s abandoned tarantula, “skin touched with the “slightest tint of midnight blue…the same blue that’s inside the angel’s flame.” These glimpses of color reveal the author’s character and the way she sees the world around her.
Characters in fairy tales are never quite conscious … It’s our consciousness that wakes them up, which is why the stories are so susceptible to retellings.”
Mark easily walks between the landscape of dreams and the waking world. Like Jack traveling up and down his beanstalk, Mark brings treasures down from the clouds to illustrate the injustices and ugliness that surround us. She is unflinching in exposing cruelties and kindness alike, for they are cut from the same cloth, woven with the same threads.
The effective blending of traditions ranges from Giambattista Basile’s seventeenth-century Neapolitan fairy tale Pentamerone: Lo cunto de li cunti ("The Tale of Tales") to Frank L. Baum’s twentieth-century children’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Tales in these essays include both the familiar (The Little Mermaid, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Rumpelstiltskin, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, The Pied Piper, Pinocchio, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and Peter Pan) and those that are more obscure (The Juniper Tree, Bluebeard, The Spider and the Flea, Pearl Tears, Tom Thumb, The Flea, The Snow Queen, The Twelve Brothers, and Through the Looking Glass).
In “The Evil Stepmother,” Mark finds a way to deal with the struggles of raising a stepdaughter in an examination of the roles filled by wicked women and monstrous mothers so commonly demonized in popular fairy tales. In “The Silence of Witches,” Mark tackles societal and ideological expectations when it comes to women’s vulnerability exposed through language and identity. And “In Fairy Tales and the Bodies of Black Boys,” she expresses her terror at the way her sons are viewed in the “American imagination.”
Fairy tales are perched on the shaky turret of laws that seem to be both drafted and passed by whimsy and appetite. What keeps fairy tales from toppling over is that once the law is passed, the inhabitants of the tale stay under its spell until the spell can be broken. Until the dreamer wakes up. The citizens of fairy tales have lived under these laws long enough to know the tale they’re end has stitched a y to the end of fair—it’s a weirdly shaped wing that carries fairness away. The word fairy, from fata, is rooted in fate but lifted by magic. Here comes the wind.
Even though there is no Ever After, Happily is a stunning compilation, a braided contemplation of motherhood and marriage, the power of grief, and enduring influence of fairy tales—an exquisitely poetic addition to the canon of retellings.
About Sabrina Orah Mark: Raised in Brooklyn, NY, Sabrina Orah Mark earned a BA from Barnard College, Columbia University. She also earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a PhD in English from the University of Georgia. She is the author of the poetry collections Tsim Tsum, and The Babies (winner of the Saturnalia Book Prize). Her collection of stories, Wild Milk, won the Georgia Author of the Year Award for Short Story and was a finalist for the Townsend Prize for Fiction. Happily: A Personal History with Fairy Tales, her collection of essays on fairy tales and motherhood which began as a monthly column in The Paris Review, is now available here.
I listened to Sabrina Orah Mark's Happily first, and then had to buy a hard copy to more fully immerse myself in the words on the page. The writing drew me in, making me feel like I'd stepped through an invisible door into a different version of our world, where fairy tales and "real" life weave together into a gorgeous tapestry of magic, mystery, and the mundane. I was both unsettled and comforted. I cannot wait to read it again.