the ridge (a letter about birth & rereading)

A Woman is a Woman Until She is a Mother, by Anna Prushinskaya, is 5 x 8 x 0.3 inches and 118 pages.

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For forever (the past six years), I’ve made semi-coded annotations in my books. There are underlines, side lines, dots, triple dots, exclamation points, circles, and two types of earmarks. If I earmark the bottom of a page, that’s kinda meaningless because it’s just anything I might want to return to; in a book I’m reading to review, it’s endless bottom earmarks in case I need to reference a plot point or a representative line of dialogue.

Then there are Top Earmarks. A top earmark, that’s the Stuff for Me. That’s something I want to just memorize. That’s something I want to imprint it on my wiggly brain! Something to transcribe in my notebook for just this purpose.

This system lends a the layered quality to rereading books, because I have proof about what lured me the first time and a chance to see how that’s changed. A few weeks ago, I re-read Anna Prushinskaya’s A Woman is a Woman Until She is a Mother after I gave birth for the first time. Let me tell you, between these two readings, the earmarks shifted. There were tons of underlines, several bottom earmarks, and no top earmarks the first time I read A Woman is a Woman Until She is a Mother. This time there are four.

A Woman is a Woman Until She is a Mother has a commonplace book quality; it strings together lots of quotations from other texts that were important to the author during her titular identity-shift. In some ways these essays are not just about ways of thinking, but about tracing how that thinking shifts and how books can guide you through it.

Anyway, here they are, my four Top Earmarks: