Gifts and guides
And my recs for this year
I’m doing two events this week! A book talk this Wednesday 12/6 at 9am PT/ 12pm ET for Mindful Return. We’ll discuss my book Touched Out, which by the way makes a great gift. Register for the talk here.
For paid subscribers: I’ll be in conversation with
at an event hosted by her new Substack also on Wednesday 12/6 at 1pm PT/ 4pm ET. A zoom link will be sent out to paid subscribers of either newsletter prior to the event. Gemma is the author of Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward—we had a fantastic event at Seattle Town Hall with Kristi Coulter back in October. On Wednesday, we’ll pick up our conversation discussing the untenable state of modern motherhood, new ways of thinking about narrative nonfiction, bodily autonomy, the mental load, and lots more.Gift guides make me anxious for reasons that are not particularly interesting or new: both gifts and guides are complex genres of digital consumerism. In his influential writing on gift economies, French anthropologist Marcel Mauss argued that exchange societies value above all the relationship established by the gift. The gift is an “invitation” that asks the recipient to reciprocate, and this exchange produces a vital social relation that is necessary in society in which goods are not bought and sold.
In capitalist economies, however, gifts are more likely to reflect the ego of the recipient, sometimes even the giver—we all know that person who gives gifts that are really just things they want. In this kind of giving, which hinges on both money and the market, no meaningful social relation is produced by the exchange between two parties—at least not one that carries more weight than the market itself.
Gifts were HUGE in my family growing up. They were, yes, often sloppy ego-driven affairs driven by the vague forces of marketing that infliterated our home—but they were also the primary way we showed each other that we understood the other’s desires, interests, anxieties, personalities. I bought my sister and mom little consumer objects every year, let loose in the Burbank mall with a twenty. Sometimes this process taught me that I did not know them at all; other times, success meant a moment of connection we hadn’t shared all year. We also had several broke, addiction-tainted Christmases made tender with trinkets from the dollar store.
Since then, gift-giving and currency has gotten increasingly weird. I spend lots of time each year on Pinterest searching for non-plastic gift ideas for my kids, swirling around the same four recommendations. Faced with the erosion of social services and of public funding for arts and education, writers and artists and content creators and influencers and everyday people also now rely on digital platforms and crowdfunding for everything from their income to education to healthcare. The line between gift-giving and straight-up necessary participation in a market economy is often blurred by the shrouded appeals that structure parasocial interactions.
It’s not all bad! We’ve also seen a growth in recent years in mutual aid networks that attempt to create autonomous gift-like economies and bartering exchanges operating outside or just beside the market. We’re all constantly figuring out how to give in ways that matter, even as we’re constrained by consumerism.
But I’m told people love to know how others do the thing: give gifts, try to produce meaningful social relationships through them, be a holiday person. Is this list of mostly books and newsletters and other bookish treasures guided by my own delights, rather than a spirit of true reciprocal exchange? Yes! Have I left off the FAO Shwartz plastic sewing machine and plastic Legos and plastic “science kit” I bought for my kids? Yes! But these recs are in no way sponsored and the only affiliate links I use are to Bookshop, where all affiliate proceeds earned from any of your purchases go directly to National Network of Abortion Funds. Oh, and here is my present to you: