A book can be many things at once, and sometimes those things can be diametrically opposed.

Halle Butler’s Banal Nightmare is one of those books. Sometimes entertaining and sometimes dull, often hilarious but also relentlessly uncheerful, and packed with brilliant observations as well as tedious arguments plucked from any living room in a small town, Banal Nightmare is full of swinging pendulums that make for a dark, chaotic read that flies very close to the line between fiction and nonfiction.

Moddie is tired. Life feels like a carousel of bad things, and her relationship seems to be the worst of it. Desperate for a change, Moddie leaves her boyfriend and moves back to her hometown in the Midwest. The change is rough, and while Moddie goes to events and parties and spends some time with her old friends, the ennui is still there, accompanied by regret and guilt at leaving her boyfriend and a growing sense that no one likes her and that everyone else is wrong about everything. And she isn’t alone. Every person Moddie meets is fighting a similar battle, both with themselves and with those around them. Moddie and everyone else in this story is experiencing the same profound, nagging sense of dissatisfaction, and that makes dealing with others much harder.

Banal Nightmare is about feeling like everything sucks. At the start of the novel, there is a sliver of hope as Moddie changes her life and finds herself hanging out with her friend Nina, feeling “a deep gratitude for her presence” and slowly “rediscovering a self-assurance that she had buried during her years with Nick in Chicago.” That feeling, however, is short lived. Yes, Nick was annoying and didn’t help around the house. Yes, Moddie needed a change. Yes, going back home was a huge mistake. Unfortunately, the problem is much bigger than that: “The worst parts of Chicago had followed her here, because the worst parts of Chicago had been inside of her.”

Moddie and the rest of the characters in this novel have no redeemable qualities. They are, generally speaking, unhappy, petty, self-absorbed people who spend the entire novel arguing and complaining. This doesn’t mean that they are hard to connect with (let’s face it, we all have bad days where nothing seems to go our way and life feels tiresome), but even when many readers will have no trouble seeing themselves in these characters, they aren’t facing anything serious, so there is no empathy present.

Following Moddie as she writes emails, gets groceries, walks the neighborhood, gets high, watches the television, and thinks about ending it all, craving a cigarette “just so she could put it out on her face, and then maybe burst into flames” is interesting at first. We can feel the darkness, the pressure, the sharp, constant tedium of life slowly crushing every character in the novel. Then, that darkness and pressure morph into something else. As the narrative progresses without a real source of tension, it’s easy to start feeling like the characters, but mostly in relation to the story. Eventually, more than 300 pages of constantly being snappish and grumbling about the “crushing tedium and confounding horrors” of life becomes too much and the book starts to become as flat as a song with only one note.

Despite the dreariness that permeates the narrative, Banal Nightmare still has some shining qualities. The writing is sharp and Butler is a keen observer of the human condition who understands how our worst enemy is sometimes our own brain. There are also many arguments between couples that illuminate the way some relationships turn into circular arguments where everyone feels like a victim but no one does anything about it.

Ultimately, Banal Nightmare is one of those books that will land perfectly with readers who often feel like the characters in the book, and will not land with those who rarely feel that way. “Life was a disappointment through and through and pleasures wilted by the hour.” That line exemplifies the aura of this novel. That line holds a powerful truth at its core. However, more than 300 pages that expand on that line’s sentiment might be too much for most readers.

Gabino Iglesias is an author, book reviewer and professor living in Austin, Texas. Find him on X, formerly Twitter, at @Gabino_Iglesias.

When Newbery Medalist Meg Medina was a kid, she had a babysitter — señora Mimí.

“She was sort of heavyset and she had dyed red hair and she had a gold tooth in the back and she had freckles on her hands,” remembers Medina.

She was a wonderful babysitter but kind of a pain in the neck, as well — Medina says you could look at the things on her coffee table, but you definitely couldn’t touch them. “She felt this was a very important skill,” she says. “We used to stand at that table and she’d have us practice, like putting our hands behind our back, and you could lean forward and look at all the pretty things.”

Then, when Medina was five years old, her mother announced that their family — tías and abuelos — would be coming from Cuba, and Medina’s grandmother would become her babysitter. Not without some glee, Medina fired señora Mimí immediately.

“I marched myself right up to that apartment. I said, ‘señora Mimí, lo siento. I’m very sorry but, you know, you’re out. My abuela is coming. I don’t need you anymore,’” Medina laughs. But the joke was on her — señora Mimí went exactly nowhere. She became friends with Medina’s grandmother, and they’d often drink coffee together. “She loved us,” says Medina.

Now, Meg Medina is honoring señora Mimí — and caregivers everywhere — in her new children’s book, No More Señora Mimí, illustrated by Brittany Cicchese.

Illustrations copyright © 2024 by Brittany Cicchese/Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Candlewick Press, Somerville, MA

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“I knew from past research that Meg’s stories are all based a bit on her past experiences,” says Cicchese. She had a hunch that señora Mimí was based on a real person, but she emphatically did not want to know what she looked like. “Because as soon as I read the manuscript,” she explains, “I just had this image of who señora Mimí was. I could see her smile, the way she braided her hair, the way she walked. I knew that if I saw a photo, it would change it in some way. And I wanted to capture that initial energy.”

And, in fact, the fictional señora Mimí looks nothing like the real señora Mimí. In the book, señora Mimí is young — she has a “two-tooth” baby, Nelson, and a “no-tooth” dog named Pancho. She and the little girl in the story, Ana, wear cozy matching sweaters. There’s nary a gold tooth in sight. They eat buttered crackers together at the kitchen table.

“When I think of the breakfast of my childhood,” says Medina, “I think of my Cuban crackers and butter and that milky coffee.” Cicchese did want to see a photo of the crackers, to make sure she was getting them right — she also ordered some online to try.

Ana — like a young Meg Medina — starts out super excited that her abuela is coming. “I bet Abuela will let me stop and play whenever I want,” Ana tells señora Mimí.

“Abuela is coming to live with me!” Ana tells her teacher.

Until Ana realizes oh — a new babysitter means no more señora Mimí.

“This is a story that is quiet, right? The change that happens, happens quietly inside her,” says Medina.

Illustrations copyright © 2024 by Brittany Cicchese

Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Candlewick Press, Somerville, MA

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Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Candlewick Press, Somerville, MA

Ana realizes that she won’t be able to tell señora Mimí the best parts of her day, or open her lobby mailbox with the little silver key, or press the top elevator button anymore. In one of Cicchese’s illustrations, Ana sits under the table, curled up with a blanket and Pancho the dog. “No more señora Mimí,” Ana whispers to Pancho, sadly.

“That was so tender to me,” says Medina. “This moment where she can appreciate that she’s going to lose something. She’s gaining something. She’s also going to lose something.”

Illustrator Brittany Cicchese says she wanted No More Señora Mimí to be a comforting story with lots of warm tones. “You’ll see a lot of warm, glowing yellows and rosy pinks,” she says. Cicchese set the story during autumn, at the start of the school year, since it’s also a time of change. “I think that echoes the story quite nicely,” she says.

Cicchese did the illustrations digitally, but her background is in traditional art. “I approached the story very much with that traditional mindset in building up the pieces as if I were working on a real painting,” she explains. “That was really important to me to capture the looseness of traditional mediums like oil paints or oil pastels.” Cicchese says the other benefit of working digitally was that it allowed her to capture the light. “You can go in and you can almost make a piece glow.” And it does create a very warm, comforting effect.

No spoilers, but author Meg Medina says señora Mimí stayed a part of her life forever. “I hold a space for her in my heart,” she says. “Señora Mimí is not buried very far from my real abuela in Flushing, Queens,” Medina says. She wrote this children’s book in her honor.

“So many people raise kids,” Medina says. There’s our parents, of course, but also older siblings, teachers, cousins, librarians, and neighbors. It’s easy to forget just how many people have a role in helping raise us.

“It feels good to know that there’s this modern story for kids right now, but that there’s a piece of this story that’s also about remembering these wonderful women who helped raise me,” says Medina. “It feels like we’re paying them honor. You know, we’re just honoring their memory.”

Illustrations copyright © 2024 by Brittany Cicchese

Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Candlewick Press, Somerville, MA

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Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Candlewick Press, Somerville, MA

Does it sometimes seem as if social media has turned American popular culture into a perfectionist parody of itself?

Last week, I followed a social-media-spawned debate over whether a home decor trend called “fridgescaping” was worthy of media attention. I guess it must be, because Architectural Digest recently explored what it called “romanticizing your refrigerator.”

“For some participants of this trend, it’s about organizing the fridge with decorative containers,” Kristen Moonjian, of the trend forecasting company Fashion Snoops, told the magazine. “For others, it goes beyond that with the incorporation of flowers, vases, twinkle lights, LED candles, framed artwork and more.”

Seems to me that worrying how your milk cartons are arranged is a bit obsessive, but I am not here to judge. Oh, hell, yes, I am. If you find yourself hankering to hang a framed photo or light a candle inside your fridge, it may be time to get help.

The longer social media exerts its magnetic hold on us, the more we’re going to see such pop culture trends going off the rails.

Do you remember the pre-pandemic trend #VanLife? The term was coined to describe incredibly good-looking couples who claimed to be having a fabulous time roaming around the country in their vans, their beautiful golden retrievers in tow, posting endless chatty updates about whatever products they happened to be paid to push that week.

In a world beset by climate change, partisan division and $20 Erewhon smoothies, some seem to yearn for a kind of Woodstockian simplicity — being able to roll around in the mud during a rainstorm — but to look like a million dollars while they do it because, you know, Instagram. (Looking at you, Coachella and Burning Man.)

I don’t care how good-looking you and your dog are, it is not fun to live in a van.

A few months ago, I was taken aback by an article in the New York Times’ Vows section. Each week, the section highlights one wedding with photos and a generally upbeat tale about the couple’s sometimes tortuous road to the altar. The story at issue was about the union of two-self described social media influencers, which took place on the shores of Italy’s Lake Como — ovviamente.

The bride, who had been married twice before, and the groom, who had one previous spouse, were very beautiful, of course, and impeccably dressed. Her social media feeds promote luxury hotels and tourism boards. He is a successful photographer.

Their vows sounded as if they had been written by the great social satirist Tom Wolfe.

“If you are down to travel the world, make babies, raise a family, jump out of planes, heal your inner child, buy dream homes all over the world and give back to the community,” vowed the bride, “I am so down to be your wife.”

“Thank you for finding me in this lifetime,” said the groom. “And here is to many more to come.” (More lifetimes, presumably, not marriages.)

Anyway, the grand finale of the nuptials was an explosion of what are called “daytime fireworks,” shooting what looked like streams of rainbow-colored powder into the sky.

As far as I can tell, unlike so many made-for-social-media extravaganzas that make their way into the news — gender reveal parties, anyone? — this one deserves some credit for causing no one to die, no forest to catch fire, no truck to end up in a lake and no man to run away in anger because he is having a girl but really wants a boy.

Further proof that social media has turned so many Americans into unrestrained exhibitionists emerged a week ago when — sorry, New York Times — the paper of record published a lifestyle story about a Brooklyn woman who throws a “birthday” party for her frozen eggs every year.

And, as we in the newspaper business like to say, she is not alone.

“TikTok is full of women throwing and attending egg showers, in which they invite friends and family to celebrate their taking charge of their fertility futures,” the article reported.

The paper did not mention whether any eggs or embryos of honor have ever been incorporated into anyone’s fridgescape.

Because that would just be silly.

@robinkabcarian