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'Time of the Child' is a marvelous blend of despair and redemption

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'Time of the Child' is a marvelous blend of despair and redemption

A village “on the western edge of a wet nowhere” populated by men who drink too much and women who smile too little. Throw in cows, an addled priest, an abandoned baby and a thick cloud cover of shame and you have the elements for a quintessential Irish story.

So quintessential, in fact, I’ve held off reading Niall Williams for a long time, despite hearing raves about his work. My skepticism, it turns out, was misplaced. I’ve just emerged from a Niall Williams binge with a belated appreciation for his writing, which invests specificity and life in characters and places easily reduced to clichés.

Time of the Child is Williams’ latest novel, a companion piece, rather than a sequel to, his 2019 novel, This Is Happiness. Both books are set in the rural village of Faha — a town in the far west of Ireland whose inhabitants, we’re told, possess “the translucent flesh that came from living in an absolute humidity.”

Time of the Child takes place in the weeks leading up to Christmas 1962 and opens — and closes — on a set piece of Mass at the parish church, where most of the village gathers. In between lies a story that feels, at once, realistic in its rough and comic everyday unfolding and mythic in its riffs on the grand themes of despair and spiritual redemption.

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Jack Troy is the town doctor and central character here. He’s a melancholy contained man who, we’re told, “carrie[s] himself in a manner that [the townspeople of] Faha might have summarized as Not like us.” Dr. Troy lost his wife and then the older woman he unexpectedly fell in love with, who’s now also dead. Keeping house for him is his 29-year-old daughter, Ronnie, the eldest of three sisters; the one who remained at home.

Ronnie, too, is a semi-enigma to the townspeople: Our narrator tells us that “Added to [her] reserve was not only the screened lives of all women in the parish at the time, but the marginal natures of all writers, for Ronnie Troy’s closest companion was her notebook.”

Dr. Troy has become haunted by despair and by a particularly heartrending question: “Why does no one love my daughter?” The answer, he fears, is his own glowering presence that may have repelled one especially promising suitor.

Inspired by what we’re told is a “mixed fuel of … brandy … [and] a parent’s fear of the unmade world after them,” Dr. Troy, uncharacteristically, resolves on a bizarre scheme to make things right. As the saying goes: “Man plans, God laughs.”

Instead of unfolding the Troy family narrative chronologically, Williams layers it on top of other simultaneous storylines, all of which are graced with language as bracing as salt spray from the chill Atlantic. We follow, for instance, the wanderings of Jude Quinlan, a 12 year old “on the rope-bridge between man and boy.”

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Jude’s father drinks and gambles and his mother, Mamie, possesses “the anxious look of one married to an instability.” Listen to how Williams moves fluidly from the mundane to the wider lens of the numinous in these snippets from an extended passage where Jude helps to unload a van full of Christmas toys for the town fair:

There were toy soldiers, kits for flying gliders, … skittles in a net, balls, bats. … dolls of one expression but many dresses, …

For Jude, carrying everything from the van … was as close has he would get to handling any of these things. He had no resentment or bitterness . Rather, from nearness to the marvelous something rubbed off on him …

The other thing, the one that only occurred to him years later when he would recall what happened that day, was that what he was carrying out of the van that December morning was his childhood.

For those who believe in such phenomena, Jude will be the instrument for bringing a miracle — a Christmas miracle complete with a baby and a virginal mother, no less — into this story. The other miracle here is a literary one: Time of the Child itself, which gives readers that singular experience of nearness to the marvelous.

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Microfeminism: The next big thing in fighting the patriarchy

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Microfeminism: The next big thing in fighting the patriarchy

An abortion rights demonstrator holds a sign near the U.S. Capitol during the annual Women’s March to support Women’s Rights in Washington, D.C. on Oct. 8, 2022.

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If you have ever intentionally addressed your female colleagues first during a meeting or shut down a guy trying to manspread on the subway, you may have been practicing microfeminism — small but meaningful acts of uplifting women in male-dominated spaces.

“When I send an email, let’s say to a CEO, and you have to copy their assistant for scheduling purposes, if the assistant is a female, I will always, in the ’email to’ line, enter their address before the CEO’s,” Ashley Chaney said in a viral TikTok post this year.

“That’s my favorite form of microfeminism,” she said. “What’s yours?”

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Chaney did not invent the term, but with her video garnering thousands of comments and video responses of other people explaining how they go about promoting women’s voices, she introduced the word to a new audience.

“I always call the dads first when the kids are sick and the moms for billing questions,” one preschool worker wrote in response.

“I write real estate contracts and I always put the wife’s name first,” another respondee wrote. “The [husbands] question it a lot even though it makes zero difference to the contract, just their ego.”

These acts might seem trivial to some, but experts say the little tricks can have a big impact.

Little “winks and nods”

Chaney, the woman behind the viral TikTok, said she was inspired to talk about her acts of microfeminism after an upsetting day of dealing with a male coworker.

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“I remember particularly just thinking, god, there are these things that happen to me on a daily basis that drive me crazy. And I know in my head that I’m doing these little sort of winks and nods to the women around me. I wonder if they notice,” she said.

The response, Chaney said, has been overwhelming.

“It is something that women A) notice and just like me are also trying to do, which I love. And moreover, if they hadn’t heard of it, they’re now inspired and they’re seeing tiny ways in which they can uplift women around them,” she said.

“I think that people really resonate with that because it gives them something to do that’s not going out to march or burn your bras or whatever. It’s like, ‘Hey, these are things that I can do and I can actually affect change in a small way.’ “

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The backlash

While many of the comments were positive, Chaney said there was also a wave of mostly men who ridiculed and derided her stance, with some going so far as to say she should die.

“In the comments, I got people saying that I was a misandrist and that I was doing witchcraft,” Chaney said.

“The first thing they attack is your physical appearance. So I got everything from fat, ugly, old, to stupid and a dumb woman,” she said. “Honestly, it scared me so much.”

While the backlash Chaney received was frightening — she stopped posting online for weeks after the episode — ultimately, it made her more secure in her beliefs.

Kelly Crowder, center, holds up a sign as thousands of protesters gather for the Women's March against President Donald Trump Jan. 21, 2017, in Los Angeles.

Kelly Crowder, center, holds up a sign as thousands of protesters gather for the Women’s March against President Donald Trump Jan. 21, 2017, in Los Angeles.

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“It has inspired me to identify more loudly and publicly as a feminist,” she said. “My entire platform is not dedicated to feminism, but I am being louder about it, particularly as people have criticism or critiques of it. I’m like, OK, that means that there is a need for a loud voice here.”

Everyday sexism

Research has shown that everyday instances of sexism affect women at all levels, including in matters of physical and mental health.

Microfeminist proponents hope to mitigate some of those effects in their own personal ways.

Halima Kazem-Stojanovic, Ph.D., is the associate director of the Feminist, Gender, Sexuality studies program at Stanford University.

She says it’s important to normalize addressing everyday gender biases in order to make bigger changes.

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“When you start to adjust society’s norms, then that has a lasting effect. That has a conscious and a subconscious effect,” Kazem-Stojanovic said.

She said that small things like changing male-centered language — for example, using “guys” as a catchall term for people — are the kind of changes that are easy to make and will benefit everyone in the long term.

“Knowing that to keep things more neutral really kind of helps everybody because the patriarchy hasn’t even helped masculinity,” Kazem-Stojanovic said, noting that patriarchal expectations of manliness lead to strict limitations on how men can present themselves and express their emotions.

Feminism after Roe

Demonstrators hold up their banners as they protest on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, May 4, 2017.

Demonstrators hold up their banners as they protest on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 4, 2017.

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Kazem-Stojanovic said that working against the patriarchy is as important now as ever before, particularly in light of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and restrictive abortion bans that have cropped up across the country in the years since.

Despite these changes in the current political environment, Kazem-Stojanovic said that the virality of Chaney’s TikTok video gives her hope that the younger generations understand how important it is to fight for women’s rights, no matter the scale.

“I’m a mom of two girls, teenagers … and I see them engaging in social media. And I think there’s this recent interest with microfeminism stems from a video from TikTok, which my girls are always on,” she said. “I find it interesting that little snippets of these long-held kind of feminist ways of thinking and being and embodying feminism have kind of come out in these modern multimedia little videos, which I find really interesting, which makes me happy to see.”

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How to have the best Sunday in L.A., according to Molly Baz

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How to have the best Sunday in L.A., according to Molly Baz

Molly Baz ended up in Los Angeles by chance. In March 2020, she was vacationing in L.A. with her family when government officials issued a stay-at-home order due to COVID. She didn’t feel comfortable going back to her crowded apartment building in New York.

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In Sunday Funday, L.A. people give us a play-by-play of their ideal Sunday around town. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.

“So I just ended up extending my stay out here and then we just never went home,” says Baz, a recipe developer, food personality and author of the cookbooks “Cook This Book” and most recently, “More Is More.”

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Baz and her husband, Ben Willett, a creative director and spatial designer, along with their 6-month-old son Gio and wiener dog Tuna, have been living in their Altadena home ever since. Their property is adorned with nearly 40 palm trees — an important selling point for Baz. When asked what she loves most about living in L.A., she says: “This is so f—ing cliche, but I love palm trees so much. Palm trees have been symbolic of vacation to me forever, so now I’m like, I get to live in a place that feels like vacation. Even though I’m in a city, every time I see a palm tree, I’m like ‘We’re chillin.’ ”

Her latest project, a mayonnaise brand called Ayoh (pronounced “A-yo”), is partially inspired by her move to L.A. During the pandemic, she hosted a podcast called “The Sandwich Universe” and made tons of sandwiches. She’d often mix her mayo with Marconi hot giardiniera relish to make her own sauce, which sparked the light bulb moment.

“I was like, this is exactly what sandwiches need, and then that kind of opened my mind up to all the other flavor profiles that I could introduce to mayo in order to make multi-textural, really interesting, delicious sando sauces as we’re calling them,” Baz says.

Just days before the launch of Ayoh, we caught up with Baz to learn about how she’d spend her ideal Sunday in L.A. On the menu is hiking in Altadena, eating a sandwich at Bub and Grandma’s and buying fresh fish from a Japanese marketplace in San Gabriel for homemade sushi.

8:30 a.m.: Snuggles in bed

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In my ideal world, my baby and I are sleeping until like 8:30 a.m., which is sleeping in for us. The baby and I will do snuggles and I’ll nurse him in bed. Then I’d have my husband go to the kitchen and make me my first coffee — a pistachio milk cappuccino — which he’d bring to me in bed. We’d hang out in bed with the baby and the wiener dog, Tuna, for like 45 minutes to an hour before we walk out and face the rest of the world.

9:30 a.m.: Neighborhood walk or hike

I don’t really eat breakfast, so the next thing we’d do is go for a walk in the neighborhood. There’s lots of hikes around that we sometimes do, but we always try to do morning walks on the weekends and sometimes during the weekdays as well just to get sunshine in our eyes. I go to Eaton Canyon a lot. Cobb Estate is a really nice one as well. We’ll do one of those hikes if we’re feeling really ambitious.

10:45 a.m.: Breakfast time

I would probably be hungry by now, so we’d go to Bub and Grandma’s, which is where I had my launch party a couple of weeks ago. I’m a freak for sandwiches and they pretty much only sell sandwiches. Also, I just love big, cozy booth vibes. I love hanging out in a booth and sitting in a restaurant for a long period of time. You typically find booths at nighttime restaurants like Houston’s, which is another place that I spend a lot of my life, but Bub’s presents a morning booth option so I really like that.

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We’d order breakfast sandwiches. They have a really delicious scrambled eggs, onions and cheese on a house-made brioche bun called the Onion Breakfast. It’s like a really overly simple breakfast sandwich, but it’s so good. The bread is so soft and the eggs are so supple.

1 p.m.: Caffeine pick-me-up

After our long, linger-y Bub moment, we would drive over to Kumquat, which is my favorite coffee shop and it’s near Bub. I would get my second coffee of the day, which would be their Cloudy with a Chance of Peanuts drink. It has this delicious, salty peanut milk and it’s a beverage that’s both hot and cold. It’s like a cold milk with a hot shot of espresso dropped into it, so as you’re drinking it you’re meant to experience hot and cold at the same time. It’s very crazy and delicious.

2 p.m.: Play cribbage at the park or go to Huntington gardens

The next thing I would do is either go to Lacy Park to play cribbage, which is a card game with a peg board that my husband and some of my friends play. We’d sit in the park and play cribbage for a couple of hours or do crossword puzzles. That’s another pastime that I love. Or we’d go to Huntington gardens. I went there the day after the election when I was feeling suffocated by politics, the news, doom scrolling, social media and everything. I left my phone in the car and I felt like I was breathing different air there than I did at home or anywhere else. There are so many plants at Huntington Gardens that the air feels and smells different. It feels fresh and alive. It’s a really amazing place to just reset your equilibrium.

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4 p.m.: Pick up fresh fish for sushi

Typically we try not to go out to dinner on Sundays, so what I’d do from there is drive to a place called Yama Sushi in San Gabriel. It’s a tiny, Japanese fish market and they have Japanese groceries and a fish counter with really, really high-quality sushi flown in from Tokyo. They will prepare the fish any way you want, then you can take it home to make sushi. So my absolute ideal Sunday night dinner would be sushi night at home with homemade sushi. We normally get their salmon and we keep the salmon skin so I can crisp it up for salmon skin hand rolls, which are so good.

4:45 p.m.: Take a nap before dinner

We would come home with our sushi then take a nap for about an hour. Naps are a huge part of Sundays. We’re big nappers. Then we’d start making sushi and we’d sit in the living room on the floor. We eat most of our meals on the floor. I just like to be low to the ground and cozy at our coffee table. We like to play music and light candles while we’re eating. We might have a glass of wine. Just very cozy and mellow with us just chatting. I feel like dinner times are really important moments for connectivity with me and my husband because we just crank on work all day long during the week, so dinner time is kind of sacred.

7 p.m.: Unwind with an ice cream sandwich and TV

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Next, we would give the baby a bath and put him to bed about 7:30 p.m. Then my husband and I would eat an Oreo ice cream sandwich and watch something on TV before bed. At the moment we’re watching “Bad Sisters.” And then lights out, for me, at 9:15 p.m. would be ideal so I can get like 10 hours before the next day.

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Stay away from Dr. Google, and other lessons learned about hypochondria

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Stay away from Dr. Google, and other lessons learned about hypochondria

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If you’ve ever Googled a list of health symptoms — and become convinced you have a serious illness and are doomed — you might be suffering from hypochondria. Author Caroline Crampton wrote A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria, because she’s pretty sure she has it.

“It’s a fear that can’t be substantiated by any medical tests you might do,” Crampton says of hypochondria, which is now known medically as illness anxiety disorder. “The definition that I like, and that I use, comes from the Oxford English Dictionary. And it runs, ‘a mental condition characterized by the persistent and unwarranted belief or fear that one has a serious illness.’”

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Crampton developed excessive health anxiety after being treated for blood cancer in her teens. Though the cancer went into remission, it returned a year later. She has since undergone several therapies for her health anxiety.

Crampton says hypochondria can manifest as illness anxiety and/or somatic symptoms. In the former, patients suffer from excessive hypervigilance and anxiety around potential health problems. Somatic symptom disorder, meanwhile, includes anxiety, but “adds this extra thing of phantom symptoms,” she says.

Of course, sometimes symptoms really do point to an underlying physiological problem and need medical treatment. Crampton says she doesn’t hesitate to have a doctor check out symptoms that she’s worrying over. Because of her serious medical history, she says doctors usually treat her concerns with respect. But says she knows that many people have experienced doctors disbelieving them or writing off their concerns as merely anxiety, “only to have a serious diagnosis later on that could have been caught much earlier.”

Caroline Crampton is the author of A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria.

Caroline Crampton is the author of A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria.

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The Internet can stoke hypochondria by offering access to seemingly limitless information about health conditions, but Crampton notes that the condition predates the information age. In fact, her book takes it’s title from “glass delusion,” a centuries-old psychological disorder in which people — including the French King Charles VI — suddenly think their bodies are made of glass.

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“I don’t think the glass delusion is hypochondria,” she says. “But the more I became fascinated by [glass delusion] and researched it, the more I began to think that it was a very good image or metaphor for what it feels like to have hypochondria, because the sufferers from the glass delusion were absolutely obsessed with the idea that they were breakable and fragile.”

Interview highlights

A Body Made of Glass

A Body Made of Glass

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Harper Collins

On how the Internet can stoke “cyberchondria”

I try and restrict myself. I don’t not look at the Internet in relation to my health, but I limit myself only to reputable sources, in particular here in the U.K., the NHS website has a very, very wide ranging catalog of illnesses and connects all the symptoms together and will allow you to click through and see how things relate to each other. So that’s my first port of call. I look at the NHS website, I know it’s evidence-backed and I know it will tell me: “If you think you have this, please go to the doctor,” and so on. And yeah, there is a shortlist of others that I take the same approach to. What I try not to do — I would say I never do it — is just type symptoms into Google … with no sort of guardrails at all because that’s where I can easily find myself falling down a spiral and getting into a really bad place mentally.

On being care-seeking vs. care-avoidant

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People fall into either care-seeking or care-avoidant. People tend to be very polarized. I’m definitely care-seeking. I think whether it’s helpful or not often depends on the type of doctor that you see. I’ve seen some incredibly helpful doctors and I’ve seen some incredibly unhelpful ones. So in some ways it feels a bit like the luck of the draw. You never know quite what you’re going to get. But I think I would always encourage people to seek medical help if they have a reason to do so, if that makes sense. I, on balance, feel it’s always better to go than not go.

I do my best to take medical personnel at face value, if that makes sense. And I try and do this test in my mind of: If it’s serious enough for me to worry about, then it’s serious enough for me to go to the doctor. And if it’s serious enough again, I’ll go to the doctor again. … I’m there in good faith. I try and assume that the doctor or the medical professional is there in good faith, too. And if they’re not, I will just go back and ask for a second opinion.

On how medical professionals have reacted to her illness anxiety

Almost all of the time I find myself taken very seriously. Sometimes a little voice in my head says, “maybe too seriously.” Maybe occasionally I could benefit from being told, “It’s nothing to worry about. You can go home.” I think because of my serious medical history and the fact that my medical file is like half a foot wide, I feel like every single little thing that I even vaguely mentioned gets tested, which is in some ways an incredibly fortunate thing to happen.

On the relationship between hypochondria and PTSD

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I spoke to some people when I was working on the book … such as someone who was a twin, and her twin had had some quite serious childhood illnesses that required them to be hospitalized. She, the other twin, had been completely healthy. But watching her twin go through that … as an adult surfaced for her as hypochondria. Other people who had a very close friend pass away young from a serious condition. And then after … that trauma, they had then developed anxiety about their health, having previously never suffered from it before. So it feels like an idea that checks out to me that you might respond to a really traumatic event by developing the anxiety that something similar might be going to happen to you in the future.

On cognitive behavioral therapy treatment and hypochondria

CBT was really helpful for the small day-to-day problems such as Googling your symptoms and reading health-related stuff on the Internet, or watching too much wellness things on Instagram, or spending too long checking on your moles, that kind of thing. That can be really helpful in changing those kinds of daily behaviors. So the exercise is mostly just not doing them for long periods of time and having to record every time you felt the impulse to do it and how you were feeling at the time. So that it was very helpful to be able to associate, I’m feeling anxious about this work thing I’ve got coming up, I seem to be checking WebMD a lot more than I normally would. Maybe those things are related. So it was very helpful for things like that.

On her new appreciation for her body

Until my diagnosis when I was 17, I very much thought of myself as a brain in a jar. I thought the only part of me that would ever produce any value was in my mind and that [my] body was just the way I moved the mind around the world. It would never do anything remarkable. Since going through all the treatment as difficult and traumatic as it was at times, I did come out of it with this incredible appreciation for the myriad complexities of the human body. …

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Sometimes I feel a bit like if you go into a really incredible building, like a cathedral or a civic hall and you have this feeling of awe that while, wow, someone conceived of this design and then it was built and now I can stand inside it, I sometimes feel that a sense of awe, a bit like that, thinking of my own body, strange as that sounds, I kind of look at it. Wow, look at what it’s doing. I’m not even thinking about this. I’m not making it do any of this. Look how magnificent it is. So it has given me this slightly cheesy appreciation for what the human body can do and made me a little bit more interested.

Sam Briger and Thea Chaloner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Carmel Wroth adapted it for the web.

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