Everyone gave you manuals. Sleep, feeding, schedules, the percentile charts. Nobody gave you anything for the fact that you have been awake since four, you love this creature past all reason, and some part of you is grieving a person you were until quite recently.
You have perhaps twelve minutes. That is the real constraint, and it rules out most of what would otherwise be right. All three of these can be read in fragments and put down mid-sentence without losing the thread.
Anne Lamott · 1993
A journal of one year with a newborn, kept by a woman who is exhausted, funny, and frequently ungracious about it. Nothing in it has the tone of a manual. It gives you permission for the thoughts you have not admitted to. Entries run a page or two, which is exactly the unit of time you have.
Rachel Cusk · 2001
The colder, sharper companion to Lamott, and the more honest about what is taken from you. When it appeared it was attacked for being insufficiently grateful, which tells you how little room there was to say any of this out loud. Read it if the sentimental register is making you feel more alone rather than less.
Matsuo Basho · 1702
Because the days have collapsed into one long blur, and this is a book of small exact moments, most of them a few lines long. Basho walking north, stopping to note a horse, a summer grass, the sound of a cicada going into stone. A travel journal from seventeenth century Japan is an odd thing to hand a nursery, and it works: it trains the eye back onto single things, which is how a year like this one ends up as memory instead of fog.
Answer the questions and let the Oracle read you
