When the pandemic lockdown hit New York in the spring of 2020, Smith reacted by, what else, writing about her feelings, observations, and thoughts about a wide range of topics.  Through the essays in this slim volume she tries to “organize some of the feelings and thoughts that events, so far, have provoked in me, in those scraps of time the year itself has allowed. These are above all personal essays.”   Reeling from the early impacts of the COVID disaster, Smith writes that reading Marcus Aurelius at that time provided her with two valuable intimations:  ‘Talking to yourself can be helpful.  And writing means being overheard.”  These concluding sentences from the Forew0rd, written in London only 2 months into the pandemic, closely parallel one of my own favorite maxims:  I don’t know what I think until I read what I’ve written.

Thankfully, Smith chose to share her thoughts with us in these six personal essays.  The sisterhood of trying to buy necessities at a closed market; the despicable Trumpian rhetoric about the economy while the inequities in the American health system led to the mounting death toll among the poor and minority communities; the ability to feel others’ pain; the need for ‘something to do’; an elderly neighbor with a little dog feeling like her community has disappeared with the pandemic; encounters with New Yorkers from the guy with the ‘I Am A Self-Hating Asian’ to the bosomy grandma on the bus seeking an early menopause; the contempt facing Black people daily; and finally a litany of friends, family, and authors accompanied by a paragraph or two about their essence (e.g. about Virginia Woolf, “To replace that missing layer of skin with language. For as long as that works.”

It’s hard to find a unifying theme or through line in these essays because I don’t think that Smith had one for this book.  She just sat down to write each day as the world she knew fell apart around her.  Rather, like Montaigne who ‘invented’ the personal essay in the 16th C, Smith sought refuge and comfort in writing (essay means ‘to test’) about her feelings, observations, and fears.  The result is a fine example of her skill as a writer, her empathy for her fellow humans especially the downtrodden, and how one person searched for meaning amidst this world wide tragedy.