Books & Audiobooks
Full disclosure: I have not read a book by adrienne maree brown that I have disliked. Loving Corrections was another incredible book that I highly recommend. Correction is often conflated with fixing, but the book focused in part, on reparative caring that through relationships that are purpose built for mutual thriving. How can we care in ways that address conflict and boundaries when they arise, ensure that our relational practices are infused with empathy? Loving Corrections answers that question, presenting the healing we need at the intersection of cancel and disposability cultures.
Brown begins the book with a chapter with a letter called “Dear Men” that I feel should be read by men everywhere. Without monolithicizing, brown details the way that men are often taught codependence as normal where “if a woman tells you she is tired, that the dynamic of labor between you is imbalanced, it means you have been carried by her without realizing or honoring it.” Under the auspices of caring, caretaking and traditional gender roles, the chapter goes on to outline how men have been taught to depend on their partners in unhealthy ways. It becomes very poignant when highlighting that men are often robbed of an education from every institution about how to build a healthy emotional inner world. Reading between the lines in the chapter, it is easy to see how popular culture and the systems we interact with daily has historically rewarded men for what are deeply codependent behaviours. They are discouraged from therapy where emotions and authentic connections are so often considered women’s work (by virtue no doubt of care industries that rely on this as a primary skill, which women were relegated to several decades ago), and friendships purpose built to support the view of masculinity that upholds its unhealthiest lowest common denominators. What this amounts to, brown notes, is codependency where men’s partners are impossibly expected to be all that men are taught they cannot be: deeply feeling, having a wealth of emotionally attuned friendships, caring, caretaking, attentive to the goings on of keeping a home, etc. These symptoms affect everyone, but they have undoubtedly affected men, more. Without blame or any condescension she makes plain and clear: what’s worked is no longer working, if it worked at all to begin with.
She begins a conversation that all men (including trans men like myself) should be having, or strongly considering when relating to the women and non-binary people in their lives, asking “Is this true for you, too? Tell me more.” At the risk of overquoting a book in a review, another outstanding summary from it includes: “Too few mental health practitioners and others who offer professional help recognize patriarchy as a disorder…believing that masculinity is an element of mental, physical, emotional, economic, or other superiority, that it exempts you from labor but also makes you more powerful, is disease.” Strong words, but offered in the highest love and truth for the reader. Clearly naming this perceived superiority an illness, she liberates men from the need to respond defensively by saying that it’s no one’s fault: we are as sick as the systems that oppress us. Men, she argues, deserve better than what they’ve been sold as relational norms, and that we all do. She devotes the rest of the chapter to a question of “what now?” offering ways to correct this default course masculinity often charts through our lives. It begins and ends with care. “Dear Men” begins the book on a strong note, and its contents continue a prosaic healing stream.
The chapters, Returning to the Whole, Love Looks Like Accountability, Accountable to Earth, and Accountable Endings form the Murmurations section and the heart of the book. Each one felt like a hymn dedicated to the way the world could be. Indeed, brown reimagines the present, so that readers understand that the world that could be exists as a possibility in the moment we choose to be accountable to it by changing ourselves. We often think about accountability in individual terms, but what happens when we look at the way we relate to one another in a stance of accountability towards redress for the way our behaviours and actions in relationships reinforces systems that reduce, minimize, invalidate, and keep us playing small? Returning to the Whole, offers healing wisdom where “The fragmentation that has resulted from colonial constructs of race, gender, class, and power has wounded many of us so deeply that we identify more with the wound than with any experience of wholeness or oneness. Because we identify with the wound, we fight against each other over differences that don’t need to be battles. We opt into these constructs, often without conscious choice.” It is at the heart of the -isms and -phobias that keep us divided. I have so much gratitude for brown fearlessly calling oppressive systems what they are: unhealthy, but not impossible. The book concludes with poems that are one part “spell,” as she titled them, and another part invocation which make for a fitting outro to such a beautifully crafted volume.
You won’t find the book in the self-help or wellbeing section, but it might call upon the chasms and crevices where we usually place books from the genre, to make us more whole. It may cause side effects of attentiveness such that you don’t just listen, but truly behold the people in your life. It could also leave you feeling just as seen in its pages which is sometimes reason enough to dive in. Every moment on this planet can seem like a high stakes endeavour with global extremes, political division, economic struggles, and instantaneity demanding our attention. Loving Corrections is an invitation into a tenderness that meets you in the moment, whose only requirement is caring deeply; the book paints a compelling portrait of the how, when we show up with an authentic why and whom of caring. When it comes to reads that you can’t put down, I rate it highly.