Happily

Happily is a memoir told through essays, in which Sabrina Orah Mark turns to fairy tales to make sense of modern life. It grew out of her Paris Review column of the same name. Mark writes as a Jewish woman raising Black children in the American South. The book starts from the idea that fairy tales, with their wolves, kings and wicked witches, have long been a way to question how reality works and to understand culture, society and the collective human psyche. Mark takes these stories apart and reworks them, looking for what they can tell us about what she calls "this strange American weather." The essays are set against political upheaval, a viral plague, social protest and climate change, and she finds the magic in ordinary things and the strangeness in everyday life. The individual essays range widely. In "Sorry, Peter Pan, We're Over You," she faces a loss of innocence when her son chooses to dress as Martin Luther King, Jr., rather than Peter Pan for Halloween. In "The Evil Stepmother," she looks into the origins of the bad reputation of wicked wives and finds an unexpected kinship with them. In "Rapunzel, Draft One Thousand," a search for a wigmaker during a time of civil unrest pushes her to confront her sister's cancer diagnosis and the stories people tell themselves to get by. The collection is playful and probing, and it considers what the fantastical can reveal about life, love and family.