“The Wreckage of My Presence” - Casey Wilson

 🐶 I highly recommend listening to this collection of essays by writer, actress, and SNL alum Casey Wilson, as an audiobook read by her. Her accents and voices add great entertainment value to her narration. She is sardonic and high pitched. She is relatable and I loved it.

🐶 Her essays include poignant yet ever humorous musings on her childhood, life in the entertainment biz, motherhood, marriage, and grief. A line that struck me so hard that I had to stop what I was doing (the dishes) to jot it down, was on the subject of her mother. Wilson writes, “the defeat of the grandma becomes the anger of the mom, the sadness of the son”. She goes on to unpack this painfully tidy summation of intergenerational trauma. 

Wilson’s mother was an ERA crusader. She notes that the entire job force is now opened to women (.70 on the $1 for white women, and even less for women of color - as she notes), yet women’s responsibilities in the home have not changed much from the 1950s; yet society has not redistributed duties. Household management and associated mental labor is still inequitably placed on women. So, hooray! We can be anything, but we still have to do all of the things we did when we  weren’t permitted to do anything else.

🐶 She is refreshingly self-aware as to her own privilege as a white woman who grew up in a stable family with some degree of generational wealth. She acknowledges it several times, and I always feel more receptive to what someone has to say on a subject when I can see that they are aware not just of their own baggage, but also their privilege. And in case anyone has their hackles up about this subject cropping up in a collection of humorous essays, let me just say, that it all flows. You need a dash of darkness to highlight the humor.

🐶 Most of the book is safe enough for car rides with older kids. However. There is one chapter about her dating life, which is most definitely not suitable for the car drop-off line!