partner are the founders of RGV PUEDE, a nonprofit whose mission is to promote dual language education in South Texas public schools. They live on the border with their two tesoros.
Alessandri applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves through Dark Moods, and reported the following:
On page 99 of Night Vision, I defend a person’s right to grieve hard, to “fall apart” instead of “keeping it together.” I insist that there is no wrong way to grieve. C.S. Lewis grieved hard when he lost his wife, and he was ashamed of his raw, negative feelings. And yet, he published his journals (anonymously) under the title A Grief Observed. The book bombed, but after Lewis died, the publisher put his real name on it, and sales skyrocketed. What readers had thought of as too personal, and even embarrassing, became a source of comfort for grievers worldwide. Page 99 of Night Vision suggests that leaning into grief instead of trying to avoid it can open avenues of connection and self-knowledge we weren’t aware of. Grieving out loud is no less dignified than grieving quietly or privately.Visit Mariana Alessandri's website, and learn more about Night Vision at the Princeton University Press website.
If you were to read only page 99 of Night Vision, you would have a very strong sense of the book as a whole: that it leans toward expressing negative feelings rather than stifling them, that it defends the dignity of people living in all kinds of dark moods. You would get a good feel for the writing, and you would know right away if you would enjoy the book or not. You might feel vindicated for feeling bad, and you might even wish to be more emotionally honest with loved ones. From these paragraphs you would gather that this is not your typical self-help book that asks you to look on the bright side, count your blessings, or #choosehappy. You would know from this page alone that the book will defend the idea that sharing pain with one another is a gift and not a burden. You might even be able to guess that I am an existentialist philosopher who believes that “death gets us all in the end.”
If you only read page 99 on Night Vision, however, you might think the whole book is about grief. What you would not be able to guess is the chapter structure, that the book is about five moods: anger, sadness, grief, depression, and anxiety. You would have no way of knowing that each chapter presents an argument against toxic positivity and for sitting in darkness until our eyes develop a kind of “night vision.” You wouldn’t fully grasp the metaphor, but you would be able to guess at it. You wouldn’t know that I write about my students and myself, as well as ancient and contemporary philosophers. And you wouldn’t know why, at the end of the page, I am bringing up the Anderson Cooper/Stephen Colbert interview…
--Marshal Zeringue
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