Of the 161 folks profiled in this book, 24 are women. You know the demographic of the remaining 137. The women include: Simone de Beauvoir, Jane Austen, Patricia Highsmith, Ann Beattie, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Francine Prose, Margaret Mead, Sylvia Plath, Maya Angelou, Agatha Christie, Louise Bourgeois, Flannery O’ Connor, Edith Sitwell, Georgia O’Keeffe, Willa Cather, Ayn Rand, Jean Stafford, Alice Munro, Marina Abramovic, Twyla Tharp, Marilynne Robinson, Maira Kalman.
Now, I live for books like these. I find reading about these rituals both inspiring as well as encouraging. So what if I want to eat dark chocolate after finishing the draft of a hard essay? Voltaire did it too! He consumed only coffee and chocolate in the first half of the day. And so what if I stare and stare at the birds that show up in my balcony everyday? Patricia Highsmith had 300 snails at one time, and even attended parties with close to a hundred of them in her purse. It is okay if I want a Tintin-stamped teacup because Soren Kierkegaard owned 50 sets of cups and saucers, albeit only one of each sort.
This book makes me want to start a new section on my own website. I want to call it Daily Rituals too, and I want to shine light on the daily rituals of writers and other artists who aren’t profiled in books like these yet. Won’t that be fun? My immediate wishlist includes writers Aruni Kashyap and Sumana Roy, the artist Shana Sood, and the dancer Jaya Mehta.