What We Need to Thrive
March 11, 2026
Mina, the main character in Emanuela Anechoum’s new novel Tangerinn, leaves her Sicilian village to find herself a well-lit life in London, one with “predictable architecture,” she hopes, and clues to the self she has yet to discover. She is relieved to be away from the mother who has remained a child and the town with a thousand rules for women. She has always felt judged there. And she is now estranged from the beloved Moroccan father who made her “a mixture of things that each had nothing to do with the other…hybrid, polluted.”
Mina has never felt at home anywhere; she has never figured out who and how she wants to be. By moving to London, she is striking out, hunting for what she needs in order to grow up. But because the growing up has yet to happen, she fastens her identity to a wealthy, ridiculously superficial friend and begins negotiating “the new reality I had chosen: a game of balance between longing to be seen and being terrified of it.”
Then her father dies. Grief overwhelms her—the entire novel is written to her dead father. “Your hands were the only home in which I’ve ever felt safe,” she tells him. Maudlin but still defiant, she returns home temporarily—and begins to see how hollow her life in London was. Working in her father’s tavern to help out—temporarily, she continues to stress—she falls in love with a relief worker who shares none of her melancholy. His past is easier and simpler than hers, his love for his parents less complicated, his identity clear-cut. “Nazim lived in his memories and inhabited his present with the same sense of himself, which I had initially thought was arrogant but was actually a resolute kind of lightness, perhaps the kind I had chased my whole life.”
What Mina needed was a way to live more freely, not a big city adventure per se. The novel, luminous and beautifully written if at times irritating, started me thinking about what each of us needs in order to thrive. For some it is a certain place. A friend of mine zigzags around the world, finding the right setting for each stage of her inner journey. Sometimes she is bubbly and sociable and culturally au courant in Mexico City or Paris; other times reclusive, writing and meditating in warm, green Tanzania or Guatemala. I worried, at first, that she was just restless, seeking pointlessly, but instead, I am watching her deepen into wisdom.
Another friend needs to be close to nature—she turns sad when deprived of that connection—and she yearns to live in a tiny cabin on a lake. (If you know of one going cheap, please say so.) My mom needed to be someplace clean and pretty, or a tension deep inside her could not relax. My husband needs whatever you call the opposite of density: he loathes tightly packed houses, tall stacks of apartments, narrow streets with cars parked on either side, people jostling to get in front of you.
Me, I have always felt adaptable. I thrive in cities, and when we moved to a small, semi-rural town, my friends called to ask, in worried tones, How are you doing? But I was fine. I have found peace and kindness and ease here, and that weighs just as much, in a different metric, as the hot energy of many different people gathered close, all looking for their own best way to live.
What I need, I realize now, is harmony. People around me who love each other—or at least tolerate each other’s quirks with a grin. Anger undoes me; it always has. When I had a chronically angry, hurtful boss, I quit the job. When I hear people scream at children or strike animals, I want to intercept the rage like a superhero, grab it in midair and hurl it back at them.
Years ago, my mom and stepdad volunteered with Big Brothers. The little boy to whom they were assigned kept marveling at how quiet it was in their house. One day I gave him a ride home and heard, as we pulled up, a weary fury of shouting; later, I knew, there would be gunshots on their street. He shrugged it off, proud not to care. I guess I could numb myself to it too, if I had to—it is amazing what we do to survive—but no one shuld have to live that way. And I suspect I would lose my mind before I adjusted.
Happy shouting, on the other hand, lifts my heart. My mom used to tease that I was a French peasant, unbothered by a little filth and delighted by rowdy street festivals that made her nervous. For me, her aesthetic was far too sterile, tame, and boring. And when my husband pronounced the South St. Louis street where we bought our first house “too city,” I nearly choked. I would have said too suburban.
It is hard to make room for people who need something very different from what you need. By definition, what they need seems unnecessary. Sometimes it even feels like a mistake.
That is, in simplistic terms, our current national argument.
There are Americans who need to feel safe and define safety as White and Christian, with father figures in charge. It has taken me years to fully comprehend this, because what makes them feel unsafe does not even register mild alarm with me, and what makes them feel safe feels coercive and bigoted and many steps backward. I will say so plainly, at the risk of that need for harmony. Because others of us need to live in a place that welcomes and honors difference.
How, then, do we all manage to thrive? What used to work were private solutions, usually religious or geographic. One group gravitated toward small towns in the Bible Belt, the other toward irreverent Greenwich Village. But a deliberate variance in lifestyle is no longer enough to calm us; public policy and the interpretations of our law and Constitution are at stake. And because of the nature of our political system and our media, there is nothing appealing about sensible, intelligent, practical compromises. Instead, we swing from one ideological extreme to the other, scaring each other every time.
Nobody needs that.
We have to solve this. Maybe we go back to the beginning, as Mina had to. What determines what is essential for each of us to live fully and freely? What we are sensitive to, what we need, what we fear, how we define ourselves. All of which has been manipulated and distorted, in a time when the tech is ahead of us at every step, and those with money throw power around and those with power throw money. How do we climb out from under all that? I have no idea. All I know is that we have been whipped up, all of us, by words and acts we find egregious, by “facts” that are not true yet spread fast and get gulped whole, by strongman decrees that destabilize democracy, and by an identity politics that did not stop with inclusion but fractured and demonized. The harmony that was my only prerequisite—is nowhere. And life rarely gets quiet enough, peaceful enough, to think anything through.
As a result, nobody feels at home. Everybody feels judged. And the lightness and ease that Mina finally realized she had been chasing feel less and less attainable for any of us.
