Finding Meaning in the Micro: On Sonya Huber's "Supremely Tiny Acts"

Sonya Huber | Supremely Tiny Acts: A Memoir of a Day | The Ohio State University Press | 2021 | 192 Pages

“I’m counting. Always.”

Deforestation, spree shooters, plastic bag islands, the last vaquita (a shy, small dolphin with panda eyes)… The world, if we’re being honest, is screwed. How can we, as dust motes taking mote-sized actions, make a difference?  

In Supremely Tiny Acts, Sonya Huber quests for the meaning of life in the micro. Her memoir-in-a-day takes place over the course of November 19, 2019, as Huber appears in court for her arrest as part of a climate change protest in Times Square. Applying modernist techniques of narrative time bending and stream-of-consciousness syntax, she’s a politically-charged, twenty-first century Mrs. Dalloway, wondering how she’s supposed to concentrate on flowers when “every day dealing with the mundane is a stark wrongness.” 

Previous work by Huber includes Pain Woman Takes Her Keys and Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir, which similarly explore the personal as political. For her sixth book, written from within the peak time-jelly of this global pandemic, it’s fitting she would turn to the modes and methods of modernism. Some of the movement’s best-known literary works were published in the wake of World War I and the 1918 Flu, a time of such upheaval that art required new forms to parse it all.

Huber’s ever-spooling thoughts create bold, almost discomfiting intimacy, as well as some “whoa dude” trippiness. One minute you are utterly engrossed in a sentence; then fifty pages have passed. The danger here could be a quagmire of confused thoughts, but from page one Huber’s mind is quick and racing. Like Miranda “outrun[ning] Death and the Devil” in Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider–jump on and get ready for the ride.  

Switching points of view is one of the great tricks of modernist fiction, a snap of the fingers in case of a bad trip. When Benjy’s lumbering obsessions overwhelm, The Sound and the Fury turns to the sensitive and intelligent Quentin. Clarissa Dalloway’s traumatization of Septimus Smith serves as counterpoint to her domestic narrative. But what about memoir, with its singular, first-person eye? Huber’s solution is to locate a second point in time, a flashback to the day of her arrest. Thus two timelines anchor Huber’s octopussing thoughts as she wrangles with 90s fashion, professor life, imposter syndrome, class consciousness, chronic pain, motherhood, and activism.  

The turning point of Supremely Tiny Acts occurs when both timelines hit their climax. In the past, Huber sits in her jail cell. In the present, she goes to court. The American legal system proves to be the ultimate liminal space once she realizes all parties involved simply “wanted things to go faster and they were going so slowly.” The “things” in this instance refer to the excruciatingly dull steps of the hearing, but Huber is also alluding to the universal experience of frustration in face of the inexorable and systemic. Sometimes, even the most dedicated activist can’t fight The Man. 

Both situations function as a No Exit purgatory, where time loses meaning, although Huber can’t help but get along with other people. She not only befriends her fellow activists, learning about their daily lives as they await their turn in the courtroom, she dials into the communal dream state: “There was a sort of fantasy—similar to waiting in line at a cash register or a coffee shop where nothing seems to be happening—that if I make a certain kind of piercing eye contact, might have been able to awaken some urgency or produce a different outcome.”

Of course, court is a different experience when the outcome is a given. Huber is so confident of her verdict that she schedules her son’s driver’s test for that same afternoon. Even when her arthritis throbs in her handcuffs on the day of the arrest, Huber understands her situation as one of privilege, a recurring theme. At times, we might wish for Huber to ease up on the self-interrogation, but the reader also comes to expect nothing less than honest appraisals of inadequacy. And Huber always returns from her lofty ideals to pragmatics: “There is always the glamorous radical stance and then there is whoever is left making the fucking pot of lentils.”

The day I’m drafting this review is the day after an election, November 3, 2021. No one I voted for won. Everyone wants to “get back to normal,” whatever that means. A burgeoning Neo-Nazi movement? Workers struggling to eat while gazillionaires build penis rockets? Not long ago, well-intentioned white liberals made Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race a best-seller. But how many of them read it? Huber’s memoir is a testimony to never forgetting. No single person can save the world, but we “can contribute grains of sand that might stop the engine of doom.”

If all this starts to feel like a bitter, jagged, little Gen-X pill, fear not, for Huber is also here to savor the wee delights of life. For instance, a tasty taco at her favorite joint in Times Square with delicately shredded cabbage. Cabbage! A miracle in itself, a swirling brain of nourishment, or as Huber observes, “To start with something so big and produce a tiny fleck speaks to a kind of sculptural grandness.”  

And it’s in the finely sliced cabbage that Tiny Acts succeeds, because Huber isn’t the friend who monologues unending prophecies of doom, but the friend who affirms your feelings. “I know! I know!” she’s saying, as she squeezes your arm. That’s why you’ll enjoy the fall through Huber’s mental rabbit holes. She’s funny and real. And if you need to jot down your racing thoughts, she will offer you a funky pen in the shape of an orange slice from Target.