Book Report: The Typing Lady

16. Ruth Ozeki, The Typing Lady—and Other Fictions (2026) (9/22/26)

Continuing on in the alphabet, I picked up another hardback book that mysteriously arrived on my doorstep not too long ago. (Okay, not so mysterious. I can't help myself.) I've read two other Ruth Ozeki books (review of her last one here and an extended quote from an earlier one here, and by the way, I can't believe it's been eleven years since I first discovered her—where does the time go?) and very much enjoy her sensibility, a sort of grounded whimsy. 

This book comprises eleven short stories, many of them featuring, at least in passing, typewriters, many of them also featuring, I'm fairly certain, a thinly veiled version of Ozeki herself. The characters range from children figuring out friendship and connection, to a young woman falling in love, to adults searching for ambition or grappling with an elder's dementia, to a widowed grandmother considering the inevitable future. There's nothing fancy about Ozeki's style; it's straightforward and comforting. 

"The Typing Lady," which opens the book, is subtitled "An Author's Note" and it ends like this:

This author's note is not really about [the typing lady's stories]. It's about yours and mine, about how, when we read a story, we bring our own lives to bear on it and make it ours, no matter what the writer might have intended. Stories are like that. They are collaborations between people who read and people who type. They are how we co-create each other and dream ourselves into being.

And this book held a couple of ancillary surprises as well, tied to the bigger world. The first relates to a FB post by a friend of mine, who was considering cause and effect, and concluded: 

It is turtles all the way down.  That’s the answer but I can’t remember the question. A giant turtle carries the earth on it’s back and it is endless turtles all the way down. We will never know the causes of life.

Bladder cancer is supposedly caused by smoking at home, or maybe second hand smoke in the office, or maybe past radiation treatments, or something eaten, or nuclear bombs tests near my mother’s Arizona home. The correct answer is, bladder cancer is really caused by turtles and there are turtles all the way down. 

So imagine my surprise when, in the final story of this collection, "The Problem of the Body," I arrived at this line: It's turtles all the way down. Ha! The context here is not cancer, but a couple of actual box turtles, Ebeneezer and Evelyn. But given that Ozeki is an ordained Buddhist priest, I'm sure she was winking at the old Hindu (etc.) concept of the Cosmic Turtle.  

Then as I was settling into bed, having finished the book, I opened my email and found one of my daily poetry messages. And this one contained the poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins "Spring and Fall, to a young child." Which was referenced in the story "One Art," about an unrequited love. "I found a poem," the protagonist writes. 

"It's very sad, I've been thinking about it all day. I cna't work for thinking about it. I dreamed about it. It won't go away."
     "Don't be sad. What's the poem. Tell it to me."
     "It's by Hopkins. It's about Margaret. Do you know . . ."
     "Margaret. I know that. Of course. I found that poem a long time ago. Someone showed it to me. I can't remember . . ."
     "'Margaret,' it goes, 'Margaret, are you grieving, Over Goldengrove unleaving . . .' It has all the accents so I can't say it right. It's so sad. I don't know what it means, but the sounds are so sad."

The remark about the accents is what caught my attention, because the emailed poem had—all these accents!

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older . . .

Anyway. These little coincidences made me like the book all the more. Not only could I identify with some of the characters in the stories, and appreciate the connection between myself and Ozeki the author, but then elements of her imagination showed up in my very own lived life. Which is exactly what's she's getting at.