Above all, it is an argument that care should be public and universal—that the grace and affirmation that women are asked to bestow on their children should not be limited to mothers, or to parents, or to the private sphere. The book is warm, raw, and occasionally scattered; some sections feel inchoate, animated by a diaristic desire to get longing on the page before it evaporates. Yet, as a lived-in argument for radicalized parenting, Essential Labor is a landmark and a lightning storm, a gift that will be passed hand to hand for years.

Garbes swoops from the universal to the personal to the downright intimate, offering an all-encompassing vision of a more socially and economically just way of caring for one another that, de facto, would improve our individual and collective lives.

Part of what distinguishes Garbes’ treatment of the subject is a question of genre. Essential Labor is a mix of political manifesto, memoir, philosophy, and cultural critique, and the writing moves with both urgency and thoughtfulness.

Equal parts manifesto, love letter, personal narrative and cultural history, Garbes’s book grounds itself in the day-to-day realities of parenting, that most constant job of caring. But by tying together the factors that brought us to where we are — colonialism and its afterlives, lack of support for caregivers, racial disparities — Garbes also looks beyond the individual to the wider webs enmeshing us all..

... slim and affirming.

Garbes draws on decades of insights from Black, Indigenous, and queer feminists.

... probing if uneven.