Review: Supremely Tiny Acts by Sonya Huber

Reviewed by Anna Sims

Here’s the thing about fixing the world: it’s important. Really important. Especially when it involves saving humanity from death by climate catastrophe. And that is what Sonya Huber’s latest book, Supremely Tiny Acts, is about. Specifically, it’s about her arrest for blocking traffic in Times Square while protesting the government’s inaction on global warming. Big picture, though, it’s a book about trying to fix the world.

But here’s the other thing about world-fixing: it’s complicated. Take Huber’s protest. She and a bunch of other people devote a day to getting arrested to draw attention to global warming, an objectively good-for-society thing to do. But first, Huber has to pick a flag. Everyone in her group of “mostly white and privileged American people,” as she describes it, is asked to pick a flag, which represents a country particularly vulnerable to global warming. And that’s how Huber, a white woman, ends up holding the flag of Malawi, a country that certainly deserves representation, but is maybe not best represented by Huber or her peers. So now the group must put its avoiding-climate-disaster agenda on hold to consider the optics of white people waiving the flags of Malawi and other nations of the Global South.

“[Was it better] not to hold them, not claim that we represented the world? . . . Or was it worse to not express solidarity?” Huber writes, fully aware of the importance, absurdity, and gallows humor of the situation.  

Of course, it would be better to just have more people of color in the group to begin with, but that’s not the reality of this protest, or many of these protests, because, as Huber acknowledges, a lot of activist groups have a diversity problem. Just like a lot of places in American society have a diversity problem. And none of that is the problem Huber and her group came to Times Square attempting to solve. Yet here it is, suddenly, the problem at hand.

And within this story, I think, lies the core message of Huber’s book.

Huber knows the easy platitudes: activism is good. Global warming is bad. White saviorism is gross. Solving the planet’s problems is important. But Huber never rests in what’s easy. She forces you to consider what to do when you’re a white woman asked to waive a Malawian flag. Or how to handle the anxiety when your protest is blocking traffic to inconvenience people—and protests do have to be inconvenient; how else can you expect anyone to notice? To care?—but what if, Huber wonders, her protest inadvertently inconveniences someone trying to get to “an important and serious doctor’s appointment . . . [or] people with major things to do, like their own court dates or tearful lunch meetings”? What if her efforts to save human civilization from a dismal future causes her to ruin someone’s life today?

Which is all to say, if there’s a resounding theme in Supremely Tiny Acts, I think it might be this: trying to fix the world is relentlessly, overwhelmingly complicated. Because you might start wanting to address one thing, but along the way, you’ll inevitably stumble upon all these other things to worry about, so many other things we need to fix.  

Supremely Tiny Acts is subtitled A Memoir of a Day—which, not to be that person, but that isn’t really true. Technically, the book covers two days: October 10, 2019, the day Huber is arrested for civil disobedience while protesting, and November 19, 2019, when Huber goes to court for her arrest. And sure, there’s more plot I could give about those dates, but plot is not what makes this book special. Even Huber agrees, writing, “This day, November 19, 2019, isn’t the best day or the worst day or anything”—and I’d argue the same goes for October 10, 2019—“it is just a day that sticks in my head because of the chemistry of adrenaline, downtime, and notes made in a journal.”

She goes on to say that she loves Nicholson Baker’s novel The Mezzanine where, “I know there’s a complex beautiful structure inside it but really it’s about the mind of a person having an amazingly normal web of thoughts, like those symphonies going on inside all of us all the time, beautiful invisible kaleidoscopes, and I always wanted to do that for real, to write that.”

And honestly, that’s a perfect description of what Huber has done in this book, with the notable caveat that she does not have an “amazingly normal web of thoughts.” Huber’s thoughts are unique and complicated. And with their complication she’s written a book that touches on nearly all the world’s worries and problems, from the internal to the external, the past to the present to our planet-on-fire future.

Because Huber can’t tell the story of her climate protest without touching on her three decades of work in Leftist activist circles. (And oh boy does she have stories, including one that ends with “a mean poem on the door of a rented third-floor room in a lesbian co-op house.”) Or why she’s protesting now—yes, to save the planet before it’s too late, but also because she finally has job security at her university so she probably can’t be fired for this arrest; still, she keeps it relatively private, just in case. Or about the depths of class divides and the imposter syndrome she still feels because she might be an accomplished private East Coast university professor now, but her roots are in the Midwest, in years of single motherhood and being intimidated by the names of the rich Connecticut towns she passes on the train taking her to and from the protest and her court date. Or what it’s like living with mental health struggles and chronic pain, the latter of which causes her to wear a carpal tunnel wrist brace to the protest as she correctly assumes being handcuffed won’t feel great to her rheumatoid arthritis. Or sexism, including the internalized kind that makes Huber scoff at her mugshot for not looking pretty or thin enough. Or white privilege because Huber admits to feeling nervous and “powerless” in the hands of the police during her arrest, but she also knows she’s a middle-class white woman surrounded by a lot of other middle-class white women, so she’s safe. Huber goes on to own that the very act of getting arrested, of willingly putting yourself into the hands of law enforcement, however admirable your reasons, still has white privilege written all over it. And then, she writes, “I know, too, that even fanning out my awareness of white womanhood is a very white-woman thing to do.”

The whole book is like this: Huber connecting every emotion, every action, every problem to something else. And just like with her privilege, she always approaches those connections from lots of perspectives. It’s a practice she picked up in high school when she realized, as she writes, “how wrong it was to not present two or seven sides to an issue.”

Supremely Tiny Acts has no chapters or any moments of real finality until its last line; a self-described “book-length essay,” only scattered section breaks every few pages give the reader any pause from the shifting moods and intensity of her sentences. And those sentences can be long. Real long. Like six- or eight- or eleven-lines long. Because you can’t capture the complexity of all seven sides of the world’s problems without lengthening your sentences a bit.

The effect is that the book reads as the definition of stream-of-consciousness, which is not a veiled way of saying it’s disorganized. Only a writer with impeccable narrative control could weave so many threads into one story, or could make what is surely endlessly labored-over prose read so effortless, so heat-of-the-moment real. 

Consider her explanation for her arrest:

[E]very day is draining because the hours are made up of attempts to keep functioning and keep a job and do normal things like microwave mozzarella sticks for one’s teenage son (actually don’t microwave, these should go in the toaster oven, trust me) and so every day dealing with the mundane is a stark wrongness, a sign that we are all more split inside, that we have to dissociate or compartmentalize, but I don’t think people are numb or tuning out, we’re just all divided into several pieces and we know we should  constantly be setting things on fire so we are trying to figure out what constitutes ethical action. . . . [T]his get-arrested-by-choice was on some level a chance to check a box or know that I did something, even though this was not the only thing I did, but who’s counting? I’m counting. Always. And I’m desperate to find a way to sleep at night, but how do any of us sleep?

This passage feels quintessentially “Huberian” in its sentence structure as well as its shifts in subject matter and tone. (It also shows why it’s hard to quote Huber without giving her lots of room: to cut her off too soon is to lose her entire voice, not to mention a gem of nuance, wisdom, or humor.) And, of course, the passage offers different sides to things.

The decision to get arrested is framed as a makeup for all the times Huber feels she hasn’t done enough to save the planet because of work, because of parenthood, because when so much feels so bad, where do you even begin?

And in this passage—in so many of the book’s passages—I remember the lesson of the Malawian flag debacle. You know: start focused on one thing, then stumble into more worries, more problems. Because everything is so complicated. Everything so connected. All of it something we need to fix.

But how?

Huber’s son asks her this shortly after her arrest. I mean, he asks what she’s going to do about global warming specifically, but I hope it’s clear by now that solving global warming isn’t separate from solving the other things.

In response, Huber writes that she tells her son, “‘Well I just went to jail last month,’ and he looked at me deadpan and asked, ‘Well, did that work?’ He has a point. But then again, this is faith for me, the faith that people who care about making the world better have to add their supremely tiny acts together, and if you can function in that constant impossibility of your tiny actions, then you can contribute grains of sand that might stop the engine of doom.”

I hope it’s not too much of a spoiler to reveal her world-fixing solution here. In my defense, it is the title, and this passage comes on page eight, so Huber’s not saving it for her grand finale. And anyway, isn’t it obvious? Of course the way we solve our big problems is to make little steps. Of course the only solution is to try.

It’s true that Huber ends her solution passage by saying her suggestion “might”—only might!!—“stop the engine of doom,” so I don’t want to put too much of a tidy bow on things. Still, I think this is what Supremely Tiny Acts is: a book about what it looks like to try. It’s a book that knows exactly how hard it is to try, and how relentlessly, overwhelmingly complicated things get when you do. But we have to anyway because the world is waiting on us—is counting on us—to try.

Anna Sims is a writer, editor, and professor with work in The Millions, Shondaland, and Boston Magazine, among others. She's working on an essay collection that's part humor, part cultural criticism about life's broken things, from journalism to feminism to hope itself. You can reach her on Twitter @annalise515.