Interracial love & more
So this has been a fucking year. I've had a hard time getting excited about pretty much anything over the past six months, but I've been trying to combat that by paying close attention — to the people I love, to conversations, to my cats, to my Spotify discover playlist, to everything I'm reading —and working hard to make sure I don't miss the good. What a fucking delight, then, to be rewarded right at the end of a year that just gutted me with Whatever Happened To Interracial Love? by Kathleen Collins — a book that filled me right back up.
I was completely in the dark about Kathleen Collins before I saw her book as a selection in this month's Book of the Month club (s/o to Maris & co. for making it so hard to choose every month) which is a shame because, oh man, what a voice. For those who, like me, might not know: Kathleen Collins was the first black woman to write and direct a feature film (Losing Ground in 1982) but she died in 1988 at 46 years old. This is a collection of her never-published short stories, and they are exactly what I love about the form.
Collins wrote with the courage to include only precisely what she felt necessary to get her meaning (whether that's a message or a mood or a cadence) across, and (rightfully) trusted the reader to get it. That is such a scary thing to do! It helps that she does it with assurance, playing with structure and format in a way that hints at her experience in scripts and honestly, for me, recalled Beckett. Her use of repetition, lyricism, fragmented dialogue, stage direction, stream of consciousness — it's all an effective reminder that sometimes plot just distracts you from the art underneath it. Her writing is immediate. I say that as a white woman, understanding there's a whole lot I can't reach in a collection that is fundamentally about being black (and specifically a black woman) in the 60s and 70s; it's a testament to to the universality of her takes on loss, love, family, depression, loneliness, ambition, disappointment. As in:
"He rode home with her to New Jersey and she him into the backyard to look at her father's roses... to look at her childhood, to look at what pricked and stung and was difficult to forgive."
"I took to crossing the Brooklyn Bridge in the evenings between six and eight at the time the sun was setting, and in the glow of sunset I relieved the outer edges of my sadness, letting it blend with the surf-like monotony of the cars splashing below and the faint, luminescent splendor of the New York skyline..."
"How he could cry! Give in to his crying, allow it full possession of his being as if life were a vast well of tears and one must cry to be at the center of it!"
I mean, come on.
It's definitely one of the best books I've read this year, and now I'd like to do something I did on my Tumblr last year but which feels much more at home here. Here are: THE BEST BOOKS I READ IN 2016, IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER, INCLUDING THE ONE I JUST TALKED ABOUT BUT WHICH I WILL NOT REPEAT IN THIS LIST BECAUSE YOU JUST READ ABOUT IT.
All Grown Up by Jami Attenberg — I saw this galley all over my social media feeds, and for good reason. Attenberg writes about something that in any other hands could be so tired — a perpetually single woman in her late 30s questions the choices and sacrifices she's made that have (apparently) led her to full-blown adulthood — but which feels fresh and true and funny here. I laughed, I cried, I read it in one day.
The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith — Maybe I'm in the minority here but, as much as I loved the movie, I think the book is better!!
Capacity by Theo Ellsworth — This book CHANGED ME. You've gotta be in a really earnest place for this one, a graphic novel illustrating the mind (and its sadness, anxieties, imagination) of the artist, but the scenery, so detailed, is transportive. It made me rethink the way I approach creativity, reminded me of being a kid. I pull it off my shelf constantly to revisit.
The Unseen World by Liz Moore — I was in a real transhumanist/AI/dystopian tech future place this year and there were a lot of great things going on — Zero K, Black Mirror, my own rabbit holes, and The Unseen World. Maybe it's weird to include it, since half of it is set in a 1980s MIT lab where a single father is trying to perfect an AI program before his Alzheimers' kills him, but Moore's questioning of the role of virtual reality in our lives and relationships is so timely. Plus the father-daughter relationship is just painfully sweet.
This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki — I wrote about this already in this newsletter so I won't get into it again other than saying these women just get female adolescence.
Our Town by Thornton Wilder — I picked this up at a stoop sale and read it in an hour, was floored. Have you read it? You should. A recently deceased woman has a chance to revisit one day in her life and asks her fellow ghosts how she will choose one. "Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough." Kill me!!!!
All the Lives I Want by Alana Massey — Look, I'm biased since I know and love Alana, but I would just avoid the topic altogether if I didn't love this book. But I did! Her essays about all of the pop culture ladies, both real and fictional, she's idolized throughout her life are almost impossible to categorize — academic and entertaining, funny and moving. Her honesty is cutting, her insights illuminating, her feminism unapologetic. I was expecting a lot, and Massey delivered.
I'm playing around with what this newsletter is (I would love your feedback!!!) and I guess we'll see what we get into in 2017. For now, I leave you with one last note: I have a book, co-written with my bff Katie Heaney, coming out in May. It's called Public Relations, and, if I do say so myself, it's great. And not just because it's essentially fan fiction about a character who may or may not be based on Harry Styles. We're really proud of it, and if you were thinking about checking it out, I would love for you to pre-order it! Pre-order sales are hugely important for authors, and can basically determine the success of the book. Which is to say: I would be honored and thrilled if you'd consider pre-ordering here.
Love you all, see you in 2017.