Monsters, creeps, crones

Hello friends.

Well, I started this draft before the election and it's been hard to find the desire to return to it. Everything that isn't actively fighting these results has seemed useless and dumb, but I also think that — for me, personally, at least — the fight can't be everything. Fighters need to be strong and healthy in mind and spirit, and an easy way to lose that strength is to immerse myself in these dark feelings of hopelessness. So, I'm returning. I hope you are all taking care of yourselves, as well. When you are doing the fighting, and I hope that you are, here are some good places to do it, with your time and/or money:

Southern Poverty Law Center
Showing Up For Racial Justice (I'm going to be phone banking next month, and you should do it with me!! Sign up here.)
ACLU
Planned Parenthood
Human Rights Campaign

So let's get to it. Let's get to that elusive lady, that misanthropic and punishing loner, that dreamer of a better future away from her sadistic father and her depressing job. Give it up for my old, grumpy pal...

EILEEN! What a fucking gal. I don't remember the last time I read such a strange protagonist. I know the big thing about this book was the (kind of insufferable??) interview Ottessa gave the Guardian, saying the whole book started as a joke (hahaha I'm so good at writing books, it's so easy, I do it for lols) and that she wanted to write something easy and digestible for mass market audiences who ate the hell out of Girl on the Train. But my god I'd love to see the reactions of people who read this thinking they were going into Girl 2. (In fact, you can see those reactions, through the many, many reviews on Goodreads that are like "What did I just read???")

This might sound like I'm panning it. I'm not at all. I really liked this. I just think it's being marketed all wrong. It's suspenseful, I guess — there is a crime that's teased in the synopsis and throughout, but it doesn't happen until the last 30 pages — but it's so much more about Eileen, who, from the distant future, is recalling a week in her 24th year, before her life changed irreversibly. She's living at home with her abusive drunk of a father, working at a boy's juvenile detention center. She dislikes most people, herself included, and her greatest joys are stalking a prison guard she loves, shoplifting at local stores, and using enemas as a physical and emotional catharsis. It's about an unusual woman in a time when women weren't really allowed to be so. It's about obsession, female autonomy, identity and presentation. Eileen lives with shame — in her desires, her class, her level of education — and revels in it. Here she is indulging in a fantasy by entering a high-end boutique:

The awning over the door spelled the name of the boutique in canned girlish cursive: Darla's. My eyes rolled as I went inside.

"Yoo-hoo," said a voice when the bell over the door chimed. The shopgirl came out from the back room. "I'm closing soon but take your time and look around. Anything you need, just holler."

My death mask didn't seem to perturb her at all. It always peeved me when my flatness was met with good cheer, good manners. Didn't she know I was a monster, a creep, a crone? How dare she mock me with courtesy when I deserved to be greeted with disgust and dismay? My manly boots tracked dirty snow across the carpeted floor as I circled the racks and fingered the wool and silk crepe dresses. It was preposterous to think I could wear such fine garments, let alone afford them.

She's obsessed with her own badness — it's both her justification for and reaction to her bad lot in life — which is why she ends up being so susceptible to the charms of Rebecca, the beautiful (and single!) new counselor who takes Eileen under her wing and catalyzes the event that forces Eileen to leave her life behind. If we have to live in a black and white/ good and bad world, Eileen is... not good. But I like her. Sometimes I, too, am merely a monster, a creep, a crone. And as compelling as Eileen is, her world is even more so. This is a PERFECT winter book, imo — all dark nights, snowy drives. You can feel the chill of it.

That's all. I'm currently reading Jami Attenberg's galley and BOY IS IT GOOD! Thank god for the books.

Send me your recs, sign up for litsy (it will be good, I know it, I just need all my friends on it with me), and be well <3