"Everything real is in the deep end."
Carolina De Robertis, Asali Solomon, Sally Rooney, and more.
I’ve deleted Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter from my phone again, which I’ve been doing for one or two weeks at a time throughout the past few months. I’m trying to allow myself to exist/succeed in the in-betweens—I don’t have to meditate every day to see the benefits; I don’t have to announce a permanent departure from social media. (Even better, I don’t have to announce any departure, for any length of time.) This endeavor is working better than it ever has, mostly, I think, because there’s really no other option. When I told my former writing professor—a father of two—that I was pregnant, he congratulated me and urged me to be patient with myself when it came to writing in these early years of parenthood. I resisted the idea, but that kind of conviction has no bearing on reality. There is no timeline.
Anyway, there was a trend on TikTok a month or so ago that I keep thinking about, a cataloging of the various people we owe different aspects of our personalities, habits, or beliefs to. “I do X because Y person did too.” I’ve been trying to pay attention in my daily life to make connections to the many people I’ve learned from. We went upstate last week and I picked wildflowers to put on the table because Rachel Sanders did it on the first upstate girls trip we took, probably eight years ago now, and I was moved by the effect of such a simple act, such simple beauty, on my mood, and now I do it wherever I go. I bring home rocks from places I visit because a middle school teacher I loved did the same, and I thought it sounded very romantic. I (mostly) stack my books rather than line them up because my genius friend Melissa Lewis told me it’s better for their long-term upkeep; I also owe my belief in universal basic income to Melissa, who took the time to talk me through the now very obvious truth that a person shouldn’t have to “earn a living.”
It’s a fun little exercise in reflection and gratitude, and I highly recommend it. And now here are some books I recommend!
The President and the Frog by Carolina De Robertis (2021)
I feel like this book has not received nearly as much buzz as it deserves, though I suppose it’s kind of a weird one? I have a hard time imagining anyone not falling in love with it, even if they see the description—a former president of an unnamed Latin American country recalls his time spent in solitary confinement conversing with a talking frog—and think, Not for me.
De Robertis jumps back and forth in time, juxtaposing daily mundanities of the present with a mythical past. In the current day, the former president—legendary for his role in the revolution followed by his political career spent fighting for human rights—sits for an interview about his legacy in his modest home. (He was once known as the “poorest president in the world” for his rejection of the sprawling presidential estate.) Woven throughout are his reflections on his time imprisoned in a hole in the ground, during which he was visited by a talking frog. He questions his sanity at first, but soon finds himself eagerly awaiting their weighty conversations about democracy, dignity, justice, patriotism, resilience, and the power of perspective. In a conversation about his dismal circumstances, when the frog asks him if he’s noticed all the dirt surrounding him:
“I’m in a rank hole with a dirt floor, I can see dirt, thanks so much for pointing that out.”
You haven’t even started looking. You can’t see it. You’re so blind you can’t even see the dirt.
“Now you’ve really gone off the deep end.”
Everything real is in the deep end.
It’s so charming, timely, and genuinely provocative.
TL;DR: magical realism, Latin America, human rights, democracy, revolution, animal BFFs, resilience, yerba mate
Trashlands by Alison Stine (out Oct. 26)
I’ve been reading a lot of fiction about parenting in the end stages of the climate crisis (The New Wilderness, Bewilderment, Klara and the Sun) and thinking about the echoes throughout them for, well, obvious reasons. In Alison Stine’s Trashlands—which stands out for me as more sci-fi dystopia than literary/realist dystopia—we meet Coral years after her son was taken for forced factory labor. Coral travels with a troop of “pluckers” pulling plastic out of garbage heaps and cluttered water in Appalachia—it’s more valuable now than paper money—and she’s trying desperately to gather up enough to buy her son’s freedom. Her home base is Trashlands, named for the region but also for the strip club at its center, whose owner hates to see a woman on his land that he can’t control.
Some of the characters can veer a bit into caricature (the villainous proprietor is called Rattlesnake Master) but I also know genre tropes can feel clunky to someone who isn’t fully enmeshed in their world. Where the book shone, for me, was in the friendship between Coral and Foxglove, a sex worker who defies cliche, and in Stine’s vivid scenery.
TL;DR: feminist dystopia, Appalachia, sex work, single motherhood, capitalism, climate crisis, hero’s journey
Excellent Women by Barbara Pym (1952)
This was my introduction to Barbara Pym and it was the most fun I’ve had reading a book in a long, long time. It’s just… so easy. Neat, funny writing. Good characters, the lowest-stakes drama. A modest, unmarried 30-something woman named Mildred’s life sees some unusual excitement when a new couple moves into her building: Helena, an anthropologist (!) who wears pants (!!), and her charming husband Rocky, back from a stint in the navy. Mildred finds herself reluctantly ushered into their domestic dramas and secular sensibilities, always uncomfortable but convinced she’s becoming a better Christian by extending these atheists (!!!) any generosity of thought or kindness or time. She finds herself uncomfortably attracted to Rocky as well as Helena’s research partner, Everard Bone [Everard. Bone.] and maybe she’s drinking a little more than usual, but ultimately their effect on her life is minimal: She continues to go to church multiple times a week, continues to actively consider what the church means to her, continues to be deeply enmeshed in the home and lives of the young vicar next door and his sister. She’s set in her ways and she’s (mostly) fine with it: “I was now old enough to become fussy and spinsterish.”
It might not sound funny, but it is very funny. Pym’s phrasing is so punchy, her dialogue is so effective, and she’s really good at exploiting the absurdity and hypocrisy of propriety. We’ve got some fantastic characters and exquisite lines, especially in William Caldicote, the brother of a longtime friend, who Mildred sees once a year for a lunch, and who is definitely coded as gay. I did a little snort-laugh on the train when I read this exchange, which occurs after William accuses Mildred of “seeming unlike [her]self.” :
‘You know I’m not used to wine, particularly in the middle of the day,’ I said. ‘But it’s rather pleasant to be unlike oneself, occasionally.’
‘I don’t agree. They’ve moved me to a new office and I don’t like it at all. Different pigeons come to the windows.’
Different pigeons!
Incidentally, this book taught me that “slut” used to have very different meanings.
Granted, it’s a novel from a white writer in the ‘50s, so you must brace yourself for the inevitable uh-oh, which, here, occurs about 80 pages in, when Mildred attends Helena’s anthropology event and there’s a good amount of talk about “primitive cultures.” For me, it’s sidelined enough that it didn’t get too much in the way, and Pym doesn’t exactly write the anthropologists with the greatest reverence anyway. But, you know, your mileage may vary.
TL;DR: Austen-esque, 1950s London, comedy of manners, spinsters young and old, Christianity
The Days of Afrekete by Asali Solomon (Oct. 19)
One thing I love about doing this newsletter is that it’s often where I notice if I’m in a ~moment~. Writing through these recommendations, I’m realizing, Oh, huh, guess I’m all about women relationships right now. Asali Solomon’s The Days of Afrekete is an especially intimate account.
Over the course of one day, two women in their forties find themselves separately revisiting the whirlwind romance they shared at Bryn Mawr. Liselle Belmont—now married to a white man—gets a call from an FBI agent hours before she’s supposed to host a party for her husband, Winn, whose (failed) campaign for a seat in the state legislature may have involved corruption. Going through the motions, ambivalent about her role as the Good Wife to a wealthy man with a domestic staff—her “twoness as the Black mistress of a tiny plantation”—she wonders about how she got here, and her mind turns to her college friend and lover Selena Octave, long out of touch.
Solomon draws out the tension of the evening party by weaving in the history of their relationship—their meeting on the first day of Bryn Mawr’s first Black literature class taught by a Black woman, the only Black students in the overcrowded class; falling quickly and heavily in love; navigating the subtle racism and classism of liberal academia; helping each other figure out who they are and what they want. Both story arcs are equally compelling, and I never found myself flipping ahead a few pages to see when I could get back to the narrative I really cared about. When we finally see the day from Selena’s perspective—colored by the anxiety and depression that has had her in and out of psych hospitals—it’s a thrill. Where will this day, these reflections, lead these women? I read it in one day because I couldn’t wait to find out.
TL;DR: coming of age, domestic fiction, middle-aged Black women protagonists, Philadelphia, racism, liberal/intellectual hypocrisy, queer dating (WLW)
Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard (1977)
Not to be all I’m working on 😏 a project 😏 but I’m working on a project that involves a lot of reading of very bleak books. This is one of them. I found it while looking for another bleak book at my local used bookstore Topos, saw that it was about death and meaning(lessness), and thought, Perfect. It’s just 80 pages, a sort of diary from Dillard’s two years spent holed up on an island in the Puget Sound, contending with all the evidence pointing to a callous god, if any god exists, while surrounded by miraculous and undeniable beauty.
“Nothing is going to happen in this book,” Dillard writes in the middle of the first chapter—and what audacity, an absolute mic drop. She cultivates potent contradictions, refuses to commit to any absolute truth or thesis; we know full well none exist. “All day I long I feel created,” she writes in a section on the holy in mundanity; but then, too, “It is the best joke there is, that we are here.” Life is beautiful but also it’s dumb, and Annie Dillard is going to write whatever she wants.
TL;DR: meditations, philosophy, solitude, religion, nature, death, beauty, grief, woof
Listening to:
Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney, read by Aoife McMahon
My shameful secret is that until I started this audiobook a few weeks ago, I’d never consumed any Rooney media. This wasn’t, like, a counterculture stance against her ubiquity; I just… couldn’t get excited about the prospect of reading about horny college students. But this one: I don’t know! I was curious, I saw the advance listening copy, I started it and was quickly hooked. It alternates between a strange sort of objective/omniscient narrator (sees everything but doesn’t know what the characters are thinking, reads more like a stage director) and emails sent between Alice and Eileen, best friends in their thirties—one a famous millionaire novelist fresh out of a psychiatric hospitalization, the other an editorial assistant at a literary magazine—who are dealing with disillusionment, existential crises, and complicated love lives. I get it now, why readers have attached to Rooney as a voice of a generation — she’s adept at zooming in on the little anxious details of our little anxious lives, our coinciding global and individual crises. From one of those emails:
“Of course, in the midst of everything, the state of the world being what it is, humanity on the cusp of extinction, here I am writing another email about sex and friendship. What else is there to live for?”
If you love an Irish accent, listen to it. If not, read it.
Etc.
I told the world that my book love would live exclusively in this newsletter but I quickly made a liar of myself. Here’s a great list of fall releases from TIME, which I was lucky enough to contribute to. Especial favorites that I would have written about in here, if we hadn’t written about them in there, include: Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence, Miriam Toews’ Fight Night, Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle, Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness, Lauren Groff’s Matrix, and Tracy K. Smith’s Such Color.
Digital media companies continue to make terrible decisions: Casey Johnston aka A Swole Woman was let go from VICE. Not to be hyperbolic but Casey’s writing about lifting is the only thing that has successfully convinced me I could give up dieting AND exercise that I hate (i.e., running) and that doing so would be okay (good, even!) and I’ve literally talked to my therapist about her column multiple times. That column is now a newsletter and you should subscribe!
Speaking of diets: That’s really all Noom is, though they are desperate to convince you otherwise. I loved Christine Byrne’s takedown at Outside.
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