books bought
The Halt during the Chase by Rosemary Tonks
It All Felt Impossible: 42 Years in 42 Essays by Tom McAllister
Preparing to Bite by Keiler Roberts
The King of a Rainy Country by Brigid Brophy
books borrowed & received
The Pilgrimage by John Broderick
Confidential by Mikolaj Grynberg, trans. Sean Gasper Bye
A Silent Treatment by Jeannie Vanasco (out 9/9)
Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy by Mary Roach (e-galley, out 9/16)
Hey you,
I’ve read a lot this month. I figured I might try to do some thinking about what I’ve read this month as well. Bear with me as it’s been a minute since I’ve bothered to do so.
The Tragedy of True Crime: Four Guilty Men and the Stories That Define Us by John J. Lennon (out 9/23)
A really remarkable book: Lennon is imprisoned for murder, and he’s written a work of tremendous reporting from behind bars. I don’t mean to imply writing a novel in prison is easy, but it’s hard to overstate the difficulties for an imprisoned journalist in gathering documents, fact-checking, interviewing, editing. (My friend Megan is his publicist, and she worked to facilitate the book’s publication: not just in the usual publicist ways but in ways like sending the entire manuscript to Lennon for editing in 37 separate envelopes to comply with the incredible and arbitrary bureaucracy of prison.)
He writes about the murder he committed and profiles three other men convicted of murder while interrogating the role of true crime in keeping each of them imprisoned. He doesn’t downplay their crimes, and he doesn’t shy away from discussing the rest of their lives as well. He doesn’t avoid any of the elephants in the room, really:
It’s conflicting, and probably grating, I imagine, to hear how someone who once took a life now wants a good one… I understand why the family of the man I murdered doesn’t want me to overcome prison and find success; they want me to feel the punishment of prison forever, because their pain is forever. And so perhaps it’s brazen, insulting even, for me to want more for my life.
Subtle Bodies by Norman Rush
Not very good. Will unfortunately be remembered (by me) for a gross line about sex that, tragically, gets repeated. However, the opening paragraph has a great line, which I will certainly be repeating:
When you’re traveling, you’re nothing, until you land, which is what’s good about it, Ned thought.
Driftwood City by Jason Martin
I was in Minneapolis on a business trip (it’s hard to believe you can grow up and become the kind of person who says this shit) and stumbled across a store called Odd Mart. They had an amazing selection of indie comics. It’s been years since I last felt particularly interested in the genre (if you can call all of indie comics one genre, which you obviously shouldn’t), but Odd Mart sucked me right back in. I picked up this self-published collection there. It helped its case that it was $12.
Smalls-heads—and they are legion—know I have a soft spot for diary comics. The comics in this collection aren’t described by the author as diary comics (he goes for “autobiographical”), but that’s where they fall under my personal taxonomy. Broadly, they’re about coming of age in the aughts in Northern California, but not as fucking boringly as my description makes it sound. A nice little collection—funny, sweet, sincere.
Territorial Rights by Muriel Spark
I’ve been fortuitous with my stumbling recently—in addition to Odd Mart in Minneapolis, I came across Lanterna Magica in Helsinki, which turns out to be an absolute marvel. They have a sick art gallery and a great selection of books and records in English and Finnish. (They have books in Swedish as well, but I have no way to gauge the quality of that collection… sorry to all the Swedish-speaking readers I have in Helsinki.) They had a large collection of Penguin Spark books and I bought three-quarters of them.
Territorial Rights, set in Venice, was a perfectly engaging read. Not her best, but then there’s a long list for it to compete with.
It All Felt Impossible: 42 Years in 42 Essays by Tom McAllister
Exactly what it says on the tin: an essay for each year of his life. My favorite essay was “1987,” about memory and false memory, events he recalls clear as day that couldn’t possibly have happened. It reminded me of Julian Barnes’s Nothing to Be Frightened Of, which is high praise from me. Barnes writes:
As a philosopher, [my brother] believes that memories are often false, “so much so that, on the Cartesian principle of the rotten apple, none is to be trusted unless it has some kind of external support.” I am more trusting, or more self-deluding, so I shall continue as if all my memories are true.1
McAllister writes:
I can try all I want to be as truthful as possible, but I have no way to verify most of the information I’m sharing. They are events I remember having occurred, and I can describe them in great detail. Still, I need to acknowledge it’s possible that some (most?) of the stories I’ve told my friends over the years have been invented, in whole or in part. What I really want to know is: can fears, if felt deeply and intensely enough, generate these experiences in our minds? What is the difference between me having actually fallen and me feeling absolutely certain that I have fallen?
The collection also made me realize how absurdly dependent I’ve become on my diary to recall the events of my life.
Audition by Katie Kitamura
I read this on a plane while sedated, so arguably I wasn’t its keenest reader. But I admired the way it refused to hold the reader’s hand. Let us be confused for once! It’s good for us! And Kitamura can certainly craft a sentence.
Confidential by Mikolaj Grynberg, translated from the Polish by Sean Gasper Bye
Belongs in the opening line hall of fame: “Unless you know how to outrun events and, cursing the past, write a happy ending. You don’t, I can tell.”
One of my colleagues, who is 22 somehow, asked me how I decide what books to read. It’s a good question, these days. This one I picked up at the library, in the new releases section, and I read the first paragraph, and I checked it out. When I was reading query letters at literary agencies I liked to wait to read the query letter until after I finished the sample pages, because I could so often and easily bias myself against a book I’d otherwise like with a few key words.2 The blurb for this book includes a few of those words—“three generations,” “Holocaust”—and so if I’d heard anything about it before I came across it I probably wouldn’t have picked it up. But it was a total treat. Incisive, laugh-out-loud funny.
A Silent Treatment by Jeannie Vanasco
I wrote about Jeannie’s last book at some length. This one, too, has a shocking premise—shocking that it happens, shocking that she is able to write about it, and to write about it with such grace. Her mother, who lives in the apartment in her and her partner’s house, stops speaking to her for varying lengths of time at the smallest perceived slights. At its shortest, the silences lasted two weeks; the longest was six months.
I keep coming back to that same word, grace. Not that it would ever be easy to write a book like this, but of all the paths you could take, surely Jeannie takes the most difficult one: to explore the question of why with a desire for true insight. You could never for a moment think this is a revenge memoir.3 It’s written with such obvious love for her mother, and with the kind of empathy often exalted but little demonstrated in contemporary memoirs. As Jeannie’s friend points out:
Every time you talk about this project, Sarah says, the question I keep hearing is, What do we owe our parents? And what do you owe her specifically, and it’s so interesting that you set it up for yourself.
It’s also remarkable for the way it makes you feel that you’re writing it with her. She includes her editorial decisions in the text, e.g.:
Her dialogue goes in parentheses—when? When it’s intrusive? (Mom: You are such a disappointment.) And when does it deserve its own line?
Remarkable, too, for the feeling you get as a reader that she isn’t leaving anything out, though definitionally writing memoir is an act of picking and choosing.
Grace, grace, grace. You’d think this would be the kind of book where scores are settled, but instead it’s a work of striking love.
Your friend,
Smalls
Tangentially related, here’s one of the passages from Nothing to Be Frightened Of that actually makes me laugh out loud:
My brother remembers a ritual—never witnessed by me—which he called the Reading of the Diaries. Grandma and Grandpa each kept separate diaries, and of an evening would sometimes entertain themselves by reading out loud to one another what they had recorded on that very week several years previously. The entries were apparently of considerable banality but frequent disagreement. Grandpa: “‘Friday. Worked in garden. Planted potatoes.’” Grandma: “Nonsense. ‘Rained all day. Too wet to work in garden.’”
It’s well-established lore that I’m quite awful at knowing which books I’ll like and which books I’ll hate based on their descriptions. And yet I bravely soldier forth.
Probably a year ago I read a memoir—I can’t remember the title, really—about the author’s husband cheating on her with and leaving her for her best friend. Devastating, and much to explore there, but I came away from it feeling that I’d participated not in art but in an act of public vengeance.