People Who Are Dead to Me

It’s been a minute! But I have some good excuses. One of which is— I’m writing a libretto! That is, I’m writing the freaking narrative and words for a new opera, devised with composer Lu Wang and dramaturg David Levin. (I’ve always wanted to know what a dramaturg does, and now I know— it’s a lot!) We’re going to be workshopping the project at Festival D’Aix-en-Provence this summer. More on that soon.

Below— some book recs and below that, a little rant about people who are dead to me, and also “One Weird Trick” I have been using on an almost daily basis for the last year that has really improved my life.

I was in Boston for a few days last month and stopped by Grolier Poetry Bookshop on my pal Kit’s recommendation, and to say hello to his friend James who is, it seems, the only person who works there. James edits a new-ish literary magazine called Duck, which he gave me a copy of (thanks, James!) and I think y’all would like it a lot.

At Groiler, I ended up buying, for no particular reason, a copy of Greenhouse by Jack Paradise. Lo! The wild high of buying and immediately reading a book because your subconscious was like— yeah, gimmie dat.

Greenhouse is a novella about a gay couple and their kid living on an island in the somewhat near-ish future. Wonderful book, calm and elegant. There’s a sense of some kind of discord happening elsewhere, off the page, or maybe that’s just a feeling I can’t help but assign to any book set in the present, recent past, or near future. Discord in all directions.

Since Greenhouse was so well-made and pleasing to hold, I looked up the publishing house that made it, which was new to me— Publication Studio, an international network of 11 studios that collectively produce and distribute their titles. I don’t totally understand how it works, but whatever Publication Studio is doing, I am pretty sure I am in favor of it. They’re in Hudson, Glasgow, Vancouver, São Paulo, Paris, etc. Why not Mexico City, my pals? Let me know.

Much of what I’ve been reading lately is following a kind of color scheme, so here it is.

Lili is Crying by Hélène Bessette was a gift from my friend and fellow writer Maryse Meijer. The language is totally refreshing and electric. It’s Bessette’s 1953 debut and it was translated from the French by the brilliant Kate Briggs. Definitely worth reading if you find yourself feeling hemmed in by the average rhythms and textures and sentences we most commonly find in novels. And maybe this isn’t the most flattering word for a book, but I think it’s had a medicinal effect on my writing. It got me out of a confusion or a slump.

The Loves of my Life is Edmund White’s last (as in final) book. It was published just a few months before White’s death in 2025, and I’d been meaning to get a copy. As the cover says, it’s a “sex memoir” and though I’m not yet done with it, I know it’s going to be delightfully frank to the very end. Sometimes a person might say “I don’t give a shit what anyone thinks, I’m just going to write whatever I want,” but really no one gives less of a shit what other people think than a gay man in his 80s. It’s raunchy, tender, a little bizarre in moments. ¡Viva Edmund!

And Dog Days by Emily LaBarge is out now in the US and it’s our Irregular Book Club pick for August. (August 9th most likely.) There’s tons to discuss here. LaBarge is doing something really interesting with the essay form (as the book feels more like an essay to me, but technically I guess it’s a memoir.) It’s out now with Transit Books, a small press I just totally adore. In the UK it came out last year with Peninsula Press.

Recently in an interview with a Spanish journalist (para El libro moebius, Alfaguara) I found myself talking about the people who are “Dead To Me.” By this I mean if I saw any of these people in the street, I would walk the other way and if they tried to speak to me I would pretend I didn’t hear them. In the interview I was thinking—oh shit, how did we get here? Shut up, Catherine. Stop talking. I’ve never had anything like media training and I run my mouth in the stupidest ways during these things.

It’s a short list, the dead-to-me list, but I’ve often wondered if it’s ridiculous to be a person who does such a thing. No, that’s not true— I know it’s ridiculous to be such a person, yet I’m the one in charge of this behavior, and it remains firmly in place.