books are the silver lining.

Writing news:

• I did an interview for The Racket about Select Screen and the internet at large (complete with shoutouts to pixel dolls and Neopets): read the whole interview here.

This post feels belated somehow, like I’ve been meaning to write it for ages, but the words just wouldn’t come. The end of summer melancholy always hits me toward the close of August. After years of teaching, I probably cling to the concept of summer more than I should, particularly now that I’m free of the school year cycle. But this summer was, in many ways, transformative — we survived our first summer in the desert, I bought a new (to me) car, and spent much of the summer traveling, swimming, and reading. Generally, it was active and invigorating and sweaty!

But the last couple of weeks in August were challenging ones — our household was down with Covid and its lingering after effects. Our little desert enclave was also besieged by summer monsoons and I’ve had to do things I’d never considered before, like reinforcing our dirt hill with piles of rocks, then going back to Home Depot for more rocks, considering the color of said reinforcement rocks, Googling “French drains.”

The silver lining of August is that I was able to get some reading done while I was primarily bed-ridden for a few days. When I wasn’t reading, I was playing Tiny Bookshop on Switch, which is a delight I’ll carry with me into the fall. The books I’ve been reading lately have all centered quite a bit on redefining womens’ roles in the world, and it’s been a while since I’ve written some rapid-fire mini-reviews, so here we go.

Nesting by Roisín O’Donnell

“Leaving is one thing, but staying away is another.”

This was an intense read — I found myself having to set it aside in order to take a deep breath. Ciara Fay makes the decision to leave her husband, taking her two children with her, in order to save herself from an abusive marriage. Set against the housing crisis in Ireland, the reader follows Ciara’s struggles to find subsidized housing and contend with a year of living in a hotel with her children -– ‘nesting’ there, as it were. I read O’Donnell was inspired by real life stories of women who were living in hotels in Ireland during the same time period and it did feel incredibly true to life. Although ultimately a heartening story, Nesting examines the silent suffering that often accompanies domestic abuse, as well as the politics of Ireland surrounding marital rape, child custody, and abortion.

Supporting Act by Agnes Lidbeck (trans. Nicola Smalley)

“The fundamental requirement is that a woman play three roles. She must be a mother. She must be desirable. She must provide care. Each role must be played in accordance with agreed guidelines.”

I’ve had a subscription with Peirine Press for a few years now, and they always publish wonderful translated fiction — Supporting Act is another hit, in my opinion. This spare novel explores the state of being a ‘carer’ in the way only women can comprehend. Similar to Nesting, there is much in Supporting Act about being a mother and wife and setting other goals and ambitions aside to be the best at these two roles, roles that require supporting others rather than being the primary actor in one’s own story. The protagonist, Anna, decides the way to gain back something of her own is to have an affair with an aging author, only for the affair to settle her right back in the role of caretaker that she had just narrowly escaped. Anna’s ‘performance’ is one that ends with the final chapter and leaves the reader wondering if she will ever fully confront her own reflection. The writing style reminded me of Audition by Katie Kitamura, so if you enjoyed that, there is a good chance you’ll like Supporting Act.

Trying by Chloé Caldwell

If you’re writing about your life in real time, are you inherently fucked?

Look, I will read anything Chloé Caldwell writes, so I pre-ordered Trying and it arrived just in time to be a sick-with-Covid read. This book felt very urgent — which makes sense when you realize Caldwell was writing it, then experienced a betrayal that skidded the narrative mid-draft, and caused the book to become something else. The writing is episodic and centered around Caldwell’s fertility journey, her desire to have a baby, her frustration that it hasn’t happened for her yet. Halfway through the book, she details her husband’s ongoing infidelity and the narrative shifts from trying to conceive to trying to create an entirely new life for herself that centers her queer identity and creative pursuits. I’m not sure I would call the book a full on rejection of motherhood, rather it maintains a open-mind on what it means to have agency in one’s own life and how to forge connections beyond the one found in the womb.

Now that we’ve officially entered a -ber month and it is starting to feel a bit more like fall, I am looking forward to pumpkin spice tea, playing Tiny Bookshop, wearing my gourmand perfumes, and settling in with my TBR. America is a dumpster fire, but at least I have plenty of enrichment in my enclosure.