a leaf & its shade: architecture

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Giada Scodellaro’s second book, Ruins, Child, threads together the voices of six women who live in the same crumbling apartment complex in the near-ish future-ish. The book is a powerfully loosely, undeniably connected narrative, like a sand storm throwing a zillion little particles together in one direction—and it was one of those reading experiences where I felt always, tantalizingly, on the edge of confident understanding.

One of its most potent forces, maybe the connective impetus behind it all, is the book’s interest in the elusive. Ruins, Child doesn’t attempt to make the elusive solid, just extremely real. It insists on the presence of something that would be easier to dismiss as not there. The book’s preoccupations include: the shift of becoming a mother, the role of plants and shade in spatial architecture, chemistry between two people.

The book returns to these subjects, again and again, drawn to focusing on the powerful, but not always tangible, visible, or permanent elements of our lives. The characters in Ruins, Child continue to insist: yes, but of course it’s right there, we all see it. Or: we all know it. It doesn’t feel like a series of preoccupations, but a belief in a shared truth or at least an instance of a shared truth, worth pausing and saying, that was there, we all felt it.

• My current strutting around music: “Broken Man”, “Not in Surrender”, “I’ve Been Thinking”, “Wild Girl”.

• Saw Holly Lowen’s preppy, hallucinatory show upstairs at Perrotin; mixed reviews in my company but I was entranced (a favorite way to be). And also there’s a Danielle Orchard painting in the group show downstairs that I want to live inside.

• This is the second Giada Scodellaro Purse Book! In the first installment, about Some of Them Will Carry Me, she also recommended a favorite Purse Book of her favorite.

• I’m in the midst of a terrible summer nail polish shade crisis because I’m wearing a lot of red this summer, but I only like red pedicures, and I almost always hate matchy-matchy. Only confident advice or kind commiseration welcome.