I followed up Maggie Nelson with more Maggie Nelson. This time it was her 2016 book, Jane: A Murder, which explores the 1969 murder of Nelson’s aunt Jane. Obviously, I’ve just been mesmerized by everything Nelson touches lately. This book is thoughtful, creative, but also frightening in the true crime kind of way. I don’t have much more to say about this piece–just that I think Nelson’s work is so novel and important and a way forward for us literary types.
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson wasn’t on my reading list, but I dropped everything when I remembered I hadn’t read it. What a great book! First, it should be taught in graduate-level theory courses. (It probably is, but nothing like this was taught in mine.) We need more feminist theory like this that truly integrates the (deeply) personal with the philosophical. I can’t be the only one who gobbled this up, and I suppose I can do my part by quoting it and integrating it into my scholarship myself.
The blurbs about this book say it’s about art and philosophy, but, I don’t know, somehow those descriptions fail to capture what Nelson is doing, which is, admittedly, unparalleled and difficult to describe.
The book helped me understand some philosophy and culture more deeply through her insights and critique. Unsurprisingly, I clung to her thoughts on motherhood, joy, femininity, womanhood, and culture. Perhaps especially as a mother, I appreciated the spare, yet complex prose. What can I say–The Argonauts is yet another important book by Nelson.
I decided to go ahead and read Heaven by Mieko Kawakami this summer while I was at it, and, wow, this is a heavy, but, of course, excellent book. It is such a departure from the much more distanced and gentler narrative in Breasts and Eggs, which I also read and wrote about a few weeks ago.
I’m not sure how I missed this, but there is a heavy portrayal of bullying in Heaven, and I don’t think that’s a spoiler, but I do think it actually does need kind of a big “trigger warning” splashed across the front of this book because it.is.intense.
However difficult this book may be, it is excellent, as Kawakami is proving herself (to me) to be an excellent writer–excellent pacing, character development, and a deep emotional landscape.
As an aside, this book is also much shorter than Breasts and Eggs, but my copy also included an excerpt of Breasts and Eggs at the end, and I’m not quite sure why this choice is being made because the current version available of Breasts and Eggs is also an elongated version of the original, but I just wanted to add here that this length of book–just Heaven–is a great length, and I think Kawakami works really well within this frame.
What a great book! As you know, I normally do not read in this genre, but Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel was exceptional. I even found myself slowing down at the end to savor the final events.
Too often I find that “sci-fi,” if you can call this “sci-fi,” lacks emotional depth, is too self aware, too clever, too focused on an overt plot. (I know sci-fi lovers will argue about this with me all day long.) But, I’ll always be impressed when an author can bring it all together in the writing–emotional depth, development, and beauty.
This is a book that examines the “simulation theory,” and the meaning in life, by jumping through eras of time. Each era is described with sparse, but powerful language. I recommend it!
Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami delves into a modern, urban female experience. The main character navigates the big questions women must face and the relationships they must navigate. Kawakami leads the reader through these issues without defaulting to any oversimplifications. The opposite, actually. Each question and relationship is as complex as real life. This book feels almost memoiristic, as I imagined Kawakami as the main character. (I’m prone to doing this though.)
The main character, Natsu, comes from poverty and brings herself out of that slowly as a novelist (the most unlikely of stories!). This character’s life leads her away from her family roots (in a sense) and complicates her relationships with her now very small extended family, not that these relationships are ever uncomplicated.
Her past (experiences with poverty and loss) also complicate her relationships and her abilities to be in a romantic relationship and to create a family of her own.
The book is strange. Natsu is confused. There is tragedy and there is triumph. It is nuanced, and that is true of the human experience, and in this case, it’s focused especially on the female experience.
I read that Breasts and Eggs was once published as a novella and then was expanded into a longer novel, which is the version I read. Through most of the book, I found myself wishing that this was two separate books, but then again, I love a good, short, digestible read. However, now that I’ve reached the conclusion, I do think extending it into one long book is defensible.
For the first half of this book, I felt myself impatient with the main character, Lucy. I am so hungry for a female lead who is not so passive, who knows her own mind. However, the writing was good enough that I suspected this all too common characterization of female leads was going somewhere meaningful, and I was right. I also grew to appreciate the spare writing style and the diary-entry style that she uses to develop a consistent sense of voice and theme throughout.
Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy by the Sea is a great book worth reading. Although this history seems so very recent, Strout’s book helps me recall just what the early days of the pandemic were like and the politics surrounding that time.
Even more interesting to me were her characters and the subtle insights she develops through the book to help the reader see just how they came to think and act like they do. None of this life gets wrapped up in a pretty bow, and Strout’s work reflects that not uncomplicated reality.
After watching some of the recent interviews with Harry and Meghan, my curiosity was piqued to read Spare by Prince Harry. For those who have been following along, this is a great book. Fans of Princess Diana will appreciate it too. The book effectively captures his tone. It offers the kind of inside look that audiences never get access to. Prince Harry bravely takes up vulnerable and taboo topics in the book. He openly admits to his bad behavior. He openly admits to his anxiety and depression.
Where this book is a triumph is in its ability to show the royals as real, fallible, human people. Of course logically we know this, but due to tabloids, celebrities often get distilled down to products for consumption rather than treated as real people. I appreciated that about the book.
Strangely, I sort of identified with some aspects of Prince Harry’s experience. He writes about visiting the site of his mother’s death years later and mentions that its the first time he’d been to Paris, but I assumed he would have traveled to all of the world’s major cities frequently. His visit was in close proximity to my own first visit to Paris. But for me, it was more understandable. I was raised in a rural location without a lot of firsthand experience with the outside world. I could read about it, but I’d never actually, for example, walked the streets of Paris. It’s great, but it’s also a somewhat isolated experience. Prince Harry’s experience seems somewhat similar. While school and studies take up a big part of his life, another big part of his life seems to have been safely sitting alone in castles.
It’s clear that Prince Harry is traumatized by the loss of his mother at the hands of paparazzi. It’s clear that the trauma informs his own reaction to the paparazzi today, and that’s made even more evident in his drive to protect his new family. While others may say that he should ignore it, or that by recounting these baseless stories in his book, he’s just giving them more air time. There’s no accounting for a broken heart and how it will make you feel and what it will make you do.
I am sympathetic to Prince Harry, but I don’t see eye to eye with him on everything. I don’t need to. In fact, challenging the audience in these areas is probably part of what makes him so compelling. I am more sympathetic to the circumstances of the other members of the royal family. I think they’re in both a really privileged situation and a really limiting one as well. As is made clear in Spare, the royals are, again, real people with all of their own strengths and challenges, living within a limited, but also very privileged world.
My Body by Emily Ratajkowski is a unique book–part expose on the seedy world of modeling, fashion, Hollywood, and fame, and part memoir, with deep personal introspection. In the book, Ratajkowski, whom I was vaguely aware of as a model, but now a fan and follower on Instagram, shares the story of her rise to fame, known for her perfect body. But, she’s also critic of the abuse she suffers at the hands of both the industry and the larger culture. She’s a critic of herself too, acknowledging stories when she was too naive, too confused, too scared, or too complacent to do better. It’s a complicated book that sends readers on a trajectory of introspection about women’s bodies, while also offering a look into an elite (and also surprisingly not glamorous in so many ways) world that few get to experience. I hope she’ll write more, especially about motherhood. This book is worth the read!
First, here are my unsolicited blurbs for this book:
“Please option this for a film asap.”
“Woolf is a modern day Nora Ephron.” (Possibly influenced by the fact that I just finished Heartburn, but still!)
“This book is the true LA Story.”
After following her work online for years (as one of the thousands of people whose fingers hold her up in this cosmic game of light as a feather, stiff as a board), I have been eagerly awaiting my chance to read All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire by Rebecca Woolf.
The first half+ of this book is a gripping narrative. Later, the book becomes less plot driven and slows, and I think that’s because the “after” is not/could not be a linear trajectory.
Woolf wrestles with what it means to be a feminist, or to become a feminist, and puts a magnifying glass to some of the common dynamics of life, relationships, particularly heterosexual relationships that are, to say the least, problematic. I was with her for these points because I also wrestle with many of the same questions. I differ though. Unlike Woolf, I was less tied down in my early adult life, and more so now, even though still not very “tied down” by comparison, and that is by design. I had my children later, but a decade ago, I was also reading about her life online. To be reading this book now, as I have little ones of my own feels very full circle, which she would enjoy.
Here are some lines I loved or identified with and/or that gave me pause:
First, as a fan of her writing, I loved seeing her include her numbered lists with numbers that get longer and insaner each time.
“I will not shrink myself nor prioritize people’s pleasure over my own.” Simple, true. It can be hard to recognize when it’s happening.
“Then the 2016 election happened.” This changed me forever too, and I am still not over it.
“WHAT IF IT DID NOT TURN OUT TO BE CHILL?” Just, lol, yes, this is what it is like to be a parent, mother, woman in life.
“I soon realize that it’s a lot faster for me to pack four lunches on my own.” This is just simply true and a lot of people don’t know it.
“My daughters. They are only mine now.”
“The bravest women I know are not widows. They are divorced.”
“And there is nothing I can do but let it go and drive him home. This is the moment I became a single mother.”
I discovered Elena Ferrante from Mothers by Jacqueline Rose, which I read recently. I started with Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, the first in a long series, and I loved it! The writing is excellent. The content is thought-provoking, and it also has the long sense of story found in easier, longer reads–not a common combination. Although it is long, I flew through it.
While I highly recommend the book, I will warn that I found the conclusion to be somewhat disappointing. I wanted a strong wrap up for this particular book, but instead found myself needing to read more of the series in order to get that. It will probably require reading all four books.
I ended the book somewhat exhausted and unwilling to continue with the series. Maybe I’ll return to them someday. They’re certainly worth it, but, and I can’t believe I’m writing this, I really don’t have the energy to give them at this point in my life.
I’m glad these books are out there. Sometimes I just need a good book, a good story, and I now know I can turn to Ferrante to get that.
I am also inexplicably obsessed with the cover art:
SHEREWIN 