The Curator: a steady diet of female literature

can stories be your savior?

If there has ever been a time to celebrate and venerate women, it is now. I often think about my Reading Origin Story, or all the past iterations of Me, and what I was reading at each moment¹. I find I am deeply indebted to the contemporary female authors who, in my late 20s/early 30s, reminded me that I had a brain and it deserved to be used for something other than a vodka sponge².

I am again seeking those epiphanic moments as I deal with the inscrutability of this mysterious life³. Why do we have to keep fighting for the same rights? Why must some suffer so? Why are my teeth falling out of my head? Who has gone before me and can impart some wisdom?

I turn to art, both consuming and generating. These are some of the women who have gone before us and found their way via the pen. Not only do the following novels (and one memoir) remind me that Reading is Life, they say something and they say it with razzle-dazzle. These women define my diet of contemporary literature and for some, their pages have stuck with me for years. I cannot recommend them highly enough.

Literature as Self-Worth

I never read memoirs. I sign up for the Literati book club⁴ and In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado is one of the monthly choices. I like the cover so I Go For It. It’s the most radical thing I’ve read since my half-hearted attempt at Naked Lunch.

Pinpricks of light filter through my brain between hangovers and boys that are bad for me. This narrative non-fiction queer story of self-worth and partner abuse is a Dream House I recognize, if not literally, then in a kindred manifestation. If someone were to tell me that life could be different, I would say

“We can fuck… but we can’t fall in love⁵” -

and then proceed to fall in love.

Consume If🙊: you are hungry for a fresh voice, a fever dream, a reality check, a big sister, genuine queer stories

Further Reading📰: Carmen Maria Machado’s Many Haunted Stories of a Toxic Relationship (The New Yorker)

a story within a story within your story

Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.

When I picked up Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, I needed reminding that Plot Was King. Sometimes college can remove the parts of a thing that are enjoyable, reducing them to what they can provide for discussion, for dissection. Atwood offers both. First, she reels you in with that infamous first sentence, and then she spins a tale that weaves through time and manipulates form while never losing sight of what drives us. It’s about a woman finding her voice through narrative, something I never thought I could do (or do worthwhile) but was suddenly made an option.

(The bookshelf beside the bed is getting so full she has to double-stack everything. Reading after work is almost impossible so she learns to read in the morning, even though the guilt of an uncertain relationship to productivity comes seeping through. If she can block out the noise for just a few minutes a day, she might find her way back).

It’s also about how women cope with trauma in a patriarchal society, another thing I had not yet learned to do. Both riveting and layered, expertly written and readable, this is one I would like to revisit in full. The Handmaid’s Tale gets all the Atwood love, but The Blind Assassin is a superior book.

Consume If🙊: you are just moving on from classics to contemporary, are hungry for plot, secrets, romance, intrigue, finding yourself, becoming a writer

Further Reading📰: Reading Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Blind Assassin’ with Ashley Winstead (Crime Reads)

enter into the portal the water is fine

No one is talking about this but at the same time everyone is talking, all the time, constantly. We are the Social Media Generation, and it is only natural our art has begun to reflect it. No One is smart and self-aware regarding the hubris of living a life online and the cognitive dissonance required to simply get out of bed to participate in it all. If you’ve ever studied Shakespeare, I liken the many cultural references to his plays - of the times and perhaps obscure unless you lived in that exact sliver of history. Inside jokes between millions of strangers who’ve loved the same meme. Thinking in 140 characters and speaking in captions.

A story of a lady in tweets.

Previously these communities were imposed on us, along with their mental weather. Now we chose them - or believed that we did. A person might join a site to look at pictures of her nephew and five years later believe in a flat earth.

Patricia Lockwood is my people. It’s ok if we live deeply but also it’s not that deep.

Consume If🙊: you need a social media reckoning, more passive-aggressive pop culture, more laughter

Further Reading📰: Patricia Lockwood in Conversation with Maris Kreizman: ‘I Like to Give People a Very Vertiginous Whiplash’ (LitHub)

it’s called a slide deck not a PowerPoint

I would be reading either only Jane Austen or only Bukowski if it wasn’t for this woman. Perhaps if you read this novel today it would mean nothing, or less than what it meant to me, because you have more experience under your belt or more novels in your comparison arsenal. A Visit from the Goon Squad is my Citizen Kane and rock n roll stories are my Rosebud. It was the first time I attempted an award-winning novel that wasn’t required reading. It tried things I didn’t think were possible in Great Literature. It showed me reading can be fun. I don’t know if it has aged well or if its best points have been replicated to such better success it no longer seems relevant, but I will be forever grateful to Jennifer Egan for showing me what a good time could feel like and that aging doesn’t have to be the end of the world.

Consume If🙊: You wish you worked at a record label, you are young or you feel old, you need some time-bending fun

Further Reading📰: An inventive investigation of growing up and growing old in the digital age, displaying a big-hearted curiosity about cultural change at warp speed (The Pulitzer Prizes)

is this play about me?

I previously said that Zadie Smith’s debut novel White Teeth had “prismatic comedic timing,” and I stand by that statement. A story in four acts that include titles such as “The Root Canals of Alfred Archibald Jones and Samad Miah Iqbal,” not only was this the first dramedy I can remember loving in my adult years, but it resurrected my love for that brilliant narrative device, The Clashing of Cultures. Set in London but representing Jamaicans, Bangladeshians, and even Jehovah’s Witnesses, there is a sense that the world is only becoming smaller, our mutual humanity on display in all its muttish ways. As a white American, it is very easy to live a reading life entirely devoid of color, picking out only the books that “represent you.” White Teeth reminded me that life is better in technicolor (and with fewer root canals).

Consume If🙊: you are starved for new ideas, need a multi-generational, multi-race, multi-anxiety, family drama with a large cast of true characters

Further Reading📰: ‘I tried to read White Teeth for the anniversary - but didn’t get past the first page’ (Independent)

an open end

Never one to want anything to do with a bible, I only picked up Lydia Millet’s 13th novel, A Children’s Bible, because the NYT book review told me to. It offers modern solutions to modern problems. The problem: our ecological demise on this once-bountiful planet. The solution: children unsullied by the crushing weight of defeat or substance abuse. I saw myself in both the adults and the children, wondering which path I would choose (would we all choose). To suffer with a bottle or to emerge clear-headed into a future that will necessarily look different than anything we’ve known before. Millet is quoted as believing “words such as apocalyptic or dystopian used to describe the book apply equally to contemporary life,”⁶ and I can’t help but agree.

Politicians claimed everything would be fine. Adjustments were being made. Much as our human ingenuity had got us into this fine mess, so would it neatly get us out. Maybe more cars would switch to electric.

That was how we could tell it was serious. Because they were obviously lying.

People often say a book changed their brain chemistry, and this might be the only one that actually did that for me.

Consume If🙊: you need an antidote to modern times, you need to believe children are our future

Further Reading📰: An Epic Storm Turns a Summer Holiday Into Potent Allegory (The New York Times)

On this steady diet of female contemporary writers, you can totally quit Ozempic because by the time you have eaten, they will have convinced you no one really cares.

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reading 📖→

I’m back! Did you miss me? Life was life-ing, and all I could do to keep up was let go of my writing schedule for just a bit. Instead, I read a bunch of great stuff and didn’t write down a single note, which is certainly going to backfire when it comes time for the monthly roundup.

• I finished Long Bright River by Liz Moore just in time for the Peacock miniseries starring a personal fave, Amanda Seyfried. This book had me in an absolute CHOKEHOLD. It was just as good or better than The God of the Woods, both genuine smart family-centered thriller-mysteries⁷, this one about the opioid crisis, a subject near to my heart. This novel reminded me that plot is great, it’s ok to want plot, why can’t we have plot!! I hope to binge the miniseries this weekend.

• I swear to god I don’t just automatically love every book I read, but for whatever reason, I have just been picking bangers lately. I finished Daphne Du Maurier’s collection of short stories Don’t Look Now and once again I was reminded of the importance of plot. This book has single-handedly ignited my new love for the short story form.

news and restacks📰→

• I just really, really love when people come up with natural solutions to modern problems (this is a theme right now, can you tell): 20 goats, two sheep, and Steve, a Sicilian donkey, start fire prevention duties in San Clemente (The OC Register).

• This might be next week’s topic: The Best Villians in Literature Bracket (LitHub).

• Witches Are Having a Cultural Moment but they never stopped having one in my heart (The New York Times gift link)

• I haven’t read Intermezzo but I love all public opinions on the topic of Sally Rooney: I’m Breaking Up with Sally Rooney (Substack)

• I greatly appreciated

  Hunter Mclendon
  ‘s vulnerability in Sad Girl Novel as Mental Road Map (Substack)

consuming📽️🎧→

We listen and we don’t judge, okay? I watched something momentous… the first Lord of the Rings movie. I KNOW I KNOW. But I always wanted my fantasy with a dash of beauty and I was somehow convinced that LOTR was just too hobbity and dirty-feet-riddled for me to love. Boy was I wrong. The second installment is coming up this weekend, and I can’t wait??

and cats🐈‍⬛→

hi

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let’s chat 👻→

• What have you been doing this month while I was away?

• Do you have any contemporary female lit that changed the way you think about books or life?

• What are you reading currently, and is it any good?

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in case you missed it 🖤

The Curator: one star reviews of my favorite books

The Curator: where I get my book recs

The Curator: you're either reading Onyx Storm or you're reading Middlemarch, and it's all the same

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See you around the bookshelf!

1. Eight-year-old me lived on Shel Silverstein and cream soda

2. Or this is an assignment from my therapist, tysm

3. Year 38 is no joke friends

4. Adult version now defunct, so sad

5. Dream House as Famous Last Words - Carmen Maria Machado

6. thanks Wikki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Children%27s_Bible

7. ok look, why don’t we have a great mashup name for the thriller/mystery crossover combo genre like we do for romantasy? Thrimystery? Mystiller? Somebody help me here