Issue 79: Everything I read in August
Including a book that had me reaching out to friends for help
Pre-script: I meant to do this write up over the long weekend but kept getting sucked into watching 19-year-olds setting up their school planners on TikTok. At 43, I still think of September as the start of the year! Gah.
August finally brought me what I have been craving for a while - a routine! My brain loves a repetitive schedule and the empty house I have to myself during the work week does wonders for my cortisol levels.
On Saturdays, my husband goes for a long run (he’s about to run four back-to-back hundred-mile races) and my daughter and I dress up, go to the library and then take our loot to our favorite coffeeshop where we read our books.
One friend said we were “Real Life Gilmore Girls” and another (jokingly?!) accused me of indoctrination.
Either way, I find myself grateful for the confluence of weather, routine, and a household of fellow readers that permits a life shaped by the rhythms of books.
In terms of reading, this month felt both extremely satisfying and somewhat disturbing. I read books by some all-time favorites (Zambreno, Nelson, Greenwell), stumbled upon a new obsession (Debré), was embarrassed by my ignorance re: Palestine (Hammad) and felt so clobbered over the head (Manguso) that I literally had to reach out to friends. A first for me, for sure.
Books mentioned:
Drifts by Kate Zambreno
Bluets by Maggie Nelson
Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad
Liars by Sarah Manguso
Playboy by Constance Debré, my Women in Translation month pick
Small Rain by
- out TODAY! Happy pub date, Garth!
📚 Drifts by Kate Zambreno - In this auto-fictional dance, Zambreno opens the door on her literary obsessions and creative paralysis. Her narrator, a writer grappling with a book-in-progress, meanders through daily life, her mind a labyrinth of influences from Rilke to Weil… determined to make art in the face of precarious employment opportunities, coordinating (competing?) careers with a husband who is an artist and a pregnancy that adds a predictable dimension of unpredictability into the mix.
What prevents me from writing the book? The heat, the dog, the day, air-conditioning, desiring to exist in the present tense, constant thinking, sickness, fucking, groceries, cooking, yoga, loneliness and sadness, the internet, political depression, my period, obsession with skin care, late capitalism, binge-watching television on my computer, competition and jealousy over the attention of other writers, confusion over the novel, circling around but not finishing anything, reading, researching, masturbating, time passing.
This isn’t for you if you prefer a traditional beginning, middle, and end, but I have to say, Zambreno is one of my all-time favorites. While many writers can make you feel like you’re right there in the room with them, Kate Zambreno goes further—she puts you inside her mind. When you read her work, you become her. It’s a stunning way to experience fiction, one that feels like equal parts voyeurism and a feminist call to arms.
📚 Bluets by Maggie Nelson - is a blend of memoir, philosophy, and poetry centered on the color blue. Through 240 short vignettes, Nelson delves into her deep attachment to blue, using it as a metaphor for love, loss, and longing. She reflects on a painful breakup and witnessing a friend’s suffering, weaving these personal experiences with cultural references to explore how color shapes human emotion. Wittgenstein, Goethe, Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Yves Klein, Mallarmé, and Duras make multiple appearances, enriching the book’s cultural and philosophical depth.
Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color...
I’ll admit, some fragments went over my head, likely due to philosophical references I probably didn’t fully grasp. Yet, Nelson’s writing remains approachable and inviting. I always imagine her smiling as I read. And if nothing else, this book has made me eager to explore more theory, not less.
📚 Enter Ghost by Isabella Haddad - If I were a proper book reviewer, I would probably tell you that this book is about Sonia, a British-Palestinian actress, as she returns to the West Bank to reconnect with her roots. In the midst of political tension, she joins a production of Hamlet, navigating the complexities of identity, resistance, and art in a land marked by conflict and cultural heritage.
Haneen once compared Palestine to an exposed part of an electronic network, where someone has cut the rubber coating with a knife to show the wires and currents underneath. She probably didn’t say that exactly, but that was the image she had brought into my mind. That this place revealed something about the whole world.
I am glad, however, that I am not in the business of writing proper reviews because what I want to tell you about this book is how perfectly it captures a certain kind of immigrant experience - the experience of finding yourself heartbroken and somehow deciding that going home will help you deal with that heartache but then you will go home - let’s say to Palestine or, I don’t know, Bulgaria - and realize how much you have changed and how much you have lost touch with both your family and your culture but you will also feel defensive and adamant that you can still catch up, that you just need to go for coffee a few times and it will all come back to you. And every day you will find yourself in circumstances and in conversations that will shock you to your core and you will have to remind yourself that even though you don’t understand this place now and even though maybe you never did … it belongs to you still, somehow, and your heart beats differently there, regardless of how long you’ve been gone. And maybe the politics of it will be confusing still but the only thing that will make it less so is steeping yourself in the art and poetry of the place. In my book, artists always know best.
I don’t know. If the idea of home makes you feel some type of way, read this. It’s profound and beautiful. And thank you, , for the recommendation.
📚 Liars by Sarah Manguso - It’s been quite the year for divorce books told from the wife’s perspective and, to be honest, I don’t mind. I think there is so much beauty and depth in such heartbreak… exactly the kind of material that amazing works of literature are made from. Ever since I finished All Fours by Miranda July, I have continued to seek out more stories of female unravelment. I love a woman unhinged and liberated by the cultural expectations placed upon her. Hell, I even love some good old rage.
When buzz started to build around Manguso’s book, I got so excited because it sounded just like the kind of thing I was describing - a chronicle of a long-term relationship between two promising young artists (a writer and film-maker/visual artist) from the day they meet, through their dating life, marriage, parenthood, and divorce fifteen years later. The book is essentially the narration of what sums up to relationship death by a million little (and not so little) paper-cuts.
Manguso has written an addictingly readable rager of a novel. And, honestly, as a married person… I find each individual confrontation, argument, slide in the book 1,000% believable. Manguso has herself described the book as a very Gen-X novel - the relationship in it being between a Gen-X feminist woman and her Gen-X husband who did not get that memo. The unsparing specificity with which the narrator describes her husband’s selfishness, gas-lighting and entitlement feels so accurate and well deserved.
But even though I found the eviscerating criticism of the husband in the story entirely appropriate AND all of the injustices incurred against the wife outrageous, in the end, I felt that I had been clobbered over the head. Like, I witnessed somebody’s self-aggrandizing martyrdom exhibition with the sound ON full blast. It was a total systemic overload for me that made me physically ill and emotionally spent. I love an awful book about awful people that do awful things but this was awful in a bad way. Too didactic, do not recommend.
📚 Playboy by Constance Debré - OK. OK. OK. THIS BOOK. I fucking loved it. I was reading and messaging back and forth with about it because I can’t believe it doesn’t already have a CULT following in the States the way I believe it already does in France. Anyway. Allow me to invite you into this newly founded cult. I am the leader.
So Constance Debré is an attorney by profession, the grand-daughter of Michel Debré, the prime minister of France under de Gaulle. MAJOR family. When Constance turns 43, she leaves her husband and her son and begins having sexual relationships with women, eventually leaving her job as a public defender to live in a tiny apartment, write and …mm… have many lovers.
This memoir is the first in a trilogy and explores the period of her life with an intense focus on sexuality, queer desire, and relationships. It is SO. SEXY. Debre describes her first serious relationship with a woman named Agnes which catches her by surprise and builds up very slowly due to both women’s uncertainty over how to approach each other. Debré is a master at writing about the longing and tension building up between the two until Debré realizes that if she doesn’t make the first move, nothing will ever happen.
We chat, it’s late, I’m lying next to her on some kind of sofa or bed, where I slept the night before. I don;t know how it all happens. Suddenly I stop thinkng. Suddenly I want her and I lean in toward her. I kiss her, I slide my hand beneath her t-shirrt, I stroke her breast, I kiss them. Breasts and love. Of course. I understand something I didn’t know before. It all just happens. I unbutton her pants. Desire makes everything so easy, there’s no awkwardness, nothing strange about the movements I’m making.
Soon enough, Constance gets bored with Agnes due to - among other things - the fact that Agnes belongs to the petty bourgeoisie and, horror of all horrors, reads Elle Magazine. Snark and sexual tension aside, what I loved equally - if not most - about the book were Debré’s reflections on her privileged upbringing and “classist instincts” that deeply influence her actions and reactions not only to her marriage and work but also towards her lovers.
I could go on and on about this book, I am so completely infatuated with Constance Debré and, you better believe it, I have the second book in the trilogy already lined up to read in September. But, mostly I am obsessed with this book because it is just such a beautiful example of something that happens to some women in our 40s when we decide that we no longer want to be bored with our own lives, with our own selves. 11 out 10 recommend.
📚 Small Rain by Garth Greenwell - after the high disturbance of reading LIARS and the hot flashes that were brought onto me by PLAYBOY, I am so glad that I finished the month with Small Rain - a book that felt quiet but steady and ultimately left me feeling that I grew up a little bit while reading it.
The book is structured in five parts and scaffolded by the narrator’s unexpected urgent hospitalization due to an infrarenal aortic dissection. The fear, anger, humiliation and unexpected tenderness of the hospital stay then becomes both the object and reflection of past experiences as his body awakens the memories of childhood trauma, a life dedicated to poetry and art, and an adult love that seems to surprise the narrator with its depth and resilience.
After watching the sparrows outside of his hospital room window, the narrator asks his partner L. to bring him a copy of The Collected Poems of George Oppen. Here’s the poem he reads:
Stranger’s child
Sparrow in the cobbled street,
Little sparrow round and sweet,
Chaucer’s bird—
or if a leaf
Sparkle among leaves, among the season's
Leaves—
the sparrow's feet,
Feef of the sparrow's child touch
Naked rock.
He asks himself:
Why do I love it so much?... I love it because it exists… this record of a mind’s noticing, a moment of particularizing attention. From a flock of sparrows this sparrow, in a forest of shimmering leaves this particular leaf.
And, truly, the whole book feels that way - a record of the mind noticing. The heart of an artist. The body of a poet, reflecting on how to be a gay man in the “Monoglot Midwest”, on the little cruelties of intimate life, on the sudden urges of homeownership and how those turn our loves into domestic traps, unless… of course… we are trapped with humans who reminds us of the happiness contained within the relationships we build.
Those of you who’ve read Garth Greenwell’s previous work won’t be surprised that this book is stylistically just as gorgeous. On a sentence level, you will want to lick every little bit of it. However, similar to the book’s narrator, you might find yourself “panicked almost, frantic” that it lacks that sexual heat that is so striking about his earlier work. But, do not worry, the book will still feel deeply intimate and you will find an immense sense of pleasure and satisfaction in reading it. A more permanent sense of contentment, a return to a mindspace that makes poetry possible.
There are many strokes of genius in this book but the biggest one - and I know that every reviewer will point it out - is the book’s title. Small rain. I didn’t cry when I read the book but I am crying now thinking about it. I loved it.
Favorite books of 2024 so far:
January - Foster by Claire Keegan
February - Small things like these by Claire Keegan
March - Stoner by John Williams
April - Clear by Carys Davies
May - Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
June - All Fours by Miranda July
July - Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin
August - Playboy by Constance Debre
Some questions for you:
What books wrecked you this past month?
Do we have any overlapping titles? Which - if any - of the titles above sound interesting to you?
Petya, the way you spoke of your immigrant experience was so beautiful and heartbreaking. Most of my friends are immigrants or children of and they have expressed similar sentiments. Even being second generation on my father’s side…feels that way when I go to Mexico. We call it “ni aquí ni allá”. Neither here nor there. ❤️🔥
I loved reading about your Enter Ghost reflections and how it resonated with you as an immigrant. As that perspective is not one I know, to hear how you read the book (w that perspective) is so intriguing and beautiful. This is why books are so amazing - so much of what you take from the page is influenced by your own life. It feels really special to be able to think about your reflections and how that adds more value to how I think about the book even over a month after I read it myself. I’m glad you enjoyed it!
And playboy sounds amazing!!! I trust you & billie so I will absolutely be keeping an eye out for that soon.
Ps you and Rumi are soooo Lorelai and Rory, no indoctrination in sight! Your dates sound wonderful 🩷