Hello there,
We’ve reached the part of the summer where schedules have been packed for at least a month, it’s so hot that AC units are starting to give out, it was fun to cook with the first of summer’s in-season produce but now who has the energy for that, and you’re tired becuase you’ve gone to sleep past bedtime the whole month. This weekend is my intermission, the only weekend from now until mid October that isn’t booked, after a packed July. I have no plans except to pick up a few things at the farmer’s market and work my way through the growing stacks of books I keep buying. I know I shouldn’t buy more until I make it through the stack, but I’ll probably buy a few more. I have an excuse though! About a month ago, I emailed an old college professor asking for the syllabus of a class I ended up dropping. I wasn’t even sure if he was the right professor (it’s been 8 years okay), but last week he emailed me back (!!!) and attached the syllabus PLUS a few more books he would have since added (!!!!!!!!!!!). It was an LA fiction course that featured Didion's novel Play It As It Lays so if any of y’all want the reading list, hit me up.
Alright, I hope everyone else has an intermission weekend because this list is banger after banger and you all need to make time to read each one.
Opening Theory
By Sally Rooney for the New Yorker
My partner and I stopped in Powell’s after getting tacos nearby since our AC is still out and we were too tired to cook. After leaving him near the new releases, I was browsing the magazines and discovered The Fiction Issue of the New Yorker. I’m embarrassed to say I let out a little baby gasp when I saw that Sally Rooney and Haruki Murakami were featured on the cover wrap. Even with so much hype around her, I’m still such a Sally Rooney stan. The author of Normal People and Beautiful World, Where Are You has a new novel coming out this fall called Intermezzo and this feature is a teaser. I came home and even though it was late, I read both pieces in one sitting. If you can get your hands on the print issue, highly recommend but if not the link will do.
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The Kidnapping I Can’t Escape
By Taffy Brodesser-Akner for the New York Times
Everything this woman writes makes me cry and this is no exception. Taffy Brodesser-Akner writes about her new novel, the kidnapping that inspired its plot, and the permanence of trauma. While recounting her interviews with her family friend, Jack Teich, about his kidnapping in the 70s, she discovers how similar the aftermath is for those who have survived a traumatic experience. She admits that the tragic event that happened in her first novel, Fleishman Is In Trouble, did in fact happen to her, and that she’s spent so much energy trying to overcome it only to realize that it simply cannot just be put behind her. It will always be apart of her. Her new novel The Long Island Compromise was written to answer the question “Who was better off, people who were born with money and never had to worry about their survival, or people who didn’t feel they had the financial stability and who had to learn to be survivors on their own?” but she later realized there was a deeper theme being explored.
By the time I was done with it, it was clear to at least the people who wrote the marketing copy for it, but somehow not to me, that it was a book about a different kind of inheritance — the legacy of trauma. Maybe I was never writing a book about money. Maybe I had to think I was writing a book about money in order to find myself examining trauma again, becuase nothing had truly changed in all this time except the swell of my shame that I was still in this state —not trauma, but post-trauma, its own discrete nightmare where self-awareness doesn’t ever seem to ameliorate its symptoms.
I know this is behind a paywall, but for those without a NYT paid subscription, please google how to read things behind a paywall. I feel like I can’t tell you here because my whole thing is directing you to read these publications so they don’t die off, but this piece is so good that you must find a way to read it.
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The Crane Wife
By CJ Hauser for The Paris Review
I forget how I came across this one since it was originally published in 2019, but it’s been in my queue for a bit and read it for the first time yesterday. It follows Hauser’s journey of calling off an engagement and before dealing with all the logistics of that decision, she goes on a scientific expedition to observe cranes. Her deeply vulnerable admissions of the ends she went to in order to be a woman with no needs are tough to swallow.
He hadn’t said one specific thing about me or us during the proposal, and on the long trail walk out of the park I felt robbed of the kind of special declaration I’d hoped a proposal would entail, and, in spite of hating myself for wanting this, hating myself more for fishing for it, I asked him, “Why do you love me? Why do you think we should get married? Really?” He said he wanted to be with me because I wasn’t annoying or needy. Because I liked beer. Because I was low-maintenance.
Honestly I think two of my guy friends in high school listed those same reasons when they told me why I was a repeat invite on their families’ annual houseboating trip. Yikes.
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Hope you’re all lingering on patios, sporting wet hair from a recent swim, eating out too much, and generally overindulging this July.