some books i read lately
Aug. 17th, 2023 02:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenluacatching up a bit! nowhere near comprehensive, this is just what i noticed when scanning my "recently read" bookshelf & started spitting out some Thoughts TM
The Three of Us by Ore Agbaje-Williams
The entirety of this novel is one long slow buildup to an Awful Dinner Party. I have made my love of fictional Awful Dinner Parties extremely well-known, so this should've been entirely my jam.
And there was a lot I liked here—I devoured it in a single evening. The Wife (a deliberately unnamed character) is childhood BFFs with Temi—they were both the children of High Expectations British-Nigerian Parents, and while Wife's way of dealing with this was much more quiet/calm/obedient/studious, she admires Temi's flagrant disregard for her parents' opinions, her seemingly effortless bucking at authority, her outspoken and highly independent ways. (It helps that Temi's the youngest of three, and thus has more wiggle room for being the family disappointment, whereas Wife is an only child, and has nowhere to hide.) When Wife meets Husband, at a family BBQ near the end of college, she gets married quickly—seeing the stable, rich, somewhat dull man as a way out from under her parents' expectation, Temi is privately outraged, how dare her BFF get together with some other man, a man!!!, how dare—yeah, Temi is probably a little unhinged but also I love her. So she devotes herself to subtle sabotage of Wife and Husband's relationship, constantly hanging around, drinking too much, goading the Wife to drink too much, overstaying her welcome, and generally being a free-spirited freeloading independent nuisance.
Husband, being an extremely straight-laced and tbh pretty boring dude (the chapter from his PoV held no real surprises), obviously hates Temi.
Wife is the most inscrutable of the three—clearly intelligent and astute, but also weirdly checked out of her own life. She stays at home, though she has a perfectly good university degree. Has some weirdly stirring monologues where she talks about how she loves Husband because he lets her be perfectly herself, which is a lovely sentiment—except, "herself" seems to be "chilling at home, exercising, and drinking," which normally I'd take as depression, but it's not that, it's something weirder.
I would've loved to see the story dig into that more. But then it just kind of—ends? Temi does a Big Thing that throws the match on a giant pile of lighter fluid, while all three of them are in the same room and tired and pissed and drunk, but then—the book ends before we see the result. Come on.
Honestly a shame. I like short novels a ton but this one wanted to be longer, even if only 50 pages longer. As-is, it's all promise and no payoff.
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou
God this fucking whipped. I'm generally a little skeptical of the Splashy Nonfiction Bestsellers That Everyone's Read, since so many of them suck, hence my avoiding reading this one for so long—but yeah this one ruled. Corporate true crime exposé at its best. Absolutely appalling things happen every fifth page & there's tons of just-plain-weird weird-culty-startup nonsense & PLENTIFUL excerpts from juicy company emails. What a fucked-up company! What a pack of morons on the board! (There's a bit, early on, where the board almost decides to remove Holmes as CEO—because, in a rare moment of sanity, they seem to notice "hm she seems to be lying and also not executing on company objectives very well"—and then over the course of a four-hour boarding meeting she talks them out of it. How. Why. Did this girl just roll a nat 20 on every charisma roll in her whole life, or...)
Anyway, that's what I expect from a book like this, but what I wasn't expecting so much—and very much appreciated—was the last section, where Carreyrou details the stories of the whistleblowers that ultimately brought Theranos down. Normally it's bad form when a journalist brings themself into the story (most of the whistleblowing involves going to Carreyrou so he can break the story in the papers), but, he takes care to keep the focus on the whistleblowers, who are remarkably decent and steadfast despite facing down monstrous threats/stalking/intimidation from Theranos and weighty legal bills. One of the whistleblowers is the grandson of a board member, and it's heartbreaking to see The Only Stanford Graduate With A Decent Head On His Shoulders desperately try and try to convince his grandpa this is a scam, get out of this with your dignity intact while you can, and... yeah, all on deaf ears. Kid pressed on anyway. Good for him.
Acceptance: A Memoir by Emi Nietfeld
Pretty damn unputdownable once I started reading, in a watching-a-trainwreck, Joe vs Elan School kinda way—just replace "fucked up 'troubled teen' abusive horseshit school" with "fucked up teen/tween foster-care-and-related-institutions." I think you probably know in advance if that's your kind of thing?
The memoir opens with Emi in her elementary school years: a bright girl (she wins her state Bible verse memorization contest! ah, Just Evangelical Things TM), with a stable-and-okayish-if-not-excellent home life, all the way through the 90s. Her mom hates her dad, but won't divorce him because he has a modest trust that pays out enough to fund him not-really-seeming-to-work-too-much, and combined, they eke out a pretty typical midwest Minnesota existence.
Except, after the dot-com bust, that trust fund isn't paying out so much anymore, the marriage falls apart, the mom wins custody (despite Emi's stated wish to live with her dad), and the mom's always-present hoarder habits get much much worse, so bad that Emi's developing persistent health issues from all the dust and dog shit and stuff everywhere, so bad she can't shower regularly because of all the stuff in the tub, and also money becomes a big problem, bad enough that mom deigns to skip on paying for hot water in, y'know, Minnesota winters. Big yikes. When Emi first gets committed to a three-day stay in a psych ward for some reason or another, she actually loves it there, because the completely-clean-corridors-and-rooms and actual-peace-and-quiet and three-meals-a-day is such a huge upgrade from her everyday existence.
At every point, the therapists, psychiatrists, social workers, and institutions in her life manage to fail her, in maddening ways. From patient records she later accessed as an adult, she knows that the psychs knew about her mother's problems, and the effect they were having on Emi—but the mom was refusing treatment, so, nothing to be done but medicate the daughter for problems she didn't really have. At one point, during a particularly frustrating stay in a recovery ward, she talks about how much she just wants to blow the place up—which she's told is the reason she then gets stuck in a care facility for a whole year, when really, it's that her mom couldn't really care for her but also refused the idea of foster care. Then, after that, when she is placed with foster parents, and seems to be developing a glimmer of hope for a normal teenage life—she makes a couple friends! one who's doing NaNoWriMo with her, even!—that's taken away from her, too, as the kinda-fundie-Christian foster parents tell her she can't be in other people's cars. Augh!
And Emi's mom. Oh God, the mom. Rarely do I see a character who is simultaneously so obviously fucked-up... and who also desperately cares, who loves her daughter, who is absolutely magnetic when she's not in the midst of hoarding. There's a goofy road trip to Washington DC that Emi and her mom do during a spring break, while Emi's in the care of the foster parents, and it's so fun, right. Emi's mom has a new car so it's merely cluttered rather than stuffed; the hoarding hasn't overtaken it yet. Mom can't afford to pay for much of anything nice, but that's fine—they split extra-large fries at Burger Kings on the way, swipe was many extra ketchup packets as they can, drink soda out of the cooler wedged between their seats. Near the Capitol, Mom strikes up a conversation with some strangers who ask her to take their picture, and she's so charming and fun they wind up invited to dinner at their place, eating butter chicken, and stashing the leftovers away for later. She's clearly intelligent, witty, charming. She could be so good for Emi.
But she's not. To their mutual disappointment.
I won't bother recounting the rest of the memoir here—suffice to say there's quite a few more dips and turns—but I'd say, come for the page-turning appalling childhood stuff, and stay for the surprisingly tender portrait of the mom who let Emi down, who Emi can't help loving anyway, and goddamn it I loved the woman too.
The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem by Julie Phillips
I picked this one up almost entirely based on the strength of Phillips's stunning Tiptree biography which I read years ago & which I still think about all the time. Also, I was promised a chapter on Ursula K. Le Guin.
Well, the chapter on Le Guin is great, and so are all the others. It's essentially a bundle of interesting portraits of women artists/novelists/etc, who happen to also be mothers, but are all individually fascinating. I don't think any two women in this book Do Motherhood the same way, and I loved learning about all of them. (And also got a new favorite artist in the bargain—Alice Neels, holy shit? so good? how had I never heard of her before?)
Some scattered high-level thoughts:
* It's remarkable how contraception—access to it, or being denied it, or not even thinking of it as an option—shaped each of these women's lives so absolutely. I mean, not that that's a surprise especially—Phillips chose to feature women born throughout the twentieth century for a reason—but man it's an important thing that more folks could stand to be actuely cognizant of, given *gestures vaguely at the state of abortion rights*. Like, the women born in the early part of the 1900s often seem to almost sleepwalk into marriage and kids, not out of any active desire (indeed, often despite protestations—Alice Neel married her first husband and loved him but refused to actually move in with him for the first ~6 months of their marriage, out of a desire to retain some autonomy), but because there was just so little agency, so few other options, in the world they saw before them. And the state of custody rights was so poor that, even when women wanted to still be a part of their kids' lives after a divorce, the law often gave them no right to such a thing. Augh!!! Never forget how hard-fought the battle for those rights was!
* The shape of these womens' careers are so varied. Alice Neel only seems to ger her proper due very late in her career, and you're thankful that at least she got that regard at all—so many women artists of her generation didn't. Audre Lorde has an early start (a poem published in Seventeen while she was in high school!), but flags during the early years of marriage (to a gay man—they were good friends; they both wanted kids; this seemed like the best way to get what they desired) and child-rearing, and it takes a kick-in-the-pants when she's 33 to get her back on track. ("In 1967 . . . a student at City college asked [Audre] if he could interview her for a class assignment. In the finished paper he asked, 'Why did this poet of such early promise stop writing?' His assumption made her sad, then angry, then ready to get her career back.") Even Le Guin, who was so astonishingly prolific from her first published novel onward, had family-related turbulence at times—her novel-a-year output was interrupted by the year her husband took a sabbatical in London, and between all the chaos of moving and finding a school to enroll her kids in and all that, she could only produce a novella. (That novella was The Word for World is Forest though, so, still, pretty strong outcome.)
* The tension between older women who forged their own way with little to guide them, versus younger women who are more outspoken and ideologically feminist, plays out several times in these pages. This theme was beautifully examined in the Tiptree biography, in the long letters that Tiptree exchanged with Joanna Russ, and it comes up again here: Alice Neel, for instance, apparently complained that feminist critics "respect you if you paint your own pussy" and weren't interested in wider issues—but, the support of younger feminists unquestionably played a role in the high regard Neel finally (justly) received in the late phase of her career. It's easy to assume the tension is one specifically of its time—certainly, the lives of women changed so damn much over the course of the twentieth century—but I sort of suspect this tension may be eternal to some extent.
Random interesting tidbits:
* Apparently Ursula Le Guin's mom was a bit of a cougar (and good for her tbh):
* There was a sick New Deal program that paid artists a decent wage just for... making art! I think, like, one painting a month was all it kept to keep you in the program once you were in (too lazy to go reach for my copy of the book to confirm)? Honestly quite based, and gave a lot of artists space to really explore and develop their art rather than trying to string odd jobs together. (Jackson Pollock and Alice Neel were recipients, among many others.)
* "[Audre Lorde] felt nourished by her home life, too, and she and [her partner] Frances enjoyed making their queer family as normal as they could. Sometimes they acted so normal they annoyed their children. Audre remembered fifteen-year-old Beth complaining: 'You think just because you're lesbians you're so different from the rest of them, but you're not, you're just like all the other parents.' Beth recalled accusing Audre and Frances of being 'hypocrites. The world thought they were revolutionaries; I knew they were Ozzie and Harriet. Or Harriet and Harriet.'" d'awww
* Access to restrooms for women in public spaces was a major feminist issue, back in the day—and once, in impromptu protest, Alice Neel peed on the floor at a conference.
* (Addendum to that: I tried to do a quick google to learn more about what the fight for women's restrooms in public was like, and got... a bunch of articles about those nasty laws barring trans people from bathrooms. Sobering moment of "these struggles are part of the same struggle actually", that.)
* Finally here's a random Louise Erdrich quote that I thought was interesting and pretty and couldn't stuff anywhere else:
Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer
This book spun off from an essay the author wrote in The Paris Review, "What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?"
As such, it's a dozen-or-so essays bolted together, each of them variations on that theme, intermixing memoir and personal reflection together with specific case studies: Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, and so forth.
Dederer's a pretty entertaining writer, if a little bit, uh, anxious upper-middle-class liberal PNWer, at times. (Insert a GIF of a parrot attacking itself in a mirror.)
I think the standout essay was her chapter on Nabokov, an "anti-monster"—a dude who by all accounts never did any monstrous Humbert Humbert things, but who wrote Humbert Humbert with such chilling verisimilitude—and she uses that as the basis for a beautiful meditation on why art depicting awful things, art from the point-of-view of awful people, is so desperately necessary and powerful.
And if you read the book generally as sort of grab-bag potpourri of interesting explorations of various artists, you'll probably come away plenty pleased. Like, I knew vaguely that Wagner is associated with antisemitism, but I'd always thought that was mostly because the Nazis glommed onto his music—but turns out Wagner was, uh, Fox-News-brainrotted-grandpa levels of antisemitic, like, his contemporaries found it kind of weird how they'd go over to dinner at his place expecting to talk about music and he'd just be going on about the Jews for an uncomfortable amount of time, and also he wrote a whole damn essay condemning the presence of Jews in music. Disappointing! But also, interesting stuff, right?
(Her coverage of "abandoning mothers," by contrast, suffers from the fact that I read this book after I read The Baby on the Fire Escape—while, e.g., both women cover Doris Lessing, Dederer's account is far less interesting and nuanced and detailed than Phillips's; Dederer is fun and knows lots of random facts but Phillips is who you want if you really want to get to the meat of things, instead of stuff cherry-picked to make a point.)
But if you read this book for some kind of answer or at least deeper insight to that central question, "how should we respond/act/deal with art by people who have done Awful Things".... eh. One of her most lengthy meditations on the question ends with, effectively, "well, the problem is structural, so it's not your problem to solve." Okay? Sure? I mean I'm sort of tired of the kinda "well capitalism is bad so we gotta fix it" kind of diagnoses?
I mean, I don't know what answer I would've wanted from her, exactly—I personally don't generally have compunctions about enjoying art by people I don't like—but I still wasn't impressed. (She's on better footing, later on, when she compares it to the problem of what we do with the people we love—after all, so many of us have people who are fucked-up or bad or nasty in various ways, who we still love anyway, who we can't help but love. Though—I'm pretty sure there's a chunk of her audience whose answer would be a biting-the-bullet "yeah of course you just kick people out of your life if they suck, I do it all the time" and, heh. I mean, letting that conversation play out could've been pretty interesting! But it doesn't quite go there.)
But since I wasn't super-invested in that question, more her thought processes, I came away pleased enough.
Shark Heart: A Love Story by Emily Habeck
If I'd stopped reading at the 200-page-mark this writeup would've just been a single "zzzzz."
And probably I should've just stopped there; life's too short for "zzzzz" books. But I got this book for free, and was stuck in a waiting room, so I kept on a bit further, and...
...I wouldn't say it was entirely worth it? Like, that first section is still definitely a "zzzzz." Thirtysomethings Wren and Lewis get married, and then Lewis is promptly diagnosed with an incurable condition that'll slowly turn him into a great white shark before the year is out—and there, I've both told you everything that happens on the jacket copy, and also everything that happens in those first two hundred pages. Does the author do something interesting with that very weird premise? really lean into the weirdness of Dudes Randomly Becoming Sharks Sometimes? show us something interesting about what it means for the surrounding society? ooooor does it all feel suspiciously like an elaborate metaphor for Something Else, instead of a premise the author was actually interested in in-and-of-itself? Yeah, the latter. Also the writing style is simultaneously self-consciously florid and weirdly removed—I hate describing writing as "tell-y" because that's a very Middle Schooler Who Just Read Strunk & White kinda critique but I got so damn tired of her telling us that Wren is methodical and organized and spreadsheet-y and Lewis is creative and fun and spontaneous. Also my allergy to twee got triggered like every tenth page.
But the second section, which details the story of Wren's mother, is surprisingly warm and sedate and pulls a much closer focus. It's still a touch twee, but in a way that felt unforced, less precious and impressed-with-itself, and more just interested in the people in a somewhat sentimental setting—think, I dunno, Where The Red Fern Grows kinda vibes. I liked Where The Red Fern Grows ok.
There's a third part that loops back around to the people-becoming-sharks premise, and tries to play with it a bit, but ultimately doesn't push far enough beyond beating you over the head with some Hallmark card-tier themes.
I'll admit that the ending got a few tears out of me. I used to use that as a measure of the greatness of thing, back when I was a cold-blooded fork-tongued teenager who was impossible to warm with anything. But I don't think I can use that heuristic anymore; life does this thing where it heaps you up with more & more experiences, and sometimes something sappy reminds you of one of them, and there, fuck, you're crying. So I'll have to come up with a better heuristic, but here's one—when I was crying, was it because I was really feeling something about Wren, and Lewis, and the story itself? were they richly-drawn enough to draw my sympathy in-and-of-themselves? or was it solely because it was just reminding me of sweet things I'd say to my own husband, or losses in my own life? And if the latter, well. Yeah.
The Three of Us by Ore Agbaje-Williams
The entirety of this novel is one long slow buildup to an Awful Dinner Party. I have made my love of fictional Awful Dinner Parties extremely well-known, so this should've been entirely my jam.
And there was a lot I liked here—I devoured it in a single evening. The Wife (a deliberately unnamed character) is childhood BFFs with Temi—they were both the children of High Expectations British-Nigerian Parents, and while Wife's way of dealing with this was much more quiet/calm/obedient/studious, she admires Temi's flagrant disregard for her parents' opinions, her seemingly effortless bucking at authority, her outspoken and highly independent ways. (It helps that Temi's the youngest of three, and thus has more wiggle room for being the family disappointment, whereas Wife is an only child, and has nowhere to hide.) When Wife meets Husband, at a family BBQ near the end of college, she gets married quickly—seeing the stable, rich, somewhat dull man as a way out from under her parents' expectation, Temi is privately outraged, how dare her BFF get together with some other man, a man!!!, how dare—yeah, Temi is probably a little unhinged but also I love her. So she devotes herself to subtle sabotage of Wife and Husband's relationship, constantly hanging around, drinking too much, goading the Wife to drink too much, overstaying her welcome, and generally being a free-spirited freeloading independent nuisance.
Husband, being an extremely straight-laced and tbh pretty boring dude (the chapter from his PoV held no real surprises), obviously hates Temi.
Wife is the most inscrutable of the three—clearly intelligent and astute, but also weirdly checked out of her own life. She stays at home, though she has a perfectly good university degree. Has some weirdly stirring monologues where she talks about how she loves Husband because he lets her be perfectly herself, which is a lovely sentiment—except, "herself" seems to be "chilling at home, exercising, and drinking," which normally I'd take as depression, but it's not that, it's something weirder.
I would've loved to see the story dig into that more. But then it just kind of—ends? Temi does a Big Thing that throws the match on a giant pile of lighter fluid, while all three of them are in the same room and tired and pissed and drunk, but then—the book ends before we see the result. Come on.
Honestly a shame. I like short novels a ton but this one wanted to be longer, even if only 50 pages longer. As-is, it's all promise and no payoff.
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou
God this fucking whipped. I'm generally a little skeptical of the Splashy Nonfiction Bestsellers That Everyone's Read, since so many of them suck, hence my avoiding reading this one for so long—but yeah this one ruled. Corporate true crime exposé at its best. Absolutely appalling things happen every fifth page & there's tons of just-plain-weird weird-culty-startup nonsense & PLENTIFUL excerpts from juicy company emails. What a fucked-up company! What a pack of morons on the board! (There's a bit, early on, where the board almost decides to remove Holmes as CEO—because, in a rare moment of sanity, they seem to notice "hm she seems to be lying and also not executing on company objectives very well"—and then over the course of a four-hour boarding meeting she talks them out of it. How. Why. Did this girl just roll a nat 20 on every charisma roll in her whole life, or...)
Anyway, that's what I expect from a book like this, but what I wasn't expecting so much—and very much appreciated—was the last section, where Carreyrou details the stories of the whistleblowers that ultimately brought Theranos down. Normally it's bad form when a journalist brings themself into the story (most of the whistleblowing involves going to Carreyrou so he can break the story in the papers), but, he takes care to keep the focus on the whistleblowers, who are remarkably decent and steadfast despite facing down monstrous threats/stalking/intimidation from Theranos and weighty legal bills. One of the whistleblowers is the grandson of a board member, and it's heartbreaking to see The Only Stanford Graduate With A Decent Head On His Shoulders desperately try and try to convince his grandpa this is a scam, get out of this with your dignity intact while you can, and... yeah, all on deaf ears. Kid pressed on anyway. Good for him.
Acceptance: A Memoir by Emi Nietfeld
Pretty damn unputdownable once I started reading, in a watching-a-trainwreck, Joe vs Elan School kinda way—just replace "fucked up 'troubled teen' abusive horseshit school" with "fucked up teen/tween foster-care-and-related-institutions." I think you probably know in advance if that's your kind of thing?
The memoir opens with Emi in her elementary school years: a bright girl (she wins her state Bible verse memorization contest! ah, Just Evangelical Things TM), with a stable-and-okayish-if-not-excellent home life, all the way through the 90s. Her mom hates her dad, but won't divorce him because he has a modest trust that pays out enough to fund him not-really-seeming-to-work-too-much, and combined, they eke out a pretty typical midwest Minnesota existence.
Except, after the dot-com bust, that trust fund isn't paying out so much anymore, the marriage falls apart, the mom wins custody (despite Emi's stated wish to live with her dad), and the mom's always-present hoarder habits get much much worse, so bad that Emi's developing persistent health issues from all the dust and dog shit and stuff everywhere, so bad she can't shower regularly because of all the stuff in the tub, and also money becomes a big problem, bad enough that mom deigns to skip on paying for hot water in, y'know, Minnesota winters. Big yikes. When Emi first gets committed to a three-day stay in a psych ward for some reason or another, she actually loves it there, because the completely-clean-corridors-and-rooms and actual-peace-and-quiet and three-meals-a-day is such a huge upgrade from her everyday existence.
At every point, the therapists, psychiatrists, social workers, and institutions in her life manage to fail her, in maddening ways. From patient records she later accessed as an adult, she knows that the psychs knew about her mother's problems, and the effect they were having on Emi—but the mom was refusing treatment, so, nothing to be done but medicate the daughter for problems she didn't really have. At one point, during a particularly frustrating stay in a recovery ward, she talks about how much she just wants to blow the place up—which she's told is the reason she then gets stuck in a care facility for a whole year, when really, it's that her mom couldn't really care for her but also refused the idea of foster care. Then, after that, when she is placed with foster parents, and seems to be developing a glimmer of hope for a normal teenage life—she makes a couple friends! one who's doing NaNoWriMo with her, even!—that's taken away from her, too, as the kinda-fundie-Christian foster parents tell her she can't be in other people's cars. Augh!
And Emi's mom. Oh God, the mom. Rarely do I see a character who is simultaneously so obviously fucked-up... and who also desperately cares, who loves her daughter, who is absolutely magnetic when she's not in the midst of hoarding. There's a goofy road trip to Washington DC that Emi and her mom do during a spring break, while Emi's in the care of the foster parents, and it's so fun, right. Emi's mom has a new car so it's merely cluttered rather than stuffed; the hoarding hasn't overtaken it yet. Mom can't afford to pay for much of anything nice, but that's fine—they split extra-large fries at Burger Kings on the way, swipe was many extra ketchup packets as they can, drink soda out of the cooler wedged between their seats. Near the Capitol, Mom strikes up a conversation with some strangers who ask her to take their picture, and she's so charming and fun they wind up invited to dinner at their place, eating butter chicken, and stashing the leftovers away for later. She's clearly intelligent, witty, charming. She could be so good for Emi.
But she's not. To their mutual disappointment.
I won't bother recounting the rest of the memoir here—suffice to say there's quite a few more dips and turns—but I'd say, come for the page-turning appalling childhood stuff, and stay for the surprisingly tender portrait of the mom who let Emi down, who Emi can't help loving anyway, and goddamn it I loved the woman too.
The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem by Julie Phillips
This book takes as its inspiration the words of Frieda Lawrence's daughter, who defended her mother for abandoning her family: "I believe she was right to act as she did; all the boring women who have told me 'I could never leave my children' have helped to convince me." It is also inspired by Toni Morrison's answer to the question of how she wrote her first novel: "I wrote a list of the things I had to do. I found sixty-three. Then I wrote another list of things I wanted to do. I found two—write and mother my children."
I picked this one up almost entirely based on the strength of Phillips's stunning Tiptree biography which I read years ago & which I still think about all the time. Also, I was promised a chapter on Ursula K. Le Guin.
Well, the chapter on Le Guin is great, and so are all the others. It's essentially a bundle of interesting portraits of women artists/novelists/etc, who happen to also be mothers, but are all individually fascinating. I don't think any two women in this book Do Motherhood the same way, and I loved learning about all of them. (And also got a new favorite artist in the bargain—Alice Neels, holy shit? so good? how had I never heard of her before?)
Some scattered high-level thoughts:
* It's remarkable how contraception—access to it, or being denied it, or not even thinking of it as an option—shaped each of these women's lives so absolutely. I mean, not that that's a surprise especially—Phillips chose to feature women born throughout the twentieth century for a reason—but man it's an important thing that more folks could stand to be actuely cognizant of, given *gestures vaguely at the state of abortion rights*. Like, the women born in the early part of the 1900s often seem to almost sleepwalk into marriage and kids, not out of any active desire (indeed, often despite protestations—Alice Neel married her first husband and loved him but refused to actually move in with him for the first ~6 months of their marriage, out of a desire to retain some autonomy), but because there was just so little agency, so few other options, in the world they saw before them. And the state of custody rights was so poor that, even when women wanted to still be a part of their kids' lives after a divorce, the law often gave them no right to such a thing. Augh!!! Never forget how hard-fought the battle for those rights was!
* The shape of these womens' careers are so varied. Alice Neel only seems to ger her proper due very late in her career, and you're thankful that at least she got that regard at all—so many women artists of her generation didn't. Audre Lorde has an early start (a poem published in Seventeen while she was in high school!), but flags during the early years of marriage (to a gay man—they were good friends; they both wanted kids; this seemed like the best way to get what they desired) and child-rearing, and it takes a kick-in-the-pants when she's 33 to get her back on track. ("In 1967 . . . a student at City college asked [Audre] if he could interview her for a class assignment. In the finished paper he asked, 'Why did this poet of such early promise stop writing?' His assumption made her sad, then angry, then ready to get her career back.") Even Le Guin, who was so astonishingly prolific from her first published novel onward, had family-related turbulence at times—her novel-a-year output was interrupted by the year her husband took a sabbatical in London, and between all the chaos of moving and finding a school to enroll her kids in and all that, she could only produce a novella. (That novella was The Word for World is Forest though, so, still, pretty strong outcome.)
* The tension between older women who forged their own way with little to guide them, versus younger women who are more outspoken and ideologically feminist, plays out several times in these pages. This theme was beautifully examined in the Tiptree biography, in the long letters that Tiptree exchanged with Joanna Russ, and it comes up again here: Alice Neel, for instance, apparently complained that feminist critics "respect you if you paint your own pussy" and weren't interested in wider issues—but, the support of younger feminists unquestionably played a role in the high regard Neel finally (justly) received in the late phase of her career. It's easy to assume the tension is one specifically of its time—certainly, the lives of women changed so damn much over the course of the twentieth century—but I sort of suspect this tension may be eternal to some extent.
Random interesting tidbits:
* Apparently Ursula Le Guin's mom was a bit of a cougar (and good for her tbh):
[Ursula Le Guin] missed her own mother, who was no longer such a loyal writing ally. In 1969, at seventy-two, Krakie remarried. Her new husband, John Quinn, was twenty-nine. He was handsome, bisexual, and probably after her money, the Kroeber children thought, but Krakie seemed to think he was worth it. Ursula's writer friend Harlan Ellison remembered arriving for dinner in Berkeley in the early Seventies to see Ursula's beautiful mother and her bonde husband coming down the stairs, having clearly just gotten out of bed. John looked exhausted, he thought, "like she had ridden him hard and hung him up wet . . . And she looked radiant, absolutely glowing."
* There was a sick New Deal program that paid artists a decent wage just for... making art! I think, like, one painting a month was all it kept to keep you in the program once you were in (too lazy to go reach for my copy of the book to confirm)? Honestly quite based, and gave a lot of artists space to really explore and develop their art rather than trying to string odd jobs together. (Jackson Pollock and Alice Neel were recipients, among many others.)
* "[Audre Lorde] felt nourished by her home life, too, and she and [her partner] Frances enjoyed making their queer family as normal as they could. Sometimes they acted so normal they annoyed their children. Audre remembered fifteen-year-old Beth complaining: 'You think just because you're lesbians you're so different from the rest of them, but you're not, you're just like all the other parents.' Beth recalled accusing Audre and Frances of being 'hypocrites. The world thought they were revolutionaries; I knew they were Ozzie and Harriet. Or Harriet and Harriet.'" d'awww
* Access to restrooms for women in public spaces was a major feminist issue, back in the day—and once, in impromptu protest, Alice Neel peed on the floor at a conference.
* (Addendum to that: I tried to do a quick google to learn more about what the fight for women's restrooms in public was like, and got... a bunch of articles about those nasty laws barring trans people from bathrooms. Sobering moment of "these struggles are part of the same struggle actually", that.)
* Finally here's a random Louise Erdrich quote that I thought was interesting and pretty and couldn't stuff anywhere else:
One day as I am holding baby and feeding her, I realize that this is exactly the state of mind and heart that so many male writers from Thomas Mann to James Joyce describe with yearning—the mystery of an epiphany, the sense of oceanic oneness, the great yes, the wholeness. There is also the sense of a self merged and at least temporarily erased—it is deathlike . . . Perhaps we owe some of our most moving literature to men who didn't understand that they wanted to be women nursing babies.
Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer
This book spun off from an essay the author wrote in The Paris Review, "What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?"
As such, it's a dozen-or-so essays bolted together, each of them variations on that theme, intermixing memoir and personal reflection together with specific case studies: Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, and so forth.
Dederer's a pretty entertaining writer, if a little bit, uh, anxious upper-middle-class liberal PNWer, at times. (Insert a GIF of a parrot attacking itself in a mirror.)
I think the standout essay was her chapter on Nabokov, an "anti-monster"—a dude who by all accounts never did any monstrous Humbert Humbert things, but who wrote Humbert Humbert with such chilling verisimilitude—and she uses that as the basis for a beautiful meditation on why art depicting awful things, art from the point-of-view of awful people, is so desperately necessary and powerful.
And if you read the book generally as sort of grab-bag potpourri of interesting explorations of various artists, you'll probably come away plenty pleased. Like, I knew vaguely that Wagner is associated with antisemitism, but I'd always thought that was mostly because the Nazis glommed onto his music—but turns out Wagner was, uh, Fox-News-brainrotted-grandpa levels of antisemitic, like, his contemporaries found it kind of weird how they'd go over to dinner at his place expecting to talk about music and he'd just be going on about the Jews for an uncomfortable amount of time, and also he wrote a whole damn essay condemning the presence of Jews in music. Disappointing! But also, interesting stuff, right?
(Her coverage of "abandoning mothers," by contrast, suffers from the fact that I read this book after I read The Baby on the Fire Escape—while, e.g., both women cover Doris Lessing, Dederer's account is far less interesting and nuanced and detailed than Phillips's; Dederer is fun and knows lots of random facts but Phillips is who you want if you really want to get to the meat of things, instead of stuff cherry-picked to make a point.)
But if you read this book for some kind of answer or at least deeper insight to that central question, "how should we respond/act/deal with art by people who have done Awful Things".... eh. One of her most lengthy meditations on the question ends with, effectively, "well, the problem is structural, so it's not your problem to solve." Okay? Sure? I mean I'm sort of tired of the kinda "well capitalism is bad so we gotta fix it" kind of diagnoses?
I mean, I don't know what answer I would've wanted from her, exactly—I personally don't generally have compunctions about enjoying art by people I don't like—but I still wasn't impressed. (She's on better footing, later on, when she compares it to the problem of what we do with the people we love—after all, so many of us have people who are fucked-up or bad or nasty in various ways, who we still love anyway, who we can't help but love. Though—I'm pretty sure there's a chunk of her audience whose answer would be a biting-the-bullet "yeah of course you just kick people out of your life if they suck, I do it all the time" and, heh. I mean, letting that conversation play out could've been pretty interesting! But it doesn't quite go there.)
But since I wasn't super-invested in that question, more her thought processes, I came away pleased enough.
Shark Heart: A Love Story by Emily Habeck
If I'd stopped reading at the 200-page-mark this writeup would've just been a single "zzzzz."
And probably I should've just stopped there; life's too short for "zzzzz" books. But I got this book for free, and was stuck in a waiting room, so I kept on a bit further, and...
...I wouldn't say it was entirely worth it? Like, that first section is still definitely a "zzzzz." Thirtysomethings Wren and Lewis get married, and then Lewis is promptly diagnosed with an incurable condition that'll slowly turn him into a great white shark before the year is out—and there, I've both told you everything that happens on the jacket copy, and also everything that happens in those first two hundred pages. Does the author do something interesting with that very weird premise? really lean into the weirdness of Dudes Randomly Becoming Sharks Sometimes? show us something interesting about what it means for the surrounding society? ooooor does it all feel suspiciously like an elaborate metaphor for Something Else, instead of a premise the author was actually interested in in-and-of-itself? Yeah, the latter. Also the writing style is simultaneously self-consciously florid and weirdly removed—I hate describing writing as "tell-y" because that's a very Middle Schooler Who Just Read Strunk & White kinda critique but I got so damn tired of her telling us that Wren is methodical and organized and spreadsheet-y and Lewis is creative and fun and spontaneous. Also my allergy to twee got triggered like every tenth page.
But the second section, which details the story of Wren's mother, is surprisingly warm and sedate and pulls a much closer focus. It's still a touch twee, but in a way that felt unforced, less precious and impressed-with-itself, and more just interested in the people in a somewhat sentimental setting—think, I dunno, Where The Red Fern Grows kinda vibes. I liked Where The Red Fern Grows ok.
There's a third part that loops back around to the people-becoming-sharks premise, and tries to play with it a bit, but ultimately doesn't push far enough beyond beating you over the head with some Hallmark card-tier themes.
I'll admit that the ending got a few tears out of me. I used to use that as a measure of the greatness of thing, back when I was a cold-blooded fork-tongued teenager who was impossible to warm with anything. But I don't think I can use that heuristic anymore; life does this thing where it heaps you up with more & more experiences, and sometimes something sappy reminds you of one of them, and there, fuck, you're crying. So I'll have to come up with a better heuristic, but here's one—when I was crying, was it because I was really feeling something about Wren, and Lewis, and the story itself? were they richly-drawn enough to draw my sympathy in-and-of-themselves? or was it solely because it was just reminding me of sweet things I'd say to my own husband, or losses in my own life? And if the latter, well. Yeah.
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Date: 2023-08-22 08:38 pm (UTC)What a wild accusation for Temi to throw, wow.
(Although I must also say, that I'm not sure my husband had *any* idea what my meds were before Recent Adventures, nor how I should be taking them, so....that might be the underlying assumption too.)
Your review posts are always great.
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Date: 2023-08-22 11:00 pm (UTC)