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[book post] A memoir & two YA novels
I still have... quite a backlog... of other books to write about... but it turns out, typing up thoughts on memoir/YA is comparatively really fast and easy, so, yeah, these books are skipping to the front of the queue:
Molly by Blake Butler
Poet Molly Brodak and novelist Blake Butler dated for seven years, were married for three, and had the kind of tumultuous-yet-fiercely-loving relationship you might expect from two determined artsy types.
Then, a few weeks before her fourtieth birthday, Molly killed herself in a nature preserve near their home.
This memoir is Butler's accounting of their relationship.
On a sentence level, the prose is kind of meh—it has the feeling of someone pretty skilled, who was unfortunately Overwhelmed With Emotion & also submitted a first draft, and the publisher just dumped that straight into a printing press instead of giving Butler what he really needed, which was an editor to tell him "dude, you don't need three completely different metaphors in a row to explain how you were feeling, pick one and stick with it, tighten this shit up."
But that doesn't seem to impugn its overall effect too much? The clarity of the observations themselves, and Butler's steadfast insistence on rendering Molly as a whole person, carry more weight than even the best prose could. So it still made for compelling reading, assuming you're willing to sort of eyeroll your way past some total clunkers on the way & skim past the 30% that's padding.
Compelling and painful reading, to be clear. The opening section, which details the day she died, was rough, in a very A Crow Looked at Me kinda way. And if you've ever been on either side (or both sides) of a relationship where one partner is Going Through It (depression, capital-d Depression, bipolar, just having a shitty time after a layoff, whatever), you'll find yourself wincing with familiarity, and wincing all the more because half of it is shit that you very deliberately forgot about because oh God that part sucked so much, and yet here it is for you! Butler remembers all that shit! (Probably you will be wincing even if you have no such experience—I've never been cheated on, for instance, and secretly, unvirtuously, deep down inside, I tend to find most "I was cheated on woe is me" narratives kind of melodramatic—but okay yeah Butler's experience of being cheated on absolutely gutted me.)
Here's where I'll confess I read this book because I heard there was some kind of controversy over it, and I am the kind of awful person who indeed slows down her car while passing a wreck and cranes her neck out the window to try and figure out what the heck is going on. In particular, I saw someone say that the discussion around the book is stunted because we just don't have very much cultural language for describing/supporting/thinking about male victims of abuse.
Hey, I have not said the word "abuse" yet! But yeah if you want to frame things that way, you could pretty straightforwardly describe their relationship as abusive, or at the very least mutually toxic. Molly threatens to kill herself when Butler does something she doesn't like. She cheats, repeatedly, while insisting that's absolutely not what she's doing, calling him paranoid and cruel when he asks extremely fair questions about where she's been, classic gaslight-y shit. She can get incredibly vicious over minor slights, then be all sweetness and light minutes later.
But Butler himself avoids using the A-word word until very close to the end of the book, I think because, while he's not uncomfortable calling those things abusive—he also doesn't want the reader to see that word and turn their brain off and stop trying to understand the Molly he knew. To reduce her to "abusive monster" or focus on his own hurt would be missing the point; he loved her, for a lot of great reasons, and he wants us to know those, too. And I found that real, and refreshing. We don't stop loving people when they hurt or hurt us, after all; they don't stop being people, worthy—and I'm suspicious of anyone who's unwilling to sit with that.
Anyway, once I was done, I went to go read up on the controversy, and, yeah, it's basically people asking: did he do this for a cheap cash-in, did he write this to get revenge on his dead wife, is this a fucked-up thing to do to someone who was clearly mentally ill, is the thing he's doing exploitative, and so on. And those are pretty reasonable questions to ask! There's unfortunately good precedent for being skeptical of Flowery Literary Dudes Writing About Dead Chicks. Particularly in a way to try and Absolve Their Own Sins or Make Them Look Better. Like, no one wants to read a book-length Zoe post, right.
I guess the tricky thing with anything like this is "it depends," and in particular the "it depends" really comes down to: do you trust the author? do you think they're giving the fairest accounting they can, and do you think they're doing this out of an honest desire to share real feeling rather than some more cynical or base motive? And that's not the kind of thing any Atlantic thinkpiece can answer for you. But based on what I read here, speaking as just one little rando: I trusted Butler, more-or-less. Enough that I'm glad he wrote the book, and I'm glad I was able to read it.
It's almost the kind of book I'd like to read in a book club, honestly, the kind of book club my mom tends to glom onto, where everyone's arguing over their moral assessment of all the characters the whole time. Sit in a room with someone who thinks Molly was a real bitch & someone who thinks Butler was a right bastard & I'll play the role of annoying centrist & let's all have a big long talk about it & maybe learn a little about how people think about this sort of thing together.
Or maybe not, actually, because I'm not that close to my book club buddies and that sounds pretty damn vulnerable. Emotional vulnerability, what is that, ha ha!
We Are Totally Normal by Naomi Kanakia
"I picked up this YA novel because I really enjoy the author's Great Books blog" is not a sentence one ever really expects to type, but, here we are. Hey, did you know Kanakia's blog is pretty good? She's been writing some really fun thoughts on a bunch of Icelandic sagas lately; go check it out.
Anyway, We Are Totally Normal is brisk & diverting little romp that is most importantly of all, incredibly funny. The whole opening section is this one huge roiling wave of dramatic irony in which our hero Nandan is hanging out with his bros, and there's all this annoying squabbling of whether they're going to the lake house or the beach and who's hanging out with who tonight and where, and he definitely wants to help his buddy Dave get with this chick he likes because Dave is just so cool, he's so cool that he invites the guy back to his apartment after the party starts breaking up and then he goes down on him FINALLY after all that Nandan has the idle of thought of "hmm, so maybe I am the tiniest bit gay" and you're like. oh my god. oh my god you're so sixteen years old. you're SO bad at this i cannot WAIT for the next hundred pages of you attempting to procure a clue from the clue factory
But, I also kind of can't figure out how this thing got published??? Like, I get the impression the YA queer romance market these days is trying to chase, idk, the Red White & Royal Blue crowd, and if you come into this book wanting something like that, well. Haha. You will be disappointed. This is not a saccharine-feel-good-love-conquers-all-and-also-everyone's-politics-are-Nice-TM thing. Instead this is a goofy romp through the life of some guy who just happens to be going through a sexuality crisis in the middle of it. The characters are mostly teenagers and thus mostly kinda shitty in various ways; just because being queer is basically fine because, come on, this is Silicon Valley—well, that doesn't mean there aren't other one-uppy weird social dynamics that crop up around the dynamics of attraction/gender/who's-fucking-who; the book isn't even particularly interested in a straightforward answer to What Is The Hero's Deal Wrt Sexuality because that's not what the protagonist cares about ("Whenever I tried to talk about what was actually inside me, I felt as if the world's answer was Well, if this is what you're feeling, then here's a word for that! [...] I didn't need words. What I needed was to know: Is Dave the right person? Or should I try to sleep with Hen? Should I do other sex stuff? Or keep doing the sex stuff I've been doing? Or not do any sex stuff at all? And at the same time there was this other question: Who do I want to be?").
So yeah, I dunno exactly how wide the market is for "jock-y bro dudes talking shit and going to dumb parties for several hundred pages." I mean, I'm in that market, clearly, but in college I was often called "the bro-iest chick I know" & I indeed spent a lot of time talking shit and going to dumb parties. It is a funny accident of fate that I also wound up kinda bookish, but, I suspect that's not super common; no one's gonna exactly make bank targeting me, right.
So yeah, probably a poor business decision on the part of the publisher to put this one out there, but, thanks dudes! It was an Actually Good Book; I don't see many of those in the quagmire that remains of YA!
Anyway, for similar reasons I picked up
Enter Title Here by Naomi Kanakia
which is yet another YA novel by the Great Books blogger chick.
Reshma is the future valedictorian of her fancy Silicon Valley high school, but not out of any deep love of learning or earnestness or any bullshit like that. Rather, Reshma's dead-certain that life is a numbers game, and if you don't get into a Top College TM you are fucked, but luckily if you play your cards right you can take exactly the right classes to get the highest possible GPA (what, challenge yourself? risk a B ever? learn for the sake of learning? fuck that), and if you are valedictorian and check all the other stupid boxes they have to let you in. (If I had read this in high school I would've been like "lmao this is nonsense, who thinks this," but having since had the opportunity to meet the products of several fancy Silicon Valley high schools... okay yeah, this kind of thinking is in the water supply there, it's wild but I totally believe there's a few Reshmas out there.)
And starting out, you're like, well hell this chick's a little mercenary but I admire her pluck, and there's no shame in playing a game by the rules—
—but then it becomes increasingly clear this chick is PROFOUNDLY deranged, in a way that is not tidily explained by any particular Trauma or whatever. Her parents are lovely, her teachers actually give a shit, and she's taken some knocks but it's clear the degree to which she's hyperfixated on those is all out of proportion—such that she's like, "plagiarism is fine," and threatens to sue the school when they catch her plagiarizing, (!), and this would in fact be her second time suing the school (!!!)—
—but hey, at least she's not boring, right?
The plot moves at a quick clip from there, with Reshma heaping ever-increasing self-imposed crises upon herself, and after a certain point... well, it starts reading like a feverdream? There's an adderall overdose episode in the middle of all this? I think Reshma was on not!Dr Phil with their literature teacher for a hot minute?? also, not!Elizabeth Holmes shows up in the final act??? I don't really know how to summarize, but if "gonzo senior year whirlwind with an unsympathetic protagonist" is the kind of quick read you're going for, well, here's the one for you.
And I love the extremely-spikey-and-weird friendship Reshma ends up forming with Alex, who's going to Princeton and kind of a bitch but also determined to be a human rights lawyer and sort of hates how goddamn nice the other candidate for valedictorian is even though they're allegedly besties:
I'm excited for Kanakia's first adult novel to come out in May, is what I'm saying.
Molly by Blake Butler
Poet Molly Brodak and novelist Blake Butler dated for seven years, were married for three, and had the kind of tumultuous-yet-fiercely-loving relationship you might expect from two determined artsy types.
Then, a few weeks before her fourtieth birthday, Molly killed herself in a nature preserve near their home.
This memoir is Butler's accounting of their relationship.
On a sentence level, the prose is kind of meh—it has the feeling of someone pretty skilled, who was unfortunately Overwhelmed With Emotion & also submitted a first draft, and the publisher just dumped that straight into a printing press instead of giving Butler what he really needed, which was an editor to tell him "dude, you don't need three completely different metaphors in a row to explain how you were feeling, pick one and stick with it, tighten this shit up."
But that doesn't seem to impugn its overall effect too much? The clarity of the observations themselves, and Butler's steadfast insistence on rendering Molly as a whole person, carry more weight than even the best prose could. So it still made for compelling reading, assuming you're willing to sort of eyeroll your way past some total clunkers on the way & skim past the 30% that's padding.
Compelling and painful reading, to be clear. The opening section, which details the day she died, was rough, in a very A Crow Looked at Me kinda way. And if you've ever been on either side (or both sides) of a relationship where one partner is Going Through It (depression, capital-d Depression, bipolar, just having a shitty time after a layoff, whatever), you'll find yourself wincing with familiarity, and wincing all the more because half of it is shit that you very deliberately forgot about because oh God that part sucked so much, and yet here it is for you! Butler remembers all that shit! (Probably you will be wincing even if you have no such experience—I've never been cheated on, for instance, and secretly, unvirtuously, deep down inside, I tend to find most "I was cheated on woe is me" narratives kind of melodramatic—but okay yeah Butler's experience of being cheated on absolutely gutted me.)
Here's where I'll confess I read this book because I heard there was some kind of controversy over it, and I am the kind of awful person who indeed slows down her car while passing a wreck and cranes her neck out the window to try and figure out what the heck is going on. In particular, I saw someone say that the discussion around the book is stunted because we just don't have very much cultural language for describing/supporting/thinking about male victims of abuse.
Hey, I have not said the word "abuse" yet! But yeah if you want to frame things that way, you could pretty straightforwardly describe their relationship as abusive, or at the very least mutually toxic. Molly threatens to kill herself when Butler does something she doesn't like. She cheats, repeatedly, while insisting that's absolutely not what she's doing, calling him paranoid and cruel when he asks extremely fair questions about where she's been, classic gaslight-y shit. She can get incredibly vicious over minor slights, then be all sweetness and light minutes later.
But Butler himself avoids using the A-word word until very close to the end of the book, I think because, while he's not uncomfortable calling those things abusive—he also doesn't want the reader to see that word and turn their brain off and stop trying to understand the Molly he knew. To reduce her to "abusive monster" or focus on his own hurt would be missing the point; he loved her, for a lot of great reasons, and he wants us to know those, too. And I found that real, and refreshing. We don't stop loving people when they hurt or hurt us, after all; they don't stop being people, worthy—and I'm suspicious of anyone who's unwilling to sit with that.
Anyway, once I was done, I went to go read up on the controversy, and, yeah, it's basically people asking: did he do this for a cheap cash-in, did he write this to get revenge on his dead wife, is this a fucked-up thing to do to someone who was clearly mentally ill, is the thing he's doing exploitative, and so on. And those are pretty reasonable questions to ask! There's unfortunately good precedent for being skeptical of Flowery Literary Dudes Writing About Dead Chicks. Particularly in a way to try and Absolve Their Own Sins or Make Them Look Better. Like, no one wants to read a book-length Zoe post, right.
I guess the tricky thing with anything like this is "it depends," and in particular the "it depends" really comes down to: do you trust the author? do you think they're giving the fairest accounting they can, and do you think they're doing this out of an honest desire to share real feeling rather than some more cynical or base motive? And that's not the kind of thing any Atlantic thinkpiece can answer for you. But based on what I read here, speaking as just one little rando: I trusted Butler, more-or-less. Enough that I'm glad he wrote the book, and I'm glad I was able to read it.
It's almost the kind of book I'd like to read in a book club, honestly, the kind of book club my mom tends to glom onto, where everyone's arguing over their moral assessment of all the characters the whole time. Sit in a room with someone who thinks Molly was a real bitch & someone who thinks Butler was a right bastard & I'll play the role of annoying centrist & let's all have a big long talk about it & maybe learn a little about how people think about this sort of thing together.
Or maybe not, actually, because I'm not that close to my book club buddies and that sounds pretty damn vulnerable. Emotional vulnerability, what is that, ha ha!
We Are Totally Normal by Naomi Kanakia
"I picked up this YA novel because I really enjoy the author's Great Books blog" is not a sentence one ever really expects to type, but, here we are. Hey, did you know Kanakia's blog is pretty good? She's been writing some really fun thoughts on a bunch of Icelandic sagas lately; go check it out.
Anyway, We Are Totally Normal is brisk & diverting little romp that is most importantly of all, incredibly funny. The whole opening section is this one huge roiling wave of dramatic irony in which our hero Nandan is hanging out with his bros, and there's all this annoying squabbling of whether they're going to the lake house or the beach and who's hanging out with who tonight and where, and he definitely wants to help his buddy Dave get with this chick he likes because Dave is just so cool, he's so cool that he invites the guy back to his apartment after the party starts breaking up and then he goes down on him FINALLY after all that Nandan has the idle of thought of "hmm, so maybe I am the tiniest bit gay" and you're like. oh my god. oh my god you're so sixteen years old. you're SO bad at this i cannot WAIT for the next hundred pages of you attempting to procure a clue from the clue factory
But, I also kind of can't figure out how this thing got published??? Like, I get the impression the YA queer romance market these days is trying to chase, idk, the Red White & Royal Blue crowd, and if you come into this book wanting something like that, well. Haha. You will be disappointed. This is not a saccharine-feel-good-love-conquers-all-and-also-everyone's-politics-are-Nice-TM thing. Instead this is a goofy romp through the life of some guy who just happens to be going through a sexuality crisis in the middle of it. The characters are mostly teenagers and thus mostly kinda shitty in various ways; just because being queer is basically fine because, come on, this is Silicon Valley—well, that doesn't mean there aren't other one-uppy weird social dynamics that crop up around the dynamics of attraction/gender/who's-fucking-who; the book isn't even particularly interested in a straightforward answer to What Is The Hero's Deal Wrt Sexuality because that's not what the protagonist cares about ("Whenever I tried to talk about what was actually inside me, I felt as if the world's answer was Well, if this is what you're feeling, then here's a word for that! [...] I didn't need words. What I needed was to know: Is Dave the right person? Or should I try to sleep with Hen? Should I do other sex stuff? Or keep doing the sex stuff I've been doing? Or not do any sex stuff at all? And at the same time there was this other question: Who do I want to be?").
So yeah, I dunno exactly how wide the market is for "jock-y bro dudes talking shit and going to dumb parties for several hundred pages." I mean, I'm in that market, clearly, but in college I was often called "the bro-iest chick I know" & I indeed spent a lot of time talking shit and going to dumb parties. It is a funny accident of fate that I also wound up kinda bookish, but, I suspect that's not super common; no one's gonna exactly make bank targeting me, right.
So yeah, probably a poor business decision on the part of the publisher to put this one out there, but, thanks dudes! It was an Actually Good Book; I don't see many of those in the quagmire that remains of YA!
Anyway, for similar reasons I picked up
Enter Title Here by Naomi Kanakia
which is yet another YA novel by the Great Books blogger chick.
Reshma is the future valedictorian of her fancy Silicon Valley high school, but not out of any deep love of learning or earnestness or any bullshit like that. Rather, Reshma's dead-certain that life is a numbers game, and if you don't get into a Top College TM you are fucked, but luckily if you play your cards right you can take exactly the right classes to get the highest possible GPA (what, challenge yourself? risk a B ever? learn for the sake of learning? fuck that), and if you are valedictorian and check all the other stupid boxes they have to let you in. (If I had read this in high school I would've been like "lmao this is nonsense, who thinks this," but having since had the opportunity to meet the products of several fancy Silicon Valley high schools... okay yeah, this kind of thinking is in the water supply there, it's wild but I totally believe there's a few Reshmas out there.)
And starting out, you're like, well hell this chick's a little mercenary but I admire her pluck, and there's no shame in playing a game by the rules—
—but then it becomes increasingly clear this chick is PROFOUNDLY deranged, in a way that is not tidily explained by any particular Trauma or whatever. Her parents are lovely, her teachers actually give a shit, and she's taken some knocks but it's clear the degree to which she's hyperfixated on those is all out of proportion—such that she's like, "plagiarism is fine," and threatens to sue the school when they catch her plagiarizing, (!), and this would in fact be her second time suing the school (!!!)—
—but hey, at least she's not boring, right?
The plot moves at a quick clip from there, with Reshma heaping ever-increasing self-imposed crises upon herself, and after a certain point... well, it starts reading like a feverdream? There's an adderall overdose episode in the middle of all this? I think Reshma was on not!Dr Phil with their literature teacher for a hot minute?? also, not!Elizabeth Holmes shows up in the final act??? I don't really know how to summarize, but if "gonzo senior year whirlwind with an unsympathetic protagonist" is the kind of quick read you're going for, well, here's the one for you.
And I love the extremely-spikey-and-weird friendship Reshma ends up forming with Alex, who's going to Princeton and kind of a bitch but also determined to be a human rights lawyer and sort of hates how goddamn nice the other candidate for valedictorian is even though they're allegedly besties:
"I'm glad we're doing this," Chelsea said. "Reshma can be a little abrasive, but she's a good person at heart."
"No, she's really not," Alex said. "Has she ever done anything to help another person?"
There was a muffled shout in the distance, and then a car revved up.
"But if you don't like her," Chelsea said, "then why do you hang out with her?"
"You know, it's so typical that you'd equate 'She's not a good person' with 'I don't like her.' The truth is that I really don't care how good or evil a person is. If you're electing a president, then you want a good person. But when you're choosing your friends, you just want someone who understands you. So, yes, Chelsea, I do like her. You're the one who doesn't like her."
"What? No. I love that we became friends with her. I think she needed us."
I could feel Alex roll her eyes. "Yeah, keep feeling good about yourself."
I'm excited for Kanakia's first adult novel to come out in May, is what I'm saying.