Literature Archives

8 Queerish Short Story Books

I grew up writing novels, because that’s what I read — novels. It’s not like Beverly Cleary or Judy Blume published short story collections. But then when you get older and are writing things for teachers or judges or whomever to read, everyone wants you to write short stories. I thought for a long time this shift was a logistical thing; workshopping a novel or evaluating submitted novels to writing contests is unwieldy.

There’s probably some truth to that, but short stories are also their own thing. And they’re rarely popular like novels are, which is funny, like how poetry isn’t popular, considering everyone’s got these allegedly short attention spans. Short stories are also always uniquely literary. Unlike popular novels like The DaVinci Code or Gossip Girl, keen storytelling is never the hook — good writing is. It’s not like I’m glued to a A.M Homes anthology because I can’t wait to see what happens next, I just want her to dazzle me with her perfect sentences.

So short story books are a bit more niche, and by definition cover more ground — more stories — than novels. And maybe that’s why it seems it’s way more likely to stumble across a lesbian here or there in a short story anthology than in a novel. In general things are a bit more queer.

Some Queer/ish Short Story Books

Trash, Dorothy Allison

“I write stories. I write fiction. I put on the page a third look at what I’ve seen in life — the condensed and reinvented experience of a cross-eyed working-class lesbian, addicted to violence, language, and hope, who has made the decision to live, is determined to live, on the page and on the street, for me and mine.”
– Prologue to Trash

If you’ve yet to read any Dorothy Allison then you need to really just stop whatever it is that you’re doing with your life, sit down and approach this motherfucker. Trash, a National Book Award nominee, was published in 1988 (before Bastard Out of Carolina) and features 14 “gritty, intimate stories” and opens with ‘River of Names,” one of my favorite stories of all time.

+

A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, Amy Bloom

“It is all small things, Jane knows. She is now practically a professional observer of gender, and she sees that although homeliness and ungainliness won’t win you any kindness from the world, they are not, in and of themselves, the markers that will get you tossed out of the restaurant, the men’s room, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.”

– “A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You”

Amy Bloom herself is a psychologist, a bisexual, and a feminist. So you and her already have three entire passions in common, which is not for nothing. The title story in this collection stars the single mother of a transgender son with a narrative that begins in the sandbox and ends with bottom surgery. In another story there is a moment when the lesbian’s best friend’s husband tells her he knows she’s been in love with his wife for twenty years, and she responds that she hasn’t been, because it’s true, and god, isn’t it lame how they just assume that. The lesbian says there was just no chemistry. I read the whole thing in one afternoon.

+

Because They Wanted To, Mary Gaitskill

“Although she could be attracted to males or females, she had little luck with either; her shy flirtations tended to be muffled failures, which started, then ended, with puzzled indifference, embarrassment, and trailing irresolution.”

– “Orchid”

Gaitskill is one of my top five favorite writers of all time. She gets so unpretty, yet restlessly sexy and fierce, with characters who often exist on the peripheries of various sexual subcultures and are rife with self-destruction, emotional wastelands and complicated, torrid relationships with the regular working world. Seems like nearly half the stories in this anthology have some queer element. One story is narrated by a father whose lesbian daughter has just published a story about him in a magazine, the other tells of a bisexual woman who runs into an ex and is forced to confront long-buried memories of who she was and who she wants to be.+

+

No One Belongs Here More Than You, Miranda July

“When we were fourteen we got drunk for the first time, and for about nine minutes, everything seemed possible and we kissed. This encounter seemed promisingly normal, and in the following days I waited for more kissing, perhaps even some kind of exchange of rings or lockets. But nothing was exchanged. We each kept our own things.”

– “Something That Needs Nothing”

Miranda July is bisexual, and you probably saw her movie, Me And You And Everyone We Know. Before this book came out, a friend I worked with and eventually slept with gave me “Something That Needs Nothing,” she’d read it in The New Yorker and thought I’d like it. I did. And then beyond that, there was this whole entire book. Not that they’re all about queer people — they aren’t. But they’re about weird people, and I think you, my loves, of all people, could appreciate that.

+

The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven, Rick Moody

“Marlene’s cheekbones were like the sharp side of an all-purpose stainless steel survival jackknife, and her eyes narrowed to reflect disappointment and loss, which, when combined with her biceps, her violent and toned physique, made for a compelling female beauty. Doris, meanwhile, looked like an Ivy League intellectual.”

– “The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven”

The title story is brutal and violent and it’s about all of these junkies, burnouts, suicidal queers and otherwise deviant kid-like-near-grownups all connected to each other through lovers and heroin and kink. The lesbian part opens in a Meatpacking District sex club where Doris and Marlene, a lesbian couples, buy this dominatrix Toni for the night at an auction. An abusive love triangle evolves. It’s not for the faint of heart. I think this story was the first place I’d ever heard about nipple clamps.

The other stories in the book I could take or leave and have since forgotten. This is one to get at the library, then.

+

The Whole Story and Other Stories, Ali Smith

I borrowed this from a friend who said she thought I’d like it and she was right because I did like it, and then I kept it, even though she wants it back; but mostly because I kept forgetting to give it back. It’s experimental fiction and Ali Smith is a lesbian. In one of the stories, a woman falls in love with a tree. It happens. I think Free Love And Other Stories has actual queer characters (this one may not, but generally gender is an afterthought), but I’d be lying if I told you that I’d read it.

+

Out of the Girls’ Room and Into the Night, Thisbe Nissen

“Darcy presses her dry lips into the pad of Gwynn’s palm and lifts them again, like a swimmer coming up for air, and they sleep like that, tucked together, the soft pressure of assurance holding them to one another, as if that’s what safety is: a point of contact.”

– “What Safety Is”

Out of the Girls Room and Into the Night is one of my favorite short story books of all time. Nissen, a graduate of the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop, explores youth with maturity and writes complicated, interesting stories about people who are sometimes college students; a feat which many consider impossible. The book is entertaining, expressive, brilliant and witty from beginning to end.

+

The Safety of Objects, A.M. Homes

It’s actually bisexual author A.M. Homes brilliant novel, Music For Torching, that digs into lady-on-lady love; but her short story collections, even when lacking lady-on-lady love or overt gayness, have a queer sensibility vivid enough to snarl lesbian wonderwoman Rose Troche into adapting The Safety of Objects into a film (one of my favorite movies ever, also features a young K-Stew). Homes actually wrote a few episodes of The L Word back when it was still good. In The Safety of Objects‘ “Yours Truly,” the narrator literally locks herself in the closet to write love letters to herself and in “The I Of It” an old gay man ponders his life as he feels it slip away.

Things I Read That I Loved #9: Orange You Glad I Didn’t Say Banana

via weheartit.com

HELLO and welcome to the ninth installment of Things I Read That I Love, wherein I share with you some of the longer-form journalism/essays I’ve read recently so that you can read them too and we can all know more about stolen bicycles and Joan Didion!

This “column” is less feminist/queer focused than the rest of the site because when something is feminist/queer focused, I put it on the rest of the site. Here is where the other things are. The title of this feature is inspired by the title of Emily Gould’s tumblr, Things I Ate That I Love.

Who Pinched My Ride? (February 2012), Outside Magazine – You’re gonna really like this one. When thieves stole his beloved commuter bike on a busy street in broad daylight, PATRICK SYMMES snapped—and set out on a cross-country plunge into the heart of America’s bike-crime underbelly. What he saw will rattle your frame.

Dark New York Apartments: Not For Vampires Only (January 2012), The New York Times: This made me feel like less of a weirdo for wishing the sun always set at 7 and never at 10 because at some point you just want to be ensconced in darkness?

Judith Clark’s Radical Transformation (January 2012), The New York Times Magazine: In October 1981, Judith Clark, a lesbian and a new mom, was arrested in connection with a robbery committed by the radical leftist political group she was involved in. She got the longest sentence of anyone involved, longer than the people who actually killed people.

HATERADE (January 2012), The Believer: “WHAT ARE THE LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF BEING CALLED AN INTOLERANT HACK, A FEMINAZI, A DESPICABLE PIG, AND A STUPID LITTLE TWIT ON A DAILY BASIS?” By Meghan Daum who I love. Have I already told you that I love her? This is so relevant to all of your interests that you maybe could’ve written it yourself.

“These days, being attacked isn’t just the result of saying something badly, it’s the result of saying anything at all.” -Meghan Daum in this essay

“…if most writers have long understood that publishing is a privilege that carries certain responsibilities—foremost among them taking the time to present ideas in a careful and thoughtful manner, ideally with the help of one or more editors—many readers seem to be approaching their commenting privileges like teenagers with newly minted driver’s licenses.” – Meghan Daum

The Autumn of Joan Didion (Jan/Feb 2012), The Atlantic: I really loved this so much. I don’t know. At times the way she described Didion reminded me of me; except obviously Didion is 1,000% more famous, 2,000% better, and 50,000% more successful but you’ll see what I mean, maybe. Like about how sure her voice is when she writes or reads but how uncertain she seems socially. At other times I wondered if including this essay in TIRTAL would be a mistake because there’s some sections where the author discusses Didion’s unique connection to women and the way women like to read, and I know y’all have lots of feelings about gender roles. But still, I think, THIS.

Too Much Information (May 2011), GQ: I liked this “review” of David Foster Wallace‘s The Pale King for reasons similar to liking the Joan Didion article, but maybe you will like it for different reasons. Or not like it. Hell, I hardly know you.

Missing White Female (January 2006), Vanity Fair: “A missing girl. A desperate family. A tropical island. The disappearance of beautiful, blonde teenager Natalee Holloway on Aruba last May has become America’s most tragic reality show. But behind the cable-ratings bonanza is a war of wills and cultures, as Natalee’s mother, Beth Twitty, alleging an official cover-up, has turned Aruba upside down to find out what happened to her daughter. Sorting fact from rumor, with new information from the police, the author cuts to the heart of the case.”

Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory (January 2012), NPR/This American Life: Fascinating transcript of a show about working conditions in Chinese factories where iPads are made.

The Rachel Papers: What a Hot, Smart Lesbian Pundit Means For An Uneasy America (Spring 2009), Bitch Magazine: I refound this, oddly, because I’d cut out pictures from it for my arts & crafts/collage bin, which I accessed earlier this week to make some cards.

Things I Read That I Love #8

HELLO and welcome to the eighth installment of Things I Read That I Love, wherein I share with you some of the longer-form journalism/essays I’ve read recently so that you can read them too and we can all know more about Uniqlo and airline security!

MIRRORINGS: The late great Lucy Grealy on her face, tragedy, beauty and identity, LostAngeles: I don’t really know how to describe this one, except that it’s tender and beautiful and heartbreaking and you should read it for yourself. Lucy Grealy, the author of this piece, wrote the 1994 bestseller Autobiography of a Face, based on her experiences with facial disfigurement resulting from cancer of the jaw, and died of a heroin overdose in 2002.

Presumed Guilty (January 2012), 5280 Magazine: This reminded me of some way in the West Memphis Three story — like how they’ll convict you just for being a bit of a fucked-up weirdo, even if you’ve never committed any crime, like this guy was imprisoned for so long for a murder he didn’t commit. Can you imagine?

How Many Stephen Colberts Are There? (January 2012), The New York Times Magazine: “Lately, though, there has emerged a third Colbert. This one is a version of the TV-show Colbert, except he doesn’t exist just on screen anymore. He exists in the real world and has begun to meddle in it.“

Air Safety on the Cheap (January 2012), The Village Voice: Did you know that all of the 9/11 hijackers set off the metal detector but were wanded and waved through anyhow? I did not. In any event, this story is about the company that provides security services at airports and treats its employees like shit.

The Triumph of Kodakery (January 2012), The Atlantic: “The popularizer of photography is on its corporate deathbed, but the culture it created is stronger than ever.”

A Rough Guide to Disney World (June 2011), The New York Times: “A small child on Disneying Eve is a thoroughbred before the gates open.” A father’s family trip to Disneyworld along with the family of his passionate pothead friend.

Did Christianity Cause the Crash? (December 2009), The Atlantic: I linked to this essay about the economic consequences of the prosperity gospel in this post, but I came across it again this week and thought you know, maybe if you missed it the first time, this could be the lucky day where you still have a chance to read it!

What Went Wrong? (March 2004), Boston: “The son of a prominent Boston doctor, David Arndt was on his way to becoming a leading surgeon in his own right when a bizarre blunder interrupted his climb: He left his patient on the operating table so he could cash his paycheck. A series of arrests followed, exposing a life of arrogance, betrayal, and wasted promise, leaving only one question left to answer.”

Notes From a Wedding (February 2010), The Washington Post: “Notes from a wedding: In the age of digital music and the relative bargain of a single DJ, wedding singer Kenney Holmes is determined to keep it real.”

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I like reading articles that explain the rise/development/operations of various businesses, even if they’re industries completely unrelated to my own business. Here’s some I’ve liked about clothing stores!

Uniqlones (May 2010), New York Magazine: “Seemingly out of nowhere, their cheap, skinny rainbow-colored basics became a kind of New York uniform. Just how did the Japanese discount brand become the hottest retailer in the city?”

Steal This Look (Feb 2008) Radar Magazine: “With God on their side (and a few unwilling designers), Forever 21 has quadrupled in size since 2001.”

Reading Rainbow 2012: The Things We’re Finally Actually Going To Read This Year

2012 is the year of moving forward without everything that’s holding us back. But sometimes it’s worth looking at whether it’s ourselves holding us back, or at least our reticence to pick up the copy of that book that we borrowed from our best friend or mom or ex and have kept on the coffee table for eight months and really are going to read one of these days. You know what I mean — like the copy of Anna Karenina or The Woman Warrior that you’ve kept through like three different moves but still never opened? Well hey, it’s a new year, and we’re all still bright-eyed and optimistic and the hangover is mostly gone, so why not make it today? Or at least one of the coming 365 days in 2012? We looked deep inside ourselves in a very honest and searching way, and came up with the books we’ve been meaning to read and are finally going to take the plunge on, or finish the very extended plunge on, depending. Here are our choices. What are you going to read in 2012?

Maurice Sendak Is Curmudgeonly, Brilliant, Tells You To Go To Hell

Whitney’s Team Pick:

Maurice Sendak, the wonderful (and gay) author of Where the Wild Things Are, is still brilliant, immensely creative, disillusioned, and charmingly curmudgeonly at age 83 — and the Tate Modern’s TateShots mini-documentary spells it out perfectly. The documentary is shot in Sendak’s home in the woods of upstate New York and begins with a shot of the forest’s skinny, leafless, looming trees — it would be a fitting backdrop for Max and his floppy wolf costume. The short film also catches little idiosyncratic details of Sendak’s home: the old Mickey Mouse figurines that sit behind his desk, the large wooden swan that sits in his living room.

via http://slices-of-life.com/

The documentary captures Sendak’s many (and varied, but all adamant) opinions about writing, being an artist and childhood:

About possible sequels to Where the Wild Things Are:

People ask me why don’t I write Wild Things 2? ‘It was such a success.’ Go to hell — go to hell.

About art:

Artists have to take a dive. And either you hit your head on a rock and you split your head and die or the blow to the head is so inspiring that you come back up and do the best work you ever did. But you have to take the dive. And you do not know what the result will be.

About childhood:

I didn’t see Michelangelo go to work in the morning — I just lived in Brooklyn, where everything was ordinary and yet enticing and exciting and bewildering. The magic of childhood, the strangeness of childhood, the uniqueness that makes us see things that other people don’t see.

Watch the short documentary here:

Things I Read That I Love #7

image via weheartit – http://weheartit.com/entry/20254689

HELLO and welcome to the seventh installment of Things I Read That I Love, wherein I share with you some of the longer-form journalism/essays I’ve read recently so that you can read them too and we can all know more about army recruiting and wax museums!

This is what you can read on your way back to where you came from, or when hungover on New Year’s Day.

+ Onward and Upward With Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen of Portlandia (January 2012), The New Yorker: Carrie and Fred are such cute best friends!

+ The Recruiter’s War (June 2005), Vanity Fair: “Pressured to fill quotas, army and Marine recruiters have been enlisting kids who don’t meet basic physical, moral, and educational standards. Ten recruiters reveal just how corrupted—and in one case deadly—their job has become.”

+ Halfway Heaven (1996), The New Yorker – “A year after a young woman at Harvard killed her roommate and then took her own life, questions remain about why it happened, and whether it had to.”

+ In the Land of the Dear Leader, (July 1996), Harper’s: You guys, this is FASCINATING. It’s a piece about North Korea from an American journalist sent there right after Kim Jong Il’s father (“The Great Leader”) died.

+ A Monster Among the Frum (December 2011), New York Magazine: My girlfriend read this one before I did, so. I read it on the airplane. Here’s the description: The faithful of Borough Park have a saying: “We are all of one face.” The life of Levi Aron, the outcast awaiting trial for the murder of 8-year-old Leiby Kletzky, suggests otherwise.

+ Sealed in Wax: Madame Tussaud’s Anniversary (December 2011), Prospect Magazine: You may or may not know that I’m obsessed with Wax Museums. Caitlin got me an entire book about Marie Tussaud (of Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum), but you get this essay!

+ “Psychic Benefits” and the NBA Lockout (August 2007), Grantland -“...both arguments miss the point. The issue isn’t how much money the business of basketball makes. The issue is that basketball isn’t a business in the first place — and for things that aren’t businesses how much money is, or isn’t, made is largely irrelevant.”

+ Between The Lines (December 2011), Los Angeles Magazine: I know you’re thinking, shit Riese, why would I want to read about parking lots? I can’t explain it to you, I can only tell you that I both read and loved it.

+ And Another Fifty Million People Just Got Off the Plane (November 2011), New York Magazine: The recession has not tempered the growth of the tourism sector. The most interesting part of this is the breakdown of tourist behavior based on where they’re from. Australians are the most adventurous, FYI.

+ A Young Woman Struggles With Oxy Addiction and Recovery (December 2011), Tampa Bay Times: There is an epidemic of prescription drug abuse in Florida — this is one woman’s story.

End Times Approach For LGBT Newsweekly, Gay Bookstore and Feminist Bookstore

Lambda Rising, the totally infamous and sometimes hilarious LGBTQ bookstore in Washington, DC, closed before I came out, but even when I wasn’t out, it was still a great place to be. I used to go in there because I like gay people and the Golden Girls, and sometimes Katrina and I would walk around and look at the cards. But when I wanted to send “GUESS WHAT I AM A LESBIAN NOW” cards to my friends, it was too late. I settled for being a total cliché and doing it with words instead.

We’ve been concerned about the vanishing gay bookstores and shuttered gay publications for as long as we’ve been a gay publication ourselves, which requires being told constantly that nobody has succeeded at doing what you’re doing without corporate ownership. In 2010, gay and feminist bookstores from New York to Rehoboth to Los Angeles were closing their doors for the last time. Now, Glad Day Bookstore in Toronto – believed to have been the oldest standing LGBTQ bookstore in the world – may join those establishments by becoming a memory. And in Minneapolis, the True Colors Feminist Bookstore — the oldest independent feminist bookstore in North America — will close at the end of February, “barring a miracle.”

Ruta Skujins bought True Colors, which specializes in “lesbian, GLBT, women’s interest, multicultural/diversity books and children’s books,” and blames the bad economy for the shop’s demise. The bookstore was originally named the Amazon Bookstore Cooperative when it opened 40 years ago, but the store was renamed following a legal dispute with Amazon.com. That blows, obviously.

Skujins, who lived off a pension while running the store, had tried a lot of things to keep it open, like hosting readings and book clubs. She sacrificed her own salary and staffed the store with her two daughters and her partner’s daughter. She still hopes an angel investor will appear, and notes “People keep saying I’m getting a lot of emotional support, but that doesn’t pay the bills.”

Glad Day’s owner, John Scythes, is trying to sell the store. He began his search for a new owner last month, and wants to reach out to regular customers and his friends before taking the listing completely public. A small white sheet of paper in the store lists the call for a new owner.

The store opened in 1970. Scythes bought the store from its founder, Jearld Moldenhauer, in 1991. It was the first of its kind in Canada. In June 2010, the establishment signaled that extinction was in sight, and Scythes revealed that he had begun using his own money to cover the costs of the shop. That summer they experienced an extreme drop in sales:

“Glad Day has suffered a big decline in the past six months and fears it will be forced to shut its 40-year-old doors by the end of summer if things don’t improve. If that happens, Toronto will lose much more than a bookshop – it will lose an ‘active archive’ of gay heritage in the city and beyond, said co-manager Sholem Krishtalka. ‘On the shelves of Glad Day we have books whereby you can essentially trace Toronto’s queer history from the early days to now,’ he said. It’s this very important recording of queer culture.'”

So, now that you’re depressed about the shuttering of Canada’s oldest gay bookstore and oldest feminist bookstore, let’s talk about a gay newsmagazine that also recently announced is departure!

For many years, local complementary publications have been a mainstay in gay-friendly cities, offering in the scoop on local LGBT government and culture, such as which night clubs are being built and which are being turned into condominiums. No but really — nightlife, the arts, local human interest stories — these weeklies are vital to queer culture and every time one dies, an angel loses its wings. If you live in Washington, DC, one of your free LGBT media outlets focused on the local queer scene is “Metro Weekly,” which I actually did once grace the pages of, y’all:

i have my old hair in this

And if you live in Portland, Oregon (or the metropolitan area surrounding it), you were probably super into the free queer magazine “Just Out.” (They’ve always had a good website, too.) The only problem is that, as the magazine so poignantly put it, “three years of recession have taken their toll.” The magazine has ceased publication, effective as of an announcement December 26. The last issue went out this month, ending 28 years of service to the extended Portland community. In recent years the publication had to downsize its free circulation to focus more on the main city, with only one drop box in surrounding areas.

The publication will be missed by its community and, more importantly, its devoted readers. One commenter on the site said: “So sad to hear this news—yet another significant loss for those attempting to do good work in these challenging times. look forward to the reincarnation, Marty, in whatever form your good intentions manifest. There is no death of good intentions and good works—only the temporary transformations.”

Editor Daniel Borgen said: “Right now, the end of Just Outfeels like a divorce, or even a death—there’s a big gaping chasm, a void that’s going to be incredibly tough to fill. The people who came together to make this paper week in and week out worked hard. More than that, our whole hearts were in that work. Writers poured their guts out. We broached uncomfortable subjects. Every two weeks, all of this effort turned into the creation of something—a tangible thing that came from nothing, put out there for all the world to see.”

The “digital revolution,” aka “the era of putting everything on the internet” has altered how we consume news, and some industries and publications have adapted easier than others. As advertising revenues wane, publications distributed for free, whether online or in print, are scrambling to find a new financial model to survive. LGBT publications, of course, face special challenges, such as being a relatively small percentage of the population. Then there’s this pesky repression thing. Two years ago, even, Windows Media, which owned a ton of LGBT publications, went out of business.

Obviously, the difficulty of keeping queer and/or feminist publications/stores financially sustained is one near and dear to our hearts. All of the aforementioned stores and publications were independently owned, as were most of those that shut down last time we talked about this. Most major queer publications, online and off, are struggling. Going into 2012 and a seemingly never-ending recession of death and misery, it’s more important than ever to support independently-owned queer and feminist media.

“In the end, Just Out was much bigger than any one person or any one incident,” wrote Just Out’s editor Daniel Borgen. “We were a collective—of artists, designers, writers, editors, salespeople, publishers—who wholeheartedly believed in the product we created. Regardless of what comes next, the hole Just Out filled for 29 years now becomes a void. A big, empty void.”

Things I Read That I Love #6

HELLO and welcome to the sixth installment of Things I Read That I Love, wherein I share with you some of the longer-form journalism/essays I’ve read recently so that you can read them too and we can all know more about homes for troubled teens and plane crashes! This “column” is less feminist/queer focused than the rest of the site because when something is feminist/queer focused, I put it on the rest of the site. Here is where the other things are. The title of this feature is inspired by the title of Emily Gould’s tumblr, Things I Ate That I Love.

Just in time for the Holidays, here are some things you can read instead of doing whatever it is your holiday companions want you to do!

Who’s That Girl (Dec 2011) – The New Inquiry: “How did someone acquire so many quirks in the first place? Take away the funky glasses, colorful dresses, and bursts of song, and Jess Day ends up having more in common with a naked paper doll than her TV-sitcom predecessors or viewers.”

What Really Happened Aboard Air France 477 (Dec 2011), Popular Mechanics: I didn’t think I’d necessarily like anything from Popular Mechanics, but I did so really like this.

Lorrie Moore (September 2009), Elle: All about one of my top five favorite writers OF ALL TIME!

Hannah and Andrew (January 2012), Texas Monthly: “In October 2006 a four-year-old from Corpus Christi named Andrew Burd died mysteriously of salt poisoning. His foster mother, Hannah Overton, was charged with capital murder, vilified from all quarters, and sent to prison for life. But was this churchgoing young woman a vicious child killer? Or had the tragedy claimed its second victim?”

The Adventures of Super-Boy (March 2011), Rolling Stone: This is the only thing I’ve ever read about Justin Bieber –> “God, girls, and boatloads of swag: how Justin Bieber went from Canadian YouTube oddity to the biggest teen idol in the world.”

Sex in Advertising: Retail Therapy (Dec 2011) – The Economist: “How Ernest Dichter, an acolyte of Sigmund Freud, revolutionised marketing.”

Horror Stories From Tough-Love Teen Homes (July/August 2011), Mother Jones: Faith-based homes for “troubled teens” are free from government regulation, which is how so many teens taken to these places report unfathomable tortue — if they get out at all. Another piece I’ve read on this topic is called Want Your Kid to Disappear? from a 2004 issue of Legal Affairs, about the people who are hired to pick up the kids stealth-style and transport them to homes like this.

The Last Lion (August 2011), Outside : “After 34 books, endless Hemingway comparisons, and too many battles with gout, legendary author Jim Harrison is unsurpassed at chronicling man’s relationship with wilderness. His secret? Ample wine, cigarettes, fly-fishing—and an inability to give a damn about what anyone else thinks. Our author takes a literary pilgrimage to Montana.”

The 1 Percent, Revealed (Dec 2011) – Mother Jones: Barbra Ehrenreich breaks it down with incredible clarity — this is seriously a must-read. It’s short, too!

Now That The Factories are Closed, It’s Tee-Time in Benton Harbor, Michigan (Dec 2011) – New York Times Magazine: Clearly I have a soft spot for anything about Michigan, which means I’ve read a lot of things about various initiatives to “fix” various areas of Michigan. This is one of those.

Peyton’s Place (October 2011) , GQ: The true story of a family who let One Tree Hill use their home as a set for many many years and how it became, eventually, too much to bear.

Pill Culture Pops (June 2003), New York Magazine: “With the stigma attached to mood-improving (not to mention sex-life-improving) drugs all but gone, New Yorkers are becoming their own Dr. Feelgoods, self-medicating as never before. Inside the new (totally respectable) drug scene.” [This feels really true to a frightening degree, surprised I wasn’t interviewed for this story.]

Another Top 10 Lesbian Romance Novels (Currently On My Kindle)

The last time we talked lesbian romance novels, a handful of enthusiasts came out of the closet and admitted to sharing my love for this genre. It was all the encouragement I needed to tell you about even more of these modern day girl-on-girl bodice busters.

The Lesbian Romance Formula

Lesbian romance novels are will-they-or-won’t-they slow burners that are loosely based on the following premise: Girl A meets Girl B and thinks she’s cocky / reckless / mysterious / looking very Shane today. An often work-related situation forces the girls to spend every waking moment together, and Girl A realizes that there’s more to Girl B than nice arms and a smokin’ hot swagger.

However! Despite their sexual tension, Girl A keeps Girl B at arm’s length as she undergoes a brief but intense struggle to overcome her deep dark secret and/or crippling emotional baggage. The tide typically turns when a confusing figure from either girl’s past shows up and/or a tragic accident forces Girl A to consider life without Girl B in it. They say “I love you” and have “earth shattering” sex. The end.

In case there’s any confusion, I genuinely love the lesbian romance genre. Sometimes I’ll make fun of the cover art and the character names and the work-related circumstances, but it’s only because mockery is the only way I can deal with matters of the heart.

Top 10 Lesbian Romance Novels

(Currently on Crystal’s Kindle)

Hostage Moon by A.J. Quinn
e-book
paperback

Hunter Roswell is a ‘painfully beautiful and intimidatingly intelligent’ multi-millionaire CEO who’s being hunted by a serial killer holding a decade-long grudge. Sadly no amount of money, jet planes or Maseratis are gonna protect her. But do you know who can? Sara Wilder, former FBI profiler and current lesbian. Tasked with finding the connection between Hunter and her prospective murderer, Sara gets inside Hunter’s head. And also her pants.

Sometimes when the mystery/thriller genre meets the lesbian/romance genre, those little literary devices that build suspense are sacrificed for countless descriptions of how the leading ladies’ pupils cloud with desire. That’s not the case with Hostage Moon. The mystery part is just as suspenseful as the romance part and I was invested until the final page. Solid debut right here.

Tags: work-related circumstance, hot lady cop, raunch, hot girl has swagger

Jericho by Ann McMan
e-book
paperback

This story starts when newly-separated and seemingly straight librarian Syd Murphy accepts a new job in Jericho, a small Virginian town that’s serviced by an attractive doctor named Maddie. The two ladies meet on the road to Jericho, literally – when Syd gets stranded roadside with a flat tire, Dr. McHotpants gets her butch on and comes to the rescue. A beautiful friendship is formed.

Lesbian romance novels are typically quite short and reading short books can be an expensive habit, particularly if you skim-read the scenes where no-one makes out. Jericho is nearly twice the length of the norm and the extra character and story development really pays off, I was so into Syd and Maddie that as soon as I finished their story I was compelled to read it again. If the uncontested 5-star rating on Amazon is any indication then you will be equally charmed, I’m sure.

Tags: tragic accident, confusing figure from the past, somebody call a doctor

Parties in Congress by Collette Moody
e-book
paperback

When Bijal Rao starts working for a Republican candidate who’s running for U.S. Congress, she’s sent to spy on the enemy: Congresswoman Colleen O’Bannon. O’Bannon is a democrat and Rao is a republican and these loyalties prevent them from ripping each other’s finely tailored suits off, at least for a while.

Politically themed novels don’t exactly get my heart racing and so Parties In Congress almost didn’t get read. That would have been a loss, as Bijal is hands down the most awkward and inappropriate character in lesbian fiction and her stalkerish, hide-in-shrubs-with-a-video-camera approach to courting really won my heart.

Tags: work-related circumstance, lesbian power-suits, deceased lover

Firestorm by Radclyffe
e-book
paperback

Firefighter and paramedic Mallory “Ice” James is a smokejumper, which means that it’s her job to parachute into forest fires. When reckless newbie Jac Russo is hired onto Mallory’s smokejumping team without her approval — thanks to strings pulled by Jac’s presidential candidate father — Mallory is understandably… fuming.

At first, things between Jac and Mallory are… heated. Not friends, those two. Mallory takes her job seriously and she’s got no time for “hot shot” Jac’s cowboi antics. However, Jac thinks that her new boss is “hotter than the blazes they’re supposed to be dousing” and her desire to see Mallory naked will not be… extinguished.

This is another novel that I wasn’t certain I’d be crazy about, as I am a devout city girl and this story is set entirely in the wilderness. But in the end, the romance won me over. It was… sizzling.

Tags: work-related circumstance, tragic accident, raunch, hot girl has swagger

Snowbound by Cari Hunter
e-book
paperback

Police officer Sam Lucas interrupts a jewellery store heist, gets badly injured and is then taken hostage by violent criminals. Enter Kate Myles, a beautiful doctor who hands herself over to the abductors in order to give medical attention to the wounded. This story is set in England and so during their fight for survival, Sam and Kate drink a lot of tea and communicate using cute British phrases.

This novel is jam-packed with action and as such, Sam and Kate don’t admit or act on their feelings for a really long time, like for most of the novel. Does this sound like complaining? I’m not complaining. The moment the two lead characters hook up is the same moment that I tend to lose interest, so I’m all for sexual tension being dragged out until the final chapters.

Tags: work-related circumstance, tragic accident, hot lady cop, somebody call a doctor

Focus of Desire by Kim Baldwin
e-book
paperback

When Isabel Sterling’s best friend enters her in Sophisticated Women magazine’s ‘Watch Your Dreams Come True’ contest, she wins an all expenses paid trip to exotic locations. Accompanying Isabelle and her BFF on this trip is infamous lesbian photographer and womanizer Natasha “Kash” Kashnikova, who has reluctantly agreed to document their travels for the cover story.

Isabelle is a sweet, caring and optimistic girl from Smalltown USA, who’s not at all interested in her 15 minutes of fame. Kash, on the other hand, is a total douchelord who uses her celebrity to bed a different model each day and who doesn’t trust women who claim they have no desire to be in the spotlight. Both girls have different ideas about romance, for example Kash wants a threesome while Isabelle wants candlelit dinners and cuddles. They work out their differences half-naked in a Roman alley.

Tags: work-related circumstance, raunch, hot girl has swagger

Loves Abiding Spirit by Syd Parker
e-book
paperback

When famous songwriter Soren Lockhart’s ex-wife takes out a restraining order on behalf their young daughter Olivia, Soren gets the hell out of dodge and purchases a dilapidated haunted house in Savannah, Georgia. Who’s she gonna call? Merritt Tanner, hunky lesbian and proprietor of a construction business.

Within the first minute of meeting, Merritt and Soren want to jump each other’s bones. Unfortunately, Merritt’s cheating alcoholic girlfriend prevents them from doing so straight away. Soren pursues Merritt like a tiger and eventually wins her heart, but not without assistance from the young lesbian ghost who is haunting her house. The dialogue in this book is funny, $4.99 is a good price for a few lols.

Tags: work-related circumstance, confusing figure from the past, hot girl has swagger

LA Metro by RJ Nolan
e-book
paperback

After getting burned by her closeted lover, Dr. Kimberly Donovan transfers to the psych unit at LA Metropolitan Hospital. It’s there that she meets Dr. Jess McKenna, the attractive Chief of the ER who has a reputation for being bit of a bitch when really she’s just misunderstood.

Dr Kim and Dr Jess form a cute friendship, they bond over shared interests such as shitty ex-lovers and a secret desire to tear each other’s scrubs off. Not much else happens, this is just a story of two health care professionals falling in love.

Tags: work-related circumstance, somebody call a doctor

Waiting in the Wings by Melissa Brayden
e-book
paperback

Jenna McGovern graduates from a prestigious musical theater program and lands a sweet role in a Broadway production starring one of her favorite television actors, Adrienne Kenyon. Jenna and Adrienne start dating and everything is golden, at least until Jenna accepts a career-breaking role on the other side of the country and Adrienne drops her like she’s hot.

That’s only the start of their story. Jenna and Adrienne meet 4 years later under another work-related circumstance and realise that they never moved on.

Tags: work-related circumstance, confusing figure from the past

Kiss The Rain by Larkin Rose
e-book
paperback

Jodi Connelly, aka ‘Lexi,’ is a high-end lesbian escort and phone sex operator living in London. Her favorite phone client is American fashion designer Eve Harris, a power femme who avoids relationships because she’s so busy and important and already has a smokin’ hot butch on speed-dial who knows exactly how she likes it.

When Eve’s fashion show travels to London, Jodi is recruited by her best friend to help construct props for the set. Jodi and Eve meet and have lots of wild sex, and Eve remains unaware that Jodi is the same person who makes her come over the phone every night. Jodi falls in love with Eve but Eve is already in love with ‘Lexi.’ Eve also thinks that Jodi is pretty swell, however Jodi is a real person and Eve prefers not to do real people. Are you following? It’s complicated, you should probably just read the book. It has a lot of sex in it.

Tags: work-related circumstance, raunch, hot girl has swagger, it’s complicated

Have you read any good lesbian romance novels lately? Tell me about them.

Get A Conversation with Eileen Myles All To Yourself

Carmen’s Team Pick:

I want to help you have a conversation with Eileen Myles. It starts on the Internet.

I follow the “Eileen Myles” tag on Tumblr, both because of my own life and because I like to queue posts for Fuck Yeah Eileen Myles in my spare time. I log in most days, and nights, and afternoons, and find pretty much nothing new there, except occasionally a “1+” pops up, like a strange gift from the Internet. On Friday this little “1+” was an unexpected and mysterious message from OR Books:

Send blank email to badmirror@orbooks.com and see what happens! (Don’t worry: it’s free.)

At first I was all, “why the fuck would I send a weird blank email to this address?” but then I was all “what bad has ever come from an email?” I have a great junk filter anyway. Also, I knew it had to do with Eileen Myles, so I decided to go for it.

I sent an email with the subject “this is blank inside, you can even check.”

Within seconds I received this automatic message:

Thank you for ordering a free copy of “Bad Mirror: A Conversation With Eileen Myles.”

It was linked right there in the email, a neat PDF transcript for my eyes to gobble up and live inside of for a little bit. It is the full transcript of Eileen’s interview with John Oakes about Inferno, a book I know you have already read multiple times.

Everything Eileen Myles says is engaging, interesting, and profound. So take the plunge and send the email. Who knows what awaits your heart:

“the classic cliché is that men are creative because they can’t give birth, and it might just be too much that a woman, who has the capacity to give birth, would instead—or also—write, and create. Creation is really another unexplored aspect of being female, so it’s new ground and when people talk about coming of age, I think it’s key. I think about punk girls and ’zines: it’s all about this rudimentary, great, raw writing which is generally associated instead with the men…”

Things I Read That I Love #5: Law & Order Edition Part Two

HELLO and welcome to the fifth installment of Things I Read That I Love, wherein I share with you some of the longer-form journalism/essays I’ve read recently so that you can read them too and we can all know more about murder, taxidermy, PTSD and sexual assault! This “column” is less feminist/queer focused than the rest of the site because when something is feminist/queer focused, I put it on the rest of the site. Here is where the other things are. The title of this feature is inspired by the title of Emily Gould’s tumblr, Things I Ate That I Love.

This week I’m giving you another hefty portion of stories that will horrify and trouble you deeply but that you will be compelled to read anyhow. We call this “The Law & Order Edition.”

The Fort Carson Murder Spree (November 2009), Rolling Stone – Soldiers returning from Iraq have been charged in at least 11 murders at America’s third-largest Army base. Could the killers have been stopped if they’d gotten the proper care they needed for the extreme PTSD they suffered? How did they get this far gone without anyone noticing?

Fatal Distraction (March 2009), The Washington Post – “Forgetting a child in the backseat of a car is a horrifying mistake. But is it a crime?” – A Pulitzer-Prize winning essay on the 15 to 25 parents a year who, for various reasons, leave their small children in the car to bake to death in the summer heat.

The Killer Cadets (December 1996), Texas Monthly – I actually remember when this happened and it being on the cover of People Magazine. This story is better than that one.

Sextortion at Eisenhower High (July 2009), GQ – “Last year, an awkward high school senior in Wisconsin went online, passed himself off as a flirtatious female student, and conned dozens of his male classmates into e-mailing him sexually explicit images of themselves. What he did next will likely send him to jail for a very long time.”

The NYPD Tapes: Inside Bed-Sty’s 81st Precinct (May 2010) – The Village Voice – You might remember Adrian Schoolcraft from a terrifying This American Life story which detailed the repercussions Schoolcraft suffered at the hands of the NYPD after he came forward with extensive audio recordings he’d made of the precinct’s sketchy operations. You can read the Voice’s complete coverage of The NYPD Tapes — released exclusively to The Voice from Schoolcraft — here.

An IM Infatuation (August 2007), Wired – “He was an 18 year old Marine bound for Iraq. She was a high school senior in West Virginia. They grew intimate over IM. His dad also started contacting her. No one was who they claimed to be and it led to a murder.”

See No Evil (May 1993), Texas Monthly – So the “coldest, most depraved killer of women in Dallas history” did this thing where he stole his victims’ eyeballs.

To Catch a Predator Sub-Section – there are so many ways in which this show was fucked up!

+ Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die (September 2007), Esquire – An exposè on Chris Hansen and how his show “caught” alleged “perverts” online by posing as children on the internet and enticing men to come to their decoy house where they’d be arrested on television and everyone would feel very entertained! Dateline literally PURSUED the guy this story is about — an otherwise upstanding citizen — into being a part of their show as a criminal to a degree that shocked even me, and led to his suicide. I didn’t think there was room for compassion in these cases, no matter how fucked the show’s methodology, but it turns out that there is A LOT. This is serious business.

+ “To Catch a Predator”: The New American Witch Hunt for Dangerous Pedophiles (July 2007), Rolling Stone – How Perverted Justice, a citizen group, along with Dateline, have taken crime-hunting into their own hands at tremendous consequence.

The Lies and Follies of Laura Albert, a.k.a. JT Leroy (February 2008), LA Weekly – I realize I’ve read more or less everything ever published about “JT Leroy” but never read anything by “JT Leroy.”

Rendezvous in the Ramble (July 1978), New York – Once upon a time, the best way for a gay man in New York to find a hookup without showing their face in public was at The Ramble, an area of Central Park. Interesting from a historical perspective.

What Killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones? (December 2010), Mother Jones – “A nighttime raid. A reality TV crew. A sleeping seven-year-old. What one tragedy can teach us about the unraveling of America’s middle class.”

“The Marriage Plot” Thickens, Kinda

Disclaimer: I really try hard to keep spoilers out of these things, but it’s hard to explain some of my issues with this particular novel without revealing a few key details. So if you haven’t read it and you don’t like spoilers, you probably should just stop after the first few paragraphs.

When I was sixteen, I read Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex for the first time, and it quickly became one of my favorite books. For starters, as a native of Detroit, the way Eugenides weaves the history of the Motor City in with the history of the Stephanides family immediately appealed to me. With all the works of fiction about Detroit that have gotten so many things wrong (Detroit 187, for example, makes its first mistake in the title), it was so nice to see someone get things right – and friends from other states have told me the book made them interested in Detroit’s history, which is always something. I also had a crush on a clarinetist at the time I read the book, which made the scenes with Milton and Tessie (yes, those scenes) probably a lot more interesting and less disgusting than they would have been otherwise. Plus, one glance at my high school voluntary reading list – favorites from those years also include Lolita, Brave New World and The Unbearable Lightness of Being – would show you that I took a certain pleasure in reading the sorts of books that would gross out my more prudish classmates. I felt like a rebel in my own little, nerdy way.

And then there’s the queerness of Middlesex. As the title punnily suggests, the protagonist is intersex, with 5-alpha-reductase deficiency. As I have discussed the book with others more recently, I have found out that a lot of people considered Eugenides’s treatment of the subject “fetishist,” that he saw Cal’s intersex identity as some bizarre twist rather than treating it with the respect it deserved. At age sixteen, still closeted and overall new to the world of queer studies, I can’t say I would have been able to tell the difference. Yet, regardless of what you think of the novel, it is certainly among the best-known works of fiction on the intersex community, and is one of the most discussed “queer” novels of the past decade. So, with that in mind, I thought you might be interested in my thoughts about his new novel, The Marriage Plot.

The Marriage Plot is unique among Eugenides’s novels, which also includes his premiere work The Virgin Suicides, in not being set in or around Detroit, although one of the main characters, obvious author stand-in Mitchell Grammaticus, is a native. Instead, it follows three early-80s graduates of Brown University as they go through their first year out of college. Unlike Middlesex, it doesn’t have overtly queer themes; while there are gay and bisexual supporting characters, all of the protagonists are straight. In fact, unlike the unusual story elements of the previous two novels, The Marriage Plot is a pretty straightforward novel about a girl caught between two different boys, the “safe” choice and the “rebellious” choice, the titular “marriage plot.”

It is interesting to read this book as I’m in the middle of a class on Jane Austen, all of whose novels revolve around the “marriage plot.” Eugenides frames his book as a modern, feminist re-telling of those stories, made obvious by heroine Madeline Hanna’s desire to become a feminist scholar of 19th-century literature. Austen’s novels also tend to involve a “safe choice” and a “rebellious choice”; her heroines just about always end up with the former. Some of them are clear –you know Catherine Morland isn’t going to end up with John Thorpe, for example – but with others, she keeps you guessing for a while. Nowadays, most of us know the ending of Pride and Prejudice, but if you manage to come into it fresh, it does take a while to realize that Darcy is the good egg and Wickham is the jerk.

This story starts out the same way. Madeleine mentions at the beginning of the book that Mitchell is the sort of boy you could “bring home to your parents” and Leonard isn’t, which is precisely why she likes Leonard and not Mitchell. Her story is a little too clearly set-up as a lesson in how her priorities in boys are messed up, another plot that is common to Austen novels. However, Madeleine has a self-awareness that the Austen heroines who go through this journey lack, and which makes what happens to her a lot less believable. Like Austen, Eugenides plays with it, but not as much as I would have hoped. He makes you feel sorry for Leonard, and gives Mitchell some negative qualities but, at least for me, I was still rooting for Mitchell throughout the novel.

What's a girl to do?

What I really don’t get about the book is how Eugenides or anyone could have considered it a “feminist retelling” of the marriage plot. The description makes it seem that Madeleine’s studies in marriage-plot novels would play a huge role in it, but they really don’t; you never even find out what her “thoughts on the marriage plot” (as she titles her thesis!) are. Instead, Madeleine’s story, like that of far too many heroines in literature, is mainly about her interactions with boys and, particularly, how her tending to Leonard as he struggles with his extreme bipolar disorder ends up consuming her life post-graduation. This contrasts it with the Austen novels that it references; one of the most interesting things about Austen’s books, and the reason that she gets so much play in feminist circles, is that she flips the usual script in terms of who is the fully-fleshed-out character and who is just the love interest. The men are the one-dimensional love interests in Austen (for the most part, there are exceptions), while the women are the interesting, compelling characters. This is true not just with the independent, feisty Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice, but even more passive characters like Fanny Price from Mansfield Park. While men had all the power in the actual world of Regency-era England, women were the focus, the major players in the world of Austen (I’m using Austen as my example because I have to admit, I’m not as well-versed in 19th-century English lit overall as Madeleine is.)

Eugenides seems to justify the “feminist” side of it by having Madeleine end up single at the end, but it is not through taking control of her own destiny that she gets out of her destructive relationship with Leonard. It is through Leonard realizing that he is ruining Madeleine’s life and walking out on it himself, and her parents talking sense into her. She may have had agency, but she never executed it, preferring to let others make decisions for her. Early in the novel, she almost doesn’t end up with a place to live post-graduation because she just can’t accept her breakup with Leonard, and is just lucky that it turns out to be temporary and her previous plans to live with him don’t fall through after all. She so utterly surrenders control over her life to everyone else, and boys particularly, that I just couldn’t see how she worked as a “feminist” heroine in any sense.

At least i have this teddy bear

The relationship-focus of Madeleine’s storylines also just made them – and her – much less interesting. The boys’ stories were way more compelling. In the Leonard-focused chapters, it delves into the history of his illness, how his depression in his early high school years made him a lackluster student with no motivation in anything, how his mania in the last two years turned him into the kind of stellar student who can get into Brown on scholarship, how his abusive home life factored into his problems, the interesting characters he met in the psychiatric ward. Mitchell’s journey – both his literal journey, which consisted of a trip around Europe, North Africa and India with his friend Larry, and a spiritual journey, which includes volunteering at Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying Destitutes – was even better, and the part that felt most like Middlesex to me. My enjoyment is probably because Mitchell’s story is the least romance-focused of all of them since, while he pines away for Madeleine throughout his travels, the focus during that part is still on his religious beliefs and his discoveries on the road.

Also, the Mitchell parts are also the gayest parts of the book, since there’s a side-plot about his friend Larry’s discovery of his homosexuality/bisexuality (the book doesn’t specify which, though Larry has a girlfriend at the start of the novel, a caricature of college feminists who clashes with Mitchell) and Mitchell’s realization that Larry went on the trip because of his feelings for him, feelings Mitchell can’t return because he’s straight. (Sound familiar?) It was yet another thing that I wished the book had explored more, but it was still nice to get that little touch of queerness in a pretty relentlessly straight book.

I can’t say I didn’t enjoy the book, but overall I was a little underwhelmed by it. I wasn’t as floored by it as I was by Middlesex, but maybe I was expecting a bit too much out of it. Maybe I was putting too much stock in the book jacket, which made it seem like there would be this huge intellectual discussion about books alongside the romantic plots. There was some of that in the early part of the novel, which flashed back to the three characters’ lives during their college years, including the courses they took, as exposition for the post-grad stuff. There’s some interesting discussion about the divide in the early ’80s between more traditional literary scholars and devotees of newer approaches like semiotics. But at least in Madeline and Leonard’s sections, all that disappeared once they left school, except for a short section where Madeleine goes to a seminar for other fans of Regency and Victorian novels. Mitchell’s sections were really the only ones that fulfilled that promise, interspersing his musings on religion with musings about Madeleine.

This review seems kinda negative, but this is actually a good book! – if you know what to expect. It’s a good romantic novel and college novel. Don’t go in with high expectations of deep discussions on literature or philosophy, and you will probably really love it.

Things I Read That I Love #4

HELLO and welcome to the fourth installment of Things I Read That I Love, wherein I share with you some of the longer-form journalism/essays I’ve read recently so that you can read them too and we can all know more about serial killers and iCarly! This “column” is less feminist/queer focused than the rest of the site because when something is feminist/queer focused, I put it on the rest of the site. Here is where the other things are. The title of this feature is inspired by the title of Emily Gould’s tumblr, Things I Ate That I Love.

I just wanna say that I’m really happy you guys are into this feature. That’s all! Also, the six of you out there who read my personal blog back in the day might be thinking to yourself, “this is kinda like auto-fun of the day, isn’t it?” because I personally had that revelation like, yesterday. Anyhow! LETS GO GADGET GO!!!

Sweet 15 (March 2009), Texas Monthly: It would seem that for some families, Quinceañeras are the new Sweet Sixteen (or Bat/r Mitzvah), which means crazy expensive shit happens here, essentially.

Document the Symbolism (Dec 2011), The Paris Review: A smartass kid actually wrote all the major writers of the time to see if they really did intend to imbue their work with the symbolism English teachers ask their students to uncover. Includes amazing actual letters from Ayn Rand, Jack Kerouac, Ralph Ellison, John Updike and more. Seriously you must click!!!

In the Life of The Wire (Oct 2010), The New York Review of Books: Lorrie Moore on The Wire, which is probably the best television show of all time. So what we have here is one of my favorite writers of all time and one of my favorite teevee shows of all time, together. (Like when she wrote about Friday Night Lights!)

The Good Girl, Miranda Cosgrove (March 2011), New York Times Magazine: I knew absolutely nothing about iCarly before picking up this magazine, which marks the second time the NYT Magazine has been my source for tween trending. (The first time was Degrassi, which I’m now obsessed with) Anyhow, it’s a compelling piece:

“If you don’t recognize Cosgrove’s name, you must not be between ages 2 and 14, the parent of such a child or, possibly, British (nearly 8 percent of England’s population tunes into “iCarly”). You’re also not of much interest to Nickelodeon, which aims for the eyeballs, as well as the prodigious pocket change, of today’s media-hungry tweens. “iCarly” is the network’s most popular show among that desirable demographic… “

The Seduction of Jane Doe (Nov 1994), Texas Monthly: What happens when a teacher takes up an affair with a student and everybody looks the other way — a precedent-setting case.

The Soundtrack of Your Life: Muzak in The Realm of Retail Theater (April 2006), The New Yorker: “Moe’s Southwest Grill, for example, wants only songs by Roy Orbison, Jimi Hendrix, and other artists who are dead.”

Three At Last (December 2011), GQ: Have you seen Paradise Lost and/or its sequel with the story of the “West Memphis Three”? Either way, what happened to these guys is fucked, but now they’re finally free.

If The Serial Killer Gets Us, He Gets Us, (December 2011), Texas Monthly: I’ve actually read two stories about this case but can’t find the first one. This one focuses on Darcus Shorten, the brave investigator who pursued the case of a serial killer of prostitutes that nobody else wanted to touch.

Picture Me Not Posting (October 2011), The Morning News: A writer asks himself “If distractions poison a writer’s ambitions, then surely a summer with no internet access is the antidote?” and sets out to answer that.

Another thing I’ve started reading a lot of since registering Autostraddle as an LLC are articles about start-ups, successful businesses and various entrepreneurs, regardless of industry. Sometimes they turn out to be totally irrelevant to my business interests but interesting nonetheless. I’ve read three recently about the food retail industry that I found compelling as a consumer:

It’s a WaWa World (June 2011), Philadelphia Magazine: “By now, it’s obvious that Wawa, our homegrown convenience-store chain, has achieved the level of cult-like customer devotion that every consumer brand on the globe dreams about. To build a world-class cult, you need a core of gung-ho zealots and a mass of zombie followers, and Wawa is fully loaded in both categories.”

Inside the Secret World of Trader Joe’s (August 2010), CNN Money: The genius of Trader Joe’s is staying a step ahead of Americans’ increasingly adventurous palates with interesting new items that shoppers will collectively buy in big volumes.

How Whole Foods “Primes You” To Shop (September 2011), Fast Company: Have you ever been primed? I mean has anyone ever deliberately influenced your subconscious mind and altered your perception of reality without your knowing it? Whole Foods Market, and others, are doing it to you right now.

xoxo

gossip girl (which, by the way, I first heard of by reading this article in New York Magazine.)

Everything Is Better With Cats, Especially Books

Carmen’s Team Pick:

I think I would have read more of the assigned books in high school if they’d featured some sort of kitten. And I’m not even a cat person! Guys I have a dog, did you know?

But how can you not be a kitten person?

Every person is a kitten person.

“Kitty Lit 101” made me wish every book was about a kitten, because then instead of reading about other people all day, I could have been reading about a kitten. Don’t you agree with me on this one? Fuzzy things are the most interesting, if you ask me.

You totally can’t judge a book by it’s cover, though. This is about more than kittens cleverly juxtaposed with text. This is about how much better plots would be if they were about cats. I’ve never even read The Count of Monte Cristo, but this sounds so much fuzzier and captivating:

After being framed for peeing on the bedroom carpet by the dog and exiled into the super-cold-tile-floor laundry room by cruel Dad, the Cat of Monte Cristo embarks on an elaborate plot of revenge, revealing Dad’s online pornography habit and the dog’s sordid defacement of family heirlooms all during a family reunion.

Sorry everyone, I have to go read Romeow and Juliet now:

The classic tale of a star-crossed love: cat falls in love with dog; a doomed romance from both social and scientific viewpoints. Despite disapproving families and the laws of interspecies mating, Romeow goes the distance to prove his devotion to Juliet. Juliet returns the favor by biting Romeow, who has to get 12 stitches at the vet, and isn’t allowed to be an outdoor cat anymore.

See you in Kitty Lit class.

Things I Read That I Love #3

Hi welcome to another installment of “Things I Read That I Love,” wherein I share with you some of the longer-form journalism/essays I’ve read recently so that you can read them too and we can all know more about serial killers and labiaplasty! This “column” is less feminist/queer focused than the rest of the site because when something is feminist/queer focused, I put it on the rest of the site. Here is where the other things are.

Also this week the thing I read that I loved the most was THE HUNGER GAMES TRILOGY. I feel like my life is empty now that I’ve finished reading it, like I’m lost in a sea of words that are not the words of the three books of The Hunger Games. Now I’m just like the rest of you, waiting for the movie.

Love in 2-D (July 2009), The New York Times: About a subculture of male anime fans in Japan who have foregone 3-D “reality” relationships for relationships with body pillows bearing a rendered depiction of a character from popular anime games/movies/books/etc.

Shock and Awe: Racially Profiled and Cuffed in Detroit (September 2011), Shebshi: This piece opened my eyes really wide. A writer who describes herself as “a half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife living in suburban Ohio” had just landed in Detroit on a commercial flight when she was taken into custody on 9-11, along with two Indian men, on “terrorist”-related suspicions that had nothing to do with anything besides, clearly, what they looked like.

My Hard-Core Porn Obsession (Nov 2011), GQ: “Threesomes, fishnets, dirty talk—those are the vanilla sorts of fantasies we admit to. Then there’s the truly filthy porn we actually watch when we’re alone. Shalom Auslander discovers that everyone has his guiltiest pleasure.”

What Made This University Professor Snap? (Feb 2011), Wired: “Every once in a while, though, brainy weirdos turn out to be brutal killers.”

Shattered Glass (Sep 1998), Vanity Fair: I’ve read a few stories and seen the movie about Stephen Glass, a New Republic reporter who made up like ten billion stories in the 90s and then got caught, but this one I found this week (via the writer who also wrote the book/article that became Friday Night Lights) I feel is an especially good overview.

Straight Time (Dec 2011), Los Angeles Magazine: Many of LA’s most prominent families thought Steve was helping their kids stay sober at his nonresidential rehab-ish facility. Then he was arrested on drug possession and sexual assault charges! It’s like Running With Scissors meets Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

Miss America’s Crown of Thorns (Jan 1985), Rolling Stone: Following Vanessa Williams in the aftermath of the Penthouse photo scandal that led to the first African-American Miss America getting de-throned.

Inside the Bloody World of Illegal Surgery (Nov 2010), This Magazine: This story begins in a solarium owned by a piercer/”body modifier” who is giving his friend a labioplasty because she wants one and it’s too expensive to obtain legally. Totally freaked me out.

The Disadvantage of an Elite Education (Summer 2008), The American Scholar: I stumbled upon this article again this week, having already read it in 2008, but I read it again because it’s just that good and makes a number of brilliant points.

How the Plummeting Price of Cocaine Fueled the Nationwide Drop in Violent Crime (Dec 2011), The Atlantic: Freakonomics attributed the nationwide drop in violent crime to the legalization of abortion 20 years prior, but actually it was because of “the collapse of the U.S. cocaine market,” maybe.

The Muppets in Movieland (June 1979), The New York Times Magazine: A profile on Jim Henson and the success of The Muppets just before the first muppet movie came out – “That day in the taxi, beneath the controlled calmness of Henson’s conversation one could detect an undercurrent of anxiety lest the unity that he and Jane have so carefully maintained over the 23 years of Kermit’s magical life be undermined, not by failure, but by a sudden flood of big successes.”

How The GOP Became the Party of the Rich (Nov 2011), Rolling Stone: The modern GOP has undergone a radical transformation, reorganizing itself around a grotesque proposition: that the wealthy should grow wealthier still, whatever the consequences for the rest of us… With 14 million Americans out of work, and with one in seven families turning to food stamps simply to feed their children, Republicans have responded to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression by slashing inheritance taxes, extending the Bush tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, and endorsing a tax amnesty for big corporations that have hidden billions in profits in offshore tax havens. They also wrecked the nation’s credit rating by rejecting a debt-ceiling deal that would have slashed future deficits by $4 trillion – simply because one-quarter of the money would have come from closing tax loopholes on the rich.”

Things I Read That I Love #2: Law & Order Edition

Hello! Welcome to ‘Things I Read That I Love,” a column I invented last week. It has been said that long form journalism is “making a comeback” and as more and more essays, feature articles and investigative reporting appears online, the more and more I enjoy being alive as a human on this earth.

So in this segment I share with you some of my favorite things that I’ve read recently. This week has a THEME and that theme is CRIME. Last week I offered to do a “Law & Order” edition of TIRTIL and you all voted “YES” on that, which means you promised not to think I was crazy for it.

I think it was maybe a year or two ago that I realized the stories I always flipped to first in New York Magazine or Rolling Stone were the stories that usually involved some kind of terrible violent crime. I don’t really read crime reporting, but I find that any crime stories worth more than 2,000 words are usually ones that feature either some kind of ideological conclusion or a crime being solved. I guess I like a good mystery/detective story, even when it involves um, child abuse!

Rebecca Coriam: Lost At Sea (2011) – The Guardian UK – Rebecca was working on the Disney Wonder cruise ship when she vanished, becoming one of the 171 disappearances across all cruise lines since 2000 (Disney’s first). Apparently when this happens, the cruise company tends to hinder any possible investigations, keeping everything on the downlow. UNTIL NOW.

The Lazarus File (2011) – The Atlantic – 23 years after 29-year-old Sherri Rasmussen’s murder case was declared cold, new forensic evidence surfaced enabling the Los Angeles detectives to “finally assemble the pieces of the puzzle.” All signs now pointed to “one of the most unlikeliest murder suspects in the city’s history.” [includes video, so it’s better to read online rather than a 1st-gen kindle]

The Day Treva Throneberry Disappeared (2002) – Texas Monthly – A case from the eighties involving a girl who kept re-appearing in new towns, pretending to be someone else, and attended high school as an adult under the guise of being a teenager.

Non-Prophet – (2011) – Texas Monthly – A “ringside seat” to and the full story of the trial of rapist cult leader Warren Jeffs.

At Trail’s End (2011) – GQ – In Cleveland, Texas, eighteen men have been arrested and charged with rape of one 11-year-old girl. This is that horrific story, which is also a story about poverty, racism, sexism and rural decay.

Robin Hood of the East Bay (2008) – San Francisco – This one hit close to home, actually, and I don’t mean because I live in the East Bay, but because I also knew someone sort of like Carol Huang and a lot of the people affected by Carol said things I’ve said/heard, too, about our person — “Carol Huang’s arrest in 2003 knocked the wind out of one of the East Bay’s most intriguing subcultures. For 10 years, the community of aesthetes, artists, craftspeople, and their patrons at places like Oliveto, Chez Panisse, and Tail of the Yak had been in Huang’s thrall. She was a local legend: seemingly self-effacing and yet as flamboyantly generous a person as anyone had ever met. But it had all come crashing down.”

Sex & Scandal at Duke (2006) – Rolling Stone – College culture, frat culture, rape culture –> “On A night in late April, barely a month after the rape allegations that have rocked the campus of Duke University, the brothers of Delta Tau Delta, one of the school’s top fraternities, are having a party at Shooters…”

The Lost Boys (2011) – The Texas Monthly – A thing I think about a lot is Stockholm Syndrome, or how easily a person can be brainwashed by another person or people. I think about this mostly as it relates to politics and hate groups and reality TV shows, but this story made me think about that too. How did “the most prolific serial killer the county had ever seen,” back in the 1970s, not only kill 27 young males while living quietly amongst his victims’ families, but lure two teenage boys into being his accomplices?

Murder by Text (2011) – Vanity Fair – Kim Proctor was 16 when she was brutally raped and murdered by two really fantastically deranged sicko teenagers. This article “reports on the teenage nightmare that British Columbia police uncovered when they peeked behind the digital curtains of Kim’s supposed friends, Kruse Wellwood and Cameron Moffat.”

What Happened to Mitrice Richardson? – (2011) – LA Magazine – We’d been following the Mitrice Richardson story for a year by the time we saw it get this level of mainstream press. This thorough report is absolutely the best I’ve read and contains new information beyond what we knew the last time we wrote about it.

Rejection Letters Are Good For You, Especially When They’re Not For You

Did you know that the Museum of Modern Art, where I first saw Andy Warhol’s work in real life, once rejected a set of his sketches?

They did:

And if you ever owned Andy Warhol-themed merchandise, like those totes everyone had 5 years ago and I had 3 of, you were familiar with his rejection letter, since it came in each one on a sheet of clear paper.

I used to hang that rejection letter in all of my rooms: first in my bedroom in New Jersey, as preemptive solace for any college rejections; then in my dorm room so that I acknowledged I could fail; then in my homes off-campus where I was growing and growing and trying – and not always getting the right results. The letter reminded me that even the greatest of the greats fail. No hater could touch me.

Everyone who didn’t like it was just MoMA to my Warhol. They’d come back one day.

Hindsight is probably the most difficult part of those letters. How did it feel to be the MoMA?How did it feel to reject someone great? Well, ask the authors of these rejection letters collected by the Atlantic, all directed at some of the greatest writers of our times:

The rejections, which range from personal to formal to completely and 100 percent absurd, are a collection of mistakes. Because, you know, rejecting a best-selling book is 100 percent a mistake for a publisher – and maybe for Hunter S. Thompson as well.

That’s what rejection letters are y’all. They’re just mistakes.

Things I Read That I Love

So it’s been a bit of a slow news week aside from the OWS action. Therefore I have nothing crucial to impart to you today from “the world” (besides that once again the OUT 100 is 80% men) and so I thought instead I’d share with you some of the things I’ve read over the last month or so. The idea is that maybe you will want to read them too.

As I’ve perhaps mentioned in the past, I am a GIANT fan of long-form journalism & essays and try to read 2-3 longish magazine/newspaper feature stories a day so that my brain gets bigger. I read online but I also save things I want to read via instapaper and then download them onto my kindle to read elsewhere.

I also read a lot of feature journalism about crime and criminals, which is sort of embarrassing. But, if you’re into that stuff though I can do a Things I Read That I Love: Law & Order Edition next week. I also have plenty of stuff for an Occupy Wall Street Edition. Lemme know! If anyone even reads this post!

I picked stuff that isn’t really directly tied to the news or even to the homos aka stuff I had no reason to tell you about until this day and isn’t this day exciting? It is!

So here’s some things you can read today:

Very Deep in America – Lorrie Moore via The New York Review of Books – Thoughts on the book, movie and television series Friday Night Lights.

The Death-Wish Kids – Joe Morgenstern via MaryEllenMark.com – A 1984 story on “the teenage suicide pact that left one survivor and many questions.” Haunting, brilliantly written.

Group Portrait With Television – David Finkel via The Washington Post – I found this fascinating. It’s from 1994 about a writer who spent some time with a family that literally watched television CONSTANTLY.

Deadly Secrets – Ali Winston via Colorlines – How California law shields Oakland police violence. Truly shocking stuff that you should probably know about.

The Glory of Oprah – Caitlin Flanagan via The Atlantic – “Why the “talkinest child” understands women and the power of television better than anyone else.”

No More Nice Girls and Standing in the Goods – Sady Doyle via Emilybooks – Sady on Ellen Willis (and the trouble of being a feminist in this world) and Eileen Myles (on the trouble of being a working-class artist in this world), respectively.

Confidence Game – Den Starkman – via Columbia Journalism Review – “The problem is that journalism’s true value-creating work, the keystone of American journalism, the principle around which it is organized, is public-interest reporting; the kind that is usually expensive, risky, stressful, and time-consuming.”

The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami – Sam Anderson – via The New York Times – “I prepared for my first-ever trip to Japan, this summer, almost entirely by immersing myself in the work of Haruki Murakami. This turned out to be a horrible idea.”

Just Kids -Evan Hughes via New York Magazine – On the evolving friendships/rivalries between Jeffery Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Rick Moody and the late David Foster Wallace.

The Hunted – Jeffery Goldberg via The New Yorker – The story of Mark and Delia Owens, American conservationists in Africa who adopted some very controversial methods and saw a documentary teevee show on them transform into a snuff film.

A Letter from “Manhattan” – Joan Didion via The New York Review of Books — a 1976 relic about Woody Allen movies and her astonishment that people proudly identify with his state of mind — “the peculiar and hermetic self-regard in Annie Hall and Interiors and Manhattan would seem nothing with which large numbers of people would want to identify.”

Q&A with Writer/Celebrity Profiler Vanessa Grigoriadis – via The Writearound – “Obviously I said a lot of things in that Britney piece that were obnoxious, but they needed to be said. She was having this meltdown that was so epic and everybody was participating in it and watching these pictures of her coming out every day – why can’t I call her an “inbred swamp thing?” That’s what everyone’s thinking, looking at these images on their computer!”

Patrick Bateman Was Me – James Brown via Sabotage Times – A remarkably intimate and revelatory interview with Brett Easton Ellis, who did a lot of coke the night before.

Getting In – Malcom Gladwell via The New Yorker – The ridiculousness of Ivy League admissions processes as analyzed by a Canadian. From 2005.

* Title “things i read that i love” inspired by Emily Gould’s tumblr “things I ate that I love“

Autostraddle Book Club #4: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

So, honestly, I start out with the same feeling every single time after finishing these books, which is “I can’t talk about this.” And then I experience a second, corollary feeling which is “I don’t know how to talk about this without talking about me. I don’t want to talk about me.”

But I think this time I actually don’t know what else to do. I am literally incapable of talking about a memoir about a queer woman grappling with a fraught, distant, infuriating relationship with her father without talking about myself. See, the thing is, I read almost all of this book while my father was, in fact, visiting me! My father and I see each other 2-3 times a year, and there is always at least one other family member present to act as a buffer. But not this time. Also, since I now live alone instead of with a house full of roommates, he didn’t see any reason to stay in a hotel, and instead slept on an air mattress in my tiny one-bedroom apartment. So weirdly, but I guess appropriately, this book was the only companion I had. I read it in an armchair while he read his Bible (which he carried with him from ten hours away) on my couch, and I read it alone in my bedroom while I listened to my dad fumble with the kitchen light and the wine bottle in the other room. It was, I guess, a lot sadder because of that — because I couldn’t read it like it was a story, something outside myself. But it was comforting, for the same reasons.

It feels a little weird to call Fun Home a memoir. I guess I don’t know why I do — the books calls itself a “Family Tragicomic,” and you could definitely argue that it’s more a book about Bechdel’s father than Bechdel herself, which I guess is what a memoir would be. But even if you leave aside the gay — the fact that Bechdel discovers that her father has had affairs with men (and some of his male high school students) that coincides awfully with her own realization that she’s a lesbian — this is kind of a book about the way in which Bechdel’s own story and her father’s are inseparable, or at least how it would be difficult to tell the former without telling the latter.

There is something about being a tomboy, about the father-daughter relationship that grows out of that. If you are lucky enough to have a father. If you are lucky enough to have a relationship. Which Bechdel was, and which I was. Sort of. Maybe this isn’t everyone. But I remember the time when I was eleven years old, and a woman in the mall was trying to recruit girls passing by for some sort of ‘modeling program.’ She tried to hand me a card, and asked “Have you ever wanted to try modeling?” I said no. My dad was so proud, clapped me on the shoulder for being his little girl who didn’t care about being beautiful. Years later, when my brother wanted to get his ears pierced (I think he wanted big fake diamond earrings like a rapper’s, it was very on trend) my father said no, never; it wasn’t what boys did.

That’s not how it works for Bechdel and her father. He wants her in dresses; he wants her to look nice enough to be a credit to him, something beautiful that he made that he can be proud of. And he is proud of her, of her brain if not her outfits. “You’re the only one in that class worth teaching,” he says when she ends up as a student in his high school English class. And she says, “It’s the only class I have worth taking.” There’s something there, there’s something in there that only a reticent father and a moody teenage daughter can give to each other. Some kind of approval, reciprocal admiration. Something that we don’t actually get, I guess.

Bechdel’s father is dead. He dies, he died, when she was in college. Younger than I am now. He killed himself, or so the evidence would suggest. Which changes everything, which defines everything. Because Bechdel is left to imagine his life as it could have been, but maybe even more so to imagine his life as it was. Filling in the blanks. There are a lot of blanks. She has his letters, and we see them too, but those aren’t the whole story. If there’s one thing we learn in Fun Home, one thing that Bechdel herself knows even as she’s writing a book, it’s that the things we write are more about what we want to be true than what is. We write things for a lot of reasons but not necessarily because they’re true. When the only thing you really know about someone is that you don’t know the truth about them, how do you remember them?

It would be easy, in a lot of ways, for Bechdel to cast her father as a villain. He’s distant, he’s duplicitous; he’s angry. He hits her and her brothers, he throws things. He buys beers for minors to seduce them. He commits suicide and leaves no note. Maybe that’s the worst part of all. And she holds him accountable for that; there’s no denial of responsibility for the things he did, and the things he didn’t do. But she finds some responsibility for herself, though, too. Accurately or not, fairly or not. “If I had not felt compelled to share my little sexual discovery, perhaps the semi would have passed without incident four months later.” Because that’s the thing about dads, right? Somehow nothing that they do to us, or don’t do for us, is quite as bad as our refusing to forgive them for it. There’s a weird sense of contradiction throughout, one that is completely honest even when it seems insupportable: the lack of emotion that Bechdel is able to summon about her father, but her simultaneous preoccupation with him and the huge way in which his short life still informs and occupies her own. Bechdel talks about how grief can take the form of its absence; the sadness that builds up over the course of a life until it’s so big that it eclipses the sadness of death.

“It’s true that he didn’t kill himself until I was nearly twenty. But his absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time I knew him. Maybe it was the converse of the way amputees feel pain in a missing limb. He really was there all those years, a flesh-and-blood presence steaming off the wallpaper, digging up the dogwoods, polishing the finials… smelling of sawdust and sweat and designer cologne. But I ached as if he were already gone.”

This week my dad picked up a framed photo off a shelf in my apartment. “Are these your friends in your [graduate] program?”

“No, Dad,” I said. “Those are my old roommates? I lived with them? Remember them? You’ve met them.”

“Oh,” he said. After my dad left, on a Monday morning, a friend of mine asked “Do you miss him?”

“No,” I said. “We’ve gotten along a lot better since we moved far apart.”

“I meant now,” my friend said. “Like, since he’s left.” The thought hadn’t even occurred to me. What was there to miss.

There’s a sense throughout that Bechdel is angry at her dad. The image of her sitting next to the phone, bored while her dad rhapsodizes over Joyce on the other end of the line. It’s so familiar, it’s a perfect image. (And a nice example of why this is so great as a graphic novel — when I close my eyes I still see cartoon-Alison in the fetal position on her dorm room floor as her mother tells her about her father’s secret, and the giant looping attempts at obscuring her own record of her life.) And why shouldn’t she be — he lied, to her and to her family, he embarrassed them in front of the entire community, and he alternated between distant and aggressively controlling, with only occasional instances of tenderness. How could you not be angry. And so she is, but you get the sense that’s not the core of it, that’s not really where the anger comes from.

Maybe more than anything else, the book is a study of a virtual stranger, a profile of someone who was always just out of reach, assembled from found objects and remembered evidence. Going through a box of old things, she discovers a photo of her father posing in a women’s bathing suit — there are no clues, no context, but he looks like maybe he’s enjoying it, like maybe he feels good. Years later, (presumably) without her father’s knowledge, Bechdel and her friend dress in his suits and ties to be pretend to be slick con men. Dirty Harry cool, James Bond aloof. “Putting on the formal shirt with its studs and cufflinks was a nearly mystical pleasure, like finding myself fluent in a language I’d never been taught,” she writes.

Bechdel’s dad died before she ever had a chance to know him, before he had a chance to know who she would grow into. That’s something to be angry about. Even if he had lived, he still wouldn’t have been present in the way she needed him to, wouldn’t have known her as deeply as he should. And no matter how long he lived, she would probably never have really known him. “We were close. But not close enough,” she says.

I hold my dad responsible for a lot of things that I find hard to forgive; some fairly run-of-the-mill, especially if you’ve ever been to divorce court, and a few that are less ordinary. He actively attends Tea Party meetings, believes that homosexuals should be prevented from having access to young children aka being Boy Scout leaders, and tried to convince me to break up with someone because the color of their skin as compared to mine was “dangerous.” We have a list of things we don’t talk about: politics, religion, the Middle East, almost every other member of our family. I can’t pretend I’m not angry. But I think the worst thing, the thing that I actually can’t forgive, is that we spent four days together and ran out of things to say to each other at the 1.5 mark. He left my apartment while I was at work, and he didn’t leave a note. I didn’t look for one when I got home. He’s not the only one with a questionable claim to forgiveness.

Thinking about how her desire, ambivalent as it may be, to “claim” her dead queer dad, Bechdel writes “Erotic truth’ is a rather sweeping concept.” Then she says “I shouldn’t pretend to know what my father’s was.” Every single time I read that line, it reaches me as “I shouldn’t pretend to know who my father was.” I guess that’s right, too.

That’s all I’ve got. Now it’s your turn.

On Style, Eileen Myles

Rachel’s Team Pick:

So do you know about Emily Books? It is Emily Gould’s newest project, possibly the future? Basically you can subscribe, and every month you’ll download a book, with the understanding that this book will possibly/probably be amazing, because it’s curated by smart, great women with excellent taste. Guess what this month’s book is? You may remember it from another book club: it’s Eileen Myles’ Inferno!

That is really neat in and of itself! But it gets neater: Riese wrote about it! For you! And the whole internet. You are going to love it. That’s all. I just wanted you to know.

She has this idea that knowing herself could be a job, that being a poet is a job. Nobody wants to pay you for that at first. So you hustle to make money to buy yourself time to write. But how I feel reading Eileen Myles is that the hustle doesn’t just enable the writing, the hustle is part of the writing. The humility.That experience… But this is a big problem for women, obviously, making poetry a job. There’s the money thing ‘cause everyone has an opinion about your budget and thinks you’re audacious for wanting to get paid to write. Generally speaking, also, most people think you’re sort of silly, especially if you’re a girl writing about yourself. Who wants to listen to a woman talk about herself! Why doesn’t she just get a job at a bank. Eileen Myles wrote a thing called Being Female for The Awl, where she says, “Is writing a job. Writing books, writing poems. If it is then the message to women is to go elsewhere.”

You should read it. This is your job.

VIA sianlilemakes.blogspot.com