breathedout | Entries tagged with book recs

I just finished The Orchid and the Wasp, by Caoilinn Hughes, and wholeheartedly recommend it to fans of protagonists who are queer, female, con-artists, wildly self-sabotaging, or, in the case of our main girl Gael Foess, all of the above. Gael is an out-for-number-one grade-A bullshit artist on the scale of Black Sails's John Silver, Halt and Catch Fire's Joe Macmillan, or Sneaky Pete's Marius Josipovic. Like these characters, she is an exuberant liar and storytelling aficionadx who is great fun to watch hatch a plot and work a room; like them she can be cruel and impulsive, and sometimes miscalculates to her great cost; and like them she is heartbreaking to watch as she betrays anyone and everyone who tries to get close to her—sometimes even as she's ostensibly trying to help them. Unlike John, Joe, or Marius, she's not an adult male lone-wolf but a girl-cum-young-woman with connections to her family of origin that are not only inescapable but which she (debatably) doesn't want to escape—yet which, at the same time, make it difficult for her to live in close proximity with any of her family for very long. The resulting struggles, both internal and external, are extremely compelling.

Also highly recommended for folks who like spiky, economical language with an excellent ear for the shifting cadences of different regional English-language dialects; a wide variety of memorable and well-articulated female supporting characters (Gael's American roommate and love interest Harper, and her obsessive conductor mother Sive, are particular standouts); stories about fucked-up families wherein everyone is trying, with varying degrees of success, to find some way to love each other; and porous familial boundaries that end up encompassing, in unexpected ways, folks not related by blood or marriage, as well as those who are. As a bonus, the close-to-denouement is set during the Occupy Wall Street protests—with which Gael, as a self-confessed aspiring one-percenter, has a complicated relationship—so that's a little piece of extremely short-term activist nostalgia in a world where 2011 already seems like a different political age.

From the book's opening, set in 2002, when 11-year-old Gael is already well on her way to the 21-year-old art fraud she will become:

It's our right to be virgins as often as we like, Gael told the girls surrounding her like petals round a pollen packet.

"Just imagine it, she said. "Louise, Fatima. Dierdre Concannon." She pronounced their names like accusations. She snuck the tip of her index finger into each of their mouths and made their cheeks go: pop. pop. pop. "I did mine already with this finger," she said. The girls flinched and wiped their taste buds on their pinafores. "Blood dotted the bathroom tiles but it wasn't a lot and it wasn't as sore as like... piercing your own ears without ice," she concluded ominously. "And now I don't have to obsess over it like all these morons. You should all do it tonight. We'll talk tomorrow and I'll know if you've done it or not."

Tiny hairs on their ears trembled at her inaudible breath like Juliet's. Gravely, she confessed: "Some of you will need capsules all your life. All the way to your wedding night because of being Muslim or really really Christian. Wipe your snot, Miriam. It's a fact of life. It's also helping people. Boys will think they're taking something fro you, when the capsule cracks. But you'll know better," she said. "You'll know there was nothing to take."

Gael was eleven. It was her last term of primary school. Perhaps that was why the proposition backfired. The girls were getting ready to fly off to some other wealthy, witheringly beautiful leader. But Gael wasn't disturbed by this. She no longer needed a posse. It would be tidier if they fell away than having to break them off.

"Really really Christian like your brother?" Deirdre replied. "Isn't he an altar boy?"

Gael rolled her eyes so dramatically it gave her a back-of-socket headache. "He hasn't got a hymen, Deirdre, so he's obviously irrelevant."

Deirdre and Louise's mirth was exacerbated by the fact that Miriam's tears had now formed a terra-cotta paste with the foundation she'd tried on at the bus-stop pharmacy earlier. How much would the virgin pills cost, Becca wanted to know. What would Gael price them at?

"What-ever," Gael said. "What does that matter? Pocket money is what. Everyone'll want them. Hundreds if not millions of people, Rebecca. So choose." She challenged their noncommittal natures, looking from girl to concave girl. "Well, are you or aren't you? In?"

(I'm about to post a couple more passages from the book redacted from folks' reading lists, so if you're interested hop on over to my journal. Also, apologies to

donut_donut, to whom I said that this book is narrated entirely in the present tense; looking back I realize that sections are narrated in past & other sections are narrated in present.)

Well! I just finished Rachel Hope Cleves’s Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America: an in-the-weeds, everyperson history of two regular New England women in a small town in post-Revolutionary Vermont, who entered into a marriage with one another and remained committed (and respected/acknowledged by their townspeople, including being close friends with a series of ministers) for over forty years, until they were separated by death. For those just joining me, particularly insightful or intriguing passages are blogged over here. Despite some occasional clunkiness in the writing I’d definitely recommend it to folks who are interested in queer female history, especially since there’s so little acknowledgment that 19th-century American women ever conceptualized their relationships as erotic, however romantic they might undeniably be.

Cleves’s biggest strengths, I think, are:

(1) Contextualizing Charity and Sylvia’s actions, relationship and correspondence within a historical framework (she does a lot of close-reading of Biblical references in their poems and letters that would otherwise have been totally inaccessible to me, and she makes nuanced arguments about the women’s delicate relationship with the townspeople, and their establishment of respectable reputations), and

(2) Grappling with, rather than collapsing or simplifying, the womens’ own conflicted relationship with their sexualities and spiritualities. Both Charity and Sylvia wrote a lot, and in relatively blatant sexualized terms, about what terrible sinners they were, and how their sins brought poor health on them and those they loved; they suffered substantial guilt about their union yet stayed together, committed to one another. Cleves doesn’t shy away from this; doesn’t paint Sylvia and Charity as anachronistically “liberated” modern-day women. But she also brings in an important counterpoint:

While the women’s religious writings capture their feelings of sexual guilt, their lifetime of bed-sharing suggests the positive attachment they felt toward physical intimacy. The history of same-sex sexuality has been overdetermined by the selective evidence available for its study. Reliant on religious doctrines, court records, and psychological theories, the history of same-sex sexuality is often framed around the poles of oppression and resistance. the missing evidence of pleasure must be supplied by the imagination. Enjoyment of each other was the daily glue that bound Charity and Sylvia despite their intermittent episodes of self-recrimination.

I think this chapter (”Wild Affections”), and the one dealing with religion (”Stand Fast in One Spirit”) were particularly good and nuanced in their analysis. In between them, “Miss Bryant Was the Man” was also extremely thought-provoking vis-à-vis gender roles and gender expression in very early America.

The book suffers a bit from “every chapter was originally presented independently as a paper at a separate conference” syndrome, and for a reader starting out receptive to Cleves’s overarching thesis—that both the women involved in the relationship and their community recognized Sylvia and Charity’s bond as a marriage, effectively proving that same-sex marriage of a sort existed in the US since its very earliest generations and is not therefore a brand-spankin’-new innovation as its detractors would claim—her points can sometimes seem a bit belabored. I’m sure there are plenty of folks who need convincing, though, and I certainly appreciate the existence of books that do that work. All in all a fascinating history, and one that fills a niche sorely in need of further exploration.

Anonymous asked: If you were going to suggest ten fictional books about queer women, which ten would you suggest??

Honestly, it would depend a lot on the person to whom I was suggesting them. I’m only too thrilled to give my personal top-10 list of works of fiction involving queer women, but first some caviats about where I’m coming from:

As tired as I am of the “tragic queer” stereotype, I do not share Tumblr’s penchant for happy happy happy all the time queers (or characters of any stripe). I myself am a queer who is not happy happy happy—or even remotely admirable—all the time, and I find the most solace in works that explore moral ambiguity and refuse to provide simplistic answers to tough questions. Simplistic answers do indeed come in both grim and cheerful flavors, but nothing sours in my mouth worse than a forced-feeling happy ending, ymm(and probably does)v.
I don’t, as a general rule, read YA fiction or sci-fi/fantasy, so can’t really rec them.
I get off on stylistic experimentation. It can certainly fail, but for me, all other things being equal, it’s an exciting plus rather than a minus to be overcome.
I’m not awesome on racial diversity in my literary back-catalog, though I’m working to remedy that.

Still with me? Here, in no particular order, are my top 10 queer-lady-involving pieces of fiction, with snippets on why I love them:

1. ( The Night Watch, by Sarah Waters )

2. ( Hood, by Emma Donoghue )

3. ( Stone Butch Blues, by Leslie Feinberg )

4. ( The Color Purple, by Alice Walker )

5. ( Nightwood, by Djuna Barnes )

6. ( Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf )

7. ( The Price of Salt, by Patricia Highsmith )

8. ( No Exit, by Jean-Paul Sartre )

9. ( Patience and Sarah, by Isabel Miller )

10. ( The Passion, by Jeanette Winterson )

I hope you find something of interest here, Anon! :-D

Mission Actually Finish Some Books 6/9:
Bring up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel

Fan-fucking-tastic. Not for those amongst my Tumblr brethren who dislike antiheroes, however you define them; but Mantel’s bullying, grief-stricken and exquisitely opportunistic Cromwell can practically be tasted upon the page. For the first half of this novel I was concerned he’d been de-fanged a bit between Wolf Hall and its sequel, but the second half brings back all his glorious moral complexity, lets him connive and intrigue, and ends with the hovering shadow of Stephen Gardiner menacing him from abroad.

It’s one of the most over-trodden stories in English history, the procurement and casting off of Anne Boleyn by Henry VIII, but Mantel still had me in thrall to both her plot and her language. Wolf Hall is the book that convinced me historical fiction could be done compellingly, so I’m not sure why I’m at all surprised to be in ecstasies upon finishing its sequel, BUT HERE I AM.

When Gregory says, ‘Are they guilty?’ he means, 'Did they do it?’ But when [Cromwell] says 'Are they guilty?’ he means 'Did the court find them so?’ The lawyer’s world is entire unto itself, the human pared away. It was a triumph, in a small way, to unknot the entanglement of thighs and tongues, to take that mass of heaving flesh and smooth it onto white paper: as the body, after the climax, lies back on white linen. He has seen beautiful indictments, not a word wasted. This was not one: the phrases jostled and frotted, nudged and spilled, ugly in content and ugly in form. The design against Anne is unhallowed in its gestation, untimely in its delivery, a mass of tissue born shapeless; it waited to be licked into shape as a bear cub is licked by its mother. You nourished it, but you did not know what you fed: who would have thought of Mark confessing, or of Anne acting in every respect like an oppressed and guilty woman with a weight of sin upon her? It is as the men said today in court: we are guilty of all sorts of charges, we have all sinned, we all are riddled and rotten with offences and, even by the light of church and gospel, we may not know what they are.

Mission Actually Finish Some Books 5/9:
The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America, by Margot Canaday

Well. If you’ve somehow missed my ongoing enamored blogging of snippets from this book, let me just reiterate here that it is PHENOMENAL. I read a fair amount of popular-academic history, queer and otherwise, and The Straight State is absolutely in the top ranks of any of it. Canaday’s points are superbly researched, nuanced yet clearly articulated, and her focus on the simultaneous and synergistic development of the American bureaucratic state and the modern formulation of homosexuality in this country, is a lens that is both unusual and fascinating. It does, moreover, a huge amount of theoretical work in terms of explaining why the US Government situated itself differently at different times, why it adopted certain lines of argument when and how it did, and how the legacies of those rhetorical strategies are still reflected today in the lives of real queer individuals.

In setting the terms of inclusion and exclusion in citizenship policy, in sum, federal officials also helped to set the terms for homosexuality. Sometimes they used medical knowledge and sometimes they dismissed it, but homosexuality was never something like tuberculosis: a problem to be discovered by the state and then simply reacted to. Homosexuality was much more like race: a certain set of rules produced out of the state’s own murky encounter with difference. That encounter was forceful and rarely benign. Still, an increasingly invasive state would in time also help to create rights consciousness for some queer individuals who, embracing the state’s own emphasis on legal rather than medical categories, began to ask not whether they might be sick, but whether they might be citizens. […] This is, of course, an unavoidably ambivalent beginning for gay politics–the crafting of individual identity and state centralization, across the twentieth century, had gone hand in hand.

Published in 2009, The Straight State’s very closing pages already seem a bit dated (which Canaday anticipated, and for which I can only give three cheers), but it remains, in my opinion, absolutely a must-read for anyone interested in the subject matter.

Mission Actually Finish Some Books 4/9: Offshore, by Penelope Fitzgerald

What a delightful novella. Fitzgerald’s prose manages to be both economical and atmospheric, her characterization keenly observed in a way that communicates absurdity and poignancy all in a few brush strokes. Offshore is a sort of Impressionist ensemble piece about a group of people living in house boats on the Thames one autumn in the early 1960s—their circlings round each other, their alliances both natural and uneasy, and their eventual lettings-go.

Nenna set out to walk. A mile and a half down Green Lanes, half a mile down Nassington Green Road, one and a half miles the wrong way down Balls Pond Road, two miles down Kingsland Road, and then she was lost. As is usual in such cases, her body trudged on obstinately, knowing that one foot hurt rather more than the other, but deciding not to admit this until some sort of objective was reached, while her mind, rejecting the situation in time and space, became disjointed and childish. It came to her that it was wrong to pray for anything simply because you needed it personally. Prayer should be beyond self, and so Nenna repeated a Hail Mary for everyone in the world who was lost in Kingsland Road without their bus fares.

Mission Actually Finish Some Books 3/9:
Hood, by Emma Donoghue

What I most deeply appreciated about this novel, apart from its exquisite prose, is that it is a story about a queer woman dealing with tragedy, but it is not a story about a Tragic Queer.

Neither Pen nor Cara are milked for pathos (a lot of the time they’re both fairly unlikeable, in fact, though I found them broadly sympathetic); they are not plot devices to further someone else’s character arc; Pen’s story doesn’t end with her lover’s death. Hood is a meditation on mortality, not because there is something fetishizably doomed or tragic about queer people in particular, but because death touches everyone, every struggling normal human, and we are part of that universal truth.

And this: that even a life so recently touched by grief is full of the mundane; of moments that are hilarious, or boring, or petty, or horny, or surreal; and one can never quite predict when one will feel one thing or the other, or all at once. Donoghue captures that beautifully, I think. A feat worthy of admiration.

Then Sinéad read an Adrienne Rich poem, rather gruffly; she kept her dark head low. I thought I recognized it; probably Cara had read it to me once while I was chopping onions. I didn’t really listen to the words this time. I thought they might either irritate me—since a cheapo hike around the Greek isles was hardly comparable to the death-defying climbing expedition described in the poem—or move me. I didn’t want to be moved in front of all these strangers. I knew that if I cried they would not even have the decency to ignore me.

Mission Actually Finish Some Books 2/9:
Just Kids, by Patti Smith

The last 50 pages were just full-on non-stop sobbing. Half an hour after finishing it I wanted to rededicate my life on the altars of Art and Friendship. I would say that’s a pretty successful memoir.

“It was a simple photograph. My hair is braided like Frida Kahlo’s. The sun is in my eyes. And I am looking at Robert and he is alive."

***

"I flung my jacket over my shoulder, Frank Sinatra style. I was full of references. He was full of light and shadow.”

***

“He was the artist of my life.”

The outbreak of war had also been a notable experience for Kresten [Andresen, a Danish-speaking conscript into the Austro-Hungarian army]. He had just put the finishing touches to a manuscript: “A Book about Spring and Youth.” It was a sort of long prose poem about folk-life, nature and young love (or rather, a longing for young love). The manuscript itself was a kind of act of love, with its pale blue cover, its elegantly coloured vignettes and illuminated capitals—all of which he had done himself. The lines with which he ended his work were these: “A bell falls silent, and then another, and another. The bells are falling silent more and more, their sounds becoming fainter and fainter, dying away until they are completely silent. Death, where are thy spoils? Hell, where is thy victory?” At the very moment he was writing these last words his father entered the room and told him that mobilisation had started. So, at the bottom of the very last clean page of the manuscript, Kresten added a few lines: “O God, have mercy on those of us going, and who knows when we shall return!”

—Peter Englund, The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War

OK, update: this book is fantastic. Reminder: Kresten Andresen was a real person, and this whole story is (Kresten claimed) absolutely true. It is at least true that Kresten wrote and illustrated “A Book about Spring and Youth” during the summer of 1914, even if his poetic and idealistic nature tends to make one question the exact timing of the way in which he learned about the mobilisation. For my purposes, though, stuff like this is absolutely perfect, because I care much less about macrocosmic causes and global truths, and much more about what the war was like for people living it, and the stories they told themselves about what was happening to them, as it happened. So Englund’s approach, of focusing on first-hand accounts from twenty different ordinary people, is pretty much solid gold as far as I’m concerned, especially since he back-fills his sources’ chaotic, in-the-moment accounts with some amount of historical context for his readers.

I also love that he’s covering more than just the Western Front, and that his stable of narrative sources includes many women, older people, younger people (12-year-old German schoolgirl Elfriede Kuhr is thus far fascinating), and people from ethnic and lingual minorities (such as 23-year-old Kresten, who hailed from Jutland, spoke Danish, and considered himself a Dane, but was technically a German citizen and so was conscripted into the army). I have, unsurprisingly, a particular soft spot for 49-year-old Scot Sarah MacNaughtan, field aid worker, who prior to the war “lives alone, unmarried and childless … has travelled a great deal, frequently in trying conditions, and … writes books.”

[Re-sharing to people's reading pages because five years later The Beauty and the Sorrow continues to be invaluable. As far as I'm concerned, if you read one book about WWI, read this one. Incidentally, Kresten later became one of several models for Daniel MacIntyre in A Hundred Hours, although by the time I was done rewriting & editing, the final version of the character doesn't bear him much of a resemblance.]

I just finished this book, and man, y’all. I really liked it. “Really liked” didn’t always translate to “was riveted by” or even “consistently enjoyed reading,” but I have to say—as a queer woman, as a mystery aficionada, and as someone from a family of addicts, with her own complicated past and present history with substance use/abuse—that I feel tremendously grateful it exists.

Maggie Terry takes the mystery-novel cliché of the hard-drinking police detective or private eye, and tweaks it in ways that leave the reader surprised at how seriously she suddenly must follow through on this familiar premise. Maggie Terry the character spends the entirety of this novel dealing with issues which—not only are they issues most alcoholic detective characters don’t have to face, but they’re two or three steps down the road from the issues those characters don’t have to face. Usually, the detective’s hard drinking is either a more-or-less static reality in their life (Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, Jessica Jones at least in Season 1), or it generates narrative tension due to its degrading influence on the detective’s ability to do their job, in which case the question is more: will they acknowledge the problem and work to get better? (Nate Ford in Season 2 of Leverage, or [I hear] Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect). In Maggie Terry, that whole process of degradation, disaster, confrontation and acknowledgment is already in the past. As the novel opens, Maggie’s girlfriend has left her and taken their daughter; she’s been kicked off the NYPD and put through an inpatient rehab program; she has a sponsor; she goes to NA meetings multiple times a day; she’s 18 months sober—but she definitely hasn’t stopped being an addict, mentally or emotionally. All of that apparatus, the meetings and the sponsor and the starting a new job, that’s what’s saving her life. But it doesn’t bestow upon her a life to be saved. Eighteen months sober doesn’t REMOTELY mean that Maggie is “doing well,” or that she is “not a trainwreck.” She is emphatically still a trainwreck, from start to finish. It’s just that now she’s a sober one.

And that continuing trainwreck quality is something I sincerely prized about this book. So many depictions of addiction flinch from the grinding tedium and constant rawness of recovery. Much like romance plots, the focus is on will-they-or-won’t-they: will they kiss? will they pick up that bottle? It’s a tragedy if they take that drink, or a happy, life-affirming ending if they don’t. While Maggie is still tempted on a near-nightly basis to go back to using, the focus of Schulman’s book is less on whether she’ll lapse, and more on the other parts of recovery: a “recovery” that’s really more like building from scratch a life and a personality that never fully developed in the first place. Spending a couple of decades making substance use the center of one’s priorities means that the rest of one’s development—the evolution of a personality, the cultivation of interests outside oneself, the ability to empathize with other people and sometimes put others ahead of one’s own interests—gets put on hold. Maggie spends the majority of this book trying (and often failing) to come to grips with who and what the “she” is who she’s supposed to be rehabilitating and recovering. She is 42 years old, but she has the self-involved crisis of personality, and the awkward inability to interact with other people, of a teenager.

As a reader, that self-involved quality is sometimes tedious and frustrating to read. Maggie’s self-pity and her lack of self-knowledge are often rough going. But they ring EXTREMELY true. And Schulman also does a great job of illustrating why they ring true: because what else is Maggie going to focus on? What else does she have? Without drugs, her life and her concept of self don’t just feel empty: they genuinely are empty. Her family of origin is toxic and also alcoholic; her previous professional connections are severed due to her disease; her ex-girlfriend and daughter are out of bounds to her; but more than any of this, the organizing principle of her life and her self-concept has been removed, and she has nothing to replace it with. She’s starting to rebuild from the very bottom, and it’s an exhaustingly destabilized and tedious process. I don’t think I’ve ever read something that confronts that reality in quite the way Schulman does here.

(As a side note: I also really appreciated the depiction of navigating AA/NA as an atheist. Maggie doesn’t believe in a higher power, which makes the 12-step program a rough fit for her; this is something with which I have intimate family experience, and Schulman’s depictions felt very familiar.)

In any case: not a light read, but a very good one.

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Book Rec: The Orchid and the Wasp
On Rachel Hope Cleves's Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America
Response to Anon: 10 books about queer women
On Hilary Mantel's Bring up the Bodies
On Margot Canaday's The Straight State
On Penelope Fitzgerald's Offshore
On Emma Donoghue's Hood
On Patti Smith's Just Kids
A Book about Spring and Youth
Maggie Terry, by Sarah Schulman

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Entries tagged with book recs

Book Rec: The Orchid and the Wasp

On Rachel Hope Cleves's Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America

Response to Anon: 10 books about queer women

On Hilary Mantel's Bring up the Bodies

On Margot Canaday's The Straight State

On Penelope Fitzgerald's Offshore

On Emma Donoghue's Hood

On Patti Smith's Just Kids

A Book about Spring and Youth

Maggie Terry, by Sarah Schulman