Tag: Female writer

AS MEAT LOVES SALT by Maria McCann

This book was five hundred pages long and I could easily have read another five hundred. I am in mourning that it’s over. It’s set in the English Civil War, and I now feel a weird sense of ownership of this period like: don’t you KNOW how terrible the siege of Basing House WAS? This is a fairly big leap from the beginning, when I was not sure which side Cavaliers were vs Roundheads.

It tells the story of one Jacob, and is mostly a love story about him and a man he meets in the army. Interestingly though, Jacob is not what you would call a nice man. He is very very needy and possessive, and this shows up, in time-honoured fashion, in domestic violence. And just regular violence. I read one review that said that put them off, but for me it made it more interesting. It was very compelling to see how it all made sense to him in his own warped world. Plus which, I am not sure that people who had to deal with the rigours of servant life in the seventeenth century, and then were in a terrible war, and then, and I didn’t really understand this part, were in some kind of utopian effort to claim common land as farm land (?) and then emigrated to America, are necessarily ready to be judged by today’s morality. The siege of Basing House alone!

I am desperately trying not to just immediately start another McCann. I don’t know who this lady is but I LOVE HER.

VLADIMIR by Julia May Jonas

A wonderfully fun, salty novel, written from an unusual perspective: that of a woman in her late fifties.  I don’t want to get all identity-based about everything, but wouldn’t it be interesting to know how many more books have 50-something male narrators than female ones?  I bet it is like minimum 10x

Anyway in this book, enjoyably, the woman has a huge crush on a much younger man.  He dresses well:

(I) had forgotten the specificity and light irony of urban style.  My husband wore what he wore because he believed in it – he had lost the sense of costuming and presentation that well-dressed city dwellers naturally possessed. That perambulating sense of always being on display.

“Specificity and light irony” – I love it! She worries about her wrinkles, stops eating carbs, gets him drunk, and then goes direct to drugging him and tying him up. I had great hopes for where this was going.  Then it took an abrupt left turn into much more ordinary territory. But I still had a lot of fun.  Try this, when she is angry at her husband:

. . . lightning bolts of anger shot from my vagina to my extremities.  I’ve always felt the origin of anger in my vagina and am surprised it is not mentioned more in literature

And this, when someone compliments her for all the art and poetry on her walls, and she replies:

But does one always want to be surrounded by so much culture? There’s something exhausting about being constantly bombarded by everyone’s best efforts

It was very pithy and interesting, even if I would have preferred the plot to go another way. I even liked this last reflection on what she had or hadn’t done:

Getting away with something, not getting away with something, moral retribution. I don’t matter, you don’t matter.  To think we do is just marketing.  It’s this cult of personality.

PINEAPPLE STREET by Jenny Jackson

This bestselling book was very more-ish. It was at the same time kind of forgettable.  It was like a nice glass of water on a hot day.  Or perhaps I just think that because I read it in a really hot country during a heatwave.

It is about a family of very wealthy people, and was an interesting window into what your problems are once the money one is solved.  Boo-hoo, etc.   One thing that did surprise me was the idea that employment in banking is heavily dependent on pedigree.  In my experience, it seems to be a lot more meritocratic than that, and mostly dependent on hard slog.  I was also struck, once again, by how much some people, especially thin people, seem to worry about their weight. 

But that’s about all I have to say. I did read it in a single day though, so I must have enjoyed it

IN THE CUT by Suzanne Moore

Writing about sex is famously hard, but this book makes it look easy.  It’s a thriller, in which a woman becomes involved with a homicide detective who she suspects of having himself committed the murder he is investigating, and of thinking of murdering her too. She gets lots of sex from him, and lots of sexual harassment from everybody else. 

I can only wonder what New York was like in the 90s.  For example: at one point she sits down to eat a hamburger alone in a bar, some guy starts bothering her, and she leaves.  What is weird about this is that apparently it was clear to her (and to him) that eating alone was asking for trouble, and when that trouble comes, she does not at all expect anyone to help her.  She barely objects.  Imagine!  I never think twice about eating alone.

The book is so very thriller-y that I was continually surprised to see it was written by a woman, and was interested by this, from the Guardian

Today, speaking to me from New York, (the author) says she realised she had been pigeon-holed as a “woman’s writer”. “And I found that quite limiting. So I decided that I would write a noir thriller, which is more commonly associated with male writers. It was very conscious on my part that I would make it tough and as erotic as possible.”

It’s kind of pot-boilerish, but that’s just what she is going for. And really, she’s  a fine writer.  Not just about sex, but try this description below, which I find very true of big talkers:

Like most people who are anecdotal, he told me nothing.  He revealed nothing about himself.  He talked a lot, but he only told me what he wanted me to know.  Which wasn’t much.

DEAR GIRLS by Ali Wong

Here is a set of essays by a stand-up comic, structured as letters to her young daughters.  It is fun and silly.  Here she is on a failed one night stand:

That’s what happens when you spontaneously go home with a fellow struggling stand-up comic or, even worse, an improviser.  (Please says say ‘fuck no’ to those ‘yes and’ mother fuckers).

I have for some reason read quite a few books by stand-ups, and I’m always struck by how incredibly rough it sounds: the travel, the horrible venues, the silent audiences.  I admire it.  I was especially touched by her early twenties, which sound a lot like mine:

Every day in NYC was about spending as little money as possible. 

People don’t talk about that too much, preferring to focus on having genius or technique or whatever, but in my experience being able to live on nothing is way more important

FOREVER YOUR ROGUE by Erin Langston

I read this romance because it was recommended in the New York Times. I was not quite prepared for how genre it was. It was full of smouldering eyes and things that throbbed. That said, I enjoyed it! The author pulled off the difficult feat of writing historical fiction in a way that felt contemporary and real without being ridiculously anachronistic. I also think genre writers don’t get nearly enough credit for how difficult it is to re-tell the most re-told stories in a way that is fresh and interesting. Also, I must confess I read it on a hot beach with a cold beer. How dead inside would I have to be to not enjoy that?

WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY BESIDES OURSELVES by Karen Joy Fowler

I so loved Fowler’s BOOTH that I decided to immediately turn to the much more famous WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY BESIDES OURSELVES.  It is full of fun snippets.  As for her example, her landlord:  “Ezra Metzger, a name of considerable poetry. Obviously, his parents had had hopes.” And when two people come to enquire about him:

They said he’d applied for a job in the CIA, which struck me as a terrible idea no matter how you looked at it, and I still gave him the best recommendation I could make up on the spot.  “I’ve never seen the guy,” I said, “unless he wants to be seen.”

LOL.  And all this for a super minor character. Or try this, on her childhood toy:

. . . Dexter Poindxter, my terry-cloth penguin (threadbare, ravaged by love – as who amongst us is not) . . .

I love that parenthesis.  That said, I did not like this novel nearly so much as BOOTH.  It has a twist that I don’t want to give away, so it is hard to tell you too much about it, but while jokey it is actually a novel about grief.  And that I just found too much like hard work.  It was a long journey through loss, and I wasn’t really ready for that.

RAINBOW’S END by Lauren St John

Here is a book that aches for the past, and a place. It’s about a childhood on a Zimbabwean farm, and let me tell you it is not recommended reading for the English winter. The author is about ten years older than me, and so bears the unfortunate burden of actually remembering the war. This makes her childhood days on the farm somewhat hair-raising. The farm they live on, Rainbow’s End, was previously owned by a family who were killed by guerillas in the war. One of the family was a little boy who SAT NEXT TO HER IN CLASS. When she moves in she finds HUMAN BLOOD ON HER WARDROBE DOOR.

And then apparently she goes on to have a blissful childhood, as the farm is also a game reserve, and she is mad for horses. She is also big on Zimbabwean food, which I enjoyed, it is not often I hear the joys of Mazowe described as they should be. In any case, it was interesting to read what it was like for young people to see the end of the war, and how it changed their perspective on what it had all been for. I am glad to be spared that burden.

I was struck by how much of Zim life is unchanged form the war. She talked about people ‘making a plan’ which I thought was a more modern framing, to do with our current issues, but apparently not. The book is full of the beauty of the landscape, and of dread. Here is an example sentence:

In late 1979, when our friends Bev and Fred Bradnick (in whose garden Lisa had once found a live grenade) were firebombed by terrorists on their farm on the Lowood Road . .

Can you believe that finding a live grenade is just a parenthesis? In other memoirs that would be a chapter. Bizarrely, what ages the author the most is not the blood on wardrobe doors, or the dead horses, but the discovery her father is having an affair. But there you go, I guess everyone has their own problems.

QUIETLY HOSTILE by Samantha Irby

Irby is the only author I’ve read who comes close to Sedaris. I love her three previus books, MEATY, WE ARE NEVER MEETING IN REAL LIFE, and WOW NO THANK YOU. She writes personal essys in the voice of the internet, which I feel is a whole new form, no doubt to be quickly replaced by the voice of or AI overlords.

This fourth book, QUIETLY HOSTILE, I also enjoyed, though perhaps not as much as the others. In part, I guess, I am used to her style, so it delights me less. In part, also, she is doing better in her life, and somehow that always make for a less fun essay. I noticed the same thing with Sedaris: no matter how charming you are, it hard to really warm up to anecdote that involves buying trousers for $300.

In the first books, Irby is a single receptionist in Chicago with a long list of health problems. In QUIETLY HOSTILE she is happily married and living in rural Western Michigan. You ae fond of her, so glad it has gone well, but somehow its not quite as funny. That said, I’ll buy the next one on pre-order too.