everything I read in October
Half the books made me cry.
Lately: Long week, glad it’s over. Stop doomscrolling. Or at least try. … I’ve watched a lot of Gilmore Girls in the past 72 hours, which has been comforting but has also made me miss the year 2006. The flip phones! The newsstand in the Stars Hollow town square! Send me back in time. … I spent last weekend in L.A. with my husband and sisters-in-law and nephew, and pretty much every minute of it was wonderful, but instead of going into detail, I’ll share some food-related highlights. First, I pigged out on this cheese and then found a shop that will ship it to my house in D.C. We got three jars in the mail on Tuesday and are already digging our way through one of them. Second, I poked around McCall’s Meat & Fish Co. in Atwater Village and my god. I’m torn between wishing I lived a block away and being grateful I don’t, for the sake of my wallet.
Let’s get into all the books:
I loved this so much, I’m crying
Same As It Ever Was, by Claire Lombardo: There it was, me, predictably sobbing on the couch after reading yet another sweeping family saga with a bittersweet ending. I can picture exactly where I was when I finished Lombardo’s first novel, “The Most Fun We Ever Had”: leaned up against a tree in Oz Park in Chicago, sobbing (of course), feeling as I’d just lost my newest friends, as if these people whose fictional lives had unfolded on the real streets around me had just fizzled out from technicolor to gray. (Is it any coincidence that I had the same visceral reaction to “Hello Beautiful,” yet another Chicago-set saga? Why are all the family dramas set in Chicago? For the record, I’m not complaining.)
I do wonder if some of my reactions to Lombardo’s books comes from the familiarity. She’s always dropping street names — Washtenaw, Ashland — and other landmarks someone might read past if they’re not familiar with Chicago. They’re shopping at Jewel! She’s working at the Harold Washington Library! She threw up on the Sheridan red line platform! But even if I weren’t familiar, I think I’d have still loved “Same As It Ever Was,” the story of Julia Ames, a woman whose fraught upbringing leaves her unprepared for a functional marriage, but who grows from her mistakes but never quite leaves them behind. Julia is not necessarily a likable protagonist, but I identified with her so often. (Consider this, from the New York Times’ review: “In less skillful hands, “Same as It Ever Was” would lose control over its transitions and veer toward soap opera; yet like Franzen’s Marion Hildebrandt, or Faye, the narrator of Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, Lombardo gives us a woman whose inner life is knotted and revelatory.”)
I just tried to find the exact quote and failed, but there’s a point in the book where Julia is reflecting on her own emotions, and she says that she is always either feeling nothing or feeling too much — and god, do I ever relate. Anyways — this does not need to be an analysis of my own emotional bandwidth. It’s supposed to be a full-throated endorsement of a book I’m sad is over. That’s all.
I’m still crying, just not quite as hard
After This, by Alice McDermott: You may remember (but you probably don’t) that last month, I read two books about the craft of fiction, one by McDermott and the other by Ann Patchett. They happen to be two of my favorite authors, both of them writing about themes that fascinate me, though from a different generation’s perspective. (McDermott is 71, Patchett 60.) My dream of all dreams would be to become even a much worse version of the writers they are, albeit as a millennial, informed by wildly different cultural forces. That’s all to say: Though I’ve read several books by each of them, my goal in the coming months is to finish both authors’ canons.
I’m not positive why “After This” was the first box I ticked off this list. In theory, I might’ve started at the beginning, but instead I landed in 2006, the year I left for college, when McDermott chose to tell a story set a generation earlier. I always enjoy stories like these, set in the past but not long enough ago to be considered historical fiction. And the past feels like the central character of “After This”; the characters, to me, felt secondary to picture McDermott paints of Long Island in the ’60s and ’70s, the sweeping change that grabs members of one family and leaves others stubbornly rooted in place.
Long Island, by Colm Tóibín: There’s nothing I love more than engaging in quick succession with two pieces of art set in similar or slightly overlapping worlds. A few months ago, I watched “Bad Sisters” on AppleTV+ and then read “Service,” by Sara Gilmartin. Both books are set in Dublin, at at critical moments, characters visit the Forty Foot, a public swimming area. Having watched the TV show first, I could picture it vividly when the villain in “Service” goes for a swim, and I imagined the Garvey sisters floating a few feet away, plotting. That kind of melding of fiction might be the most powerful spell storytelling can cast, the sense that there’s a whole world out there of made-up magic, and every piece of sidewalk is overlaid with someone’s dreamed-up tale.
I’m getting to a point, and my point is this: A few days after finishing “After This,” I started “Long Island,” get another book set on Long Island around the time of the Vietnam War. The characters in both stories are staunch Catholics — Irish in “After This” and both Irish and Italian in “Long Island.” Eilis Lacey, the protagonist in Tóibín’s novel (who’s also the main character in “Brooklyn,” played by Saoirse Ronan in the movie version), is an Irish immigrant who’s married into an Italian family — and so I couldn’t help but imagine an alternate world for her in McDermott’s Long Island, among people descended from her own island, especially as she feels growing alienation with her in-laws as the meat of the story unfolds. Not long into the story, Eilis travels to Ireland, and I imagined her driving on the highway to the airport past the Keanes of “After This,” who are dealing with their own set of tragedies and secrets just across the threshold of another fictional universe.
The Group, by Mary McCarthy: This book had been on my “to read” list for about a decade, ever since I read that the essay collection that spawned “Sex and the City” was born after someone challenged Candace Bushnell to write a modern version of “The Group.” My hesitation to actually read it, I think, spawned from a believe that the story would be too antiquated to be relatable; the novel is set in the 1930s and was published in 1963.
In a lot of ways, I was dead wrong. The attitudes of the female characters in “The Group” are surprisingly modern, and their experiences with sex and politics and the men in their lives carry lessons that still apply today. (Whispers bitterly: Though maybe that’s in part due to the way our society has failed women in recent years.) What I actually found foreign about the group of friends in the story was how shallow their relationships seemed to be; there was a distance, a constant sizing-up, between many of the women that left a sour taste in my mouth.
Two books with interesting narrative voices
Liars, by Sarah Manguso: “Liars” is written in the style of a quick journal, or even a series of emails to a best friend. The narrator feels immediately relatable — but as I read, I began to wonder how much I could trust her. She stays in a bad marriage through so many small daggers of cruelty, which add up to a bigger question: Is she totally blameless?
Ilium, by Lea Carpenter: The narrator of “Ilium” never reveals her name or much of her backstory, beyond memories of a dysfunctional childhood and the fact that she, as a young 20-something, is an orphan. Quickly, she’s drawn into a world of international espionage through her older husband, and without much introspection, she agrees to play a part in a mission to take down a Russian oligarch. The story manages to move at breakneck speed without much action, which is both a total contradiction and not something I’d have expected from a spy novel — but even so, it was an enjoyable, if dark, romp.
More writing books
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, by George Saunders: Saunders’s book is essentially a writing workshop put to paper. If you’re not interested in writing fiction, particularly short stories, this probably isn’t the book for you — unless you’re exceptionally interested in Russian literature. Given that I am someone who’s interested in writing short fiction, I found “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain” to be a really practical guide to thinking about tension and character development, and I loved the opportunity to slow down and carefully read a few stories by the biggest names in Russian literature.
One Writer’s Beginnings, by Eudora Welty: I was given a free copy of this short book (which is part memoir, part writing inspiration) almost 15 years ago, when I won a journalism award at Mizzou. I think I read the first few pages before shelving it, too busy reporting and writing and tweeting and trying to get ahead in an unforgiving industry. I hate that it took me a decade and a half to finally take a deep breath and open it again, but here we are, and that’s what happened.
In middle school, Welty’s novel “Delta Wedding” was assigned reading — and it was one of the few compulsory texts I read in full and enjoyed. (I’ve always been an enthusiastic reader, but most of the time I hated what my teachers deemed essential.) “One Writer’s Beginnings” took me behind the scenes of the world that inspired Welty’s writing, and though it was short on practical writing advice, it was still a great yarn.