Reading Sucks April-June
Hi! Thanks for following me. This is my substack where I focus on everything I read and everything that distracted me from reading.
So, it’s really no big deal and I’m sorry to bring this up so suddenly. It’s totally okay if you’re mad, but something you should be aware of is that my collection of short stories Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus is Alive! comes out September 2nd. You can pre-order it here through Books Are Magic and I’m sorry to break this news, support a local independent book store. You can even get one of two customized post cards made by Paola de la Calle. Look at them, here, if you even care.
All my jokes aside, they’re so beautiful! Beautiful enough to hang on your wall but the hope is that people actually send their friends some mail. You can ONLY get them through Books Are Magic. Order here.
DISTRACTIONS
Somebody asked me if I have ever had a spiritual experience and I told them that sometimes I cry at flowers. What they meant was “have you ever seen a ghost?” I haven’t had the pleasure and despite my fondness for the supernatural, the supernatural never seems to find me. I don’t think I want it to. This is all to say I spent a lot of time in April crying at flowers and how their whole purpose is to be beautiful.
Me who’s whole purpose is to be beautiful I overheard somebody say “the fact that I don’t have a crush is a recession indicator.” The person they were with gasped and said “That’s so true. I never thought about that before.” Deeply depressing to me because person number #2 was far enough away from the internet to think they just heard an original thought. The entire conversation lacked imagination because 1) Person #1 used regurgitated internet jargon to say they were lonely, a common phenomenon felt in every economic swing. 2) Loneliness and yearning, while not unique, is a special, fertile feeling that should be cherished. Why chalk up that precious feeling to a meme? 3) You don’t need to be chugging espresso martinis at a cocktail bar to find a crush. I believe it was Rihanna who once said “We found love in a hopeless place.”
A cat in Puerto Rico in January On a day in late March, my friend Chris and I signed up for a canvassing event for Zohran Mamdani. This was the stage in the campaign where he was still petitioning to run, so we were knocking on doors asking people for signatures. We gathered a total of SIX signatures after knocking on one hundred or so doors, feeling like we were bad at this (knock knock knock.. “Who is it?” “It’s …. Melissa and Chris?”) and could’ve tried harder. Plus, only one person knew who he was. But then, later, we saw how many signatures he gathered in total: 36,66 (what?)6. We felt like we had done nothing but could see our precious number there. Last Wednesday, in the middle of extreme heat and sun showers, we canvassed again. Nearly every person who answered the door not only knew who Zohran was, but had already ranked him number one or was planning on it. I wouldn’t have been knocking on doors without my own grief and despair. I love canvassing because talking to strangers is thrilling and more importantly, random. It’s so random that it’s hilarious. Anyway, I could be delusional, but I really think Zohran could win and New York City could be somewhere great to live. When people can afford their groceries and their rent, they’re happier and they’re healthier. Cortisol levels decrease, violence goes down, hospitals are less overwhelmed. We will win!
Zohran, Ariel and I at Rialto Literally learned I have ADHD.
I had to change a line in one of my short stories that mentions “Be My Baby” by the Ronettes for copyright reasons. I decided to instead, just describe it. Which, by the way! Great writing challenge. Instead of naming a celebrity, describe the celebrity. Instead of a naming the restaurant, describe the street it’s on, the atmosphere! In researching the instruments involved in the song, I happened upon a strange Wikipedia passage:
It’s not the influence the song had on Brian Wilson, but the effect. After hearing the song one afternoon on the radio, he proceeded to listen to the song hundreds of thousands of times. His daughter describes mornings of her childhood hearing the opening riffs of “Be My Little Baby,” and her father pacing in the studio, the song blasting on a loop. He wrote “Don’t Worry Baby” as a response. He’d play the opening (just the opening) at parties ten times, then when people asked him to stop, he’d play it ten more times. When asked what music he’s into at a talk show he responded, “I listen to a song called Be My Baby by the Ronettes.” The song became a form of consolation, and as biographer Luis Sanchez describes, “a baleful haunting of the spirit.” There was one summer where I had “All of Me” by John Legend stuck in my head. Like, weeks and weeks of not being able to get out that annoying ode to Chrissy Tiegan. What happened to Brian Wilson seems different than a standard ear worm phenomenon. The man was (is?) (I wrote this before he literally died) simply possessed by the iconic boom-clap, that chorus begging for somebody to claim them.
WHAT I READ
MIDDLE SPOON by Alejandro Varela
In this textured domestic novel by the author of The Town of Babylon, polyamory is a trojan horse for exposing broken societal structures and how we are consistently, and maybe forever, figuring out the way we need to be loved. Often, the modern novel can have the curse of being contrived; mentioning “capitalism” but never going beyond the words “gentrification iced latte.” Often, a contemporary, diasporic novel wants to be everything. And why not? Fuck, I want to be everything, too! But instead of over-extending the form, Varela uses e-mails to “Ben” to capture as much as he can. Letter-writing also feels historically queer. A certain intimacy, coded language, and forbidden desire pulse through passages when they’re addressed to a “you.” A way of saying I’m telling you this because you’re the only person that gets this and who gets me. Anyway, I could’t put this book down.
Strangers To Ourselves by Rachel Aviv
Rachel Aviv profiles four different people who lost their minds, starting with her own. I was afraid to read it because of my own mental illness, a very charming Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (what bisexual doesn’t have intrusive thoughts at this point in time) that’s previously convinced me I was eating poisoned food and that taking the train would cause death. Rachel Aviv writes about her experience with childhood anorexia. She didn’t want to be thin; she just didn’t want to eat anymore. She describes being hospitalized with other anorexics, including a girl who looks a lot like her. In her hospitalization, she gets better, gaining weight and nearly forgetting why she was there in the first place. Her counterpart never gets better. She begins her book wondering why mental illness seems to latch on to some people and not others. The big thesis of this book is that we don’t have the capacity to treat mental illness. Our understanding of it changes rapidly based on people’s experiences and research. One woman, Laura, decides to stop taking her medication one day and, well into her adulthood, feels sexual desire for the first time. The writer herself, Rachel Aviv, decides to experiment with anti-depressants and suddenly feels compelled to get married, have a child. Once she’s pregnant, she stops her medication and nearly immediately wants to get an abortion. She confesses to the reader that she’s been debating going off of Prozac for eleven years. She now has two children.
EXIT ZERO by Marie-Helen Bertino
I loved these stories as a fellow woman afflicted with quirkiness. My favorite story was “Can Only Houses be Haunted?” In it, a couple finds themselves haunted by the ghost of the peach basket they picked up on the side of the road. As they try to extinguish her, they realize they shouldn’t actually be together. In the title story, a woman inherits her father’s estate and finds that a unicorn is part of it. The unicorn is just like you’d imagine, except for all the disgusting bits. It’s still an animal — gassy, chewing on everything. Bertino is so good at adding magic to the ordinary world to show us just how magical the ordinary world is. Every sentence in this collection is so funny and gorgeous. Intentional! Try describing women that way.
Finishing this book about two sisters living together a year before the pandemic begins, their anxieties catastrophically colliding, I realized it was a horror novel. I was laughing and underlining so much and then I closed the book completely shaken, disturbed! I’ve never seen the internet transcribed in the way that Alexandra Tanner transcribes it. It made me realize that scrolling isn’t just this passive, private thing to be embarrassed about. There’s poetry in Mormon Mommy bloggers and popular girls from high school stuck in a pyramid scheme. There’s beauty in posting. Why not date ourselves as we’re writing? Why not include what we’re glued to and obsessed with? It’s part of us, for better and for worse. Also, I thought I was cruel to dogs in my fiction — this takes the cake.
Until I read more,
Melissa