![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
month for suffering
High stress last few weeks, for reasons definitely preventable but I'm still irked about them anyway in a deserving way, in my opinion!! This post has an unexpected theming on autobiographical works... well no. Some autobiography, some identity themed books... you know, let's just say I was keeping busy, book-wise.
One! Hundred! Demons!, Barry - I picked this up because I was on Ira Glass' wiki page and encountered a truly baffling and strange section about his pitbull and how it contributed to his divorce… included in pathetic self-own of a biography section was a quote from Glass saying that whatever Lynda Barry wrote about him in a work called "My Worst Boyfriend" was 100% true and correct. He seems like kind of a nightmare guy, so off to the library I went.
One! Hundred! Demons! is an incredibly charming book and text: a long and skinny book that opens to have four rectangular panels across two pages with colorful panels on colorful pages. The text is big and handwritten, mostly done in print except for a few cursive words for emphasis/fun. It feels very DIY, in a charming and warm way. The back of the book includes a guide on how to grind up an ink stick and use a brush to ink comics of your own if you want to take up a bit of painting, too.
The title hints at the original project: Barry saw a scroll by the Zen monk, Hakuin Ekaku, where he painted (you guessed it) a hundred demons as a way of exorcizing them. Barry seems less interested in exorcizing the demons and more interested in exploring them. The whole book hits hard, and I think she's especially good when she's writing about her childhood and adolescence in the Seattle suburbs. She has a rare gift for looking at childhood from the child's eyes and an adult's at the same time, without feeling the need to beg the audience to forgive her or puff herself up. It's a book about the delights of listening to your favorite song in the basement when you're thirteen and the pathetic cowardice of pushing your best friend away because you're in middle school and she's in the fourth grade; a book about your shitty first job and your favorite substitute teacher; a book about pretending to cry on the phone after hearing a boy you kissed committed suicide and crying while drawing the panels thirty years later. "I thought I would be over it by now," Barry writes, knowing that she is not.
The best way to experience the book is to pick it up and read the text with the panels, but here's a taste:
I cringe when people talk about the resiliency of children. It's a hope adults have about the nature of a child's inner life, that it's simple, that what can be forgotten can no longer affect us. But what is forgetting? … When your inner life is a place you have to stay out of, having an identity is impossible. Remembering not to remember fractures you.
This ability to exist in pieces is what some adults call resilience. And I suppose in some way it is a kind of resilience, a horrible resilience that makes adults believe children forget trauma.
I really enjoy and appreciate the way Barry writes about childhood. I've been trying to think about why so much writing about childhood makes me kind of nauseous, and I think it's because there's often this attitude that childhood is a sacred and pure time that has been "ruined," and that the self you were in childhood, the pure and innocent entity I guess some people might be, is something that we should go back to… not to say that I hate kids or anything, but I do think that childhood is a time of formation and vulnerability, but not a personal Eden… anyway, one of the demons in this book is called The Election, referring to Bush 2000, and I couldn't help but laugh. Think of the demons of the modern age! Maybe it's time to bust out the paintbrushes, too.
Final verdict: 100 supers
My Death, Tuttle - A twisty novella about a recently widowed writer, in search of her next book project, interviewing Helen Ralston, a writer she's long admired. The writer strikes up a friendship with Ralston and gets a sit down interview and access to Ralston's notebook. The interview is odd: Ralston says she's a fan and recounts a detail in the widowed writer's short story as though it's her own memory, and her notebooks have some eerie coincidences… what could be happening? What could it mean!!
You'll probably figure out the twist if you're inclined to science fiction/fantasy at all, but it's still a fun romp.
Final verdict: nice two nighter read.
Birthgrave Trilogy, Lee - My dash recently hit a critical Tanith Lee saturation point, and I finally checked a bunch of her books from the library. Birthgrave is Lee's first. Her strengths are considerable and evident from the first pages: well-balanced prose, strong understanding of human psychology, a really fantastic sense of imagery and repetition. Really just a wizard of showing you just enough and of hitting the right tone. Lee's especially skilled with gender and depicting what being a woman in this world is like. The protagonist of Birthgrave is often constrained, despite her power, and the contradiction between her magical gifts and the vulnerability/weakness of her social position is really compelling. It's a cruel and unsparing world but a compelling and exciting read.
I do think the second and third books are weaker, in part because the motivations of the protagonist (kill my mother, avenge my father) are inherently ironic, given what we know, right; and I think that by the end of the second book, it ends up played out, but Lee carries it into the third book, anyway. The effective use of repetition in the first book do not have the same power with the new protagonist, and the setting, which was already leaning on unsubtle racialized imagery, threw itself entirely onto the beautiful spike pit of orientalism for the first two-thirds of the third book for little gain.
Not to say that I hated the trilogy entirely. I do respect Lee's guts when it comes to committing to her themes—the third book ends in a way that had me going, "Well, what's the point of fucking milfs unless we get a little oedipal here" and boy lol did that ending shut me up.
Final verdict: wouldn't go back to reread, didn't like the trilogy, but when it was great it was absolutely amazing and when it was bad it was lol really really bad. I respect it (positive).
Silver Metal Lover, Lee - After reading the Birthgrave trilogy, I went straight to Silver Metal Lover, her sci-fi about a girl who falls in love with an android, and I liked this much better. I like how seriously Lee takes sexuality as a way for understanding yourself, your priorities, and the possibilities of what's past your life as is; love and sexual desire may be irrational forces, but pursuing them in a Tanith Lee book is never (or rarely?) stupid or trivial. The happiness is real, however fleeting it is, and the agency, though it comes from an irrational source, is real, too. I think Tanith Lee really understands and respects sex as something that gives people access to a way of breaking through the boundaries of "rational" understanding (class, orientation, uh organic… species… maybe race, in a future work??)—what's rational and "makes sense" is often another way to trap people into prescribed patterns. It's a great romance.
Final verdict: two silver thumbs up
The Dry Season, Febos - So this book is pretty straightforwardly bad—I almost wish I had read the Gilbert (of Eat, Pray, Love fame) memoir instead.
The Dry Season is supposed to be about Febos' year of committing to celibacy after getting out of a bad relationship. It falls within a lot of the same beats as a substance addiction narrative in mass media: I have a problem, I face temptation, I resist, I overcome. I guess a unique point here is that for Febos, the problem is her reflexive seduction of friends and strangers; she unconsciously and consciously flirts and flatters and, when she's feeling trapped in a relationship, has a tendency for kissing people to have an excuse to break up with her former partner. In addition to covering her own journey, Febos dives into the history of Christian nuns and saints, taking the reader through a pretty traditional read of medieval Christian women.
I'm really struggling to not seem pointlessly mean here, because I feel like I got basically nothing out of this book except the sense that I was watching someone commit double faults and unforced errors on every page. A brief list of things that made me go, "I don't think that's right!": Febos suggests that nuns choosing celibacy is a form of feminist praxis because they're centering women in their lives and not men; Febos attends a meeting for sex/love addicts and spends the whole time surprised, humbled by her presumptions!, that the women are not ugly + that they're worried about whether masturbation counts as breaking celibacy; there's a whole frame narrative about Febos wondering if she might break her celibacy by fucking a hot stranger she sees on a plane, then at the baggage claim, then on the train. This thread of the narrative covers some odd eight hours and spans some ten pages. They talk one time in the bathroom and the other person by all accounts wasn't in the mood to flirt. What?? What was the point of that?
The book's central problem, I think, is that nothing narratively interesting happens with the celibacy memoir. There's an attempt to structure the narrative around a climax around confessing to her spiritual advisor all the relationship sins she's committed in pursuit of romance/sex. The advisor diagnoses Febos as a user, and at that point I was like, okay, am I supposed to be connecting drug user to people user, or...
I can't really tell! Febos stubbornly evades linking her issues with intimacy with addiction. Intimacy problems can be fixed through meditation, mindfulness, and therapy; the only overlap between intimacy and substance use is chronological. And I can see why, from a book structure perspective, why she'd want to do this: addiction is a kind of supernarrative that wants to eat everything, while this celibacy memoir is kind of a dead end. Does this solution feel honest? Thorough? Interesting? Eh.
Final verdict: pretty bad and not even in the fun way
no subject