July report

Sometimes I wonder how many readers of this Report notice when I straight up LIE, like when I say the next month will probably be a bunch of rereads only for it to then have zero rereads? It’s about ethics in newslettering, and don’t worry, I’m tracking my lies so you don’t have to.

What I read in July:

Ann Patchett, Commonwealth (2016)—You know what’s messed up? I’ve had a second-hand hardcover copy of this book for years, waiting for me to be in the mood to read it. That’s not the messed up part—we all know how capricious my book inclinations can be. What’s messed up is that I walked around a bookstore that mostly sold used books trying so hard to find something other than the brand-new paperback copy of Commonwealth that I suddenly felt driven to read, and I found nothing. Nothing!

I wanted to keep the good vibes from last month of not thinking too hard going and to read something slightly scandalous but also fairly literary. That’s how I ended up reading Patchett’s story of 50 years in the life of a family created when two people leave their spouses for each other and move from California to Virginia with their 6 children.1 That initial scandal (the couple leaving their first spouses for each other) sets the novel’s plot in motion, but the real drama happens decades later when one of the children, Franny, begins dating a much old author who fictionalizes her childhood stories and experiences new critical and commercial success. Ann Patchett is so reliable for compelling narratives and satisfying sentences. I really like her writing!!

Looking back at this entry at the end of the month, I see Commonwealth launched me on a heavily thematic reading journey in July. A whole month of: Stories—can they be “owned”? If so, what determines someone’s right to “own” a story? What compels us to tell them? What goes into deciding whether to tell a story as nonfiction or not? Some real foundational questions!

Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful (2023)—Another question about stories is: What do we want from them? Why do we read them? I confess that I wanted to read Smith’s memoir of her divorce and the aftermath because the excerpt published in The Cut was riveting AND written in that kind of prose that I love so much, the kind written by poets. It was riveting because it identified the beginning of the end of her marriage in her husband’s resentment toward her sudden success as a poet, which came when one of her poems went viral.

After reading the whole memoir, I now know that I was motivated by that same kind of lurid curiosity that powers an entire gossip industry. The first half of the book, the part that really gets into the disintegration of her marriage but also the history of the relationship, absolutely some of the most compulsively readable prose I’ve ever read about divorce. The second half, about her life after divorce—moving, thoughtful, important to include—please forgive but I felt like it was much longer than it needed to be.

What’s interesting to me (and perhaps only me) is how different this report would be if she had ended the book shortly after describing the day the divorce papers were signed. I would have raved unequivocally about the book, focusing on the experimental structure of the narrative, the repetitions and different forms she brings to it, and on how in awe I was of someone who could turn such a painful and disruptive life event into something so moving.

But here I am, confronted with the knowledge that I didn’t want to read however many hundred pages about how Smith and her children recovered from the event, how they moved forward. On the one hand, I feel a little scummy! On the other . . . I learned from this book that this is not her first book about her marriage ending!

As I kept reading, I learned of the ways that Smith has (understandably!!) harvested her personal experiences into very literary content. And it did make me start to think, usually every time she would say she wasn’t going to reveal too much about her children due to her children not being old enough to consent to their own lives being narrated so publicly and then a few pages later she’d directly quote something her children said that she originally tweeted about, that maybe I didn’t like the second half of the book not because it wasn’t about personal mess but because it started to feel like she moved on to telling stories that weren’t necessarily hers? Or at least like, how many books could she get out of this event? It started to feel a little too monetized, like in the way that social media influencers use their own lives and experiences to generate endless content.

R. F. Kuang, Yellowface (2023)2—Speaking of the life-content continuum, Kuang’s first non-fantasy novel is indeed the smart and thrilling satire it’s been marketed as!

Narrated by Juniper (Junie) Song Hayward, a struggling writer and white woman, Yellowface is an account of how Juniper steals the unfinished manuscript (about Chinese laborers in World War I) of Athena, her recently deceased frenemy (a wildly successful writer of Chinese descent) and publishes it under her own name3 to great acclaim. Both the question of whether she will ever be caught and the mental acrobatics she performs to rationalize her actions are the novel’s main drivers.

If I hadn’t closely followed the 2021 real-life drama of the “Bad Art Friend,” I might have thought Kuang’s novel was a feat of pure imagination that uses exaggeration to effectively convey compelling insights about publishing, gender, race, and social media. Instead, I know that her novel does convey those insights, but without relying on much exaggeration at all. In fact, one could argue that Kuang has taken the real story of the Bad Art Friend and transformed it into fiction, which allows the reader to focus on the philosophical questions without being lured down the rabbit hole of total, unfiltered speculative gossip.4

In a novel that pursues important and timely questions about the ethics of storytelling and publishing, Kuang also paints a full and compelling image of what one commentator identified as the key to understanding the Bad Art Friend—“writers who define themselves via their writing and writers who define themselves via ‘being a writer.’” Junie’s quest to be a famous and respected writer, her deep jealousy toward Athena, and her resentment toward anyone she perceives as threatening her goal are all tied to her identity of being a writer vs of being someone who writes. There’s more to the novel than that (eg, more central matters include: Who do stories belong to? Particularly stories about specific groups of people written by people not of those groups?), but what Kuang did vis-à-vis the contemporary type of Writer? That was a good surprise to me.

Natalia Ginzburg, Family Lexicon (1963/2017)—I can’t believe I’ve let myself go nearly a year without reading more Ginzburg. Shout out to new Friend of the Report and longtime friend of mine, Geri, for recently praising Ginzburg’s memoir, which is apparently all it took to make me want to read it immediately!

What a book!! Ginzburg’s prose is so powerful—it transports the reader to the world she is describing. When I read her writing, I feel like I am in the room with her characters, peeking out behind a curtain, or like I am sitting in the kitchen with them, gossiping away. I say characters, but Family Lexicon is a memoir, a memoir that reads like a novel.

And here this month’s whole report has been about stories, who tells them and why, where is the line between fact and fiction, and what is true even? But with Family Lexicon, I feel so strongly that all of it is true even though I know that’s physically impossible. If Ginzburg says:

then that’s what she said and she is telling the truth.

Family Lexicon is not so much a memoir of her own life but of the lives of her family members, of Italy’s descent into fascism, and of those early years after the war. What I love about Ginzburg is how much she could make me laugh in a book with such heavy events. I am convinced that details like her father “ironically greet[ing] . . . every new infatuation” from any family member by saying out loud, “‘new star rising,’ or simply ‘new star,’” are as hilarious to me as they were to her. It gets funnier every time the phrase reappears throughout the book.

Going back to the fascism bit, reading Ginzburg helps me wrap my head around how it happens, how it is “allowed” to happen (which is to say it is not by mandate of the majority but it happens anyway), and what it feels like to keep living through it and then keep living through capitalism. This is my way of leading into a block quote that I don’t know what to say about it except that it made me write “Damn, Natalia!!!!!” in the margins of my book:

ANYWAY, it felt like a dream to read this book, a dream that was only enhanced by the presence of our foster cat, Ginger Spice, a very special girl who has cast a spell on our household.

What I’m looking forward to reading in August:

Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall (2019)5

Lauren Redniss, Oak Flat: A Fight for Sacred Land in the American West (2021)

?????? IDK what else but I need to cool it with the books by white women for a minute.