Happy Easter, to those who celebrate! We’ve had an eventful month, with some family time and even international travel (for me). We had a big giant blizzard at the very beginning of the month and then warmed up into the 60s and then cooled back down a bit, which is about par for the course in Reno in March! Spring is a total question mark around here.

In Books…

• The Paper Wasp: What an odd little book. It tells a story about Abby and Elise, who were best friends as children growing up in small-town Michigan. Smart, creative Abby wrote stories and directed beautiful, charismatic Elise in playing them out. Together, they discover the movies of Auguste Perren, an Ingmar Bergman-esque European experimental director. But then Elise starts pursuing an actual acting career in middle school, and by the time they graduate they’re estranged. By the time the ten-year reunion rolls around, Elise is an up-and-coming starlet…but Abby has stagnated, and she’s working at a local supermarket chain. When they cross paths at the reunion, Elise is genuinely excited to see her long-lost bestie again and casually invites Abby to call if she ever finds herself in LA. Abby, driven by her vivid dreams and sense of destiny, seizes on the opportunity and soon has ensconced herself into Elise’s life as a personal assistant. Abby’s ambitions, though, range far beyond what Elise could have imagined. This book exemplified something I try to describe when I talk about what I look for in a book: characters that are compelling, which does not mean I have to like them. Abby thinks of herself as superior to other people, uses them, is false and devious. But she was, to me at least, interesting in the way that she manipulates people and the way she teeters between sanity and breakdown. I found the way she was written to be a fairly straightforward portrait of undiagnosed bipolar disorder, with its deep lows plunging Abby into despair but also manic highs she uses to drive herself forward towards her increasingly outlandish goals. I found the plot propulsive, it kept me genuinely engaged in and uncertain about what might happen next. The writing style, first person but addressed as a monologue to Elise as “you”, was unusual and well-deployed. A sense of overhanging doom builds throughout the narrative. Not everything worked: some characters were obvious plot devices, some developments seemed to only happen because they needed to in order to set up the next bit, the ending left me with questions, but it was an intriguing, unusual read and I’ll be looking for more by Lauren Acampora.
• The Star Machine: I’ve loved celebrity gossip for decades. I used to buy The National Enquirer with regularity (this would have been in the late 90s/early 00s). As I got older, my taste broadened from the gossip, generally, to the ideas behind the gossip…the celebrity image-making, the how and the why of it. It feels like such a different time than now for celebrity press, with all of the channels for famous people have to connect more directly with the general public. But as quaint as the 90s feel, that was far from the real heyday of the manufacture of celebrity: the studio era. That all being said, this book was obviously all but tailor made for my interests. It examines how stars were created and maintained under the watchful eyes of the studios, with their iron-clad contracts and systems for shaping public perception of their actors/actresses. It also examines how and why these processes came to fail, in some instances. Rather than go for the low-hanging fruit of screen idols like Marilyn Monroe, Cary Grant, and Joan Crawford (all of whom are discussed at least briefly), it turns its focus on players whose notoriety has faded somewhat with the passage of time: Tyrone Power, Errol Flynn, Irene Dunn, and Jean Arthur (among others), conducting detailed analyses of why, despite their prominence in their own time, they did not ascend to the most rarified heights. This is incredibly informative and detailed work, but I found it to be relatively straightforward. Basinger lays out her arguments carefully, not relying on jargon or assuming her audience has existing knowledge (but if you’re a regular listener of something like You Must Remember This, you’ll definitely be familiar with lots of these ideas). I very much enjoyed it and recommend it for fellow film buffs!
• The Painter’s Daughters: The titular painter in this historical fiction novel is Thomas Gainsborough…if you think you don’t know his work, you’ve probably seen Blue Boy. He also painted his daughters, Molly and Peggy, and they are, of course, the focus here. Peggy is the younger, by a year, but even as a young girl she feels a sense of obligation to her sister, who has episodes where she seems to forget who and where she is. Peggy is terrified her beloved Molly will end up in a madhouse and devises a system to keep Molly’s condition hidden. This becomes more challenging when the family moves to Bath and the girls become teenagers. After a betrayal when they’re in their 20s, Polly finds herself questioning everything she’s done and struggling to figure out how to proceed. We also get some peeks into the life of Meg, a different girl living in a different time, whose story does eventually intersect with the main plot line but not until quite late in the proceedings. I found myself drawn into this book quickly, the voice Emily Howes creates for Polly is incredibly compelling. The love and fear she has for her sister, the anxiety she feels about keeping anyone from understanding the depths of Molly’s issues, the way she sublimates that anxiety into feeling like she has to be good are all convincingly rendered. Polly feels like a girl, then an adolescent, then a woman. Since I’m a character reader, this went a long way towards making the book work as well as it did. The biggest issue for me was the Meg storyline. I understand why she included it, but I resented every time it pulled me out of the main narrative in which I’d otherwise been engaged. This is a very promising debut and I’m excited to read more from Howes!
• A Little Life: As someone whose self-professed taste in books is “very long bummers”, this feels like something I should have read ages ago. It’s been out for nearly ten years now, so I have seen both the hype cycle and the backlash and after reading it I understand each of them. It tells the story of a group of four friends from college: Malcolm (an architect), JB (an artist), Willem (an actor), and Jude (a lawyer). When we first meet them, just a few years after they’ve graduated, they’re all struggling to find their places in the world, striving for success while working to rise above their childhood demons. And no one has more childhood demons than Jude. This book has been called “trauma porn” as it relates to the life story Hanya Yanagihara creates for Jude, and it’s not an unfair criticism. However bad you think it could be, it’s worse. As a reader, I found the section in which Jude has been taken on the road by a quasi-parental figure who abuses him while claiming to love him (and does even worse than that), ping-ponging around the country in a series of motels, to be reminiscent of Lolita…but while Lolita leaves most of the actual crimes to the imagination and is narrated by the abuser, A Little Life brings it out into the open and is narrated by the abused. It’s shocking, and horrifying, and not even the most shocking and horrifying thing to be recounted in the book’s 800+ pages. But it’s not all despair and unimaginable cruelty to children. Jude, and indeed all of his friends, find success. They find love. They have friendships that feel real, with periods of closeness and periods of estrangement. People care for each other and are kind to each other. They are happy sometimes, and sometimes not. Life is not just one thing, it’s lots of different things, often at the same time, and I feel like this novel captured that beautifully. That being said, I do agree with some of the criticism. The level of trauma visited upon Jude becomes almost numbing in its depth. There is a lot of aspirational lifestyle content that got repetitive (especially, for me, the food, which is something I tend to find boring to read about). I don’t think I could ever recommend this book to anyone. It needs just about every content warning possible. I can well understand why some people hate it. But I found it highly compelling and genuinely moving.
• Parable of the Sower: This is a book that tends to come up if you mention that you liked Margaret Atwood’s Oryx & Crake, and it was also an excuse to finally finally take Octavia Butler off the list of authors I’d never read before! This one felt even more eerily prescient than Atwood, set in 2024 (the book was published in 1993) in a United States suffering from civilization breakdown in the wake of climate disasters. Lauren Olamina is a teenager in what was once a middle-class LA suburb but has become both less actually wealthy and much more relatively so. Her neighborhood is walled off from the outside world to protect the little (food, some money earned by those who still can find work, guns) that they still have. Lauren’s mother used drugs during pregnancy, leaving her with hyperempathy, a condition in which she literally feels the pain that others experience. Both smart and canny, she understands that the little comparative oasis she’s been raised in can’t last long, and she starts preparing to have to survive in the outside world as well as developing her own religious philosophy based on an acceptance and even embrace of change, which she calls Earthseed. The crisis she’s anticipated does in fact arrive, and she finds herself one of many people on the road hoping for something better while they try to evade theft, rape, and murder. I found Lauren a refreshing kind of heroine. Usually a teenage girl in a story like this one would be plucky and sassy, hiding an inner core of insecurity. Lauren is serious, smart, and resourceful. She’s confident in her beliefs. And despite being a preacher’s daughter, she’s no goody two-shoes. The other characters are also developed in ways that make them feel like people rather than stock characters. Butler’s prose is engaging, and the narrative journey she crafts for Lauren kept me turning the pages to see where it would go next. My major complaint here would be that it feels more like a “first in a series” than a standalone novel, with lots of set-up and character introductions (indeed there is a sequel, and Butler had originally intended there to be several entries). I am excited to read the sequel and more of Butler’s other work as well!

In Life…

• My dad came out to visit: He hasn’t been out this way to visit since C was just a little little guy! It was fun to see him and he got to do the things toddlers think are super fun, so we went to the park and played with toy cars. It was low key but very nice.
• I went to Montreal: My bestie and I do one figure skating event every season, and for this year, well, Worlds was in Montreal, a city we’ve both always wanted to visit so this seemed like the best possible excuse. It was really hard to leave my family for a week but it was a really amazing skating event! I do wish the weather had been more hospitable, it didn’t creep much above freezing and it snowed a few times, which made exploring the city a less reasonable proposition than we might have hoped. I’d love to go back and spend more time there at some point!