March in Review — Lit Chat, Vol. 17
Hi friends,
What is there to say about March? It’s always colder, wetter, and longer than I want it to be, as all the fun seems to go out of it after my birthday. Good reading weather, but not good for much else. Not much to report here, so let’s just skip to the books!
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THE FOUNDATION:
The Paper Palace — Miranda Cowley Heller
Two of my least favorite things to read about are infidelity and sexual assault (particularly CSA), and both of these happen in the first 30 pages, so a big fat content warning for this one! I came very close to noping out after that, but I powered through for the sake of book club. The Paper Palace opens with a woman cheating on her husband with her best friend at her family’s summer lake house, and the rest of the book is spent unpacking the woman’s traumatic past to show how she got to this point of no return. The timeline hopping was a bit tough to keep up with, but the ambiguous ending inspired a heated book club debate, which is always fun. I would’ve never chosen this book for myself, but if you’re someone who enjoys twisted narratives and awful characters, this could be for you!
X-Acto — Kate DiCamillo
This is a soft plug for One Story magazine, which mails its monthly stories to subscribers in a cute little paper zine. This isn’t an ad; I’m just a fan who was delighted to find a story from one of my favorite childhood authors in my mailbox this month! Kate DiCamillo’s “X-Acto” is a short story for adults about two children of divorced parents who go to stay with their father and his new girlfriend for the summer. There’s a darkness to this story that I found surprising compared to my childhood memories of reading DiCamillo, but also a familiar sense of defiant resilience. “Terrifying and hopeful” is how DiCamillo describes this story in an interview with the story’s editor, which you can read here, and while you’re at it, you can buy the story for a whopping $2.50. Is there anything more fun than good snail mail in this digital spam age?? I think not.
Heartstopper Vols. 2-5 — Alice Osman
Oh, my heart! I spent a solid week down with a cold this month, and Nick and Charlie were very much there for me in my congested suffering. Beyond the obvious reasons of representation, I think these books are also so important because they’re teaching an audience of young readers what healthy relationships and communication skills look like, for all gender identities and sexual orientations. Volume 4 in particular, which deals with Charlie’s eating disorder, tenderly portrays the difficulty of wanting to be a supportive partner when you’re not equipped to give the person you love the kind of help they need. Oseman does a beautiful job of teaching that sometimes the best and only thing you can do is listen and be there for someone, and make sure the real help is coming from a trusted (adult) source. I wish I had half the courage and compassion of these kids when I was a teenager, and I’m so glad there’s still one more volume in Nick and Charlie’s story to look forward to.
SOLID SUPPORTS:
Natural Beauty — Ling Ling Huang
This was a wild satire of the wellness industry turned unexpected thriller, and I was engrossed in every second of it. Our narrator, a child of Chinese immigrants and former piano prodigy, is strapped for cash when she accepts a job at Holistik, a prestigious beauty and wellness company. Holistik offers everything from products to treatments to pills, and the narrator welcomes the changes the job (and the free products) bring to her life and body, until a series of frightening encounters brings the company’s sinister underbelly to light.
This novel was the joint book club pick for my work’s AAPI and Women’s Networks, and the author was kind enough to join us for a virtual Q&A, which was so special! My personal highlights were when she shared how her career as a violinist and the movie Shrek were two main inspirations for this provocative debut. Natural Beauty is currently being adapted into a TV series by Constance Wu, and you’re definitely going to want to read the book first.
The Godfather — Mario Puzo
Let me just say, I was so unprepared for how much brain space this book (and movie) were about to take up in my mind. Until now, my only frame of reference for The Godfather was Joe Fox’s repeated references in You’ve Got Mail, which honestly always seemed like a red flag to me. Now, after reading the book and seeing the movie (in theaters, no less!), dare I say…I get it.
What fascinated me most about this story was not the way it made other pop culture references finally make sense, but the way it explored the various forms and avenues of power, how that power manifested differently in each of the characters, and how easily and often it was manipulated through the seemingly innocuous institutions of family and friendship. Questions of what it means to be powerful, to embody power and feel entitled to wield it, have been stewing in the back of my brain ever since. I feel like these thoughts come less naturally to women, so I’m now on a mission to find (or create??) some kind of female equivalent. In the meantime, I’m gonna need to watch Part II ASAP.
THE TIPPY TOP:
Biography of X — Catherine Lacey
This book was one of my most highly anticipated reads ever since reading (and loving) Pew last October. On the surface, it is the fictional biography of X, a famously enigmatic artist, written by her widow, C.M. Lucca. Lucca’s biography is a thoroughly researched attempt at understanding her elusive spouse, including interviews, archival material, and numerous secondary sources documenting decades of X’s shifting artistic personas. Depending on who Lucca talks to, X is a genius, a mystery, a liar, a visionary, a manipulator, or a hack—and as impossible to forget as she is to pin down.
I was less intrigued by X’s resistance to definition as I was by the construction of this novel, specifically the way Lacey uses media to create an alternate reality that is both aspirational and dystopian. Set in an alternate history in which the U.S. was divided into regional territories after WWII, X escapes the uber-conservative autocratic Southern Territory as a young woman and spends most of her career in the ultra-liberal democratic haven of the North, integrating herself into the New York arts and literary scene of the 70s and 80s.
Lacey incorporates photographs alongside quoted text from real interviews, letters, articles, and books about historical figures and events—the Berlin Wall, David Bowie, Susan Sontag, and Kathy Acker are just a few—and either attributes them directly to X or manipulates them to reflect the divided world that produced her. I am obsessed with the way Lacey takes details from history and simply refilters them through the lens of X to create a perfectly plausible substitute reality. As with X’s many personas, the line between the truth and the version of it that Lacey offers her readers is not only blurred but completely disposable. The truth is the least interesting part of this novel; X is a variable that isn’t meant to be solved, but clearly that hasn’t stopped me from trying.
Did that even make any sense? I don’t know anymore! Writing it gave me a massive headache, that’s how much this book scrambled my brain. Anyway, let me know if you read it (or any of these books, of course!) because clearly, I have a lot of thoughts.
And if you’d rather avoid the headache, there’s always the Heartstopper Netflix adaptation. 😍
Until next time, happy reading!
❤ Catherine
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Catherine Thoms 