Change is afoot
Not a hand. PLUS 3 more books 📖 📖 📖
Hi, faithful readers. Today, I’m very excited to talk to you about the resurgence of Bennifer and all the ways in which the phenomenon pertains to this newsletter—which is to say, in no ways at all. Let’s read! 👇👇👇
Wooooh!, it’s an exciting time of year, isn’t it? As any New York- or New England-er knows, we’re in the midst of two of the (maybe) five nice weather weeks we’ll get all year. Or else it’s about to rain—who’s to say. For the rest of you just about anywhere else, please enjoy your continuous good weather fortune.
Change has been on my mind of late, or maybe adaptation, self-discovery, self-actualization, regression, transcendence—all the ways and directions in which we can grow. It’s possible this feeling is what drew me to these books (spanning from 1983 to 2021) in the first place, but maybe it worked the other way around. In any case, because how we think is who we become, I would like you to become enthralled by these three narratives. I certainly did. On your marks, get set… well, you know what to do 📖 📖 📖.
CURRENT:
Detransition, Baby, by Torrey Peters
January 2021 (One World/Random House)
First up is a book you’ve probably seen making the rounds over the past few months: Torrey Peters’ debut novel, Detransition, Baby. In good news, there’s no need to puzzle over the title, it’s quite literal. This book is about a detransition and it is about a baby. In other good news (really, the only kind there is with this one), it’s filled with fantastic observations and funny lines and plot twists and protagonists you’ll love deeply and keep thinking about long after you’re done reading (you know, if you’re into that sort of thing).
Since plots to my mind are kind of like fries—a vehicle for language, or for ketchup—let’s get that out of the way first: Reese is a trans woman living in New York. She broke up with her girlfriend Amy, also a trans woman, a few years prior. After the split, Amy detransitions to live as Ames; Reese has affairs with married men. Ames begins dating his cisgender boss Katrina, who doesn’t know about his past. Katrina becomes pregnant. She doesn’t want to raise a baby on her own, but she’s in if he’s in. However, while Ames has decided he prefers to live his life as a man (“I am trans, but I don’t need to do trans,” he notes), he has to tell Katrina he can’t imagine being a father—that ultimate end of gender expression—unless, maybe, he could queer the experience. Re-enter Reese, who as the reader has already learned, very much wants to be a mother. Can the three of them form a family unit? And if so, how?
Plenty of people have said this book is about parenthood—what it means to become a parent and the different relationships different humans have to this concept. It’s not not about that. But Peters has used the conceit as the basis for a bourgeois social comedy, one in which various disparate people with various disparate motives must interact and work towards what they hope will be a happy ending for all of them—all while reckoning with, and sometimes weaponizing, identity.
In this way, being transgender and being cisgender (it me) while entering into the transgender community is diegetic to the story (convenient entry points for all!). Peters, a transgender author, makes clear that the world is gendered, gendered, gendered, and if you think that can be without consequence, well, um, nope! (and lol). Even much of the language in this book reads as cause and effect: if this, then that. So I’ll add one more: If you are looking for a book that is equal parts fun and sexy, thoughtful and dishy, then you should read this one. I gobbled it in a few days.
You’ll like it if you like...its lines:
“The receptionist put him on hold to make an appointment and as Vivaldi played, Ames pondered whether he ought to cancel his subscription to HBO in order to afford this sperm bank. He couldn’t fully comprehend the enormous weight of fatherhood and generational lineage, but he could comprehend how much he did not want to cancel HBO.”
(Did I mention that this book is very funny? Well, I just did again.)
“Reese used to say that she was only interested in people who’d had a major failure in life. She believed that one ought to have a singular major failure, in which all of one’s hopes were dashed, in order to sprout into something interesting, as pruned trees grow baroque and beautiful, because an unpruned tree only grows vertically and predictably, selfishly sucking up as much sunlight as possible.”
(Advice for fictional character Reese: Write a “101 Reese-isms” book that collects your many poignant and hilarious observations; sell it at Urban Outfitters; reap royalties.)
“Afterward, the mourners will all file out and the break into little clusters, trading solemn hugs, some shoulders shaking, while others dart suddenly apart due to a just-glimpsed ex, so that the macro effect is like watching sperm wriggle under a microscope. Everyone will dress themselves in some shade of goth—in goth apparel, you can look sad while also showing off fishnets and boobs.”
(The aftermath of a transgender memorial service, as social commentary fodder.)
“In the apartment, Iris sits on a stool at the kitchen counter in panties and a tank top, sipping on white wine chilled with ice cubes. In a fig leaf of decency, she has at least tucked before Katrina’s arrival.”
(No competition: “fig leaf of decency” is my new favorite phrase.)
CONTEMPORARY:
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong
2019 (Penguin Press)
This is 100-percent that book that, while you’re reading it, you ask everyone you know, “Have you read this book??” in such a way that the person you ask can actually hear the extra punctuation you’ve attached to the end of your question.
I don’t want to write much here because you should be using your time to read Ocean Vuong’s words instead of mine. So, just a few notes:
Loosely, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is the story of a young Vietnamese-American boy growing up in Hartford, Connecticut with his mother and grandmother, who fled war-torn Vietnam. (It mirrors the author’s own biography so closely that it began as memoir before becoming auto-fiction.) It’s a coming of age novel in which the narrator discovers/faces/lives his race, class, sexuality, family history, etc. etc., but written in a way you haven’t experienced before—as an epic letter to his mother, who cannot read.
Vuong is also a poet, a very good one, which explains the chill-inducing beauty of his language. Reading this book is almost like that experience of hearing a great poem where the last line knocks your breath out—but over and over again.
If there’s a better modern exploration of a deeply complicated, abusive relationship between a mother and a son (“You’re a mother, Ma. You’re also a monster. But so am I—which is why I can’t turn away from you.”), I certainly haven’t read it.
The entire time you’re reading On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, you will have either a constant film of tears over your eyes that never falls or you will suddenly realize you’ve been holding your breath.
You’ll like it if you like…its lines:
“You once told me that the human eye is god’s loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket doesn’t even know there’s another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty. Opening the front door to the first snowfall of my life, you whispered, ‘Look.’”
(See note above, about Vuong being a poet.)
“After a moment, he said, real quiet, ‘I fucking hate my dad.’
Up until then I didn’t think a white boy could hate anything about his life. I wanted to know him through and through, by that very hate. Because that’s what you give anyone who sees you, I thought. You take their hatred head-on, and you cross it, like a bridge, to face them, to enter them.”
(Holy moly.)
“After he came, when he tried to hold me, his lips on my shoulder, I pushed him away, pulled my boxers on, and went to rinse my mouth.
Sometimes, being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you’ve been ruined.”
(Besides “beautiful,” “devastating” is probably the word that will most appear in your mind while you’re reading.)
“In a world myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly.”
(Let this serve as a reminder to you to put down your damn phone.*)
*Unless you’re using it to read Shirley.
YORE
Binstead’s Safari, by Rachel Ingalls
1983; reissue 2019 (New Directions)
I don’t like the notion that you can have a favorite book. But I (nearly) changed my stance after re-reading Binstead’s Safari, which was even more of a weird little masterpiece than I remembered. (“Weird” and “little” pretty much represent the epitome of a reading experience to me.)
Binstead’s Safari is all about Millie, Millie, Millie—which I write three times simply because I have about three times the love for her as I do for most other fictional characters. (I challenge you to not want to tattoo “Millie Forever” over a heart on your bicep after reading this book.) Specifically, it’s about her metamorphosis from long-suffering housewife of an (honestly kind of untalented and boring) anthropology academic named Stan to, well, whatever it is that she becomes in the end. Maybe a lion, maybe not. In any case, she’s managed to free herself of Stan, who we can tell is lame by the name Rachel Ingalls has given him. (If there has ever been a “good” literary character named Stan, please bring them to my attention.)
The entire tale happens over the course of one of Stan’s research trips to an unnamed country in East Africa (not a great start, Stan) by way of London in the mid 20th century. Millie comes along at her own request, and by page 9, the thematic thrust of the book is clear. (“He looked astonished. She never answered back like that. But he hadn’t noticed the other changes in her.”) It’s compact and effective storytelling: Even though you know what you’re in for, the narrative continues to surprise and delight as Millie finds ever more friends and admirers over the course of the couple’s trip.
Most of that delight comes from Millie’s, and even Stan’s, internal thoughts. The book’s straightforward language belies its emotional complexities, letting them hit you that much harder. This isn’t so much a story of a marriage unraveling as it is about its seesaw of power shifting when one person decides to accept joy. Expect carnage.
You’ll like it if you like...its lines:
“Stan Binstead and his wife, Millie, reached London early in the morning. They both felt heavy and tired from their flight and were already weighed down by an emotion that made for even greater lassitude – a kind of inertia, intermittently broken by irritable indecisiveness. In the army they call it combat fatigue.”
(^These are just the opening lines, so you know you’re in good hands.)
“Millie felt at peace. Strength had come back into her, and just as suddenly as this: the sun rose and everything was different. It hadn’t ever been this way before, not during the years of her marriage, nor before that, when she’d lived at home with her family. Only now. Nothing threatened her. She had found her life.
(This is what they call a revelation… )
“One late afternoon he returned to camp and saw Millie too as if he’d never met her before. For a moment she looked so beautiful that she took his breath away, like some ordinary object that had turned and caught the sun, to become suddenly dazzling, blinding. And yet, she was the same. He had just never seen her like this, not even when they were first married.”
( …and this is what they call too little too late.)
If I included any more of my favorite lines here, I would give away too much. So you’re just going to have to read for yourself and discover why its author, who died just two years ago, got the huge wave of recognition at the end of her life that she should have had all along.
✨This Is the Ending Section✨
And that’s it for this month’s (not-even-a-little-bit-monthly) newsletter. Thanks for reading!
For friends who are just joining the ride, you can read last month’s installment here. (Quite a few of you let me know you read a book or two from the list, which really thrilled me.)
Oh! Since Memorial Day is the unofficial start of Reading Season, I’m going to try to give you some more quick hits coming up, starting next week (🤞) with a very special Shirley featuring two very special new books.
And finally, some more ways to make your life exactly 91 percent better by Labor Day:
Follow Shirley on Instagram 📸.
Actually, maybe also follow me 📸, because, as it turns out, my personal Instagram is basically like my books instagram, except with more 100% more dog.
Support independent bookstores by shopping Shirley at Bookshop.org. You’ll find all the books above☝️, plus a bunch of other recs. (I recently placed my first order through Bookshop.org and it was so easy and fast that I more recently placed my second order through them, which was just as easy and fast. And no, this is not an ad. I was just pleasantly surprised by what a good alternative it was to the Site That Shall Not Be Named.)
Don’t be shy. Hit that heart button, leave a comment, or simply reply to this email to reach me directly. Suggested topics of conversation:
books you’ve read recently and liked;
books from the list above that you plan to read;
books that you spotted Nessy reading the last time you peeped her in the wild.