Shirley Books' July Newsletter
The word ‘reflect’ has seven definitions; these three books contain about 18 of them.
When I was a women’s magazine editor, I would sometimes find myself writing headlines like “Hummus: Friend or Foe?” In that world—and maybe the world—you were usually thought of as one thing or the other, little nuance. The three books I read this month feature heroines delightfully unable to be assigned to any particular side of any particular line, especially when they themselves are doing the assigning. They are neither friend nor foe—nor are they hummus, which is a good thing for character development.
I didn’t pick these three books—one current, one contemporary, one classic—to fit any particular theme. This made it all the more delightful when it became clear how well they fit together. Despite spanning a full 30 years in their release dates, when read in approximation of each other, they form a pleasing patina over the concept of reflection, which has at least seven definitions* as a verb alone. (It really is a wonder of a word.)
Do not take this more, well, reflective turn to mean these three books aren’t joyful. Quite the opposite. Reading them within a matter of weeks gave me one of the best reading experiences I’ve had in a long time. I highly recommend reading any of them individually or in rapid succession.
Care to find out why? Let’s give it a go.
CURRENT:
The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett
June 2020
First of all, it wasn’t easy to get my hands on a copy of this book. In my last newsletter, I joked that about 80 percent of the population was currently reading it. I may have been right. It was sold out at multiple independent bookstores in my area and was even back-ordered on Amazon for a time. But a few weeks after putting in an order at my local, I had the book in hand. I’m happy to report it was worth the wait.
This novel has a lot of plot, which almost kept me from reading it; I’m glad it didn’t. Here’s the gist: The Vanishing Half is a multi-generational, decades-spanning book that starts in the 1950s when identical twin sisters, light-skinned and Black, run away from their tiny Louisiana town. On the lamb, one of the sisters, Stella, decides to pass as white to get work as a secretary—and soon passes for the rest of her life, marrying her wealthy boss, moving to L.A., and giving birth to a fair-skinned, blonde daughter. The other twin, Desiree, marries a dark-skinned man and has a daughter who inherits his dark skin.
The narrative is riveting; the characters, delightful; the emotions, poignant. But the most exciting aspect is the way Brit Bennett—her debut novel, The Mothers, was a New York Times bestseller in 2016—goes for Storytelling with a capital “s.” And how she plays with conditional tense in such a subtle and sporadic manner, that the story has the feel of being specific and mythical, historic and current, memory and fact all at once—like there’s a Greek chorus just off the page.
You’ll like it if you like… its lines:
The morning one of the lost twins returned to Mallard, Lou LeBon ran to the diner to break the news, and even now, many years later, everyone remembers the shock of sweaty Lou pushing through the glass doors, chest heaving, neckline darkened with his own effort. The barely awake customers clamored around him, ten or so, although more would lie and say that they’d been there too, if only to pretend that this once, they’d witnessed something truly exciting.
(These are the first lines of the book, and if this doesn’t set you up for the full story experience, I don’t know what ever would.)
It was a strange town. Mallard, named after the ring-necked ducks living in the rice fields and marshes. A town that, like any other, was more idea than place.
(Go ahead and read that last line again, and then another time, until the magic truly sets in—I did.)
“I’m not one of them,” she would say. “I’m like you.”
“You’re colored,” Loretta would say. Not a question but a statement of blunt fact. Stella would tell her because the woman was leaving; in hours, she’d vanish from this part of the city and Stella’s life forever. She’d tell her because, in spite of everything, Loretta was her only friend in the world. Because she knew that, if it came down to her word versus Loretta’s, she would always be believed. And knowing this, she felt, for the first time, truly white.
(A harsh reality of race in the flash of a never-ending, what-if reverie.)
CONTEMPORARY:
The Cost of Living, by Deborah Levy
2018
People have a weird tendency to self-flagellate if their mind wanders while they’re reading, like it’s a bad child they need to tame. Au contraire!, I say. The more my mind wanders, the more I know the author is casting the best kind of spell on my brain—helping it make connections where it couldn’t see them before. If you, like me, welcome that kind of associative reading experience, then consider Deborah Levy your priestess.
The Cost of Living, subtitled “A Working Memoir,” is a slim tome that doles out more “aha” moments than a Murder: She Wrote episode. In the time period of her life that two-time Man Booker Prize finalist Deborah Levy covers, she has recently divorced her husband and moved from their family home in the suburbs to a leaky London flat with their two teenage daughters. Besides the practical issues she faces in her new life—career! housing! new friends! aging parent!—Levy finds herself circling around the theme of major and minor characters: which one are we? What are the structures that make it so? What have other philosophers and writers and artists had to say about this and other identity conundrums? Levy will make you feel smart. She’ll also make you feel seen. I could barely get through a page without snapping photos of a passage.
You’ll like it if you like… its lines:
I had spent the last few months trying not to feel anything at all. [Sculptor Louise] Bourgeois had learned to sew at a young age in her parents’ tapestry business. She thought of the needle as an object of psychological repair — and what she wanted to repair, she said, was the past.
We either die of the past or we become an artist.
(Chills.)
Marguerite Duras did not have the “fatal patience” that de Beauvoir rightly thought women who were mothers had learned to their detriment. After Duras wrote Lol Stein, she made a curious remark — she said that she had given herself permission to speak “in a sense totally alien to women.” I know what she means. It is so hard to claim our desires and so much more relaxing to mock them.
(Double chills.)
I liked to think that the past, as I experienced it, came to the same end as Ziggy Stardust. I saw it off and then rose from the dead in a number of incredible outfits. Yes, I was with Ziggy and I was with Kierkegaard all the way: “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
(Triple chills, close the window, please.)
I thought it best not to throw more of Freud her way while she had a knife in her hand.
(Kthanks, I’m warm now!)
YORE:
Lucy, by Jamaica Kincaid
1990
Like many a person with an MFA in creative writing, I read Jamaica Kincaid’s most famous short story, “Girl,” in a craft class. I was like, “Wow. This is amazing. I’m going to read more Kincaid.” And then I simply didn’t—until a few weeks ago. And now I want back those six years of my life when I could have been reading more Kincaid. I loved this book so much that I don’t want to write about it here because I know whatever I manage to plunk out on my keyboard will never live up to the experience of reading it for the first time. So, mostly, I’ll say: If you haven’t had the pleasure of reading it for the first time, please give it to yourself.
Like much of Kincaid’s work, the slim novel (you can knock it out in a weekend, speed readers) contains autobiographical elements, but it’s a pure jumping-off point rather than a retelling. Kincaid left her home in the West Indies at 17 to become an au pair for a wealthy New York family and changed her name. In Lucy, the titular character is a 19 year old who leaves her home in the West Indies to become an au pair for a wealthy New York family and changes her name. As Lucy uncovers more about this (literally) cold world, she discovers more about herself—who she is as a woman, who she wants to be, who she doesn’t want to be, how the legacy of colonialism really affected her, who she adores or hates and why—and how she wants to verbalize these thoughts to those around her. Lucy does not hold back. And that is a pure delight (and a horror). The whole novel is full of unflinching, nearly incredible honesty—it’s so blunt that, sometimes, it’s hilarious, other times, heartbreaking. But it’s the last chapter—a startlingly sudden self-reflection of the immediate past—that I’ll go back to again and again. The first time around, I’m not sure I breathed.
You’ll like it if you like… its lines:
The household in which I lived was made up of a husband, a wife, and the four girl children. The husband and wife looked alike and their four children looked just like them. In photographs of themselves, which they placed all over the house, their six yellow-haired heads of various sizes were bunched as if they were a bouquet of flowers tied together by an unseen string.
(You know this exact photograph and everything it means, even if you don’t.)
They were very chatty people, chatty in a way she did not like: they were talking about the world, they were talking about themselves, and they seemed to take for granted that everything they said mattered. They were artists.
(And the funniest joke of all is the truth.)
I had lived through this time, and as the weather changed from cold to warm it did not bring me along with it. Something settled inside me, something heavy and hard. It stayed there, and I could not think of one thing to make it go away. I thought, So this must be living, this must be the beginning of the time people later refer to as “years ago, when I was young.”
(Yes.)
I realized again and again how lucky I was to have met her and to work for her and not, for instance, some of her friends. But there was no use pretending I was not the sort of person who counted blessings; I was the sort of person for whom there could never be enough blessings.
(Is hearing one of your actual thoughts coming from someone else meant to be harder or easier?)
See you in August!
…which is actually tomorrow, so you know—really soon.
Oh, right. In the meantime, I owe you some definitions. (Thanks, Merriam Webster.)
*Reflect, verb:
To prevent passage of and cause to change direction.
To give back or exhibit as an image, likeness, or outline; to mirror.
To bring or cast as a result.
To make manifest or apparent; to show.
To realize or consider.
To bend or fold back.
To turn into or away from a course; deflect.
Now, in the midst of all this reflecting, go forth and read—and take care.
Love, Kelly
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