What I'm reading (winter 2024)

It's been a mad dash of memoir reading these past months, including a few by celebrities:

Kerry's: the magnificent "Scandal" star's memoir Thicker Than Water reads like a politician's, to me. Elegant, contained, not too revealing. Much like her, think.
Britney's: The Woman in Me reminded me why she's a megastar: it's deeply personal, fun, sad, insightful, and full of longing. I'm embarrassed at how terribly we have treated this genuine artist.
Jada's: I was interested to learn more about Jada Pinkett Smith, apart from the snark and the mean headlines. In Worthy, she writes vividly about her tough Baltimore upbringing, shares rich details about her longtime friendship with Tupac, and generally paints a picture of intellect and accomplishment. It lost me with the woo woo stuff toward the end, though.

In a more literary vein, I just reread Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel. Her story of her determination to live the kind of life she wanted, despite many years of hardships in Somalia and Kenya and Holland, two forced marriages, the loss of a sister and the strictures of men-led religion. Unfortunately now she's leaned into belief in a christian god, but her story is still compelling.

And I was reluctant to read Jennette McCurdy's I'm Glad My Mom Died, mostly due to the title. A thoughtful barista in Memphis urged me to read it nonetheless and I'm glad they did.
What a story, of celebrity, anxiety, abuse, lies and love.
It ended abruptly and in a way I get why, it's almost too much pain to bear ultimately, but I'll just say I'm amazed at McCurdy's bravery and wish her well.

big kid friendship

Ahoy and hello.
The colonialist holiday got the best of me last week so I laid low and worked on some writing projects.
Check out this article about making friends as an adult.
As a work-from-home newcomer in a place grounded in centuries-old traditions and generational relationships, it's been hard to develop new friendships.
One of the first things I did here (as per the article) was reach out to acquaintances.
Lol.
One ignored me, one strung me along, then ghosted. The third met for coffee once and then disappeared, only to pop up here and there to ask how my holidays were (rude, I'm alone, duh) or when I'm moving back to the PNW (ok bye).
So, I pivoted to new friendships. Those have been tough, too but I've been patient and finally met some transplants and a local writer or two.
Had to weed out the religious because they just want to convert me but otherwise I'm keeping expectations low and flexibility high.
It feels unnatural to this Capricorn! But I don't know what else to do.

what I'm reading (fall 2023)

It’s been awhile since my last reading update. And I’m still devouring memoir like donuts fresh out of the fryer.

I just finished journalist Prachi Gupta’s They Called Us Exceptional, and while I found the POV jarring (it’s told as though to Gupta’s mother), the story of being othered as an immigrant, the tension of mental illness in a demanding father, unreliable sibling and subservient mother, is compelling.

Two other memoirs blew me away with their vivid, immediate, funny and honest prose: Strong Female Character by Fern Brady, about a Scottish woman discovering her own autism after years of blindly muddling through life, not knowing why she was (is) as she is (was).

And Leg, by Greg Marshall. He’s devastatingly honest and compassionate about his own physical limitations and his vibrant family and ultimate losses. Hashtag-writing-goals for this writer.

I also want to mention Joan Wickersham’s The Suicide Index, incisively and delicately written within what could be a hokey framework, but manages to iteratively tell of a father’s suicide and a family’s unraveling.

I also had the wonderful experience of reading 3 novels quickly, fast because I adored Jen Beagin’s writing, but with the dread of finishing such wonderfully-written prose: Pretend I’m Dead, Big Swiss (a sex therapist’s transcriptionist falls in love with a client) and Vacuum in the Dark.

That’s it for now. I’ve got 6 more books going on Libby. Happy reading!

white dude apolooza

White dude memoir x 3 on the Sunday home page.

Do better Washington Post.

 

one book one city

I joined a book chat the other day for Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You. It was part of a city-wide effortto focus on one book. The leaders take the book into the community, to book clubs and libraries and into prisons. I’d read the short stories a couple months ago but this was a chance to revisit them with other readers and writers and it was truly wonderful to realize the care and craft that Ruffins puts into two-page flash fiction.

I’m stunned, amazed and inspired.

memoir seeking agent part 1

Welp, I've started the tough task of finding an agent.
My memoir manuscript is complete. And with the guidance of a few trusted professionals, I've written a proposal, synopsis, query letter, chapter summaries, bio, and pitch.
My acceptance rate for short stories hovers in the 40-to-1 ratio which means I'm expecting probably worse numbers with this exercise. (I will note that publishing excerpts from the memoir has been much quicker and successful, which means --? probably not much.)

This week I've submitted to 3 agents.
Agent 1: no response yet
Agent 2: responded 24 hours later saying I had no following so she couldn't possibly sell my book
Agent 3: no response yet

I know the publishing world works as gatekeepers, it rewards the shiny, controversial and new, plus the only other published writer in the family passed away of covid so nepotism won't save me either. I'm going to give this a go anyway, because I believe in my story, and I believe in myself. No one will work harder or be more persistent.
Wish me luck.

only the heathen cry

 I've been reading Bruce Gerencser's blog for awhile now.

He's a former pastor and current humanist who points a bright light at the abuses and failings of the church. His black collar crime series is a sickening reminder of how many predatory "men of God" are out there. I wrote him a note in March and we've corresponded a bit.

He was kind enough to post my most recent creative nonfiction piece, "Only the Heathen Cry," out last week in Aji Magazine (full issue at the website or just my story on Box.com).

Thanks for reading and go read Bruce's blog too!

James Baldwin on writing

Reading a James Baldwin interview from The Paris Review in 1984, on the art of fiction.
It's all wonderful and devastating and inspiring. 

I'll be pondering these interchanges about writing for awhile:

Q: As your experience about writing accrues, what would you say increases with knowledge?

A: You learn how little you know. It becomes much more difficult because the hardest thing in the world is simplicity. And the most fearful thing, too. It becomes more difficult because you have to strip yourself of all your disguises, some of which you didn’t know you had. You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal. 

Q:What do you tell younger writers who come to you with the usual desperate question: How do I become a writer?

A: Write. Find a way to keep alive and write. There is nothing else to say. If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you’re not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real.

Q: Can you discern talent in someone?

A: Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.

Hold off

Hold off on the Egan book.
A pal gave me news about the author this week that I'm still processing.
Apologies for vague-blogging but yeah. Hold off.

What I’ve been reading...2023 part deux

New Orleans' own Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s book of short stories, The Ones who Don’t Say They Love You, is a funny, incisive, painful look at the New Orleans I haven’t often read about. The characters are real people trying to find joy and get by.

I also read Timothy Egan’s Fever in the Heartland, about the rise of the KKK in America in the 1920’s. Everything I thought I knew about America’s embrace of the Klan was underestimated and wrong. The white-hooded menace reached beyond what we like to think of as the backwards Southern states, deeply into the Midwest and out to Oregon and Washington. White women embraced it and preachers not only took the KKK’s money but endorsed the hypocritical hate group from the pulpit. Egan’s story focuses on the prosecution of the rape, torture and murder of a white woman in Indiana as the ultimate derailment of the Klan’s grip on America. With the rise recently in open hate and racism and homophobia on the right, you have to think the rot and repulsiveness is still there, festering away.

Margaret Verble remains one of my favorite writers, with Stealing, and Cherokee America, complex, witty, compelling Native American protagonists doing their best to survive and thrive in an America that seems intent on driving them out and away.

I wanted to enjoy Zehanat Khan's Blackwater Falls more than I did. The mystery part of it was fine but the personal lives of the Muslim characters felt flat, muddled somehow. I wanted more life and character in the detectives!

Trayvon Generation by Elizabeth Alexander, whom I had the privilege of hearing at Tulane recently, provides incisive, beautiful meditations and prose poems on art, culture, and race in America.

README.txt by Chelsea Manning was gripping and left me wanting more. I hope she’ll continue.

Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts is beautiful fiction, about family and resistance and love and loss.

In my ongoing pursuit of knowing New Orleans better, I read Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink. Covering the five days after Hurricane Katrina at Memorial Hospital, it’s anecdotal and long and claustrophobic and sometimes messy and ultimately, worth a read.

What I’ve been reading...2023 part one

Well, a lot, I guess!

Libby makes it super easy and now I’m equipped with a NOLA library card too. The list is lengthy so I’ll start with some memoirs.

Not quite intentionally, I read three memoirs of escape from North Korea:

Every Falling Star by Sungju Lee, The Hard Road Out by By Jihyun Park, Seh-Lynn Chai, and Sarah Baldwin, and While Time Remains, by Yoenmi Park.

I found the first two especially compelling, with often hard-to-read details about hunger, cold and deprivation, executions and delusion. Sungju Lee writes for the YA audience but the book is beautifully written and includes the Dickensian years he spent living in a boy gang on the streets, stealing and fighting to stay alive. The third turns into a right-wing polemic and so I felt pushed away by the writer, who also suffered undeniable horrors only to be swept into another form of scolding, right-wing delusion in Europe and America.

A Heart that Works Rob Delaney was an unexpectedly compelling read, because I didn’t know Delaney’s story going in. He writes about losing his young son to cancer in the most direct, funny, angry way I’ve ever read. This is the book on loss and grief we needed (in companionship with Didion’s Magical Thinking).

As a Top Chef fan, I enjoyed Savor, a visit into Fatima Ali’s short but passionate life as a Pakistani-American cook before losing her life to cancer.

Wrong Side of Murder Creek Bob Zellner was also an unexpectedly interesting and complex read; Zellner was a Freedom Rider in the 1960’s, and he writes humbly and deftly about supporting the Black civil rights fighters including John Lewis, his beatings and arrests and flights for his life in Georgia and Mississippi and Louisiana.

The last memoir I’ll mention is Lost to the World by Shahbaz Taseer, a tale of kidnapping, torture and a decade of survival. Powerful. It reads like a thriller.

a momash gift

The longer I don’t post here, the worse I feel, and also the harder it is to post.

Bsp has been on the road. In Canada for a week, enjoying family, projects, and delicious vegetarian food (a mezze feast here, vegan pizza here and a Rajasthani thali here). And some non-veg pastries, the best of which were pillowy donuts filled with the lightest of cream fillings. Incredible dining.

*

One of the projects was typing up a handwritten journal we found in a box of family items retrieved from the trash heap in Kansas. A diary my mother wrote when she was 17 years old, a handful of double-sided lined loose papers that covers only half a year or so, but it’s an engagingly immediate piece of writing, of her crushes and friendships and desires, her frustrations with the nuns who educated her -- and alternately, her desire to join the sisters because romance and life sometimes felt so difficult. She adored music and listed bands and songs that touched her: The Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Animals.

I never knew this Mom of course. I feel such a nostalgia for her. How could this vivacious, witty, petty, scheming, big-hearted, fun-loving teenager know that just a year later she’d be unexpectedly pregnant with me, and hastily marrying the father, a guy who never even appears in the journal?

As we draw closer to nineteen years since her passing, I am beyond grateful for this gift of my mother.

life advise

Words to live by, from men's tits enthusiast on tumblr. 

"Always dress extravagantly and wear platform shoes if you can. Be nice. ok thats it."

 

a handy dandy link to all bsp stories

Now, find all the busysmartypants story goodness in one place.

BSP stories

how often do you feel joy?

I'm continuing to read memoirs that stun and dazzle.

Charles M. Blow's Fire Shut Up in my Bones, about growing up Black and bisexual in the American South. He writes directly and powerfully about being abused by a family member, not minimizing the horror, finding the grace and truth within himself. His realization of his skills as a writer is also beautifully and humbly written. 

"These were things that I had to learn to fold tight so that no one could read them. Even now it seemed to me that the world was full of boys like Chester and men like Paul--the ones who looked at me and saw a chance, not a child."

"I had to resort to the most useful and dangerous lesson a damaged child ever learns--how to lie to himself."

"There is nowhere to hide in a small house. I had to make a room within rooms, a safe place midway in the mind, behind seeing and before knowing. There I could resurrect memories and bury secrets."

I'm also about finished with Erika Krouse's Tell Me Everything, which combines true crime, an amateur p.i, a dirty football program and a complicated mom-daughter-abuser triangle. This one hits so close to home that I can only read a chapter at a time. Krouse references psychiatrist Daniel Siegel who writes about making sense of one's past, and people who tell the same trauma story over and over. I'm going to read Siegel and see if it can bring some thoughtfulness to one of my support groups. 

Anyway, to the question: how often do you feel joy? For me, infrequently. But I'm hoping a weekend of music and friends and nature might bring me some.

how it all started

Thanks to the Seattle Public Library I finally was able to check out The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. It's a weighty topic, revisiting human history using indigenous texts and reexamining archaeological discoveries and questioning assumptions. How did I not realize that yes, there are contemporaneous texts from indigenous leaders who encountered the white Europeans descending on North America? Of course there are, and the indigenous Americans didn't think much of the Europeans' way of interacting with each other, the striving and cheating and stealing. The authors also noodle over ideas of equality and freedom and how those were expressed in various civilizations. They posit that humans a thousand years ago traveled more and farther than humans today. And so on.

Anyway, 300 pages in I realized the e-book was due back at SPL in a day. 

And I realized, it's an 1100 page book and there was no way to plow through 800 pages in a day.

So, I'm on the hunt for another copy via other libraries, back on the SPL waiting list and hoping to get back to reading soon. It's that good of a book. 

In the meantime, here are thoughts.

Pro: Atlantic

Con: Climate and Capitalism

more of what I'm reading

My copious reading continues.
First, Trevor Noah's 2016 memoir, Born a Crime. He's a talented writer, incisive and funny. I didn't know much about his childhood or the history of racial oppression in South Africa. He blends them well and I enjoyed everything but the sort of shoulder-shrug regarding the physical violence he endured from his parents. "Hidings," he calls it. Or as a former shrink said to me, "child abuse."

"Center, Center" by James Whiteside, was also engaging and also glossed over the painful bits. I'm not one for wallowing and I laughed aloud at some of the funniest bits. This talented ballet dancer is truly witty and self-deprecating in a mimosas at brunch kind of way. The story felt stretched out though. I wondered what else he might have to say.

I also tuned in the other night to Northwest African American Museum's "Conversation with the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution's Lonnie Bunch." NAAM's own Dr. Quintard Taylor interviewed Bunch about his work establishing the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture which is visited by more international DC tourists than any other institution. It was a reminder that Black history is American history, and that the world views the civil rights struggles here with a far keener eye than we Americans do. The US never had the reconciliation commissions that South Africa held. We're so far behind and falling ever farther, it seems. The interview is a must-watch, charming and inspirational.

just bounce, baby

Life since Thanksgiving has felt like being on a trampoline. Every plan changes. Every day something has to flex, adjust, be canceled or rescheduled. Every outing is a calculation of risk. Staying home is the safest thing covid-wise but the deadliest mental health-wise.

We pulled off Hannukah just before the variant swept through, keeping the guest list tight, staggering 2 people here, then 3 people an hour later. Windows were open and distance was kept and the post-fete negative covid test was a relief.
Our family’s grand plans for a holiday together began falling apart a week before Christmas. Snow loomed in the forecast, all up and down the highway corridor we’d be traveling. Omicron meant our destination was implementing new restrictions on gatherings and updating them daily. One person got sick, then another. We ended up celebrating as we did in 2020, at our separate homes and on Zoom.
It’s a bitter pill in a year when it seems like that’s all we’ve had to dine recently.
*
To keep my spirits up, I’m still reading and enjoying media.
Shang Chi was the feature film for Christmas Day. It’s wonderful! Funny and intricately planned and paced, from the way information is released to the knockout action scene on a San Francisco city bus. I need to watch again so I can enjoy the spectacle.


I just finished Casey Plett’s Little Fish, about a trans woman in Canada who finds out her Mennonite grandfather may have been gay or trans. The writing is raw and courageous. Plett mentions Torrey Peters in the afterword and I think this is a perfect companion piece to Detransition, Baby. Both books address pain head on and like massaging a bruise, make it hurt a little extra so that together we come to a greater understanding.

Another gem is Janet Mock’s Surpassing Certainty: What my Twenties Taught Me. This memoir by an acclaimed writer and executive producer for Pose is a window into a trans woman of color’s experience getting jobs, marrying, studying journalism and finding her place in the very white, very male world of publishing.

As we inch closer to 2022 I feel relief--bye bitch--and anxiety. I’m looking forward to writing and books and love and friends and good times and delicious cocktails. Don’t let me down 2022.

what's up with white women: the book

A friend of a friend recently co-wrote a book titled, What's Up with White Women? Unpacking Sexism and White Privilege in Pursuit of Racial Justice. I watched the Town Hall event where Karena Smith interviewed the authors, Ilsa Govan and Tilman Smith. It's a lively and incisive discussion. I felt uncomfortable for most of it, because I had to interrogate myself. 

I've been that Karen, enforcing "the rules" set up by some white guy somewhere.  

Two days I go I was re-watching an old season of "Top Chef" and during the Restaurant Wars episode, the white guy chef who works front of the house is lauded (and is declared the week's winner) for his charm, the way he interacts with diners, smiling and laughing and managing, while the Black woman chef is scolded and sneered at for the way she interacts with diners, smiling and laughing and managing. 

Huh. The franchise is trying to do better but it's taken too long and these old episodes are hard to watch.

Watch, read, ask, learn.

numb

I read J.P. Brammer's book recently, "Hola Papi! how to come out in a Walmart parking lot." He's an insightful and very funny columnist and writer.

Now on Substack he writes about numbness. I know this well. The sense that not feeling is far preferable to the alternative. To feeling sad or lonely or anxious. 

I made my peace (sort of) with feeling anxious. It's a part of life and will never 100% go away. There are things that make it briefly cease--a live music show, hilarity with friends, hanging out with pets--but like an old social media post, anxiety never ever truly goes away. It's always hovering quietly in the background, awaiting its chance to slip back in.

And so: numbness. Yes. The negative space of feelings.