Good evening!
The first newsletter of 2024! Thanks for all the kind words about my ‘favourites of the year’ edition, I enjoyed doing it and I’m glad everyone had fun with it and took it in good faith (doesn’t always happen). I’ve had a nice start to the year, quite low key but that’s fine. I’m ready to get back into things now though as I’ll have a busy year ahead (annoying and vague soz).
If you’d like to buy me a coffee, on Ko-Fi, you can do here 🙂
My twitter/X is @jessf_white and my Instagram is @lunchpoems.
What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
This week I read an advance copy of Lisa Ko’s Memory Piece, which is out with Dialogue books in March. I haven’t read Ko’s debut The Leavers but I’ll certainly be seeking it out after this. I picked this up because the premise sounded really intriguing. It’s about three childhood friends (Giselle, Jackie and Ellen) who meet in the ‘80s in the Chinese language school their parents send them to. They are drawn to one another because they all feel that they are slightly different to other people, both in their overwhelmingly white schools and in Asian-American spaces. It is in their futures that they work out how to channel their inner differences; Giselle as a performance artist, Jackie as a coder and early web developer, and Ellen as a community activist. Their lives centre around New York and New Jersey and they drift in and out of each other’s focus but remain constantly attached together by the early connection found in Chinese school.
The above is not what I thought was intriguing about it (although all of that is fine and good). One of its main focuses is on art, largely through Giselle’s performance art, and how thinking about ‘life’ through the lens of performance can both clarify and obscure a sense of meaning. Giselle leads the novel, forgoing college and a formal study of art to take on temp jobs and carry out increasingly more complex and outlandish performances, largely without an audience until she is ‘discovered’. What I loved about her section of the narrative is how focused on the art itself was, going over her influences, thoughts and feelings as she thrashed it out. I won’t say what the performances are, but they’re extremely fun to read about and I think Ko has a real gift with handling art and artists. The novel is peppered with art and photography that adds something to the narrative -- not just in a ‘this is the image this person was talking about’ way, but sometimes also as standalone pieces that forward the text on. It’s another ‘document text’, the kind that I love.
The novel is set in the past, present-ish and future, starting in the early ‘80s and going into the future. The future aspect was well-rendered, imagining a New York that has been overtaken by delivery services and convenience for the people who can afford it, sectioned off so that the wealthy and the poor service workers barely come into contact with one another, unless they are receiving/doing a delivery. It felt so vivid that on a couple of occasions when I was thinking about New York for unrelated reasons, I had a vague sense of unease. (The header photo was taken from this 2020 NYT article on how delivery drivers are largely living below the poverty line, so her vision might not be far off).
Another aspect that I loved about Memory Piece was how it represented the days of the early internet in the late ‘90s/early ‘00s. It really captured the sense that we were on the brink of something, while also having more access and more possibilities open up to us everyday. Jackie is a coder trying to get her social media platform off the ground, which is increasing in popularity at an astonishing level but lacking the funding to completely establish it. There are a lot of directions Ko could have gone with for Jackie, but she chose an interesting route that is fun and unexpected.
I feel like I keep saying this about a lot of 2024 releases, but this is a really fresh novel that is beautifully done. I do feel that publishing is taking slightly more risks with narrative this year, putting out books that very much stand on their own in terms of plot, setting and form. This feels like a welcome break from the concentration on inner narrative-led fiction that favours emotion (these books are emotional, but the emotion is tied up to different kinds of prose and is usually part of something larger). I would pair this with Ka Bradley’s The Ministry of Time in how it treats time itself, as well as how it isn’t afraid of experimenting with form, using it to question how value is attributed to individual and collective lives.
Last night I started Paula Byrne’s Blonde Venus (2020), a book that was brought to my attention by Sara, who has been assigned chief ‘discoverer of books about old Hollywood’ person in my life (she is the one who introduced me to my beloved Gavin Lambert). It’s set on Marlene Dietrich’s life and told from the perspective of her daughter. So far it’s rich in detail but the style isn’t my usual thing, but I’m finding it useful for my own writing.
More next week!
Books on my radar
As I’m firmly back in my old Hollywood bag I made myself up a little pile of books I’d like to get to soon: Judy Garland by Anne Edwards (1975); Natalie Wood: A Life by Gavin Lambert (2004); Mr Wilder and Me by Jonathan Coe (2020) (another one recommended by Sara); Running Time by Gavin Lambert (1982) (sent to me by Sara).
Be sure to get around to Jonathan Coe's "Mr Wilder and Me"- so enjoyable, moving and thought provoking.