Good evening!
I went to see Harry Styles this week (I cannot be chic and extremely cool in every aspect of my life, let me have this one) -- and was frankly delighted when he opened the show with a big ‘Good Evening!’. It’s a really stupid bit I do where I say it whatever time of day it is and I often forget that it is a normal way of greeting people.
If you’d like to buy me a coffee, on Ko-Fi, you can do here 🙂
What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
I finished Dorothy Tse’s Owlish, translated by Natascha Bruce (2023). I was scheduled in for an event with Tse at Blackwell’s later in the month but this will unfortunately need to be rescheduled, so I’ll let you know about that when I have more info. This is a really fantastic novel that really comes together when you allow yourself to go along for the ride. I wrote about the premise last week but just to go over it again, it’s about an alternate Hong Kong called Nevers, in which a Professor called Q goes through a strange episode and ends up with a lifesize doll. In the background, riots, protests and student strikes rage on, which are based on the real political disruption in Hong Kong.
There is a deliberate fairytale element to Owlish, connoting a shadowy element to what is at the forefront of Nevers. Tse’s implication is that the urban front of the city is hiding the unrest of its people, who exist in a limbo that has been created by a number of forces that work against them. One of these forces is colonialism, another is urban expansion, another is governance, another is university management. All of these elements work together to impact the individual resident’s body, so that they constantly feel displaced.
A thought I had for around ¾ of the book was, why dolls? Why would this professor (who may be at the centre of the book but who is as impenetrable as the city itself) collect and be fascinated with them? I am not one to disregard a novel because I don’t ‘get’ character intention -- this is actually something that encourages me on. In the case of Owlish, its ending (and Tse’s afterword) really draws the central themes together, and you understand why the image of dolls as well as a sense of the magical is the way that the writer chooses to present the version of Hong Kong that she conjures up. I very much recommend it.
After Owlish, I picked up Jennette McCurdy’s I’m Glad my Mom Died (2022). This was a book that I was lightly interested in when it was released, because a lot of people had a lot of positive things to say about it. It’s always interesting when a celebrity autobiography or memoir takes off, because it says a lot about our curiosity towards famous people, I think. However, like Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart (2021), much of the positive reception focused on how well the book was written, rather than it being particularly ‘juicy’.I only really picked it up because it was in my nail technician’s book swap, but I’m actually soooo glad that I did because everyone is right, it is excellently written.
I feel like it doesn’t really need an introduction at this point, but just to quickly go over it: I’m Glad my Mom Died is a memoir by the Disney channel actor Jennette McCurdy, who got her big break in the series iCarly with Miranda Cosgrove and then its spin-off Sam & Cat with Ariana Grande. Much of the book is taken up with McCurdy’s relationship with her mother, who pushed her into being a child actress. I think a lot of the initial interest was because of its title, which only goes some way in showing how difficult things were between the actress and her mother. You don’t need to be too far into the memoir to realise that she was a deeply troubled woman who took out many of her issues on her children, mostly by emotional manipulation. As an example, she didn’t allow her children to shower by themselves because it made her feel like they were growing up, and she wanted them to be small children that she took care of forever -- in this case by washing them until they were 18 or thereabouts. She was also an extreme hoarder, and so she, her husband, her parents and all of her children didn’t have proper beds because they were so taken up with stuff that she would scream at them if they moved it. This is kind of just the tip of the iceberg -- there’s a lot in I’m Glad my Mom Died that show how the mistreatment of child actors is encouraged and upheld by the child’s parents, but in this particular case it shows how damaging it can be for an unstable woman to be in that position. McCurdy also struggles/d with OCD and eating disorders, and her depiction of both is really well rendered.
McCurdy has since been contracted to write a novel, and I can see why. This actually reads a lot like a novel because of its frequent use of the present tense and its general tone, so I’m actually really interested to see how she leans into the fiction form.
What has always struck me about this book is its cover. It sounds vapid, but I don’t think that cover design is immune to criticism or praise. Books are, after all, a product, and if a product doesn’t look appealing or do something exciting it does do a disservice to the writing. I also think that design artists are a largely unrecognised sector in publishing, despite having such a strong hand in it. (As a negative example, I’ve really hated both the hardback and paper covers for Hernan Diaz’sTrust, which had a really exciting and promising proof version.)
I’m Glad my Mom Died not only has a visually appealing cover, but it does something really clever with one of the themes of the text. To look at the book, it feels like a ‘90s young reader paperback, like the original covers of The Babysitter’s Club (which I believe have some of the best book covers, ever). McCurdy is appealing to the audience who grew up with her by doing this, those who watched Nickelodeon in its prime (as well as Nick+, the Disney Channel and Cartoon Network). These types of book covers were everywhere in children’s and young adult fic, and so it’s like she’s saying, hey I was a part of that! This book is about that era! But my mum wasn’t nice to me and also everything was bad!
I read some really good articles this week: this profile of Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o at age 85 by Carey Baraka, whose novel The River Between I love; this review of Lorrie Moore’s latest novel I am Homeless if this is Not my Home by Parul Sehgal, who captures the complexities of the book as well as Moore’s writing overall, and this opinion piece by Joseph Earp on what Jane Austen teaches us about male loneliness.
Books on my radar
Sad news about Cormac McCarthy’s death, a writer I have quite embarrassingly not read but know that I need to. So what’s on my radar is all of his books.