Hello! Hope you all had a nice Christmas. Mine was very nice, I spent some time with family and got some brilliant presents, plus my niece had a great time.
Thankfully for this newsletter, I also had an excellent week of reading. I’m always careful to choose books that I’m very likely to enjoy over the Christmas break, because I want to switch off and have a nice time. I went with two old favourites — Jean Rhys and Lorrie Moore — and, as ever, they didn’t disappoint.
What I’ve been reading and what I think about it
My first read of the week was Rhys’ unfinished autobiography Smile Please (1979), which she was in the process of completing when she died. The first half is polished and probably comes very close to what would have been published if she had finished it, and the second half is made up of notes that she made, hashing out how she was going to write about the later part of her life.
First, the completed section — it was interesting to read, at length, about her childhood in the West Indies, a part of the world that most of her protagonists are connected to in some way (most obviously so in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)). My impression is that she had an unhappy start in life, with a mother who was closed off and resentful, and a father who she loved but was largely inaccessible due to his work as a doctor and low moods. Rhys describes retreating into books, but not in the sentimental eye roll-y way that a lot of people talk about childhood reading, which I am thankful for. (In fact, you never get the impression that she felt like writing was a ‘calling’ of some kind, and she spends very little time on this aspect of her life, including reading. This is not a ‘writer’s autobiography’ by any means, it’s an autobiography of a complex and unhappy woman who was also a writer).
Some of the writing about this part of her life is uncomfortable, and it would be naive to gloss over that. Although a lot of her opinions and viewpoints on race and the native people of the islands were probably advanced for the time (she thought it was wrong to segregate seating by race in church, for example, and was sent to a ‘mixed’ school), there are some moments where it becomes glaring obvious that this is writing by a woman born in the nineteenth-century in a colony. She is sympathetic to a lot of the native’ people’s complaints, but she largely sees them as a kind of decoration in her life, something outside of her reality. She speaks about a time in her childhood when she wanted to be Black, largely because she felt left out of things like Carnival and other traditional Black spaces. Post-colonial scholars would have (probably already have) a field day with this line of thinking that she confidently puts down on paper.
Rhys left her birthplace at the age of 17 and only returned once — I don’t get the impression that she saw her parents again, and she doesn’t seem particularly phased by this. The rest of her life was spent between London and Paris, the settings for almost all of her novels. It was good to see what her actual experiences were; her books all certainly all feel semi-autobiographical, but her characters differ from each other ever so slightly that it becomes hard to tell what her actual life was like. This part of her life, the time in Europe, appears in the section is that is unfinished, so there is still a little bit of mystery there. You can trace which events formed which novels, though, which is interesting. This is especially evident in how the love affair that she had shortly after arriving in London, which ended with her unceremoniously dumped but the recipient of a maintenance cheque every month via the man’s lawyer for years after, was rehashed for After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931). In Mackenzie, however, the protagonist is a slightly older woman, concerned about becoming stale and resented by men for her fading beauty. It’s interesting that she used this affair that she had when she was very young and looked at it from an older point of view, putting an older version of herself into it.
I’m aware I’ve said ‘interesting’ a million times thus far, but it is interesting to come across a text like this from a writer that you love. From the more note-heavy sections, you can see Rhys labouring over how to write certain things into the book, which is surprising because her style seems so effortless. I suppose it is this kind of soul-searching that enables her to write things like ennui, dissatisfaction and ambivalence so well.
The second book I read this week was an advanced copy of Lorrie Moore’s new novel I Am Homeless if this is not my Home (out June 2023). I feel like this was the right time to come across a novel like this. It is entirely bonkers, strange and beautiful, and extremely cathartic for someone who has lost someone they love to suicide. I can’t really say too much because the plot hangs on a precarious point (in a good way), but it clearly comes from a place of huge loss that Moore works through in her writing. Itis set in 2016, but it is interspersed with historical letters from after the American Civil War, which is a period I love reading about (hence an entire PhD chapter on it). I’m excited for it to be out in the world but, for maybe the first time ever, I’m glad that it has only been read by a few people for the moment. I feel like this book was a personal revelation, and I’d like to keep those feelings close and not have to discuss them at great length or join in larger conversations about it.
My fave books of 2022
As this will be the last newsletter of the year, I thought I’d do a roundup of my favourite books of the year. By my count I have read I’ve read 70 books, and as I’ve been pretty selective about what I pick up it’s difficult to keep the list concise. In no particular order:
Trust by Hernan Diaz (an insanely great writer, I can’t believe this didn’t make the Booker shortlist)
Nevada by Imogen Binnie (go out and read this book!!! A foundational trans experience novel that was reissued this year by Faber. I was lucky enough to see Binnie in conversation with Torrey Peters (ahhh) in Manchester this year, and they were both so intelligent, so chic, so brilliant,,,,,)
Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys (obv)
I am Homeless if this is not my Home by Lorrie Moore (a late addition)
Lazy City by Rachel Connolly (pre-order this book!!!)
Deep Down by Imogen West-Knights (pre-order this one too!!!)
White Noise by Don Delillo (I’ve scornfully thought myself above Delillo et al., for years because of an overhang from my days as a Bright Young Feminist and was abashed to find out I was extremely wrong)
Indelicacy by Amina Cain (a strange, haunting little book)
The Employees by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitkin (another strange, haunting little book)
Garments Against Women by Anne Boyer (prose poetry about shopping, making, working and so on and so forth)
A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood (was struck by how different this was to one of my fave ever novels Goodbye to Berlin, but loved it just as much)
Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Allison Markin Powell (extremely pleasant reading experience)
Voices in the Evening by Natalie Ginzburg, translated by D.M. Low (my first Ginzburg, somehow and most definitely not my last. I still think of some of the scenes in this.)
The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan (extremely well thought-out and well-argued essays on gender and sex, largely on university campuses)
Happening by Annie Ernaux, translated by Tanya Leslie (ah, this as Annie’s year! Soooo thrilled she won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Happening is one of most affecting books I’ve ever read.)
There’s no Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura, translated by Polly Barton (feels more like interconnected short stories, about the absurdity of work. So great!)
Happy New Year, here’s to another year of saying what we mean.