Four Books from 2021
I hate to be That English Teacher, but I’m gonna say it: what else is there, besides stories, to save us? I wrote about this a bit last year in my piece about Station Eleven, which is now being turned into an HBO series (that’ll be interesting….. will I watch it?!). Now don’t get me wrong, I know that science literally saved us these past two years, as it has for centuries now. I love you, science. I love you. But without stories, why even stay alive? I will probably write another post about this with regards to my new favorite musical Hadestown, a story about stories and their power. But for now I figured I’d offer up some of my favorite reads from this past year, since I haven’t really had time to write longer, more thoughtful reviews. These are just four wonderful books that kept me company this year. I could’ve also included On Freedom by Maggie Nelson, Autumn by Ali Smith, Detransition Baby by Torrey Peters, or You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat, each of which deeply touched me in their own way. I also could’ve done a short list of TV or movies or articles or podcasts. But I decided that it was inside these four works of fiction below that I found the most profound aesthetic experiences this year, and I hope you’ll find the same. These were each a balm for some part of my spirit that felt wounded, scared, or unhinged this year. In particular, the stories by and about black womanhood felt to me to be a striking antidote to the relatively inert language of diversity that has filled my work life the last few years. Rereading Toni Morrison’s Nobel Lecture this fall, I was reminded of her definition of “dead language”: that which stalls thought rather than encouraging it. What these authors did was crack me open, strum my strings, instruct me in the complexities and contradictions of people living in different skin than my own. These books reminded me that I’m alive, and that while I am, there’s a lot to wrap my head around.
So without further ado, here are Four Books from 2021.
The Second Place by Rachel Cusk. I’ve written about Rachel Cusk previously on this blog. I find her style so deeply absorbing. I borrowed her language, from Outline, of a “shared trance,” to describe the spell she puts on me when I read her work. She doesn’t ever seem to be writing about anything, but just like a fascinating person can be fascinating without having to be ‘fun,’ her writing is that sober, brilliant person at a party you want to sit next to all night. In this book, she’s back to themes she often explores: marriage, motherhood, womanhood, desire. Her protagonist, a past-middle-aged remarried mother of a young adult, lives in a beautiful, simple house in a very isolated location on a marsh. She and her husband have a kind of Airbnb situation with a cottage on their property -- the eponymous second place. The plot of the story unspools from her inviting a famous artist to come paint their marsh; she writes to him saying that his art has deeply moved her, has been the art that has most affected her in her life, and that she’d like to invite him to this hermitage to create work. I won’t say much more, aside from: expect the unexpected.
What Is Not Yours is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi. This collection of stories crawled inside of me this summer: its pieces are the strangest I’ve read in ages, perhaps since first discovering Garcia Marquez in high school. Reading this reminded me of visiting Meow Wolf in Santa Fe; I knew I was in a trippy place designed to confound and delight me, and my tendency to want to understand and solve the mystery of it eventually gave way to just pure aesthetic enjoyment of the bizarre and beautiful craftwork of Oyeyemi’s worlds. Weirdly, once I let go, the allegorical meanings of it all could wash over me. I recommend starting with the first story, “books and roses,” which feels like The Secret Garden grew up and went to a women’s college. And then I would say jump to the final story in the collection, the one I ended up teaching with my 11th graders this fall, “if a book is locked there’s probably a reason for that don’t you think.” Yes, that’s the title. It’s about a middling corporate workplace, rattled out of its routine by a new employee, Eva, who has both an alluringly self-possessed style and frustrating personal boundaries; a woman who carries around a locked diary, which she explains is partly in homage to Anne Frank -- she’s “shaken by a voice like that falling silent.” You could call these stories mysteries, or magical realism. But just like how Jordan Peele’s horror movies don’t have to really invent anything horrific to reveal the horrors of society, Oyeyemi’s stories have the thin veneer of the fantasy genre behind which are hidden plain messages about how women, and especially black women and other women-outsiders, navigate the world. These are stories of self-preservation, and they’re only mysterious if you know little of women’s lives. (This profile of Oyeyemi in Vulture is sure to delight and intrigue you, too.)
The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans. I read these stories almost a year ago, but I returned to one of them this summer when a friend and I were co-planning our short story unit. I never ended up using the story “Boys Are From Jupiter,” which begins when its protagonist, a white girl, posts a photo of herself in a confederate flag bikini, but I have a feeling it will find a place on my syllabus soon. Evans’ book is comprised of short stories and then a novella called “The Office of Historical Corrections.” Though “Office” is almost 100 pages long, I swallowed it whole. It was the first piece of dystopian literature I’d read that addressed the very real phenomenon of the neoliberalization of academia: in the world of the story, academia has been so decimated that the government creates a kind of “New Deal” to employ historians. Their job as public servants is to correct historical inaccuracies. There’s a kind of reverse Dolores Umbridge or 1984 vibe to it -- indeed, these are trained historians who do actually care about fact and truth (and our protagonist is a black woman for whom, we imagine, historical accuracy has personal significance). But they are also meant to make corrections in a particular, state-sponsored format, one that doesn’t exactly inspire critical thought. Evans is obviously responding to multiple phenomena in modern life: the gutting of Humanities programs and faculties across universities all over the world; the ‘fake news’-ification that Tr*mp’s regime proliferated; and then of course the reckoning with public history that the last two waves of Black Lives Matter brought back into focus -- the meaning of our monuments, the “official” narrative of the nation as displayed in public. Like Oyeyemi, Evans might be less interested in an allegory about institutional racism -- that’s all plain to us at this point. Rather, she wants us to understand the more insidious ways black women are made to do this labor of reckoning for us all, all the time, at the expense of their personal lives and relationships with other black women.
The Secret to Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel. Alison Bechdel is my spiritual godmother and I’m entirely biased in favor of everything she does. We know her best for her runaway hit memoir in comics, Fun Home, about her father who died by apparent suicide shortly after Alison came out as lesbian, and who in his death was revealed to be closeted himself. Aside from her early comic strips Dykes to Watch Out For, which were fictionalized vignettes about lesbians in the 80s and 90s, all of Bechdel’s work has focused closely on her own life. Superhuman Strength is the most systematic autobiography she’s created yet; she literally goes decade by decade through her life (she’s now 60) discussing her relationship with exercise. One can imagine obvious themes that come along with this topic (gender, body image, sensation, physicality), but Bechdel expands the field of intellectual connection (always) to include things like the history of the mind/body dichotomy in western thought; spirituality and transcendence through both natural and substance-induced highs; nature and the physical landscape; obsessiveness, compulsiveness, and mental health; and processing grief. This is a book I’ll likely reread in each decade of my life, since some of the insights she shares feel obscure to me at my present life stage. But I will say, her love song to exercise convinced me to get back into running for a bit, and eventually to return to my kickboxing classes. Endorphins may be the only thing that make sense in our otherwise fucked up world.
