To the Friends Who Make Us Real: A Summer Reading List
“When I was a child, luxury for me was fur coats, long dresses, villas next to the sea. Later, I believed it was living an intellectual life. Now, it’s also the ability to experience passion for another person.” - Annie Ernaux
I suppose this blog has always been about books that seemed to pick me –– books whose trajectories crossed mine and forever changed me. Almost always, those books arrived in my hands via a friend. Maybe it’s something about working as a literature teacher, whose job it is to tell other people what to read; there’s a luxuriousness to a syllabus that falls from the sky and treats you right.
Like when a teacher of mine this summer assigned Khadijah Queen’s “Peregrination: Graffiti” –– about the poet’s travels through France in 2019 –– the selfsame week of my travels in the same places named in Queen’s essay, places covered in graffiti, sometimes allowed to be called street art by the powers-that-be.
“The fact that there’s so much graffiti in France is all the more interesting because it occurs in Nîmes but not in the wine country, land of vines and white cows au pasture. Perhaps family, purpose occupy the energy it takes to climb atop roofs and take night climbs to spider one’s alias as artwork on shadowed underpasses, and on the unsuspecting walls of labyrinthine buildings, occupied and not.”
Sometimes I become incapable of spitting out a coincidence with my daily toothpaste. It’s not that I can see any predestiny; it’s that I feel my fate in the way literature, and its wisdom, arrives at my door. It’s that the “night climbs to spider one’s alias as artwork…on the unsuspecting walls” involve taking matters into your own hands. Making, and witnessing, art, as a luxurious way to feel your fate, and someone else’s.
And by the way –– I’m borrowing Ernaux’s transformed meaning of luxury, which I believe can coexist with Audre Lorde’s definition of luxury, her oft-quoted words from 1985’s “Poetry is not a Luxury”:
“For women… poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.”
If luxury means that which is deemed unnecessary and dispensable, or that which is gatekept for a chosen élite, then no, poetry is not a luxury. But contained in that disavowal is a reimagining of luxury: the “quality of light,” the luxurious feeling of being inside a work of art, yours or someone else’s. Is that luxury not our shared human destiny?
~
The following list of books found me, picked me, and brought me into a luxurious space where art makes fate. Each is somehow a story of a writer who must choose their fate as artist –– and even so, must live that fate as time spent in another dimension.
A still from Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Note the tags on the buildings.
It’s a fate that hangs, against all physics, like a spider-person from a rooftop: do you accept the beckoning dare? In each of these stories, creatives must carve out a third space –– an apartment on Uranus, Paul B. Preciado calls it –– in which to suspend, ignore, refuse, the politics and interpersonal judgments that can accompany the choice to use your one life to make art. A space to live the furtive industriousness and obsessive absorption required to pull it off.
Often that safety, that elsewhere, can be found inside a friendship. A friend can offer refuge for your imagination, a part of the spirit always under siege by consumerism and the protestant work ethic and nationalisms. (All the accusations of my entire life: selfish, liar, greedy, space cadet… these are all necessary for art.) (And then there’s the elitism: you aren’t a chosen one. You either know you’re truly special because the ivyleague chose you, or, sorry, you’re a sad piece of toast, go on, Contribute To Society and otherwise shut up.) (Friendship of this kind must offer refuge from these violent voices of despair.)
It seems complicated that many of the characters I list here, burgeoning artists, are figured as young people. Why do we often periodize these kinds of fateful choices as juvenile? I felt reassured by the fact that, of course, adult authors wrote these tales; adults used their adult time to make this art. Annie Ernaux is the only one of these authors who describes a period of life that is not adolescent. She’s writing about passion, obsession, lived as an adult.
“We’d created meaning where there was none, but, I don’t know, isn’t that art?” Kevin Wilson’s Frankie narrates. “Or at least I think it’s the kind of art I like, where the obsession of one person envelops other people, transforms them.”
After a long spring of reading and thinking about the literature of wannabes and boarding school, spaces of thwarted personal desire, this summer drew me to books about giving in to desire, to passion, to obsession. Letting it all run its salutary course.
So here’s to the friendships I read and lived inside of during summer 2023 — artistic companionships awash in passion, each making me feel more real.
Agnès and Fabienne: Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose (2022). When Agnès is sent to boarding school in England, wrenched away from her best friend Fabienne, the two fourteen-year-olds decide on a game: Agnès will write both to Fabienne and to “Jacques,” an imaginary brother of Fabienne’s, an imaginary boyfriend for Agnès. Fabienne writes in two distinct voices, two distinct handwritings; Jacques becomes a third space in which for the girls to express their love for one another, to dream and romanticize inside a life –– in post-WWII Europe –– that otherwise leaves no space for girls to imagine outside of the patriarchy.
“In my letters to Fabienne I described everything in my new life without saying much about myself: the buildings and the streets in Paris and London were other people’s; the furniture and curtains and the rug in my room belonged to Woodsway; the new clothes in my wardrobe were like arrogant strangers, looking down upon me from their hangers. In my letters to Jacques I was chattier and less worried about being called an idiot: I tried on the soft slippers I was supposed to wear only in my room; I drank tea from gold-rimmed cups, the handles looking so dainty that I sometimes imagined taking a bite of them; the sweet-scented soap, a half-opaque oval, golden as honey, had left my face and hands soft and fragrant, unlike the dung-colored, hard-edged soap bars we used at home, which made our skin burn. Jacques was better than any boy I had known: he had all the qualities of Fabienne, and he loved me more than Fabienne did.”
Tamos and Nina: Tamos le Thermos, Genderflou (2023). Tamos is not a girl and not a boy –– in fact, they’d rather just be an escargot –– but despite the vicissitudes of naming, claiming, and living their nonbinary selfhood in a society that still resists understanding “les iels” (iel is a gender-neutral pronoun in french), nevertheless, with their best friend Nina, Tamos always finds the freedom to be flou: blurry, fluid, and unsure. Nina is there to help pick out the right shoes; to celebrate the arrival of a new binder; to ground Tamos after periods of dysphoria; to have long meandering conversations, winding through the canals of Amsterdam, talking through the meaning of gender and of life. Nina co-authors Tamos’s story with them; in some ways, as a trusted and beloved friend, Nina makes possible Tamos’s self-awareness, and by extension, their art: this memoir.
From Genderflou: Tamos: Aww my babies, aren’t you beautiful? Aren’t they amazing? Nina: It’s funny, either you have crushes on guys or on pairs of shoes.
Frankie and Zeke: Kevin Wilson, Now is Not the Time to Panic (2022). Coalfield is a “dinky little town” in the South; Zeke is from the big city, visiting his grandmother for the summer. “But I was sixteen,” Frankie narrates. “I lived inside of myself way more than I lived inside of this town.” Frankie sees what is different about Zeke, and sees that it is perhaps what is different about her, too. “We were sixteen. How did you prevent your life from turning into something so boring that no one wanted to know about it?” Apparently, you do so by making art. Frankie and Zeke don’t imagine they’ll create something so powerful that it will turn Coalfield upside down… and then some. Is it that the art was their fate, or the friendship? Or was it that the friendship and the art were one and the same, chicken and egg?
“I don’t know if that’s love, to need the sensations produced by the body more than the body itself. Not the kiss, but the taste of celery that came after. Not his hands, but the sound of his hands making art. Not the fact that he was here for only this summer, but the fact that I might find reminders of him in surprising places for the rest of my life.”
Paul and Virginie: Paul B. Preciado, An Apartment on Uranus (2019, French; 2022, English). “I am a dissident of the sex-gender system,” writes Preciado. This collection of essays, all originally columns published in the French leftist newspaper Libération between roughly 2013 and 2018, is the third space: it is the sacred truth-telling space of a dissident. Virginie Despentes, French feminist author and close friend of Paul’s, writes the preface:
“You call this book An Apartment on Uranus and you have no apartment on Earth, just the keys to a place in Paris, as you’ve had the keys for two years to an apartment in Athens. You don’t settle down. It doesn’t interest you, to be fixed in place. You want the status of a permanent illegal immigrant. You change your name on your identity papers and as soon as your name is Paul to cross borders, you write in Libé that you have no intention of adopting masculinity as your new gender –– you want a utopian gender.”
And Preciado’s introduction is a kind of response, directed both at the recognition Virginie offers, and at an inscrutable and global public readership.
“Uranians are not, [the 19th century German lawyer Karl Heinrich] Ulrichs writes, sick or criminal, but feminine souls enclosed in masculine bodies attracted to masculine souls. This is not a bad idea to legitimize a form of love that, at the time, could get you hanged in England or in Prussia, and that, today, remains illegal in seventy-four countries…a form of love that constitutes a common motive for violence in family, society, and police in most Western democracies.”
And then: “But what does it mean to speak for those who have been refused access to reason and knowledge, for us who have been regarded as mentally ill? With what voice can we speak? Can the jaguar or the cyborg lend us their voices?”
(Another moment of fate: I’ve been making strange jaguar comics for the last four or five months, using a roll of gorgeous wrapping paper printed with a jaguar in various stoic yet evocative postures and expressions. I read this line of Preciado’s and felt terrified, like a god had slipped through the locked front door.)
(Jaguar, leopard… the difference between the two is a subtle and practically fictional one –– they’re both panthers, as my friend recently informed me –– but one way to distinguish them is that jaguars, who live in the Americas, like to swim, while leopards, mostly African, like to climb.)
Annie and… Annie: Annie Ernaux, Passion Simple (1991). I guess what I loved about this book is also what makes it different from the rest of these stories, where friendship is the enabler of third-space existence; Ernaux, it seems, makes her own space. She lives, and then she writes. The book is rigorous about detailing the ways in which her passion for her obliquely untethered lover, A, manifests in her daily existence. A is a foreigner with whom she makes love for a couple hours in the afternoons, during a period in her late 30s. She’s already a successful writer, already a mother, an ex-wife. She observes, without judgment, a kind of possession that overtakes her; it seems her entire life has reorganized itself around the principle of this passion, a law of physics that imposes itself so long as A is in her life. « Je ne veux pas expliquer ma passion — cela reviendrait à la considérer comme une erreur ou un désordre dont il faut se justifier — mais simplement l’exposer » she writes: I don’t want to explain my passion — that would make it seem like an error or disorder in need of justification — but simply expose it.
She returns to this relationship between writing and living later on:
« Je ne ressens naturellement aucune honte à noter ces choses… »
I don’t feel any shame writing about these things, because of the delay that separates the moment they’re being written — where I’m the only one seeing them — from the moment when they’ll be read by people, which I imagine will never happen. Between now and then, I could have an accident, die, there could be a war or a revolution. It’s because of this delay that I can even write at all, sort of how at sixteen I exposed myself to the burning sun for entire days, or at twenty had sex without contraception: without thinking about what comes next.
Each book treats the act of writing this way: as utterly private, as primal, not explanatory or performative but as a force unto itself. They invite each of us to find our third space, our ‘simple passion,’ as simple and even as childlike or adolescent as we can allow. We grow older; we don’t expose our skin to the burning sun anymore, not without lotion or a hat. But in our apartments on Uranus, perhaps we find space, space for the answers we thought we knew to once again become flou.
~
