Author: Siel

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August book reviews: Mothers, lovers, and our multiple selves

Brief reviews of books by contemporary authors I read this month — along with photos of what I ate while reading. The list is ordered by the level of my enjoyment:

Person/a by Elizabeth Ellen (Short Flight/Long Drive Books, 2017)

“I click on the link as a way of saying hi. I click on the link as a way of saying I hate you and I love you and I wish we’d never met and I wish you were dead and I am sick and I wish I didn’t love you.”
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It’s a strange and thrilling experience, reading as a finished book what you once read in rough manuscript form. Last summer, I read a draft of Elizabeth Ellen’s novel-in-progress while at a residency at The Anderson Center. At that time, the manuscript — a highly autobiographical work about a short-lived affair that turns into a years-long obsession — was less than 300 pages long. I devoured the whole thing in a night and sent her some comments. Full review here —

Mothers and Other Strangers by Gina Sorell (Prospect Park Books, 2017)

“My father proposed to my mother at gunpoint when she was nineteen, and knowing that she was already pregnant with a dead man’s child, she accepted.”
*
How can you read that first sentence and not read on? This tiny tidbit of Gina Sorell’s debut novel Mothers and Other Strangers gripped me when I first read it nine months ago and kept me in anticipation until the book finally came out in May — after which I devoured it in two days! Full review here —

So Many Olympic Exertions by Anelise Chen (Kaya Press, 2017)

“Eating, writing, sleeping, swimming. My vocation has all the features of vacation for most people.”
*
Anyone who mostly drives herself through goal-setting — and relatedly, struggles to enjoy downtime even as she procrastinates — will be able to relate to the hilarious but depressed protagonist Athena’s challenges. Read my full review at Los Angeles Review of Books’s BLARB.

South and West by Joan Didion (Knopf, 2017)

“I had only some dim and unformed sense … that for some years the South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for America what people were still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be: the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center.”
*
Which contemporary authors are overrated? I got into a conversation about this with a couple other writers at a recent Pen Center USA event. Joan Didion’s name came up — and though I haven’t read enough of her oeuvre to come down on a side on this question, I do very much feel the heft of her reputation weigh on me whenever I pick up one of her books. Full review here —

The Sky Isn’t Blue by Janice Lee (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016)

“If there ever was a city in which every inhabitant could tailor their existence and experience of that city completely, it is LA. Your LA is very different from my LA. My LA from a few years ago is different from my LA today.”
*
This poetic, evocative work by Korean-American writer Janice Lee will make you nostalgic for the Los Angeles you’re in now, the Los Angeles you want the city to be, and the Los Angeles that never was.

Drenched by Marisa Matarazzo (Soft Skull, 2010)

“In my dream I know that he remembers me, but forever we do not talk.”
*
Marisa Matarazzo’s short stories are dreamy and surreal — linked tales about young love tinged with fantastical elements: a boy with hot teeth of quarts, a girl with ashtrays for breasts. Drenched recalled for me Aimee Bender’s work quite a bit.

Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America by Tom Lutz (FSG, 2006)

“My sense of my own laziness may simply be the perverse guilt engendered by a work ethic that digs its dominatrix heel into my back and rarely lets me up.”
*
So my own sense of aimlessness earlier this summer convinced me to pick up Tom Lutz’s book — and I could totally relate to Tom’s description of feeling simultaneously lazy and productive! The personal parts of this book about Tom’s own life engaged me the most, though this is primarily a historical survey through the times of attitudes about work, productivity, laziness, and the meaning of a life well lived —

The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende (Atria, 2016)

“I was unable to give up my security, and so I was trapped in convention.”
*
I picked this book up for the West Hollywood Women’s Book Club and tried to like it — but just didn’t. This tale of a secret relationship between a rich Jewish woman and a poor Japanese gardener was marred by flat stereotyped characters, history dumping, and underdeveloped / implausible plot details. All of this did make for a lively book club discussion though! I’ve heard other books by Allende are better — Anyone have one to recommend?

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The Many fictions of Elizabeth Ellen’s Person/a

It’s a strange and thrilling experience, reading as a finished book what you once read in rough manuscript form. Last summer, I read a draft of Elizabeth Ellen’s novel-in-progress while at a residency at The Anderson Center. At that time, the manuscript — a highly autobiographical work about a short-lived affair that turns into a years-long obsession — was less than 300 pages long. I devoured the whole thing in a night and sent her some comments.

This summer, I finally read the completed novel, Person/a — a 600+ page tome published in February by Elizabeth’s own press, Short Flight/Long Drive Books. And reading the book this time, I was so conscious of the act of reading that I’m not sure I ever gave myself over to the experience of the book itself.

They say, after all, you can never read the same book twice — since you are inevitably a different person by the time of the rereading. This is doubly true if the book too has changed — significantly. I couldn’t help but be hyperaware of what Elizabeth chose to keep or change, judging the merits of her decisions, evaluating her choices. Add to this the fact that Person/a is an extremely self-conscious text — one that explicitly grapples with issues of autobiography, authorship, truth-telling, and fictionalizing — and the act of reading began to feel like a surreal, multilayered experience with no solid center —

I mean, the book begins, first of all, with rejection letters from agents to whom Elizabeth submitted the Person/a manuscript (“The inventiveness of the prose, which you have in spades, needs to be hinged on something, even if the form is played with”). Then comes an eviscerating email from Elizabeth’s own mother (“My personal opinion though is that it was so self-absorbed and so self-serving that frankly it was boring…. I feel sorry that at 40 you seem to be stuck.”) — the sort of cruel note that makes me glad I’m estranged from my own mother.

Then the novel proper begins. On the surface, the plot is fairly simple. The character Elizabeth, who like the real life Elizabeth is 40-ish with a teenage child, has a brief fling with a 20-something guy called Ian, whose real life identity, if you can call it that, can be figured out fairly easily since he too is a writer with a public profile. And on the surface, the fling seems inconsequential, since the two really see each other in person only a few times and never have sex.

Yet somehow Elizabeth the character becomes obsessed with Ian, stalking him online, sending him nude photos, and even driving hours to his town unannounced in an effort to see him — all while Ian keeps pushing her away, first by refusing to talk on the phone, then rarely returning her texts, keeping his address a secret and outright refusing to see her. This sends Elizabeth into a years-long spiral in which she nurses a highly romanticized form of anguish: “I was constantly torn then between feelings of extreme melancholia and feelings of heightened eroticism. I cried and masturbated and drank with increased frequency.”

Person/a recalls, in many ways, Lydia Davis’s The End of The Story — one of my favorite novels of all time — which is also about obsession and memory and the aftermath of a relationship. Lydia’s female protagonist also debases herself in many ways in her efforts to try to get her lover back. Elizabeth makes the influence explicit, often quoting Lydia’s books and even including an email exchange between the two of them.

But Elizabeth’s novel is also at once more explicitly autobiographical and more explicitly about the fictionalizing process. The book is divided into volumes, but there are three Volume Is, each dissecting the relationship from slightly different perspectives. In the first Volume I, for example, Ian is an unnamed writer, Elizabeth has a daughter, and the relationship between the two begins its denouement when Elizabeth takes a trip to Jamaica. In the second Volume I, Ian has become a musician, Elizabeth’s daughter a son, and the trip is to Mexico. Later the novel melds the perspectives: “Ian was a writer a musician.” And Elizabeth the character muses often about the fictionalizing choices she’s made:

I realize now I seem to have left out the majority of ways in which he contacted me or said things to me each time I tried to stop talking to him so that I have presented myself as the woman in the movie who has an unfounded obsession when in reality it was more a mutual obsession, a mutual inability to cease communication.

The result is, at its best moments, riveting — at its weakest, highly repetitive. There’s the endless dissection of why Ian might have distanced himself — to what extent it might have to do with her age, her money, her motherhood or a whole host of other factors. Often, I wanted to shake the protagonist and say, “Let it go! He’s just not that into you!”

Yet so much of the book fascinates. Person/a is especially telling about the strange, distanced ways we communicate with each other in the internet age. In one scene, Elizabeth the character — now married to another man — realizes that Ian can see by looking at his web stats how often she visits his website, and through what path. So she decides to send him a message:

I search “Ian Kaye ily” and “Ian Kaye faggit” and “Ian Kaye murder you” and click on the link to his blog when it appears. I click on the link as a way of saying hi. I click on the link as a way of saying I hate you and I love you and I wish we’d never met and I wish you were dead and I am sick and I wish I didn’t love you. Every time I click on the link to his blog now I am saying each of these things. And I am still holding true to my marital vow not to talk to Ian.”

After I finished reading Person/a, I felt that intense mix of sadness and pleasure and longing that I get whenever I come to the end of a book I love. And I simultaneously wondered if the book might have been better had Elizabeth the writer persisted in her agent search, and through him or her, landed a firm editor to invest in and refine the work, like Malcolm Cowley did for Kerouac’s On the Road.

Yet would that have killed the raw beauty of this book?

I can’t wait to read what Elizabeth writes next.

Earlier: Five Firsts: Elizabeth Ellen on writing from life, creative freedom, and other gray areas

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American Tea Room: Best matcha spot for writers

There’s nothing quite like lounging by a lush green living wall to make the hot muggy weather seem alright. The summer swelter feels just a part of a tropical paradise, where you’re on vacation to soak it all in.

That’s the feeling I get from American Tea Room, whose downtown arts district patio boasts a 25-foot living wallscape. It’s a great place to sip iced tea and spend a few hours working on a novel — equipped with free wifi and fire pits wired for USB charging.

I liked it outside, but the heat-averse can opt for the spacious, air-conditioned tea lounge — right next to the 30-foot bar crafted from reclaimed wood. The popular summer drink here seems to be the cold Green Tea Tereré, a pretty layered drink with OJ and lime at the bottom, sweet matcha green tea on top, served with a slice of blood orange.

Being a creature of habit though, I opted for a matcha soy latte: rich, slightly sweetened, and energizing — but, alas, with no latte art. There’s ceremonial matcha too for purists, Himalayan butter tea for the adventurous, and regular espresso drinks for the diehard coffee drinkers. If you get hungry, pastries, chocolates, and a small selection energy bars will tide you over.

This is a spot I’d go to all the time, if only it were closer to me! I’ll have to drop by the less distant Beverly Hills shop, though it looks a bit smaller; American Tea Room also has a third spot in Newport Beach.

Since I’m mostly a coffee and juice person, this tea shop was really a new discovery for me. Are there other tea places great for getting writing done? Let me know in the comments —

American Tea Room. Downtown Arts District: 909 S Santa Fe Ave. Beverly Hills: 401 N. Canon Dr. Newport Beach: 549 Newport Center Dr.

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The terrible secret of Joan Didion’s South and West

Which contemporary authors are overrated? I got into a conversation about this with a couple other writers at a recent Pen Center USA event. Joan Didion’s name came up — and though I haven’t read enough of her oeuvre to come down on a side on this question, I do very much feel the heft of her reputation weigh on me whenever I pick up one of her books.

Meaning: When I read a book by Joan Didion, I find I’m less interested in diving into the subject matter of the book than into the thoughts and impressions of Joan Didion on said subject. I care less about what IS important and interesting — than what Joan found important and interesting.

Of course, the two can’t really be separated. This is especially true when it comes to a book like South and West: From a Notebook, described on the book jacket as “two excerpts from one of her never-before-seen notebooks” — a phrase that promises a peek at Joan’s heretofore private thoughts more than anything else. Composed of edited notes from two occasions — Joan’s month-long trip to the Gulf South in 1970 and her efforts to cover the Patty Hearst trial of 1976 in San Francisco — the slim volume purports to be less a fully-formed book than a behind-the-scenes look at Joan’s writing process.

That’s not to say we don’t learn about the South or the West of the 70s. Joan’s description of the South is especially thick, palpable: The dirty mattresses and empty lots, the sullen girl at the gas-station cafe, the slow heat and sluggish time, the ubiquitous graveyards. The overall mood of that section is one of ominous boredom. And throughout, the prose is punctuated by keen observations of race, class, and gender: “To be a white middle-class child in a small southern town must be on certain levels the most golden way for a child to live in the United States.”

One gets the clear, intimate sense of living in a place and just how much doing so can shape the trajectory of a life. Reading South and West made me curious to visit the Gulf South — to see how much it is today as Joan described then — and also eminently grateful not to have grown up there, with its stagnant traditions and possibilities. “It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken,” Joan writes. “Would I have taken up causes, or would I have simply knifed somebody?” The brief California section, in contrast, mostly explores Joan’s keen sense of her own privilege growing up well-to-do in Sacramento, in a house with beloved gold silk organza curtains from 1907.

But the aspects of South and West that really grabbed me were the parts that, in subtle ways, struggle with what it means to write, to be a writer. The fact that Joan went to the South without a clear sense of topic in mind, simply to explore the possibility that she might find something to write about the place, is in itself intriguing:

“I had only some dim and unformed sense, a sense which struck me now and then, and which I could not explain coherently, that for some years the South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for America what people were still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be: the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center.”

This sense she goes in with is never fully explored, certainly not enough so to hint at a sort of thesis. After all, Joan never completed this essay — just published her notes forty years after the fact. Interesting as they are, I doubt Knopf would have published these notes were Joan Didion not already Joan Didion.

Which is to say: Reading Joan’s not-quite-organized thoughts brought up a lot of writerly questions for me. What must writing accomplish to be called complete, to be worth publishing, to be worth reading? There’s a sudden, telling page in South and West where Joan seems to grapple with this: “At the center of this story there is a terrible secret, a kernel of cyanide, and the secret is that the story doesn’t matter, doesn’t make any difference, doesn’t figure.”

It’s unclear which story Joan’s referring to here — the story of Patty Hearst she was ostensibly covering, or her own story of growing up in California that occupied her thoughts. Perhaps she meant both. The passage goes on to describe things about the world that go on regardless of us (“The snow still falls in the Sierra. The Pacific still trembles in its bowl.”), yet the secret remains. None of the stories figure.

“I never wrote the piece.” That’s the short sentence with which Joan ends her notes on the South. Yet, she did write the piece. I just read the whole of it, in book form. It felt incomplete, and unmoored me. And it made me think.

Elsewhere on the web: Belletrist exclusive interview: A discussion on South and West with Emma Roberts and Joan Didion

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Five firsts: Gina Sorell on switching careers, swapping agents, and making money

Every month, I interview an author I admire on her literary firsts.

Gina Sorell’s made a lot of bold choices in her life, switching creative careers, swapping literary agents, and shaking up her life to move across  countries and continents.

Her debut novel, Mothers and Other Strangers, is equally bold. Part psychological thriller, part coming-of-age story, and part redemption narrative, the story follows Elsie, a thirty-something woman in Los Angeles who learns her estranged mother — a beautiful, self-absorbed, and secretive parent — has died. So Elsie goes on a journey to discover the true story of her mother — a story that takes her all over the world, from Los Angeles to Toronto to Paris to Cape Town. (full review here)

So I was happy to get a chance to ask Gina for tips and advice on making bold choices, writerly and otherwise!

In this interview, Gina talks about who inspired her writing, why it’s important to have a job, and what caffeine-filled snack got her through her writing days in L.A.

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Siel: I really admired the ambitious scope of Mothers and Other Strangers. The novel takes us to four wildly different cities on three continents, straddles several different literary genres, and tackles heavy themes ranging from creative ambition to apartheid to mental breakdowns. All this made me curious about the books you yourself love. What novels would you say served as inspiration for your own?

Gina: First of all thank you. And thank you for having me here! That’s a great question. I think I was more inspired by the writing styles of other writers, rather than a particular work.

For example, I love how Caroline Leavitt (Cruel Beautiful World) is able to take her readers on a whirlwind ride, vividly creating the world that her complicated characters inhabit. I’m always swept away in her novels. Robert Eversz (Killing Paparazzi) expertly pushes his stories and plot forward with a ticking clock that keeps the reader turning the pages. I do love a big bold family Saga, and adored Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible.

At the time I was writing, I don’t think I was really aware that my own novel was ambitious! It was just the story I needed to tell and the only way I could tell it.

From an essay in The Millions, I learned you were compelled to switched literary agents while working on this book — a bold move for an unpublished author. What tips do you have for writers for recognizing when a relationship isn’t working — and letting it go despite fear and uncertainty?

Oh that was a hard one. My first agent for this book was a terrific agent and powerful. The decision to leave wasn’t an easy one. But after a very, very long time working together, we lost momentum and then clarity. And it became clear that we wanted different things for this book. So after a couple of years I thought, well I’ve waited this long I can wait a little longer to get it right.

The advice I’d give, is to do everything you can to make the relationship work, and then at the end of the day, remember that you really do just get one shot at being a debut author, it’s actually what this former agent told me, so you have to know that it’s the book you want and the relationship you want, because it’s a career you’re building and if you’re lucky it starts with that first book. And then hopefully you and your agent can work together on your next one.

Before turning your focus to writing, you were an actor for two decades! Do you have tips for other creative types who seek to completely change careers to become writers?

Yes, always have a job! That sounds so practical I know. But writing won’t necessarily pay the bills, and stressing over how to pay them isn’t inspiring, at least not for me. So if you can keep your career and change it in a way that let’s you work on your writing until you are ready or able to write full time, then do that. Or if you need to let go of your career, so you can claim your new one as a writer, which I needed to do, then do so and find something else that makes you money and doesn’t leave you too exhausted to write.

I’m also the Creative Director of a branding firm, Eat My Words, and I love my job and my boss. But before I had this job, I did a lot of freelance copywriting for ad agencies, because it was short term work that paid well. And I made and sold my own jewelry, which was really great, because it was tactile and the rewards were immediate.

If you were to go through the entire first book process again, from acceptance to publication, is there anything you might do differently?

You ask the best questions! Yes. I’d tell myself, it is going to take 10 years. And then 7 years wouldn’t feel so long! I’d also revise more in entirety and less in chunks. Part of what happens when you have an editor an agent involved, is you work on a section, then they read it and like it, then you work on another one, and eventually it becomes hard to see the work clearly for both of you. So I’d also allow myself months per revision and save certain readers to the very end, so that they would have fresh eyes.

Elsie, the protagonist of your novel, isn’t such a huge fan of Los Angeles — complaining even about its optimism! She cracked me up — and also made me wonder what your own thoughts were about this place. What do you miss most about Los Angeles, now that you don’t live here anymore?

L.A. was hard for me to love for the first two years. I’m an East Coast girl, I walk everywhere or take transit, driving is terrible for me, and I have the worst sense of direction. Before Google Maps I was always lost, even with GPS! But then I heard this great radio show on NPR about how L.A. was a city of neighborhoods, pockets waiting for you, making you discover them, and that shifted things for me. I lived in a ton of neighborhoods in L.A.: Mount Washington, SilverLake, Korea Town/Hancock Park, Beverly LaBrea, Studio City and Magnolia Park in Burbank. Eventually I loved L.A.

And what I miss is the optimism! And the belief in oneself that we are capable of trying anything, doing anything, succeeding at anything we really believe in, work hard at, and put our minds too. I would not have my career as a Creative Director or as a Novelist, had I not lived in L.A. And it has such a great literary scene! And the food, the farmer’s markets, the friendliness of people saying hello to one another, the weather, and let’s face it, Trader Joe’s. My grocery bill is three times what it was in L.A. Trader Joe’s is the first place I go when I return to L.A., their chocolate covered espresso beans have gotten me through many long writing days at my desk!

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Enter to win a copy of Gina Sorell’s Mothers and Other Strangers by signing up for my newsletter. Already joined up? Then you’re already entered — but you can get a second entry into the drawing by leaving a comment on the giveaway post with your mother’s name. Good luck!

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Cake Time in August: Two readings, two interviews

Is it really August already? Last night I had a nightmare that stores were already selling Halloween-themed tchotchkes. I woke up to a happier world, if rather anxious to really make the most of the rest of this summer —

And I hope you’ll be part of it. I have a couple readings coming up in Los Angeles — both free and open to the public — so please come on by and hear me read from my novel-in-stories, Cake Time!

First, up, the latest Roar Shack reading (more about the series here) happens Sunday, and I’ll be reading with Martina Blumenthal, Lisa Cheby, Brad Griffith, Patrick O’Neil, and Jane Starr:

Roar Shack presents “Shine On” Sunday
Sunday, August 13, 2017, 4 pm – 5:30 pm
826LA, 1714 W. Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles

Then just a few days later I’ll give my first library reading:

Author’s Club: Siel Ju
(Facebook event page)
Wednesday, August 16, 2017, 6 pm
Westwood Branch Library, 1246 Glendon Ave., Los Angeles

I realize 6 pm on a Wednesday is an odd time — but you know, there’s a bar down the street from me that always seems to be packed then, so my guess is many of you can get out of work on time and make it! We can all go out for happy hour later —

In other cakey news:

— Juked interviewed me about Cake Time, and I said things like this: “I think cake brings up a lot of emotions, some pleasurable and cheerful, some disturbing and dirty.” Read the whole thing here: An Uncontrollable Sweet Tooth: A Conversation with Siel Ju.

— The Story Prize featured an interview with me about writing, in which I said things like this: “I go through periods where I actually worry my excessive reading is a sign of something, I don’t know, bad.” You can read more about my bad habits here: Siel Ju and the Suitable State of Mind.

Also, did you notice my website’s been redesigned? Thanks to Kim Woodbridge for her amazing WordPress skills! Leave a comment or drop me a line and let me know what you think of the new look —