Tag: book review

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October book reviews: Where lieth freedom?

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:

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (McClelland and Stewart, 1985)

“I hunger to commit the act of touch.”
*
For those who still aren’t familiar with the story, here’s a summary: The U.S. has been taken over by a religious regime — that has subjugated women into servile, domestic roles. The story’s told by Offred, a “handmaid,” aka a woman forced to have ritualistic sex with a high-ranking official in the regime for the purposes of reproduction, as birth rates have been plummeting for social and environmental reasons.

I first read this classic as a first-year undergrad — and as always seems to happen whenever I reread a book, Margaret’s work spoke to me in completely different ways this time around. I was especially struck this time by the ways the regime justifies its curtailing of women’s freedoms, arguing that women have it better under the regime, since they’re protected from sexual assault and harassment, as well as from the harsh judgments and expectations about their appearance. The argument is that women under the regime just have different sorts of freedoms — and as a result are perhaps more free — an interesting idea in juxtaposition to the current #metoo movement that very much speaks to the ways women’s freedoms are curtailed in today’s society.

It recalled for me Elif Batuman’s New Yorker essay, “The Head Scarf, Modern Turkey, and Me,” in which she comes to this conclusion about the choices and freedoms that women in the U.S. enjoy, versus the ones in Turkey who take more traditional roles (and wear their head scarves): “Nobody has everything; everyone is trading certain things for others.” Here’s an excerpt:

I found myself thinking about high heels. High heels were painful, and, for me at least, expensive, because they made walking more difficult and I ended up taking more taxis. Yet there were many times when I wore heels to work-related events in New York, specifically because I felt it made people treat me with more consideration. Why, then, would I refuse to wear a head scarf, which brought a similar benefit of social acceptance, without the disadvantage of impeding my ability to stand or walk?

The whole essay’s worth a read. I’m not sure where I’m going with this, beyond saying that I’d love to have a conversation about this. Someone should create a MOOC with The Handmaid’s Tale, Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, and Elif’s essay on the syllabus. Also, the Hulu series is fabulous.

All Grown Up by Jami Attenberg (HMH 2017)

“For so long I have believed I could never catch up, but now I realize there’s nothing to catch up to, there’s only what I choose to make.”
*
This novel about a single woman in NYC felt so intimate and vulnerable and gritty in its exploration of desire and want and artistic ambition and human connection. It’s a book I needed to read — at this time when I feel perpetually behind on everything —

Hunger: A Memoir of My Body by Roxane Gay (Harper, 2017)

“What I know and what I feel are two very different things.”
*
Roxane’s raw memoir is a must read. A tad repetitive, yes, but so honest — I learned so much, I became more empathetic about the many physical and societal issues that confront bigger people on a daily basis that I’d never even considered, and I related a lot in many unexpected ways. It’s so true — We can know a lot of things intellectually, but the knowing that comes through feeling can be something else altogether.

Transit by Rachel Cusk (FSG, 2017)

“Writing was just a way of taking justice into your own hands. If you wanted the proof, all you had to do was look at the people who had something to fear from your honesty.”
*
I read Rachel Cusk’s novel in a day. There’s something about her largely plotless story of a female writer having conversations with people she comes across that propels you forward — the quiet philosophical insights, the revelations about humanity, all our little motivations and rationalizations about what’s ok and what’s not, who to be, how to live. Many of the conversations hinged on moments of epiphany — a seemingly innocuous event that suddenly makes you see everything differently and decide to completely overhaul your life.

Quartet by Jean Rhys (Chatto and Windus as Postures, 1928)
*
“Her life swayed regularly, even monotonously, between two extremes, avoiding the soul-destroying middle.”
*
I picked this up after loving Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight last month — and I think my expectations were a bit too high because I didn’t love this one as much — though Quartet is still a worthy read. The novel tells the story of Marya, a young, newly married British woman in Paris — whose husband is good to her but is an outlaw type and sent to jail for a year. Penniless and bereft, Marya then needs to figure out how to survive in Paris but mostly just drinks a lot. Depression ensues….

The Candidate by Zareh Vorpouni (Originally published 1967; English translation from Syracuse UP, 2016)

The Candidate follows a young Armenian expat in 1929 Paris, reeling from the sudden suicide of his friend. The poetic work covers a lot of ground — the Armenian diaspora, racism, writerly ambition, poverty. It made personal the international aftereffects of the Armenian genocide and combined it with the beautiful listlessness of artistic life in 1920s Paris. I came to this book via Boxwalla.

Testify by Douglas Manuel (Red Hen, 2017)

“No, the present presses and mints / the past into a gold coin / you can’t spend anywhere.”
*
Douglas Manuel’s poems explore uncomfortable boundaries — navigating a black identity across and in between class, race, and gender expectations. Doug and I will be reading together at the Red Hen Press event at Lit Crawl LA, happening Wed 10/25 in North Hollywood!

Handiwork by Amaranth Borsuk (Slope Editions, 2012)

“Imagine this longing not yet known: it cant be wrung: it will only get longer.”
*
My grad school friend Amaranth’s poems fuse personal and cultural histories, combining the unpublished story of Amaranth grandmother with the Jewish practice of gematria with the periodic table. If you love constraint-based poetry, pick up this precisely-crafted volume.

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September book reviews: Zhang, Rhys, Khong, Walls, Gray, Maum plus two guys with two-syllable names

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:

Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang (Lenny, 2017)

“All I had wanted for so long was to be part of a family that wasn’t mine.”
*
You guys, this book is so good. Sour Heart tells interconnected stories of girlhood as Chinese immigrants in NYC — the raw, unvarnished, gritty stories completely unlike, say, The Joy Luck Club. Four families packed into one room with rats and roaches, volatile mothers who threaten abandonment and suicide, alcoholism, adultery, claustrophobic closeness and latchkey kid loneliness — plus a lot of love and beauty and desire and survival. Pick this one up.

Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys (Constable, 1939)

“One day, quite suddenly, when you’re not expecting it, I’ll take a hammer from the folds of my dark cloak and crack your skull like an egg-shell.”
*
How have I not read any Jean Rhys until now?! Her dark, dissolute style is my new obsession. Loved this story of a woman who returns to Paris to battle the disappointments of the past and paranoia of the present. The ending is chilling —

The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls (Scribner, 2005)

“I lived in a world that at any moment could erupt into fire. It was the sort of knowledge that kept you on your toes.”
*
I loved this poignant memoir — Jeannette’s parents are so irresponsible, fucked up, and abusive, yet also loving, steadfast, and wise in their own strange ways. The memoir’s also real eye opener that makes you rethink your beliefs about all sorts of social issues: poverty, work, self-improvement — even literacy and reading. I’m now curious about the movie —

Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong (Henry Holt, 2017)

“What I want to know is what counted for something and what counted not at all.”
*
I thought Goodbye, Vitamin would be a rather depressing read — after all it’s about a 30 year-old woman fresh from a bad breakup who moves back in with her parents to help out with her father who has Alzheimer’s — but the novel is actually full of love and forgiveness and humor. It reminded me to enjoy the small serendipities in life — both the ones that bond you to people for life and the ones that momentarily connect you to strangers in the grocery store.

Isadora by Amelia Gray (FSG, 2017)

“The silver tray of his heart holds two brown tincture bottles, each offering their own opiate. The first is marked Desire and the other Virtue; one clouds the mind and the other turns the stomach, but they have the same general effect in the end.”

Aren’t those lines a beautiful way of describing competing wants? I got to interview Amelia about her novel based on the dancer Isadora Duncan’s life. Here’s my full review of Isadora, along with a giveaway —

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (Random House, 2017)

“Doubt will fester as long as we live.”
*
I picked up Lincoln in the Bardo knowing nothing about it, just because I’m a fan of George Saunders’s short stories — so the novel surprised me and brought up a lot of questions too, namely: Why a slightly goofy, sort of historical yet largely paranormal story about the death of Lincoln’s young son? I mean, George’s stories are so varied — He really could have written anything. I wonder what made him choose this setting, topic, and style over others. Did it somehow choose him, or was this a deliberate decision on his part? Apparently he talks about this a bit on podcast interviews; I’ll need to listen to some of those —

Touch by Courtney Maum (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2017)

“All these humans with their disappointments and their desperate hearts, but it’s so much easier, so convenient, to blame emotional distance on a lack of time.”
*
I think my expectations for Touch might have been a touch too high. I liked it on a conceptual level — this idea of a screen-addicted, increasingly isolated society longing to return to simple human, physical connection — but I found the message a bit heavy handed, and thought the whole instant love thing between the protagonist and the hot younger guy too pat and easy. Isn’t real life — real touch — messier? In a good way?

Happy Gut by Vincent Pedre (William Morrow, 2015)

Among the foods I can’t really eat right now: dairy, eggs, gluten, almonds, and alcohol. That’s what I discovered after doing the Happy Gut program — an elimination diet plus gut health protocol I have mixed feelings about. Full review with all the details of my personal food issues here —
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September giveaway: Isadora by Amelia Gray

*** Winner selected! Congratulations to Isaly in Fort Worth, Texas! ***

I’m one of those people who don’t function well when there’s a lot of drama going on in life, yet I often find myself pulled towards it, and to people who go out of their way to seek it out. I think many people are this way — which explains why Isadora Duncan, with her brief, wayward life, provokes such fascination in the public imagination.

Widely considered the mother of modern dance, Isadora had quite the dramatic life, traveling all over the world to live, teach, and perform, flouting social mores to take on many lovers, and finally, dying tragically at 49 when her scarf got caught in the wheels of a car she was riding.

Many biographies have been written about Isadora, but Amelia Gray’s fictionalized account of Isadora’s life — plainly titled Isadora and published earlier this year by FSG — focuses on a lesser known period — when Isadora’s two young children drowned in a car that lurched into the Seine River. The historical novel follows Isadora through the time after the accident as she grieves, growing unpredictable, ascerbic, and mentally unhinged.

It’s a gorgeously-told story of a downward spiral. Isadora goes to the Greek island of Corfu to recouperate — where she struts around nude, urinates in public, and eats her children’s cremains: “It has come to be that I can eat only when the flavor is attended by the subtle ash of the children in my mouth.”

Yet she retains her wit, and her incisive observations of humanity. Of her skeevy doctor, Isadora muses: “The silver tray of his heart holds two brown tincture bottles, each offering their own opiate. The first is marked Desire and the other Virtue; one clouds the mind and the other turns the stomach, but they have the same general effect in the end.”

The novel is actually written from four perspectives: Isadora, her lover Paris Singer (the wealthy son of the Singer sewing machine magnate), her sister Elizabeth, and Elizabeth’s lover Max. Each protagonist is uniquely vulnerable — and insufferable — preoccupied with their individual hopes and self-pity and senses of entitlement. Yet it’s hard not to be drawn to them, selfish as they may be. Elizabeth’s constant emotional repression, for example, is especially touching. She consoles herself through lonely times by gorging on rich food, “and hid[es] happiness from the others so they wouldn’t suspect her for it.” When she writes a new lover, she edits and re-edits her letter, excising all allusions to desire, herself, to home, until all that’s left is a single sentence: “R — Can you picture the morning?”

Isadora is the kind of book that makes me want to wallow and revel in despair, numbness, unprovoked aggression, self-loathing — all the habits and emotions I generally try to run away from. It also makes me want to live bigger, less afraid of what may become of me. “What use is there to life and love without the mystery of circumstance?” the fictional Isadora says. What indeed?

I’m excited to be giving away a copy of Isadora to my readers! All current email subscribers will be automatically entered to win one copy. Subscribe now if you’re not yet getting my occasional newsletters.

For a second chance to win, comment on this post below with the title of the last historical novel you’ve read. The giveaway closes September 30, 2017 at 11:59 pm PST.

Come back mid-month to read a Five Firsts interview with Amelia Gray.

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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.”
*
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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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