Tidings!
Oh joy, it’s that most festive time of year, when each morning brings the Elf whimsically reoriented on that literal/metaphorical shelf, and an inbox freshly bloated with Best Of lists and shopping recs. (And deals! Oh the deals! One day left! Just kidding, sale extended!1 )
Anyway, I figure you do not need another such roundup from me. Instead, I bring you a threesome of books about artists and love, and sadness and madness, and sex and family and friendship and rage and despair, inspired by the book I devoured this week2. Each is wonderful, speaking poignantly to the woman’s experience of the artistic life. And hey, in a pinch, any one could make a lovely stocking stuffer, perhaps paired with a theme-scented candle. What would heartbreak smell like, anyway? Bergamot, with just a hint of old sweat pants?
Okay, onward! Or whatever Santa says to get his reindeer to move.
I finally picked up Hanna Halperin’s I COULD LIVE HERE FOREVER3 this week, and pretty much did not put it down until I reached The End. The story is of Leah, a writer living in Madison, Wisconsin while she earns her MFA, and handsome guy/sort of musician Charlie, who is adoring and sensitive and is also a recovering/not at all recovered heroin addict. Think you know how this will end? Well, you probably do—but you’ll be so drawn in by the characters, and the seamless way Halperin answers the question she knows you’re asking of her protagonist (But why, Leah? WHY????), terrain that could feel well-trod reads like fresh earth.
The setting/secondary plot—Leah’s writing life, the companionship and competition in her MFA cohort, the exhilaration she feels when the words are flowing and she’s earning approval… and the equal and opposite dejection that detonates upon her after any hint of rejection—is vivid and illuminating: Leah muses that what she and her fellow writers are really aiming to do in their writing and workshopping is use empathy to create characters that readers will believe in and sympathize with, though she fails to realize that her empathy muscles are possibly a bit too swole (as the kids say), likely owing to the overuse they endured while she was growing up, trying to figure out exactly what was going on in her home and in her family—a condition which might serve her characters well, but also likely primed her for the kind of tragic, codependent love story she can’t ever quite let go of. This book is a heartbreaker, in the best possible way.
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If I COULD LIVE HERE FOREVER places you decidedly (and uncomfortably) in the middle of the worst—and most addictive—relationship of your life, Ann Patchett’s latest, TOM LAKE, is what happens when you’ve survived, moved on, and built a whole life beyond a similarly irresistible and terrible arrangement.
The book is a COVID novel4 insofar as it takes place during COVID, thus returning all three of our main character Lara (nee Laura)’s daughters to the cherry farm on which they were born and raised. (Patchett does love forcing people together, doesn’t she?) While helping with the harvest, or the picking or whatever it’s called (there’s a fair bit of cherry farming intel in this book—the details of which promptly flew from my head once I closed the cover), they demand their mom spill the tea on her long-ago, turbo-charged affair with the actor Peter Duke, back when the two were staging a summertime run of Our Town at a theatre company called Tom Lake. Duke went on to become one of the biggest movie stars in the world, while Lara… did not (see: the aforementioned cherry farm). In the present day, Lara’s husband Joe drops in and out of scenes with little fuss as she recounts the story; theirs is a comfortable marriage, it seems, free of fireworks (and explosions). Yet as the story of the past unfolds and we watch Duke’s artistic genius teeter into the realm of madness, we understand how Lara has found such contentedness—or is it relief?—in her gentle life, and the aperture on her love for Joe grows wide. Her sanguinity is the opposite of regret: she knows she dodged a bullet, even if what hit her first was heartbreak.
And the final item in this happy little trifecta is a book I couldn’t shut up about when I read it last year, though it never seemed to really catch fire in the way I thought it deserved. (Never mind how many hands I pressed it into.) Carlene Bauer’s GIRLS THEY WRITE SONGS ABOUT shares some DNA with the others, though it is way (way) less concerned with romantic love than it is with the equally intoxicating romance of choosing a creative life, of finding a best friend who holds the space of a soul mate—and of what happens when that soul mate detours away from the pacts and promises to revel in the freedom of the agreed-upon BohemiaForever! and instead into a tastefully appointed Brownstone, and a life that’s much more conventional than either ever planned.
The complicated women at the book’s core are Rose and Charlotte, and we know from the start that they are now estranged. But the story places us first in 90s New York.5 They are young and they are free, working at a music magazine and seeing shows and drinking and smoking and running around the still vaguely untamed city and coming face to face with Lou Reed and sleeping with whoever they feel like sleeping with. It is dreamy and dangerous and intoxicating and goes on for years—and then Rose takes an off ramp. She marries not for love (exactly?), but for something more like the safety of convention (and real estate and vacations and acceptance and etc etc etc), and Charlotte cannot, will not, understand, registers it all as a cutting betrayal. Rose has babies and cheats on her husband; Charlotte keeps making the same sorts of choices she always has made, only to find herself far more deeply battered by their fallout as the years go by. Though their undoing is, in a way, gradual, the final straw is harsh and shocking—as is the fact that the breach appears unreperable. This book is a Gen Xish examination of friendship and time and choices and changing and aging, and rage and estrangement and sadness, and what it means to be the last one at the party. And it will hit you where it hurts.
If I were a more generous person, I’d have turned this into a gift guide. But I’m not and so I will suggest instead that you buy these three books for yourself. (Self care!) And three more copies, maybe, to have at the ready, to give to whomever you’re talking to when you find yourself inserting them into conversation about something else entirely. Because you will. See you next time!
Grinch here: Nothing puts me in a less-shoppy mood than the faux urgency of Black Friday/Cyber Monday/Tchotchke Tuesday.
While up all night coughing. Dear cooties, kindly fuck the hell off.
Pubbed in April… and I’ve meant to read it since then! Dear lord where does the time go?
When I had COVID I came up with the great idea to torment you with a roundup of COVID books. I still might. There are many goodies that don’t involve nasal probes!
Oh, the 90s! No wonder they’re back; they were fun.