Welcome to another edition of Amateur Bibliotherapy, my weekly newsletter about book-y things. Use this Google Form at any time to tell me about what you’re reading—you might be featured here! Note: I’m an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which means that I may make a small commission if you make a purchase through affiliate links included in this newsletter.
Hi friends. Last week I had some trouble with SubStack that resulted in a lot of folks missing my newsletter. If you’re one of those folks, you can go check out my review of The Wandering by Intan Paramaditha and other little musings. Then you can come right back here!
Okay. Did you read it? Are you convinced now that The Wandering should be your next great read? That it will transport you, both because of its myriad settings and because of its vast emotional terrain? I hope so. I’ll be thinking about that book for a long time.
Not The Books
In pursuit of my goal to ~watch more new stuff~ instead of cyclically marathoning my same three TV shows, I watched Effie Gray (2014), a bad Dakota Fanning biopic about the title character’s dramatic annulment (her husband refused to consummate their marriage after FIVE YEARS!!!); and Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am (2019), a wonderful documentary about Morrison’s life and work. I do not recommend the former, but have already watched the latter twice!
The Book(s)
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I read Bunny by Mona Awad this week. Alexis, my favorite Mountain Standard Time comrade, sent me a copy of it and knew I would be infatuated from the first page. Alexis also graciously answered my fevered “what the ever-loving fuck did I just read” phone call once I finished it. (If you read Bunny on my recommendation, know I will do the same for you.)
The book focuses on the dynamics of MFA students at an elite university, where there is inevitably a clique with the style sense of the Plastics and the venom of the Heathers. They cloyingly call each other “Bunny” and ice out everyone else until, one fated day, they invite our ~outsider~ protagonist to an off-campus “Smut Salon” in the name of workshopping their craft. (We’re in grad school. Lots of talk about The Work and The Body and The Process. Le sigh.) As is the case with most of the books I like, it goes off the rails after about 100 pages. This book is warped like a Barbie in a microwave. It descends from the trope-laden and familiar madness of cliques and satire into something darker, witchier, weirder, and altogether less coherent. Read this interview with Awad in The Paris Review if you’d like to know more about what goes on, or this review from the Los Angeles Times if you want to stay spoiler-free.
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I also finished The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw, a short story collection about Black women experiencing tension between teachings of the church and their own desires. The stories play with different forms and tones: one is entirely epistolary, from the perspective of one long-lost sister writing to another; a second alternates between the troubling diary entries of a teenager and her great grandmother; and a third is a blunt instructional guide for cheating husbands. Despite myriad forms, the collection is linked by depicting relationships between four generations of women and examining “what’s passed on, rejected, and learned.”
My favorite stories are “Peach Cobbler,” which is from the perspective of a young woman whose mother has an affair with their married pastor, and “How to Make Love to a Physicist,” which gorgeously chronicles a blooming relationship. You can read an interview with Philyaw in The Rumpus to glean more about the collection’s development and themes, which include loneliness and nostalgia and compulsory heterosexuality.
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I recently started reading The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang, a book of essays that explore life with mental illness, and Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, a re-imagination of Mexican mythology that follows a girl who accidentally frees the spirit of the Mayan god of death. I’ll report back on them soon.
I also bought a copy of My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh at Amanda’s behest from Bookhampton. My cold heart was warmed upon receiving a sweet note of thanks from the bookseller who shipped my order. I know very little about the plot of the book and plan to keep it that way until I read it. (I know a lot of you have Strong Opinions on it, and that is all I need to know!)
If you’re still searching for your next book, this Seattle bookstore organizes books by topic and emotion; the NYT has a guide to the essential Octavia Butler; and a kindred spirit on Goodreads put together a list of millennial malaise books.
TTFN!