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- I scored a used copy of Anne Lamott's latest novel, Imperfect Birds, which revisits the characters of Rosie and Crooked Little Heart. I'm enjoying it significantly more than I expected to, by which I mean "significantly more than her last novel Blue Shoe which was rather spoiled for me by the fact that I'd read most of the most affecting bits as autobiographical essays on Salon.com." It has a lot to do with teenagers using drugs and it makes me desperately grateful that I didn't find myself in circles where drug use was normative because it sounds like so. much. work. And adolescence sucks enough without adding hangovers and bad trips to the mix.
- Thinking about Blue Shoe makes me remember a line in it about how Mattie (the narrator) sometimes felt like running down her mother in a parking lot, but that when she felt like that but acted humanely it seemed to repair something in her soul. When I first read that, honestly, I thought "What the fuck ever. I have been being nice when feeling like acid my entire life and I'm sick of it." But when I think back on it now I see a difference between what Mattie's describing and what I spent a great swathe of my life doing. Mattie isn't discounting her anger at her mother and pretending it's not there and beating herself up for being angry. She's acknowledging the anger but choosing not to act on it. And that makes all the difference, particularly with letting yourself feel good about how you're acting (or trying to act) rather than bad about how you're feeling (or trying not to feel.)
- Yesterday I read Emma Donoghue's The Sealed Letter. I can report that it is not of the Slammerkin genre, but not the Stir-Fry or Landing genre either. Closest to Hood on the misery index but not focused on the experience of grief. Also very reminiscent of Sarah Waters' Affinity. To be more useful - it's based on a real divorce case from London in 1864, and it's intensely readable but also rather grim because everyone in the book is unhappy and many are cruel.
- Reread The Lyre of Orpheus last week. Still love Robertson Davies, the snarkiest Canadian to ever snark.
- Read Ink Library by NicoleAnell, a story about Wesley and Dawn and rewritten memories.
- Thinking about Blue Shoe makes me remember a line in it about how Mattie (the narrator) sometimes felt like running down her mother in a parking lot, but that when she felt like that but acted humanely it seemed to repair something in her soul. When I first read that, honestly, I thought "What the fuck ever. I have been being nice when feeling like acid my entire life and I'm sick of it." But when I think back on it now I see a difference between what Mattie's describing and what I spent a great swathe of my life doing. Mattie isn't discounting her anger at her mother and pretending it's not there and beating herself up for being angry. She's acknowledging the anger but choosing not to act on it. And that makes all the difference, particularly with letting yourself feel good about how you're acting (or trying to act) rather than bad about how you're feeling (or trying not to feel.)
- Yesterday I read Emma Donoghue's The Sealed Letter. I can report that it is not of the Slammerkin genre, but not the Stir-Fry or Landing genre either. Closest to Hood on the misery index but not focused on the experience of grief. Also very reminiscent of Sarah Waters' Affinity. To be more useful - it's based on a real divorce case from London in 1864, and it's intensely readable but also rather grim because everyone in the book is unhappy and many are cruel.
- Reread The Lyre of Orpheus last week. Still love Robertson Davies, the snarkiest Canadian to ever snark.
- Read Ink Library by NicoleAnell, a story about Wesley and Dawn and rewritten memories.
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