sadreads #3: a year of sad reading
This letter, which is going to be a long one, is a map of my reading this year. But first, a bit about the year itself. The morning of January 1st, 2019 was mild and sunny, and my husband and I rode the yellow line to Coney Island for the Polar Bear Plunge, a New Year’s swim organized by the oldest winter bathing club in the US—something I’d always wanted to do in all my time in the city. The heart-stopping rush of the Atlantic in January seemed appropriate somehow; it made sense to mark the beginning of an unknowable year with a blast of cold water to the body.
So we ran into the water amid all the costumed Coney freaks and the burly, thick-blooded old-timers, surrounded by a drumline on either side of the entry point, and we screamed and felt so incredibly cold, and then we dressed and went home again. I don’t want to say it felt renewing, but it felt like a way to mark the passing of time. So much of grief is the same thing over and over: get up, cry, eat, cry, go to sleep, repeat. So much of grief is a lack of new memories. But Coney Island on the first was a new memory. The idea of new experiences seemed impossible—moving on seemed impossible—though of course I would let new experiences happen to me as the year unfolded. In retrospect, on 12/31/2019, I see that this year has given me many unforeseeable things, and even moments of loveliness. But running into the ocean on that sunny winter day felt like forcing a computer at the core of my being to restart. I still felt like shit afterward, but at least, at the very least, it was another day. (Insert “same shit, different day” joke here.)
And for 2019, I let my sadness guide my reading. I began the year in the depths of the most intense grief I have ever felt; I wanted stories about the worst that people had ever felt, and I sought these stories out from the beginning, the circle of my search widening as I found myself running out of material. I’ve kept the books listed in order of my reading them, and you may see some patterns in my reading.
Overall, I think the literature of grief is flawed (I’m writing something about this now that I will hopefully finish in the next couple of weeks). As the poet Johannes Göransson tweeted about grief poetry: I “[c]an't relate to [...] how it's all wrapped up in an epiphany. I'm not going to overcome grief. Nor will my poems.” This list is emphatically not about getting past anything.
And finally, this "project" (brain map) definitely owes something to Elisa Gabbert, who’s been listing her reading, along with commentary, for many years now. Check out her 2019 list.
Please feel free to write me back if any of this is meaningful to you. Happy new year, and thanks for following along.
<3
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January
An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, Elizabeth McCracken (2008). This memoir about the stillbirth of the author’s first baby and the time that followed was a wonder to me at the time when I read it. It’s incredibly sad and also, at times, very funny, which is something you wouldn’t imagine is possible from the nadir. The duration of the book contains a new pregnancy and a second baby; I came to realize that this was a formula in many books about child loss, but since this was the first one I read, I wasn’t bothered by it. McCracken holds both narratives at once, and skillfully.
“This is the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending.”
Ghostbelly, Elizabeth Heineman (2014). An account of a home birth with a sad ending, and the extraordinary way in which the author chooses to process her grief after the fact. Heineman works with the funeral director to bring the baby home, and spends several days with his body before the burial; the descriptions of this, and Heineman’s insistence that the body of her child is not to be confused with something abhorrent, are so tender and loving.
“We prepare Thor to go out into his world. Isn’t that what you do with your children?”
The Word Pretty, Elisa Gabbert (2018). I had preordered this book while still pregnant, and it arrived when I was already grieving, though I didn’t pick it up until January. Elisa is one of my favorite writers—she is rigorous and smart and playful, and this book is very good. I think I will want to revisit it, because I wasn’t in the state of mind to think about all its questions, but there were certain things I found very meaningful, like this sentence:
"Once we know the future, the past is changed, and we lose access to whatever purer version of it might have existed."
Marlena, Julie Buntin (2017). I started this book in October, when I was still pregnant and couldn’t sleep anymore, but I wasn’t able to finish it until January so I count it as a January book. It is the story of, perhaps, a toxic friendship: two girlhood friends, one lost to the world around her, the other (the narrator) surviving into the future. It felt like a conversation with a friend.
“Who can recognize the ending as it’s happening? What we live, it seems to me, is pretty much always a surprise.”
Heart Berries, Terese Marie Mailhot (2018). I loved how fragmented and frantic this book was. It’s a memoir about intergenerational trauma, and a love story of sorts, and it hurtles forward at a great speed.
“I know the limit of what I can contain in each day. Each child, woman, and man should know a limit of containment. Nobody should be asked to hold more.”
The Boneyard, The Birth Manual, A Burial: Investigations into the Heartland, Julia Madsen (2018). The first book of poetry I read this year. Madsen’s collection, which felt to me like it took place entirely in the darkness of night, deals with the depressed, burnt-out heartland. She writes cinematically, in short prose poems and with a longing that “wears a necklace of teeth.” Of the three parts, the first was my favorite.
“The heartland is the desert of the real and if you can’t imagine this then you’re already on the gravel road traveling back toward fire and abandon.”
Comfort, Ann Hood (2008). A memoir about the author’s five-year-old daughter’s sudden death from strep throat, and the aftermath. I wanted to like it, but I could not. The only aspect I liked was the descriptions of the author’s partnership with her husband:
“I used to think that leaving was the thing to do when times were hard. But having now lived through the hardest time, having made it because Lorne was by my side, holding me, and I was there holding him, I understand the virtue, the necessity, of staying.”
Mr. Splitfoot, Samantha Hunt (2016). I read most of this deeply weird, gothic novel about a pair of orphan siblings raised by religious fanatics while I was on the Stairmaster at the gym, and I really loved the whole experience. The book is about the yearning to understand family, and to belong; it made me think of my own mother and the oddness of our relationship.
“There’s sacrifice, antagonism, rebellion, obsession, and adoration, but no properly complex word for what’s between a mother and a daughter, roots so twisted, a relationship so deep, people suffocated it in kitsch and comfort words to pretend it’s easy.”
February
The Secret History, Donna Tartt (1992). I wanted to read something that would transport me, and I had read The Goldfinch in the fall and loved it, so I chose this beloved liberal arts murder classic. I think this is a book, like Star Wars, is an experience you should first have when you’re young; you won’t get as much out of it if you encounter it later, as an adult. While I enjoyed it, none of the characters moved me, and I understand the reverence, but I did not have a transporting experience. I found it kind of exhausting, actually. Maybe (probably) I wasn't in the right state of mind for it.
“What if you had never seen the sea before? What if the only thing you’d ever seen was a child’s picture — blue crayon, choppy waves? Would you know the real sea if you only knew the picture? Would you be able to recognize the real thing even if you saw it?”
March
The Third Hotel, Laura Van Den Berg (2018). After the Tartt experience, I wanted to double back in the direction I’d begun to head with Mr. Splitfoot and choose something weird and uncanny. This book satisfied in that way. It’s a book about a woman whose spouse has suddenly died, or perhaps disappeared. She is in Havana for a film festival they were both supposed to attend, and begins to see him around. Van Den Berg asks smart questions about seeing and watching; the grief and loneliness in this book are a tangible atmosphere, like humidity.
“Behind every death lay a set of questions. To move on was to agree to not disturb these questions, to let them settle with the body under the earth. Yet some questions so thoroughly dismantled the terms of your own life, turning away was gravitationally impossible.”
Crapalachia, Scott McClanahan (2013). I’d read The Sarah Book in 2018 and it was one of my very favorite books of the year, so I wanted to read more. I have also been spending a lot of time in Western North Carolina, so the sense of place felt right. McClanahan’s voice is unlike anyone else’s and I will read anything he publishes.
“The theme of this book is a sound. It goes like this: Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. It’s the sound you’re hearing now, and it’s one of the saddest sounds in the world.”
Cherry, Nico Walker (2018). A voice-driven dirtbag novel about a young veteran and his post-military life as a serial bank robber who attempts to love people in a broken way. I enjoyed this novel’s simultaneous heart and nihilism.
“Fucking the sad is like fucking the dead; it's not something healthy people want to do.”
The Kiss, Kathryn Harrison (1997). I’d read so much about this memoir of the author’s relationship with her estranged father that I thought, ok, it’s time to read it. Maybe 2019 has desensitized us all but it seemed a lot more poetic and tame than I expected.
“Sleep in response to unbearable desire: I have learned this from my mother. My psychic sleep is often not distinguishable from real sleep.”
April
Conversations With Friends, Sally Rooney (2017). Friendship is at the heart of this novel, and the promise of the title delivers; this novel feels like conversations you wish would never end with your extremely smart best friend. I liked it much better than Normal People, which I read later.
“I realized my life would be full of mundane physical suffering, and that there was nothing special about it. Suffering wouldn't make me social, and pretending not to suffer wouldn't make me special. Talking about it, or even writing about it, would not transform the suffering into something useful. Nothing would.”
Loudermilk, Lucy Ives (2019). One of the most slept-on novels of the year—I can’t believe it hasn’t gotten more attention! It’s so smart and funny, especially if you’ve ever been involved with academia in any way. The titular Loudermilk is the scam artist we deserve in 2019. I interviewed Lucy about this book at Granta.
“Loudermilk does what he does because he has to, and not because he believes, at base, that any of this is fun.”
Strangers on a Train, Patricia Highsmith (1950). At some point this spring, I remembered that I love thriller. I contemplated rereading some Graham Greene but opted to read Highsmith for the first time instead. This novel is so different from the movie, and so much more psychologically complex and oppressive.
“There was inside him, like a flaw in a jewel, not visible on the surface, a fear and anticipation of failure that he had never been able to mend.”
May
Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, T Kira Madden (2019). I was drawn to this book because, like Madden, I grew up in the bizarroworld that is South Florida and lost my father young. Madden is a generous storyteller, leaving room for complexity in the lives of her parents, a flawed but loving sometimes-pair. I felt warm about the narrator, and tender toward her lost girlhood.
"Every fly is somebody dead and sacred. Every cockroach is watching."
June
The Octopus Museum, Brenda Shaughnessy (2019). I wrote a review of this collection of poems, but it’s in limbo and I’m not sure if it will ever appear. It’s a near-future dystopia in which hyperintelligent octopods have subjugated humans; it sounds silly, but overall the collection isn’t silly at all. The poems are about the everyday actions that still have to take place even when everything is fucked up, and in that way, it’s about grief, and about irreversible change and its manifestations.
“Me, I’m thinking of all the Befores, like all old people who have no future.”
Severance, Ling Ma (2018). Like the Shaughnessy book, which I read right before, this book is about what we rely on when everything else has gone to shit. In this book, some kind of fungal fever spreads rapidly across the globe. The fevered lose cognitive capability and begin to execute rote, familiar tasks (setting the dinner table, flipping through a textbook, combing their hair) until they basically die of malnourishment. The narrator is one of the last few holdouts in New York. The book is about loneliness and work and the person you are when you’re very alone.
"The past is a black hole, cut into the present day like a wound, and if you come too close, you can get sucked in. You have to keep moving."
July
Once More We Saw Stars, Jayson Greene (2019). This is another memoir about child loss; Greene’s daughter was killed at two years old in a freak accident. I went to a reading at which Greene was a generous conversationalist, even when pelted with dumb-ass questions from the audience. One of the things he said was that there are two versions of this book, the one that the world sees, and the one only he sees, and that both needed to get written. It’s something I think about a lot as I try to write about my own grief.
"There are days when I am confused, panicked, like I've woken up in a dark room with unfamiliar contours: What is it? What is it that feels so awful? Then I calm down and I remember: Oh, yes, I am in hell. The thought places me in time and space, like a dot dropped on a map. Once I am armed with this knowledge, my eyes clear, my walk straightens, my breathing slows."
The Cost of Living, Deborah Levy (2018). I had never read Levy before, but I really liked this personal essay collection about being a “woman artist” after divorce, and setting out to define your life again.
“We either die of the past or we become an artist.”
Wave, Sonali Deraniyagala (2013). This is a memoir with a devastating premise—the author lost her entire family (husband, children, parents) in the tsunami that hit the Indian Ocean in 2004. I appreciated the unflinching way in which Deraniyagala regarded herself afterward: completely messed up and refusing to learn a lesson from the utterly random thing that happened to her. I found especially meaningful her engagement with the emotion of shame.
“When I had them, they were my pride, and now that I’ve lost them, I am full of shame. I was doomed all along, I am marked, there must be something very wrong about me. These were my constant thoughts in those early months.”
August
The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro (2015)
All My Puny Sorrows, Miriam Toews (2014)
I wrote about these two books in the first of these letters, and will unlock that for a little while if you joined since I sent it; see it here. I liked the Ishiguro, but the Toews book is the one that has stayed with me—she writes about grief in such a funny, tender, absurd, human way. One of my favorites of the whole year.
September
The Book of X, Sarah Rose Etter (2019). This is a dreamy novel about a young woman with a congenital, matrilinearly inherited deformity that causes her abdomen to be knotted in a painful and unpleasant-looking way. It’s a book about familial legacy and loneliness. I found it a bit poetic at times (sorry to be saying that with my own poetic tendencies lol), but some of these poetic descriptions stayed with me in spite of myself. Like the following:
“My heart is an animal that has vanished, my chest an empty field.”
The Painted Bird, Jerzy Kosinski (1965). The main character of this book, which was assumed (but later proven not to be) based on Kosinski’s own lived experience, is a small Jewish boy whose parents leave him with strangers in the Polish countryside during the second World War. He is a master of adapting, thrust into scenario after scenario of sordid cruelties and made to endure. Of course by the end of the book he’s changed; even though the war is over, he’s totally uninterested in the peaceful life of a normal boy. I wanted to like this book, but hated it.
“I tried to preserve that feeling of being alive for future use. I might need it in moments of fear and pain.”
October
Animals Eat Each Other, Elle Nash (2017). I think of this in communion with the novel Cherry, sort of. The narrator is a girl who enters into sexual relationships that feel transformative at the time; she lives around them, and around her other human interactions, in a cloud of substances and alcohol. The thing I liked most about this book is Nash’s attention to the brain space around young women’s experience of sex.
“I was more attracted to a person’s interest in me than to the particulars of their personalities, or the things they liked to eat, or what they liked to do when they weren’t texting me or sleeping with me.”
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion (2005). Another book I wrote about in this letter, here. Didion, in her journalistic integrity, sometimes feels cold to me; this book, however, does not.
“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.”
Normal People, Sally Rooney (2019). The hype cycle was finally dying down by the end of the year, and I felt I could read this book. It took me a long time to get through it even though I liked it, and I don't quite know how to explain that. I think Rooney's narrators eat a lot of toast.
"Is the world such an evil place, that love should be indistinguishable from the basest and most abusive forms of violence?"
November
Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller (2011). I’d read Circe last year when I was pregnant and wanted to read more Miller. This book is a queer love story shrouded in Greek myth and the story of the Iliad. Books of fantasy, etc, sometimes feel unapproachable to me because of the stylized characters, and although Achilles is sometimes drawn in an unapproachable way, the narrator, Patroclus, is desperately and painfully human.
“He said what he meant; he was puzzled if you did not. Some people might have mistaken this for simplicity. But is it not a sort of genius to cut always to the heart?”
A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving (1989). I would never have picked this book up if someone hadn’t recommended it to me on a random Twitter thread, but I loved it. The titular character, a peculiarly moral boy who speaks in scream-caps and keeps a dressmaker’s dummy in his bedroom, is totally untranslatable to film or any other media. I laughed out loud a lot while reading this book about friendship. Also, the narrator’s observations about Reagan feel politically true to our situation in 2019.
"It was Owen Meany who taught me that any good book is always in motion—from the general to the specific, from the particular to the whole, and back again. Good reading—and good writing about reading—moves the same way."
Heaven’s Coast, Mark Doty (1996). I broadened my search for grief books at the end of the year, and sought out grief memoirs by poets. Doty’s memoir of being the caretaker to his partner Wally as Wally died of AIDS, was the first one that stuck, after I tried to read some Donald Hall. It’s funny—this book doesn’t feel like one cohesive story in my mind, yet I wrote down pages and pages of quotes from it. Maybe some books are meant to be consumed in fragments. Doty said he wrote it in the tender state of mind right after Wally’s death, and maybe that has to do with it, too.
“Being in grief, it turns out, is not unlike being in love. In both states, the imagination’s entirely occupied with one person. The beloved dwells at the heart of the world, and becomes a Rome: the roads of feeling all lead to him, all proceed from him.”
December
The Long Goodbye, Meghan O’Rourke (2011). Another grief memoir, about O’Rourke’s mother’s death and its aftermath. This book felt self-conscious to me—I thought some parts were beautiful, but other parts felt like something you’re supposed to write in a grief journey. I’m aware that this is an ungenerous and perhaps biased reading, and for that I apologize.
“Three-quarters of a year after a loss, the hardest part is the permanently transitional quality: you are neither accustomed to it nor in its fresh pangs. You feel you will always be wading the river, your legs burning with exhaustion.”
Men We Reaped, Jesmyn Ward (2013). This book is a memoir of the lives of five men who died too early, in violent or random ways, in the author’s native Louisiana. Ward does something beautiful with time in it that feels very true to grief—the book tells the men’s stories from most recent to first, while simultaneously narrating the author’s own family life forward in time, so that the two modes of storytelling converge in the death of her brother. This sliding back and forth feels like the remembering and re-remembering that the living do after the dead exit their lives, without being confusing or fragmented.
“How the privilege of my education, my eventual ascent into another class, was born in the inexorable push of my mother’s hands. How unfair it all seemed.”
Women Talking, Miriam Toews (2019). I wanted to end the year on Toews, whose other novel was one of my earlier favorites, and it was worth it. Women Talking is a novel about the interpersonal aftermath among two families of women after a horrific crime in a remote Mennonite community, but this world only seems far away for a moment. The narrator is unreliable, but he is so because of love, which I find forgivable.
“Most of us, she said, absolve ourselves of responsibility for change by sentimentalizing our pasts.”