The first work of Sheila Heti’s that I read was her book How Should a Person Be?, a novel about being an artist—or, more specifically, a novel about being a woman and an artist, and how those two things inform and sometimes resist one another. The book was extremely polarizing; some reviewers found it riveting in its experimentation, while others found its content indulgent and its lack of form irritating. I was enamored by it, as Heti has an extraordinary ability to capture the convergence of creativity and self-doubt while voicing thoughts most people believe are unsayable.
Like How Should a Person Be?, Heti’s latest novel, Motherhood, isn’t for everyone. For people who turn to books primarily for their plots, this is not the one (or the writer) for you.…
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There’s a scene in Angelica Baker’s debut novel, Our Little Racket, where the underaged daughter of a fallen financial tycoon escapes her Greenwich, Connecticut community and runs off to New York City. She’s looking for a reprieve from the suffocating attention her family is under and winds up at a noisy bar. It has an underlying din dominated by male voices and interspersed with female shrieks in reaction to them. The moment is an apt metaphor for this book and its rumination on the ways in which women can become the collateral damage of scandal. In this novel, the men at the root of the story create chaos and then proceed to exist in shadows, while the women are positioned to be reactive, left to process the situation they’ve inherited and face societal scrutiny head-on.…
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I have to admit: I wasn’t planning on writing about Living the Dream when I was originally scheduling my review coverage. The book I had initially chosen to talk about this month was a darker, more “literary” pick, but with the news covering natural disasters and violent protests, I needed to immerse myself in something lighter. Instead, I chose Lauren Berry’s debut novel, and I’m so glad I did. It was such a pleasure to get lost in the lives of twenty-something Londoners as they made messes out of their careers, romantic relationships, and friendships (and tried their damnedest to clean them up.…
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Absence populates Rachel Khong’s stellar debut novel, Goodbye, Vitamin. It’s a book about the absence of reliable memories, the absence of people you thought were permanent, and the absence of self-understanding. It’s about the memories that follow and haunt you, and the ones that only leave behind traces of themselves, their negative space haunting you all the same.
When we meet our narrator Ruth, she’s in her thirties and the life she envisioned for herself is in shambles. Her fiancé broke up with her on the day she thought they were moving in together. If that weren’t enough, she’s dispassionate about her job and her father, Howard, has Alzheimer’s disease, which is getting progressively worse. Everything she thought she could depend on has been upended.…
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Anyone who saw me reading Things We Lost in the Fire in public must have thought I was suffering and in deep pain. Every story in Mariana Enriquez’s debut collection had me grimacing and squirming, shifting uncomfortably in my seat. But her stories are so thoroughly transporting that I lacked the self-awareness to care. I was far away in Argentina, worried about the news of the decapitated child flashing across the television screen, and the one-armed girl who went missing in a haunted house, and on a murder tour of Buenos Aires. Enriquez’s stories all center around life in Argentina, often detailing the lives of disadvantaged youth. These stories are dark and unsettling, written so beautifully that the whole experience of reading them leaves you in a macabre trance.…
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Behind every crazy woman is a man sitting very quietly, saying, “What? I’m not doing anything.”
At some point, you realize you aren’t waiting anymore for your life to start. Your life’s happening right now, and it’s pretty dull.
– Jade Sharma, Problems
There’s an unspoken yet ubiquitous set of expectations we have for women in an attempt to keep them palatable. They shouldn’t be “too loud” or “too much.” We praise them on their restraint. We associate femininity with being demure. Maya, the narrator of Jade Sharma’s Problems, has freed herself from the shackles of these notions, so much so that her behavior directly upends them: She’s a drug addict. She’s blunt about not loving her husband. She’s unapologetically unfaithful, sleeping with a much older man who doesn’t bother pretending to be interested in her.…
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