7 Books We Can’t Stop Talking About
Congratulations on surviving T.S. Eliot’s “cruelest month” only to tumble headlong into one in which the leaked draft of a majority ruling illustrated a Supreme Court poised to overturn Roe v. Wade. Would choose burgeoning lilacs over being forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term, but go off, Thomas! (Ha. Ha. Ha.) I read and wrote about the first book on this list before the draft posted online; afterwards, a scene from the book stood out in retrospect. The author, Itabari Njeri, has become pregnant. “I wanted a child one day, but I didn’t want one then,” she writes. And neither does she want one by the man who’d impregnated her. When she requests an abortion, the physician who confirmed the pregnancy advises against it. “As I got dressed, I chose to focus all my rage on her. How dare she tell me not to have an abortion.” After informing the man of her decision, she schedules an appointment at a clinic; her fellow patients in the waiting room are a mother of four, a woman in her early twenties, and one who has had two prior abortions. “It’s nothing,” this woman tells the twenty-something. But for Njeri, the abortion is not nothing. The nurses and doctor treat her well, but she “could not stop crying. I can think of few circumstances that would compel me to have an abortion again.” Still, she does not write that she regrets the decision—but that’s beside the point. Her ability to choose whether or not to continue the pregnancy afforded her further choices: whether to continue any form of relationship with the man she’d been seeing; the kind of work she wanted to do.
All this is to say that one thing a good book can do is capture both the individual and universal complexities of being a human in the world, and for that—this month, all months—I am grateful.
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“Every Good-Bye Ain’t Gone” by Itabari Njeri (1990, Crown)
In her prelude to her memoir, Itabari Njeri writes that Every Good-Bye Ain’t Gone “began as a novel and ends up the literal truth; many might not have believed the portrayals otherwise.” The family portrayals in question: A violent Marxist intellectual of a father; a murderous, slave-owning pirate ancestor; a mother whose motto she describes as “when things get tough, the tough move furniture, vacuum floors, and decorate.” But Njeri, a 1992 Pulitzer Prize finalist in criticism, was selling herself short, I think, in her concern about whether readers would go along on any ride she chose to take them—the book feels true not merely because the reader knows that it is, but because Njeri instills her descriptions with nuance, empathy, and trenchant scrutiny, whether her subject is the automobile accident that left her grandfather dead and more questions than answers; her own childhood in Brooklyn and Harlem, or love affair with a womanizing colleague; the process of adopting an African name; or the loss of her earliest chosen art form, singing: her voice is “now a lover that comes and goes.” Last month I read, loved, and recommended Maud Newton’s Ancestor Trouble; the books read very much in conversation with each other, so for those looking for complicated stories of finding oneself through the story of one’s family: why not treat yourself to a double feature? Every Good-Bye is out of print—a sin!—but is available secondhand.
“I Never Promised You a Rose Garden” by Joanne Greenberg (1964; Penguin Classics Reissue May 2022)
As someone who went through much of life bombastically flipping past the introductory essays to books (some combination of wanting to greet the text on its own terms and, you know, laziness), I have rarely been one to choose a read because of its introduction. But Esmé Weijun Wang’s essay collection The Collected Schizophrenias—in which Wang writes about her own diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, and more broadly about mental illness, through a highly articulated lens that is at once personal, clinical, and rigorous—was one of my favorite books the year it was released, and so her name attached to this 1964 novel about a 16-year-old in a psychiatric hospital—a book I’d read about but never read—caught my eye. In her foreword, Wang compares Joanne Greenberg’s I Never Promised You a Rose Garden to Sylvia Plath’s more-famous novel, published the year before: “Sensitive readers over the past many decades have tended to identify more strongly with The Bell Jar’s ambitious, fashionable Esther Greenwood, who scoops heaps of caviar at dancy luncheons before everything goes awry. Rose Garden’s Dora Blau, who is Jewish, psychotic, and capable of acts of violence and gruesome self-harm, is comparatively difficult to glamorize. Still, it is exactly this grit that I find appealing.” Hard concur. Greenberg’s semi-autobiographical novel, told from a kaleidoscope of perspectives—teenage Deborah, with her astute observations of the ward’s orderlies and her fellow patients; her parents, who vacillate between mourning, anxiety, and shame; the coolly competent Dr. Fried—is unsentimental in its depiction of Deborah’s mental illness, which includes frequent descents from what she describes as the Now on Earth into the shadowy world of Yr, an in between Midworld, a Fear-bog filled with “the monsters and corpses of her nightmares.” These private mental terrors knock up against the ones of Deborah’s earthly world, including a traumatic childhood operation and cruel anti-Semitism from kids at a sleepaway camp. When Dr. Fried describes a patient to Deborah’s mother, who said that he imagined horrible things happening so that real life couldn’t make them happen first, “That patient…did he get well?” her mother asks. “Yes, he got well. Then the Nazis came and they put him into Dachau and he died there.” Still, for all its stark sadness and difficulty, the life and wit in this book jumps right off the page.
“The Year of the Horses” by Courtney Maum (May 2022, Tin House)
“[A]t thirty-seven,” writes Courtney Maum in her new memoir, The Year of the Horses, “I did not know how to play, because somehow, my ability to be comfortable in joy had left my heart and body.” Maum (the author of the novels Costalegre and Touch, among other books) felt unseen by her husband, and her two-year-old’s needs “became vast and existential…Nina wanted a form of love that was far beyond the planned care I’d shown up until that point.” Her debilitating insomnia couldn’t be solved by a host of remedies: “I have tried alcohol and acting out and kissing other men,” she writes. “I have tried acupuncture and exercise, no exercise, essential oils, drugs made in a lab. I have tried denial.” Through the fog was a persistent draw towards riding horses, a childhood passion that fizzled with teenage distractions. And so she began to ride again.
As a child, Maum’s love of horses centered around faithful and doomed Artax in Everlasting Story, the titular winged horse in a children’s book called Flutterby, the leased pony presented to her, at age six, on Christmas morning. At thirty-seven and on, with the love comes healing: relearning how to ride with soft hands and eyes following the pain of a lost pregnancy; the lessons learned at the barn—patience, courage, relaxation—carrying over into Maum’s relationships with her husband and daughter. There are setbacks and frustrations and one devastating tragedy that left this animal lover (who still cannot watch that scene of Everlasting Story) weepy for a full evening, but the arc of the book is undeniably upwards. By some weird cosmic twist, I received a review copy of Maum’s book the day I was due to take my own first riding lesson in thirteen years; obviously, it held certain particular resonances for me. But over the last couple years, as lives and priorities have shifted in the wake and midst of a dozen kinds of large-scale tragedies, it has not been unusual to learn that a friend or acquaintance is rekindling a relationship with a childhood hobby or passion. Drawing, playing an instrument, spending time in nature, working with clay. For those who haven’t, but hope to, this book may be the velvety nuzzle of a nudge needed to start.
LIGHTNING ROUND: A grab-bag of recent favorites from the V.F. staff
“Better Angels: A Kate Warne Adventure” written by Jeff Jensen and illustrated by George Schall (2021, Archaia)
How is the name Kate Warne not already known to everyone? Why didn’t her daring true-life adventures during the mid-1800s turn her into an American legend on the level of Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett? How are there not already countless movies, books, and TV shows about her? This astonishing, thrilling and at times heartfelt and hilarious graphic novel by Jeff Jensen and George Schall celebrates a real-life hero in a way that is both enlightening and entertaining. Warne is considered the first female detective, a daring “spy” who infiltrated Confederate circles to protect President Abraham Lincoln from assassination long before his aspiring killers finally caught up with him.
Jensen and Schall’s graphic novel combines the untold truth with heaping helpings of legend, but it’s often hard to tell where the fiction begins. Dig into Warne’s history, and you’ll find that some of the most shocking twists in this tale are actually real events. The unanswered question still lingering at the end is how Warne’s tale hasn’t been embraced by pop culture until now. Haven’t we craved a hero like this since forever? Maybe Warne was simply overshadowed by countless other larger-than-life figures who command attention from the Civil War era, or maybe the sexist disregard she faced in life continued to hold her back over the centuries. Better Angels will make you cheer for her, admire her, and wish the world had more fearless, noble and clever people like Kate Warne. We could all use a protector (or inspiration) like her. —Senior Hollywood Reporter Anthony Breznican, who is here to untangle the multiverse
“The Boys on the Bus” by Timothy Crouse (1973; Random House Trade Paperbacks Reprint, 2003)
I asked my editor for a list of books to read before he went on sabbatical and The Boys on the Bus was at the top of the list. Timothy Crouse’s iconic account of reporters covering Nixon’s reelection campaign against George McGovern in 1972 (and later the Nixon White House) is an outgrowth of an article Crouse wrote for Rolling Stone and is often referred to as the definitive account of “pack journalism”—with mini-profiles of some it’s biggest players scattered throughout. It is often as hilarious as it is shrewd, and written with a kind of energy that makes it a blast to read (even if you’re not a media reporter). Much of the analysis holds up, too, including Crouse’s quip that R.W. “Johnny” Apple Jr. “had reached the higher echelons of the Times, where politics is practiced almost as much as journalism.” It’s dated mostly by the fact that the title is quite literal (Cassie Mackin is one of the only female journalists who shows up). Still, I couldn’t get enough. —Staff Writer Charlotte Klein, who chronicled that Wordle mishap
“The Palace Papers” by Tina Brown (April 2022, Crown)
In 2006, Tina Brown, former editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, established herself as the definitive interpreter of Princess Diana’s short, glamorous life and her tragic death in The Diana Chronicles. In The Palace Papers, she shoots even higher, looking to tell the story of Queen Elizabeth’s family and their foibles in the decades since Diana died. Her true love for the queen as a person shines through, but she is not at all afraid to touch some of the subjects that ardent monarchists might avoid, and she’s equally fact-based and dishy. —Staff Writer Erin Vanderhoof, who has all your royal updates—via audio!
“Cake Zine” (May 2022)
“My throat tightened—the moment I’d been waiting for. I extended my neck elegantly like Grace Kelly, like a swan, like I was taffy to pull.” Such is the eroticism of Cake Zine, a new literary project by Aliza Abarbanel and Tanya Bush. The inaugural issue’s theme is “Sexy Cake,” which explains why Nicolaia Rips, quoted above, revisits the birthday cake-scented body wash that ignited her teenage fantasies. On the side of chaste, a former Mormon shares her twist on so-called Better Than Sex Cake; closer to kink, there’s a polemic against phallic pastries and an interview with a performance artist known to sit on her frosted, layered confections. Why not lean into temptation? As the editors remind us: “Always save room for dessert.” —Beauty Director Laura Regensdorf, who talked cheek tint and self care with Alicia Keys
