Book Flood
In the midst of a broken washer, I read like crazy
The week was dominated by a flood in our apartment. Our front-loading washer broke and water poured out in a river onto the floor, soaking the carpet. Thankfully T. was there with every towel and sheet in the house to soak it up, and cut the power to stop it. Still, we had maintenance guys in and out of the apartment, replacing our washer/dryer, and extracting the water from the carpet with something that looked like an evil Empire-serving droid with hoses. It’s been nearly a week and the carpet is mostly dry, but it’s stained and looks pretty gross. We’ve been through a mold infestation (twice!), so we’re skittish. Thankfully, all the of the books stayed dry. Yes, including the library books!
The library finally wants Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge back and it’s due in a couple of days. So I dutifully began the story of a drunkard and gambler who sells his wife and daughter to a sailor passing through town. But get this—the wife is happy to find any way out of her marriage to this loser. So she and her young daughter go willingly. Once the daughter’s grown up, they hit the road only to discover that the drunkard is now reformed and—you guessed it—the mayor of Casterbridge. Will he recognize his wife and daughter?
I’ll have to keep reading, but I’m probably going to run out of time. I’m too distracted by We Keep the Dead Close by Becky Cooper, which is a true crime book about the murder of an Anthro grad student at Harvard in 1969. It looks like her advisor did it, but I’m only fifty pages in and it’s a door stop at nearly 500 pages.
What are YOU reading?
I also logged in two pretty devastating novels of contemporary social media: Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts and Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This. I wasn’t familiar with Oyler, who is apparently a tough literary critic. She bravely wrote a novel herself about a woman who discovers her boyfriend is an alt-right conspiracy theorist by doing a bit of espionage on his cell phone. She is ready to break up with him after the Women’s March in 2017 when she discovers he’s dead.
There are some dead-on representations of the Women’s March post-Trump inauguration, and Oyler captures the minefield that is social media with equal parts trepidation and fascination. I found it a confounding book in many ways—the structure is at times experimental, and always very very ironic, as when she decides to switch to short paragraphs of imagery, each focused on a sign of the zodiac. It ended up being too crazy of a ride for me to make much of the story, but I’m giving Oyler stars for tearing literature up.
Lockwood’s book is better—and it employs the short vignette structure that Oyler satirizes in Fake Accounts. No One is Talking About This features a social media influencer who became huge after her absurd tweet, “can a dog be twins?” went viral. The narrator is smart and savvy about “the Portal” (which it took me too many pages to realize meant the Internet) and the novel is full of wise and snarky and raunchy observations about the crazy reality we construct for ourselves online. That would be enough, but the second half of the book is about a child born with Proteus syndrome (The Elephant Man’s condition) and how the narrator comes to care deeply for this child. I don’t know how Lockwood pulls off sharp wit and tenderness in the same book, but she knocks it out of the park. Plus, it’s a short read—I gobbled it up in an hour, while the Oyler took me three good days.
Lockwood is primarily known as a poet and a memoirist—if you love poetry but haven’t checked her out, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals is a must read. Same with her memoir—Priestdaddy is a sad and subversive story about Lockwood’s father becoming a priest through a Catholic Church loophole. The Vatican gave him a special dispensation to become a Catholic priest, as he had been a Lutheran minister before. (I did not know this was possible! New information for this lapsed Catholic that still keeps up with the faith like a believer). Most of the memoir is about Lockwood’s young adulthood, wherein she and her husband have to live with her parents for a stretch of time. Again, that would be enough, but HER DAD WAS A PRIEST. You must forgive me for being stuck on this, but I can’t imagine it.
With the flood stuff out of the way, I’m going back to my own memoir/novel about my Catholic upbringing and identity as a contingent academic. It’s about TWO kinds of faith—get it?—and how I got school and God hopelessly mixed up. I’m honestly scared to write it, but it will bother me forever if I don’t tell this story.
You’ve got a story too—everyone does—but maybe you want to write it down this time. Maybe you’re looking for a sign to get started. Well, take this as a sign if you need one. Remember, no one ever has to read it. It just feels good and even joyful to get it out on paper. What are you waiting for?
Bibliography
Cooper, Becky. We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence. (2020)
Hardy, Thomas. The Mayor of Casterbridge. (1886)
Lockwood, Patricia. Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals (2014)
No One is Talking About This (2021)
Priestdaddy (2017)
Oyler, Lauren. Fake Accounts (2021).