Strangers' Opinions and One-Sided Conversations
On inside thoughts, caring what people think, and (a little bit) more
Hello, and thank you for being here!
Some housekeeping to start off: last time I wrote you, I was apparently overeager with the green “Send” button and didn’t double check my links, leading to some confusion and, at least on my part, annoyance. Apologies! (The links all fixed in the version of that newsletter that lives on the web. The most important link continues to be the one where you can pre-order my book.)
Now that’s out of the way… I’m still figuring out the shape these emails will take. My instinct is to treat it like one of the diaristic blogs I had as a teenager, because apparently I am that certain kind of millennial who has never outgrown the version of the internet where anonymity—and the attendant confessional freedom—was not only possible but strongly encouraged. But it’s the year of our trash fire 2025, I’m listening to music curated by an algorithm on Spotify and not downloaded songs from Limewire, and I have a professional writing career but not the kind where I can count on an audience eager for my every inside thought.
When I think about why I want to share my every inside thought (or why I think I want to do so), I can recognize easily that it comes down to a desire for affirmation, for acceptance, for the kind of love that is unconditional enough to be interested in the nonsense and mundanity. I have that IRL! But some version of me that came of age during the rise of the World Wide Web and the advent of diverse and rapidly coming-and-going social media platforms still yearns for the approval of acquaintances and strangers on the internet.
On the flip side of that is my completely disproportionate and irrational reaction to receiving disapproval online. Which is perhaps why I have been terrified of the fact that advance reader copies of Beings are now arriving at the doorsteps of strangers. My first review from someone I don’t know, from @tessreadsbooks on Instagram, was lovely! This of course only increases the dread I feel for the inevitable unlovely opinion that someone, somewhere, will have.
![Screenshot of IG post by @tessareadsbooks. On the left is the image of an e-reader with the cover of BEINGS on it next to a to-go cup, and on the right is the second half of the review which reads: "The interconnected stories are beautifully woven together, and I kept changing my mind about who I was most interested in. It is clear that the theme of aliens, and feeling like an other, is a heavy but apt metaphor for what all of the characters in all different timelines are experiencing. Phyllis, the lesbian sci fi writer, was a fascinating character and I began to wish that she was real as well! I would love to read her stories. All in all, this book lived up to the excitement I had going into it and I think it will be a hit title this fall. Can’t wait for what else Masad has for us in the future. [five star emojis]""](https://assets.buttondown.email/images/300883af-2eaa-4ef3-a8c7-12ec97c0f1a8.png?w=960&fit=max)
In a very indirect way, I was thinking about all this when I was researching and writing Beings. Specifically, thinking about how the internet has made it so much easier to react to things swiftly—and in public!—and then be socially (and/or algorithmically) rewarded for doing so. I feel very trapped within that cycle’s mentality, but also, as a freelance book critic, I have to take part in it to an extent—the newspapers and magazines I write for cover new literature almost exclusively, and it’s very hard to place anything about a book that’s already come out unless it’s having some kind of big anniversary (and thus getting a reprint or rerelease that allows it to count as “new” again).
Much of Beings takes place in the 1960s, and while all my research tells me that it was not, at all, a simpler time1, what is true is that there were, due to technology, fewer venues in which an instant public reaction to news was possible. Laypeople (i.e. those who weren’t professional critics or commentators) had to make the effort of writing a letter to an editor if they wanted to criticize something, or they’d have to call into a radio program, or make some other concerted effort to reach an audience outside their circle of friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues.
Similarly, reading through archives—which I did a lot of while researching the novel—is often both rewarding and maddening due to how one-sided it is. You’re reading someone else’s letters, scraps of paper, lists, itineraries—but you can’t ask follow-up questions. You can’t ask them why they contradicted themselves in two distinct pieces of writing, or why they saved so little from one aspect of their life but kept everything from another, or how they chose to archive their things in the first place. You can’t reach out to an editor of a 50-year-old magazine issue to ask what it was like, placing advertisements for grifty cults in their pages, or why they chose to feature women more in some issues than others.
There’s something freeing about unanswered and unanswerable questions, though. They leave space for imagination, for deduction, and even—and this is, in so many ways, what Beings is really about—for invention.
I published a few reviews in May:
For the Los Angeles Times I wrote about Christina Li’s fun adult debut, Manor of Dreams, and about Tash Aw’s truly incredible and tender new novel, The South.
A note: links in this section will take you to the reviews, not to the books themselves; I will, at times, link to places where you can buy a book I love and am recommending, but I will never do that when I’m sharing reviews.
For Alta Journal, I wrote about Courtney Gustafson’s Poets Square: A Memoir in Thirty Cats, which—although I am a cat lover through and through—I really do recommend to anyone who cares about, well, the nature and labor of care, regardless of how you feel about cats.
And for NPR, I contributed a blurb about a book that’s coming out this summer, Meet Me At the Crossroads by Megan Giddings, which I’m nearly finished with and which has repeatedly taken my breath away.
Thank you again for being here! Next time, I’ll write a bit about how (and why) I’ve been reading and rereading Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness for the last fourteen months. That is, at least, the plan.
Yours, etc.,
Ilana
In fact, part of what I was both pleased and horrified to discover during my research was just how goddamn similar the 1960s were in terms of the social issues, moral panics, and civil rights fights. The language was often different, but the meat of so many of the issues was fundamentally the same.