"Bear," a Great Summer Mystery, and More
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1. I had the great pleasure of interviewing Julia Phillips for Electric Lit about her new book, Bear. Julia and I overlapped at Barnard (and, according to my email archive, briefly crossed paths on the staff of the literary magazine, though I do not actually remember this), and while I don’t normally feel a lot of college pride I was excited by her success with her first book, Disappearing Earth, in part because of the Barnard connection. It was fun to get to cross paths again so many years later and talk about her new book. Bear is partly based on a Grimms’ fairy tale, partly a story about economic pressures in America, partly a story about sisters. I found it extremely stressful to read, which is a compliment. You can read the interview here and order the book here.
2. Gavia and I also chatted about books we’ve read and enjoyed recently on Overinvested’s Patreon. Our collective list included books from the 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, nonfiction and fiction, fantasy and realism. We covered it all! You can find the post here. I’d especially like to shout out Rachel Somerstein’s new book Invisible Labor: The Untold History of the Cesarean Section, which I found to be essential reading.
3. One more new book rec, one that you’ve probably heard about already if you follow book news: The God of the Woods, by Liz Moore, is going to be one of the books of the summer and is probably the mystery of the year (not that I’ve read enough to say that for sure). It’s a big fat book to sink into on vacation, one of the most purely pleasurable reads I’ve had this year despite its darkness. I particularly enjoyed Maureen Corrigan’s review in the Washington Post, which draws a comparison with The Secret History that I never would have thought of but which makes a lot of sense.
4. A couple pieces of literary criticism for you: B.D. McClay on Persuasion; Anne Enright on John McGahern. Reading Enright’s essay, I thought about how we talk about autofiction and writers who use their own lives as material (in a direct way); the autofiction discourse often makes it seem like this is some kind of novel phenomenon, but that trend is really more about style. Here, McGahern’s life-writing seems to clearly be both a liberatory act (his insistence in writing about being sexually abused by his father), whether or not it felt that way at the time, and a cruel one (writing about the mother of his long-secret child, whom he didn’t love).
This has been particularly on my mind as I’ve recently read Vigdis Hjorth’s If Only, a roman-à-clef that made waves in Norway over two decades ago and is finally coming out in English this fall. Hjorth’s ex-boyfriend recently published his own version of the story (over twenty years later?), no doubt inspired by her sister, who wrote her own “counter-novel” attacking Hjorth’s Will and Testament, in which she (lightly) fictionalized their family and accused their father of abusing her as a child. (The Times covered this several years ago.) Things get complicated easily with a writer in the family, no?
5. Neil Gaiman has been accused of sexual assault. This has been a long time coming.