The Crime Lady: Some of What I've Been Reading Lately
Dear TCL Readers:
After a month away traveling and writing in Europe, I’m finally back home — but only to catch my breath, because this week, I am recording the audiobook of Without Consent, the first time I’ve ever narrated one of my books.
I’ve loved the various narrators of my work, particularly Cassandra Campbell (The Real Lolita) and Gabra Zackman (Scoundrel and one-half of Unspeakable Acts.) But I felt that this book, in light of the subject matter and its treatment, ought to be narrated by its author, and that the reader/listener would benefit from hearing my voice delivering the text.
The HarperAudio team has been amazing throughout, and I could not be more honored to be doing this.
Speaking of Without Consent, the pre-publication rollout continues. I had a wonderful time last week as one of the featured authors of the HarperCollins Fall Bookseller Preview — really wonderful to see Angela Flournoy, whose much-awaited second novel The Wilderness is one of my favorites of the year, and to meet Catherine Newman, whose prior novel Sandwich I really liked - Wreck, out in October, is just as good.
My book also garnered its first trade review, as Kirkus not only didn’t hate it, but deemed it “a well-argued work of legal journalism that shines light on the darkest corners of married life.” Without Consent is also featured in the Boston Globe's fall books preview as a “sadly timely” nonfiction work. And after Labor Day, there is so much more to come, including book event announcements, so please stay tuned for that.
**
One of the great joys of traveling to different countries is the chance to visit new wonderful bookstores, and read solely for pleasure. I must shout out Shakespeare & Company and The Red Wheelbarrow in Paris, the American Book Center and Athaeneum Boekhandel in Amsterdam, and Shakespeare & Sons in Berlin, stores I know I will want to visit again in the future. (I was also mightily impressed with the two floors of books, mostly in French but also in various other language, at the FNAC superstore near my lodgings, but the indies obviously have my heart and mind.)
I read a number of very good novels — The first installment of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume, Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day, Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, and on a day trip to Toulouse, the entirety of Mary McCarthy’s The Group, which was just about the perfect way to read that book, on trains and in cafes — but the one I continue to think about most is Her First American by Lore Segal, an astounding meld of coming-of-age, race inequity, and acute Holocaust trauma, all with mirth and delightfully good humor. How did she do it? I think I’ll only have the answer by reading more of Segal’s works, which I intend to do this fall.
On the nonfiction side, I was particularly taken with The Aviator and the Showman by Laurie Gwen Shapiro — my god, George Putnam was a dangerous, publicity-obsessed narcissist, and the things he pushed Amelia Earhart into doing are ultimately unforgivable, seeing as they ended up killing her — and with Paris to the Past by Ina Caro, a truly charming trip through French history as traveled on the country’s trains and subways. (It’s also a stealth memoir of her long marriage to Robert Caro, though the big revelations are few — he’s obsessed with Napoleon, she very much is not — but the vibe is of a couple wholly in sync with each other.)
It was fascinating and more than a little discombobulating to read the recently reissued (and wholly excellent) Vegas by John Gregory Dunne — we’d call it autofiction now, though “memoir” is the term on the book cover — and follow it up with Notes to John by Joan Didion. I’d held off for a bunch of good and bad reasons but the UK paperback edition by 4th Estate was too much to resist. And even though I’m not certain this is actually a “book”, rather than something better read in the archive (namely, the NYPL, where the Didion-Dunne holdings largely are now), the seemingly raw anguish Didion puts in text about her daughter, Quintana — the alcoholism, depression, co-dependence, you name it — puts the lie to Blue Nights, and possibly in part to The Year in Magical Thinking.
As I read Notes to John, I had this nagging sense that she actually meant the text to be published at the time she was recording her notes. Didion saw her therapist, Roger McKinnon, until 2012, but the notes end in January 2003 and had grown sporadic well before then. Perhaps they might have, had not Quintana ended up with the series of medical calamities that led to her death in 2004, and particularly had not Dunne dropped dead of a heart attack in 2003. Whatever thoughts Didion might have had would have been irrevocably altered by the deaths of her two closest loved ones in quick succession. An emotional door slammed shut. Or did it?
Argue the merits of publishing Notes to John, and these are arguments worth having. But it exists as published text now, and has tremendous value not just to the scholar, but to the dedicated reader. I do wonder what other clues will be found in John’s specific archive, and now that Vegas is getting a new readership of its own, it’s certainly time to evaluate his body of work on its own merits, as well as in relationship to Didion (and to Quintana, someone whom I thought about writing but realized I’d already written that story.)
**
Now back to the recording booth. Next dispatch in September!
Until then, I remain,
The Crime Lady