birthday monologue
Aquarius season officially starts tomorrow. This also means my birthday is in a couple of days. I don’t consider myself a diva on a day-to-day basis (unless you steal my Barnes and Noble gift card in a office-wide Yankee gift swap even though I clearly make about one hundred thousand dollars less than you AND my arm is in a SLING. this is very specific and personal), but my birthday is a different story.
Some people hate their birthdays, and I kind of do on a deep level. I’m not excited to age anymore. The ravages of time, in fact, terrify me. Some people don’t really like to be the center of attention, which I also understand. Yes, I dabble in the world of comedy, and I write a Substack, and I’m clearly on my way to becoming a really famous book influencer, so on at least some subconscious level, I have a thirst for the spotlight. But, really, I wish I could do these fun things in the shadows of darkness while not being perceived by anybody at all.
All that to say — I love celebrating my birthday. It’s nice to feel a little special. I adore spending time with everyone I like and having an excuse to get all my friends together. I love getting cards because they always make me cry in a happy way where you remember how lucky you are in your life, even if you don’t have a Barnes and Noble gift card and you had to spend two weeks with your arm in a sling. And I’m not even going to pretend I don’t love presents. If I had to psychoanalyze all of this, I’d say it’s related to being a weird little gremlin as a child, but I don’t, so you don’t have to worry about it.
If you were touched by my sad story about being a weird little gremlin child and getting my Barnes and Noble gift card brutally torn from my hands, there’s one wonderful gift you can give me, which is sharing this newsletter with your friends. Think of it as compensating for the friends I didn’t have as a child… </3
reads
I posted a review of All This Could Be Different last week with a pretty nice photo attached. As previously mentioned here, I loved this one, but I probably summed up my thoughts more nicely over yonder.
I read a couple of books at the end of 2023 that I didn’t get to discuss here. But they were actually a pretty excellent way to end the year and deserve their own write-ups:
Rifqa, by Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd, is a poetry collection detailing life in Palestine and is a tribute to his late grandmother Rifqa.
The past few months have been a stark reminder — not something new — of the atrocities that have been committed in Palestine by the apartheid state of Israel. It’s an active genocide. At least 25,000 Palestinians have been killed since October alone.
I know it’s difficult to read the news and to see the same fucking horrible things over and over. When I read this collection of poems, it reminded me of the immense power that literature holds. It’s just devastating because it’s true. You will hold some of the lines close for their simplicity and beauty and feel physical pain.
It's the same killing everywhere. Seventy-two years later we haven't lived a day.
El-Kurd is a young man, but he has seen horrors far beyond his years, and he pens them heartbreakingly well. His writing is poetic, but he’s clear about what reality is: “Poems won’t build a house.” I couldn’t recommend this collection more, especially if you need a jumping-off point to engage with Palestine. From the river to the sea. 4.4/5.
Shifting gears dramatically — I’d heard some positive buzz around Julia Fox’s memoir and, after reading an essay she published about her first time working as a dominatrix, was officially intrigued. And I have to say that I was not disappointed, because this is a pretty gripping and moving memoir that takes us through the twists and turns of Fox’s life in the spotlight.
I think she’s such a notorious figure in entertainment and has been so open about her life that you might think you’re reading this to learn about salacious secrets. But it’s not a celebrity name-drop fest at all, which makes it all the more compelling, because her life is what’s actually compelling. If anything, I was more interested in her early life and childhood than I was her movie career.
The main motif of the book is her struggles with substance use and the deaths of several close friends from overdoses. She doesn’t shy away from it; she speaks frankly, both telling crazy and amusing stories and also not glamorizing any of it. And considering she’s not a professional novelist, she’s a very solid writer with a clear and funny narrative voice. She’s frank and to-the-point, but doesn’t hesitate to give great visceral descriptions of scenes that need it (like the feeling of using heroin for the first time).
Of course, it’s not perfect; there are gaps in the timeline where I could have used more of a narrative flow. Also, some characters were just dropped in with no introduction whatsoever and that led to a bit of confusion. But I’m pretty impressed! I would love to read more of her stuff, and I’d be especially interested in her fiction, which I feel like I heard she was working on unless I’m making that up completely. To call it a celebrity memoir is doing it a disservice; it’s something much more fascinating. 4.3/5.
current reads
At time of publishing, I’m about halfway through The Bluest Eye. Fucking devastating and we haven’t even gotten to the really sad shit yet. I’d never read this in school or anything, so I actually had no idea of the plot prior to starting. It’s tough — lots of content warnings — and it’s necessary. There is an intersectional focus on the Black woman experience at the hands of layered levels of subjugation, and I also appreciated the post-Depression setting as a backdrop for the plot. You don’t need me to tell you to read Toni (can I call her Toni?), but I will tell you to just in the event that you do.
My dear friend Deirdre sent over an early birthday present in the form of a copy of The Rachel Incident, by Caroline O’Donoghue, and while I haven’t started it yet, I’m just going to put the jacket copy here and you can tell me what you think:
Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it’s love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them.
When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at their local bookstore, with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred’s glamorous, well-connected, bourgeois wife.
Married affairs … “insistently heterosexual” … Irish … sounds pretty much exactly like Conversations with Friends … my friends know me well. <3.
for the aquariuses (?) in your life
Finally, in the spirit of the season, I thought it might be fun to come up with a list of books I’ve read that sort of give me Aquarius vibes. This is not based on anything but my own intuition, but if I had to categorize them, I’d say the list comprises of books with wonky structures and/or sad hot girl weirdo characters and/or kind of an ethereal vibe and/or a cursed overwrought romance. Linking my reviews so you can give me your thoughts.
Writers and Lovers (cursed romance, sad hot girl, I’m a narcissist)
Devil House (has a lot to say and has a chapter in medieval font which is annoying)
Our Wives Under the Sea (ethereal vibe, sad and weird)
The Secret History (the most insufferable characters you could ever imagine)
The Rabbit Hutch (wonky structure, also sad and weird)
Ghost Lover (every woman depicted in these stories is miserable and convinced they’re not hot but they inherently are as sad hot girls)
Happy Hour (these 21-year-olds are cooler than I could ever hope to be)
other media
I have a lot of reality TV to talk about, but I want to finish this in a timely fashion. However I cannot pass up the chance to discuss The Traitors. I’ve been meaning to watch for a while, but never had a Peacock account, and then when I finally got one I was sucked into Vanderpump Rules, and then The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City started going absolutely bonkers (I will speak about THAT in full when the three-part reunion is over, but Monica Garcia/Fowler is the smartest person on television). But my oft-mentioned pal Caroline gave me a heads up that the new season premiered the other week, and being a bit sick this week with some time to kill, I finally jumped in.
Holy fucking shit: this is the PERFECT reality television show. A mass game of Mafia where I get to watch Pilot Pete of Bachelor fame and queen of Love Island Ekin-Su interact? Next question. Two people are designated as the “traitors,” and they have to go undetected by the rest of the group while killing people off. If they’re sussed out, they lose; if they aren’t, they win $250,000.
Only three episodes were out when I started, so I went back and watched the entirety of season one in about 24 hours, and if you can avoid spoilers for that older one and watch it too, I would HIGHLY, HIGHLY recommend it. There’s some genius on display that we could all learn to integrate into our personal games of Werewolf. Alan Cumming is perhaps the best reality TV host to ever grace the stage. We should probably get Tony award-winners to start doing every ridiculous gig possible. Theater kids COMMIT.
A massive thanks, as always, for reading, and an extra thanks to everyone who’s shared posts with their friends and told me they’ve enjoyed the newsletter. I’m going into my *shudder* late twenties a very lucky lady.
And I almost forgot!!! my birthday signals the second anniversary of my bookstagram!!! Enjoy this throwback from the photoshoot I forced my friends to do last year and bask in the glory of a good read.
