March: Read, Listen, Drink

Some - but not too many - recommendations.

Read: There are the books you aspire to write, and the books you’re actually able to write. This concept came up over dinner with other writers and it’s something I’ve been working through most of my life. For a period, I wanted to write like an academic: Susan Sontag or Lionel Trilling, and then a sexy academic like Maggie Nelson. Another phase: I wanted to write like Louise Gluck, Jorie Graham, Anne Carson, someone who studied the classics. So I studied the classics but still did not write like those who inflect the Latinate echo into every word. These days, good god, I wish I could write a Katie Kitamura novel. A tense, dispassionate, steely, incisive, European-style thriller. I read Intimacies and A Separation back-to-back and I cannot overpraise them. I kept comparing her to Cusk (a lot of white space within the characters), but that’s not totally correct. Kitamura’s books have plot. Movement. Conflict. And while I will never write like her, I do think it’s wise to read in the general direction of your aspirations. Hopefully some of it rubs off. Linking to Kitamura’s Sewanee Review podcast episode with Brandon Taylor.  

Listen: Following up on Joan Didion, my agent, Mel Flashman, recommended the Know Your Enemy podcast and I cannot stop. Their episode on Joan Didion is the best “reading” on her I’ve ever encountered. It’s a close examination of her Republican years, her writing at The National Review, and it expands into how her conservative California upbringing produced an elitism that spans across all her work. Highly recommend.

Tenn, Honey & L.A. Blueswoman

Read: I recently contributed to the Los Angeles Times “Ultimate Los Angeles Bookshelf” (I’ll send it around when it’s published) which got me thinking about my hometown’s literary landscape. If you haven’t read Wanda Coleman, this is your call to action. Coleman is considered the city’s poet, the “L.A. Blueswoman,” born in Watts, a chronicler of the all kinds of institutional dis-ease. I’ll let her speak for herself:

American Sonnet 24 

i’m on uptime/have no resting place/cannot rest 
constant strive constant drive 
getting into bed is an act of creation. i’m putting
on weight and hope with unequaled relish – trapped twixt the
illusion of escape and the hallucination of release

i am the love of my secret rapists/the men
who break before the enter
they fight to maintain the myths i die by
(when underthegun who has time to keep a war journal?)

in that blues pocket of need reed where sweet darkness 
begins befogged in the snooze of mist, my legacy
the slave-soaked night wailings of misbegotten dreamers 
beseeching the dead to rise once more – that fierce 
hoodoo of humans consumed in the defiant flames of living

Listen: Some of the best discussions with my friend Emily have been about sex work, body ownership, desire, & OnlyFans. This is one of my favorite episodes of her season and it pairs nicely with Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex, a book I’m always thinking about.

Read: Jia Tolentino recently asked for help finding a vacation book. The list of aspirations was long and wide-ranging (something like the Patrick Melrose novels, also Pachinko, also The Known World), and the comments section has enough recommended reading to last multiple lifetimes. When I thought about a big juicy book that could transport me, envelop me, leave me bereft when it was over, I surprisingly did not think of a novel. I remember the last two weeks before my son, Julian, was born. I had just returned to LA from NYC where we were shooting Sweetbitter season two. In LA, our entire house was in boxes, except our mattress and a crib (my husband moved us while I was living in New York, I had never even seen the apartment in person). I remember the fucking glorious naps I took. And I remember reading John Lahr’s biography of Tennessee Williams, Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh. I adore a juicy artist biography (Benjamin Moser’s Why This World, and Heather Clark’s Red Comet come immediately to mind), but Williams’ life in particular – the New Orleans to New York, the unreciprocated love, the booze, the madness, the gothic suffering, maniacal highs – is the stuff of a tragicomic novel. I still think about Elia Kazan calling TW, “Tenn, honey.” I don’t know why it sums up that prolific partnership. I remember the mild December days, the lemon blossoms open, falling asleep with the book, waking up and picking up where I left off, thinking I would never have another reading experience like it. And I never have!

I also rec’d Ali Smith’s Artful (a dreamscape - but is it out of print?!) & Shirley Hazzard: either Evening of the Holiday & Bay of Noon together (both short, and EOTH will leave you with your mouth agape) or simply Transit of Venus.

Read: Should we talk about the Agnes Callard piece? Or has it been talked to death? I am a Rachel Aviv devotee (putting Strangers to Ourselves on my bookshelf in case you missed the best book of 2022) and this profile earned a solid place in her canon of the slightly amiss, delusional, & moral. You know I love to talk about other people’s marriages.

Drink: Ghia. Goddamn it, this shit is expensive. And goddamn it, I hate when people recommend expensive shit. I hate how sexy the bottle is - I feel like a bot being so attracted to it. But…since I’ve stopped drinking at home I am, for lack of a better word, “obsessed.” This is my spritz. So bitter. So scorching-hot-days-on-the-Mediterranean, pinked-up-and-giddy-from-Campari-sodas, eating-potato-chips-topless-on-hot-stones, except the Campari part.

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As always, the books mentioned are collected at my author bookshelf.