LATE IN THE DAY by Tessa Hadley

This novel was my first foray into Hadley’s fictional worlds, and it won’t be my last. The novel opens with the death of one of the four main characters, Zach. His death shakes loose the four main characters' beliefs about who they are, who they love, and why. For years they held tight to the power structures of their twenties when Zach married Lydia and Alex married Christine. A time when they all pretended they didn’t know they should have married the other. So Zach’s death disrupts the status quo, and the three remaining characters question their choices and begin dismantling their rigid beliefs about marriage.   

Favorite line(s): In the Campo Ghetto Nuovo, the five of them sat drinking Campari in the last warmth of a May evening—the spring’s heat was still tentative, hadn’t consolidated yet into summer. The women pulled light scarves around their shoulders. The rosy, dusky air was filled with the effervescent spritzing of darting swallows; yeshiva scholars with sidelocks came in and out of lit rooms belonging to some American foundation. Too many tourists drifted through the square, breaking up the picture, disproportionate to the substratum of local life, which nonetheless maintained its steady purposefulness, pretending to be oblivious of them—men heading home swinging briefcases, old ladies gossiping indignantly on the bridges, children’s high musical voice glancing in rapid flight, like the swallows, against the water and along the walls of pinkish brick and stucco. They felt the guild of being tourists, of Venice unraveling at its edges—and for so many decades and centuries now—into something frayed and spoiled. But it was also all exquisite and exalting: they had come from the Madonna dell’Orto full of Tintorettos, and this was the second Campari. Where could one go in the whole world, seriously, and not feel guilty?

BODY WORK: THE RADICAL POWER OF PERSONAL NARRATIVE by Melissa Febos

In a circular fashion, all four essays in Febo’s latest work start and end on the notion that personal narratives free the self from the constraints of form. In the first essay, “In Praise of Navel Gazing,” the author writes about how one popular male memoirist is considered a genius for writing about his interior life when most female writers are vilified for their domestic depictions of motherhood. With marginalized authors, trauma stories are resisted because “resistance to memoir about trauma is always in part—and often nothing but—a resistance to movements for social justice.” In “Writing Better Sex,” she argues for setting aside the preconceptions surrounding sex set down by males, male writers, society, and who taught us what and who to enjoy it with. “To write an awakened sex scene,” she writes, “one may need to be awake to their own sex.” In “A Big Shitty Party,” the author examines the delicate line of writing about family and friends and the writer’s job as a considerate storyteller. The last essay, “The Return,” Febos explores the confession of memoir and “that distance between the author’s internal self and the version of herself that lands on the page.” Deep. Important.

Favorite line(s): It is not experience that qualifies a person to write a memoir, but insight into experience, and the ability to tell a story of the past that contains both dimensions. That is, the past experience has been integrated into the larger narrative of the author’s life.

YOU HAVE A FRIEND IN 10A: STORIES by Maggie Shipstead

I devoured these stories. Yes, I’m an obsessed Shipstead stalker-word fan. But what’s fun about reading these ten stories is that they span a lifetime in the author’s writing journey. From grad school to present, the collection shows us the author’s ability to capture men and women at their worst without the reader misjudging the characters' ulterior motives. I believe because the author doesn’t. Shipstead lets their stories take their own shape and purpose, dangling on low limbs to pick and bite into at will. All the while portraying the protagonists as confused as the rest of us about sexuality, identity, betrayal, and memory.   

Favorite line(s): A hand on his shoulder. A zip and a crackle as the needle is reset. He listens with his forehead against the rough fabric of the speaker. This is the music. It has been lost for years, lost like his mother, lost like her piano, which was no longer in the house when he returned after the war. Had it been chopped up and burned? Had an enterprising soul somehow carted if off to sell? Had it gone to reside in a country chateau to be pounded away at by a circle of singing Nazis? His mother will never return, but as he listens, he believes she might be just in the next room, lavishing her caresses on a mass of smooth wood and ivory, taut steel strings, sheet music easily sent cascading, pedals smooth and cold as cobblestones that, when he was small and would lie on his back beneath the instrument, hissed faintly as she depressed them with her small feet, her narrow leather pumps.

GHOST LOVER: STORIES by Lisa Taddeo

There’s an electric current that runs through Taddeo’s writing. Zings of desire, pangs of jealousy, the humming disquiet of body dysmorphia. And sometimes all at once in one sentence. In these nine fevered stories, the female narrators yearn for the male gaze but compete for female inclusion. They are armored on the exterior with the right clothing, a bank account, or an attitude. Interiorly, they are wounded and scared. Every woman knows women like Taddeo’s characters. But not every writer could write them with such unsentimental care.

Favorite line(s): She thinks of the impending six-minute ceremony, and the forty-three minutes the cowboy fucked her in the hay during which time she came and then came again against the milk-bearded mooing of the cows outside and the whistle of the humble Colorado wind. The ecstasy of grass, the violence of milk. Staring at the wedding bounty before her, feeling the weight of the crown of flowers in her hair, she knows there are hundreds, thousands, who will be jealous, but she doesn’t know them by name. She whispers the name of the cowboy to the unlit candles like a church girl, to the naked bread and the tiny daisies in tiny jars. She incants the name, and the name itself, like the memory of a moment before it becomes a legend, frees her enough to think the thing she has been thinking for ten thousand seconds for one hundred billion years, the thing we all think when we finally get what we want. The right was to do something might be the wrong way in the end.