Emily Books

May 30

Just Do It

When I was 24, I took mushrooms at a party in a seedy part of Hollywood and got it on with a bunch of strangers in a hot tub. There’s nothing inherently wrong with mushrooms + strangers + hot tub + heeeey, but the situation was wrong for me, because I wasn’t really enjoying myself. My focus was on putting on a show and making other people happy, not myself. And these were spectacularly gross people—anyone else could have seen that, tripping or not. But the craziest/saddest/worst part of the whole evening wasn’t that I was faking moans for people who couldn’t have cared less about whether I was enjoying their drunk fumblings, it was that I ran into someone from high school in the hot tub. Do you understand? I was naked and tripping and groping and being groped and through the fog I heard someone say, “Hey! It’s John from CHS.”

The hot tub incident came towards the end of a time in my life, between ages 12 and 24 approximately, when I was really into being performatively crazy. The thing people say about young women who flaunt their sexuality the way I did is that they’re like that because their dads were dicks. I know that isn’t the case for everyone, but it was for me. My father, as I’ve chronicled here, here, and here, was a dick. Though he was successful, erudite, and often quite charming, he also taught me to hate myself, mostly by calling “stupid” and then calling me “crybaby” after I started crying because he called me stupid.

Apr 20

The Not-Nice Novel

Helen DeWitt’s books aren’t apologetic, cute or kind. In an Extremely Sentimental and Curiously Twee literary marketplace, we need her work more than ever, argues Rich Beck

In the last fifteen years, the Precocious Child has become one of the American novel’s favorite protagonists. Whimsical, ingenious, and verbose, the Precocious Child knows simultaneously more and less than his adult readers. He may be a tennis prodigy (Infinite Jest) or a twelve-year old farm boy who wins science prizes from the Smithsonian Institute (The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet). But he’s impeded by his youth and something else, too: autism (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime) or amusingly bad English (Everything Is Illuminated) make it difficult for him to understand or articulate adult feelings. This tension between extraordinary competence in some areas and lovable haplessness in others is what gives the Precocious Child novel its appeal.

The Last Samurai belongs to this genre—in fact, it is one of the very first Precocious Child novels—but it also obviates it. It seems to have been written, point by point, to reject everything the Precocious Child novel would come to stand for.

Apr 19

“A Glory Hole Would Have Ruined EVERYTHING.” An Interview with Helen DeWitt

Helen DeWitt is the author of EB pick Lighting Rods. She is also the author of The Last Samurai and the blog paperpools. Andy Selsberg is the author of You Are Good at Things: A Checklist and teaches college freshman composition. They had a fascinating recent email conversation about Lightning Rods and the ethical and physical practicability of some of the acts described therein. You should certainly follow both Helen’s and Andy’s twitters.

AS: Eureka, FL, Electrolux, Encyclopaedia Britannica, characters who say
“Jumping Jehosophat”: these all seem to set the story in a mythical
American past (or at least a parallel America). Did you do this to
give the story an air of fable or allegory? (If not, what drew you to
this setting? It is one I’m sucker for.) At any point you consider
about making it more now—maybe have Joe hustling ads for a website,
or going after venture capital for a startup? Would that have changed
the essence of what you wanted to do with the novel?

HD: I think what I had in mind was the simplified America(s) of TV sitcoms of the late 50s, 60s, 70s. It struck me that when Joe was growing up the popular culture that was his frame of reference would not all have been contemporary, it was common to have endless reruns of shows that had aired years, even a decade earlier. (I suppose one could see that as a kind of mythical past.) His outlook feels more dated than one would expect if one thought only of his age (hits 30 sometime in the 90s); that seemed to matter somehow, that this simplistic, outdated view of the world should find a foothold in a real world that had left it far behind. Which, in turn, is possible because 1 person in the 1000 he tries shares the same dated point of view and is in a position to give him his first sale. I don’t think that particular irony would have been possible if Joe had been brought up to date, been more recognizable as a modern businessman.

I don’t mean to imply that the book is particularly profound, but this does seem to be a fictional instance of something that is genuinely shocking about our world: most of its structures were put in place, are now kept in place, by people who couldn’t even IMAGINE the resources taken for granted by the young.

Apr 9

Trading Futures

The following is an excerpt from Making Scenes, our April pick.

***

I HAVEN’T SEEN ROBERT for five days. He’s working on fixing things with his wife, but she’s not as smart as I am, and Robert needs smart. This is what he told me.

One reason Robert knows I’m smart is because I pick out better books for his three-year-old than she does. I get the books from my grandma’s store. I get the artsy ones that have deep adult meaning and cool kid pictures. Grandma makes me pay for the books. I didn’t ever have to pay for books before, but I gladly hand over the cash, which I will hit Robert up for later.

Today I buy Annabel Lee.

“Where are you getting all this money?” Grandma asks.

I tell her Robert and I are sharing our money. My grandma points out I have no money to share.

When I get back to my apartment, I write an inscription about how our love is as true as the love Poe writes about in Annabel Lee, but I don’t say that, exactly, because it would be sappy. And instead of inscribing, I write on a notecard, and slip it inside, so he doesn’t have to throw out the whole book if he doesn’t leave his wife.

CAMERON SAYS he has a present for me. He gives me his three favorite pictures from the Victoria’s Secret catalogue. “You can put these up with your pictures of women triathletes,” he says.

I examine the pictures. The women all have smooth stomachs with soft belly buttons, and I am pleased. “Thank you,” I say, looking at his nose or his forehead—not his eyes, in case I still love them. I say, “There’s this part in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings where Maya Angelou says she thought she was a lesbian, but really she was just becoming conscious of her own body and learning to love it.”

“So?”

“So, Cameron, how do you think she knows?”

“She’s just making excuses. She’d do Toni Morrison if she could.”

ROBERT CALLS. He’s in his car. He’s always in his car when he calls because it’s the only phone bill Marla doesn’t open.

I haven’t seen him for five days because he says that to see me on a day he sees the marriage counselor would be dishonest.

I spend the next half hour preparing for his arrival. I shave my legs twice, once up and down and once diagonally. I place a volleyball and a swimsuit in the middle of the floor so he thinks I’ve been out playing, instead of home waiting. I’ve spent all week waiting: Cleaning behind stuff, putting new stuff in concealed spots, and throwing up.

I sit on my floor and imagine what it will be like when he gets here. He’ll look the same as always—khaki pants, brown loafers and oxford-cloth shirt. He wears the same clothes on the weekend that he wears to work. Once I told him his life has no boundaries, and he said he’s too old for jeans.

Feb 27

Because it’s broken

by Sady Doyle

It’s easy to read the buddhist as a feminist text. It’s also easy to read it as a book about dissolving the boundaries between high and low art, or a performance piece about obsession, or a book about the abuse of spiritual authority. It’s even possible to read it as simply a book about abuse and its aftermath. Bellamy explicitly acknowledges that her subject — an ex-boyfriend, whose gruesome break-up tactics and even more gruesome post-break-up communications demonstrate him to be an endlessly creative and energetic mindfucker — was psychologically abusive. She acknowledges this about halfway through the book, at which point I was already suppressing the urge to mail her my copy of Codependent No More.

But maybe all of these frameworks are deployed — politics, religion, art, a healthy dose of psychotherapy; all the neat little devices people use to extract meaning from raw experience — precisely because none of them work. The book sucks in frameworks, chews them up, and spits them out, one after another. One after another, each coping strategy is found insufficient to the experience at hand. At its core, the buddhist is a protracted fight between two people for the right to know what happened.

Feb 22

Without a net: an interview with Dodie Bellamy

Dodie Bellamy’s book the buddhist originated as a series of posts on Dodie’s blog, belladodie, in which she described her life in the aftermath of a protracted breakup with a Buddhist teacher. Dodie has used many writing forms over the course of her career, from poetry to academic writing, often focusing on the sometimes-blurry line between what’s considered “memoir” and what’s considered “fiction,” but she did not become a blogger until relatively recently. Now she’s making up for lost time. Emily Gould spoke to her via telephone on 2/20/2012.

EG: When did you start blogging and why?

DB: It was August, 2008. I was feeling isolated, and even though I’m surrounded by writers, I felt like opening up a dialogue with the world. Kevin, my husband, said “Okay, if you want to blog, you have to put up four posts before you tell anybody.” His other advice was, “Write about readings like a reporter, and list everybody that came to the reading, cause then people will Google themselves and they’ll read your blog!”

EG: That’s good advice! Before blogs existed, though, and before you became a blogger, what did you do that was like blogging?

DB: My book The Letters of Mina Harker is comparable, in a way. It was a project where I re-created this character of Mina (the heroine of Bram Stoker’s Dracula) as my own alternate personality, and Mina was sending letters to writer friends of mine. These friends were writing back to her – short, casual letters – but then as the project progressed I realized I was really interested in Mina as a character, and her letters got more and more involved. Every letter in that book was actually sent to somebody, and my process involved much personal confrontation. I compare it to blogging because it was the same kind of mashing around with the boundaries between personal and public, bringing a larger community into the work.

Dec 12

“Ask Amelio” by Emily Carter

Emily Books’s coverage of Glory Goes and Gets Some will be ramping up later this week, but in the meantime, we’ll leave you with this short story from the collection, one of our favorites.

***

Ask Amelio

***

On an early Sunday morning a reporter called to ask me questions about women with AIDS. Don’t waste your time with me, I told her, I’m nothing more in the scheme of things than a rather charming statistical anomaly.

Meaning?

Meaning I come from a wealthy family, supportive, who provided me with a safety net, its resemblance to a spiderweb notwithstanding. I don’t have children, I don’t have problems getting access to medical care, I don’t have to buy the groceries for the family when I’m too exhausted to stand up for more than ten minutes straight, and I don’t have a husband who will feel betrayed enough to resort to physical expression if the house is still cluttered and dusty at the end of the day. I don’t have your usual problems, in other words, either girl- or boystyle. Go talk to somebody else.

For instance, I suggested, you could talk to Amelio. He repaired broken air conditioners and refrigerators, a trade he picked up upstate—upstate being how a certain East Coast demographic refers to prison, the prisons being mostly upstate.

Nov 11

Standing in the Goods

Inferno and the Myth of the American Working-Class Artist

by Sady Doyle

“I could go for about a month without working. That was the amount of debt I could float.” — “Eileen Myles,” the narrator of Inferno (a poet’s novel)

Portraits of bohemian poverty are a dime a dozen. Describing your crappy apartment, elaborately painful relationships and the earlier, cuter stages of alcoholism is a way to show that one is suffering for one’s art and is therefore good at both. As Eileen Myles puts it, even just a few years of poverty can get “the dirt of authenticity” under the nails of comfortably middle-class artists. But Myles’s relationship to money isn’t a pose, or a bid for admiration. Money, for her, is a continual undercurrent of concern.

Nov 2

Style Like Eileen Myles

by Marie Lyn “Riese” Bernard

My girlfriend got me an Eileen Myles t-shirt at this Sister Spit event in Oakland, it’s black with big purple letters reading “YOU’VE GOT THE STYLE EILEEN MYLES.” I wore it for the first time in Palm Springs to a Dinah Shore White Party which is a party where everyone wears white. And Dinah Shore is this gross annual lesbian “weekend” for girls who want to fingerfuck in swimming pools, oil wrestle in wet t-shirts, drink their faces off and scream at each other in public. All the lesbian websites send reps to Dinah Shore so we were there like a bunch of pasty nerds at a football game, and I was there in my black pants and black Eileen Myles t-shirt at The White Party and then suddenly everything turned black and then I wasn’t anywhere anymore. I was carried and I could hear things, like my friends saying I’d only had one drink and that my face was blue. Some minutes later in the hotel room as the EMTs were attaching things to me and announcing my alarming blood pressure I apparently garbled “it’s over,” to my friend Sarah. “It’s all over, Sarah. This is it.” Ha! She told me I’d said it a few times: “This is it, it’s all over. It’s all over. This is the end.”

Are We Sisters Under the Skin Yet?

by Lauretta Charlton

Recently I stumbled across a photo of Ryan Gosling. You know the one. “Hey girl. My perfect Saturday is a hot cup of tea, a trip to the Farmer’s market and curling up on the couch to figure out bell hooks’ theory that feminism is a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture with you.” Soon after, I read “Sisters Under the Skin?” by Ellen Willis. In this 1982 essay, Willis analyzes two then-recent books by feminist authors that address the question of why the contemporary feminist movement is so white. One of those authors is bell hooks. Feminist Ryan and I had our Saturday cut out for us.