March favourites

March: two lots of snow, endless rain and the occasional glimpse of sunlight. I am so ready for spring. Despite the weather, it’s been quite a good life month. The company I’ve been writing for the past year have extended my contract yet again, leaving me free of career panic until the autumn. It’s funny to think that this time last year I was in a constant state of anxiety about having zero life direction, but now that I do, and not only that but am actually earning money doing the thing I ultimately want to spend my life doing,  I live in constant fear of it all going away. This adulthood thing never lets up.

This is why we have books and Netflix. Speaking of, without further ado, here are my favourites for March:

TV: Jessica Jones & Sneaky Pete

Come on! There was no way I could choose only one. I adored both of these shows from their premieres and having them both return in the same month was the best kind of televisual gift.

JJ thoughts: Why do I love you so much when all you ever do is hurt me?

Sneaky Pete thoughts: I am so ready for some kind of Marius and Julia heist situation. Also real Pete is such a gem he almost (*almost*) made up for the lack of Eddie in season 2.

Podcast: The 50^th episode of The Bright Sessions

The Bright Sessions, for the uninitiated, is a wonderful fictional podcast by Lauren Shippen about people with supernatural abilities in therapy. It’s very much the Buffy the Vampire Slayer of podcasts – a tense and dramatic supernatural show that is actually a heart-rending examination of fucked up people and their messy lives. I adore it, and for their fiftieth run, in true Buffy style, they did a musical episode. At the start, I was smiling in the uniquely joyful way you do when your faves burst into song unexpectedly, by the end I was a tearful, emotional mess. This weird little show packs a serious emotional punch, and I will be very sad when it ends later this year.

Random stuff: The Bleed

I used to be a huge fan of the Lenny Letter. When it first came out it felt like it was addressing this huge gap in my reading life, as well as showing me a model of what I could achieve with my own writing if I really put my mind to it. Though Lena Dunham is a controversial figure and has frequently been wrong, even as I was irked by her, I stuck with the newsletter, because I thought what it was doing was of value. But after how she and Jenni Konner responded to Aurrora Perrineu’s allegation of sexual assault against their friend Murray Miller, I was out. Both Dunham and Konner betrayed everything they ever stood for – and I just didn’t feel right supporting their work after that. But I missed Lenny, and wanted an injection of women-centred journalism coming in my inbox on the reg. Enter The Bleed, the Call Your Girlfriend podcast newsletter. Every month, Aminatou, Ann and Gina post a list of the articles they loved from the month, and it is informative and fantastic and has somewhat plugged the hole left behind by Lenny – though if you have further suggestions of high quality feminist content online please throw them my way.

Special mention: Mike Coulter’s Instagram account

https://www.instagram.com/p/BgjCV-FBqU7/?hl=en&taken-by=realmikecolter

He is an adorable man and I love having him in my feed.

Did you have a fun March? Any faves I should know about?

 

The F Word

Here’s to the girl who knows you inside out. The work wife, our long distance confidant, and tea chat companions. To the one who is cripplingly honest, and the new friends we’re yet to meet.

When I look back on my life almost every decision, experience and memory comes with a female companion somewhere behind the scenes – supporting me, pushing me, or telling me outright that I’m in the wrong.

If I could offer one piece of invaluable advice for women and girls of all ages, it’s that there is nothing more important than creating and maintaining strong, positive and happy friendships with other women.

They might be complex and emotional, but they’re the mini love stories that make us who we are; they move us into new homes, out of bad relationships, through births and illnesses, and they shape us into the women we want to become.

The F Word is a celebration of female friendships… all strings attached.

The F Word: A Personal Exploration of Modern Female Friendship by Lily Pebbles is the love letter to the strength, tenacity, complexity and fun of female friendships I’ve always wanted to read.  One of my besties sent it to me as an International Women’s Day gift.

Yep. I’m lucky like that.

It has bothered me for a long time the relatively low status that friendships have. We’re all about love and sex, as if those relationships are the only ones you need, so much so that, for some people, that becomes their truth. I think we’ve all had at least one friend who vanishes without a trace the moment they get into a romantic relationship. But for me, my female friends are some of the most important in my life – and not just because I’m single. In the past, female friendships have also been the sources of some of my greatest heartbreaks. I still feel a little bit sad thinking back to when I was 9 and my best friend at the time, Lara, told me that she didn’t want to be my best friend anymore, because I didn’t ride horses and Zoe did ride horses so she was going to be best friends with her instead. Brutal.

In The F Word, Lily covers all that and more. Through a collection of her own experiences interwoven with those of the women around her, she breaks down different kinds of friendships and the roles they play in our lives. She sketches familiar figures, from the ‘work wife’ and the ‘big sister friend’ to the BFF (it’s not a person, it’s a tier) and the BFFN or ‘best friend for now’.  Crucially, I think, she made clear that #friendshipgoals isn’t only one thing – it isn’t only the 90s Friends-style daily hangouts in your nearest coffee shop, sometimes it’s only seeing someone a couple of times a year but always being able to pick up right where you left off. Other times it’s organising Skype dates with someone who lives on the other side of the planet, or drifting away for a time only to come back together later on, when your lives are once again in sync. She makes clear that the length and depth of a friendship is much greater than a single Instagram post, which, in a world where something is only legitimate once it’s online, is important.

There is so much goodness in this book. Whether she’s discussing how to be a good friend, maintaining friendships even once you’re romantically attached or the thorny subject of toxic friendships, Lily approaches it all with empathy and a sort of calm wisdom I’m told you find once you’ve reached the end of your twenties. Lily, as anyone who has ever dived into her YouTube videos will know, is a very calming presence, and that sense of her is sprinkled all over the book. I can easily imagine myself returning to it on a rainy Sunday when I’m in need of a comfort read.

Most of all, The F Word leaves you feeling inspired by your community of women, and even more crucially, open to letting more into your life. This book is the perfect antidote to the Mean Girls crap we’ve been fed out whole lives. Female friendships are the best. I’m so happy we’re finally acknowledging it.

 

What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

Here. Take this key. It might open a house, a heart, a secret.

What links each of these stories in Helen Oyeyemi’s collection is keys: keys that are gifts, threats, invitations, gateways. Keys that haven’t found their locks. Here, as characters slip from the pages of their own stories only to surface in another, you will find vanished libraries and locked gardens, lovers exchanging books and roses, and a city where all the clocks have stopped…

What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours is a delightfully magical collection of short stories by Helen Oyeyemi. Her small but richly imagined worlds are captivating, and at the end of every story I was left aching for more.

The sweeping stories in the collection range from magical realism to utter fairy tale, and though they are diverse in terms of setting and narrator, all of Oyeyemi’s characters seem to share a sense of being at a loss, whether it’s the stepfather who seeks to comfort his teenage daughter, grieving after the discovery that her favourite pop star and the erstwhile love of her life, Matyas Furst, is a violent criminal, to Monste and Lucy, two women with nothing in common but the keys they wear around their necks, both of them symbols of a person who promised to return, but, thus far as least, hasn’t.

The collection is like a tangle of threads, with side characters from one story suddenly appearing as the narrator in another. A character we might have perceived as evil in a previous story suddenly pops up elsewhere, totally changed observed by a different pair of eyes. In perhaps my favourite pair of stories “is your blood as red as this? (no)”  and “yes”, we first read the story of trainee puppeteer Radha’s unrequited love followed by what happened next, narrated by Radha’s puppet, Gepetta.

As you’d imagine just because of the form, some of the stories are deeply, and, I think, deliberately, unsatisfying. They seem to end just as it’s getting good, and I was left reading the final pages repeatedly, looking for the resolution Oyeyemi had denied me. The characters almost always left me before I was ready for them to go, and I think it’s a testament to Oyeyemi’s skill that in such a short period of time she had me utterly invested in narrators who often did nothing to ease me into the situation. More often than not the story would start in the middle of the action and it was the job of me, the reader to put the pieces together and catch up from the clues she dropped along the way. Other stories were very and surprisingly cathartic, with baddies getting their comeuppance and some, and centuries-old conflicts ended by one person willing to wave the white flag.

What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours took me by surprise. As I’ve mentioned before, short stories aren’t always my thing, but these captivated me and I have not stopped recommending them to people.

I have decided I for sure need some more Oyeyemi in my life. Fortunately for me, she’s written plenty for me to choose from.

The End We Start From

In the midst of a mysterious environmental crises, as London is submerged below flood waters, a woman gives birth to her first child, Z. Days later, the family are forced to leave their home in search of safety. As they move from place to place, shelter to shelter, their journey traces both fear and wonder as Z’s small fists grasp at things he sees, as he grows and stretches, thriving and content against all the odds.

This is a story of new motherhood in a terrifying setting: a familiar world made dangerous and unstable, its people forced to become refugees. Startlingly beautiful, The End We Start From is a gripping novel that paints an imagined future as realistic as it is frightening. And yet, though the country is falling apart around them, this family’s world – of new life and new hope – sings with love.

The End We Start From by Megan Hunter is a snack of a novel. At only 127 pages, I finished it in only a couple of sittings, and the spare beauty of Hunter’s writing along with the expansive yet simplistic story snapped me right out of the reading slump that’s plagued me throughout February. It was one of those reads where, when I reached the end, I closed the book and just sort of stared at it for a minute like ‘how did you do this to me?’

The End We Start From is a Belletrist book club pick from a few months back – as much as I love Belletrist, I unfortunately cannot read along in real time because they pick literary new releases, which are always hardback and my bank account, sadly, just can’t handle that kind of abuse. Needless to say, Emma and Kara have done it yet again. This. Book. Is. Gorgeous.

Hunter began her career as a poet, something that is wholly evident throughout the book, which is both lyrical and simplistic in style. There is a deliberate vagueness to her writing that works to create just the right amount of intrigue and the right amount of universality in a book concerned with the ways in which people cling to normality when thrust into extraordinary situations.

This is a story about the end of the world, yes, but that is only the backdrop. The lead story is that of new motherhood, of the sheltered world families go into when it is just them and their new baby. The catastrophe they are surrounded by is constant, but within that we sit in a strange oasis of calm where I raises her baby Z, and although the outside world encroaches, it doesn’t overwhelm – even if it does. Because whatever is happening outside, with the floods and the fights, I still has a baby to look after.

This is a gorgeous, strange, unique, haunting and ultimately uplifting novel. I can’t recommend it enough.

Down and Across

Scott Ferdowsi has a track record of quitting. His best friends know exactly what they want to do with the rest of their lives, but Scott can hardly commit to a breakfast cereal, let alone a passion. With college applications looming and his parents pushing him to settle on a “practical” career, Scott sneaks off to Washington, DC, seeking guidance from a famous psychologist who claims to know the secret to success.

He never expects an adventure to unfold. But that’s what Scott gets when he meets Fiora Buchanan, a ballsy college student whose life ambition is to write crossword puzzles. When the bicycle she lends him gets Scott into a high-speed chase, he knows he’s in for the ride of his life.

Soon, Scott finds himself sneaking into bars, attempting to pick up girls at the National Zoo, and even giving the crossword thing a try – all while opening his eyes to fundamental truths about who he is and what he wants to be.

I was all geared up to love Down and Across by Arvin Ahmadi. The first chapter was great, all my blogger buds love it, and it’s the story of a kid panicking about his future – all elements that usually add up to love for me. Unfortunately though, as sometimes happens, me and this book did not click. It’s kind of like when I read Mosquitoland (David Arnold, incidentally, is thanked in Ahmadi’s acknowledgements), I could see at a distance why other people loved it, but the disconnect between that and me was just too great to bridge. It took me two weeks to get through it – and it’s really not that long of a book.

It wasn’t all bad. Saaket “Scott” Ferdowsi is a fairly endearing character. It was refreshing to read about a fellow quitter – there are far too many naturally talented and committed fictional teenage role models in my opinion – someone who had been led to believe that a lack of a specific passion meant that he wasn’t a passionate person, something anyone a little further on in the whole life process than Saaket will have discovered (or will discover) isn’t true at all. The novel explores the universal truth that life isn’t so much a straightforward plan you execute as something that you stumble into. That just because a person isn’t in your life forever doesn’t make them any less important.

My issue with the book – something I should have seen coming from the blurb – was with Fiora Buchanan, the ballsy college student whose life ambition is to write crossword puzzles. From her name to her crosswords, Fiora is a worthy addition to the canon of manic pixie dream girl, the trope that apparently will never die. Fiora is a classic boundaryless, non-specifically angry, manipulative, beautiful mess with, apparently, no female friends to speak of, who leads Saaket on a journey of discovery. The weird part is that Ahmadi tries to head off this criticism early by making a joke about the very trope the whole of the rest of his book is built on. When Saaket and Fiora first meet (on a bus on the way to DC where Fiora implies she has deep life problems and pain but refuses to get specific about it), Saaket thinks to himself:

“I couldn’t resist imagining my life as one of those coming-of-age movies – and Fiora as the quirky, two-dimensional female character, written solely to help me discover my own full potential. The idea was nice… But that wasn’t Fiora’s job.”

And yet, Fiora did not do one believable thing throughout the entire book. She did a series of ridiculous things to inspire Saaket to do character-develop-ey things, which is the definition of the thing that Admadi says that she wasn’t.

She is at various points described as a sexy, manipulative tease and primarily hangs out with teenage boys and middle aged men.

Sigh.

My patience with this particular trope has worn so thin as to be non-existent, and though I did try to move past it and enjoy the story, unfortunately I could not. Like Fiora’s apparently ginormous lips, it was impossible to look away from.

Down and Across is an okay novel. It takes something that has often been a very white story – a young man trying to find himself – and looks at it instead through the lens of the child of Iranian immigrants. Trying to determine a solid sense of self while dealing with the clashing cultures of home life and school life while also dealing with the pressure of his parents forever reminding him of the sacrifices they had made for him isn’t easy for Saaket, and his journey throughout the story is an engaging one. However, for me anyway, Down and Across fell down through an over reliance on tropes, and, without getting into spoiler territory, a resolution that felt a little bit too easy, under the circumstances.

Solid three stars. Unlikely to reread.