This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel

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This Is How It Always Is is a novel about family, secrets, fairy tales, and gender. Rosie and Penn are busy parents—Rosie a doctor and Penn a writer—with five children, all boys. When it turns out their youngest wants to grow up to be a girl, Rosie and Penn do what they can to be supportive parents, but that turns out to involve making a big change for the entire family and keeping a secret that nobody sees lasting forever.

The book is focused particularly on being a parent of a transgender child, and particularly a set of parents trying to be as encouraging and accepting of all of their children as possible. The whole family is very important to the novel, as Frankel gives all of them—not only the parents and Poppy, the youngest—individual personalities and lives, which are all tangled together as families are. The narrative is split into separate parts, broadly different phases in the family’s life across five years, and the writing style is informal, meaning it is quite easy to read much of the book in one sitting.

Frankel says in the concluding Author’s Note that the book is not based on her own experiences with a trans daughter, but is a made up story that has sprinklings of her own life as well as imagination and research. Indeed, this idea of storytelling runs throughout the book, through Penn as a writer using stories to give morals to his children and through the stories that everyone tells to make situations seem less confusing.

It is a heartwarming and sad book that ultimately tries to give hope, using a happy ending and a running theme of fairy tales and telling stories to make sense of life. I’ve seen people claim the happiness is unrealistic and the parents “too” accepting, but that is why this book is an important one as well as an enjoyable read: if a trans child’s fictional happiness is seen as unrealistic, it shows the one, there’s maybe something wrong with reality, and two, then books are needed that show happiness and a future for trans people of all ages, and This Is How It Always Is is one of these books.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

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The Underground Railroad is a book deserving of its hype. It is a sharp, clever novel that gives the Underground Railroad of US history—a network of routes and safe houses used by slaves to escape into free states—a physical form as a steam-powered escape that must stay secret. Cora is a slave on a plantation in Georgia, ostracised due to her mother’s disappearance from the plantation when Cora was ten. When a new slave, Caesar, tells Cora about the hope of escape on the Underground Railroad, her journey begins to find safety along the lines of the railroad, whilst being pursued by the slave catcher Ridgeway.

Whitehead’s conceit is simple, yet the transformation of the metaphorical railroad into a physical one feels momentous. It brings a sense of momentum and also gets across the idea of something beneath the ground, beneath both Southern states and those in the North, that is alive and working to help black people escape. Cora’s story is a compelling narrative of a desperation to keep escaping, even when those around her are not so lucky. By combining a character’s personal battle with a sense of larger scale—not only through the railroad, but also by describing other characters’ lives and looking into the future at times—the novel is both an engrossing and brutal read and a sharp look at not only slavery but race in America across the centuries. It is clear that many of Whitehead’s concise sentences are true now as they are to the time of the novel.

The Underground Railroad is an impressive combination of style, structure, narrative, and concept to produce a novel about slavery that is both devastating and fresh. Whitehead’s writing style, clever and direct,  gives the book an immediacy that feels vital to reading it and thinking about the past, present, and future.

Order in the bookcase

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This blog has been a little quiet for the past week as I was moving house and working. One part of this was building a bookcase. Only a thin one because I left the majority of my books with my parents, having learnt my lesson that when you know you’ll be moving again in a year/under a year, don’t take all of them with you (unless you’re planning, as I did one year, to build your bedside table out of books and a piece of wood). After two English graduates remembered how 3D space worked and marvelled at how wood and screws can come together, a bookcase existed. And then I had to organise it.

How you organise your books is controversial (though there’s a fairly uniting disdain for people who do it by colour). There’s alphabetical, the classic, but then do you split further into categories like fiction and non-fiction or form or genre? You can just sort by categories, maybe subdivide by topic. Time period works if you own a lot of  ‘classic’ literature. When you’re lacking in space, as I have been, the best option can be by priority, creating your own ‘high use’ material (this is the only way to make a book bedside table without needing to dismantle it all the time).

I work in a library so you think mine would be very organised. Actually, they’re not. The shelves are as follows, from the top: drama (and a teapot); poetry and two books about Byron; prose, mostly novels but also Wollstonecraft’s Vindication(s); a small thematic shelf that is solely The Secret History, A Little Life, and If We Were Villains (and a cuddly bat); the Harry Potter books plus DVDs, a copy of Quidditch Through The Ages that my friend delightfully graffiti’d in character, and a Buckbeak keyring; and finally, a misc shelf that is keeping the bookcase stable by containing the complete works of Shakespeare, The Goldfinch, The Stranger’s Child, a single hardback book, and a selection of things I didn’t think I’d be reading too soon, but I did want to have with me.

It’s a fluid system that needs to be able to integrate parts of my to-read shelf once they’re read (these books are currently on my desk urging to be chosen next). It is also based upon whim and could be totally changed in a few months (say, after Christmas and my birthday, the main book gaining times of the year handily only a week apart). I think my point is, organise your books how you want. You’re the person who has to find/look at them, after all. Though if you have a particularly notable system, do share it so we can all be outraged/inspired.

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

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Sparks and flames: Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Little Fires Everywhere is an intricate and observant novel that shines a light on false perfection and the intricate way in which everyday things are interlinked. Shaker Heights is a carefully planned suburb of Cleveland, where everything has order and they pride themselves on being progressive. Elena Richardson embodies much of Shaker’s ideals, but when the Richardson house is found burnt down, the recent past must be unravelled to see how the arrival of the Richardson’s tenants, the artist Mia and her teenage daughter Pearl, affected the four Richardson children, their parents, and the whole community, showing how underneath things aren’t always quite as they seem.

The narrative structure is particularly impressive, with an omniscient narrator flashing back from the burnt house to tell the story from many perspectives in a way that foreshadows and hints at past events in a satisfying way. Key moments and details that will clearly cause a ‘little fire’ later on, be misunderstood or reinterpreted by other characters, are apparent to the reader, but also not overly signposted by the writing. Through this, the book has a great sense of connection and coincidence as the present and past come together in the relationship between the Richardsons and their new tenants and in the battle over the custody of a Chinese-American baby that grips Shaker Heights and puts Elena and Mia on different sides.

Little Fires Everywhere is a novel somehow both charming and tense, with the drama between the characters built upon tiny moments and the overall narrative one that doesn’t reveal surprises so much as fill in the gaps to show how interpretations can be different. The teenage characters are a highlight and this is the kind of adult novel that can also be enjoyed by older teenagers. This tangle of characters and detail is an impressive book with a very satisfying linking of structure and themes and a very apt title in multiple ways. The ‘little fires’ are what makes the novel blaze.

Quick book picks for November

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Now that we are in the midst of autumn and I am sat here drinking smoky lapsang souchong (as if I don’t all year round), it’s time for a new list of books out this month. Here’s some portraits of American memoirs, an endearing memoir, and a weird book about Nabokov (with links to reviews in the titles).

  • Heather, The Totality by Matthew Weiner – The creator of Mad Men writes the story of a girl, her family, and what happens in their orbit. Summaries can’t capture the strange atmosphere Weiner creates.
  • Demi-Gods by Eliza Robertson – A stylistic and unnerving novel about growing up in the 1950s and 60s in Canada and the US, told in episodes.
  • Trans Mission by Alex Bertie – This YouTuber’s memoir about his life so far as a trans man combines humour and emotion and is perfect for older children and teenagers, but also parents and other adults who want to be more understanding or know more.
  • The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth by William Boyd – A collection of stories of varying length about flawed characters at decisive moments in their lives and relationships.
  • The Future Won’t Be Long by Jarett Kobek – The 80s and 90s America novel that wasn’t written then. Kobek tells the story of a gay guy and a straight girl who become friends and try to survive America, featuring comic books, drugs, clubs, AIDS, money, famous authors and artists, and a metafictional awareness of what came next.
  • Insomniac Dreams by Vladimir Nabokov – A book on Nabokov and dreams that uses a combination of Nabokov’s own words in dream diaries and his published works alongside Gennady Barabtarlo’s notes and commentary.

A year in writing

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In an unusual departure for this blog, this post is about writing, not reading. You see, it is exactly a year since I started trying to write something every day. Wanting to get back into writing regularly and inspired by NaNoWriMo, I made the resolution last Halloween to try and write something every day in November. I achieved that (with certain allowances for what ‘writing something’ entailed, which I’ll talk about later) and kept going. Each day I noted down what I had written, whether one thing or more. Now, a year later, I can look back and see that I missed 20 days out of the year. I don’t think that’s too bad.

What trying to write something every day has taught me, shared for mostly gratuitous reasons:

  1. Give yourself leeway. Writing is hard. Making yourself write regularly is even harder. In my category ‘writing something’, I included fiction, non-fiction, poetry, letters to friends, job application statements, and the online shop listings I wrote for Oxfam. Partly, this was because at the start I needed to be able to only do one writing thing—a blog post, or going to my volunteering at Oxfam—in a day and still feel I had achieved something. Also, life gets in the way and it is good to think that any number of words is still progress. It means a bullet point in my notebook (so a ‘piece’ of writing) can be a few lines of poetry, or 4000 words of fiction. That doesn’t matter.
  2. Structure is not for some people, but is for me. Any ‘you should write every day’ advice is not helpful. It entirely depends on how you write, what you write, and what you do with your life. It worked for me because once I had settled into the routine, it just felt like something that had to be done each day, even if it meant I just wrote some bad poetry at 10 p.m. (as could be the case when I’d been at work all day).
  3. Not just fiction. I was massively helped in my endeavour by the fact I review proof copies of books via NetGalley. This means that for over half the books I’ve read this (calendar) year, I’ve written a review of them too. That’s a lot of pieces of writing to get under my belt with little creative effort. I also wrote something for Shakespeare & Punk and a number of non-review blog posts on here. This leads me on to my next point.
  4. Variety is good. I’ve done NaNoWriMo (twice). Whilst doing it, I was also writing essays as an undergrad English student. That variety was probably necessary. I could not have written so much this year without having a range of things to write: whenever I felt unable to write one kind of thing, I tried something else.
  5. You never know where it’ll end up. A year ago, I had a sporadically-used book blog and a dream of writing things I wouldn’t just post online. Now, I have a regularly-updated book blog and a published poem (watch this space/my Twitter for further updates on this topic, in fact). Every step, however small, counts.

Scariest Stories

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Fear is pretty subjective. Obviously. Some people laugh at horror films and others scream. Around Halloween, there’s often lists of the scariest films/TV/books ever, but it’s impossible to agree with all of them. Is Kubrick’s film of The Shining a masterclass of tense, slow horror or a dated relic lacking in terror? Zombie flicks—scary or ridiculous (or Shaun of the Dead)?

This isn’t about books, you say. I know. My point is, this is all subjective. Books are maybe even more so because it is up to the individual to picture the scares, to be drawn in and see them as more than words (I hope that hasn’t derailed you into thinking about the Extreme song). So when I talk about books I’ve found scary, I know it won’t be the same for anyone else.

The book I remember finding most scary is a Point Horror novel called Fright Train. It was from the ‘Unleashed’ range, which I think was meant to be more intense in some way (I’ve talked a bit about my love for Point Horror before). In Fright Train, a couple got on a train only to find their fellow passengers acting weird and the conductor terrifyingly rude. It turns out (spoilers, in case you really fancy trying to track down a secondhand copy) they’re on a train to Hell, incorrectly. A different couple were meant to get on that carriage instead of them. Their fellow passengers all have horrible recollections of whatever it was that got them on the train to Hell and our heroes try and convince the devilish conductor they should leave.

Doesn’t sound that scary, I know, but there was something about it that caught my imagination aged about ten or eleven. Maybe the combination of scary devil stuff, people who had actually done bad things, and the injustice of it all. Whatever it was, it threw the Goosebumps story about the Halloween mask you can’t get off seem like a fun trip to the park (Google tells me this is The Haunted Mask).

I have to admit, I don’t think I’ve read anything since that has made me personally feel scared in the same way. I think Cujo is probably the scariest Stephen King read for me, for the tension, and there’s definitely a horrifying factor to some of the stories in Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted (one about a swimming pool drain sticks in my head), but it’s not the same. Maybe it’s because I don’t read much horror any more, or I became too immune, or because it is so dependent on time and place of the reading experience as well.

Maybe you think the scariest stories now are the dystopian fiction that feels like it is coming true. Maybe it’s still the horror genre, which can be tense and the fear believable even when it is otherworldly. Maybe nothing is scarier than real life. Regardless, pick up one of your favourite creepy books this Halloween (unless you opted for the last option there, then sorry).

The Future Won’t Be Long by Jarett Kobek

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90s New York novel written with hindsight: The Future Won’t Be Long by Jarett Kobek

The Future Won’t Be Long is a self-aware version of 80s and 90s New York novels that follows two friends over ten years of saving each other and striving for something resembling success in a disillusioned America. Baby is a gay guy fresh in New York from Wisconsin, where he meets Adeline, a rich kid art student with space for him to crash. They end up best friends and navigate a world filled with friends, disappointment, drugs, art, and East Village gentrification as America moves from the late eighties into the nineties.

The novel is fuelled by references to Warhol, Wojnarowicz, and Basquiat, Bret Easton Ellis, The Great Gatsby and Marvel vs DC. Though clearly similar to books by Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney, by including them as minor characters and taking a modern perspective on the period (the narratorial voice, which alternates between Baby and Adeline, makes mention of 9/11) Kobek makes The Future Won’t Be Long feel like a novel of that period and a comment upon them. The characters engage with politics on race, gender, and sexuality, using the twenty years distance between the end of the novel and the modern day to give space for reflection. The main characters are flawed and their friendship serves as a reminder that books can be centred around a friendship and its ups and downs whilst engaging with the culture surrounding them.

At times it does feel a little too clearly another New York epic about art, drugs, and friendship, but it makes a good companion to other books of the year like Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City (for the art and AIDS background) and has an enjoyable self-awareness about the popularity of the straight white American male author even in the alternative culture of the 90s. The narrative style is fast-paced and fairly jumpy, likely to appeal to people who like books by the authors referenced within the narrative like Easton Ellis. Sometimes almost metafictional, Kobek combines 80s and 90s gay New York life, the literary world of that time, comic books as art (including being female in that world), and general American life and disillusionment to create an enjoyable and interesting novel about a period there seemed to be too many books about already.

The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth by William Boyd

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The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth is a collection of stories by William Boyd, mostly about chance encounters, affairs, and the charting of lives. The book starts with some shorter stories, then the central story follows the titular Bethany Mellmoth—a young aspiring actress who dreams of better and deals with her separated parents—and then the final story is about a small time actor who finds himself in a mysterious thriller-type situation, not unlike the genre of film he tends to be cast in. At least one of the earlier stories connects to Bethany’s and overall it feels like a carefully curated story collection with her longer story at the heart.

The style of many of the stories—including Bethany Mellmoth and earlier shorter ones—is a snippet type one, with the given story feeling like either a moment of something larger or the telling of a story in small, fast pieces. This allows Boyd to depict characters’ lives in small spaces and it is mostly effective, creating readable short stories about interesting characters. Those hoping for more of an interconnected book, perhaps closer to a novel, when reading the summary may be disappointed, but there are connections and plenty of similar themes. Most of the stories are set in and around London and even when they don’t, it does feel like the characters could run into one another at any point.

Boyd’s collection of stories is an interesting read about flawed people and decisive moments in their lives and relationships, with some conceits used to create the kernel of a story (for example a man listing all the things he has stolen throughout his life, or another vowing off adultery except for kissing) and others just showing elements of a certain character’s life. These are enjoyable literary short stories of varying length that can be consumed at once or dipped in and out of.