Some of my favorite hobbies include looking at Timothée Chalamet’s haunted Victorian oil painting face and smugly saying that the books are better than the movies (the only exception to this rule is The Cheetah Girls), so obviously I am trying to read Dune before Denis Villeneuve’s Chalamet-led adaptation of the sci-fi classic is released in October. I don’t know if having a deadline is making the prospect of reading it unappealing (I left assigned reading back in undergrad, where I’d like it to stay for good) or if I’m just not in the science fiction mood, but every time I try to get past the opening sentences of Dune I find myself putting it down to do literally anything else – including reading other books instead. I can be remarkably productive when I have something to procrastinate on, a fact to which the list below can attest. Here are some of the things I’ve read so far this month:
Yolk by Mary H.K. Choi
“Mom’s love language is to scrutinize and criticize all the physical attributes that you’re most sensitive about.”
Yolk is a tale of two sisters: Jayne Baek, a 20-year-old fashion school student in New York City navigating an eating disorder, a distressing penchant for undeserving white boys and swirling anxiety about how to afford rent and what she wants to do with her life. June Baek is a 23-year-old hedge fund manager who’s everything Jayne isn’t – focused, professionally ambitious and healthy. But her ability to be reliably not ill, a significant factor in making June the Good Daughter to Jayne’s Misbehaving Daughter, no longer applies when June finds out she has uterine cancer. Her diagnosis brings the estranged sisters crashing back into each other’s lives and soon they end up switching places to commit insurance fraud that will hopefully save June’s life.
Mary H.K. Choi has written excellent YA novels before (Emergency Contact is probably her most well-known to date), but Yolk feels different to me, just more in every sense. Meaner and riskier, more visceral and specific and ambitious. No selfish, shadowy corner of the characters’ psyches is spared by her unforgiving prose. After reading Choi’s essay for GQ about how her parents got sick during the pandemic and gave her a new perspective on her marriage and family, I can see how deep she must have dug to write Yolk. Like Jayne, Choi couldn’t wait to get out of Texas (her first American home) and find a fresh start in New York City, pursuing a creative career and rarely visiting her parents. Jayne and June were restaurant kids left to their own devices growing up; so were Choi and her older brother, who saw their parents so rarely that “[Choi] often fantasized about them dying so at least [she’d] know where they'd be.” Jayne is the younger daughter, as is Choi, with a particularly fraught relationship to her mother – something Choi touches on in her essay.
Of course, Jayne also differs from Choi in a lot of ways. Just because a Korean American author writes a story centered on a Korean American protagonist, it doesn’t mean that the heroine is a stand-in for the author. But the truth of her experience bleeds through the pages, the details vivid and the generational trauma painfully resonant. I have even less in common with Jayne than Choi – the only overlap is that I, like Jayne, am a younger sister who likes to watch Gilmore Girls with her older sister and church is something I also do to humor my mom – but I recognize my own family in the Baeks nonetheless. Their inability to articulate their love in any way other than cooking or cleaning for each other, the secrets they let go unspoken for years and the resentment that the parental unit and the daughters harbor towards each other because each takes for granted what the other can never access – American opportunity from childhood and an unwavering conviction in one’s cultural identity, respectively.
Finishing Yolk felt like the hollowed out ache you get after a cathartic crying session – a little numb from the indulgence of such big emotions, swollen and raw to the touch. It hurts a little, but you’re glad for it in the end. You feel like you’ve just purged something that you didn’t even know was eating away at your insides.
Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
“Alex was alone, and the one thing she still had was the freedom to follow the narrative that suited her best.”
The clock is ticking: in a matter of months, Emira Tucker will turn 26-years-old and get kicked off her parents’ health insurance plan. The current state of her employment – babysitting white mommy blogger Alix Chamberlain’s daughter, Briar – is not going to cut it. Emira needs a job with benefits, with better pay, with more legitimacy so her friends and family will take her seriously. When Emira takes Briar to the grocery store one night, a white security guard accuses her of kidnapping the toddler. It’s a wake-up call for employee and employer alike. For Emira, the incident encapsulates how untenable her situation is and the micro- and macroaggressions that are baked into being a Black caretaker for a white family. For Alix, it’s a golden opportunity for her to show Emira how much she cares, for them to get as close as all her friends are with their kids’ nannies. As you might expect, things don’t go according to Alix’s plan.
Such a Fun Age understands the ubiquity of main character syndrome. In your own story, you’re the hero; in someone else’s, you could be anything from the antagonist to nothing more than an extra walking around in the background. By switching between Emira and Alix’s perspectives throughout the novel, Kiley Reid illustrates this disorienting incongruity between motivation and impact to paint a biting but empathetic portrait of the desperately oblivious wannabe white savior. It should come as no surprise that Reese Witherspoon’s book club anointed Such a Fun Age with its sticker of approval and accompanying publishing clout. Books about mothers and daughters are her bread and butter – better yet if there’s an interrogation of what it means to weaponize white womanhood, too.
When We Were Infinite by Kelly Loy Gilbert
“It wasn’t like I wanted to die – I was afraid of it – but at the same time the thought of feeling nothing felt like a beckoning friend.”
After Beth Claire’s dad left, she got a second chance at family – whole and unbroken – with her best friends: Sunny Chen, Brandon Lin, Grace Nakamura and Jason Tsou. She’ll do anything to keep them together, even as the future looms over their senior year of high school, its shadowy tendrils creeping up over them faster than they can scramble away. Then Beth accidentally sees Jason’s father assaulting him. Suddenly, the future she imagined for herself and her friends crumbles – survival itself can no longer be taken for granted. As Jason begins to withdraw even further from the group, Beth takes up the thankless, impossible task of saving someone who didn’t ask to be rescued.
The first Kelly Loy Gilbert novel I read was Picture Us in the Light in 2018. After four years of non-stop literature classes, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d read a book purely for pleasure. Picture Us in the Light was the first to break that drought. Like magic, I experienced that miraculous suspension of time and space that you can only reach by reading stories that make reality seem optional. When I came to, it was 4 AM and I was curled up on my bed crying. Gilbert’s writing is a precision instrument, and she wields it for maximum emotional devastation. You would think someone as well-versed in coming of age narratives as me would be immune to them by now, but Gilbert writes about the cusp between adolescence and adulthood in a way I’d never encountered in fiction before, or at least not as skillfully and vividly as she does. Her casts of characters might as well be my friend group growing up – Asian Americans under immense pressure to achieve – the only significant difference being the U.S. coast they reside on (West rather than East). Gilbert’s writing lives in the overlap between sexuality, class, immigrant generations and gender without getting into didactic, after school special territory. I’d like to think her novels bowl everyone over equally, regardless of their background, but the only people I know who’ve read her books are also Asian American, so maybe that extra thrill doesn’t always translate. Regardless, her work has been a revelation for me, giving life to all different dimensions of the Asian American imagination.
Another thread that runs through Gilbert’s writing is protagonists who know the exquisite torture of loving a creative craft so much that pursuing it feels risky. Sometimes they think they’d rather give it up entirely so they don’t have to risk failing at it or losing it against their will one day. For Danny Cheng in Picture Us in the Light, it’s art:
“But this is what’s been haunting me the past two months: I can’t draw anymore. At first I thought maybe it was that I was afraid of drawing something better than what I turned in for my applications … But then it lasted, and keeps lasting, and I’m worried now that the truth is that something’s empty at the core of me. That whatever well you’re supposed to draw from to put anything worthwhile into the world – mine’s run dry.”
For Beth in When We Were Infinite, it’s the violin:
“Music is a mirror: It waits quietly for you, and when you come to it, you appear temporarily inside of it, you insert yourself there and mold yourself and the piece to fit, and in the best times, you then go away with new insights about yourself.”
While neither Picture Us in the Light nor When We Were Infinite skimp on the drama or the trauma, the latter was a heavier read for me, which I think comes down to Beth. The selflessness that verges on martyrdom, the impulse to shrink herself so small that she never steps on anybody’s toes, the frantic need to prove that she can be enough to make those she loves stay by her side forever – it gets suffocating. But I think that’s what Gilbert asks of her readers, to stand on the precipice with her characters and feel their anxiety and exhilaration as your own. To know, intimately, the danger and hope of loving other people. Above all, there’s no greater endorsement I can give than to say that her writing rings with beauty and truth.
“There were whole oceans of anger inside me that I’d always tried to map for myself instead as hurt or fear or shame.”
When Beauty Tamed the Beast by Eloisa James
I think we all knew there’d be at least one romance novel included in this batch. Long story short: Linnet (Beauty) has a reputation that’s in tatters, but luckily there’s an heir to a dukedom (Beast) whose father says he’s in need of a wife – though the Beast in question would beg to differ. A quick disclaimer that the Beast is nicknamed so for his temper and scarring alone (no witches or curses or furry shit here). That the Beauty and the Beast will end up together in the end is a blessedly foregone conclusion (it’s all there in the title), but what does come as a surprise is how much the pair like each other from the start. Romance novels, particularly historical ones, tend to fall into the trap of mistaking sexual tension for chemistry, which results in a lot of gazing and trembling and growling and corsets growing tight – but rather a shortage of dialogue that’s substantive or charming. Apparently Eloisa James’ Beast was inspired by House, who is himself a fanfiction-esque imagining of Sherlock Holmes as a modern physician. I never watched House, so I can’t speak to how the romance novel version compares to the original, but I appreciate that he’s a hero with a sense of humor (rare) and a vocation (even rarer). Linnet doesn’t let him push her around, and soon they have an easy rapport going. It’s just nice to read about two people who genuinely get along and will probably still have things to talk about once the novelty of having sex with each other wears off.
P.S. If you’re a House fan and you read this book, please let me know what your thoughts are.
And Finally, Here Are Some Shorter Reads I’ve Also Enjoyed Recently
Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny, an essay by RS Benedict about the depressing lack of eroticism in action and superhero films, despite more chiseled muscles on display than ever before. I hadn’t really considered how these films fetishize the body as a site of imperial dominance and control before, but now I can’t stop thinking about it. Someone put on the phone with Kevin Feige so I can tell him that I don’t want to see an endless parade of actors getting scarily jacked; I want some on-screen heat. What does that man have against superheroes being sexy? Choice quote from Benedict’s piece:
“Contemporary gym ads focus on rigidly isolated self-improvement: be your best self. Create a new you. We don’t exercise, we don’t work out: we train, and we train in fitness programs with names like Booty Bootcamp, as if we’re getting our booties battle-ready to fight in the Great Booty War. There is no promise of intimacy. Like our heroes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, like Rico and Dizzy and all the other infantry in Starship Troopers, we are horny only for annihilation.”
(Behold?) The Vision’s Penis: The Presence of Absence in Mutant Romance Tales, a piece by Anna Peppard about Vision’s negotiation of masculinity and authenticity as a romantic hero. If you watched WandaVision and thought at all about Vision’s dick (or lack thereof), this is for you.
“Within a genre that’s always had a complicated relationship with sexuality, the Vision’s penis is an especially dense locus of meaning. It’s aesthetically absent (which is typical), narratively synthetic (which is not), and mysteriously (or perhaps threateningly) generative.”
Welcome to the Monkey House, a piece by Tim Shorrock about the ugly legacy of military prostitution in South Korea. In light of the Atlanta shootings this past week, I recommend this to anyone who wants to learn more how anti-Asian violence, fetishization of Asian women and U.S. empire are linked.
The Untold Story of Queer Foster Families, a piece by Michael Waters about social workers in the 1970s who quietly and discreetly placed queer teens with queer foster parents.
‘Ward had been wearing makeup to school—only touches, mostly of eyeshadow—and Robert received a phone call from an administrator, threatening to place Ward on probation if he didn’t change how he dressed. “It creates disruptions in our school,” the administrator said. Robert replied, “Listen, you’re either going to just drop all this or I will create disruptions in your school because I will bring twenty drag queens to picket outside.” The school didn’t call again.’