Hi from a week where I took off work to focus on my writing,
I rarely take time off work so it feels extremely weird to just have a week to think and walk around Prospect Park and try to pull sentences out of my brain. I’m at my “writing desk” for the week which is already cluttered with a bouquet of sunflowers and empty glasses and post-its that say things like “necessary?”. On Monday, my interview with Keziah Weir came out at Full Stop which I’m really excited about. Keziah and I actually went to college together and, although we didn’t know each other very well at the time, have stayed connected through social media. Keziah is an impressive journalist in addition to being an extremely talented fiction writer - her debut novel The Mythmakers came out this year. I didn’t know what to expect going in and was completely enamored. I sent her many unhinged DMs praising it and shockingly Keziah didn’t block me. She was actually nice enough to let me interview her. She’s lovely and smart and kind and a delight to be in conversation with.
The Mythmakers is a nesting doll novel about a young woman, Sal, who has a chance encounter with an older gentleman writer and then recognizes herself, and said encounter, in the last short story the author had published before he died. This sets her off on a mission to learn more about the writing project and the author under the guise of her own writing project, which of course is an attempt to learn more about herself. Sal becomes immersed in the world of the women that shaped the author - his astrophysicist wife Moira, his musician daughter Caroline and a mysterious figure from his past. Full of twists and surprises, this is an immersive book that will haunt you in the best way. The Mythmakers is a beautiful novel about women and art making that interrogates the role of the muse. It made me unexpectedly sob and I hope you’ll read it to take in its beauty. You’ll love it.
I asked Keziah, who actually has a book recommendation column at Vanity Fair (casual), to come on all the things she said and list some of her favorite books. Luckily for us, she said yes and in a surprise to no one, they are delightful. Enjoy!
It is an astonishing thing, to be read thoughtfully and rigorously by someone who cares deeply about literature, and a lucky thing to be in conversation with that reader. And a wildly fun and surreal thing to have last chatted with that person some ten years and change earlier at a party, probably, as baby undergrads. (There’s some accordioning of time that happens when you re-meet someone you haven’t seen since adolescence, a weird confrontation with one’s shifting and stagnant selfhoods: we’re always the same, we’re always so different!)
I was so grateful to talk to Ariél about The Mythmakers, and stoked when she asked for a list of reading recommendations. I always tend to throw out the same titles when asked about my favorites (Nabokov’s Pnin is my desert island novel) so for this list I pulled from the shelf books that have more quietly meant a great deal to me over the years—or, in the case of Catherine Lacey’s newest, one that I anticipate will going forward. Happy reading!
I think one could market this, in 2023, as for fans of The Guest. Marie is 30, hot, and freshly released from her six-year prison stint for a murder affiliation. She celebrates her freedom by drinking herself to sleep in a bathtub while babysitting a former friend’s kid, and things roll quickly downhill from there: kidnapping, adultery, bad cat management, and more. Marie is all the things you want to say or do, but don’t. There’s a lot of misanthropic fun to be had with this one, but there’s a mournful undercurrent to it—I’m always so impressed and beguiled by authors who can hit both those registers.
Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith
I fear I’m not blowing any minds here—under the radar she is not—but Zadie Smith’s 2009 collection is a consistent source of inspiration, aspiration, motivation, provocation. All those nouns of state. I love these essays because they read like witnessing a mind in process, from a piece on Nabokov and Barthes, to one on avoiding and then falling in love with Their Eyes Were Watching God, to a craft lecture on stages of novel-writing. I have a few books that I dip into when I feel blocked while writing both fiction and journalism, and Changing My Mind is right up at the top, along with Smith’s more recent collection, Feel Free.
In literature, at least, I find failure to be more interesting than success. Perhaps because failure is such a personal state: for two talented pianists in The Loser, simply not being Glenn Gould (their fellow conservatory student) is failure enough that they give up playing, and one of them kills himself. The novel is narrated in a single paragraph by the other one, the only man of the three still alive by the time the story begins. (This one has been such a consistent presence in my brain since I first read it in 2012 that I stuck a mention of it into my own novel: a literary father with no ear for music gives the book to his teenage daughter, a young pianist, thinking of it as a point of connection between them; when she reads the jacket note she runs upstairs, upset, and he shouts after her, uncomprehending, “It’s a wonderful book about pianists!”)
The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang
Esmé Weijun Wang’s essays revolve around her symptoms and diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder—the hallucinations she experienced as an undergraduate at Yale, the lab research she engaged in after graduating from Stanford, the reality-destabilizing effect of watching a movie—but rather than rely solely on personal experience, the pieces are vast and wide-reaching. Wang pulls in definitions from the DSM, a historical case of violence against a schizophrenic man, depictions of schizophrenia in pop culture. It’s a fascinating and expansive read.
Biography of X by Catherine Lacey
Catherine Lacey has blown me away with each new book since her debut, Nobody Is Ever Missing. In her most recent novel, the conceit is that it’s actually the biography of an enigmatic, mercurial, Lydia Tar-esque artist, written by that artist’s widow. (The history of America, too, has been shifted off its tracks.) It does all the things I, in my heart of hearts, want novels to do: dance around with form, interrogate art and its making and makers, play out a doomed love story, entertain entertain entertain.
Thank you so much Keziah for sharing your impeccable taste with us! <3
I’ve been mostly reading for research but have been sneaking in pages of Leslie Jamison’s new memoir Splinters which is gorgeous and I can’t wait for it to come out. Other recommended reading: Scenes From An Open Marriage which is a beautiful essay I have read multiple times, “Orange Is the New Yolk” by my friend Marian Bull for Eater <3 and the book I’m A Fan by Sheena Patel (out next week and deliciously obsessive - more on this one soon).
I have a few other very exciting guests lined up for the fall so please stay tuned.
Blowing you a kiss and talk soon -
xo,
Ariél