Idlewild will scratch your The Secret History itch
Idlewild author James Frankie Thomas on beloved books
Hello beloveds,
I’ve been waiting to talk about this book because I wanted to present to you a whole package. Today is the day!
Idlewild completely knocked me out. This was a book I was carrying around with me everywhere and not wanting to do anything else but read it. After I finished it, it lingered - and I wanted everyone I knew to read it so we could talk about it. In fact, if we are friends IRL, I have probably brought this book up to you already, especially if you are gay.
Idlewild follows Fay and Nell in both 2002 when they’re at a Quaker high school in Manhattan and in 2017 as they reflect on this fundamental relationship that shaped them. Fay and Nell are both smart, weird and very queer and Thomas captures the obsessive, big-feelings, hilarious in retrospect but not at all at the time quality that is being a teenager. They meet a set of queer boys in the high school production of Othello and it gets weird. It’s devastating and also very funny (especially if you are a millennial who grew up talking on the house phone and chatting on AIM after school). It’s also a uniquely beatifiul depiction of a young trans man unlike any other I’ve ever encountered. I interviewed James Frankie Thomas for The Millions, where we talked about fan fiction (a prominent part of the plot), the horniest book he’s ever read (not included here), Donna Tartt and realizing he was trans while writing this book. It was a lovely conversation and I wish I was able to fit more in!
A lot of our conversation was about books (surprise, surprise) so I asked the very smart and charming James to come onto my newsletter, for a very special edition of All The Things He Said (were good).
Here’s James:
Multiple friends recommended this novel to me, but I didn’t get around to it until one friend told me they interpreted the narrator as a thwarted gay trans man. If you want to get me to read a book, those are the magic words. I checked it out from the library that very day, and what followed was one of the most blissful reading experiences of my entire life. I spent an entire Saturday night at home reading it and it felt like I was partying, that’s how much fun I had with this book. It’s about a woman writer/professor whose husband, another professor, has been MeToo-ed, and in the aftermath of the scandal she becomes infatuated with a younger male professor. I’m not sure if the author consciously intended for her novel to have such trans resonance, but if you’re seeking out a book about trying to make straight womanhood work for you when you’re actually a gay man, you couldn’t do better than this one. And even if you take it at face value that the narrator is an aging straight woman who feels like an old man on the inside and channels her self-disgust into an erotic obsession with a hot younger man, it’s an absolutely delicious feast of a read. It’s hilarious and sexy and sensual and disgusting and appalling and gripping and thrilling and evilly satisfying; it made me horny and hungry and it inspired me to invent a new salad recipe. You MUST read it.
This is another one I discovered belatedly, thanks to a friend who also recommended Vladimir. (It’s so important to have friends with excellent taste in books.) This novel is almost impossible to describe, so you should really just read it for yourself. I can tell you that it’s about a cuckolding fetishist, but that doesn’t convey how dizzyingly strange it is. From sentence to sentence, you have legitimately no idea where the story could be going. Will it have a supernatural element? Oh, is it a trans coming-out story? Or not? Maybe it’s a crime thriller? Or, wait, a love story?? No other novel has ever spun me around like this, nor made me laugh so hard. I love living alone and being single, but Darryl made me wish for a live-in boyfriend just so I could read it aloud to him. Read it and then let’s talk about it!
I’m always hesitant to recommend this one because it is fucked up. I’m not especially sensitive to violence in books (though I’m a huge wimp when it comes to violence onscreen), but the violence in this one is so stomach-turning I felt physically faint at times. The conceit is that you’re reading an Internet forum in which people are trying to figure out the identity of a notorious twink sex worker; the gossip eventually becomes so outlandish, and so self-contradictory, that you realize that some of the forum posters must be lying or just fantasizing. (The scenes of violence are bearable because you know they can’t possibly be real…or can they??) The book was published in 2004, and I’ve never read another novel that so perfectly captures the Wild West era of the Internet – that mix of anxious dread and greedy excitement that came from genuinely not knowing what horrors you might stumble upon.
A Time to Be Born by Dawn Powell
Dawn Powell (1896-1965) is sort of famous for not being famous – if you google her, all the results mention her “obscurity” – and her fans can get annoyingly smug about it, like “Oh, she’s my favorite but you probably haven’t heard of her.” There was even a line to this effect on Gilmore Girls, when Rory castigated Lane for never having heard of Dawn Powell. I’m not gonna do that here. I’ll just say that A Time to Be Born is one of my all-time favorites, and if you read it, I guarantee it will be one of yours too. Published in 1942, it’s about a sociopathic media star named Amanda Keeler who, as part of a devious social-climbing scheme, invites her old schoolmate Vicky Haven to come work for her in New York City, resulting in an unexpected love triangle and much social scandal. As a satire, it’s every bit as biting now as it was in 1942 – if you’ve ever tried to make it in New York City, you’ll feel attacked on every page – but it’s surprisingly tender, too. I revisit it every few years and love it anew every time; the other day I was re-reading it in the park and laughing so hard, people were staring at me. I wish I could give this book a big hug. If you read it, I’ll give you a big hug.
Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden
This is the only nonfiction book on my list, and I think it might be the best memoir I’ve ever read. T Kira Madden is around my age, so her memoir covers a time period that’s inherently interesting to me (childhood in the 90s, adolescence in the early 2000s), but that’s not why I’m obsessed with it. Nor is it just because Madden has such good personal material to work with, although she definitely does: she grew up in a rich community in Boca Raton, Florida (her uncle is the shoe designer Steve Madden!), but her parents were so troubled by addiction that her childhood was largely unsupervised. Beyond its subject matter, though, the book is a masterpiece. The writing is luminously beautiful, not just on the sentence level, but deep in its soul; it positively glows with compassion and curiosity and love, transforming everything it touches – even the trashiest cultural detritus of the Y2K era – into precious treasure. If you were a kid in the 90s and early 2000s, you owe it to yourself to read this book.
Note from Ariél: this is one of my favorite books of all time!
Thank you, James! Everyone go read Idlewild, you’ll thank me. Really. It’s a fuck everything in my life so I can read it book.
In terms of my own reading - I’ve been listening to Girlhood by Melissa Febos on long walks and working my way through Every Drop is a Man’s Nightmare by Megan Kamelei Kakimoto which is beautifully, beautifully written. I just picked up Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica (recommended to me after I was gushing about A Certain Hunger - what else is new) and ponyboy by Eliot Duncan at Politics and Prose last night (dreamy bookstore if you’re in DC!). I also really enjoyed this Julia Fox interview by Jia Tolentino (eagerly anticipating that memoir.)
Wishing you a blissfully long walk, a pot of coffee that never runs out and an exciting dog sighting -
Talk soon!
Kisses,
Ariél
<3 DARRYL FOREVER <3