🚨IN COLLAB WITH @CONZTANOMS🚨

why do dads f*cking love yogurt?

a review of Indian-Ish by Priya Krishna

Perhaps we fall on two sides of a divide: eat-to-live and live-to-eat. I can count on my fingers the times I’ve thought: “I forgot to eat lunch.” And because I love lunch so much--stick with me here--I see how food is marbled with our values, our struggles, and our vision for the future.

Indian (-ish) by Priya Krishna is a practical yet uncompromising take on food. Her writing is so beautiful, and her mother’s recipes are so creative, because of their specificity. Not in that annoying cookbook-y way that’s like, please source Icelandic skyr from Ingibjörg in Klofalækjarkjaftur ONLY. If I wanted to spend that much time overthinking yogurt I never would have left the Pinkberry on Wells Street in 2011. 

I used to hate Indian food when I was a kid because I only liked eating what I had tried 1000 times before. Once a year, for my dad’s birthday we’d go to an Indian restaurant called Bombay Bicycle Club and I secretly really liked the food but did not want to admit it because… stubborn-as-a-mule (SAM) vibes. Anyway, it was my loss and I’m thankful now that I’ve seen the light and it looks like Saag Paneer. This cookbook helped me expand my understanding of “Indian food” (a grossly reductive term, for a massive country with so many different regional cuisines). Saying “I want some Indian food” is like saying “I want to read a book.” A good place to start but huh? We’re here on earth eating food and reading books for no reason, so we might as well order a side of critical thinking to share. 

Cooking and food-styling c/o @Conztanoms. Caramelized Onion Dal recipe c/o Priya Krishna.

Even Saag Paneer pales to the real star of this book: Ritu Krishna. Priya loves her mom sooooo much and her mom loves her. While reading I felt like a welcome but slightly awkward friend at a Krishna family dinner. Awkward because it would be weird if I effused over Ritu Krishna as much as Priya does, but I think it’s warranted. Ritu does it all, then adds lime and salt to taste, then finds an exquisite wine pairing. 

I like how Indian (-ish) calls out racist stereotypes around Indian cooking (also recommend Ugly Delicious “Don’t Call it Curry” episode). It’s helpful to check my own views and expand my mind past “garam masala.” Also honorable mention to Priya’s dad’s yogurt, one case in a growing study I’m planning called “why do dads f*cking love yogurt?” coming to a JSTOR database near you. 

When Language Emulsifies Into a Story

a review of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Congratulations to everyone who has written a book,” Heidi Montag tweeted once. And now, more than ever, I’m like: where is the lie? Zora Neale Hurston belongs to the coterie of authors who use language to create a meta-narrative around storytelling, race and gender. It’s not just about the stories we read, but how they’re told. Hurston’s story is satisfying and episodic like a perfect HBO mini series. Her use of language in Their Eyes Were Watching God is a twin pillar of the book’s greatness. 

Their Eyes Were Watching God is written both in dialect (AAVE) and Penguin Classics English that is formal, flowery, grammatically immaculate, traditionally revered. Growing up in London, I was fed Shakespeare like it was spinach and believed that to understand and appreciate El Bardo was pinnacle English class. That is white supremacy! I believe there’s intrinsic value in engaging with different iterations of language because it provides an opportunity to learn new words and exist outside your intellectual comfort zone. I felt this way reading A Brief History of Seven Killings, written in stream-of-consciousness Jamaican Patois, even though when I was on the bus and a leering gentleman asked me what the book was about I honestly answered “Bob Marley, I think.” But the moment when language emulsifies into a story is so satisfying that the mental whisking is worth it. 

Janie Crawford asks “Did marriage end the cosmic loneliness of the unmated?” like an intersectional, relevant Carrie Bradshaw. And while her life is ordered by marriage and romantic relationships, her agency is steadfast. Every man who walks into her life with a hopeful luminescence is eventually dimmed, a lesson I’ll remember as I match with Account Managers and Moderates on Hinge. If Janie was living in another context, her story might not be so determined by dudes. But alas, Florida in the 1930s was as inequitable as it was humid. 

This is what hopeful luminescence looks like—fellas take note.

The great love of Janie’s life is Tea Cake (named because he is sweet). Tea Cake is a good dude but when I met him, I felt so protective of Janie I was like… don’t even try it, babe! Does Tea Cake even try it? You gotta read the book to find out, since this is a no spoilies zone. Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is firmly in the canon of Black literature, but deserves a more central place in the greater American literature landscape. Basically, I wish I had read it in high school. I trade The Awakening for this. I mean actually, you can just have The Awakening because I thought that book was extremely bogus. Regardless, it’s too little too late for Hurston who was sidelined in her lifetime and brought back into focus by Alice Walker. Hurston did not just write a book, but created a permanent fountain for Black female writers, as well as the rest of us, to drink from. To push back on Ms. Montag, I think she deserves more than congratulations.  

Books to Hold in your Hand While Eating Pretzels

a review of “Wow, No Thank You.” by Samantha Irby

The internet has rained a storm of horror on humankind. Of course, a horror storm existed pre-internet and the difference is now we can like and comment on said horror storm. Nobody asked for this! But here we are, online, googling “are racist people getting fired,” “Florida covid,” “susie park budget director chicago” and “paws chicago.” Say what you want about humanity, but we be googling. With all that salty sweet information in our tongue, what’s next, you ask? Simply move on with our lives and engage with other human beings? Of course not! Enter “blogging” stage right. 

Samantha Irby has been blogging since 2008. Her blogs become books and the books are something you can buy and hold in your hand and read while eating pretzels. Irby’s writing welcomes you into the 5BR 2.5B of her brain by holding the door ajar. There’s no deli tray or fruit bowl or “welcome friends” doormat. We don’t need it; Irby’s writing is effortlessly hospitable. There is no reason she has to tell us about her showering habits or bowel functions or inner monologue. It is suuuuch a privilege and luxury to attend an open house of someone’s brain, and we live in a time where--thanks to the internet--it’s readily available.

sound off in the comments.

 In Wow, No Thank You Irby writes funny, honest essays about being uncomfortable in different locales. Some of her essays are sparse and rely too heavily on “the bit”--to use a term I am highly qualified to use after taking 3 levels of improvisational comedy. But Irby’s writing is interesting by default because she is such a sincere narrator (it’s an imperfect comparison, but reminds me of the way Dave Chappelle’s audiences laugh at his premises before the punchline because they know they’re in safe comedic hands). 

In college, I wrote a column called #ColgateProblems about “the inevitable blunders of collegiate life” (to quote my resume). Like Irby, I wheeled and dealed in personal embarrassment. I wrote about falling down the stairs at the library, getting called out for not making eye contact, grinding at non-grinding parties, getting friend-dumped. Everything feels terrible and embarrassing until it’s in a funny essay riddled with Drake references and inane metaphors. Once, I got an email from a graduated student who was working at the university and it said: “I just wanted you to know that I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. And this comes from someone who does not read the Maroon News often. Lol the Drake reference was gold.”* The external validation sent shockwaves of joy throughout my life, since here we are in 2020 and I’m quoting it verbatim. When you’re writing for no one and someone says “that’s nice” it feels electric. 

We are lucky that Samantha Irby writes. My favorite writers to read are people who I have something in common with and then also nothing in common with. Irby is a self-described “cheese fry-eating, slightly damp Midwestern person” as well as someone with chronic pain, a Black woman, queer, successful, Diet Coke drinker. I love her writing and if you enjoy a side of shits n giggles with your nonfiction, then you will too.

*Yes I did log in to my college email to find this and maybe that’s sad but to that I say Do you love this shit? Are you high right now? Do you ever get nervous? Are you single? I heard you fucked your girl, is it true?

iPhone Notes but you paid an independent bookstore $27

a review of Weather by Jenny Offill

This is a book I would lie about liking to get an interesting-seeming boy with an MFA and no Instagram to like me. Luckily for all parties involved, I don’t like interesting MFA boys; I like sushi-grade boneheads. 

The story needs to be harvested from fragmented paragraphs and my big ol brain is too distracted currently, perhaps always, to be a hunter-gatherer of metaphors in my leisure time. Lizzie, our narrator, works in a library while her life and the planet-at-large unravels. She lives with a low hum of doom. Everyone around her is on the brink. Her brother is fighting substance abuse. Her son is growing up, in ways she can’t control, into a frazzled, broken world. Her husband is just vibing. For Lizzie, the doom balloons and starts to consume until there’s no more room (Dr. Seuss vibe on my vibe). Rationally, I am aware of the doom expanding exponentially in every nook and cranny of this English muffin we call earth. But if I think about it too much, it subsumes me to inaction (you, too?! NO WAY!). In these moments, I puff on the metaphorical inhaler of optimism and make it through the day. Lizzie does not have this prescription. 

This book is written in fragments, dispersed with pithy New Yorker cartoon-esque jokes, and some spare, exquisite dialogue. It feels like you’re reading iPhone Notes but you paid an independent bookstore $27 to do so. I think everything is profound

when it’s clipped into short, cryptic sentences.

I wanted to be carried by the story but felt instead like I was given a map by a smarmy concierge only to find the map was blank because it’s contemporary art, actually?

It’s about the urgency of our climate catastrophe, obviously, and how we blew it thanks to big ag, plastic-wrapped plastic, Mitch McConnell, etc. It’s important and it’s true. When I first learned about climate change, or global warming as we so quaintly called it, I was 9 or 10 and sleepless over humankind’s fuckup and what it meant the future. From what I understand, now we’re in the “what future?!” stage, but I am still going to buy climate credits/not eat meat/use mason jars/vote because it’s no skin off my teeth and I’d rather act as if I gave a shit about the planet even though I’m not sure I do/any of us do because if we did we’d do more.

coddle my ass to hell

Weather has lots of good survivalist tips I will forget ASAP because I can only live coddled, like a fine city-dwelling egg. If you’re yearning for an anxious narrator, you can just go on twitter where everyone is an anxious narrator. Nonetheless, reading this is still more pleasurable than arguing with my parents about what is and isn’t recyclable when I know it’s all headed to landfill anyway! 

A Place to Sit Before and After Eating Ice Cream

a review of Now Everybody Really Hates Me by Jane Read Martin and Patricia Marx, illustrated by Roz Chast

Bedrooms are holy spaces and that’s why it’s actually good/healing to drink wine and eat crackers in bed. Are you in your room now? What are you wearing? Haha. JUST KIDDING. Throw on some gregorian chant music and read what I’m writing. Now Everybody Really Hates Me walked so A Room of One’s Own could run. Don’t fact check me on this. Our sulking narrator, Patty Jane, vows to stay in her room forever after insulting her little brother, Theodore, at his own bday party (feminist icon).

I think of the title of this book every time I wake up after a night of drinking and 1) complaining I’m not getting enough male attention 2) telling my secrets to people who never asked??? 3) treating my angels-from-above friends carelessly because I’m doing (1) and (2). 

I loved this book so much that the pages are taped together and the spine is split. It’s illustrated by Roz Chast, of New Yorker cartoon fame, who is fantastic. I love the liberal media! It taught me about aspic, which think is savory Jello, two concepts that never the twain shall meet. Patty Jane is a card-carrying hungry legend, fiending after hot dogs, crinkly french fries, and ultimately wooed out of her bedroom by an ice cream sundae. 

We really just vibing.

She vows never to speak English again, rather in code that only she understands.  Let it sink in how truly psycho that is and how I am going to do that next time I am mad at someone. “Habool nix pardneereg meltinbaum corz?” asks Patty Jane “Jip lotsy fooch kibberslat binto…. SLÖDZ!!!” she replies. My dad used to read that part aloud to me and I would laugh like he was the Comedy Central 9/8 CST slot. 

I have been thinking about two years ago, when I lived in a room that shut with plastic accordion doors stuck together by velcro. Every night, Sasha, my roommate’s cat would slam her hulking might through the doors and leap onto my bed like a furry long jump gold medalist. I’d bolt upright and initiate a feline relocation program much to her dismay, which she expressed via incessant mewing. The room was imperfect but did the trick: four walls, a bed, and a place to sit before and after eating ice cream.

This book is perfect because Patty Jane is a feminist icon who refuses to settle. She seeks to have it all and believes that with her own ingenuity, she will get there. Do you know who Patty Jane grew up to be? Billie Eilish. Her little brother Theodore? FINNEAS. Don’t fact check me on this. This book is not just for bratty, hungry 6-24-year-old women. It’s an anthropological study! It’s a philosophical text! It’s an exegesis of the nuclear family! An architectural digest! A meal plan! And a reminder that when it feels like everybody really hates you, just eat some ice cream.

One Friend Starts Randomly Reciting Poetry

a review of Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

If we get a share in the world’s delights (unlikely animal friendships, the beautiful marriage of pastry and coffee, when you’re thinking about someone and they text you like it’s mind magic), we have a duty to immerse ourselves in its failings. Adichie makes it palatable.

As a kid, I was terrified of the holocaust because of my resemblance to Anne Frank--white, brown hair, avid journalers, I think that’s it but I’m not sure because I never read the book. In 2007, I lied about reading The Boy in the Striped Pajamas in English class (Don’t tell Mrs. Brown). I didn’t want to read the book so I said it was “good.” In 2008, I was too afraid to watch “The Crucible” movie (it’s spooky!) so I sat outside the classroom while the rest of my class watched. But now I know terrible things happen regardless of my awareness of and reaction to them. 

Half of a Yellow Sun tells stories of the Nigerian Civil War through the intersecting lives of dutiful Ugwu, level-headed Olanna, and bumbling fool Richard (with erectile dysfunction… what does it all mean…). The war slowly strips away worldly delights. Gone are raucous yet sophisticated dinner parties where that one friend starts randomly reciting poetry, book collections, dank soups, salt. They disappear slowly and then suddenly. Though it’s sad, the characters are human beings with coping skills who can adapt to varying degrees of success. “Adapt or die!” I said one minute into quarantine, like a bumbling fool.

This book is a chefs’ kiss example of how fiction helps metabolize painful history. Honorable mention to Adichie’s descriptions of food that help us taste terrible times. Fried powdered egg yolk! Beer with fanta! I was/am a hungry legend and my favorite book at one point was The Truth Cookie by Fiona Dunbar because I loved reading the descriptions of food. Same goes--I need Ugwu’s pepper soup RFQ (right fucking quick). 

It’s a story of family but not in a corny Google super bowl ad way. It’s about real family: the one we build and grow over time, those who may or may not share our DNA. We learn how our understanding of family shifts amidst crisis, perhaps for the better, though it feels perverse to say so. Ok. I’m like… trying too hard to sound like an NYT Contributing Opinion Writer. 

What… do you think they’re talking about…?

There’s a baby named Baby and I enjoyed when an adult male formally addresses the baby by saying “Hello, Baby.” There’s Richard’s kooky servant Harrison who is always making elaborate dishes that no one really asked for. There are meditations on how to stomach cheating in romantic relationships. The whole book is a gift we don’t really deserve. File this under “Adichie is GOAT.”

Bad Dad Energy But No Baked Ziti

a review of Jami Attenburg’s All This Can Be Yours

This orange book decided to take place in New Orleans because the flights were cheap and ugh it just needed a weekend away from it all! It’s not a novel of place, or even about place. It’s not a book that feels very deeply at all, really. If it were a t-shirt, it would say “My Dad Went to New Orleans and All He Got Me Was This LOUSY T-SHIRT!” That t-shirt design... so self-deprecating… should listen to more Lizzo. 

What to do when a loved one is dying, and we’re forced to grapple with the fact that we never loved the loved one in the first place? This book does not answer that question. The Luchman family and their network are too busy pantomiming their flaws to think critically about death. It’s not a book about place or about death, which leads me to my spyglass-and-trenchcoat conclusion that this is a book about bad people! Doing bad things for no reason! It’s just because they’re bad!

I like stories about bad people desperately grasping around in the darkness for the right thing to do, but I don’t like stories that rejoice in quotidien moral failure. The Luchmans aren’t evil, they just suck. There are half-assed Sopranos undertones, with all of the Bad Dad Energy but none of the baked ziti. The matriarch, Barbra, loves furniture and her fitbit. It’s terrible marketing for Fitbit, because you don’t want to be anything like Barbra. I read this book on the floor, on a Barbra-induced furniture boycott. 

The best character is Twyla, who loves drugstore makeup and spends most of the novel in a bikini and a coverup which I imagined to be a Juicy Couture velour romper. She goes on a highly relatable depression-fueled CVS run then changes her mind at the checkout, so that the employee must put it all back. Nothing says “raise the minimum wage!!!!” like that anecdote.

The butt of a romper speaks a thousand words.

At the smoothie bar we call a family unit, there are unlimited combinations that all result in lasting emotional damage. I wanted to yell “YOU go to therapy! And YOU go to therapy!” Oprah-style to every character. I did like reading this book, though. My eyes have been scorched by screen time, hours hunched over my computer or phone like someone who is hacking into the mainframe (shouts OUT to my girls who can and cannot code). This book made me feel like I was watching a movie via words and paper, which was nice. And as my family continues to tussle over social distancing rules (I am always right and they are always wrong, weirdly), it was good to feel like dysfunction aside--my immediate and extended family absolutely DUNKS on the Luchmans.

I Read The Page Again Because I Wanted To

a review of Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

The Invisible Man is a movie starring Elizabeth Moss about a mad scientist who uses science (?) to turn invisible and stalk his girlfriend (???). It’s a horror movie (hate) about a nerdy man (ugh). Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison is not that.

Invisible Man maps the experience of being Black in America for an unnamed narrator. His life is episodic; we watch him through the small-town South, his HBCU, a paint factory, a hospital, Harlem, an underground room.  The story that emerges is like a rickety wooden rollercoaster, twisting around and through; the reader must strap the fuck in. The book came out in 1952 but the stories feel current as white power structures continue to work as intended under the guise democracy. But the story is surreal, dancing between recognizable acts of racist violence--physical and interpersonal--and dreamlike sequences that make you need to read the page again. 

Can’t wait to understand this metaphor in 5-10 years.

Our knowledge of the narrator is purposefully clipped to shift focus on the societal shitstorm happening at a macrolevel. Following him from frame to frame, his identities shift as they slither through his grasp and ours. There are a lot of metaphors, I think. Milk, for example. In a sexy setting, a woman offers the narrator “wine or milk instead of coffee” and the narrator finds milk “strangely repulsive” which is not at all strange because nothing is less sexy than a cold glass of udder juice. There’s also the idea of blindness and vision which, if you recall from Cliffsnotes-ing The Great Gatsby in high school, is an FDA approved metaphor for ignorance/omniscience/etc. I stumbled through some of the metaphors in this book, perhaps because I was am a clumsy well-meaning white person overthinking things. Who’s to say! Ellison’s prose is universal and luxurious and made me need to read the page again because I really wanted to this time. 

The surrealism, pricked by moments of eery clarity, is Jordan Peelean, whose film Get Out expertly demonstrates the “racism as horror” genre. I wonder if Ellison would like Get Out. Or Atlanta. This article explores those parallels really well. 

Ellison reviewed books, too. Coincidentally, I read his scathing, fantastic review of Gunnar Myrdal’s American Dilemma, a looooong study of American race relations pre-WWII by a white Swedish sociologist who randomly said “Actually, I think I’m the authority on this matter because I’m impårtiål.” Please stick to your smörgåsbords, thanks. Invisible Man tells a clearer story of “American race relations” than American Dilemma ever could through its embrace of the unseen and interrogation of what’s democratic.

Thankfully, not every book on earth is written for my greedy little eyes and churning absurd mind. Invisible Man was not written for me to understand sociological phenomena or help me experience blissful universality. There are big ideas I will continue to chew on and little snacks I will come back to when I inevitably re-read this book in a less covid time. For now, I will think of what invisibility means for humanity and why, if offered wine or milk, anyone would ever choose milk.

The Narrator Took Phil 101 and Loved It

a review of The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

This sexy lil book takes place mostly in Prague and the Pragueland Area. Prague is not a very horny place for me. I’ve been once, when I was 10; my dad had food poisoning. I wore lime-colored converse and watched the Astronomical Clock do its thing maybe three times a day. 

Our Prague tour guide, and the book’s narrator, took Phil 101 in college and loved it. The narrator checks in on us, the fair readers, intermittently like Artie Bucco hovering over his patrons Nuovo Vesuvio. It walks the line between irritating and thoughtful and makes me want to say “It’s okay, dude, we got this. I also took Phil 101 and actually I bodied that course.”

This book pairs well with an entire bottle of cabernet sauvignon and an encyclopedic knowledge of Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals by Immanuel Kant, but I only had the cabernet sauvignon. I will never not have to google “metaphysics” which is basically the branch of philosophy that examines the nature of existence. 

Kundera explores duality (lightness vs weight, soul vs body) and the ways in which they braid together like metaphysical challah in our psyche. He does this through a cast of horny, troubled characters who seem familiar to us. In our own lives we are the horny, troubled characters (HTCs). So we must look upon them with compassion when they pose in nothing but a bowler hat and underwear. First we cringe, then we try to understand. 

Discuss.

The HTCs are all wrecked pancakes, burned at the edges while their gooey insides spill out under pressure. Tomas is a middle-aged surgeon committed to his “erotic friendships” in which he either sees a woman “three times in quick succession and then never again” or in 3 week intervals over years. Which means Tomas is the platonic ideal of a Fuckboy. 

His wife Tereza is wrecked by body image issues that storm her dreams and rival those of a 13-year-old girl raised on Abercrombie and Fitch marketing materials. His mistress Sabina is an artist, guilty of the aforementioned bowler hat scenario, who I would probably feel envious of because guys would think she is hotter than me.

Kundera writes rhythmically and the book reads like a foreign film, narrated by an omniscient and handsome-sounding European man. It reminds me of “Amélie” and begs for a Yann Tiersen soundtrack. It’s not a love story, but Unbearable Lightness believes love stories are the driving force of an interesting life. If our lives are spun with love story thread, and the love stories are fraught, does that mean our lives are fraught, too? Would we have it any other way? 

I like my romantic relationships like I like my series of events: unfortunate. Save froth for Netflix original content, because I would rather create lifelong bonds with random people who have repeatedly clicked “unsubscribe.” It is a mid-weight burden. If lightness is unbearable, mid-weightedness is annoying. Ugh. Or as Beethoven put it: Es Muss Sein (it must be).

Essays are Pools, Tweets are Bathtubs

a review of Leslie Jamison’s Make It Scream, Make It Burn

In high school, we learn essays are boring and your parents won't notice if their liquor cabinet’s Malibu is down to its last shot. High school essays are covered in literary blackheads like: “In conclusion” and “the dictionary defines…” But I’ll read a grown-up essay over anything else, Malibu on the rocks in hand. Essays teach us that things... they’re like other things. Essays are swimming pools and fiction is the ocean. I want to learn to swim in a pool rather than an ocean. Tweets are bathtubs. 

Is this copyright infringement or is there a loophole because it’s so bizarre?

The modern essay was popularized by mustachioed Frenchman Michel de Montaigne, who said: “I am myself the matter of the book.” I picture him saying this at an NBA post-game press conference to an audience of 16th-century French intelligentsia, his announcement dripping with “I’m going to take my talents to South Beach” arrogance. The crowd, befuddled but receptive to modern audiovisual technology, emits a collective gasp and “Oh mon dieu.” 

Leslie Jamison is herself the matter of the book. Even with her eye focused on another she writes within the parameters of her own self-awareness, an eye on the road and the other checking “Am I good?” That question is essential to her, as well as the subjects she writes about. The collection inhabits a NO HEDONISM zone.

It is of my professional opinion that our minds are prisons in which we are both the prisoner and the warden. One time someone told me I was self-aware, and I responded, “crippingly so.” They laughed and I thought “AAAAAAAAAAAH! Who can repair the mute button on my nattering brain!” In The Empathy Exams, another Jamison essay collection, she wrote something I resonated with so deeply, but can’t find online and can’t fully remember so I shall butcher. Basically, it was about wanting someone to love you so much that you forget they have feelings, too, and that you are capable of hurting those feelings. *pulls at collar* Yikes!

Jamison doles out similar insights on the over-examined life in Make It Scream, Make It Burn. That the book begins with an essay on a “lonely” whale and ends with the birth of her daughter is no coincidence, it’s a nudge in the ribs and stage-whispered “that’s growth, baby!” Her writing is generous and lyrical, full of memorable metaphors that track across pages like croissant flakes in a beard appearing later. She admits when she expected the essay to exit toward Neat Conclusion Highway, but ended up on Ideological Backroad. This is a sacrifice to the essay genre gods, who demand the honesty of the newest iPhone camera (ok so… my face must be Camp Green Lake because my pores are massive holes...). But breaking the fourth wall is most effective when rare (unless you are Jim Halpert). 

I forget that vulnerability is not a one-way ticket to Everybody Likes Me land. Jamison knows this, which makes her honesty all the nobler. She spatchcocks her psyche open like a Cornish game hen and expects no reward. I tell the truth once and expect the world to cheer me like a race winner in response.

My favorite essay, piece of writing perhaps, is Brian Doyle’s Joyas Voladoras. I read it in--of all places--high school and wanted it tattooed in my eyelids. I continue to love the way every detail brings gravitas, how it braids humanity and the natural world (an idea explored in 52 Blue). I love The Devil's Bait by Jamison, too, for making me say “What! That’s crazy!” to no one in particular. 

When we learn that things are indeed like other things, we a) feel less alone and b) start to uncover more of the invisible ink in which life’s playbook was stupidly written. And the best part about essays: you can read them on your work computer and kind of pretend it’s something relevant to a project.

Wait… Jane Austen Copied Clueless…

a review of Jane Austen’s Emma

At the Hartfield estate, mischievous brat hours are 24/7. Emma is the popular girl in a motley crew of lovers and friends that ranges 20 - 65 years old but is united by their love for: gossiping about other people’s constitutions, eating cold meats, this one fabric shop. She takes on guileless Harriet Smith as her “project” and spends a lot of time with her cranky dad and older, serious neighbor, Mr. Knightley. If you’re thinking “Wait… Jane Austen copied Clueless…” then, fair reader, you’re totally right (kind of). 

Emma inspired Clueless and in both tales, frivolities abound. The pages-long debate of whom is going in whom’s carriage is the 18th century “who’s calling the uber?” And just as I willfully fritter away ¾ of a Sunday recapping the night before, Austen spares no detail--the book is 450 pages of tiny font. Strap the fuck in for the ball at the Crown Inn, which is covered in granular detail over 80 pages. Emma is a verbal thicket of passive voice that exhausts contemporary readers (or at least… this contemporary reader). I spent the entire book not knowing Isabella was Emma’s sister, confused as to why this random family kept stopping by Hartfield and talking about the health benefits of sea air. 

In the 2020 movie, they signaled Harriet’s inferiority by giving her no eyebrows :(

Emma is a Beyoncé-style Single Lady whose life’s work is to sit next to her dad and help him determine whether or not there is a draft. She plans to sidestep marriage because 1) she is already rich 2) actually she doesn’t need a reason because even in the 18th-century women were capable of making their own decisions. Regardless, she is hot and charming, so she doesn't lack suitors. The most promising of which is Mr. Frank Churchill, who incites appeal by being shrouded in mystery. Frank Churchill is like a hot guy in the back of someone’s insta story of the party you’re going to. He’s as attractive as you want him to be because you actually don’t know! Until you get to the party and see he has Juul vapor coming out of every orifice and non-ironically requests My House by Flo Rida. 

Jane Austen is lauded for social commentary peppered with irony and humor, all of which Emma offers by the pound. But it lacks an ethical stance. Emma’s matchmaking, and treatment of Harriet, is demeaning and wrong, borderline cruel. She knows this. She has nothing else to do. In Emma, we learn the line between frivolity and cruelty is hard to define (for women, at least).

So many books demote women’s ethical lapses as bitchy; they’re not as impactful as men’s treacherous betrayals. I wish Austen allowed Emma to lean in to her penchant for social manipulation, in true Sandbergian fashion. If you’re itching to know who gifted Jane Fairfax the pianoforte, then this is a must-read. Or watch the movie. Or watch Clueless for the 1000th time instead.