Alizah Salario

I had every intention of writing about Caitlin Flanagan’s Girl Land, but then I thought the better of preaching to the choir. The New York Times and Bookforum already butchered it, and honestly, I couldn’t get past the Kindle sample. Besides, it’s not really fair to knock a book because my views differ from those of the author. Flanagan did bring up this fabulous little Mystery Date game that looks like the predecessor to my beloved Girl Talk and that’s about all you need to know.
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This hit me at just the right moment, so I’m borrowing it from Advice to Writers and reposting here. The truth is, I’m not nearly ruthless enough.

Be ruthless about protecting writing days, i.e., do not cave in to endless requests to have “essential” and “long overdue” meetings on those days. The funny thing is that, although writing has been my actual job for several years now, I still seem to have to fight for time in which to do it. Some people do not seem to grasp that I still have to sit down in peace and write the books, apparently believing that they pop up like mushrooms without my connivance. I must therefore guard the time allotted to writing as a Hungarian Horntail guards its firstborn egg.

J.K. ROWLING

I’m making a best of list to suggest that you should read the same  books and articles I enjoyed this year. My motivation is more personal. List making  a way to take inventory, define patterns, and remind myself that I’m not a totally worthless blob of cells and fluid wasting the world’s precious space. Rather, I’m a worthless blob of cells and fluid that reads and writes a lot!

In 2011, my reading wheelhouse seemed to be death. (Shocker!) I was stuck on work that explored the tension between order and chaos. I found myself enthralled by stories that tapped into either a thrilling life lived on the edge or a life of stability that made perfect sense, in a picket fence sort of way, but verged on suffocating. I mention this because while one can argue about objective quality in art, for the sake of this post I’d like to define “best” not by quality of language or craft, (though many of the pieces mentioned possess top quality style) but by my reading experience. I often judge whether or not a book captures me by how strongly I feel like writing after I’ve read it, and that has just as much to do with my sense of ennui as it does with the quality of the text.

The truth is, for all my yoga-practicing, list-making, straight and narrow behavior, I prefer to live at life’s extremes (perhaps that explains all the douchey guys I date?)  I’m no tastemaker, so take this all with a grain of kosher salt.

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Didion with her daughter. From the LA Time's Jacket Copy

In order to do the heavy lifting of reading a Joan Didion book, the brain – and the heart – must be prepared to carry the weight. This is especially true with Blue Nights, Didion’s extended eulogy to her daughter Quintana, who died in 2005.  For this reason I hesitated picking it up immediately; one has to be in the right place to read about death, especially when it’s a mother writing about the death of her only child. I wanted to save Blue Nights, but the Bookforum cover, the NPR interview, the review after interview after review all finally got to me. I had to read it to know what all the fuss was about. I had recently finished the book and started jotting notes for a blog post when I found out about the death of my father’s girlfriend (for lack of a better word), who had lived with us for many years and played a major role in my upbringing. I returned to Chicago before I had the time – no, before I could create the mental space – to flesh these out.

• It is impossible to read Blue Nights without thinking about all the things one has loved and lost.
• Didion lets us see the small cracks in the veneer
• We are constantly shaping and reshaping the stories of our lives to align with the changing visions of ourselves.

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Please don’t hate me.

I know we’ve all got our pleather thongs bunched up over the Kardashian kerfuffle. Real or fake, for money or for love,  it’s Kim K..’s life – and she’s now alone. For reals. So why is America taking it so personally?

Aren’t we, like, totally over marriage? Considering that many successful, independent women have resigned to, shall we say, less than stellar husband choices (exhibit A: Kris Humphries) should we even be surprised?  I’m not really sure about the rest of the country, but I can tell you why I care. If you have an overbearing mother, a sister with whom you fight constantly but still consider your best friend, or are a petite white girl who doesn’t look like she belongs on The Hills and has butt and not a pancake for an ass, you might, on some level, be able to relate to the Kardashians (Surprise! I have all three).

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The problem with writing about a book like Jeffery Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot is that everyone and their three-legged dog has something to say about it. 

Then there was this week’s Modern Love, which pointed out that we often choose lovers not because they’ll make great partners, but because they fit an epic love story. Who we think we should love has less to do with the object of affection than with the love story we hope to write. This is the reason can’t bring myself to date online - not out of shame, but simply because I don’t want my love story to start on the Internet. (Okay, I tried it once. Not a huge fan.)

But here I go digressing and confusing love stories with love. They are quite distinct, and this is exactly what Euginides is trying to reconcile in The Marriage Plot, or perhaps, more accurately, what I was trying to negotiate as I read it. Oh, how the swift undertoe of love can seem so separate from the actual relationship! How the supposed euphoria is really just a guise for the extreme solitude of the lover in love! But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Our privileged protagonist, Madeline, became an English major at Brown for the most banal of reasons: she loves to read. But here, loving to read means more than loving the experience of reading. Madeline is the type of person who defines herself by books: from the Madeline wallpaper in her childhood bedroom to A Lover’s Discourse, which serves as balm for her broken heart, books become the metric by which her life is measured. So as she works on her thesis – The Marriage Plot – about literary courtship and marriage of the Victorian era, we can be certain her story – the one Eugenides is writing – won’t end up like a Jane Austen novel.

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When I lost my iPhone in the back of a taxi a few weeks ago, I decided I wouldn’t replace it. My incessant checking of Gmail, Facebook and Twitter had bred a certain gadget co-dependency that I felt rather ashamed of. I had become that girl walking down the street while texting without looking where she was going. I’m also the girl who has to check her phone in the middle of meals, meetings, and otherwise important events. Rude? Maybe. But you’re probably that girl or guy, too. Still. Perhaps the iPhone mishap was a blessing in disguise. I replaced it with a $20 go-phone, which is the modern-day tin-can-on-a-string equivalent: it makes calls and texts. That’s it. No photos, no email, no Internet – and worst of all, no Tweets. I’d survive. Maybe.

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Want to come over and watch MSNBC?

I don’t get bunny ears. Are they sexy because they seem docile and coquettish, just like the furry creatures that procreate a lot? Or have they simply become associated with sex after years of Playboy-inspired scantily clad bunny Halloween costumes?

It turns out a lot of people are skeptical about bunny ears. NBC’s sitcom The Playboy Club premiered last week to a swift backlash against the show’s regressive portrayal of women. At The Washington Post, network television’s fall lineup of shows depicting grown women as kewpie-dolls in kitschy uniforms had critic Hank Stuever asking a simple yet provocative enough to warrant all caps question: WHAT THE [EXPLETIVE] HAPPENED TO WOMEN?

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If we’re going to judge books by their covers, then what does a glossy pastel paperback branded with toothpick legs, towering stilettos, the occasional cupcake, and a title written in the loopy script of a lovesick teenager say about the story of the grown women between the covers?

British author Polly Courtney didn’t want her latest novel, It’s a Man’s World (given the tagline “but it takes a woman to run it”) marketed as “chick lit,” that sub-genre of fiction often stigmatized as the cotton candy of literature: saccharine, insubstantial fluff that dissolves the minute it comes into contact with a warm brain. So when her publisher, HarperCollins, gave the book a “condescending and fluffy” makeover — complete with a cover spotlighting slender gams and pointy heels — Courtney subsequently announced she won’t be working with them again. She spoke to the Guardian about her decision:

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I fear I’ve reached my saturation point with fiction. When the inner workings of novels start to become transparent, is it time to stop reading – or just time to start thinking about them differently? I think, in fact, it’s simply time to start why books do what they do. Here’s a old essay I wrote on the topic — and Elif Batuman’s The Possessed –that suddenly seems relevant.

“I fake it so real, I am beyond fake.” When Courtney Love sings “Doll Parts,” she may not realize she’s summing up the contemporary novel.

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