Reading Pleasures of 2021
by Gwynne Garfinkle
It's the end of another strange year, in which books once again served as an important respite for me. Early in 2021, I read a lot of fiction. Later, as I worked on edits for my debut novel (forthcoming in January!) and dove into the first draft of a new novel, I gravitated more toward nonfiction. Here are some of my favorites.
The Final Revival of Opal & Nev, Dawnie Walton's debut novel, tells the story of Black singer Opal Jewel (inspired by the likes of Betty Davis and Grace Jones) and her 1970s musical collaboration with white British singer-songwriter Nev Charles. At the center of the novel is the killing of Jimmy Curtis, Opal's lover and the duo's drummer, during a riot at an ill-advised showcase featuring Opal and Nev and a Confederate-flag-toting Southern rock band. Jimmy's daughter, a music journalist, attempts to unravel the truth about Opal's life and the events of that fateful night. My only frustration with this book is that Opal and Nev's proto-punk oeuvre is so vividly rendered, I desperately wish I could pull up their music on Spotify and YouTube.
Machinehood by S.B. Divya is a science fiction thriller about artificial intelligence, sentience, and the perils of the gig economy, set in a future even more Internet-driven than the present moment. It's both suspenseful and thought-provoking, full of chewy ideas about the ethics of AI.
I'm a sucker for campus novels, and if they contain a speculative element (à la Pamela Dean's Tam Lin), so much the better. Two novels in this vein that I enjoyed this year were Unbecoming by Lesley Wheeler and Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo. Unbecoming deals with faculty politics, faerie, power, and perimenopause. (There should be a lot more speculative fiction involving menopause.) In Ninth House, Yale's secret societies (and the wealth and privilege associated with them) are fueled by the occult.
Monstrous Bonds is a chapbook of short stories by the prolific Marissa Lingen. A couple of story titles convey something of her gentle humor: "Shrapnel From My Cousin's Kaiju Battle: $229 Plus Shipping" and "The Swarm of Giant Gnats I Sent After Kent, My Assistant Manager." The protagonists of these two stories find unlikely friendships among the monstrous. "After the Monster" deconstructs tropes about mental illness: "Like, mental illness is as bad as a monster with nasty yellow fangs, but look, there's the monster, there it is right now, it has the nasty yellow fangs that drip monster spittle. And also there is mental illness to deal with in addition to the monster. Yay, lucky you." The story celebrates communities that fight to keep everyone alive in the face of literal monsters and mental illness. This slender compilation whetted my appetite for what continues to be a long-overdue full-length collection of Lingen's short fiction.
Other recently published fiction I enjoyed this year included: Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark, Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger, Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth, The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey, and Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw.
I was delighted to read Leslie Brody's Sometimes You Have to Lie: The Life and Times of Louise Fitzhugh, Renegade Author of Harriet the Spy, since Harriet was a formative book for me as a young writer. Fitzhugh left the Jim Crow South and pursued life as an artist in circles that were gay and bohemian, and the book features an amazing cast of characters including James Merrill, Lorraine Hansberry, Sandra Scoppettone, and M.E. Kerr.
I suspect Adrienne Rich herself would have hated Hilary Holladay's very revealing biography, The Power of Adrienne Rich, but it provides a good deal of insight into the evolution of Rich's poetry and politics. The book shows Rich's beginnings as a dutiful daughter eager to please her intellectual taskmaster of a father, her early literary success, her years of marriage and motherhood, her embrace of women's liberation and lesbian identity, and her reclamation of the Jewish identity her father rejected. It also illuminates her nearly lifelong struggle with rheumatoid arthritis. It contains a number of revelations (for me, anyway) about Rich's personal life, including her affairs with Robert Lowell and Susan Sontag, Audre Lorde's unsuccessful attempts to seduce Rich amid their important and challenging friendship, and Rich's problematic love relationship with her psychiatrist, Lilly Engler, who inspired her classic Twenty-One Love Poems.
The book I was most excited to read this year was the newly published Letters of Shirley Jackson. Sometimes painful (for example, its depictions of Jackson's struggle with agoraphobia and the difficulties in her marriage to Stanley Edgar Hyman), but often hilarious, the letters are a brilliant document of a working writer and mother. I could quote from this book all day long, but here is just a taste: "stanley says he promised to send you copies of my stories; they’ll be coming out soon. our collective books progress slowly; stanley reads more every day, and i write lots of stories, some of which sell. laurie is due to start writing his book any day; he has started getting out of his crib; we caught him one night and he had apparently been getting away with it for weeks; he hoists himself up and over the edge and lets himself down by his hands. like humphrey bogart going over a prison wall." The letters shed light on Jackson's writing process during the creation of such masterworks as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
Dodie Bellamy's latest essay collection, Bee Reaved, was assembled after the death of her husband, the writer Kevin Killian. The final essay in the book, "Chase Scene," a letter to Killian, charts her process of grief and loss through an examination of movie car chase scenes (which Killian loved). As in her earlier work (all worth reading, from her experimental novel The Letters of Mina Harker through her poetry and nonfiction), Bellamy has a wonderfully excessive approach that delivers startling connections, as she describes in "Hoarding as Écriture": "When writing happens, my world shifts and like on Marvel's Agents of Shield a portal opens. Things tumble into it--events memories books movies the endless online garbage I read my body. The longer the portal is open, the more tumbles in. Patterns form, but on some level everything feels--everything is--connected so I keep pushing more and more stuff in. . . While I'm in the thick of writing this essay, in fact, a male critic complains my pieces go on and on and on, and my confidence stumbles. I download Judy Grahn's 1974 lesbian-feminist anthem A Woman is Talking to Death and reread it. Regretting all the women she didn't love enough, didn't try to save, Grahn writes, 'These are indecent acts, lacking courage, lacking a certain fire behind the eyes, which is the symbol, the raised fist, the sharing of resources, the resistance that tells death he will starve for lack of the fat of us, our extra.' Defending our 'fat,' our 'extra,' we starve death. Grahn reminds me that for a woman, too much is always a form of resistance, and I regain momentum."
Diane di Prima, who died in 2020, is primarily known as a poet, but she's long been one of my favorite prose stylists as well. She wrote Spring and Autumn Annals: A Celebration of the Seasons for Freddie in the mid-1960s following the suicide of her friend, the dancer Fred Herko. Finally published this year, the book is a remarkable time capsule of the bohemian artistic communities of which di Prima was a part and also a beautiful meditation on the seasons, New York, love, motherhood, art, and friendship.
Gwynne Garfinkle lives in Los Angeles. Her debut novel, Can't Find My Way Home, is forthcoming in January from Aqueduct Press. Her work has appeared in such publications as Fantasy, Uncanny, Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, Mermaids Monthly, The Deadlands, Apex, Not One of Us, and The Cascadia Subduction Zone. Her collection of short fiction and poetry, People Change, is available from Aqueduct Press.
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