Turtleneck Round-Up Season: Books that made me feel something in 2021
How to get your heart ripped out of you by books about foster care, ghosting, and, believe-it-or-not, rocks.
One of the first things you learned about me through this newsletter is that I keep a list of what I’ve read. I was nervous that once I moved in with someone, I wouldn’t read as much as I was able to when I lived alone, but in my first year of cohabitation, I read more than I ever have. (It helps to move in with someone who reads more than you do.)
Looking back at the list, patterns emerge. I see that this was a year where nonfiction spoke to me more than fiction—in addition to memoir and essays, I picked up many narrative nonfiction tomes that had engrossed Ben and found myself gripped by a new genre. Writers of color are underrepresented on my reading list this year, though I tried to read more American Indian voices. I got stuck in a pattern of reading a Tana French mystery after finishing a grief and trauma-filled memoir. Much of the fiction I read was by millennial writers grappling with the Internet and what it means to be a young adult in late-stage capitalism.
Books that haunt me or made me cry:
Stranger Care by Sarah Sentilles (memoir/non-fiction) - what does it mean to be a mother? A wife? To love someone you did not birth? This meditation on foster care, loving, and creating family broke my heart. I fell in love with Sarah Sentilles after reading Draw Your Weapons, but this vulnerable account of being a foster mother was without a doubt my favorite read of 2021, though I wept through the second half.
No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood (fiction) - What I thought was just another novel about social media and the Trump era with a Very Online Narrator completely surprised me in the second half—when the narrator’s niece is diagnosed with a genetic abnormality in utero. Somehow it all comes together. Again, I cried through the second half.
The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio (memoirish reported essays) - I was on the library waitlist forever for this book, which was written by one of the first undocumented immigrants to graduate from Harvard and attracted a lot of attention when it came out in March 2020. I don’t know what I expected it to be, but her exploration of the lives of undocumented immigrants surprised and captivated me. I was stricken to realize that these were stories I had never heard before.
The Unreality of Memory by Elissa Gabbert (essays) - I’ve written about this collection on Turtleneck Season before, how I had to put it down after the essays on climate change and disaster kept me up at night. I picked it back up a year later and devoured Part 2 and Part 3, which perhaps made me think more than they made me feel. Her eponymous essay on memory and the Mandela Effect was my favorite.
Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine (mixed genre brilliance) - This woman was a MacArthur Genius for a reason. Her writing on race, the brokenness of America, and being a Black woman should be required reading for Americans - especially white Americas like myself. It is extraordinarily cringey, but Rankine won’t let us look away.
There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura (fiction) - Late-stage capitalism in Japan. Millennial ennui. Satire. Delightfully weird. Corporate burn-out. Relatable, if you have ever fantasized about quitting your job and pursuing mindless temp work instead.
Ghosts by Dolly Alderton (fiction) - This debut novel by Sunday Times dating columnist Dolly Alderton made me laugh and cry. It’s not a radical piece of literature in form or style or even plot, but felt radical to me in that its central character is a woman in her 30s who knows and likes herself, who doesn’t self-sabotage, and for whom non-romantic relationships remain central, vital, and worthy of pursuit. Cathartic for anyone who has ever been ghosted, been single in their thirties, and/or watched friends fade away into their relationships. The anti-Bridget Jones.
The Thin Places by Jordan Kisner (essays) - omg I loved these essays so much and want to be Kisner’s friend. I had to return my copy to the library but have been meaning to buy a copy to have on the shelf. Through essays on wonderfully weird and seemingly esoteric subjects (a Martha Washington-themed debutante ball for Latinas in Texas, hipster-evangelicalism in Montauk), Kisner explores her own identity.
Having And Being Had by Eula Biss (memoir/essays) - To know that someone else shares my angst about wanting to be a writer and a mother, and is trying to figure out whether it is possible to live ethically under capitalism is helpful. But also terrifying. After decades as a struggling writer, Biss finds herself middle-class and comfortable, owning a home in a gentrifying neighborhood, and decides to try to work out all of her complicated feelings on the page, whether it is possible to opt-out, how she feels about being implicated in the system for the sake of art, etc. etc. etc. I cried because we are trapped! But we can still write about it beautifully!
Empire of Pain by Patrick Raddan Keefe (nonfiction) - This kind of nonfiction is not my usual genre, but after Ben blazed through this book, I picked it up. This history of the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma shattered any lingering doubts I was harboring over whether quitting my last job (which paid me $$$$) because I didn’t want to continue representing opioid manufacturers was an overreaction and that the grotesqueness of their actions was exaggerated. They were as bad as I thought they were, if not worse. Raddan Keefe’s research and reporting is incredibly thorough. For fans of Succession and true crime podcasts.
Books That I Can’t Stop Thinking About
The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time by Hugh Raffles (nonfiction) - After Stranger Care, this was perhaps my favorite read of 2021, though I am embarrassed to say that I can’t even begin to describe what it was “about” and nervous to recommend because I don’t know if anyone else will like it - though Ben did. The history of stones? A history of the world through the lens of rocks? Time, permanence, memory? It was quiet and profound and enlightening. If you hate Sebald, probably not worth your time.
East West Street by Phillipe Sands (nonfiction/memoir) - Though I spent the almost a decade wanting to be a human rights lawyer, I was embarrassed to admit to Ben that I was unfamiliar with Phillipe Sands, a famous British international human rights lawyer, whose books lined his shelves. On our way back from Santa Fe last year, we listened to a BBC podcast based on Sands’ most recent book, The Ratline, but Ben recommended I start here, with Sands’ history of the origins of post-Holocaust human rights law and the Nuremberg Trials. Sands discovers that the two Jewish lawyers who invented the concepts of “genocide” and “crimes against humanity” are from the same town as his own grandfather - Lviv (or Lwów or Lemberg, depending on who is in control) in Galicia. A family memoir intersects with Sands’ history of these two lawyers, how their respective experiences shaped their respective views of the crimes perpetuated against the human people and whether to treat them as crimes perpetuated against a group or crimes perpetuated against individuals. You don’t need to be a lawyer to be fascinated by this book, but it will probably be most compelling to anyone with a particular interest in this chapter of world history and/or Jewish family history.
To Be A Man by Nicole Kraus (Quiet short stories) - Female narrators. Displacement. Family. Jewish. Europe. Israel. Sex. Everything I love about Nicole Kraus. A perfect follow-up to East West Street.
Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country by Sierra Crane Murdoch (Nonfiction) - I had never given any thought to visiting the Dakotas until I read this book and saw its empty expanses through the author’s eyes. Murdoch follows an Arikata woman, Lissa Yellow Bird, on her dogged quest to solve the mystery of a missing white oil worker. While the book might be a letdown for anyone hoping for a gripping true crime tale, it nevertheless captivated me because it opened my eyes to a corner of the U.S. that I knew nothing about - oil booms on reservations in North Dakota, the ensuing corporate interests, corruption in tribal governments, reservation life in the barren north of this country. It is also a portrait of Yellow Bird herself, her family, their inherited trauma, their connection to the once fertile land, and their healing.
Intimacies by Katie Kitamura (fiction) - Kitamura’s novel is on every “Best of 2021” list for a reason. For fans of Rachel Cusk, Kitamura’s female protagonists are controlled and circumspect. We inhabit their heads for the entirety of the novel and yet learn little about them - what does this say about the “Intimacies” with which Kitamura is concerned? This one has moved from New York to the Hague to be an interpreter at the International Criminal Court; she is trying to decide whether to stay, whether her new lover will ever come back from Portugal where he has gone to confront his ex-wife. Those are the outlines of the plot, which serves only as a skeleton for the themes Kitamura wants to explore.
A Swim In The Pond In The Rain by George Saunders (Literature 101) - For anyone who wishes they could go back to college and not sleep through their comp lit seminar (me!), Saunders has given you another chance! I had not planned on setting aside time to read any short stories by the Russian greats this year or ever, but Saunders makes it a worthwhile delight. As he does as a professor at Syracuse, he walks you throw a series of classic short stories by the likes of Chekhov and Turnegev, breaking them down line by line (in some cases) or page by page, revealing their author’s mastery of craft while enhancing the reader’s appreciation of it.
I would love to hear from any of your about your favorite reads of 2021, or to hear your thoughts on any of the above.
Happy holidays, and hope you enjoy a good book while you are shielding yourself from Omicron this holiday season.