~*~*~*~*~*what delia read recently~*~*~*~*~
Cosmogony by Lucy Ives
I don’t read a lot of short story collections. I’m not sure why. The concept of them is appealing: after one story is done, you get to refresh and start over with a new one. I guess one of my favorite books is Bad Behaviour by Mary Gaitskill. So it makes sense that reading Lucy Ives’ collection Cosmogony felt like exactly what I wanted from a book. I mean, the first sentence of the book is: “When we were first married, he went out and bought a ball gag.” Later, the main character applies for an erotic blog writer position to write diary entries based on pictures of girls. Ives’ stories often start grounded in reality and then go further into a murky other area:
““I want,” I thought that night, “to be free. But freedom is an intellectual demand and, as such, has nothing to do with pleasure.” Far far below, there was some sort of silvery substance. I could see it glittering there. Truthful, perhaps. Perhaps eternal.”
“I used to think that what disrupts repetitive living is fate. Now I think that what disrupts living is other people.”
In her main characters, the desire for truth is constant. The writing is funny and odd, straightforward but also mysterious in its purpose. A certain dose of magical realism subtly breaks a barrier, such as a friend’s boyfriend who is a demon, or a main character who lives at the bottom of the ocean and comes up to meet a client at a tennis court. I always appreciate a writer who can pull off wacky experimentations, like writing a story in the form of a Wikipedia page about the word “guy.” Another story is told entirely through a dialogue between two women – a phone call – gossiping about behaviour, Ashton Kutcher, and a shitty Joyce Carol Oates book, among other things.
Cosmogony is about “other people”: their conversations, fantasies, and contradictions. Ives writes about a woman who stopped seeing her favorite bodega cat, and how that affected her life. It feels very philosophical, emotional. It’s revelatory that in a brief chunk of pages, I know exactly how she feels.
Don’t Call Me Home by Alexandra Auder
I think all memoir audiobooks should be read by their authors. How could it be told in any other voice? I loved the way Alexandra Auder said her mom’s name “Viva Supstaaarrrrr” in this playful kid husky whisper at the beginning of the book, telling her childhood. Viva was an Andy Warhol it-girl (she was on the phone with Warhol when Valeria Solanas shot him), an actress (an Agnes Varda muse), and a filmmaker herself (Auder’s father and Viva made a film about Alexandra’s birth, which she watched many times in her childhood.) Auder grew up living in the Chelsea Hotel and following her mother around through different moves around the country, taking care of her little sister, and eventually going through her own coming-of-age romps in New York City. Sometimes I felt like this book was just Auder listing off all the craziest stories of her life, like giving her mom advice about plastic surgery as a child or hooking up with Vincent Gallo as a teen. Although Viva was a celebrity for some, she never made much money off her fame. Auder explains the ups and downs of this lifestyle, loving her mother with an intensity that matches her later desire to strangle her. The memoir does some weaving back and forth between present day and the past, as an elderly Viva visits Auder and her own children and husband at their home. I liked these parts, where Auder gets really self-aware, wondering about herself as a mother and if her children are truly able to freely express themselves while also having the boundaries that she didn’t get to have as a child.
The Last Clear Narrative by Rachel Zucker
The body gives birth and also explodes. Description of a marriage also refuses description. A body hides and nourishes another body, a twin breaks off, a birth becomes a breakage of the self. In the acknowledgements and notes in the back of the book, Rachel Zucker explains that you can put two cold green cabbage leaves as cups between breast and bra. In the history of her family, people are escaping the Holocaust with jewels sewn inside clothes. Someone survives the explosion, the experience. The pieces of the book are divided up, like sections of life when everything changed. There is a clutching child, suckling. There are birds and snow. How to tell anyone this? “Birthing is no— metaphor?”
