Issue 01 — Permission Slips
A friend of mine once said that in her line of work, she writes a lot of permission slips for her clients. This got me thinking about the books I've read that have done just that: books that have named what I thought were nameless feelings and concepts, that have allowed me to change for the better. Stories, poetry, memoirs—you name it—that have changed my mind or reinforced a feeling or belief I wasn’t ready to yet embrace.
Great books, especially books deemed “classic”, articulate ideas whose full picture we can’t quite see all at once. These books are the wind at our back, pushing us towards new versions of ourselves—even if that’s right over the cliff of absolutes and certainty. Homicidal tendencies aside, the permission granted by the works that make up your personal canon are sometimes self-help: whether well-hidden in a variety of genres from chick-lit, to overlooked literary fiction, or tucked away in abstract prose.
The recommendations in this issue have written me some of my most needed permission slips, those that are always in-demand in my life. They have allowed me to hold hope and dread all at once, to be romantically wronged and do some wronging myself; they’ve given me permission to question the accepted, to ask who is writing, and to embrace the unknown.
Tell me, dear reader: what books have given you the permission you didn't know you needed? What stanza of poetry admitted you to a brand new mindset? Which narratives allowed you to level-up your emotional processing?
No. 1
Permission to jilt and be jilted.
Hearburn by Nora Ephron
It’s hard to write about, and recommend, the work of someone as pivotal as Nora Ephron, because with someone like Nora (yes, in my brain we’re on a first-name basis)—who is so talented, so iconic, but above all else so beloved by you and yours—it can feel like the recommendation is so blindingly obvious it’s idiotic; like a choir of DUH.
If you’ve been living in a hole for 30+ years and are still unaware of Heartburn’s premise, it’s an auto-fictional retelling of the demise of Nora’s second marriage to reporter and salmon-colored neck-tie enthusiast Carl Bernstein.
In re-reading the book this year, I couldn’t separate it from the criticism Nora faced for Heartburn and its movie adaptation. The media’s disapproval stemmed from Heartburn’s autobiographical nature which frankly is comedy to me: if her ex-husband had written his version of the story, he would have been deemed BRAVE by the the very same pundits who couldn't handle the idea of a woman reclaiming the narrative of her life. Fuck men!
Anyway, what was I talking about? I reread this novel for the millionth time this April. The hole it carved into my heart many years ago allows me to return to it no matter the situation—yes, even in a pandemic. It’s rife with observations and how-tos on surviving heartbreak and building self-respect. Before I even knew what it meant, Nora granted me permission to accept that ‘two things can be true’: you can be the victim and hero of your own life; you can jilt and be jilted; you can master a key lime pie recipe and throw said pie in your ex-husband’s face. Heartburn is so human it borders on being gauche—only in terms of its earnestness—but what is more bumbling than the human experience? Nora’s novel can be read as a timeless blueprint for independence and self-regard, something I will forever be in desperate need of. Nora famously said that her religion was “to get over it”, something I try to practice every day but unfortunately holding a grudge is my Olympic sport.
While this book covers matters of the heart—the likes of which are forever deemed “easy reads” by this lil’ patriarchal-consumerist-society in which we dwell—it isn't a passive read even at less than 200 pages. If anything it’s one of the few books that is meant for re-reads, you can read Heartburn a million times and find a new joke and a new bit of life-changing advice. Without any pretension, it's witty, it's warm, it soothes and it eviscerates. And while we’re at it, it also has some great recipes in it. So please, if somehow you haven’t already, pick up a copy and get ready to nourish your little heart—and your stomach too.
It’s for you if you’re for…
Dolly Alderton’s Agony Aunt column in The Sunday Times Style, a strong allegiance to turtlenecks, restaurant-industry conspiracies (can you imagine Nora’s response to the moldy jam lady?!!), Dorothy Parker, fries for the table, Meg Ryan’s wardrobe in You’ve Got Mail, toile print accents, the Polly Platt season of You Must Remember This by Karina Longworth and happily-ever-afters no matter their forms.
No. 2
Permission to hope in hopeless times.
Weather by Jenny Offill
Hope can fall apart in your hands if you try and quantify it. Before I read the following recommendation, I envisioned hope as a Marshall’s brand wall-hanging, that spelled out the word in a Barney-purple, Papyrus-adjacent font—hanging in a college grad’s bedroom. That's to say that at face value, the abstract concept of hope made me cringe. Then I learned of that quote by Mariame Kaba that we’ve all heard repeatedly over the last 6 months, “hope is a discipline”, and a shift occurred. But irrationality and despair are no slapdash walk in the park either.
Enter Jenny Offill’s most recent novel, Weather; a fabulously strange and fragmented book where its author explores both of these notions, hope and despair, equally with eloquence and patience. Ideally, Weather should be read slowly in multiple sittings to really savor Offill’s artistry. We follow sardonic Lizzie Benson and her family as they navigate their own interpersonal struggles against the backdrop of an impending climate change catastrophe. The imminent disaster is only ever alluded to throughout the book, like fearful glances thrown over each characters’ shoulder. Offill has published a master class in compartmentalization: this perfectly-weird little novel (at 201 pages) is the detached opposite of a happily-ever-after.
Weather granted me permission to accept that hope is not an either/or concept. Hopeful people are in-between people, people who are relatively free of absolutes because they know you can’t be hopeful about something if you can’t acknowledge the pain that fertilized the need for change—and thus the hope. I am perpetually reckoning with, and reestablishing my relationship to escapism, so it was delightful to lose myself in Offill’s lyricism and poetic fragments, while still being drawn out of that quiet peace by her sharp metaphors and allegories for aging, collectivism, coping mechanisms, extremes, care circles, fatalism, and identity. At the risk of overselling, I have not underlined so many sentences and dog-eared this many pages of a book in a long time: it’s like Offill read my diary and then wrote my fears as beautiful poetry that I could never mimic or live up to. The way this book cut into me is honestly, just plain rude.
“This wasn’t the apocalypse I had planned for,” Offill said while promoting Weather, at the beginning of this ever-so-charming global pandemic we’re all trying to survive. Drafts of this newsletter were written—for you!—from exclusively inside my apartment, not just because this is where the wifi lives, but because the west coast was literally on fire (still is!) and going outside was no longer an option. With that in mind, this rec could be a little too on the nose in light of the apocalyptic events unfolding. I read somewhere that “books better prepare you for the world,” so suit up nerds! Read this book, because if 2020 has taught us anything it's that hope is all we have left.
It’s for you if you’re for…
Fiona Apple, Exposure by Olivia Sudjic, Rebecca Solnit, D.A.R.E. t-shirts, Barbara Loden’s Wanda, a skeptical acceptance of Stoicism, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, Byredo’s Bibliotheque candle, Rachel Cusk, and Roger Cohen’s 2014 piece “Active Fatalism” in the NYT.
No. 3
Permission to unlearn.
Wide Sargasso Sea
by Jean Rhys
Wide Sargasso Sea is a subversive, eerie prequel to Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë—it is an anecdote to Brontë’s portrayal of the madwoman in the attic (spoiler alert/trigger warning for attic dwellers!): the first Mrs. Rochester, Antoinette Conway. Wide Sargasso Sea reads like a lucid dream: a nightmare that lures you in with promises of serene landscapes and finding love...in a...hopeless… place... yet delivers you to a point of betrayal, isolation, and displacement—but most importantly, a place of questioning.
This book came to me through a former, ill-fated book club (RIP book club, miss you book club), and up until then, I used the work of the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen, and their peers to take a break from my modern, perilous life. Wide Sargasso Sea reframed and decontextualized so many of those escape paths for me. This short but biting novel took my brain by its (devil) horns and shook me all around to bring new light and a very delayed critical mindset to my coping mechanisms.
In telling the story of Antoinette and how she found herself in said attic, Rhys employs a torrential writing style that will overwhelm your senses: the descriptions of each landscape, particularly the Caribbean scenes, are sensual and visceral—the humidity seeps off each page; the antagonist’s anger flashes like bolts of lightning through each peek into her interiority and deteriorating mental state. Neither Brontë nor Rhys confirmed Antoniette/Bertha's race. Rhys was a white West Indian woman writing about the demise of a Creole woman—at the hands of a white man (surprise!) in the context of a post-slavery Jamaica and Victorian England—in the 1960s. Rhys herself was born in Dominica and lived there until she was 16, and then spent most of her life in England. She felt othered throughout due to her West Indian heritage, but when she returned home she felt othered there too by her time away.
This book gave me permission to reexamine the assumed and to question who an author is writing for: Brontë was writing for the deemed-pious, Anglo-Christian Janes of the world (Tyrese L. Coleman’s LitHub essay says it best), Jean Rhys was writing for the Antoinettes—the women left behind by society due to gender, race, socioeconomic standing, or by their own values and integrity that were before their time. A greater question lingers from the framework of this novel and both books’ ambiguities: what are the limitations of empathy?
Like Weather, Wide Sargasso Sea invited me to extend my care circle but did so by prompting me to be critical when reading about someone else's suffering. By uniting the stories of two very similar women—who are granted two very different outcomes—this book allowed me space to directly confront another beloved narrative; one that fails to examine that one heroine's happy ending comes directly at the expense of another. And look, Wide Sargasso Sea will not ruin Jane Eyre for you, unless your passions are too fragile to withstand critical engagement: if so, good luck out there buddy! Drive home safe! This book will, if you haven’t done so yourself, destroy the foundation you have for critical thinking in fiction, and then help you to rebuild it by asking more questions.
There is a very specific cadence of grief in this book, sung by the seemingly recurring deaths and tragedies of certain characters. Those returning traumas and the literal naming and renaming of the women by men in this narrative highlights the brutalizing theme of female non-autonomy. The story is composed of imperfect narrators, which will have you quite literally questioning who is speaking for much of the plot, and that is the book's biggest gift: questioning and unlearning as an active practice.
It’s for you if you’re for…
Shirley Jackson’s investigations into what happens behind Gothic closed doors, Regency silhouettes and Victorian necklines, Circe by Madeline Miller, ylang ylang oil, Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo, Liz Garbus’s What Happened, Miss Simone?, wasabi roulette, and “Shake It Out” by Florence + The Machine.
Honorable Mentions 🏅
While my *official* recommendations for this issue are done, other honorable mentions must be made:
Blue Nights by Joan Didion and Bluets by Maggie Nelson (we love a theme!) for granting me permission to grieve in a non-linear timeline.
The novel The Pisces by Melissa Broder granted me permission to love magical realism in a time of millennial pink, and to accept that the hardest lessons are not the most obvious ones (thankfully Broder’s mythical novel is explicit in its prescriptions—prescribed by a Merman).
The semi-unauthorized and problematic biography Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations by Ava Gardner and Peter Evans (recommended to me by the legendary Mimi von Schack) gave me permission to change my mind at will, and the understanding that who people want you to be and who you really are don’t have to match.
Finally, the entirety of Ada Limón’s body of work continually affords me permission to embrace opposing energies: please read my favorite poem of all time “How to Triumph Like a Girl” for reference.
Until November, friends! 👋
We will be reading and recommending books about my most beloved emotion, my guiding light, the thing that gets me up in the morning no matter the state of the world: rage.
Thank you so much for reading the debut-ish edition of wait, have you read this? Like all good sitcoms, this project will get much better after the first episode. Stay tuned!
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