Issue 04 — Enigmatic Women
We’re back, baby! We maybe don’t have to wear masks? ...but still really should, we’re definitely vaccinated, we’re very unsure of how to interact with each other IRL, and there’s another issue of wait, have you read this? Your favorite newsletter for unsolicited book recommendations and the current bastion of redefining what a “monthly” commitment really means. Nature is healing!
At present, I am very distracted by the dethawing of society. Is the American rush to...whatever it is we’re all doing...making you feel as strange as I do? I find myself in new emotional territory these days: I have so many feelings I simply cannot feel a single one of them fully. Are you feeling anything remotely like that? I am so involved that I am removed; I am not sharing absolutely every single thought I have with every single person I’ve ever met for the first time in my life, so in short, I am as close to enigmatic as I think I’m ever going to be.*
When I started therapy (can we go back to calling it analysis for the love of Diane Keaton’s vests??) I’d tell my therapist that I always felt like a glass of water spilling, nay spewing, over, while everyone else around me appeared to be filled just right or didn’t have enough water at all. When you think about your emotions, are you a water glass spilling over, soaking anyone who tries to pick you up? Or, are you filled just right for drinking pleasure? Or, are you down to your last drop? As the spilliest bitch on the counter, I view anyone emotionally filled to the halfway line of their proverbial cup as enigmatic, a mystery. I am fascinated by people who have some semblance of ambiguity: Maggie Cheung in In the Mood for Love, the cowboys of the Pioneertown lots, the Joan Didion’s, the ice queens, the Lady Brett Ashley’s, the Grace Jones’, and the Clarice Lispector’s. I am desperate to get inside their interior lives and understand the mechanics of how they relate to themselves. Self-control?? In this economy?! “Reading the room”?? Couldn’t be me!
We’re all naturally attracted to the performances of assuredness, but uncovering what of that performance is authentic is half the fun. This month’s recommendations are all about enigmatic women, but more so the attraction and bewilderment surrounding them, and sometimes a peek into their own interiority (or even the unriddling of their enigmatic presentation). Let’s be tourists in the lives of those who don’t seem to spill! There are unreliable narrators abound and each book is a high-stakes, lo-fi exploration of the ineffable and its shadows.
*still incredibly far off: I am distracted, not lobotomized.
No. 1
The Lightness
by Emily Temple
This book melodically screams “unreliable narrator” through the aesthetics of Manson Girls meets goop© wellness retreats. Emily Temple asks can we ever really know our families, chosen or otherwise? Teenage protagonist Olivia spends a fateful summer at a meditation retreat trying to retrace her absent father’s seemingly last steps. During her time at The Levitation Center, Olivia falls in with the camp’s very own Bad Girls Club, Love & Light edition, until the toxicity of their tenuous connection takes over amidst a pivot from a coming-of-age story to a thriller. Every element of this book is enigmatic: each scene is written as if it’s in the hazy golden hour or the fog of Twin Peaks, the revelation of each character’s true motivation simmers, and the dialogue rattles around your brain while you desperately parse for double meanings. The Lightness is also a book about longing, about the scars of absence and the kind of void that leaves behind for liminality to fill.
It’s For You If You’re For...
That scene of Liz Lemon exclaiming “Oh god, youths!” in 30 Rock, the Moon Juice vs. Father John Misty Quartz skirmish of 2016, The Girls by Emma Cline, meditation apps, really any interview with Susan Choi but particularly this one, and The Craft.
No. 2
New Waves
by Kevin Nguyen
A deceptive workplace novel with a mysterious death, cyber espionage, and one of the best Jay Gatsby revisions to date. New Waves follows enigma-exemplar Margot, a literal genius and software developer (ex-boyfriends, take note: the two are not one and the same) who convinces flâneur Lucas, her best friend and coworker at a truly insufferable tech startup, to join her in stealing their employer’s database. Their revenge goes haywire when Margot dies in an accident that leads to the introduction of Margot’s outside-of-work friends into Lucas’s world as he’s left to pick up the pieces of their plan and Margot’s life. Nguyen’s ruminations on race discrimination, social media surveillance, identity, and intimacy are biting and eye-opening, and the pacing of Lucas’s path from admiration full of iconolatry to debunking the friend he thought he knew is on par with the great detective novels of the ‘30s and ‘40s.
It’s For You If You’re For...
Zelda Fitzgerald, the demise of WeWork, barcades, Amélie Nothomb novels, Angelina Jolie in Hackers, Gchat, and Leigh Stein’s newsletter.
No. 3
Pizza Girl
by Jean Kyoung Frazier
How do you relate to the chaos inside you? Pizza Girl attempts to answer that question with a love letter to broken people in a very unorthodox bildungsroman. 18-year-old Jane is pregnant and delivering pizzas in LA while navigating feelings of zealous ambivalence and suffocation from her boyfriend and mom at home. One day a young mom named Jenny orders a pickle-covered pizza for her son and so begins Jane’s reckoning with inherited grief, obsession, and connection. Jane’s ambivalence makes her an enigma to everyone around her, but to the reader and to Jenny, Jane’s receptivity to vulnerability borders on compulsion. Like pickles on pizza, this novel is not for everyone: as much as it is tender, it is too sharp at times but at 200-pages it’s an incredibly readable story of a young woman on the brink, masking despair with ambiguity and mistaking empathy for salvation.
It’s For You If You’re For…
Dum Dum Girls, Elio's wardrobe in Call Me By Your Name, Ottessa Moshfegh, Saved!, sea glass, and Kirsten Dunst’s Crazy/Beautiful era.
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