Bookish Bites: What Writers Are Talking About Right Now

Plus fun things I'm obsessing over.

I’m beginning today on a bit of a high note because I got some *very big publishing news* that I will share in a future installment. Still, it’s been a busy week of thinking and writing and reading and I even wrote a plot summary of my next book. Think: Two paragraphs. Nothing more but still. Even that is a HUGE deal. In between my notes and pondering, I was jotting down myriad lit news and catching up with friends about fiction.

Book coverage centered so much on Prince Harry’s debut Spare even a week after pub day, and I loved this article on Slate by Laura Miller. Here, Miller argues that what makes Spare so compelling is that it reads like fiction. In my local bookshop the other day, I read the opening scene and felt compelled by the fantastic writing, too (this is thanks to ghostwriter J.R. Moehringer who had an excellent profile in The New York Times over the weekend). The details in Spare are breathtaking and truly feel as though you’re being transported into the world of the Royals, and I don’t even care about the Royals.

Miller cites numerous examples of the book’s literary prowess, but I loved this one: In the opening scenes, there’s a description of the bedsheets at Balmoral Castle, which is where Harry woke up to the news that his mother was killed in a tragic car accident many years ago: “The bedding was clean, crisp, various shades of white. Alabaster sheets. Cream blankets. Eggshell quilts. (Much of it stamped with ER, Elizabeth Regina.) Everything was pulled tight as a snare drum, so expertly smoothed that you could easily spot the century’s worth of patched holes and tears.”

“…you could easily spot the century’s worth of patched holes and tears.” Holy crow. That is a stunning line.

Is anyone else so happy that Barnes and Noble plans to open thirty more stores in 2023? I’m an avid visitor to local Indie bookshops everywhere I go — those booksellers have been critical in getting my novels out into the world and I treasure all of the conversations I’ve had with them over the years. And still! I also love a well-curated Barnes and Noble where you can wander the stacks with a cup of coffee. The towering Barnes and Noble in Union Square in Manhattan is a favorite as is the moody library-like iteration on the Upper West Side.

Plus, the fact that B&N’s newish CEO James Daunt also runs the Waterstones book chain in England accounts for all of the changes you’ve probably noticed in your local B&N: lots more handwritten staff picks, more books up front and less toys and tchotkes, and fantastic author events, like Maggie O’Farrell (Hamnet) who recently came to my local B&N.

Did anyone else FLIP out when they heard that Judy Blume’s YA novel “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” is now a movie? And it’s starring Rachel McAdams as the mother. I started literally hitting my husband with excitement on the couch last night when the trailer came on. My husband was dumbfounded: What is the world is this kids’ movie, and why are you so excited? Well, it’s only a total bible of awkward early teenagehood to every woman now in their 30s and 40s. We will watch in force, and best of all, we’ll watch with our daughters. I mean, Judy Blume is the only reason I knew it was normal to get my period for god’s sake. Here’s the trailer.

The best bookish article of the week goes to the New Yorker’s take on literary sequels. With all of the movie sequels out this holiday season — Maverick, Jurassic Park for starters, Katy Waldman tracks how many book sequels have come out in 2022. To cite a few: Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House picks up where the character featured in her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Visit From the Goon Squad left off ten years ago. Other examples: Less is Lost is a sequel to Andrew Sean Greer’s Prize-winning Less. Tom Perotta’s Tracy Flick Can’t Win is the sequel to Election. You’ll have to read the article to read about all of the others, but here’s the most fascinating takeaway. Waldman acknowledges that many of us think that you write a sequel when you run out of new material — it was certainly my assumption. But what she found in her reporting was that authors didn’t have a dearth of ideas. They simply couldn’t let go of one of their characters. There was still so much to say, unresolved aspects of the character that they needed to return to and work out.

This quote from Waldman was especially telling, too, about why we love sequels as readers: “But there are other reasons for going back to the well. Amid the chaotic present, the past offers escape, a sense of coherence. And the yearning to dwell a little longer in delight is deeply human: people read TV recaps because it’s fun to linger in art that you’ve enjoyed. The pleasure sequels provide is the pleasure of endlessness.”

It reminds me of Elizabeth Strout’s interviews when her novel Olive Again came out in 2019. Reporters kept asking her: Why return to Olive Kitteridge? What drew you back to her? Strout told a story how she was washing dishes in the kitchen and looked out her window and saw grumpy Olive mumbling to herself in the backyard. The character had come back to her and suddenly, she knew it was Olive’s story that needed to be continued. That’s how my characters are too — they often appear in my eyeline and I think: Why hello there! Welcome.

Check out this front page (see below) of the Boston Globe Books coverage on Wednesday.

Now I’m sure my old workplace, The Boston Globe, works hard to feature a diverse group of writers, both women and people of color on a day to day basis. But Wednesday was an epic fail. Every author featured on the home screen was a male writer. That seemed like an egregious oversight. Ugh!

We’ve got a sleeper hit on our hands with Julia May Jones’s novel Vladimir, which released February 2022. The book received much critical acclaim, but I didn’t hear of anyone reading it until now. It’s everywhere, even a recent Vogue article where Chloe Schama decreed it her favorite book of the year! If you haven’t seen the creepy looking cover, you can find it above. I’ve avoided the book because of that cover — it’s just screams cheesy romance to me — but apparently, the novel is more than that. An excerpt from the Vogue story has me intrigued, and I’ll listen to this one on Audible next.

“Vladimir: A Novel is campus fiction with just a smattering of undergrads; instead, the protagonist is a nameless and seemingly beloved English professor, married to a less warmly received fellow professor who has been suspended from his duties due to the revelation that he conducted several affairs with his students—all consenting adults, his wife is at pains to mention in her internal monologue, if not to her peers. (She didn’t much mind the liaisons.) The affairs have put his long-suffering wife in a precarious position, navigating the way in which she must appear aggrieved, horrified, generous, and forgiving all at once. There is, in short, a lot expected of the wife as a woman, a teacher, a mother, a female body—it’s almost a punishment in itself.” 

And lastly, I’ve been waiting for my favorite television adaptation to return with a new series, and it was reported for months that it would drop this February. But alas, we haven’t heard anything else about the fourth and final season of My Brilliant Friend. Still, while writers around the country wait, Ferrante’s novel The Lying Life of Adults is streaming on Netflix. Here’s the funny part: I do not like Elena Ferrante’s novels at all. I’ve never been able to get through one — there’s something about the writing style (maybe the translation) that I’ve never been able to connect with. But the HBO series? I think it’s the best writing on TV so I’m willing to give Lying Life a try.

Happy Friday, everyone! If you know anyone who might appreciate bookish news and reflections on the writer’s life, please send them my way.

What I’m listening to: Trust by Hernan Diaz

What I’m reading: The Clockmaker’s Daughter by Kate Morton

Artwork at the top by the amazing T.S. Harris.