Worms Best Reads of January 2024

Arcadia Molinas

Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson

Love demands expression.

I went to Oxford with a lover once. We stayed in a hotel on the outskirts and ate take-out on the bed and had pints by the river. The narrator of Written On the Body goes to Oxford too, with Louise, the subject/object of love/grief/passion of the book. I texted my old lover and read him a passage:

"She was under water. We were in Oxford and she was swimming in the river, green on the sheen of her, pearl sheen of her body. We had lain down on the grass sun-scorched, grass turning hay, grass brittle on the baked clay, spear grass marking us in red weals. The sky was blue as in blue-eyed boy, not a wink of cloud, steady gaze, what a smile."

The entire book reads like an association of thoughts, pebbles skipping over a lake. Reading the words out loud, I heard the words as musical notes, a ringing of bells. This is a book that lends itself to multiple readings, to simultaneous readings, sonorous readings, meaningful readings, emotional readings, imaginary readings. There's a surprise at every turn of the sentence.

I fell in love with the narrator of this book (infamously genderless - to me an androgynous Orlando, comfortably nestled in the in-between of gender). When we meet them at the start of the book, they have been flitting from love affair to love affair, sometimes with girls, sometimes with married girls and sometimes with boys. In their own words:

I was looking for the perfect coupling; the never-sleep non-stop mighty orgasm. Ecstasy without end. I was deep in the slop-bucket of romance. Sure my bucket was a bit racier than most, I've always had a sports car, but you can't rev your way out of real life.

Then, they meet someone who makes them "settle". They don't love her, don't desire her - their frenetic lifestyle, full of highs and dipping before the lows, have made them come to equate "falling in love" with "walking the plank" (lol) - and that tepid feeling suits them just fine. They have found a love that is unchallenging, unprovoking of the fiery highs but also absent of the woeful lows: they have “settled” in all senses of the word. But, out of the blue and red-haired, Louise appears.

Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as branding irons? You have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me with your mark. The pads of your fingers become printing blocks, you tap a message on to my skin, tap meaning into my body. Your morse code interferes with my heart beat.

Written on the body... to feel you have known someone all your life... to explode... to map out their body with your hands... every space between you wet and licked and stroked... repeating their name a psalm a prayer an anchor... their voice becoming the one in your head.

Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation.

Over the period of their affair, the most beautiful words spurt from the narrator’s pen. It is such a moving ode to love, to finding that one person that makes everything makes sense, or makes everything else NOT make sense. “Louise’s face. Under her fierce gaze my past is burned away. The beloved as nitric acid.” Isn’t that just so beautiful? The absolution of love, the beloved as nitric acid, there is danger there, burn, a chemical alteration, but salvation too, repentance. To boot, this book is HILARIOUS (also so, so devastating, the book warns you from its first sentence “Why is the measure of love loss?” but I'm a silly gal that loves a laugh). I barked on planes and trains but above all I underlined the hell out of this. A book to be read out loud to lovers, friends, yourself. A book to be revisited. 

You are a pool of clear water where the light plays.

Enya Sullivan

Slow Days Fast Company by Eve Babitz

Eve Babitz was the exact cure I needed for a dreary January, a quick escape into her salacious 70’s LA life. The echoes of her writing still reverberate today, such as her observations on  English austerity (as I write this my house has had a leak from the roof that hasn’t been repaired for two years) or mocking and revealing the immorality and stupidity of her upper class associates. It’s not just the upper classes who Eve mocks, but herself too. She shows herself as debased, greedy, selfish, out of fashion, voluptuous, horny, loud, mean.

But also gentle, she makes the everyday glamorous and something to be savoured: discussing the beauty and anticipation of waiting for it to finally rain during a smoggy LA heatwave, or rituals around making scrambled eggs. There is a profound rebellion in her work, and how she lived life, refused to be defined by anyone else’s rules (be that Joan Didion’s astute writing style or husbands who count their wives’ calories).

After reading Slow Days Fast Company I got my hands on The Long Winded Lady, a set of essays written in 1960’s New York by Irish immigrant Maeve Brennan. Brennan is both so chic and so melancholy, writing on her feet as she meanders throughout a gentrifying New York City and observes those around her in the street, in hotels and in bars. The perfect accompaniment to Babtiz! Reading both writers have really helped this month to feel simultaneously lighter and more real. They’ve allowed me to feel present as I walk around the city and observe things unfolding, while being able to have a slight distance that is afforded to you in the city- easing into the year. I must also note that this is a wonderful addition to Peninsula Press’ archival reprints, such as a Love Leda.

Pierce Eldridge

Initially I was reluctant, meme culture washed over me and I’m in no position to launch into the turbulence of that online sphere, but I bought the book. Down The Drain’s author, Julia Fox seems to me the darling of the internet, a paparazzo’s dream, and I was hesitant to read. I didn’t want to be pulled into a grotesque tabloid, salacious scandal, clickbait bore.

Amongst a collection of autobiographies released last year, I missed the buzz around Julia’s. When I saw it at a bookstore a few months ago, I picked up the hardback copy and thought, ‘fuck, she’s so cunt’ (a term of supreme endearment). I flipped through a few pages, saw something about club antics and getting super messy, and thought ‘fuck, is she glamourising this?’ and threw it down. I turned to a friend and muttered some stubborn profanity and walked away from it, but it kept coming up; we even chose it as our book for the December Worms Book Club.

A month after the book club convened, late to the gathering (soz, told you I’m stubborn) I finally read it and I feel I have to preface the experience above here because… I was wrong. Well, I was right in some regards, I still think she’s cunt. But, I also think it’s one of the most authentic autobiographies I’ve read.

Oftentimes we get a biography that’s a tell-all — which is a total bore to me — or we have a famed so-and-so who’s taken to poetry and prose, promising there was no ghostwriter, and it lands in our hands as cavalier and cringe. It’s not often we just get authenticity, vulnerability, and a sensible disposition from a person in ‘the spotlight’ that’s able to cut through the torment of their life with such earnest precision. To break through the niche history of autobiographical ‘celebrity’ lineages — however Julia thinks of herself as not one — is no small feat. I feel impressed as I do earnest appreciation for how caught I became in the whirlwind of her life.

The parts of the book I enjoy most are when she approximates her existence in relation to the people she surrounds herself with; to friends, the people she relies on to get high, her family that she loathes and exploits at each turn, and the abusive lovers. This is where I find the most complication in her tone, a sincerity toward the severity of the circumstances that are completely reckless and yet evidently — to me at least — unequivocally rational; her recollections are grimy and she’s not afraid to name herself the instigator of inflicted pain before conceding that external arbitrators were necessary when she needed intervention.

I think I feel this way, justifying her irrational actions and anxieties, because in my adolescence I was a codependent nuisance with my friends, latching at any form of love I could find whilst being taken advantage of physically and emotionally. The form of anxious attachment that Julia presents, to me, is in equal measure devastating as it is reassuring; I hadn’t expected to relate so much to Julia and her unavoidable winsome. Which is the paradox the book strikes, or my own unconscious bias reforming into a new appreciation, that her exterior and fierce veracity is bundled and bound in the most gentle sensations of all: devotion, love, ambition and survival that, at each turn, is misguided, abused, and destructed by deplorable people and experiences. 

I feel compelled by the book, by moments that sear into me like:

Surprisingly, my date still wants to see me after this, but for some reason I don’t want to. It’s ruined. He saw my life for all its horror, and even though he accepted it, I no longer feel sexy. I wanted to put Andrew behind me and build a new future, but the past seeped through to my present like mould and tainted everything.

and

I feel the anger and resentment I’d been harbouring leave my body, and I quietly forgive him for everything he’s done to me: the nights alone waiting for him to come home, hooking up with my friends, cheating on me with prostitutes, abandoning me when I was pregnant, telling me I would be more interesting if I had gone to art school, and just always making me feel like a piece of shit for things I couldn’t change about myself. 

more

For so long, I looked to him to validate me. I wanted to prove myself to him, that I was better than the nepotism girls he always compared me to. I don’t desperately crave his approval anymore. I’ve just validated myself. 

Looking back at those selections above, these are the moments she transgresses her greatest vice, the destructive men in her life, and I get an overwhelming gratification that the ugly realities she has endured — as I relate to those with mine — are valuable cornerstones to the unknotting of excellence that can follow into adulthood. 

I feel proud of her. I feel like one of her girls cheering her on. I feel witnessed and empathetic to how compassionate, charming, and forthright she is. I feel grateful to have read it now when cultural conversations on consent and teenage rebellion feel — although I believe to be far from the truth — seemingly ‘done’ or ‘completed’ or ‘moved past’ in our consciousness. It gurgles up a reflection on modernity, heteronormativity, on women coming forward about the men who have abused them and being scrutinised shamelessly, and cultural class promises that have all failed us.

I love this memoir, it’s gruelling. I’m desperate to check in with her, girl are you okay? Do you need anything? Can I make you dinner? Girl shit, fuck. Women are everything to me.

I love Julia Fox.

Caitlin McLoughlin

Greasepaint by Hannah Levene

Greasepaint by Hannah Levene (forthcoming on Nightboat in Feb) kicked off my 2024 and I was glad for it. It’s brash and boozy yet brimming with tenderness and vulnerability. Told in a raucous procession of Friday nights – one of many bars, the deli, dinner at Marg’s, on the floor of Frankie’s childhood living room – it follows a cast of butch lesbians, gender queer Jazz musicians and Yiddish anarchists through the 1950s New York queer scene. Vivacious star vocalist Frankie Gold was born and remains an anarchist, though conflicting notions of freedom wriggle to the surface when her Yiddish anarchist poet father discovers she’s queer. The cooler and more languid Sammy Silver is her childhood friend, also an anarchist and a member of the Butch Piano Players Union. Other characters include Lil (“At Sixteen Lilly had thought she’d like to be a woman.”), Laur, Sid, Roz, Teddy (“Teddy looked good of course, like a man who has come home from work looks good only Teddy got home from work and got into a suit not out of it.”), Vic, Marge and Suzy (“Marge was like a steam train unable to let off enough steam. Suzy was like a tall glass of water.”) Perspectives and timelines shift and blur effortlessly, dreamily, between the big personalities and lost souls of a community forced to thrive underground. But community is the centre of this novel around which everything else orbits and twirls. The whole book reads like a score, it swells and surges, moments of wistful reverie follow, dream sequences and starry-eyed harmonies, then comes the crescendo, rising giddily towards the gleaming heart, an all-out ensemble of theatrics and rebellion.  

I love that Greasepaint occupies an imperfect and embodied anarchist politics as it might exist outside of academic institutions – which often feels like the only type of leftist politics that we are presented with. It’s scrappy, brassy, hazy, but in the chaos and uncertainty, seeds of hope twitch and squirm in the form of love, friendships and imagined futures as we sit and wait for the revolution, for “the pot to overflow”. It’s a reminder that fantasies and pipe-dreams serve a purpose in political struggle, as does music and dancing with your friends. More than anything I wanted to be there, at the bar, in the deli, sat round the table at Marg’s, seems like a really good time.