Worms Reads for the Summer
Arcadia Molinas
Pregaming Grief by Danielle Chelosky
"writing began to feel less like an attempt to move on and more like a form of relapse"
To anyone who's read Annie Ernaux, this book is a clear inheritor of the French memoirist, both in theme and style, and in its affirmation that writing is a form of freedom. Chelosky understands writing as a continuation of life, it is a sort of necessity, a way to make sense of the world around her. Her writing, she often suggests, sprouts from the moment itself. There is not much of a gap between action and writing, meaning her commitment to understanding is red-hot, is immediate, it's the present she wants to grasp.
I felt a lot of nostalgia for my younger self reading this book, and a lot of tenderness for her too. I think Chelosky captures some of that raw oblation that your late teenage years inspires in you and is at her best being self-indulgent, clinging on to the things in her life that give her meaning, the people and the feelings. There's an undeniable bravery to her writing.
I can't help but deeply respect this book's project and commitment to itself. Her world is cohesive, her symbols and world too. And it's a beautiful book, if I'm to take the book as object into consideration.
La Seducción by Sara Torres
This one is for my spanish-speaking Worms. Sara Torres has come out with her second book La Seducción, following the success of her debut novel Lo Que Hay (which I will come forth and say I have not read). After listening to Torres on the ciberlocutorio podcast I became completely enamoured with her voice, which is so soft-spoken yet so direct and insightful and intelligent. The next time I was in Spain I ran to the nearest bookshop and got myself a copy.
La Seducción reads at times like a novelised essay on the themes of seduction, attraction and desire. To me, it was at its best when these more essayistic parts surfaced and Torres’ doctorate level expertise (literally, she has a PhD on fetish, fantasy and queer becomings) really provides thought-provoking insight into the inner workings of something as nebulous as our attraction to one another and the tentative game of seduction.
Following the thoughts of a young woman as she visits an older woman’s beach house with whom the former believes a romance is budding, La Seducción takes us through those frustrating, titillating moments involved in seducing someone, when you’re not sure where the fantasy ends and where reality begins, or if the other person is a door or a wall. Perfect summer read.
P ELDRIDGE
I went to see Sheila Heti at the Southbank Centre a few weeks ago and her advice, to a pleading audience member asking how to ‘get over’ a recent breakup, was to ‘burn their house down’. Whilst practically not a sound option to take, the message was clear, use what you can to light the experience up in flames; Heti’s choice of action, words. When Motherhood was released, the first reviews were poor and distasteful, overtly misogynistic and didn’t recognise the attitude toward the topic of ‘mothering’, and the complications of who is allowed to be a ‘mother’, that Heti so eloquently addresses here. Putting her relationship on show, divulging into her relationships with her mother and grandmother, what we see here, throughout, is a tussling on what it means to ‘birth’ something; be that art or a child, and what it means to preface one over the other. Cultural stigma, bioessentialism, child-rearing, and the double negative of not not being a mother are all thrown up here in an interesting, refreshing, and charming recount on what is lost and what is gained by bringing a child into your world. I’m not sure when it happened, maybe a year or so ago, but I’ve felt the call to have a child, to bring a child into my life. I’m not sure how responsible a thought that is, how complicated it might make my life in love, how it might enhance or destabilise my transition, but as a woman who is a trans person, something I want to continue thinking about is: who has the right to claim, and be, maternal?
Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti
Another thing Heti said during her discussion was that rules guide her; in her writing practice, in her life. Taking to Alphabetical Diaries with curiosity, I was surprised to find that sentence structure and narrative flowed, even if pieced together across various diaries. All sentences begin with the chapter letter, from A to Z, some are even alphabetically in order with each word, and the overarching emphasis, and visualisation I saw, was Heti, rummaging through her life, sitting by a computer, at her journal, for years, trying to understand her own subjectivity, in relationship to others, in correspondence with herself, as she beckons us towards thinking on ideas of authenticity. “Been thinking about authenticity, and about how we have been done a great disservice by being taught that what we are to be authentic to is our feelings, as opposed to our values.” There’s a lot of heartbreak in here, the processing of the rejection and shame we feel by forcibly convincing ourselves we love someone who doesn’t love us, and the insecure feelings that emerge. “And then talking to Rosa about him today, she pointed out that he has never treated me as someone he wants to have a relationship with, but as someone he’s really fond of that he likes fucking.” Chapter F was/is my favourite.
I’m currently reading, and loving, these gems:
Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright
saké blue: selected writings by Estelle Hoy
Disquiet Drive by Hesse K.
CAITLIN MCLOUGHLIN
This is the first in Maya Angelou’s autobiography series and chronicles her early years ferried between her mother in San Francisco and her father in Southern California, though mainly she’s with her grandmother “Momma” in the southern, segregated town of Stamps, Arkansas. Angelou holds her young self with tenderness, but also with a kind of seriousness that is not often afforded to children. Where its most heartbreaking is where the young Maya struggles to comprehend the cruelty and abuse that she witnesses or is enacted upon her; being sexually abused by her mother’s boyfriend; when a white dentist denies her dental care because she is Black; or watching from behind a screen door as a group of white kids mock and chide Momma, who, for reasons not totally understood to Maya, does not scold them as she would her or brother Bailey. Slowly, painfully, she grows wise to the sick injustices she is victim to as a Black person and woman in the US and a fire in her belly is lit, one that will fuel the rest of her life as a writer and activist. An at times tough but ultimately beautiful and powerful read.
The title of this book comes from a Hilton Als quote where he says “every mouth needs filling: with something wet or dry, like love, or unfamiliar and savory, like love,” a line that Nelson has puzzled over and held close – grappled with and sought to decode – its meaning morphing and changing over the years. Like Love is a collection of essays and conversations that charts a career of thinking deeply and puzzling over art and writing and life. You can see ideas for various books seed and then bloom through conversations with friends and idols and essays that originally found homes in catalogues and magazines, it's both stimulating and optimistic.
Survival Takes a Wild Imagination by Fariha Róisín
This is the perfect book to carry around in your pocket this summer. For Róisín, poetics and politics cleave together always, with this collection of poetry exploring religion, family, colonisation and borders, love and abuse and how we might navigate through this complicated and often hostile world.
I’ve also been turning a lot to Róisín’s substack How to Cure a Ghost where she has been a unrelenting and salient voice on the genocide in Palestine, circulating vital information and resources. She distils the sense of despair and rage we feel at Zionist vitriol and our governments for their part in Israel’s genocide, alongside hope in the form of Palestinian resistance and places we can direct our collective anger. With the recent horrific bombing in Rafah it’s more important than ever that we don’t turn away from what is happening in Palestine and how we can take action.
SUMMER MORAES
Essays In Love by Alain De Botton
Understanding love is a lifelong quest. Alain De Botton is the teacher you should have met in the beginning. His Essays in Love paint relationships from rosy infatuation to daily humdrum, from casual hook up to long haul commitment, the breakups and the heartbreak of it all. “Love,” he writes, “is a lonely pursuit” and readers know this to be true. Still his words keep you company. This book lifts the heaviest of hearts.
Blue by Derek Jarman
A pocket-sized read, Blue by Derek Jarman, features the text of his wonderful film.
Mixing poetry, prose, imagery and metaphors, he highlights the hardships of living with an AIDs related illness in its later stages.
The work moves readers to reflect on the appalling government response to the AIDS epidemic — particularly as it was created and released shortly before Jarman himself succumbed to the disease.
This book lets me carry the film around. A tiny weapon, against procrastination and apathy, it reminds me of why art needs to be made and the right time to do it: now, now, now.
Enya Ettershank
Remember Rapture by bell hooks
Summer gives us space: long evenings and fresh air. I recommend using this time to cultivate the writer within, to nurture it and ourselves rather than feed anxieties and self-doubt or competition. bell hook’s series of essays is a balm with many angles, looking at writing and faith, class, race, womanhood and intelligence. Like a lot of non-fiction with a ‘self improvement’ angle, it can sometimes read as common sense. I recommend reading each line like a poem, meditate on the sentence and let the meaning call to you like a bell. There is space in summer, give this book space too. Written in 1999, the landscape of self writing and writing as a woman or black woman has of course improved, but it is important to honour the significance of being able to write as you are.
A book that I would suggest reading alongside this is David Lynch’s The Big Fish, a book with simple sentences that encourage us to take our time on our creativity, to really go deep enough to catch ‘the big fish.’
Space Crone by Ursula K Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin witnessed and contributed to many of the twentieth century’s upheavals and historic movements, including women’s liberation, the Civil Rights movement and US anti-war and environmental activism. Spanning fifty years of her life, Space Crone is a wonderful collection of Le Guin’s writing on feminism and gender, rooted in an ecology that is wonderful and vital to contemplate on concernedly hot summer days with musings on ageing, motherhood and non violence. It is sad Le Guin is not here to witness and help us in our heartbreaking times, but her philosophies can be carried on. Laugh, cry, reflect!
Complete Short Stories by Clarice Lispector
I love short stories, especially in the summer. You can read one story in the park, on the train, while you wait for a friend. Clarice Lispector’s voice is so captivating, showing the immense colour and vibrancy of all life. From carnivals in Brazil, to the ugliness of drunk narcissism from a depressed and oppressed housewife, the lust and naivety of young lovers and the child’s desire to be bigger than they are, Lispector’s stories are really truly born of their own and are underscored by a creative, inspiring and yet melancholic yearning to enjoy life and create.
“The courage to be something other than what one is, to give birth to oneself, and to leave one’s former body on the ground. And without having answered to anyone about whether it was worthwhile.”
