I Gorged On Women's Words
Christ I've never read so much nonfiction outside of a textbook in my Fucking Life . . . but I loved it!
I decided one day that I should read Didion and Plath. The two Substack darlings that I can’t scroll for more than a minute or two without seeing referenced. Actually— I used to see them very often, and now they’re less visible but . . . still the darlings of this website, and undoubtedly (on Plath’s end) a favorite for quote blogs on Tumblr. But then I thought, well it’s not really fair that just those two have so much visibility. Surely there are more excellent writers of personal essays! Like Eve Babitz, who’s cover for Eve’s Hollywood was so iconic I bought it without even knowing who she was. So this essay will discuss a lot of women’s (primarily from the 20th century) work.
We’ll start with Joan Didion, though hers wasn’t the oldest writing I’d read, she was the first I started with for this project. I just wanted to know, finally, what made her so popular with some of the people I followed. Don’t worry, we’ll get to Substack’s darling, Sylvia, later. But first:
Joan Didion
Slouching Towards Bethlehem. This was Didion’s first book of essays, and the ones easiest to get at the library. 20 essays, some investigative journalism done for her job— like the first one “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” about a woman who murdered her husband, the other about John Wayne, and of course the titular essay. Then her personal essays, like “On Keeping a Notebook”, “On Morality” and so on.
She’s got a clear voice. Very intentional yet unobtrusive(?). Yet somehow the intentional unobtrusiveness also had a tinge of like . . . gloom? And sometimes it grated on me how . . . how unobtrusive she was in a sense? Like none of this mattered in a personal sense to her, moreso she was just being purely clinical or academic, which is fine for the magazine work she did but put me at a distance from her personal work. I wasn’t sure if she was putting any of her personality into this writing— I really like writers who let themselves be present in the words, the work, like I could really hear them saying this— and just thought she was being distant for the sake of objectivity. But perhaps that was her, close as she could be, that musing and mild voice that hid deeper inflections for those with the mind for treasure hunting. But I felt no compunction to go deeper for that braided in delicacy, until I read the essay, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and there I could catch a couple of hints of this being personal to her.
The way she admitted her voice caught when she asked about the five year-old child’s drug routine, some small little glimpses of her opinions on the fried yet tender hearts she was most often around. The little girls, the epidemic of kids looking to build something out of the flotsam they were given, the rest of the world unwilling to lend an ear.
I don’t know, I got the sense nearly the whole book that I wasn’t quite reading her correctly. Like I was letting some grudge form against her, but for what reason and why I couldn’t even tell you. Maybe I was too fresh off my period for this? But that sense of resistance to Didion’s work eased when reading through the easily engaging and very interesting “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and “On Self-Respect”. Those two, and “Where The Kissing Never Stops” are definitely my favorites of the whole book.
The grudge feeling returned almost double when I read “On Morality” because it felt like she was being purposely vague and using word salad to haze over a point she didn’t really want to make. Like, I got it on a second read but how many of her readers in San Francisco, sitting at their kitchen tables and reading, would stop to really go over the word salad to get a deeper meaning instead of just taking all that as confirmation that California, and by in large the U.S.A was going to hell in a handbasket because of the damned youth? Funnily enough, she did say in the introduction of the book that she experienced for the first time the sensation of having work go out and being interpreted much differently than she had intended with the Bethlehem essay, and it was weird for her.
Again, I really did feel like I was being a little unfair to Didion, so I did get a second book of hers that was thankfully on the shelf on a trip to return books to the library. I found it while I was searching for the book of Toni Morrison’s essays— which would be at another library later on— and found South and West instead.
It starts like this: “In New Orleans in June the air is heavy with sex and death, not violent death but death by decay, overripeness, rotting, death by drowning, suffocation, fever of unknown etiology.”
What a START. That’s a hook!
This was much better! Again, maybe it’s on me and my potentially clouded vision while reading Bethlehem, but South and West had much more personality it felt like— though, that could be because it was mostly just jotted down points in a notebook? And perhaps she didn’t feel the need to extrapolate or dive deeper than what she wrote at that time for better authenticity, but it just felt more comfy. I don’t know, I can’t it explain it any better than that. Didion just felt closer this time. Her perplexion and even worry about how drip-dry slow, if not stagnant, life seemed in the South. The claws-deep grip of tradition, the southern charmed explanations around it, the early nights and hot days and how badly she missed California if she thought about it for too long.
All in all, I only partially cared for the first book I ever read of her, and was more receptive to the second. Well, to admit it, I liked South and West. Which leaves me with a, say . . . If I can only say I really liked 3 out of 20 essays in the first book, then unfortunately that’s a fail. I liked all the second book . . . which puts her at 50%. And you might argue,
“Delise! It was her first book of essays, of course there’d be some growth between a book made in the 70s and one made much more recently! You have to try The White Album next and get a better, more rounded view of her work!”
. . . No🧡
Zora Neale Hurston
For whatever reason, I looked up Zora because even if I’ve only read the one thing (Their Eyes Were Watching God), I just felt like she’d have what I was looking for.
And did she!
Zora Neale Hurston: A Life In Letters by Carla Kaplan had as many letters of Hurston’s that has survived the ages in one thick book, and You Don’t Know Us Negroes is Hurston’s essay collection. You don’t know how excited I was to find out about her letters! Real insight into her life, her thoughts and how she went across this land and who she mattered to and who mattered to her! I thought it delightfuly fair, because I’ve known from the many restacks on SS and reblogs on Tumblr all about Plath’s letters and such. So this would be as close to a direct comparison as I could get, of course accounting for the difference in generations.
That Zora Neale Hurston, she fought like hell to graduate high school at the age of 28, bartered and cajoled and beseeched patrons for money to go to Bernard College, fought viciously for the pleasures she wanted to pursue in the arts and to make a place for Black people to focus on their art. So many of her dreams weren’t realized but she fought so hard, was known so prolifically throughout the Harlem Renaissance . . . and she’s laid to rest in an unmarked grave somewhere. Mm-mm.
She was great friends with Langston Hughes (until she wasn’t), super critical of W.E.B. DuBois, who she asserts as a “panderer”, and was . . . I’m not sure the word to use. She was a proud and staunch champion of Black people and their art, critical of white people and feared their appropriation of said art . . . but she was also one of the most . . . accomplished? Intense? Code switchers I’ve ever heard about from that time period. And, listen, I sure don’t judge her because white folks was running different back then, but wow. She sure didn’t skimp on the ingratiation. For example, in a letter to one of her first patrons, Annie Nathan Mayer, and in a letter refers to herself as Mayer’s “pickaninny” which . . . would definitely see a non-black getting their ass beat for calling any Black person now. But, the woman was pretty much paying for her schooling, so I don’t like it but— again, I get it— she needed patronage to do what she wanted, what she needed, and there were a lot of white patrons who held salons and curried favor during the Renaissance (just wish she hadn’t needed the favor of Charlotte Osgood Mason).
Anyway, the work!
Oh, man, she was just so vivacious and fiery and passionate. It’s like I just knew that when she mispelled something, it was because her mind was running faster than her pen could catch up with— the author, the one who’s researched and gathered these letters, Kaplan, she did not edit anything to make it pretty, just for clarity. So you’ll read the word mispelled as Hurston mispelled it, see a point in the letter where the author uses parenthesis to explain a word was crossed out, shows how Hurston thought better of a word, or thought of a better word, and hastened to use it. There’s hardly a letter without one mispelled word or something crossed out and I thought to myself, “Oh she’s just like me forreal.”
That was a well-travelled woman, and through her letters I got such fascinating insight into race politics, implications of the gender schema and how she fared as a Black woman on a majority white campus, and into the distinction between Northern Blacks and Southern Blacks because, believe you me, the former wanted a distinction from the latter. Some research on the side to investigate confirmed this, and I knew there were cultural differences but man I hadn’t realized there was such a . . . . gulf between the two sides. Kind of sad actually.
She’s a profuse writer, and that sort of energy also applies to the syntax and her use of idioms in her letters, as if she’s penning novels to her recipients. Often people were delighted to get letters from her. Like one to her dear Dorothy West, where she says, “Life has not been kind to me, not always, and so perhaps the heel of life has left its print on my face.”
In the book You Don’t Know Us Negroes and other essays the essays are seperated into Art, Race and Gender, Politics, the Folks, and the trial of Ruby McCollum. It’s hefty, with a total of 50 essays.
High John de Conquer was a fantastic essay essentially uplifting this old folktale about a man named High John (sometimes Jack) who uplifts the slaves and is a sort of spirit-hero of their folktales who fight back against Ole Massa and reminds the slaves to hold tight for their promised freedom. In a letter to Langston Hughes and Alaine Locke, along with Godmother, Hruston detailed to them the many months of travel she undertook— from New Orleans to the Bahamas— searching for Black folktales that had been passed down through generations, noting the rhythm, the strong energy, the incerdible mythos of them. The work she compiled wasn’t completely used, sadly, but some of it still exists and the title is Mules and Men.
Which, come to find out, a lot of it was plagiarized so that . . . made me feel a kind of way. Hurston was an excellent writer, she surely didn’t need to, but the implication from her letters to Locke, Godmother, and some background text by Kaplan made it seems like she felt she had to. There’s no excuse but, at least that’s the only instance of such ever found in her work. But back to her original work—
My favorites were the above mentioned about John, “How It Feels To Be Colored Me”, “You Don’t Know Us Negroes”, “The Last Slave Ship”— where she talked with one of the last two surviving Black people that remember being slaves, this one named Cujo Lewis and his tribe name being Kossula-O-Lo-Loo-Ay— “Characteristics of Negro Expression”, and “What White Publishers Won’t Print”. I’m worried this section is too long so I’ll just explain each in one sentence. “Colored Me” is about not thinking of herself as a “colored woman” just Zora, but being forced to feel it when she’s in majority white spaces. “You Don’t Know” is about the puzzling inability of white people to see Black people as just as complex as they are, and the suppression of Black voices, expression, and thoughts to the detriment of all. “Slave Ship” is a whole interview with Kossula-O-Lo-Loo-Ay and hearing how he was taken as a boy by the Dohamey Amazons (you might have seen the movie based on them starring Viola Davis and John Boyega) from his home at 18, being sold to three slave runners, and his five years of slavery before being freed and trying to assimilate to this country. “Characteristics” is just good, hearty anthropological fun. And, “White Publishers” is a startling look at how history keeps repeating itself with what the mainstream consumer wants, what publishers are willing to bet on, and how non-white writers keep getting the short end of the stick.
There’s so much more I could say, but at that point I’d be better off making an essay exclusively for Hurston. All in all, I’m definitely buying her essays book so I can keep it, and I’m happy these letters exist. Now, on to—
Sylvia Plath
The woman, the myth, the legend of Substack. One of the (princesses? Saints?) of the Coquettes on Tumblr.
She is overhyped. But she is not overrated.
I got the book of her unabridged journals (1950-1962), a whopping brick of a book, so I knew already I sure as shit wasn’t reading all that. Maybe 300 pages out of the 530.
We’ll get to the examination of the writing style later, let me just start saying that she kinda shook me the first 10 pages! That strange little reference to rape, her awful mistreatment at the farm, her and her date saying “all Negroes looked alike until you got to know them individually.” I knew before starting this that Plath had said some things and held some beliefs that were incredibly typical of white people in her time (in many cases still quite typical today!), and I’ll be frank with y’all— my limit for racism in white authors is H.P. Lovecraft. If you’re less unserious than he was, I can let it be. And besides that one point, and the one other time referencing the Vietnam War, no other overt mentions of race or racism were showin in her journal entries. As far as I read, of course. But it is funny as hell thinking that there would be nary a Black person in sight and white people just took it upon themselves to go “Y’know . . . . Black People—”
Shout out to Tony. Anyway!
She was a good writer. I was honestly shocked at the level of detail and lovely imagery in her journal entries, like. Plath was only writing for herself and had no idea these things would get published so she really was in it for the love of the game! And I can appreciate that a lot. Her memory was sharp as a tack to recall so many details and exchanged dialogue in a day, and I can’t even imagine handwriting so many pages anymore . . . well that’s a lie, I did recently write out 12 pages by hand but my bones sure told me how foolish I was for that, so to think she would just do that every damn day for like . . . three years at least is a study in dedication. But she also implied that she could be socially reclusive in many ways, not knowing much about her own housemates at Smiths as she admitted, so perhaps her journals were her best friends.
She spoke often of how dull her classwork was, fretted often about the future, and was worried sick at the possibility of not getting married. Which, at first I wanted to label her boy crazy but I think . . . I think rather it was partially societal pressure, and partially her own belief that having someone to care for and care for her was a natural step towards happiness as a woman, if only she could find the boy to meet her standards. She worried about how marriage and children would impact her writing, but she still wanted it regardless. Also I appreciated how her many dates brought up the fact that it was not uncommon for girls at that time to keep their options open and date often (almost like a mix of social currency and social requirement to remain included in group?), so this take in the 21st century that girls who do this are loose or whores is dumb as fuck. I mean girls were still getting called loose or such back then, but it seemed less often and more towards girls who were open about sexual appetites, not dates. Which is still the same today. But also worse. I also think it’s got some tinge of trauma relating to her father’s early death. I don’t know, back to the writing—
“It was inestimably important to me to look at the lights of Amherst Town in the rain, with the wet black tree-skeletons against the limpid streetlights and grey November mist, and then look at the boy beside sme and feel all the hurting beauty go flat because he wasn’t the right one— not at all.”
Beautiful. And this one, “Atop the great rock formation you stood, and the whole ocean curled up bluely at your feet. Slowly, with great, patient, unanimous motion, the huge bulk of tide water heaved up and back . . . far, far down at your feet, the water was strangely clear turquoise and clouded yellow-green where submerged strata of rock were close to the surface of the sea.”
In some ways, I compare Sylvia Plath to Anne of Green Gables. Not so much in temperment or sociability, but in their dreaminess, and their great love for describing the world in delicate strokes of love and wonder. She enjoyed dresses and dinners and dates and when her writing really sparkled. And, like Anne, Syliva would adopt a more conservative manner of description upon reaching adulthood. But for completely different reasons.
I had no idea she died by suicide. Nor did I have any idea she’d tried once before during college. That I found on Tumblr, while looking up letter quotes since I couldn’t find the book of letters she wrote in either the library or any book store. Turns out I wouldn’t even be using any letter quotes but, whatever. And she doesn’t shy away from speaking about the pain she feels in her journals. It was quite clear to see that she had a sensitive soul and things could cut her to the quick, more often than she’d like I’m sure. She had troubles with dating, feelings of self-worth both tied to men and to her writing, she was terrified when the war was going on (the Korean War, but she seemed oddly more settled about war ideas come time for the Vietnam War, a lot more, uh, opinionated), and she was just . . . depressed. Also a victim of electroshock therapy, jeez.
So by the time she moved over to Englad to go to Cambridge University, her writing style had changed from that slow-cooked romanticism to a more subdued but still detailed accounting. She was from this point on, and until the end of the book, a lot more sporadic with her journals.
So, I get why she’s such a huge influence on a lot of female writers. Plath was sensitive, had a very romantic outlook on life when she was happy, and a very somber poetic outlook when she was sad, was so curious and a huge yapper if only to herself. Considering how often I see her in Coquette Tumblr, Sad Girl Tumblr, and the like . . . she clearly influenced a lot of people and aesthetics. How many girls typing away on their computers imagine themselves sharing a dorm with Sylvia Plath at Smiths, writing with pen or using a typewriter, looking outside to Hopkins House and having intimate chats with her, because they think she’d really get them. Maybe cheering her on while she dated handsome men (except, hopefully, not cheering for the 17 year-old), and then hoping to inspire her to change her own fate.
As for me. She’s a good writer, and I might give The Bell Jar a try, but I think I’ll always be a little mystified by the intense sense of near-worship some have for her.
Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith is the youngest writer on this list, and her work is the most recent of them all, her book Feel Free containing essays published in the eight years that made up the Obama administration and compiled in 2018.
A combination of “work” essays interviewing and reviewing art, and personal ones about her life as a British woman growing up on council estate, a woman who lived in Manhattan,a woman who has interviewed some of the best minds in entertainment (talking about the two essays she interviewed Jay-Z, and Key & Peele). She notes in her foreward that some of this work might not apply by the time its published, the foreward written in 2017, so a year into President Trump’s first term. Boy, I remember how discombobulated folks were after that trade-in.
It was so interesting to read about how Britain’s government (once?) had a strong social support net, I think council estates are what we’d call section 8 housing? Plus hearing about how beneficial Universal Healthcare was to her, and this sense of civic duty it instilled in Smith when she was grown to help contribute to that same network of care that helped raise her. Smith shows quite a bit of vulnerability in her works, like in the essays “Notes on Attunement” and “Flaming June”, as well as “Life-Writing.” Though, thinking about it . . . I think she’s the third most vulnerable writer on this list. I’m sure you could figure out who gets top and second spot.
In Smith’s very first essay in the book, “North West London Blues”, about defending the library (and it sucks how common a story that is), she admits to being naive about politics, and there is a glimmer of that sort of innocence in the essay “Fences: A Brexit Diary” about her and her friends all being shocked that Brexit went through. But that’s maybe a difference in me being pessimistic about politics and Smith being hopeful. I actually thought Britain would sink pretty soon after leaving but y’all are holding on! But, back to the first essay, it felt a little jarring to read after our President has just cut funding to public libraries and museuems as a cost cutting measure. And then to the Department of Education. It’s just never going to stop being ridiculous!
Otherwise Smith shows a great depth in plenty of other ways, like in retrospection on her parents in “The Bathroom” and “Love In The Gardens”. I loved her essay “Generation Why?” about Zuckerberg and what shallow connection like what Facebook shoved at us could do to us. Smith really had me in the first half, I thought she was being oddly permissive of Zuckerberg’s very, um, automation-like self, but she presented a very interesting point to me. That he genuinely wanted to fit in, and to do that, he worked to create a world where everyone was sort of . . . flat. Exposed. No hidden depths meant no traps, no social stumbling. I’d never seen the movie about it and so didn’t realize they’d taken lots of creative liberties. I probably would have felt as betrayed about the fanciful takes as I’d been watching Bohemian Raphsody if I’d known. “Find Your Beach” was excellent, too, as much about the self-centerdness of Americans as it was about how seductive our same fault can be to so many others.
“You don’t come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn’t a strong aspect of your own personality. ‘A reality shaped with your own desires’— thre is something sociopathic in that ambition.” Smith writes about the general beat of SoHo.
And may I just say that I greatly appreciated the 12 point font used on each page so that they weren’t cramming entire essays on one page like they did so often in other books on this list? Like, come on man, 12 is standard for a reason. 10.5 is not more aesthetically pleasing, it honestly pisses me off.
Anyway Zadie Smith definitely can offer a new perspective on things, especially as we in America can be kind of nazel gazers about issues, more focused on the USA than the world as a whole. Case in point how American-centric even Substack is.
Toni Morrison
Ah . . . Toni Morrison.
One of the most celebrated voices of our time. To this day I can’t have anything to do with Beloved because all I remember, the snippets of a six year old’s memory, was traumatising as fuck. But I admit shamefully that, until this March, I’d never read any Toni Morrison.
I actually started with fiction, and there were two choices on the shelf. Beloved or Paradise. Just seeing that swooping cursive B sent shivers down my spine, so I picked up Paradise. What I want you to know first is how enchanted I was with the meter in the prose that just . . . exuded from each line. From each paragraph. A melody building upon another, a score growing into a symphony that is called a novel by Toni Morrison. It was that beautiful arrangement of language that kept me on that book so long. Because honestly the story wasn’t hooking me. I mean, it was interesting, and the characters as she wrote about them were all so flush with life and dreams and failures— but I just couldn’t get into the story. I onyl got as far as I did (just a little after the sex rock in the desert) because of the beauty of language. But I felt a little disappointed in myself for not getting it, you know?
So I wanted to try again, and this time it would be with nonfiction. I was delighted to get this copy of The Source of Self-Regard from the library, containing some essays, speeches, and what they call meditations but aren’t those also just short essays?
The writing might not be as lush as her fictional work, but the content within and the tone are searing in its clarity, cutting in its knowledge and applied wisdom. The short prayer for “The Dead of September 11” was gorgeous. Following that up with “The Foreigner’s Home” was a stroke of genius, an essay about the involuntary and voluntary movement of people across the globe, the ways in which home could and must change in response, the wonders and public fears. “The Price of Wealth, the Cost of Care” contained so many thoughts about community care and wealth sharing that I’ve had as well, only not even a fraction as elegantly as Morrison pens it here.
Toni Morrison is, I think, the perfect communicator. Her ideas come out so clearly and if they don’t or a point must be elucidated, rarely do I see her stumble or fumble through an explanation. It’s just clear as the note of a butter knife tapped against a crystal goblet. And there’s also this . . . this quality of succession to her writing. Often I like to pause if I’m reading something really good, and I find a line that’s just too darling not to write down in my quotes book. But I find that I almost can’t do this with Morrison because her work builds upon itself, and trying to take one line to keep would be like taking a single petal out of a flower, instead of getting the whole flower. You see?
Morrison’s essays “Race Matters” and “Black Matter(s)” are so impressive to me, and I learned a lot about her art process. It took me some time to chew over her assertion in her work that she worked to use language that (and forgive me if I’m not getting this correctly) broke away from the inherent violence and greed in Western language, to use solely Black language and experience to craft her worlds. Not to be race transcendant, but to just . . . be Black art. Art that does not need to justify or explain or cater to any audience that isn’t Black. Not that this detracted in any way from her being supremely acclaimed, a well deserved state.
Oh, I could talk all day about the essays I read in here but you’ve got a limit. My favorite essays would be “Memory, Creation, and Fiction” about how the practice of remembering is also the practice of creation, and integral to her fiction, “The Source of Self-Regard” talking some about the process of creating Beloved without rehashing a subject that’s both overdone and pushed aside, slavery, “Academic Whispers” about African American Literature and how its a solid part of the foundation of this country, and finally “Black Matter(s)” which featured the same subject as the former but with some different detail. Sometimes a lot of these things had some similar material because it was either a speech used for an essay or an essay maybe used in a speech.
All in all, brilliant. And I would like to try again with her fiction, I saw some titles in there and her excerpts of them that have me interested. Jazz and Tar Baby, specifically.
Eve Babitz
This was the first collection of essays I’d ever read. Mainly because I had no idea this was a collection of essays. I just saw the cover and was on a shopping spree in Barnes & Noble, read a bit of the back, and gave it no thought to toss it into the pile of “Buy One Get One 50%” books I would get that day. It sat in the trunk of my car for . . . a year? Before I finally pulled it out in January and declared that it would be the last book of the year for me.
I’d heard once that Babitz and Didion were in a feud together. Some research proves this false, and its just people pitting the two together because they were both from California, met a few times, and were wildly different in writing styles. Babitz was a zany, seductive figure that was synonymous with the wild life of 60s/70s California. Didion was a cool, self-contained woman synonymous with the saying “still waters run deep”. I read that Babitz fired Didion as an editor for her book, and I wonder what the hell she was thinking hiring her considering their differing styles, and what Didion was thinking applying. Whatever.
Eve’s Hollywood is not chronogical, but it starts with a couple stories of childhood— the Ojai Festival, the beautiful music that would enter her home thanks to her composer father, the times with her mother taking a drive to Bunker Hill, and the assorted community around her. Then on to high school, the gorgeous and eeffervescent Pachucos, hating school and loving the beach during summer break. Popsicles, parties she was too young for, the old California. There was this one essay, “The Polar Palace” that I just loved. And this line in it was a delicious chew:
“The smell of Tweed, though, still reminds me of the time I didn’t make sense and a dropped panic of thankfulness glints golden through the scent in gratitude for Aces’ laughter that afternoon with straight hair.”
On to adulthood and New York with its drugs and never stopping city escapades and cherished friends. There’s probably one of the best descriptions of New York City in there, “they’ll let you have stories, but you can’t ever think in a certain way.”
There’s just so much . . . juice in her writing. It’s casual its chatty it gets kind of erratic but then kind of slows to a simmer and I wonder if that’s exactly what listening to her talk sounded like. Pace like what a Mancala game looks like. Her descriptions of her home, it’s not painstakingly detailed, but I can see what she’s talking about. I see those streets and that taquito stand and the girl who went to Japan. I see the Luau and the friends who adored her and the people zooted out of their minds. It makes me kind of envious, and I just eat it up I tell you. I want to see that California she was blessed to know, and I know I never will, but I can’t even be mad because she gave me all I’d want to know anyway in this book . . . and likely in her others? I don’t know. Thinking about it now I want to find out. But I’ll get them from the library first, I am . . . not in a position to make financial choices of the heart.
Ok, so the thing is there are . . . so many essays in this book because some are five pages and some are just one and some— it’s hard to choose. But I’ve done it everywhere else, pretty much, so. Among my favorites are “Daughters of the Wasteland” a glimpse of her childhood and the artists and incredible people she knew, “Bunker Hill” about beautiful homes and walks with mom and memory, “Grandma” about her Jewish grandmother and the frankly crazy way she spoke to her own grandmother, “The Choke” about dance and Latina girls with pride and moves, “Frozen Looks” about a beach trip, a boy on the other side of the tracks, and how cool her friend is, “The Polar Palace” about Ace the boy wonder and the skating rink . . . I have to break up this sentence . . . “New York Confidential” because there’s nothing like the big city baby, “The Art of Balance” about a movie screening and surfing culture and beauty— Ack, I got too many! Too many! Oh but I can’t just forget “The Girl Who Went To Japan” and “The Luau” and— no stop, I’m stopping. There’s honestly just an insane amount of sections in this book. No, I have to go get another one of her books. That’s it.
Cute divider I made for my Tumblr. Anyway!
I thoroughly enjoyed doing this. Like, wow. Words. Women. I read these books so quickly because they were just . . . engrossing! I want to own some of these, live by some of these, especially Morrison’s essay on Memories and Fiction. If need be, I’d buy them all so I could scan and print my absolute favorites and put them all in a handbound book for me to keep the absolute stars of the show.
I feel like I should have read these books ages ago, if not before I started my Substack then right after. But this also feels like it was timed just right, for me to get all this incredible insight and information at this time. And I would like to find Black women writers who are more casual and talk more about their personal life like Zadie Smith— daughters of Morrison and Hurston who shrugged off the shackles of obligation to explain their existence and instead relish in it and proudly display it. And I definitely want more Babitz. I don’t know, it’s been a couple of weeks since starting this essay and so I think I’ll give Didion another try. I’m content to leave Plath alone, she’s a talented writer but damn she wrote a lot of journals. And letters. And poems. I’ve had my fill is what I’m saying.
Thank you for reading all this! Wow, this is actually . . . my longest piece on Substack to date. 28 reading minutes at the time of writing this post script. Funny thing, you know I have a list of “side quests” for 2025, and one of them was to write a 40 minute post? Not fucking likely, after doing this.
Give me a hand here and share this around, maybe some more people would benefit from a few more books in their TBR list. And if you wanna buy me some time, after I’ve been essentially locked in a cave reading nothing else but these gorgeous essay books, you can buy me a tea and help me reacclimate to society!
Here’s some visual media to help balance out all the reading you just did: