Ann Patchett's Blog, page 37
August 14, 2018
Notes from Ann: Three Great Books for the End of Summer
August 10, 2018
Fun Guaranteed: 16 Books We Love for Young Readers
You know what they say: Nothing softens the blow of back-to-school season like a new book.
Well, we say it.
Here in Nashville, school starts back as early as this week, but there’s still plenty of fun to be had at the bookstore! Summer’s not over as long as you have something exciting to read. Come check out our latest favorites for young readers, from tots to teens:
PICTURE BOOKS
Recommended by Katherine
The Secret Life of Squirrels: Back to School! Join Rosie and Mr. Peanuts as they ready their classroom for another squirrelly school year! I loved the attention to detail. The author painstakingly assembles the scenes herself with homemade props and real squirrels found in her backyard!
Recommended by Rae Ann
Trevor By Jim Averbeck, Amy Hevron (Illustrator)
This is the delightful story of Trevor, a bird on a quest for a friend. It’s a picture book for anyone who needs a friend to sing the silences while they sing the notes.
Recommended by Jackie
Harriet Gets Carried Away By Jessie Sima, Jessie Sima (Illustrator)
Harriet loves to wear costumes, but her penguin outfit lands her in a bit of trouble when she wears it shopping for party hats with her dads!
Recommended by Jackie
How to Be a Lion A sweet story about being yourself, even when bullies question your choices.
Recommended by Jackie
Can Somebody Please Scratch My Back? By Jory John, Liz Climo (Illustrator)
This is a hilarious tale about Elephant, who needs help scratching an itchy spot.
NONFICTION: SCIENCE!
Recommended by Katherine
The Brilliant Deep: Rebuilding the World’s Coral Reefs By Kate Messner, Matthew Forsythe (Illustrator)
Equal parts stunning and informative, The Brilliant Deep shows that scientific books for kids can be as aesthetically pleasing as they are educational.
FOR INDEPENDENT READERS
Recommended by Katherine
Super Rabbit Boy Blasts Off!: A Branches Book (Press Start! #5) The latest in this interactive and fast-paced chapter book series will hold the interest of even the most impatient, screen-time-oriented kids who love adventure.
Recommended by Ella
Denis Ever After This book is a thrilling mystery about a boy, Denis, haunting his twin brother, Matt, to solve his own murder. I love this book for showing how deep family ties run, and the amazing concept of the afterlife. This is for anyone who loves mysteries.
Recommended by Rae Ann
Courage T’Shawn’s life is all about diving practice and hanging out at the local pool . . . until his older brother returns. Perfect for fans of Ghost by Jason Reynolds.
Recommended by Ella
Illegal By Eoin Colfer, Andrew Donkin, Giovanni Rigano (Illustrator)
A harrowing, timely story following the path two brothers take to get from Africa to Europe, Illegal shows the fight that many make to reach a better life. This graphic novel is for anyone who enjoyed Refugee or Ruta Sepetys’s books.
YOUNG ADULT
Recommended by Ella
I’m Not Missing: A Novel Miranda and Syd have been best friends since forever, tied together by their mothers‘ abandonment. By senior year, Syd has everything figured out, combined into one, big plan to escape the small town they live in. One night, Syd inexplicably vanishes, leaving Miranda to pick up the pieces of her disappearance. This is a wonderful story about family, love, and loss that is perfect for anyone who loved Paper Towns.
Recommended by Devin
Save the Date Charlie’s family of four older siblings, two parents, and a borrowed dog come together for a huge wedding weekend and the last big event in their home before it is sold. What could possibly go wrong?
Recommended by Ginger
The Loneliest Girl in the Universe I read this book faster than anything I have read in a long time. It had enough twists and turns to keep me guessing. I absolutely loved it!
Recommended by Carla
The Other Side of Lost By Jessi Kirby, Annica Lydenberg (Illustrator)
This is a book about figuring out who you are, deciding if you like that person, and finding a willingness to change. It’s a great reminder that there is freedom in being exactly who you are and that there is a peacefulness only found on a nice, long walk in nature.
Recommended by Katherine
The Cheerleaders A great young adult novel (that would also suit adult fans of Megan Abbott’s thrillers who might want to venture into YA), The Cheerleaders is a must-read.
ParnassusNext — August Selection
Darius the Great Is Not Okay
Adib Khorram’s novel, Darius the Great Is Not Okay, is a heartfelt exploration of friendship and family that’s become one of the fall’s most highly anticipated debuts. It’s the story of Darius Kellner, “Fractional Persian,” who speaks better Klingon than Farsi, who embarks on a trip to Iran with his family to visit the grandparents he’s never met. When Darius meets Sohrab, the boy who lives next door, he develops an unexpected friendship, and begins to uncover truths within himself and his family — the kind of truths that could change his life forever. Fans of Becky Albertalli, Benjamin Alire Sáenz, and Adam Silvera will love getting to know Darius. See more praise below:
“I love this story, and the way it combines the bitter of adolescence with the sweet of friendship and family. Brewed together they make a beautiful, memorable book.”
–Laurie Halse Anderson, award-winning author of Speak
“Heartfelt, tender, and so utterly real. I’d live in this book forever if I could.”
–Becky Albertalli, award-winning author of Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda
“I’ve never read a book that so powerfully demonstrates how connecting with where you come from can illuminate who you are and help you figure out where you’re going. From its deadpan Star Trek humor to its brilliant examination of mental health, Darius the Great is Not Okay is a supernova of heart and hope that’s sure to become a classic.”
–Nic Stone, New York Times bestselling author of Dear Martin
“Darius the Great is Not Okay is a total knockout. This story of identity and friendship–and how one can inform and reveal the other–will stay with me for a long time. And challenge me too, as a person and artist, which all great books should do. For its exploration of male friendship and cultural expectations alone, Adib Khorram’s lovely debut should be required reading.”
–John Corey Whaley, Michael L. Printz award-winning author of Highly Illogical Behavior
“A love letter to anyone who has felt uncomfortable in their own skin and wondered where exactly they belonged. A big-hearted and marvelous debut.”
–Jasmine Warga, author of My Heart and Other Black Holes
ParnassusNext is the book subscription box for YA lovers. Every member of ParnassusNext receives a first edition hardcover of each month’s selected book, signed by the author. There is no membership fee to join — and no line to stand in for the autograph. Not only will you have one of the best YA books of the month when it comes out, you’ll have it straight from the author’s hands, with an original, authentic signature! Set up a subscription for yourself or buy a gift membership for your favorite YA reader for 3, 6, or 12 months.
Fun Guaranteed: 16 Books We Love for Young Readers
August 7, 2018
Hot Reads for Hot Days: 26 Bookseller Favorites
When you were little, did you want to grow up and work in an ice-cream parlor so you could eat free ice cream all day? And did your parents tell you not to be silly, because of course you’d get sick of all that ice cream after a while? It’s not like that with books. Here at Parnassus, our booksellers sample the merchandise on our shelves every day and never tire of it. Here are the books we’re enjoying most — and can’t wait to share with you!
(They all go great with ice cream, by the way. It’s very hot in Nashville.)
FICTION
Recommended by Catherine
An Ocean of Minutes: A Novel This is a fantastic meditation on how time changes relationships and perceptions. The action kicks off with a Station Eleven-like pandemic illness and the offer of time travel to a future with a cure.
Recommended by Rae Ann
Good Luck with That Two friends are bequeathed a to-do list by a dying friend. Their journey is both laugh-out-loud funny and sad, in turns. Author Kristan Higgins infuses serious topics with heart.
Recommended by Rae Ann
The Summer Wives: A Novel This multigenerational story of island life intertwines the lives of year-round residents and summer people with a murder and a family secret. An excellent narrator and a compelling story make this a great audiobook on Libro.fm. (Or course, it’s good in hardcover, too.)
Recommended by Rae Ann
America for Beginners: A Novel I love this book! The cast of characters embarking on a cross-country trip hooked me into each of their stories from the beginning. I wanted to read faster and slow down at the same time.
Recommended by Ann
Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir Ever feel like reading a book you know is going to be fantastic? I read this when it came out 22 years ago and just picked it up again. It was as perfect as I remembered. Read it again or read it for the first time. You’ll be struck by what a pleasant childhood you had.
Recommended by Mary Laura
The Incendiaries I’m always a sucker for a college love story, but I was especially entranced by the haunting, urgent tension Kwon creates among Phoebe, Will, and the strange, charismatic outsider who comes between them. This unusual little novel was the #1 IndieNext pick for August!
(Read our interview with the author here.)
Recommended by Mary Laura
A Double Life I’m not usually much of a thriller reader, but DAMN, I couldn’t put this one down. Based on a real unsolved crime — the Lord Lucan case in England (google it, or don’t if you want to be surprised) — this suspenseful novel about a woman hunting down the truth about her family’s grisly past is perfect vacation / late-night reading.
Recommended by Kathy
Country Dark It’s been compared to Larry Brown, Flannery O’Connor, and William Faulkner — and recommended by Ron Rash, Tom Franklin, and Stewart O’Nan. That’s all you need to know about this tough yet hopeful book of “country noir.”
Recommended by Kathy
The Widow Nash A young woman reinvents herself after fleeing an unhealthy relationship. Can she find happiness as a “widow” in small-town Montana at the turn of the 20th century? How long until her past catches up with her? Will her beloved father’s legacy as a skirt-chaser taint her future? What a fun read!
Recommended by River
The Madonna of the Mountains A sweeping, historial saga of family and faith and what is left to us when war threatens to steal away all that we know and love.
Recommended by John
My Year of Rest and Relaxation “This was the beauty of sleep,” Moshfegh writes. If you know anything about Ottessa Moshfegh, you know the cruel ironies by which her writing operates, the perverse world of sympathetically unsympathetic characters. This is not a book about rest or relaxation. And certainly don’t get this confused with “beauty sleep.”
Recommended by John
The Lost Country William Gay is a flat-out monster. The former protégé of Cormac McCarthy is back from dead and could not care less about giving us a picture of the world we see every day, but is preoccupied instead with a twisted, subversive, yet elegiac representation of a South that takes no heed of where it’s been nor where it’s going. Get ready for a ride.
Recommended by Halley
The Third Hotel Hypnotic, delirious, and surreal, this novel captures not just a woman’s loss but also her journey around both a blisteringly strange Havana and the horror-infested corners of her mind.
POETRY
Recommended by Steve
New Poets of Native Nations Urgent and rich, this is the definition of an essential anthology.
NONFICTION
Recommended by Karen
South Toward Home: Adventures and Misadventures in My Native Land By Julia Reed, Jon Meacham (Foreword)
It’s always a good day when honorary Nashvillian Julia Reed puts out a new book. If you need a pick-me-up, these essays are guaranteed to make you laugh.
Recommended by Keltie
Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir A memoir of one investigative journalist’s quest to understand her deeply troubled, but gifted, father, who variously claimed to be a shaman, a mystic, an animal whisperer and a victim of CIA mind-control experiments. Her journey criss-crosses the U.S.-Mexican border, and the border of sanity and mania. Somewhere in the crossings, the author finds herself following her father’s path in more ways than one, and wonders if there is truth to even his most outlandish claims. If you loved The Glass Castle, try this.
Recommended by Keltie
Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island Tangier Island, Virginia, in the Chesapeake Bay, is disappearing before our very eyes. Within only a few decades, this solitary outpost of Americana, famous for its traditional (and unnconnected) ways, unique dialect, and production of blue crabs, will be underwater. Reporter Earl Swift spent a year living and fishing with the “Tangiermen,” finding them endearing, charming, loyal, decent — and maddeningly stubborn in their deep denial about their island’s fate and the causes for it. I was transfixed from page one.
Recommended by Sissy
You’re on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir Parker Posey is my favorite actress. If you find her interesting, you will love this book. If you’re not familiar with her work, you may become very confused.
Recommended by Andy
Second Wind: A Sunfish Sailor, an Island, and the Voyage That Brought a Family Together Nathaniel Philbrick’s mid-life crisis purchase isn’t a red Corvette — it’s the VW Bug of sailboats. Having won the Sunfish North America Championship in his twenties, he decides to clean up the old boat and rediscover the pleasures of sailing and racing. From the little ponds of Nantucket to the big competitions, this is a great book to read while you wait for Philbrick to bring us his new one in October: In the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown.
Recommended by Andy
Jell-O Girls: A Family History The author’s great-great-great-uncle bought the patent for Jell-O for $450 and parlayed it into a vast fortune that financed the family for many generations. This is not only a fascinating corporate history of one of the best-known food brands in America, but a compelling biography of a wealthy, complicated family and the individuals within it.
Recommended by Sarah
Atticus Finch: The Biography Since the release of Go Set a Watchman, we have come to know two distinct versions of Atticus Finch: one courageous and wise, the other prejudiced and intolerant. Why the drastic change in this beloved character? Dr. Crespino examines the facts of Harper Lee’s life in the South along with the fiction of her books, and his analysis is utterly fascinating.
First Editions Club: August Selection
[image error]His Favorites: A Novel
There is something so wonderful and rare about a short, decisively plotted novel — a book that can be read in one satisfying afternoon. Kate Walbert’s latest novel, His Favorites, is one of the best new examples of this art form.
Our narrator, Jo, tells the story of losing her best friend in an accident during a drunken summer night on a golf cart and retreating in the following years to a private boarding school. There, she ends up in an emotionally abusive relationship with a teacher.
Though this novel fits easily into the narrative of the #MeToo movement (but not in a heavy-handed way), there’s so much more to it. It’s about what happens when someone faces loss and blame at a young age. It’s about the ramifications of a family disintegrating. And it’s about how a human being forges a new identity in the wake of tragedy, with only questionable guidance.
We’re so happy to introduce you to this page-turner, perfect for the last month of summer. Enjoy!
Yours in reading,
Catherine Bock
Inventory Manager
More about our First Editions Club: Every member receives a first edition of the selected book of the month, signed by the author. Books are carefully chosen by our staff of readers, and our picks have gone on to earn major recognition including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Plus, there’s no membership fee or premium charge for these books. Build a treasured library of signed first editions and always have something great to read! Makes a FABULOUS gift, too.
Parnassus Book Club — Upcoming Meeting Schedule
August – Saints for All Occasions by J. Courtney SullivanMonday, August 13 at 6:30 p.m.
Wednesday, August 15 at 6:30 p.m.
Thursday, August 16 at 10 a.m.
September — Dispatches From Pluto by Richard Grant
Monday, September 17 at 6:30 p.m.
Wednesday, September 19 at 6:30 p.m.
Thursday, September 20 at 10 a.m.
Classics Club – Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz
Monday, September 24 at 10 a.m. and 6:30 p.m.
Are you a member of our store book club? Would you like to be? Parnassus Book Club and Classics Club meetings are free and open to anyone. Buy the book, read along, and join the discussion!
“It’s all about the book.” More thoughts on reading from Kathy Schultenover, Parnassus Book Clubs Manager:
[image error]In the June meetings of the Parnassus Book Club, a near-record number of 79 people came to talk about Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. Written by David Grann, the book explores the mysterious deaths in the 1920s among the Osage Indians of Oklahoma. This tribe lived lives of prosperity and wealth, with mansions, servants and luxuries, thanks to oil found on the reservation. Their lifestyle exacerbated already deeply-held prejudices among whites in the area, and when several unexplained deaths and murders occurred, the fledgling FBI (under a young J. Edgar Hoover) stepped in. What the undercover agents unravelled was a network of evil with shocking consequences for so many in the area.
In our discussions, reader conversation focused on these points:
1.) The enormous and impressive amount of research done by David Grann
2.) The fact that this case was so little-known in history until now (and possible reasons for that), and also how many other similar incidents in our history are unknown to us
3.) The social position of Native Americans, and the nature of prejudice towards them
4.) The freewheeling, “lawless” nature of law enforcement at that time
5.) Just how remote the plains are from large cities like Washington DC and New York, and how this impacted the entire situation
While Parnassus Book Club usually discusses fiction, Killers of the Flower Moon — which was named the Best Nonfiction Book of 2017 by the independent booksellers of the American Booksellers Association — was an especially popular choice and a welcome change for all of us. I strongly recommend it for all book clubs. If your club reads it, feel free to use the talking points above!
What are YOUR favorites?
Pick a winner: After scandal led to cancellation of the Nobel Prize in literature this year, The New Academy Prize in Literature arose to take its place. The big twist? Readers determine the short-list. Should it go to Donna Tartt? Or maybe J.K. Rowling, Patti Smith, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, or any of the other beloved artists on the long list? You have until August 14 to VOTE by clicking here.
Speaking of voting . . . Help choose America’s favorite novel in the PBS Great American Read! Episodes resume in September. Meanwhile, you can still place up to one vote for each book, each day, using the PBS app or by posting on Twitter or Facebook with the designated hashtag for the book you love most.
PS: We’re not the only ones who think ice cream and books make a tasty pairing.
[image error]From the Ice Cream Books instagram
Hot Reads for Hot Days: 26 Bookseller Favorites
July 31, 2018
This Book Is On Fire: The Incendiaries
[image error]
To fully grasp the magnitude of R.O. Kwon’s debut novel, The Incendiaries, being named the #1 Indie Next pick for August, you first have to understand what the Indie Next List is. Containing just 20 titles each month, it comprises the most highly recommended new books, as nominated by independent booksellers nationwide. Considering how much bookstore staffers read (not to mention how many hundreds of books are published each month), making it into the top 20 really sets a book apart. Kwon has landed not just on the list but in the highest spot — and with her first book, a short, unusual, and entrancing novel about a young couple pulled together by love and apart by religion.
Critics can’t stop talking about The Incendiaries either. The Washington Post called it “the most buzzed-about book debut of the summer, as it should be.” From The New Yorker: “It is full of absences and silence. Its eerie, sombre power is more a product of what it doesn’t explain than of what it does.” The New York Times put the book on the cover of its Book Review this week in a piece titled, “When First Love Is as Lethal as Religious Extremism.” In its “Writers to Watch” piece earlier this summer, the Times gave this succinct preview of the story:
The book is thematically about the spectrum of belief, and is told from the perspectives of three main narrators: Will Kendall, who transfers from a religious college to the fictional Edwards University, where the book is set, after becoming a nonbeliever; his girlfriend, Phoebe Lin, who joins a Bible study and support group after her mother’s death; and, to a lesser extent, John Leal, who leads the gatherings and has mysterious ties to North Korea. Will must contend with Phoebe’s spiral into Christian fundamentalism and the group’s eventual embrace of violence.
What makes someone fall in love with another person? What makes someone turn to religion? And what happens when the person you fall in love with turns away from you and toward a religion that terrifies you? Kwon discussed The Incendiaries with our Musing editor, Mary Laura Philpott. Here’s their conversation:
These characters fall in love as they’re on opposite spiritual trajectories: Will has lost his faith just as Phoebe believes she has found hers. They’re . . . not star-crossed lovers, exactly . . . God-crossed lovers? To what extent did you draw on your own personal experience of being out-of-sync with your loved ones and faith?
(Photo by Smeeta Mahanti)Kwon: God-crossed lovers—yes! I love that, Mary Laura. I drew substantially from my own experience of having lost my faith during high school. Back then, almost everyone I knew was a believer, which made the apostasy extra difficult. I was desperately lonely, as lonely as I’ve ever felt, and, in some ways, I think I was writing this novel for that 17-year-old girl, to let her know she’s not alone. She never was.
Why set this love story in college?
Kwon: One practical answer is that college is a liminal time, a time of flux, when a lot of people are figuring out who they are. (Terrorist groups and religious groups both often recruit at the college and high-school level for this reason: because people’s selves tend to be shifting, changing.)
The other answer, though, is that I loved college. Sitting around and learning, reading—it was an arcadia for me. A problematic time, in some ways, but also an enchanted time. I loved being able to revisit that time of my life while writing The Incendiaries.
[image error]Read about the poetic quality of language in The Incendiaries in The Atlantic’s profile of Kwon: “A Writer’s Fixation on Sound.”
You’ve said this book took a decade to write. What kept you coming back to it?
Kwon: Part of it was that sense I mention of writing for the lonely girl I was—I felt I couldn’t let her down. There was also my love of sentences: anytime I could really get lost in the words, I’d forget I had an I, and then I could just write. That feeling might be the deepest joy I know.
How does it feel to see the book finally going out into the world and landing in other people’s hands?
Kwon: It’s wonderful, strange, and disorienting. For all these years, the novel was my private dream, and now, each time, it feels a little startling when people talk about the book to me. How on earth do you know about this? I want to ask. Then I realize, Oh, right.
Talk about the decision to write dialogue without quotation marks. I’m always curious when a writer makes that choice.
Kwon: It didn’t feel like a choice so much as a necessity. I did, at various points, try putting in quotation marks, but I found that, at least for The Incendiaries, the marks shifted the balance of the book too much toward the dialogue. Quotation marks are so emphatic! They’re showy, and pop out at me. I wanted less pop, more flow.
You were a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow in 2016 (alongside some big names, such as Anthony Marra and Celeste Ng). What did that support make possible for you — and how important is the NEA to our country’s continued cultural vibrance?
Kwon: No joke, the NEA changed my life. The money’s wonderful, of course, but it also felt profoundly meaningful to receive that vote of confidence from the government, from my country. It gave me the last push I needed to finish revising my novel, and then to have my agent send it to publishers.
The amount of money allotted to supporting the arts, as a percentage of the nation’s budget, is ludicrously small, especially when compared to what other countries do. The NEA is vital to the nation’s arts. There are whole, incredible organizations that would be in peril if the NEA were cut. People who want to cut the NEA—good god, what short-sighted trolls.
OK, let’s say you’re in a bookstore, and a fellow reader browsing nearby asks your advice on what she should buy. What books do you pull off the shelves and place in her hands?
Kwon: I love everything I’ve read by Anne Carson, but this time, I’ll recommend Eros the Bittersweet. It’s one of her less well-known books—it was her dissertation in graduate school—and it’s a delight. It’s a kind of meditation on a Sappho fragment, though that word, “meditation,” sounds so static. It’s a romp. It’s a celebration.
I’d also recommend some August books I’m really excited about, and which I’ve been so fortunate as to get to read early. There’s Laura van den Berg’s The Third Hotel, which is so haunting it stole into my dreams, and Vanessa Hua’s epic A River of Stars. There’s also Crystal Hana Kim’s heart-shredding If You Leave Me. Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s splendid Fruit of the Drunken Tree publishes in July, but it’s the last day of the month, so I’ll slide that in as an August pick as well!
I loved what you wrote in The Cut about your signature eyeliner look, and now I have to know: did you ever find a good black eyeliner that can stand up to summer heat?
Kwon: Thank you for saying that! I’ve been using a combination of primer (Etude House, Proof 10) and black eyeshadow (NYX, Raven). I carry around a gel eyeliner, also black, for touch-ups. We’ll see.
You’ve been on quite the media circuit lately. Anything you wish you’d been asked but haven’t?
Kwon: No one’s asked yet about the last books I loved. One I just read is an advance copy of Ancco’s Bad Friends, a graphic novel set in 1990s South Korea. It’s about cycles of violence and abuse, and the limits of love, and I cried as I read it. I’m thrilled it’ll be out in the U.S. this fall.
Get your copy of The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon — the #1 Indie Next pick of the month — in-store or online at Parnassus Books.
This Book Is On Fire: The Incendiaries
July 24, 2018
Women’s Lives on Their Own Terms in Two New Books
Between them, Glynnis MacNicol and Jo Piazza’s new books have appeared on more must-read lists this summer than we can count — including BuzzFeed, Elle.com, Goop, People, Cosmopolitan, Vulture, Refinery29, InStyle, and Town & Country, just to name a few. While MacNicol’s No One Tells You This is a memoir and Piazza’s Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win is a novel, the two books make for a delightful pairing, as both focus on women pushing back against expectations to create the lives they want. Parnassus Books will host these authors together next Tuesday, July 31, at 6:30 p.m. To celebrate this double-header event, we’re offering twice the usual reading experience today on Musing, with excerpts from each.
In No One Tells You This, her personal account of turning 40 and evaluating her life choices, MacNicol asks, “If the story doesn’t end with marriage or a child, what then?” (You may have seen her recent piece on that note for The New York Times: “I’m in My 40s, Child-Free and Happy. Why Won’t Anyone Believe Me?”) Rebecca Traister, author of All the Single Ladies, calls the book “a mapping of contemporary adulthood, unmoored from the institutions that once defined it for women.” As Vogue pointed out in a recent profile, “it is also a book about what David Brooks once called the odyssey years, that drawn-out phase of finding oneself that stretches far into adulthood—and what happens when those years butt up against one’s parents’ twilight years.”
Here’s how it begins:
For someone who has always been bad at math, I have a weird fixation on numbers.
Take my mother’s death. Officially my mother died on March 20. A Monday. This is the date on her death certificate, and the date on her gravestone. This is also what the staff at the nursing home north of Toronto, where my mother had lived for the past twenty-six months, told my father when they called him at seven that morning. My mother, they said, had died overnight.
I wanted more details, though. “Overnight” felt too nebulous. When my sister, Alexis, and I arrived the next day to retrieve the last of my mother’s possessions, it was the first thing I inquired about. Who exactly had found her? I asked the nursing attendant manning the staff desk that oversaw my mother’s wing, hoping this would lead to the specifics I was searching for.
The nurse was an older blond woman and she seemed puzzled by my question. “When a person is that ill,” she said, “we send someone in to see them every hour.” Behind her on the wall, in the frame reserved for pictures of recently deceased residents, was a picture of my mother. In loving memory read the goldplated plaque nailed to the bottom of the frame. It was a terrible picture, taken recently. My mother’s face was thin and frail, the confusion that had eaten up her mind apparent in the angry, taut expression. It made her look like a stranger. My mother, always so careful with her appearance, would have been horrified by the photo. She wasn’t even wearing lipstick.
I turned back to the nurse. I understood her confusion; there was exactly nothing mysterious about my mother’s death. She had been sick for a long time; the previous Wednesday a specialist had told us she probably had six months, “give or take.”
Still, I tried again. I concentrated on sounding calm—I’d long ago learned this was the best way to deal with medical staff—as if I was just making casual conversation. But the truth was that since the previous morning, when my father and then, minutes later, my sister had called to tell me the news, I’d been preoccupied with this small bit of information: I wanted to know the exact minute my mother had died. And barring that, I wanted a time stamp on the last instance they’d seen her alive. I had obsessively time-stamped my journals as a child, carefully watching the second hand on my Mickey Mouse alarm clock, and then furiously scribbling down the numbers before it ticked on, as if this detail would give more authenticity to my record. I wanted to be able to do the same for my accounting of the end of my mother’s life. It felt like a loose thread in an otherwise perfectly woven tapestry I was trying to reattach correctly.
I hadn’t yet shed a single tear. I had a vague sense they were on the horizon, but the tsunami of emotions brought on by her loss wouldn’t reach me for a while yet. In the meantime, I set about constructing a narrative around my mother’s death that made sense, a path I could funnel everything down when grief arrived and tried to wreak havoc on me. So many of the decisions I’d made in my life had been the result of stories I’d read, or heard, or was trying to emulate—there was a safety there, I knew. I also knew there was an irrefutability to numbers that I could rely on to nail everything else down.
From the book No One Tells You This by Glynnis MacNicol. Copyright © 2018 by Glynnis MacNicol. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Elle magazine calls Piazza’s fourth novel, Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win, a “perfectly timed” novel, for the way it portrays the often contradictory pressures of career, family, politics, and privacy. Charlotte does like to win — specifically, she wants to win a Senate race against a sleazy opponent — but as she finds out, women aren’t always applauded when they state their ambitions so plainly. In her blurb for the book, Camille Perri, author of The Assistants and When Katie Met Cassidy, describes it as “a rallying cry to the #TimesUp generation . . . smart, fierce, and so much fun to read.”
The story starts like so:
Tell people one true thing before you tell them a lie. Then it will be easier for them to believe the lie.
It wasn’t the best advice Marty Walsh ever gave to his daughter Charlotte, but it had stuck with her for almost forty years. Marty had been a garbage collector by trade, though he insisted “sanitation specialist” had a smarter ring to it. He wasn’t a successful man by most people’s standards and he died drunk in his bed before his fiftieth birthday. Now his daughter was running for the United States Senate and Marty’s words held a new utility for her.
Charlotte hadn’t expected her campaign to begin with an interrogation—an aggressive one at that—but the questions just kept coming.
“Have you ever used any drugs besides pot?”
“No.”
“Paid any undocumented workers under the table?”
“Nope.”
“Ever killed anyone?”
“Not yet.”
“Ever get an abortion?”
“No.”
“Infidelity in your marriage? Affairs? Secret ex-husband?”
“I love my husband. We don’t have anything to hide.” One of those things is true. Charlotte punctuated her sentence with a chuckle, hoping the laughter would sooth her nerves and add confidence to her answer.
Josh Pratt, who if all went well today would sign on to be her campaign manager, twisted his mouth in a way that told Charlotte he wasn’t sure he believed her. He had a tiny blob of something yellow, maybe mustard, on the side of his thin lips. As he asked his questions, Charlotte had a hard time focusing on anything except for the golden dribble.
I’m running for national political office, she wanted to answer back. Ask me my thoughts on immigration, on the flat tax, on school vouchers, abortion rights. How much do I think we can raise the minimum wage? Can I bring more jobs to Pennsylvania? Will I fight for college tuition assistance? What do I think about trade with the Chinese? Why does my marriage matter?
“You’re thinking, ‘Why does it matter?’ Why does your husband matter?” Josh read her mind. “Your husband matters. Your marriage matters. As a woman, you bear the burden of having to appear to be charismatic, smart, well-groomed, nice, but not too nice. If you’re married, you need to look happily married. If you have kids, you should be the mother of the year.”
“Goddammit. It’s 2017. There are plenty of women in Congress. A woman ran for president. It shouldn’t matter that I don’t have a penis.” Charlotte rolled her eyes. “It’s unbelievable that we have to deal with that kind of shit anymore.
“Well, I’m sorry, but it matters a lot.” Josh shot her a stoic stare. “You do still have to deal with this shit. No one likes to say that out loud, but it’s true. You’re running in a state that’s never elected a woman to the Senate or as governor. That should tell you something.”
“Tug Slaughter is a serial philanderer,” Charlotte fired back at Josh.
Pennsylvania’s longtime incumbent senator Ted “Tug” Slaughter had been married three times—his current wife was twenty years younger than he. The man was a walking cliché. For more than forty years, Slaughter had reigned as the senior senator from the state. Most men in Congress would be easy to miss in a crowd. Not Slaughter. Pushing eighty, the man still oozed raw ego. He was known to strip his shirt off and perform sit-ups onstage at events. Just last month he’d climbed the trestle of the Black Bridge in Marshfield Station with a pack of teenagers and leapt into the icy Delaware River below. A week earlier he’d announced that he’d donated a kidney to a complete stranger he’d met at an Eagles game.
“It’s true, Tug does more cocktail waitresses than he does lawmaking, but he’s not the one who needs to create a legitimate candidacy. You do.” Josh had an answer for everything.
From the book Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win by Jo Piazza. Copyright © 2018 by Jo Piazza. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Join us at Parnassus Books for a book signing and discussion with both authors:
Women’s Lives on Their Own Terms in Two New Books
July 17, 2018
Former Times Book Critic Asks: What Happened to Truth?
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