Look, Over Here! It’s Our First Book Club Pick!

Welcome to the inaugural edition of the Man Repeller Book Club! Before I spill the informative beans and tell you about our first novel, I want to tell you why I, your longtime resident astrologizer, have closed up horoscopes shop and started peddling my brain-wares in the form of book clubbery—and why this is not your mother’s book club (although she can join too, I LOVE moms).

WHY!?

When Mallory at Man Repeller asked me what I would do if I could do whatever I wanted, I realized that more than anything, I wanted to feel less lonely.

It’s hard for me to talk about how lonely I’ve felt because I would never want to imply that those who love me are somehow insufficient company—that’s absolutely not the case. Loneliness is not about the amount of love that other people pour into us, but rather, it is about how our own hearts can suddenly feel strange, unknowable, untouched by all that the world offers us.

Before the pandemic created the space we now must put between ourselves and everybody else, before even brushing elbows with a stranger as you passed through the same doorway became dangerous, loneliness was called an epidemic. But now that we’ve spent months six feet apart and smiling through screens, there is even more talk about how incredibly lonely so many of us feel. I had read about ten of these articles when the inspiration for this book club hit me with the intensity of a Sunday morning waffle craving. I realized that my calling as a lifelong sadgirl who, in spite of it all, wants desperately to live in this world, is to invite our loneliness into the open and offer play, curiosity, and friendship as an attempt at alchemy. I want to transform the raw material of our shared loneliness into a beautiful new thing.

The goal of this book club is to create a shared world for us that does not just live in words on paper or a screen. Every month, the selected book will guide our experience, but instead of just taking in the story, we will do experiments with visualization, mini art or journaling prompts, games that connect us to each other. I want to move our community out of the regular-degular internet friends who hang in the comments section to co-collaborators in the creation of our own intimate world. Look, I grew up with you, the community of MR readers. I started reading this site when I was in high school and it inspired me and made me feel less alone. The site has changed since those days, and so have I. Writing the horoscopes for you every month felt like passing notes in class and I loved it. Now, I want to cut first period with all of you and hang out in the parking lot smoking doobies and reading Ntozake Shange.

But Wait, What’s So Special About This Book Club?

TLDR; This is basically like a book club / performance art project / month-long game / secret society of many-gendered mystical heauxs.

More than anything, though, this book club is an experiment in how to form new kinds of intimate communities at a distance. We are up against a lot: the limitations of internet life, a pandemic, etc. I want to create opportunities for the world of our monthly novels to penetrate our lives so that we don’t just take them in, we are transformed by them.

We are going to read very good, rich, brilliant stories together, of course. But I am also going to offer you experiments to make these stories live off the page and more deeply in your life. Then at the end of the month, we’re going to have a little disembodied virtual party and, yes, of course, there will sometimes be a dress-up theme and/or show-and-tell and probably some games and a mystery. I want us to find ways to connect with each other beyond the comments section, too: I’m talking massive secret Santas and pen pal networks and seed exchanges and scavenger hunts and all kinds of stuff that I have not yet schemed up a way to accomplish!

Okay, Sarah, We Get it. We’re in. Tell Us What the First Friggin Book Is!

The first book club selection is The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi

Pre-order it riiiiiiiiiiiight here.

This multivocal novel is a masterful winding and unwinding of the tethers of love, shame, identity, intimacy, and violence. Vivek, a queer boy born to a family in which gender and sexuality are rigidly defined, is the gravitational center around which the rest of the story orbits. We see Vivek’s life and the lives of those who loved him form intricate webs of cause and effect, of possession and loss, like a game of Cat’s Cradle—we know the strings will come apart but we are captivated by the shape they make in the air.

I chose this book because it made me want to live. It made me understand my own life as not a fixed possession that I am given at birth and take with me when I die, but instead as a dynamic, fluxing thing that is fed and shaped by so many other lives.

The story takes us into the intimate worlds of each character, with chapters moving fluidly between consciousness and the voice that sees all of them moving and making choices. In reading this story, I felt myself wriggle out of the lonely constraints of my own body and mind as I moved into the electrified heart of Emezi’s characters.

The book comes out on Tuesday, August 4th. You can pre-order it from Bookshop.org right now and it will ship out as soon as the book-birthing gates open next week. By the way, if you’re not sure you can afford a new book right now, keep an eye on our Instagram—we’ve got something coming for you. And speaking of Instagram, the author has quite a handle of their own (long story short a cat named Güs is involved). Wanna give them a follow too?

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guess what came in the mail!