.SOMETIMES RAW.

This is the season to cuddle up inside and read. I wish someone would pay me to read all day because this is what I love the most. To be surrounded by my beloved books at all times. I read a lot but today I would like to highlight the novella. Some people count a novella (a short novel) as anything up to 250 pages, I’ve focused more on the 100-150 pages. Maybe there is something for you in my book pile of awesomeness. Enjoy!

This Is Pleasure  A skilful, absorbing novella by Mary Gaitskill about Margot grappling with the news that her friend Quin, a fellow book editor, has been accused of multiple acts of sexual assault. The chapters, which are usually only a couple of pages each, alternate between M and Q, so you have this sort of narrative tussle between these friends of over 20 years. Margot has always been ambivalent about Quin’s behaviour (she refers to the stories as “awful/ funny”; enjoys his “rakishness”, his “dirtiness”) while Quin has always viewed himself as a “sensualist” and still, now, remains charmed by himself (he assumes these women will shuck off their victimhood soon enough and move on to something else). Margot can’t decide if she should turn her back on Quin – “this is where I don’t understand my own feelings” she admits – or if she even wants to. And what if she doesn’t? Is she as bad as him? A thought-provoking, nuanced book.

The Great Gatsby Bet you’ve never heard of this one! But this book by F. Scott Fitzgerald is so short, I like to re-read it fairly regularly (I find it very different to the film.) Set in the roaring twenties, Nick Carraway is writing from a sanatorium about his past friendship with a millionaire Jay Gatsby and his erstwhile lover, Daisy Buchanan. Sometimes I find this book a bit overrated (please feel free to fight me in the comments, I welcome a fiery defence of it), at other times I think it skewers greed, celebrity and the American Dream perfectly.

Heartburn How could I not. Nora Ephron’s 1983 book has gone through something of a revival for millennials and will no doubt have another revival on BookTok. It’s a piece of fiction (I’d call it auto-fiction) inspired by Ephron’s own life, when her husband Carl Bernstein left her 7 months pregnant and with a toddler, told through Rachel, a cookery writer and Mark, a dolt. It’s a gorgeous book – tender, waspishly witty, full of grit and pin-sharp observations – but I feel incredibly rageful when I read this book. Thankfully Ephron got her revenge by publishing it, against Bernstein’s will. If you haven’t read it, here’s a small excerpt of a bit that particularly tickles me, to whet your appetite:

“And then Mark started to cry. Mark started to cry. I couldn’t believe it. It seemed to me that if anyone was entitled to cry in this scene, it was going to be me; but the man had run off with my part. “I’m in a lot of pain”, he said.

There has been a lot written in recent years about the fact that men don’t cry enough… I would like to say two things about this. The first is that I have always believed that crying is a highly overrated activity: women do entirely too much of it, and the last thing we ought to want is for it to become a universal excess. The second thing I want to say is this: beware of men who cry. It’s true that men who cry are sensitive to and in touch with feelings, but the only feelings they tend to be sensitive to and in touch with are their own.”

Small Things Like These This is such a lyrical and profound little book by Claire Keegan, set in 1985 featuring father of five and coal and timber merchant, Bill Furlong, who is busy dropping off his goods ahead of Christmas. As he makes his daily deliveries he becomes increasingly concerned about a young girl in one of the Magdalene Laundries (church-run, state-sanctioned institutions in Ireland where “fallen women” and their children were kept in appalling conditions. It is estimated that 6,000 babies died in them and the last laundry, shockingly, was not closed down until 1996.) Furlong is used to keeping his head down – like everyone he knows does, like his wife advises – but he can’t just sit down with the papers and a pint on his one day off. He must put his head above the parapet. I’ve seen Small Things described as Dickensian, and I’d totally agree – Furlong is heroic, (or he puts it, “of foolish heart”) and this book is loving and hopeful. 

Convenience Store Woman I’ve written about it a few times this year, but this is the most famous of Sayaka Murata’s 11 novels – though by no means the weirdest, I’m still haunted by Earthlings – about a convenience store worker called Keiko resisting Japanese society’s pressure to get married and have children. The only thing she wants to do is be in her beloved convenience store. It’s a quirky and charming story and very easy to read.

Terrific Mother My favourite of Lorrie Moore’s writing, this little story has been taken from the story collection, Birds of America and published by Faber in teeny tiny stand-alone clutch-bag size, costing 3.50 Euros, which I remember books actually used to cost 30 years ago. It’s about Adrienne who doesn’t want children but finds them always thrust into her arms anyway – and then one day there’s a terrible accident and she kills a baby. She goes into hiding for 7 months, but she’s lured out by a man who wants to be her husband and who takes her to an artist’s colony, where she is torn between allowing herself to live again, with the help of a philosophical masseuse named Ilke, and keeping herself locked inside a cage of guilt and shame and trauma. It’s very funny in parts and achingly lovely in others. Says Ilke of why people come to her for massages:

“It is because they are overeducated and can no longer converse with their own mothers. They have literally lost their mother tongue. So they come to me. I am their mother, and they don’t have to speak at all.”

Bonjour Tristesse If you didn’t read this as a tormented teenager, where were you? The Guardian once called Françoise Sagan “the French Scott Fitzgerald” and it’s true that Tristesse, published when she was just 18 (!) in 1954 has become a cult book. It tells the story of moody, nonchalant Cécile, who enjoys the sole attention of her widowed father – until his girlfriend, Anne, only a little older than Cécile, joins them on their summer holiday on the Riviera. 

I re-read this a couple of years ago for a bookclub reading. The book thrums with authenticity – Sagan was 17 when she wrote it, Cécile is 17 – and teenage imperiousness: “I noticed that [Anne] was lightly but immaculately made-up. It seemed she never allowed herself to be really on holiday” but it’s also so sage and elegant about matters of the heart. It’s really astounding that she wrote it as a teenager.

Other novellas I have on my bedside to read:

Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner

Termush by Jeff VanderMeer

The Premonition by Banana Yoshimoto

I don’t get haircuts very often. During “the pandemic” I used to cut my son’s hair (initial failure, he looked like a convict but it slowly improved) and my own; even my bangs. I don’t understand why any woman’s haircut is always 150 Euros and up. With this in mind, I don’t get haircuts too often. I like my long hair and this messy-I-just-got-up-and-had-no-time-to-use-a-comb style. I have had this haircut for ten years or so and still like it. If I end up at a hair salon (maybe after I hit the lottery) I usually cannot wait to get out. So, here is a list of everything a hairdresser could do during a haircut before I speak up:

Cut my hair too short (they always cut hair too short!)

Start trimming my ear hair (I had ear hair?)

Force me to have an opinion on Royal gossip or any gossip actually

Cut my hair longer somehow

Start using a product I don’t recognize

Start using a product I do recognize: Kikkoman Soy Sauce

Start talking about me on their cell phone

Start talking about me on my cell phone

Say, “I wonder if I’m ambidextrous”

Shave part of my head

Wax part of my head

Wax my whole body

Tell me my hair is “brittle”

Say, “Oh my god, this looks terrible.”

Call over the barbers to snap pictures of something on the back of my head

Say, “Be right back,” and then go on vacation

Tell me my hair is “sleepy”

Start sneaking sips of that blue liquid he keeps his combs in

Steal my wallet

Steal my boyfriend

Tell me he’s going to give me the “Van Gogh” of haircuts

Say, “Wow, that’s a lot of blood”

Insist I had only one ear when I came in

Cut up a line of dry shampoo and ask if I “party”

Ask for a tip after each snip

Sneeze on the back of my head

Get upset when I don’t say, “Bless you”

Tell me my hair is “claustrophobic”

Make me sweep up the hair clippings

Glue the hair clippings back on my head

Start cutting with finger scissors

Start cutting with hedge trimmers

Start cutting with their teeth while whispering, “Chomp chomp, here comes the haircut monster!”

Insist I pay for their Liferando order of fish tacos or anything fish actually

Not apologize for the fish taco juice dripping on my head

Hand me the scissors, then break out into a diabolical grin and whisper, “You fool. You sweet, simple fool. Hear those sirens? What do you think the police will say when they find your fingerprints on the murder weapon?”

Give me the exact hairstyle I requested, but I still look weird

You know I’m not a mathematician. You know that adding simple numbers isn’t something I can do. You know that subtracting simple numbers isn’t something I can do either. When we first met, I told you, I didn’t understand quantum physics, regular physics, or how many a dozen is. And you laughed like you thought I was joking. And then I laughed because you were laughing. And then I drank too much because I couldn’t accurately count the number of drinks I’d had. Also, on that date, I explained to you that I had skipped every single math class I had ever had in school because they seemed boring. And you laughed again because you thought I was joking, but I wasn’t.

I don’t need a fourth-grade math skillset to know that you + me = something special.

How long have we been dating? You could tell me it’d been a couple of years, because I feel so comfortable with you, and also because I am not good at math. You could also tell me it’d been only a couple of months because everything feels so fresh and exciting and new and also because I am not good at math.

We’ve had so many good times together. Like, remember that date when we went out for brunch, and I ordered all those eggs? I ordered scrambled eggs, and then the waiter asked how many, and I panicked and said nine. I did that because I got nervous around you, but also because I have no conception of how many eggs nine is. Then I ate all those eggs and got sick on the floor of that brunch place and was told not to come back. How many brunch places have I been told never to step foot in ever again since we’ve been dating? As you know, I’m not a numbers person.

When I think about our future together, I get scared, because I realize I don’t know how old I am due to the math thing. I know I’m not a baby (well, sometimes I am I guess) because I can walk and talk, but beyond that, who can really say? At night, when I can’t sleep, I don’t count sheep, because—you know. Instead, I picture us together, living in the country. It’s you, it’s me, and it’s eighty golden retrievers. Is that a lot? I don’t even know if eighty dogs is a lot because I’m bad at math. I do remember you being upset when I bought you thirty cats for your birthday. But maybe you were just mad because they were cats and not because you were actually frustrated about the number of them. You know I don’t know if eighty dogs or thirty cats is a lot, but I do know that I want to be with you.

I don’t need to have the intellect of Albert Einstein to know that you’re the one for me. I may be unable to add, subtract, divide, multiply, or effectively use a calculator, but I know there’s something here. And hey, I know I’ve got my faults. There’s the whole math thing, the being banned from brunch places because of overheating due to the math thing, and all those cats I bought you that ended up kind of wrecking your apartment because of the math thing. I may never understand the Pythagorean Theorem or the associative law of multiplication or even what all those zeroes that come after the one in my savings account mean. Ugh, so-so-so many zeroes! It’s kind of concerning.

You know I’m bad at math, but you + me = something special.