Subverting Heroism and the Trojan War: A Review of A THOUSAND SHIPS by Natalie Haynes

In this subversive novel shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2020, Natalie Haynes produces a bold reading of the women featured in Greek mythology, who have “always been relegated to the edges of the story.” Until now…

A Thousand Ships presents a narrative with a feminist twist on the myths surrounding the Trojan War. Haynes brings to life a series of fierce accounts told by the women affected by the war’s bloodshed and betrayals. Although some might claim that these figures are not forgotten, in original sources such as The Iliad, The Odyssey, and Heroides, they are only briefly mentioned and tend to function as possessions subjected to the abuses of men. From these mythological origins, Haynes assembles her own emotional masterpiece packed with elegant language which can be implied through her descriptions of grief and love. For instance, when Amazonian queen Penthesilea shoots and kills her sister, Hippolyta with a bow and arrow in a tragic accident, she vows to avenge her by surrendering herself to death. Having lost the one person who was “dearer to her than life itself,” Penthesilea proudly leads her own army of women, her “bright jewels of the mountainous north” into battle to defend Troy. Haynes not only dismantles the rules of heroic traditions evident in Homer’s epic the Iliad, such as the value of glory for men who fought on the battlefield, she also provides perspective on behalf of the women who were motivated by their love for friends and family.

In The Odyssey, Homer portrays Odysseus as a brave leader with good judgement, whereas Haynes challenges the validity of this notion by insinuating how incapable Odysseus is of returning home in one piece to his family, especially when some of his own men return to their former lives. Odysseus’ lack of progress and attempts at warding off any unwanted distractions prove to be a comical failure in Penelope's letters, as Haynes incorporates sarcastic humour throughout her novel. Years after his departure, Penelope who is riddled with frustration by her husband’s impulsive need to seize opportunities and endanger himself in the process writes:

“They say that Circe, your witch friend, told you the consultation was necessary. I suppose I should be grateful that she only persuaded you to sail to the end of the world to do her bidding. Some women really will do anything to avoid returning a husband to his wife. But honestly, Odysseus, did you believe this journey was necessary?”

Penelope now mocks Odysseus’ irrational decisions as he roams around like a restless child, always looking for the first sign of trouble. While he is waylaid by storms, detained by a giant one-eyed Cyclops, and led astray by a charming sorceress, Odysseus barely considers those he has disowned, and purposefully bides his time so to speak in relentless pursuit of opportune moments to prove his worth. Just as men strive to gain greatness, so too do they get side-tracked in their endeavours, and Haynes summons her readers to consider more openly the ways in which women like Penelope could survive without their lovers.

Haynes ranges well beyond the male-centric scope of The Iliad, as well, to highlight how there is more to being a hero than creating war and causing conflict to solve issues. Oenone, Paris’ wife, is abandoned after he pursues Menelaus’ wife, Helen of Troy, “the face that launched a thousand ships”—from which the novel draws its title. Helen’s beauty is believed to be what drove Paris and Menelaus to fight for her affections in the war after she embarks on a scandalous affair. Evident in Ovid’s Heroides, Paris writes to Helen “No woman of beauty is like you,” which points out how his love for her will “attempt to conquer any obstacle” in his way. A betrayed Oenone is thus left to raise their son on her own. Menelaus, on the other hand, despite his efforts to retrieve his wife loses Helen to Paris and all hell breaks loose. As a result, Menelaus recklessly decides to rally his troops to “bring her back to him, costing countless lives and creating countless widows, orphans and slaves.” While Oenone resents Paris who she swore loved her and their son and holds him accountable for the grief he has inflicted, she spares herself from giving him the satisfaction that he has won. Instead, he lies wounded and begging before her. Both Oenone and Menelaus are victims of their partner’s deception. Yet while Menelaus resorts to selfish drastic measures to claim back his wife, Oenone, directs her pain in a more rational manner. Instead, she selflessly accepts her responsibility to be the best mother she can be for her child and renounces the defining characteristics of what heroism was believed to be, simply by surviving without the man she once loved by her side.

Haynes refers to The Iliad in the afterword to A Thousand Ships, as quite rightly “one of the great foundational texts on wars and warriors, men and masculinity.” However, unlike Homer who fails to acknowledge the valuable contribution women made, Haynes conveys how heroism is something that everyone regardless of gender can exhibit through various forms other than fighting between men alone. I thoroughly admired how Haynes reconstructs the tale of the Trojan war through an assortment of female characters, including those more minor women who have always been side-lined in relation to its male-centric history.

In conjunction with The Iliad, Ovid’s Heroides plays an essential role in Haynes’ novel through the device of letters inspired by the heroines of Greek mythology, “in address to their heroic lovers who have in some way mistreated, neglected, or abandoned them.” Penelope writes to her husband Odysseus who was obliged to join the Trojan voyage and help return Helen of Troy back to Menelaus. However, what she did not realise was how long he would be away for, that he would miss his son growing up, or that she could risk losing him altogether on his travels to another woman. During those twenty years, Penelope, similarly to Oenone, is left to raise their child singlehandedly, and anxiously awaits the return of Odysseus. Yet unlike Oenone, Penelope knew that Odysseus still loved her and always intended to return to where his duties lay as a father and as a King to his people on the Island of Ithaca.

Due to not being as familiar with Greek mythology as others may be, I was fully expecting A Thousand Ships to be a somewhat challenging reading experience. As such, I found Haynes’s brief List of Characters before the beginning of the book to be a very helpful introduction for guided reference, in that it encouraged me to seek out who they are and how they all relate. The further I read, the more I understood how these courageous women dominate the novel and how Haynes passionately reimagines them throughout their personal journeys of resilience. It becomes more apparent amid the harrowing repercussions of armed conflict that the “casualties of war aren't just the ones who die,” but the ones who, by further extension, fight for survival amid the war’s trials and tribulations. These include the Trojan women who are captured and become exposed to the sexual desires of Greek men, Briseis who mourns the loss of her slaughtered relatives, and young, selfless mothers like Oenone and Penelope who are cast aside by their ignorant husbands. Each woman has in turn “waited long enough” to be heard, and Haynes grants them all the honourable voice that they deserve in their stories. Given the compact size of the novel, which is just short of 350 pages, Haynes does a commendable job at displaying a diverse range of heroines who were involved in one of the most notorious events ever recounted in Greek mythology.

Human Beings Are Inherently Ridiculous: A Review of Milan Kundera's The Farewell Waltz

People who know me might find it a little hard to believe that I’ve never read any of Milan Kundera’s fiction. Heck, I even find it a little hard to believe myself. I read a lot, and I should have read Kundera by now. However, I haven’t. I am a bit late to the party, or rather, to The Farewell Party (sometimes translated as The Farewell Waltz, which is not the title on my copy and would ruin the attempt at wit in this sentence).

The Farewell Waltz/Party centers around a beautiful nurse, Ruzena, who has been impregnated by a married jazz musician at a fertility clinic. Ruzena sees the baby as a way out of the banality of her life. However, the jazz musician, being of another opinion, sees it as a yoke that will end his life.

Of course, before you get too set in views that could be easily taken, I should tell you that the nurse may actually have been impregnated by a young mechanic that she can’t stand. In fact, after deciding that she will not give up her baby, the following scene occurs with her and the young mechanic:

The young man grasped her hand. “Don’t go yet!”
Ruzena turned her eyes toward the ceiling in desperation.
The young man said: “Everything would be different if we got married. Your father couldn’t stop us. We’d have a family.”
“I don’t want a family,” Ruzena said sharply. “I’d kill myself before I’d have a baby!”

Also, there are a great deal more people involved in The Farewell Party than just Ruzena, her jazz musician, and her mechanic.  We also have a benevolent fertility doctor who has been injecting women with his own sperm to combat ugliness in the population, a formerly imprisoned dissident who holds himself above everyone else but really is just as bad, a saintly but somewhat foolish rich American, and a number of other strange beings.

For me, this is the real magic of Kundera’s writing. Kundera writes a number of intricate characters that are all extremely interconnected in a very short space. But, that alone would not be as impressive if it was not for how these intricacies and interactions come off. Really, everyone ends up looking pretty idiotic.

After all, all human beings are inherently ridiculous. It is only when we are full of our own self-importance that we don’t see that. However, at the same time, our follies are an extremely serious thing. I mean, what else do we have? Kundera seems to recognize this in The Farewell Party. All the characters are ridiculous in some way or another, but Kundera treats them simultaneously (or sometimes alternatingly) as foolish and serious. They are flawed, but so is everyone else. Stretching out over all of this is a constant sense of tenderness that Kundera seems to feel for his characters, through all flaws and virtues.

Perhaps it was just a moment of weakness on the part of the Lord when He permitted Noah to save himself in the ark, thus allowing the human story to continue. Can we be certain that God never regretted this moment of weakness? But whether He repented or not, it was too late. God cannot make Himself ridiculous by continually reversing His decisions. Perhaps it was God Himself who planted the idea in Herod’s mind? Can we rule out such a possibility?”

Bartleff shrugged his shoulders and remained silent.

Herod was a king. He was not responsible merely for himself. He couldn’t very well tell himself, as I do: Let others do as they please, I refuse to propagate the race. Herod was a king and knew that it was up to him to make decisions not only for himself, but for many others, and he decided on behalf of all mankind that man would cease repeating himself. This was how the Massacre of the Innocents came about. Herod was not led by the base motives ascribed to him traditionally. Herod was animated by the noblest longing to liberate the world from the clutches of mankind.”

I rather like your interpretation of Herod,” said Bartleff. “In fact, I like it so much that from now on I will think of the Massacre of the Innocents the same way as you do. But don’t forget that at the very time Herod decided to do away with mankind, a little boy was born in Bethlehem who eluded his knife. And this boy grew up and told people that only one thing was needed to make life worthwhile: to love one another. Perhaps Herod was better educated and more experienced. Jesus was actually a young man, and probably knew little about life. Maybe all his teaching can be explained by his youth and inexperience. His naïveté, if you like. And yet he was right.

I admit, I’m a sucker for this kind of take on humanity. Kundera presents it so well: tight yet effortless sentences, a story that manages to focus on an entire crew of characters at once, and sadness mixed with laughter mixed with hope mixed with fatality.

There is really nothing else to say about The Farewell Waltz/Party other than I was very impressed and should have read it years ago. If this book is representative of Kundera’s work, then I need to spend a lot more time with him. I think that conveys my reading experience better than anything else I could say.

Nothing Is Revealed that Won't Be Important Later: On Francine Prose's Blue Angel

I bought my copy of Blue Angel by Francine Prose for a few thin reasons. First, I was tickled that someone who wrote fiction would have such a fortunate last name. Second, the cover intrigued me: a black-and-white photo of a student and teacher, focused on their studies except for the fact that the student holds up the back of her skirt. I probably read the first few paragraphs, too, and noticed the accolades on the cover, but mostly I remember the image. I was nineteen years old and had decided that I most certainly would judge books by their covers. I spent about six months browsing the shelves at Barnes and Noble, purchasing books based on cover design.

This is not to say that I knew anything about graphic design. It means I was (and probably still am) susceptible to certain cues. I tended toward images of young girls: a pair of scraped-up knees and the hem of a skirt, a freckled face with red lips and a cigarette, skinny shins sprouting from sneakers. Analyze this how you will, but it led me to stories about girls around my age, almost all of which helped me wrap my head around my own life.

I didn’t go straight to a four-year university despite the fact that my grades and test scores could have gotten me in most anywhere. I had spent half my high school career involved in the theater department at a local community college, and when I graduated, I didn’t want to leave. I enrolled full-time, paying my own way with the token scholarships I’d received from Kiwanis, etc, and lived at home. For the first year, I was almost sublimely happy with the situation. I’d helped a friend move into her dorm at UCSD and the experience terrified me; I was much more comfortable in classes full of adults and running-start high-schoolers than I would have been in a pool of my so-called peers.

But as happy as I was at the beginning, when my first two years of school ended, I was more than ready to move on. I was not only done with my general education courses; I was done with the theater as well. I wanted something more permanent, without the constant cycle of auditions, something that wouldn’t change from night to night and then disappear altogether. I began to write stories: dark, terrible things in which girls like me performed melodramatic acts (I was socially stunted and nineteen, after all). I had been writing — mostly fiction — off and on since I learned my letters, but now I saw my work differently. This was art. Maybe it was bad art, but I could learn how to make it good art. I had to read more good books and find out what good art was, but aside from the classics, I didn’t know where to look. So I went to the bookstore and judged books by their covers. Thus I found Blue Angel.

It starts in a creative writing classroom, in the mind of Professor Swenson as the students get settled before class begins. Perhaps Swenson’s judgments of his students and their work should have scared me off a course of study in creative writing, rather than piquing my interest. Of course, the presence of Angela Argo, the deeply troubled and talented antagonist, provided proof that not all fiction students are judged harshly. Angela’s talents provide Swenson with all the attraction he needs to become entangled in this unlikely student/teacher affair. Her novel within the novel provides Swenson a happy diversion: from his teaching duties, his writing, his own family. He pours his enthusiasm into Angela’s writing, and though he surprises himself by doing so, into Angela herself, until he is trapped. While he’s thinking about love and art, she’s thinking about publication. She exploits Swenson’s connections, his personal life, and the political climate of the school — ruffled by a sexual harassment case at a nearby college — to get what she wants and come out looking like a victim.

We spend the whole novel inside Swenson’s head, so it seems possible that all this plotting is in his imagination. Except Blue Angel is one of the most carefully plotted and foreshadowed books I’ve ever read. It’s as tense as a thriller, but with stakes that feel supremely real. From the opening paragraph, nothing is revealed that won’t be important later, a fact that made this a perfect transition from plays to novels. Prose adheres to Checkov’s rule, “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired.”

My connection with Blue Angel will always be more than the combination of words and characters and a story. It kicked me in the pants and sent me stumbling toward creative writing, a path down which I would eventually find myself, quite unwittingly, the student of a man who had been taught by Francine Prose. I’ve since had a lot of guidance in my reading, but hundreds of books later — a few of which also deal with academia and the student/teacher affair — I’m still impressed by Blue Angel’s style, its characters, and its tight construction. It’s the first book I ever read that combined engaging plot with sharp writing: a combination that still feels rare

More Than Anything, This Searing Collection Offers Us Hope: On Barb Johnson's More of This World or Maybe Another

Barb Johnson, author of More of This World or Maybe Another, worked as a carpenter for more than twenty years in New Orleans. I suspect Barb Johnson was a fine carpenter and built great things. She certainly created nine exceptional stories in this debut short story collection.

More of this World or Maybe Another traces the lives of several unlikely friends and loves living amidst the poverty, violence, and marginalization of New Orleans’s underclass. Through these excellent stories, Johnson offers us a welcome window into a place and people that are all too often overlooked and devalued.

Johnson has a great talent for titles, and the stories behind them consistently live up to their promises. Throughout this collection, Johnson displays an enormous gift for storytelling, characterization, and fresh, evocative language. More, the tenacity and individuality of the collection’s heroine, Delia Delahoussaye, jump out even in the opening lines:

“Delia has to walk past A.J. Higginbotham and his crowd to get to the gym, which is where the dance is. The boys are installed on the railing under the long breezeway like they’re at a livestock auction, cans of Skoal wearing their way through back pockets. Delia raises her right hand and shoots the bird at the line-up for the entire fifty-foot walk.”

By the end of this gripping title story, I was inside the page, urging Delia to “Do it. Now. Now.”

The collection’s second story “Keeping Her Difficult Balance” further reveals Delia’s torment: vacillating between how she is expected to behave (get married and settled) and what she knows to be true (her homosexuality and need for emancipation). Johnson draws her characters with enormous honesty and compassion, and even as I cheered for Delia and Maggie in this story, I also felt great sympathy for Delia’s fiancé, Calvin — further testimony to Johnson’s lavish skill.

By the end of the next three stories, “If the Holy Spirit Comes for You,” “Issue Is,” and “Titty Baby” I felt a growing tightness in my chest and heightened pain in my throat, similar to the sensations that come from swallowing a too large lump of ice-cream. My discomfort, alas, from far less innocuous causes. Rarely before have I felt such an overwhelming ache to reach inside the pages of a book and comfort characters. Yet that’s just how I felt for Dooley and Reet, Delia and Maggie, and Pudge and Belinda respectively.

As I read on, my emotions continued to take a beating as mastery and truth resonated from these pages (from “The Invitation”):

“I hand Luis the old valentine, proof of some bygone love. ‘Bring this to your Mama,’ I tell him. ‘Girls like to know they’re wanted. Even big girls. Especially big girls.’”

Even the one story that I found least powerful, “Killer Heart” (where Dooley leaves his baby daughter, Gracie, inside his car in searing temperatures), has stayed with me. Indeed, I found that I missed Delia when she was absent or played a small role in a story. Perhaps because I am so connected with her from the outset. It may well be a drawback in interconnected short story collections to unevenly represent recurring characters, particularly the hero or heroine. Regardless, this collection is stellar.

The collection closes with “St. Luis of Palmyra,” and ends as it began with a young protagonist, this time Luis, struggling to break free of shackles. However, this is a much darker, more violent and disturbing tale than the opening story. As this final story unfolds, we again witness great suffering and savage cruelties, and how even the oppressed will in turn oppress. Yet this story, like the rest of this collection, is also about transcendence, redemption, and ultimately a belief in the human spirit. More than anything, this searing collection offers us hope, however slim the crack of light.

This Is the Book For All of Us Ready to Confront Our Own Complacency: Kate Zambreno's Green Girl

If you follow other blogs and websites about independent literature and publishing, you may have seen Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl cropping up on a number of lists as one of the best books of 2011. And for good reason — Green Girl is without question one of this past year’s fiercest texts.

In 2007, when I completed my undergraduate major in Women’s and Gender Studies, I had a certain idea about what it meant to work as an artist in service to feminist and social justice movements. As a fiction writer, I felt like it was my responsibility to restore complex, three-dimensional subjectivity to marginalized and “othered” groups, that is, to use the tools of traditional, character-driven storytelling (whether realist or fabulated) to elevate voices that are often silenced and to dispel stereotypes. But after engaging with an array of transgressive and outsider artists past and present, and in the process developing my own vain and at times abrasive queer aesthetics, I have discovered there are other modes and practices that appeal more to my sensibilities. One of these is to write into, rather than counter to abjection, objectification, and stigma.

This is terrain in which Kate Zambreno excels. Her debut O Fallen Angel (which was actually written after Green Girl) was a cartoon grotesquerie, with deliberately performative, confrontational, and one-dimensional characterizations that shined a garish spotlight on American militarism, patriarchy, and conformist consumerism. Green Girl is perhaps more concerned with subjectivity, experience, and emotionality, but a subjectivity that is “shallow,” or is made shallow (by patriarchy, “the culture,” etc). Her protagonist Ruth fashions her identity after “superficial” consumer fashion objects and images from French New Wave cinema. A young American woman living and working abroad in London, Ruth is everything your most narrow-minded creative writing workshop classmates told you wouldn’t work. Rather than initiating her own dramatic arc, she is passive and reactive. Rather than having a clear objective, she is never clear what she wants, nor is it fully clear to the reader. She welcomes our gaze, then shuns it. She is the young girl as described by the poet Kate Durbin: “She is begging to be loved; she is grossed out by your attention.”

Zambreno presents us with a girl subject whose lived experiences of depression and alienation many of us would prefer to avoid. In her blurb for the book, Durbin says Zambreno implicates “Ruth’s vacancy as our own.” But so too does she implicate us as possessors of the gaze, or as those with the power to pull the young girl’s strings: Green Girl is brilliantly narrated by a maternal figure who is alternately sadistic and nurturing; this narrator self-consciously pokes and prods Ruth to see whether there is any “there” there, then holds Ruth together to prevent her from cracking.

Author Lidia Yuknavitch says Zambreno’s language creates its own “poetics of desire.” Nowhere is this more evident than in her rendering of Ruth’s job in retail, hawking a celebrity fragrance that is itself cleverly named “Desire.” “Would you like to sample desire?” is Ruth’s futile chorus to disinterested passersby, and her failure to move product becomes her failure as an object of desire.

More than anything else I’ve ever read, Zambreno’s prose captures, in a visceral way, how retail invades the bodies and psyches of its workers. And of course retail is not just retail. Retail is capitalism, patriarchy, misogyny, adultism, stigmatization of mental illness, and perhaps most importantly, lest I make this to macro and silence her yet again, retail is the context in which we as readers encounter a particular type of abject girl subject, in which we encounter Ruth. As an artist, Kate Zambreno is profoundly non-complacent, and this is the book for all of us ready to confront our own complacency.  This is a vital book, a necessary book, a book I will long treasure.

i've been lonely my entire life

i can write about my depression. i do it without a second thought. i do it because my disease even has a fancy medical term — dysthymia — and my disease requires medical treatment. it’s beyond my control, you see. more than that, decades of research and countless papers and medical journal articles have documented effects and treatment of depression [even, to some degree, the cause].

loneliness, on the other hand, doesn’t get that much. it’s regarded as an individual problem — that is, the individual is expected to heal his own loneliness. and let’s not get into the social stigma of loneliness.

on second thought, let’s.

from Lonely:

“So much ink has been spilled about the need to not judge the depressed or socially anxious person, and to not see emotional problems as indexes of flawed characters, that many people don’t notice that these misconceptions — mood as character flaw, the sufferer as somehow off — are still alive and well when it comes to loneliness. Loneliness is still judged harshly in our society, and it’s the trick of balancing this judgment against their own experience that lonely people have to confront at every turn. The lonely, in other words, have to do battle not just with their state, but with the very loud and widely communicated sense that there’s something wrong with them for feeling it in the first place.”

*

i’ve been lonely my entire life. my secret shame — easier to admit than depression and bisexuality and infidelity: my life is, if nothing else, [un]charmed.

few people understand this, or can comprehend what i mean when i say such a thing as “i’ve been lonely my entire life.” many people dismiss it as the histrionic rant of an anti-social man; i don’t blame them since, to this point, i’ve done a poor job of explaining the loneliness. or what it means for me. or for you, the reader who tries to connect with me. for you, my lover. for you, my parents and siblings. for you, humanity.

loneliness, on the surface, is a social malady. humans are social creatures — we need each other as much as we need sex and food and water and oxygen and sex. something goes awry and haywire in us when we’re disconnected from other humans — when we can’t connect.

connection is achieved through intimacy. and what is “intimacy” but the energy between me, you, and trust?

i trust few people. i find it hard to trust people. i can’t explain why. i haven’t experienced childhood trauma which would prevent me from trusting people. well, no trauma i can actively remember. anyway, without trust, there is no intimacy. no intimacy? no connection. i’ve been lonely my whole life.

alone in my marriage[s].

alone in college.

alone in love.

alone in artistic collectives.

alone while surrounded by friends and family.

and i said something to the effect of, “something goes awry or haywire — when we can’t connect.”

i don’t think much of myself. i don’t deserve love. i don’t deserve happiness. i feel lonely because i’m unworthy of other people, of connection, so there is always space between you and i — the space which should be filled with intimacy.

those are my thoughts when i’m lonely — like right now, two days before Christmas.

but i fight on. i look for answers. and my lover said, “read Lonely. . . . it helped me” and i reached for the book because i believe in lovers and literature. i’ll believe in anything, short of religion [buddhism excluded], to end this loneliness which, as i read and finished White’s memoir, i understood as a lifelong battle, like depression and accepting my bisexuality and infidelity. so goes the [un]charmed life.

Lonely told me i’m not so alone. in White’s personal story, alongside interviews conducted with other lonely people, i found kinship and, in a sense, comprehension: through her, i discovered a clearer understanding of my loneliness. White’s narrative threaded her childhood and adolsence, her college years and her previous life as a lawyer: through it all, she felt “stalked” by loneliness, as though it were a shadowy monster preparing to end her life or, at least, shade it in darkness.

that’s my life.

“’Emotional loneliness deals with the more intimate difficulties one may have,’ says Enrico DiTommaso, a psychologist at the University of New Brunswick. . . . ‘for example, with your family or romantic partner. And that’s a different kind of loneliness from the loneliness you may have in regard to your network of friends. Emotional loneliness means your emotions are internalized, and you keep them to yourself. You don’t engage in sharing those emotions with others, and they don’t share with you.’

“[. . .] While [Dr.] Weiss is now saying that some people can find companionship in intimacy, it’s still the case that most people who lack a specific tie will, at one point or another, feel socially or emotionally isolated. If they try to mend their isolation by substituting a friend for a lover, or a lover for a friend, the loneliness will persist.”

the loneliness will persist.

the loneliness will persist.

the loneliness will persist.

*

loneliness explains my presence on the Internet: my literary magazine, the collective i’ve formed, my twitter timeline. here’s where i disagree with White:

“To state the obvious: you can’t cry on a digital shoulder, you can’t hold a digital hand, you can’t take comfort in a presence that isn’t actually there. As humans, we’re hardwired to seek out a sense of togetherness and community, and it’s unlikely that Internet communications can satisfy this need.”

sometimes, people need to know that someone cares, that someone is listening to them. words have power. emails from people including Ashley Bethard and Alana Voth have, at times, saved me. i never met these women. i never cried on their shoulders or held their hands, but i found comfort.

and since White would acknowledge that forming friendships — the actual, tangible steps required to form friendships — is an unknown, unsolved equation for us all [because sitting in a coffee shop or attending a literary conference doesn’t mean strangers will clasp hands and skip away happy and beaming with friendship], sometimes we take comfort when we can get it.

that aside, Emily White successfully merged the memoir with social and pop culture analysis, medical research, and interviews. the result: Lonely is a damn good book. it’s an important book to tackle and possibly approach loneliness as a disease. and look, real talk for a moment: sooner or later, we all experience loneliness.

the next time you’re at home, alone, beating yourself up because you have no social life and people — if they knew this about you — would laugh and laugh at your loneliness, you might want to read Lonely and understand two things: you’re not alone in your loneliness and there’s no reason to be ashamed.

and find me on Twitter if you need to talk.

Blake Butler On Reading

“Reading is eating. There are corndogs and there is cereal and there is lettuce. It's fun to get a lot of weird shit up in your waddle. You get really hungry sometimes, and other times you want to go for a good big walk. I like exercising on a stationary bike or running on a treadmill while I read because it's like becoming and unbecoming the fat boy at once, which pushes out inside doubly. Sometimes I drive my car and read. I drive better because of it. I want everything inside me. I want to see a dog squatting over America. Books have butts. They have legs and arms and money. Some will help you to the bed. Guns are in books sometimes and sometimes, less often, Hostess products appear. My mom taught me to want to read by showing me a big bag I was not allowed to look in. I took one book out at a time. I am a pig child and so I ate it and I ate the words and I got XL. I had to wear the shirts that looked like teepees. Thanks, books.”