Bits #35
otters pockets, misogyny slop + pods for High Low fans
A quickie today, as it’s my sister’s birthday and I must finish off her cake (a curious combination of red velvet topped with nerds) and my husband’s 40th on Sunday (properly grown up, terrifying). I’ve also lost the past 48 hours to this video, which I have been watching on a loop since my friend Sandra sent it to me. If you have ever seen me trying to make a reel, you will know how intensely seen I feel by this woman.
Above the paywall today: some beautiful personal writing on motherhood—both abandoned and current; otters pockets; and why it’s rare to find a Trump supporter writing literary fiction
Below the paywall today: misogyny slop; malnubesity; barebackers (steady); and a list of podcasts to try to if you miss The High Low. Because I have been asked this every week since I started this letter 2.5 years ago and I care about your ears and hearts <3
Maria Grazia Calandrone made international news in 1965 when she was found on a blanket in Rome’s Villa Borghese, aged 8 months. Fifty years later, and Calandrone, a poet who went on to be adopted by the director of the Italian Community Party and his wife, has written a memoir about her quest to find out who her mother was, and why she abandoned her. I learned about Calandrone and her book from Martha’s Monthly (one of my favourite places to read about books) who nods to this piece about Calandrone in The Guardian. It’s a story of poverty, misogyny and social violence in postwar Italy, as much as it is a story of maternal abandonment and it’s astonishing
I have been so moved by Bella Younger’s diary of parenting two babies, while her partner lies in a coma. How do marry hope with realism? How do you cultivate joy and onward motion for your children, when half of you is static—literally and emotionally—by their father’s bedside? Many of you will remember Younger as the wellness parody, Deliciously Stella, but it turns out the comedian is a deft and beautiful writer, too. It is one thing to write about painful things in retrospect; it is another skill entirely to be able to write about it as it’s happening—and without ego or self-pity. To any commissioning editors reading this letter: this is a book I would like to read
I knew that sea otters had pockets, but I didn’t know that it was a place to store their favourite stones. Sometimes, my sister told me, they keep the same stone in there for life 🥲. I would really like a pocket to keep my book in, so that I don’t have to carry it everywhere (and really, given that my nickname is Otter, I should have one) but I don’t think I could commit to the same book for life. Could you? And if so, what book would you keep in your fleshy bum bag?
The best thing I read this week was this interview on Electric Lit1 with writer Lee Cole, whose stone cold fox of a second novel Fulfillment I just finished (more on that next month). Cole, who is from Kentucky, explores why there are so few Trump-supporting writers in literary fiction, and I think it might be the most insightful thing I’ve read on the limitations of lit fic2:
“For lack of a better term, the MFA pipeline tends to deliver writers who are coming from coastal cities. They’ve gone to elite colleges. You’re more likely to have access to the resources to make you have a good writing sample if you’ve gone to an elite college.
I was lucky to have grandparents who were always buying me books and people who were reading to me and encouraging me to be creative, but I’m not sure that that’s always the case in the South. I know my parents and some of my family members, and I’m sure this is true of other families too, they don’t want their kids to go to these elite schools, they don’t want them to get too far away from home, because then they might get ideas that run counter to the Evangelical “values” that they were raised with.
It’s hard to say how much representation in literary fiction contributes to the broader cultural conversation at all, because not many people read literary fiction. I think it’s the same forces of exclusivity and people being maybe kept out of certain spaces that is causing resentment on some level, and that contributes to the divide. I don’t know exactly in the literary world how that’s contributing necessarily, except to say maybe that if somebody growing up in rural Kentucky is made to read a piece of literary fiction in school or they go to their library and they pick up a book that’s literary and they don’t see themselves in it, if they don’t see the kinds of landscapes that they recognize, or the kinds of people that they recognize, or the kinds of vernacular that they recognize, then they might be more likely to put it away and not be interested in it. It took me a long time, way after college, to find Kentucky writers, to find writers who I could read their stories or their novels and recognize myself in them, or recognize my family members in them.”