Schooooool's out, for summer! So here are 3 beach reads 🏖️

Also: the Barbie film, a slew of YA content, the bum-out new beauty trend + a doc to make you weep

I loathe the term ‘beach reads’ - books are not seasonal! - and yet I have a compulsive urge to employ it. But maybe it’s just me that doesn’t change their reading habits with their swimwear. Perhaps some of you do gravitate towards certain books in sunnier climes. Or perhaps the term is merely reflective of the fact that you read more when you’re on holiday. (Debatable with little kids, but I do find I read more in the evenings specifically, as I don’t have any bills to sift through and with an almost 4 month old on the cusp of teething, getting hooned rn is sadly not an option.)

On that note, this will be the last free edish of Books+Bits until September. The newsletter is having its first break! My kids have just broken up for the long summer holidays and I’ve realised my post-partum brain is really craving a rest. Paid subs don’t worry: The List, Shelf Request and a bunch of Book Thoughts will go out as normal over the next 6/7 weeks - regularity depends on the aforementioned teething. But for the freesies - I’ll see you in September.

Now onto 3 recent books I loved, that you might want to read on a sun lounger but also… on a sofa.

an accidentally and satisfyingly tonal book trio

Bellies by Nicola Dinan First things first, I love the title of this book. Its origin is quite sentimental:

“What are you doing” I asked.

“You can hear everything”, he said. “Not in a gross way, but it’s soothing. I used to lie on my mother’s stomach when I was younger. Try it.”

He lifted his head and sat up. I placed my ear on his abdomen and listened to the low gurgles under his skin. The system beneath it seemed larger and more powerful than the belly of a boy… It was a dark and endless canyon. The deep deep sea, outer outer space.”

That’s Ming - a spry, sarky playwright from Kuala Lumpar - talking to new lover Tom - gentle, handsome, an inveterate people pleaser - after they meet at a drag night at their student union. Bellies begins as a love story between them but blooms into a multi-layered narrative about identity and ambition after they leave university and Ming transitions into a woman.

Bellies really benefits from being a dual narrative, allowing the reader to see their evolving relationship - with both each other and their own selves - from different perspectives. Ming’s transition is the initially more central one, but there’s also a revelation of sorts for Tom, who takes a job in the city that he hates because it feels less painful than to confront what he really wants. And while Ming prevails in her new life, Tom gets left behind. “It’s important to me, especially with Ming who is at times a very difficult person and operates quite selfishly, that trans people should have the freedom to be pieces of shit too” said Dinan, in a recent interview.

This is a lovely debut; eager, youthful, authentic and with an optimistic heart beat even in its darkest moments. The friendships around Ming and Tom are also really core to the book. It’s being turned into a TV show by the people who made Normal People and I think it’s going to work so damn well on screen.

A Life Of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again by Joanna Biggs I am loving this book. I’m reading it quite slowly, which really suits the subject matter, as it’s all about finding a new place in the world - creatively and socially. It’s written by an editor, Joanna Biggs, about her decision to leave her long-term relationship (and its potential for children) and it’s a mixture of memoir, literary criticism and biography.

Biggs is definitely an intellectual: whilst many of us would turn to Dominos and Netflix in the wake of a break-up, Biggs turns to the life and work of Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison and Elena Ferrante amongst others; and whilst I recently struggled to read To The Lighthouse by Woolf (soon abandoning it), Biggs think it is necessary that it somewhat turgid, because why should complicated thoughts about the world be easy to digest? (You may note that the title is a pun on Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own).

The work these women produced was undeniably epoch-defining, but I found myself most interested in their lives (while knowing that they would rather I was more interested in their work) particularly the knottier parts: the unpalatable habit de Beauvoir and Sartre had of passing teenage lovers back and forth; Ted Hughes’ callous abandonment of Sylvia Plath and their two tiny children (heartbreakingly she was just 30, when she took her own life); that Virginia Woolf bought a printing press (which went on to publish some of the most famous books of her time) so that she might have a hobby, having being prescribed the “rest cure” for madness.

Most of all, unlike Doris Lessing (and I clearly have a vested interest in this) I love that Toni Morrison did not see mothering and writing as incompatible.

“One doesn’t have to make a choice between whether to dance or to cook - do both. And if we can’t do it, then it can’t be done!” - Toni Morrison

The common thread throughout so many of their lives - Plath, Wollstonecraft, de Beauvoir - is that they had suicidal ideations. It feels undeniable - and brings me great sadness - that their mental health is directly connected to the respect were given and the physical space they were allowed to take up, in order to write their work. Woolf’s greatest work was written when she was in love with Vita Sackville-West (with the knowledge and blessing of her husband, Leonard - theirs was a “partnership of minds” rather than a romantic one.) I have so much more I could write on this book…. go read it.

Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan The second book from the hugely talented Irish writer Megan Nolan (the Daily Telegraph described her as, “the millennial author everyone should be watching right now”), Ordinary Human Failings appears at first a rather different fare to Acts of Desperation - about a toxic relationship between two young people - but it actually explores many of the same ideas, about the many ways in which people will debase themselves when they are desperate (for love, for sex, for money, for notoriety) even when they know they are being manipulated.

Tom Hargreaves is a thirsty young tabloid reporter looking for his career-defining scoop, in the early 90s. He lands on the murder of a toddler girl on a notorious council estate, supposedly murdered by a 10-year-old girl, from an equally notorious Irish immigrant family. Determined to get to the bottom of the ‘story’, he fosters an intimacy with the accused’s family, putting them up in a hotel, plying the known alcoholic brother with booze, flirting with the beautiful, broken mother of the accused, Carmel.

It’s a fierce book about fierce people (her writing reminds me of Elaine Castillo at times in its muscularity) who more often endure life they do enjoy it. It’s also about the monstrous: are monsters born, or made?

Particularly brilliant were the parts about duty and motherhood - Carmel’s mother sacrificed her life for her (moving her family from Ireland to London when Carmel became pregnant as a teenager); is Carmel now to sacrifice her own life, for her accused ‘monstrous’ daughter, Lucy? It also touches on very topical themes of a woman’s right to choose and the passages on Carmel’s failed attempts to end her pregnancy are so evocative and heart-breaking. They should be sent to pro-lifers as an example of what happens when young women are forced to have babies they neither want, nor are able, to care for.

Another equally topical notion is that of the hungry, morally moribund tabloid hack, willing to do anything to get a story. In the wake of the ‘BBC scandal’ - and the idea of what a tabloid can and can’t report; and the due diligence they should do - this feels all too relevant. Here’s a queasily brilliant description of Tom:

“He had a tension headache from the posted expression of benevolent worry he had maintained for those hours, eyebrows drawn in in quizzical bafflement that such terrible things could be happening to such wonderful people, mouth scrunched up to the side into a little anus of concern… He gathered all the reserves he had of ambition and curiosity and incision and reminded himself that he was unusual to be so plentifully gifted with these things”.

In a recent piece for The Guardian, Nolan writes about how the book was inspired by a sexual crime had taken place on the estate that she grew up on, in Waterford. She didn’t find out about the crime until she was an adult, when “it made me feel dark about the area, about my origins”. The estate had felt safe when she grew up; now it felt tarnished and terrifying. But then her mother gentle took her aside. “She reminded me of what I had once known but had forgotten in the ensuing disturbance of learning about this crime, which was that the real characteristic feeling of Ballybeg was its powerful, defiant community.” Her second novel is a testament to this defiance.

---

BITS

Much viewing content

• I just got back from a cinema trip to see Barbie with three generations of my family. (I am afraid to say that I did not have the wherewithal to attempt a Barbenheimer.) I found it camp, clever, moving and ever so slightly too long. The feminist message is not subtle, but then neither is Barbieworld! (I genuinely felt like I was watching Don’t Worry Darling, at points.) I also loved how many Brits (and Sex Education alumni) there were in it. Post movie snacks: this New York Times podcast on whether Barbie can be re-cast as a feminist icon and this 2015 TIME piece on the origins of Barbie.

• Prepare to weep while watching Netflix’s new chart-topping doc, The Deepest Breath, about the world’s top freediver, Alessia Zecchini and her safety diver and boyfriend, Stephen Keenan. The film is stunningly and hauntingly shot - much of it compiled from original footage - and a not un-stressful viewing experience, as they dive down over 100 metres on a single breath. There is also - forewarned is forearmed - a tragedy in the doc. If you liked The Rescue, you will be absorbed by this.

• Speaking of streaming, I’m watching a lot of YA content at the moment and I can’t help but wonder: how old is too old? Because I think I might be cusping. After reading lots of press about the forthcoming 2nd series, I watched the mild but sweet Heartstopper on Netflix - based on Alice Osman’s stupendously successful books about two teenage boys falling in love; I think she’s sold an insane 6m of them so far - and I’m currently dabbling in the second series of The Summer I Turned Pretty on Amazon Prime about a girl in love with the son of her mum’s oldest friend.

• One YA show that always makes me lol is Never Have I Ever about a garrulous Indian-American teen named Devi looking to lose her viginity, created by Mindy Kaling, also on Netflix and - for mysterious reasons, which even he acknowledges as mysterious - is narrated by John McEnroe. All of the above are seriously feel good, with not a drug or fag in sight: think Sex Education rather than Euphoria.

• My meme of the week. Don’t sulk because your friends have not organised you a surprise shindig: Be More Carol and forcibly assign them the job!

• I imagine - for British readers, at least - that you’ve had your fill of ‘the BBC scandal’ but if you listen to one thing/ anything more on it, I really recommend this ep of Today In Focus, featuring the Guardian’s Media Editor, Jim Waterson, who is excellent on the media’s changing (cliff) face. In this episode, he explains The BBC’s long-running feud with The Sun (and Rupert Murdoch) and what responsible journalism vs. irresponsible journalism (“the battering ram of journalism [used] as a way to take down certain people”) looks like.

• I don’t often buy The Economist, but I picked it up last week as their cover story on the fertility industry caught my attention. It’s a relatively short but eye-opening read on “IVF tourism” - in low-income countries, just one cycle of IVF costs 50-200% of people’s average annual income. And in a “just world” says one endocrinologist, 10% of babies would be born through IVF (currently its under 1%.)

illo by Diana Ejaita

• It’s been so long since I thought of Katherine Heigl as “a famously rude actress” that I can’t remember a time when I didn’t. This video popped up in my feed last week - it’s her on a talk show, I’m not sure when, and it is both humbling and infuriating, as I realise that she was only considered rude because she was establishing boundaries in the early 00s, aka the most woman-hatey time in showbiz. She would not be considered rude now! Time to revise her status.

• A bummer of a piece but riveting nonetheless: Hannah Marriott on the ‘snatched jawline’. Forget buccal fat removal, now it’s all about snatchy jaws. Routes to an ice-sharp jawline include: a chewable ball called Jawzrsize, Rockjaw’s “mastic chewing gum”, which give your facial muscles a work out (but careful not to dislocate your jaw!) and a TikTok trend called ‘mewing’ which involves plastering your tongue to the roof of your mouth to make your face look thinner. My god, where will this end.

no

• If you’re looking for a podcast to accompany your travels, I recommend the back catalogue of The Rewatchables. It’s a movie podcast by pop-culture website The Ringer (its most regular host is Bill Simmons, who created and sold The Ringer to Spotify for $200m and is best known over here for calling Meghan and Harry grifters) and it’s one of my husband’s faves. My fave eps are the ones on The Devil Wears Prada, Top Gun and Mean Girls (fun fact: Lindsay Lohan was meant to play the role of Regina George but worried that playing a “mean girl” would hurt her reputation.) The hosts are well-informed but wear their bottomless pop trivia knowledge lightly. Happy holidays!