Your summer reading list, part 3

On running away, cam work and loving a murderer

Discovering, reading, listening, thinking about:

• The term hikikomori via Philippa Perry, a Japanese term for young men who withdraw entirely from society. (You can read more about this social phenomenon here)

• Boop Beauty, The Outnet of the beauty world, which sells heavily discounted (up to 70% off) beauty products that would otherwise go to landfill due to old branding, damaged packaging, spelling mistakes, excess stock (rather than anything nefarious.) Genius

• Joel Golby’s bio from his new book, Four Stars, which might be my favourite bio of any book ever

  

• Manu Chao, whose music I was obsessed with during my teenage years. Such good music to tidy/ sort/ procrastinate to. If you’re wondering where Manu is now, here’s a… strange semi update

• Eva Wiseman on the schools debate: “I’m starting to feel, and I don’t think I’m alone, increasingly sick about the airtime given to concerns about the education and finances of Britain’s richest children and their families, when our state schools are at breaking point, and a far greater proportion of children are arriving at school hungry and exhausted in too-small shoes, their families scrabbling to simply survive.” Hear bloody hear

• I received a hilarious amount of DMs asking for the provenance of a silly cap I bought my husband. (They have a huge - somewhat variable - selection; I really want to meet the person who buys a cap that says MATCHA LATTE.) On the subject of caps, I bought myself this one from Idea Books, which is an excellent bookshop on Wardour St in Soho

  

• A sensational summer salad via Feldspar: 1kg tomatoes, 4 peaches, large hunk of Gorgonzola, scattering of rocket. Dressing (a sort of chermoula): 1 clove of garlic (not for the IBS girlies), small piece of ginger, paprika, 1/2 teaspoon toasted cumin and coriander seeds, 1 red chilli, 1 lemon zest and juice, virgin olive oil, white balsamic vinegar, parsley. YUM

• This interview by Dr. Phil (many thoughts on him after reading Crystal Hefner’s book) with OG IG tradwife, Estee Williams. I keep thinking I’ve had my fill of tradlife and then… down the content hole I fall once more

• A very vibey conversation between Jameela Jamil and Rylan Clarke for Clarke’s new pod How To Be In The Spotlight about eating disorders, tabloid shaming and navigating controversies (of which Jamil has had plenty). Jamil: “I’m the only person I know who would fuck myself down the industry.” Clarke: “Now, see, that’s where we are so different.” And on the Ozempic craze in the entertainment industry (which I am seeing everywhere right now! Even amongst my peers who were slim to begin with): “The [clothing] samples are Baby Gap sizes again. It feels like when I started 16 years ago”. One step forward… you know the rest.

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Women are going crazy for that book, my friend Eddie messaged me last week about Miranda July’s startling new work of autofiction, All Fours. (He’s not wrong.) It’s about a 45-year-old artist who sets off on a road trip from one coast of America to the other, only to spontaneously divert to a motel room just 30 minutes from her home, where she spends the next three weeks eating, dancing and masturbating, while having a passionate, unconsummated affair with a young dancer who washes her car.

I haven’t shacked up in a hotel room in Brighton (yet), but reading this filthy, peculiar and deeply profound book feels gloriously mind-expanding: a realisation that just because you’ve always done something one way (re: marriage and parenting specifically), doesn’t mean you can’t do it an entirely different way, providing no-one - least of all the child - gets hurt. Unsurprisingly, July herself - a kind of literary Cindy Sherman - describes writing the book - which in its broad strokes, I believe, mirrors her own life - as “an ecstatic free-fall”.

All Fours is about being a grown-up - “grit grit grit release”; marital sex - “sometimes I would hear Harris’s dick whistling like a teakettle”; postpartum trauma - “I suddenly missed my child with the incoherent, howling ache of the… NICU days”'; and peri-menopause, when our artist finds herself in something of a rumspringa, “a dangerous time, right before the window [of fertility] closes”. Put those all together and it’s a book about occupying your body and your mind, and the increasing desire, as you reach the mid point of your life, to be honestly and truly known.

“Harris doesn’t have a lot of conflicted feelings vis-à-vis the domestic sphere. I didn’t either until we had a baby. Harris and I were just two workaholics, fairly equal. Without a child I could dance across the sexism of my era, whereas becoming a mother shoved my face right down into it. A latent bias, internalised by both of us, suddenly leapt forth in parenthood.”

July’s narrator, who believes that you are either “mind rooted” or “body rooted”, is on a lusty quest to become more body rooted, believing that it’s the route to feeling connected with your psychic and sexual self. The problem, she then finds, is that after three transcendent weeks of body rooted freedom, she can no longer do the grit grit grit release of her home life.

One of the most moving lines in the book is when she comes home to her husband and child, who are tender and patient about her half-return to the domestic space, but nonetheless, confused.

“Every day, Harris and Sam extended their hands and said, Come in from the cold. But I could not come in.”

What followers is an elegant, probing, tender look at what a different kind of marriage might look like. Of what might happen if you don’t suppress your desires; if you don’t brush your rumspringa under the carpet. (Worth nothing that the artist’s friends, whom she canvasses at length in the latter third of the book, are notably more progressive/ open-hearted than I think most.)

The thing I loved most about All Fours is that even in its headiest moment, it moved and charmed. It is a deeply erotic book (with some fairly funky scenes) about a woman lying to her husband and child about her whereabouts for almost a month, but it isn’t dark or sleazy or cruel. It’s filled with optimism and curiosity. It feels like July has deliberately brought this murky shape-shifting thing in from the shadows (our egos? our shame?) to show how the light can still get through. That pathways to transparency exist in everything.

It’s so gorgeously written, the language isn’t remotely pretentious and yet it’s still unarguably a literary work. It’s transcendent, in fact, and I think the reason why women are going crazy for it, as Eddie put it, is because it’s a book that emboldens you. To read it, is to feel gloriously, unashamedly alive.

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I picked up Tasha Coryell’s debut, Love Letters To A Serial Killer (out 4 July) with a degree of trepidation. I don’t particularly like thrillers, I often find them cheesy - and the cover of this one is very splashy. But I was very quickly hooked and ended up reading the whole thing over the course of one long night.

Hannah is a thirty-something woman coasting herself out of her long-term, low-level office job, consumed with obsessions for men she has casually dated. Out of boredom and loneliness she begins writing to a rich, handsome lawyer named William, who is in jail awaiting trial for the murder of four women.

At first, Hannah’s motivation is fury - a fury that includes the men who have ghosted her and hurt her but also, in one of her many over-extensions, men who kill women - but soon, she finds herself emotionally involved. She feels so adrift and alone that she will fall for any men who shows an interest in her, even one accused of murdering women.

It’s a clever, provocative satire about the kind of women who fall for violent men. Loving a serial killer marks you out. It gives you an identity.

“I understood, suddenly, why the Manson girls were so willing to carve swastikas on their foreheads as markers of their love. They wanted to be recognised as a devoted follower, someone special, even if it meant being hated forever.”

In time, this even becomes part of William’s appeal. Does Hannah love him despite, or because of, his violence?

The book’s opening conceit is that we don’t know if Hannah is going to make it out of the book alive: it opens with her tied to a chair and the will he, won’t he, runs throughout the book, before leading to a satisfying, semi-surprising conclusion. It also sent me down a Carol Boone rabbit hole and even to Ted Bundy’s last ever televised interview in 1988, which I am not going to link to because it is absolutely chilling, but which you can easily find should you want to.

I was totally absorbed in the book but a lot of Hannah’s thoughts about the erotica of violence made me wince. She’s not a remotely likeable character, which I don’t think matters, I’m perfectly happy to read about abhorrent people, although I wonder if readers may struggle to find sympathy for her and therefore, invest in Coryell’s story. I’m interested to see how it is received. Perhaps that’s part of the satire.

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Lastly but so not leastly, an eccentric little gem of a book that cracked my heart wide open. Margo’s Got Money Troubles is a novel by Rufi Thorpe, about a 20-year old single mother with no money, who starts an OnlyFans account with the help of her former pro-wrestler, drug addicted father. Margo is a glorious heroine: resilient, spunky, generous - she spends little time thinking about the grim college professor who got her pregnant (she was never that into him anyway) and all her time thinking of her son, and how to provide a life for him, and how delicious snack foods are.

Cue endless hilarity as her father tries to help her succeed at cam work (not as seedy as it sounds but also still quite deliciously weird), thus transforming a relationship, built on the painful foundations of her being his secret daughter and him living with his other family for her entire childhood, into something more truthful and robust. There’s also a very selfish mother, with whom the conflict-averse Margo is forced to re-examine, through her own burgeoning motherhood.

Margo’s life is tough - it’s filled with people letting her down and fucking her over. College was her way out of the kind of life her parents had - and now she’s been impregnated by her fuckwit professor and forced to leave. And yet she remains, in her heart at least, determinedly free.

“I had been doxxed and lost both my mother and the client who made up a staggering proportion of my income, but I was also twenty years old, going seventy miles an hour on the freeway, hopped up on sugar and preserved meat.”

My favourite thing is the way Margo talks about her son. Bodhi is made of “pudding instead of bones”, he is “super chonky” with a “miniature Hitchcock vibe”.

“And Bodhi, Bodhi glowed gold, drinking and drinking the love that flowed out of my body, using it to make himself strong and happy, using it to grow, his cells doubling and redoubling, his bones assembling themselves with time-lapse speed like a miracle.”

It’s a gorgeous, life-affirming book and I was both entirely unsurprised and extremely excited to learn that the book is set to be adapted by Big Little Lies director David E. Kelley, Apple TV and A24, one of the best production companies out there, with Elle and Dakota Fanning and Nicole Kidman already signed on. I also can’t wait to watch Rufi Thorpe in conversation with Monica Heisey next week at Waterstones in London. I haven’t been to a book event that I haven’t worked at since before my baby was born, and I’m really looking forward to being audience side and just kicking back and enjoying the chat! If you’re free, come along. I know it’s going to be good.

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