It seems there are quite a lot of you who are new here, thanks to last week’s post (if you’re here because of that, thank you!). So if you aren’t familiar, Tomato Girl Summer is where I rate movies about American girls in Italy, according to a set of self-devised criteria explained in this post on You, Me & Tuscany. I also posted about Netflix’s Love and Gelato here.

Tomato Girl Summer, as we have previously established, is not a new phenomenon. The social media-friendly aesthetic is, the name is, but the essence of Tomato Girl Summer — at least, the iteration of it that I’ve been engaging with in this series — has been around for about as long as there’s been an Italy. Which isn’t as long as some people think. But it’s still a while! For this installment of the series, I felt I had to revisit one of the OG Tomato Girl Summer movies1: David Lean’s Summertime (1955), starring Katharine Hepburn and Rossano Brazzi and based on the Arthur Laurents play The Time of the Cuckoo. I mainly am aware of this movie because my Italian grandma is obsessed with it, and with Rossano Brazzi generally. I think the movie should be talked about more than it is! Maybe not much more, though. Let’s get into it.

Writing

Katharine Hepburn’s character, a forty-something2, quippy, fast-moving secretary named Jane Hudson, travels to Venice at the end of a long-awaited European vacation, stays in a boardinghouse full of quirky Americans, and falls in love with shopkeeper Renato de Rossi, who’s captivated by her plucky American-ness. It’s a tale as old as time, but it was a lot less old in 1955. I’m willing to give Summertime at least partial credit for pioneering the Tomato Girl Summer genre!

The last time I watched this movie, I was not a legal adult, and I think that’s why I don’t remember it being actually funny! I especially got some chuckles out of the McIlhennys,3 a couple staying at the hotel who are a pitch-perfect parody of the American tourist. They rush from Switzerland to Spain to Austria to Italy with little heed for anything other than absorbing as many sights as their eyeballs can handle. As they describe their schedule to Jane, they make sure to mention their free time: “Independent activity! We’re allowed two hours of it every day.” Hotelier Signora Fiorini’s pooh-poohing of French and American eating habits is just as good: “In Italy, you sit down to eat, and you eat a meal. In Paris, you sit down, and what do you eat? A sauce. And in America, this Mr. Bag-Bag, whatever it is, he sits down, and what does he eat? Pills, only pills.”

But the film isn’t a pure comedy by any means. It’s melancholy in many parts. Jane and Renato’s romance is bumpy at the beginning, because he’s hiding something from her (which is revealed about two-thirds of the way in) and she doesn’t believe he can really be into her. This latter is milked a little too hard for my liking, in a way that feels a little like woman-torture by male writers, but these two still manage to have a beautiful love story with a beautiful backdrop.

Acting

It is unsurprising, to say the least, that four-time Oscar winner and Hollywood legend Katharine Hepburn is good in this movie. She sells the humor and the sorrow of her character equally well; she can transmit visceral awkwardness at being alone in a city full of couples, and she’s also up for plenty of physical comedy, like falling directly into a canal.4 (Jane actually makes a lot of jokes herself, too; I love a woman character who’s funny on purpose.) Rossano Brazzi is an admirable Italian heartthrob, the kind of man who can actually make you believe that men got horny over stuff like a woman’s ankle showing. But respectfully, of course. As they say, how is he so hot, and respectful?!5

Other than the two leads, there aren’t a lot of big-name actors in this movie, at least not ones that most of us would know today. But the cast is fully committed. I especially enjoyed MacDonald Parke and Jane Rose as classic American tourists Mr. and Mrs. McIlhenny (Rose played the same character in the Broadway play), and Gaetano Autiero as Mauro the street urchin, who’s really funny when paired with Hepburn.6 Funny enough for me to overlook the fact that a Venetian street kid in the 1950s would probably not speak English this well!

Growth Arc

Like many Tomato Girls after her, Jane comes to Venice in need not only of a vacation, but some self-worth. She’s an unmarried woman in her forties in the 1950s, which means that by the standards of the time, she’s failed, and though she brings humor and zest to her solo traveling adventure, she kind of thinks she’s failed, too. She ends the film knowing that love is possible. It’s a well-worn cinematic lesson, but an effective one.

The notable thing about Jane’s arc in the movie is that we really know nothing about her life before Venice. She mentions she’s some kind of secretary, but we aren’t sure for whom. She seems to have been unlucky in love, but we don’t know in what way. She mentions a few friends, but no family. The lack of backstory would be unusual today, but it’s refreshing. We don’t really need to know why Jane is this way. We just need to know that she’s going to be a little bit different after this.

Italian Vibes

This movie does a lot better than I expected at illustrating the differences between American and Italian culture. There’s the food comparison, of course, but there’s also the mad dash of the McIlhennys’ tour contrasted with the laid-back street cafes, full of Italians sipping cappuccinos. And, of course, there’s the sad twist (spoilers for a 70-year-old movie): Renato is actually married. He and his wife are separated but not divorced. Jane struggles with this, which I understand, but the movie doesn’t mention that divorce wasn’t even legal in Italy at the time, which kind of puts Renato’s situation into perspective. Renato and Jane converse about this after she learns another man she knows is cheating on his wife, and he tells her that Americans have unnecessarily black-and-white attitudes about sex. (I’m sure this has nothing to do with our being settled by Puritans.)

You can find Summertime for free on YouTube, and I think you should watch it. It’s a little more honest than many of its modern Tomato Girl counterparts. It’s definitely still a fantasy. It’s just one that doesn’t try to baby you.

8/10 Red Vases They Make Right in Front of You

It has been many years since Taylor Swift, the person, has particularly irked me. Certainly, I once harbored as much disdain for her Fearless and Speak Now eras as any Not Like Other Girls-girl, but somewhere in my college years, I stopped caring so much about how many boyfriends she had and relaxed into a casual Taylor Swift listener, one who could name maybe one song per album I especially liked but who was largely untroubled by the dizzy fervor of midnight releases (other than enduring a couple of friends peppering our group chat with their favorite lyrics in all caps around 2 a.m.). But what does irk me — or if it doesn’t irk me, it endlessly fascinates me — is Taylor Swift, the global phenomenon: namely, the insistence that everything in pop culture somehow comes back to her.

This post gets at what I’m talking about:

When I saw this post a couple of years ago, I could not for the life of me figure out why Swift was being compared to the protagonist of Parks and Recreation. Was it that Swift was yelling, and Leslie Knope is known for being a little too loud? Was it that they’re both white and blonde? It took a friend to point out that it’s probably the dress; Leslie’s newspaper wedding dress and the outfit Swift is wearing here as part of her Eras tour are both inspired by writing, ink, and paper. But even with that information, I found the connection tenuous at best. Then there was the constant comparison of Swift to Emily Dickinson after it was discovered they’re distantly related, and then the heralding of millennial comedian Taylor Tomlinson as “the Taylor Swift of comedy.” It seemed inescapable: was every successful woman just Taylor Swift now?

If you thought the book world had escaped the Swift-ification of its successful young female creators, you’d be wrong. I’ve noticed two quite different women writers whose careers have been retroactively Swiftified in the last several years: Sally Rooney, the Irish contemporary novelist of Normal People fame, and R.F. Kuang, the Chinese American writer of both historical fantasy novels like Babel and contemporary satire like Yellowface. It’s true that there are a few similarities between these two novelists and Swift. For starters, they’re young and prolific; Rooney, who’s a year younger than Swift at 35, has written four novels, and Kuang, who just turned 30, has written six, with a seventh coming out on September 8. Also like Swift, they’ve amassed significant followings, especially on social media, and especially among young women. But here’s the million-dollar question: why do we need to designate a “literary Taylor Swift” at all?

Swift and Rooney

Taylor Swift is a reader. We know this for the same reason we know anything about her: because she wants us to. When announcing her engagement to Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, now her husband, last summer, Swift jokingly called herself “your English teacher,” seemingly referring to what she once said she’d have done if music hadn’t worked out. (Unsurprisingly, the choice triggered quite a few writers on this English teacher website.) In Swift’s All Too Well: The Short Film, constructed around the extended edition of one of her most iconic songs, her self-insert character is a novelist, reinforcing the idea of Swift as not a mere musician but a wordsmith, a poet. Her songwriting itself is chockablock with amorphous literary references — Romeo and Juliet in “Love Story,” Hamlet in “The Fate of Ophelia” — that bear a hazy, funhouse-mirror resemblance to the actual texts. Swift occasionally shares her favorite novels, which tend to be classics with some contemporary sprinkled in; for example, she reported reading Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods1 while on the Eras Tour. Also, she likes Sally Rooney.

Rooney, who was discovered through her 2015 Dublin Review article on competitive debate, “Even if you beat me,” and burst onto the literary scene with 2017’s Conversations with Friends and 2018’s Normal People, is the biggest literary fiction star millennials have, and she’s perhaps the only one to become, as Swift has, an institution in and of herself. We’ve got adaptations, we’ve got aesthetics, we’ve got playlists, we’ve got Reddit threads (entire subreddits, even) and BookTok rants and raves. Rooney’s characters are usually lugubrious Irish university students who really do want to focus their attention on worthy topics like Marxist theory and Earth’s self-immolation via climate change, but like generations of humans before them, they’re just too damn worried about whether their crushes like them back. This is also, we all know, a familiar preoccupation for Taylor Swift.

But although we’ve heard Swift say she likes Rooney’s work, we have no idea whether Rooney likes Swift’s. Unlike the relentlessly public Swift, Rooney tries her utmost to not be part of the conversations around her work. She has no official social media accounts. She can’t comprehend people’s curiosity about her personal life; she revealed in a New York Times interview that she’s never read a biography of an author, and she’s baffled at why anyone would care about her music taste. “I’m just a random person,” she says, “and I do all the things you would expect a writer would do: read, watch films, watch TV. There’s something in me that resists being humanized. At least when I talk about my work, I feel like I’m holding onto something.”

Although Rooney’s more willing to discuss her writing publicly, she also flagellates herself for writing it in the first place. Swift has long defended her right to create art out of her relationships — in her Greatest Living American Songwriters interview for The New York Times, she expresses a wish for more men to engage in confessional songwriting so it’ll finally be taken more seriously — but Rooney, like her characters, worries she’s wasting time on work that’s useless in the face of widespread global annihilation. Critics argue over how Marxist Rooney’s books are or aren’t, but Rooney doesn’t think her novels are all that politically significant; after all, as she has said, if they’re selling so well, surely they can’t be that subversive.

We can get an idea of what Rooney thinks about fame from her third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You. One of the protagonists, Alice, is a writer who became successful at a young age, and she has this to say about it:

It makes me miserable, keeps me away from the one thing in my life that has any meaning … and serves to arrange literary discourse entirely around the domineering figure of “the author,” whose lifestyle and idiosyncrasies must be picked over in lurid detail for no reason. I keep encountering this person, who is myself, and I hate her with all my energy. I hate her ways of expressing herself, I hate her appearance, and I hate her opinions about everything. And yet when other people read about her, they believe that she is me.

This paragraph is from one of the many emails Alice and her friend, literary magazine editor Eileen, write to each other within the book, the topics of which include international climate and nuclear disasters, archaeological remnants of long-ago civilizations, and both women’s fraught, claustrophobic romantic entanglements. Your mileage will vary on the literary effectiveness of these emails; I found their wording stilted and their style too alike to be believably composed by two different people. Literally and figuratively, they’re all by Sally Rooney.

Here’s a snippet from Eileen in another email:

I agree it seems vulgar, decadent, even epistemically violent, to invest energy in the trivialities of sex and friendship when human civilization is facing collapse. But at the same time, that is what I do every day.

Despite her own assessments of the frivolity of her work, or perhaps because of them, Rooney has become more outspokenly political as her fame has grown. A few years ago, she came under fire for not allowing her new novels to be translated into Hebrew due to the BDS movement against Israel’s genocide of Palestinians,2 and she says she can no longer safely travel to Britain due to her support for Palestine Action, a direct-action advocacy group that has been criminalized in the United Kingdom.

Swift, of course, is quite different; throughout her career, she’s been largely apolitical. It’s true that she has occasionally endorsed Democratic presidential candidates, and she has spoken out against restrictions of women’s reproductive freedoms, but it’s rare for her to address an issue that doesn’t affect her directly. (To this day, she has not taken a public stance on the Palestinian genocide.) To an extent, Swift cares about doing good with her money; she’s known for paying her employees well3, and she and her now-husband, Travis Kelce, donated some $26 million to local charities when they married earlier this summer. Notably, however, they’ve chosen fairly inoffensive organizations: food banks, animal shelters, children’s hospitals. Nothing directly to do with race, or LGBTQ+ issues, or even women’s rights.

Detractors often accuse Swift of conservatism, but I don’t think that’s quite it. Swift may have her own convictions —in fact, I’m sure that she does — but she’ll never do anything that’s truly bad for business. This, after all, is how you become Taylor Swift in the first place. Swift’s work has been meaningful to countless people, but I’m always puzzled at people who call it, or her, particularly radical. Rooney said it herself: can your work, or in fact your person, really be that transgressive if it’s become this popular?

Swift and Kuang

Rebecca F. Kuang’s ascent to literary success was early and rapid, if not unprecedented. In 2015, Kuang was living in Beijing while on leave from her undergraduate studies at Georgetown when she saw an ad for Scrivener, downloaded it, and started the first book of the Poppy War trilogy, a dark fantasy series based on 20th-century Chinese history, on a whim. For months, she emailed drafts to her dad (Kuang’s parents are Chinese immigrants, and her dad studied physics at Berkeley and now works in telecommunications), who urged her to try and get them published. Less than a year after finishing the book, she had an agent; by the time she graduated college in 2018, she had a published novel; by 2020, she had a published trilogy, one that was nominated for multiple fantasy awards. In 2022, she published historical fantasy doorstop Babel, or The Necessity of Violence, which took TikTok by storm, then publishing-industry satire Yellowface in 2023. Her most recent novel, Katabasis, is another fantasy take on the Oxbridge system; in between all the novels, Kuang was studying for one master’s degree each from Oxford and Cambridge — I could not tell you the difference between the two programs she graduated from if you held a knife to my throat — and a PhD at Yale in East Asian languages and literature. She’s also recently signed a book deal for about four more novels, the first of which, Taipei Story, comes out next month.

There’s not much similarity in the subject matter of Kuang’s work and Taylor Swift’s; Kuang is best known for fantasy and dark academia that interrogates institutionalized racism and colonialism, whereas Swift’s songwriting on relationships and white-woman girlhood has led her to become, as Kuang snidely remarks in Yellowface, an unintentional “white supremacist Barbie.” There’s a lot about their styles, though, that feels similar. They both became successful very young. They both work at a breakneck pace. They’ve both managed to harness the power of the Internet, and particularly of young, enthusiastic women, to become hugely recognizable in their respective spheres; Kuang was directly compared to Swift after drawing massive crowds of young people at a literary festival appearance. She has hundreds of thousands of social media followers: nothing to Swift’s millions, of course, but they’re enviable numbers for most young writers.

But the big similarity is that both of these women live and die by references. Swift has used her songwriting to build a multiverse around herself, a maze to which her personal lore serves as a map: even I, barely a Swift aficionado, am aware of her favorite number (thirteen), her childhood home (a Christmas tree farm in Pennsylvania), and much of her dating history (somehow both varied and unvaried). Her most recent work mostly falls under the category of what Esther Berry has hilariously termed “Taylor Swift-themed albums,” albums I mostly bounced off of because I wasn’t the super-Swiftie I apparently needed to be to enjoy them. When Swift refers to a literary work, it’s typically something that American teenagers read in school; as with everything in Swift’s personal brand, this is a show of relatability. She’s read the books you’ve read, and she can make you feel them more deeply, if less accurately, than you did when you were a bored student, waiting for the bell to ring or for a cute guy to leave the hyper-femme popular girl he’s dating for dorky, Converse-wearing you.

R.F. Kuang is also known for references, more of the university-philosophy-syllabi variety — for example, Babel’s subtitle, The Necessity of Violence, comes from the work of anti-colonial philosopher Frantz Fanon — but among her readers, these references have the opposite effect that Swift’s do. So many of Kuang’s fans are in awe of how difficult her books are, how they’re so erudite that reading one requires a rigorous literary pre-game. In the months leading up to Katabasis’s release, I couldn’t open Instagram without being subjected to a list of underworld-centric classics supposedly essential to understanding the novel. It’s interesting that this perception of Kuang’s work is so pervasive because I actually think the key to her books’ success is their approachability. They make postcolonial philosophy and translation theory accessible. This accessibility, however, often comes at the cost of craft — at least in the eyes of Kuang’s critics, of which, at least in this matter, I’d have to say I am one.

This brings me to another Kuang/Swift parallel: both have spent considerable time and energy responding to criticism. Swift has spent decades fighting her critics, addressing her critics, working on the flaws her critics perceive in her until they look for something else to call her out on. In her NYT Greatest Living American Songwriters interview, she says:

Criticism has been a huge fuel for me. It’s been a huge jumping-off point, like a creative writing prompt or something. There are so many songs … like Blank Space would not exist if I hadn’t had people being like, “Here’s a slideshow of all her boyfriends.”

Kuang’s trajectory here is shaping up to be similar, if not more pointed; in the past, she’s taken a defensive attitude towards much of her criticism. In her 2022 Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature, she’s clear about her opinion on accusations of didacticism:

Sometime over the 20th century, we have become convinced that any art that tries too hard to send a message is bad … I get the occasional review saying that they wish my work was more subtle, more nuanced, when it’s clear that what they really mean is that they wish I would fritter away everything I meant to say in the first place. Sometimes folks will not listen until you’re beating them over the head with the point.

I suppose I understand Kuang’s point of view here, and certainly being a woman of color in a creative field will result in a good deal of unnecessary vitriol, but the idea that every “occasional review” complaining of a lack of nuance in her work just isn’t ready for her perspective is patently false. Leave It Unread has a great series of posts on Kuang’s work here on Substack, which I recommend reading, but the section on Kuang’s use of footnotes is particularly well put. As Leave It Unread says, Kuang could use the footnotes to really flesh out her world, or to make fun jokes, and she does a haphazard bit of both of those, but she’s most likely to use them to yell a version of what’s she’s already been yelling throughout the novel:

She’s incapable of being in conversation with her own text, defaulting to the postures of defending herself against an imaginary online foe scolding her for glorifying problematic colonial behaviour. Nearly every footnote seems to be a talisman against the online wokescold who dogs her. And I think she doesn’t notice because she’s incapable of conceiving of her imagined world as its own context that needs to be respected.

This was my own chief issue with Babel: almost every time Kuang could use one of the many techniques at her disposal to complicate her characters, or develop her world, she uses them to drive her points into your skull, or quickly move you to the part where she can drive them in even harder. Footnotes often become “by the way, this was racist” or odd character infodumps; plot points are resolved through silly, fanfiction-like, body-hiding antics; characters the narrative has designated as Bad serve mainly to spout whatever dummy opposition Kuang wants to knock down next, and even the Good ones are typically dull and unmemorable. (For example, I struggle to name any characteristic of Robin’s friend Victoire besides the fact that she is a Black woman.) I of course don’t think Babel needed to insinuate that colonialism is ever good, or that the racism people of color faced in Victorian Britain wasn’t staggeringly cruel, but I genuinely think it’s possible to get that across with more nuance; Octavia Butler’s Kindred, for instance, depicts plantation owner Tom Weylin and his son, Rufus, as average and perhaps even lenient slave owners for their time while still upholding an inherently barbaric institution. What Kuang said in her Tolkien lecture is true: folks don’t always listen. I just don’t believe that the novelist’s primary responsibility is to force them to.

Kuang is on (somewhat) surer footing when she draws more from her own experiences. Katabasis’s main characters are based on Kuang herself and her husband, the two people she knows best, and they’re better fleshed out than most of her previous protagonists. Yellowface, her only non-fantasy novel to date, is a satire, a genre that is at least heavy-handed on purpose. It chronicles the connection between mediocre white girl June Heyward and Kuang stand-in Athena Liu, whose overwhelming beauty, privileged background, and prodigious writing talent are either a sign of Kuang’s self-aggrandizement or her ability to laugh at herself, depending on whose review you read. (June actually doesn’t come from money; this tension between her and Athena is briefly touched on, but it would have been interesting to explore more.) The same goes for the criticisms Athena’s novels face within the story, many of which are strikingly similar to criticisms lobbied at Kuang: they’re too heavy-handed, they represent Taiwanese indigenous groups poorly, etc. Not to mention that the characters attended undergrad at Yale, where Kuang is getting her Ph.D, and they live in Washington, D.C., where Kuang went to college; all these details and more, down to the brand of whiskey June drinks, feel like Kuang lore-drops. Remind you of anyone we know?

Rooney and Kuang

Partially in preparation for this essay (which has been percolating in my brain for longer than I’d like to admit), I read the latest novels by Rooney and Kuang, Intermezzo (2024) and Katabasis (2025), respectively. They’re both long books that took a while to read, but I’m glad I did read them. I think these two books exemplify why I so often think of Rooney and Kuang in conjunction with each other. I also see both of them trying something different in these novels, with some, but not equal, success.

First off, academia: neither Rooney nor Kuang seems to be able to stop thinking about it. Both Rooney and Kuang attended, and write extensively about, elite institutions of higher education. Both Conversations with Friends and Normal People are about university students, as is Babel. Kuang’s Katabasis, of course, is about two Cambridge graduate students, Alice and Peter, whose descent into Hell in search of a lost professor and a letter of recommendation is somehow less grueling than their higher educational experiences as a woman of color and a disabled man. Intermezzo takes a different approach, centering two brothers, early-twenties chess champion Ivan and early-thirties barrister and philosophy degree holder Peter4, who each are involved in relationships with someone of a different age: Ivan with a thirty-something woman named Margaret, and Peter with both his first love, Sylvia, and a college student, Naomi. Throughout the novel, Rooney interrogates social ideas of maturity: which of these people are supposedly more mature, and which actually are more mature? Rooney offers plenty of contrast here between academia and the world outside of it.

But this focus on academia, for both Kuang and Rooney, is just the surface level of another preoccupation: the complicated relationship these two high-achieving writers have with their own exceptionalism. As Becca Rothfeld writes in her essay “Normal Novels,” Rooney seems so uncomfortable with the idea of being exceptional that she takes pains, however ineffective, to convince us that she isn’t. She insists in interviews that she’s boring and normal. Her characters are often successful, but without striving or wanting to become so: Connell in his English studies and eventual MFA acceptance, Alice in her writing career. Ivan of Intermezzo is another example; early on, we hear him say he’s not even that good at chess, that it’s just a silly board game, right? Here’s Rothfeld on the appeal of Rooney’s characters’ passive personal victories:

The commercial and critical success of Rooney’s books is no mystery, for they give the comforting impression that, whoever you are, you, too, could make out with a preternaturally beautiful vampire or get handcuffed to a torture machine by a magnate with washboard abs. You, too, could publish the story or seduce the entire school. You, too, are different — and that is what makes you the same!

Rothfeld isn’t a fan of Rooney’s romances, either, for a similar reason:

Rooney’s romances fall flat precisely because her characters are unable to accept that they see each other as exceptional. and although they spend almost all of the books conspiring to win the debate tournament or the literary prize, to receive the most competitive scholarship or the highest test score, they cannot accept that they want to be exceptional.

Interestingly, as Rothfeld also points out, the very essay that launched Rooney’s career, the debate confessional “Even if you beat me,” betrays at least something of a competitive streak, some sort of investment in coming out on top. This is its conclusion:

I still occasionally feel an impulse to attribute all my achievements that year to my perfect teammate, or worse, to good luck. But I’m not nineteen anymore; I don’t need to make people feel comfortable. In the end, it was me. It may not mean anything to anyone else, but it doesn’t have to — that’s the point. I was number one. Like Fast Eddie, I’m the best there is. And even if you beat me, I’m still the best.

It’s an impulse that Rooney has spent the entire rest of her career running away from. At least publicly speaking.

Kuang, at first glance, seems to take the opposite approach. Her exceptionalism is the bread and butter of her career success. She clearly has mixed feelings about achievement: her stand-in in Katabasis, Alice Law, has been pushed to the breaking point and farther by both the pressures of being a woman of color at an Oxbridge institution (in a narrative set in the 1980s, no less) and the general desire to be somebody extraordinary in her field. But she also leans heavily on her Oxbridge and Ivy League degrees,5 and her particular experience attaining them, to establish herself as an authority on the topics she writes about, and the publishing/media landscape has treated her as a Girl Genius figure from day one. In the rather fawning profile of Kuang published in The New Yorker last August, Kuang herself is quick to assert her (not entirely convincing) disinterest in pursuing future accolades, contrasting sharply with interviewer Hua Hsu’s starstruck recitation of her staggering publishing and academic record. Kuang’s friend Tochi Onyebuchi, another literary-minded speculative fiction writer, says in the article: “Yeah, sure, the Hugo is nice. But what about a Booker? I could see it for her.” (My first thought was that Onyebuchi must be seeing with a stronger prescription than I; perhaps it’s better to start with the Hugo.) But the most striking detail in the piece is Kuang’s description of the tattoo she got after her first book deal: a maybe-Chekhov quote, “Show me the glint of light on broken glass.” Or, in Kuang’s words, “A really fancy way of saying ‘Show, don’t tell.’”

So Kuang might actually know what her weakness as a writer is. I just haven’t seen her work on it yet. Her fiction has always been self-indulgent, and Katabasis, unfortunately, feels like a sign that her editors continue to indulge her. The exhausting academic tangents, the strange pacing choices (why do we only really see a couple of circles of Hell?), and the halfhearted, cartoonish antagonists all make for a reading experience that feels a couple of hundred pages too long. I had high hopes for Katabasis initially, though, because its opener is really quite charming:

Cambridge, Michaelmas Term, October. The wind bit, the sun hid, and on the first day of class, when she ought to have been lecturing undergraduates about the dangers of using the Cartesian severance spell to revise without pee breaks, Alice Law set out to rescue her advisor’s soul from the Eight Courts of Hell.

That’s so fun! Kuang really can be fun sometimes. In a later chapter, there’s a hilarious aside about a guy residing in the circle of Pride: he’s there because he said he taught at Oxford, but really it was Oxford Brookes. I’d have loved a 350-page version of Katabasis that had a lot more humor and a tighter cast of characters — well, at least, I’d have liked it more. I’ll be interested to check out the upcoming Taipei Story, since it’s manifestly autobiographical and not that long, the kind of story I think Kuang could do well.6 That is, if she can allow readers the opportunity to decide for themselves what her work means.

Intermezzo, I think, is a more successful novel than Katabasis, because you can really sense Rooney going out on a limb. Unusually for her, she focuses more on male characters than female — Margaret, Peter’s older girlfriend, is the only female point-of-view character — and she also experiments with structure. Peter’s more stream-of-consciousness chapters, especially, have a Joycean tone to them. (I’m about the hundredth person to say this, but hey, Rooney is Irish.) There’s less social-issue pontificating, a nice break from the intrusive-thoughts vibes of Beautiful World, Where Are You, and when it’s there, it’s making a point; Rooney excels as always in describing the insular and often inert politics of white leftists, but she takes a chance in Intermezzo by making one character a former incel sympathizer. I won’t spoil the conclusion, in case you care about that, but one character’s arc is partly about caring less what other people think. This might be a lesson Rooney herself is learning, and I hope Kuang is in the process of learning it, too.

Swift and all women

You don’t have to be Sally Rooney, or R.F. Kuang, or even Emily Dickinson to have Taylor Swift thrown into your face. You kind of just have to be a woman in 2026. Certainly, many women (and, I’m sure, some men, and some people who identify as neither) were thrilled to hear that Taylor Swift, queen of the breakup ballad, was finally engaged; her Instagram post announcing it became the most liked in the platform’s history. But the widespread treatment of that announcement as a special occasion for all women, everywhere, was rather exhausting, and I’ve heard that sentiment echoed by bigger Swift fans than myself. I was happy enough for Swift at the time, but I was preoccupied elsewhere; I had just had one of the worst summers of my life. One of the things that made that summer so difficult was a breakup, and so Swift’s engagement news did make me feel a little lonely. Which, I suppose, goes to show that I’m as prone to parasocial behavior as anyone else.

Swift undoubtedly cares what we think of her. She’s fostered her fans’ good opinions and encouraged them to relate to her for two decades. But in the last year, she’s appeared to start caring less, at least about some things. Her twelfth album, The Life of a Showgirl, was panned by fans and non-fans alike, although I personally found it to be listenable enough and certainly more fun than the labored metaphors of The Tortured Poets Department. Her wedding, which took place at Madison Square Garden with over 1,000 guests, Adam Sandler as the officiant, and an ultra-wealthy carnival aesthetic complete with caviar on chicken nuggets, arcade games, and raffles for luxury prizes, was denounced as “tacky,” and sure, it kind of was.

But the Swift news from this year that most excited me was the “Opalite” music video, which premiered in February. The song in question is fluffy, girly-dance-party material, but rather than a deeply literal portrayal of the lyrics à la All Too Well: The Short Film, Swift’s “Opalite” video builds a wacky, Wes Anderson-esque, pseudo-90s world where Opalite is a spray-on product that will find the user love immediately. The infomercial opening the video assures us that Opalite will work on “friendships, couples, pets, and co-workers,” and we later see Swift and Domhnall Gleason leave behind their pet rock and cactus and begin a shy, awkward romance together at the mall. It’s a piece of work that some people will find a bit too weird,7 and I liked Taylor Swift more for creating it than I had liked her in years.

The end of the “Opalite” video features Swift and Gleason in matching sequined tracksuits, performing a dance that would certainly be called tacky if anyone were to perform it in public. Four judges each give the pair a score of 0, which they promptly ignore in favor of hugging each other and cheering. I’ve long been weary of the need to dissect every lyric or color choice or throwaway prop in anything Swift makes, but this time, I actually hope she’s trying to tell us something. I don’t expect Swift to be fully authentic; she’s too invested in the persona she’s crafted for that. But maybe she’ll expend a little less energy on trying to please us all. If any of us can apply anything about Swift to our own lives, I think that’s it.

It seems many fantasy readers agree with me, because two of the biggest fantasy awards for works in English, the Hugos and the Nebulas, hold their ceremonies in summer. The main difference between these awards is who exactly decides the winners. The Nebula Awards are voted on by members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. In contrast, anyone who attends Worldcon and pays a fee can submit a Hugo Awards ballot. Shortlists for the two awards are often pretty similar, but that wasn’t the case this year; there were only two repeat books. You’ll see which ones they are down below, since I read both of them!

I tried to sample a few books from each Best Novel list. The Nebula Awards are already over, but they often provide a hint towards who might win the Hugos come August 30. That isn’t the case this year, though, because the winner of the Nebula for Best Novel wasn’t even on the Hugo list. So it’s still anyone’s game!

Books from the Nebula list

Sour Cherry by Natalia Theodoridou

I feel a little bit bad for author Natalia Theodoridou here, because the first thing I heard about his1 book was that it was getting Angela Carter comps. I can see why; you can't really write a macabre, literary-adjacent fairy tale retelling focused on women without getting compared to The Bloody Chamber. It probably wasn't fair of me to have this comparison in my head, though, because it's hard to live up to! Unfortunately, I don’t think Sour Cherry manages it.

Starting with the good: this is perhaps the only time I have ever said that a frame story makes a book more engaging instead of less. We jump back and forth from this version of Bluebeard — featuring a listlessly destructive lord, the woman who nursed him and loves him despite her better judgment, and the wives who withstood his rotten psyche until they withered and died — to a woman telling the story to her son. How this storyteller fits into the tale is gradually revealed; I don't want to give it away since it's the best part of the book, but the author's approach had a lot of potential.

But the execution just isn't sound enough to carry the premise. I think this book could have been much better if it were novella-length; the amount of repetition we’re subjected to (yes, we get it, the cherries! The darkness! The dead ladies!) doesn't justify 300 pages. The writing is serviceable (again, I'd have liked it more without the Carter comparison, because really, who can stand up to Carter in the prose department) but often heavy-handed; the storyteller likes to remind us that she's there in a very clumsy wink-wink way that feels like it's trying to cover for narrative inconsistencies. Like, don't expect us to explain this, because the narrator is under a lot of stress right now, you know how it is.

This is certainly a unique debut effort, and I'm interested to see what Theoderidou comes up with in the future. But it wouldn't have been my pick for the Nebula.

⭐️⭐️1/2

Katabasis by R. F. Kuang

Okay, I know I’ve said that the big R. F. Kuang essay was coming before, and then it didn’t … but I actually mean it this time. You’ll likely get that essay within a couple of weeks. But because Katabasis technically was on the Nebula shortlist, I feel compelled to discuss it here, at least a little bit. Okay, more than a little bit.

R. F. Kuang has long been fascinating to me as an entity, as the publisher-designated wunderkind of the fantasy genre today. What interests me so much about her work is that the way it's discussed online, usually as highly intellectual and requiring a massive pregame TBR of various classics in order to be comprehended, doesn't resemble what I see when I read it. In fact, I think the opposite is true: Kuang takes intellectualism and makes it marketable, digestible. That's not easy to do, and she's capable of both effervescence and humor while doing it. Several of the descriptions of Hell in this book are hilarious, like the aside about how you're not supposed to ask why someone ended up in Pride, but everyone knows anyway (one poor guy said he taught at Oxford when it was really Oxford Brookes).

But the great problem with Kuang's storytelling is that it's continually undermined by her self-indulgence. In Babel, it's footnotes explaining why something was racist in case the readers of a book that’s already a manifesto against colonization didn't catch the critique. In Katabasis, it's about 200 pages that didn't need to be there. Kuang's exhaustive philosophical digressions drag down the narrative, and very few of them come up again or further the story at all. So much time is spent on these, and on various riddles serving as vehicles to prove the cleverness of protagonist Alice Law (Kuang's stand-in), that things like "developing the antagonist" or "creating romantic tension" or "making a substantive critique of academia" — you know, things that would make the book interesting — are thrown out with the bathwater. Kuang clearly has a love-hate relationship with her many degrees (two nearly identical master's degrees and one PhD in progress, but who's counting), but she stops short of saying anything really damning, probably because she still wants to be accepted by that world. Most of this novel's characters are introduced, discarded, and brought back again almost at random, especially the antagonists. Much of we hear about them, especially Alice's professor, is given to us through narration, or through backstory of them being an asshole in precisely the same way five different times.

In fact, the only two characters drawn with anything approaching depth (although their relationship itself leaves a lot to be desired) are Alice and her love interest, Peter. These two are probably the most multifaceted characters Kuang has ever written — not that that's saying much — and that's probably because they're based on the two people she knows best: herself and her husband. Peter has the same chronic illness as Kuang's husband, and exploring the character's experience with that illness was one of the parts of the book that worked best for me; it felt like Kuang had taken the time to talk to her husband about his experiences and understand his point of view. But this is an exception for Kuang, who rarely wants to venture outside of the exact scope of what she knows — an odd trait for someone who insists on writing sweeping fantasy doorstops drawing on centuries of mythology. (This may be why my favorite Kuang book is Yellowface; for all its flaws, it's short and to the point.)

Kuang is a former Nebula winner (for Babel2), so I don’t feel all that bad that Katabasis didn’t win this year. I don’t think it should have, anyway.

⭐️⭐️1/2

As I said, the Nebulas have actually already happened, and the winner of the Nebula for Best Novel wasn’t any of the books I’ve read; it was The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones. I don’t read much horror, which is what Jones writes, but I’ve heard good things about his work. Good for him!

Books from the Hugo list

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh (also on the Nebula list)

I was already familiar with Emily Tesh as a co-host of the podcast Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones,3 and I knew already that she had experience as a teacher. She puts that expertise to use in this magical boarding school story; unlike most, it focuses on a teacher and can therefore mix magic talk with more adult topics, such as the inconvenience of sleeping with a colleague who isn't really your type, or which of the teachers it's hardest to chat with in the lounge. Tesh’s understanding of how teens act in a classroom is spot-on, and she does a good job of feeding magic-world exposition to us through classroom lectures.

The plot of the novel, aside from periodic demon shenanigans, feels almost slice-of-life until a quarter of the way from the end, where it suddenly speeds up and deposits us at the denouement, leaving us breathless and babbling. Was Tesh trying to write her way out of a corner? Hard to say. But this was fun, and from what I’ve seen, it seems to be many people’s favorite book on the Hugo list. That could mean it’ll win.

⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor (also on the Nebula list)

Death of the Author wasn’t my favorite Hugo nominee, but it might be the most interesting one I read. Most of it is the story of Zelu, who writes a science fiction novel at a low point in her life and watches it become popular beyond her wildest dreams. Zelu is paraplegic due to an accident in her youth, and other than a new form of technology she uses as a mobility aid (I’m being vague on purpose), there aren’t many explicit sci-fi elements in this storyline. We also get interviews with Zelu’s family members and friends, as well as sections set in the futuristic robot world of Zelu’s books.

Zelu is caustic, stubborn, funny, and bold, and I loved her as a character. Zelu is Nigerian American, and Nigerian culture plays a huge role both in her life and writing, and in Okorafor’s narrative. Zelu also has more complex feelings about her disability than disabled fictional characters are often permitted, which I really appreciated. (Since Okorafor herself was paralyzed as a teenager and learned to walk again, I’m sure Zelu’s feelings are influenced by Okorafor’s experiences.) It’s difficult to talk about the resolution of the story without spoilers, and I felt like the reader was left hanging on a few too many occasions, but I will say that “death of the author” comes into play in more than one way, and the payoff is worth it!

⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow

This novel combines everything I like about Alix E. Harrow’s style — her skill at developing fantasy worlds, the complex web of legend and myth she creates, her creativity when it comes to concepts of time and different versions of the same story — and this time does it with strong, lovable characters and a message that comes across without being too #resist. The Everlasting isn't an Arthurian retelling, but Una Everlasting's legend is very similar to King Arthur stories, as is both the way the story is utilized by the nation's leaders and the way it differs depending on who tells it. It feels like a comment on Arthuriana rather than an addition to the canon, and I like that approach!

Some of the mechanics of the way the story plays out didn't quite mesh (this isn't always necessary, but since the author takes pains to explain how it works in this story, I felt that more cohesion was warranted), and some of the sex scenes get a tiny bit cringe, but I mostly thought they were done well. Sex is kind of cringe, anyway, if you think about it. (Actually, no, don’t think about it.)

Anyway: The Everlasting is really good!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

What will win the Hugo?

I’d honestly be fine with any of the books I read winning. I found The Incandescent to be the weakest of the three, but I still really enjoyed it, and it seems to be a fan favorite. Emily Tesh did win a few years ago for Some Desperate Glory, but since this is a fan-designated award, that doesn’t matter as much as it might for the Nebula. I’d love to see either Death of the Author or The Everlasting win — maybe a bit more The Everlasting, since it’s my favorite of the three, and Alix E. Harrow hasn’t won a Hugo for Best Novel yet.

The Hugo isn’t chosen by writers, but by readers, and so the Best Novel winner tends to be a book that a lot of people love. The three books I didn’t read from this year were The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson (it’s beloved, but very long, and I didn’t think I’d get through it in time), Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky (seems more sci-fi than my usual taste), and A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennet (I started the first book in this fantasy mystery series a while back and didn’t finish … I’m not a mystery girl because I don’t really care who did it most of the time). People do seem to like all of those three, and A Drop of Corruption being the latest installment in a series doesn’t mean anything, since I think the fifth Murderbot book won in 2020.4

So, in short, I read three good books for this award, and the three I didn’t read also sound like they’re good. If you’re someone who reads prize lists, that’s about the best position you can be in.

Have you read any of these novels? What do you think should win the Hugo Awards?

Finally, at the behest of a friend who had enjoyed The Other Bennet Sister, I gave it a watch, gulping down the entire show in 48 hours. I found it charming, more so than I had predicted. It goes without saying that it’s not historically accurate (on the spectrum of Regency media, I’d place it somewhere between the 2005 Pride and Prejudice and Bridgerton), but I liked most of the characters, Ella Bruccoleri’s portrayal of Mary in particular, and I genuinely chuckled more than once. However, there’s still something I am curious about: the cultural obsession with this particular Bennet sister, one that extends far beyond the scope of this show. What is it about Mary, a secondary character at best in the original novel, that so endears her to readers of today?

Even before The Other Bennet Sister premiered, it was clear that there is something about Mary: awkward, studious, clueless Mary, the Bennet sister next to our beloved Elizabeth in age but far behind her in beauty. Austen fan fiction has long fixated on Mary; there are over 100 books on the Goodreads list of Mary Bennet Pride and Prejudice retellings — nearly five times as many as those of her next most popular sister, Lydia — ranging from standard Regency romance to modern remix to fantasy to mystery. Whether it’s in comments on Goodreads reviews of Pride and Prejudice or in real-life conversations, I’ve noticed so many people saying how bad they felt for poor Mary, who so dearly “wished to say something sensible, but knew not how.” Doesn’t she just want to learn and be liked? Is that so wrong?

Well, of course it isn’t, but that’s not really the character Austen set out to create. It’s widely believed that Austen meant Mary to be a parody of a bluestocking1, a common character trope at the time: a woman who uses her intellect and education to chastise the inferior lifestyles of her family and friends. Mary isn’t a hapless, earnest autodidact; she’s annoyingly didactic. This backfires for her, often and hilariously.

“That is very true,” replied Elizabeth, “and I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.”

“Pride,” observed Mary, who piqued herself upon the solidity of her reflections, “is a very common failing, I believe. By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed; that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or other, real or imaginary. Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”

“Oh! Mary,” said she, “I wish you had gone with us … we talked and laughed so loud, that anybody might have heard us ten miles off!”

To this Mary very gravely replied, “Far be it from me, my dear sister, to depreciate such pleasures! They would doubtless be congenial with the generality of female minds. But I confess they would have no charms for me—I should infinitely prefer a book.”

Mary’s preference for reading over socializing is meant not to endear us to her, but to make us roll our eyes. In fact, this is true of many of the other oft-quoted lines about books from Pride and Prejudice. I have been given more than one piece of merchandise with “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!” written on it, and I do not often have the heart to tell the giver that that quote comes not from Elizabeth or Mr. Darcy but from mean girl Caroline Bingley, who doesn’t mean a word of it. At one point, Austen says of Mr. Bennet that “with a book he was regardless of time,” but that lack of regard for his surroundings also translates into a lack of attention paid to his daughters’ often inappropriate behavior. Then there’s Miss Bingley’s famous comment to Elizabeth: “She is a great reader, and has no pleasure in anything else.” Decades of adaptations have tried to make Elizabeth into a Great Reader — as fond as I am of the 2005 movie, I’m aware of its own contributions to this —2 but this doesn’t jive with Elizabeth’s response in the book: “I deserve neither such praise nor such censure … I am not a great reader, and I have pleasure in many things.” Austen is harsher on those who affect intellectualism than those who don’t engage with literature at all. This, I think, is part of why so many people defend Mary: they realize that Austen’s values aren’t necessarily the same as their own, and it makes them uncomfortable. What would Austen think of massive book hauls on TikTok, or T-shirts emblazoned with out-of-context quotes from her novels? I myself bought nearly a dozen books at a bookstore crawl this past week — am I, like Mary Bennet, amassing all the trappings of intellectualism and forgetting the actual substance?

This website loves to call people out for misunderstanding Austen, for overlooking her sharp wit in favor of her characters’ romantic entanglements. This criticism is at times warranted, but I think it’s grown into another issue: deriding anyone who actually likes the romantic bits of Austen’s work for ignoring her social satire, as if some invisible entity is forcing us to choose between appreciating caustic irony and a well-developed love story. I mentioned this on Notes a few weeks ago:

I see the original poster’s point, but time and time again, I see people’s hackles raise up at the idea of connecting emotionally to characters, especially by getting invested in fictional romantic pairings. I’ve written about the tension between antihumanist and humanist character theory before, and as before, I detect a whiff of misogyny in the obsessive denigration of romance lovers. We live in a time and place where almost any strong emotion, especially romantic feeling, is feminine-coded.3 Regency society had similar hangups about what women enjoyed; novels were thought of as actually dangerous for women to read, especially those with romance and happy endings.4 Austen herself defended novels and the people who enjoyed them in her own novel Northanger Abbey:

“And what are you reading, Miss—?” “Oh! It is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.

Call me crazy, or a hysterical woman, or whatever, but I think hating on readers who enjoy Austen for her romance is intellectualism-signaling and, what’s more, very Mary Bennet-ish. In a bad way, just like Austen intended.

The Other Bennet Sister, to its credit, does have some understanding of Austen’s original Mary Bennet character. I was afraid the show would turn the entire Bennet family into Mary-hating demons, but this thankfully doesn’t happen. We see that Mary retreats into books and studying as a way to stand out from a crowd of beautiful, vivacious sisters, but because she’s performing intellectualism to garner social approval, and people can tell she is, they don’t like her. It’s only when Mary goes to live with her aunt and uncle in London and relaxes enough to show her real self — still quirky, still prone to proffering factoids about insects, but real — that she makes friends and even attracts the notice of two bachelors, one eligible and one not-so-eligible. There’s something healing about this growth arc: if you learned to read early, or showed other academic promise as a child, you might have had a Mary phase yourself. The Other Bennet Sister shows us that you can grow out of it, and given some of her other characters’ transformations (most notably, Mr. Darcy), I think Austen would agree this is possible.

Something I liked about the Mary of The Other Bennet Sister is how touchingly attentive she is to other outsiders. It’s not only Mary who grows throughout the series; there’s Mr. Collins, whom Nary helps guide into self-awareness, and Mr. Hurst, whom the vindictive Caroline Bingley seats Mary beside at dinner as a punishment. Mr. Hurst is the husband of a second Bingley sister who doesn’t make it into a lot of adaptations, but in the original novel, Elizabeth Bennet, and by extension Austen, have little time for him:

… as for Mr. Hurst, by whom Elizabeth sat, he was an indolent man, who lived only to eat, drink, and play at cards; who, when he found her to prefer a plain dish to a ragout, had nothing to say to her.

In The Other Bennet Sister, Mr. Hurst is more of a pathetic dullard. Mary, who’s less prone to snap judgments than her famously prejudiced older sister, allows him to reject multiple topics of conversation before saying, “And what do you like, Mr. Hurst?” This gets him going about horse racing, and in the end, he and Mary have more fun than anyone else at the table.

She’s not Austen’s Mary, I suppose. But I like her all the same.

Writing

This movie definitely feels like a mishmash of other coming-of-age movies. Protagonist Jenna, a neurotic, play-it-safe teenager who’s just been admitted to MIT, is going alone to Rome after the death of her mother and stays with her mother’s old friend, reading bits from her mother’s old diary throughout the movie. While exploring Italy, Lina is caught between two boys: Alessandro, a wealthy playboy-in-training, and Lorenzo, a humble chef-in-training. (Both are cute, which is what really matters.)

I remembered Love and Gelato as a pretty well-written film. It’s significantly cheesier than my depressed self’s memory of it, but if you don’t expect greatness, you’ll probably more or less enjoy it. Jenna’s control-freak, geeky character is actually quite believable, and she has a few lines just cute and nerdy enough to both be effective onscreen and sound like something a real teenage know-it-all would say. “Less than zero respect for the X chromosome” is a particular favorite.

I’d have liked more in the way of character development, and the gradual reveal of Jenna’s mom’s diary is such a blatant plot device (what girl wouldn’t immediately read the entire thing in one sitting?), but it’s not criminally silly. I guess.

Acting

Susanna Skraggs, who plays Jenna, is really the highlight of the film. Adorkable teenage girls are a hard character type to play without testing audiences’ patience, and Skraggs manages to make Jenna both likable and ridiculous, whichever the script most calls for at a given moment. Skraggs’s look of awe as Jenna attends an opera for the first time is so arresting that I never forgave Alessandro for not noticing it. Ronny Cammareri in Moonstruck would never!

I honestly have little to say, good or bad, about anyone else’s performance (except Anjelika Washington, who’s a sprightly and lovable presence as best friend Addie). They’re there! The guys are cute; the wacky Italian mother figure is wacky and Italian. Jenna is most of the movie, anyway, so Skragg’s success counts for a lot here.

Growth Arc

Over the course of the film, Jenna loses a lot of her fanatical risk-assessing tendencies. (These tendencies are honestly pretty understandable for someone whose mom died in her 30s — I’d be wondering what the hell else could go wrong with my life, too.) By the time we get to the end of the movie, she’s much more willing to try new things, and she’s had novel experiences. I think two of the most mind-expanding things you can do as a young person are living in a foreign country (ideally one that speaks a language not native to you) and and dating someone quite different from yourself, and Jenna does both!

Italian Vibes

The Italian vibes in this film are pretty much as stereotypical as they come (the main exception being that Jenna actually speaks some Italian, so several conversations are able to take place in that language). Jenna’s love interests are a wealthy Italian bad boy and a sweet, modest Italian chef-in-training, both of whom are captivated by her brand of American nerdery. There’s a cranky grandma who makes pasta (points to the movie for showing the process of making it), and another cranky grandma who makes bread. There’s a family friend who functions as a kind of Italian wine aunt and championer of less-than-stellar decisions. There’s classically beautiful cinematography featuring all the expected shots of Rome and the Italian countryside. In this, and in general, Love and Gelato gives you about what you came for: a sweet, wholesome coming-of-age story with a pretty Italian-ish backdrop. It’s nothing remarkable. But you don’t always need that, I guess.

6/10 Disrespecters of the X Chromosome

The best book I read

Whistler by Ann Patchett

Shocker: my favorite book I read this spring was the newest release by Ann Patchett, an author that critics, literary prize committees, grandmas, and 27-year-olds on TikTok all like. Whistler is about a woman who reunites with her beloved short-term stepfather, a man married to her mother for a few years of her childhood whom she hasn’t seen since they survived a harrowing car accident together in the 1980s. It’s easy to suspect the book will go down the most shocking possible road after this, but it has no intention of shocking you, or even particularly surprising you. I respect it all the more for that decision.

When I do hear a criticism of Ann Patchett, it’s often that her books are too nice, too full of lovely people who are trying their best, to possibly be interesting. It’s a critique I can comprehend, but I don’t share it: if you’re a good enough writer, you can do whatever you want. Patchett’s “nice” books work for me because they're not trying to coddle you. So many supposed comfort reads feel like gentle-parenting manuals for grown-ups, sanding the edges off any possible complexities. Whistler, on the other hand, is like a long letter from your favorite relative: warm and gentle and satisfying. It’s about people who have made mistakes but who try to make up for them, even years down the line. I remember reading an interview with Patchett where she said that although evil happens every day, most people she meets are kind, and she tries to reflect that in her writing. It makes me glad to know there are writers out there with that mission, talented ones who can really do it justice.

I listened to the audiobook, which Patchett reads. I don't always recommend authors reading their novels, but I do in this case. Her narration is excellent.

Continuing my “privileged white woman” journey

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

Okay, I was curious. I’ve enjoyed Elizabeth Gilbert’s other books (I read The Signature of All Things and City of Girls recently and liked them very much), and I’m a bit of an apologist for (some) of her actions, but I’d never actually read Eat, Pray, Love. Of course, we now know that Gilbert didn’t come out of this experience a fully enlightened woman — far from it — but I’m sure it bores you to know that my opinion of the book itself is quite middling. I completely understand why so many find Gilbert insufferable (there are several throwaway comments that feel very, very white-lady-in-2006-coded), but she genuinely seems to care about the people she meets during her travels, and I found some of her spiritual insights moving, even if the India section tested my patience.

I listened to the audiobook, read by Gilbert herself. She's an excellent narrator, which won’t surprise anyone who’s ever heard her speak.

Famesick by Lena Dunham

Over the past several months, I have become a fan of Girls, and as a result, I have become a fan of Lena Dunham. In her new memoir, she talks about her experience making the show, engaging in a toxic friendship with showrunner Jenni Konner and a good-until-it-wasn't relationship with music producer Jack Antonoff, and battling complications from several chronic conditions, including endometriosis and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. I think I expected this to be more about illness than it ended up being; there's a greater focus on surviving fame and the relationships Dunham had with the people closest to her. Dunham is also famous for putting her foot in her mouth and pushing boundaries a bit too far, and she addresses several of these instances, though not always completely satisfactorily. But here’s what I’ll say about Lena Dunham: she has basically never deserved criticism and not gotten it, but she has, on numerous occasions, gotten criticism and not deserved it. We’re starting to understand how smart and talented she was, and still is, and I’m grateful for it.

What really makes Famesick so enjoyable, though, is Dunham's unique powers of description. She didn't get her show greenlit at 26 for nothing; she's an expert storyteller and renders her family, her Girls costars (especially Adam Driver, who comes across as talented but detrimentally odd), and her rehab-mates in vivid detail. One of my favorite lines is about her mother's friend: "the kind of woman who could scare a contractor." Amazing. I quite liked Dunham’s reading of the audiobook as well; she reads in a deadpan voice that makes a lot of her lines even funnier.

Just take me back to Italy

In May, I was in Italy for a week, and not a day has gone by when I didn’t wish I was back. I read the following Italian-esque books during and just after my trip:

Stories of Southern Italy, edited by Ella Carr

It’s hard for me to tell how I feel about this Everyman’s Library anthology, since a) I read many of these stories while in Italy, which was excellent for my immersion process in both directions, and b) I loved "The Siren" by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (and its melodious translation by Stephen Twilley) so much that it's tipping the scales too hard. I refuse to be called beautiful ever again; all men soliciting my affections must now refer to me, as the senator did the siren, the most vividly alive thing they have ever looked at.

Most of these other stories were fine. The Sicilian stories, in particular, interest me because of the pattern they fall into: Sicily formed the writer indelibly, then he (it seems to have usually been a he) goes to the mainland for a while and comes back and Sicily is wrong somehow, sad and fading. Or maybe the Sicily of the writers’ memory never really existed. The stuff translated by Ann Goldstein mostly wasn't my cup of tea, but that's all right; I knew her translation style wasn't for me.1 This collection sent me on a quest to learn more about Italian literature, so that's certainly worthwhile in and of itself!

Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri

I like Jhumpa Lahiri’s translation work from Italian, more than I like her fiction, even (though I’m in the minority there). This book is a mix of forewords to works she’s translated and other essays she’s written about her translation process. They range in effectiveness from relatively ho-hum to interesting to some of the most cogent insights on translation I’ve ever read. Read “In Praise of Echo,” if nothing else, in which I highlighted basically every word Lahiri wrote:

This hierarchy, sadly prevalent, between what is authentic and what is derivative — one might take another step and say, between what is pure and what is tainted —influences not only how we regard literature but how we regard one another. Who is original, who belongs authentically to a place? Who does not? Why are those who are not original to a place — migrants who did not “get there first” — treated as they are?

Hoping for more translations from Lahiri, and more of her writing about them.

Villa Coco by Andrew Sean Greer

As anyone who's read Less knows, Andrew Sean Greer has built his career on serving his readers stories that should be schlocky and sentimental but escape this fate by dint of being just so damn well written. Villa Coco (for the first two-thirds) is no exception. As Greer says, it's not a comfort novel, but it is a "charm" novel, and for most of the book, that charm is buoyant and pleasing. Our young protagonist, Giovedì (not his real name; in a classic Greer miscommunication, his name is mistaken for the Italian for Thursday), goes from bumbling blithely around university to bumbling both blithely and confusedly around Tuscany, working at a villa populated by a formidable elderly Baroness, her dogs, and her many kooky friends.

Charming as Greer’s writing is — he knows it, and why shouldn’t he — he often stretches those charms a little too far. The book flounders most when it attempts to surprise the reader. Parts of its original blurb suggest a trajectory that Greer rapidly steers away from in the latter half, instead taking a direction that I found rather silly. The book might have worked even better if it hadn't been so wary of predictability; Greer is equal to the challenge of making it good anyway. I suppose it’s nice enough as it is.

I listened to the audiobook, read by Eduardo Ballerini. He's sublime. I highly recommend his performance.

A satire with a heart

Medium Rare by A. Natasha Joukovsky

This spring, I picked up Medium Rare by Substacker A. Natasha Joukovsky of the newsletter quite useless, which is about a ho-hum lobbyist who aims to create a perfect March Madness bracket. It’s a fiendishly clever satire that still manages to add touches of humanity to its absurdity — a rare feat! Whether you like basketball or not, it’s useful to know that only about half the book is about how the protagonist’s bracket plays out. The second half, describing the social fallout, is the part I enjoyed most. Fun, smart, and totally unique.

Tried again with a book I gave up on — and was glad I did!

Good Material by Dolly Alderton

I put books down often, and usually I'm right to, but sometimes I give them another chance and I'm pleased with what I find. I was in this case. Two years ago, I initially bounced off of Good Material because it sticks you inside the head of an annoying, immature guy, which is not the type of head I wanted to be in at that time. However, this past month I gave it another go and resonated much more with Andy’s journey dealing with his breakup, having recently gone through something similar myself. There’s a full cast of secondary characters, from Andy’s (more successful) comedy buds to the guy friends who do their best with their limited emotional intelligence to a highly particular roommate obsessed with getting his building recognized for Beatles lore. Good Material feels very updated-Richard-Curtis-comedy, in a good way. He might make a decent film adaptation of it someday.

Feel free to let me know what you’ve been reading!

If you were reading me last year, you may know that the summer of 2025 was not the summer I had hoped for. Actually, this is an understatement: the summer of 2025 was a bust. It was, hands down, the worst summer I have ever had. But one of the best things about it was my Tomato Girl Summer series, which I am delighted to bring back in the hopes that it will provide the good vibes I need in the summer of 2026!

If you’re new here, this is how Tomato Girl Summer works:

For each post (I’m shooting for one a month, starting now and ending in August), I will be reviewing a movie that qualifies for Tomato Girl Summer status according to the following self-devised criteria:

• Part of the movie must be set in Italy, UNLESS it is set in a Little Italy in a non-Italian city.

• The protagonist must be a girl or woman, and she must not be from Italy. She can, however, be Italian American.

• The protagonist, or protagonists, must go on some sort of personal growth journey for which Italy or Little Italy is the catalyst.

• The movie should be fun. No tragedies, no lady Godfather plots. Summer is for fun! It’s not the Tomato Girl Winter of our Discontent, for Lord’s sake.

You may think these criteria have been inconsistently, perhaps even lackadaisically selected. You are correct! This series is mostly based on vibes and me wishing I was in Italy. (I actually was just in Italy, which is part of why you didn’t hear from me for most of May! I am already somewhat regretting coming back.)

I’ll be rating the movies on the following criteria:

• Quality of acting

• Quality of writing

• Quality of the protagonist’s personal growth arc

• How Italy is used in the film: How pretty is the scenery? How stereotypical are the Italian background characters? How unrealistic is the storyline?

Past Tomato Girl Summer movies have included When in Rome, Little Italy, Enchanted April, Letters to Juliet, and a few others. If you have other suggestions, feel free to let me know!

For this post, I’ll be rating the new feature film You, Me & Tuscany, starring Halle Bailey and Regé-Jean Page. As always, I will need you to please keep in mind that what makes a good Tomato Girl Summer movie is not necessarily what makes a good movie … perhaps even more so now than usual.

Writing

The plot of You, Me & Tuscany1 is simple. A child could follow it. First, we meet main character Anna, who’s a house-sitter who used to want to be a chef, and her mom is dead. Anna also has a friend, Claire, who works in a hotel, and Claire lets her hang out there sometimes. Anna meets this Italian guy, Matteo, who tells her about his beautiful villa in his Tuscan hometown while they’re in his hotel room. Then he leaves before she wakes up but leaves her a message saying hey, you should go to Italy like you and your mom wanted to! Then Anna flies directly to Tuscany with no plans, has a run-in with a swoony British-Italian man named Michael, and sneaks into Matteo’s house because “he basically invited me to stay!” She’s chilling there when Matteo’s mom and grandma come to clean, at which point Anna convinces them that she and Matteo are engaged and that’s why she’s in the house. Then Michael comes home, because guess what, he’s Matteo’s cousin-brother because he was adopted by Matteo’s parents after his own died!! Anna totally wants to come clean but she likes these people too much, and they own a restaurant she can help them with!! Also, there’s a festival centered around teams of two pushing ginormous barrels down the street!!

Okay, so maybe a child couldn’t follow it. You, Me & Tuscany it feels like a mishmash of other rom-coms before it: the typical Italian self-discovery ones, of course, but there are definite notes of While You Were Sleeping, another film about a lonely young woman who lies to a guy’s family about being engaged to him and ends up falling for both his brother and the entire wacky “spicy white” family (“spicy white” is Claire’s term for the Italian family; in While You Were Sleeping, they’re Irish). Both movies also take a looong time to get to the liar reveal, but it’s more tolerable in While You Were Sleeping because it’s just so much funnier and better written. Honestly, I wished I was watching that instead.

Acting

Halle Bailey is sweet and winning enough in this role, once you get past her character’s utter lack of boundaries or travel savvy (even a first-time traveler shouldn’t expect to book a room in Tuscany with zero notice). Regé-Jean Page is also likable enough here. However, I wasn’t sure how much I bought their chemistry, simply because we don’t get to see much of it; the film tends to lacquer over their time together with montages. Aziza Scott is a genuine delight as Claire, Anna’s despairing best friend, and Marco Calvani is an affable presence as Lorenzo the cab driver, who’s perhaps a little too invested in this American woman’s love life. (This latter character actually gave me pleasant flashbacks to living in Colombia, when it seemed like I was having a hour-long conversation about the meaning of life with a taxi driver at least every other weekend.) Every other character is just kinda there, which is starting to be a theme in this movie.)

Personal Growth

Anna’s whole thing, at the beginning of the movie, is that she lives vicariously through other people and doesn’t try to chase her own dreams. She’s a house sitter, and the opening montage is of her pretending she lives the life of the woman whose house she’s caring for.2 She really wants to be a chef, but she hasn’t made progress towards fulfilling that ambition since her mother, who was also a professional cook, passed away. By cosplaying as Matteo’s fiancee and helping in his family’s restaurant, Anna realizes she wants to dust off her dreams and try them again. It’s a decent growth narrative. If only the rest of the movie was better!

Italian Vibes

This is clearly a movie purposely curated to entice American viewers with Italy-porn. The jaw-dropping sandwich Anna almost eats at the cafe on her first day is too beautiful to be real. (I was recently in Italy, and the sandwiches I saw did come close.) It includes wacky Tuscan traditions like the barrel race, though I still think Under the Tuscan Sun did it better with the flag-throwing. (“And these men are straight?”) The bustling Italian family, if a little stereotypical (ok, a lot), is charming enough, and of course they own a restaurant, because no one in all of Italy is an accountant or a mechanic! It’s the uber-Italian Vibes movie, with very little substance. But it is pretty.

The one notable thing about this movie, Italy-wise, is that both its protagonist and its romantic lead are Black. Tomato Girl Summer movies tend to be overwhelmingly white, and seeing an American woman of color get her chance at a transformative trip to Italy was really nice. I hope we see more of this in the future. And, I hope, in a more memorable movie.

5/10 Delectable Deli Sandwiches

You’ll see what I’m talking about down below.

Books from the longlist I read:

Moderation by Elaine Castillo

Moderation is a bold, high-concept idea: a former social media content moderator, quietly burned out from the pedophilia, incest, and other horrific violence she witnesses daily, starts working for a virtual reality dreamworld of a company. She’s also devastatingly attracted to her boss. My favorite parts of this book were the descriptions of the VR experience and how it worked; it’s like a time-travel theme park, featuring locations from all over the world, and the various ways players try to ruin it for everyone else are (sadly) realistic.

I struggled more with the prose; it's maximalist, choked with detail and dry humor in a way that's entertaining until you realize every paragraph is like that and your energy starts to wane. It could be that I just don't share enough cultural touchstones with Castillo to enjoy what she's doing — aside from our differences in age, ethnicity, and geographic location, there are several references to, like, fancy watches as indicators of personality that made my eyes glaze over. Even romance-obsessed me barely noticed the romantic subplot (main plot? I was unsure to what degree this book intended to spotlight the romance), so suffocated did it feel by mention after mention of various class signifiers.

Moderation wouldn’t have been one of my picks for the shortlist, and I guess the Women’s Prize committee agreed.

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Audition by Katie Kitamura

Despite Audition being one of the buzziest novels of last year, and despite how much I enjoyed Kitamura’s earlier novel Intimacies, I really do think this book is just the bag of chips, no “all that” included. I’ll try to avoid spoilers in case you somehow haven’t heard or read about Audition yet; there’s a twist — more like a gimmick — that occurs halfway through. Without it, this book is really nothing. It’s all gimmick, and I don’t even think the gimmick is that interesting! The writing had strong moments, especially when discussing the craft of acting (the protagonist is an actor), but the style felt loose and sloppy; the number of comma splices I saw made me want to take to my copy2 with a ballpoint pen.3 (I'm not even a comma splice hater! Just use them judiciously. Which this book did not.)

I have been told that you can’t miss a single detail in Audition or you’ll be done for, and it’s true that I read it amid a number of other distractions … but I’m not so sure my opinion would change upon a reread. I’m shocked it didn’t make it to the shortlist, though, because it’s the kind of book that the Women’s Prize typically loves. But, as we’ll get into, rewarding avant-garde fiction may not be the Women’s Prize’s M.O. anymore.

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Books from the shortlist I read:

Dominion by Addie E. Citchens

I wanted to enjoy Dominion because it had gotten so much hype, and the third of so of the audiobook I got through was at least well produced. The story is set at a Black church in Mississippi, and the church newsletter sections had fun background music that sounded appropriately ecclesiastical. The narrators were good, too. But I was eventually forced to conclude that everyone else must have read a different book than I did. I felt like I’d seen this type of church narrative before; the book seems to want to surprise you, but it always goes for that surprise factor in the most predictable way possible. Can you believe that some of these CHURCH people have a lot of SEX and it is WEIRD?4 Can you believe that this CHURCH person is GAY? I felt that neither the writing nor the character development was strong enough to compensate for the general predictability of the plot.

Other people seem to really like this book, but no one seems to really love it, and historically, the Women’s Prize has gone to a novel that people really love. So my guess is this won’t be it.

DNF ❌

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

The Correspondent is a crowd-pleaser if there ever was one. It has a thorny old-lady protagonist with a sharp tongue, a good group of secondary characters she writes to (this book is entirely composed of emails and letters; I recommend the audiobook because it’s well acted with a full cast, and there are so many characters), and plenty of tragic backstory and heartwarming friendship to round things out. It’s accessible, but not nearly as sappy as it could be. It’s the kind of book that’s a safe choice for a book club pick, or a gift for someone you don’t know that well, because it’s hard to imagine anyone disliking it.

But I don’t think this means it should win the Women’s Prize. A Women’s Prize book, to me, is a book that people like, but also a book that’s doing something innovative, a book that’s seen as a real writing achievement. This means the books that win it tend to be considered “literary” by the publishing market. The Correspondent feels too quintessentially upmarket — which, for those who don’t spend every waking minute following the publishing world, means a novel that falls somewhere between literary and commercial — to fit the usual Women’s Prize criteria. As John Warner says in his excellent piece on upmarket fiction, one of this category’s defining characteristics is its tendency to affirm whatever principles it thinks are held by its target audience, usually meaning middle-class white ladies from the U.S. The Correspondent, to its credit, complicates a few of these expectations with a protagonist who has made a lot of serious mistakes. But there are other moments where the novel pats you on the back for being a liberal and understanding reader; for example, one rivalry is quickly resolved by the protagonist learning how hard it is to be a Black woman in professional spaces. I don’t think it’s inherently bad for books to contain messages like these, but the book handles those moments in a way that’s less subtle and a touch more didactic than I’d expect from a typical Women’s Prize winner.

But maybe I’m wrong, because this isn’t the first time such a book has been nominated for the prize. I think I remember similar discussions about Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, for example. The last few years of the Women’s Prize have skewed fairly “literary,” so maybe they’re going for relatability this year. And even when they nominate lesser-known or more esoteric novels, they do tend to hand the prize to a popular book. Maybe I’m blathering on about nothing. We’ll see!

I still liked The Correspondent, and I think you should probably read it. But though I’m impressed at this book’s widespread likability, I’m less interested in books that please everyone than I am in books that risk repelling readers by doing something weird and different. This might explain what I think the winner should be.

⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2

Flashlight by Susan Choi

Look, I don’t think Flashlight is a perfect book. Its first third drags. It doesn’t really care about tying up loose ends. These things irritated me. But I still think it should probably win the Women’s Prize, and it’s because I genuinely can’t remember the last time I read a book like this. It’s possible that I never have.

Flashlight, which follows a Korean-American family before and after the father disappears in Japan, is basically four different books. It’s an immigrant family saga about cultural and generational divides, a tense thriller, a campus/study abroad novel, and even, subtly and briefly, a romance. It works because Susan Choi writes them all really well. Even when I was frustrated by the pacing, I never thought the characters were underdeveloped or uninteresting. Choi’s writing, too, is a standout; its long sentences and hyper-specific clauses feel almost old-fashioned at times, not at all like the stripped-bare MFA sentences so common today.5 And, again, this works because she’s good at it.

If you need total closure in your fiction, or even more than a little closure, this book might annoy you. But I still think you should read it. That doesn’t mean it’s my favorite book on this list, though.

⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2

Heart the Lover by Lily King

You may know, if you were here the last time I wrote about Heart the Lover, that I listened to the audiobook on a car trip that took almost exactly as long as the audiobook lasted. I’d cleaned my car the week before and had never moved my seat back to its original position, so I was basically plastered against the steering wheel for six hours. Yet so engrossed was I in this novel, so invested was I in whatever happened to its characters, that I felt almost ill. (The next day, unfortunately, I was so sore from driving in such a cramped position that I felt terrible in a different way.) So, of course, my favorite book on this shortlist was never going to be anything else.

Heart the Lover, like all books by Lily King, is deceptively simple. It’s easy to read, its prose as clear and fresh as spring water, and it starts as a charming campus novel, but it doesn’t end that way. It doesn’t anticipate readers’ positions and try to affirm them; it expects empathy, because it provides empathy. It holds warmth and love for all its characters, even when they make mistakes. Especially when they make mistakes. It loves both the permanence and the impermanence of love. This impermanence pierces the heart, and yet the heart continues.

You don't need to have read King's earlier novel Writers & Lovers to enjoy this, but if you have, you'll enjoy it more. And I think you deserve to enjoy it more. It probably won’t win the Women’s Prize. But I don’t care.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

What is your favorite Women’s Prize contender? Do you care about the Women’s Prize at all? I don’t blame you if you don’t. There is, as always, far too much out there to read.

Literary Hub has delivered. The site recently announced its Best of the Best summer reading challenge, which offers six challenges, plus one bonus, over the course of twelve weeks. Anyone who completes all six challenges (reading a book from a different LitHub list) gets one entry for a prize drawing, and those who also do the bonus challenge get two entries. These lists are long, so the sky’s the limit!

I won’t publicize which books I’m reading for the challenge, because 1) I may change my mind and 2) I may flame out in disgrace halfway through. But there are so many wonderful books on these lists, ones that I can’t personally use for these challenges because I’ve already read them. (Rereading doesn’t seem to be quite in the spirit of the challenge, but I’m sure LitHub will support other interpretations.) This upsets me to no end. But I can try to make you read them! Here goes.

50 Great Classic Novels Under 200 Pages: Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

This first challenge begins today, but don’t worry! It’s designed to be short. Giovanni’s Room, the story of two young men’s love affair in Paris, was recently up for Saddest Book Ever on LitHub, and I’m still incensed that it lost to The Bell Jar (which isn’t even sad, really!). In the tradition of great tragedy, the saddest thing about Giovanni’s Room is how easily it could have turned out differently. But, of course, it could never have turned out differently. If you’ve never read Baldwin’s prose, you’re in for a feast; I can’t believe he uses the same alphabet that I do. He must have had a pen dipped in gold.

If you’ve already read this, there’s also:

• Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov, a delightful, sometimes wistful book about an aging Russian professor at a small college. It pulls out just as many fifty-cent whopper words as Lolita, but it’s a much less grueling reading experience. (It’s also on the campus novel list down below!)1

The Greatest Summer Novels of All Time: Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

Giovanni’s Room is also on this list, but if you’d prefer nostalgic melancholy over tragedy, you can’t do better than Dandelion Wine. Bradbury’s ode to the summers of his Midwestern youth are made lovelier and stranger and fuller of quiet human longing than a real Midwestern summer, or some would say. I, having lived several of them, think that Bradbury actually gets it just right.

If you’ve already read this, there’s also:

• A Room with a View by E. M. Forster, which is both extremely clever and set in Italy. Nothing could be more summery than that. (I wrote about the film version last year.)

What the New York Times Missed (71 More of the Best Books of the 21st Century): The Idiot by Elif Batuman

Every once in a while, you read a book that seems to be about you. I didn't go to Harvard, and I'm not Turkish American, and I am not very tall with a very large shoe size, but in many other ways, I am Selin, the main character of this book. Selin, a freshman at Harvard in 1996, has a fascination with languages and how people communicate, but she struggles to communicate herself with Ivan, her senior crush. They trade increasingly intellectual and personal emails while she waits for him to either commit or commit to not committing, neither of which he does. She takes classes at school during the year, travels abroad to teach English in the summer, and through it all, she is very confused. Whether or not you can relate to The Idiot, it’s smart and ironic and so, so hilarious.

If you’ve already read this, there’s also:

• Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, a wild, gorgeous collection of surrealist short stories

• No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood, a novel of the Internet that starts out bizarre and ends up sad. Great on audio.

70 Great Contemporary Novels Under 200 Pages: The Passion by Jeanette Winterson

This book is one of a kind, and I mourn that deeply, because it means we’ll never get another one. It perfectly conveys the tragedy of war, the magic of Venice, and the beauty and the pain of loving another person. Books about Venice are so often cheesy but this book never is. It’s quick and bright and tender. Read it or I will weep. Read it and I will weep (but for joy)!

If you’ve already read this, there’s also:

• Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, a delicately observed novel of a 1980s Irish Christmas and a man who faces a choice between a comfortable enough life and an uncomfortable truth. Also great on audio.

The Greatest Coming of Age Novels: Oreo by Fran Ross

Fran Ross’s only novel, Oreo, is frenetic and vivid and a linguistic delight. I’ve already written about Oreo here, and as before, I feel I have no choice but to quote its very first sentence:

When Frieda Schwartz heard from her Shmuel that he was (a) marrying a black girl, the blood soughed and staggered in all her conduits as she pictured the chiaroscuro of the white-satin chuppa and the shvartze’s skin; when he told her that he was (b) dropping out of school and would therefore never become a certified public accountant — Riboyne Shel O’lem! — she let out a great geshrei and dropped dead of a racist/my-son-the-bum coronary.

Hell yeah.

If you’ve already read this, there’s also:

• How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez, about a family of immigrants from the Dominican Republic and how some of them rediscover their roots. Read if you enjoy books about gaggles of sisters and their complex dynamics.

• Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld, a pitch-perfect chronicle of privileged teen awkwardness. If you liked The Idiot, I think you might like this.

The Best Campus Novels of the Last 100 Years: Real Life by Brandon Taylor

Brandon Taylor’s brilliance lies in quick, intense observations: of the layers of meaning beneath a seemingly banal interaction, of the faces of strangers crossing the street, of the death by a thousand cuts being a gay Black man in academia will win for you. Every other page you’re going to wonder how he DOES that, and you’re going to be so happy that he does it.

If you’ve already read this (and The Idiot, which is also here), there’s also:

• I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai, a non-mystery-mystery that avoids tidy solutions

• Possession by A. S. Byatt, a heady, academic read best suited for those who were graduate students or wish they were

• The Secret History by Donna Tartt, a suspenseful, atmospheric, beautifully written thriller that’s a classic for a reason

The Best Contemporary Novels over 500 Pages (Bonus): Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

The time-travel novel that converted me to the side of time-travel novels. Life After Life, which follows an English family during World War I and II, asks the same question all the best time travel novels ask: can we really start over? And if we can, is it worth it?

If you’ve already read this, there’s also:

• The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman, one of the best Arthurian novels in recent memory (I wrote more about it here)

• Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a modern novel on the U.S., Nigeria, and race relations that reads like a Dickensian character study, but more tightly plotted and even sharper

Let me know if you’ll be joining the challenge, and what you’ll be reading!

Starting in the late 2010s or so, Nate, played by Adrian Grenier, became an object of near-ubiquitous online scorn. The consensus, in a nutshell, is that he’s a whiny brat incapable of compassion for Andy as she weathers a hellish job at Runway for the sake of advancing her journalism career. Of course, it makes sense that Andy isn’t dating the same guy in her 40s as she was in her early 20s, but I suspect that the Nate-hate so many fans have expressed was a factor in his character being written out. Great! I thought. This movie will be so Internet-pilled, it’ll need its stomach pumped.

It turns out that The Devil Wears Prada 2 is fine. I’m not mad I saw it. The costumes look good; in a small act of mercy, Miranda’s ringmaster-chic gold-and-red heels1 from the teaser trailer were not forced upon us in the film, and costume designer Molly Rogers is obviously aware of how fantastic Anne Hathaway looks in royal blue and black. Stanley Tucci and Emily Blunt are delightful, as always. There’s some genuine humor in the film, like Miranda’s halfhearted attempts at avoiding HR violations and Emily hurling staccato insults at her ex-husband over FaceTime while giving herself a facial. And the commentary on journalism struggling against AI was astute, if not as thoroughly developed as I’d have liked.

But as I got further and further into this too-long movie (somehow only 10 minutes longer than the original, but it felt like an extra half hour at least), I realized something. I missed Nate! I’ve defended Nate’s character before, but it’s not that I loved Nate, or even liked him; there’s little to note about his character in either direction. It’s that in the original movie, he’s the primary counterpoint to Andy’s increasing affinity with the cutthroat world of Runway, which means he drives most of the film’s conflict. You can like or dislike Nate, but undeniably, the movie needed him.

This is The Devil Wears Prada 2’s biggest flaw: by removing Nate, it also removes any trace of criticism for Runway and, therefore, the tension between appreciation for fashion and suspicion of the industry at large that makes the original film interesting. Any character who could feasibly voice Nate’s viewpoint simply … doesn’t. Andy’s new love interest, Peter, is unflaggingly supportive of Andy despite her distaste for his architectural designs, and Andy’s friend Lily has no real concerns about her friend returning to the job and boss that caused her so much grief in her early 20s. Andy seems to not remember why she left Runway in the first place; she greets Miranda with a daft, cheesy smile and gushing enthusiasm that doesn’t fit her character’s experiences — didn’t she walk right out of a car in Paris and throw her work phone into a fountain? Miranda herself is significantly softened from the original and married to a lovely, understanding partner (played by Kenneth Branagh) herself. That wouldn’t even be so bad, if we got even a little insight on how she got there.

I’m aware the film had its reasons for going easy on the fashion industry this time around. Obviously, there’s money; it’s harder to get high fashion to sponsor your movie if they know you’re going to crucify them. Anna Wintour herself even did a Devil Wears Prada-themed Oscar bit with Anne Hathaway and appeared on the cover of Vogue with Meryl Streep, if that tells you anything about the industry’s comfort level with this sequel. (In the magazine’s interview of the two women, moderated by Greta Gerwig, Streep says that Miranda was difficult to dress in the first movie because designers were scared shitless of Anna Wintour’s reaction.) The other reason, as I suspected before, is simply the Internet. Miranda’s character, as played by Streep, has become a readily meme-able girlboss role model, and the “cerulean” monologue is on every fan’s lips. Andy is excited to see Miranda again not because it’s a logical character choice, but because she’s serving as an audience proxy: we are excited to see Miranda again.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is doing well, for now. It made over $200 million, double its budget, in its opening weekend alone. Its original cast returned — the important ones, anyway — and were happy to be there. People don’t actively detest it, and that’s usually about what you can hope for in an unplanned sequel. But I wonder if this movie will age as well as its predecessor. After this year’s Jeff Bezos-sponsored Met Gala2, and the announcement that the last few years of the event have made enough money to potentially set up an endowment for the Costume Institute,3 public opinion for high fashion seems lower than ever. We might think Miranda is the villain again in a few years. If you ask me, of course, we shouldn’t be nominating a villain for this movie at all. But does TikTok care what I think? No, it does not.

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“You have to remember,” the speaker said, “that books are products. If you want to work in publishing, loving books helps, but at the end of the day, it’s not your job to love them. It’s your job to sell them.” That was how I learned that the blissful metaphorical marriage I had anticipated would be forced to carve out a space for that most coldhearted of bedfellows: capitalism.

This is a reality of our system, of course: all books must be sold and therefore must be marketed. Marketing copy isn’t going to get a book exactly right. Usually, the gap between a book’s marketing and its actual content is surmountable with the help of honest, thoughtful reviews. Sometimes there is tension or disagreement among readers as to how well a book stands up to its marketing promises; for example, much of the discourse on Madeline Miller’s novel Circe devolved into whether it was as feminist as its promotional materials claimed. You often see this when a fiction book is marketed based on politics or what it has to “teach” readers, or when the blurb desperately tries to avoid the mention of a twist that could actually help market the books successfully, if it were mentioned in anything but the vaguest possible terms. I always find these situations interesting to analyze, but I’ve always thought the most fascinating marketing gaps happen in romance.

Romance is an economic issue. Jane Austen knew it 200 years ago; there’s a reason none of her characters marry far outside their class. If the proliferation of irksome TikToks on why men should always pay for women on dates — but like, in a feminist way1 — are anything to go by, our society is little different. In the book world, romance is both a fantasy-oriented genre and a practical one: it’s a genre where women and their desires are centered, but it’s also an enormous share of the market, usually quoted as around 25 percent of total book sales. People who read romance often read a lot of it. By design, romance is a formulaic genre, one that must always end happily, and it’s also a type of book people often read for emotional rather than cerebral reasons. They want to feel a specific way after reading one. That’s all well and good, but it often results in readers using their feelings about a novel as artistic judgment. If a romance novel was supposed to make you feel good (that’s the promise), and it made you feel bad, or even something more complex than merely good, then that means the novel is bad. You paid for a specific product, and you should get what you paid for. Right?

This is where Rainbow Rowell’s newest novel, Cherry Baby, comes in. I’d been reading Rowell’s work for a while, so I picked it up despite many unsatisfactory reviews, and even I was startled by how different it became from what I’d assumed. One reason for this is that different sites were putting out completely different blurbs. Here, for example, is the blurb you’ll see if you look the book up on Goodreads right now:

Everybody knows that Cherry’s husband, Tom, is in Hollywood making a movie . . .

Almost nobody knows that he isn’t coming home.

Tom is the creator of Thursday—a semi-autobiographical webcomic that’s become an international phenomenon.

Semi-autobiographical. That means there’s a character in this movie based on Cherry . . . “Baby.”

Wide-hipped, heavy-chested, double-chinned Baby.

Cherry never wanted this. No fat girl wants to see herself caricatured on the page—let alone on the big screen. But there’s no getting away from it. Baby looks so much like Cherry that strangers recognize her at the grocery store.

While her soon-to-be ex-husband is in Los Angeles getting rich and famous and being the internet’s latest boyfriend, Cherry is stuck in Omaha taking care of the dog he always wanted and the house they were going to raise a family in . . . and wondering who she’s supposed to be without him.

But what you’ll see on Amazon, and what people saw months before the book came out, was all that plus this additional material:

Cherry had promised to love Tom through thick and thin.

She’d meant it.

One night, Cherry decides to leave all her problems, including Tom’s overgrown puppy, at home. She ventures out to see her favorite band play her favorite album ... and someone recognizes her from across the room.

Russ Sutton knew Cherry when she was a young art student with a fondness for pin-up dresses and patent leather heels. Before Tom.

Russ knows Cherry. He likes Cherry.

And best of all... he’s never heard of Thursday.

Tender, funny, and utterly human, Cherry Baby is Rainbow Rowell’s richest, most surprising — sexiest2 —novel yet.

With that second half, Cherry Baby looks far more like a traditional second-chance romance than it does without it. And, without spoiling too much, I can say it isn’t a traditional second-chance romance. My guess is that when early reviews said they felt baited by the marketing, publishers pulled that last few paragraphs as damage control, but it was too late. Readers’ expectations were set, and then they were thwarted.

I don’t know whose idea it was to present Cherry Baby as a typical genre romance, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Rowell’s. She’s basically said as much:

Rowell, best known for her young adult novels, is no stranger to books that don’t neatly slot into marketing categories; her most recent YA project, the Simon Snow series, was a fantasy trilogy, a spinoff of her earlier book Fangirl, that’s more or less a gay Harry Potter fanfic. Her first adult novel, Attachments, is more enjoyable as a contemporary novel about the character evolution of a geeky, insecure IT guy than it is as a romance between him and a woman whose emails he’s supposed to be screening for work, but it tends to get shoved in the “romance” category anyway. But Rowell’s most recent adult novel, Slow Dance, was very much structured as a traditional romance novel, and nothing about the blurbs most readers saw led them to expect something different in Cherry Baby, so I do understand why readers were confused.

I expected not to like Cherry Baby much myself, but I did like it, and many of the reasons I liked it are also ways it differs from commercial romance norms. Outside the romance, there’s a lot of detail on Cherry’s family and friends, especially her sisters, all of whom (except one) are fat like her, and though the book’s discussions of fatphobia tread the same ground a few too many times, I thought the commentary on GLP-1 meds was quite thoughtful. But my favorite thing about the book appears to be a lot of readers’ least favorite: the men.

Rena Rani over at Smart Romance wrote an excellent piece a while back on men in romance novels, and she has this to say about how they’re often written differently from the female leads:

On one side: abundance. Female characters of every stripe and size … Tall and short, fat and thin, soft and scarred. The camera lingers on them all with affection. Our modern heroines don’t require atonement or improvement before their love stories can begin. That expansion is real. It’s hard-won, and worth exalting.

On the other side of our book covers, though, is constancy. Heroes who remain, physically, near-mythic. Tall and broad. Thick thighs, tapered waist, a miraculously full head of hair regardless of age, the kind of jaw that could cut through plot. I’m not above the pleasure of corded forearms, nor do I want to be; fantasy is part of the point. But when one body is allowed to resemble humanity—flawed, varied, recognizably ourselves—and is still treated as worthy of love, while the other must remain pristine, perfection incarnate? That’s a substantive disparity, and not one easily bridged.

There’s often an assumption that unrealistically attractive men is what women want to see in romance novels and that anything else is demeaning, yanking readers out of their fantasy and back into a world where Pete Davidson dating Kim Kardashian makes sense but Pierce Brosnan staying married to his plus-size wife doesn’t. But this is not always the case. On a historical romance subreddit, I once saw a comment about “real” men in romance novels that I think about at least once a week. This person said that she wants to read romance heroes with love handles or stretch marks or irregular facial features — not because she thinks she deserves no better, but because she actually thinks those things are hot. We forget that women and men really do like each other, if they let themselves. That’s kind of why humans are still around.

Rowell is a great writer of (white) men’s appearance3 because she understands what real women find attractive about real men. Take, for example, how Shiloh sees Cary in Slow Dance:

Cary was smiling again. His mouth was closed, and there were deep lines in his cheeks. He’d always had a face full of lines — in his cheeks, under his eyes, in his forehead. Even in high school. Like he had a little too much face for the space. Cary crinkled when he was happy and creased when he was angry.

Russ and Tom in Cherry Baby, too, seem like men you could actually meet. Russ says he’s five-nine, but he’s probably five-eight, and he wears tortoiseshell glasses “like the token Irish actor on a BBC drama — a little flintier than everyone else and a little more alive.” Tom is a large, solid guy, with short ash-blond hair that drives Cherry nuts when it’s long enough to curl and, at least when she first meets him, “a mouth that never quite resolved itself into a smile.” They’re both so much more memorable than hulking muscles and chiseled jawlines. Nothing is hotter than specificity.

The other thing about Russ and Tom is that you don’t hate either of them. Well, people do; they’ve said so. But I don’t. It’s an unspoken rule of commercial romance that you’re not supposed to like any guy in the heroine’s orbit as much as you like the hero. This isn’t bad on its own, but it’ll often result in secondary men that are just dummy characters designed to be punching bags, presented to you in all their callous, incompetence-weaponizing glory with apples in their mouths. It’s a cheap trick, and Rowell won’t use it. She refuses to give you a guy to hate, which is more difficult, but also more poignant, because life doesn’t always give you one, either.

This whole book-marketing business has, strangely, made me think of being on dating apps. The older I get, the more wearying this mechanized mating ritual becomes. It’s less the dates themselves, because I’ve had the good fortune to mostly go out with polite and pleasant enough guys. But the process of getting to the dates is a dehumanizing sequence of likes and messages and reporting profiles with photos taken of abdominal surgeries (yes, this really happened). You’re inundated with so many profiles that it’s easy to forget that beneath each one lies a person who could never be accurately depicted with six photos and a prompt about which character on The Office they’re most like. Fictional and real alike, we all deserve better than our blurbs. But hey, that’s the world we live in.

Rufi Thorpe’s novel Margo’s Got Money Troubles, one of my favorite books of 2024, is about many things, but its most interesting theme is the one least publicly discussed. Descriptions of this novel often take on a breathless quality, rushing to include all the wackiest details of its premise: Margo is a 20-year-old mom whose baby daddy is her misanthropic English professor, and she moves in with her once-absent ex-pro-wrestler father and starts an OnlyFans account to pay the bills. The book tricks you, in multiple ways: its irreverent bubble-gum packaging envelops a story that’s intelligent and funny without being opaque. It has things to say about sex work and religion and parenthood, but its interest in character dimensionality is what elevates it into something more complex. In Margo’s Got Money Troubles, Margo’s online sex work is above all else a performance, a creation of a persona that is and is not Margo. But, as Thorpe points out, this process is not altogether different from the writing of a novel. Even when she’s talking to us, Margo knows she’s constructing a narrative, and it’s not always clear whether character Margo and narrator Margo are quite the same:

There is a desperation to a novel that is unsettling. The world so painstakingly re-created in miniature; this tiny diorama made of words. Why go to all this trouble, to create me, to seduce you, to enumerate so many different breakfast cereals … It’s almost easier to believe I’m real than to understand what’s actually going on. The desperation that could have caused anyone to invent me in the first place. The urgency and need that would require creating an imaginary space of this size and level of detail.

And it really makes you wonder: What kind of truth would require this many lies to tell? 1

Technically, Margo is the narrator of her book. Large swaths of it are told from her first-person perspective, but other sections are in third person, and, as above, even in second. Margo tends to use third person in more emotionally fraught situations: the dissolution of her best high school friendship, the deception of a client she becomes close to. It allows her to create some distance between herself and the people she’s hurt, or the people who have hurt her.

The October you finished Margo’s Got Money Troubles, you told the guy you were seeing about it, how weird and insightful it was. He said he’d like to read it. When his birthday rolled around a few months later, you got him a hardcover copy of the book. You thought about annotating it with your favorite parts, but you worried about whether he’d like reading a book with notes scrawled in it. You instead marked the book with Post-It notes indicating the parts you lingered on, which of your memories they reminded you of, little jokes. When you presented him with the book, he thanked you, bemused, and you wondered if he even remembered you telling him about it. For the remaining six months of your relationship, you saw the book whenever you were at his place, sandwiched between other books on his desk. You wondered if he’d started reading it. You didn’t ask.

When he broke up with you, you asked him, with a clarity of mind that surprised you, to at least take the Post-It notes out of the book before giving it away. He agreed, and you realized that all along, part of you was bracing for this. You were afraid to write in the book because you didn’t want to picture this moment, didn’t want the responsibility of dealing with an indelibly personalized gift whose recipient had rejected not just it, but its giver.

Margo’s experiment with narration is a flirtation with postmodernism, one she embarks on because of a flirtation in her own life. In the college English class taught by her son’s father, Mark, whether characters can be viewed as real people is a constant topic of discussion. There’s a student in the class named Derek — the kind of guy who, according to Margo, never washes his hair and likes foreign movies — who gets in arguments with Mark over this constantly:

Mark kept saying, “The main character is not a real person.”

“But in the book, he’s a real person,” Derek says.

“Yes, insofar as he is not presented as a cat or a robot,” Mark said.

“So, I am just saying, in the book, I think he has borderline personality disorder.”

“This is not an interesting way to read the book.”2

Depending on how you view character, the argument between Derek and Mark could either be a deadlock between two stubborn, pretentious indie boys or a representation of the real-life academic debate over how readers should interpret characters. Mark’s position, which scholar Rita Felski calls an “antihumanist orientation,” is that fictional characters should not be viewed as analogous to real people, but as symbols created by the author for the purpose of conveying their message. Many educators who received their training in a certain era — the mid-to-late 20th century, say — espouse this view, which was itself a reaction against earlier academic emphasis on characters as living, breathing entities.3 I wonder if some of the English teachers my friends had, the ones they claimed “killed” their love of reading by distilling books down to nothing but symbols and synecdoche, were just one link in a Telephone game of antihumanist character theory, repeating increasingly garbled echoes of what their professors and their professors’ professors before them had taught.

In the 1990s, however, American literary scholars started to reassess antihumanism. (I say “American” because not all cultures approach literature in such a character-focused manner; Czech writer Milan Kundera, for example, wrote about how odd he found it that Anglophone readers and scholars were so keen on knowing exactly how fictional characters looked and spoke.4) One reason for this was the wave of cognitive science research that took place in this era, which trickled over into literary criticism, making a case for reading as a crucial empathy-building activity. Another was the new consideration given to reader-response criticism. Lay readers were turned off by antihumanist approaches to character, finding them impersonal and joyless.5 If you are the sort of person who falls in love with fictional characters — and I may, perhaps, be speaking from experience — being on the receiving end of antihumanist theory feels a bit like finding out your best friend is a robot. Of course, an antihumanist might retort that centering emotional responses to fiction is borderline anti-intellectualist. When devoid of critical thought, this can be true; we see it often enough on social media. But there’s a hypermasculine edge to militant applications of antihumanism, an insistence that emotionality implies immaturity and is antithetical to critical analysis. (This is, in part, why romantic comedy fans are so often told that rom-coms are inherently silly and artless movies.) I don’t see any reason why we can’t have it both ways. You can write an insightful thesis on class issues in Pride and Prejudice and still want Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy to kiss — and perhaps not nearly so many readers would be fascinated by that novel’s themes if they were not also deeply compelled by its characters.

Mark is the kind of antihumanist who would scoff at BookTube “book boyfriends” and TikToks of young women demolishing entire boxes of tissues after reading The Song of Achilles. As he says, approaching characters as real people is not just silly, but uninteresting:

But the character would not be interesting if they were a real person … You would never want to know someone like this, you would never become their friend. They are only interesting because they aren’t real. The fakeness is where the interest lies. In fact, I would go so far as to say that all things that are genuinely interesting aren’t quite real.

Neither Margo nor the novel fully supports Mark’s method of understanding literature. In fact, the explanation Mark offers above shows exactly why he’s so unlikable: antihumanism isn’t just his philosophy for literary studies. It’s his philosophy for life. Mark sabotages real things over and over; he is, after all, a guy who begins a relationship with his teenage student despite being in his thirties and married with kids, and, as we later find out, a guy who slept with his wife’s sister on their wedding night. He is most enamored with Margo not when she acts as herself, but when he can build a mythology around her. After Mark exclaims over Margo’s tattoo of Kermit the frog, she remarks, “It was almost like I was a character in a book to him.” We see more of Mark’s obsession with the intangible over the real in the poem he writes for Margo, “The Hungry Ghost”:6

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

In the dark, we turn to each other
Like deformed doves, 
Confused that we have bodies.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

I feel nothing,
Keep touching me, 
I feel nothing.
I'm a hungry ghost.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

We try to eat each other
But it is like trying to run in a dream,
The dark frozen ice of reality splintering around us. 

Later in the book, Margo uses HungryGhost as her OnlyFans username. The name represents her view of her online sex work persona: a part of her that isn’t really there, something that can be seen, or talked to, or lusted after, but never actually touched. When Margo ends up in a lengthy, intense email exchange with JB, one of her clients, she justifies the details of her life that she changes or embellishes by remembering Mark’s class:

Our job, he insisted, was to try to understand the author, not the character. The character was merely the paint — we needed to try to see the picture the paint was making .… it made her feel better about lying to JB somehow. Like even if she was lying, it was okay because she was using the lies like paint to try to tell him something real.7

After your breakup, you started thinking about Lavinia again.

The original Lavinia is a character from the British soap Downton Abbey, which you watched with your mother in your formative years. In it, Matthew Crawley, heir to Downton, falls for Lady Mary, the caustic, firebrand eldest daughter of the house. She toys with him until he can’t take it anymore, and he leaves for war and comes back with a fiancee, Lavinia. Where Mary is dark-haired, Lavinia is blonde; where Mary is prickly, Lavinia is docile; where Mary is witty, Lavinia is dull. She is everything Mary couldn’t be. This is the point.

You have made many Lavinias for yourself over the years, the women you imagine dating your exes after you. The first guy who broke up with you was older, so you thought of an older Lavinia, with a long sheet of dark hair that didn’t tangle, or come out half curly and half straight in the morning. Lavinia has also been redheaded, blonde, tall, short; she’s been a stage manager; she’s been a rock climber; she’s been someone who likes the right music; she’s been someone who reads philosophy. She is, essentially, not you, or she’s you, but just a little bit better.

Lavinia, of course, is not real; she’s not real even to you. She’s someone you’ve made up to dislike on purpose. She tells you something about yourself, in the moment of time you dream her up: what you’re insecure about, what you think your exes want that you can’t provide. She’s thin because you think you’re not thin enough, well-versed in subjects in which you perceive your own deficiency. You once saw a picture of an ex’s new girlfriend and were surprised by how normal she looked, like someone you might like if you met her. Mary Crawley actually had liked Lavinia, you now remember. You might like your Lavinia, too, if you made her a little more real.

It’s not just Margo and her OnlyFans friends — with whom she films videos with increasingly complex storylines — who take on personas in Margo’s Got Money Troubles; nearly every character is playing some sort of part. Most explicitly, Jinx’s wrestling career is another form of character creation, even sexualization; it’s this realization that allows him to finally accept Margo’s OnlyFans work. Shyanne, Margo’s mother, is pretending to be a type of woman she isn’t in order to get Kenny, her youth pastor boyfriend, to marry her; she doesn’t really love him, but she wants desperately to play the part of his wife. And, of course, Margo is also writing her story for us, hooking us in until we can’t help but want to turn the page.

What I like most about Thorpe’s technique in this novel is her usage of metanarrative tools to do something that few '“meta” novels I’ve read can pull off: invest readers even further in the characters she’s creating. She’s questioning our perception of characters, but she doesn’t make us feel silly for caring about them, because she cares about them, too. I worry that the metanarrative element is going to be lost in the TV series; how would you pull that off in anything other than a book? We could still get a fun story about a plucky young woman and her crazy friends, sure, but it wouldn’t be the same. But who knows. Maybe they’ll surprise me.

I finally decided I wanted to write this essay, and I needed a physical copy of Margo’s Got Money Troubles. I passed a Little Free Library in my neighborhood and saw a shiny hardcover copy, so like the one I had given my ex that I checked it for Post-It notes. There weren’t any, but I decided to buy a paperback copy instead.

A day or two later, I went to a coffee shop by myself — something I’ve been doing more lately, and enjoying — and brought the book with me. I’d read the audiobook before, and I’d only skimmed when adding Post-Its, so this was my first time thoroughly reading the print version. I curled up in the corner of an alcove, a space just big enough for one, and I opened the book. This time, I wrote right on the pages. I used pen.

Two works of Austen-related nonfiction

Jane Austen’s Bookshelf by Rebecca Romney

I bought this book (and waited almost two months for the flibbertigibbet publisher to transport it to my local Barnes & Noble) because I knew I was going to want to own it, and I was right. Romney’s journey to track down the women writers who inspired Jane Austen is not only fun, and not only fascinating, but transformative. It challenges assumptions at every turn: that Austen was the One Great Woman Writer of her time (nope), that she considered herself superior to her female contemporaries (she admired many), that the works of these contemporaries didn't survive because they weren't worthy (no, it was the changing social ideals of what made a good novel, and also, sexism). These women weren't all as fortunate as Austen; many had to work hard to survive, supporting large families and seeking out patrons. Reading Romney's accounts of their rich, complicated lives is like reading a novel in and of itself. I could have done without her giddy asides about tracking down all these books; in smaller doses, they would have added just the right amount of texture, but I'm less interested in the details of these chases than Romney is. (If you want to write a book about rare book dealing, do that … I want to get back to hearing about these cool women!) But this is really extremely minor, and I highly recommend this book to anyone who's wondered why we don't read more women from the Regency period and before.

Patchwork: A Graphic Biography of Jane Austen by Kate Evans

I didn’t know I needed a fabric-themed graphic biography of Jane Austen in my life. But I did! Evans’s illustrations are intricate in their detailing and original in their scope, depicting events that actually happened to Austen, events that may have happened to her, and, notably, speculations on the people who may have made the fabrics Austen wore, many of them from societies colonized by the British Empire. Evans has a talent for conveying facial expressions on the page, even if the faces aren’t as traditionally pretty and symmetrical as some readers’ tastes might prefer. (A surprising number of reviews online were grouchy about this.) However, Evans has a tendency to editorialize, especially about Austen’s books themselves, and as fond as I am of a good editorialization, I don’t know if a biography is the place to do it. For example, she dunks on Mansfield Park and Sense and Sensibility a couple of times. Part of me was like, “Go off!” because they’re not my favorites either, but Evans writes them off as less worthy of being read, as though that’s a general scholarly consensus. (It isn’t: lots of people love Mansfield Park and will passionately defend it to whoever asks! I admire their conviction in the face of public opinion, including my own.)

The most annoying book I read

Katabasis by R. F. Kuang

I won’t say too much about Kuang’s latest dark academia offering because a full essay is coming, but from chapter one, I thought this was going to be an entirely different book than what it was. And if you ask me, the lighthearted adventure-romance novel in my head was more satisfying than the meandering look-at-me-I’m-an-academic story we got. Your enjoyment of this book is highly dependent on how much you’re willing to indulge Kuang’s tangents. (Actually, you could say that about a lot of Kuang’s work.) More on this in a bit!

Two new releases I read

Adult Braces by Lindy West

I have already listened to Adult Braces in its entirety, not because I was at all aware that the discourse would be discoursing (and oh, has it been), but because I have, historically, been a fan of Lindy West’s work. Shrill, a memoir of comedy, fat womanhood, and West’s radical empathy towards even those who really hate her, was one of my favorite books of the year I read it (and it’s also the reason I don’t do a Best Books wrap-up until after December 31st, because I didn’t start Shrill until after Christmas). I had been anticipating this book for several years, and so I preordered the audiobook, read by West herself.

I am already so exhausted by the conversation around this memoir/essay collection that I barely want to rehash it, but in the interest of those who are less online and therefore more at peace than I: West’s relationship with her husband, portrayed as lived-in and warm in her previous work, has been rocky basically since the beginning, when he said he wanted to be polyamorous and she agreed, despite not really wanting it herself. Finding out about his serious-ish girlfriend was the impetus for the cross-country road trip West describes in this book. Today, West, her husband (Ahamefule), and the girlfriend (Roya) live as a closed triad outside Seattle.

Having followed West for a while, I was aware of some of this context, but the details have had the Internet all up in a tizzy, mostly centering on a conviction that West is not nearly as happy as she claims in her relationship and should kick her husband’s ass to the curb. (Plenty of people are using this as an excuse to knock polyamory in general, as if one relationship represents an entire relationship type.) Ahamefule certainly doesn’t come across well in this memoir, though as West points out, she is the one writing it. However, I find it pointless and gossipy to obsess over the real-life relationship that none of us are privy to. We simply don’t know. What we can weigh in on as readers, however, is how well West did at explaining and justifying her decisions through her book.

And … relationship-wise, she did not do great! The ending sequence, in which West gives her story a rapid-fire happily-ever-after treatment, is the written equivalent of diarrhea: it goes right through you with no chance of you processing it. If you don’t know anything about West, you have little reason to believe that this relationship has a chance of working out. This unconvincing ending is probably the main reason readers are so put off. She writes a similarly hasty summary of the dom-sub dynamic she and her husband tried out, which she explains so awkwardly that I wasn’t sure what she was talking about until almost the end of the chapter.

I did really enjoy a lot of other moments in this book: West’s driving trip through the U.S. and her several funny adventures (among the best: her description of the most contemptible avocado toast ever served to woman — West should totally write a food memoir next!), her ADHD, her navigating the tricky tension between being a well-known body positivity figure and realizing she has a binge eating problem. I also enjoyed West’s reading of the audiobook, which includes the original voice memos she made while on her trip. But her failure to stick the landing undermines much of the good to be found here.

Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy

I read McCurdy’s memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died in 2022 when it came out, partly because I was curious and partly because it was getting such glowing reviews that I was almost suspicious. I enjoyed the book, but I wasn’t as bowled over by the writing as many readers said they were. McCurdy got a lot of credit for supposedly writing immaturely on purpose, but given her inconsistencies between sounding adult versus childlike — she’d sometimes switch awkwardly within the same paragraph — I got the feeling that this was just how McCurdy wrote.

And then I read Half His Age, McCurdy’s debut novel about a teenager who dates her teacher, and it turns out I was right. McCurdy’s style is choppy and simplistic, a little too simplistic for the story it’s attempting to tackle. Yes, Waldo is a teenager, but her thought processes often feel confusingly more mature than the book’s language; I wonder if McCurdy had trouble deciding whether to have the teenage Waldo or a more grown-up Waldo narrate the story, and she picked the former while still maintaining a feel of the latter. She also gets Alaska comically wrong, apparently: as I saw one former resident point out, no one there has air conditioning.

I did appreciate that this novel is not afraid to complicate the situation it's portraying. It would have been very easy to make Waldo a helpless victim dragged into a relationship kicking and screaming, or to make Mr. Korgy a full-on Humbert Humbert. But Waldo does in fact pursue her teacher, and Mr. Korgy is in fact kind of a sad loser. There's a little nuance there! Overall, I think this is a good effort for a first novel by someone without a real writing background. I'm interested to see what McCurdy comes up with next.

The book I really should have read by now

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

I know. I know! I was never assigned this book, and I somehow never picked it up. A friend once asked me if I’d read it, because of all his friends he thought I’d be the one who had, and though this was flattering, it was untrue. Now I have read it, and I wish my feelings about it were stronger.

Their Eyes Were Watching God is a gorgeously crafted book on a prose level. Many of these passages were among the most stunning I've ever read. But something about the experience of reading the whole book felt ... fuzzy to me. Like, hard to picture. Time is wobbly; years can pass in the blink of an eye. There are a ton of extended dialogue passages that don't try to catch the reader up to what's happening. Modernist writing in general is kind of a bad fit for my brain; I almost always end up confused. (Though I blush to admit it, I have a similar problem with Toni Morrison.) Is there a type of book that scrambles your brain and keeps you at arm’s length this way? Let me know.

Listening to the audiobook, read with panache by Ruby Dee, helped a lot with the dialect (it's much easier for me to hear it than see it on a page). I toggled back and forth between that and the print text.

The classics I want more people to pick up

The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford

The Pursuit of Love, the most famous novel by the eldest of the endlessly fascinating Mitford sisters, is a delight. It's a rare feat for a novel to be so unsparing in its satire and yet so generous in its characterization, but on many occasions, this book does manage it. It's almost aggressively British, so there's a learning curve if you aren't, but dredging up old memories of Downton Abbey will probably bring you up to snuff, culturally speaking. As funny as the book is, and as silly and fond its depiction of this odd family is, there’s a melancholy to it that can’t quite be suppressed by jokes. There's a reason it's called The "Pursuit" of Love, after all.

The Street by Ann Petry

The Street, set in a working-class Black neighborhood in 1940s Harlem, depicts difficult situations faced by people who are both oppressed and oppress others. But the book never shys away from this complexity. Even the characters who suck (and a lot of them do) have stories and pasts and motives. It's such a fascinating study of an environment that, in this time and place, has little hope of really changing. I found the pacing slow in the middle, but perhaps that's due to me coming in with the wrong expectations. I had thought this story would be primarily about supposedly main character Lutie, and I was distracted by how many breaks the story took to focus on other characters. But the approach Petry takes allows us to witness the full range of her abilities. It's far easier to write a likable heroine than it is to make us understand the perspectives of broken antagonists. Petry can do both. I look forward to reading more from her.

A fun romance

Back After This by Linda Holmes

I love a romance about people with oddly specific jobs, and this book is no exception. Linda Holmes brings her extensive experience as an audio producer to her character, Cecily, who is wrangled into starring on a dating podcast led by an influencer and going on 20 first dates. I really enjoyed the romance; Holmes is really good at writing banter, almost too good in a way. There are a few lines, mostly in the narration, that would sound good aloud on a radio show but read clunky. But this is a minor complaint; this book still made me grin on almost every page. (The best part? "No breathing." If you know, you know.)

The weirdest book I read (that I still recommend)

Sky Daddy by Kate Folk

This is one of the most singular books I have ever read. It follows Linda, a woman who’s sexually attracted to planes and believes she will die in a fiery crash while riding one, uniting her soul with her plane husband’s forever. And yet it treats this batshit premise with such straightforwardness and lack of judgment. The result is both hilarious and endearing. I did start to tire of the constant plane references (Linda’s descriptions of human beings as reminiscent of planes were funny the first ... five times), and the pace lags occasionally, but this book is strange and silly and yet also touching, sometimes. You should read it, especially if you think it sounds stupid!

Tell me: what have you been reading?

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, on an individual basis. I like men!1 I like plenty of romantic comedies that men have made: 13 Going on 30, Moonstruck, When Harry Met Sally. What I have come to be skeptical of is men who decide they want to make a different kind of romantic comedy. They say they’re bored with the classic rom-com format and want to interrogate it differently. What is at the bottom of these tropes that we so romanticize, and how would we react if we saw them play out in reality? What if the girl doesn’t get the guy, or the guy doesn’t get the girl? What if these people are pieces of shit?

These are not unfair questions, but I’m not sure these “subversions” adequately answer them. Two of the most prominent examples of this format — 1997’s My Best Friend’s Wedding and 2009’s (500) Days of Summer, both directed and written by men — depict “trainwreck” women who either reject or aren’t seen as deserving of a traditional happy ending. These films exult in depicting women’s reprehensible behavior, but what they forget, or don’t care to mention, is that it takes two to tango. And someone has to dance the man’s part.

There was a very specific period of time on the Internet — sometime in the late 2010s, just as the traditional romantic comedy film was losing its grip on theatergoers — when everyone was claiming to know The Truth about (500) Days of Summer. The twee, postmodern-leaning bildungsroman, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, tells an anti-love story: Tom, a hopeless romantic, tries to convince Summer, a cynic and relationship anarchist, that she is his one true love, with disastrous results. The Truth that I saw so many people proclaiming was that everyone had gotten the film wrong when it first came out. Summer, who did nothing but clearly state her relationship preferences, was not the villain of the film: Tom, who tried to manipulate her into feeling otherwise, was.

This narrative of a woman expressing herself honestly and a man overriding her wishes feels familiar and satisfying, a reading of the film that felt comfortable in the #MeToo era. It’s not a wholly incorrect interpretation, but it didn’t match my own feelings about (500) Days. Something about Summer’s characterization, the cavalier way she dealt with other people’s feelings, had always made my skin crawl, but then again, I was a teen at the time I first watched the film. Upon rewatching (500) Days more recently, I enjoyed it much more, and I sympathized with Summer much more, but I didn’t come away believing she was innocent. If Tom is controlling, Summer is painfully avoidant: she's bad at setting or respecting boundaries, and especially near the end, she withholds information from Tom, specifically that she’s now partnered and later gets engaged. Her only defense when he confronts her about this is along the lines of, “Well, he hadn’t asked me yet.”

Part of me wants to give the film credit for this nuance. Contrary to what the Internet would like to believe, failed relationships are rarely composed of one perfect person and one horrible person; it’s usually two flawed people rubbing up against each other. But the more I learned about screenwriter Scott Neustadter’s inspiration for his script, the less charitably I viewed his interpretation of Summer. According to Neustadter, about 75 percent of his screenplay for (500) Days was based a past relationship with a woman named Jenny Beckman. Beckman’s name (which may or may not be her real one; Neustadter has never confirmed this) even appears onscreen at the beginning of the film:

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

Especially you Jenny Beckman.

Bitch.

Arguments abound on whether this message is purposely vindictive or simply ironic, meant to trick viewers into sympathizing with Tom before revealing the narrow-mindedness of his perspective. But somehow, what strikes me most about this message is the punctuation. Why isn’t there a comma after “you” and before “Jenny?” You’re probably convinced I’m overthinking this — and yes, perhaps my inner pedant, long-stifled in favor of keeping my friendships intact, is responsible for this rumination — but it’s notable because (500) Days of Summer is otherwise such a detail-oriented film. It manages to keep track of 500 days worth of time jumps, skipping from day 2 to day 200 to day 20. It assigns Summer a signature color, blue, that other actors don’t wear. It even, annoyingly, stylizes its title with parentheses around the “500.” So how, in such a carefully planned project, did this omitted comma in the opening shot get past an editor? The sloppy, eighth-grade-bathroom-wall vibe of this statement could be purposeful, a manifestation of Tom’s petulance and immaturity. Or maybe it’s an indication that the movie isn’t as meticulously thought out as it seems to be, that the different facets of the film aren’t really talking to each other — and, perhaps, neither were the different men working on it.

For example, there’s a striking contrast between how Neustadter talked about this film when it first came out and how he began to talk about it years later. Shortly after the movie’s release, Neustadter said in an interview that he and Jenny Beckman met up again for coffee while he was working on the (500) Days script, which he shared with her. She emailed him to tell him how much she identified not with Summer, the character she was based on, but with Tom. This detail, which on its own could have been the impetus for a brilliant movie, fails to resonate with Neustadter, who merely seems annoyed to find his ex-girlfriend capable of interiority that clashes with his own. But in interviews from a few years later, Neustadter speaks about the film the way 2010s indie-twee lovers did, as the coming-of-age tale of a man who learns he can’t control a woman. Neustadter might have genuinely grown as a person in this period of time, but he might also have realized that the Internet would crucify him if he didn’t change his tune. It’s possible that director Marc Webb and star Joseph Gordon-Levitt pushed Neustadter closer to this conclusion; both spoke critically of Tom’s character well before Neustadter did. Their influence over the film may be why so many viewers perceive Tom as intentionally unlikable, and they probably did save Neustadter’s reputation: in the hands of a different director or star, this film probably would have appealed to incels even more than it already does.

But even a well-meaning director and star cannot force an underwritten character into dimensionality, and so it is with Summer. If you’re a fan of the movie, you've probably insisted that Summer’s flatness, the way her character is distilled down to childhood trauma and a love for The Smiths, is the whole point — the John Green Defense, as I like to call it, the idea that a well-meaning male author who knows he can’t write women can avoid criticism by having the text acknowledge these women’s lack of depth. However, this technique never actually results in better-written women, and it was certainly never going to here, because Summer was written by a man who resented her. Or, at the very least, he resented what she represented. Zooey Deschanel didn’t have a fighting chance.

Unlike (500) Days of Summer, 1997’s My Best Friend’s Wedding is primarily about a woman. But that woman wasn’t created by women. Directed by PJ Hogan, the movie follows Julianne, or Jules (played by Julia Roberts), a woman so convinced she has a right to the heart of her “best friend,” a guy she rejected years ago, that she sabotages his wedding and relationship with his fiancée to prove it. Ron Bass, who wrote the script, wanted to comment on the unhinged behavior that’s so often handwaved in classic romantic comedies, especially, in his and Hogan’s view, from women. Scott Meslow’s book From Hollywood With Love: The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again) of the Romantic Comedy describes Hogan’s initial reaction to Ron Bass’s script:

… usually in romantic comedies, everything the main character does in order to win love and to find happiness is totally justified. Even if it’s kind of awful. What Meg Ryan does to Bill Pullman in Sleepless in Seattle is kind of awful … And I got to the end, and she didn’t get the guy. And I thought, Oh, my God, that’s the point. This takes the form and smashes it on the floor.

My Best Friend’s Wedding challenges audiences’ expectations for romantic comedies at every turn. It casts Julia Roberts, queen of the 1990s rom-com, in the deeply unlikable role of Jules. It sets us up to hate Kimmy, Jules’s friend Michael’s 20-year-old fiancée, only to give us a sweet, winning character played by Cameron Diaz at her most effervescent. It teases viewers with musical numbers that nod at bucolic, Disneyfied romantic ideals, only to contrast them with increasingly psychotic behavior from Jules: forcing Kimmy to humiliate herself in karaoke, wheedling Kimmy into asking Michael to give up his journalism job, even hacking into Kimmy’s dad’s email account to try to get Michael fired. And, of course, it doesn’t have Jules get the guy after all, because, as it makes pains to tell us, she doesn’t deserve him, and anyway, he doesn’t love her. Right?

Despite its many innovations, I have never been able to like My Best Friend’s Wedding, and this is why: it is so concerned with tearing down a terrible woman that it ignores the terrible man staring us all in the face. Michael, played by Dermot Mulroney, is laughably unconvincing as a man in love who has completely forgotten about his college ex. What’s more, the movie depends on Michael’s manipulative tendencies, because most of Jules’s own behavior is a response (a deeply disordered response, but still a response) to the mixed signals she’s getting from Michael. He flirts with Jules shamelessly (including one time when he says she still looks good in underwear — yikes), alludes to their past as lovers multiple times, and practically begs her to reveal her true feelings while they’re on a riverboat, gazing tragically down into the water when she doesn’t respond. It’s also not just Jules that Michael manipulates; his behavior toward Kimmy, his much-younger fiancee, is domineering at best and downright abusive at worst. Julianne may not be playing fair, but when Kimmy suggests Michael quit his job after she’s already left college for him, no one forces Michael to scream in her face. He does that all on his own.

What really gets me is that My Best Friend’s Wedding could have worked without having to write Michael this way. Many lovers of the movie point out the brilliance of its karaoke scene, in which Jules convinces tone-deaf Kimmy to sing karaoke hoping she’ll be humiliated, but Kimmy bellows her song with such gusto that Michael is even more enamored with her than before and even Jules is impressed. I think I know why this scene is such a favorite: it’s not tainted by Michael’s emotional cheating and lack of boundaries. This is the one scene that pulls off what the whole movie is supposedly about: a woman schemes to steal her supposed best friend’s heart, but because he loves someone else and not her, it doesn’t work. If Jules were less successful in provoking Michael’s ire and got less encouragement of her feelings from him, if everything she did only served to make Michael happier with Kimmy and less interested in her, My Best Friend’s Wedding would be a better movie.

But my opinion is apparently in the minority. Viewers of My Best Friend’s Wedding constantly ignore Michael’s shortcomings in favor of Julianne’s, going all the way back to when the movie was first made. Meslow’s book describes test audiences’ disgust at the original ending, which involved Julianne getting wooed by a handsome man played by John Corbett: “One woman suggested that Julianne deserved to be alone forever. A man said that if either of his two daughters acted like Julianne had acted, he’d kick them out of his house.” What did these people say about Michael? If they said anything, the book doesn’t mention it.

In the My Best Friend’s Wedding episode of film podcast The Bechdel Cast, one of the few sources I found that corroborates my opinion of Michael, Jamie Loftus offers some insight on why it is that Julianne’s wrongdoing receives so much more focus than Michael’s:

I am not upset that Julianne was called out for her behavior; I think that makes narrative sense. I do think that most men in that same role and position would not have to answer for this so severely. And I don’t think that a man in this character’s position would have to meaningfully apologize … if we’re putting a woman in the villain role, she’s going to have to spend the last 15 minutes eating shit at unprecedented rates. Where, you know, if you put in Freddie Prinze Jr., he’s like, “Yeah, so I’ve been lying to you and that’s why your life sucks. Do you want to be my girlfriend?”

I was surprised to learn from Meslow’s book2 that despite how anti-woman My Best Friend’s Wedding can be, it did in fact have a team of (uncredited) women writers. In many of his screenwriting projects, including My Best Friend’s Wedding, Bass worked with a group of young female creative consultants, which he dubbed “the Ronettes.” Hogan commented that “[Ron] was certainly not lacking for the female perspective on that screenplay.” So, then, how did a writers’ room full of women produce a character as appalling as Michael? I can think of two explanations. One is that we can’t know much power the Ronettes actually exercised over character development, since Hogan also mentions feeling nervous to discuss the script in front of so many people and asking to speak to Bass alone. The other is that, well, this movie was made 30 years ago, when neither men nor women felt as uncomfortable with men’s moral transgressions as they did women’s. We’re more likely to call attention to the difference today, but honestly, I don’t think much has changed.

In order to subvert a genre, you have to do three things. First, you have to understand what the genre is doing, at its core. Then, you have to have a what-if question that turns certain audience expectations on their heads. Finally — and this is the tricky part — you have to understand the difference between exploring the question and injecting it with your own personal biases.

This is my problem with (500) Days of Summer and My Best Friend’s Wedding. The initial question they both ask, something akin to “What if one person in a romantic comedy doesn’t think they’re meant to be with the other?” is an adequate place to start. But because we live in a culture where hatred of women is the law of the land, and, yes, because both these films were made primarily by men, the message we end up with is more like, “What if a woman behaves almost as badly as the man she’s with? Wouldn’t that be disgusting?” This type of interrogation is, of course, sexist. But it’s also not all that interesting. Being subversive requires doing something novel, and humiliating women isn’t novel at all. We’ve been doing it for way too long for that to be the case.

American Girl, that bastion of nerdy millennial girlhood, is in the news. The company, now owned by Mattel, is releasing modernized versions of their classic historical dolls to commemorate their 40th anniversary; much of this discourse has been centered around how much more waifish and TikTok-ready they look. Also, there’s going to be a new book about Samantha Parkington, American Girl’s 1904 character — for adults.

I suppose American Girl cashing in on millennial nostalgia was inevitable, since their sales have been declining in recent years, and if American Girl must novelize the future of its characters, I guess I understand why they chose Samantha. Of the original three American Girls (the other two being Molly McIntire of 1944 and Kirsten Larson of 1854), Samantha is the fan favorite, and when I was a kid, she was my favorite, too. Her life in a New York mansion is probably the most glamorous American Girl setting; it beats Kirsten’s bestie dying of cholera, that’s for sure. Samantha also has a hot uncle who supports women’s rights, which means he has aged better than almost anything else that came out of the 1980s! American Girl has referenced Samantha in other work before: their most recent Girl of the Year, Raquel Reyes, is Samantha’s great-great-granddaughter.1 In this upcoming novel, it’s now 1920, and Samantha is a 25-year-old suffragist. And based on the “American Girl Legacy Novel” heading on the cover, there are probably going to be more of these books coming.

However, I simply do not think children’s books need adult sequels.2 This Samantha novel will either have to be so childish that it won’t read naturally to adults or so adult that it wouldn’t matter whether it was about the Samantha character or not. My guess is it’s going to be a strange blend of the two that, in the grand tradition of most efforts to please everyone, will end up pleasing nobody. That doesn’t mean I don’t care about what happens to Samantha! I just don’t want a published historical fiction novel for adults written about it. The real place for stuff like this? Fanfiction!

There’s already a lot of existing American Girl fanfiction, which you may read at your own leisure. Here is my own interpretation of what each American Girl3 from my own childhood would be doing 15 years after her story ended!

Kaya (1780)

Kaya is Nimiipuu (a Native tribe often known by the name Nez Perce), and she lived in the Pacific Northwest. Since her story takes place in the 1760s, the brand got to neatly avoid tackling the issue of Western colonization, what a coincidence! At least that means that in 1780, Kaya could maybe have become an important defender of her tribe in the vein of her hero Swan Circling … before the U.S. purchased that land and headed over to mess up her and everyone else’s life.

Felicity (1790)

Felicity is now married to her dad’s firebrand apprentice, Ben, who knew she was the one when he came home from the Revolutionary War, saw the nearly grown Felicity chomping an apple on the roof, and got hit on the head by the core when she tossed it down. They have three children (so far) and only fight once a year over visiting Felicity’s grandfather’s slave plantation at Christmastime. (Felicity is pro-visiting, of course.) Ben runs the Merrimans’ store, and Felicity, who did not sustain a head injury from an apple core, does the accounts. The local businessmen are much more scared of her than of him.

Josefina (1840)

Is training to be a healer under her aunt. Can occasionally be persuaded to sing and play the piano for guests. I don’t know what it is about Josefina but something tells me she dies young? I mean, I don’t want any of them to die young, but statistically some of them had to, and Josefina gives massive Beth March vibes so maybe that’s why I’m throwing her under the bus. She probably catches something while at work. RIP Josefina!4

Kirsten (1870)

Has 6 children, all of whom are tired of her stories about how much colder and deeper the snow was in Sweden. Especially since they live in Minnesota and this is most likely untrue. Dies of cholera. (I kid, I kid! But she probably loses a child or two and that’s almost worse.)

Addy (1880)

Thinking of Addy, so full of hope at the end of her series after she and her family escaped slavery, having to endure the grim reality of the Reconstruction era is, to put it mildly, a bummer. However, I can definitely see adult Addy as a teacher at a Black school in Philadelphia. This might not have lasted, though; Pennsylvania schools were officially desegregated in 1881, so just a year later, Addy would probably have lost her job through an effort to make room for white teachers.5 That might make a pretty good story, actually. A03, take note!

Samantha (1920)

Definitely a suffragist and workers’ rights advocate, but still lives in a very nice house. Famous for delivering sick burns very politely. Eddie Ryland proposes to her once a month and she always says no, and he ends up marrying the daughter of a factory owner who spits when she talks and exclusively refers to him as Mr. Ryland. (Nellie likes to say this is because she can’t remember his first name.) Samantha later marries a black-sheep socialist guy from a wealthy family who looks suspiciously like Uncle Gard. We also know she has at least one kid!

Kit (1950)

Kit obviously grows up to become a journalist and starts covering the sports beat at the Cincinnati6 paper when a lot of male journalists have left to fight in World War II. After the war they try to force her back onto the society pages, but her columns are so popular — and, as she points out, “Kit Kittredge” could easily be a man’s name — that they let her stay. Also because Kit finds some crazy dirt on her editor: he’s cheating on his wife with a 19-year-old. (Fortunately, the editor never finds out about the throuple Kit is in with Ruthie and Stirling.)

Molly (1960)

Diner waitress who bores everyone stiff talking about the time she almost danced as Miss Victory in the town parade during the war. (Newcomers tend to think she was at least 16. She was 10.) Has 5 dogs. Will probably be really into Woodstock in a few years.

Feel free to sound off on what you think the American Girls are like as adults! Are there any I missed that you have thoughts on?

But I grew up, and I changed my mind.

I think we forget what Little Women gave us because today, it’s often thought of as a conventional text, a traditional text. There’s a healthy dollop of sermonizing about Christian values, mostly from Marmee, that’s greatly abbreviated in film adaptations. The most virtuous March sister, held up as an example for both her sisters and the reader, is Beth,1 whose kindness leads her to contract an illness in service of others and who dies before she can be sullied by adulthood, and especially love and romance. And, of course, by the end, all three of the living March sisters are married.

But it’s Little Women’s unconventionality that has allowed it to remain timeless. It was written by the daughter of Transcendentalists (read: hippies), and it shows. The March parents are decidedly unworldly, focusing on their daughters’ spiritual growth and education over their making advantageous marriages. This is such a popular position for parents today that we forget how radical, and to some actually insane, it sounded in an era where most women still needed to marry in order to secure their futures. Nowhere is this radicalism more apparent than the novel’s portrayal of main character Jo’s love life.

I hope that Louisa May Alcott — whose nominally tolerant parents refused to tolerate their second child’s explosive personality, whose resulting self-criticism knew no bounds — had even the smallest inkling of her readers’ adoration for Jo. Among the March sisters, Jo is an easy favorite, and for good reason.2 She’s blunt, jolly, energetic. What she loves, she loves to excess (her family, young children, her writing), and she expresses dislike with equal zeal (girly things, dull sermons, working for her cantankerous Aunt March). She’s aged so well both because she’s easy to like and because she’s a good match for modern women’s sensibilities: innumerable women writers claim her as an inspiration, from Simone de Beauvoir to Barbara Kingsolver to Ursula K. LeGuin, who says this about the character:

She is not like most ‘real’ authors, either dead or inaccessibly famous; nor, like many artists in books, is she set apart by sensitivity or suffering or general superlativity; nor is she, like most authors in novels, male. She is close as a sister and common as grass.

Jo is devoted to her “scribbling,” which her parents encourage, and until very late in the story, she isn’t interested in romance; in fact, she actively scorns it. Of course, this is not for Theodore Laurence’s lack of trying.

Ah, Laurie Laurence,3 the earliest fictional crush of so many. Certainly mine. Tall and attractive, educated in Europe, a virtuoso musician, only occasionally so sullen as to brood and just sensitive enough to be a little bit sad. And he’s funny! He and Jo are a comedy duo together, feeding off each other’s energy, bursting off the page. Laurie likes women, as a whole; he’s friends with all the March sisters. But he loves Jo, and in a truly touching fashion: wholeheartedly, after having been her friend for years, after seeing her scribble in mad fits and trip over everything imaginable, after attending her horrid dinner party where she serves berries with salt instead of sugar. She is awkward and homely and loud and will never, ever be conventional, and he loves her. And yet Jo has the temerity to refuse him, and therefore part of the happily ever after we think she deserves. We loud, unwieldy, literary girls, who adored Jo when she bucked social norms in a way we personally wanted to, cannot forgive her this most egregious violation of narrative order. If one of us were loved this way by a hot, wealthy, wonderful guy, we think to ourselves, we would have loved him back. We would have died for this to happen to us. But Jo, it appears, is different.

Some readers like to say that Jo does love Laurie, she’s just mistaken about her own feelings, but they’ve got the wrong book: that’s L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, in which our dreamy, fish-out-of-water heroine, Anne Shirley, is similarly adored by paragon of manly virtue Gilbert Blythe. The difference between Anne and Jo is that Anne is romantically interested in Gilbert, but she’s constantly squashing that interest: stubbornly holding onto a grudge after he mocks her red hair the first day they meet, then holding tight to a Prince Charming ideal that everyday Gilbert doesn’t fit — in Anne’s view, at least. To readers, Gilbert’s character is a different kind of fantasy man: the classic all-around great guy, popular and smart and handsome, who could have any girl he wanted but falls for the weirdo who lives in a made-up world. Laurie, for all his charms, is a fuller-fledged character with more significant flaws: he’s often mercurial, is known to take a prank too far, shirks his studies, and becomes frightfully indolent after Jo’s refusal, prompting her sister Amy to shame him into shaping up and, later, marry him.

Unlike Anne Shirley, who’s clearly lying to herself for the entire first three books of her series, Jo has thought her position through. She’s acutely aware of her and Laurie’s incompatibilities, and she lists them for him: they’d argue constantly, she doesn’t like elegant society the way he does, he wouldn’t tolerate her writing life. They’re all good reasons. But the only one she really needs is the one she gives first:

I’m grateful to you, and so proud and fond of you, I don’t see why I can’t love you as you want me to. I’ve tried, but I can’t change the feeling, and it would be a lie to say I do when I don’t.

Jo couldn’t have been clearer than that. And yet even today, in the supposed “no means no” era, readers will still insist that they know better than she does.

Pop culture, I think, has not helped Jo’s case. Film adaptations of Little Women make Laurie’s advances a lot sexier. The 2018 BBC miniseries, with Maya Hawke as Jo and an improbably handsome Jonah Hauer-King as Laurie, includes a couple of drawn-out, awkward kisses instigated by Laurie, though at least you can chalk up one of them to the influence of claret.4 Even guiltier of this is the 1994 Gillian Anderson film, featuring a young Christian Bale as Laurie. While confessing his love to Winona Ryder’s Jo, Bale’s Laurie grabs her and passionately kisses her, not once but twice. He looks great while doing it, I admit, but this isn’t true to Laurie’s character; it feels aimed at the impressionable young women the film knows are in the audience. Laurie is also much more seductive here than in the book, breathing huskily into Jo’s ear:

I’ll be a saint. I’ll let you win every argument. I’ll take care of you and your family. I’ll give you every luxury you’ve ever been denied. You won’t have to write, unless you want to.

This is all about what Laurie intends to do for Jo, promises that are easy to make in the moment without a thought of the work they will take, and not, as in the book, about what Laurie has already done for Jo’s sake (not engaging in behavior she dislikes, finishing college despite not enjoying it). Of course, Ryder’s Jo turns Laurie down anyway, but she delays in responding, is less vehemently opposed than in the book. For a minute, she might even be half persuaded, and it makes me wonder if the audience was expected to be, too.

1994’s Laurie is far eclipsed for me by its Professor Bhaer, a book-inaccurately suave Gabriel Byrne5, but something about Bale’s Laurie has imprinted on millennial women; I think he’s the most commonly cited favorite for women over 30. I like Bale’s combination of energy and sensitivity in the first half of the movie, but his behavior in the confession scene, coupled with his threatening address to Amy about hating any man who loves a March sister, spoil his Laurie for me in the end. Part of Laurie’s appeal is that he is safe, that women feel comfortable around him. But I am often afraid of Christian Bale, so much so that even his marrying Amy at the end is difficult for me to swallow.6

In contrast is Greta Gerwig’s 2019 Little Women, the only adaptation I’ve seen to really understand the Laurie-Jo relationship. Timothee Chalamet is a delightful Laurie, more mischievous than the others, with just the right mix of shyness and charm. He and Saoirse Ronan’s Jo are joined at the hip, but Jo quite literally doesn’t see Laurie the way he sees her: time and time again, Chalamet’s Laurie throws a meaningful glance Jo’s way, and Ronan’s Jo is never looking. Laurie’s confession scene in this film also moves me in a way the other adaptations don’t. It’s much more similar to the book, emphasizing not what some yet unrealized version of Laurie will do for Jo, but what he has already done:

I have loved you ever since I’ve known you, Jo … I gave up billiards, I gave up everything you didn’t like, and I’m happy I did … and I never complained, because I figured you’d love me, Jo! And I realize I’m not half good enough, and I’m not this great man, and …

The clumsiness of this speech, peppered with panting interjections by Jo, makes it all the more affecting. It’s painful to watch, as painful as it was to read.

Gerwig also does more than her counterparts to assure us that Jo’s rejection was the right move. She’s probably the first Little Women director to actually like Amy, devoting more time and development to the Laurie-Amy romance than previous adaptations. (A lot of writerly Jo March types hate the pragmatic, feminine, socially adept Amy, resenting the ease with which she sails through life’s difficulties and ends up with the goods — including, of course, Laurie.) And although Gerwig’s Bhaer is played by the dreamboat Louis Garrel (also book-inaccurately, but come on, who’s complaining), there’s some autobiographical referencing in her directorial choices, most notably the inclusion of Jo bargaining with the publisher who eventually takes on Little Women, that hints at a completely different outcome for Jo.

Because indeed, we know this for a fact: Louisa May Alcott did not want her heroine to marry, and she certainly did not want her to marry Laurie. Alcott wanted Jo to be a literary spinster, like herself, and only threw in the idiosyncratic Professor Bhaer — fifteen years older, comically forgetful, without “a really handsome feature in his face7” — to appease publishers who insisted Jo had to end the novel married. We can’t label a Victorian figure’s sexuality from a hundred and fifty years in the future, but it is extremely likely that Louisa May Alcott — who spoke of feeling out of place in a woman’s body, who claimed to never have loved a man, but many pretty girls — was some variety of queer. You can make a case for just about any letter of the LGBTQ+ acronym for Alcott, and Jo, and even Laurie. And people have.

But sexuality, authorial intent, and all other things aside, I must concede that on a character level, Jo rejecting Laurie just makes sense. Jo is as unusual romantically as she is in everything else. Male beauty never catches her eye, nor do romantic gestures. She’s exactly the type to fall in love with the shining truth of someone’s soul, to find herself compatible with someone as unconcerned by appearances or social niceties as she is. Professor Bhaer, joke though he may be, is that kind of person. Jo knows her own mind, and she always has. Must we continue to insist we know it for her?

Little Women taught me two valuable lessons. One is that it is fine to say no to a person, or a future, that you know is not for you. (Amazingly for a book written in the 1800s, there is no point where anyone gives Jo grief for her choice: her parents support her fully, and Laurie’s grandfather tells him to buck up, go to Europe, and get over his infatuation, which is exactly what he does.) The other lesson is that fictional characters are not mere reflections of ourselves. It’s not a character’s job to embody the choices a particular reader would have made, nor is it fair for said reader to reject a work of art solely because they disagree with a character’s perspective. It’s all very well to admire a character or, for that matter, a real person, a celebrity or role model or friend. It’s another thing to refuse to allow these people the autonomy to live differently from you, to disagree with you, even to disappoint you.

I am twenty-nine, and I am a single woman. I have been single for much of my life, but after my last relationship ended a few months ago, I noticed that many friends, family members, and acquaintances were far more concerned with my dating life than they had ever been before. Some have wondered why I don’t date this person, or that one. Some have wondered what it is I am doing wrong, because, of course, I must be doing something wrong. I don’t wish to be single forever, but the last word on whether I enter into a relationship, or with whom, is only mine to give. When someone tells you what they do or don’t want — as Jo March, like it or not, certainly does — the best thing to do is to believe them.

My reading taste does not lean particularly masculine,3 so this list of recommendations was more difficult than last year’s, but I aimed to get these guys out of their comfort zones a little bit, and I hoped I succeeded!

Big

Big is a toughie, because I feel strongly that he does read. He just doesn’t read what I read. I’m picturing lots of stereotypically manly classics (Hemingway, Steinbeck) and modernist novels that feel like challenges (Ulysses, As I Lay Dying, maybe even a Mrs. Dalloway thrown in there just so Carrie can’t claim he never reads women). Also, I fully believe that Big would be reading the where-are-the-literary-men pieces with great interest — assuming, of course, that this is an alternate universe in which the Peloton never got him. He definitely sends Carrie Jacob Savage pieces on a regular basis, and Carrie definitely pretends she never saw them.

I think the famously emotionally constipated Big needs to read something a little more Sex and the City-ish, something that’s well written but full of genuine feeling. I also think Big’s probably a little no-homo. So I’m recommending him Less by Andrew Sean Greer, one of my favorite contemporary novels. He’ll enjoy the wit, laugh at Less’s exploits, and maybe be inspired to open up to Carrie a tiny bit more! But probably not. I’ll also throw in Chronicle of a Death Foretold, since Big probably never got farther into García Márquez than One Hundred Years of Solitude or maybe Love in the Time of Cholera, and I think he could be down for some weird magical realism shit. But not too weird.

Steve

A few months ago, when I wrote my defense of fictional manchild boyfriends, I made sure to point out that Steve does, in fact, read. He canonically is reading Hemingway the first time we see him! Much of the rest of what we see Steve reading is an incoherent mishmash of self-help, trashy mysteries, and manuals to something or other, but I feel very strongly that Steve likes sci-fi. I’d recommend him Ray Bradbury or Kurt Vonnegut, but he’s probably been all over that stuff for years. I’m guessing most of what he’s read is by men, though, so I’m going to recommend Lois McMaster Bujold’s Shards of Honor, the first book in her Vorkosigan Saga. Steve seems capable of enjoying a good romance between two well-developed characters, which this is!

I’m guessing Steve probably hasn’t read Octavia Butler before, either, so I’d give him Kindred as well; it’s propulsive and thought-provoking, and since it’s also historical fiction disguised as sci-fi, I think it could give him something to talk to Miranda about, since I’m sure she has no luck getting him to read her favorite political biographies!

Harry

Harry seems like someone who only reads if it’s for a reason. Like reading a book with his kids; I’m sure he’s totally up on children’s fantasy series. I’d say he’s a mystery reader, but I bet he gets bored with them because he’s so good at guessing the end. He’s not the best divorce lawyer in New York City for nothing.

I’m going to recommend him … Pride and Prejudice. I know, I know, but hear me out on this fanfic: Charlotte is rereading P&P for her book club and she finds out Harry’s never read it, so she begs him to try, and he is hooked to the point where he’s constantly annoying her about it, like he’s absolutely incensed on Lizzy’s behalf and saying Darcy needs to get it together and Charlotte’s like, “Harry, this is a very famous book! We all know how it ends!” Then he goes to the book club meeting and he’s waxing so poetic about the final proposal, and all the book club ladies wish they were married to Harry Goldenblatt. Because don’t we all.

Smith

I actually do think Smith reads! I bet he has a celebrity book club and is the Dua Lipa of his universe.4

For Smith, I think some translated literary fiction about women is in order. I recently really enjoyed Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa (translated by Polly Barton), about a disabled woman who advertises on social media that she wants to have a sexual experience. It’s a type of weird that Smith, by far the most open-minded of the leading men, would be most likely to appreciate. I’d also give him Shoko’s Smile by Choi Eunyoung, translated by Sung Ryu, a series of stories mostly about young women’s lives in Korea. I think it would be a good book club pick for him, as long as he sings the praises of translator Sung Ryu a bit! He wouldn’t even try to get Samantha to pick one of the books up … she never does, but I’m sure she’d let him talk to her about them for several minutes so she can make a social media post about each book club meeting. That’s true love, and don’t let the SATC movies tell you any different.

As a bonus, here’s what I think some of the secondary love interests like reading:

• Berger: David Foster Wallace all the way. The Catcher in the Rye, American Psycho, the Beats, just all the perpetually stuck-in-college white lit bro reads.5 He kept telling Carrie she’d love The Road.

• Petrovsky: lots of European classics. He’s quite knowledgeable about 19th-century literature, but he’s probably never read a book written after 1920. He kept telling Carrie she’d love Anna Karenina, and about 10 years later she runs into him and says, “You know what? I did love Anna Karenina.”

• Aidan: Walt Whitman. So much Walt Whitman. Enough Transcendentalism in general to choke a horse. He kept telling Carrie she’d love Thoreau.

• Trey: took a Russian literature course in college and rereads a Wikipedia summary of War and Peace every year so he can bring it up at parties but hasn’t finished a book, or for that matter begun one, in decades.

• Robert: probably does love biographies. I could see him and Miranda swapping recommendations on these. I’m guessing he occasionally picks up some fiction: maybe a thriller, or whatever new book is being made into a movie. He likes to know what people are talking about.

• Richard: never reads. Except his favorite book. The Art of the Deal.

What do you think these guys would enjoy reading? Feel free to let me know. Happy early Valentine’s Day.

As recently as fifteen or twenty years ago — say, around the time of the early Harry Potter movies — it was pretty much expected that child actors would just be bad. That was almost part of the charm; you knew you were looking at a real kid, not some 15-year-old cosplaying as a third-grader. These days, I don’t know what they’re putting in the water those kids drink, but the last handful of times I’ve seen a child act in something, I’ve been blown away. I rarely feel the need to examine this sense of awe when watching comedy, since most of us like seeing kids have fun, even if it’s on a screen. But when it comes to tragedy, I think twice. It’s horrifying to watch a child die in a film, as Jupe’s Hamnet does, and Lynes’s Judith lives, but not without doing her share of agonized writhing. I wonder what it is like for such young children to perform such intense pain, so many times. I wonder if it’s fair to ask it of them.

For about as long as children have attained motion picture stardom, those child stars have been abused, and been at risk of abuse. You can peruse any in-depth history of old Hollywood for such stories; a 12-year-old Shirley Temple, for example, once had a studio exec expose himself to her, at which point she was so overcome by nervous laughter that he kicked her out of his office. Comparatively, she got off easy.

The 2022 publication of I’m Glad My Mom Died, former iCarly star Jennette McCurdy’s memoir, brought conversations about child stars and their well-being to the forefront of pop culture discourse. In the memoir, McCurdy describes her childhood as an unwilling actress for a hit Nickelodeon show, spurred on by her emotionally abusive mother’s desire to live vicariously through her daughter’s fame, as well as the money McCurdy brought in for her struggling family. In the memoir’s wake came other books, podcasts, and documentaries by and about former child stars. As it turns out, experiences like McCurdy’s were and are commonplace in the industry, especially among children from low-income families, who may feel pressured to continue working despite long hours, intense schedules, and manipulation from their management, film producers, and guardians.

However, these discussions center on the conditions child stars work in, rather than the nature of what they’re being asked to do. I think most of us would agree that there are, in fact, limits to the type of work that child stars should be performing. It’s much more difficult to agree on what those limits actually are.

In 2020, the French film Cuties debuted on U.S. Netflix after being shown at the Sundance Film Festival and in France to great acclaim. In the U.S., however, it was immediately a massive failure. Directed by Maïmouna Doucouré, the film follows Amy, an 11-year-old Muslim girl from Senegal living in Paris, and the hypersexualized dance troupe of young girls that she joins (called “Cuties” in English). Doucouré intended for the film to comment on how our culture encourages young girls to sexualize themselves, something she’d witnessed herself among girls in Paris. But U.S. viewers, many of whom hadn’t even watched Cuties, slammed the movie for supposedly promoting child pornography and taking advantage of its young stars, most of whom were in their early teens. Netflix’s racy marketing shots of the girls posing in their skimpy dance outfits — shots that weren’t part of the marketing in France, where the promo photo showed the girls wearing bras and underwear over their regular clothing — didn’t help.

I didn’t watch the movie while it was on Netflix, and it’s no longer available in the U.S. From the few clips I’ve seen on YouTube, I can understand the discomfort with certain close-up camera angles on the girls as they twerk in their tiny dancing outfits; the intention is likely to simulate exploitation, to force the audience to reckon with their own role in it. I question the necessity of this technique, but I have to admit that I’m watching these scenes in isolation, without context, and that’s no way to judge a work of film.

In fact, one of the most compelling arguments in favor of Cuties comes from one of the very people its detractors claimed to speak for. Caira Conner’s 2020 Atlantic article “Watching the Outrage Over Cuties as a Survivor of Pedophilia” eloquently defends the film. She writes:

[T]he argument that images of girls dancing like women will “delight pedophiles” forgets that pedophilia is a perversion, a sickness unworthy of consideration in the process of creating sensitive, highly contextual art.

Conner also pinpoints why it is that stories about young girls exploring their sexuality trouble us so much:

Cuties isn’t a tender tale about a first crush or first heartbreak, both surely more palatable themes for a tween film (think My Girl, or 13 Going on 30). It’s a movie about girls not wanting to be little girls anymore. About girls spying on classmates in the bathroom, girls who want to wear tight pants and hump the dance floor, without understanding why no well-intentioned adult wants to look at that, and without understanding the danger of the adults who do. The roughness in the slow transition from girl to woman—the fumbling, the misunderstanding, the pain—has been left in for the viewer to see. Cuties is a reminder of the dangers of the digitally connected world, but also of the fact that sexual feelings aren’t always contained within bodies old enough to understand them.

Years ago, when I witnessed the backlash over Cuties, it occurred to me that no one yelling at the film online knew what its young stars thought about their participation in it. Many people presumed to know, projecting trauma onto the teen actresses who, they seemed to think, were old enough to be sexualized but not old enough to understand or contribute to any kind of critique of it. Doucouré said that she had a psychologist on set for the girls who continued to work with them after the movie came out, and I think this was a really sensitive move on her part, but many still derided her for “needing” a psychologist there in the first place. (To this, I say: what about all the kids we cast in horror movies? I’d imagine they could benefit from psychologists too, no?) It seemed we were hearing from everyone, except the girls themselves. In the episode of the podcast Rehash that discusses Cuties, co-host Hannah Raine addresses how seldom we actually include children in discussions about their welfare:

It’s fail-proof to bring up kids a lot of the time. And it sucks, because we don’t really give kids the autonomy to speak for themselves … we can just use them as these figures to project stuff onto. And it doesn’t matter what they want or need, or what they’re thinking, because then we’re like, you’re a dumb kid. What do you know?

So, when reckoning with my feelings about watching children die onscreen, I decided to take Raine’s advice. I decided to see what 12-year-old Jacobi Jupe thought of his role as the title character in Hamnet.

The film Hamnet has come under a lot of criticism for being “grief porn,” or portraying child death in a way that’s less artful than emotionally manipulative. I think the film is sad, but appropriately, not gratuitously so, because child death is horribly sad. That doesn’t mean I think the “grief porn” conversation is unproductive, but I wonder who we should be centering in that conversation. Our own feelings as audience members? Or the experiences of Jacobi Jupe and Olivia Lynes, the young people who actually had to play these emotionally taxing roles?

We usually don’t see kids in meaty acting roles. Most of them don’t have the chops for it yet, and why should they? But Jacobi Jupe does. Every time Jupe is in a scene, he is in the scene. He’s not just good at dying, or at saying lines when he needs to; I don’t think I’ve ever seen a child actor with such impeccably attuned facial expressions. Even when he isn’t speaking, even when the camera is barely on him, Jupe is always Hamnet.

In a Time magazine interview, Jupe says he has, in fact, died onscreen before. And he doesn’t enjoy it. “I was a bit annoyed at first,” he says about learning he would die as Hamnet, “because I actually wanted to get through a role where I don’t die. But it was definitely worth it. The experience was incredible.”

This is the great irony of American viewers’ outcry over supposed exploitation in Cuties: abuse of child stars is a much larger problem in the U.S. than in many other places. British child actors, which Hamnet’s Jupe and Lynes are, seem to fare better than American on average, for a variety of possible reasons: stronger child labor laws, an emphasis on talent over appearance, treatment as children first and professionals second. Jupe, I think, was taken care of on set; when he told director Chloé Zhao how drained he was from performing several death scene takes in a row, they scheduled a “dance take” where the actors run through a scene as usual, then dance their way out of it when a song starts playing. The song Jupe picked? “Stayin’ Alive.”

Jupe also said he cried when watching the movie for the first time. But it wasn’t for the reason you might think. You see, Jupe has an older brother. 20-year-old Noah Jupe, known for his work in the Quiet Place movies, plays the actor who plays Hamlet at the Globe in Hamnet.2 Jacobi said watching his brother die was the most emotional part of the film for him: “It’s different when you watch yourself die, because I knew I wasn’t dead. But my brother’s such an incredible actor that I just believed it.”

As I read the Time interview, in which Noah is also featured, and watched the brothers on The Kelly Clarkson Show, I found myself moved by the closeness of their relationship. They describe joking around at home, stunt-fighting together for hours with anything from Lightsabers to just a couple of sticks, watching the movies that Jacobi says they both love. At one point, Noah shocks Kelly Clarkson by admitting that prior to filming Hamnet, Jacobi knew more than he did about Shakespeare’s biography. “This man’s an intellectual,” he says, and none of us could disagree. At the end of the Kelly Clarkson interview, Jacobi reads Puck’s final speech from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and as the audience applauds, you see Noah Jupe rise to his feet almost as soon as the camera hits him, beaming at this brother he loves.

Perhaps this is what Jacobi Jupe, and all talented, driven young actors, really need: not sheltering, but support. Jupe can act, and despite the difficulties inherent in the vocation, I really think he should act. He was probably always going to act. What matters is who stands beside him as he embarks on that career.

In Hamnet, after Hamnet has passed away, his twin, Judith, asks her mother, Agnes, if she can see her brother. We know, because we have seen a flashback, that Agnes Shakespeare’s mother died when she was a child, and Agnes was dragged away from her body, screaming. As a mother, Agnes makes a different choice. She takes Judith’s hand and leads her to her brother’s corpse. Judith makes an observation that many before her have made: that this dead body looks nothing like her loved one. Then she cries. It’s heartbreaking to watch, and it must be heartbreaking to be in that situation. But I do hope that this fictional version of Judith Shakespeare grows up and remembers this. I hope she remembers that when she needed to do the hardest thing she’d ever done, her mother helped her do it, and held her all the while.

Reiner, a filmmaker both prolific and beloved, died Sunday, December 14. He died horribly, from stab wounds in his own home, along with his wife of over 35 years, Michele. One of their sons, who has been mentally troubled for many years, is the primary suspect. Many have expressed their shock and grief on social media. Infuriatingly, the man who is still, somehow, the president of my country made cruel and baffling remarks about Reiner’s death, believing that the latter man’s opposition to his administration is justification for mocking him on social media.

But what I’m really here to talk about is Reiner’s movies.

Rob Reiner directed such a variety of movies that almost everyone loves one of them. Horror, legal drama, fantasy, comedy, rom-com … he did it all. Here, I’d like to pay tribute to two in particular that have become a significant portion of my personality. One is a movie of my childhood; the other, a movie of my adulthood. In a sense, Reiner has been with me the whole time.

When I was about twelve, I was shown The Princess Bride at a family friend’s house. The true love, high adventure, and endlessly quotable dialogue so enthralled me that I refused a snack because I was told I would have to eat it in the kitchen, away from the movie. I was a highly food-centric child and am no less so as an adult, so this was the highest compliment any movie could have received from me.

From that day on, I never missed a screening of The Princess Bride: at school, at a movie theatre, or at a party, especially a party I threw. I soon found I was not unique in this. It’s hard to imagine a more widely beloved movie, by a more diverse group of people: film critics, writers, actors, your grandpa who watches about three movies a decade, your 10-year-old cousin. I shared it with many, as time went on: my high school theatre friends, who joined me in staging the scene at Miracle Max’s hut (I played Valerie); a grad school friend who for months afterward would intermittently text me quotes from it; a Brazilian friend who had no idea what to expect and emerged a convert, newly obsessed with deeming things “inconceivable.” Even in my most insufferable teenage years, when I often performed disdain for pieces of media I perceived as too popular, I never got there with The Princess Bride. I was just happy everyone else loved a film so worth loving.

The Princess Bride is, of course, a satire of high fantasy, but to define it thus is to cheapen its effect on people. The novel of the same name by William Goldman is certainly more satirical in the classic understanding of that technique, and though I came to it after the movie and loved it too, it took me several years and a few readings to appreciate it for what it was. Rob Reiner’s movie was written by Goldman, and its script is one of the wittiest on record, as thirty years’ worth of viewers can attest, but it’s gentler than the novel it’s based on, more willing to expose its soft belly to the audience. In an astute adaptation choice, Goldman and Reiner removed the caustic, cynical intrusions of the fictional William Goldman — funny on paper, but difficult to transfer to film — and replaced them with a grandfather reading a beloved book to his grandson. You’re no longer experiencing this tale alongside the older Goldman, rolling his eyes at the fantasy novel he still loves; you’re embarking on a journey with his younger self, and you can absorb the beauty of the story as a child might, even though you know it’s a bit silly. Especially since you know it’s a bit silly. The movie is the thing it’s parodying: it really is true love and it really is high adventure, and it gives its viewers, reluctant participants in the workaday world of bills and divorces and long hours at bullshit jobs, permission to yearn for true love and high adventure themselves.

I don’t remember exactly when I first saw When Harry Met Sally, but I know it was during the worst six months of my life. I was grieving my health, which at that time was poor, and my future, which at that time was uncertain but soon cleared itself up as my health did. I was also grieving a breakup, which was convenient, because this is a movie about what you can do in the aftermath of a breakup. Which is: make friends.

There is a common understanding, fueled by the advertising campaign for the film, that When Harry Met Sally is about whether men and women can be friends without sex somehow getting in the way. This oft-quoted tagline has prejudiced many modern viewers against it without them having seen it. I don’t think this is really what the movie is about, though. What it’s actually saying is that these two people, blunt, cynical Harry and meticulous, basically-happy-but-kinda-not Sally, befriend each other and shed the gendered bullshit that has heretofore cloaked all their previous relationships, and that is what allows them to fall in love. Their relationship works because it becomes as warm and lived-in as the film itself is; rewatching it this past week (as I always do when it’s free on YouTube), I saw Harry and Sally walking through Central Park talking about their dreams, and it made me want to schedule a trip to New York in the fall myself so I could wander a park with a friend and psychoanalyze my own dreams, swaddled in an oversize white knit sweater.

When reading of When Harry Met Sally’s production history, it struck me that this film about two people who find new love after the dissolution of their relationships was made by people who had gone through the same thing. When she wrote the screenplay for the film, Nora Ephron was on her third marriage. Her second marriage, to investigative journalist Carl Bernstein, blew up so spectacularly it inspired Ephron’s novel Heartburn, but this third, to Goodfellas screenwriter Nick Pileggi, worked out; they reminded married until her death. Rob Reiner, who was working on When Harry Met Sally after a divorce, actually intended for the film to end very differently, with Harry and Sally not ending up together at all. But during filming, Reiner met Michele Singer, a photographer who would become his wife, and the shift this caused in his outlook on romance led him to change the film’s ending so that Harry and Sally ended up together. This means we have Michele Singer Reiner to thank for Harry’s famous ending speech to Sally:1

I love that you get cold when it's 71 degrees out. I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich. I love that you get a little crinkle above your nose when you're looking at me like I'm nuts. I love that after I spend the day with you, I can still smell your perfume on my clothes. And I love that you are the last person I want to talk to before I go to sleep at night. And it's not because I'm lonely, and it's not because it's New Year's Eve. I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.

We love When Harry Met Sally because it’s smart and it’s funny, but also because it gives us hope. One day, it makes us believe, you will find someone to whom you shine in specificity, to whom your quirks and foibles are not invisible, but loveable. This makes the tragedy of Rob and Michele Reiner’s deaths all the more horrific: instead of getting the happy, quiet ending they deserved, the one the film sets up for us through its intermittent clips of older couples telling their love stories, they got one of the most cruel endings possible. As William Goldman said in the novel The Princess Bride was based on, life isn’t fair, but it’s at least fairer than death. The Reiners’ deaths are some of the most unfair of all. No movie could possibly have prepared us for them.

All this is to say that we are mourning Rob and Michele Reiner for many reasons, and Donald Trump has shown a refusal to understand any of them. The inane “Trump Derangement Syndrome” post from his social media account — which, as many point out, might well have been written by someone other than Trump; I find this an even scarier prospect — reminded me of Joyce Carol Oates’s genius tweet about Elon Musk:

Trump, and his entire administration, can be described thus. It’s not just that they celebrate the murder of a man who opposed them, or that they feel comfortable doing so on a public social media platform: it’s that their approach to governance and life is fundamentally hostile to art. They will not show appreciation for Reiner’s extraordinary contribution to American film because to do so would be to engage intellectually with culture, and people with the tools to do that will eventually go on to question their cruel tactics and politics. Which, of course, is what they fear.

I’m not naive enough to suggest that art is activism. It isn’t, and in fact, it shouldn’t be; art and politics may be linked, but they are not identical. I also don’t think that art is only valuable because of what it can teach us, or what it inspires us to do or become. But art can help guide us to the kind of world we want to live in, one where second chances are possible, where true love and high adventure feel a little more achievable than they did before. If we don’t know what that looks like, we won’t know how to build it for ourselves.

So thanks, Rob Reiner, for everything.

Section 1: Really good!

The Wedding People by Alison Espach

This is a book that a) everyone was saying to read and b) I otherwise might not have read because I assumed I would find it sappy. It wasn’t. It’s got a huge, quirky cast of characters, all of whom are fascinating and multifaceted and whose lives I really care about, which is my favorite kind of book! It also has a wry, smart protagonist, someone to whom all the wedding people open up in a way you often can only do with strangers, displaying their messiness and humanity for us to enjoy.

The audio performance by Helen Laser, who gives each character such a unique voice that I knew exactly who was speaking even if the text didn’t indicate that, was so engaging that I was listening like a fiend: while I shopped, while I made dinner, sitting on my couch after dinner, whenever. The last little bit felt too resolved to me, but also not resolved enough? Maybe I just wanted the book to keep going.

Dangerous Fictions by Lyta Gold

Lyta Gold, whose writing I am a big fan of on Substack, wrote a book which takes to task two banal, oft-repeated statements about literature: first, that fictional stories are somehow dangerous, and second, that fiction is worthwhile because of what it can "teach" you. Gold is an observant and astute critic, thoroughly covering the history of moral panics over fiction and tracing that history to our present book-banning frenzy. The book does feel more like a series of scattered points than a clear narrative. But I love the way Gold states those points, so I didn't really mind!

The Swans of Harlem by Karen Valby

I am beside myself. I cannot believe that we supposedly live in the age of television (well, at the tail end of it, probably) and there is not yet a miniseries based on The Swans of Harlem. This is the most engrossing, cinematic history of athletes I have ever read, because ballet dancers are athletes, as this book well knows. Valby wrote the book, but she knows who the story belongs to, and she tells it with significant input from the five former Dance Theatre of Harlem ballerinas she consults, peeling back the layers of their lives and careers before and after DTH with care and finesse. I’m already envisioning a series with an episode or two on each of the five dancers, and a few on their charismatic, flawed leader Arthur Mitchell. Get on that, HBO!

I highly recommend the audiobook, read by January LaVoy and several of the ballerinas themselves.

The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow

I like Alix E. Harrow’s style, but the last few books of hers haven’t quite hit the mark for me, until now. The Everlasting isn’t an Arthurian retelling, but Una Everlasting’s legend is very similar to King Arthur stories, as is both the way the story is utilized by the nation’s leaders and the way it differs depending on who tells it. It feels like a comment on Arthuriana rather than an addition to the canon, and I like that approach!

Some of the mechanics of the way the story plays out didn’t quite mesh; I think that if the author attempts to explain magic, as Harrow does here, there’s a responsibility to see that through. But I liked this book a lot! I will be searching out people to discuss it with.

Hunchback by Saoi Ichikawa, translated by Polly Barton

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel of a disabled woman who decides she wants to have a sexual experience and takes to social media to inquire about the possibility. Her story is told without pity but not without complexity. It was sharp and smart and emotionally honest, even when it went into strange territory. I usually think books under 100 pages are too short, and I did want more this time, but in a good way. More stories about sex and disability, please!

Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks

A few years ago, I wondered when Geraldine Brooks, one of my favorite historical fiction writers, was going to publish a new book, since I hadn’t seen anything from her in a while. It turned out that in 2019, her husband, historian Tony Horwitz, died suddenly while on a book tour. In this memoir, we follow Brooks in the immediate aftermath of her husband’s passing, in which she is forced to mourn while navigating the hostile bureaucracy that surrounds death in the modern era, and also a few years later, where she travels to Flinders Island, off the coast of Tasmania, to give herself space to grieve at last.

Brooks vividly renders Horwitz’s personality in this book. I was especially amused by his thoughts on Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, which he mocked for being overwritten and excessively full of famous names, and his love of pranks:

He made me laugh every single day. He could see absurdity, puncture pomposity, pull off practical jokes of maddening plausibility. Our family learned to beware the date April 1 and to defend against scams so elaborate they might involve a newspaper article, mocked up in perfect typeface, scooping me on a news story I’d been toiling over, or a convincingly dramatized phone call from a contractor saying that the new renovation work in the kitchen wasn’t built to code and would have to be demolished.

Section 2: Excellent

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

I was told about this book for years before reading it, and this year, I finally did. This book is every bit as atmospheric as I was told, and the characters are just as engaging as I was told, and the writing is just as rich as I was told. If you have ever attended a small liberal arts college, or have wondered what attending one is like, this book will tell you. It's also suspenseful - not a mystery, exactly, but its plot propels you through lots of minutiae about college life, which somehow never gets boring! I kind of wish I had read this when I was younger, because it would have altered my brain chemistry. Now, it's just a really good book. But that's not bad! A really good book is never bad.

Also, I'm now 90 percent sure that If We Were Villains started as a Francis-Richard slash fic.

The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman

A King Arthur retelling that knows why the source material is so great (also, one that includes Muslim and queer knights, and comments on colonialism). Though Bright Sword gives us the aesthetic of mystery and fantasy that makes King Arthur stories so escapist and exciting (in this respect it might be more fun to read than my beloved Once and Future King, loath as I am to admit it), it also understand the true power of these legends: the stories of men who fought snakes and wizards and knights, but struggled most of all to conquer themselves. It’s a doorstop, but it goes by fast.

Splinters by Leslie Jamison

A memoir about an incredibly common life event — divorce — that somehow manages to stand out. Leslie Jamison’s vivid character snapshots make you feel like you know everyone in her life, even the people she doesn't name here. She’s self-aware and honest; even when she handles a relationship poorly, you understand her enough to see why she does it.

Section 3: These books singlehandedly saved my year

Middlemarch by George Eliot

I hate being wrong, but I was wrong about this book. I thought I had such an edgy take in college when I read this and disliked it. But in the years since, I'd heard it praised so endlessly and highly that I was forced to conclude that the problem was me (or, perhaps, the phone I read this 800-page tome on). So I tried again this summer, and I am so glad I did.

You have to read Middlemarch slowly, at least at the beginning. Eliot's writing style, with sentences lengthy even for her time, must be taken in with purpose; you need a solid foundation if you want to understand any of the rest of it. But once I had that foundation, the pages flew by. This book is not as humorous as Austen (though still quietly funny in many ways) and not as outwardly dramatic as the Brontës, but it is a stunning portrait of humanity, specifically small-town humanity, and the depths of emotion and reason that only take place inside human souls. The reader is not permitted to condemn even the worst character without a second thought, because although Eliot wants you to know her characters, she also wants you to care about them. She must have liked people, I think. I certainly like her people.

I wish I could still be a hater, but this book is too good.

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, translated by Ros Schwartz

I was told that this book would change my brain, and yet I still was not prepared for what I found. It's short and spare, simple yet elegant. It is about human nature, but it's also about human bondage, and human cruelty, and human resilience. It's the resilience that lingers in my memory: the way people can forge a life out of what seems like nothing, the idea that there is often little choice, but usually some choice. This is a famously depressing book, but after finishing it, I think I felt more hopeful than not.

Heart the Lover by Lily King

I listened to this six-hour audiobook on a car ride that took about that long. The car seat was scrunched up way too close to the wheel because I'd been cleaning it the week before, and the next day my muscles hurt like crazy but I didn't care! That's how good this book was. Lily King is a master at writing about relationships and literature and heartbreak and romance, and she does this in a way that feels as natural as breathing but is so acutely observed that you know her skill is immense. She continues to have a way of peeking into my brain and knowing my own thoughts and feelings, and having her characters reflect them. Also, she continues to absolutely kill it at writing children!

You don't need to have read King's Writers & Lovers to enjoy this, but if you have, you'll enjoy it more. You deserve to enjoy it more. Go read both of them!

What have you been reading? Let me know!