Volume 1, No. 24: Bodies Are Messy + Plum & Black Pepper Cake

Greetings, book-eaters and treat-lovers! I’ve been working in my new office for a few weeks now, and yesterday I saw a white-breasted nuthatch, one of my favorite birds, creeping along the trunk of the tree outside my window. Seeing familiar and beloved birds is making me feel at home again.

I thought a lot about how I wanted to phrase this week’s theme. Yes, bodies are messy, and these books don’t shy away from it. But it’s not just the physicality of having a body that’s messy. Bodies are constantly changing. So are our relationships to bodies — our own and other people’s. It’s easy to think about bodies as fixed, but they’re not. They’re often volatile, and I adore books that delve into that volatility. And there are so many kinds of bodies — our human bodies, yes, but also bodies of water and rock, the bodies of knowledge and culture and memory that shape our lives. These books explore those kinds of bodies, too. They’re not any neater or less complicated than the ones we inhabit.

I mentioned two of these books briefly in my Best of the Year So Far newsletter, and I’m excited to revisit them. Weekend is one of my favorite queer novels ever, and it’s been sitting on my “must include in a newsletter soon shelf” for a while now.

The Books

Backlist: Weekend by Eaton Hamilton (Fiction, 2016)

I bought this book last winter after struggling to find it at the library. It’s an Arsenal Pulp Press title, so I was confident it would be good, but I was not expecting it to become a new favorite novel.

The story revolves around two queer middle-aged couples. Joe and Elliot have been together for close to twenty years, and they’ve just had their first child. Joe gives birth in their small cabin on a remote lake in Northern Ontario, and the haze and exhaustion and mess of new parenthood puts an enormous strain on her relationship with Elliot.

Logan and Ajax have been together for a year or so. Ajax is turning fifty, and accompanies Logan to their cabin on the lake, their first weekend away together. Logan and Elliot are old friends, and occassaionly still sleep together. They’re wound deeply into the fabric of each other’s lives; they built these side-by-side cabins decades ago.

I cannot possibly relate everything that goes on in this book. It’s one of those novels that feels painfully real, in a way that sometimes makes it uncomfortable to read. Just like real life, it’s light on plot. While there are events that drive the story forward, it’s mostly made up of conversations. There is so much processing. The couples talk, and do not resolve the issues they’re addressing, and then have the same conversation again in a different setting or when one of them is in a different mood. They make up, sort of, and express a lot of tenderness toward each other, and then they start fighting again. There is a lot of fighting, and a lot of sex. It sounds banal and dramatic when I write it out like that, but it’s not. It is intensely real.

And wow, is it messy. It’s physically messy and emotionally messy. There are a lot of bodily fluids. Joe and Elliot are new parents; Joe is nursing. Hamilton writes graphically about all of their bodies — Joes’s and Elliot’s and the baby’s — especially when they’re in pain, or experiencing pleasure. Ajax and Logan have a lot of sex, and these scenes are so emotionally grounded. Ajax is disabled (she has a heart condition that affects her mobility and other things), and Hamilton writes beautifully about this reality. There is just so much embodiment everywhere, all of these people struggling to live with the realities of their aging bodies, with the ways their desires manifest and the weird and vulnerable things they want, with the limits of what their bodies can do.

There’s also a lot of grey space. Joe and Elliot’s marriage is slowly falling apart. This is not a rosy book about motherhood. Elliot, who is a breast cancer survivor, has a lot of feelings about Joe carrying and birthing and nursing their baby, something her body can’t do. Joe’s exhaustion and anger and loneliness is a palpable presence. They both act like assholes and are horrible to each other and make big mistakes. They are not good parents; they are parents figuring it out.

None of the characters fit neatly into boxes. They’re all moving through different expressions of gender and desire. Some of the tension in Logan and Ajax’s relationship comes from that movement. Time and experience change identity. The whole book is an exploration of trans and queer identity as something fluid and continually transformative. Though there are moments of stagnation in the character’s lives, nothing about the story is stagnant. It's about queer people being fucked up and hurtful and selfish and self-righteous. It’s also about queer people being tender and trying their best, creating refuge and taking care of each other. It’s a refreshingly chaotic read about people in their forties and fifties.

There was a moment, in the middle of the book, where I just felt done. I didn’t want to read any more about these people hurting each other, intentionally and unintentionally. I wanted to yell at all four characters. I was exhausted, and yet I could not look away. I kept reading, and I’m so glad I did, because the ending is perfect, and getting to witness the whole journey, especially the hardest parts of it, made it even better.

I know a book is special when I get to the end of a review and think, “But wait! I didn’t mention that…or that…or that.” I could talk about this one for hours; it is full of so much brilliant and heartbreaking queer life.

Frontlist: A History of Scars by Laura Lee (Essays)

This is an absolutely gorgeous memoir-in-essays, a slim volume overflowing with raw honesty. It’s about trauma and family history and illness and queerness and messy romantic entanglements. Lee writes about her family life and childhood, especially her mother’s undiagnosed Alzheimer’s, and how living with and taking care of her mother as a teenager and young adult has shaped her identity. She also writes about her own mental illness, and the ways that living with both diagnosed and undiagnosed schizophrenia have changed the way she moves through the world. She explores her identity as a Korean American and a child of immigrants, her queerness, the lineages and memories she holds in her body.

What I love most about this book (and I love so much) is how deeply grounded Lee’s writing is in the physical. In the titular essay, “A History of Scars”, she catalogues the scars on her body, as well as the emotional scars she carries. It’s a beautiful essay, graceful, though it is about pain and its lingering afterlife. In writing about her scars, and the memories they evoke for her, she doesn’t separate her physical reality and her emotional one. This plays out again and again throughout the book. In writing about her relationship with her girlfriend, the abuse she suffered from her father and sister, her mother’s illness, her schizophrenia diagnosis, the food she loves — all the difficult and joyful experiences that have made up her life — she intertwines the physical and the emotional, the life of the body and the life of the mind.

Lee is a rock climber, and this book is also full of climbing. There is physicality in this, of course, but she also makes startling connections between her own body and the rock. Her deep love of climbing permeates the whole book, as does her obsession with it. Yet she’s able to write about it with insight and clarity. She does this when writing about food, as well. In the essay “Lineages of Food” she delves into her complicated relationship with food and cooking. The immediacy of this essay is breathtaking. It’s brilliant food writing, but it’s not just food writing. It’s about how Lee has used food to understand herself, how food has brought her closer to and further away from other people, how food preparation is intimately linked to her relationships and her mental illness.

Over and over again, she returns to this idea of impermanence, that both her body and her mind are constantly shifting:

I’m impatient with the need to divide intensity into categories, for convenience, for the sake of the outside gaze. I think of myself as infinitely changeable, not a fixed entity. I believe in possibility.

In a beautiful passage about the sense of comfort and home she feels with her Pakistani girlfriend, she writes:

It’s a relief to date someone who understands the odd composite that is me, who doesn’t expect me to explain my cultural inheritance. This, I think, is why she and I get along so easily. We accept each other as experts in our own experience.

This memoir is twisting and non-linear. Lee circles around the same themes again and again. She’s actively grappling; you can feel it in the text. It’s not neat or tidy. The essays are beautifully structured, but they’re also a mess of emotions and scars, painful memories, future worries, physical longings. She’s the expert in her own experience, and, with these words, she bears witness to it.

Upcoming: Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body by Megan Milks (YA Fiction, The Feminist Press, 9/14)

This is one of the weirdest and most surprising books I’ve ever read. I actually started it over a month ago, but after reading the first 40 pages, I got distracted by other things and set it aside. I picked it up again this past weekend and read the whole thing in two days. Friends, it’s wild. It’s a raucous, heartbreaking, funny, bizarre, disturbing, upsetting, delightful romp of a queer coming-of-age.

I requested the ARC because I’ve enjoyed all of the books I’ve read from The Feminist Press. I didn't even read the whole blurb. I saw it was billed as a queer and trans coming of age novel, and thought, “sounds gay, I’m in”.

It’s set in the 90s, and it’s about a teenager named Margaret who forms a detective club (Girls Can Solve Anything) with her best friends in middle school. But the club falls apart when they start high school. Margaret develops an eating disorder and gets sent to a treatment center. And that’s all I want to tell you about the plot.

I am not the kind of reader who cares about surprises. I rarely avoid spoilers. Knowing what happens almost never decreases my enjoyment of a book. But in the case of this novel, I truly think that the less you know about it going in, the better. I was constantly off-kilter while reading it. I never knew where it was going. It was one kind of story, and then suddenly it was a completely different kind of story. Just when I thought I understand what was happening, Milks would veer off in a new direction, ad the whole book would change: the format, the style, the tone. And I’d have to recalibrate everything I thought I knew about the story and the characters.

It’s a disorienting experience. Being a teenager is also a disorienting experience, even more so if your’e queer or trans or don’t have the words to explain or understand yourself. Margaret is a teenager going through it, and Milks’s depiction of that painful and weird growing-up journey feels truthful in a way that’s hard to explain. The book is surreal and odd. There is a lot of body horror and strange, unexplainable happenings. It is not straightforward. But the structure feels inevitable. Milks takes all the angst and loneliness and horror and tenderness of being a queer teenager and translates it into a shape-shifting story.

It’s not an easy read. The body horror is intense. It’s about eating disorders, body dysmorphia, dysphoria, and fatphobia. It’s often painful to be inside Margaret’s head. There are also moments of absurd silliness. It’s often funny, and it’s so smart. There’s a campiness to parts of it. I am honestly bowed over by how much Milks does with it. It’s a book that contains hundreds of stories.

I’m going to be thinking about this one for a long time. There are a lot of books out there about girlhood, but this is a special one. It’s a story about girlhood and the limits of girlhood, about the girlhoods and not-girlhoods of people who are not quite, not always, not forever, girls. It’s about the specificity of queer and trans girlhood and not-girlhood. The last section took my breath away. The layers are endless. I’m already curious about what hidden meanings and new possibilities I’ll discover on the reread.

It’s out 9/14 and you can preorder it here.

The Bake

I am over summer. This isn’t a bodies-are-messy cake, this is just a cake I made because I am ready for fall. All I want is frosty mornings and cozy sweaters and a kitchen that smells like cinnamon and applesauce and caramelizing pears. So instead of making a summery cake with summer fruit, I made a fall cake with summer fruit. It’s delicious.

Plum & Black Pepper Cake

This recipe is adapted from the fantastic A New Way to Cake by Benjamina Ebuehi. Because it’s what I do, I messed with the flour and the spices and a few other things. I use a mix of spelt flour, cornmeal, and almond flour, which gives the cake a nutty flavor. The combination of plums and black pepper is wonderful. It’s warm and a bit zingy, with these delightful pockets of sweetness from the plums.

Ingredients:

• 2 sticks (16 Tbs, 225 grams) unsalted butter, softened

• 225 grams (1 cup plus 2 Tbs) toasted sugar (untoasted, of course, is fine too)

• 1/2 tsp vanilla

• 4 tsp coarsely ground pepper

• 3 eggs

• 65 grams (1/2 cup) whole grain spelt flour

• 150 grams (1 1/2 cups) almond flour

• 50 grams (1/4 cup) cornmeal

• 1 tsp ginger

• 1/4 cup milk

• 1 quart small yellow plums (these are what I had on hand from the farmers market, but you can also use 3-5 larger plums)

• A handful of sliced almonds

Preheat the oven to 350. Butter a 9” springform pan and line the bottom with parchment.

In a medium bowl, combine the spelt flour, almond flour, cornmeal, ginger, and one teaspoon of black pepper.

In the bowl of stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, or using electric beaters, cream the butter, sugar, vanilla, and 2 teaspoons of the pepper until pale and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing on low speed after each one. Add the flour mixture and mix until combined. Add the milk and mix just until smooth.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan. If you’re using small plums, slice them in half and remove the pits. If you’re using larger plums, quarter them and remove the pits. Arrange the plums on top of the cake. You don’t have to push them into the batter; just lay them gently on top. Sprinkle the sliced almonds and the remaining teaspoon of black pepper on top.

Bake for 50-60 minutes, until the top is golden brown and a tester inserted in the middle comes out clean. Allow to cool in the pan for 15-20 minutes before turning it out on a wire rack.

If you want you can eat it with a dollop of whipped cream of créme fraîche. I can personally guarantee that it makes a delicious breakfast.

The Bowl & The Beat

The Bowl: Super Boring + Outrageously Delicious Summer Veggie Roast

The other day I dumped a somewhat random selection of veggies onto a baking tray, roasted them, and ate them with lots of Parmesan over bulgar. It is one of the easiest meals I’ve made in a while and one of the most delicious. I can’t explain why it was so good. I was expecting something tasty, but this combination of roasted corn, fennel, and tomatoes is sublime. Don’t let the simplicity fool you.

Preheat the oven to 450. Thinly slice 2-3 bulbs of fennel. Do the same thing to 2 small red onions. Cut the kernels off 6 ears of corn. Slice a bunch of cherry tomatoes in half, about a quart’s worth. If you’ve got Roma tomatoes, cut 6-8 of those in quarters. If you don’t, quarter some red slicers instead. Dump all the veggies on a baking sheet. Add olive oil, salt and pepper, and some fresh thyme springs. Whole garlic cloves would be lovely, too; I forgot them. Roast for a while, 30-40 minutes, until the corn is sweet and starting to brown, the tomatoes are juicy, and the fennel and onions are caramelized. Serve over the grain of your choice with a lot of the grated cheese of your choice.

The Beat: In Deeper Waters by F.T. Lukens

I’m about halfway through this, and so far it’s a fun queer pirate adventure. I’ve been listening to a bunch of intense and/or nonfiction audiobooks, so I was in the mood for something lighter. Also, Kevin R. Free is one of my absolute favorite narrators. Everything he reads is perfection. I would listen to him narrate anything.

The Bookshelf

The Library Shelf

I have so many books checked out, they hardly fit in a photo. The Sealey Challenge has been incredible and I’ll have a lot more to say about it (and some of these amazing books!) next week.

The Visual

I’m so happy to finally have my books unpacked that I sometimes find myself idly staring at my bookshelves. This is one of my TBR shelves. (I have four, it’s a complicated system of rotating books, don’t ask. Or ask, if you want!) I love the way rainbow bookshelves look, but my brain needs to have most of my books organized by author. So I just make my TBR shelf a rainbow, since I’m actively pulling unread books from it all the time (theoretically).

Around the Internet

Curious about romance novel awards? I made a handy guide.

Now Out

Nothing I’ve previously recommend is out this week. Stay tuned for a flood of amazing September releases!

The Boost

Recency I’ve been having a blast using Libro’s bookstore finder to discover indie bookstores I’ve never heard of. I usually buy books from my own local indie, or from Bookshop, but Libro makes it so easy to find cool BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and women-owned bookstores! I’m excited to spread my money around a bit the next time I buy books.

A few bookstores I’ve found with great websites that are fun to browse (beware):

• Buffalo Street Books (Ithaca, NY)

• A Room of One’s Own Bookstore (Madison, WI)

• Massy Books (Vancouver, BC)

As always, a little bit of beauty to send you on your way: It’s taken a little while, but I’ve finally gotten into the routine of my new morning walk, which includes this beautiful view.

And that’s it until next week. Catch you then!