Volume 1, No. 32: Queer City life on Three Continents + Mini Chocolate Rye Cakes

Greetings, friends! The temperature finally dropped around here and I am in full-on fall appreciation mode: sweaters, slippers, soup, and plenty of “these leaves are too beautiful to exist!” exclamations.

I’ve written before (here and elsewhere) about how much I hate the way queer life is often associated with urban life in books, TV, and film. Queers live everywhere, some of us do not like cities, and not every queer person flees their small rural hometown! However, that doesn’t mean that I don’t also appreciate books about queers in cities. I hate the stereotype that queer people can only be happy in urban areas, but I recognize that rural life holds real challenges for queer people, and cities can be lifesaving.

This week’s books take place in London, New York, and Seoul. Each one is a love letter to a particular city, though they are not blithely romantic: the cities in these books are sometimes lonely and alienating. What I love about these stories is the complexity with which they explore queerness and cities. Cities are opportunities. They create space for queer lives where there wasn’t space before. They’re sometimes exhilarating, sometimes intoxicating, sometimes exhausting.

I like a city for four to six hours, max. After that I get grumpy and overwhelmed. But that’s the beauty of books. They remind me how fascinating and alive cities are—even if I’ll never live in one.

The Books

Backlist: Insomniac City by Bill Hayes (Memoir, 2017)

Bill Hayes moved to New York City at the age of forty-eight, shortly after the death of his partner of sixteen years. In this memoir, he recounts falling in love with the neurologist Oliver Sacks, who was seventy-five at the time. They were together until Sacks died seven years later. But Insomniac City is not only a moving memoir about a surprising and life-changing relationship, or an intimate portrait of a famous writer. It is also about the experience of moving to a new place in middle age, and about falling in love with New York City.

Part of what I loved so much about this book is its structure. Vignettes about life in New York—riding the train and walking the streets and talking to strangers—alternate with snippets from Hayes’s journal. The two main characters (so to speak), Oliver Sacks and New York City, appear in both the vignettes and the journal entires, but Sacks is more often present in the journal sections, whereas in each vignette, it is the city itself that takes center stage.

This structure lends a complexity to the memoir. It refuses to be just one thing. Hayes falls in love, utterly unexpectedly, after going through a devastating loss, with an extraordinary and famous person. But Hayes’s experience of New York City—and his relationship with the city—is just as meaningful and transformative, albeit in a different way.

Hayes writes about both the city and his relationship with Sacks with palpable tenderness. It gives so much weight to the story. Our lives are rarely linear; our emotions and desires are almost always multi-faceted. Rarely do we live through a story that is simply one thing: a love story, a coming of age story, a story about death. The stories we live through are complicated. They are about many things. This book is a love story and a death story, an assertion that many truths are possible. It’s about renewal, reinvention, mess, loss, dependence and independence, aging, sickness, grief, wonder.

I also love the smallness of the things Hayes chooses to write about. He writes about ordinary life with sparse, exact language: cooking dinner, drinking wine on the roof, swimming laps, getting high. The shapes and colors of trees and clouds, the items on Sacks’s desk, the expressions of people on a subway.

There is big joy and big grief in this book. Hayes and Sacks found each other at a completely unexpected time in their lives. The wonder of that, their pure happiness in each other, shimmers on the page. But Hayes does not shy away from the difficult, either: loosing his partner suddenly and uprooting his life, the realities of aging, Sacks’s death from cancer less than ten years after they met. The extraordinary thing is how he uses such minute and ordinary details to weave those big themes into such a moving, funny, readable story.

Everything about life is messy. This book celebrates that messiness. In a scene where Hayes and Sacks are discussing the sensation of pleasure while high, they decide that pleasure and happiness are not the same because “happiness is more complex”. With this love letter of a book, in spare and haunting prose, Hayes asserts that this is so, and that, even in the midst of grief, it is possible to find worth in wildness of our lives.

Hayes gifts his readers with too many verbatim bits of Oliver Sacks’s wisdom, humor, profundity, and wonder to write them all down here. Here’s the one I copied onto a post-it which now lives on my desk: “The most we can do is write—intelligently, creatively, critically, evocatively—about what it is like living in the world at this time.”

This is one of the most succinct and beautiful meditations on the work of a writer that I’ve ever heard, and it is exactly what Hayes has done in Insomniac City.

Frontlist: The Heiress by Molly Greeley (Historical Fiction)

I wrote about this book briefly a few weeks back when I was listening to it. I enjoyed it a lot, and I’ve found myself thinking about it often since. It’s one of those quiet books that didn’t immediately grab me. I didn’t finish it and rush to structure a newsletter around it. But the characters have stuck with me. Sometimes a book like this will quickly fade from my memory; this one has cemented itself in my brain.

It’s not exactly a Pride & Prejudice retelling; it’s more of a spin-off. It centers a minor character from P&P: Anne de Bourgh, Darcy’s original intended finance. This is my favorite sort of retelling, honestly. I love books that play with the source material but create their own worlds. I remember basically nothing about P&P, but because it’s a book that’s so deeply ingrained in the cultural imagination, the queerness of this book still felt like a powerful reimagining to me.

Anne grows up on a wealthy estate. As a sickly baby, she’s prescribed laudanum by the family doctor, and she soon develops a dependence on it. Throughout her childhood, she’s sheltered from much the world, viewed by her family as “fragile" and “delicate”. She takes laudanum every day, and it keeps her in a kind of stupor, though she’s not aware of it at the time; she’s told she needs it and that she’ll become even sicker without it.

The first part of the book has a dreamlike quality to it, as Anne recounts her life as a teenager and young adult. She develops a crush on a governess (though she doesn’t name it as such at time time), who is also the first person to suggest to her that it’s the actually laudanum that’s making her sick. Anne isn’t ready to hear this, though, and when this governess eventually leaves, she’s devastated. Greeley’s prose throughout this whole section is languid. You can feel the slowness with which Anne moves through the world. There’s a palpable tension between what you know, as the reader, and what Anne knows, as a teenager with very agency over her own circumstances.

It isn’t until she’s nearly thirty, after her father dies, that Anne finally realizes the opium is controlling her life. She’s just inherited a vast fortune and the title to an estate, but she has no idea what to do with it. She’s not prepared for adulthood. She takes a big risk and decides to flee to London anyway, against her mother’s direct wishes. In London, with the help of her cousins, she stops taking laudanum and works through a slow and painful withdrawal.

It’s in the London that the book—and Anne’s life—opens up. She begins to think for herself. She meets people who have opinions about gender, money, democracy, work, and purpose. She falls in love with a woman named Eliza. She discovers that her body is her own to do with as she pleases, and that it can bring her pleasure. She dives headfirst into London society, gulping everything in greedily. She goes to bookshops and dances. She’s delighted by novels. She lets her passion for Eliza show in ways she never dreamed possible before.

Of course, she discovers that the world is not prepared for her newfound brazenness and determination. Many people, including her mother, preferred her when she did as she was told and did not question authority. Along with the rush of freedom and excitement that comes from forging a new life of her own design, Anne encounters heartbreak and derision and loneliness. Things get messy.

I love the slowness of Anne’s journey. She changes so much over the course of the book, and we get to see so many moments of revelation and tenderness and grit and despair along the way. London is a gift; it gives Anne back a part of herself. The city, in this novel, is a stop along the way, though it’s not the final destination. This, I think, is true for so many queer people, whether in the 19th or 21st centuries. Cities can help us figure out who we are, and give us the courage we need to live the lives we’ve dreamed of—wherever we choose to put down roots.

This novel has such a beautiful ending that I didn’t want to like (it felt forced for a minute there), but it made me cry despite myself, and I still think about it all the time. There’s so much interesting stuff in here about disability, power, agency, and queer womanhood. It’s a quiet coming-into-yourself novel, a satisfying lesbian romance, and a celebration of London.

Upcoming: Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park, translated by Anton Hur (Fiction, Grove Press, 11/16)

I’ve recently gotten into a kind of book I used to not like at all: novels that aren’t about the change, that simply document characters’ lives. With Teeth is a great example of this, and Love in the Big City is another. I’ve come to appreciate the power of simply getting to exist with a character as they go about their life. It takes patience to read books like this. They don’t have the same kind of payoff. When I finished this novel, I didn’t let out a sigh of relief. I didn’t feel like I’d been through it with the main character, Young. He didn’t arrive at some kind of revelation, and neither did I. The rewards of books like this are different, quieter. They lie in the pleasure of getting to sink into a world, and to experience the details of another person’s life.

The novel is about Young, a gay man living in Seoul. It’s split into four sections, each with a distinct focus, though they overlap in time and theme. The first part focuses on Young’s relationship with his best friend from college, Jaehee. They live together in their twenties and rely on each other for everything; when Jaehee decides to get married, Young isn’t sure what to do with himself. The next three sections are about his various romantic entanglements and relationships. He falls in love with a man he meets in a philosophy class, and later documents his relationship with another man, Gyu-ho, which swings between angst and tenderness. In the last section, while meeting up with a man from Tinder, he reflects on his past relationships. Throughout, he’s taking care of his sick mother, as well as slowly becoming a successful writer.

It’s a meandering and melancholy book. Young is often unsatisfied in his work and relationships, and he’s very direct about it. He has a brash, “here’s how it is” way of describing the things that happen to him, whether he’s talking about sex, falling in love, his dying mother, or his career as a writer. He’s not exactly apathetic, but he does allow himself to just drift along, letting relationships happen to him. There’s something both fascinating and familiar about this attitude. It’s hard to capture the pace of life in a book; most of what happens to people every day is boring. But Park does a brilliant job of it here. Young is snarky and sad, a bit selfish, sometimes haughty, sometimes kind. He goes to bars, texts with his friends, goes to class, visits his mother, reorganizes his apartment, hooks up. It’s all very banal. But it doesn’t make for boring reading. Young is also self-aware and reflective, and it’s just as interesting watching him analyze his life as it is watching him live it.

I don’t know anything about Seoul, but the setting in this novel is wonderful. Young is constantly moving between neighborhood and parts of the city, each with their own character. He lives his life in a series of public and private places: parks, restaurants, bars, cabs, streets, apartments. The whole book is rooted in the places he visits over and over again, and that also gives it a kind of familiarity.

At one point, Young is reflecting on his relationship with Gyu-ho, and how it has continued to preoccupy him even after they broke up:

Using all kinds of other methods to create Gyu-ho and write him as other characters, I’ve tried to show the relationship we had and the time we spent together as complete as they were, but the more I try, the further I get from him and the emotions I had back then. My efforts become something fainter and more distanced from the truth. The made up Gyu-ho in my writing got hurt or died many times, and is always resurrected, as if love saves his life—whereas the real Gyu-ho lives and breathes and keeps moving on.

The novel is full of interesting tidbits like this—Young trying to untangle the differences between living a life and witnessing it, between memory and story, reality and fantasy. But the actual novel embodies the opposite of what he’s saying here. Young “lives and breathes and keeps moving on” in the pages of the book.

It’s out 11/16 and you can preorder it here.

The Bake

It is Bake Off season, which means I’ve been baking treats on Fridays so that I have something to enjoy while watching the new episode. I’m not even going to try to connect these delightful mini bundt cakes to queer urban life. I made them because I wanted chocolate, and I wanted an excuse to use my fancy mini bundt pan. They are delicious and quick!

Mini Chocolate & Rye Bundt Cakes

These are loosely based off a recipe for Take Home Chocolate Cake in Sweet. They are wonderfully moist, but not too sweet. The rye does its magic rye thing; I’m really not sure what that is, but I love it. From what I can tell, these keep well, too. (They tasted perfect three days later.)

I used mini bundt pans for this because I can’t resist fancy pans, but you can make it in a regular 9” round cake pan. If you do use a mini pans, I got 24 cakes. You could also use muffin tins.

Ingredients

• 250 grams (2 sticks +1 Tbs) unsalted butter, at room temperature

• 200 grams dark chocolate, chopped

• 1.5 Tbs coffee dissolved in 1 cup boiling water

• 230 grams (1 cup + 1 Tbs) Demerara sugar (I’ve been using this recently because I have a lot on hand and want to use it up; regular white sugar will work no prob)

• 2 eggs

• 2 tsp vanilla

• 200 grams (2 cups minus one tablespoon) whole rye flour

• 40 grams (1/4 cup) all-purpose flour

• 2 3/4 tsp baking powder

• 1 tsp ginger

• 1/4 tsp salt

• 30 grams (1/3 cup) cocoa powder

• chopped candied ginger and chopped toasted hazelnuts (optional)

Preheat oven to 350. Butter and flour your mini cake molds, or butter a 9” cake pan and line the bottom with parchment. You can also cocoa powder your molds instead of flouring them!

Cut the butter into small chunks—you want them to be small enough that they’ll easily dissolve when you add hot water. Put the butter chunks in a medium heatproof bowl along with the chopped chocolate (again, small is good). Pour the coffee mixture into the bowl and whisk until smooth. Add the sugar, eggs, and vanilla and whisk until combined.

In a separate bowl, combine the flours, baking powder, ginger, and salt. Add the dry ingredients to the wet and gently fold together with a rubber spatula or wooden spoon. Pour the batter into your prepared pans.

Bake cakes for 15-16 minutes, until a tester interested in the middle comes out just clean. If you’re using a round cake pan, it’ll take about an hour.

Allow to cool on a wire rack for at least 35 minutes before running a knife along the edges and gently popping the cakes out.

To decorate: I made a simple vanilla glaze (1 cup powdered sugar, 1 teaspoon vanilla, 2-3 tablespoons milk), which I drizzled over the tops of the cakes. Then I sprinkled them with chopped candied ginger and hazelnuts.

The Bowl and The Beat

The Bowl: Potato Leek Soup with Lots of Butter and Bacon

What can I say? It’s soup season. I cooked a bunch of bacon, sautéed leeks in the bacon fat, and then added a big hunk of butter along with the potatoes and stock. It’s the most hearty and comforting fall soup I could ask for, though I am not a food stylist, so the photo doesn’t really do it justice.

Cook up some bacon. I used ~10 pieces for a big batch of soup (about 4 quarts). Transfer the cooked bacon to a plate. Dump the fat from the pan into a large soup pot. Add a whole pile of thinly sliced leeks (I used two fat bunches of small leeks), a hunk of butter, and salt and pepper. Cook over medium until the leeks begin to soften and turn brown around the edges. Now dump in a pile of potatoes. For a big batch, I used ~3 pounds. I like to leave this soup chunky, so I chopped the potatoes in fairly regular 1-inch cubes. Add a quart of stock (veggie, chicken, whatever), turn up the heat, and let simmer for a while until everything is soft. If the veggies look like they’re about to char, or the soup is very thick, add some more stock or water.

Purée with an immersion blender (or however you purée things). Potatoes can get gummy if you blend them for too long. I like to nicely thicken the soup, but leave some hefty chunks of potatoes for texture. Return to the heat. Chop up your bacon into small bits and add that back in. Add some milk. Taste and adjust the seasonings to your liking. Yum.

The Beat: Things We Lost to the Water by Eric Nguyen, read by Quyen Ngo

I got a little overexcited and currently have 11 audiobooks checked out from Libby. Instead of reading them in order of due date, I just picked the one I was most excited about. I can’t resist a family saga! This story is about a Vietnamese immigrant family living in New Orleans; the POV shifts between Huong and her two sons, Tuan and Binh, who eventually starts going by Ben. I’m a few hours in, and so far I love it. It’s a beautifully detailed book that moves swiftly through time but hones in on moments. It opens with Huong leaving Vietnam in 1978, and now I’m somewhere in the mid-80s; Binh is in elementary school and has decided to change his name to Ben because it’s “easier for everyone”. I love a quiet novel that examines all the tiny details that make up relationships. I’m also loving the narration, especially getting to hear all the Vietnamese that’s scattered throughout the book.

The Bookshelf

The Visual

Sometimes I end up with multiple copies of a book, or extra ARCs. So I’ve started a shelf of duplicate books, and it’s currently home to some real gems! I like the idea of having a shelf of books that anyone who comes over can peruse and take from. But it’s not like I’m hosting a whole lot of dinner parties at the moment. If you’re excited about reading any of these, let me know, and I’ll happily mail one your way!

Around the Internet

On Book Riot, I made a list of 20 must-read queer webcomics.

The Boost

You may have heard about the supply chain issues that are affecting publishing right now. The long and short of it is that lots of books are on backorder, so if you are planning on buying books to give as gifts later in the year, now is the time. Here are a few fantastic resources to help you support indie bookstores despite global supply chain delays!

• I absolutely love this list of staff favorites from The Feminist Press. I want to buy every book on the list, honestly, and I appreciate how each staff person highlights not only a few books they love, but also their local indie. What’s even cooler is that all the books are in stock at these stores (or were at the time of writing, anyway), so you’re likely to get them sooner rather than later!

• Loyalty Bookstores has a fantastic list of BIPOC books to preorder. Preorders help debut authors whose sales may be affected by supply chain issues and shipping delays. Preordering also ensures that indie bookstores will order enough copies of a particular book. It’s just a great thing to do all around.

• Bookshop.org is generally awesome, and it’s likely to be somewhat less affected by supply chain delays than brick-and-mortar stores. You can always browse the Books & Bakes Shop for lots of under the radar recs, or select your favorite indie store and a portion of your purchase money will go to them!

As always, a little bit of beauty to send you on your way: The leaves, my heart.

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