Volume 2, No. 3: Reinvention + Snack Cookies

Greetings, book people! It’s almost the end of January. It’s snowy! There have been tons of juncos hopping around on my porch. I saw a coyote running through my neighbor’s pasture on the way home from the post office yesterday. Let’s talk about books!

These books aren’t as much about reinvention as they are about continual invention. They’re about the impossibility of reinvention as much as they’re about its inevitability. The making and remaking of self. The making and remaking of story. They explore change, transformation, reinvention, remaking and unmaking, all that messy movement and growth—as journey. Not as a pathway to somewhere final but as the pathway itself.

The Books

Backlist: Polar Vortex by Shani Mootoo (Fiction, 2020)

This is an intensely quiet character study about a middle-aged queer couple, Priya and Alex, living in a remote Canadian town. Pirya is an immigrant from Trinidad who arrived in Canada for university and is now an artist. Her wife, Alex, is a writer and scholar. The novel unfolds over the course of a single day, with many flashbacks. Priya has recently gotten back in touch with Prakash, a man she was friends with as a young woman, and has invited him to come visit her. As the novel unfolds, first from Priya’s POV and then from Alex’s, the complicated histories of all of these characters and their relationships begin to emerge.

I don’t read a lot of thrillers, but this novel is full of the tension I associate with good thrillers. There is so much going on beneath the surface. There is so much left unsaid. And it’s not just what Alex and Priya aren’t saying to each other, but what Priya isn’t speaking even in her own mind. I felt like I couldn’t trust anyone, like I was never quite sure if events—and emotions—were being recounted truthfully. The whole book has an eerie, sinister quality to it. Part of this is due to the setting, a tiny island town. Part of it is due to Mootoo’s sparse, chilling prose, which is precise and emotive and dispassionate all at once.

But mostly, I think, it’s due to the emotional heat running through the whole book. I couldn’t help feeling like something bad had happened, or was about to happen. Certain scenes were so tense that I found myself holding my breath. All of this simmering tension and sense of foreboding comes from how close we are inside Priya’s head. We become intimately acquainted with her fears, her confusion and anger, the faultiness in her relationship with Alex, with what she’s withholding, with the price of her silences. I wasn’t expecting a monster to jump out from under the bed. I was expecting some sort of emotional upheaval. Priya is so careful with her words. I knew something had to give, that things couldn’t go on as they were. I’m making it sound like this book builds toward a dramatic climx, but that’s exactly what it doesn’t do—or at least not in the way you might expect. The surprises are subtle, emotional, so small you might miss them if you blink.

I’ve gone on and on about the perfection of the plotting and the pacing, but this is also a book about memory and reinvention. It’s about the selves we create—can we even create a new self? And what happens to the old one when we do? Priya has created a new life for herself with Alex, completely cut off from the person she was before. So when Prakash—a character from that other, forgotten, rejected world—reappears suddenly, her entire understanding of self, world, past, future—begins to shift. It all gets blurry so fast.

Mootoo also explores queerness through this lens of reinvention. Priya’s understanding of and relationship to her own queerness shifts throughout her life. Her identity isn’t fixed; it’s slippery. Its slipperiness causes so much tension, especially in her current life, where most of the people around her aren’t aware of, or don’t want to accept, how fluid and slippery identity can be. This is true of so many themes in this book. The characters move among places and ideas and ways of being. Middle age is a kind of reinvention; immigration is a kind of reinvention. So is marriage, and relocation, and making art. Priya and Alex and Prakash all struggle with these little reinventions throughout their lives, with the impossibility of erasing whatever came before in order to make something new.

Frontlist: People Change by Vivek Shraya (Nonfiction)

I am a huge fan of all of Shraya’s work, and her newest book is no exception. It’s a meandering and insightful essay about change and transformation and reinvention. She explores the role these forces—experiences, ideas, attitudes—have had on her life, as well as how society talks about change and transformation. It’s astounding to me how much ground she covers so thoroughly in such a short book. She writes about friendship, divorce, making art, pop music (and especially the idea of the comeback), trans identity, religion, and more. And she relates each of these experiences back to change.

I was so moved by the sections on friendship, breakups, romantic love, and the paucity of language we have to talk about how relationships change over time. “One of the secrets to growing with someone is changing the language and ideas about relationships and endings,” she writes. She talks about how her relationship with her ex-wife blossomed after they got divorced, even though divorce and breakups are so often viewed as bad, final, endings. She talks about how hard it can be to navigate longterm friendships because we don’t have the language to describe how they change. If two people fall out of love, but remain loving toward each other, there’s a word for that: friendship. But what happens when a friendship shifts, or ends? There is so little nuance in how we talk about relationships. Shraya argues for more space, more nuance, more language, more options. We morph, our relationships morph, the world morphs. Just about everything is in a constant state of flux. What happens if we celebrate and honor that flux instead of trying to stop it from happening?

So many people—especially queer and trans people, and especially trans people of color—are put into confining boxes by the heteronormative, patriarchal society we live in. There’s a right way to be queer, a right way to be trans, and if you change your mind, whatever you were before is wrong, erased. Shraya talks about this pressure and the violence it causes, the ways it has limited her, the ways it has affected how she presents herself, how she talks about herself, her own identity. And then she refutes this whole idea of the static and the fixed, instead celebrating the joy of transformation itself, the freedom of moving through versions of self. “Why must transformation be monstrous and frightening, or something to be laughed at, instead of an opening for self-discovery?” she wonders.

What if we stopped trying to project authenticity and instead admitted that our image and presentations actually reflect an ongoing process of figuring ourselves out? And that this process of learning (and unlearning) how we want to see ourselves and how we want to be seen involves stumbling and posturing.

I highlighted so much of this book and I honestly just want to share a million quotes from it. Like this one:

It’s the before, the after, and the subsequent that has drawn me to transformation, the opportunity to express multiplicity—that someone can be more than one person, can oscillate between shy secretary and ferocious cat woman, and that no one person is more true, but rather the truth (and thrill) lies in the sum of my parts and in the seeming contradictions among them.

There’s nothing pity about this book. Shraya writes about who’s allowed to change and who is punished for change, about the intersections of racism and transphobia and sexism and how those oppressions play out when we talk about reinvention. She delves into why so many of us fear change, why we’re taught to fear fluidity and transgression and transformation. And yet there’s a beautiful playfulness to her writing and her thinking, a joyful celebration of the possibilities of transformation. The whole book feels like an answer to this question she poses near its beginning: “What might a reinvention that acknowledges the pain and history it’s born out of look like?”

And maybe this is the answer, or one of infinite answers—that fulfillment doesn’t come from striving for a final, best form, but from reveling in the endless journey.

Our ideal self is actually holding us back, not propelling us forward. Like our true self, the notion of the ideal self once again limits us to one ultimate self, instead of giving us room to grow and explore alongside our evolving circumstances and desires. It limits our future.

Upcoming: Fine by Rhea Ewing (Graphic Nonfiction, April 5th, Liverlight)

What is gender? First, my friend Patricia wrote a paragraph about that in one of her recent newsletters that is truly worth a read (she also recommends some resources that are great starting points for talking about and understanding gender). Second, of course, it’s an unanswerable question. Ewing doesn’t answer it in this book, even if trying to find the answer is the reason they started writing it in the first place.

Instead, what this book offers is a collection of conversations about gender. Ewing started questioning their own relationship to gender during college, and so decided to start asking other people about it. This book collects all of those interviews, conducted over about a decade. There are so many different people and perspectives! A lot of the folks Ewing speaks with are trans, though not all of them. They’re mostly located in the Midwest, but are incredibly diverse in terms of race, sexuality, age, life circumstances, ability, class, etc. Interspersed with all of these interviews is Ewing’s own story. It provides a coherent narrative througline. As they learn more about gender from others, they document their own shifting understanding of themself. It’s a moving memoir, and one that illustrates just how important community and storytelling can be when it comes to figuring yourself out.

Ewing talks with their interviewees about relationships and family, about bodies and desire and sex, about health care and housing and friendship. They talk about masculinity and femininity, about race and religion, about community, transition, work, art, creativity, community, activism, childhood. Everyone talks about what gender means to them, and they also discuss gender in a broader societal context: how it affects every aspect of our lives.

The book is a beautiful symphony of different ideas and perspectives. It’s not really a primer on gender, or an introduction to gender. It’s a collection of lived experiences. It’s full of stories and ideas, memories and musings. The people Ewing speaks with often don’t agree with each other. No two experiences are alike. Ewing’s commentary is minimal. They may have begun asking all these questions out of a desire to understand gender, but it soon becomes clear that they’re much more interested in understanding each person they speak with. Even their own journey, which is one of self-discovery, isn’t really a story about arrival. They become themself, but that becoming isn’t an ending; it’s just one stop on the journey.

I started this book just after reading People Change and read a few pages each day for a luxurious stretch of weeks. In some ways it feels like a continuation of that book, or an embodiment of it. It’s a loud, chaotic, beautifully messy celebration of all the ways that people are. It made me think about gender in new ways. The art is so expressive and thoughtful. It’s not an all-encompassing book; no collection of stories like this can be. But I saw myself in it, and and I saw people I love in it, and I suspect a lot of folks will also see reflections of who they are, or who they were, or who they want to be—in these pages.

It’s out on April 5th and you can preorder it here.

The Bake

This week’s recipe is a special one because my nephew and I developed it together! The base chocolate chip cookie recipe is from Melissa Clark’s Kid in the Kitchen, which comes highly recommended by my nephew. But he wanted to make something a little different, so after some brainstorming, we came up with this perfect reinvention of chocolate chip cookies: snack cookies! Z and I made three different variations, each with a different mix of add-ins (chocolate chips, chocolate covered pretzels, popcorn, and kettle corn). My favorite was the batch with kettle corn, chocolate chips, and pretzels. I might use regular pretzels instead of chocolate-covered ones next time, because it’s the salty-sweet combo that makes these cookies so good. But no matter what you put in it, this recipe is the perfect vehicle for cookie reinvention!

Snack Cookies

Makes 18-22 cookies

Ingredients

• 250 grams (2 cups) all-purpose flour

• 3/4 tsp salt

• 3/4 tsp baking powder

• 1/2 tsp baking soda

• 10 Tbs (142 grams) unsalted butter, at room temperature

• 100 grams (1/2 cup) white sugar

• 100 grams (1/2 cup) light brown sugar

• 38 grams (3 Tbs) dark brown sugar

• 1 egg

• 1 Tbs vanilla

• 255 grams mixed add-ins of your choice (chocolate chips, chocolate chunks, pretzels or chocolate covered pretzels, popcorn, kettle corn, potato chips)

Preheat the oven to 350. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper or silicone baking mats.

Combine the flour, salt, baking powder, and baking soda in a medium bowl. Set aside.

In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, or with handheld beaters, beat butter on medium speed until creamy, about 2 minutes. Add the sugars and beat until light and fluffy, 2-3 minutes more. Mix in egg and vanilla until smooth. Add the flour mixture and mix on low speed until just incorporated and no streaks remain. Add your chosen combo of snacks, and mix a few times to distribute.

Scoop balls of dough onto the prepared pans, leaving 1 1/2 to 2 inches between them. Bake for 12-18 minutes, until golden brown around the edges but still soft in the center. Let cool slightly before eating (if you can stand it).

The Bowl and The Beat

The Bowl: The Quickest Tortilla Casserole You’ll Ever Make

Seriously. Open a few cans, tear up a few tortillas, grate a little cheese, dinner. You can sauté an onion if you’re feeling fancy, but it’s not required.

Chop an onion and sauté it in butter or olive oil. Press or mince a few garlic cloves and add those. Open and drain a can of black beans and dump them into the pan. Season with the spices of your choice. Mine are cumin, oregano, and cayenne. Let it all cook for a few minutes, mashing up the beans a bit, and set aside. Meanwhile, slice 8-10 corn tortillas into thin strips. Heat some butter in a pan and fry them in batches, 1-2 minutes on each side. You don’t have to be careful or delicate. Pile up the fried tortilla strips on a plate. Grate a whole bunch of your favorite cheese (I used cheddar), and open a jar of your favorite salsa (I used tomatillo). Assemble your casserole in a 9x13 inch baking dish: tortillas, beans, salsa, cheese, tortillas, beans, salsa, cheese. Bake at 400 for 15-20 minutes, until bubbling and golden. If you have scallions or cilantro lying around you can scatter them on top.

The Beat: Don’t Cry For Me, written and read by Daniel Black

I’m only about 20 minutes into this but I love it so far. It’s an epistolary novel about Jacob, a Black man on his deathbed, writing a series of letters to his gay son, explaining himself and his actions in attempt to make amends. The writing is beautiful, but it feels just like a letter might. Black’s narration is wonderful. I’m always hesitant about authors reading their own novels, but so far he is spot on. I was riveted from the first sentence.

The Bookshelf

The Visual

My new (well, I guess it’s not that new anymore!) house has two massive built-in bookcases at the top of the stairs. Between these and the five boxes of books I got rid of when I moved, I have extra shelf space for the first time in my life! I’ve been playing around with different ways to organize this shelf in my bedroom and I love the current arrangement. The top shelf is romance and my small pile of Rabih Alameddine’s backlist (I decided to read it all after falling in love with The Wrong End of the Telescope). Next, all my unread books under two hundred pages. Below that is unread short stories, a stack of recent purchases, and library books. The bottom shelf is all the physical books I own that I’ve already read this year.

Around the Internet

On Book Riot, I made a list of twelve favorite queer books I’ve read thanks to past Read Harder challenges.

The Boost

Elizabeth, who writes the lovely What To Read If, is organizing a paperback book swap! February is one of my favorite months but I know I am in the minority. The idea behind the book swap is to have something fun to look forward to in the middle of the winter. Here are Elizabeth’s instructions, from her newsletter:

Sign up here to send and receive a book by February 4th.

Receive info on your giftee the week of February 7th.

Choose a beloved book from your shelf you’re ready to part with, grab one from a free lending library or purchase a book. Then, send it to your giftee during February (don’t forget to use the media mail rate!). 

Receive a book in the mail from your gifter.

As always, a little bit of beauty to send you on your way: All the grays, all the whites, all the muted silvers, all the mist and snow and clouds, forever and ever, thank you.

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