Volume 2, No. 27: What Are Stories For? + Unadorned Butterscotch Bars

Greetings, book-eaters and treat people! I’m on vacation this week, so I’m writing to you from the past, in a flurry of packing and deciding how many books is too many to bring with me. (Answer: there’s no such thing as too many.)

I love books about stories. How to make them and why we tell them and what they’re for. This week’s books are all about the possibilities and limitations of storytelling.

The Books

Backlist: Seasons in Hippoland by Wanjikū Wa Ngūgī (Fiction, 2021)

I always roll my eyes when people say things like, “stories can change the world.” This is a beautiful book about what stories do have the power to change: people. Mumbi lives in Westville, a town in the fictional African country of Victoriana. As a young teen she and her brother Mito are sent to live for a season with their aunt in Hippoland, a small town in the countryside. Unlike Westville, which is the seat of a repressive regime, Hippoland is looser and less rigid, a place connected to the country’s past.

At first Mumbi hates Hippoland. She wants to be back in the city with her friends, in the life she’s used to. So she refuses to speak. Her Aunt Sara doesn’t try to force Mumbi to talk. She just starts telling stories. Eventually Mumbi is drawn in by them, and can’t resist asking her questions out loud. This is how she slowly comes to love Hippoland and connect with her aunt: through stories.

Over the next several years, Mumbi and Mito return to live with Aunt Sara in Hippoland each season. She keeps telling stories. These stories are living, breathing things. Sometimes Aunt Sara describes them as being orphaned. Sometimes she says that she’s lost a story, that it’s wandered off beyond her reach, and so she starts a new one. They are not ordered. They are messy and complex, entangled with each other.

Sara tells Mumbi about how she met Mumbi’s parents, through the movement they were all part of that eventually overthrew the colonial regime. She tells her about her grandparents, who were also freedom fighters, about how her grandmother smuggled weapons to guerrilla fighters. She tells Mumbi about a magical bowl of stories and a suitcase of strange desires, about falling in love and getting her heart broken, about the unbearable things that happened to her and her mother at the hands of the government. These stories sink into Sara, become her.

Sara tells stories of the days when she and Mumbi’s parents fought against the green berets. Mumbi grows up in a country ruled by a new totalitarian regime, the red berets. As more and more people begin to protest, the red berets become increasingly hostile. Near the end of the book, the old emperor dies, and there’s yet another regime change: now the government's orders are carried out by the blue berets. It’s very cyclical.

Perhaps it sounds bleak, but this is actually a hopeful book. It’s not about the big, sweeping changes, but about the small stuff of everyday people and their everyday lives. Yes, it’s about living under repressive governments, and the new oppressive governments that spring up after revolutions, and the cycles of violence that repeat and repeat. Mostly, though, it’s about Mumbi’s slow transformation from clueless kid to someone deeply concerned with history, with the land, with doing justice. It’s about the things that change her as she moves through the world, living her life in the midst of those cycles of harm.

And it’s about how stories change her. She becomes a storyteller herself because she has been so profoundly changed by stories. And then she goes out into the world and acts—she becomes a lawyer and helps free a man who’s been wrongly arrested by the government. Stories don’t create any real change in the world. Stories don’t solve problems. Mumbi does that, with her mind and her body and her voice. It’s a small distinction but an important one, and it’s so beautifully expressed in this book.

The writing is lovely and quiet. It reads like a fable, with little bits of magic woven in—hippos hold the stories of ancestors, and the spirits of those who came before are everywhere. Sometimes time blurs, as Mumbi falls into stories and becomes the person telling them. But at the center of this fable is an intimate, emotional journey. Mumbi becomes herself because of stories. She goes on living and speaking into the next cycle, whatever it brings, knowing where she belongs and what she stands for, ready to go out into the world with her stories to see what lives she can touch.

Frontlist: Body Work by Melissa Febos (Nonfiction)

This is a book about craft, a writer’s book, but it is also a book about life. As a writer, I drank it up, the way I drink up all of Febos’s work. As a human, I savored it. Febos is such a sharp and compassionate writer. I mean both of those words specifically. She doesn’t sugarcoat anything. Her sentences feel alive and sometimes cutting, like she’s hacked through all the obscuring undergrowth to get to the hard stuff at the center of things. The clarity she brings to the work is remarkable, especially when she’s writing about her own life, the stories of her life she’s told through her writing, and the ways that writing has in turn shaped her life.

I loved Girlhood, and I loved Body Work for the same reason. Both are complicated, thorny books that contain immense gentleness and relentless interrogation. This is what I mean about her compassion and sharpness. Reading her books often feels like work to me, and I think this is because so much of the work of writing them is visible. In Body Work, she writes:

I want more than mechanics, more than experimentation. I want to feel on the page how the writer changed. How the act of writing changed them.

This is what she does in all the books of hers I’ve read (I still have two to go): she writes the change onto the page. Body Work is an unusual blend of memoir and craft seminar. It’s about the interconnectedness of writing memoir, writing about trauma, and healing from trauma. Memoirs, especially memoirs about trauma, and especially memoirs by people from communities that have been historically marginalized, are often criticized for being self-indulgent. This book is a beautiful refutal of that idea, a celebration of the messy reality of writing and telling stories: that the act can and does change us.

Febos explicitly does not equate writing with therapy, or writing a memoir about trauma with healing from trauma. But she acknowledges that these things are not unrelated, that there is space for writing to serve more than one purpose, and that writing about our most intimate selves—as a creative process, as a path to understand the world, as vocation or profession—can be both a profoundly transformative experience and a way to make art.

The book consists of four essays, each one gorgeously written and full of wisdom. My favorite, perhaps, is “Mind Fuck”, which is about sex writing, although, of course, it’s about much more than that. I love this passage from the very end of the essay:

In order to write well about sex, we must write our whole selves into it; we must place our characters at the center of their own stories. This is an issue of craft, but it is also about joy—the joy of awakening to the full range of human experience, in all its ecstatic, uncomfortable, freaky, transcendent, holy realness. “Uses of the Erotic” is not an essay about sex or sex writing—but in the end, neither is this. It is an essay about the revolutionary power of undoing the narratives we’ve been taught about ourselves, and how that project might make us not only better writers and lovers, but more human to ourselves.

We understand ourselves through narrative—our own narratives and the narratives the world imposes on us. Untangling these narratives, finding the true ones and casting off the rest, undoing the violence of narratives that say the way we eat and fuck and love and speak is wrong, and building in their place stories about our lives and bodies that are imaginative and spacious—this is the work of writing, and the work of our lives. It is never-ending work, and I know I’ll be returning to this book again and again as I do my own untangling.

Upcoming: A Minor Chorus by Billy-Ray Belcourt (Fiction, W. W. Norton, October 4)

Why write a novel? There are the requisite answers: to think through questions that agitate thinkability—what is truth, what makes a livable life, who suffers and who injures, what is it to be in a world one didn’t choose, et cetera. On the contrary, the news coming out of North America as of late was, in a sense, an ongoing refutation of the novel, of anything that wasn’t direct action, that didn’t have to do with an immediate insurgency against those whose disregard for the livability of the oppressed amounted to a politics of socially engineered mass death.

Out of all three of these books, this one wrestles most directly with the question: what are stories for? It’s a truly exceptional novel, a hilarious and heartbreaking mix of genre, an argument for stories, an argument against them. What’s the point of writing a novel? Is it a violent act? A hopeful one? Is the desire to write one self-delusional? Selfish? Noble? And how does a person even undertake such a project in a world that is already so destructive? Specifically, how does a queer Indigenous man go about this project, a person who carries ancestral trauma in his body, a person committed to the act of uncovering truth, a scholar, a twenty-something trying to find and hold onto moments of joy in the here and now, even as he craves a better world? These are impossible, unanswerable questions. This is an impossible book. I don’t know how to review it. How do you review a work of art that grapples so openly?

Maybe I could write an essay about the places it touched in me, its spiny, heartbreaking, beautiful living layers. Maybe I could write about the contradictions it honors, the precise, expansive poetry of every sentence, all the ways it builds and destroys ways of knowing, feeling, remembering. It feels impossible to to reduce it to anything other than what it is. It is singular. Yet perhaps the act of not reviewing it is a failure to engage with its thorniness, its demands.

The unnamed narrator is a twenty-something queer Cree man who abandons his dissertation and leaves his PhD program to write a novel. He returns home to northern Alberta where he speaks with various people from his past: a closeted gay elder, an old classmate, his mother. It is intensely, ferociously interior. The narrator is a scholar. He's constantly analyzing, reframing, philosophizing. It is so academic. It is also anti-academic, a searing indictment of the academy, an institution that is rotten right down to its white supremacist colonial core.

In this book there is the work of Lorde and Baldwin and Roland Barthes. There are lots of Grindr hookups. A lot of exhaustion and self-reflection. Wry, bitter humor. Enduring queer Indigenous friendship. There is the story of the narrator's cousin, another Cree man arrested for drug possession. There are Canada's crimes. There is so much complexity to all of it, and then there is the spectacular form: a novel that isn't a novel, a novel that condemns the act of a writing a novel, a genre-smashing blend of fiction, autofiction, and oral history. It is, simply, a novel. It is, far from simply, a novel that defies conventional storytelling logic, that wrestles directly with this:

What I know about being queer and Indigenous and in my twenties is desperation. It is we who experience aliveness as both inescapable and a shimmering impossibility. We improvise life outside the frame of futurity while also being ensnared by it. We don’t die. We proliferate life as if machines engineered to do so; that’s it. I would return to my hometown and go about the practice of not dying, I thought. My liveliness would be artful.

And this:

I combed through my copy of Roland Barthes’s Mourning Diary. One of the sentences I underlined twice: “Mourning: a cruel country where I am no longer afraid.” For the colonized, the same could be said of the future, of one’s own body.

And this:

A novel is a body of water from which I frantically wanted to drink. What would a novel attuned to rising sea levels and melting Arctic ice sheets look like? What would its structure be? I wondered.

And, like Febos, Belcourt understands the power of narrative:

Humans are pitiable because we are unfree from the scripts inside another’s head; but we rebel.Was I endeavoring to hear the sounds made when someone broke through a story they hadn’t written for themselves? At that moment I couldn’t think of anything else worth doing.

I could go on and on because the grappling never ends. Belcourt engages in grappling with ferocious, reckless glee, and with despair that is heavy, quiet, unavoidable. His sentences are like poems. They’re rooted in the body but they never stay there; they always fly up into the theoretical. The blend is dizzying. I’ve never read a book that is so precisely both of these things at once, so cerebral and so attuned to the physicality of grief and desire and loneliness and delight.

It’s out October 4th, and you can preorder it here.

The Bake

I made these on one of those days when I just really needed a treat, right now. I didn’t feel like making cookies, or a cake, or anything that took more than 12 minutes to mix up. I didn’t have any chocolate in the house; brownies are my go-to emergency baked good. So I made these instead. They are the simplest of simple. They’re basically browned butter and brown sugar, with a little flour to hold it all together.

I had completely forgotten, until I smelled them baking in the oven, that butterscotch brownies were one of the first things I ever baked. I used to make them as a kid, from the recipe in Joy of Cooking, long before I thought of myself as baker. The smell took me right back. So did the taste. These are decadent and rich and yes, you can mix them up in 12 minutes.

Unadorned Butterscotch Bars

Very lightly adapted from Yossy Arefi via NYT Cooking

I left these unadorned but you can fancy them up with all sorts of add-ins: chocolate chips, toasted and chopped nuts, halvah, shredded coconut, dates or other dried fruit. Swirl a few tablespoons of Nutella, peanut butter, or tahini into the top of the pan before baking. Add a pinch of espresso powder, or mix in some cinnamon or cardamom. You get the idea.

Ingredients

• 2 sticks (16 Tbs or 227 grams) unsalted butter

• 330 grams (1 ½ cups) dark brown sugar

• 2 tsp vanilla

• 1 tsp salt

• 2 eggs

• 224 grams (1 ¾ cups) whole wheat pastry flour (or use all-purpose)

• ½ tsp baking powder

• flaky salt for sprinkling (optional)

Preheat the oven 350. Butter a 9-inch baking pan and line the bottom with parchment paper.

Heat the butter in a small saucepan over medium heat, stirring frequently with a rubber spatula. Let it cook until it turns a rich, golden brown and starts to smell nutty. The bubbles should quiet down when it’s ready. Be careful not to let it burn. Transfer to a medium heatproof bowl and let cool until luekwarm.

Add the sugar, vanilla, and salt to the cooled butter and whisk until smooth. Whisk in the eggs. Add the flour and baking powder and stir with a rubber spatula until all the flour is incorporated.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan, smooth the top, and sprinkle with flaky salt. Bake for 25-30 minutes. I took mine out at 25 and they were perfect: very gooey and soft, with a crinkly crust. Let cool before slicing.

The Bowl and The Beat

The Bowl: Quick Potato & Garlic Scape Hash

Sometimes I open my fridge, take out all the vegetables, and throw them all together in whatever way seems best. In this case, all I had was garlic scapes, so I fried them up with some grated potatoes and bacon for a not-very-summery but extremely delicious hash.

I like the fat and salt bacon brings to this, but it’s just as good without. If you are using bacon, I like to make it in the oven: line a baking sheet with tinfoil and cook 4 strips of bacon at 400 for 12-15 minutes. It really depends on how thick your slices are and how crispy you like them, so start checking after 12 minutes.

While the bacon is cooking, grate two medium sweet potatoes and two medium white potatoes. Thinly slice a bunch of garlic scapes into 1-inch pieces. Heat a big hunk of butter in a skillet and add the scapes. Cook over medium heat until they start to brown. Add the grated potatoes, salt and pepper, and a drizzle of olive oil if the pan seems dry. Cook, stirring often to scrape up the browned bits on the bottom of the pan, until the potatoes are soft and starting to crisp.

Remove the bacon from the oven. Pour off the fat into the skillet. (If there’s a ton, you can freeze the extra. I keep a mason jar in my freezer that I’m always adding to.) Cut the bacon into small pieces and add it to the pan. Continue cooking and stirring until everything is nicely browned. Season to taste with more salt and chili flakes. Serve topped with a fried egg and slices of your favorite soft cheese.

The Beat: Ma and Me by Putsata Reang, read by the author

I’m about halfway through this memoir, and it’s so beautifully written. I love the way Reang approaches storytelling, blending her story and her mother’s story and the story of her complicated relationship with her mother. The book opens with the story that has defined and haunted Reang’s life: she fled Cambodia with her family in the 1970s, just before the Khmer Rouge genocide. Reang, only a few months old, didn’t eat for three weeks on the boat, and the captain suggested her mother toss her overboard. Her mother refused, and Reang survived the journey to the Philippines, where she was able to get medical care. Growing up, Reang feels that she owes her mother a debt for saving her life, even as she folds herself into smaller and smaller shapes to become the perfect Cambodian daughter.

There’s so much compassion, understanding, and hurt, so many layers, in the way Reang writes about her mother. She says in the beginning that she has been trying to write this book for a long time, and I think it shows (in a good way)—she’s not writing from inside the experience, though her prose is intimate and immediate. She’s able to look back and see connections and histories she couldn’t access as as a chid and young woman.

The Bookshelf

A Picture

It’s been a while since I’ve shared a fun geeky chart from my reading spreadsheet! Here’s one that surprised me—I haven’t reviewed the majority of the books I’ve read this year. Maybe I should get on that.

Around the Internet

My review of Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty is up on BookPage.

Now Out

Hurray! A whole bunch of amazing books are finally out! Go forth and find yourself copies of Other Names for Love by Taymour Soomro, Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield, Big Girl by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, and Gods of Want by K-Ming Chang.

Bonus Recs about Stories and Their Purposes

My favorite one, which I’ve mentioned here before and will probably mention again, because everyone should read it: Exile & Pride by Eli Clare. Pulp by Robin Talley is a fun YA novel about lesbian pulp fiction and the meaning of queer stories, past and present.

The Boost

This little visual poem brought me so much joy. This is some thoughtful and useful information about land acknowledgments courtesy of the On Canada Project. It’s Disability Pride Month, and my fellow Rioter Kendra Winchester wrote a fantastic book lover’s guide to the celebration.

As always, a little bit of beauty to send you on your way: I’m on my beloved island this week, reveling in the ocean and hanging out with my nephews. One of the best parts: sunrise walks and swims.

Catch you next week, bookish friends!