Volume 2, No. 42: Time & Memory & Journals + Caramel Apple Cake with Mulled Cider Buttercream

Greetings, book and treat people!

As I mentioned last week, I’m in the middle of a big Books & Bakes overhaul. This week, you’ll notice that The Bookshelf is bigger and beefier than usual. After reading through your feedback (thank you!) I’ve made a few tweaks. A lot of your ideas were ones I was already excited about!

This week I’m reviewing a trio of short books I read last weekend that are all in conversation with each other. They’re about time and memory and motherhood, and they all wrestle with questions of recording. What does it mean to record a life? How does journaling change experience? What’s the point of writing something down? Reading these books together was illuminating and challenging. If you can, I highly recommend it.

In other news, I’ve given up on making these newsletters shorter. It’s not in my nature! Click on through to read the whole thing.

The Books

Backlist #1: Ongoingness by Sarah Manguso (Memoir, 2015)

I have been keeping a journal since I was twelve, so it’s not surprising that I loved this book which is, essentially, the story of Manguso’s diary. I related painfully to the compulsion Manguso describes: the constant, gnawing need to record life as it happens, the sense that, if not written down, my life will disappear into some irretrievable place, will cease to be real. If you have ever felt that incessant need to put pen to paper, to write “This is what happened to me today” over and over and over again, day after day after day, I suspect you will find this book as beautiful and challenging as I did.

But this is not just a memoir for diarists; this is a book about being human. It’s about the thing that defines all of our lives: memory. Manguso’s diary is a way for her to trap memories. For decades it gives her a sense of power, a way to feel that she has control over her life. She rushes home from events so she can write about them. The diary is eight hundred thousand words long. Over the years, it becomes something like a spiritual practice for her, a constant, the thing that makes her who she is. It becomes an extension of her memory, an external hard drive where she keeps what matters—what feels like it matters—safe.

And then she has a child, and she begins questioning why she writes the diary in the first place. Much of the book is about this rupture. Should she keep writing? What does it mean if she stops? What does it mean if she doesn’t? What does it mean when the diary, slowly, becomes more of a record of her son’s life than her own? I am not a parent, but I know how an event can shatter a life, make something that seemed obvious suddenly opaque. It’s fascinating, and moving, to watch Manguso move through this period of opaqueness. She writes with such clarity about how painful it is to recalibrate, to teach herself a new way to understand—and participate in—her own memory.

Early in the book she says: “To write a diary is to make a series of choices about what to omit, what to forget.” Near the end she writes this:

Before I was a mother, I thought I was asking, How, then, can I survive forgetting so much?

Then I came to understand that the forgotten moments are the price of continued participation in life, a force indifferent to time.

The book is only 88 pages, many of which only have a little text on them. It’s a collection of short, poignant bursts. I read it in one sitting, but I don’t think I’ll ever be done with it. It’s an extraordinary meditation on memory, letting go, mortality, middles. “There’s no reason to continue writing other than that I started writing at some point—and that, at some other point, I’ll stop,” Manguso says. The book ends with an em dash. Life, whether recorded or unrecorded, is ongoingness.

Backlist #2: Happening by Annie Ernaux, tr. by Tanya Leslie (Memoir, 2019)

This book is harrowing to read. It’s an account of an abortion Ernaux had in France, in 1963, when abortion was illegal there. She was twenty-three. The abortion was not easy to get. The memoir is factual—it’s not without emotion, it’s overflowing with emotion—but it has this simple, elegant cadence that makes reading it somewhat grueling. Ernaux wrote it almost forty years later, using her dairy from the time as a grounding point. Here’s what happened, she says. Here’s what I remember, she says, and here’s what I wrote about it, she says. Here’s how I felt about it then, according to the memories I recorded, she says.

Abortions are not extraordinary events—they should not be. They should be basic healthcare, available to everyone, though, of course, they are not. It’s this fact that makes this memoir so upsetting. Ernaux, at twenty-three, knows this. She feels this. She gets pregnant, she does not want to be pregnant. She knows exactly what she needs to fix the problem and it is extraordinarily difficult to get. She’s a college student. She doesn’t know where to go, who to ask. She goes to a doctor who doesn’t help her. She moves through what feels like a random, shadowy network of acquaintances until someone finally connects her with a woman who will preform the abortion in her home. She has to find the money. She has no one to talk to about it. The actual procedure is painful and she has to have it done twice because it doesn’t work the first time. Doctors are consistently terrible to her.

She writes about all of this with an emotional immediacy that illuminates just how difficult the experience was for her—not the abortion itself, but the getting of it. It’s an exact account, full of detail, written precisely, an act of witness. It’s like she’s describing a crime for a court, laying out each step, with evidence, indisputable. And she is, of course, describing a crime—not the fact of her illegal abortion but the crime of its illegality.

It’s also a book about memory and narrative and the act of storytelling. She analyzes her diary from the months surrounding the abortion like it’s a literary artifact. She muses on how her memories of the experience have changed the experience. She wonders what the point of writing it all down is, why she feels compelled to do so.

I want to become immersed in that part of my life once again and learn what can be found there. This investigation must be seen in the context of a narrative, the only genre able to transcribe an event that was nothing but time flowing inside and outside of me.

It’s extraordinary that Ernaux has done exactly this. Happening is partially a straightforward account, a simple record of “time flowing inside and outside of me.” Simultaneously, it’s a powerful reflection on how time moves, how it moves through the body, how bodies move through time, how time warps when we try to capture it in print, on paper. It’s a work of ongoingness, in constant motion, perpetually happening.

Frontlist: Linea Nigra by Jazmina Barrera, tr. by Christina MacSweeney (Memoir)

This memoir is the opposite of Manguso’s in many ways, which made them a joy to read together. Like Manguso, Barrera writes about motherhood, but unlike Manguso, it’s motherhood, in part, that compels her to record her life in a diary. The book is itself a diary, one she often references the making of—she jots down notes on her phone and then types them up later while her son is sleeping. She, too, ponders what it means to write it all down, but she is hungry to write it all down, and that hunger gives the book an immediate, intimate quality. You can feel her curiosity and excitement, taste her sleeplessness nights, sense the interweaving of fear and love and loss she experiences as the events of the book unfold: getting pregnant, giving birth, learning of her mother’s cancer diagnosis, adjusting to herself as a new version of herself.

Like Ongoingness, Linea Nigra is a collection of fragments, short passages that are sometimes a few pages, sometimes only a sentence or two. Barrera jumps from subject to subject with a swiftness that’s sometimes dizzying, disparate memories and ideas snugged up next to each other on the page. She writes about getting pregnant, her terrible doctor, and her early days of parenthood and breastfeeding. She examines lots of art, mostly involving mothers and children. She writes about her mother’s paintings, many of which are destroyed in an earthquake. Some of the fragments are philosophical, intellectual. She’s interested in how motherhood is understood, culturally, how it’s written about and represented in art. Other fragments are matter-of-fact, factual, or purely emotional.

She’s constantly quoting other writers. All of these literary illusions and interruptions make the book feel like a conversation we get to witness. Barrera is talking to herself, to her child, to us, and to the many writers and artists who have also written about the things she’s writing about. At one point, she quotes Manguso:

In an article entitled “The Grand Shattering,” Sarah Manguso writes, “But motherhood is a different sort of damage. It is a shattering, a disintegration of the self, after which the original form is quite gone.” For her, motherhood is an earthquake.

I felt a little zing of delight and recognition when I came across this passage, having finished Ongoingness only a few hours before. Barrera also writes about the necessity of building and expanding the cannon of motherhood books. “I think of newspapers, lists, letters, herbals, textbooks, pregnancy journals and diaries, homemade cookbooks: all of these forms of writing are, or can be, literature. The same thing is true of baby diaries. I want there to be more than enough of them, and for them to be good, bad, or indifferent books. I want a cannon and a tradition. And also a rupture, counter-cannon books. New literary genres.”

Linea Nigra is a self-proclaimed baby diary, but Ongoingness and Happening are also baby diaries—they are ruptures, contradictory and counter-cannon. All three women are creating new literary genres with their words, and even more richly, with the intertextual conversations they create. I, too, want more: more books that rupture our understandings of parenthood, more books that contradict each other, more books that queer genre, more books like these ones, that shapeshift as you read them.

The Bake

I can’t stop baking fall cakes! This one is wholly different from last week’s pear cake, with a moister, denser crumb, and a revelatory mulled cider frosting. It’s studded with lightly caramelized apples. In other words: it’s perfect.

Carmel Apple Skillet Cake with Mulled Cider Buttercream

Adapted from NYT Cooking

The mulled cider frosting adds a lot to this cake: it’s spicy and appley and sweet. But I’m sure it’s also delicious plain, or with a dollop of whipped cream instead.

Ingredients

For the caramel apples:

• 4 tablespoons (55 grams) unsalted butter

• 2 large apples (any kind)

• 110 grams (1/2 cup) dark brown sugar

• 1/4 tsp salt

For the cake:

• 1 stick (113 grams) unsalted butter, at room temperature

• 290 grams (1 1/3 cups) dark brown sugar

• 3 eggs

• 1½ tsp vanilla

• 215 grams (1 2/3 cups) all-purpose flour

• ¾ tsp baking powder

• ½ tsp salt

• ½ tsp cinnamon

• ¼ tsp freshly grated nutmeg

For the frosting:

• 1 cup apple cider

• 1 cinnamon stick, 3-4 allspice berries, and a few cloves

• 1 stick (113 grams) unsalted butter, at room temperature

• 170 grams (1 1/2 cups) powdered sugar

• 1 tsp vanilla

Preheat the oven to 350.

Make the apples: Peel, core, and thinly slice the apples. Melt the butter in a 10-inch ovenproof skillet. Add the apples, brown sugar, and salt, and cook over medium heat, stirring frequently, until the sugar dissolves and the apples soften. Keep cooking to let the mixture thicken slightly, about 10 minutes. Let cool to room temperature.

Make the cake: In a small bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, salt, cinnamon and nutmeg.

In a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, or using electric beaters, cream the butter and brown sugar until light and fluffy, about 5 minutes. Add the eggs one at at time, beating after each addition, followed by the vanilla. Add the flour mixture and beat until just incorporated. Scrape down the bottom of the bowl.

Using a rubber spatula, fold the apple mixture into the batter—make sure to include all the caramel-like liquid! Wipe down the skillet and butter the bottom.

Pour the batter into newly prepared apple-cooking pan. Bake 30-35 minutes, until the top is golden brown and a tester inserted in the center comes out mostly clean. Let cool completely before frosting.

Make the frosting: In a small pot, combine the cider and spices. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer until reduced by almost 3/4. You want about 1/4 cup of thick cider syrup. Discard the spices and let cool.

In a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, or with electric beaters, combine the powdered sugar, butter, and vanilla. Beat until it starts to come together, then add the cider reduction 1 tablespoon at a time. Keep beating until the mixture smooths out into a thick, spreadable frosting.

Use a knife or offset spatula to spread the frosting over the cooled cake. Serve it right from the skillet.

The Bowl & The Beat

The Bowl: Pasta with Roasted Cauliflower Pesto

This is something I make often. It’s based on a Smitten Kitchen recipe for cauliflower pesto that uses raw cauliflower. I roast mine, which I think makes a much tastier pesto. I put different things in it—sometimes I leave out the tomatoes, sometimes I add onions or shallots. It’s very forgiving and you can play with the seasonings however you like.

Cut a head of cauliflower into florets. Slice 2-4 paste tomatoes into quarters. Peel 3-4 garlic cloves. Put it all on a baking tray with some olive oil, salt, and pepper, and roast at 450 until the cauliflower is just tender. A few minutes before taking it out of the oven, toss in a handful of pine nuts to brown them.

In a food processor, combine the roasted veg with 2-3 tablespoons capers, 1/2 cup (at least) Parmesan, a few parsley leaves, the zest and juice of one lemon, a splash of sherry vinegar, a teaspoon or so of mustard, a few glugs of olive oil, and some Aleppo or red pepper flakes. Blend until it’s all nicely mixed, but not smooth; you’re going for a pleasing, nubbly texture. Toss with your favorite pasta and serve topped with cheese.

The Beat: Man o’ War by Cory McCarthy, read by E.R. Fightmaster

It’s been a while since I’ve read any YA, and now I’m on a YA audiobook kick. This one is about River, a teenager in a small Midwestern town who…really does not have their shit together and is really not doing okay. I almost DNFed it a few times in the first hour, just because it’s so real and River is such a mess, they’re dealing with so much internalized homophobia and transphobia, they’re so sad, and it’s a lot. They are not an easy character to get to know—which I’m sure is deliberate on McCarthy’s part, because they keep themself locked away, and arm themself with biting humor and cynicism. But I’m about two hours in now and fully committed. I can tell it’s going to be a hard, messy, journey, and those are usually the best ones.

The Bookshelf

A Portal

I was delighted to hear from a bunch of you how much you enjoy these weekly peeks into my reading life. I enjoy hearing from you just as much! So I’m inviting you to join me in transforming this bit of the newsletter from a static picture to a two-way portal. I’m not sure I’ve explicitly stated how much I love short books, but oh, I do! These are a few I’ve devoured recently in one or two sittings. What are your favorite books under 200 pages? Come talk to me!

A Bookish Quandary

A few of you mentioned how much you’d like to hear reader questions answered. I, too, love this idea! I’ve got a few exciting questions already in the queue—but I would love to hear from you! Looking for a certain kind of book? Want to know more about a weird ingredient I’m always using? Got book cataloging or pantry organization questions? Anything bookish or bake-ish is fair game! Send your questions to me at queerbooksandbakes@gmail.com, or just hit reply.

This week’s question is from Sarah (who writes the fabulous kidlit newsletter Can We Read?):

Where do you get all your book information and find all the books you read? I'd especially like to hear this from you, because as I've commented many times, most of the titles you review and/or write about are new to me, someone who considers herself pretty plugged into book news and the book world.

This is such a good question that I’m going to break it into two parts. This week I’ll focus on where I hear about backlist books, and next week I’ll focus on where I find out about new/upcoming releases.

#1: Bookstagram. I know social media isn’t for everyone, but I cannot overstate how important this community of readers has become to me. Yes, there are lots of books that get hyped over and over again. There’s also a small but thriving community of people who read tons of interesting books I’ve never heard of. I save posts about books that intrigue me (I have about 85 saved right now), and every few months, I go through and move them onto my TBR. A few recent favorites: Dancing after TEN, Noopiming, In Sensoirum, and In the Company of Men.

I follow too many incredible bookstagrammers to name them all here, but a few that have profoundly impacted my reading life include: @half_book_and_co, @ifthisisparadise, @bankrupt_bookworm, @suzyreadsbooks, @blackgirlreading, and @ayearofreadingqueer. I also follow hashtags (my favorite is #IndigenousBookstagram) and have found great recs that way, too.

#2: Indie Presses. I’m currently reading Temporary by Hilary Leichter, which I’m super into. I bought it last summer when Coffee House Press was having a sale. The majority of the books I’ve bought in the past two years come from indie presses I love. I’d never heard of Temporary; I discovered it browsing the Coffee House website and bought it because Coffee House rarely disappoints. I often browse indie press websites like bookstores. A few books I found this way that I’ve reviewed here: The Breaks, Silhouette of a Sparrow, The Blue Sky, and Double Melancholy.

#3: Other Newsletters & Goodreads (AKA find your bookish people). There’s a difference between having bookish friends and having bookish friends who can rec you books you’ll love. It takes time to figure out whose tastes align with yours. There’s a few people I follow on Goodreads, or whose newsletters I subscribe to, because our tastes overlap in particular and specific ways. I’ve read a bunch of books this year thanks to Rebecca Hussey’s newsletter, because even though our tastes often diverge, we love the same kind of genre-defying, thinky nonfiction (she lead me to Linea Nigra). My former Book Riot colleague Jessica Woodbury reads a lot of thrillers (not my thing), but when she loves something litfic-y, there’s a 99% chance I’ll love it, too. She’s the reason I read Little Rabbit.

#4: Reader, I googled it. I know this sounds silly, but it’s true. I got really excited about queer books in translation earlier this year, so I googled “queer books in translation.” The first thing that comes up is my colleague Leah’s excellent list of queer books in translation from around the world. That list lead me to Cobalt Blue, La Bastarda and Fair Play— three favorites of the year! I’m biased, but do I think Book Riot has excellent lists. Sometimes asking the internet actually works.

Around the Internet

Speaking of Book Riot, I made this super fun list: Surprise! It’s queer!

Now Out / Can’t Wait!

In the past, I’ve used this section to highlight books I’ve previously recommended that are now available. I’ll still do that, but I’m also going to include a few new and upcoming releases I’m excited about, even if I haven’t read them yet. I haven’t been reviewing upcoming books recently—I can’t keep up, and I’d rather read for joy than out of obligation—but I do want to keep championing new queer books! I’ll focus on indie press books that might not show up on more mainstream new book roundups.

Now Out

Jade Is A Twisted Green by Tanya Turton (October 11, Rare Machines): A coming-of-age story about a queer Jamaican woman living in Toronto and dealing with the grief of losing her twin sister. Rare Machines is the literary imprint of Dundurn Press, an indie publisher I love.

Can’t Wait!

Engine Running by Cade Mason (December 5th, Mad Creek Books): Essays about growing up queer in the South. Mad Creek published one of my favorite essay collections of the year, Dark Tourist!

Bonus Recs: Journal-Adjacent Writing

I didn’t fall head-over-heels in love with it, but Chloe Caldwell’s The Red Zone is an interesting piece of nonfiction about periods. Caldwell uses lots of different structures (narrative, oral history, ephemera, diaries) and the way she plays with time and memory is fascinating.

The Boost

A few things:

• Chase Strangio is raising money on his birthday for House of GG, a retreat in Little Rock, Arkansas founded by Miss Major. Its aim is to provide healing and transformative space for trans and gender nonconforming people.

• I’m sharing this from my fellow Rioter Patricia, whose mother is trying to move back to the Bay Area, so that she can be closer to her family and support networks. You can donate to her GoFundMe here. Patricia is a rad human who writes the wonderful Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice.

• I enjoyed reading Saeed Jones’s ode to Leslie Jordan.

As always, a little bit of beauty to send you on your way: I’m back home now, and we’re in that glorious part of fall when some trees are bare and some are still resplendent in their golden glory. But here’s a picture of a salt marsh from my island, because it was spectacular.

Catch you next week, bookish friends!