Volume 1, No. 13: Families of Women + A Big Buckwheat Pancake
Volume 1, No. 13: Families of Women + A Big Buckwheat Pancake
Greetings, bookish friends! It has been in the 90s all week here in the Valley and there are just no words for how much I hate it. In more exciting news, however, I have a beautiful new logo!
Once upon a time I was planning on turning my annual Cookie Extravaganza into a year-round baking business. This logo was originally going to be for that. But I realized that turning baking into a full-fledged side hustle would drain all the joy out of it. So now I have a logo for this newsletter instead! Kelley at Brainflower Designs drew this for me, and I’m still swooning over it.
This week, I’ve got three amazing books about the families that women build with each other: queer families, biological families, found families. Playwright Quiara Algría Hudes’s memoir is all about the women in her big Puerto Rican family. Cantoras is a historical novel about five queer women who find refugee in each other. Skye Falling is about a much smaller family of women, and how family-making can be an act of transformation. All of these books reflect the varied and unexpected architectures that all the families of women I’m a part of are built from.
The Books
Backlist: Cantoras by Carolina De Robertis (Historical fiction, 2019)
I love this book so much, I don’t even know where to start. It takes place in Uruguay in the 1970s and 1980s, set against the backdrop of a repressive dictatorship. Five gay women find solace and companionship with each other, and in a tiny house they buy in Cabo Polonio, an isolated town on the coast. They first visit the house, which they later name La Proa, in 1977. This first scene is breathtaking. De Robertis begins by describing the terror of their lives in Montevideo: the disappearances, the curfews, the laws that make homosexuality illegal, the impossibility of loving and talking freely. Flaca, fiery and determined, the one with the dream, organizes the trip, despite how impossible it seems to all of them: five gay women, known, together in one place. It’s hard to describe how powerful the writing is. These few days, these women together on this deserted beach, talking openly, running headfirst into the ocean, is the beginning of something magical, something forever. You can feel the tension falling off their shoulders, the deep bonds forming between them, sacredness of the queer space they’re building around each other.
Here’s one of the characters, Paz, reflecting on that first trip to La Proa:
She hadn't known air could taste like this, so wide, so open. Her body a welcome. Skin awake. The world was more than she had known, even if only for this instant, even if only in this place. She let her lips part and the breeze glided into her mouth, fresh on her tongue, full of stars. How did so much brightness fit in the night sky? How could so much ocean fit inside her? Who was she in this place? Standing on that shore, staring out at the Atlantic, with those women who were not like other women sleeping a few meters away, she felt a sensation so foreign that she almost collapsed under its spell. She felt free.
The novel spins outward from this first trip. Over the years, the women continue to visit La Proa, sometimes all together, sometimes in pairs. Each character is so beautifully written. There’s Flaca, charismatic, quick, determined; Romina, her oldest friend, steadfast and quiet, still carrying the trauma of her arrest and detainment by the government; La Venus, whose unhappy marriage dissolves as she grows closer to this new family; Malena, wise but reserved; and Paz, the youngest, brash and fearless. The narrative moves among their POVs, shifting from one to the next without pause. De Robertis’s writing is flowing and gorgeous and full of heart and heat and pulsing life. It’s intimate, but also symphonic. We get to know each of these women so well: how they feel about each other, how they react in anger, what they’re like in love. We also get to know this family as a whole: how they take care of and betray each other, the many ways they shape, and are shaped by, each other.
I think a lot about queer family-making, about the act of deliberately choosing to create a family. This book is about that process. It’s also about falling in love, breakups, parenting, resistance movements, the ocean, friendship, aging. It’s about all of those things in relation to family-making. When Flaca and La Venus fall in love, it changes the family. When they break up, it changes the family. When Paz opens an underground gay bar in her basement, it changes the family. When Romina meets someone new, it changes the family. There are layers upon layers in this book, but it always returns to this ever-shifting family.
My favorite kind of queer books are the ones that tell queer stories from the inside. There is a lot of queer suffering in this. It’s about living under a dictatorship, and the various ways — often dangerous — these women fight back, carve out space for themselves. It also deals with violent homophobia, rape, conversion therapy, and suicide. But while some stories that deal with such horrors seem to be trying to make A Point about queer suffering, this novel feels more like it’s bearing witness. There is so much boundless queer joy between these pages. The women take so much delight in each other. They aren’t always good to each other — they get in fights, they fall in and out of love; it’s messy. But they always come back to each other. They always return to the sacredness of queer space. In scene after scene, I felt this in my bones: the vastness of their love for each other and its revolutionary potential.
You can’t put unbearable suffering on one side of a scale and joy on the other, and simply expect them to balance each other out. Life is much more complicated than that, and so is this novel. I’m so tired of books about queer lives in which queer suffering drives the plot. But I’ll never get tired of books like this one: true and whole renderings of queer lived experience. Suffering is present, but it’s not what drives the plot. Family-making drives the plot. The act of creating refuge drives the plot. The difference is everything.
This novel is a love letter to queer women, to the families we make, to the lives we’ve lost to homophobic violence, to the radiant possibilities that exist in our futures.
Frontlist: My Broken Language by Quiara Alegría Hudes (Memoir)
As often happens when I read a book I absolutely love, I finished this and immediately knew that I had to include it in an upcoming newsletter, and exactly what the theme would be. “In Perez homes throughout Philly,” Hudes writes, “womanhood was rampant. Girls, cousins, tías, abuelas, primas, hermanas, madrinas.” This memoir is about that rampant womanhood. It’s a book of loving, boisterous, hilarious, heartbreaking stories about the women who make up Hudes’s extended Puerto Rican family. It opens with a description of the North Philly neighborhood where Hudes grew up, and the disorientation she felt when her family moved to a horse farm in rural Pennsylvania. Though she encounters both connection and alienation in many places throughout her life, she always returns to this Philly neighborhood and the women who live there. It gives the book an incredible cohesiveness. You know where its heart is, always.
The chapters are short, full of movement, and in each one, Hudes recounts her experiences with a playwright’s ear and attention to detail. She catalogues every place she searched for meaning as a child, teenager, and young adult: in her mom’s rituals, her dad’s Judaism, the music of North Philly, the authors and artists she encountered at Yale.
It’s so exuberant and full of life that it’s hard to know what to even tell you about it. There’s a chapter in which she talks about the different traumas the two sides of her family carry, and how the context of suffering changes our ability to understand it. Some of her family on her dad’s side survived the Holocaust. About this, she writes: “The horror of history, made slightly less unbearable through the telling, the forensic understanding, the bearing of witness.” On her mom’s side, many of her relatives died in the 1980s and 90s during the crack and AIDS epidemics. “I had no sense that we were living and dying through a discrete dot on the American timeline,” she writes. Again and again, she shares these intimate stories about her family, and then telescopes outward, illumining truths about race and history, language and lineage.
In another chapter, she describes a trip to Puerto Rico with her mother and stepdad to search for Taíno petroglyphs in an old cave — a revelatory experience. But she frames this story around the Quaker meeting where she was moved to share it. She braids these two different realities together so beautifully. She does this over and over again, moving through the world hungry for every kind of language, every kind of meaning, and then weaving all of those questions and parts of herself into something whole, and wholly her own.
The heart of this book is in the women of Hudes’s family, but underneath that, it’s about their languages. It’s a story about coming-of-age as an artist and playwright, a story of discovering, excavating, creating a language of your own. She writes about English and Spanish, the tension between them, about what it’s like to live between languages, about how language shapes the way we experience ourselves and the world. She’s writes about navigating academia as an artist and a woman of color, about the languages she isn’t “supposed” to use/know/desire, and the languages that do not honor her lived experience, her history and culture.
The book moves mostly chronologically, but it does jump around in time a bit. Hudes is building a language, and as she does, she revisits her past. Here again is that brilliant push-and-pull, that widening and narrowing of the lens. She shares her own language stories about her mom’s accent, her abuela’s recipes, Yorbua religion, Chopin. But she also examines how the history of language is also the history of colonization and violence.
All of this searching and interrogating and storytelling eventually turns into a play about the women in her family and their beautiful, broken, many-layered language.
Mami, primas, hermana, no one else qualifies for the job. We must be our own librarians because we alone are literate in our bodies. By naming our pain and voicing our imperfections, we declare our tremendous survival.
One last note: I listened to this on audio and I can’t recommend it enough. Hudes reads it and there is so much warmth, pride, and curiosity in her voice. It’s also a treat to hear all the Spanish out loud.
Upcoming: Skye Falling by Mia McKenzie (Fiction, Random House, 6/22)
Friends, this book is a mess. A mess in the absolute best possible way. Skye is a queer Black woman in her late thirties and her life is…yup, you guessed it, a total mess. She’s spent most of it running away. She owns a successful travel company, and she only spends a few weeks out of the year in Philly, home to her friends and family. So she’s become adept at ignoring the way her actions have hurt them. She’s definitely not happy, but she’s also smart and self-aware, so she’s constantly trying to convince herself that whatever she’s doing (not showing up for people she loves, being hard on everyone, including herself, etc. etc.) is just fine.
All of her precarious coping mechanisms come undone when she meets Vicky, her daughter-via-egg-donation. In her twenties and broke, Skye sold her eggs to her childhood friend Cynthia. Cynthia has just died, and Vicky, her twelve-year-old daughter, tracks Skye down. Suddenly afraid that she’ll die alone like Cynthia did, Skye decides to stay in Philly and get Vicky to love her, so she’ll take care of Skye in her old age. That’s the whole premise. She doesn’t want to get know this child for her own sake. She just wants a safety blanket in the form of the next generation. Obviously things don’t go to plan, but I love the selfishness of this, the truth of it. Skye’s actions are often infuriating, but she’s also been deeply hurt in the past, and she knows how to protect herself.
I read this book quickly, drinking it up, despite it being painful to read at times because of Skye’s constant avoidance. She makes choices that cause harm (to herself and others), but even as she’s making them, she explains to herself why she’s making them: she doesn’t trust people, she’s afraid of intimacy, she doesn’t want to get hurt again. Isn’t this how so many of us function? It’s a lot harder to change patterns of behavior than it is to recognize them. It’s not easy to lower all the protective casings we build around ourselves over the course of a life. Watching Skye fall into the same cycles over and over again was excruciating. I so badly wanted her to be okay, to get it together. It’s such a true-to-life journey.
The themes of queer family, and especially the families that women build together, are so lovely in this. The relationship between Skye and Vicky is so specific. McKenzie captures the weirdness and tenderness of a kind of caregiving that is not quite parenthood. This is something that so many queer people experience — a kind of almost-but-not-quite parenthood, intergenerational relationships of kinship and care that do not fit into neat boxes. Throughout the whole book, Skye is learning how to be a parent, but she’s also learning how to be a big sister, a friend, an aunt. She’s also falling in love with Vicky’s aunt, Faye. The way all these relationships intersect is at the heart of the book. Skye’s feelings for Faye, and for Vicky, are all jumbled together. She’s trying to figure out how to be Vicky’s family. She’s trying to figure out if she wants to build a family with Faye, or if she even can. All this wrangling and untangling is what finally offers her a path forward, a different way to look at her past and and her future. It’s a book about family-making as a way to understand yourself.
Also: it’s hilarious! There is no lyrical writing here. Skye's first person narration is loose and familiar and vibrant, the opposite of stuffy. She sometimes writes in all caps. She addresses the reader directly. She talks to herself out loud in the text. She’s constantly cracking jokes. Her voice is so alive and so immediately herself.
In addition to all that, this book is deeply steeped in the Philadelphia Black culture. It’s about gentrification, police violence in Black neighborhoods, the ways that places define and shape identity, activism, aging, how friendships change over time. All the various intersecting plots feel so natural. It's a book that's deeply rooted in the ordinary, in all the moving pieces that make up a life. It’s about being stuck, and getting unstuck. It’s out June 22nd and you can preorder it here.
One note: there are a few instances of ableism. At one point Skye pretends to be deaf so that a man in a bar will stop talking to her. I’m obviously not throwing the whole book out, but I was frustrated that this interaction wasn’t challenged anywhere in the text.
The Bake
This is likely the simplest bake I’ll ever include in this newsletter, so if you’re primarily here for the books, it’s your chance to stretch your baking muscles! It’s not even a bake, it’s just a pancake. I wanted this week’s recipe to be one that has some connection to the women in my life. But I do not come from a family of bakers. This is a recipe I learned from a dear friend and cherished member of my chosen family. She made it for me many, many times before it occurred to me to ask her for the recipe. Now I make at least once a week. It’s simple and delicious, and you can fancy it up with just about anything.
A Big Buckwheat Pancake (with Rhubarb Compote & Strawberries)
This recipe makes one 10” pancake, a perfect breakfast for one. You can easily double it to make a bigger pancake or use it to make smaller ones, but I don't know exactly how many you’ll get.
Ingredients:
For the pancake:
2 Tbs buckwheat flour
2 Tbs yogurt
2 eggs
pinch of salt
butter for the pan
For the optional compote and topping:
7-8 rhubarb stalks, chopped
1 pint strawberries, trimmed and sliced
1/4 cup honey
To make the pancake: Whisk all ingredients in a small bowl until smooth. Heat the butter in a small sauté pan over medium heat. Pour in the batter and let cook 2-3 minutes, then flip and cook another 2 minutes on the other side.
To make the compote: Combine the rhubarb and honey in a small saucepan and cook over medium heat until it turns into a thick sauce, about 12-15 minutes.
Serve the pancake warm, topped with compote, strawberries, and maple syrup. It is also delicious with many other toppings, both sweet and savory. I often eat it with sautéed onions and greens.
The Bowl and The Beat
The Bowl: Early Summer Panzanella (That is Mostly Bread & Cheese)
It’s been so hot that I don’t even like looking at my stove. So I've been eating a lot of variations on the dinner salad. This variation is basically just my favorite food groups (bread and cheese) dressed up with some herbs. I did turn on the broiler for a minute, but it was worth it.
Slice 2-3 pieces of bread (whatever kind you have) into cubes. Toss with olive oil, salt and pepper, and broil for 1-3 minutes, until browned and a bit crispy. Dump the croutons into a large bowl and add several handfuls of shredded basil, some cubed mozzarella, a handful of chopped reconstituted sun-dried tomatoes, the zest of a lemon, and a hard-boiled egg or two, chopped up, if you’re into that. Mix a few tablespoons of ricotta with a few glugs of olive oil and a pressed garlic clove. Pour over the salad and toss until everything is well coated. Yum.
The Beat: In at the Deep End by Kate Davies, read by Nicola Barber
I’m about halfway through this and I’m enjoying it a lot. Julia is a twenty-something civil servant living in London. She spends the first few chapters describing the terrible sex she has with men, and the next few chapters describing the incredible sex she has with women, which leads to her lesbian awakening. I loved all of this. It is absolutely poking fun at itself. There’s one moment, soon after Julia sleeps with a woman for the first time, where she enthusiastically recites every clichéd marker of gay culture to herself, claiming it all. I couldn't stop laughing. It’s ridiculous, but there’s also an earnestness to it that’s endearing. It’s exciting to realize you’re queer! Julia is over-the-top and clueless, but she’s genuine.
The second half of the book is a lot darker. Julia’s first serious girlfriend Sam turns out to be emotionally abusive, and watching Julia go through this, in the midst of so much joyful self-discovery, is painful. I am, however, getting increasingly frustrated with some pieces of this storyline. Sam is both kinky and polyamorous, and while her actions (not asking for Julia’s consent, not listening to what she wants, trying to control her behavior) have nothing to do with either of those things, it often seems like most of the characters, including Julia, are equating Sam’s controlling behavior with her non-monogamy.
I appreciate that Davies writes so openly about things that aren’t that common in queer fiction: realizing you’re queer in your late twenties and abuse in same-sex relationships. But I’m not sure I like how she’s doing it. We’ll see. Nicola Barber’s narration is fantastic.
The Bookshelf
The Library Shelf
I’ve been working through a backlog of ARCs and books I own, which means my shelf of library checkouts has just been sitting here waiting for me. I’m excited to start Burning Girls today, as I just finished my current collection of short stories. I’ve hardly read any short story collections in the last four years, but this year I feel compelled to always have one going. Who knows.
The Visual
I’ve been keeping a reading spreadsheet since 2016, and in 2019 I started tracking queer authors. As you can see, the percentage of books I’ve read by queer authors increased a ton between 2019 and 2021. (And I don’t wander around the internet trying to figure out if someone is queer, so this is only an approximate count.) I share this not to brag about it, but because it’s such an exciting illustration of how paying close attention to what I read has improved my reading life. I noticed that reading queer books brings me joy, I deliberately started reading more queer books, and now I’m a happier reader.
Around the Internet
I’ve been dabbling in Bookstagram a fair bit this month. I like a project (it keeps me focused on the good parts of social media), so I’ve been posting a queer book review there every day. Which means I’ve also been reading a lot of reviews and saving a lot of books to add to my TBR. These two reviews were standouts for me this week.
Now Out
Hooray! There Plant Eyes by M. Leona Godin is now out! Go forth and find yourself a copy.
The Boost
It’s still Pride Month, so I’m highlighting another incredible queer business! Arsenal Pulp Press is a small Canadian publisher that focuses on LGBTQ+ and BIPOC books. They’ve ushered so many remarkable queer stories into the world over the years, including some of my all-time favorites. And they’re currently having a sale on LGBTQ+ titles! I want to buy them all, but since my budget won’t allow that, I’ll just be vicariously enjoying this sale. There are literally hundreds of LGBTQ+ books to choose from! Want a rec? Tell me what kind of book you like and I’ll tell you which APP title you should buy.
Image: An Instagram post from Arsenal Pulp Press: The APP logo appears in rainbow colors on the left, and the text reads “Arsenal Pulp Press 30% Off LGBTQ+ Titles, use coupon code PIRDE at checkout, valid June 1 to June 30, 2021, arsenalpulp.com.”
As always, a little bit of beauty to send you on your way: I’ve been to my river spot three days in a row, and I am endlessly grateful for its magical and life-giving water.
And that’s it until next week. Catch you then!