Volume 1, No. 35: Queer Grief + Pear & Chocolate Spelt Cake
Greetings, readers and bakers! So far November is living up to all my expectations. I haven’t turned on the heat upstairs, which means instead of working in my office I’ve been working in the living room.
I have no complaints.
This week I’m talking about three beautifully quiet novels that deal with grief. I write a lot about how much I enjoy queer books about human experiences that aren’t specifically queer—i.e. suffering that isn’t queer suffering. But I also love books that do delve into the nuances of particular queer experiences. These books (for the most part) aren’t just about grief, but about the specificity of queer grief.
The Books
Backlist: History is All You Left Me by Adam Silvera (YA Fiction, 2017)
I usually try to stay away from buzzy and well-known books in this newsletter, but sometimes I can’t help it. If you’re a YA reader you’ll likely have heard of this one. I’m including it because I love it, but also because it engages with grief in different ways from the other two books. It’s a very queer novel, but the queerness is an undercurrent. It’s about a teenager dealing with the death of his ex-boyfriend. The ways in which his queerness affects his grief are subtle.
The book is narrated by seventeen year old Griffin, following the death of his ex-boyfriend and best friend Theo. After moving across the country for college, Theo starts dating another guy, and when he dies suddenly, his new boyfriend Jackson comes to New York for the funeral. Griffin has to deal with both the loss of his first love and his feelings surrounding Jackson, who also loved Theo.
A good novel is exactingly crafted. Nothing happens by chance. Every character, every plot twist, every passage of dialogue is perfectly arranged by the author. Every sentence is there for a reason; everything that happens is in service to the story.
Life, by contrast, is an unpredictable collection of days, a completely open-ended story. We make plans and decisions; we have desires and goals and ideas about what we want for ourselves and those we love. But unlike authors, we don’t have complete control. We have almost no control at all. The illusion of control is nice—but when it comes to the big stuff, it’s out of our hands.
That’s why it is so wonderful—and so rare—when a book captures how absolutely messy it is to be a human on earth. This novel is beautifully built, and yet the architecture is hidden. Everything that happens makes sense, especially at the end, but in the midst of reading it, the book feels like a confusing, scary jumble. It’s so honestly, humanly messy. This is also how the exploration of grief and queerness works.
History Is All You Left Me is about grief, about falling in and out of love, about what people mean to each other and how those meanings shift and blur and snap with time. Nothing about the story is neat. It is winding and complicated and shifting. This is how life is. We make big mistakes. We surprise ourselves. We find ourselves in situations where we don’t feel the way we think we should feel. In our hearts, things change rapidly and unpredictably. So many things happen to us over the course of our lives, and often those things do not have clear reasons or clean endings. There’s nothing linear about our lives except that we’re all born and we’re all going to die. There is nothing linear about this book, either. It refuses to simplify. It is not a straight line.
It is no small feat to craft a novel that feels so true to the big, complicated mess of life and yet also works on a structural level. I still think about this book a lot; it’s my favorite of Silvera’s novels, though it’s by far the quietest. It asks a lot of questions, and though it’s a completely satisfying read, many of questions remain on the page, unanswered.
Frontlist: And Then the Gray Heaven by R.E. Katz (Fiction)
I discovered this book while researching a post of upcoming queer releases for Book Riot earlier this year. I added it to my TBR, and then, on a whim, bought it. I knew almost nothing about it and no one I knew had read it. I’m so glad I bought it, because it is one of my favorite reads of the year.
The story follows Jules, whose partner B has just died suddenly. B’s family never accepted that B was trans, and they didn’t approve of B’s relationship with Jules. In the week B spends dying in the hospital, Jules is not allowed to see them; they have to break into their room. After B dies, their family doesn’t invite Jules to the funeral; they merely give them some of B’s ashes. Jules decides to take a cross-country road trip to scatter those ashes in the places that meant the most to B.
They set out with their new friend Theo. B was a diorama artist who worked in museums all over the country. Jules and Theo travel to various museums, home to the work B was most proud of, and break in to the exhibits to scatter B’s ashes. Throughout, Jules recounts the story of their long partnership with B.
This is such a beautiful book about queer grief, art, found family, the specific ways that queer people show up and comfort and understand each other, lineage, and ancestors. It's beautifully written on the sentence level, full of paragraphs that stopped me in my tracks. It's also very real and straightforward. There is nothing flowery about it. The prose is simple, direct, often sparse. You can hear the devastation in Jules’s narration. But you can also hear how deeply they loved B, and so the book also feels like a celebration. It's absurd and silly and whimsical at times; yes, it’s heartbreaking, but there’s a levity to it as well, an undercurrent of joy.
As Jules recalls their life with B, we get a glimpse into who they both were, and we learn about Jules and B’s community. When describing how B felt about an artist friend and mentor, Jules says:
B said Fran was like a sister stepdad to them or some safe thing that straight people don’t have a word for, someone looking out for you without being expected to you, that queer affection whose namelessness is power.
Here is the heart of this novel. It's about a particular queer experience of grief, but it also articulates a very particular expense of queer joy. Queer grief becomes an expression of love, a way of honoring those who are gone — not only B, but the queer and trans ancestors who are connected to B, whose lives made B’s life possible. That “queer affection whose namelessness is power” shows up again and again. Every queer relationship in this novel felt quietly sacred to me. All the queer people Jules meets along the way—old friends, chosen family, and strangers—understand intuitively what Jules is going through. They share a language.
While Jules is staying with a dear friend in New York, and has to tell him that B has died, this is what he tells her:
In death, Fran says, we are most valuable because we can’t disprove their narratives. So B is a saint, and you, well. If they can make us invisible while we’re still alive, queer death proliferates. It recolors the world.
The whole book feels like a reclamation, a refutation of invisibility. Jules refuses to become invisible, and they refuse to let B become invisible. There is a beautiful passage in which Jules is thinking about the lineage of queer artists. They reflect on the queer and trans artists who influenced and inspired B, and the artists who inspired those artists, and on and on and on. Jules muses that those artists were “paying tribute” so that “B would know generations later they were alive in their discomfort and resilience.” Jules understands that B’s art was a core part of who they were, part of what brought the two of them together. In turn, Jules says, “B let me know I was alive in my discomfort and resilience, which is how I made it this far.”
This novel itself (the title comes from Weight of the Earth by David Wojnarowicz) feels like a living ode, elegy, and paean to the discomfort and resilience of queer lives.
Upcoming: Panpocalypse by Carley Moore (Fiction, The Feminist Press, March 8th, 2022)
I didn’t realize how badly I wanted to read a book set in pandemic times until I picked this up. I realize it may be too soon for some folks, and if that’s you, skip this one, because it’s set in the spring and summer of 2020 in New York City and COVID is everywhere. I found it comforting. I pick up novels for lots of different reasons, and one of them is to get closer to the world. There’s something strange about reading books set in alternate realties in which COVID doesn’t exist. It’s not bad, it’s just strange. This book is a full-on pandemic novel, and so it’s heartbreaking and exhausting. But it’s also such a true reflection of the world we live in, the last two years, the realities of isolation and quarantine and podding. Turns out, I needed a book like that.
Orpheus is a middle-aged disabled queer woman living alone in New York. She’s a writer and professor. She has a daughter who lives part-time with her ex and his partner. She has various lovers, though seeing them during the pandemic becomes nearly impossible. In early May, 2020, she buys a bike. She spends the next several months biking around the city, and she documents her life in this book. She’s lonely. She’s scared. She misses people. She tries to find connection via queer dating apps and it’s hard. She visits with her kid. She eventually forms a pod with some friends. She misses her ex. She writes about living in a disabled body and the specific challenges she faces in the pandemic. She’s worried about money. She’s pessimistic about the state of the world. She’s grieving. She’s darkly sarcastic. She observes what’s going on around her and writes it down.
One thing I adore about this novel is how earnest it is. It is not subtle. At one point, Orpheus muses:
Is this writing an attempt to craft some emergent strategy, a fractal approach to art-making in the face of totalitarianism, plague, the carceral state, and white supremacy’s capitalist death cult?
Later she says:
Please remember that joy is an act of resistance. I used to make people laugh, when I could see them. I mis making you laugh. I will try harder for joy.
There are a lot of lines like this. Orpheus just comes out and says things. She puts it all on the page, everything she’s feeling while living through the pandemic. I love how real it all is. Moore is clearly not interested in veiling anything, and neither is Orpheus. Author and narrator are both so honest and vulnerable. It’s refreshing.
I have complicated feelings bout autofiction and how to write about it, so I’m not going to go into the complexities of it here, but this book is fascinating, structurally. Moore shows up in Orpheus. The first part of the book was published as a serial online in 2020, and the process of writing the book, finishing it, and selling it to the Feminist Press show up in the work.
This is a strange, sad, witty book. It’s full of portals and many-selved beings and queer magic and loneliness. There’s some fantastical happenings, maybe, or maybe not. It’s blurry. Orpheus is queer and grieving and her grief is for her queer community and her queer self, and it’s also for the city, the planet. It’s heavy and expansive, and it extends into the past and the future. Time shows up again and again—pandemic time, disabled time, queer time—in ways that I’m still thinking about.
Think of this book as a series loops. Think of time this way too. Sick time is slower, altered, looped, less fixed, less finite, less able to make its mark on us. If nothing else, we have all had to slow down. Some of us had to stop altogether. Sick time is anti-capitalist, revolutionary if you can accept it or even see it. Care and community in the time of the police state are radical acts. Still, to this day.
If you’re up for something weird and visceral and raw, this gem is out March 8th, and you can preorder it here.
The Bake
I made a chocolate and pear cake because I bought some pears….weeks and weeks and weeks ago and they sat in my fridge for ages. Don’t ask me why. The cake was delicious.
Pear & Chocolate Spelt Cake
This is a very moist cake. I love how dense and packed full of pears it is, but if you want you can cut the amount of pears in half to make it a little lighter.
Ingredients:
300 grams (2 sticks + 5 Tbs) unsalted butter, at room temperature
250 grams (1 1/4 cups) sugar
4 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
100 grams (7/8 cup) all-purpose flour
150 grams (1 1/4 cups) whole-grain spelt flour
2 tsp baking powder
3/4 cup buttermilk
6 ounces bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped
4 medium pears, peeled and chopped into small chunks
Preheat the oven to 350. Butter a nine inch springform pan and line the bottom with parchment.
In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, or with electric beaters, cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy, 4-5 minutes. Add the eggs one at a time, beating on low speed for a few minute after each addition. Add the vanilla and mix again.
Add the flours and baking powder and mix just until there are no streaks of flour visible. Scrape the sideband bottom of the bowl, add the buttermilk, and mix again. Fold in the pears and chocolate by hand with a rubber spatula.
Bake for 1 hour 10 minutes, until the top is golden brown and springy, and a tester inserted in the middle comes out clean. Let cool in the pan on a wire rack before ummolding. It’ll last for a week at least.
The Bowl & The Beat
The Bowl: Allium Roast Chicken
I actually roasted this particular chicken last spring, but I never share the recipe, even though I meant to. Happily, now is the perfect time for this warming, comforting meal. The alliums give the whole thing a wonderful flavor; it’s one of my favorite ways to roast a chicken.
Rub salt and pepper all over the chicken (inside and out). If you have time, wrap it in plastic and let it sit in the fridge for anywhere from one hour to a day.
Meanwhile, prepare your alliums: slice 3 or 4 onions into thick wedges (I often cut them in eighths, depending on size). Peel a head of garlic or two. Cut 2-3 medium leeks in half lengthwise, and then into 2” slices. If you have any shallots, you can toss them in whole or halved. Cut a lemon or two into eighths.
Preheat the oven to 450. Place the chicken, breast-side up, in a cast iron skillet or roasting pan. Spread the alliums and lemon pieces around the chicken. Sprinkle with some salt and pepper and a little bit of olive oil. If you want, you can toss in some fresh thyme or rosemary springs, or stuff them in the chicken cavity.
Roast for 50 minutes, stirring the alliums once halfway through. Baste the chicken with some of the pan juices, and roast 5-15 minutes longer, until the juices run clear when you pierce a thigh. Let cool for at least 10 minutes before cutting.
The Beat: A Snake Falls to Earth by Darcie Little Badger, read by Shaun Taylor-Corbett and Kinsale Hueston
I loved Darcie Little Badger’s YA fantasy Elatsoe, which is also read by Kinsale Hueston, and so far I’m loving this one, too! Shaun Taylor-Corbett is another narrator whose work I’ve loved (he is fantastic in Black Sun and The Removed). So this is a stellar audiobook all around. Hueston voices Nina, a Lipan Apache teenager eager to learn more about her family’s history, especially her great-great grandmother’s stories. Taylor-Corbett voices Oli, a cottonmouth person who lives in a different world; he’s just been cast out of his mother’s home and is trying to make it on his own. I’m riveted by both their storylines and I can’t wait to see how they intersect.
The Bookshelf
The Visual
In one last piece of settling in, I finally hung up a coat rack. For years, I’ve been dreaming about having a shelf of books for the taking by my door. And now I finally have one! It’s just a Little Free Library in my house, but it’s bringing me a lot of joy.
Around the Internet
On Book Riot, I wrote about how much I love book recommendation newsletters (yes, I subscribe to many!) I also made a quiz to help you find your next graphic novel or memoir on audio.
The Boost
Beyond These Walls is an organization supporting LGBTQ+ prisoners in the Pacific Northwest. Each year they organize a holiday card project, and you can sign up to write holiday cards to incarcerated LGBTQ+ folks using this form.
An instagram post from Beyond These Walls: Two text boxes appear over an image of red berries. One says “Holiday Card Project 2021” and the other says “Sign up to write to LGBTQ+ prisoners! Share a bit of holiday cheer! Follow the link in our bio to sign up.”
As always, a little bit of beauty to send you on your way: I was up on the ridge at 4:30 yesterday to watch the sunset. November is perfect. You can’t convince me otherwise.
And that’s it until next week. Catch you then!