Volume 4, No. 23: Queer Love & Queer Grief in New Zealand, China, & Spain

Three recent queer novels I can't stop thinking about

Greetings, book and treat people! Two things up front. First, I have not had the time or bandwidth to draw winners for the Bookshop.org gift card raffle yet. I will do so when things calm down later in June. Thanks for your patience. Second, the Queer Palestine Readathon starts today! Check out all the details here.

I’ve been struggling to write this newsletter for days. Partly it’s because I’m swamped with work. I have a million deadlines. My bookkeeping boss is taking two weeks vacation starting Friday, which means we’ve both been busy getting everything squared away before he leaves.

This is also the first newsletter that will be for paying subscribers only since I made my announcement about the future of Books & Bakes a little over a month ago. As I pondered what to write about this week, I found myself thinking, over and over again, “this one has to be the best newsletter you’ve ever written.” I couldn’t stop imagining that if I wrote the most perfect newsletter, with the most perfect words, about the most perfect books—then people would subscribe. I couldn’t shake the belief that not only is it in my power to convince folks to pay for the work I do (it’s not), but that the thing that would finally do the convincing would be this newsletter—just one out of the 150+ I’ve written in the last 3 years.

That’s a lot of unnecessary pressure to put on myself.

I honestly haven’t known how to write about any of this since I made the ask. Do I sound like I’m begging? Do I sound desperate? Angry? Who wants to listen to someone ask for money over and over again for weeks? I’ve been so careful about what I’ve written. I’ve tried to express my optimism, my belief in the work I do, my deep gratitude for everyone who reads my words. I’ve tried not to fall apart in public because, in a thousand ways, my life is sweet and and good and full and safe and stable.

The truth is that I have poured my whole self into every newsletter I’ve written since the very first one. The truth is that some weeks I have not had the time or energy to write at my best, but even then, I have written with everything I have. The truth is that this is one of those weeks. The truth is that I am going to be fine, and the truth is also that asking for something you want, something scary, and not receiving it—well, it hurts. I have done everything in my power to pretend it doesn’t hurt but—surprise!—that is not how risk-taking works.

Recently I’ve noticed that the books I love most are books that make me feel a little less alone. They do not always make me feel good, or seen (whatever that means), or happy. Sometimes books that make me feel less alone also make me feel uncomfortable, distraught, enraged. When I see another person feeling and hurting and trying and failing and loving and getting their heart broken and grieving and caring—on the outside—that’s what makes me feel less alone. That’s what I felt reading Martry! and There’s Always This Year and Greta & Valdin and Another Word for Love and Arrow and Blessings.

I’m writing all of this down, the real sometimes-I’m-on-the-floor-crying and sometimes-I’m-falling-apart-in-private mess of this transition—because I want to be a writer who makes other people feel less alone. A lot of us are out here feeling big feelings about a lot of things. These are mine. Maybe knowing I have them will make you feel less alone.

Not much is actually in my control, but the words I choose to put out into the world are. Thank you for reading these ones.

The Books

I adored Cinema Love, Bad Habit, and Greta & Valdin so much that I wrote 1253, 1508, and 1003 words about them, respectively. These days I write book reflections in a stream of excited babble. I interrupt myself and veer off on wild tangents about a particular scene or character. It’s a marvelous way to untangle how I feel about a book, but unedited, these reflections are not much use to anyone else. I didn’t have time to edit them this week, but I really want to tell you about these books! So these are truncated reviews—just a paragprah from each reflection. If you’ve been waiting for the day I become less wordy: surprise, it’s here!

Cinema Love by Jiaming Tang

This decades-spanning, continent-spanning novel is everything I crave in queer fiction. It has an alive setting and complex and layered characters who make all sorts of messy choices. It is deeply steeped in the specifics of two places: Mawei in Fuzhou, China, and Chinatown in Manhattan. It is full of sounds, colors, smells, textures, bodies. It’s about queer history and how it shapes the present, and about how and why queer and immigrant architectures matter. It's about memory and mistakes and how they form people. There are three intersecting timelines that tangle with each other in a wonderful, nonlinear way.

I've read a few books recently that explore how so much individual trauma is actually collective, and this is another (brilliant) one. It's about systemic violence. Most of the characters make choices that are catastrophic, that do lasting harm to other people. No one is a villain or a monster. The villain is homophobia. The way the characters try to work through all the pain they've felt and caused—in a system built to kill them—is so poignant and rageful and real. I felt this book in my body.

Bad Habit by Alana S. Portero, translated by Mara Faye Lethem

This is my favorite coming-of-age novel of the year, and maybe an all-time favorite, too. It’s about a trans girl growing up in a working class neighborhood in Madrid in the 1980s and 1990s. It reads like a fictional memoir. The narrative voice is incredible. She’s funny, sharp, campy, bitchy. But she’s also tender. She makes fun of herself but she’s also deeply self-reflective and astute. It reminded me a lot of Faltas—it has that same mix of sharpness and earnestness, dark survival humor and bouyant love.

The narrator is closeted, and in a whole lot of dysphoric pain, for much of the novel. It is sometimes excruciating to read. But at heart, it’s a book about trans sisterhood and mentorship. In her late teens, the narrator meets a trans sex worker and they become close. Portero writes this relationship with such exquisite care. This older woman gives the narrator space to be herself without dictating or demanding. She doesn’t prescribe. She waits until the narrator is ready to face the fact that she’s trans and in pain. She loves her through the waiting.

Throughout the whole novel, there’s so much reverence (rather than shallow worship) for trans women who have survived. As a kid, the narrator is is terrified and repulsed by the trans women in her neighborhood, by the bulges in their faces from hormone injections, by their “tacky” beauty. By the end of the novel, she sees them—and, by extension, herself—as beautiful. Not in spite of what they’ve survived, but because of it. It’s so moving to watch her enter into these messy, caring kinship relationships with the trans women who made her life possible.

Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K. Reilly

This is a hilarious and tender novel about two queer Maori Russian siblings and their big chaotic family. This family is a joy to witness. There are a million branches. They live in various countries. They sprawl. They’re connected by an intricate web of biology, happenstance, choice, accident.

This is what I keep coming back to: how deeply Greta and Valdin are loved by their family—their parents and their brother, but also their extended family. There is so much love between all of these people, and it doesn’t mean any of them are perfect. They don’t see each other clearly. They hurt each other, they mess up, they are oblivious to each other’s needs, they try to protect each other and fail spectacularly, they keep secrets, they don’t want to be around each other. Through it all, they love each other. It’s all so earnest, and, honestly, so refreshing to read about a group of people who aren’t good or right or easy or simple but trying. I loved every moment I spent with this book.

The Beyond

Cooking

Guess what? I made a rhubarb crisp! It was super tasty! I also made my favorite rhubarb cake, this rhubarb cake with sumac crumb from Yossy Arefi’s Snacking Cakes (yes, it’s still the only baking book I ever use). I did not take any pictures, but yum.

Recent Audiobooks

The Queen of Fourteenth Street by Barrie Kreinik, read by Barrie Kreinik, Orlagh Cassidy, Imani Jade Powers, Elisabeth Rodgers & James Fouhey

If you are an audio person, I am begging you to stop whatever you’re doing and go track this book down. An original audio play! About a queer actor/director/producer who founded a reparatory theater in NYC in the 1920s! So much lesbian drama! Passion and betrayal and ambition! It’s about running a theater during the Depression, and queer art-making, and living a queer life as loudly as possible when doing so can get you killed. Eva Le Gallienne was a force of nature and now I am a little bit obsessed (I mean!).

Further Reading

Two other 2024 queer books that I have written many words about and not yet reviewed: Another Word for Love by Carvell Wallace and Blessings by Chukwuebuka Ibeh. I know I wrote about Wallace’s memoir briefly last week, but I have not yet edited my full 1500-word reflection into a coherent essay. I did review Blessings for BookPage.

The Bookshelf

Around the Internet

For Audiofile, I wrote about some recent nonfiction audiobooks that range wide, exploring one idea from a million perspectives. For Book Riot, I rounded up some sophomore novels I love.

A Taste of the Commonplace

In honor of Pride, here’s a reminder that assimilation is never the answer, from She of the Mountains by Vivek Shraya:

It occurred to him that the gays and the straights had more in common than he had considered before. Just like the straights, the gays were intent on preserving and presenting a uniform, singular version of themselves; in this case, their gayness. They hadn't been saying: you're gay! You're GAY! They were actually saying: Our way! OUR way!

And Beauty

Some words that have been fueling me recently:

• Safia Elhillo on the war in Sudan.

• Kai Cheng Thom, “Why can’t people stop fixating on ‘transition regret’?”

• I appreciate Margaret Killjoy so much.

• I absolutely cannot wait for this book, and you can read an excerpt here.

• I am currently reading Modern Poetry by Dianne Seuss, and WOWWOWWOW. Hanif Abdurraqib interviewed her for The New Yorker. What a dream.

As always, a little bit of beauty to send you on your way: I have put my body into a body of water, mostly my beloved lake, every day for the last 23 days. It is a gift beyond words.

Catch you next week, bookish friends!