What I Read In September & October (2024)
I’ve traveled thousands of miles in books I’ve read.
September 2024
Motherhood by Sheila Heti (Super quirky & awesome, def recommend if you are grappling with the possibility of having babies & and if you can’t have babies maybe it will make you feel better? Said as someone who has not been able to have a baby yet)
After the Funeral by Tessa Hadley (short stories) (Love Tessa Hadley mostly, this was good)
Circe by Madeline Miller (Fiction / Greek Mythology) (Aboslutely loved this one, took me back to my teenage years where I devoured books even more ferociously than I do now)
The New Ships by Kate Duigan (NZ fiction) (loved this one)
The First Bad Man by Miranda July (After reading her new book All Fours in July)
Hot Milk by Deborah Levy (I love Deborah Levy)
October 2024
Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors (This was alright, good beachy read)
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides (reread)
Introduction to Internal Family Systems by Richard C. Schwartz (Reference material for trauma & therapy work)
The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison (Essays) (really intelligent and interesting essays, loved)
The Mermaid Chronicles: A Midlife Mer-Moir by Megan Dunn (NZ, Nonfiction) (Totally badass NZ writer Megan Dunn, loved this so much, cried.)
From the essay ‘Immortal Horizon’ in The Empathy Exams: “I watch Laz from across the campfire. He’s darkly regal in his trench coat, warming his hands over the flames. I want to meet him, but haven’t yet summoned the courage to introduce myself. When I look at him I can’t help thinking of Heart of Darkness. Like Kurtz, Laz is bald and charismatic, leader of a minor empire, trafficker in human pain. He’s like a cross between the Colonel and my grandpa. There’s certainly an Inner-Station splendor to his orchestration of this whole hormone extravaganza, testosterone spread like fertilizer across miles of barren and brambled wilderness.”
From the essay ‘Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain’ in The Empathy Exams: “A friend of mine once dreamed a car crash that left all the broken pieces of her Pontiac coated in bright orange pollen. My analyst pushed and pushed for me to make sense of the image, she wrote to me, and finally, I blurted: My wounds are fertile! And that has become one of the touchstones and rallying cries of my life.”
“I was listening to ‘Swan Dive’ years before I got my period, but I was already ready to jump. I was ready to weaponize my menarche. I was waiting for the day when I could throw my womanhood to the sharks because I finally had some womanhood to call my own. I couldn’t wait to be inducted into the ranks of this female frustration—the period as albatross, lunar burden, exit ticket from Eden, keys to the authenticity kingdom. Bleeding among the shark meant being eligible for men, which meant being eligible for hope, loss, degradation, objectification, desire and being desired—a whole world of ways to get broken.”
From Sheila Heti’s Motherhood:
“I really need an infinity amount of time to work. Infinity sounds so dauntingly impossible!—but infinity can be accessed in moments like this one. It does not mean that to write this book, I need an infinity amount of time, but rather that I need to access infinity in time, Infinity is not a duration of time, it is a quality of time. I can reach it in moments like this one.”
“Is this the condition of being a woman—remaining obstinately in one place, because her body thinks that if she stays in one place long enough, she will have a child? She doesn’t want a baby—but her body doesn’t believe her. On some level, no one believes her. On some level, she doesn’t even believe herself.”
“I should have known all along that this would happen. All the times I contemplated children, I felt a giddiness and wobbliness that are nothing like the commitments I’ve made that come from a deeper, more solid place. Those commitments feel dark, unfantastical, mixed up equally with the good and the bad. But the thought of having children always made me feel dizzy, or as elated as sucking helium, like all the things I’ve rushed into, and just as impulsively, left.”
“Then I named this wrestling place Motherhood, for here is where I saw God face-to-face, and yet my life was spared.”
From Hot Milk by Deborah Levy: “It was hard to accept that the first man in my life would do things that were to my disadvantage if they were to his advantage. Yet it was a revelation that somehow set me free.”
From The New Ships by Kate Duigan: “Whatever we demanded or wanted or willed, whatever we spent or pledged or researched, had nothing to do with it. We were at the mercy of forces well outside my power, of microscopic, relentlessly proliferating cells.”
So many more good quotes, but that’s plenty. I haven’t typed up the ones from Megan Dunn’s book yet, otherwise there’d be some mermaid quotes in here too.
Thanks for reading ox