Books, Books, Books
Last year, Document Journal asked me to come up with a reading list. Here’s the full story, and the list below.
Somehow, the writing of Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick (1979) seems both careful and unwieldy, a train of thought that was edited to its essential emotions, ensuring it would become a reflection of coming-of-adulthood that would outlive its era. Hardwick is a writer’s writer, yet unpretentious—a hero to the directionless and the overeducated.
Janet Frame is maybe best known as a person who lived through extraordinary circumstances, later portrayed in the Jane Campion adaptation of her memoir An Angel At My Table. The extraordinary, still fresh style in which Owls Do Cry (1957) was written, though, is the most fascinating part.
Eve Babitz’s comeback makes sense and it doesn’t. In Slow Days, Fast Company (1977), she represents a type of woman that is all around us, now: excited to investigate and participate in debauched success. She’s also a better writer than most of us millennial navel-gazers, though, infatuated with the hierarchies that inform her stories.
Jean Rhys is the ultimate sad writer, and that makes her even more miserable (she’s famous for saying “I’d rather be happy than write.”) Quartet (1929) is a guide to getting drunk alone, falling out of love, and fleshing out a story with such mesmerizing details that the whole affair seems worth it.