All pleasure, no guilt

In defense of lighter fare

Maud Lewis, “Winter Sleigh Ride,” 1950s

The fog of grief changes by the day. Sometimes it’s so thick I can’t see right in front of me. Other times, it’s diffuse. The sound of my own laughter breaks through and startles me. Or I discover I’m able to passively wonder, without crying, what my dad would say about the week’s election news. Grief is performing upon my life the same kind of whittling that lockdown did. Reducing my days to the essentials. Among the essentials, sadly, remain things like work, commuting, laundry. But even amid the drudgery of adulthood, the sense of things having been pared down — naturally, without great effort, as if by some wise, guiding force — is a pleasant one.

My literary diet has been odd. In pursuit of a kind of cozy lobotomy, I’ve been spending time in a corner of the romance market focused on food, mostly baking, but also televised cooking competitions. In the past couple months, I’ve scarfed down Love at 350 Degrees by Lisa Peers, Sadie on a Plate by Amanda Elliot, and The City Baker’s Guide to Country Living by Louise Miller, which at points reached Gilmore Girls levels of small-town snugness and which I liked a lot. As well as Good Material by Dolly Alderton, whose books are as close to new Bridget Jones volumes as we’re going to get (although this one is mostly narrated by a 30-something man and more reminiscent of High Fidelity). I read the last in Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series, The Last Devil to Die, and now impatiently await the miniseries. My ardor for the books embarrasses me — I recently saw someone reading one on an airplane and almost tapped their shoulder to talk, then thought better of it. What was I going to say — isn’t Joyce hilarious? What is happening to me?

These books are light, very light, but they’ve been helping me survive and entertaining me just enough. I appreciate how little they ask of me. I actually really enjoy this kind of low-effort consumption of pat stories. I encounter a lot of self-styled literary types, chronically unimpressed, with strong, cynical opinions, and I sometimes wonder about the affective dimension of their relationships to reading. Do they love to read? As in love the act of reading, curled up in a window nook in good socks with a bowl of pretzels and a cup of tea? Love it so much it almost doesn’t matter what they’re reading? My love of reading comes from childhood and in many ways is the same as when I was eight. The way I feel with a snack and an undemanding, predictable story in my hand? It’s my Rosebud.

There’s a quote I think of often from an interview Claire-Louise Bennett did with Lauren Elkin in the The Paris Review, about Bennett’s pleasure in being, as she calls it, “really general.” Forgive me if I’ve quoted it here before, but I really do think about it a lot:   

I spent yesterday afternoon being what I call “really general,” which involves going into shopping centers and looking around major chain stores for stuff like sleeping attire and leggings and storage boxes. I spent a lot of time in TK Maxx reading the back of serum bottles, comparing their various antiaging ingredients. Then I went to Marks & Spencer, tried on a couple of puffa coats, bought some plums and reduced free-range chicken, and when I came out I sat on one of the gray seats that go around a big pillar and checked into a flight I’m taking tomorrow. I could have done that at home, it occurred to me, but I was kind of reveling in this sensation of being really general and undistinguished. I felt curiously unburdened. Experience is increasingly curated and there’s a pressure for everything—everything!—we do to be special in some way. It’s a relief not to always aspire, to feel fine with being just another passerby, one of the crowd, a woman with her shopping looking at her phone. Unburdened by the weight of wanting every moment to contribute to a specific idea I have about myself. So what. So what.

I crave this sensation more and more. It is a fucking relief not to always aspire! In fact, it can feel like an act of resistance in a world where every single instant of our lives is expected to be captured or mined for content, and every click and conversation is surveilled by rabid advertisers. Interestingly, being “really general” in Bennett’s view involves consumption, too, but it’s closer to the passive, basic, maintenance of everyday life, not an aggressive play for uniqueness on the internet.

I chased all those romance novels with cozy food nonfiction, like Ella Risbridger’s The Year of Miracles, a charming grief-inspired cookbook I found on a remainder table, and Nigel Slater’s new one, A Thousand Feasts, which conjures dozens of ephemeral delights in miniature, with lines like “A little cake in a sandwich shop in Kyoto. A single, bright-pink cherry blossom trapped in the snow-white icing.” Yup — I’d read a thousand pages of that.

Lingering in Japan, I read Rental Person Who Does Nothing, a short memoir by Shoji Morimoto, who began renting himself out as quiet, nonsexual company to strangers with an ad that read, “Maybe there's a restaurant you want to go to, but you feel awkward going on your own. Maybe a game you want to play, but you're one person short. Or perhaps you'd like someone to keep a space in the park for your cherry blossom viewing party.” After accompanying thousands of clients on errands ranging from the banal to the bizarre, Morimoto wrote this book. I was in a weird headspace, but I found it extremely amusing and poignant.

I also read a grief book, As Long as You Need, by a hospital chaplain, J.S. Park, that had a few beautiful lines and harrowing stories, but also a lot of ardent and unruly language reminiscent of high school poetry.

Of course I never really take a break from mainlining the horrors of the world, so I also read so-called serious books this month. The Postcard by Anne Berest, a French bestseller that fictionalizes the author’s family’s Holocaust story. And Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative by Isabella Hammad, a beautiful lecture delivered just before October 7 with an afterword written afterward. I read The Alternatives by Caoillin Hughes, a very smart novel about the fraught intersecting adulthoods of four sisters who had to raise themselves — it crackles with good Irish dialogue, heavy on the sarcasm, like an episode of Bad Sisters. I read Yuri Herrera’s latest, Season of the Swamp, a short, bawdy evocation of 19th-century New Orleans with memorable characters, one of whom is real-life Mexican politician Benito Juárez. And Johanna Hedva’s How to Tell When We Will Die, which is the most exciting work on disability I’ve read since Andrew Leland’s brilliant memoir The Country of the Blind. Disability studies remains a thrilling, still-radical discipline and these books will make you confront yourself and your biases in important, uncomfortable ways.

Last week, at the urging of my friend Rachel Goldman, I read Liliana’s Invincible Summer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir by Cristina Rivera Garza about her sister’s murder at the hands of an ex-boyfriend 30 years prior. It’s gorgeously written and painful to read. A politically charged work of personal memory and a brutal indictment of a world that only recently began calling femicide by its name and still punishes women for being victims of intimate partner violence. She quotes often from Rachel Louise Snyder’s excellent No Visible Bruises, which should be required reading in every high school. Garza evokes her sister so vividly that I’m still wading through my sadness and anger. I feel a bit like I’m grieving Liliana too after reading the book. And all the women whose lives are extinguished by men who claim to love them. It made me revisit some old writing I did on the topic of abuse and hopelessness. A project I wonder if I’ll ever finish.

And that, my friends, is how you end up turning to a stack of culinary romances!

Speaking of Lauren Elkin, I’m about halfway through Scaffolding and having thoughts that I’ll send along next time.

The world slips daily further into chaos, but books are still here, and they’re good, even when they’re not that good. So happy reading 📖🤍☕️✨