A Life in Books (and other wonderful things) with Joanna Rakoff

Hestia Strikes A Match, Help Wanted, The Sicilian Inheritance, Last House and more!

Many years ago, when I was a baby book critic, my editor at Newsday–the legendary Laurie Muchnick--assigned me the paper’s annual essay on summer reading. “Great!” I said. “Great!” she replied. “We’ll messenger a big box of new releases for you to take a look at.”

The next day, a box the size of a dorm fridge appeared outside my door, and as soon as I opened it,I realized I had made a grave error in judgment. Because, you see, for me, summer reading meant filling in the gaps in my decidedly imperfect literary education, usually by plucking an enormous Victorian novel from the collection left me by my grandmother, and delightedly making my way through Daniel Deronda or Great Expectations or The Forsyte Saga. 

Needless to say, the contents of this box proved quite different. From its brown walls beamed a riot of pink. Many covers featured high-heeled shoe; some, wedding dresses; others, bikinis. All pink. Hot pink. Fuschia. Magenta. Enough pink to build a Barbie Dreamhouse.

This was the early 2000s, the height of what was then known as “chick lit,” a term I–and many–found offensive and deeply misogynistic even at the time. What was “chick lit”? The term emerged–not coincidentally, around the time Sex and the City captured the imagination of seemingly every woman in the world–as a way to categorize novels with characterize novels with single city-dwellers working in glossy arts-adjacent fields–and similar plot lines, involving thorny romantic situations. I did not watch Sex and the City and had no interest in reading what I imagined to be upscale bodice-rippers, filled with awful prose and two-dimensional characters. “Laurie made a mistake,” I thought. “I am not the right person for this piece.”

I closed the box and returned to my desk.

That night, I cautiously opened the box again, pulling out the books one by one, perusing the the opening pages. What I found surprised me. The covers had little to do with the novels themselves, which were: A wrenching exploration of grief. Two sophisticated coming-of-age tales hinged on the changes wrought by motherhood. A brilliant Whartonian comedy of manner. In other words, nothing like I had imagined “chick lit” to be.​​ The term, I suddenly realized, was a marketing tool and nothing more. All these novels had in common was smart, successful, complicated heroines wrestling with big questions, both societal and personal. So, actually, the term was more than a marketing tool: It was a way of defusing, defanging provocative, subversive, iconoclastic tales of women’s experience. A way of spinning them as harmless, as mere entertainments rather than pieces of art. 

That moment–the chick lit era–has passed, thankfully, but I found myself thinking about it as I prepared to offer up some summer reads to you over the next few months. Would the novels below have been considered chick lit back in 2001? Given titles like “Going Topless” or “Summers in the Riviera”? Would they even have been published, with their darkness, their explorations of broad societal issues, not necessarily leavened with a 2001-style dose of comedy? I loved those comedies, I did, but these titles may be a little more on the nose in terms of my traditional summer reading. Here goes:

HESTIA STRIKES A MATCH, Christine Grillo

Not a day passes without some aspect of contemporary life–another draconian abortion ban, a man scanning his palm to pay at Whole Foods–sparking the extremely-not-original thought that our reality is, essentially, the stuff of the dystopian fictions I read as a teen. Though my attraction to speculative fiction waned in my early twenties, I devoured Christine Grillo’s perfectly imagined HESTIA STRIKES A MATCH, set in Baltimore in  an unspecified near future, in which the United States has broken into civil war, divided along the very real lines that fracture our country. Grillo’s heroine, Hestia, stands at the intersection of those two lines: Her parents, academics, have swung dramatically to the right–the insurgents–while she is firmly on the left. The brilliance of this book lies, perhaps, Grillo’s quiet sense of humor and her grounding Hestia’s experience in the mundane–her dating app encounters, her job at a nursing home–as modified by life in a war zone, where UN peacekeepers patrol the streets and she can’t leave the house without checking an app that tells her which areas to avoid due to violence. The world Grillo creates in this deeply relevant, unexpectedly delightful novel feels so utterly familiar, I felt almost disoriented at times. In the best way!

HELP WANTED, Adelle Waldman

A Whartonian comedy of manners set in an upstate big box store? Yes. Waldman took a job at her local Target to research her second novel, which follows a group of behind the scenes workers–they unload boxes and stock the store before it opens–over a tumultuous period, in which their kind, smart store manager announces he’s leaving, and their awful, self-absorbed department head is proposed as his replacement. The staff–who range dramatically in age, gender, and background–plot to promote their loathed boss, in the hopes that her beloved assistant will be given her job and she’ll vanish from their lives. Waldman’s tremendous gifts for dialogue and character, her empathic approach to the world, her global understanding of the economic and social forces at play in her characters lives, and her masterful plotting, synthesize here into one of the most compelling novels I’ve read in ages. In which I loved, and felt myself rooting for, every single character, and holding my breath at pivotal moments. I’m just going to use those words again: Relevant and delightful. Also, I strongly recommend this perceptive review from a favorite writer of mine, Jordan Kisner, in The Atlantic, and Emily Gould’s piece on the making of the book, for The Cut.

THE SICILIAN INHERITANCE, Jo Piazza

Maybe you know Jo Piazza as host of the groundbreaking podcasts  UNDER THE INFLUENCE and  SHE WANTS MORE? If so, you know she’s an unparalleled journalist and cultural critic, who looks at our world, our country, from a singular angle. Maybe you read her buzzy 2018 novel  CHARLOTTE WALSH LIKES TO WIN? If so, you know she’s a remarkable storyteller, with an inclination toward complicated stories tied to the issues of our day.

In this new novel, Piazza  synthesizes everything on which she’s been reporting for years  and so, so much more into a spellbinding literary thriller (of sorts), which is also, somehow, a midlife coming of age tale and a historical novel, and it is just EVERYTHING. The basic premise: A Philadelphia chef has lost everything. Her much-lauded restaurant,, her marriage, her stability, in all ways, and her sense of who she is, or what she’s meant to do in the world. Amidst all this heartbreak, her favorite aunt dies, leaving her a ticket to Sicily, a set of local contacts, and the task of reclaiming her namesake grandmother’s abandoned plot of land. The story shifts back and forth between the two women, with each plot line building in mystery and tension until it reaches a fever pitch. I am not a historical novel person, nor am I a thriller person, but I loved this book, and can’t stop thinking about it. A truly masterful feat of storytelling.

LAST HOUSE, Jessica Shattuck

Summer, for me, is a time for sprawling family epics and Shattuck’s absorbing, ambitious fourth novel truly delivers! Reminiscent of many novels I’ve loved–from Lydia Kiesling’s MOBILITY to Maile Meloy’s LIARS AND SAINTS–the novel alights with the generically American Taylor family in at three pivotal moments in both history and their specific lives–1953, 1968, and 1971–moving between Nick, an oil industry lawyer recruited by the CIA, his bright wife Bet, a WWII codebreaker turned suburban mom, and their fiery daughter Katherine, an activist eternally at odds with her parents. Shattuck smartly explores the ways we’re defined by the political, societal, and cultural shifts of our time, deftly inhabiting the mores of each era and her characters psyches. (I also really enjoyed Shattuck’s 2009 comedy of manners PERFECT LIFE.)

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READING NOW: Kelly Dwyer’s truly unputdownable GHOST MOTHER, which I’ll discuss at length next month! Maggie Smith’s brilliant divorce memoir YOU COULD MAKE THIS PLACE BEAUTIFUL, for the second time, in preparation for our event earlier this month. And SEVEN SUMMER WEEKENDS, Jane L. Rosen’s charming romantic comedy, about a young ad exec, fired for a Zoom slip-up, who inherits a crazy house on Fire Island from her artist aunt. I’ve had a hard few weeks, honestly, and turned to this out of a desire for escape; it delivered, but I also found myself sobbing, at points, as Rosen’s heroine returns to her former vocation, sculpting, and gets to know her aunt posthumously.

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Some shorter reads: 

In this profound, moving New Yorker essay, Lucinda Rosenfeld reflects back on her affair with a professor, as an undergrad, from the vantage point of a post #metoo world. I read this essay when it came out, exactly one year ago, and have revisited it several times since.

I love

Sari Botton

’s GOODBYE TO ALL THAT, a collection of essays about leaving New York; so I was very excited to see that Botton has dedicated a section of her Substack

Memoir Land

to a serial continuation of the anthology. My favorite, so far, is Botton’s own essay on moving into the East Village apartment of Joe Coleman, the 90s cult artist–beloved by me and many friends–known for his paintings of serial killers and carnie-style oddities. 

In Elizabeth Benedict’s long, incisive  Salmagundi essay, “A Letter to James Salter,” she examines her own relationship to Judaism, her husband’s to Mormonism, through the lens of her epistolary friendship with James Salter. So, so good.

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Some other things I love:

As Cambridge finally warms up–after a Narnia-like endless winter–I have sunscreen on my mind, and I’m here to tell you that the perfect iteration exists. Lightweight, unscented, moisturizing but not greasy. If you are a person who wants some sort of color to their sunscreen, you need to own Ilia’s Super Serum Skin Tint, which is the one beauty/health/dermatological product I can’t live without. (I am not alone; a few weeks ago, I was hastily applying it in an airport bathroom when a thirty-ish woman cried, “ISN’T THAT THE BEST? My entire family uses it now because of me!”)

My friend Catherine recently sent me–out of the blue! For no reason!--these achingly beautiful personalized notecards. As a person who cherishes paper correspondence–a person who basically wrote a whole book about writing letters!--I nearly burst into tears when I opened the mysterious white box on my porch and saw these.

And also: I am hesitant to mention my own stuff here, but maybe you’d be interested to know that a collectors edition of My Salinger Year–my last book–has just been issued! (By Slightly Foxed, a UK publisher that solely releases collectors editions of classic literary memoirs, like Roald Dahl’s Boy and Hilary Mantel’s Giving Up the Ghost.) It is beautiful and I am honored and astonished! If you’d like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPh2EAnkWdA, you can do so here (while also getting a glimpse of my office!).

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In case you missed Joanna’s May Recommendations, you can find them here:

A Life in Books (and other wonderful things) with Joanna Rakoff

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Thank you for being here, dear Beyonders! ❤️ Your comments (and hearts) mean to much to me. I read each and every one.