By Eileen Myles
Myles is, primarily, a poet. Her fractured, fragmented diaristic way of telling stories from her life takes some getting used to, like about two minutes or three pages or so, and then you start forgetting that you’ve ever expected anyone to write any other way. The narrative momentum in
these stories—of lesbians and various sorts of cultural outlaws in seedy and glamorous settings up and down the Eastern seaboard, interspersed with stories from Myles’ traditional messed-up Irish Catholic childhood—is so strong that the book is almost impossible to put down, even though it has none of the conventional attributes that tend to make a book gripping, like characters or a plot. Myles’ voice is singular and I would follow it anywhere. This is a cliché but she could make assembly instructions for a small electronic device gripping. It also helps that these stories are full of drugs and sex and small quiet portraits of human nature at its naked best and worst.
By Colette
This
collection, which comprises the first four novels by the pioneering French writer-performer who eventually came to be known by the singular surname Colette, was originally published under the name of her domineering first husband. They are widely acknowledged to be a very lightly fictionalized account of the author’s tomboyish Burgundy childhood, lesbian schoolgirl adventures, and eventual disastrous and traumatic marriage. The French countryside, food, sex, and play are described throughout in the straightforward yet sensual style that would become Colette’s hallmark. My favorite is "Claudine at School"; the tortures and rivalries that young Claudine and her friends invent for each other are poignant and deliriously sexy.
By Geoff Dyer
Dyer, another meandering master of style, sets out to write a biography of D.H. Lawrence and ultimately
ends up conveying a great deal of information about Lawrence, and writing, and life and creativity in general, while describing the years he spent not writing about Lawrence, not reading Lawrence, and not researching Lawrence. By not writing a biography of a long-dead author Dyer manages to almost incidentally deliver a winsome, fascinating portrait of a similarly compelling and gifted author: himself.
By Laurie Colwin
While she lived, Colwin was best known for her cute, forgettable novels; now she is mostly remembered for her quirky, poignant, hilarious
essays about family life and food. Her recipes have their idiosyncrasies—for a long while in the '80s she almost completely eschewed salt—but her embrace of organic and local foods was prescient, and her enthusiastic, reassuring voice makes the reader desperate to run to the kitchen to attempt to entertain in her whimsical, effortless style.
By Cookie Mueller
By the time she died of AIDS at age 40 in 1989, Cookie Mueller had already had achieved iconic status. Muse to photographer Nan Goldin and filmmaker John Waters (she famously had sex with a chicken in his cult film
Pink Flamingos), Cookie is probably least well-known for her frank and stark
essays and stories about her teen-delinquent Baltimore youth and her wild adventures in Provincetown and the East Village when those places were seamy and bohemian. As a documentarian of an era, she makes up in frankness what she lacks in clear-eyed total recall. Colorful characters of every persuasion seem to offer themselves up to be gently mocked, illuminated, and immortalized. Like Goldin’s photographs, Mueller’s stories freeze-frame fast-paced life in a way that lends random moments mythic power.
By Phoebe Gloeckner
Gloeckner has worked as a medical illustrator, drawing cadavers in cross-section, and her comics and writings tend to emphasize the sordid and miraculous inner workings of people’s minds and hearts—including her own. Drawing from the diaries she kept during her Bay Area adolescence in the Free Love-hangover late '70s, Gloeckner
traces her alter ego Minnie Goetze’s journey from innocent childhood to artistic and romantic awakening; the latter comes at the hands of her neglectful mother’s boyfriend, and Gloeckner doesn’t shy away from the sordid and tragic details even while refusing to shunt the story’s nuances into a clichéd trauma-and-recovery narrative arc. Anyone who has ever been or known a teenage girl will relate.
By Romy Ashby
This is my favorite book, the book I reread to remember the point of writing. Technically a novel,
The Cutmouth Lady is a collection of stories about an American girl who, like Ashby, spent time in Japan as a teenager, trying to understand and fit into a narrowly proscribed culture with a deep-seated tradition of repression. Her fantastical descriptions of iridescent fantasy palaces and sordid schoolgirl humiliations were entirely unprecedented in my reading experience when I first stumbled across this book nearly a decade ago; to my surprise, they still are.
By Ruth Reichl
All Ruth Reichl’s food memoirs are great but
this one, which details her return to her native New York and her stint as the NYT’s restaurant critic is a must read for anyone who likes to eat food, especially if you’d like to eat the world’s most delicious food vicariously via one of the most entertaining and evocative food writers of all time
By Patti Smith
Even if Patti Smith had never written or sung a single song,
this book alone would seal her immortality. Smith’s writing is a pure expression of her personality, devoid of self-conscious literary style, and the experiences she describes—her penniless early years in New York and the love affair that deepened into lifelong friendship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe—are fascinating in and of themselves. Even though any reader with a glancing familiarity with Smith and Mapplethorpe’s work knows how the book will end, the last few pages are unexpectedly raw and wrenching. In the face of tragedy, Smith’s courage and artistic conviction are a beacon of inspiration.
By Chris Kraus
If you’re looking to get the hairy eyeball from strangers on the subway, there’s no book I’d recommend more highly than
I Love Dick by Chris Kraus. Also, there’s no book I’d recommend more highly, period, especially if you took a lot of literary theory classes in college that intrigued and annoyed you in equal measure.
At the outset of this “autobiographical novel,” Kraus is a semi-failed filmmaker married to a famous French academic. On a visit to L.A., the couple spends the night at the home of critic Dick Hebdige, during which Kraus develops a random but passionate—and apparently unreciprocated—crush. The next section of the book is a series of letters that Kraus and her husband sent (and didn’t send) to Dick detailing the crush and its implications for art and heterosexuality and feminism and Kraus’ career and their marriage. This probably sounds unbearably pretentious and, for a moment, it is; in the next moment, though, Kraus shifts to the third person to describe how she left her husband. And in the second section of the book, narrated in the first person by Kraus, the real fun begins. She forces a confrontation and a sexual encounter with Hebdige. She describes her romantic history and the place of women in the downtown NYC art scene of the '80s and '90s. She asks and, more importantly, answers the question, “Can a crush be art?”
