Things I Ate That I Love

"I didn’t want Iris to think I was making fun of her for trying to fuck me while I was tied up..."

Wed, 22 May 2013 14:42:53 -0400

“I didn’t want Iris to think I was making fun of her for trying to fuck me while I was tied up without undressing me first. She was very sensitive about criticism.”

- Emily Books: Baby

an excerpt from Lee and Elaine by Ann Rower

I assigned 6 word memoirs to 7th graders as a warmup writing...

Wed, 22 May 2013 13:28:17 -0400

I assigned 6 word memoirs to 7th graders as a warmup writing assignment.

emilybooks: Lee and Elaine by Ann Rower is our May pick and it...

Tue, 21 May 2013 17:36:07 -0400

emilybooks:

Lee and Elaine by Ann Rower is our May pick and it is so good.

bennettmadison: In case you hadn’t noticed already from my...

Tue, 21 May 2013 14:26:23 -0400

bennettmadison:

In case you hadn’t noticed already from my incessant and shameless Tweeting/Tumbling/Facebooking about it, MY BOOK IS FINALLY OFFICIALLY OUT TODAY and I’m pretty happy about it. You can even buy it and everything.

And I just found out it got its third starred review, this time from Booklist, where the reviewer wrote:

[Madison’s] command of language, both informal and beautiful, lifts the work from a basic boy-meets-fantastical creature tale to something both familiar and tragically moving. This isn’t just a supernatural beach read; it’s a rare and lovely novel, deserving of attention from discriminating readers.

It also got a positive— if somewhat more measured— review from my grandmother, who wrote the following in an e-mail to my mom:

Hi Jane,

In case you miss it, you left yout pink (coral) sweater at my house. I will save it for you. Incidentally, I was on Amazon and I found Bennett’s book—I read the sample they had posted, and so far, I disagree with his bloggers. I find it very interesting and extremely well written. I confess I think the overuse of “wicked word” language a little much, but I’m willing to admit that is the way a lot of teenagers talk these days. (But not in front of me, I hope.) Anyway, I want to say that what I have read so far I find compelling and I want to see how it ends. So I’ll buy a copy and proudly have my grandson autograph it for me.

Your ever lovin’ Mom

P.S. I don’t have Bennett’s E-Mail, but you can forward this to him if you wish.

SEE? Even my grandma is buying it so you should too!

“‘wicked word’ language”

"I began reading Sarah Schulman’s book Gentrification of the Mind and a slow realization crept into..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 14:05:30 -0400

“I began reading Sarah Schulman’s book Gentrification of the Mind and a slow realization crept into my consciousness. I was afraid of my own gayness. I had become afraid of exploring my gayness in my work and people not being able to connect with it. I was afraid of people ignoring me or wanting to harm me if I wrote about being gay. I was afraid of never being reviewed by a major publication. I was afraid of never being published at all. I was afraid of being stuck in the Purple Room in Powell’s. I wanted to be “normal” and I wanted the opportunities of a “normal” person. I would even settle for the opportunities of a “normal” woman.”

- Emily Books: The Wall by Sara Renberg

"there’s just something about the way that guy writes about music that makes me want to go hug an..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 13:07:32 -0400

“there’s just something about the way that guy writes about music that makes me want to go hug an Ellen Willis book.”

- a little gem from Manjula Martin’s featured subscriber interview, at Emily Books. I love asking people about the least favorite thing they’ve read lately.

Also: seriously.

emilybooks: Manjula Martin runs the important and revolutionary...

Tue, 21 May 2013 13:02:40 -0400

emilybooks:

Manjula Martin runs the important and revolutionary site Who Pays Writers, which asks and answers that important question. She also does many other things, which are detailed here, and has excellent taste in music and vintage photos of Justine Frischmann. (!!) We love having her as a subscriber.

Read More

elanormcinerney: seems weird to have a Yahoo! account

Mon, 20 May 2013 11:08:04 -0400

elanormcinerney:

seems weird to have a Yahoo! account

Nearly.

Sat, 18 May 2013 18:58:33 -0400

Nearly.

"I literally imagined the following scenarios: I come home from the hospital; something terrible and..."

Thu, 16 May 2013 12:30:20 -0400

“I literally imagined the following scenarios: I come home from the hospital; something terrible and unforeseen has happened, my baby is dead. Or: nearly dead. Or: we have to make a choice about whether death is better for it. And then, after all that, say I’m trying to recover, and I can’t even express myself on the internet or take comfort in mindlessly submerging myself and my grief in my feed, because I had made the mistake of being happy in public about something that was now taken away from me.”

- I love how thoughtful Jessica Stanley always is about the vagaries of our lives online, and her thinking about how online-public to be about her pregnancy is a great example. What a modern worry, but it feels so familiar.

Also congratulations Jessica, friend I’ve never met!

bennettmadison: I’ve known Emily Gould since we were twelve. In...

Wed, 15 May 2013 14:46:42 -0400

bennettmadison:

I’ve known Emily Gould since we were twelve. In those days, she bore a striking resemblance to the movie version of Hermione Granger. We were only loosely friends at first— she disinvited me from her 7th grade YELLOW SUBMARINE viewing party because her mom said she could only have so many people and Emily had just developed a new crush, meaning that a boy (me) had to be cut from the list. I was only mildly annoyed; I felt that at least she had a good reason.

The summer after that, even though we were only warmish acquaintances, Emily surprised me by calling me on the phone just to chat. I’m pretty sure the reason for this is that she was going down the list of names in the school directory, calling everyone, and I was the first person who picked up. Most people were out of town. We had a long and probably very bitchy conversation and after that we were actual friends.

It was the year Kurt Cobain died, so she wore lots of baby-doll dresses. I was always trying to affect a grunge look, which usually ended up coming off less Evan Dando and more Gay Pigpen.

As a hobby, Emily was making a comprehensive list of all the pop songs in the world that had the word love in the title. This was before the internet, you understand; you couldn’t just Google it. I don’t think she ever made it to the end of the list, but she did get pretty far.

In high school, Emily started a proto-blog called The Notebook. By this point the internet had finally come along but there were definitely no such things as blogs. The Notebook was an actual notebook. The way it worked was that Emily would write down her thoughts and pass it around during class and everyone else would add their comments. Eventually this got us all in big trouble, but in an uncharacteristic act of largesse, the school administration at least let her keep the book. She still has it and it’s always shocking to look at it and see how smart and funny and articulate she was even then, not to mention what idiots the rest of us all were in comparison.

It’s sad that we never took gym together, because gym is where high school really happened. But Emily was very committed to her Artistic Movement class and there was no way I was giving up Trampoline, so that was that. We had most of our other classes together anyway.

She was always trying to find me a boyfriend. When she masterminded a blind date between me and her Hebrew School classmate Dan Fishback, she had to tag along with us to White Flint Mall (which no longer exists) because we didn’t have cars and Dan and I didn’t want to try to explain to our parents where we were going. Emily was our cover.

Later she arranged a match between me and a friend of a friend from swim team. This time we went on a date by ourselves. We took the Metro to see BEAUTIFUL THING at a movie theater in Dupont Circle that no longer exists and then went to Burger King because we were teenage boys and thought Burger King was a great restaurant. Needless to say, this wasn’t much of a love connection. Emily has never had a great feel for the vagaries of homosexual chemistry, but I will always be grateful that she tried.

The first time I got drunk, it was with Emily. Her parents were out of town and she served a beverage she called Long Island Iced Tea. Really it was just vodka and Country Time tea mix. I know it sounds toxic, but I think we were basically just pretending to be drunk.

When Emily found herself embroiled in all sorts of romantic drama a few months before the prom, we resolved to go together. I would have preferred to bring a dude, but the White House travel staffer I was semi-seeing at the time would not have been an appropriate choice. I helped Emily pick out her prom dress at the Betsey Johnson store in Georgetown, which no longer exists. She wrote an article about it for the school newspaper.

On the way to the dance, we got in a huge fight over the issue of where to park. (We had foolishly judged ourselves too cool to take a limousine with the rest of our friends, and so we were in my dad’s Honda Civic.) On top of that controversy, Emily’s love life was still very complicated and she had other boys to think about.

So she ditched me for the last dance in favor of one of her various boyfriends or ex-boyfriends; I can’t remember who exactly. I stood in the corner alone feeling sad. Luckily, another friend was in the bathroom holding a puking girl’s hair and her date— this really hot swimmer named David— was alone too. He asked me to dance. I said no because I was too flustered by the whole situation, which I still regret. Instead, we ended up just standing there watching everyone else and feeling a sense of strange fraternity. It was nice. Emily and I made up later that night.

Emily went to college in Ohio and I went to school in the suburbs of New York, but after a couple years she got bored of the country and transferred to the New School. She shared a tiny apartment in the East Village on the Hell’s Angels block with a performance artist who had also been a middle school classmate and a girl who played pool and loved iceberg lettuce. The apartment was very glamorous and always filled with smoke. Emily and her roommates had a hobby making miniature food out of Sculpey; they briefly got the notion to turn this into a business but all the boutiques to which they tried to sell their wares already had all the doll food they needed.

One night I smoked this really crazy weed and thought I might have to check myself into a mental institution. My roommate at the time, the artist Lee Relvas, cradled me in her arms on a mattress on the floor and fed me pretzels and water until I fell asleep. The next day I was still feeling pretty out of my mind so I took the Metro-North to Emily’s place in the city. She made me lasagna and I finally felt better. That apartment no longer exists; the building was torn down and replaced by a fancy condo.

After college (and a brief stint living with my parents), I moved in with Emily in Greenpoint. I got dumped by my boyfriend of several years and was trying to write my first book and pretty much became a monster. Emily was working her first 9 to 5 job and wasn’t at her best either. The highlight of this period is that I taught Emily how to blog. But there wasn’t much for her to learn— The Notebook had been good preparation— and she quickly surpassed me in this department.

There were some other nice moments in the year or so when we were living together, many of which Emily covered in her collection of essays, AND THE HEART SAYS WHATEVER. But overally the whole thing was sort of a disaster and I see it as a testament to her kindness that she left the most damning stories of my bad behavior and our huge fights out of the book.

I moved out and we didn’t really speak to each other for a long time, but it didn’t last. Years later, when I broke up with yet another boyfriend and had no apartment, no money and no prospects, Emily let me crash with her in her new place for weeks at a time. I was miserable, but the apartment was sunny, plus I got to hang out with Raffles, her cat who had also once been mine.

That summer her family took me along to the beach with them. Emily’s parents gave me relationship advice. Her father seemed concerned when I confessed that I’d gotten into a phase of listening to Astral Weeks on repeat while I sobbed every night. I was having a hard time finishing the novel I was working on, which would become SEPTEMBER GIRLS, but I got huge chunks of it done on that vacation, sitting on the balcony next to Emily as she wrote her own book. The next year I went on another vacation with the Goulds and wrote some more. Eventually I was done.

Emily’s first novel, FRIENDSHIP, will be published next year by FSG. She also co-owns the feminist e-bookstore EMILY BOOKS. (You should become a subscriber.) September Girls comes out next week. Emily and I will be talking about it at McNally Jackson on Tuesday, May 28th. I’m hoping she’ll read a little from Friendship too, even though it won’t be out for awhile.

I feel incredibly lucky that I get to do this with someone I’ve known and loved for so long and that we’ve both (sort of) accomplished what we set out to. I left a lot of things out of this.

I probably should have put this part at the top, considering it was originally the point of this:

Bennett Madison in conversation with Emily Gould

Tuesday, May 28th, 7pm

McNally Jackson 52 Prince Street, NYC

I really hope you come.

All the stuff Bennett left out will be revealed on the 28th.

"Behind that potted plant, sitting crosslegged and getting coffee stains on the books, I was in..."

Tue, 14 May 2013 16:11:31 -0400

“Behind that potted plant, sitting crosslegged and getting coffee stains on the books, I was in comparative queer nirvana. The GLBT sections at B&N and Borders, with their cheerfully tacky rainbows, were refreshing compared to the dour library, and those potted plants were a place I could hide reading piles of trashy lesbian romance novels and Advocate magazines (before I learned from my elder radicals that the Advocate was an assimilationist pile of shit and learned to avoid it accordingly.) Even being ghettoized by the bookstores was a step forward from the crypto-mystical Freudian references that the canon had thrown at me about the insidious perils of Lesbianism. Even the further commercialization of the gay movement was an improvement over invisibility.”

- Emily Books: “Her broken heart had something to do with the collapse of culture.”

Caty Simon on Empathy and being a “library lesbian”

tonight!!!!!!!

Mon, 13 May 2013 15:29:00 -0400

tonight!!!!!!!

emilybooks: Tonight! Moderated by Topside’s Tim Léger. To...

Mon, 13 May 2013 12:03:41 -0400

emilybooks:

Tonight! Moderated by Topside’s Tim Léger. To prepare us all for this conversation between Barbara Browning and Sarah Schulman, I’ll be posting relevant quotes all day here and over on the Emily Books twitter (if the quotes are short enough.)

elanormcinerney: Janet Malcolm | The Silent Woman Amazing...

Sun, 12 May 2013 11:17:43 -0400

elanormcinerney:

Janet Malcolm | The Silent Woman

Amazing book. Elanor, I hope you also read “Bitter Fame” along with it for best possible Silent Woman reading experience.

"When I was 28, I thought that making my living exclusively by writing was the goal of my life. Or if..."

Fri, 10 May 2013 13:13:00 -0400

“When I was 28, I thought that making my living exclusively by writing was the goal of my life. Or if not “exclusively,” primarily. Dimly, and without ever lingering in thought too long about the specifics, I imagined teaching, being a teacher almost exactly like my least-engaged college professors, the ones who showed up to workshop with a large coffee and some xeroxed Raymond Carver stories and then sat there for two hours while their students talked, sipping the coffee and sometimes nodding. The rest of my time would be spent alone in a library or a home office, some room with a computer, a desk, a chair. I would write novels and then, later in the day, make dinner. Maybe sometimes if I felt like it I’d accept an assignment from the kind of magazine no one really reads but that basically exists to pad the bank accounts of already-rich writers, travel and specialized beauty magazines, you know, ”[So and So’s] Wacky Adventures In Bangkok,” ”What [Whoever] Really Thinks Of Several Slightly Different Spa Treatments.” I’d slide on up into that echelon effortlessly. My inherent greatness would be recognized and one day I’d wake up and just find myself there. I mean I’d also have published novels, in this fantasy. The parts of this fantasy that pertained to my personal life were just as inchoate and illogical. I thought and maybe (cringe) even said out loud, “I’ll have my first baby after I finish my first novel.” As though those were two goals you could easily work towards simultaneously. As though they were not two distinct and unrelated life paths.”

- I wrote on my blog about how I’m not a complete idiot about my career as much anymore.

bennettmadison: Got sick of wishing that there was a gif of...

Tue, 07 May 2013 11:39:27 -0400

bennettmadison:

Got sick of wishing that there was a gif of this and realized I had no choice but to make it myself.

Nao and forever.

Whenever I’m angry I think of Dany.

Mon, 06 May 2013 11:26:22 -0400

Whenever I’m angry I think of Dany.

emilybooks: I googled “beach volleyball” to find an image for...

Thu, 02 May 2013 14:58:23 -0400

emilybooks:

I googled “beach volleyball” to find an image for this post. Guess what: people love butts.

Making Scenes by Adrienne Eisen, who now goes by the name Penelope Trunk, continues to be one of our most controversial Emily Books picks. It’s about beach volleyball, bulimia, incest, and finding yourself in books and writing. It’s the story of a young woman developing as an artist despite her best efforts to destroy herself. It’s nauseating in parts and very, very funny in other parts, sometimes on the same page. It’s on sale this month for 30% off with the code ADRIENNE at checkout.

Read it!

Where will you be on May 13, May 18, May 28, and June 6? Well,...

Thu, 02 May 2013 14:24:08 -0400

Where will you be on May 13, May 18, May 28, and June 6? Well, here is where I will be.