The First Bad Man by Miranda July (Scribner, 2015)
You may know of Miranda July by the films she wrote, directed, and starred in: Me and You and Everyone You Know and The Future. Though she has published books of short fiction and non-fiction, The First Bad Man is her debut novel and my first exposure to her work. Despite not having seen either of her films or read her previous books yet, I was familiar with July’s work, so I knew what I was getting myself into when I picked her novel off the shelf and bought it without reading the synopsis.
July’s writing tone matches the personality of her protagonist and narrator Cheryl: quirky, observant, and undeniably weird. Cheryl is a middle-aged woman who works at a self-defense fitness DVD company. She suffers from globus hystericus, an anxiety-induced lump in her throat that makes it difficult to swallow, and she seeks therapy to resolve the issue. Naturally, other issues arise. Cheryl is in love with an older coworker, Phillip, who seeks her blessing to begin a romantic relationship with an underaged girl. On top of that, her married bosses forced her to host their 20-year-old daughter Clee, who becomes physically violent with Cheryl.
Woefully in love with a man who loves a 16-year-old and unable to stand up to her bosses, others would perceive Cheryl as easy to walk all over. In actuality, she is running an intricate system to keep order in her life and combat feeling “down in the dumps,” and July’s relatable tone of voice makes the reader feel like her humble protagonist’s unusual state of mind is charming. I found myself often relating to the sentiment behind Cheryl’s thoughts and actions, even as they seemed to spiral out of control.
It doesn’t have a name—I just call it my system. Let’s say a person is down in the dumps, or maybe just lazy, and they stop doing the dishes. Soon the dishes are piled sky-high and it seems impossible to even clean a fork. So the person starts eating with dirty forks out of dirty dishes and this makes the person feel like a homeless person. So they stop bathing. Which makes it hard to leave the house. The person begins to throw trash anywhere and pee in cups because they’re closer to the bed. We’ve all been this person, so there is no place for judgment, but the solution is simple:
Fewer dishes.
They can’t pile up if you don’t have them. This is the main thing, but also:
Stop moving things around.
How much time do you spend moving objects to and fro? Before you move something far from where it lives, remember you’re eventually going to have to carry it back to its place—is it really worth it? Can’t you read the book standing right next to the shelf with your finger holding the spot you’ll put it back into? Or better yet: don’t read it. And if you are carrying an object, make sure to pick up anything that might need to go in the same direction. This is called carpooling.
It goes on. Cheryl claims we all do most of these things some of the time, and with her system you do all of them all of the time. The system gives her a smoother living experience, “none of the snags and snafus that life is so famous for.”While you may relate to some of these time-saving tactics, they quickly get out of hand. July writes an exaggerated version of life, to emphasize the oddities we have to put up with, or openly embrace.
July highlights the peculiar relationships in The First Bad Man by having her characters act uncharacteristically for their age. A sixteen-year-old girl and a man in his sixties have romantic and sexual feelings for each other, yet they seek forty-three-year-old Cheryl as their moral compass. While waiting for Cheryl’s blessing to consummate with an underaged girl, Phillip sends her confessions—text messages in all caps describing what he’s most eager to do with the girl, or revealing where they’ve crossed their latest line. These perverse messages interrupt both Cheryl and the reader, as there is rarely a time that they’re welcomed or expected.
Meanwhile Cheryl cannot communicate openly with her twenty-year-old houseguest who never bathes, and when Clee begins attacking her, it actually improves their relationship. They only get along when they’re fighting; otherwise they simply ignore each other. With encouragement from her therapist, Cheryl starts fighting back, and her health improves. She watches her company’s self defense videos to learn effective methods, and eventually she and Clee act out scenarios from the videos. Clee calls herself a “misogynist” and shines in the dominant roles, while Cheryl throws fake punches in response.
Whenever they’re done fighting, Cheryl feels immensely better, and July’s writing helps you feel relieved and oddly proud of Cheryl. She’s not anxious; her globus is relaxed. She becomes a little bolder, but also obsessive over Clee and the violence. She doesn’t seem to understand her relationship with Clee any better than I did. As soon as Cheryl seems to have a handle on things, she starts feeling and thinking what Phillip feels about the sixteen-year-old girl. She insists she’s feeling his feelings, and she even narrates as Phillip, imagining his sexual encounters with the girl.
With so few characters feeling so much passion, it’s not long before the reading becomes uncomfortable. July writes bluntly about Cheryl peeing in cups due to laziness and compounds it with images of Clee’s dirty, smelly feet or the therapist’s pile of Chinese takeout containers filled with urine and feces because the office has no bathroom. The vivid descriptions of sex, violence, and bodily functions begin to feel superfluous, but that’s likely what July intended: to show the “snags and snafus” of life with characters her experience nothing but constant absurdity. It’s not all comfortable, or explainable, or understandable; sometimes life is just weird and gross. July’s funny writing and strange characters offer an interesting perspective on what we all consider to be normal.
Which books have you read that made you uneasy or turned societal norms upside down?
Can’t and Won’t by Lydia Davis (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2014)
Lydia Davis is a master of short fiction. Whether it’s ten words long or two hundred, Davis packs emotions, connections, and an astute reflection on the human condition into each and every story in this collection. Her writing is so captivating and evokes so much emotion that I found myself turning each page with fervor, eager for more, even though it’d be an entirely different story with a different narrator, setting, and point of view.
The stories began to bleed together, but not because they were indistinguishable; they flowed well back to back. It was a fun challenge to discover the next new protagonist and plot with each page turn. Just as often as I’d quickly turn the page for a new story, I’d also stop and pause, dropping the open book onto my lap and gazing out the bus window during my snowy commute, contemplating the last brief story.
Davis’s observations and character struggles are deceptively simple. Flash fiction is quick and easy to read and comprehend, but, when done well, the story sneaks up on the reader. Whether it reminds you of a personal experience or makes you look around and imagine the lives of strangers, these few well-organized words can make an impact. The best part of reading flash fiction is that you can easily read the piece again, two or three times in a row, to soak up the depth of emotion that flows in such a shallow, short story, as in “The Dog Hair”:
The dog is gone. We miss him. When the doorbell rings, no one barks. When we come home late, there is no one waiting for us. We still find his white hairs here and there around the house and on our clothes. We pick them up. We should throw them away. But they are all we have left of him. We don’t throw them away. We have a wild hope—if only we could collect enough of them, we will be able to put the dog back together again.
Of course, not all of the stories in Can’t and Won’t qualify as “flash” fiction. Some of them are four, even five pages long. I am overwhelmed by the amount of information Davis crams into a single page, inspiring the reader to wonder more about the life of the narrator. However, it is just as important to consider what isn’t written. What she omits is just as important as what she leaves on the page, especially when it comes down to telling an entire story in one page.
For example, “On the Train” is ten sentences, four characters, and one setting. There aren’t many descriptive words about the characters, but I instantly relate to them, because I know the sudden bond that connects strangers experiencing something together.
We are united, he and I, though strangers, against the two women in front of us talking so steadily and audibly across the aisle to each other. Bad manners. We frown.
Later in the journey I look over at him (across the aisle) and he is picking his nose. As for me, I am dripping tomato from my sandwich onto my newspaper. Bad habits.
I would not report this if I were the one picking my nose. I look again and he is still at it.
As for the women, they are now sitting together side by side and quietly reading, clean and tidy, one a magazine, one a book. Blameless.
It seems unfair to describe fiction writing as “vague”, but Davis uses it to her advantage. Her characters become more relatable the less we know about them. We see just a small moment of their grand lives, and it makes us dig internally for the rest of that story. Even when it’s just a snippet, simply an observation by the character, as in “Circular Story”:
On Wednesday mornings early there is always a racket out there on the road. It wakes me up and I always wonder what it is. It is always the trash collection truck picking up the trash. The truck comes every Wednesday morning early. It always wakes me up. I always wonder what it is.
In not so many words, Davis describes the feeling of being jolted awake, and for a moment not knowing why, and then calmly remembering the pattern. I, too, do this every Wednesday when the trash collection truck comes.
Throughout the collection, some of the stories are inspired by dreams. They may be something Davis herself has dreamt, or she heard the recount from a friend. Either way, they provide a surprising jolt of imagination amongst all the day-to-day observations and mundane reality that Davis captures so well.
She also works as a translator and has translated many of Gustave Flaubert’s works from French. Sprinkled throughout are stories inspired by Flaubert’s letters. It’s difficult to say how much is translated and how much is original content by Davis, but I found myself not caring. Nestled between some simple, modern flash fiction by Davis, you’ll find a story about somebody in the 19th century, and their challenges and wishes are not far off from our own today.
That’s the magic of Davis’s writing. No matter how brief, whether real or imagined, each story is relatable and could be pulled from an entire novel on that subject. When I finished reading a story, I found myself wanting more, but I was mainly impressed that she didn’t need to provide more to the story to keep my interest. I can just wonder, and sometimes that’s exactly what I want to do after reading.
Which short stories make you wonder, eager for more? Any writers inspire you to keep it concise?
A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition by Ernest Hemingway (Scribner, 2009)
Ernest Hemingway never gave a title to the memoir he wrote about his life in Paris in the 1920s. He hadn’t finished the book before he died, and it was published posthumously with the help of his wife Mary. However, the title was chosen from something Hemingway had once said: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”
Paris stayed with Hemingway long after he left it. Though he very well may have thought about or planned to write a memoir about his years in Paris in the 1920s, he didn’t start what he temporarily called “The Paris Sketches” until 1957, after having lived in Key West, Cuba, Spain, and throughout Europe during WWII. In A Moveable Feast he writes about Michigan while he’s living in Paris, and he finally writes about life in Paris once he’s been immersed in many other places. I had a similar experience when it came to reading the memoir.
When I was studying abroad in Paris, I bought this copy of A Moveable Feast without knowing it was the restored edition, or understanding what that meant, (read the introduction—it’s worth it). I said to myself, “I am going to buy A Moveable Feast at Shakespeare & Company in Paris.” And that’s exactly what I did, but I didn’t even open its pages until two years after I’d last been in Paris, just a few weeks ago. I was glad that I waited, because though I made a point to visit many of the places Hemingway has written about, it was rewarding to visit Paris through his own eyes.
Mary Hemingway and an editor at Scribner gathered the manuscript as it was in 1960, heavily edited it, and published the book in 1964. However, Hemingway continued to work on the manuscript until the spring of 1961, and for the first time in 2009 it was published as Hemingway had last left it, including some unfinished and never-before-published chapters.
Though I never read the non-restored edition, I highly recommend picking up a copy and exploring Hemingway’s memories as he last left them. As a writer, he often struggled with finalizing his work, and images of his manuscript show how many meticulous changes he has made in just a brief paragraph.
Hemingway wrote a forward to the chapter about F. Scott Fitzgerald, and here are some examples of its earlier versions:
The forward in the first edition includes the lines crossed out by Hemingway. The restored edition is published with Hemingway’s own changes made:
His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think. He was flying again and I was lucky to meet him just after a good time in his writing if not a good one in his life.
Of course there is not much wrong with the original version of the forward, but writing is revising, isn’t it? And Hemingway revised his writing beyond what we’ve seen in previous publications of the text. When the first edition was published posthumously, the second person point of view was removed from a handful of pages, and his reflections on his first marriage and divorce were cut by his fourth wife Mary. The heart of the story, the tales of the Lost Generation, and the sentiment of being a struggling writer in Paris were never lost in publication, but I found that some of my favorite moments while reading were those that were unique to the restored edition.
When written in the second person, I felt that Hemingway’s thoughts were speaking directly to the reader, inviting them to join him in Paris. It was a delightfully nerdy as watching Midnight in Paris for the first time, or going to Brasserie Lipp and ordering the exact same meal that Hemingway ate and wrote about in A Moveable Feast (cevelas, sausage smothered in mustard, and a cold beer). The second person point of view brought me back there. The book begins:
Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over. You would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe.
Who, me? You need me to shut the windows? I know I’m an absurd romantic when it comes to Paris, and maybe I’m just a sucker for effective run-on sentences, but I’m starting to feel the cold wind he describes.
Whether you’ve been to Paris or not, I urge you to experience it with Hemingway in hand.
What do you think of posthumous publications, such as this? And the juxtaposition of an author’s original notes, and restored editions? There’s a conversation that happens there, as we’ve seen here. What does that mean to you?
Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on love and life from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed (Vintage Books, 2012)
Have you ever read a book that made you feel as though the author had written it specifically for you—or the narrator was speaking directly to you—because of how much it meant to you, even on the first read? When I picked up Tiny Beautiful Things for the first time, even after multiple recommendations and the way I felt after reading Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild, I wasn’t expecting to be moved this much. The unknown pages within told me the exact words that I needed to hear at that precise moment in my life, in order to better myself and feel inspired.
For about two years, Cheryl Strayed took on the anonymous persona of Sugar for an advice column on The Rumpus called Dear Sugar. Readers poured their hearts out to her and confessed their deepest secrets, seeking advice on love, relationships, loss, debt, betrayal, jealousy, family, acceptance, and forgiveness. Strayed responds with warmth, understanding, and sometimes snarky honesty to her “sweet peas” and “honey buns,” as she calls them. In 2012, Strayed revealed herself as Sugar, and shortly thereafter Vintage Books published Tiny Beautiful Things, a compilation of those letters and responses.
A recent divorcée in her mid-fifties, who calls herself Wanting, writes seeking a solution for her mixture of desire and fear when it comes to dating and sleeping with men again with her “droopy” and aging body. Sugar tells her:
You have to find a way to inhabit your body while enacting your deepest desires. You have to be brave enough to build the intimacy you deserve… This will require some courage, Wanting, but courage is a vital piece of any well-lived life. I understand why you’re afraid. I don’t mean to diminish the enormity of what’s recently ended and what now will begin, but I do intend to say to you very clearly that this is not the moment to wilt into the underbrush of your insecurities. You’ve earned the right to grow.
Sugar leaves the woman hopeful at the end of her letter:
I know as women we’re constantly being scorched by the relentless porno/Hollywood beauty blowtorch, but in my real life I’ve found that the men worth fucking are far more good-natured about the female body in its varied forms than is generally acknowledged. “Naked and smiling” is one male friend’s only requirement for a lover. Perhaps it’s because men are people with bodies full of fears and insecurities and short-comings of their own. Find one of them. One who makes you think and laugh and come. Invite him into the tiny revolution in your beautiful new world.
While being understanding, Sugar turns every topic, question, and concern on its head. Sometimes it feels like she’s talking directly to you, but other times she might be talking about you, opening your eyes to your own faults, goals, questions, and concerns. (Suddenly I have eight wildly different things that I immediately need Sugar’s advice on.) Readers can relate, on a small scale yet also in some big ways, to many of those who wrote to Sugar seeking advice. She comforts you and reassures you, and you’re in good company with the anonymous letter writers, but then she shares stories of her own survival to put things into perspective for you. The collection of columns has the heartfelt honesty of a memoir.
The shortest letter written to Sugar reads:
WTF, WTF, WTF?
I’m asking this question as it applies to everything every day.
And her response, with a blunt recount of sexual abuse by her grandfather when she was a child (and how she rose above the negative experience) culminates in this bit of advice:
That question does not apply to “everything every day.” If it does, you’re wasting your life. If it does, you’re a lazy coward, and you are not a lazy coward.
Ask better questions, sweet pea. The fuck is your life. Answer it.
Yours,
Sugar
Anonymous advice columns remind me of this quote I’ve heard: “If we threw all our problems in a pile and saw everybody else’s, we’d want ours back.” Reading these columns can make us feel that we’re not alone, but it can also open our eyes to how we can manage our problems, and how we might be better suited to manage our own and we’d rather not have anyone else’s problems. Perhaps that’s why I found this book in the self-help section of Magers and Quinn. It’s definitely why Tiny Beautiful Things has helped me process some things I’d been dwelling on.
At the same time, the universal theme throughout Sugar’s column is simple, but huge, complex, diverse, scary, amazing, humbling, and wonderful: love. The root of all her advice is to love. Love yourself, let yourself fall in love, “be brave enough to break your own heart,” tell people you love that you love them, and share, spread, enjoy, embrace love. To love is her mantra. And after reading the haunting, tragic stories of her past and the struggles she has overcome completely alone, her confidence and adoration of love is inspiring. It made me want to love a little bit more. (Okay, a lot more.)
It is a rare and special feeling when a book can both fill you up and cleanse you. While reading (on 15-minute breaks at work, on the bus, in line at the bank, because I couldn’t put it down), I addressed some of the burning questions I wanted to ask Sugar, and I found the most comforting solution to many of my problems: love. Be kind, be true, be thankful, and love.
Reading Tiny Beautiful Things was so eye-opening, because I’ve been the teenager who’s worried about her friends but is afraid of interfering. The college grad in her twenties who thinks her student loan debt defines her? Yeah, I can relate. The one fighting depression? I feel your pain. And that writer who feels a book within her but is terrified at the daunting task of writing? I understand how overwhelming and writer’s block-inducing that feeling is. But we can all take Sugar’s advice:
Write like a motherfucker.
What books have moved you? Which narrators seem to speak directly to you when you’re reading? Do you write like a motherfucker?
