The Things You Do For Love

We all get a little stupid when hit with the arrows of Cupid.

The following is a brief and non-exhaustive list of the crazy things I’ve done for love:

• Sneaked to Chicago to attend a wedding with a guy who definitely didn’t care if I were there or not.

• Claimed falsely that Andrew Sullivan was an insightful and important philosophical beacon in my life because I guy I liked loved him.

• Got a tattoo on a dare to prove I was cool to someone who was a horrible match for me.

• Lived with a Virgo.

• Declined to go abroad in college to not miss out on anything in a relationship.

• Learned that someone left a first date I had with them and stole a car, and then agreed to a second date with said person.

• Continued seeing someone who said he “never pooped because Jackie O. never pooped” on our first date.

• Drove from Philadelphia to Washington DC for a pupusa date.

• Bought a house and got married.

We’ve all done crazy things for love, and that’s an accidental through-line of the past couple wonderful novels I just read. Be a love, and see below.

THE LIBRARY IS OPEN

Biography of X

by Catherine Lacey (2023)

Picture it. America. An alternative historical period mapped onto the 50s through 90s we thought we previously knew. This novel asks: What if the beleaguered wife character in Tár were writing a corrective biography of her wife after her death and dug up a bunch of secrets she’d never known? And also, the deep south seceded in 1945 to become its own Christofascist nation and put up a wall to keep people out?

Our put-upon heroine, a self-admitted overdramatic queer woman, is confronted with the fact that a biographer has released an unauthorized biography of her recently deceased wife, and she sets out the correct the record to show the genius that X was and to preserve her legacy as an artist. X, whose many names and lives over the years are revealed through her widow’s research, was a prodigious artist across all media. She wrote novels under pseudonyms, made physical art by hand, and even dabbled in music. Like many geniuses is pop culture, X was also a bit of a creep, a full blown narcissist, and certainly had a tenuous relationship with the truth. Also happening: David Bowie and other famous folks make appearances, Emma Goldman gets assassinated after creating a set of values on which the North bases its government, and gay marriage has been legal in the North for decades.

As her history is taken apart and put back together by the woman that loved her most (maybe), cruel deceptions, obfuscations, and revolutions abound. All the while, in the present day, alternative 90s when the novel is set, the once-seceded South has entered into an uneasy reunification with the North, and the ripple effects are felt everywhere.

If this novel description feels a little bananas, it’s because it is. There’s so much going on in here, and I can’t wait for someone to adapt this into a mini-series. I loved it.

Read it if you like: alternative histories, lesbian love stories, complicated legacies, post-WW2 culture, Underground Airlines.

Confidence

by Rafael Frumkin (2023)

I love a scam. If you make a low budget documentary for a streamer about a scam, I’m going to watch it. If you build a semi-prestigious mini-series event around that same scam, I’m going to watch it too. If you throw a music festival on a beautiful island, I simply will not go because I have watched enough cautionary tales to know what’s up. If you introduce me to a character like Elizabeth Holmes, I am absolutely going to walk around the house speaking in her voice. My main, and maybe only, critique of the scam entertainment industrial complex is that it could be gayer.

In steps Confidence, where we meet Ezra, a shorter than average juvenile delinquent who is legally blind, and, don’t tell Tyra Banks, gap-toothed. He comes from humble means, and things are not going too well for him. That is, until he meets Orson at his juvenile delinquency corrective behavior camp. Orson is, to Ezra, everything that he isn’t: built like a Greek god, absurdly handsome, and having an easy way about him that people love to be around. Ezra has no idea why Orson has taken a shine to him, but together they discover they make a good team swindling others out of their money. We travel with them over the years as their small scam at camp grows into something of Theranos proportions.

The scam part is fun, but the more fascinating aspect of the novel is the complicted relationship between Ezra and Orson, sometimes lovers to always business partners, and the things we let people get away with when you’re in love with them - particularly how gay men prize aesthetic beauty over soulful content way too often.

Read it if you like: scams!, complicated queer love stories, basically anything on Hulu, underdogs, Going Clear.

I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself

by Marisa Crane (2023)

First, I have to let you know that the whole time I was reading this lovely novel, I had Selena Gomez’s “I Keep My Hands to Myself” going through my head. Please don’t let that deter you from reading this one because it’s great!

The United States has done away with term limits for presidents and established a Department of Balance to help curb crime with radical law enforcement policies. If you commit a crime that harms another person, you’re given an extra shadow that follows you around to remind you of your sin. This way, others can also see that you’re a Shadester. The new scarlet A is a rogue shadow.

Kris, a Shadester for years, is a recent widow and mother, gaining those statuses simultaneously. Her new child is also born with an extra shadow, making the prospect of single-motherhood all the more challenging. She’s faced with navigating the world built to discriminate against her and an extended family who maybe never understood her.

This novel is a melancholy little miracle about resistance. It’s wise and queer and sweet and meditative and thrilling in parts. I don’t want to give too much away, but like most good sci-fi experiences, it asks more questions than it answers and maps perfectly onto our current realities with disconcerting relevance.

Read it if you like: dystopian futures, queer relationships, Let’s go lesbians!, parenthood tales, resisting in a weary world.

LIGHTNING ROUND

If alternate histories intrigue you, maybe you’ll want to read more about a South where slavery never was abolished.

If you haven’t gotten enough of lebsians from this newsletter - and who ever could?! - you’ll want to dig into this lovely tale from Uruguay.

If, like me, you’re heartbroken that life keeps stacking the deck against protecting trans youth, I’d recommend this novel about one family’s journey in doing just that.

Until next time…happy reading!