love, love, love 👼💖

Today is Valentine’s Day! And, though that means love is the topic du jour, I wanted to share some books that — if you just so happen to not be in a relationship — will make you happy you are single and alone on this day of coupledom.

TRUST BY DOMENICO STARNONE*: Our narrator spends the entirety of his adult life married—has two kids and a successful career—but his thoughts are consumed by his former flame and the secret he told her.

THE DAYS OF ABANDONMENT BY ELENA FERRANTE: The novel begins with Olga’s husband leaving her for a younger woman. In the wake of this betrayal, Olga becomes a wraith of a woman. She tries to care for her two children and the dog that belonged to her husband but she is descending into madness.

EX-WIFE BY URSULA PARROTT: Patricia’s husband is a violent drunk who throws her through a glass door in a fit of rage. Even once she’s divorced him, she is still plagued by his memory and the prospective of a lifetime alone.

MY HUSBAND BY MAUD VENTURA: Our unnamed narrator is obsessed with her husband. She even keeps a diary noting his behavior, the good and the bad, which she uses to guide her responses to him. This is a trippy novel about the inherent power play in marriage.

THE BIRTHDAY PARTY BY LAURENT MAUVIGNIER: Though this book is about a birthday celebration and murder. It is also a story about the baggage one brings into a marriage.

THE PUMPKIN EATER BY PENELOPE MORTIMER: The narrator of this novel is a British housewife, obsessed with being pregnant, and saddled with a philandering husband.

RUN RIVER BY JOAN DIDION: This novel (that I’m still in the middle of) is focused on the marriage of Lily and Everett. Their bond is strained with the weight of Lily’s various dalliances. In the summer of 1959, all this tension comes to blow with a murder. Who said love is easy?

LAST MINUTE, AND DEFINITELY WILL ARRIVE LATE VALENTINE’S DAY GIFTS FOR A PAL OR BELOVED OR YOU:

• For those who are hooked on phonics, how about a Girl Parts tee or sweatshirt?

• Can’t go wrong with some Tabi pumps. I’m partial to the grey.

• What about a striped Tekla bathrobe or a lighter robe from Hanro.

• Don’t forget a bottle of Serge Lutens’ La Fille de Berlin with its top notes of rose and geranium.

• Who wouldn’t be charmed by a sticker pack of hearts?

• Finally, what about a cream knit pullover with heart detailing from Free People?

RECENT READS:

• The social space has been changing. It’s not social media because there’s nothing social happening on these apps. This article by The Atlantic talks about the end of the social network. Personally, I think FB should just pack it up. It’s time is over.

  • Fun stats: “Social apps take up nearly half of mobile screen time, which in turn consumes more than a quarter of waking hours. They gobble up 40% more time than they did in 2020, as the world has gone online…Meanwhile, people are posting less. The share of Americans who say they enjoy documenting their life online has fallen from 40% to 28% since 2020.”

• In the wake of last week’s London/Russia article by Patrick Radden Keefe, I read another Russia article by Keefe! This one, from 2022, looks at how the oligarchs bought London. The article also discusses how libel suits in the UK make it possible for Russian parties to sue publishers, journalists, authors, etc. From that article, I then found this video about Chukotka - the most remote region of Russia before watching this video about the closed city Norilsk where acid rain falls from the sky and the trees have withered and died.

• The Swans are having a moment courtesy of a new season of The Feud. Personally, I’m looking for a biography on magazine editor and socialite Babe Paley but I’m not having much luck. However, I did find this Vanity Fair article from 1990 which gives a good overview of her life and marriages.

  • I find this photo of her to be really charming.

  • Did you know her face was reconstructed in 1934 after a car accident when she was 19?

  • Diana Vreeland described Babe and her two elder sisters as having “the sort of minds that were curious about beautiful things.”

• Meanwhile, this New Yorker article tackles the Swans and Capote dynamic while primarily criticizing the show for being a boring “simulacrum of a scandal.”

• Having finished Rent Boy by Gary Indiana, I read this interview with the author about his memoir describing his experiences in California and Havana. I found a lot of interesting quotes and ideas about writing, love, and life in the interview, so you will find all of them below:

  • “At the same time, I discovered that writing a memoir, if you’re actually a writer, involves formal and aesthetic choices that make it impossible to tell ‘the whole truth and nothing but the truth’, as if you were giving sworn testimony in court. Court transcripts make pretty dull reading.”

  • “A good novel is a thousand times more revealing than a memoir.”

  • "But people who keep dredging up what a great place New York was thirty or forty years ago should just shut up and open a funeral home, where nobody minds if you talk about dead people all day.

  • "I made the film as beautiful as possible, because beauty is quite often lethal.

  • “I’m often interested in seeing how much I can remove from a story and still be able to tell it.”

  • “With the memoir, I simply took the attitude that I had no obligation to share everything about my life with some imaginary reader. This was no simple realisation, it took me a while to overcome the idea that I had to be in a literary confessional. I wanted only to be entertaining and brisk and thoughtful without oversimplifying anything. As far as withholding goes, I think that could only sound like an accusation in an era when people habitually spill their guts about everything, whether it’s of any interest or not. Writing is as much about withholding as it is about telling. Believe me, you do not want a whole generation of Knausgaards.”

  • “My whole life is not of interest, not in any blow-by-blow recounting of it, and neither is anyone else’s.”

  • “I don’t know. I mean, we’re all very conditioned. Especially now, with gay marriage, people condition themselves into certain bourgeois expectations: how you live with another person, how you can be with another person, how exclusive that has to be, how circumscribed it has to be. People put all these rules on relationships. Intellectually, I just find that all to be asphyxiating.”

  • “I mean, it’s good to be with someone to help pay the mortgage, but the rest of it is either meaningless or pointlessly oppressive. It’s artificial. It’s all just consumerism; people call consumerism love. Jealousy is real enough, but not everybody has to feel it all the time, unless they’re brainwashed.”

  • “Mind you, there’s no such thing as a normal artist, we all just perform our pathologies in different ways. Typically, an obsessive writer writes the same novel every time, performs the same ritualised treatment of the same basic material, sometimes the result is good, sometimes it’s terrible. I’m not that kind of writer.”

*Not monetized.