Hi.
It’s been a little while. But that’s okay.
I started doing this For Fun which means that I wanted a place to go on self-indulgently about the mysteries I was reading and enjoying. Unfortunately, I forgot—as I so often do!—that actually I am constitutionally unable to do things For Fun and feel I must instead be consistent! Dedicated! In a word: perfect.
But it was never meant to be that, it was always meant to be very ad-hoc and at a little bit flighty. It was supposed to be … god, what’s the word. Joyful.
This to say that I skipped a few of these. And that is largely due to the fact that I could not make my brain retain a sentence of fiction that my eyes had read between the Christmas break and literally three days ago.
And I felt self-conscious about that. I think when books are a big part of our identity, it feels really bad to lose, even briefly, the ability to engage with them. But it happens to me, usually a few times a year, more times during COVID year, and that’s okay.
In the meantime, while my brain is in that anti-fiction gear, I chip away at the massive sprawling nonfiction doorstops I keep in my nightstand as I am willing myself to sleep. I’ve been reading The Power Broker for about two years, in fits and starts. It’s an excellent read! Also I can only absorb it while I can’t read fiction. I’m reading, also, Manufacturing Consent, which I always meant to do but never finally got around to. The introduction is like a thousand pages. It’s a lot of Book. Also: extremely readable under certain conditions.
Anyway. I finally read a whole novel. And then we all hunkered down for two days of nor’easter snow and I thought: if I were me, wouldn’t this be a lovely time to receive a newsletter telling me which novel I should read while I watch all this weather?
So here is a mystery for ya.
Amy Gentry’s new one, Bad Habits, is available for purchase tomorrow, 2/2. I read it in three bites and I loved it.
It opens at a hotel during a conference, that sort of suspended reality where you’re not where you live or work but you are in fact living and working. And then our narrator, Mac, recognizes someone from her past standing in the lobby as she’s about to take someone back up to her room to have some fun. The person she sees is her glittering blonde best friend from her youth, the one with the money and the class and all the shit that Mac could never get with straight-As and a clean permanent record.
Because no matter how good her grades might’ve been, Mac was (and is?) still a try-hard kid from a shit home, the daughter of an addict, a bottomless pit of career ambition desperate to reach escape velocity.
She’s also a people-pleaser, as are most of us from bad homes, for a while at least. We learn, from a young age, to manipulate our caregivers into providing what we need to stay alive, and then we struggle to spend our adult lives unlearning that vital survival skill once we don’t need it anymore. Then we have to learn to say no, a prospect that is terrifying and freeing but mostly terrifying.
When Mac starts saying no, it’s way too late for her. She’s in a grad program that is pretentious beyond all reason, struggling to keep her side job so she can send money home, drinking too much and studying too little. Her power couple professors are vultures pulling her apart for sport, all under the guise of helping her win a fellowship, and the more she fights against them, the more tangled she becomes.
It’s too much, of course, it always is. And when Mac snaps, she snaps hard.
This one hit me deep in the solar plexus, because, like Mac, I was considered a brilliant student. Like Mac, I had a mom with a painkiller addiction, so there was never any money. Like Mac, my friends were from socioeconomic tiers miles above my own, and none of them could ever have understood my reality. Like Mac, I could never manage to get both feet into a room before someone from my family came calling, fighting, accusing, or begging.
There are people who recognize those qualities in others—the desperation to reach escape velocity from bad circumstances, the need to be liked at all costs, the fear of doing things *ahem* imperfectly—and use them to their own ends. If you’re like me, you remember them from your 20s, and you see them differently now. They were your bosses, but they were also your professors or your friends or your fucking shitty family. They blur boundaries and test limits again and again, until the boundaries and limits fall away. They need you enough to crush you.
And look. Mac is not necessarily, to use a phrase I hate, a likable fucking character. Life turns her into a monster and calls her one. But what I love about this book is that there, flickering around the periphery of Mac’s vision of herself, are the people with the money, with the power. The people who see her as a mark, and use her to their ends. We can see them for who and what they are, even when she can’t.
Mac will have to deal with her past, as we all fucking do. She’ll have to deal with her present, too, which will involve a drunken confessional at the hotel bar to a friend she hasn’t seen in a decade, while the hotel around her breathes and moves and watches. She’ll have to deal with how the two keep intersecting again and again, because she can’t escape her past, not really. And the darker she gets, the more you’ll like being in her head.
Tight pacing, some absolutely devastating academia snark (several LOLs from me), a twisty psychological nightmare, a little bit like Secret History on adderall if there had been a poor person around, and generally a ton of fun.
Buy Bad Habits here. Oh, and get her first book while you’re at it.
Cooking: I made the cinnamon rolls, they are so good i wept.
Listening: Jake Hanrahan’s podcast Q Clearance is smart and informative and also you will want to have sex with his voice
Fairy Tale: a story about a seven inch dwarf with a seven foot beard
Watching: Marian Keyes just did a series of Instagram lives about novel writing that were so absolutely kind and generous and lovely that I can’t stop thinking about them. You can watch them all on her IG.
Drinking: Wölffer’s Dry Rosé Cider is the only cider i can actually drink because it tastes more like a wine than a cider, anyway, they came out recently with a “botanical” version that is, just, out of this goddamn world with some gin (and lime and bitters and maybe a splash of Campari) in it. Fuck, I’m gonna go have one.
Be back sooner next time, probably.