Wow, hi, it’s been a minute. (Please know that I’m clenching every muscle in my body trying not to say “I’m sorry” about that.)
The big news is that I have bangs now.
Just kidding. Well, the bangs are real, but the actual big news is that I don’t live in New York City anymore. I live in the Hudson Valley, which is something I think I’ve always wanted but have always been afraid to admit to myself.
As a kid I spent a lot of summers here. Formative early summers, bug-bitten and sunburnt, with my cousins and aunts, and with my mother before things really went south with her. We’d stay with my great aunt, my grandmother’s twin sister, who lived with her quasi-cult in a big old hotel that sat on the bleeding edge of a huge lake surrounded by woods and a whole lot of nothing else. Everything up here felt huge. Mountains and jagged rocks that jutted into twisty highways and enormous birds that swooped lazily above it all. It seemed magical and ancient here.
But we don’t live in the boonies, Alan and me. We’re townies now, which is also something I’ve always wanted. Groceries I can walk to, a quiet dive where I can read at the bar on a rainy afternoon, a movie theater that only shows one film. A flea market on Sundays, weather permitting. That kind of thing. It’s only been a month, but we’re so happy.
Being happy, I’ve been reading more, which is typical. And now that the move is done and dusted, I’m ready to get back to writing. And and, I love using this little newsletter as a warm-up. It gets the story machine in my brain whirring. Whirr, whirr.
All this in mind, I want to tell you about something slightly different from the normal BaM fare. For context: The novel I’ve been working on for the past *mumbles* is set up here by the Catskills, in the sticky mid-summer, by the hotel on the lake, with the cult. It’s about belief and loneliness and lies and generational secrets and how teen girls take their responsibilities VERY seriously because, as the brilliant Sarah Marshall once quipped, they’re the oldest they’ve ever been.
I read one recently that hit those notes so beautifully I was captivated, and also very jealous.
It’s called God Spare the Girls, by Kelsey McKinney, a writer and co-founder of Defector Media. It’s not a mystery, per say, but it’s mysterious, as teen girls always are. It’s got that propulsive momentum that I look for in a good mystery, that sense that the car you’re in is speeding towards a brick wall and nobody is going to get out of it whole.
Caroline and Abigail are sisters. Abigail is the shining golden older sister with the gorgeous voice, the perfect daughter. Caroline is younger, rougher at the edges, uncertain. Messier.
It is revealed that their father—famous head Evangelical preacher and man respected and trusted by the whole town—has had an affair with Caroline’s fourth grade teacher. Caroline realizes she knows more about that than she thought. More, at least, than her father has admitted.
To escape the fallout, Caroline and Abigail head to the family’s ranch to wait out the summer, and each other, as Abigail’s wedding looms and secrets tumble out—about their father, about Abigail, and, whether she likes it or not, about Caroline herself.
It asks so many questions that I’ve been trying to ask myself, about why and how familial bonds are worth saving, repairing. What’s it like when you love someone so rabidly you kind of hate them also, fear them? What happens when all the scaffolding you built around your idea of who you are falls away at once? Does that freefall ever end?
It’s also about how summer scrambles your brain and turns anxiety into a bleary molasses drip. It’s about small towns, and what it’s like when everybody knows you, or thinks they do. It’s about sex and what it means, and guilt and shame and the mysterious pull of belief, and so much more.
I was mesmerized and I can’t stop thinking about it. I never wanted it to end. And despite not being a typical mystery-mystery, I think you’d like it too.
Buy God Spare the Girls here. Or, if you like, from my new lil neighborhood bookshop.
Reading: The Egregious Lie Americans Tell Themselves
Drinking: Everything I can find in the wild from Great Notion because I think they might be the best beers I have ever tasted
Cooking: my favorite strawberry pie. Truly, it is unparalleled. Go ahead and blow your mind.
Fairy tale: Oh u like babies? How about HUNDREDS OF BABIES
Thinking about: how this kid whose note i found in a used book absolutely definitely climbed on that car again