It’s been a long time since I’ve written one of these. I’m SORRY! I just have been busy not being online. I’ll explain later. But first!
JUNK DRAWER
Here are all things going on lately!
Book Update: The RIPE paperback is out on March 5! Happy to say it is an INDIE NEXT Paperback pick, so thank you booksellers! You can pre-order where ever find books are sold.
Tour Update: For most of March, I’ll be on paperback tour, so come out and say hi to me and some of my favorite people including Carmen Maria Machado, Karen Russell, Deb Olin Unferth, and more!
Art Update: For one of my holiday gifts, Tommy Pico created a mixed-media painting called “Sarah” and it was one of the best presents I’ve ever gotten. He’s also opened a print shop, so you can own it or one of his other paintings for his friends — they are all beautiful, but I’m partial to the Morgan.
Blurb Update: Otherwise, I’ve mostly been blurbing my face off. Highlights:
Kittentits by Holly Wilson, which reminded me of FIGHT NIGHT by Miriam Toews while standing completely on its own. Fun, lots of cursing, just a ride.
The Princess of 72nd Street by Elaine Kraf, a forthcoming reissue of a novel about a woman who calls her manic episodes “the radiance.” From the first two sentences, I was hooked: I am glad I have the radiance. This time I am wiser. STOP IT, ELAINE!
Old Lady Update: I’ve gotten into puzzles because I saw a sexy puzzle in the store one day so I will share with you these Piecework puzzles that are driving me insane, yet I cannot stop completing them. This one is vaguely sexual???
Nail Art Update: I’ve fallen into an obsession with polishes from abroad, where the real innovation is happening. Gentle Pink’s Hello Star line is a smooth dreamy cat eye that turns your nails into actual orbs. Hard to find in the states but worth it SORRY I HAD TO SHARE.
Innovative Foods Update: I don’t usually talk about this but one thing I love is limited edition flavored coffee creamers that taste like absolutely insane things like Peeps. Currently into the Coffeemate Limited Edition Mean Girls Creamer, which tastes like Pink Frosting. I’m sorry, this is just who I am.
Hollywood Update: Sometimes I get invited to things randomly and sometimes I have to say yes. So I went to the insane world premiere of the new Jennifer Lopez movie This is Me… Now. It was as star-studded as you would expect, and Jennifer Lopez, Ben Affleck, and Fat Joe sat like five rows in front of us at the Dolby Theater. The movie was surreal, almost existing in that liminal space that reminded me of parts of The Cell. It also didn’t take itself too seriously, and I had to respect her for that. The afterparty was this deluxe JLO experience with rose petals everywhere and JLO and Ben Affleck and Fat Joe and professional photo and video booths that delivered wedding-quality results. You have to hand it to her -- she knows how to throw a party. On the way out, we were handed T-shirts with JLO’s face on them. I died.
Dog Update: Keanu Reeves wearing angel wings pet my dog.
Love Update: I went to the Wedding of the Century with everyone I love -- Congrats Kristen & Kayla!
Big Banger Books on My Radar
Listen, I had to break this off into a special section because there is SO MUCH COMING OUT or making me obsessed right now. HERE YOU GO!
You Get What You Pay For by Morgan Parker: NEW MORGAN PARKER COME ON??? Pre-order it, get ready, this is going to be bananas!!!
The Silent Woman by Janet Malcolm: Examining all the land grabs made for the rights of Sylvia Plath’s works, journals, letters, and interactions with those around her, Malcolm builds a portrait of Plath in the absence of Plath. One of the most compelling things I’ve read recently, and I’m still thinking about Malcolm positing that fiction holds more truth than non-fiction because reality is subject to interpretation while in fiction, the writer decides what happened and that is the end of it.
An Artist’s Life by Elenora Antinova: This fictional memoir is written by the fictional alter ego of the artist Eleanor Antin. Antinova is a black ballerina who was never given her due -- and as she ages, she recounts her struggles in a book that blends her life and Antin’s. I loved this from the first three sentences: “You want me to begin at the beginning? Life never begins at the beginning. One day you find you are someplace like Paris but how you got there is not easy to say. One can always say on a boat. Yes, I came to Paris on a boat. In steerage, don’t you know.”
The Book of Love by Kelly Link: All my group chats are BUZZING about it and it’s on my stack as we speak.
Mother Doll by Katya Apekina: I just wrote an intro to the Recommended Reading excerpt that will go up on Electric Literature next week for this one and I’m excited for everyone to read Katya’s latest.
Headshot by Rita Bullwinkle: Always a huge fan of Rita and I can’t wait for this one.
If Only by Vidjis Hjorth: You know I’m a translated literature girlie through and through, and this is Hjorth’s most popular novel that’s never been translated into English before so I’m absolutely dying for this one.
Forces of Nature by Edward Steed: I have been super obsessed with this New Yorker cartoonist lately, and this hardcover collection of his work coming out has my name written all over it.
REAL LIFE UPDATE
Otherwise, it is winter in Los Angeles, which mostly means rain and floods. I don’t mind it -- it’s a cozy time in a city that otherwise is so blinded with sunshine that I feel the East Coast pressure to go outside and make the most of the weather every single day. It’s a specific guilt you are raised with if you are from the East Coast -- since the sun goes away for so long, once it returns, you’ve got no excuse to stay inside. It feels nice, then, when I’m basically forced to stay inside in LA, sometimes.
I’ve been thinking recently about the internet and screens. I found myself embroiled in some drama that I didn’t expect based on something I subtweeted. I genuinely don’t think anyone gives a fuck what I think about anything, so I was sort of surprised anything came of it at all. Lesson learned, I guess.
I’m less interested in that specific instance than exactly how and why it happened, and I mean that from a technology standpoint, the mechanisms in place that keep us coming back to these dying social media channels and the algorithms that turn everything gray into something black and white, something to choose a side about.
The internet is where we go to fight. And zooming out, it’s fascinating to me from a broader perspective.
Everyone knows we don’t need a 40 hour work week. But we needed something to do during the other 20 or so hours we were stuck at our desks. So it started with ecommerce -- we could spend the money we were making before we made it, whenever we wanted, between meetings and on lunch breaks, so boxes with surprises would arrive at our homes and maybe, for a moment, make all of the work feel worth it.
But that wasn’t enough -- we also needed emails and social media. And as our spending plateaued and we bored with the emails, the only thing left to do between meetings was argue. And so we do. And the technologies flatten us and our opinions, narrowing everything we’ve lived and experienced down into a single sentence that we can fight about.
It is natural then, to see a return to real life. As the value of social media decreases and the stress increases, why wouldn’t we begin to turn away?
After a year of book tour and press interviews, I find myself closing in before I have to go out on the road again. I feel lucky -- I had an incredible experience with a great publisher. But still, after so much talking and so many interviews, at the end I felt like I had given some portion of myself away that I couldn’t put a finger on. Or maybe it was that every part of me had been made so public that even I was sick of myself. No one is interesting enough to do 25 interviews about themselves. No one.
If you talk to any author after a book comes out, this is usually described as something similar to postpartum depression. It is that but it’s also partially the need to be “on” for such an extended period of time. There are days where your needs as a person have to be set aside so you can perform alongside the work as it enters the world. There are days you must sell yourself alongside the work, and your real self must get smaller, must shrink, must go without so that you can show up as your public self.
The last few months, I’ve found myself not wanting to write but to rest. To be in my real life, with my dog, with my friends, doing small stupid things. At Kristen Arnett’s wedding, Carmen and her partner Lauren took me to Target in a rented silver Dodge Charger and we bought silly sequined dresses and patterned floral shirts and earrings and lipgloss. There were no photos taken, there was no posing, no one had perfect hair or a perfect outfit. But it was one of my favorite moments.
Or the morning after the wedding, sitting by the pool with Kristen, catching up, having drinks with our legs in the water in the sun, the palm trees waving overhead, talking our bullshit and making each other laugh. And I thought to myself how perfect that was, how that was real friendship.
More and more, I am craving those moments -- the imperfect ones, the relationships that aren’t a photo op but are the real mess of life. When Keisha comes to my house while I’m in sweatpants and no makeup, when we eat dim sum and pet my dog who stinks a little because she needs a bath, when I take a walk with my neighbor Sami, or go to Alamo Drafthouse in yoga pants with Tommy.
I peck away at writing, at new projects, but more and more, there is a settling in, a nesting, a quiet away from all of the noise of the internet debates and the publicity and the need to Always Be Posting. More and more, there is just this, real life, beautiful and messy, crystal clear and calm, the everyday unfolding of existence before the next catastrophe, the next drama, the next book tour. I’m trying to stay here, in it, for as long as I can.
Love this, Sarah! Thanks for sharing 💜 So over social media lately and into the quietness of real life. I don't need all the arguing and noise.