Venita Blackburn, Dead in Long Beach, California, Alta’s California Book Club's July book

Venita Blackburn, Dead in Long Beach, California, Alta’s California Book Club's July book

Venita Blackburn’s Dead in Long Beach, California has made me think (again but also in new ways) about how we deliberately and accidentally splinter our consciousness in the face of the unbearable. I wrote about the book for Alta’s California Book Club: I am wild about the books they choose and the smart, great essays people post and the wonderful live Zoom conversations. Also, I count myself very lucky to keep learning from Anita Felicelli, brilliant writer and brilliant, respectful editor. Here’s the beginning of my piece about the book:

In Venita Blackburn’s original, fierce first novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, Coral E. Brown, a graphic sci-fi novelist, finds her brother dead by suicide and splinters into separate selves. As she fends off grief and horror, the futuristic machines she’s invented to narrate her own novel step in to tell the story with tender, wry curiosity about humanity. As these machines say from the start, “We are responsible for telling this story, mostly because Coral cannot.” Of course, since the machines are her creation, she is telling the story, but obliquely, as a novelist does. They investigate her deep past and family and report on her thoughts and actions after her brother’s death. They draw conclusions about human relationships to destructiveness, debt, desire, minor fame, avoidance, denial, fan fic, and the devastating, insatiable human craving forMore.”

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Zadie Smith, On Beauty, and Jeanette Winterson, The Passion: Domesticity and Wildness

Zadie Smith, On Beauty, and Jeanette Winterson, The Passion: Domesticity and Wildness

Right now I’m teaching On Beauty and The Passion to an advanced novel-writing class and so have been rereading both novels. Maybe one of the reasons I love them so much is that they are about errant or unexpected love and that they each, in their own way, subvert domesticity. They remind me of my childhood family parties. Back when my parents were alive, we used to celebrate all the extended family birthdays, and every other occasion, with as many family members as we could gather, friends, and people invited on the spur of the moment. Not many of my father’s university colleagues were invited, even before the divorce, since according to my mother the mess of our family and chaos of the house embarrassed him. All the strange art covering the walls, the hoarded and treasured supplies, and then, at parties, fiery words and messy apologies, someone crying in a bathroom or hallway, people embracing afterward and assuring everyone of their love. Immersive family theater.

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