All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews

Hardcover, read summer 2014 and August 2018

This book helped me through the worst time of my life during the summer of 2018, and inspired me to start bringing Sad Girls Book Club to life. Books can save lives, bring people together, inspire. And bookish people are kind, compassionate, empathetic, soft-edged people in a very hard-edged world. I want to help bookish folks find solidarity and comfort in each other the way we find it in books. Keep your edges soft! You will change the world that way.

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride

Hardcover, read July 2016

It took me about two months to finish this book, because I had to take a significant break in the middle--work, life, whatever.

“And he came, this grandfather, like bolts from the blue. Not a bit of warning just a rap on the door. No one expects the Spanish inquisition late Saturday afternoon. Would they drive four hundred miles without checking you’d be in? Be he did because you wouldn’t dare not. Not be in, indeed.”

I tore through the first 60 pages in a weekend. I was at a work conference spending a lot of time waiting between panels, and we were on the beach! So I read of course, and got beautifully sunburnt of course. It was an incredible experience: the writing is impossible, unreal. It’s not sentences. It’s hardly English in places. It rejects any and all grammar, and takes a great deal of mental and emotional energy to penetrate, but when you do, you’re there. You’re all in, you’re her, you understand what was previously incomprehensible, you are a part of this half-formed thing.

“That night we’re hunting. Pup to pup. Drunk up that. Do you feel? Better now. Better tan before. And some nice young man’s mouth some nice young man’s hands up my skirt in the toilets open up my thighs. Mind. All my life is hassle and all of this is fine. Singing toora loora, toora loora lay.”

I’m writing my thoughts out because, after those first 60 pages, I vehemently recommended this book to a few people who had been putting it off. I still recommend it, but more cautiously. It’s more than intellectually difficult. This book affected me physically--from distress, from empathy, from hate. It’s not the publisher’s responsibility to put a trigger warning on books, but I’ll put one with my recommendation: sexual assault, abuse. I almost wrote “graphic,” but that’s not quite right. Because nothing is described from the outside, because it’s all her, it’s all how she experiences it, but it’s visceral, it’s all the intensity of description meeting all the horror of experience.

“There’s no room for him in me. Or thing we did. Million million years ago fell off the planet. Good. Safe within my healed up eye.”

I hate the jacket copy for this novel. “Chronicles a young woman’s tender relationship with her dying brother... and goes on to reveal her harrowing and isolating sexual awakening.” It is never tender, he is only sometimes dying, there is never an awakening. It is about grief, obligation, guilt, self-loathing, independence, toxicity forced and chosen, consent. It’s awful. It never gets better. But I’ve never read, or heard of, a book that ploughs so forcefully and fearlessly into how awful girlhood, womanhood, can be; how confusing sex can be, even for women who want it; how lonely it can be to just exist, sometimes.

I didn’t discover feminism until I was about 22 years old. I knew about a history of feminism, sort of, and my mother is a strong, stubborn woman who taught me to be strong and critical and independent. (I think sometimes she’s still surprised at her success.) But I didn’t understand what feminism is now. I didn’t understand rape culture, I didn’t understand misogyny, I didn’t understand the patriarchy. I struggled with depression and anxiety and eating disorders rooted in guilt and pressure and--mainly--confusion. Confusion about sexuality and individuality and obligation and desire, right up into my early 20s. (Lol who I am kidding. Right up until forever, but now I have better resources and a better support network.) This book captures that overwhelming confusion and all the havoc it can wreak in just over 200 pages of chaos.

So yes, I certainly recommend it. If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, this book may help you. If you are familiar with what I’m talking about, but not intimately, this book will be difficult but immensely rewarding, I think. If you are, like me, a fellow half-formed thing slowly building up the rest of you, if you know what it is to be half-formed and propelled by dreams and terror, then this book will be awful. But it is a form of solidarity I’ve never encountered before, gut-wrenching, painstaking. And all that bundled up in one of the most incredible literary feats of my time?

Well.

Where it Hurts by Sarah de Leeuw

Paperback, read December 2017

This book hurts like a fist in the chest. I don’t read a lot of non-fiction, personally – not because I have anything against non-fiction, just because I heckin’ love novels and short stories, and there is more than enough out there to keep me occupied forever. But I’m professionally acquainted with Sarah, and I know she is a beautiful writer, so I picked up this book of creative non-fiction, and it killed me.

The essays reflect on the author’s youth in northern BC, on the women and people who have gone missing from her life, on the people who have gone missing in all of our lives. The writing is soft and sweet and flows like a river with a swift and deadly current. There is something about the writing that doesn’t match the content at all: how sweetly she can talk about breaking a breached baby’s clavicle, how soft. This dissonance is what makes this more than a heartbreaking and necessary collection of essays, and what makes it an unavoidable experience of hurt that we are forced to take away and do something with.

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

Audiobook, read March 2021

This was another book that I jumped into without any idea what it was about, and I was surprised, intrigued, and in awe of what The Vanishing Half brought to me as a reader. This intergenerational family saga is about race, class, love, family, privilege, gender, and all the huge sweeping strokes of what it takes to be alive. I’m typically critical of books that I feel like are trying to tackle too many issues at once, but what sets The Vanishing Half apart is that it isn’t trying to tackle these issues–it is simply a long and complicated story about being alive, and being alive is full of nuance, choice, and luck.

When people ask me what a book is about, I usually don’t have a straightforward answer for them–I will answer with something like my first paragraph here, existential and vague, because that’s what stays with me about a book: what it made me think and feel and reevaluate. But The Vanishing Half also just has a gripping story: light-skinned black twins from a small Southern town who separate as teenagers and go on to lead complete different lives. Stella passes for white, becoming a wealthy housewife, while Desiree ultimately returns to their small town with her daughter and stays for decades. I suppose what I loved is that the *aboutness* of this book neither overshadows nor is overshadowed by its story; they are equal, different, separate, and entwined. The Vanishing Half is a great book, and it is also a Great Book.

Untamed by Glennon Doyle

Audiobook, read October 2020

Untamed by Glennon Doyle is *very* outside my wheelhouse (that self-help-ish women empowerment kind of memoir), but it’s about a woman who fell in love with a woman and realized she had a great deal to unlearn and upheave in her life–how could I not give it a go?

Much of the book is fine, standard, poetic ruminations on unlearning and being true to yourself and remaining true to yourself in a society that benefits from your untruthfulness. If that sounds like your kind of book, I genuinely recommend this! But what I loved about it was every time she talked about her wife. I realized I was gay at age 27, 6 years into a relationship with a man, and when I fell in love with a woman it was like the whole world split open into something new and soft and hopeful and warm. Suddenly, I understood love songs and romantic movies and suddenly I knew what it felt like to crave someone and be craved in return. It was like this invisible wall had been separating me from the rest of what North American media told me life was like, and falling in love with my girlfriend brought that wall down. Suddenly, I understood. And my whole life changed.

When Doyle talks about her wife, it is with a joy and reverence and adoration that would have been alien to me a year ago, but which now melts my heart into a familiar warmth that seeps into my whole body and I can’t help but smile. I love straight love stories more now, too, because love is love and I know love now, and I love love. But queer love stories, especially between women, light my heart on fire, because I *know* what that magic feels like, and it is incomparably beautiful to see that magic out in the world, authentic and unapologetic and wild.

NDN Coping Mechanisms by Billy-Ray Belcourt

Paperback, read September 2020

Billy-Ray Belcourt’s mixed-genre book NDN Coping Mechanisms made my dumb little brain work hard, but I am so grateful for it. I heard Billy-Ray deliver a lecture on poetry last year and I was absolutely floored by how sharp, how wickedly intelligent, how astute and incisive and direct he is, while still embodying a generosity and softness for readers and listeners willing to do the work. This book is no exception. It aches and it rages and it yearns and it teaches, and I am so grateful for every book that is so kind as to teach and rage at the same time. I’m out of practice when it comes to writing about the writing of a book, so this post contains just my feelings, and all my gratitude.

Are You Listening? by Tillie Walden

Graphic novel, read March 2020

Tillie Walden is truly a genius. Her books are so creative and so beautiful, and I want to say there’s a universality to them but then I realize I am just one person, I can’t really know if that’s true. So what I do know is that her books sit under my skin like I am exactly the person she was writing for, and it hurts to be seen like that, and it hurts to know you are not alone, and it hurts to be alive, and still there is a soft wash of colour that is love and kindness and solidarity and it is something to be grateful for every day. Are You Listening? is heavy, very very heavy, but it is also a stunning, surreal road through and out of being lost. I am not sure how to describe it more concretely without giving it away, so I will simply say: brace yourself, and drive. I love you.

Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft

Audiobook, read May 2021

I would like to recommend this book to every person 16 years of age and older. It should not be read in a vacuum, as nothing should, but more than anything I have ever seen or read, this book describes abuse with clarity and specificity, and provides suggestions for action to the abused person, people of authority, and loved ones. It is deeply compassionate for the abused person, and it systematically dissects every knee-jerk or taught empathetic response to abuse that we all tend to have. This book provides no excuses for an abuser’s behaviour: the abuser’s problem is not anger management, or mental illness, or trauma; the abuser’s problem is an abusive mindset, and treating anything other than that will not solve the problem of abuse. This book dispels every common myth about abuse with a firmness and specificity that I have hardly ever encountered.

This book isn’t new – in fact, it’s fairly dated. In its introduction, it does attempt to address the fact that not all abusers are men and not all abusive relationships are heterosexual, but in execution, this book will not serve queer relationships as effectively as cishet relationships with an abusive male partner. But I believe there is value, still, for everyone: it uses clear language and examples to identify many types of abuse and abusive personalities, which is a useful tool for any toolbox. The reason I want to recommend it to everyone is because so many abusive behaviours are still, to this day, considered normal or unremarkable. People deserve to feel respected in their relationships, and I think people who date men are ready to sacrifice respect in some way, simply because it feels so hard to come by. I have no judgment for those people, and I have no answer. But I just wish we could talk more about the ways in which disrespect manifests, and when it manifests as abuse. I wish we could talk about it, and this book does.

I was at first suspicious when I realized the author was a man, but as the book went on I felt relieved, instead. I recently finished Kai Cheng Thom’s book of essays, I Hope We Choose Love, and left with the question: whose job is it to do the hard work of helping hurtful people? I want good men to help abusive men stop being abusive, because I don’t want women to have to do this work – and here we are, Lundy Bancroft, doing that work. I was grateful.

When I read Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House a year and a half ago, shortly after leaving a six-year abusive relationship, it felt like some part of me had been unlocked. I felt profoundly validated, and that book was a huge first step in allowing me to confidently identify my experience as abuse. Since then, I have been in a beautiful, healthy relationship, constantly encountering new ways in which those six years of abuse affected me. I’ll jot down thoughts and feelings, here and there, and I attended an eight-week therapy program to address some of the consequences, but I know I have many more years of work ahead of me. More than almost anything, I have understood what it means when we say trauma lives in the body. This book was a massive next step in validating the more complex thoughts and feelings that have come up in the past year, and while maybe I wish this book might have helped me 7 years ago, I am grateful for its help now.

Know My Name by Chanel Miller

Audiobook, read November 2020

This memoir is harrowing and hopeful, and I chuckled out loud and I cried, and it’s incredible to see how such a terrible thing can be shaped into something that will change hundreds of lives, and reach millions more. I hate that the burden of changing oppressive systems is on the oppressed, but God I am in awe of the people who fight those fights. I am in awe and I am grateful from the very pit of my being, because I am full of excuses for why I don’t or can’t fight. I am in awe and I am grateful for this book.