Fun Home
Alison Bechdel, 2006

I think the popularity of the term "graphic novel" is really unfortunate, because it sounds cheesy and pretentious, like something you proudly display on your shelf to prove how cool you are. For me, books with pictures (can I call them comic books? This seems to imply that they have X-Men, which, to be fair, I also like) are what I reach for when I can't sleep because I'm scared of the universe, and I want to be reminded that other people exist. Graphic novels (fuck it) seem more like company to me than their non-illustrated brethren, probably just because you can see people's faces, and in Fun Home the faces reveal fear and pain and love and confusion as eloquently as the words. The story is about Bechdel's coming-of-age as a gay woman and her realization that her father is also gay — a realization that comes along with family tragedy. Fun Home is especially touching and effective as a graphic novel because the drawings reveal the family resemblance between father and daughter — a resemblance especially striking when Bechdel compares their taste in clothes. The book is about lies and secrets, but it's also the public record of a daughter's choice not to hide her life story as her father did, but to tell it and to show it — and Bechdel does both very well.

The Last Of Her Kind
Sigrid Nunez, 2006

This was the best book I read in 2006, and for a long time it was my favorite novel. Two roommates meet at Barnard in 1968 — Ann comes from a wealthy family and Georgette is working-class. As Ann becomes a radical and gets deeply embroiled in the racial politics of the 1970s, Nunez examines her activism through the eyes of Georgette, to whom it sometimes seems like a luxury. Ann turns out to be disturbingly committed to her cause, but the position of a privileged person fighting for the underprivileged remains a fraught one. Nunez doesn't pull emotional punches — Georgette's narration sometimes simmers with resentment, and her observations exist outside polite American discourse in a way that makes the way we talk about "political correctness" seem restrictive and misguided. Nunez's writing, too, is beautiful, but what made me love this book was the way it managed to portray the ambivalence we feel in a world where all politics is personal.

The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
Amy Hempel, 2006

Seriously, read this book. Especially if you think you don't like short stories. Some of Hempel's stories sound more like jokes — "Memoir," in its entirety, reads "Just once in my life—oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life?" Many are the kind of jokes that make you sad. All of them — whether they deal with a possibly-fabricated motorcycle crash, a pre-mastectomy party, or the death of a best friend — are so witty and weird they remind you that art's purpose is not to represent life, but to augment it.

Veronica
Mary Gaitskill, 2005

This book gave me nightmares. I've always found Gaitskill's writing scary, not just because it often deals with abusive or otherwise fucked-up relationships, but because it reveals how the intensity of any human relationship can be enough to wipe you out. Veronica portrays the international modeling scene in the eighties as a heady and terrifying world of sex clubs and hard drugs and exploitation, but what really stabbed me in the heart about this book was its portrayal of how people love and hate and discard each other, how they create makeshift families every bit as loving and as awful as the ones they left behind, and how a platonic touch between friends can be as revelatory as orgasm.

Brother, I'm Dying
Edwidge Danticat, 2007
The beginning of this book made me tear up on the subway, and the ending made me shiver. Danticat writes about her childhood separation from her parents — they moved to the United States while she and her brother stayed in Haiti — their eventual reunion, her father's illness and death, and her uncle's ill-fated attempt to gain asylum in America with language whose matter-of-factness and precision become a perfect conduit for love, fear, regret, and outrage. It's impossible to read Danticat's account of her octogenarian uncle's incarceration at a Florida refugee camp, his shoddy medical treatment and ridiculous interrogation there, and his eventual death in custody, without raging against the way America treats people who wish to come here. But still the most moving part of the book for me was near the beginning, when Danticat's father announces at a family meeting that he is dying, and her brother asks, in a halting voice, "have you enjoyed your life?"

Runaway
Alice Munro, 2004
In a way Alice Munro is the opposite of Amy Hempel — while Hempel's stories are often short without feeling as though anything's been left out, Munro writes long, meandering pieces in which every word seems absolutely essential. Her stories feel like lives, not just because they often span many years and many miles, but because they render human interiority so clearly and completely that each character feels like a fully realized, functioning brain. In fact, her writing is often so consuming that it takes over my brain — I have been that character, I think, or I will be her. Her stories are especially strong when her characters look back at the past, with a perfectly rendered mixture of regret, resignation, and longing. The linked stories "Chance," "Soon," and "Silence," in which a lonely woman meets a man on a train, moves in with him, and has a child who later cuts off all contact with her, provide ample opportunity for looking both backward and straight ahead, and this may be why Runaway is the best of the collections Munro has published this decade.

Rent Girl
Michelle Tea (illustrations by Laurenn McCubbin), 2004
Yeah, okay, there are two graphic novels on this list. Whatever: my friends and I passed around Rent Girl the summer after I graduated from college, and I highly recommend both this method and this timing. Yes, Tea's story of her time as a sex worker was titillating to a bunch of still-relatively-sheltered 21-year-olds, but it also inoculated us against easy, black-and-white opinions about sex work. More importantly, Rent Girl is an incredibly absorbing tale of being young and dumb and in love, and slightly older and wiser and still in love, and how sex both paid-for and not fits into all this. The accompanying illustrations are both beautiful and hot.

Gilead
Marilynne Robinson, 2004

A lot of people describe this book as "boring," which it kind of is — if you think of the sum total of a man's life, examined in old age after both great disappointment and great, unexpected happiness, as boring. It's true that Gilead contains few fights, few twists, and few fireworks, and that it is in some ways about the struggle to be a good person, which is not traditionally seen as exciting. It's also true that this story of Reverend John Ames, married late in life, and the flawed young man he desperately wants to help, should be required reading for any coastal person who thinks midwestern Christians are all narrowminded assholes. But all this is kind of beside the point — I could not fucking put Gilead down (I should say here that Marilynne Robinson was my teacher for a semester, though I read and loved the book before I met her). I ordinarily like fights and twists and fireworks — the fact that this novel is one of my favorites of all time speaks to both the sublimity of its language and the deep importance of its subject matter. Many of us, at the end of our lives, will wonder if we did what we could for those around us — but we probably won't wonder it as beautifully as Reverend Ames.

•  Muslim lawmakers in Aceh, Indonesia may soon forbid women from wearing tight trousers. Ramli Mansyur, regent of the district, says women who flout the law may have their pants "destroyed" and he has set aside 7,000 skirts for women unable to afford "proper attire." •  Ever wondered how much you'ree getting paid to sit on the toilet? WorkPoop.com helpfully calculates exactly how much money per year you are make by hiding out in the stall at work. •  As the average age of motherhood has risen, so has the number of cases of Down syndrome detected in the womb, according to a new study. However, fewer children are being born with Down syndrome, since the majority of women do not choose to carry the screened fetus to term. •  A new study shows that Israeli Jews who survived World War II are at a higher risk for developing cancer than other Jews. Researchers speculate this may be due in part to the hardships endured in the Holocaust. •  Women may be catching up to men in one unfortunate area: Heart disease. Up until recently, more men suffered from heart disease than women, who are protected by our hormone fluctuations, but with rising rates of obesity, women are making gains on men. •  Amazing writer (and personal girlcrush) Alice Munro revealed last week that she has had heart bypass surgery and "just had cancer." For the sake of great literature, get well soon! •  According to new statistics, there is a gap between the number of women in top positions in large law firms and the number of men. Above the Law has a few theories to explain the dearth of women rainmakers. • A rape victim who was assaulted 13 years ago testified yesterday against Richard Thomas, who is also accused of raping a 12-year-old girl in 2004. DNA confirms that Thomas raped both women. •  A recent study suggests that anxiety during pregnancy may have an impact on the size of the baby. They found that women who suffered from severe chronic anxiety during pregnancy are more likely to have smaller babies than those who only reported low to moderate anxiety. • Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice have come together to write an op-ed for Politico detailing women's economic gains in the US and stating, "we must extend to all societies the universal right of women to choose their own fortunes." • According to a small study, extra testosterone makes men more miserly. The effect of seeing the Ghost of Christmas Past was not studied. • The city of Seoul is making an active effort to become more "woman friendly" through changes in a dozen sectors, from restrooms to workplaces. But many women feel that not enough has been done. "Personally I don't know where those 'women-friendly' places are," says one Korean woman. "I never see them." • 

[Queens, September 7. Image via INF]

Munro was born in rural Ontario in 1931, and she spent the first part of the interview talking about her background. Her mother had Parkinsons and the family had very little money, but Alice really wanted to go to college, so she rustled up a scholarship and shipped off to university. "Don't give me that much credit," she said. "I didn't go for education, I just went because I wanted time to myself."

Her family neither encouraged nor discouraged her education; they had enough to deal with and as long as Alice supported herself financially, they didn't care what she did. The idea of writing for a living was so far outside the realm of her childhood that she had "terrific confidence. I didn't know any writers so I thought I was just great." Then Alice talked about getting married and becoming a mother in the 50s in suburban Vancouver, and Deborah Treisman said, "You've written a lot about women feeling trapped by marriage and motherhood," and she wondered if that was from Alice's personal experience. "I never felt trapped by kids or housework," Alice said, "but I felt trapped by a community of people who all did the same thing."

Since writing was as unheard of in Vancouver as it was in rural Ontario, when Alice started publishing short stories people were more bewildered than anything else. The local newspaper even published a story about Alice entitled, "Housewife Finds Time To Write Short Stories."

When asked if she considers herself a feminist writer, Munro said, "I don't think about it at all. I think I am a feminist politically and in my life, but that's not the purpose of (fiction) writing. You have to go down deep, and you don't start with political stuff." She spent much of the sixties raising her kids and mentally creating stories while her children were napping. But Alice emphasized the notion that writing is always hard, and rejection is even worse. You never get a thick skin, she said, but you go on anyway.

And just like the deep emotional content of Munro's stories, the woman herself was forthright and funny and true. Though it's hokey, listening to Munro speak made me realize how much I take for granted. My access to education, my supportive family, the relatively egalitarian times in which I was born. But it also made me realize that the key to future success in writing is probably ignoring these outside influences like Munro banished the potential detractors who lingered outside her own mind.

New Yorker Festival [New Yorker]