I Want to Talk About These Two Books

YWR #150

Welcome to week one hundred and can you even believe it’s fifty, my book buddies! If you haven’t found something to read from these lists by now, I just don’t know. Well, I do know - it means you were looking for some non-fiction business book or a sober treatise on climate destruction translated from the Finnish. Can’t be all things to all people, I guess.

And this week, I have two books I wish you would read so we can talk about them. While they’re quite different - fiction/non-fiction, relationships/detachment, even a bit in quality - they’ve both stayed with me for a while. And in a year where most of my 52 books read have smeared together with little staying power, I welcome these kinds of reads.

Okay, I don’t know where I’ve been because Wellness has been on every top list, apparently, but I only recently stumbled onto it. And boy am I glad I did and you will be too - SORT OF, CAVEATS APPLY.

Power summary: Jack and Elizabeth meet in 1990’s Chicago, young dreamers who are drawn to each other. Twenty years later as a suburban married couple, they’re grappling with children, health, home, as well as deeper challenges of connection, of long-buried traumas, and of how far they’ve come from their young love.

Okay so this summary sounds like nothing special, but this novel really packs a wallop in multiple ways. First, it’s an excruciating skewering of white middle-aged late capitalism - if any of those descriptions apply to you, do not read this if you do not want to feel uncomfortably seen. But it’s not done in an unkind way - more about the undercurrent of anxiety and control that the characters want to exert on a difficult world.

Second, there are about eleventy storylines which at times feel very fragmented and disjointed, but which skillfully hold together. Things that absolutely shouldn’t work - deep stylistically different sidebars into the Facebook algorithm, research citations about the placebo effect, time jumps - all come together in a powerful reminder of how stories create who we are and how we act. Or is it all about belief and perspective and aging? About how we deal with disappointment, with sadness, with loss, and love anyway? You tell me.

Anyway, it was excellent and I wish you would read it so we can discuss. Plus if you have any experience with late 90’s Chicago, it was perfectly done and I was hollowly nostalgic. A little bit Tomorrow x3, a little bit Fates and Furies or Fleishman is in Trouble, maybe? Definitely amongst the best books I’ve read this year so far, and I’ve heard the same thing from the one person I know who’s read it (hi Joanna ILY).

This is the first time I have ever awarded a 2.25 Gentle Lamb Rating - there’s nothing weepy or violent or terrible about this, and yet you’ll feel it deeply. Learn about these all important lambs HERE. If you don’t know, now you’ll know.

On the flip side, let’s also talk about this memoir, Sociopath. I have so many questions and feelings about it. Is it real? Is it an elaborate performance piece? Can we trust a sociopath’s memoir (or anyone’s memoir?) Is this even that good? Does it even matter? I NEED TO TALK ABOUT IT.

Power summary: this is a memoir by a woman who is (self) diagnosed as a sociopath, who is now a therapist apparently writing the book she wish she had as a young person, to know that sociopathy is not the dangerous, malevolent, irredeemable personality disorder that culture leads us to believe.

She takes us through her childhood typified by lack of feeling, by destructive and occasionally violent impulses, by frustration in not understanding why she is so different from everyone else. We follow her through college, through a career as a music manager*, and as a psychology student-turned-PhD trying understand of sociopathy. And through her admittedly criminal activity as well as her navigation of love and friendships without “normal” emotional functioning.

I can’t remember the last mental-health memoir that I found this thought-provoking, where I was mostly empathetic but a little bit disturbed. Mostly because the topic is new to me, and partially because I found things in the book frustratingly contradictory and kind of sensational. Is that because humans are messy and I’m pushed out of my neurotypical comfort zone? Is it because she is a self-proclaimed liar and also a therapist so is trying to explain as well as show, and it all feels a little unbelievable? I don’t know!

A little bit The Night of the Gun with a whiff of A Million Little Pieces. It’s not extraordinarily written (and the pacing/ending is a really curious choice to me) but it sure is interesting.

*If you’ve read this book - Max is John Mayer, right? This character was so John Mayer coded.

LET’S TALK ABOUT THESE IN THE COMMENTS:

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Fine, Let’s Talk About This Instead:

• If neither of these interested you, or if I wrote too much about both and you got bored and skipped here, check out the archive instead for 149 other weeks of suggestions.

• Links go to Bookshop.org, because if you can’t get your books from the library or the Libby app (SERIOUSLY GO TO LIBBY) , supporting independent bookstores is the next best thing. You don’t need that book in 24 hours, you know you’re not going to start reading it that fast. You can also see and buy many of my suggestions here.

• At this point I’m concerningly behind on my Sun Valley Writers’ Conference Reading. Consider this just a confession?

• In honor of 150 weeks of newsletters, feel free to like, share, comment. But also you don’t have to!