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On the phone, my grandmother asked me if I had planted anything in our window boxes. She always phoned too early, when I was barely out of bed, forgetting about the time difference. She would begin each call with something she had thought of during the night.
—From The Anthropologists, a novel by Ayşegül Savaş (Bloomsbury, 2024). This segment is from page 10 of the hardcover.
What do I call him? My husband? Arnold? I would if the story were about how we met and married, shared meals for forty-five years, raised a puppy, endured illnesses. But if the story is about an older man preying on a teenager, shouldn’t I call him “the artist” or, better still, “the art teacher,” with all that the word teacher implies?
—From Consent, a memoir by Jill Ciment (Pantheon Books, 2024). This is essentially a sequel to Half a Life, the memoir Ciment wrote in her mid-forties. It's interesting to see how she looks at the events of her past through different lenses. (When she met her future husband, in the 1970s, he was a Casanova and she felt cool for kissing her art teacher. Today, what happened is more clearly an abuse of power. But it didn't happen now; it happened in the '70s.) What to make of the events, then, especially in light of the way their relationship ultimately played out? After dissecting and amending the earlier memoir, she picks up where it left off.
I held him together
as long as I could, she says.
—From "Piano," a poem by Edgar Kunz, The New Yorker (November 7, 2022), p. 41.
even i am less a woman than a ball of mercury breaking
into forty pieces of silver.
—From "i lie back on my red coverlet and contemplate," a poem by Diane Seuss, Blackbird, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Spring 2007), and reprinted with artwork by Tanja Softić in Blackbird's special section called Women Poets from the Archive, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Summer 2024). This specially curated collection of poems from the Founders Archive also includes poetry by Ada Limón, Claudia Emerson, and others.
It didn't matter where I lived—Mid-City, Mid-Wilshire, or Miracle Mile. It didn't matter where I worked; one Hollywood bullshit factory was equal to any other. All that mattered was what I ate, when I ate, and how I ate it.
—From Milk Fed, a novel by Melissa Broder (Scribner, 2021). I read her books out of order, starting with Death Valley (Scribner, 2023), then going back to The Pisces (Hogarth Press, 2018) and Milk Fed. All of these novels are available as audiobooks read by the author, and they are compulsively readable (and . . . listenable?). Broder does include intimate details about her characters' experiences in the bathroom and the bedroom (and everywhere else), so if that's not your cup of tea, you may want to skip these. But there's something very direct and honest about the way she talks about things. Also, it might be helpful to read a little Sappho before starting The Pisces.