Newsletter

Readings for July 24, 2022

If there's a theme this week, it's looking to the light

Kristen Hall-Geisler

24 Jul 2022 • 5 min read

Elle, by Camille Laurens

I ordered Elle by Camille Laurens ages ago because a profile of the author and review of the book in Lire, a French magazine entirely about books, made it sound amazing. And it was amazing! For a while! Laurens interrogates the way language outlines and determines gender, especially in a language that uses grammatical gender as French does. I sharpened a fresh pencil in anticipation of all the underlining I was going to do.

Then we hit the sexual abuse of a child. I tried to make it through, but I just couldn’t. It’s not a trigger for me, per se, but I do not enjoy reading about it. I do not find descriptions of it enlightening. I gave up. A DNF.

Confessions of the Fox, by Jordy Rosenberg

So I took a break from my summer of French immersion and picked up Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg, which promised to be far more fun. And it was, right from page one. Here’s the thing that’s funny: it is spicy. High heat level in this one. Very sexy — immediately. As opposite from the tenor of Elle as a sexy book could possibly be. This is a joyful celebration of gender transformation and queer romance, plus jail breaking and thievery and resistance to power structures. What’s not to love?

I Do Love a Structure

Confessions of the Fox uses a found manuscript as a framing device. The fictional editor, Dr. R. Voth, tells the reader in the introduction that everything they are about to read is true; in this case, it’s a long-lost manuscript telling the story of Jack Sheppard and Bess Khan, two fabled eighteenth-century ne-er-do-wells. This was a popular literary device used by realist fiction, especially in the nineteenth century — the whole “Everything you’re about to read is true” setup. It’s still used, especially in movies. The Blair Witch Project comes to mind, but surely there are more recent examples; share any that come to mind in the comments if you like.

But here’s the wonderful kicker: Rosenberg, through the citations and annotations in Voth’s footnotes, includes actual scholarship on LGBTQ+ history and representation in literature. If you are intrigued by what you read in the novel, you can truly look up the source material, thanks to Rosenburg’s own scholarly work at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The footnotes are not only there to direct readers toward useful scholarship. Nor are they there to teach us the many, many, many ways that a person in eighteenth-century London could say penis, though they do that too. The footnotes also tell Dr. Voth’s own story as he edits the manuscript for publication. He chronicles his tenuous position at his university, he shares his crush on the pharmacist, he has discussions in the footnotes with overbearing administrators. There’s a whole second story going on in the footnotes, and it might be more bonkers than the thievery and scheming of the main text. The saga of the missing page that occurs within the footnotes is itself a delight.

The People’s Canon

On the back cover of my copy of Confessions of the Fox, there’s a blurb from author Carmen Maria Machado that says, in part, “It should be in the personal canon of every queer and non-cis person.” I cannot argue that, but I will argue that it should be at least on the reading list of cis people too, if for no other reason than it’s a good book and a fun read. Did I mention the structure? The structure!

But I’d like to recommend it to cis readers who maybe don’t have – or don’t know they have – trans people in their lives. In case you’re new to the idea of “cis,” it basically means that you were assigned male or female at birth, and you’re totally at home with that assignment in body and soul. This is the case for many if not most humans, myself included. There are many more nuances and clarifications to be made when it comes to gender, but this is the main gist of the cis part. There are loads of great resources out there if you’re interested to learn more, but don’t forget that there are real citations for further reading in the footnotes of this very novel. Handy, that.

I don’t want any reader to feel like this book is medicine you have to take or that reading it will make you an instant ally. It’s way better than medicine, for one thing, and allyship requires doing things for and with actual people. But Confessions of the Fox is a delightful, smart, joyful way to widen one’s empathetic cis horizons as much as it is a candidate for one’s queer and non-cis personal canon.

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, by Michelle McNamara

I read I’ll Be Gone in the Dark as an audiobook from the library. I’m not usually a true crime kind of reader, but I do like anything that has been researched within an inch of its life (you did notice how excited I was for the footnotes in Confessions of the Fox, right?). Author Michelle McNamara was obsessed with this case for years, and her meticulous data gathering, interviewing, and reporting are stellar.

The thing I appreciated most about her style was that she was able to recount the crimes, share the pertinent details, mention the killer’s methods and the victim’s reports, without putting the focus on the actual acts of violence. True crime narratives can lean so heavily on the knife slashes, gunshot wounds, beatings, and rapes that it becomes a backhanded glorification of the violence done by the perpetrator. McNamara was interested in the victims as people but more interested in the puzzle left behind by the Golden State Killer, as she dubbed him. She wanted to find him. She wanted him to be caught and arrested. She didn’t want to linger in the scenes of violence; she wanted to put the man who committed them away.

The focus on the puzzle pieces and how she, along with other detectives, amateur crime solvers, and journalists, tried to fit them together, was fascinating. McNamara died before she finished the book, but two of her colleagues were able to work with her mounds of notes and files to bring it to a close. And in 2018, after the book was published, the Golden State Killer was indeed arrested.

And Your Promised Dog Picture

If you buy any books via the affiliate links in this newsletter, I will receive a small commission.