Sad
Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget by Sarah Hepola was a difficult read. I am not an alcoholic, but I struggle with addiction in another way as I have an eating disorder. I find some dark comfort in reading about any kind of addiction because there’s so much overlap in behaviors and narrative between us all. However, I should have perhaps anticipated more emotional distress than just simpatico from this memoir.
Hepola was so brutally honest, I found at a certain points I couldn’t wait for the book to be over. She’s a brave writer because she’s not beautiful with her honesty, she’s not poetic, she’s working with the cringiest details, pulling up the whiniest self indulgent voice, the ugly, dumb basics of out of control, self harming behavior. It’s rare to witness someone show their ass not on accident but because they’re making a deliberate choice, pointing out how addiction is an ass-showing affair. I’ve struggled deeply in relationships with alcoholics and the way Hepola relayed her life brought up a lot of memories and anger for me that I didn’t expect revisiting, which was tough. It’s terrible to see someone you love beyond the reach of reason and it’s terrible to be the one beyond the reach of reason. I appreciated that there’s no one moment in Blackout that shakes Hepola to her core where she almost dies or something. Instead there’s a lot of awful, scary things that almost happen to her, it’s like watching an animal documentary and seeing the rabbit escape the leopard. But I thought this was more powerful in a way because when you escape a black hole in your life, it is deeply frightening to look back at what could’ve been and wonder why it wasn’t. Why were you the one that made it?
I found Hepola’s tone to be overly self indulgent at times, too focused on the extra love she didn’t get from people that already love her, even after she found recovery. I respect this book, but I wouldn’t say Hepola endeared herself to me. She also writes about weight, body and food impulsivity in a way that might not be helpful for people with ED to read, so proceed with caution.
Famous
The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher is my favorite of her three essay collections. It was famous for revealing her affair on the set of Star Wars with co-star Harrison Ford. Fisher was nineteen while filming Star Wars and Ford was thirty-three, married and a father of two. Fisher doesn’t cast retrospective judgement on Ford for his choices when laying out what happened between them, but instead, as she does in all her personal writing, saves most of the judgement for herself.
I read all three of Fisher’s essay collections back to back, listening to them on Audible during a month that could easily be described as the worst of my life. I wrote about one of her earlier memoirs here:
Triggered by forces beyond my control, I was in a depressive episode so black that I could not pay deliberate attention to anything for longer than ten minutes. My ability to imagine, create or comprehend disappeared so wholly I felt as though I’d been dropped into a new brain, and it didn’t feel like whatever concept I’d had of “me” was ever coming back. A friend suggested the sound of Fisher’s voice might be comforting even if I couldn’t retain her words. So I listened to her audiobooks while covering an entire bookshelf with stickers, a weird activity, and the only thing got me to stop crying, frozen in place, waiting to fall back asleep.
I credit these books with helping me live through this period of time. Fisher was a hurt person who spoke honestly about her suffering and was a hand for me to hold during those hours I couldn’t see beyond. Fisher is not sentimental about her life, which I appreciate, but she deflects with humor too often and is pretty hard on herself. In The Princess Diarist she finally loosens up with the self deprecating jokes, and while always wry, lets us see more of who she was. She shares her diaries from Star Wars, I believe in full, and like the writing of any nineteen year old, it’s overwrought, but it is also serious, beautiful and full of a pain she hasn’t learned to eclipse yet.
The Star Wars section takes up most of the book but all the essays in The Princess Diarist are solid. One in particular that haunts me is about Fisher’s relationship with her absentee father as he got ill and died. Eddie Fisher was a louche, an addict and a “ladies man” with whom Fisher had almost no relationship growing up. When they did have contact he was inappropriate, seeming unable to interact with a human female body in a way that was not sexually informed or did not expect maternal care. This obviously effected Fisher in a myriad of ways. However, when her father became ill at the end of his life, Fisher took on the role of his carer. She says something to the effect that “by giving him what he always wanted from me, to be his mother, I got everything I always wanted from him as a father.” I’m destroyed by this sentence. It contains some really dark depths of the earth (hell?) psychic goo. I don’t want to sit in judgement of a situation that brought her peace about something that she struggled with for so long, but also, damn. I wish I could’ve given her a hug, set her free, something. I think, I hope, wherever she is now she is finally free.
Sexism! In The Book Industry
This is not my usual fare on shopping, sorry about that, but I did purchase this book, so maybe it counts? Lol. I just need to go off about something.
Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey is a successful fantasy novel that came out in 2001. I’ve been told to read it by a number of people over the years. However, I stayed away from it because its reputation in the wider world is that it’s the Fifty Shades of Grey of fantasy. A BDSM romance novel dressed up with castles. A Clan of the Cave Bear type situation but cornier because there’s no real historical setting. I heard people I trusted say it was good and then dismissed that because the covers look like late night 90s soft core HBO and the main piece of info that’s out there about it is that it’s a spanking book. I went through covers of it from across the world and the above Portuguese cover was the only normal one.
Eventually, a friend randomly mentioned some wacky aspect of it and I thought, ok I’ll bite. And the funny thing is about this book is that it reminded me more of Dune than anything else. Like Dune, Kushiel’s Dart is a wholly unique, totally bizarre vision of its author that is like nothing else out there, backed by some insane, intricate and almost baffling worldbuilding. Set in an alternate version of earth, a deely weird off shoot of Christianity becomes the religion of fake France, its prophet declaring “love as thou wilt.” This is one of the things that leads to sex and sex work being seen as holy. It’s a fantasy novel that interfaces more directly with the sex and religion aspects of worldbuilding than any other fantasy novel I’ve ever read, fascinating more than titillating imho. Instead of a magic system, the magic in this book comes from gods and angels interfering in the lives of men. The main character, Phédre, is marked by the god of punishment to experience pain as pleasure (I can hear all your brains going “uh-oh, it IS a naughty sex book after all!”) and because of this she gets trained to be a courtesan and spy. The tone of the book is a first person Moll Flanders affair, wherein a person who is not a writer is relaying their life story to you completely in the contemporary voice of their time without pity for your lack of understanding. It’s a weird ass interesting book! It makes some very left field choices.
There are certainly a number of explicit sex scenes in the first half of the book as Phédre learns her trade and becomes a spy, but it’s no more plentiful than in Game of Thrones (bonus: no rape! In a society that reveres sex, rape is an act of religious desecration). The book is almost 1000 pages long and there’s barely any sex in the entire second half as the story moves into its larger narrative. Phédre herself is a very pragmatic, unsentimental narrator who is not motivated by romantic longing or interest in love. The plot also is not moved along by romantic arcs. This irritated me whenever I looked at the cover of the copy of the book I had which loudly declared Kushiel’s Dart “THE ULTIMATE ROMANTASY!” Why tho? In what way? Because there’s sex in it and a lady wrote it? Let’s look at some more covers.
I wonder how this book would be marketed if released now. All the covers and marketing blurbs seem to focus on the fact that the protagonist is DTF therein. It clearly wants you to assume it’s a bodice ripper. This book is also unique and interesting among epic fantasy novels because both the hero and villain are women. AND nobody seems to give a fuck about sexual orientation—in a society where the religion is based off “love as thou wilt”, why would they? But honestly, those are not even the main aspects of the plot. The book is about spy games and journeys across vast lands and betrayal, all the stuff epic fantasy readers love. However, you’d never know it wasn’t anything but a dirty one-handed read about a woman who spends most of her time naked from the waist up based on this crap and it makes me mad. It makes me mad Dune is taken seriously and this is considered kinda trashy. Anyway, I think it’s because of sexism and that’s fucking stupid. I hope Jacqueline Carey made a ton of money.
I’m on Blueksy these days if anyone else is? I stopped using Notes bc if you’re a small creator no one ever sees anything you post, and I don’t think Substack has done anything to correct that for reasons I don’t understand and larger creators don’t seem to know this is a problem for the rest of us. It doesn’t motivate me to keep using it. I will say when I reply to things others post on Notes, it does usually get engaged with, but otherwise it’s not working for me. I am not on Bluesky a ton but if you want to see pictures of my dog (which of course you do!) that is where to go: (at)elinor.bsky.social
re Kushiel’s Dart and gratuitous toplessness: i always think to myself "oh, there must have been a bunch of meetings", or whatever the author equivalent is of an actor or director "taking notes" from some executive. At the meeting there will be a pivot table projecting revenue based on certain marketing hooks or promotional tie-ins. "Women missing critical articles of clothing" is a popular option. It's on the drop-down menu. I suspect Kushiel is an IP franchise like Jason Bourne's Identity, Supremacy, Alacrity etc. btw, at the meeting one of the notes was "focus on the fact that the protagonist is DTF". <g>.
Have you ever noticed that the pilot episodes of TV shows—it used to be just on HBO but now it seems like it's everywhere—frequently involve at least one topless woman? I've always found this both enraging and insulting. "Surely," the showrunners say to themselves, "the only thing that can ensure our success and future viewership* is the promise of more titties."
Seems like the Kushiel's Dart cover designers may have all had the same idea.
*Men. They mean men. Straight white men.