A Summer Update!

Writing, Reading, Despair, etc,

Hello, hello.

My modest goal is to send out a newsletter every time I publish a new piece, but I’m failing to hold to it. I so enjoy reading other people’s newsletters, and I find it fun to write my own missives — still, I can’t seem to do it with any regularity. Sometimes I worry that this means I don’t have much to say about the things that interest me, but I don’t really think that is the case. My energy is simply too finite a resource these days: after the freelance assignments, the parenting, the teaching (during the school year), and the basic household upkeep (but let’s face it, I shirk these duties whenever possible), I don’t have much left in the tank. Add to that the drain of my consistent horror over the multifaceted (geo)political nightmare, and I can hardly maintain consciousness until 9 p.m. I know so many of you are in similar boats, and I join in you fervent solidarity. Things are very, very hard right now.

I feel guilty for bemoaning what often feels like a relentless pace of life because, god, who cares?? I whine about my lack of a true vacation or general domestic ease and then look at the news to see what new hell has been unleashed on Gaza, or on America’s immigrant communities. Yes, it’s all relative, but America is in genuine crisis right now because, for the second fucking time, millions of people in this country empowered the absolute worst human being to run it. I still cannot fully wrap my brain around that. I don’t want to accept that such a broad swath of our population abides with such hatred, such desire to inflict harm on others for their own perceived benefit. I’ve been desperately clinging to the naive belief that cruelty is a minority, that most people are governed by kindness, or at least tolerance. It is hard to maintain this belief nowadays.

Anyway, there are more crucial matters afoot than my exhaustion.

I have been writing, thankfully, and I’m grateful to have a good bit of new work to share. All the following URLS are gift links, so you can click freely.

In April, I wrote an essay for The Washington Post’s Book World on grief literature which draws significantly on Lauren Markham’s Immemorial, an extraordinary book-length essay on memorials and climate grief. The essay also includes some forays into Roland Barthes’ wonderful Mourning Diary and a bit about a tree that I think might remember my mother as a child. The art that Book World commissioned for the piece is really dreamy, and I was glad to have the space to consider how my love and grief for my mom, who will be gone eight years in November, evolves over time.

In May, Smith & Taylor Classics released their new edition of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s excellent sensation novel Lady Audley’s Secret, featuring a back-and-forth conversation between brilliant crime fiction expert Sarah Weinman and yours truly on queer desire, hysteria, domestic fiction, and other varied topics. I love this wild novel, and it was a real honor to be a part of such a gorgeous reissue.

June was a real whopper. I made my New York Times Book Review debut by writing about two middle grade novels which are distinct in scope and motivation but aligned in their depictions of rites of passage achieved through the characters’ harsh recognition of adult solipsism and corruption. I appreciated being thought of for this assignment because I really enjoy thinking rigorously about books written for younger audiences. I loved studying Victorian children’s literature in graduate school, and I think we do ourselves a disservice by ignoring the smart youth literature being published today. I’ve come across so much compelling work in the last few years, as I’ve begun building my son’s library. Children’s literature deserves attention and insightful conversation (and thankfully, it is getting a bit more, with the start of newsletters like Looking At Picture Books, by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen).

Back to June: I also wrote my first cover story! I reviewed Jayson Greene’s miraculous debut novel UnWorld for WaPo’s Book World, which gave me an opportunity to scream about the scourge of AI and why I think people are eager to rely on it in the first place. The piece was chosen for the section’s Sunday cover after I submitted it, which is lucky for me, because I otherwise would have gotten stage fright while drafting it. Again, the art accompanying the piece is beyond humbling. I feel very fortunate.

I currently have a couple more pieces in the works, one of which should be publishing soon. Otherwise, I’ve cleared my summer dance card so that I can (hopefully) finish drafting the book proposal I began last summer. It occurred to me that I’m feeling nervous to return to it. I’m afraid, I think, that I won’t be able to live up to the idea. I’m telling myself that this fear is an indication that the idea is worthwhile. And in any case, it won’t abate until I force myself to open that Google doc and see what’s there.

I’ll leave you with some reading recommendations!

I was lucky enough to read a galley copy of my friend Erin Somers’ sophomore novel, The Ten Year Affair, and oh my GOD, you are not ready for this searingly insightful, intelligent, sexy book. Erin structures the novel with such elegance and narrative intuition, and she depicts millennial adulthood with both tenderness and frank precision. I loved it so, so much.

And then I also finally read my dear longtime friend Jamie Hood’s sophomore work, Trauma Plot, which came out in April. I’d been fortunate to read an early version of part of it, but I wanted to save the finished book until the spring semester crush was over, and I could take my time. It is marvelous, which comes as no surprise. Jamie and I met at undergraduates at the College of William and Mary in Nancy Gray’s Politics of Female Storytelling class. I knew then that she was a singular mind, and it has been a joy and a privilege, as we’ve both navigated post-academic writing careers, to think and write alongside her. Trauma Plot broke my heart, because it’s impossible to read about someone you love dearly suffering like this and keep your heart in tact. (I also think our hearts should break from time to time.) But beyond that, I was thrilled by the way Jamie examines trauma as a problem of literary genre—how she interrogates the ontological problem of fitting the fracture of pain into the teleology of narrative. It is also a dazzlingly hopeful book, and hope on the page is an especial balm right now.

A few more books on my radar that I haven’t had a chance to read yet, but which are authored by brilliant writers I know and love: I Want to Burn This Place Down, by Maris Kreizman, See Friendship, by Jeremy Gordon, and Amber Spark’s forthcoming novel, Happy People Don’t Live Here.

(I should mention that Erin, Jamie, Jeremy, and Amber are all members of my nonfiction writing group.)

I also highly recommend Immemorial and UnWorld. And if you have a middle grade reader in your life, you must get them Meg Medina’s Graciela in the Abyss. (You can read my reviews for extended thoughts, obviously.)

At present, I’m reading Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea, which I’m loving for many reasons, among them the fact that I cannot resist a nasty first person narrator. (One of my erstwhile dissertation chapters was focused significantly on the delightfully bitchy narrator of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. He’s awful! I adore him!) More when I’ve actually finished the book!

Time to sign off, I think. But this was fun! I hope you had fun! I should do this more! I’m going to do my best.

Until then, take care of each other. <3

RVC

Recent Items of Note (To Me, But Also Maybe to You?)

Writing my little book reviews as the world burns.

Hi!

Maybe one day, I will not sit down to write a newsletter after a very long day of intellectual and parental labor, but alas, I am once more writing to you as an almost-corpse.

But maybe that’s actually the most fitting mode for communication in these dark times. It is draining to be so angry and worried all of the time, especially when one is angry and worried about things that were not previously cause for ire or concern. When I allow myself to think about the destruction being wrought by Trump Part Deux—and when I contemplate the many potential ramifications—it feels as if I’m perched precariously at the edge of an abyss. Entertain these thoughts for too long, and I’ll fall. So far I always manage to bring myself back, not through optimism, exactly, but through the desperate force of my self-preserving instincts. And I’m stubborn enough that I refuse to despair or give myself over to nihilism on account of these incompetent, evil clownfucks.

Anyway, maybe you’d like to know what I’ve been working on lately?

My most recent piece was published in The Atlantic the week before last. I wrote about Haley Mlotek’s debut memoir, No Fault, a lovely, rigorously searching, and generically playful work which understands at its core the ontological quandary of trying to fit feelings into narrative. Originally, the piece had more to say about that, but as is so often the case, a couple of paragraphs were cut during the editorial process. I thought, instead, I’d share some of that writing here:

“Apply a bit of pressure, and the term “love story” reveals itself as an oxymoron. It unites—marries, if you prefer—two fundamentally opposed entities. A story committed to the page or screen, no matter how unconventional, generally functions according to a precise, language-bound logic. It sets its terms and unfurls in accordance with them.

But love does not abide reason; it is bound by neither internal coherence nor temporal structure. So too is the case with anger, grief, ambivalence, and every other existential condition a person experiences in the span of a lifetime. For all their ineffability, we name our feelings as if doing so might make them more legible. And we seek to comprehend and explain them with the tools available to us. The result, oftentimes, is narrative.”

Cuts and revisions happen; ultimately, I am very happy with the published version of the review. (Here’s a gift link, by the way.) Moreover, The Atlantic has been very generous in its promotion of the piece, which I definitely appreciate. And I’m grateful that my wonderful editor thought of me for this assignment in the first place. I love the intellectual exercise of writing about books, but this was a particularly meaningful read, and I hope that my review will encourage you to pick it up.

I’ve got some more writing projects in the works, and I’ll share them when they are published/exist. In the meantime, I am very excited to share some writing adjacent news. The excellent people at Smith & Taylor Classics are reissuing Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s sensation(al) novel, Lady Audley’s Secret, a book that you’ve probably read if you completed graduate work in Victorian literature, but otherwise is not especially well-known. Each S&T edition includes a conversation between two critics about the text, and I was fortunate to be one of the critics in conversation on Lady Audley’s Secret. My conversation partner, Sarah Weinman, is a brilliant crime fiction expert, and I learned so much from her. Our discussion was wide-ranging, including such topics as Victorian sensation novels, contemporary crime fiction, Gone Girl, hysteria and misogyny, surveillance, and why Robert Audley is The Worst. Obviously I’m biased, but the edition is gorgeous, and I highly recommend preordering a copy so that you can hold it in your hands immediately upon its May 2025 publication. It’s a delicious novel, even a little campy in parts, and it lives in the DNA of countless works of crime and neo-gothic literature (Daphne DuMaurier, for instance, surely read both Braddon and Wilkie Collins).

Speaking of books, mine turned five last week. I was a different person when I wrote Too Much, but as Joan Didion puts it, I am on speaking terms with that person, and I’m very glad she wrote this book. I am, moreover, deeply grateful to everyone who has read and shared it.

Alright, I think that’s enough for now. Please take care of yourselves. For every thirty minutes of doom scrolling, maybe look at a tree? (This is advice that I need to follow as well.)

Hello again!

America has renewed its national nightmare, and I have renewed my commitment to newslettering.

Remember when I said that I’d send a newsletter every time I published new work? You probably do not (why would you?), but I do, and I am here, metaphorical hat in hand, to ask forgiveness for my delinquency. I’m realizing that my particular Newsletter Journey will likely be one characterized by sporadic updates and unceremonious pauses. And to be honest, that frustrates me, because I like writing newsletters. It’s refreshing to have a blog-like forum to ramble for several hundred words about what I’m reading and what I’ve written and why I’m obsessed with this, that, or the other.

Unfortunately, this season of life is proving rather relentless. I have a toddler, who is a marvelous, incandescent ball of chaos, and I have work. Substack is sort of work-adjacent, but it’s the sort of thing I do in my uncommissioned writing time, and between commissioned writing and teaching, I don’t have much of that these days (see also: why I’m not done with my proposal for book two). Anyway, you didn’t come here for me to whine! And really, I shouldn’t. Given the state of things, politically speaking, I’m exceedingly fortunate to be safe and secure, engaged in the intellectual work I love, and I’m determined to spend the next four years doing all I can to help foster conditions of safety and well-being for those who don’t share my privileges. That sounds trite, but I really do mean it.

It’s a god-awful time. I wasn’t thrilled to vote for the Democratic presidential ticket because I am appalled by the Biden administration’s substantive role in the Gazan genocide. If, just once, Harris had uttered the words “arms embargo,” I would have been thrilled, although I don’t know that her position on Israel and Gaza did much to influence the election results. Regardless of my feeble enthusiasm, I was quite certain that a second Trump administration would be catastrophic, and I try to regard voting as a way to choose my adversary. That so many people voted for Trump—voted against their own interests, their own well-being—makes me want to scream, but this is where we are, nationally, and now I need to figure out how to be useful during what will certainly be four difficult years. If, by the way, you’re in search of a sharp and clarifying Election 2024 autopsy, I vigorously suggest reading “Exit Right,” an essay by University of Chicago historian Gabriel Winant.

But I guess I’m also here to ask you to read things by me, so I might as well do that. Since I last wrote, I’ve had some great projects, and I would be honored to have your eyes on them. You shouldn’t encounter any paywalls — when necessary, I’ve used gift links. Here’s the rundown, mostly in chronological order:

I’ve reviewed a couple of books for The Washington Post’s BookWorld: Hannah Regel’s debut novel, The Last Sane Woman, which I found quite promising, and Jamie Quatro’s third book, Two-Step Devil, which annihilated me in an extremely positive way (also, if you haven’t read her novel Fire Sermon, change that).

I wrote about Texan Jewish country singer Kinky Friedman and my childish investment in the goodness of famous strangers for Still Alive Magazine (he was Still Alive when I was writing the essay; after he died, I wrote a postscript).

For The Nation, I wrote about Cuban-Italian writer Alba de Céspedes’s vigorous feminist polemic, Her Side of the Story, which argues that women cannot be happy with men. It’s not as strong as Forbidden Notebook; you get the sense that de Céspedes was putting too much pressure on herself to produce An Important Feminist Text. The ending especially is a bit of a mess. But it’s a fascinating book, and still well worth the read.

And most recently, I wrote for The Atlantic about Cho Nam-Joo’s excellent short story collection, Miss Kim Knows, which gave me the opportunity to think about how feminist writing, at its best, grapples with the tension between the universal and the specific.

If you are so inclined, please click on my work, and maybe read it too!

On the reading front, there’s big news: I finally read a Rooney! While visiting friends in NYC I picked up Normal People, and ended up buying my own copy before returning home. It’s good! It doesn’t work for me structurally! Rooney has such tenderness for her characters! The prose sometimes feels limp, and at other points really sings! I’ll almost certainly read more of her!

I also watched the miniseries adaptation, which I probably enjoyed more than the book itself. It’s very sexy, if that’s your thing.

Some more highlights from recent-ish reading:

Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Women: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day

Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages

Vigdis Hjorth’s If Only

Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos

Like most women in my demographic, I read All Fours by Miranda July and found it pretty obnoxious. I did laugh, here and there. July’s narrator (who is definitely July) can be very charming and funny, but she seems to exist in a reality without any meaningful problems. And as Christine Smallwood’s excellent review notes, the narrative can’t withstand the loss of its central tension (the narrator’s marital crisis).

Oh! I also finally read a Franzen. The Corrections was a good time with some uniquely despicable characters. I don’t know that I’ll read more of him. It doesn’t currently feel like a priority.

I’m going to wrap up now — maybe next time I’ll write about some of my recent viewing. For now, I hope you all are hanging in there. These are tough times. We’ll find a way to the other side of them, but the progress might be painful. It so often is!

x Rachel

Being Happy / Being Dignified

Is there a secret third option?

Author’s Note: The below entry is something of an intense thought exercise! If you’d prefer to bypass that, allow me to wish you an early happy New Year and to offer you a gift link to my most recent essay, a New York Times Magazine Letter of Recommendation on Jon Klassen’s brilliant children’s books. The essay focuses on his skillful juxtaposition of tenderness and brutality and ends with a few reflections on what, to my mind, it means to parent a young child right now.

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Lately I’ve been thinking about an oft-quoted line from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, spoken by the titular narrator: “I would always rather be happy than dignified.”

[You might reasonably assume that Jane is thinking about Rochester at this point in her narration—and to be sure, she’s probably always thinking about him—but this particular line refers to her eagerness to make amends with St. John after refusing his astonishingly unsexy and altogether unpleasant marriage proposal. The context is not especially important to what will follow, but then again, context always matters to me, so I couldn’t help but lay it out.]

I’ve always assumed that I agree with Jane. At least, I do in theory. If happiness and dignity must exist in mutual opposition, then the former seems like the more satisfying pursuit. Can they coexist, though? I’ve often thought that the answer entirely depends on one’s disposition. And of course, it depends on how one is defining dignity. In my twenties, I made a few pivotal romantic decisions that to many probably seemed supremely undignified, while I would argue that, in fact, they were crucial acts of self-dignity that made the rest of my life (so far) possible. The quality of possessing dignity—that is to say, respecting oneself—does not necessarily manifest as dignified—or composed, mannered—behavior.

Jane doesn’t care about being dignified, but she absolutely cares about possessing dignity. Her estrangement from Rochester, which she presently believes to be permanent, is an excruciating exercise in personal dignity. So too is her refusal of St. John Rivers. “God and nature intended you for a missionary’s wife,” St. John tells her, blowing future readers’ minds with the profundity of his charm and tact. “It is not personal, but mental endowments they have given you: you are formed for labour, not for love.” Jane, for her part, does not submit — not to St. John’s theology, and not to his estimation of her. [Maybe the context was relevant after all.]

I’m muddling my way through this bit of text because I’ve arrived at a couple of recent realizations:

1. I’m not sure who I thought I was kidding for all these years. I place a great deal of importance upon being dignified. Too much, in fact.

2. I fear I have a tendency of conflating dignity (foremost, an internal quality) with the act of being dignified (foremost, an outward performance). Undoubtedly this conflation intensifies the importance I’ve bestowed upon being dignified.

Was I always this way, to some extent? I’m not sure, and frankly, it would be boring for all of us if I were to attempt to answer that question. But in any case, I am like this now. And to be clear, I don’t want to pathologize it — there’s no inherent virtue in vulnerability. Most personal qualities aren’t laden with any kind of moral nuance; we either possess them or we don’t.

Moreover, it makes a certain amount of sense that I would grow more protective over the details of my personal life after becoming a parent. My son deserves privacy. And while I can’t know what he’ll one day think about having a mother who is a writer—and while I won’t censor myself to the detriment of my work—I can give him empathetic consideration as a future reader.

And yet, increasingly, I’ve found myself struggling to be vulnerable when I’d prefer to be—where I know I can be, safely—because it nonetheless feels like a perilous sort of exposure, and a relinquishing of control. Somewhere, deep in my lizard brain, is a nagging fear that love will ultimately make me a chump. It’s a feral kind of feeling, and maybe it, too, is not entirely unreasonable, in light of current affairs. The more I struggle to bear witness to this suffering world, grimly aware of my powerlessness in the face of so much horror, the more I claw for a set of reins. How could one not tense and bristle like a wounded animal when nothing about the world we live in seems certain or safe? (I must, however, acknowledge the privilege of my safety compared to so many right now, namely the Palestinians under Israeli siege. Political and existential horror have combined to make me a little paranoid.)

I’m not going to arrive at any answers tonight, but I think best through writing, so I thought I might as well take to the page and see what progress I make. I confess it’s also a little experiment: I wasn’t sure, when I began writing, whether I’d actually publish this post.

But it’s almost a new year, and maybe this is my resolution: To regard dignity as a healthy complement to trust and intimacy — and accordingly, to dismantle my learned misconception of it as incompatible with the vulnerability I feel in the presence of those I love. To prize happiness, which is never promised and always a gift, above the hollow satisfaction of being—or seeming—dignified.

Wilde Times

One day, I will write a newsletter from a place of serenity, but alas, that's not what I'm doing today.

Hello! I’m excited to share a new essay with you which recently published at The Nation. As you might have guessed from the title of this newsletter, its subject is Oscar Wilde — in particular, Oscar Wilde the critic. The piece is pegged to a lovely new annotated collection of Wilde’s critical work, edited by scholar Nicholas Frankel. As soon as I knew this collection was in the works, I was determined to write about it. However solipsistic, I’m always eager for the opportunity to think about what a critic’s role ought to be in the larger world of art and ideas, and how incisive criticism can make the world better (because it absolutely can!). And predictably, I often turn to the Victorians as a way to muddle through these questions. No matter how I feel about a particular Victorian writer or their work, I am at my best when I’m sussing out the contours and idiosyncrasies of my own intellectual milieu alongside a consideration of theirs.

That said, I unabashedly love Oscar Wilde. And this essay is pretty firmly focused on his philosophies on the role of criticism, which I find genuinely inspiring. Wilde believed so vehemently in criticism’s artistic significance. He believed, too, that the best criticism was beautiful, and beauty, he emphasizes, is not merely a decorative fringe benefit; it is, rather, a crucial component to lived experience. Every human deserves not merely to live, but to live amongst beauty.

Yet it is hard, at the present moment, to discern much beauty in this world that is being smashed and blown apart. As I bear witness to the humanitarian horror erupting in Palestine and Israel, and to the callous, incoherent social media circus unfolding in its wake, I cannot help but think that humans have entirely lost the thread on the basic matter of how to exist on a planet amongst other people. I’m not going to offer any amateurish geopolitical musings. Instead, you should read Jewish Currents’ coverage, both of this horror, and of the many years of brutish state oppression that underpins it. I will only express my bone-deep sadness when I think of the possibilities Wilde conjures in his work—possibilities ultimately denied to him as a gay man in Victorian Britain—and the chasm that separates them from this broken, ailing world. I only hope that the grief weighing upon so many of us right now will urge us towards moral clarity and consistency.

I’m tired enough that if I write much more, the content will devolve into gobbledegook—although, perhaps it’s brazen of me to assume that it hasn’t already. I’m back in the classroom this fall, and it’s deeply rewarding, but balancing writing, teaching, and a toddler is proving demanding work. So, I’ll end here, with a request that you read my essay, and that you share it if you’re so inclined. I also share this link to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. Please donate if you possibly can.

Take care, friends.

RVC