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I’m deep into rewatching Six Feet Under for the umpteenth time, so I didn’t read much this month. By my usual standards, I know five books a month is a lot for many people.
Floor Sample: A Creative Memoir by Julia Cameron
Floor Sample is Julia Cameron’s memoir about addiction, mental illness, recovery, motherhood, and creativity. Cameron shares her descent into alcohol addiction, drug use, and the episodes of psychosis that led to her being hospitalised. She is also candid about her relationship breakdowns, her experience of motherhood and her changing relationship with her daughter, Domenica.
Floor Sample grabs your attention from the first page and doesn’t let up as we see how, throughout it all, Cameron built a creative life for herself — something she teaches others to do in The Artist’s Way. Cameron is a prolific writer, teacher, poet, playwright, filmmaker, composer, and journalist. I kept thinking, “how does she find the time to do everything?”
The Year of the Cat: A Love Story by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett
On the surface, Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett’s The Year of the Cat is about getting a kitten during the year of many pandemic-related lockdowns. It is also a tender, moving and beautifully written exploration of PTSD, family, motherhood, and the forced separation from our families and support networks that so many of us faced at the height of the pandemic.
How to Survive a Plague: The Story of How Activists and Scientists Tamed AIDS by David France
It took me almost a year to listen to David France’s How to Survive a Plague, but only because it was a library audiobook I needed to return and check out multiple times. It is a brilliantly written history of the AIDS epidemic in the US.
France combines the personal, the political and the scientific giving the reader a deep and lasting understanding of why it fell to gay and bisexual men, the broader LGBTQ+ community and grassroots activists to push the medical and public health establishment into taking AIDS seriously.
The Tragedy of Heterosexuality by Jane Ward
The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, the title of Jane Ward’s examination of the pitfalls of straight culture, is a play on the idea that it is a tragedy to queer. What if heterosexuality has more problems than we’re willing to admit?
I read this as research for an essay I’m writing (the same reason I read Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel), and I genuinely think it has rearranged my brain. It’s queer. It’s feminist. It challenges the notion that queer people would choose to be straight if they could. Ward argues that straight men could learn a thing or two about embodying their love of women from queer women.
While Ward references the LGBTQ+ community throughout, she often speaks of women as being straight or lesbian with little to no mention of bisexual, pansexual, and other m-spec women. Given that bi+ people have unique experiences with both queer culture and straight culture, this felt like a missed opportunity. I do not doubt that others will expand on Ward’s work, so I read this as the beginning of a much-needed conversation rather than the final say.
Where I End by Sophie White
I’ve already reviewed Where I End, but the TL;DR version is that Sophie White has crafted a literary horror story that snakes its way into your brain and will not leave. It will take a truly exceptional book to beat this for my book of the year, a bold claim to make in February!
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