My favorite question when I’m getting to know someone is, “What books should I read if I want to really understand you?” I took last week off from writing this newsletter due to some unrelated nonsense, but when I started thinking about the new and upcoming releases I wanted to write about this week, I realized that’s the common thread between all three: these are books I’d tell someone to read if they wanted to understand me. Not sure what that’s about, but hey! I just hit three straight weeks of social distancing, and I’m pretty much gnawing at the bars for some meaningful face-to-face interaction. This newsletter isn’t that, but it was fun to write anyway!
Anyway, all navel-gazing aside, these are three really great books and I really hope you read them. Here’s what I think you should read this week.
Oh man. Oh man, oh man, oh man. Chelsea Bieker’s debut is one of the most genuinely thrilling novels I’ve read this year — a Southern Gothic revelation that reads like the literary love child of Flannery O’Connor and Margaret Atwood, filtered through the lens of Joan Didion’s literary ethnographies and VHS-scratchy ‘90s televangelist specials, and finished with a smoky Merle Haggard twang. After catastrophic drought renders California’s once-fertile Central Valley dry and barren, the residents of Peaches, CA fall under the thrall of Pastor Vern, a cult leader who claims he can summon rains that will restore the region to its former agricultural prosperity. When 14-year-old Lacey May, a believer reeling from the recent departure of her alcoholic mother, receives her first “assignment” from the cult, she’s thrown down a harrowing path of violence, doubt and enlightenment. This book has everything: cults, Bibles, witches, climate horror, motherhood, sex workers, blood, glitter, god complexes, generational trauma, and that thing where you dress up stuffed rats in tiny outfits. It’s Angels in America if Prior Walter were a 14-year-old girl. It is, simply put, the novel I’ve been waiting my whole life to read.
Chelsea Bieker is from the Central Valley, and I can tell. The California she evokes here is the California of my own upbringing: a burnt-brown landscape populated by the descendants of Dust Bowl refugees, whose political conservatism and evangelical Christianity make the San Joaquin Valley a red smear down the center of a blue state. Water, and who controls it, drive many of the major political battles in the region. I’ve said before that water rights are the single most important issue in California politics, and I mean it. The South and Midwest have their billboards that read “HELL IS REAL” or “REPENT,” but the roadside credo I most associate with home is the less urgent, but catchier, “FOOD GROWS WHERE WATER FLOWS.” Water is crucial to Bieker’s plot in a big, Biblical way — but first and foremost, this is a book about the violent things we do to women and the earth.
Plenty of folks have already devoted time and column inches to unpacking why women are so obsessed with true crime and thrillers, but it seems pretty obvious to me. We are obsessed with violence against women, and some women turn to stories about rape and murder out of a desire to protect themselves, while others see it as a form of catharsis. I’m not really interested in asking those questions, but perhaps that stems from how much my own worldview was probably shaped by the murder of Laci Peterson. The Petersons lived in Modesto, only a three hour drive north of where I lived in Bakersfield, and as the case played out I followed the story obsessively. I was in middle school, at the tipping point of adolescent girlhood marked by the incipient realization that the world is a dangerous place for women. As a child, stranger danger felt like a unisex proposition: don’t talk to strangers, don’t get in a car or go into their house. But women are far more likely to be murdered by their husbands than by a stranger in a white van. The Peterson case marked a turning point in my understanding of how violence and womanhood were uniquely intertwined, but as I got older, my fears and obsessions shifted to a much narrower subject, albeit one with a similarly gendered slant: Cults.
The average woman is much more likely to be murdered by her husband than end up in a cult. Nonetheless, stories about cults have achieved a cultural prominence arguably on par with more mundane narratives about domestic and sexual violence, especially among women. This encompasses podcasts and documentaries like Wild Wild Country, works of fiction like Emma Cline’s The Girls, The Leftovers, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and even Quentin Tarantino’s cultsploitation film Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, which tried (and failed) to do for the Manson family what Inglourious Basterds did for the Nazis. “Waco” and “Jonestown” are synonymous with the tragedies that took place therein. Lurid reports of branding and sexual slavery were central to the trial of NXIVM founder Keith Raneire. The details may change from story to story, but the themes remain largely the same: financial exploitation, physical abuse, and sexual violence, inflicted on largely female populations. Cult leaders are typically men, often white, but their victims are overwhelmingly women; research suggests women in cults outnumber men by as much as 70%. Charismatic cult leaders typically “love-bomb” women with low self-esteem before subjecting them to acts of physical, mental, and sexual violence. The end goals are always the same: complete obedience and subservience to the leader. Central to most cults is the inherent disposability of the female body once it has fulfilled the man’s sexual and/or reproductive needs, and some form of religious or spiritual extremism nearly always forms the basis for the systemic dehumanization of female followers.
Cults reflect and magnify forms of violence that are already familiar, from religious repression to reproductive coercion to the manifold abuses of power perpetuated by straight men, and women are obsessed with stories about cults, real and fictional, for the same reason we read The Handmaid’s Tale and other dystopian fiction rooted in feminist anxieties. Cults are patriarchy on steroids. In Godshot, Bieker explores not only the forms of violence unique to this setting, but all the ways in which desperation and alienation condition women to endure unthinkable suffering. “Women have a long history of suffering,” Lacey’s mother tells her, and indeed, suffering is the primary engine for most of this novel’s events. But Lacey’s awakening is told with such compassion and care, and her journey from naïve child to self-determined young woman is so thrilling to read, that the suffering along the way never reads like torture porn or titillation. It’s a glittering, gorgeous gem of a novel. I can’t recommend it enough.
Godshot is available now. Thanks to Catapult for providing an advance copy.
Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World by Olga Khazan
Disclaimer up top: I currently work for Hachette Books, who published this book. That being said, my opinions are my own. Trust me.
In Weird, Olga Khazan explores the psychology of nonconformity and what it means to go through life feeling unable to fit in, be it due to some externally visible trait, such as being a devout Muslim in the rural south, or an internal alienation from the dominant culture in your neck of the woods. A science writer at the Atlantic, Khazan delves into the evidence that indicates feeling like an outsider can sharpen key psychological skills such as critical thinking, creativity, and resilience. But she also acknowledges the psychological downsides of rejection, exploring how people who struggle to understand and comply with social norms can change their personalities to fit in better. Feeling like an outsider can be a source of power, Khazan argues, but it can also really suck. The key is knowing which parts of your weirdness to embrace, with the understanding that many aspects of our personalities aren’t set in stone. Over time, it’s possible to become more extroverted, less neurotic, and more easygoing — and, perhaps of interest to some of y’all, how socially awkward adults can make new friends.
For me, reading Weird was an enjoyable but paradoxical experience. Khazan uses her own experiences growing up as a Soviet Jewish immigrant in West Texas as a framing device for her research and case studies, exploring the effects cultural norms and experiences can have on our psychology. Ironically, the cultural attitudes, dynamics, and details in these anecdotes were instantly familiar to me as a Russian-American who grew up in California’s conservative Central Valley that they actually had the opposite effect. I finished this book feeling slightly less weird than when I started it, at least in regard to the quirks of my own cultural background, but found it to be a bracing and insightful read that helped me contextualize and understand my own particular brand of social awkwardness.
Remember how, growing up in the early 2000s, we were constantly bombarded by contradictory messages about the virtues of nonconformity? This was the heyday of Avril Lavigne, Evanescence, and Happy Bunny. “Welcome to the Black Parade” was a top 40 hit, and with the advent of MySpace came the era of the scene kid. Far from the Columbine-fueled moral panic about goth kids in the late ‘90s, these socially acceptable modes of nonconformity were practically mainstream by the mid-oughts. To this day, seeing the phrase “You laugh at me because I’m different, I laugh at you because you’re all the same” choke-slams me right back to the chat boards on Neopets.
At their core, the ostensibly nonconformist trends of the early 21st century amounted to little more than an aesthetic sensibility built on the typical adolescent desires to rebel against your parents while fitting in with your peers. I was absolutely confounded when those kids bragged about how weird they were and mocked the “preps” for shopping at Abercrombie & Fitch, wearing too much makeup, and listening to Taylor Swift. Didn’t they realize they were all dressed alike?! Did they think the time they spent on their own hair and makeup didn’t count?! What’s wrong with Taylor Swift?!? I got remarkably worked up as a teenager about my classmates’ hypocrisy, because the way I saw it, none of them knew what it was like to be truly weird. Meanwhile, I was a cold, bossy, know-it-all showtune dork with a contrarian streak visible from space. My achievement-obsessed Soviet immigrant father had instilled in me an achievement-based value system of being the first one to raise my hand and volunteer the correct answer. My atheism didn’t win me any friends in heavily evangelical Bakersfield. I got good grades, but fought with my teachers almost relentlessly. The only exceptions were those teachers who encouraged me to channel that intense energy into the arts, and perhaps develop some skill or passion that might become a sense of pride rather than my baseline of self-loathing.
As it turns out, they might have been onto something. As Khazan explains later in the book, growing up with the sense of not fitting neatly into any specific cultural identity can result in higher levels of integrative complexity — the ability to see a problem from multiple perspectives — which can in turn make you more creative, a better critical thinker, and more comfortable voicing your opinions in a group. Or, to paraphrase Leslie Knope, one person’s know-it-all contrarian jerk is another person’s offbeat straight-shooting problem solver. Even though I’ve chilled out a bit with age and maturity, there’s still something reassuring about reframing the qualities that made me feel alienated and ashamed as having been secret strengths all along. If you were (or are) any kind of freak, loser, outcast, reject, socially anxious introvert, or just plain odd, trust me: this is for you.
Weird is available April 7 from Hachette Go, an imprint of Hachette Books. I had to read it, because my job.
Oksana, Behave!, by Maria Kuznetsova
Gonna keep this one short and sweet. Any time someone asks what book I most want adapted for the screen, my answer is Maria Kuznetsova’s Oksana, Behave! — a coming-of-age tragicomedy that it could easily be the Soviet-American Freaks and Geeks. The eponymous Oksana, who moves from Ukraine to Florida with her parents as a child, is one of those first-degree human disaster protagonists you probably know I absolutely love: part Ramona Quimby, part Fleabag, and wholly original. It’s a sharp and surprisingly moving character study of a flawed but well-intentioned young woman struggling to find a place where she feels at home in her own skin, torn between her parents’ culture and her own, and touches on many of the same themes that I found particularly resonant in Weird.
It’s also really funny.
I never saw actual prostitutes, but sometimes men would honk or slow down and shout at Baba and she didn’t know why. Mama and Papa said not to tell her, because she needed the attention since her daughter had just died, her husband had kicked it a while back, her father had been purged, her morning work at the lab was unpaid, the Soviet Union had just collapsed, she had to share a room with me, her family had been gutted by fascism, the world was cruel and unwelcoming, et cetera.
If you’re into snarky, world-weary female characters, immigrant coming-of-age narratives, or jokes about Stalin — this is for you.
Oksana, Behave! is available from Random House. I paid for it myself.
Oh my God, okay, that’s it. Thanks to anyone who stayed with me. I hope you’re all staying healthy, sane, and at home! I’d love to hear from you. Reply to this email, or hit me up on Twitter with questions, comments, or recommendations. Next week will be shorter, I swear.