What to read this week: pink covers only.
Seriously, these books are so pretty. But they're also... good!
Hey, y’all. How’s quarantine treating you? I’ve slacked on my newsletter duties this past month because, quite frankly, my brain is mashed potatoes and I’ve also been focused on launching another newsletter, this one for work. (That’s launching soon and I’m excited about it!) I’ve also, quite frankly, been going stir f’ing crazy at home. If you’re also struggling to read and pay attention to things you’d normally have no problem with, you’re not alone. We’re all in this together, and so this week, I’m recommending two books that are on the short-and-sweet end of the spectrum — congraturitos to everyone spending their quarantine reading A Little Life, but I know what I’m about, and that’s not it.
So, in the spirit of brevity: here’s what I think you should read.
Everything is Under Control by Phyllis Grant
The internet is full of a lot of soggy, lukewarm takes that get passed around every six months or so as if they’re piping hot. You know what I’m talking about: “Does anyone think Andy’s friends were the real villains in The Devil Wears Prada?” “‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ is about date rape!” (Seasonal edition.) Et cetera.
My least favorite of these stupid Twitter platitudes is, of course, this stupid, sexist old chestnut about how Ladies Be Writing Essays Before The Recipe:
You get it. Others have written better defenses of the Long Food Blog Story than I’m capable of slotting into this newsletter, but at the end of the day, even many of the defenses I see on social media revolve around operations and logistics: the pre-recipe essays are necessary for SEO and site traffic. And, well, they are! But what about the food writers you actually love to read? What about the bloggers who write with passion and eloquence and grit about the process of developing recipes and their lives and families?
I first came across Phyllis Grant’s writing on her food blog, Dash and Bella, circa the mid-2010s, and I was instantly hooked. I’m a millennial New Yorker with no children; she’s a Gen X Berkeley mother of two. On the surface, we have very little in common. But Grant’s writing about food and motherhood and womanhood was more than just adherence to SEO best practices — immediate and personal and brimming with raw warmth. Hers was a recipe blog you actually read for the articles.
Everything is Under Control is a hybrid: part memoir, part cookbook, it traces her journey from Juilliard-trained ballet dancer to restaurant line cook to motherhood and adulthood in Los Angeles and Berkeley. Grant has a unique gift for writing about food in a way that activates not just taste but all five senses, and the effect is transportive. Picking the streusel top off a blueberry muffin, splashing creme fraîche over homemade tacos, sneezing in the storm of flour that flies up from a stand mixer. Her love for food — real food, with carbs and fats and calories — comes through in her prose, woven through with sparsely-written but intimate anecdotes about eating disorders, pregnancy and postpartum depression, and marriage. In a market saturated with cookbooks written by lifestyle bloggers that gloss over the painful and messy elements of parenting and real life, this is a real treat.
If you’re only going to make one recipe, I suggest the pesto. Anyone who advocates for sneaking anchovies into pesto is on my side.
Everything is Under Control is available now from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Thanks so much to the publisher for providing an advance copy for review.
Paperback Crush: The Totally Radical History of '80s and '90s Teen Fiction by Gabrielle Moss
Like anyone who came of age in the era of the Babysitters Club, teen magazines, and the early internet, I love two things: serial novels aimed at middle-grade girls, and personality quizzes. In fact, one of my favorite pastimes thus far in quarantine has been the resurgence of the personality quiz through uQuiz — so much that I ended up combining these two passions in one quiz: “Which book series that made girls go apeshit at the Scholastic Book Fair are you?”
(If you take this quiz, please tweet me or reply to this email with your answer. I’m the Princess Diaries!)
Anyway, while writing said quiz, I stumbled onto Gabrielle Moss’s excellent nonfiction book Paperback Crush, about “the young adult lit published after Judy Blume but before J.K. Rowling,” and smashed the 1-click Kindle purchase button before I’d even made it through the first blurb. In six chapters, each encompassing one major theme of the genre (Friendship, Love, Jobs, etc.), Moss provides an overview of how the YA market exploded in the ‘80s and ‘90s, allowing girls to graduate from the various Clubs — Babysitters, Saddle, Twelve Candles — to the racier world of Sweet Valley High and the Wakefield twins. Side note: am I the only one who has never tried cocaine expressly because of the SVH book where Regina Morrow tries it for the first time at a party and immediately dies due to an undiagnosed heart problem? It can’t be just me.
Moss’ hindsight isn’t entirely clouded by pastel-colored nostalgia, and she takes pains to note the period-typical issues present in many of these books; lack of diversity and regressive ideals about sex and gender are frequent themes. But she also takes a look at some lesser-known titles from the era that featured underrepresented characters, from Sandra Scoppettone’s ‘70s lesbian YA romance Happy Endings Are All Alike to Leah Klein’s The B.Y. Times (Sweet Valley Yeshiva!). And… the covers. Oh my God, the covers.
Can’t relate.
Paperback Crush is a quick, compulsive read — I flew through it in one sitting — and will likely bring back long-buried memories of books you picked up at yard sales and brought home from the library, mostly forgettable but with odd details that burrowed their way into your brain even to this day. (See also: my Regina Morrow cocaine story.) Even just seeing some of these covers made me remember books I’d completely forgotten I’d read. If you were the type of girl prone to going apeshit at the Scholastic Book Fair, I can’t recommend it more.
Paperback Crush is available everywhere from Quirk Books. I bought my own copy.
Thanks for reading! As always, feel free to reply to this email or just reach out with questions, comments or just to say hi. You can also find me on Twitter at @ElizabethBelsky.