Books from our Panelists
We've hosted a series of wide ranging panel discussions recently. Here are some of the books, movies, and more that came up in those conversations.
One of my favorite kinds of reading experiences is when a book gives me a thread (or multiple threads!) to follow, and sends me to other books, artwork, and movies. Recently, we’ve hosted several panels that have invited exactly this kind of experience. One was on the life and work of the mercurial Finnish author and illustrator, Tove Jansson; another was on literature of divorce and marital decay; and another was on blazing antifascist Cuban Italian author, Alba de Cespedes, and the cohort of writers who inspired Elena Ferrante.
Below is a list of all the different books and other cultural objects discussed at those events, as well as links to the full panel discussions. I hope that they send you on an interesting path. I, for one, was struck by some of the overlap in these conversations. Anne Carson was mentioned multiple times, which I have taken as a sign to revisit The Autobiography of Red. Natalia Ginzburg also comes up multiple times, who is a writer one should always be reading and re-reading, in my opinion. Vivian Gornick was mentioned as a writer working in the lineage of Alba de Cespedes, and she recently appeared on our Jane Austen panel. Jane Austen, I should add, is also mentioned as a peer of the main character in Cespedes’s The Forbidden Notebook — both women hid their writing. What a dizzying, wonderful web we’ve accidentally woven. A comment from Judith Thurman sent me on a delightful journey through the MoMA online archives, I’ll let you keep reading to find out about that.
— Mikaela Dery, Director, Unterburg Poetry Center
A celebration of Tove Jansson with Mackenna Goodman, Kate Zambreno, Alexander Chee, and Leanne Shapton
“I think of Natalia Ginzburg when I think of [Tove’s] writing, although I feel like Natalia is saltier, grumpier, funnier. Not that she’s not funny, Tove, but it’s a similar economy. A directness, maybe.” - Alexander Chee
“How does Tove resonate in literature today? [Alexander] said Natalia Ginzburg, people have compared her to Proust. Can we talk about who you might see her conversation with?” - Mackenna Goodman
“I think about the kinds of books that Danielle Dutton is publishing at Dorothy1 —writers like Jen George, Amina Cain — have that slowness to them…. that sense that it’s just about texture at atmosphere, and taking up these characters. In America, books like that tend not to be as championed because they’re not seen as plot-oriented. - Kate Zambreno
“I was just thinking of Raven Lelani, who is also a painter. Her books are wonderfully physical, expressive, sensual… or her book rather, we’re still waiting for a second book from her. - Alexander Chee
“There’s also this really surreal quality…I think of Leonora Carrington, or these surrealist writers, where something violent could suddenly happen, something sudden could suddenly happen. I don’t know if she really follows realism in terms of the logic of most of her work.” - Kate Zambreno
“It strikes me that writers working now who are kindred to Tove in a way are Anne Carson and Lydia Davis, especially how much their work deals with weather. I always think of Anne Carson and snow, and this idea of landscape affecting so much of her work, or Lydia Davis’s The Cows and how she writes weather, and how she writes wind. Have you seen the collage that Tove kept on her studio door of all the different storm clouds? It’s really beautiful, she was so interested in writing about [that].”
“[There’s an] honesty about the fact that she wasn’t [on the island] full time, compared to Thereau, that didn’t come up when writing On Walden Pond, that his mother was bringing the laundry, bringing him lunch so that he could experience the glories of man in nature. Here she is, completely laying that bare. She has, not only nothing to hide, a lack of vanity, and the ability to say not only am I in love with the island, but I am unworthy, and also — so what?” - Mackenna Goodman
“If you can write for children, you can write anything. It’s the hardest form I think, and there’s not quite an understanding of how hard it is to not be didactic, to not be finger-wagging, and to be truly weird. The books that last are the weirder ones, like Goodnight Moon. And the Moomins are pretty weird!” - Leanne Shapton
“In the green room, Leanne brought up Miyazaki, and I think there’s this idea in some children’s literature or films about needing space for a political imagination. In The Moomins, much like in Miyazaki, there are so many natural disasters, and there’s often other forms of family crisis, being moved, being orphaned, and it’s the same in The Moomins. There’s migration, there’s great floods…” - Kate Zambreno
“There’s the inevitability of not getting along with the people closest to you, or with your neighbors, you will not see eye to eye…” - Leanne Shapton
“And managing it” - Alexander Chee
Watch the full conversation here.
Before Ferrante: Ann Goldstein and Judith Thurman with Dayna Tortorici on Alba de Céspedes’ There’s No Turning Back
[On writers who recall Alba de Cespedes] “Joanna, you mentioned Cespedes’ cohort of Natalia Ginzburg and Elsa Morante, but you also mentioned Simone de Beauvoir and Mary McCarthy’s The Group…” Dayna Tortorici
“Unfortuately Beauvoir is a wonderful thinker and not a fantastic novelist, and that isn’t to say that Cespedes isn’t [a fantastic thinker] — and in fact they knew each other when they lived in Paris — she almost takes the ideas that Beauvoir has that are kind of good, and writes the real novel of them. I was thinking of The Forbidden Notebook, which to me, has an interesting relationship with this very short story that Beauvoir wrote called La femme rompue, or The Woman Destroyed… they completely misunderstood it, her readers. The story is a diary of a woman who’s saying, ‘my husband has left me, what am I going to do with my life?’, and the readers wrote in and said, ‘we loved her, we thought she was so wonderful’, but Beauvoir wrote it to say, ‘don’t put all your eggs in one basket! Don’t think that marriage and children will be your only way of being.’ Cespedes managed to do that idea properly, I think, [with The Forbidden Notebook].”
“In The Days of Abandonment Ferrante talks about A Woman Destroyed” - Ann Goldstein
“Hiding your work probably starts with Jane Austen, she would write in the parlor and whenever anybody came in she would slip the pages under a book.” - Judith Thurman
“I just read recently this writer called Nadia Terranova, who has written a lot about de Cespedes, she’s a current Italian novelist. She said that the mental hospitals [during fascism in the 1930s] were full of women who didn’t want to have children” - Ann Goldstein
“There’s an absolutely wonderful figure of his same generation whose name is Grete Stern, and she was a designer at the Bauhaus and Jewish. She and her husband, who was not Jewish, went back to his native Buenos Aires where she had a very important career as a photographer. And she illustrated for women magazines for the advice columns, and these illustrations are so subversive. Subversveness is another great commonality that these writers have.” - Judith Thurman
“The kinship [between Vivian Gornick, Cespedes, and Ferrante] is this incredible struggle for independence as if she’s resisting being sucked back into the world of her mother. She has an incredible memoir called Fierce Attachments…she is also part of this project of ‘dignifying’ feminized forms like the advice column and the diary.” - Dayna Tortorici
“As the culture becomes more permissive, where one is encountering resistance and is pushing back becomes sort of hard to feel. I see people reacting very strongly to Miranda July and her new novel All Fours2, which is a book about perimenopause and figuring out how to get free of the constricting bonds of motherhood and partnership, even when you’re married to a good man, and you have a good life, but you’re not completely yourself, and still not completely free. I think that touched a lot of people, in the way Ferrante touched a lot of people.” - Dayna Tortorici
Watch the full conversation here.
The Divorce Plot: Fiction of Marital Decay with Ada Calhoun, Weike Wang, Alissa Bennett, Susan Minot, and Alexandra Jacobs
At this event, each panelist read a passage of their choosing from the long canon of divorce literature. Those titles, with their readers, are listed here:
Alissa Bennet: Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrot (1929)
Ada Calhoun: Heartburn by Nora Ephron (1996)
Weike Wang: Wants by Grace Paley (1971)
Susan Minot: The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson (2002)
Alexandra Jacobs: Sublimating by John Updike (1971)
Back now to our regularly scheduled programming!
“When did you first encounter the concept of marriage breaking down in life, literature, or both? I’ll go first, it was Kramer vs Kramer.” - Alexandra Jacobs
“Mine was Family Ties, my mother was an actress in the 80s, and in 1983 she was in season one as the divorced friend of Elyse. I rewatched it today, and in my memory she’d been divorced forever, but in reality, she’s only splitting up with her husband in the last five seconds of episode 19. You’re so relieved because this guy is to terrible for two whole long episodes. They get a postcard from her saying that she’s in Greece having the time of her life. She says ‘Greek is very hard to pick up, but I am not.’” - Ada Calhoun
“There’s the southern writer Barry Hannah talked about how there’s music in everything in life, and the writer hears the music and writes about it. He said that there is no music in the death of a child, and he said that there is no music in divorce.” - Susan Minot
“[Divorce] is an option now, it didn’t used to be. I was going to read something from Anna Karenina, but they never get divorced in Anna Karenina. She leaves [her husband] and has a child with Vronsky, her lover, but neither of them can bear to get a divorce.” - Susan Minot
“When I write about marriage I think about Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters, I think about August Osage County, I think about how these people should not be married. And that’s what I always thought marriage was like! You can’t get out of it, this is it!” - Weike Wang
“Updike was sort of stigmatized for his novels not being about ‘big subjects about the world.’ Now that we’re in a very transformative time for the world, I wonder if when you’re writing you’re conscious of this topic as a ‘feminine’ topic, and what you think about that?” - Alexandra Jacobs
Watch the full conversation here
Upcoming events!
April 10: There has never been a better time to bone up on The Odyssey! Luckily, the prolific translator, Daniel Mendelsohn, has a new translation out! He’ll be discussing it this week with Ayad Akhtar. Buy tickets here.
April 15: We are hosting the legendary comic illustrator, R Crumb, for his only US event!! He’s celebrating the publication of his glorious biography by Dan Nadel. The biographer and subject will be joined by Naomi Fry, and seats are going very quickly!! Buy tickets here.
April 30: Pulitzer-prize finalist, Sophie Gilbert, is smart enough to live in the UK, but she is coming to The 92nd Street Y to celebrate the publication of her new book, Girl on Girl. She will be joined by some of our most astute cultural minds — Amanda Hess, Anna Marie Tendler, and Zoë Haylock — to discuss feminism in the early 2000s, the dark side of nostalgia, and how the early aughts ushered in our current moment of regression around women’s rights. Buy tickets here.
You can see all of our upcoming events here!
Dorothy is a wonderful feminist press! They publish two books every October, and they are all wonderful.
I have linked here to the hardcover, but would be remiss if I didn’t flag that the paperback comes out in May!