Book Reviews

Self-Isolating and Bored? Here’s 15 Pieces of Media to Entertain You…

Kate Sloan

Dear friends: This is a hard time. I’m proud of you for wherever you’re at, whether you can’t stop crying in bed or you’re doing pretty okay actually (or something else entirely). Whatever reaction you’re having is valid – as long as you’re not one of those “This virus is cleansing the planet!!” ecofascists or a “But people should still pay their rent somehow!!” capitalist.

My friend JoEllen recently published a list of “comfort media” to consume in These Trying Times. I wanted to do something similar, although I will say that not all of these works are necessarily comforting. Some of them are just cathartic, or absorbing, or all of the above. When I’m sad or anxious, sometimes I don’t want to turn away from those feelings – sometimes I want to walk right into them, revel in them, exorcize them from my body.

In that spirit, here are 15 pieces of media, across various genres and formats, that I think you might find helpful right now in one way or another. (A note: all the links to books in this post go to the Powell’s website. Powell’s is a great indie bookstore that you should absolutely support in these tough times if you can, instead of lining Bezos’s already-overstuffed pockets.)

Stephen King, it must be said, is a problematic fave. However, he has written some of the best apocalyptic fiction in the biz. I often find it useful to focus on his terrifying stories in times that are, themselves, also terrifying – because, I reason, I may be having a tough time but at least I’m not handcuffed to a dead man’s bed (Gerald’s Game) or running away from my axe-wielding husband (The Shining).

There are three King novels that feel particularly salient to me in These Times, and they are as follows. Under the Dome is one of my all-time favorite books – it’s a hefty 1,000 pages but the pace is snappy enough to make that seem reasonable, as is often the case with King. In this story, an invisible but impenetrable “dome” descends on a small town in Maine called Chester’s Mill, cutting off its residents from the outside world and plunging the population into a panic. You’ll see familiar moments in this story – grocery store riots, lying politicians – but also moments of hope, triumph, and the goodness of humanity. (P.S. If you like audio formats, you honestly owe it to yourself to read Under the Dome as an audiobook – it’s read by the ever-wonderful Raúl Esparza and is beyond compare in its genre, IMO.)

The King novel most prescient of our current situation is, of course, The Stand, his epic novel about a flu strain engineered by the army as a biological weapon which then gets leaked into the world by accident. It quickly infects and kills over 99% of Earth’s population, and the survivors are left to cobble together some semblance of a new society in the wreckage. There’s lots of good stuff in here about friendship, grit, and goodness – all balanced with plenty of that signature King darkness and evil. This book shows a version of pandemic response that’s far more drastic than anything our world will likely face due to COVID-19, so it’s escapist in the sense that it allows you to think, “Well, things are bad, but at least they’re not this bad.”

I also gotta shout out my favorite lesser-known King novel, the relatively recent Sleeping Beauties, which he co-wrote with his son Owen. This one’s also about an apocalyptic scenario of sorts: all the women on Earth start contracting a mysterious illness where, when they fall asleep, they essentially go into a coma and cannot be awakened. Hilariously, we then get to see what happens when the men of the world are left to fend for themselves. Chaos ensues, obviously. This one isn’t as well-reviewed as some other King novels, but I wonder how much of that is due to its vaguely feminist themes!

If you like podcasts and/or roleplaying games and haven’t yet dove into the amazingness that is The Adventure Zone, you’re in for a treat. It’s my favorite podcast of all time – maybe even my favorite piece of narrative media ever? It has made me laugh and cry more than any other podcast, certainly.

TAZ is the three McElroy brothers (of My Brother, My Brother and Me and Polygon fame) playing tabletop RPGs with their dad. The first campaign, Balance, follows a flamboyant wizard named Taako, a wholesome carpenter named Magnus, and a goofy cleric named Merle as they work to collect 7 dangerous relics from all over their magical world. Start with episode 1; after that, there’s still SEVENTY-SIX more episodes for you to listen to in the first campaign alone. (Yeah, it’s a hugely epic story.) One of the later campaigns, Amnesty, is also a gorgeous blend of comedy, camaraderie, and magical realism.

While we’re talking about immersive fantasy podcasts: have you heard of Hello from the Magic Tavern? It’s an almost entirely improvised narrative fiction podcast about a guy named Arnie who accidentally falls through a magic portal into a faraway fantasy land called Foon. Looking to understand the planet he’s landed on, Arnie sets up his podcast recording equipment at a nearby tavern and begins weekly interviews with various guests from around Foon – swordsmen, shopkeeps, goblins, and royalty – all while backed up by his two faithful cohosts, a self-aggrandizing wizard named Usidore and a horny shapeshifter called Chunt. Start with episode 1 and get lost in Foon – it definitely seems better than Earth right now!

Brilliant comedian and musician Lane Moore wrote a book called How to Be Alone which feels particularly needed at this time. It’s full of thoughts about anxiety, attachment, and the longing for intimacy, but its tone is ultimately hopeful – by the time I finished this book, I felt much better about the idea that I might not always have a partner, or tons of close friends, and that might be okay. If you’re struggling with feelings of loneliness and isolation, pick this one up; reading it is like having a profound chat with a good, smart pal.

Lane is also doing a nightly Twitch show (last I checked, anyway) at 8 p.m. Eastern time, also called How to Be Alone, that you can watch right here. She describes it as being like Pee-Wee’s Playhouse for lonely adults – and don’t we all need that right now?!

Looking for something uplifting to read? You really can’t do much better than Alexandra Franzen’s You’re Going to Survive, for which she interviewed professionals across multiple fields (cuisine! music! fashion! non-profits!) about the hardest moments of their careers and how they got to the other side. I’ve never seen a more striking illustration of the notion that “this too shall pass,” always.

If you’re less about distraction and more the type of person who likes to dive directly into your feelings and face them head-on, I highly recommend the movie Contagion (2011), a fast-paced thriller about a high-mortality virus that originates in bats and pigs and quickly spreads around the world. It’s topping the charts right now on streaming sites and whatnot; evidently a lot of people are turning to it, for one reason or another.

The main thing I found comforting about this film is that the scientific and medical professionals in it are incredibly competent and smart (and are, notably, mostly women). The science presented in the movie was thoroughly researched and the moviemakers consulted professionals in the relevant fields, so one could even say Contagion is educational. On an emotional level, watching the brilliantly-acted suffering of Matt Damon’s character – who (mild spoilers here) loses his wife and son within the first few minutes of the movie – is cathartic in the most ineffable of ways. He is us and we are him. Hang in there, Matt Damon.

If you like fanfiction – and even if you don’t – the novel-length Sherlock stories written by Katie Forsythe (a.k.a. Wordstrings) are worth looking into. She’s a brilliant writer who explores themes of mental illness through the familiar characters of the Holmes universe. I find it’s very hard to worry about my own problems (or even my own planet’s problems) when I’m tracking Sherlock and John’s journeys through crime scenes, drug hazes, and sexual tension.

All the Best and Brightest Creatures might be my fave. An asexual (but not sex-repulsed) Sherlock gets together with a bewildered-yet-horny John, all while they try to solve mysteries set in place by one Jim Moriarty. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a fanfic story so gripping. And conveniently, Archive of Our Own lets you export fanfic in formats that’ll work on your e-reader, so you can lounge in bed or in the tub with Sherlock and John to keep you company.

It’s all too easy to fall into a YouTube rabbit hole these days, consuming news videos and conspiracy videos galore about the current situation. But why not make your YouTube gallivanting into a more pleasant, educational, and uplifting endeavor? I can’t recommend Philosophy Tube highly enough – it’s a campy-yet-esoteric video series in which the dazzling Olly Thorn presents his ideas on topics as wide-ranging as sex work, witchcraft, and Jordan Peterson. He takes an honest look at the world as it is, and theorizes on ways it could be better, kinder, stronger. His videos are also plenty theatrical and silly at times – this isn’t some dry philosophy lecture!

While I’m talking about YouTube, I would be remiss not to mention the Bon Appetit channel, which is basically porn if you enjoy food, competence, and kindness. Our mess of a planet kind of fades into the background while you’re watching, for example, Claire Saffitz trying to make KitKat bars from scratch, or Amiel Stanek sampling every way to cook an egg. I wish the channel would start putting out videos of the BA chefs making quarantine-appropriate dishes from their own separate homes!

If you are a video game person, you’ve probably already been turning to your games of choice for entertainment and comfort. But if you’re looking for recommendations specific to this moment, I’ve gotta say that the immersive, competitive, and plot-driven nature of the Pokémon games has made them invaluable to me through all of this. You add “pocket monsters” to your team, train them, and battle with them, all while traversing strange lands and meeting interesting people. I would suggest starting with HeartGold or SoulSilver if you’re new to the series – they’re both fairly accessible and they also take longer to get through than most (if not all) of the other main-series games. If visuals are important to you, the X/Y and Sun/Moon versions look much nicer, though they are definitely less challenging than previous iterations.

There’s also the game everyone is talking about right now, Animal Crossing. A new version is out for the Switch but I’m also quite partial to the 3DS version, New Leaf. Animal Crossing is essentially the Seinfeld of games, in that it’s a game about nothing: you have a house in a small idyllic town, and you can make friends with your neighbors, decorate your home, go fishing, buy cute clothes, and just generally lead a low-stakes fantasy existence. If you need a whole other life to distract you from your real life, Animal Crossing is definitely a good option.

Along similar lines, it’s very easy to get absorbed in any Harvest Moon game. The focus of these is farming, which doesn’t seem like it would be that interesting – and indeed, sometimes isn’t – but it has clear goals, and sometimes you need that. You can also befriend (and even marry) other villagers, mine for valuable ores, upgrade your home, take care of livestock, and cook from recipes. My favorite in the series is the very simple and straightforward Friends of Mineral Town.

What media are you turning to these days?

12 Days of Girly Juice 2019: 8 Brilliant Books

Kate Sloan

This instalment of 12 Days of Girly Juice used to highlight my favorite things I tweeted all year, but you know what? I’d rather talk about books. (However, if you were wondering, my favorite tweets of the year were definitely this one and this one.)

I read 40+ books this year and loved lots of them, so this is hard – but here are my 8 top picks!

You Know You Want This by Kristen Roupenian

From the author of the viral story “Cat Person” came this tour de force, a collection of short stories about the complexity of consent. Within these pages are several tricky fictional situations centering around sexual sadism, relational autonomy, erotic humiliation, and more. Several times while reading this book, I had to put it down and ponder: What do I think this character should have done, ethically? What decision would I have made in this situation? This book is so timely, what with the concept of consent being debated and dissected all over the place due to the #MeToo movement, and I think these stories are useful thought exercises for those of us concerned with parsing what consent and non-consent really mean, and what their limitations might be.

The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang

When I first read Esmé’s essay “Perdition Days” years ago, I thought it was one of the most striking things I’d ever read. It chronicles her time living with Cotard’s delusion, a belief that (in her case) one is dead, and that the people in one’s life are merely purgatory’s facsimiles of their living counterparts. Esmé painted an incredibly affecting picture of what this delusion felt like from the inside, and how it impacted those around her. She went on to write The Collected Schizophrenias, a collection of essays (including “Perdition Days”) which discuss her life with chronic mental and physical illness, and the various dilemmas and struggles therewith. I found myself crying on the subway while reading Esmé weigh the decision to have kids or stay childless; I marveled at her reporting on chronic lime disease and the way its sufferers are frequently dismissed and disbelieved; I revelled in the bravery it must have taken for her to write about these things, and the artfulness with which she has done so. This book has stuck with me in ways I can’t even articulate, and I’m so glad it exists.

High Heel by Summer Brennan

You won’t read a more thorough history of the high heel than this – but this book is so much more than that. It discusses the iconic shoe in relation to politics, gender, sexuality, pain, music, film, fashion, and more. I notice people’s shoes a lot more now than I did before reading this book – and I’m more intentional about my own choices in that regard, too. I like Summer’s nuanced conclusion that high heels aren’t necessarily oppressive and evil like many feminists argue – they can instead be a freely chosen expression of identity that many people find affirming and uplifting.

Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me by Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell

I saw this book retweeted onto my Twitter timeline and my interest was immediately piqued. A gorgeously illustrated story about queer high-school heartbreak? Yes please! I cried multiple times while reading this immensely beautiful graphic novel, because the feelings of rejection, insecurity, unworthiness, and ultimately resilience were so familiar to me, from both my queer relationships and my “straight” ones. The pleasure of reading this book was equal parts emotional, intellectual, aesthetic, and tactile – a rare thing!

Building Open Relationships by Dr. Liz Powell

If you read only one book on non-monogamy, make it this one. Dr. Liz lays out all the common pitfalls of this relationship style and how to deal with them. Their book is written with compassion and vulnerability, and is full of useful stories from Liz’s own dating life that illustrate the principles they teach. I feel much more equipped to handle non-monogamy after reading this book, and I’ve recommended it to countless people. It’s just that good.

Night Film by Marisha Pessl

I love a good murder-mystery, and that’s exactly what this novel is. An investigative journalist sets his sights on figuring out why and how the daughter of a prominent horror movie director died. In the process, he picks up a couple of sidekicks, wanders through revered movie sets, chats with a drug-addled movie star, breaks into abandoned buildings, swans around Manhattan penthouses, sneaks onto an estate in a canoe, and basically just gets up to some good old-fashioned hijinks. Marisha Pessl is a gifted (and often hilarious) writer, and I was captivated by this story from beginning to end.

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

This book got a lot of attention around its launch, and for good reason. Tolentino’s painstakingly constructed essays dive into precarious topics like the wedding industrial complex, the absurdity of reality TV, activewear as capitalist fetishwear, and more. Every piece in this book is incisive, witty, evocative, and meticulously researched. Reading it probably made me smarter, and definitely made me feel smarter.

The Wagers by Sean Michaels

I’m biased because Sean is my cousin, but this novel is really extraordinary. It’s primarily about luck – what does it mean to be lucky, and how can one become moreso? – but is also about love, and family, and fame, and privilege, and the grocery business. I love a twisty plot, and this one frequently made me shout “OH SHIT” while reading in cafés or on the subway (whoops). I fell in love with the characters of this strange novel, and couldn’t wait to find out what would happen to them next.

What were your favorite books you read this year?

Book Review: The Offline Dating Method

Kate Sloan

I receive many press releases per week, and most of them hold zero interest for me. Weird new porn movies. Shitty new vibrators. Swanky events I can’t go to because they’re in New York or Los Angeles.

But recently I got a press release that did pique my interest. It was about a new book that had just been released, The Offline Dating Method: How to Attract a Great Guy in the Real World, by dating coach Camille Virginia.

The concept caught my eye because the realm of “offline dating” advice is usually presided over by male pickup artists. They call it different things – “day game,” “night game,” and so on – but it’s essentially the same idea, just twisted into a different form. PUAs are misogynist manipulators, but this female writer, I gathered, was not advocating the shitty kind of manipulation – maybe just the kind that can get you a date with someone who finds you attractive but who you otherwise never would’ve talked to.

Indeed, while Neil Strauss’s books are guides for men on picking women up, Camille Virginia’s book is a guide for women on getting picked up by men. (Yes, it is painfully heteronormative, so I’m sorry for any accordingly heteronormative statements that follow. Virginia does acknowledge in her introduction that a lot of the tips she offers will work on a broad range of people, not just straight men – and she’s right – but the book is written explicitly through the lens of “You are a woman and you want men to ask you out.”)

Virginia’s central thesis is that meeting potential romantic partners in “the real world” is superior to online dating, for a plethora of reasons: you can make better connections more quickly, and you’ll know much sooner whether you’re actually attracted to and compatible with the person you’re flirting with. In three meaty chapters full of headings and subheadings, she explains how to seem magnetic and approachable, how to start and sustain a conversation with a man you don’t know, and how to transition that conversation into getting asked on a date.

At first, the most striking thing to me about this book was how anathema it seemed to how people my age actually seem to date, and to want to date. I’d recently read an Atlantic article about the so-called “sex recession.” The millennial interviewees spoke about meeting “offline” as an impossibility, an archaic relic, in the wake of Tinder and its cohorts. Take, for example, this sentence where the author, Kate Julian, is chatting with a young female source about Sex and the City: “’Miranda meets Steve at a bar,’ she said, in a tone suggesting that the scenario might as well be out of a Jane Austen novel, for all the relevance it had to her life.” But for all their romanticization of meeting a partner in a bar or a bookstore, these millennials also acknowledge that this type of meet-cute wouldn’t really be welcome in their lives. Julian, who met her husband in an elevator in 2001, writes, “I was fascinated by the extent to which this prompted other women to sigh and say that they’d just love to meet someone that way. And yet quite a few of them suggested that if a random guy started talking to them in an elevator, they would be weirded out. ‘Creeper! Get away from me,’ one woman imagined thinking.”

This is in line with my own experience of dating in a world filled with smartphones and social anxiety. Once, during an extended dry spell in which it felt like I’d never have sex with someone who desired me ever again, I was approached by a random flirty man at a food court while I was reading. After a tense conversation in which I basically politely told him to leave me the hell alone, I tweeted, “Dear men who try to pick me up in food courts: can u not? I’m just tryna eat my General Tao chicken & read my book, bro.” A male friend replied, “Complains about lack of male attention by night, complains about male attention by day” – which enraged me at the time (and still to this day, honestly – hi, Brent), because it implies that all romantic/sexual attention is the same and should be received with the same warmth, whether it’s wanted or not, and that if I ever push back against negative attention, I don’t deserve the positive attention I want.

But as misguided as that feedback was, it also, in some ways, captured the same millennial dating contradiction Julian’s interviewees talked about in her article: we romanticize offline “meet-cutes,” but, at the same time, we find them scary, annoying, or just plain weird.

This is the somewhat hostile context in which Virginia’s writing her book on how to get picked up in public. There’s very little acknowledgment in the book that people might think you’re odd or creepy for trying to talk to them on the subway or at the grocery store – she just says that women are rarely perceived as creepy, and that if someone gives you a weird look for talking to them, they’re not a good match for you anyway and you should just shrug it off and move onto the next person. She does acknowledge that there are certain places and cultures where it might actually be unsafe for a woman to initiate a conversation in public with a man she doesn’t know, but for most women, she seems to think it’s a perfectly normal and acceptable thing to do. I had to suspend my disbelief a little to accept this premise that underlies her entire book, but I’m a socially anxious introvert, so of course I did.

Even if you’re not a straight woman trying to get a straight man to ask for your number, there’s still lots of valuable stuff in this book about general social skills. It contains a lot of practical advice about sparking and maintaining conversations, building confidence, and developing a natural curiosity about your fellow (hu)man. When I read some sections aloud to my extremely extroverted partner, they said all the social tips were fairly obvious to them and almost go without saying, but I didn’t feel that way at all – I think a lot of people who are as socially awkward as me, or moreso, would find these tips illuminating. They give you a blueprint for developing your relational skillset and having meaningful (i.e. not small-talk-y) conversations with people you just met.

So, yes, this is a useful dating book. But I actually found it to be a fascinating read on an entirely different level as well, and here’s where this review gets really weird. As this book picks up steam in the middle, it starts to read like – there’s no other way I can say this – conversation fetish porn.

Hear me out. I’d never heard of a conversation fetish before that phrase popped into my head while reading The Offline Dating Method, but I’m sure it exists. My friend Bex often talks about having a “flirting fetish,” being turned on by witty repartée and double entendres – and that’s what I thought of as I read Camille Virginia’s rapturous magnum opus.

I’m not saying that Virginia necessarily has this fetish, but the way she writes about good conversations is genuinely erotic at times. “You’re going to become addicted to how fulfilling it feels to make other people feel good,” she warns in a section about committing “random acts of kindness” as icebreakers in public. She colorfully defines a “meaningful connection” as “a genuine conversation that feels natural, not forced in any way, and gives each person a feeling of deep fulfillment… being completely present in a conversation and co-creating a shared experience.” After an example conversation in which a man tells her that his cufflinks bear his English family’s coat of arms, Virginia writes, “Boom! You just went from the topic of cufflinks to talking about his family’s 300-year-old estate in Cornwall in less than ten seconds” – profound conversations are as compelling and exciting to her as “number closes” and “kiss closes” are for pick-up artists, and she writes about them with the same slick sensuality. “I’ll admit it: I have an addiction to connection,” she says; “I absolutely love it.”

Virginia talks with reverence about hallmarks of human kinship like sustaining eye contact, making relatable jokes, exchanging compliments, and creating intimacy through authenticity. “Conversations will become an experience that are ten times better than any movie, TV show, or book because you’re not just observing; you’re living the story with another human in real time,” she effuses. “This will not only feel incredibly fulfilling for you but everyone you create that connection with, which means people will naturally want more of you and the good feelings they now associate with you.” She could literally be talking about sex or kink here instead of conversation and the sentiment would still feel true. I’ve never seen someone describe the simple act of dialoguing with such carnal enthusiasm.

I’m not at all saying this to shame her, whether or not this is actually a kink for her, or for anyone else. I actually find it fascinating to observe how eroticizing a particular act, and/or fitting it into a kink framework, can help me look at that act with new eyes and feel invigorated to include it in my life more often. It’s like how thinking of comedians as reaction-soliciting tops has helped me enjoy comedy even more. Understanding that conversations unroll with electric and pleasurable interpersonal energy, just like sex or kink, has made me more jazzed than usual to engage people in conversation, even people I don’t know very well or at all. I enjoy the process more now that I’m specifically chasing the fulfilment and connection Virginia writes about so descriptively (and erotically). I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: kink is magic.

There are some problematic things about this book, as you might imagine. Safety concerns aren’t acknowledged enough. Every reader is assumed to be a woman who wants to date men but doesn’t want to be so forward as to initiate a date herself. (“Asking a man out myself has never turned out well for me,” Virginia mentions. “I’ve been told by many men that they prefer to ask the woman out and plan the date.”) Most vexingly – and pretty typically, for the dating self-help genre – the author uses herself and her own stories as examples of how easy it is to meet potential dates IRL, without particularly acknowledging that she’s conventionally attractive, thin, white, able-bodied, and socially capable in ways that many people are not. Advice that amounts to “Be yourself!” rings pretty hollow when your self isn’t as traditionally desirable as the advice-giver’s self. I will say that her conversational suggestions don’t necessarily rely on you being attractive, but their positive reception might.

Overall, though, while I went into The Offline Dating Method expecting a light and frothy dating guide that reads like cobbled-together Cosmo tips, it is actually so much more than that. It’s an ode to the beauty of human connection, and a road map to help you get there. It’s a brave stand in a world that has increasingly digitally anesthetized us to our fellow people. It’s also – most surprisingly of all – some of the most explicit and satisfying erotica available for a subculture I’m not sure even exists: conversation fetishists.

 

Thanks to Camille Virginia and co. for supplying me with this book to read!

Love Addiction, “The Pisces,” and Me

Kate Sloan

I’ve never been addicted to a substance. I’ve never been over-reliant on booze or weed or pills. But I have been addicted to romantic fantasies, and let me tell you, the compulsions and withdrawal can feel surprisingly tangible – like something vital is missing from your blood, your bones, and you’d do anything to get it back.

In the last few dying weeks of 2016, I went on a Tinder date which was completely unremarkable, except for what I learned from it. My pre-date banter with this boy was fast and easy, creating the sense of chemistry where perhaps there was just empty charm. The date itself was boring, one of those classic Tinderludes where you work painfully hard to pull dry conversation out of a monosyllabic, nervous stranger. The sex that followed was boring, too: our bodies didn’t fit together right, we didn’t take each other’s hints or make each other giggle, we just loped through the encounter as if on hookup-culture autopilot. The boy left around 2AM and I snuggled up in my bed, alone.

It took me until the next day to realize something was wrong. I felt a profound heaviness in my body, like when I’m hit by depression, yet even more acutely needling. It felt like something I loved had been abruptly taken away from me, even though – much to the contrary – someone I didn’t love had left me alone.

Dissecting these feelings in my journal, I saw that I’d put a lot of stock into this boy in the few days we’d known each other. I’d extrapolated wild compatibility from his brief texts and bland emojis. I’d spun our present into a plausible future. I’d imagined he wanted more from me than just sex, and I’d imagined wanting anything from him. So when the date itself was a disappointment and the boy left, I was shaken – not by the loss of the boy, but by the loss of the fantasy.

This had become, I realized, a pattern in my life. Compulsive swiping was how I dealt with any uncomfortable emotion, from boredom to sadness to fear. No matter what, it felt safe and sparkly to return to a reliable old fantasy: that this next swipe, this next match, this next message would lead me inevitably closer to the love of my life. That I was moments from a meet-cute that would cure my every sore spot. That someone perfect would come along and relieve me from the mundane inadequacy of myself.

The trouble is, when romantic fantasy gets you high, you crash spectacularly hard whenever your romantic hopes are dashed. I saw this in the months to come: a sexting pal told me he was unavailable for a more romantic situation, and I cried; a Tinder match told me he wasn’t actually interested in me because our views on polyamory differed, and I cried; a new FWB stated clearly that he didn’t want me in a romantic way, and I cried. A promising OkCupid boy ghosted me after less than a day of scintillating texts, and I had a total meltdown: nausea, panic, weeping, unsalvageable despair. When the pain of that rejection became unbearable, what did I do? I hopped on Tinder to find someone else to fantasize about. (That next distraction eventually ghosted me too.)

I was in therapy all the while, and probably not being altogether honest about the extent of my addiction. But my therapist, ever-perceptive, asked me once, “How much time would you guess you spend on online dating every week?” and I couldn’t quantify it. There were the hours I spent swiping, and the hours I spent moonily fantasizing, and the hours I spent going on dates, and the hours I spent crying and journaling when the dates didn’t go perfectly. The total seemed incalculable – partly due to the shame of that calculation.

Somewhere around this time, a friend of mine started going to weekly meetings for sex and love addicts. I was surprised to hear this; she had always seemed so level-headed. But looking back, I saw places where maybe our kinship and connection had been based on a shared addiction: we loved debriefing about boys and dates and minute flirtations, and we encouraged each other in these fancies. Where was the line between healthy fun and self-destruction?

Though I wasn’t sure whether my friend’s condition was anything like mine, the phrase kept returning to the forefront of my mind: love addiction. It seemed to fit. The highs of my fantasies were euphoric, like that first sweet hit of a new drug – and the subsequent devastations felt all-consuming, closer to rock bottom every time. In those depressed states, I’d hunt for something, anything, to relieve my sense of loneliness and failure. Alcohol, drugs, shopping, self-harm, exercise, bad TV, more Tinder time – nothing could fill the void. It felt like I needed love, but really what I needed was a healthier relationship to love.

I went to see another friend of mine who had struggled with multiple addictions in the past, and had been through a couple of twelve-step programs. As we sipped milkshakes in my pal’s apartment, they told me, “When I find myself wanting to do something rash, I always just tell myself, ‘If I still want to do it in 15 minutes, I can.’ And I almost never do.” I took their advice to heart: distraction, I knew, was not a long-term strategy, but maybe it could help shake me out of my addiction just enough that I could start recovering.

And recover, I did – slowly, non-linearly, with the help of a therapist and my friends and intermittent partners and lots and lots of writing. Nowadays I can browse Tinder occasionally without hanging my entire livelihood on each swipe, and while I haven’t been on a first date in months, I gather the day after a date would no longer make me feel like death. I’m still careful and self-critical about these behaviors, but I seem to be doing okay.

I hadn’t thought about this stuff in a long time, but then I picked up Melissa Broder’s new novel The Pisces and felt like I was peering through a looking-glass at my early-2017 self. So it seemed like a good time to examine my history with love addiction and write about it here.

Broder is the biting writer behind the viral @SoSadToday account on Twitter, the subsequent depression-soaked essay collection So Sad Today, and a book of poetry called Last Sext, among other things. While I think she deals with mental illness more intense than mine has ever been, her work fixates on themes of love and sex and how they interact with depression and anxiety – so, naturally, I adore her.

Her debut novel, The Pisces, is – as you might already know if you’ve seen any press about it – the story of a woman who falls in love with a merman, and has tons of sex with him. (Yes, a merman, as in a male mermaid. Yes, he lives in the ocean and she lives on land. Yes, he has a dick. It’s under a loincloth.) But at its core, it’s really a novel about love addiction. The protagonist, Lucy, breaks up with her long-term boyfriend at the start of the novel, and falls into a toxic cycle of chasing fantasy men and then being disappointed by them. I found her Tinder tribulations so relatable that I made more Kindle highlights than I’ve ever made in any book, and kept alternately weeping and cackling as I read. “There was something about the morning of a date that tricked me,” Lucy muses, after spending far too much money on lingerie for a tryst that will turn out disastrous-bordering-on-traumatic. “It tricked me out of the haze of being alive. Or perhaps it tricked me out of the sadness of knowing that one day I would die. It punctured the nothingness.” I nodded so hard my teeth chattered.

I saw myself in Lucy’s hapless Tinder dates, and, later, in her pining lovesickness over Theo, the handsome merman she meets near her sister’s beach house. While the novel sets Theo up as potentially being Lucy’s “true love” – the one she’s been waiting for, searching for, longing for – there’s actually no indication that he’s better than any of the online-dating fuckboys who leave her sexually and emotionally dissatisfied. It’s telling that Broder gives her romantically delusional protagonist a dream man who is a literal fantasy creature – and that no other character in the book ever actually sees Theo, so we can’t be entirely sure he exists at all. Isn’t every “true love,” in some sense, a projection, part mirage, a trick of the light?

Far from being the wild merman sex romp it’s been marketed as, The Pisces is a deeply philosophical novel that struggles with huge themes of love, emptiness, and contentment. It spends more time picking apart the whys and hows of romantic addiction than it does describing Theo’s scaly tail or the logistics of his underwater life. We know more about Lucy’s fears, fantasies, and yearnings than we ever know about Theo. But that’s the way of the love addict: making other people into a goal or a punchline, rather than allowing them to just be people.

By the end of the novel, Lucy seems to understand herself a little better, and to have a better handle on what she actually needs. I cried when I finished this book: I cried for Lucy, and for Theo, and for myself. At one point in the story, Lucy quips, “I didn’t want to be seen too closely or I might have to look at me too,” and that’s how The Pisces made me feel: seen, looked at, called out. But ultimately it served as a reminder of the habits I’d hate to fall back into, the fantasies I can no longer rely on, and the emptiness I no longer need to feel.

The Pisces
by Melissa Broder Hardcover
Powells.com

Book Review: Of Sound Mind and Someone Else’s Body

Kate Sloan

Content note: there are some discussions of nonconsensual sex, transphobia, gender dysphoria, and whorephobia in this post.

Have you ever read the plot summary for a piece of media and immediately thought, “Oh, this is gonna be a shitshow?” That was me when I read the blurb for Of Sound Mind and Someone Else’s Body, by William Quincy Belle.

Picture this: a supernatural body-swap story, à la Freaky Friday or The Hot Chick, with the lead characters being a successful male businessman and a female sex worker.

“This is gonna be transphobic and whorephobic as fuck, right?” I asked a friend when I told them about the plot of the book. They agreed that it would be difficult to navigate the fraught territory this book wanted to tackle without wading into some problematic shit. But nonetheless, I dove in, wanting to see the probable trainwreck for myself.

Of Sound Mind is about Alan Maitland, a nonspecific “businessman” (much like our boy Christian Grey, the exact scope and focus of his work is never quite spelled out), and Hana Toussaint, an escort with ambitions of becoming a sex therapist. The two are strangers at the beginning of the book, but through a neuroscientific mishap explained in somehow simultaneously not enough detail and far more detail than I cared to read, their brains switch bodies one night. Hana’s shrewd, sexy consciousness relocates into Alan’s brawny businessman body, while Alan’s serious, analytical mind flips into Hana’s eye-catching lady-bod. And, as they say, hijinks ensue.

Hilariously – or horribly, depending on what type of person you are – the switch happens while Hana is blowing a client, so Alan finds himself suddenly choking on cock after a lifetime of staunch heterosexuality. I felt conflicted reading this section, because on the one hand, it seemed written for laughs and I got instantly annoyed at Alan’s no-homo bravado in punching the dude in the nads and walking out. But at the same time, gosh, it would sure be traumatic if there was suddenly a dick in your throat when you’d neither consented to that nor ever experienced it before. I couldn’t tell whether I was supposed to laugh at Alan or pity him, which was a frequent feeling for me while reading this book.

Alan and Hana locate each other fairly quickly, figure out what’s happened, and unite in a mission to find the neuroscientist who fucked up and switched their brains. In the process, however, they navigate various challenges, like Hana fielding Alan’s business calls, Alan chatting up Hana’s escorting colleagues, and – all the while – getting used to life in their new, gender-swapped bodies.

I can’t personally speak to what it would feel like to read this book as a trans person. I imagine it wouldn’t feel great. There’s no acknowledgment in the book of transgender identities, which seems a shame, as that would be an interesting take on the somewhat tired body-swap trope.

Some of the gender-based difficulties Hana and Alan encounter seem overblown for comic effect – like Alan struggling to put on a bra, or Hana getting her dick caught in her pants zipper. (She’s a sex worker. There’s no way she doesn’t know her way around a fly.) But though Alan is sometimes incompetent at his coercively-adopted womanhood, overall I get the feeling that he thinks men would make better women than women do, and that women’s “petty” concerns would be easily solved with a small dose of “male” assertiveness. In a couple different scenes, Alan (in Hana’s femme little body) confronts catcallers and subway masturbators, shaming them publicly, and the book seems to suggest that this is the best way to deal with these altercations – completely ignoring the reality that marginalized folks standing up to creeps often results in violence, which is why we don’t do it more often. Duh.

The book is peppered with monologues from Hana about the stigma and oppression faced by women, sex workers, and people who dare to be publicly sexual. While I think these soliloquies are designed to paint Hana as a three-dimensional character, she ultimately comes across as someone who doesn’t so much have a personality as a series of staunch opinions. The effect is Manic Pixie Dream Girl-esque; her narrative function is to open Alan’s eyes and change his life, and she doesn’t seem to have much of an inner emotional life beyond that mission. Further, her impassioned rants are fairly 101-level stuff; anyone who’s familiar with feminism and social justice concepts, even from afar, is likely to read these and go, “Yeah, of course.” I know there are still many people out there who would benefit from basic explanations of gender bias, sex stigma, and whorephobia, but are those people really gonna read this book, let alone learn from it?

The other weird thing about Hana is that she spends almost the entire book flirting with Alan, fawning over him, and trying to fuck him. This is a pretty classic thing for a male author to do: ignite desire in his female protagonist for wish-fulfilment purposes, even if it doesn’t make sense for the characters. We’re shown no reasons why Hana would be attracted to Alan, other than (maybe) the physical attractiveness of his body, which she is in. He doesn’t come across as particularly smart, kind, funny, or interesting – so why does this babely, ambitious, clever woman pursue him relentlessly for the entire book? It doesn’t ring true to me.

The author tries to paint a compassionate picture of sex workers, unpacking some of the stigma they face. But we’re reminded again and again that Hana is educated, volunteers her time for philanthropic causes, and could easily do something else with her life but has chosen sex work. There is nothing wrong with this by itself, but depicting Hana as a “good” sex worker for possessing these qualities feels icky to me. Sex workers are still perfectly legitimate and acceptable even if they don’t have a formal education and/or have chosen sex work for survival reasons.

As a piece of literature, I felt similarly about Of Sound Mind to how I felt about the Fifty Shades books: the writing is okay but the plot is at least fast-paced and interesting enough to keep my attention. It’s often hard to tell characters apart when quotes aren’t attributed because their voices are so similar, and the dialogue is consistently stilted and awkward. (“Man, did I enjoy my orgasm! I love ejaculating,” Hana exclaims after one ostensibly sexy scene. “God, I love a good fuck pounding!”)

I think the premise of this story is fascinating, and could’ve been a good jumping-off point for discussions of gender politics, privilege, and empathy. The author does address this stuff but it’s all fairly surface-level; I would love to read a deeply feminist, nuanced, “woke” take on this story trope. Likewise, I was curious to see how the author would handle sex scenes between two characters inhabiting different bodies than they’re used to – but the writer breezes through the one sex scene in a hurry, without delving at all into what that type of sex would feel like, physically or emotionally. I felt a bit cheated that one of the most interesting questions the book poses was never answered.

If you want something light and silly to read that might prompt some reactionary feminist thoughts, give Of Sound Mind and Someone Else’s Body a try. I didn’t hate it, and it gave me lots to think about – including the question, “Why is this making me roll my eyes so hard?!” There are worse things you could read. Like – by a small but decisive margin – any of the Fifty Shades books.

 

If you like, you can buy this book on Amazon (in Kindle edition or paperback). Feel free to check out the author’s website if you want to learn more! FYI: This review was sponsored, meaning that I was paid to write an honest (not necessarily positive) review.