Snow, Glass, Apples by Neil Gaiman and Colleen Doran

Snow, Glass, Apples is a graphic novel by Neil Gaiman and Colleen Doran. Gaiman wrote the story and words, and Doran was responsible for the adaptation and art. The book is a re-telling of the German fairy tale Snow White that was published by The Brothers Grimm.

The book tells the story of Snow White from the Queen’s perspective, and this time she’s the protagonist of the story. Her stepdaughter Snow White is a frightening vampire who at age six bites her and then attacks and sexually assaults her father, the King. The King dies, and the Queen describes how she got revenge on Snow White. She also shares how she would do it all differently if she could. The Queen’s men take Snow White to the forest, cut out her heart, and leave her for dead. They bring her heart back to the Queen who hangs it above her bed with a piece of twine. Snow White’s heart continues to pulse.

Later, the Queen uses her looking-glass and realizes that Snow White is still alive. She’s grown up and is preying and feeding on men in the forest. The Queen uses witchcraft to make three poison apples and disguise herself. She delivers them to Snow White who eats the apples and falls into a death-like sleep. Eventually, Prince Charming arrives at the palace. The Queen sleeps with him, but he’s into necrophilia, and she’s very much alive. The Prince ends up finding cold, pale Snow White in her glass and crystal coffin, and wakes her up. The necrophiliac and vampire are a perfect match. They marry, and burn the Queen in a kiln.

It's a creepy, gory re-telling of the fairy tale with sexual violence and adult imagery. The story is meant for adults, not children. Even though I know that fairy tales are often scary and gruesome, I was surprised by the explicit nature of the story.

The artwork by Colleen Doran was beautiful, and for me, it was the best part of the book. Doran was inspired by the Irish artist Harry Clarke, and I love his work too. At the end of the book, Doran shares some of her early sketches and provides information about her process in creating each piece of art by hand.

Related Review:
Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

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And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories and Other Revenges by Amber Sparks

And I Do Not Forgive You (2020) is a collection of stories, reflections, lists, and essays by Amber Sparks. It’s a thought-provoking and humorous read. The stories have fantastical, surprising, gruesome, and imaginative twists. Most of the stories feature unique female protagonists. Sparks is a Gen X writer with a strong feminist perspective, who describes herself as a "morbid weirdo" in her acknowledgments. I discovered her writing on Twitter where I often identify with her tweets, and I decided to read one of her books.

The collection contains the following 22 stories:

Mildly Unhappy, with Moments of Joy
You Won't Believe What Really Happened to the Sabine Women
A Place for Hiding Precious Things
Everyone's a Winner in Meadow Park
A Short and Slightly Speculative History of Lavoisier's Wife
We Destroy the Moon
In Which Athena Designs a Video Game with the Express Purpose of Trolling Her Father
Is the Future a Nice Place for Girls
Our Mutual (Theater) Friend
The Dry Cleaner from Des Moines
The Eyes of Saint Lucy
We Were a Storybook Back Then
Rabbit by Rabbit
Through the Looking-Glass
The Noises from the Neighbors Upstairs
Our Geographic History
Death Deserves All Caps
A Wholly New and Novel Act, with Monsters
When the Husband Grew Wings
The Language of the Stars
Mildly Joyful, with Moments of Extraordinary Unhappiness
Tour of the Cities We Have Lost

Some pieces of writing are quite lengthy, but most are short and succinct. My favorite stories included "Mildly Unhappy, with Moments of Joy," a painful recounting of a broken friendship where one party is ghosted by text message, and "A Place for Hiding Precious Things," which was a modern fairy tale about a princess whose fairy godmother helps her escape her lecherous father. I also enjoyed "A Short and Slightly Speculative History of Lavoisier's Wife" where Sparks recounts the contributions of Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier who has been minimized in history as her husband’s "helpmeet."

And I Do Not Forgive You is a great read, especially if you’re a Gen X, feminist, morbid weirdo, who loves history, ghost stories, and fairy tales.

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Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

Transcendent Kingdom (2020) by Yaa Gyasi is the story of 28-year-old Gifty, a graduate student at Stanford working towards her Ph.D. in neuroscience. The story flits back and forth in time from the present day to memories of Gifty’s childhood and college days.

Gifty grew up in Alabama with her mother, father, and older brother Nana. Her parents immigrated to the United States from Ghana when Nana was young. Gifty’s father faces racism in the US and struggles to find work, and eventually he abandons his family to return to Ghana. Gifty’s mother works long hours as a caregiver and is a devoted member of her church.

Gifty is a quiet, studious young girl who wants to be good and writes to God in her diary. Her brother Nana is popular, outgoing, and good at sports. In high school, Nana becomes a star basketball player. Sadly, Nana’s basketball successes end when he injures his ankle and is prescribed OxyContin. Nana becomes addicted and dies of a heroin overdose. Gifty is 11 years old at the time. Her mother sinks into a deep depression and attempts suicide. During her mother’s recovery, Gifty is sent to Ghana to spend a summer with her aunt. Later, Gifty attends Harvard where she studies molecular biology. Before she heads to Cambridge, Gifty decides to reinvent herself and leave her past behind her.

In the present, Gifty is researching addiction and reward-seeking behavior in mice. She grows attached to an injured lab mouse with a limp. While Gifty denies that her life experiences led her to study the neuroscience of addiction, she’s not being honest with herself. It seems to me that she’s attached to the mouse because its injury is like her brother’s. The mouse also displays signs of addiction in Gifty’s experiments. When Gifty’s mother suffers from another depressive episode, Gifty’s family pastor calls her. She asks the pastor to fly her mother to California where Gifty will care for her.

In the past, Gifty has had trouble with relationships. She purposely destroyed a meaningful relationship with Anne in college when Anne tried to learn more about Gifty’s family. Gifty quite cruelly cut Anne out of her life entirely. Later, Gifty is involved with Raymond during her first years of grad school, and when he tried to get more serious and talked about meeting her family, Gifty sabotaged their relationship.

In the present day, Gifty is struggling to care for her mother while doing her final experiments and writing a paper. When her classmate Han notices her crying, they grow a little closer, and Gifty eventually tells him about her brother. She also begins to trust another colleague named Katherine, and Gifty tells Katherine about her mother. These small steps indicate some form of healing and newfound willingness to begin sharing her past with others.

Gifty’s final experiments are successfully. When Gifty alters the brain activity of the limping mouse, it restrains itself from seeking reward. At last, Gifty has an answer that she’s long been seeking. She reflects on her discovery in the passage below:



The end of the novel is abrupt. There’s a quick afterward to let the reader know that Gifty succeeds in life and that she has a prestigious job running a lab at Princeton and a happy relationship and home with Han. Her mother died in her own home. It was somewhat dissatisfying that there was such a gap in information about how this comes about in the arc of the Stanford narrative. Han and Gifty have planned to go out to dinner, but their early relationship is not well established for the reader. There’s also no explanation of how Gifty’s mother recovers to return home. The novel spends more time in the past than in the present day.

One of the strangest things in reading the novel for me was all the similarities I shared with Gifty. I too studied molecular biology, and I got my Ph.D. doing neuroscience research on addiction. I have an immigrant family. Long ago, my boyfriend-now-husband and I had a print and online magazine with the name “Transcendental Deliverance.” I made the same triangular move around the US as Gifty from the South to the Northeast to the West coast. Some of the minor anecdotes even rang true to me. Once, like Gifty, I avoided a man who was creeping me out by hiding in my campus library until I was sure he was gone. I found these similarities so curious and strange.

I was glad to read this story, and I really enjoyed Gifty’s voice and reflections.

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In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes

In a Lonely Place (1947) by Dorothy B. Hughes is crime novel set in Los Angeles following World War II. The story centers on a serial rapist and murderer named Dix Steele. Dix was a fighter pilot in the war, and after his wartime successes, he finds his return to his regular life lacking. He lives in a friend’s apartment and depends on checks sent to him by his rich uncle. He has no interest in finding work. Dix spends his days sleeping and his nights riding buses with routes along isolated, foggy beaches looking for women to prey on and ideal places to get away with his crimes.

One night, Dix contacts his old Air Force friend Brub Nicolai, and he visits him and his wife Sylvia. Dix is stunned to learn that Brub is now working as a cop and trying to catch the strangler that’s been raping and murdering woman around the city. Brub tells Dix about the crimes, which have been occurring roughly once a month. At first, Dix is nervous that Brub and Sylvia will be suspicious of him, but then he grows audacious. Dix is convinced that he can outsmart Brub and the other cops by getting inside information from his old friend.

Here's an example of Dix's boldness in a conversation with Brub:



Dix is an evil and twisted individual, a man who feels overly confident and entitled. He’s a misogynist who believes women have wronged him and that they deserve to be punished and humiliated. At the same time, he craves the company of a woman and begins dating Laurel Grey. She’s a complex woman, and Dix is convinced that they’re alike and meant to be together.

The reader sees the characters through Dix’s eyes, colored by his paranoia and rage as "the red knots tightened in his brain." Will those around Dix catch on that he’s the killer, or will he continue to get away with his crimes? In a Lonely Place is a fascinating and disturbing look into the mind of a murderer. It's noir at its finest.

Related Reviews:
The Scarlet Imperial by Dorothy B. Hughes

External Link:
I loved this wonderful essay on In a Lonely Place called "The Gimlet Eye of Dorothy B. Hughes" by Megan Abbott at Women Crime Writers of the 1940s and 50s. Abbott also wrote an outstanding afterword to the novel for the NYRB Classics reprinting of the book.

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French Leave by Anna Gavalda

French Leave (2009) by Anna Gavalda is a novel about four siblings who reunite after ditching a family wedding. It was originally published in French as L'Échappée Belle (The Beautiful Escape). I read the English translation of the novel by Alison Anderson published by Europa Editions.

The story begins when Simon and his wife Carine pick up Simon’s younger sister Garance to take her to a family wedding. Carine and Garance do not get along, and they spend much of the drive provoking one another. For instance, Garance waxes her legs in the back seat, much to Carine’s dismay (mine too). During the drive, Garance notices that Simon and Carine have had a fight and that her brother is upset.

Simon receives a call from his sister Lola who has decided at the last minute to attend the wedding. She recently got divorced and wasn’t sure if she was up to seeing her family. Lola asks Simon to pick her up too, which further displeases Carine. Once the group reaches the wedding, Simon, Garance, and Lola are disappointed to learn that their brother Vincent will not be there.

The siblings end up escaping the wedding, leaving Carine and their mother behind, to visit Vincent at the chateau he works at. Together, they share old memories, buoy one another up, and bond with a feeling of joyous freedom, before returning to their regular lives the next day. It’s a mainly light, happy read about the bonds between brothers and sisters.

The story was narrated by Garance, and I think I would have enjoyed the novel more if one of the other siblings had been the narrator. Garance was sometimes thoughtful and humorous, but she was also immature and unlikable. She complains that members of Carine’s family insult Arabs, but later calls Nono, Vincent’s co-worker "Way Retarded." She was as judgmental as those she criticized. Moreover, Garance brought a sari to wear to the wedding, but she didn’t seem to know how to properly put it on. She had no reason to dress in one, so it all seemed like an effort to draw attention to herself.

I don’t think the reader was meant to sympathize with Carine at all, but I did at times. It was clear that she was struggling to fit in with her husband’s “cool” siblings, and Simon was aware of her issue. While Simon enjoyed his escape, Carine was trapped alone at a wedding with her husband’s extended family, and Simon had abandoned her. Of all the siblings, I liked Vincent the most, probably because he just seemed to be living his own life happily.

Overall, it was a fun story with a unique idea. I haven’t read many books about adult siblings.

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In Love by Alfred Hayes

In Love (1953) is a novel by Alfred Hayes about the breakup of a relationship. The story is set in New York after World War II, and two main characters are nameless. The narrator is a man who is nearly 40 years old. He’s a writer who has lived in New York City his whole life. He doesn’t have his own home and lives in a hotel. This drifting and inability to commit extends to his relationships. In Chapter 1, the narrator begins telling a story to a pretty girl at a hotel bar. It’s the story of his previous relationship. The next nine chapters describe this relationship and its eventual breakup.

The narrator was involved with a young woman, who was nearly half his age. She was "not yet twenty-two, a mother, divorced, alone." At 17, she got married, and the next year, she had a child. Her marriage ended badly. After her divorce, the woman’s daughter was sent to live with her mother and step-father in the suburbs. The woman dreams of security, commitment, a second loving marriage, a home, and another child. She wants to be "happy, quietly happy, beautifully happy, genuinely happy." She’s often melancholy and quiet. The narrator doesn’t fully understand her.

The woman lives in a tiny studio apartment, and she’s so afraid of potential prowlers that she has a tear-gas gun for her protection. It resembles a fountain pen and sits within reach on her coffee table. The narrator doesn’t take her fears seriously, and he mainly enjoys having pleasurable evenings with her. Beyond that, he’s not interested in providing her with the security she seeks or any form of commitment.

Their routine is turned on its head when the woman goes out with friends and meets a rich man named Howard. Attracted to the woman’s beauty, Howard offers her $1,000 to spend a night with him. As noted in the quote from the The Guardian on the book's back cover and in the book’s introduction, this plotline preceded that of the novel Indecent Proposal and its film adaptation.

The woman arrives home and tells the narrator about the offer, first shrugging it off, but then returning to the idea. She wonders if the money would be tainted. However, it’s such a large sum, and the money could be used to provide for her daughter. She reasons that the narrator would forgive her. It would just be one night. The narrator doesn’t speak up or act in any way to stop her. After having a nightmare that her daughter died, the woman decides to call Howard.

She begins seeing Howard, who treats her to fine dining and fancy outings. Meanwhile, the narrator sees how empty his life is without her. Perhaps, also realizing that his girlfriend was sought after by a rich man, he begins to reassess her value. He now feels that he loves her, and his jealousy and resentment grows. The woman eventually leaves the narrator for Howard, and the narrator takes the loss very badly.

Three months later, the woman calls the narrator late at night. He heads straight to her place. At first, he is grateful to be with her again, and he proposes a trip to the white sand dunes on the New Jersey shore, saying "It would be so nice to go away. The dunes were something we owed each other." Unfortunately, his plan falls apart. It’s late October, and all the little summer places are closed for the season. As they drive on in the cold, the narrator decides to stop in Atlantic City instead. Everything about their trip is going wrong. Instead of trying to make amends, the narrator resents the woman for being silent. Later, in bed, he sexually assaults her to "bring her back," but concludes that, "my taking her as I had, had widened the distance between us; she was still there, wherever the ocean had her, and locked up wherever she was locked up, and I hated her now."

It's a painfully sad scene. After arguing, she dresses, and they leave the hotel just three hours after checking in. Subsequently, the narrator meets a joint friend named Vivian who gossips that Howard refused to marry to the woman, and that’s why she had returned to the narrator. Now angry and vindictive, he decides to blackmail the woman into sleeping with him in exchange for him remaining silent about their relationship. Otherwise, he’ll send Howard a letter, telling him everything.

She arrives at the narrator’s door, and the pair argue. Finally, the narrator decides the woman is free to go. She now offers him a proposition that they continue their affair after she marries Howard, but he refuses. Perhaps, he doesn’t want the power in their relationship to be in her hands. He finally accepts that their relationship is over and sends her off to marry Howard. In the final chapter, the narrator is ready to move on with a new, pretty, young girl. In the end, In Love was not much of a love story after all, but more a story of desperation, possession, power, cruelty, and misunderstanding.

I always read an introduction after finishing a novel to avoid spoilers, so I turned to Frederic Raphael’s introduction to In Love after concluding the story. It was a strange mix of snobby insults and flattering remarks. Most of the remarks on films went over my head. Raphael’s comments on Hayes’ life included a lot of guesswork and seemed poorly researched, unlike most NYRB intros. Raphael seems to define a writer’s success by being an A-lister and sleeping with notorious women, and he hypothesizes, without evidence, that Hayes had a "lack of thrusting ambition" although he notes that Hayes was nominated for an Oscar.

Raphael considers My Face for the World to See, Hayes’ 1958 novel, to be In Love’s "quasi-sequel." Despite the similarities in style, the two novels are unrelated, stand-alone works. Both Raphael and David Thomson, who wrote the introduction for My Face for the World to See, conflate the fictional male narrators of Hayes’ fiction with Hayes himself. However, it’s unfair to assume Hayes shares the opinions of his characters and to consider the novels to be entirely autobiographical.

One thing that put me off about both books was the sexism of the book cover blurbs by NYRB. The back cover of In Love insultingly describes the 21-year-old woman as, "good-looking, if a little past her prime." The back cover of My Face for the World to See describes the 25-year-old woman, saying, "She’s a survivor, even if her beauty is a little battered from years of not quite making it in the pictures." Meanwhile, the middle-aged male protagonists don’t come under any scrutiny, not for their appearance and not for pursuing young women roughly half their age.

I thought In Love was a compelling, engaging read. I’m glad I read it after reading My Face for the World to See. Hayes is a great writer with a unique style that reveals the inner monologues and thoughts of his characters. Both novels left me thinking. Most of all, I was left wondering how different the stories would be if told from the female perspective.

Related Review:
My Face for the World to See by Alfred Hayes
The End of Me by Alfred Hayes

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Away from Her by Alice Munro

Away from Her (2007) by Alice Munro is a stand-alone republication of the short story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" from her 2001 short story collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. (I read the full collection many years ago). The story was originally published in The New Yorker in 1999, and the magazine republished this early version of the story online in 2013 when Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 2006, the story was adapted into a film called Away from Her by the actress and director Sarah Polley. The stand-alone printing of Away from Her was a tie-in with the film’s release, and it has a thoughtful introduction by Polley.

Away from Her is the story of Fiona and her husband Grant. They have been married for nearly 50 years. The story jumps back and forth in time, shedding light on their relationship. Fiona is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, and she and Grant have decided it’s time for her to live in a facility called Meadowlake.

The story begins with Fiona’s romantic proposal to Grant on a beach at Port Stanley:

"Do you think it would be fun—" Fiona shouted. "Do you think it would be fun if we got married?"

He took her up on it, he shouted yes. He wanted never to be away from her. She had the spark of life.

At first, their marriage seems ideal, but soon the reader learns that Grant was frequently unfaithful to Fiona during his years as a university professor. Strangely, Grant has convinced himself that Fiona never knew of his infidelity, but it’s clear to the reader that she was fully aware of his actions. For instance, Fiona would mimic the voices of women Grant had cheated on her with, women that Grant assumed Fiona had never met.

After Fiona is admitted to Meadowlake, Grant is asked not to visit his wife for 30 days to give her time to adjust to her new setting. When Grant finally visits his wife, she has forgotten him entirely. Fiona is now in a relationship with a man named Aubrey. This turn of events makes Grant an onlooker to his wife’s relationship with another man. Fiona treats Grant politely, as she would any stranger.

As time goes on, Grant wonders out loud if Fiona is playing a charade. Has Fiona really lost her memory? Or could this be a complicated act to make Grant experience what she went thorough? Grant may want to believe that it’s all a charade because coping with being forgotten is so much harder for him. In reading the story, I wondered about Fiona’s motivations. Is this Fiona’s way of punishing Grant and testing his devotion to her? Does Fiona want time away from Grant or time to forget him?

Like Fiona, Aubrey is married. One day, Aubrey’s wife Marian arrives and takes him home from Meadowlake. Fiona becomes sick with grief after Aubrey departs, and Grant worries about her declining health. Nothing he does seems to help.

Grant decides to ask Marian to bring Aubrey back to Meadowlake. After visiting Marian, Grant has the idea of pursuing Marian romantically as part of his plan to reunite his wife with Aubrey. When the story ends, Grant is visiting Fiona to tell her Aubrey will soon be returning, but surprisingly, Fiona now recognizes Grant as her husband. Fiona remarks that Grant could have just left and forsaken her, and he replies, "Not a chance."

The ending of the story is ambiguous. Did Fiona regain her memory of her husband temporarily, or was she acting all along? Will Grant be true to his wife, or will he abandon and forsake her?

Away from Her is a fantastic short story, and Munro is an incredible writer. Her characters are realistic, imperfect, and complex, and her stories always resonate with me and leave me thinking.

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Brave New Girl by Louisa Luna

Brave New Girl by Louisa Luna is a coming-of-age tale that was published by MTV Books in 2001. MTV Books also published Tunnel Vision by Keith Lowe, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky.

The protagonist in Brave New Girl is 14-year-old Doreen Severna. The novel describes her life during the summer between 8th grade and high school. Doreen has an authentic voice of a teenager in the 1990s. She’s sharp, biting, and funny. Like most teens, she answers adults in short sentences, but she shares her full thoughts with the reader.

Doreen’s voice is comparable in many ways to Holden Caulfield’s in The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, a classic book about adolescence set in the 1940s. Doreen talks about The Catcher in the Rye below, and I really loved these lines. They made me laugh.

Like Holden Caulfield, Doreen does not fit in. The only person she trusts and cares about is her best friend Ted. Ted is an outcast too, and he has an alcoholic mother. Everyone at school considers them both losers. It doesn’t matter to Doreen and Ted though. They enjoy their time together, hanging out, joking with one another in Ted’s basement, listening to the Pixies, going to Tower Records, smoking, and eating junk food in the parking lot at 7-Eleven or Trader Joe’s. Their families and classmates all think they are dating, but they aren’t.

At home, Doreen’s father lectures her constantly, her mother wants her to be more feminine and have girlfriends, and her older sister Tracey is always unkind to her. Doreen is also troubled by the disappearance of her older brother Henry. He left home or was kicked out ten years ago when he was fourteen, the same age Doreen is now. Her family never talks about Henry, so Doreen doesn’t know where he is or even if he’s alive.

Tracey just graduated high school and is dating an older man named Matthew who is 21. Matthew shows an interest in Doreen and talks to her when others aren’t around. Doreen has a crush on him and is confused when Matthew tells her that he likes her more than he likes her sister. Eventually, Matthew’s behavior takes a dark turn when he rapes Doreen in her own bedroom. Doreen is unable to tell anyone, including Ted. Her family does not notice her pain and confusion. She’s silently suffering, hiding evidence of what happened, vomiting, bleeding, passing out, and crying.

Meanwhile, Ted is beat up by his classmates and is afraid and suffering too. In the end, Doreen finds a way to fight back by telling the truth, which helps her establish a relationship with her father. Unfortunately, her father didn’t take her to a doctor or the police. It was also disappointing that Doreen’s mother was so useless and unsympathetic and that her sister refused to believe her.

Somehow Doreen and Ted both survive their awful summer. I had to wonder where life would take them next.

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Cathedral by Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver’s Cathedral (1983) is a collection of twelve short stories. These stories feature themes of discontent, broken relationships, despair, loss, and detachment. Many of the characters are alcoholics who are unable to change and grow. Overall, it’s a bleak read.

Here are summaries of the short stories contained in the volume:

"Feathers" is the story of the interactions between two couples at a dinner party. Jack and Fran are invited to have dinner at Bud and Olla’s house. Bud and Olla are a happy couple with a new baby and a peacock. Strangely, this visit has negative consequences on Jack and Fran's marriage.

"Chef's House" is about Wes, an alcoholic man, who is renting a home from a recovered alcoholic named Chef. Wes invites his estranged wife Edna to live with him, and they enjoy their time together at Chef’s house. Eventually, Chef tells Wes he must leave the house and move in a month. This loss creates a setback for Wes.

"Preservation" is the story of a stunted man who is unable to leave the sofa after losing his job.

"The Compartment" is about a man named Myers who is taking a train in Europe to meet his estranged son, but then changes his mind at the last minute.

"A Small, Good Thing" is about a couple who loses their child after he is struck by a car on his birthday and how they find comfort in an unlikely place from a baker.

"Vitamins" is a story of a couple struggling with alcoholism, discontent, and infidelity. The following quote about Portland in the story got my attention because I live in the city.



"Careful" is about an alcoholic man named Lloyd who is living separately from his wife Inez, but is still dependent on her.

"Where I'm Calling From" is about men sharing their personal stories of how alcohol ruined their lives while they are drying out at a rehabilitation house.

"The Train" is a story about Miss Dent waiting at a train station and her interactions with two people there. It’s a response to John Cheever’s short story "The Five-Forty-Eight."

"Fever" is about a man named Carlyle who struggles to find a caregiver for his children after his wife leaves him.

"The Bridle" is about a woman named Marge and her observations of a new family that is renting an apartment at the building she manages with her husband.

"Cathedral" is a story narrated by a bigoted man whose wife is preparing for a visit from an old friend who is blind. The narrator grows as he tries to communicate with the blind man and describe and draw a cathedral with him.

The final story was the most enjoyable because it showed growth, connection, and humanity. Carver writes minimalist stories, and for me, many of the stories felt unfinished and dissatisfying.

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My Face for the World to See by Alfred Hayes

My Face for the World to See (1958) is a novel by Alfred Hayes about the dark side of Hollywood. It’s a beautifully written book with sharp prose. However, the plot itself is unsettling and disturbing. It’s taken me time to process the story.

The two main characters are nameless. The narrator is a 37-year-old man. He’s a financially successful screenwriter, but is dissatisfied with his work and life. He’s been married for 15 years, and his wife and daughter live in New York. He works in LA part of the year and comes to the city alone. As the story begins, he’s at a Hollywood party on the beach. He watches a woman, with a drink in hand, exit a bedroom at the house and walk outside towards the edge of the surf. She falls with the undertow and then walks directly into the ocean and goes under. The man rescues her.

Two days later, she calls him, and he asks her out to dinner. She agrees. After dinner, they go to a club together, and she asks him, “You’re married, aren’t you?” and he responds, “A little. Why?” The two eventually begin an affair.

The woman is a 25-year-old aspiring actress. When she learns that the narrator’s daughter is eight years old, she notes, “She was born when I was seventeen.” The woman is an adult, but there’s a big age difference and power differential between her and the narrator. He has contacts in the film industry; she doesn’t. He also knows she’s struggling with her mental health. She tells him she’s seeing an analyst and that she used to drink heavily, and he knows she may have tried to kill herself. She explains that when she was at her worst, she was under the delusion that people had been following her since she came to LA. They were watching her every move. She believed that if she passed through the “great trial by loneliness and hunger” that they were putting her through, she would be rewarded with success and fame in Hollywood.

They continue to date. The narrator decides to get the woman an appointment at the studio through a colleague named Charlie, and he expects to be her hero when things go well. But something happens at the appointment that leaves the woman crushed. She doesn’t elaborate on what occurred, but I was left feeling that it was a casting couch assault. The narrator dismisses her reaction, thinking it was just a silly part that was not worth being so disheartened over. Although the narrator tells himself that their relationship isn’t serious, that night, he tells the woman that he loves her.

Later, the narrator receives a letter from his wife, which provides an interesting perspective about her and her childhood. Her father has died, and she’s decided to come to LA. She’s ready to talk over all the misunderstandings in their marriage.

The narrator takes the woman out to dinner, and she gathers that his wife is coming to town on her own. The result isn’t pretty. The woman is angry and lets the narrator have it in a brutal breakup scene. He imagines that they can eat together peacefully, but she sticks her cigarette into the duck on their table. She gets drunk, dances with a young man, and disappears from the restaurant. He’s angry and goes home alone.

She shows up at his place late that night, heavily drunk and disturbed. She’s angry that he didn’t look for her. She recalls old memories in monologues of disturbing events in her life, and she’s clearly in crisis. The narrator is upset that she’s making so much noise. Then the woman slits her wrists in the bathroom. Instead of calling the police or a doctor, the narrator calls his friend Charlie, saying “I’m in a jam.” Together they take her home because, “Home’s for suicides. Get her out.” When they bring her inert body home, the narrator says, “...still I first knocked on her door thinking that all I’d come for was to take her to dinner, to dinner, because after all she’d been a girl I’d, oddly enough, saved.” Only, he wasn’t interested in saving her this time.

The narrator calls the woman’s analyst and explains that she needs help. While waiting in the car down the street, the narrator implies that the woman’s first suicide attempt in the ocean may have been because she knew Charlie. It made me wonder, have these men been actively preying on this vulnerable woman? The narrator continues talking to Charlie and confuses him when he speaks of the same delusions of Hollywood spies that he attributed to the woman earlier in the novel. Were the delusions about spies his own, or is he now taking on the woman’s delusions? Charlie is concerned. After they drive off, Charlie takes the narrator to a restaurant where they will be seen to create an alibi. The novel’s title, “my face for the world to see,” initially was the woman’s dream, but it now applies to the narrator. His face had to be seen by the world; hers would be forgotten.

The novel concludes in an unsettling manner, and the reader does not know if the woman dies or survives. I wondered how much of the narrator’s story was true. How reliable is he? Is the story his guilt talking? Is this his way of creating an alibi? He is a writer, and he’s great at telling a story. He’s adept at giving himself and the woman voices, but the woman’s voice is not her own. What would the woman choose to say?

The novel, though written in the 1950s, feels modern. Men in power in Hollywood still manipulate, abuse, and discard vulnerable women. Underneath the glitz and glamour is a lot of darkness.

In terms of style, Alfred Hayes had a unique way of writing dialogue. Sometimes conversations begin in traditional quote marks, and then meander into unmarked paragraphs with both dialogue and the narrator’s unspoken thoughts flowing together in a stream. You feel like you’re both in the action of the scene and in the narrator’s mind at the same time.

Hayes was a screenwriter, and he knew how to write a story that could translate visually to the screen. The chapter where the narrator describes the woman’s reaction to watching bullfights in Mexico is upsetting and painful, a vast contrast to the romanticized notion of the sport in Hemingway’s The Dangerous Summer and The Sun Also Rises. The narrator’s unspoken refusal to help the woman and escort her out of the arena stands out as cruel and cold. The final restaurant breakup scene was such a vicious and biting end to a relationship. I haven’t read a more vivid depiction of a toxic breakup in literature, and I think it would be incredible to watch in a film.

Although I found the story’s subject matter disturbing, I loved Alfred Hayes’s writing. I spent a lot of time contemplating this novel, and I’m planning to read his other works.

Favorite Quote:
“There was a noisy rush of water from the bathroom, and she appeared, ready for the evening, a smile she had chosen, I thought, from a small collection of smiles she kept for occasions like this, fixed upon her face.”

Cover Art:
I also love the cover photograph "Sleep" (1955) by Saul Leiter.

Related Review:
In Love by Alfred Hayes
The End of Me by Alfred Hayes

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Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch is a novel that was written as a collaboration between Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett in 1990. It’s a funny, entertaining book about friendship and appreciating humanity. I find it fitting that friends wrote the story together.

The book’s premise is that the end of the world is near. The final battle between Good and Evil will occur according to the Divine Plan. The Antichrist is born and delivered to a hospital in England, and he will be raised by an American diplomat.

An angel named Aziraphale and a demon named Crowley must play their assigned roles, but they don’t want to. They’ve lived on Earth among humans for so long that they enjoy it, and they don’t want to world to end. Beyond that, after being enemies for 6,000 years, they’ve ended up becoming friends.

So together, Crowley and Aziraphale decide to sabotage the end of the world, or at least postpone it so that they have more time. They plan to help raise the Antichrist so that he can’t tell the difference between Good and Evil. But the problem is, they lose track of the baby. Meanwhile, the Antichrist Adam Young ends up growing up in Lower Tadfield, an idyllic English village.

Chaos ensues as Aziraphale and Crowley try to locate the Antichrist, and the armies of Good and Evil amass their forces. The story is full of humor and was a fun read.

Along with making me smile, the book made me reflect. Maybe it’s appropriate that I read this book during this time while living in Portland, OR during the pandemic. As I read about the horsemen, I realized that I’ve felt that all four were at my door during the past years.

War – The city has been destroyed by riots and fighting between protesters and the police, Antifa and the Proud Boys, and political and class warfare. Helicopters circled overhead for months. You could hear the sounds of anger and flash-bang grenades on the streets. Stores are still boarded up and closed.

Famine – The homeless crisis in Portland has been unbearable with people living in squalor in tents on sidewalks. During covid, this escalated, and at the start of this year, there were probably more people living in tents within a block of my apartment building than there were tenants in my building itself. So many people who lived downtown left the city (and even the state) in a mass urban flight.

Pestilence/Pollution – Of course, covid. And beyond that, there were massive wildfires during the first year of the pandemic that made the sky appear yellow and orange. Ash fell from above like snow. Last summer’s heat dome here in the Pacific Northwest shattered temperature records. These events were not good omens.

Death – Death has seemed to hover so close at hand with so many people sick and dying worldwide during the pandemic. I’ve had family members who have been sick with covid. Throughout the pandemic, I’ve had recurring dreams of a friend who died unexpectedly. Sometimes, I feel like his ghost wants to talk to me.

I wouldn’t have thought to compare these events and experiences in my own life to the four horsemen of the apocalypse if not for reading this book. What a strange, eerie feeling to recognize such similarities between fiction and life.

If only I tried to dispel the horsemen with a sword crafted from twigs and twine, a handmade pair of scales, and a crown of grasses and flowers…

Sometimes you read books when you need them, and stories help you heal. That’s what this book did for me in reminding me of the power of small actions and finding a way to laugh and smile when it feels like the end is near.

Adam was right. There’s more to do, see, imagine, learn, and explore. There’s joy in being human. And there’s more living to do. There are friends to find and care for—even angels and demons. In this world, nothing is set in stone. Change is always possible.

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Bright Dead Things by Ada Limón

Bright Dead Things is a book of poems by Ada Limón that was published in 2015. Limón's poems are raw and personal. In reading them, I felt I was caught in an intense flood of emotions.

The title of the volume comes from Limón's poem "I Remember the Carrots" where she remembers ripping up her father's carrot crop as a child and loving her "own bright dead things." This poem was one of my favorites.

I also loved the closing lines of her poem "Outside Oklahoma, We See Boston," where Limón writes about the mud swallows building their nests,

How do they do it? Demand the sweet continuance of birth and flight in a place so utterly reckless? How masterful and mad is hope.

It was a thoughtful, intimate, engaging read.

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Forever Words by Johnny Cash

Forever Words: The Unknown Poems is a collection of Johnny Cash's poems and writings that was published posthumously in 2016. It's a remarkable look at Johnny Cash's artistry and writing process. One of my favorite things about the book is that selected lyrics and poems were presented in his own handwriting.

In his forward to the book, John Carter Cash describes his father's intellectual curiosity and love of reading and writing. Paul Muldoon's introduction describes the rationale behind publishing Johnny Cash's words after his death to "broaden and deepen our perception of Johnny Cash and his legacy." I've been thinking a lot about the quote Muldoon shared from T.S. Eliot's "Tradition and Individual Talent" that, "No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone."

A few of my favorite poems in the volume include "Chinky Pink Hill" (which I discuss here), "Does Anybody Out There Love Me?," "If You Love Me," "My Song, " "I'll Still Love You," and "You Never Knew My Mind."

"Forever" had a profoundly beautiful closing:

The songs I sang
Will still be sung

Johnny Cash's poem "Don't Make a Movie About Me" gave me a laugh with its opening lines:

If anybody made a movie out of my life
I wouldn't like it, but I'd watch it twice

I wonder if Johnny Cash would have watched "Walk the Line" twice.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Forever Words. It's a great read for any fan of The Man in Black.

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The Creation by E.O. Wilson

The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth (2006) is a short book by Edward O. Wilson. In it, E.O. Wilson makes an appeal to preserve Earth's biodiversity. The book is written as a letter to a Southern pastor, and though Wilson sometimes returns to this concept, most of the book is geared towards general readers, students, naturalists, scientists, and teachers.

While my husband was at Harvard, we lived in a building where E.O. Wilson once lived. I also share his deep appreciation for the natural world.

One of my favorite quotes from this book is the introduction to Chapter 7, "Wild Nature and Human Nature," pictured below:

"Our relationship to Nature is primal. The emotions it evokes arose during the forgotten prehistory of mankind, and hence are deep and shadowed. Like childhood experiences lost from conscious memory, they are commonly felt but rarely articulated. Poets, at the highest human level of expression, try."

One of my other favorite quotes is in Chapter 13, "Exploration of a Little-Known Planet," where Wilson writes,

"Each species is a small universe in itself, from its genetic code to its anatomy, behavior, life cycle, and environmental role, and a self-perpetuating system created during an almost unimaginably complicated evolutionary history. Each species merits careers of scientific study and celebration by historians and poets."

Wilson emphasizes how much there remains to be learned about living creatures, how many species remain undiscovered, and how important it is to protect all forms of life on Earth.


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