Book Cover of the Week: Hands On - by Louise Tripp

The book cover of the week this week is more of a trend in book covers that I happen to like. Yes, I admit it – I judge books by their covers. The prettier a cover, the more likely I am to pick the book up and see what it's about, read a few sentences or paragraphs, buy it or check it out of the library. The trend I am liking right now is: HANDS. Romances with a glossy picture of two hands intertwined, misty pictures of an adult hand grasping the hand of an unsteady child – I think this is pretty. But admittedly, I don't read much romance. Unless, of course, it's a gay or lesbian romance – then I just might be hooked by a cover displaying lovers touching hands. Case in point: Emma Donoghue's Landing (pretty much my favorite lesbian romance of the last five years).

And let us not forget YA fiction, my other weakness. Sara Ryan's The Empress of the World has a gorgeous picture of golden sunlight shining like a halo over the clasped hands of a teenage lesbian couple. It makes me happy just looking at it.

Challenge: Recreate either cover in photographs and I'll post it here next week.

Louise Tripp grew up in North Carolina. She currently lives in Chicago, where she is revising her first YA novel and working in a public library. You can read her regular blog at http://risktoblossom.blogspot.com.

Dorothy Allison - by Ammie Brod

There are a lot of reasons I read books. I read to learn new things, to relax and distract my mind, but also to keep my brain on its toes; I read because it’s fun but also for the sheer joy of feeling words resonate inside of my head. There are also a lot of types of books that I enjoy—scientific narratives, history, poetry, cookbooks, and novels have all fallen prey to my restless and roving eye. But the things that stay with me the longest, the ones that keep me up at night and make me clench my teeth together because goddamn, they have this feeling to them that I’ve never been able to define as anything other than a feeling of truth. I don’t mean nonfiction; the feeling I’m talking about defies genre. I secretly (or not so secretly now, I suppose) believe that you can tell when something has been written from a true place, when there is no bullshit going on, when the person who was writing was speaking from somewhere inside of themselves that they absolutely believe in and so was able to let down some of the walls between themselves and the outside world. True writing feels vulnerable, but at the same time it’s so unbearably strong.



A few years ago I picked up a copy of Dorothy Allison’s completely lovely book of short stories, Trash, at a used book sale. I’d read the book years earlier in college, a time in my life where I perhaps unfortunately read a number of fantastic books and failed to understand them in almost any way; I was a very literal reader, trained by my public education to find symbolism irritating and the beauty of prose ignorable to the point where I read Lolita and was merely bored and grossed out instead of shattered into pieces by Nabokov’s writing. Graduating from college was probably the best thing that ever happened to my reading life. Anyway, so I picked up this vaguely-remembered book and brought it home, and damn if it didn’t break my heart in the best way possible.


Reading Dorothy Allison is a very specific feeling for me. The word I want to use is bitter: reading Dorothy Allison is the taste of crushed aspirin, acrid and lingering, something you can feel in your bones long after you’ve swallowed it down. When I read her in college she scared me, and so it’s no surprise that one of the stories I remembered best from my early perusal of Trash was a series of vignettes about food and relationships titled A Lesbian Appetite; it was a favorite in large part because I remembered it having an element of humor that was more apparent than it is in many of the other stories. Now I realize that Allison is often funny, just in a way that makes you want to bite your tongue until you draw blood.


A Lesbian Appetite was not as humorous as I remembered it, or rather the humor had more depth, more edge. The story mixes food and sex in a way that is so visceral and violent and sensual that I can’t think of anything else I’ve read that raises such conflicting feelings of hunger and anger, want and rage and denial. It's specifically about the food that poor white trash Southerners eat and how terrible and wonderful it is at the same time. You can taste what she's writing about—the bacon fat, the bubbling gravy, the biscuits, the pan-fried green tomatoes—and in between the reminisces about her mother's cooking, she talks about her lovers and the food that they either ate together or didn't, and the sex they had, or not. There's a scene that I love where the health-food girlfriend is forcing the narrator to slice and salt eggplant, and the narrator starts rubbing eggplant slices all over her to salt it with her sweat, and they have sex and fry the eggplant up with garlic and tomatoes and eat it together. It just... It makes me want to eat and have sex and lick grease off of my fingers. I want that salt and sweat, that laughter and tender force and finally the flesh and sharp tang of tomatoes in my mouth.


But what really gets me is this food nostalgia that she writes about. The food that she ate as a child and young woman is, in many ways, still reflected in negative ways in her present-day body. She has numerous health problems caused by her former diet; in fact, one section of the story details how, after a seventh-grade teacher informs her class that the children of the poor are lacking in intelligence because they are deprived of vitamin D in childhood and it keeps their brains from developing properly, she starts obsessively eating dairy to try and catch up, to make her brain strong so she can get out of where she is. Twenty years later, a doctor tells her she has a slight dairy allergy that has caused her to have an ongoing stomach problem, and she just laughs and laughs.


But despite all of this, despite the wreckage caused in her body, she daydreams and dream-dreams about the food of her childhood, about baking biscuits and cooking beans with onions and pork fat and the sweat on her mother's neck when she prepares these things, about how she knows how to make these foods but she can’t because, well, she is living a different life in a different place. But she wants them. There is such a sensory glut of taste and scent and smell that I feel a longing for these foods I’ve never tasted, just so I can think of them that poignantly. I remember being vegan and home for Thanksgiving and how hard that was, and I think about all the vegetarians I know who still eat turkey that one day of the year, and I think about the power of comfort food. It's so wired into our heads, what we do and don't want to eat and why. What we eat is literally a part of us, not only our bodies but our minds, our tongues, our sense of the past and our position in the present. It ties us into who we are. It’s family and geography and history, and sometimes you just want that taste on your tongue to remind you of who you are.

Ammie Brod spent most of her childhood trying to come up with a profession that would allow her to do nothing but read all day, but when that failed to pan out she became a classical musician and florist instead. Her fifteen minutes of fame, now passed, involved a google image search for the phrase "naked girls and me." You can read more of her writing at http://www.extraneousness.blogspot.com/.

Book Cover of the Week - by Louise Tripp

Working as a shelver in a public library, I tend to derive a certain amount of glee from book covers that make me giggle. More often than not, pulp novels are the objects of my amusement. For instance, this one: Another Kind of Love by Paula Christian. The blurb on the back begins with this telling sentence:
"The moment Laura Garraway shares a forbidden kiss with Hollywood starlet Ginny Adams, she discovers a missing piece of herself."

It goes on to describe the "cigarette-and-martini-drenched gay bars of the Village." Oh, yes.

Is it just me or does the cover remind you of the female characters from Mad Men?

Challenge: Recreate this cover in photographs and I'll post it here next week.

Louise Tripp grew up in North Carolina. She currently lives in Chicago, where she is revising her first YA novel and working in a public library.

Teen Scene: My Favorite YA Fiction - by Louise Tripp

It's no secret that I enjoy reading (and writing) young adult fiction. I've often been asked to recommend teen fiction and so I thought: why not compile a list of some of the best YA novels I've ever read? Without further ado, a few of my favorite things ( that you can find in the "teen" or "young adult" section of your local library or bookstore).

1. Taking The Ferry Home by Pam Conrad – My all-time favorite teen novel that I must have read fifty or so times, it takes place on an island where two girls – one priviledged, one the daughter of a recovering alcoholic novelist – spend the summer keeping secrets from each other. Evocative language and one character's dark past make this an especially memorable novel. (More to come in this Friday's Friday Favorites column).
   
   
2. 
   The Perks of Being A Wallflower – Pop culture, letter-writing, mixed tapes, Rocky Horror. All of these serve as a backdrop for Stephen Chbosky's novel about being socially awkward and the secrets we keep, even from ourselves.
   
   
3. Girl by Blake Nelson – Another of those books I've read on repeat, Girl tells the story of Andrea Marr and her discovery of thriftstores and grunge rock in '90's Portland, Oregon. The narrative voices is a pitch-perfect copy of authentic teen-speak, with lots of "and thens" and a barrage of supporting characters – an incredibly fun, smart novel.
   
   
4. 
   LESBIAN FICTION – Okay. I know, I know. This is not just one novel, but a slew of them. Or rather, a group – I wouldn't say "slew" as that would seem to indicate there are a lot. Teen lesbian fiction is few and far between (and most are "coming out" stories). I happen to think there need to be more. Here, in this sub-category, are a few I think are the best: (1) Annie On My Mind by Nancy Garden– Because it is a classic. Because it was banned. Because no one dies or gets beaten or raped. Because neither character decides she'd be better off with a guy. Because it is a wonderful novel about two girls who fall in love. (2) Keeping You A Secret- One of those aforementioned coming out stories, this one follows Holland as she realizes her sexuality after meeting already-out teen Cici. She dumps her boyfriend and turns her world upside down to be with a girl. Things aren't perfectly rosy by the end, but there's a feeling of hope that sticks with you and it's written by one of my current favorite YA fiction authors, Julie Anne Peters. (3) Hello Groin – Protagonist realizes she's in love with her best friend and spends the book trying to hide it, only to find out by the end that – spoiler alert! - her best friend is in love with her, too. Written in thoughtful, believable prose by Beth Goobie, who uses the novel Foxfire by Joyce Carol Oates as a device for her young characters to discuss and discover who they are. (4) The Cat Came Back by Hilary Mullins – Released in 1993, this was one of the first teen lesbian novels I ever read. Written in a diary format, it follows a girl named Stevie who attends a Connecticut boarding school and is having an affair with Rik, a teacher. He's using her, of course. Meanwhile, a new girl on her hockey team, Andrea has made an impression on her. Before long and through her feelings for Andrea, Stevie finds herself able to ditch Rik. (5) The Bermudez Triangle – A group of three friends who have grown up together loses one of their threesome to an academic camp for the summer. While she's away, the other two...shall we say hook up? (6) Hard Love by Ellen Wittlinger – This one comes in at #6 only because it is more about a boy named John than it is about his lesbian friend, Marisol, but it's a terrific book. John falls in love with his Puerto Rican zinester best friend, who is, unfortunately, not that into him – because she likes girls. (7) Far From Xanadu – Another from Julie Anne Peters, this tells the story of a tomboy named Mike (yes, Mike's a girl) who falls in love with the new girl in town, Xanadu. Xanadu likes the attention she gets from Mike, but really likes guys. It's a sad, all-too-common story – bi-curious teen girl pretends to be into gay girl and then, not-so-much (and people wonder why that ubiquitous Katy Perry song makes me so irate!) – and the characters in Peters' novel are, as always, entirely realistic and relatable. AND that ends my shameless plug for the best teen lesbian fiction I know of. More to come, I hope.
   
   
5. 
   
   
   
   Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret and Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume – Queen of the teen novels, Blume has managed to shape the lives and formative years of pretty much every woman I have ever met. These are probably the two of her books that had the most profound effect on me, personally (though I remember snippets of several of her other books as well – Just As Long As We're Together and Forever come to mind). In Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret, the title character stumbles into puberty longing for her period to start and her boobs to grow (anyone else recall "we must, we must, we must increase our busts?). Here, Blume mixed humor with real-girl worries about being "normal" and I don't know anyone who couldn't, in some way, relate. Tiger Eyes was somewhat darker. A girl named Davey is grieving the loss of her father, who was shot and killed in a convenience store robbery. Following the funeral, depressed Davey spends a great deal of time in bed (in discussing the book with my sister a few years ago, we found that we both most remembered a snippet of narration in which Davey describes how she has come to like her own unwashed scent). Feeling a change of scenery is in order, Davey's mother moves the family to New Mexico. There, Davey feels more alone and her only friend for awhile is an alcoholic girl – but what's especially interesting is that Davey goes to work as a candy striper in a wing of the hospital mostly used to care for the terminally ill. Interesting because it seems a way of dealing with death that forces a person to face it, too, and in the barest way possible. I recall the tone of Tiger Eyes being sad, but hopeful and Blume's language is lovely, crafted so as to expose the world in the distilled way that teenagers see it.
   
   
6. 
   I Am The Cheese by Robert Cormier – From the beginning, Cormier's novel is mysterious and fast-paced. The protagonist is riding his bike "furiously" and immediately there is the sense that he is fleeing something. The story comes together in flashbacks as it approaches a surprise ending that, when I was young, I recall taking my breath away. 
   
   
7. Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohn & David Levathan – A more recent read for me, Cohn and Levathan tell a "he said, she said" story of two snarky, music-obsessed teenagers out on the town, trying to locate their favorite band and forget their terrible exes. It's one of those books that makes you (or, at least, me) wish to be younger again, out on the dance floors and streets of the city until sunrise and just getting to know someone who, in an instant, you know will change your life.
   
   
8. Uglies by Scott Westerfeld – I read this last year and was blown away by the intelligent, original story. Central character Tally lives in a future where, until their sixteenth birthday, people are known as "uglies" because they have not yet undergone the operation to make them "pretty" (which, in their world, means their faces are perfectly symetrical and everyone looks about the same). The collective logic is that it will make everyone equal – no one will be treated differently for not being as beautiful as someone else. But then Tally becomes friends with a girl who wants to forego the operation and join a hidden resistance – and she begins to question what it means to be "ugly" and "pretty" and why the government forces the operations in the first place. Uglies is a heart-pounder and feels almost cinematic (I would love to see it made into a feature film).
   
   
9. The Pigman by Paul Zindel – To this day I can find no other author who understands what it means to be a weirdo better than Zindel does and if I'm going to get personal, I should say that this was the first book ever that I can remember making me cry. I remember finishing it up in my parents’ kitchen back in North Carolina, my vision blurred by tears, feeling a love like I'd never felt for a piece of writing before. Mind you, I was 12 – but I read a lot as a child. In this one, Lorraine and John are high school misfits – he sets bombs in the school bathroom, she feels estranged from her own mother, who works long hours. Together, the two play pranks, one of which leads them to a lonely old man who collects ceramic pigs. Before long, Lorraine, John and Mr. Pignati are friends – he's the only adult they've ever trusted. Oddly enough, they are the ones who betray his trust.
   
   
10. Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson – I read Speak during one of my life's rough patches and the character really spoke to me – no pun intended. It's both, touchingly funny and painfully grim and begins with a girl named Melinda on the first day of high school. She talks to no one, makes references to how her friends are still not speaking to her and observes how everyone around her seems to be clueless, hypocritical or liars. As her story unfolds, we get bits and pieces of a puzzle that come together to form an agonizing truth – the reason why she no longer had friends...and another underlying truth that leads to the dark secret she's keeping. 
    
    
    
    
    

    Louise Tripp grew up in North Carolina. She currently lives in Chicago, where she is revising her first YA novel and working in a public library.