“Eileen” by Ottessa Moshfegh

Reading this book was a slightly surreal experience. I think that no matter what, I would have had the same response as I turned the last page (that response being,  “Well, that was weird.”). But pile on top the juxtaposition of the book’s setting (the East coat of the U.S. in freezing weather, and everything was ugly) with my own setting (vacation in Costa Rica, where it is never freezing and everything is beautiful) and the weird coincidences (the book takes place in the days leading up to Christmas, and I read it in the days following Christmas) and you get the surreality. I also oddly conflated this book with the one I read before it (the main character could be described as atypical, had a strained relationship with her father, and her mother had passed away previously) and the two I read before that (since this character kept mentioning her future in NYC). 

Eileen is a 24-year old girl who lives with her alcoholic ex-cop father and works as a secretary at the local prison for boys. Her life is filled with shame and disgust, mixed in with a bit of fantasy. She plans to run away to NYC at some point in the nebulous future, but currently she is… well, content is probably the wrong word, as she’s really just numbly moving forward in time, keeping her father stocked with gin and occasionally daydreaming about Randy the prison guard. Enter Rebecca, a beautiful redheaded new hire at the prison who surprises Eileen by paying attention to her, and who surprised me at least once. 

I’m so glad I had *something* to read, even if it felt like it knocked me a little off balance. 

“Rules for Visiting” by Jessica Francis Kane

I really loved this book. I hadn’t known at all what to expect from it. Some unknown amount of time ago, for some unremembered reason, I’d noted the title and author on a short list of Books I Want To Read that I happened to re-discover during Black Friday week, so I went ahead and bought it with only the knowledge that at some point in the past, something about it had interested me. 

As it turns out, this is the story of May Attaway, forty-year-old botanist at a local university (working in the grounds rather than as a professor) who still lives with her father and doesn’t really have any friends. She had a few friends in the past, but didn’t really make any effort to keep them, and hadn’t tried making any new ones for quite a while. 

But recently she had started to notice all the friendships going on around her, and had begun to wonder if maybe she was missing out on something. So when the university gifted her with an extra month of paid vacation to thank her for her years of service, she decided to use the time to visit her four closest friends from the past. 

This book is what I would describe as a treatise on friendship disguised as a novel. As I read, I realized I was looking for instruction in the same way I did with the handful of conversation-related books I read a few years back, only with a different outcome. I did not improve my conversational skills by reading those previous books (nor was I reassured that my current skills were adequate). With Rules for Visiting, while I didn’t gather any useful advice on how to make new friends, it did make me feel good about my cultivation of old friendships. 

Finishing this book was, however, a narrowly avoided catastrophe. We are on vacation, and (looking back now I can see it) I very stupidly only packed two books. And this was the second one. I just assumed I wouldn’t want to have my nose constantly in a book. (Do I know myself at all??) Luckily Sam dug up a book in our rental—and it’s actually one we have at home, on my TBR shelf. Whew! Disaster averted. 

“My Salinger Year” by Joanna Rakoff

I really enjoyed this book, which coincidentally also took place in New York City, just like the last book I read. 

This is a memoir about a year in the life of Joanna Rakoff, which she spent as the assistant to a literary agent at Harold Ober Associates (or so Wikipedia tells me, as her book only ever refers to The Agency). One of said agent’s main clients was a man named Jerry or, as most of the world knew him, JD Salinger. 

One of Joanna’s duties at The Agency was to respond to Salinger’s fan mail, which he had requested to never see. Her official duty was to type the same scripted reply to everyone, only changing the addressee. However, as Rakoff read more and more of the fan mail, she found some of it so touching or soul-baring that she could not resist crafting more heartfelt replies. 

I’m going to tell you a secret. Years ago I had a friend, TF, who loved to ready maybe as much as I do, and we bonded over books. TF’s literary hero was JD Salinger (no matter how unoriginal that might be). I think I was impressed by this because I did not have a literary hero; I just liked to read. Well, anyone would like to meet their literary hero, right? I knew how reclusive Salinger was (though probably only because TF had told me) so I knew this was a total long shot, but I wrote a letter to JD Salinger… inviting him to have lunch with TF. (Insert crying laughing emoji here. This can kind of be equated to writing to Santa.) My letter, of course, acknowledged the fact that this was highly unlikely, but it never (or rarely) hurts to ask, right? I mean, TF would certainly never have lunch with Salinger if such a meeting were never requested. 

The short story is, of course, that TF never had lunch with Salinger. But I did receive a reply to my letter. (Not from Salinger himself, of course.) The letter was typed by someone who introduced themself as Salinger’s assistant, and in my memory the writer said it was a very kind request to make for TF, who was lucky to have a friend like me.

As I read Rakoff’s book, an idea occurred to me. Could Rakoff have been the one to reply to my letter to Salinger? The timing works out relatively well (Rakoff took the assistant job in 1996; I met TF in 1994 and would likely have written the letter between then and 2000, with 1996-7 as my best guess). The only thing is, in my memory the assistant was a male, and as Joanna signed her own name to her letters, I don’t know where I would have gotten the wrong idea about her gender. And really, Joanna’s boss could have had a male assistant before or after Joanna—one who took the same tack in terms of not sticking to the formulaic reply, but also one who never wrote a book about the experience (at least not one that I’m aware of). But it’s much more fun to think it was actually Joanna who replied to me. 

“Grief is for People” by Sloane Crosley

I wish I could remember how I heard about this book. I was thinking it must have been in Oh Reader magazine, but I flipped back through the most recent issue and didn't find any mention of it. My next guess is Bookstagram. Either way, when I saw Crosley had a new book out, I ordered a copy with hardly a second thought. It seems that my memory is full of how much I loved the first book of essays I read by her, and time has dimmed my disappointment in the second one. 

Okay so actually when I said I ordered this book with hardly a second thought, I kind of lied. I did read a few reviews first, including one I wish I hadn't. Some Amazon reviewer going by the name of John Berry stated, "In the context of a book about coping with the suicide of a best friend, the number of pages devoted to stolen jewelry seemed out of place." I feel like that one sentence colored my entire reading experience, and the insignificance of stolen jewelry next to the devastation of suicide really stood out to me. Would it have, if the contrast hadn't been pointed out to me ahead of time? That seems like a stupid question, where the obvious answer is "of course it would have," but I guess the real question is: would it have bothered me?

Honestly, when it comes right down to it, I don't think it actually did bother me. It was noticeable, but I was okay with it. To me, what Crosley was trying to say was that she found parallels between the burglary and the death, but also that she was well aware that the two situations were SO NOT THE SAME. And I appreciate that the writing was thought-provoking but not emotionally manipulative. I don't think it was full of universal truths about grief; rather, it has more of an "everyone grieves in their own way" vibe. And it included the biting humor and the taste of New York City that I enjoyed in Crosley's previous writing.