What I Read in June

Plus: an update on my novel

June has been a busy month. I’m in the process of completing the first draft of my novel. Because of how my brain works, I’ve been simultaneously working on two different projects. The first is based on my short story, “Selling Vermont,” that published in Volume 0 last year. The second is based on another short story that I completed in New Orleans earlier this year. I’ve been listening to a lot of interviews from Charli XCX lately. I’m fascinated by her cinephile bonafides and how she discusses persona and worldbuilding when it comes to her music.

Charli XCX spoke to Nicky Reardon on his podcast, Nicky at Night, about constructing an album: “When I’m making music, it really informs the direction that the music takes. It provides this sort of, like, set of boundaries in which I create. And that can really help the direction of the music itself. When you’re creating in this set of rules, you can get really potent. When I was making Brat, it became really clear early on what was Brat, versus what wasn’t.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about my intentions when it comes to my first novel. I have a wide body of work already: my former podcast Keep It, a decade of cultural criticism, a television writing career, and my essay collection Pure Innocent Fun. How do I want the next chapter (pun not intended) of my life to look creatively? I've become extremely interested in fiction as of late. And not just fiction, but literary fiction. I want that to be reflected in my work.

I traveled to London for two weeks recently for a writing retreat. I expected to get a good chunk of my book done, but instead, I read my existing pages in both projects and decided that it was time to put the first project away for a bit. It initially existed as an idea for a screenplay when I was working on Uncoupled. My manager at the time really loved this idea, but I couldn’t find a way to make it work as a screenplay. My manager and I parted ways last year. And then, as some of you may know, I lost my apartment and a very close friend later that year. I realized in London that this first project was me still attempting to hold onto things that I need to let go of (at least for now).

Conversely, my second project came to me in a Gothic fiction writing workshop I took in New Orleans. Yes, it’s gothic horror. But also a romance? And in part, an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s 1881 play Ghosts. It’s messy in a good way. I attempt to make sense of everything that’s happened to me in the past year, and it’s full of anger and sadness and grief. But it’s also my writing that feels the most connected to literary fiction. One thing I’ve always appreciated about my past creative projects is how quick the turnaround is from inception to presentation. Novels are a different beast, but I do think there’s something to getting all of those ideas out as soon as you can without allowing them to simmer for too long. I want to process the last year, and then I want to be able to put it on a shelf and let it be, much like I did when I published Pure Innocent Fun. The three-year time period during which I wrote it was a chaotic time in my life, and it felt therapeutic to leave it all inside a book that I don’t have to reopen again until I choose to.

This is all to say that I’m working towards my goal of finishing this draft this summer, on or around my upcoming 40th (!) birthday. More to come.

What I read in June

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deeshaw Philyaw

Lives of Saints by Nancy Lemann

White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Flyboy in the Buttermilk Greg Tate

The Disappearers by Marlon James

Love by Toni Morrison

I am shocked that for the sixth month in a row, a work by Toni Morrison is not my favorite book I’ve read! That honor goes to the forthcoming masterpiece (yeah, that’s right) from Marlon James, The Disappearers. I’ve met Marlon socially a few times through one of our mutual close friends. At that friend’s wedding, he described the plot of his latest novel to me, and I knew this was absolutely gonna be my kinda shit. A queer Jamaican revenge epic that’s also kind of a romance and also set in the late ‘80s and 90s? I was hooked from the moment Less Than Zero and Prince were referenced.

There’s so much more I want to say about this novel, but it’s not out until September, so I will hold off for now. Just know that I took this book to Fire Island and then to London and finished it within a week. When I wasn’t reading it, I was either thinking about it or I was talking to friends about it.

Yes, it’s a Marlon James book, so it’s long as hell. But in these 617 pages is a gorgeous blend of history, language, pop culture, and magic. To say it’s a masterpiece feels like an understatement. This is his Song of Solomon.

I did absolutely adore Love, though. I didn’t know what to expect from this one, given there’s not a lot of writing on Morrison’s later works (this New York Review piece by Raven Leilani is fantastic tho). It’s a slight read compared to her classics, but it still packs a punch. And it feels like a master is taking all the themes she’s explored in her prior work and drawing new conclusions. This book is in conversation with Sula for sure, but it’s also very much a continuation of Recitatif. Christine and Heed carry on Twyla and Roberta’s venomous feud, only to greater, melodramatic heights. I need to know if Morrison watched The Young and the Restless because the climactic skirmish absolutely gives Jill and Katherine’s iconic 1988 attic brawl. Katherine finds Jill snooping through her ex-husband’s mementos, just as Heed finds Christine doing the same.

Sula ends with the realization that friendship is what Nel missed in her life, not her husband. The sentiment in Love is, “All this time, we could’ve been friends?”

There was an article about the “gay lit boom” in the NYT recently, but a quieter boom in queer literature has been coming from well-known Black women writers. I expected I’d enjoy Philyaw’s story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, but I didn’t expect it to have so many delicious queer stories. The same goes for Kin, whose queer romance has gone largely unmentioned on social media and in reviews. There’s also Lonely Crowds from Stephanie Wambugu, which features an unrequited (until it’s not) queer romance. I’ve also heard that Kennedy Ryan’s Score (which I have yet to read but plan to!) features a bisexual lead. It’s not shocking to me that these Black women are telling such bold, exciting sapphic stories.

But it is shocking, I think, that they’re not being discussed more widely as queer lit. Is that the future of queer literature? Is it something that only one demographic is allowed to explore without expressly being labeled as queer lit? Or is it the fact that Black women are writing these stories the reason why the men writing about the current “gay lit boom” haven’t noticed?

As for the other books I read this month, I read Dostoevsky’s short story White Nights because I’ve been working my way through The Brothers Karamazov this year, and I just wanted to finish a Dostoevsky story. I didn’t particularly love it. Lives of Saints has such gorgeous, vivid prose, and it made me feel like I was back in New Orleans again. Flyboy in the Buttermilk is an excellent collection of criticism with a must-read introduction from my MTV News colleague Hanif Abdurraqib. It also includes one of my favorite pieces of music criticism ever, “I’m White!: What’s Wrong with Michael Jackson.” People aren’t writing fire like that anymore!

Another fun thing I did in June? I traveled to Fire Island to guest host Marc MacNamara’s Hot Tub Games, where he pairs a housewife with a porn star for a series of games. This month, his porn star was Rhyheim Shabazz. And the housewife? Nene fucking Leakes. Yes, the inspiration behind the title of my essay collection Pure Innocent Fun. THAT Nene Leakes.

During the game, we played a few rounds of Never Have I Ever at The Tryst Pool. A highlight of the game was when I said, Never have I ever had a lesbian moment like most of my Real Housewives of Atlanta castmates. And would you believe that Nene admitted she HAS had a lesbian moment before? The entire audience screamed in gleeful shock. She wouldn’t divulge any other debates, but that was enough for me.

The best moment of the experience, however, was gifting Nene with a copy of my book and signing it for her. Hilariously, she didn’t recall the quote that inspired the title (it’s not one of the more famous ones!) and thought I was asking her to sign my book. It gave very much, “whatever that means…” And I died. When I first wrote this book, I asked Random House if there was any way to secure a moment with Nene on my book tour. It wasn’t in the cards.

But I’m a firm believer in the universe delivering things to you when it’s time. And one year after the publication of my book, that moment came. One of Nene’s most famous quotes is, “bling bling bling, bitches is mad!” But damn, actually? Bitches is glad!