All posts by Jackie Pick

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About Jackie Pick

Jackie Pick is a former teacher and current writer living in the Chicago area. She is a contributing author to multiple anthologies, including Multiples Illuminated, So Glad They Told Me: Women Get Real about Motherhood, Here in the Middle, as well as the and the literary magazines The Sun and Selfish. She received Honorable Mention from the Mark Twain House and Museum for her entry in the Royal Nonesuch Humor Writing Competition. Jackie is a contributing writer at Humor Outcasts, and her essays have been featured on various online sites including McSweeney's, Belladonna Comedy, Mamalode, The HerStories Project, and Scary Mommy. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Northwestern University, Jackie is co-creator and co-writer of the award-winning short film Fixed Up, and a proud member of the 2017 Chicago cast of Listen To Your Mother.

The Folio: What I Read May 2025

Books, Reading, Recommendations, The Folio, , , , , , ,

Breakdowns, Breakthroughs, and a Goldfish Named Whitney Houston

A graphic titled “The Folio: What I Read May 2025” with the subtitle “Breakdowns, Breakthroughs, and a Goldfish Named Whitney Houston.” Four book covers are lined up: Burning Questions by Margaret Atwood , I See You’ve Called In Dead by John Kenney, There’s Nothing Wrong with Her by Kate Weinberg , and Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang. “By Jackie Pick” is at the bottom right.

This month, I read four books about breakdowns of sorts. While that sounds grim, I promise these were often humorous and generally optimistic. “Breakdown” implies something was once intact and now is no longer. These books suggest that “breakdown” does not equal the end. Sometimes it’s the tender beginning of something else.

These are stories of things coming undone: society, bodies, the workplace, the environment, systems. These don’t just stick the landing, they explode midair and rain glitter.

We get literary dispatches for the end of the world, warnings about how we should treat each other, books saturated with decadent language. Stories devastating and hilarious while documenting intimate unravelings of identity, patience, biodiversity, decency, and workplace norms. There is a book by Margaret Atwood, which means I am contractually obligated to use the word “prescient.” She is classy enough to not use the words “told you so.”

What ties them together isn’t just maddeningly well-rendered unravelings. It’s what’s left standing: language, connection, morality, ghosts, and sharp humor. These books are about the things that break and the tiny, glowing bits that survive the wreckage.

Which is all just to say here are the books I enjoyed enough to finish this month:

Burning Questions by Margaret Atwood
I See You’ve Called in Dead by John Kenney
There’s Nothing Wrong with Her by Kate Weinberg
Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang

Let’s begin.

BURNING QUESTIONS BY MARGARET ATWOOD

What happens when a literary demigod has the nerve to be brilliant, funny, and absolutely right.

Early in the introduction to this magnificent mini-behemoth, Atwood poses a question: Why the title? In other words, what are the burning questions? As if anyone reading a book of essays in the year of our collective undoing requires an explanation. Still, she names a few of the flames: the planet, the economy, democracy, justice, decency, survival. This is not, one suspects, an exhaustive list. She calls these issues “urgent,” which is putting it politely.

With sharp humility she writes, “These are some of the burning questions I’ve been asked, and have asked myself…Here are some of the answers. Or should I say, some of the attempts.” She follows that with a reminder: “That’s what essay means, after all: an attempt. An effort.”

An invocation tucked into a derivation.

What follows is two decades of Atwood being Atwood: brilliantly observant, ruthlessly precise, funny in a dagger-behind-the-teacup way. It’s an impressive scope of inquiry: The mythology of trees, feminism, the art of giving advice (spoiler: don’t), Anne of Green Gables, being Canadian, and of course, The Handmaid’s Tale, which she now has to explain to increasingly horrified readers that speculative fiction has ceased being entirely either.

Atwood renders these burning questions manageable. Enjoyable, even, like a well-arranged closet of catastrophe. She’s writing because she notices and she cares.

Each piece is an anchored moment: a response to a speech invitation, a news event, a book release, a sense that something needs saying. Each is like sitting across from someone at dinner who has ordered something far more interesting than you and is generous enough to let you taste it.

My personal favorite is “Five Visits to the Word-Hoard,” a love letter to language and process. Writing tips include: If you’re blocked, change the tense or the point of view. If you have a headache, go to sleep. Honestly, the best advice I’ve ever gotten while horizontal. (OH, BEHAVE)

If you have not read Atwood’s nonfiction, this will be a newfound gem. There’s a mythic wisdom to her. She’s fiercely protective of Earth, of words, of history, of Canada, and yet she is never precious. Burning Questions is not her manifesto. She simply names things. Language, power, writing, what it means to live in the moment before history is history.

If you have read her nonfiction, you’ll recognize the voice: generous, skeptical, and clear. And curious. Always curious. Because, the essay is not a final word. It is the beginning of a conversation.

I SEE YOU’VE CALLED IN DEAD BY JOHN KENNEY

Officially (?) Dead, Mildly Functional

We’ve all suffered the slings and arrows of an accidental “Reply All.” Or sent a group text meant for one person. It’s a uniquely modern humiliation to discover you’ve shared something private with everyone including Janice in HR. Worse if it was something juicy about Janice in HR.

Now imagine doing this intentionally. Or, more precisely, in a haze of Scotch. Welcome to I See You’ve Called in Dead, a howlingly funny and sweet novel that takes everyday digital self-sabotage and escalates it to an existential crisis about the deep weirdness of being alive.

Bud Stanley is an obituary writer and midlife smoldering crater in a slow, sarcastic freefall. In other words, Bud has problems. After one bad date and enough Scotch to embalm a small elk, Bud pens his own obituary. It’s full of wonderful claims like performing open-heart surgery on himself and dying in a hot air balloon accident. Then he hits send, pushing the obituary out to the world. This leaves him in a bureaucratic no-man’s-land: he’s professionally dead per the computer system at work, and also still alive enough to get called into his bosses’ offices for reprimand. Worse, his employer isn’t sure if they can revive him in the system, at which point they will fire him for this massive breach of protocol and taste.

Now Bud is in a kind of limbo both on paper and in spirit.

What follows is a man trudging through thick malaise in search of an exit. Bud starts attending strangers’ funerals and partaking in other life-affirming activities. Along the way, he’s nudged forward by a small cast of supporting characters who represent various shades of vitality: Tim, best friend who steals every scene and never falls into cliche; Clara, a funeral-loving free spirit; and Leo, the grade-school neighbor who is seven-going-on-Stanley-Tucci. I’d say Leo was my favorite character, but they are all my favorites and I’m not choosing among them.

Kenney doesn’t waste time pretending grief is poetic or that midlife is some golden era of reinvention. But he also doesn’t turn it all into a joke. Kenney understands the architecture of comic prose (the man has a Thurber Prize!) and the human condition that fuels it. Bud’s sarcasm is a coping mechanism, not a gimmick. The writing is funny and occasionally sad, but not self-pitying. At the beginning, it felt like the timeline did a little cha-cha, but that gets sorted out very quickly.

Is this a midlife crisis story? Perhaps, but it’s not the kind where someone runs a marathon or takes up improv. Bud doesn’t “reinvent” himself. He barely reinflates. What he does do (with much sarcasm and some trepidation), is begin to engage with life.

I See You’ve Called in Dead reminds us that it’s possible to be deeply lonely, moderately functional, and still worth loving. The reluctant act of staying somewhat present in one’s own life has meaning. And sometimes eulogies are wasted on the dead.

And that weird process of staying alive? Turns out it’s a group project.

THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH HER BY KATE WEINBERG

The delicate art of being ill in a society that puts a lot of effort into not believing women.

A locked room mystery where the locked room is your own body and the mystery is why no one can figure out what (if anything) is wrong with you. Kate Weinberg’s There’s Nothing Wrong with Her is about solitude, rage, memory, creativity, and the fragile scaffolding that holds a person together.

The title is not just ironic, it’s the whole diagnosis. It’s also very much like being a woman

Here’s the thing about being low-grade, vague, hard-to-diagnose sick: Everyone thinks you’re fine. You look fine. You say, “I’m okay,” because saying “I’m falling apart in slow motion” is, frankly, a buzzkill.

The body becomes suspect and the mind is no longer fully reliable. What follows is often isolation. Not the good kind, the kind assigned by a world that distrusts women and women’s pain.

Vita (a name that would feel heavy-handed if it were in a different author’s hands) Woods is a podcast producer who loses nearly everything when a strange illness leaves her unable to climb stairs, hold a conversation, or distinguish one blurred afternoon from the next. She becomes a ghost in her own life. Sure, people are concerned, doctors can’t figure it out. Her boyfriend (a doctor!) is “supportive” in the same way a traffic cone is supportive — it’s there but it’s not really doing much.

She is stranded in her body, in bed, stuck in what she calls “the Pit”: a place of exhaustion, semi-consciousness, and memory where reality often fuzzes out then returns in sharp relief.

The novel mostly takes place within the confines of Vita’s home, her body, her brain. That should and sometimes does feel claustrophobic, but can also feel expansive when secret compartments open in Vita’s mind. There’s a Renaissance poet/ghost named Luigi da Porto who holds delightful conversations with Vita, teasing her and understanding her better than her boyfriend seems to. There’s a goldfish named Whitney Houston who may or may not be a stand-in for the weird nature of time and memory when you are ill. There’s a look at how the mind deals with boredom and stretches of time, of course, because when your world shrinks, the brain gets very inventive.

Vita’s upstairs neighbors, a grieving piano teacher and her charismatic tenant, serve as unexpected lifelines, pulling her attention upward both literally and emotionally.

It’s a book of in-betweenness, and Weinberg captures these spaces beautifully. Time slows down, then forgets itself.

This book is weird. It’s brilliant. It’s a little mad in exactly the way being sick for too long makes you mad. The boredom gets loud. The silence gets mean. Your own mind becomes a snarky roommate with a penchant for cruel flashbacks. The tone ricochets between funny, sorrowful, and furious, capturing what we think about when all we can do is sit still and try to piece together words and memory, even when our brains feel like unspooled VHS tape.

There’s Nothing Wrong With Her is not a protest novel, but it is a political one. To write about an ailing woman stripped of narrative control, credibility, and energy, and to insist that her version of reality matters, is a quiet and necessary rebellion.

It’s a standout. I’ve never read anything quite like it.

LAND OF MILK AND HONEY BY C PAM ZHANG

What’s for dinner when the world is ending

I really didn’t mean to pick up another climate disaster novel. But I did. And oh, this book is so beautiful and devastating it steams off the page.

Due to some very bad science in America, most of the Earth is covered in smog. Crops fail. Biodiversity collapses. What little food remains looks and tastes gray. The world starts to choke on its own hubris.

It’s not a great time to be a chef, like our narrator is. As America slams its borders shut, it is not a great time to be out of the country, like our narrator is. If you are Asian-American, like our narrator is, you are shuffled to the bottom of the returnee list. She is effectively stuck.

So she lies about her credentials as she applies for a chef job on one of the last smogless places on Earth: a remote mountaintop colony in Italy. Yet, in her application, she writes truthfully, “I will faithfully perform any task within reason and with dignity.”

In fiction, this is a flare gun to the gods which says: “Please test this.”

(N.B. Throughout the book we see how survival and truth can repel each other in drastic situations, and how much living and truth can cling.)

The mountaintop is a private country owned by a wealthy man with a god complex who has amassed massive stores of seeds, livestock, and deep freezers filled with once-extinct and going-extinct species. Animals hung in the deep freezer two-by-two while the rest of us eat mung-protein-soy-algal government flour. It’s a dystopian Noah’s Ark.

Aida, the only main character with a name, is the employer’s daughter, a geneticist who runs the secret labs and revives what maybe should have stayed lost. She is also what we commoners might call “a foodie.” Aida and her father (“the employer”) say they are trying to rebuild/save humanity, with an alley-oop from the world’s wealthiest.

The narrator is hired to seduce these potential investors. Food is but part of the bait. She is bait in another way. But not how you are thinking.

For a book set in the thick fog of collapse, the language is dazzling. The prose is a tasting menu: precise, ornamental, and full of unexpected flavor.

Zhang offers no subtlety in the distinction between lushness and rot, between those who live and those who die, between those who get seconds and those who starve. All the appetites in the book are sensuous and fairytale-like.

The novel is not subtle in its moral juxtapositions. But then, neither is extinction. The employer — a composite of every charismatic autocrat, every disaster profiteer — believes his wealth confers both survival and vision. Luxury and its skewed version of altruism are not spared judgment here, but it is complicated. It is violent and virtuous. Deprivation and depravity of every sort thrive. This book is a panic window into the terrifying human inability to form community under pressure. A survivable planet is one of trust and equity. This is not that planet.

There’s a love story throughout, but the sensuality turns in on itself, becoming something numbing. For a book so full of flavor, it is also deeply desensitizing. Heavy. Slow. Holy. And like all things that present as holy, sometimes we need to look away.

Still, how can you resist a line like this:
 “And that is how, in the depths of that surreal country in a flavorless world, I discovered, among various fruits, vegetables, and animals believed extinct, the last specimen of my professional pride. Shriveled, squashed — but extant.” (p.29)

Land of Milk and Honey is slender, but it’s hardly a light read. This book asks you to look at something beautiful, and then stay there when it turns monstrous. It wants you to crave, and then to feel gross about craving.

It is a book about who has the privilege to choose, and often it’s not pretty either way. However, apocalypse is not à la carte. It’s a prix fixe situation. You get what’s on the menu.

Read any good books lately? Please share in the comments!

Ignore That Refrigerator in the Bathroom

Humor

A Progress Report on Writing

A blue retro refrigerator sits against a lined notebook paper background. The text reads: “Ignore That Refrigerator in the Bathroom: A Progress Report on Writing” by Jackie Pick.

I am of the firm belief you do not ask someone when they are due unless you can see the baby crowning. Likewise, you don’t ask a writer how the novel is going.

We don’t know.

Besides, we’re not supposed to talk about it. We’re supposed to keep our big mouths shut and let the work speak for itself. Ideally after we’ve emerged from a volcano with a manuscript, multiple offers from agents, and severely chapped lips.

But here I am talking about it because apparently I’ve reached the part of writing a novel where I start peeling my skin off like a baked potato and handing it to the internet. Please acknowledge this. It’s covered in salt.

This is my third attempt at writing this novel. Not a third draft. I mean I’ve started over from scratch twice.

The first attempt took years to not finish. Entire children were conceived, born, and sent to preschool in less time. It was an accomplishment in the way that keeping your maternity underwear long after your youngest is complaining about their orthodontia is an accomplishment.

The second attempt was a rebound. A creative fling with all the structure of a failed soufflé and the range of a doorbell chime.

What pushed me into this third attempt was that the first two were steeped in political satire born of deeply unfunny, relentless real-life headlines. The world refused to cooperate. After a while, it felt like writing from inside a sealed flaming trash compactor. I do not enjoy such things.

Around that time, people who actually read books started asking for recommendations with an almost universal plea: “Something fun. Something smart. Something I can get lost in.”

And I thought, YES, SAME, PLEASE, and also, Hey, maybe I can build that place.

I already tell people to get lost all the time. Maybe I should help them do it.

So I started again and quickly finished a draft. It has legs. Newborn giraffe legs, but legs nonetheless.

“Great! So you’ve written a book!”

Oooh, no. I’ve written a draft. This is different from writing a book. A draft is a long, disorganized document that’s too done to be a total mess, and too messy to be anything else.

You know how people refer to airports as “liminal spaces”? My draft is an airport Chili’s.

There’s always revision, though.

People love to talk about revision. They use words like “refinement,” “clarity,” and “where the magic happens.”

Huh.

My revision process, such as it is, involves rereading what I’ve written and muttering, “What is this?” and “Who did this to me?” Plotlines open politely, never to return. Characters introduce themselves, say something baffling, then wander off towards Act Three. Entire pages seem to have been written while I was concussed.

Still, I persist…mostly because I’ve told too many people that I’m writing a book and now I’m trapped. There’s no going back. I either have to finish it or fake my death.

Writing a novel is mostly problem-solving, which is to say, it’s discovering that you are the problem. You move scenes around like furniture in a rental apartment. You convince yourself that having a refrigerator in the bathroom is fine, ignore it. Then you reread it and have to lie down.

I am told by people with better outlooks that this is all part of the process.

“It’s good to question your choices. Writing is about discovery!”

Maybe so. But when they say “discovery,” they mean it like spiritual growth. I mean it like accidentally finding a family of bonobos in the linen closet.

This is not my process. Those people are untrustworthy.

“Oh yeah, Smartmouth? What’s your process?”

Excuse me. Do you also ask a person tripping down stairs what their choreography is?

I mean: I sit. I write. Quietly. Irritably. Daily, if possible.

There will be a book. Sooner rather than later.

It’ll be as smart and as fun as I can make it. Something people can get lost in.

And one day, I’ll admit I’m enjoying the whole rotten process.

Until then, if you ask how it’s going, the answer is “Fine.”

Because I don’t want to talk about it.

The Folio: What I Read April 2025

Book Review, Books, Reading, Recommendations, The Folio

Reality Is Suspicious and So Are You

April 2025 reading list by Jackie Pick, titled “The Folio: What I Read April 2025.” Subheading reads: “Reality Is Suspicious and So Are You.” Books shown: Alice in Wonderland, Gentle Writing Advice, Another Roadside Attraction, and Joan of Miami.

This month, I tried to read books that, strictly speaking, weren’t about the world ending in fire, bureaucracy, or vibes. Not because I believe the world isn’t decomposing in full view — it is, and with remarkable enthusiasm — but because I am occasionally tired of being reminded.

I didn’t consume books like they were rations in a bunker. I didn’t read to survive. I read to live. And it was exactly what my overtaxed little brain needed. Books full of humor, weirdness, and sharp little elbows jabbing at the ribs of reality. Did the world behave better as a result? Nope. But these books at least did not add to the noise. They were entertaining. Intelligent. Occasionally infuriating.

You know. Worthwhile.

Can I connect them all thematically? Ha. Obviously. That’s what we do here. Let’s lay them out like tea leaves spilled across a summoning circle and see what dark magic swirls out.

If there’s a thread among these books, it’s not tone or genre. It’s attitude. These are books written by and for people who look at the world and say, “I don’t think so.” Books that side-eye the system, question reality, and refuse to take their elbows off the table.

They are books for people who suspect that reality (like most things) has been poorly edited, and that it’s entirely reasonable to rewrite it.

If you’re looking for polite stories about polite people doing what they’re told, you’ll find none of that here.

Which is all just to say these are the books I enjoyed enough to finish in the last month:

Alice In Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
Gentle Writing Advice by Chuck Wendig
Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins
Joan of Miami by A. Parrish

Let’s begin.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

Abandon Linear Thought, Ye Mighty.

Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its companion novel, Through the Looking-Glass, form an enduringly strange and brilliant duology. These tales are far more than whimsical romps through fantastical lands — they are surrealist puzzles, philosophical playgrounds, and cultural mirrors that continue to enchant and perplex readers of all ages.

Though often lumped together, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass have distinct tones and structures. Both follow Alice, a sensible girl dropped into thoroughly nonsensical worlds: first through a rabbit hole into the chaotic dream-logic of Wonderland, then through a mirror into a more structured, chessboard-like realm. Wonderland is a tumbling disorder full of talking animals, shifting rules, and queens obsessed with beheadings, while Looking-Glass is more of a surreal thought experiment, populated by living poetry, mirrored rules, and unsettling nursery rhyme characters. If the first is all riddles and reversals, the second feels like an upward climb toward queenship, meaning, and a strange kind of self-awareness. Both show worlds run by folks who absolutely should not be running the world. Through it all, Alice is as polite as she can be.

Carroll’s characters are unforgettable weirdos who’ve pitched tents in the collective unconscious. From the fretful White Rabbit and the cryptic Cheshire Cat to the haughty Red Queen and the delightfully befuddled Tweedledee and Tweedledum, each figure feels both iconic and symbolic. Some represent the adult world’s hypocrisy, others embody logical paradoxes or childhood anxieties. Their nonsensical dialogue is often razor-sharp satire disguised as silliness. They are real in that sideways way. They’re not metaphors, they are archetypes of dysfunction. And Alice, when she doesn’t outright defeat them, walks away.

Though often labeled children’s stories, these books are subversive and complex. Carroll’s background as a mathematician shines through in his love of paradox and his relentless wordplay as the engine of the narrative. Logic, grammar, and social norms are constantly upended. Alice isn’t just navigating strange places; she’s navigating meaning itself. The poems, puns, and riddles twist language until it starts to resemble something closer to truth — or at least, a more honest kind of nonsense. Carroll games the English language like an old pinball machine and never tilts.

And it works because Carroll seems to understand better than most that language is a power tool. Or a tool of power. Either way, people in power often speak the most nonsense with the greatest confidence.

Alice is a triumphant protagonist: curious, skeptical, occasionally indignant, and deeply grounded in a child’s sense of fairness and reason. She’s not a wide-eyed innocent but a sharp observer who meets absurdity with exasperation rather than awe, making her the voice of reason in a world that gleefully resists it. Neither helpless nor perfect, she holds her own against the madness. In doing so, she becomes the grounding force that allows the books to spiral, twist, and tumble without losing their center.

Alice is just trying to make sense of it all, get to where she thinks she should go, and make some friends along the way without getting her head bitten (or chopped) off.

Aren’t we all?

These books endure because they resist a single interpretation. They can be read as nonsense or satire, fantasy or dreamscape, children’s story or commentary on Victorian society — or all of these at once. Carroll invites readers into a world where nothing is fixed, and that openness keeps Alice fresh with each reread.

Together, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are strange, clever, disorienting, and absolutely iconic for reasons that are both obvious and, frankly, impossible to explain. They remind us that logic can be silly, that childhood contains profound insight, and that language itself is a kind of magic.

If you’re willing to wander, they’ll take you somewhere worth going.

Gentle Writing Advice by Chuck Wendig

How to Be a Writer Without Coming Entirely Unglued

Writing advice is usually:

  • Agonizingly Practical (“Use a timer, a color-coded scene-by-scene spreadsheet, and an accountability partner with a whistle and cocked eyebrow.”)
  • Fussily Prescriptive (“Make sure your protagonist’s internal arc adheres to all twelve stages of the Hero’s Journey and Save the Cat, then read the entire Western Canon [preferably in the original languages] before attempting dialogue.”)
  • Completely Bananas (“Lie in damp grass, arch your feet, and listen for the ghost of Virginia Woolf to whisper your story into the mist.”)

Oh ho! But there’s another category: advice that isn’t so much instruction as permission. Permission to be weird. Permission to be lost. Permission to not write for a while, or write badly, or want to burn everything down and start a goat farm.

This category is usually where the good stuff is.

Cue Chuck Wendig.

Gentle Writing Advice: How to Be a Writer Without Destroying Yourself is, in theory, a craft book. But in reality, it’s an exploration of “Why Bother?” in the best sense. It’s also hysterical, intelligent, and surprisingly tender in a way that makes you realize halfway through a solid joke about Comic Sans that you’re actually crying. Or writing your next book. Or both.

I am a — well, not firm believer, but a somewhat jiggly, Jell-O-level believer — that writing expertise is mostly a slippery reflection of what we’ve already done. For example, I am an expert on my most recent dumb social media joke, my last published piece, and my last writing disaster (unpublished, thank goodness). That’s the résumé. And yet, like everyone else, I want the hacks. The tricks. The hacks about the tricks.

But what we really want is reassurance that we’re capable, we’ll find our voice (again or ever), and our messiness doesn’t disqualify us from making something good. We want to laugh at ourselves and fiercely believe in ourselves. We want someone to tell us how to be confident and vulnerable and brave and realistic and gentle and productive and very specifically address the spiral of concerns we have about that one unfinished essay that haunts us like a ghost in a hoodie sitting in the corner of our writing space playing the recorder.

Chuck Wendig gets that. (The need-for-reassurance part, not the recorder-playing-ghost part. I hope.)

Note: Yes, the title says “gentle,” but he’s saucy and foul-mouthed, and his words come at you rat-a-tat-tat. And then, like most saucy, hilarious, foul-mouthed people, he lets the mushy, empathetic core out.

In the introduction, Wendig warns us: “Writing advice is bullshit. But bullshit fertilizes.”

Unfortunately, this is very good advice.

He takes aim at the MFA-ified “listen to the clouds” advice that dominates traditional literary circles. Not because it’s wrong, but because it doesn’t always speak to the chaos-writing many of us do in the margins of our lives. We, the 4 AM Scribblers.

Please consider this book if only for the footnotes. (See page 8 for one that made me snort my coffee). Chapter 5, “Self-Care for Writers,” contains a section on shame that I desperately needed, along with perhaps one of the most resonant pieces of writing advice I’ve ever heard:

“Self-care sometimes means limiting people’s access to you.”

This funny, sweary, generous writing guide believes in you. It’s vulnerable because it knows you are, too. It’s strong because it’s built to help you keep going. Gentle Writing Advice connects us to something inside ourselves that still believes in trying.

And honestly? I’m happy Wendig and I live in the same timeline. (I think. The man gives strong “slides between dimensions on Tuesdays” energy.)

Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins

Absurdist fiction / countercultural theology / metaphysical hot dog stand

Let me begin by saying that I do not believe in roadside attractions. I believe in roads. I believe in destinations. I believe in stopping only when absolutely necessary: for example, when a building is on fire, or when someone is waving at you to prevent you from driving into a sinkhole.

Roadside attractions, as a concept, suggest you are not already where you’re meant to be.

Which also describes this novel.

Another Roadside Attraction is Tom Robbins’s debut novel, and it comes in HOT. The plot, such as it is, is something like: a clairvoyant ex-circus performer named Amanda and her musician/tightrope-walking husband John Paul open a roadside hot dog stand that is also a museum of weirdness. They are joined by a scientist/drifter/occasional scold named Marx Marvelous and an ex-CIA operative named Plucky Purcell who steals the mummified body of Jesus Christ. What follows is a swirl of theology, sex, and philosophy.

If you’ve ever read a book and hoped there was at least one pet baboon in it, you’re in luck.

The prose is a study in excesses. Robbins unleashes language upon the reader. His sentences somersault and flirt, then rest. Even when it’s too much — and it often is — it’s never boring.

The characters are archetypes in tie-dye, full of delightfully implausible wisdom and nonsense. Amanda, especially, is the grandmother of every mystic dream girl in contemporary fiction. Yes, radiant, but also written in that “male-gaze-mystical-fertility-goddess of the 70s” way. (although, to be fair, her agency and internal logic are more developed than “archetype” implies.) John Paul is a philosophical foil with a man bun before man buns were a thing. Robbins clearly adores his characters and seems to write them with a loving sense of “You’re fabulous, go be free.”

This book does not ask for permission to be weird. It takes swings at organized religion, capitalism, science, mysticism, and the entire notion of polite fiction.

As one character puts it: “Real courage is risking one’s clichés.”

Robbins risks every cliché. And that is fun. He has big, unwieldy, thought-provoking, and possibly unwashed ideas.

Overall, however, the book felt pseudo…something. Philosophical? Poetic? Literary? Infectious? Familiar? Challenging?

Perhaps that is due to the writing style, which felt relentless. It is metaphor-as-worldview. Or at least as a hallucinogenic window to a worldview. If you’re in the mood, it’s delicious. If you’re not, it feels like being sea-lioned by someone in a fedora who wants to “explain” how you’ve misunderstood greatness by just asking questions. A different editor, perhaps, might have been warranted.

And yes, the book is extremely of its time, and it may be possible to get a contact high off of some of the passages.

Don’t read Another Roadside Attraction for plot. Read it for the ride. For the glittering, overgrown language. For the absurdity and the sincere questioning. For a bygone world that’s falling apart but bringing forth a whiff of patchouli and old truths. It’s for all of us weird kids.

And here’s the thing: Despite all that, I feel largely indifferent about Another Roadside Attraction, and I think Robbins, were he to float by on a peyote-scented cloud, might actually be fine with that. This isn’t a book that begs to be loved by everyone. It’s not tidy — it’s not even particularly clear — and it’s not universal. It’s certainly not a relaxing tale.

This book is not normal.

A not-normal book doesn’t necessarily need adoration. It just needs you to walk through it once, eyes open, and maybe leave a little differently than you arrived. You may even end up admiring it, as I did.

Joan of Miami by A. Parrish

A Joan for the 21st Century

It’s an ambitious book and, to its credit, entertaining while committed to the radical notion that a young woman with opinions might actually change the world.

Read any good books lately? Let me know in the comments!