Related Books:
This was the year the “millennial novel” retreated in my consciousness. Not that I didn’t read compelling books by millennials: Boys Parts by Eliza Clark, Acts of Service by Lillian Fishman, and the forthcoming Central Places by Delia Cai were devoured in one sitting. I also resonated with Noor Qasim’s piece for The Drift about the “millennial sex novel,” especially this quote: “Even in their most climactic scenes, the books feel pulled between one character’s desire to narrate her experience and the writer’s desire to conjure a credible and enticing world.”
For me, this was primarily a year of domestic studies: heartbreaking and funny works on the societies we create through our most intimate relationships, rather than love as political microcosm. I very much enjoyed nonfiction like Foreverland by Heather Havrilesky, Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly, and the fictional short stories in Five Tuesdays in Winter by Lily King.
It was a year of trilogies: The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen, which brings working class Denmark to life with the grit of Ferrante’s Naples. And Deborah Levy’s Living Autobiography, an example of the hybrid criticism and memoir which I can’t seem to stop reading. (Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing That Is Happening by Laurie Stone would be an excellent pairing with any of the Levy books.) There were also books that felt like trilogies, indeed Breasts and Eggs and All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami, which I read this year in close succession, are loosely connected with Kawakami’s 2009 book Heaven which I look forward to reading in 2023.
