Lauren Mechling's Reading List

"It’s funny, because that’s such a dark book, but it’s actually the lightest of the five. The friendship in it is very sweet, actually: it’s about two women, one of whom doesn’t have a name, and her best friend, Reva. They’re both brilliant comic characters, but Reva really lived on with me. Ottessa Moshfegh has this ability to say so much with little spiky details that linger. Though I read it over a year ago, I just vividly remember Reva, glugging Diet 7-Up, obsessed with her fake Gucci purses, or going to Pilates and talking about her nights going out to gay bars in the West Village. She’s just this hilarious creature of a moment: the basic girl from 2000. But she’s actually the only source of love in the novel. She cares and worries for the narrator. In fact, the most poignant, life-changing moment in the book at the very end is about Reva. She’s a character who all along has had a comic element to her, so I was surprised by how profound the ending to do with her fate was. It’s what happens to Reva that ends our narrator’s stretch of total self-destruction. “ My Year of Rest and Relaxation is the anti-wellness manifesto” I read it as a rebuke to our culture of wellness, which was so refreshing. It’s the anti-wellness manifesto: this woman is basically poisoning herself every hour of the day with all sorts of pharmaceuticals. Coming from a culture where everyone is glugging turmeric juice and matcha powders and charcoal, reading about this woman who’s hilariously, greedily downing her medications—as much as she can get from the one other person in the book she talks to, her horrible psychiatrist, who’ll give her absolutely anything under the sun—was just great. That is hilarious. I wonder if the therapist went into this place of defensiveness—‘We actually don’t do that! Why is she depicting us as these thoughtless monsters?’ But the book itself is so prickly and so deranged, and that’s the only culture or environment in which a character like Reva could survive in a way that pleases me. If Reva were dropped into any other book that was a little more earnest or full of heart, she’d probably really annoy me, or I would’ve thought her more two-dimensional. But instead, there’s a contrast: Reva is this night-clubbing, narcissistic bulimic who’s actually really devoted to her friend. The narrator isn’t necessarily a bad friend to Reva. She’s a very ill person; she’s a bad friend to herself , mostly. (Though she’s a good friend to herself by being friends with Reva). But Reva is a saint for putting up with this person, who won’t even accompany her anywhere. The narrator is a drag; it’s all about her problems. Reva has to operate in the world friendlessly, because her best friend is lying on the couch in a stupor for most of the book. It’s very off-balance, which is really interesting. That element of a friendship fascinates me: sometimes the dynamic isn’t the thing that suddenly changes, but rather it’s one person’s attitude. Something that’s been simmering, something that’s been the status quo, will suddenly prompt one person to disrupt the ecosystem of a friendship and say ‘I can’t do this anymore.’"

"I would pick her for any list. I named my daughter (Louisa Pym) after her! I love Barbara Pym. From the moment I found her, she has not left that special place on my bookshelf. I press her into the hands of younger women and most have not read her. So many people who work in the world of literature, and who love humorous, poignant writing, still haven’t gotten to her yet. But that’s part of the beauty of Pym—she was so overlooked and so marginalized, and that’s why she’s able to write about that kind of character. It’s many-layered. She’s known for writing about lonely women who have romantic fantasies about clergymen. They have jumble sales, live in small villages and survey each other for gossip as if bird-watching. There’s a very suppressed interiority in Barbara Pym: people are well-behaved, repressed, very English, and not generous with themselves. There’s always a scrimping and saving element, an emphasis on what would be suitable and not being extravagant or showy. But for me the real pleasure of Pym is less about the set dressing of her world—which I do adore—but her flavor, her point of view. Which is unsparing and melancholic, but a little twisted. I re-read Quartet in Autumn a month ago. It’s a strange novel to re-read with much time in-between. The first time I read it, I thought it was a hoot. It was published in 1977, but it has this late 60s, early 70s flavor to it—this chartreuse aesthetic. It’s about four people who don’t feel comfortable in a changing, groovy London. They work together in an office. One thing I love about it is that it’s never made clear what they do. All that’s clear is that they’re completely marginalized. It seems like their colleagues put up with them, are waiting to get rid of them, and maybe give them little fake tasks. You get the sense from the book that there’s actual industry happening, but these four are not a part of it. [ Laughs .] It’s a little like The Breakfast Club ; there are these four losers who are united by virtue of that. “The real pleasure of Pym is less about the set dressing of her world—which I do adore—but her flavor, her point of view” When reading it for the first time, I thought it was the weirdest book of hers. Because it is weird. It moves out of cottage country: now we’re in London, and you get the sense of a more modern society creeping in on Pym-land. There’s a less jolly spirit. It feels more deranged and more tragic in a very appealing way. But little details stuck with me. There’s one character who has this strange compulsion to not recycle her milk bottles; instead, she hoards them in a shed, or sometimes she hides them on a bookshelf in a library. And she also obsessively collects brochures for holidays she’s not going to go on. But re-reading it a month ago, I was horrified. Because it’s brutal and it’s so sad. Really, it’s a book about mortality—about the world truly having no need for you. I’m also interested in the idea of the context-based friendship: the deep connection that can form between people simply because they’re sharing some experience together. Nothing otherwise would’ve drawn these four characters—Marcia, Letty, Norman and Edwin—together, but they’re in the same boat, in the same strange office, and they come, albeit not in a warm, cuddly way, to be each other’s family. They’re each other’s only human connection. Despite this sustained proximity, throughout the novel their boundaries never really let up with each other. It’s so delicious but so painful. It’s something I don’t relate to—that’s not how I am—but you get the sense, watching these people, that in a way they’re spying on each other. There’s a tenderness; they worry about each other, but they wouldn’t really dare say much to each other. A character won’t openly express her thoughts about the other person’s life choices, but they will obsess over them. Absolutely. There’s this one line: “It was a comfortable enough life, if a little sterile, perhaps even deprived. But deprivation implied once having had something to be deprived of, like Marcia’s breast, to give a practical example, and Letty had never really had anything much. Yet, she sometimes wondered, might not the experience of ‘not having’ be regarded as something with its own validity?” It’s at once tender and brutal and subtle. Classic Barbara Pym. Yes. That’s of course the case in Ottessa Moshfegh’s book. And A Friend From England features a classic Brookner heroine. Even the character in Alice Munro’s ‘Nettles’ is sort of a loner; she keeps losing her relationships."

"I feel like each book of Brookner’s is a continuation. She’s created this world with her novels. I haven’t read them all, but I’ve read several, and it’s like they’re part of a family. There’s very little dialogue and there’s a very rich texture to the prose. The prose itself is why I return to Brookner again and again. How to describe her prose? It’s sophisticated and a little musty. She’s known for writing about spinsters, or about women who are not in possession of the brass rings that maybe those around them have come to get. They’re outsiders, and often very curious observers. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . There’s something both calming and disturbing about her writing that brings me back over and over. And I love that she didn’t start writing novels until she was 53. I won’t call her a late bloomer, because up until then she had a full career as a historian of art. But she was a late adopter of a new métier, and she’s a master. She was a consistent writer, too; I think she wrote a book every year for much of her career. When she got older, she started slowing down—maybe one every two years. [ Laughs .] But really, she was on fire. I chose it because this book feels less lonely to me than the others of hers I’ve read. I also love this particular trope: a mismatch pairing of two women not naturally destined to be friends, and at different stations in life. One of them is a little more pitiful than the other, perhaps, and one of them is a little more glamorous. Other books like it include What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller, or The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud. A Friend From England is also more suspenseful and plotty than some of her books. It’s told from the point of view of a 32-year-old woman named Rachel, who’s essentially been chosen by 27-year-old Heather’s parents to be Heather’s friend and look after her and keep her company and make sure she’s okay. So there’s an obsession in this book with meddling concern. In a way, it’s crazy that Rachel and Heather have nothing in common. They have no past together. There’s no attraction. There’s no glue of a friendship. It’s simply this bond of duty—it’s a strange friendship where all the other elements are boiled away. That’s the focus: this attachment that’s based on a sense of obligation. “How to describe Brookner’s prose? It’s sophisticated and a little musty.” Really, it’s Rachel who’s trying to take hold of Heather’s life. She thinks she knows what’s right for Heather, and actually becomes a little untethered over the course of the novel. At the beginning, she’s very tolerant, maybe a little judgmental, and there’s a distance between the two of them in their companionship. By the end, we have Rachel travelling across the world to track down this woman and trying to shake her out of her life choices. The most amazing scene is at the end, where suddenly the distance between the two melts away and Rachel’s obsession with Heather is just thrown back in her own face. She sees herself completely differently, in a way that’s incredibly painful. There’s a lot in this book about knowledge, and not sharing knowledge. There aren’t very many characters, but there are definitely discrepancies among them about who knows what, and who has observed what about each other—all to varying degrees measuring the happiness of other people. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter In the end, the one person who has felt like she’s essentially drafted the shape of her own life is Rachel: she’s the outsider; she’s orphaned. She’s not part of this prosperous family where there’s always a sense of warmth, food and happiness surrounding them. She’s always circled around them, happy enough to get a taste of it when she comes to visit but resigned to being single. She’s not one of those women who becomes all atwitter about marriage or weddings; she holds men off at a distance. She’s engineered this life as a lonely woman, and there’s a sense of total self-deception, of explosion of self-awareness, at the very end that has absolutely nothing to do with Heather. And it boomerangs right back at our narrator’s self-consciousness. She says at one point, “I had been softened and amused by the solemnity with which they had accepted all the farrago of romantic passion. For to me it was a farrago, both on the stage and in real life, something archaic and unmanageable, unsettling and devastating, and to succumb to such a passion would be a quite voluntary step towards self-destruction.” Yes. Her worst possible path, or destiny, just flashes in her face. It almost feels like she just as suddenly shoots right to her death. Rachel feels throughout the book that she’s given herself space and liberty. She doesn’t have to put up with nonsense the way other people do, the nonsense of connection with other people. At the end, she’s essentially completely cut off from the family. But she’s not just back to being alone: she’s alone with her demons. In one sense, yes: she was the chain-smoking, cat-loving spinster. There’s obviously a reason people lump Brookner herself with the Brookner heroine. But my sense of Brookner is that she was more pleased in life, and that she was fascinated by the characters she wrote about. In another quote, she says: I am interested in people who live on their own, people who get left behind, who drop through the net, but who survive. They seem to me quite heroic characters sometimes, but no one inquires about them because they’re people who do without much conversation, whose loudest moments are internal. If such characters persist through my novels that’s because I don’t know much about them, not because I know them too well. I write to find out what makes them tick. And I’m not sure she feels like she was one of those people. It’s like the way Mike Leigh’s films are so great for the same reason: he doesn’t look at the winners. Brookner says she holds these women in very high esteem because she sees them as fierce warriors. There’s something very admirable about the day-to-day survival of a Brookner heroine."

"Totally different. I chose it for a very autobiographical reason: a very good friend of mine put the book in my hands recently, and it was the greatest act of friendship. The book itself is a manifesto of how to be a good friend to yourself. Odell writes about opening up to a new kind of experience: the experience being not having your nose pressed into your phone, and how fascinating the world around you is if you actually tap into it. As someone who’s constantly wired in—I do not want to tell you my screen-time hours; it’s terrible—the weird but fascinating thing about reading this book was the purifying element of it. Now I’m back on the internet, having read this book—and keeping it in mind—I find myself feeling less addled. I feel a little more zen, a little more grounded. In a way, it’s an indictment against living on Twitter. She talks about Twitter being a very out-of-context ecosystem: Compared to the algorithms that recommend friends to us based on instrumental qualities—things we like, things we’ve bought, friends in common—geographical proximity is different, placing us near people we have no “obvious” instrumental reason to care about. On the internet, everyone is so isolated. There isn’t much nuanced connection, or a sense of a community coming together and figuring out how to solve a problem or enjoy themselves together. There’s a pervading alienation. Right. And she talks about the natural order of things: how people, especially after a disaster like an earthquake or something, are suddenly forced to scramble and help each other: Not only did these neighbors organize and provide each other with food, water, shelter, medical aid, and moral support—often crossing social boundaries or upending norms in order to do so—but these local, flexible, and rhizomatic networks often got the job done better, or at least faster, than the more institutional aid that followed. She’s talking about this democratic, criss-crossing world where there is no hierarchy; this deep, multi-connected world where things aren’t just essentially like Twitter—which, if you look at it, is a bit like blocks of different people basically yelling. Odell writes: “the platforms that we use to communicate with each other do not encourage listening. Instead they reward shouting and oversimple reaction: of having a ‘take’ after having read a single headline.” These people are not talking to each other, really—or rather, there’s no correlation among the different “takes” you’re seeing. As an internet addict, I go back and forth between to trying to be offline a bit more, but since reading How To Do Nothing I’m also just not feeling as wound up in it as I was. “Odell writes about opening up to a new kind of experience: the experience being not having your nose pressed into your phone” It’s also just incredibly smart: it’s a lot about conceptual art, philosophy, and activists in California. It’s a very interesting patchwork quilt of a book. It’s not a self-help book that shames people about the effects of the internet on our brains. Odell’s interests do not overlap with mine, and nevertheless I was fascinated to hear her tell me about, for example, the longshoremen in San Francisco in the 1920s and 30s and how their union, the International Longshoremen’s Association, was built up. I don’t even know the name of the tree outside my building in Brooklyn, but Odell is really interested in looking at and classifying nature. Since reading it, I’ve stopped now and then outside my building and just tried the experiment of looking at a bunch of leaves sprouting out of it in the sidewalk. I’ll notice, say, a beautiful formation of ants moving around. I’ll stare at it for a little bit and think, ‘Life isn’t boring—you just have to get better at living it.’ It’s very good, and very well-written. That’s the thing—it’s really satisfying. As someone who 99% of the time reads novels, I thought this book would be good for me, but in fact it was a pleasure . I only underline the heck out of books when I’m assigned to review them. But when I read this on my own steam, still I couldn’t stop underlining. It was a way of acknowledging to myself what resonated with me. It wasn’t for coming back to later so much as it was a way of high-fiving Odell along the way."

"I feel like any Alice Munro story is a horrid story to boil down to an elevator pitch. It’s disorienting. I still don’t even know what the story is about, except I know that it’s about a woman who feels at home in the Alice Munro universe: she’s a writer, she’s a Canadian, she’s a mother, she’s sexually alive. She’s very connected to her past; there’s a modesty to her. The reason why I thought it was an interesting choice for books about friendship is because even though the main meat of the story is to do with our narrator and men in her life, her friend Sunny comes in and out in little blips. Each blip is very intense—say, more intense than the narrator’s experiences with men: with the husband who she left, or even with Mike, the boy who as a man she reconnects with. ‘Nettles’ reveals how essential friendship is. Sunny is the bridge; it’s through visiting Sunny later in life that our narrator happens to be reconnected with this pivotal character from her past. Munro’s description of how her and Sunny became friends very much resonated with me. It was during the time when they were both new mothers. Society expected them to be dopey and checked out, but in fact it was one of the most intense periods in their lives. They’d sit around together, discussing books, and art, and things that really meant something to them: Our pregnancies had dovetailed nicely, so that we could manage with one set of maternity clothes. In my kitchen or in hers, once a week or so, distracted by our children and sometimes reeling for lack of sleep, we stoked ourselves up on strong coffee and cigarettes and launched out on a rampage of talk—about our marriages, our fights, our personal deficiencies, our interesting and discreditable motives, our foregone ambitions. During that time of life that is supposed to be a reproductive daze, with the woman’s mind all swamped by maternal juices, we were still compelled to discuss Simone de Beauvoir and Arthur Koestler and The Cocktail Party . Our husbands were not in this frame of mind at all. When we tried to talk about such things with them they would say, “Oh, that’s just literature” or “You sound like Philosophy 101.” Just in that single stroke, our character dismisses all men. She’s talking about the way that two women can come together and stay up at all hours, and really understand each other and feel each other. Then Sunny comes back, once our narrator decides to leave her first husband. I love Munro’s description of this moment, too: Now we had both moved away from Vancouver. But Sunny had moved with her husband and her children and her furniture, in the normal way and for the usual reason—her husband had got another job. And I had moved for the newfangled reason that was approved of mightily but fleetingly and only in some special circles—leaving husband and house and all the things acquired during the marriage (except of course the children, who were to be parcelled about) in the hope of making a life that could be lived without hypocrisy or deprivation or shame. That last sentence, in itself, is a novel. We don’t know the story of what happened in her marriage. What was the hypocrisy? Where was the shame? We don’t even know how long has passed between their initial bond and this moment. It’s like magic, what Alice Munro does. It’s Sunny who our narrator seeks out. It’s through visiting Sunny that she sees what at first is a mystery to the reader. The first line of the story is: “In the summer of 1979, I walked into the kitchen of my friend Sunny’s house near Uxbridge, Ontario, and saw a man standing at the counter, making himself a ketchup sandwich.” We later find out who that man is, and he’s so significant. There’s this one line at the very end of the story that’s so—I want to make the Italian chef’s kiss but I also want to cry. In the penultimate paragraph, she says, talking about Mike in this line, “I never asked Sunny for news of him, or got any, during all the years of our dwindling friendship.” So she kills this one relationship, this lifeline to her. Alluding to the death of a friendship is very provocative to me. It’s just fascinating that this platonic, wonderful, out-of-the-blue friendship is so closely intertwined with a passionate relationship that’s also carried on throughout most of our narrator’s life. Sunny is the portal to it, and she’s also the end (or the exit door). I know. Our narrator is so brave and so alone in the world. It breaks my heart, the idea that her relationship with Sunny, the one person with whom she feels understood and the person who she feels is a safe harbor, fades away. Or control. You always wonder what the other person’s perception of what’s happening between the two of you is. I do think, especially in this triangle, there’s an element of care-taking and withholding, and striking that balance. There’s one quite needy friend at the beginning who does the unthinkable, something she’s been threatening to do for a decade that no one thought she’d actually carry out. At this point, people thought she was just going to die in her apartment because she’s so traumatized by something that happened a few years ago, and she hasn’t been able to move on. She announces at the beginning of the book, you know what, I’m going to come to New York, I’m ready to make it here, on the verge of 37. This is what’s so disruptive to the other two women, and what brings them together. Originally, they were most distant in the triangle, but they converge out of a very mixed sense of generosity and caring. They’re also feeling a little put out by this new situation, because they don’t want to have a mess to clean up after. As the story progresses, there’s a new sense of horror, watching their expectations be proven totally wrong. That came in at the end, actually. It all kind of fell together and found a perfect place. As Trump was happening around me, I could tell how the flavor in the air had changed and I thought that was fascinating. I could see that. Our sense of borders was completely unstable. In New York a sense of frenzy set in; it almost became like a new social life—the new thing to go out to was, you know, the resistance party. It was this thing that brought people together. Sadly, that’s faded away. But that’s all anyone was talking about. I think you’re right. Before, there was a sense of safety and complacency during the Obama presidency. And there was a sense of safety and complacency when it appeared clear that Hillary Clinton was going to be president. And suddenly, there was a sense that we were all delusional. Everyone who thought that what happened could never have happened. Nobody felt safe in their beliefs, and I think that led to this buzzed craziness that we’re all sharing together. It started right after the election with lots of people walking around like zombies, and hugging people who you never even used to say hello to but saw every morning. There were a lot of people brought together. And it continued. It was like one big end of times party. “When people are all on a sinking ship together, they will act in very ugly ways” There were a lot of get-togethers or fundraisers for things that maybe really weren’t going to change. We couldn’t turn back what had happened, but we were all brought out of our isolation. Maybe that is why or how on a very subliminal level the characters in the book end up acting a little out of character, and interacting with each other in a bolder way than they have been up until that point. Everything’s upside down. And there’s a parallel of that in the industry in which they all work: media, which is also dying. Crazy things are happening. Suddenly podcasts are becoming the prime real estate in that world. I think there’s a sense that when people are all on a sinking ship together, they will act in very ugly ways. Exactly!"