Marion Winik's Reading List

"This is a great example of what I was just talking about, because it was also on the longlist for criticism. Although it has happened before, that a book has ended up on two lists—Claudia Rankine’s Citizen was a finalist for poetry and for criticism. There was great enthusiasm for Hong’s book on my committee. It has a real freshness to it. She talks about being Asian American in a way we haven’t quite heard before. She digs into the personal to get to her political points, and that keeps it really lively. The opening of the book tells about trying to make an appointment with a therapist who is Asian, and there’s only one Asian name in her insurance company’s database. She sees this woman once, and thinks it’s gone great, she’s going to have a great experience working with this therapist. Then the woman refuses to take her on as a patient. Cathy gets, like, obsessed with the woman, is practically stalking her. And this experience seems to be a metaphor for her whole experience of herself in the world. She can’t ever be recognised or listened to—even the Asian American therapist doesn’t want to hear her problems! It’s a charming and unexpected way into the topic. She writes about how Richard Pryor was a really important influence on her, because it was the first time she saw somebody really tell it like it is on race, and not be hampered by ideas of what you can and cannot say. She was so excited about Richard Pryor that she transcribed all his stand-up routines, and even tried stand-up herself, because she felt poetry was too limited. ‘Minor feelings’ is Hong’s term for the whole constellation of alienated and unhappy emotions she experiences as a cultural outlier; she’s springboarding off the idea of ‘ugly feelings,’ written about by Sianne Ngai . For example, Hong writes about the complexity of her relationships with other gifted Asian American girls she was friends with in college. She is so honest and clear, and not afraid to be self-deprecating. There’s plenty of autobiography in the mix here, so I was really glad it made it to our final five."

"This is a really edgy book. Lawson says things that may get on people’s nerves… and she really doesn’t care. She gets into the whole woke scenario in a really interesting way, both in real life and on social media, which is as you know a big vehicle for wokeness and social justice warrior-ing. I love the beginning of the book. She talks about how there was no American Girl Doll that was black, but she and her sister were obsessed with their little white, prairie girl. By the time they finally came out with a black American Girl Doll it was quite an anticlimax. She also writes about working in an office where she’s ‘the other black girl’. As you can tell from the title, she’s very in your face. And we wanted to honour that bravery and clarity. “We figured out that the personal was political in the 1970s. Fifty years later, it’s time to let this genre absorb the impact of that insight” We didn’t necessarily want to put out a list of books that everyone has already heard a lot about, have won other prizes, etc. We felt that This Is Major could easily be one that had slipped under the radar, so it’s exciting to lift it up. Like I say: it’s edgy, it’s funny, it’s badass. Because they’re just as interested in exploring issues as they are in telling a story. They need to not be limited by the demands of chronological storytelling. When you start Shayla Lawson’s book with the American Girl Doll essay, you could be reading the beginning of a regular narrative memoir, starting in her childhood. While it does jump around through her autobiography, many of the pieces are topical, as in ‘Black Lives Matter, Yard Signs Matter,’ and ‘Diana Ross Is Major.’ But as with Hong, there’s always autobiography in the mix. And this is why these books used to fall through the cracks. People would say: ‘this isn’t autobiography, it’s cultural commentary.’ But we figured out that the personal was political in the 1970s. Fifty years later, it’s time to let this genre absorb the impact of that insight."

"Lehrer has such a great voice on the page, it’s so engaging and witty. Her memoir is a cousin of Lucy Grealy’s classic Autobiography of a Face . But there are not too many laugh lines in Autobiography of a Face , and this has more of a sense of humour—which is good when you’re in a situation where everything is just so unbelievably painful. It’s not only the disability. Terrible things have happened to her. It’s amazing that she has this resilient, wonderful spirit, and she’s a terrific painter, and the book includes dozens of plates of these beautiful paintings. At the end of the book, there’s an appendix where she tells the story of the paintings in order. It’s really cool. One of her series involves inviting people over to her house to paint a portrait of them. Then, after she’s done, she says: ‘I’m going to leave the house for two hours, and you can do whatever you want to this picture in that time.’ So she talks about it in the narrative, then, at the back, you get to see more of them. It’s just such a juicy book. Your thirty bucks could buy you a regular old book, or this one, which is like a coffee-table book as well as a memoir. That’s a great point. Her life follows the journey that our culture has taken in the last half-century or so. She also has a very complicated sexuality. She’s tried out different types of relationships with various different people, and shows the way these things unfolded in her life."

"This is the one I was thinking of when I talked about formal innovation. This is Moore’s debut memoir—her previous book was a novel with elements of magical realism. She doesn’t let categories of literature bother her. That’s a good thing. The whole first part of the book is written in what I would call a voice of innocence: it’s her five-year-old self explaining the civil war in the terms she saw it at the time. She thought that the bad men were dragons, the giant is her father. She perceived the situation in these mythic terms, because those kind of stories were her only reference to make sense of what was happening. And some chapters are almost like lyric essays, letting us into her stream of consciousness. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . You’ve got 100 pages of this stuff. Then you turn the page and it’s like, boom, she’s on Tinder in Brooklyn trying to get a date. It’s just so unexpected. I love that. So it’s not just about the heartbreak of war, it’s also about the heartbreak of romance. But she keeps alive through the whole book this question that you have in your head from the beginning. When the war breaks out, her mother is in the United States. They’re running away from their home barefoot into the woods, and she has no idea if or how her mother will ever find them. Because the whole country is so severely dislocated, it’s a real question: how would anyone find anyone? She withholds the answer to the question to the end of the book, which creates great narrative momentum. Then, at that point, she switches into the first-person voice of her mother. This is very rarely seen in memoir—if ever. Some people would say, well, now it’s not a memoir. It’s autofiction , or just plain old fiction . But no, it’s published as memoir. I was thrilled with the device, that she didn’t feel she had to follow some unwritten rules of memoir. I don’t think she saw anything wrong with jumping into the first-person voice of her mother. This makes it an important and liberating book for people who want to write memoirs themselves. I’ve already taught it in one of my classes in the MFA program at the University of Baltimore."

"So, Volz’s mother was the main vendor of pot brownies in San Francisco in the 1970s, and into the ’80s. She literally pushed Alia around in a stroller, delivering pot brownies to all the artists and restaurants around the city and at Fisherman’s Wharf. It was a major business. Both parents were involved. They had a special bag for the brownies that had a new picture every week, because the father was an artist. The bags are included in the book. One of them says: “If all the world’s a stage, San Francisco is the cast party.” It’s just this great recreation of that time. There’s another level of the book that’s a social and political history of San Francisco, including the assassination of Harvey Milk, the beginning of Aids , etc. It turns out that these pot brownie vendors were some of the first people to explore the medical uses of marijuana. They were forces in the decriminalisation process as well. We’ve all read a lot of memoirs by people whose parents were drug addicts, or alcoholics, or led wild, unconventional lives, and most of the time it isn’t pretty as far as the parenting goes. But this is not that story at all—the portrait of her parents is sympathetic. Her mother was committed to raising Alia the best way she knew how, in fact she participated in an alternative parenting support group, where they talked about raising their children differently to the older, nuclear family model. Her father was pretty troubled, not exactly the number one all-American Dad, but she doesn’t throw him under the bus either. It’s refreshing. And it’s great to have the Liberian civil war and pot brownies in San Francisco on the same list. Part of our best books of 2021 series."

"I think I can reveal that this book was considered by more than one committee at the NBCC, because—yes—it is as much cultural criticism as it is autobiography. One of the things that’s important to us is not to let books like that fall through the cracks. We might say, well, it’s not really a memoir, and they might say, well, it’s not really criticism. So we’ve made it our job to embrace those hybrid books. I mean, there was almost a little turf war over this one. Abdurraqib’s voice is so powerful and personal that even when he’s writing about Whitney Houston or Michael Jackson, it still reads as personal storytelling. It’s certainly not what we ordinarily think of as music criticism. His discussion of each entertainer is very much in terms of his culture and life story. There was one essay that the committee went crazy for: ‘It Is Safe to Say I Have Lost Many Games of Spades.’ It’s about playing cards in a van with a group of other writers traveling to an event down South. It’s about the different rules and traditions for the game in black communities all over the country. It’s also about friendship. He says that the way each of his friends plays Spades brings out the thing he most loves about each of them. That’s a lovely piece of memoir right there. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter As both a writer and reader of this genre, I’m obsessed with interesting formal constraints and decisions about language. Abdurraqib is a poet, and brings a lyricism and often a sort of incantatory style to his writing. One essay is based on a kind of poem called a ‘crown of sonnets’, where the last line of each sonnet becomes the first line of the next one. He did that with sections of an essay about Mike Tyson. That enchanted me. He also has five essays with the same title: ‘On Times I Have Forced Myself to Dance.’ And ‘Sixteen Ways of Looking at Blackface’ clearly gets its spinal column from Wallace Stevens. If you want to know what you’ll come away with from this book, it’s less that you’ll have a new way of thinking about Beyoncé or Don Shirley (though you very likely will know a lot more about Don Cornelius, the host of Soul Train, than you did before!), it’s more about the writer than the cultural subjects, which is what makes it an autobiography."

"Oh, it’s really good. First of all, it’s very brave and candid. It has a lot of raw sex writing in it, which is attention-grabbing and very well handled. It’s a love story, really; he describes how he met his partner, whom he calls ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ or just ‘Famous’, in a bar when they were really very young. It’s the story of him and Famous, their coming of age, and their sex life over decades, threaded all through the book. So it’s the furthest thing from a dry history of gay bars. It’s very experiential, and takes you inside gay culture in a rare way. He evokes the settings so powerfully. It’s a great way of telling history. Do you remember the Alia Volz book we talked about last year , Home Baked ? About her mother selling hash brownies in San Francisco? So the cities featured in this book, London, Los Angeles and San Francisco, come to life in a similar way as in that book. You feel there’s a really vivid capturing of those cultural centers at certain times in their history. The author came of age in the 1990s, but Aids plays a smaller role in the book than I might have expected or feared. It’s put in its place by all that’s happened before and since. It’s put in a historical context, and that’s kind of liberating I think Jeremy Atherton Lin started out a blogger; he blogged about gay bars and his experiences in them. So his project kind of morphed from an online diary into this book. It contains substantial research about the story of each bar, the evolution of the cities and the neighbourhoods. But if someone else had written it, it might have been very different. It could have gone down the road of urban development and architecture . It could have been a history of homophobia, or a ‘discourse’ about liminal spaces and such. It has those angles, those vocabularies, and others, but it’s all enlivened by Lin’s persona and his experiences. I mean, they are quite in-your-face experiences."

"We talked a lot about two aspects of this book. First: is it a handicap that it’s so short? Or is it beautifully compressed, and perfect at this length? Obviously we decided it was the latter. We also talked about whether this book is important because his father was so famous—is that why we liked it?—or was it because it captured something universal about losing both parents? Again, we decided the latter, though Garcia does honor the loss to the world and to his father’s many fans, as well as his own. It’s a intimate, straightforwardly written narrative of the weeks surrounding a death, a document of grief. And, yeah, it’s interesting to see inside the world of Gabriel García Márquez, but this book is not like most books by the children of celebrities. For one thing, they rarely take this elegiac tone. We’ve read a lot of books that are more like exposes, revealing difficulties and resentment. You can tell from this book that it wasn’t always the perfect family—Gabriel García Márquez was revered during his lifetime, to the point that they were living like Hollywood celebrities, that kind of paparazzi pressure and public attention. But García’s tone is humanising, and not warts-and-all humanising, but humanising due to his filial emotions."

"People really can’t decide what genre this book is in, probably more so than any of the other books. They even tried to say it was fiction! Turf war, part two! I think there’s no doubt it belongs in autobiography. Ní Ghríofa interweaves the earthbound realities of her life as a young mother with her literary obsession with an 18th-century poem. It’s quite remarkable. She explains that she knew this poem from it being taught to her at school, and then she encountered it at a different time in her life. She had never realised before that the woman poet was a young mom at the time she was widowed; I think she says that this was the detail that pushed her over the edge into obsession. She has a xeroxed copy under her pillow that she pulls out and reads in stolen moments. She researches everything that can be known about this woman’s life (which is both more than you’d think and less than she wants), and she makes her own translation from the Irish, which is included in the book. “‘Autobiography’ is a pretty old-fashioned word for this category. I think it’s closer to what people now call ‘creative nonfiction’” The poem itself is almost kind of goth in its details. She drinks her dead husband’s blood, she takes his dead horse’s skull and buries it in her fireplace. It’s also unbelievably romantic, quite in contrast to the diaper pails and floor-mopping and everything else she has going on. But the thing is that she embraces both. She is not downtrodden by her duties as a mother. There’s an interesting discussion over whether this is a feminist book, because she does kind of love her dishwashing and breast-pumping and such. It has been more traditional in feminism to package up domestic duties as part of female oppression. That’s not really Ní Ghríofa’s approach at all. She finds a beauty in the duties of care. She’s a romantic in the traditional sense. She finds an intensity and romance in her own life. You know how there was a turn in feminist thinking about sex? Instead of being exploited or ashamed or whatever, you could be ‘sex positive’ and proud of it. This book is, like, housework positive. Right. That’s a great example of what I’m talking about—the extreme romance of the way she sees her own life."

"There’s a lot we admired about this book. It’s an undertold story. Someone on the committee described it as a collective memoir, shared by unheard people from this background. In addition to the complicated history of the islands starting with Magellan, he includes several wonderful personal stories. His uncle Spanky who was literally a rock star in the Philippines became a baggage handler at the airport in California. His mother who darts in and out of the story, is a Trumper and a QAnon follower. She gets catfished by a guy from an online dating site. So all these different narrative threads energize each other, and benefit from the contrast. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . In some ways it’s like Gay Bar , in that it is a long cultural history mixed with a personal story. And it succeeds because the writing is so personal and powerful and vivid. It’s part of a more general flowering of Filipino writers right now. I’d say he writes in a very accomplished narrative nonfiction style—longform journalism laced with personal storytelling—including moments of high irony and humor. He’s not as lyrical as the poets Abdurraqib and Ní Ghríofa, but the task he sets himself makes that an asset. There’s a lot of actual information and education delivered by this book, more like what you’d expect from a title on the nonfiction list—and there’s that hybrid thing again, the leitmotif of this list. So now the members of all six NBCC committees are reading all the shortlisted books from every category. Then we will meet on Zoom, and at that point it’s all about hearing the voices of the people who weren’t involved in the shortlisting process. As the chair of the autobiography committee, I’m very interested to see how the five books are going to roll with the larger group. Those final discussions are so interesting and important. The best part of being on the NBCC, really. Then we will vote on the winners, and the ceremony will be on the 17 March , preceded by a finalists reading where we will hear two minutes each of all 37 books! I’m particularly excited about that."