New-ish books to celebrate pride month

| Michele Sharpe

Every day is a good day to celebrate and envision equality for all, like my little dog Pilot here. In 2023, our Pride celebrations and activism have urgent significance, so this week I’ve chosen three books that celebrate queer survival and joy.

Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit about Carlotta by James Hannaham is set in and out of an upstate prison and Brooklyn in the 1980’s. The book opens as Carlotta, a trans woman, is about to go for a parole hearing after serving most of a 25-year sentence in a men’s prison. Parole is granted and she heads home on a bus. Arriving at the house where she grew up, she walks into an exuberant party with all the food, music, drinks, and dancing anyone could want. But the party isn’t for her homecoming — it’s for a dead man. Carlotta dismisses this mistake, at least on the surface, just as she dismisses any mention of her dead name as she grabs all the life she can on her first day out.

In a brilliant move, Hannaham ditches conventional punctuation and dialogue tags and blends first person and third person narration, allowing Carlotta’s thoughts and perspective to mesh with the voice of a cagey omniscient narrator.

The story and setting brought me back to my time as a public defender who was so often astonished by my clients’ reckless enthusiasm for life, even when life had shat upon them relentlessly. Carlotta is unforgettable.

Heaven by Emerson Whitney

I came to this book because I needed more of Emerson Whitney’s writing after reading an advance review copy of their soon-to-be-published memoir, Daddy Boy, which becomes available June 27, 2023. Both books are from the McSweeney’s imprint, and both are literary excursions that draw on queer theory, art theory, and personal experience.

Heaven diagrams Whitney’s complex relationships with their family’s women. The book opens with Whitney re-remembering a story she’d been told about one of their mother’s near-death experiences of getting sober. The two, mother and child, are estranged, but Whitney isn’t here to judge. On the contrary: “Everything I fear in her lives hot inside of me.” Just look at how “hot,” one little word in a little sentence, opens up meaning. This is a short book, but one where you’ll probably highlight or copy down a zillion phrases or sentences. The writing is that good.

When the beloved grandmother asks “do you think you’re like this because your mother loved your brothers more?” Whitney notes that “No one asks about the root causes of heterosexuality or cisgenderism.” This questioning of underlying assumptions is the sort of thing I live for, along with relentless logic. The book is rich in both.

The Sacrifice Zone by Sandra Gail Lambert

Saving the best for last — and fessing up, up front, that author Sandra Lambert is my friend — is The Sacrifice Zone, a cli-fi, sci-fi environmental thriller with wholly unique elements, like one family’s sticky bond with the land they live on between the Gulf of Mexico and a nuclear power plant. Some think it’s a jealous, malevolent bond, one that makes it impossible for the family to leave.

A worldwide environmental disaster unfolds as Vic, the main character, is interning at a newsroom. She’s one of the few members of her family who can tolerate being away from home for long, and she’s different from them in other ways, too. A polio survivor, she uses braces and crutches to propel her through the world, and she’s a visibly butch lesbian.

At her newsroom, she hears and feels a siren going off hundreds of miles away. There’s been an explosion at the nuclear plant near her home, where a new device, “World’s Ease,” was being tested. This new technology, touted as civilization’s great energy solution, turns out to be a weapon. Vic leans into the horror that will change her family, her homeland, and the world, as she and her cameraman inch closer and closer to the truth.

Avalailable as an e-book, or the serialized version on Substack. Oh, and I have three FREE (no credit card required) one-month subscriptions to Lambert’s Substack to give out, which means you can read AND listen to The Sacrifice Zone in addition to her other witty and insightful essays about writing, queerness, disability, publishing, and aging. Send me an email if you want one of those free subscriptions: michelejsharpe (at) gmail

Curing the Mean Girls: A Review of Curing Season

| Michele Sharpe

Have there always been mean girls, or was that an invention of the 1990’s? Based on my reading habits, I’d say the mean girls have been with us for centuries, from Becky Sharp (no relation!) to the Heathers in Daniel Waters’ film of the same name to Regina George in Tina Fey’s film, Mean Girls.

Kristine Langley Mahler’s essay collection, Curing Season: Artifacts offers an exhumation, an exorcism, and a bit of anodyne in response to questions of whether people can recover from toxic, obsessive friendships, and whether those of us who’ve felt out of place can find ourselves at home.

Forced to move with her parents from an idealized Oregon to the foreign country of the Deep South, Kristine’s journey through adolescence is complicated by the difficulty of breaking into an established brood of upper middle class, middle school girls. Worse, on visits back to Oregon, her old friends have changed. Some people don’t remember her, but she remembers her life, past and present, in shining and precise detail.

This skill (or inborn talent) ends up giving her the tools she needs to write these essays: a deep understanding of how details fit together to form meaning, of how artifacts reinforce memory and reality, of how relationships, and the stories we tell ourselves about them, both leave marks.

Praised for its masterful inventions in essay form, Curing Season is often as intriguing in its formatting as it is in its narrative. It’s written in such a diversity of forms, the figuring out of each essay’s pattern is as pleasurable as solving a puzzle. The essay “Creepsake” employs my favorite form of the collection: making up a word, and then writing narrative definitions of the word. So cool and inventive! Here’s an excerpt:

Creepsake

  1. a memento growing along a wall, like a vine

I left things behind, fetishes tied around the fences I wanted to infiltrate. I pushed my copy of The Baby-Sitters Club Super Special #1 under the dust ruffle of Heather’s bed after a sleepover . . . I thought my “misplaced” belongings would be magnets, inexorably pulling relationships back to me . . .

Available from the publisher, WVU Press and the usual suspects.

Interviewing C.W. Cannon about I WANT MAGIC

| Michele Sharpe
Foreword’s image for this interview, a mash-up of the book’s cover, the author’s photo, and a glimpse of New Orleans

If you love New Orleans or want to visit there, check out C.W. Cannon’s I Want Magic for an insider’s take on what makes the city tick.

As a young woman who grew up under New England’s puritan Blue Laws, I found New Orleans’ legal public drinking exotic. I dreamed of partying there. By the time I had the freedom and money to attend Mardi Gras, though, it had lost its appeal for me, probably because I’d spent too many years bartending by then. For servers, holidays like New Year’s Eve can mean great tips, but they’re also amateur nights, where inexperienced drinkers overdo it and either act the donkey or puke or both.

A place where sensuality is celebrated year-round has a great appeal for me, though. As a mad hedonist who drenches food in butter or sugar or both, who chooses the 90-minute massage over the one-hour version whenever possible, I loved the lust for life (thank you, Iggy Pop) and nonjudgmental vibes New Orleans exuded once I finally visited the city in my fifties. I was delighted to review I Want Magic for Foreword, and to interview the author, C.W. Cannon.

My first interview question was about that lust for life:

Several essays in your book showcase New Orleans’ unapologetic sensuality. What sort of wisdom can the city offer to those who want to reclaim their exuberance after living through the COVID-19 pandemic?

Click here for the complete review

Can Objects have feelings?

| Michele Sharpe

Here’s my interview of British author David Musgrave, whose science fiction novel, Lambda, took me out of this world!

The book is an on-the-edge-of-your-seat story where even your toothbrush collects data on you. It also considers important questions about the meaning of being human and whether a near-future (a/k/a “now”) surveillance state impacts that meaning. By bringing programming languages and natural languages together, the book adds a meta layer to the question of whether objects can have sentience.

Click here, too, for my review of Lambda.

A womanist Take on the “Selfish Artist”

| Michele Sharpe

Reading Jami Attenberg’s memoir, I Came All This Way to Meet You, I kept thinking it was unlike any memoir I’d ever read. Above all, it’s a story of increasing dedication to the art of fiction, to an identity as a writer. Everything else is subordinate to her work, and everything else except family and friendships is transitory, even the idea of home.

Many male artists have told a story like this, but Attenberg brings a womanist take to the “selfish artist” trope without relying on some cathartic event to create her identity. Instead, she writes about the logistics of making time and space for her work, of dedication to selling her work, of understanding how she works.

The book hops around in time, but I found this pleasing along with the reflective bits toward the end where Attenberg tries to understand some of her less-than-happy behaviors.
Many thanks to NetGalley for an advance review copy. (less)

Sandra Gail Lambert

| Michele Sharpe

Jessica’s clone comes calling in this fast-paced story of nature, nurture, and survival.

Keily Blair's avatarSignal Mountain Review - Volume V, Issue I

Split Thread

White, neon light splatters over the windshield of the spacecraft. Although Jessica knows it can’t be called a windshield. There is no wind in space. Maybe there is. Earthbound, previously earthbound, Jessica is uncertain. Gayle43 reaches over and yanks on her harness until Jessica snaps tight against what should have been the co-pilot’s seat. But he is knocked out and stacked in a utility closet, along with the pilot, at the spaceport just outside Titusville which is forty miles down the Florida coast from Jessica’s home, which she will never be able to return to.

“Don’t touch anything.”

Gayle43 goes back to staring at the control panel in front of them. Lights blink, an alarm sounds, and Gayle43 punches buttons too fast for Jessica to follow. But not superpower fast. Does her clone have superpowers? The little craft twists sideways in quick loops. Streams of light crisscross in…

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Heathcliff’s Lost Years

| Michele Sharpe

Ill Will by Michael Stewart

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I sought out this book, which imagines the “lost years” spent by the Wuthering Heights character Heathcliff, after hearing Michael Stewart speak on the one of the “Sundays with Jane Eyre” broadcasts done by the Rosenbach Museum (excellent series, highly recommend for fans of JE). I was taken with Stewart’s ideas about how class issues function in JE and appreciated his perspective as a working class person, so I was interested to see how he would write about Heathcliff, who must be one of the most controversial characters in British fiction.
The book far exceeded my expectations. Stewart invests Heathcliff with complex motives that derive from a complex history, including an authentic (I’m an adoptee) representation of adoption as trauma in Heathcliff’s yearning and confusion towards the mother he cannot recall. The novel is also rich in period detail about class and race oppression. Stewart doesn’t turn away from ugly truths.
TBH, I wasn’t optimistic about the novel. I don’t read many books by male authors, as their assumptions about women often irritate me, I’m not into fan fiction, and I hold the work of the Brontes sacrosanct. Every year, since I was 8 years old, I’ve (re)read at least one Bronte novel, usually Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights. I’ll turn 65 this year, so that’s a lot of re-reads. Nevertheless, Stewart’s novel expanded my thinking about Wuthering Heights.



View all my reviews