7 New Books for 'Lit Girl Summer'

The Italy Letters

Nao (Swimming with Dead Stars) delivers an incisive epistolary novel about a Vietnamese American writer’s economic hardship and queer desire. The unnamed narrator, who’s broke and desperate after losing her bid for a professorship, writes, but does not send, a series of letters to her poet friend in London. In them, she mixes quotidian details of her everyday life with rants on the pitfalls of academia and sorrowful descriptions of her mother’s severe pain from bronchitis and suicidal feelings. Only in these unsent letters does the narrator confess her lust for her friend, as she’s worried her feelings are unrequited and doesn’t want to damage her friend’s marriage. The narrator’s missives are full of complex issues lacking easy solutions: her inability to feel an emotional connection in romantic relationships due to being abused; her mother’s tendency to make the narrator feel guilty for her suffering; and her precarious living situation with a friend who lets her slide on rent in exchange for sex and household chores. In fluid stream of consciousness, the narrator conveys her external struggles and her inner passion. The result is a one-sided exchange that explodes with feeling. (Aug.)

An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work

Essayist Shane follows Prostitute Laundry with more stimulating dispatches from the front lines of the sex industry. Dividing the collection into seven sections, Shane recounts her sexual awakening, subsequent introduction to sex work, and relationship with Roger, a longtime client who died of a brain tumor at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. She deliberately scrambles the timelines, juxtaposing anecdotes about coming-of-age at the center of an all-male friend group with accounts of jobs that mirrored the lessons she learned about male desire from those adolescent experiences. Flanking the more narrative passages are ruminations on the ironies of client/escort relationships, Freudian breakdowns of Shane’s relationship with her father (“When I was sixteen, my father demanded two pieces of information from me: my status as a virgin and my status as a lesbian”), and sharp examinations of the prostitute’s symbolic power as opposed to that of the “civilian woman.” Refreshingly, Shane depicts the good of sex work (its liberatory potential, for example) as thoroughly as the bad (its occasional reinforcement of patriarchal structures). This slim volume packs a punch. Agent: Samantha Shea, Georges Borchardt. (Aug.)

The Hypocrite

Hamya’s provocative second novel (after Three Rooms) lays bare a family’s fraught relationships over the course of an afternoon at the theater. Sophia’s father, a successful novelist, attends a matinee performance of her play, having no idea until it begins that it’s about him. The play recounts a summer holiday in Sicily a decade earlier, when Sophia was 17 and her father insisted she take dictation for the novel he was writing. In flashbacks from Sophia’s point of view, she reveals her disgust with her father’s misogynistic writing and his philandering, which she dramatizes on stage—in one scene, the character based on her father has sex with a woman in the kitchen of the place where he is staying with his daughter. During intermission, Sophia’s father overhears a fellow audience member call the play “social justice for the upper middle class,” which prompts him to come to Sophia’s defense. During the performance, Sophia has lunch with her mother, who divorced Sophia’s father years earlier and who claims her marital duties were a mix of “companionship and coddling.” None of the characters escape Hamya’s bemused and excoriating view, nor are there any easy answers to the questions raised about expressions of gender and privilege in art. Fans of Anne Enright’s The Wren, the Wren ought to take note. (Aug.)

You’re Embarrassing Yourself: Stories of Love, Lust, and Movies

Actor and filmmaker Akhavan reflects on her heritage, her romantic disappointments, and her 1990s coming-of-age in this funny and incisive debut memoir-in-essays. The daughter of Iranian immigrants who sent Akhavan and her siblings to one of New York City’s most exclusive private schools, Akhavan knew early on she was a “different species” from her peers. At 14, her classmates nicknamed her the Beast and included her on a list of the school’s “ugliest girls,” a designation that haunted her into adulthood (“I was the Beast for so long that even once I crawled my way to something different, I couldn’t decide what I’d become without looking to strangers for answers”). The essays on Akhavan’s failed relationships have their charms—especially the one about her first heartbreak at a women’s college in Massachusetts, which brilliantly balances humor and pathos—but she’s at her most heartrending when she looks elsewhere, writing about her quest to feel at home in an immigrant community that struggles to accept her queerness, or cataloging how her best friend’s motherhood impinges upon their relationship. By the moving final entry, in which Akhavan surprises herself by realizing that she, too, wants to become a mother, she’s charted an endearingly crooked path to maturity. This is a winner. Agent: Kim Witherspoon, InkWell Management. (Aug.)

A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda

Film critic Rickey delivers the definitive biography of French filmmaker Agnès Varda (1928–2019). Born in Belgium, Varda fled the country after the Nazis invaded in 1940 and settled down in Paris several years later. There, Varda took photography classes and picked up gigs shooting portraits of children with Santa Claus. At age 25, she made her first film, La Pointe Courte, as something of a lark (she had seen fewer than 25 films at the time), but its distinctive modernist ethos established Varda as a talent to watch. Discussing how the director drew creativity from practical restraints, Rickey notes that Varda’s opus, Cléo from 5 to 7, was conceived as a lower-budget alternative to another project that would have required a sprawling cast and on-location shoots in Venice. In addition to budget constraints, sexism in the American and French film industries would be another constant in Varda’s life. For instance, Rickey recounts how Varda pulled out of a 1967 deal with Columbia Pictures after an executive pinched her cheek during a meeting. Rickey captures Varda’s tenacity and pluck (one chapter details how while making La Pointe Courte, Varda navigated the French film industry’s byzantine regulations through a mixture of fibbing and waivers), serving up a portrait of an artist determined to succeed on her own terms. This is a must for cinephiles. (Aug.)

Men Have Called Her Crazy: A Memoir

Multimedia artist Tendler (The Daily Face) recounts her struggles with mental illness and low self-esteem in this devastating personal history. She begins in 2021, when, at 35, she checked herself into a psychiatric hospital at her therapist’s urging. From there, she weaves in flashbacks that describe, in wrenching detail, her teenage experiences with self-harm (“I am not sure how I landed on cutting... but I am certain I would have found my way to injurious behavior eventually”) and a high school relationship that made her “a girl who, well into adulthood, would contort and conform to the desires of a man, overlooking his easy dismissal, and dampening self-worth, all to be loved.” Much of the account examines a string of failed romances that eroded Tendler’s self-worth, including teenage sexual experiences with much older men. (Her marriage to comedian John Mulaney is only ever alluded to.) She also discusses daily life in the psych ward, and the peace brought to her by her dog, Petunia, before she checked in. After contextualizing her depression as a partial by-product of a turbulent childhood spent witnessing blowout fights between her parents, Tendler ends on a hopeful note (“Life has in no way gotten easier..... But I’ve become sturdier”). In a sea of mental health memoirs, this stands out. Agent: Meg Thompson, Thompson Literary. (Aug.)

Mina’s Matchbox

In Ogawa’s captivating latest (after The Memory Police), a Japanese woman looks back 30 years to 1972, the year she stayed with her aunt’s family in the coastal town of Ashiya, and reflects on the secrets she uncovered there. Tomoko is 12 when she leaves her home in Tokyo while her widowed mother attends a course for dressmaking. In Ashiya, she’s dazzled by her handsome half-German, half-Japanese uncle, the owner of a soft drink company, who drives her from the train station to his magnificent house, where she’s charmed by her asthmatic cousin Mina, who collects matchboxes and writes stories based on their cover designs. Even more impressive than the family’s mansion is the pygmy hippopotamus they keep as a pet. Tomoko and Mina bond over the books Tomoko borrows for them at the local library and they share a devotion to the hippo, on whose back Mina rides to school. But Tomoko’s joy and wonder are tempered by Mina’s chronic health problems and by the discoveries she makes about her aunt’s secret drinking habit and where her uncle disappears to for days at a time. The revelations are described with cool and subtle precision, and Ogawa pulls off the rare feat of making childhood memories both credible and provocative. Readers will be hypnotized. (Aug.)