Oh I forgot to mention that I want to read nonfiction, too. I'm reading "Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals" right now and it's so well-written and thoughtful and helpful so far. I also want to avoid falling into the trap of trying to find novels that are similar to each other. Anything smart and strange and groundbreaking qualifies!
Heather, I keep myself on an even(ish) keel with a weird paper calendar + PaperMate Flair system. Will reading "Four Thousand Weeks" derail me or is my approach ( https://kategace.substack.com/p/five-things )somehow compatible with the book's recommendations? I've been side-eyeing that one for a while--but wasn't sure if it would help or hurt!
Wow your system makes perfect sense to me. I've tried to implement something like this for decades. But I have this bone-deep distrust and fear of consistency. I like to invent a whole new plan every day. This means that some days are like a light bulb shining brightly and other days are just a big question mark, with lots of pacing and wishy washiness and uncertainty. I don't recommend my system.
I also want to say that I found this opener very enticing:
"1. I know some people manage to live in this world without losing their minds, but I am not naturally one of them. I have to work at it."
And I swear I had this exact thought yesterday.
I think you'll like 4000 Weeks. It's extremely well-written which is rare for these sorts of books. I'm not sure I'm inspired by the message, exactly - I prefer to live in denial some of the time, where I can pretend that I'll get to everything eventually - but I'm going to finish it and see! About halfway through now.
Thanks for sharing your system! Bringing a photocopy of your calendar with you on trips is seriously hilarious and great. Paper: underrated!!!
Heather, thank you for reading and thank you for sharing your thoughts! On the strength of your recommendation, I'm going to read 4,000 Weeks. I'll report back.
Also I'm intrigued by your "bone-deep distrust and fear of consistency"?! A column you wrote in June--"Mental Health *Is* Physical Health"--is burned onto my brain, possibly because it is literally *laminated* and taped on my whiteboard. (I find a lot of joy in office products.)
Anyway, your revelation that the physical self needs daily tending or the mind will almost surely suffer had me painting a different picture: I think I imagined you as one of those people who is wildly creative in their work but pretty systematic about certain daily routines. But I guess not! FASCINATING. People are fascinating.
Something I'd particularly like to talk about is the massive plot twist (spoiler alert) ...KIMBERLY WAS RIGHT ABOUT MODDIE THE WHOLE TIME!
Inside Kim's head she thinks, "Moddie was just like that, like some kind of trust fund kid, it was so absolutely disgusting. But, she wasn't even a good trust fund kid, or she wouldn't be here in this stupid little town. If Kim were rich, she'd be better at it, live more interestingly, find a way to make something out of all her free time."
I know Kim The Insane Emailer is the character we all love to hate, but at the end of the book after the financial reveal, this is sentence I remembered the most. Like, dang Kim said the truest thing in the whole book!
Because really, what are any of these people actually doing? The actual practice of art is irrelevant compared to the the academic and reputational hamster wheel they're all running on. It's so...boring!
(I'm not saying the book was boring; it's the most hair-raising page-turner about boring lives I've ever read.)
I know Moddie's previous job was supporting people who work with disadvantaged kids, but I kept thinking that everyone in this book needs to volunteer with disadvantaged kids! Nobody is taking care of any kids or old people at all. Even more striking, everyone in this book has a job with or near the University, but nobody ever thinks about what college students might want or need. I think that's part of what makes the book so claustrophobic. Nobody has anyone or anything to care for. Not even any pets!
I thought this same thing! The book felt really self indulgent... unmarried childless people have so much room to think and feel about themselves. It's hard to do this when you have kids, you just automatically have purpose.
That said, I devoured this book. It sent me down the burnt out millennial rabbit hole... just finished Work Nights by Erica Peplin which is gay burnt out millennial... Fun! This is not a genera that I would have explored, so thanks Heather
Moddie's passive understanding of her having lost sensation in her breasts during sexual activity, but not actively understanding that meant something had gone terribly wrong to make that happen, was really validating for me. I binge-read the book too quickly so I can't recall if she even faced that head on or if it was a passing comment in her internal narration, but regardless, I related. I felt like an idiot when I realized an instance of someone crossing a sexual boundary of mine 12 years earlier had made my breasts go from a source of pleasure to a literal source of pain when touched. I always thought something else was wrong with me and just vaguely chased every other shadowy thing in my life that could have been the cause.
One peak experience I had reading this book was reading Bethany’s diatribe about how Moddie could social engineer the greatest pain for the guy who assaulted her and her former friend now dating him which ended by pivoting to “or you can just think of yourself as a benevolent godmother to their children.” My brain felt so seen and embarrassed with that depraved but shameless diatribe, it was awesome and also kind of scary and controlling but at least Bethany feels honest; the desire to be the cool girl of the small town who can help people isn’t purely superficial and she did have a fascinating mind for it. I think it could have been easy for the author to make that character the worst because she did have some power and esteem but she ended up being one of the least fraught for me.
I loved Moddie, and I also resented how involved and supportive her mom/parents were. I couldn’t help but create a narrative about of course Moddie is so shameless, her mom is still hanging on her every word and her parents have validated her every breath, but it may just be jealousy that she had endlessly gracious rich parents who want to hear her talk every day, or at least welcome it enough to be perhaps overly enmeshed. Idk, her parents seemed “cool” in a way that disgusted me and forces me to reflect on why. And that her dissociated boldness, (which I also love and celebrate and champion and steward pieces of in myself) will only balloon to cartoonish levels with this inheritance. Or maybe money will mostly buy her happiness since she’d be able to pursue her art more thoroughly. Probably both, but she’s definitely going to make at least one gigantic nonsensical purchase and I’d be curious what that would be.
** Spoiler alert: there are spoilers in this comment**
I truly loved this book. I did feel it was a personal attack on me specifically!!! but I kind of loved that!!
This summer I had a horrible close friend break up and have been tormented by a group of people/former friends who are all apart of yoouuuuu guessed it-- the art world. I am even a print maker who broke up with another artist after a ten year relationship of trying to compete for each other's attention and support. I think it's the line... "People are not secretly plotting to humiliate and harm me." When you kind of know that some of them in the story actually sort of are?? But that they don't even know truly know that??? I said "Stoppppppppp!" out loud, it hurt me physically. I would think that Butler implanted herself into my life à la Being John Malkovich but I have never lived in a small town. More importantly, one of the themes of the structure I believe is that the entire Nightmare itself is so Banal that it's an experience that lives in all of us all the time.
I mean maybe not entirely, maybe we haven't all been on the outs of a navel gazing self important community like art, maybe we haven't all tried to make people like us who we aren't even sure if we like in order to feel safe, but as a little diorama for the difficulties of, as you have said, being honest, accepting ourselves and finding a place in the world for the parts of us that are, as it turns out less cuddly when exposed to the cold, hard daylight?? It is very successful.
There's so many things I loved about the book it's hard to even talk about it or summarize it into a comment, but you asked for digressions so here goes:
Relating so heavily to a character such as Moddie is uncomfortable but it's also extremely satisfying. Struggling to embrace every facet of your messy annoying little self is a pleasure and a curse. Relating to the less funny, sadder and maybe ickier characters is also very fun. Kimberly, you sucked so much, but I draft emails to all of my friends when they are bothering me in my head all the time-- "She would tell her story, and then she would be undeniably successful, and then everybody would want, most of all, to come to HER party. That's right. MY party." It feels like my entire life has been trying to talk down the Kimberly in me, the Pam in me while supporting the Moddie in me (sometimes!) and I can never get enough of a story that lets me laugh at how sad these competing parts are while helping me kind of root for them too. I spent so long this summer basically telling myself "it's okay if this person doesn't like you, you don't exist to make everyone happy." Like, "it's okay that nobody is coming to your party". How do we become little Kimberlys except by being that parent to that inner child that is like "You have to go to this kid you hate's party because I can't tolerate having a child that is unliked." You know? It made it hard to hate Kimberly, but she was also so insensitive herself, I was like, c'mon Kim.
I loved how Butler is so sincere in not giving anyone too much slack, but I also love how she can't help but drive the knife a little deeper into the men in the story-- I dunno if anyone else noticed that? Am I projecting, lol? Like even when the men are saying what we may be thinking, I was still like, okay buddy check yourself. I can't remember Pam's boyfriend's name now, which is telling, but he was really sacrificed as the humiliation kink for us, the reader, and I didn't feel like there was any shame in that for Butler writing it. Also the character with the highest cruelty to least introspection ratio was David, the visiting artist, I loved spending time in his horrible little mind, he also made me incredibly suspicious about men my age and what the fuck they're thinking, but then, it was like... well that's just David and he sucks. I guess in essence was most comfortable dismissing the men, even when it came to Kimberly who, as previously mentioned, SUCKED.
One piece of Moddie's history that really spoke to me was her experience with adults in school as a kid. I've never really heard anyone else talk about that before. In first grade, my very first experience of school, my teacher fucking hated me for absolutely no reason. It was like baptism by fire of "Adults are fucking crazy and will project all their weird shit onto you" combined with "Why are you teaching children?" she's most definitely dead now, and I fantasize about calling the school to be like "Hey just so you know this woman was unwell and extremely cruel and you are assholes for letting her be around children". This painted a good picture of how Moddie is so sensitive to people telling her who she is, and I was honestly proud of her for putting herself out there anyway in light of everything she's been through.
I think it's interesting that we don't really have a good picture of her parents, that they are a little bit absent, but Butler tries to explain them like they're super attentive? I think this is done maybe so that Moddie is really centered as the person responsible for defending and protecting herself as an adult, and that a big theme of the story is an exploration of all of our defenses and protections, for better or worse.
Moddie needed to be protected from Nick's friends, and from her predatory art school teacher, and then eventually to some degree from her new, weird friends, the same way she needed protection as a kid. The stakes all feel equally as high, which is common for people with trauma, even though they certainly aren't. But being "powerless" (also a theme!) for moments of extreme trauma will make you hyper vigilant to pretty much everyone. Centring Moddie as her own parent figure makes it so the central conflict is Moddie growing up a little bit and filling this role herself, which is rewarding and maybe makes sense of the very, very ending, where she is "rewarded" with a ton of money, which sort of felt a little lack lustre when reading it initially.
I guess the last moment I did want to touch on was her... 5 page monologue about her college art school teacher. This was so brilliant. It was so flawlessly inserted in at maybe the exact perfect time and coming from a cohort of unprotected young, sensitive women, extremely believable. That she summoned this entity (trauma) of protection from this horrible situation, that it was so funny and sad. Again, something that I've seen explored in a couple formats, but building a world as a novel that gives your characters this much space but is written almost so you feel the need to be extremely protective of yourself while reading it, to maybe not trust people too much, even when they're showing you their worst parts, was... divine, honestly.
Thanks so much for the recommendation and thank you Halle Butler for this wonderful novel and I hope everyone gives it a chance!!!
Wow, you're so right that each character seems to represent what we're all tempted to do when we don't get what we want -- manipulate, send long emails, throw tantrums, say provocative things. I love how the visiting artist's whole empty scheme is to behave like a dismissive shit, muttering the vaguest nothingness, trying to seem out of reach, but inside he's also this cauldron of need and despair. He needs so much yet he never puts his ass on the line. I half expected him to recognize Moddie as this clumsy, life-giving force that had stumbled in at just the right time, the only person with the capacity to understand his struggles and his weaknesses. Instead he writes her off as an idiot, something we know that she is not. He only responds to fawning but he hates that, too. What a great invention, and way too real.
The parents are strange blurry figures, symbols, never involved enough to inconvenience themselves. The message always seems to be that she's entirely on her own, unless I'm forgetting something or missing something? There's something so lonely about her situation, and Butler underscores the inherent isolation and alienation so often. Even the money feels like a force that could unravel Moddie by keeping her remote from everyone around her. It's such a deux ex machina to throw money at her in the end - I couldn't make sense of it.
Does anyone have a theory on why Butler would choose that ending? It didn't really make sense to me but maybe if I read the book a second time it would add up somehow. Even though there's so much heart in the book, there's also this shadow of revenge and wrath and people wanting to have power over each other. I love how dramatic that force is in the book but I also felt that the money was a strange echo of that darkness instead of being a real happy ending/ source of redemption.
I read the whole book, and I loved even the parts of it that I hated. It made me think that if Virginia Woolf--who was also haunted by the distances between people--had been born into a later age (one with medications, effective therapy, and more books like this one) she might not have walked into a river with rocks in her pockets at age 59. She might have endured--even thrived!--for so much longer, and we might have 20+ more books from her. In other words, BANAL NIGHTMARE landed on me as one of those life preserver-type books. A lot of people--seen raw--are not that likeable. But they are lovable--and I loved Moddie.
So the character dynamic I super-related to, personally, was Nina and Moddie's friendship. Moddie always has an absolute blast with Nina. They're "best friends" and the book does a beautiful job of capturing the hilariously deranged conversations two intelligent women can have when they're relaxed and trust each other. But even though they have a great time together, Nina is always trying to weasle out of spending too much time with Moddie. Like this scene:
"Nina had her shoes on before Tony arrived, and when he called to say he was outside, Moddie walked Nina to the door. 'I guess this is farewell," said Moddie. Nina laughed, and while they hugged, Moddie whispered, 'Should I kill Tony and wear him like a skin suit so we can hang out more?'
'Probably not,' said Nina, 'but let's hang soon. I have a doctor's appointment Tues, and I have to take my batteries to the recycling place and talk to my cousin on the phone, so maybe like in a week or something.' "
I laughed out loud when I read that last part because I AM NINA. When I have an intense friendship, I value my time with that person, but I also value time without them. I protect my distance and alone time, and yes, I will come up with all kind of insane excuses not to hang out. I always feel like people want to hang out with me way more often than I want to hang out with them, and like Nina and Moddie, I know this makes people confused, like I'm blowing hot and cold. Or that I'm holding people at arms length and they don't understand why. I mean, Nina's the one who said Moddie should move in the first place, right? But she's wary of her life becoming too enmeshed with Moddie's life. I don't really know how to explain Nina/myself except that I value my emotional independence, and if I think someone needs me more than I need them, it makes me want to keep a little time in between hangouts. I guess this is confusing to people because when I AM with them, I'm all in and very emotionally available, so they think I'm the best friend they've always wanted. But because I bring openness and availability in the moment, that means I have to ration my energy. I can't have the faucet on all day every day.
I suppose this can set up an avoidant/anxious dynamic where the stepping away from clingyness causes more clingyness and more stepping away, but I'm not really sure what to do about it. I just really hate feeling pinned down or obligated! And I really do need a lot of alone time to daydream and rest and imagine! I'm sorry, Moddie! I really do like you!
Yeah I found the friendship so relatable, too. I was Moddie when I was younger and now I feel more like Nina, although I think she's pretty heartless for disappearing after urging Moddie to move there.
I think it's good to value your emotional independence! But I also think it would be nice if some friends would just say "My ideal is to hang out once every three months" or "I would hang out every other week if I could" and then some third party could draw up a schedule and everyone could approve it or say "You know what, this is too much" or "this isn't enough" or "what do you really want here?"
The point is, friends just feel their way forward without discussing these things most of the time. I guess that makes much more sense than having a group therapy/ Google calendar session with every friend, lol.
I related to their friendship too. I appreciate your points on emotional independence and needing some space from your relationships. I saw it like Nina was in a different phase of her life, wanting more from her boyfriend Tony who seemed avoidant in his own way, and hanging out with Moddie was almost some sort of pathetic consolation. For me a lot of this book was about the transition into adulthood and how clumsy it seems to be in this day and age, and how our relationships evolve/devolve with it. It’s like Moddie is still in a place of wanting newness and fun and getting something out of life whereas the more settled friends are just that, safe and maybe content, but not willing to go after it as much or sacrifice comfort for growth. Really made me think of my relationships where my married/partnered friends all kind of gravitated towards other married friends. A single woman can be seen as kind of a powder keg in many social circles (probably mostly hetero) so that was also an interesting dynamic to see here.
So true! Though I have a real problem with married social circles that don't include any single people or divorced people or people without kids. But some people operate like independent agents no matter their circumstances and others operate like couples even once they're divorced. More to discuss on this front but have to go meet two single friends and one married friend (without her spouse) right now!
Ok, I LOVED reading this book, and I have a several thoughts about it. Maybe I will put them in different comments so that people can reply to them separately! :-)
The first thought I had is this: I don't understand how people can tolerate SO MUCH BULLSHIT in their romantic relationships?!? I know this is actually a hella realistic aspect of the book, because we also see it with our friends and loved ones and Ask Polly letters. But honestly, if someone treated me even 1/100th as shitty as Nick treats Moddie in the beginning of the book, I would instantly break up with them and they would be absolutely dead to me.
Maybe that's because I default more to avoidant attachment, but I usually think of it as just... having adequate self-esteem??? Like, my God, how do people tolerate the intolerable? If my husband or roommate is doing something that psychicly harms me, I'll just talk about it with them right away and be like, "look, this isn't working for me, let's find a plan that works for both of us." Obviously you have to pick your battles, but if a man is verbally cruel and unwilling to collaborate I don't understand why women don't just NOPE right out of there immediately.
I mean, I guess there is that moment when Moddie "felt her spirit puke out in anger. The words came out like heavenly music, as if Christ himself had reached his hand down and put his fingers in her mouth and used her as a puppet to transmit his divine decree, that she break up with him that instant." But my question is WHY DIDN'T SHE FEEL LIKE THAT YEARS AGO and WHY DOES SHE KEEP TRYING TO GET BACK TOGETHER WITH HIM FOR MONTHS AFTERWARDS? Please explain this to me because I really do not understand.
To me, the most nightmare aspect of this book is that Nick gets the last word in his horrible gold-digging love letter, and we never get to see Moddie's reaction to it.
I hear you. I think Moddie is in this very specific traumatized, numb state when she meets Nick, and as a result she puts up with his horrible behavior. My impression is that he's effusive and needy and that sort of makes him seem lovable for a while before he turns sour and cruel. I haven't dated many men like that, have always steered clear of that type, but I do understand the problem of falling for someone who seems dynamic and also a little helpless and feeling responsible for them. I had a boyfriend once who was so dependent on me he often felt like my kid. It was adorable and burdensome. He was a very nice person but if he weren't, it might've been even harder to drop him. I mean sometimes when the last thing you want is to understand or face yourself, the bigger the challenge a person presents, the more intoxicating and distracting they become. You can avoid your own desires by disappearing into theirs.
One thing I really liked about the book was that she keeps waking up to what an asshole Nick was and realizing that she wasn't aware of how bad it was until after the fact. I've definitely been through that. That said, I get it - it does seem odd that she keeps thinking he's the worst but she still wants the upper hand. There is a very strong strain of competitiveness in this narrator!
Hmmm, that's a good big-picture point, that different people want to get different emotional sensations out of a romantic relationship. Like the emotional sensation of taking care of someone, or the emotional sensation of disappearing into someone else's desires. Or even the emotional sensation of being negged and slightly shamed all the time, if that's what feels like home to you. That being said, at what point does a relationship like that turn into active self-harm, like cutting or bulimia?
Maybe you're right that Moddie needs to "win" somehow to resolve things (see: air hockey scene). And if you think about it that way, Nick's awful letter at the end COULD be Moddie's ultimate triumph, since he's now the one who's obsessed with her and wants her back.
But God, just because she's rich? And he's still negging her? Ugh, it's all so yucky!! if I think of this book as being in the horror genre, it's an absolute triumph.
I have been struggling with my friendships a lot lately. Like, grappling with whether I actually like these people and they like me or if we are just often free at the same times and willing to do activities with one another so we don’t have to go alone; what even IS a friend; am I a terrible friend because I’m fundamentally selfish or is it because I’m deeply cold and overly irritable; am I just repeating the patterns I saw my mother play out in her own friendships, etc. Sometimes I love spending time with these people and I come home feeling like my cup is full, but equally often (probably more, as of late?) I come home thinking “thank God that’s over and I don’t have to do it again for another couple of weeks.”
So listening to this audiobook was…a tricky experience. And reflecting on it, maybe the audiobook was the wrong way to go. Having this novel in my ear as I’m running errands, doing chores, taking walks… it was just like it was a constant history of “there is no such thing as friends, only people who feel they must tolerate you to varying degrees; and everyone is experiencing you as an irritating obligation to the exact same extent that you do them; and it isn’t different for ANYBODY and it will never change.” I made it about halfway, I think, and it got to the point where I was just angrily moping around the house and feeling bleak (even though I did think parts were very funny). I had to stop. But maybe I’ll try to pick it up again, this time as a physical book. I think the problem was that I use audiobooks as company, and this book is terrible company, With a physical book maybe I’ll be better able to engage with it as art. (Also I’m not the world’s best listener and this book has a very large cast of characters to track, so I had a really tough time keeping the various plots and relationships straight. They all just kind of blurred into a single person who hated their partner and couldn’t stand their friends.)
I started with the audiobook and I couldn't hang! I had to actually see the words and read them at my own pace. I also found it easier to keep track of the characters if I saw their names visually, but maybe that's just how my brain works. I think one of the points of the novel is that the characters have a lot in common, like they're all in the same little age/culture bubble. It did make people blur together at times, but perhaps the point is that the illness they suffer from is corporate not individual.
I came to say this! I love Halle Butler's other books, but this audio book was so, so hard to follow. I finished but I totally lost track of who was who. I'm going to try again with the physical book.
I can't imagine listening to this book! I love the writing but I would've completely lost the thread the second the perspective started jumping around. It also feels too dark for audio? There's more distance and more comedy when you're reading you and you can put the book down when you're not in the mood!
I read Halle Butler's two previous books after two different people recommended them to me, one because the main character hilariously described a temp assignment, and another because the main character was like a female Larry David. So, I was happy to catch up with "Banal Nightmare," and EVERY character could have written to "Ask Polly," and I'll be turning my next comment around obsessively in my head all afternoon so that I act like a distracted airhead at my dental appointment and attempt to pay Trader Joe's with my OMNY card.
Meanwhile, Kimberly is all of us who've thought, "This is gonna put me on the map" and been brought back to earth, with "Her lips went numb. She described her job" as an understated and perfect epitaph.
I like this book club idea very much. Could totally get involved via the comments. I may not read the book, this IS dark for me, but I will keep an eye out for the next one. Delighted to see Polly’s diving in already!
I read the book thinking it was you Heather that had actually written it!
At first I found it highly amusing and so refreshing to read about the characters, then at a certain point I was starting to feel like the awful characters were permeating my energy. I was questioning, are people really this awful?
It also made me self reflect on certain aspects of myself too that aren’t particularly pleasant.
All in all an original and great read. Thank you for the recommendation.
The characters are so terrible at times, but I love that she dares to NOT soften them or make them lovable. You can make anyone lovable - they trip and fall, they're insulted by someone they love, they wait for the ducklings to come back to their backyard pool (Tony Soprano). We see these things all the time.
I guess I saw many of her depictions as vivid imaginative portraits of how people seem from inside one confused person -- and in that way, they felt soothing to me: This is how we misunderstand each other. When you throw in all the ways that each character misreads another character, I think that heightens the effect.
I feel this portrait of extreme alienation feels reassuring somehow because it shows how easily people miss or lose or misunderstand each other. There are times when you want to tell them "Just talk to each other and tell the whole, awful truth!" The details of how you dislike the people around you are always a dramatized creation that comes from some core emotion. I'm thinking of that scene in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" where they list what they hate about each other. The details aren't even important or personal. What's important is admitting that we have extreme reactions to each other that are illogical, and when we can hear the lack of logic and laugh at it, we can grow closer.
The risk of telling the truth includes the risk of exposing your own strange, warped view of the world, which is narrow and so emotional that logic has nothing to do with it.
We're all unpleasant in the extreme at some level. That's what makes us human. Truly terrible people don't accept human flaws in themselves or anyone else, so they push their warped non-reality perfectionism onto others without seeing them clearly, or treat others as transactional helpers or obstacles to their goals.
Okay I'm sure this is obvious and I promise not to dive in with LESSONS every goddamn time!!!
There are a ton of quotes/passages from the book I want to talk about but this one was so simple and stayed with me:
“The worst parts of Chicago had followed her here, because the worst parts of Chicago had been inside of her.”
Damn. I know it’s the same sentiment as “everywhere you go, there you are” but I love the honest brutality of it. I always have these fantasies of going to a new place and reinventing myself and I think Moddie does ultimately do that in X, but it’s like coming to terms with those horrible parts and being ok with them is ultimately what helps get you through I guess? Don’t know, still working on it. I also kept picturing Hannah Einbinder playing Moddie and would be interested to see this adapted in to a mini-series though it would likely fall short of the book but could still be hilarious.
Here's what I wrote about the book in my weekly blog post:
The preoccupations and angst of she and her friends were keenly observed and at times devastatingly funny, but mostly the book made me glad to be an old crone finished with striving.
I got the book too late to finish it in time to comment properly, but it's great, 2/3 done, and I love the characters. I might be back here to comment after I've finished the book. This post seems too spoilery to read right now, so there's that too.
Oh I forgot to mention that I want to read nonfiction, too. I'm reading "Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals" right now and it's so well-written and thoughtful and helpful so far. I also want to avoid falling into the trap of trying to find novels that are similar to each other. Anything smart and strange and groundbreaking qualifies!
Heather, I keep myself on an even(ish) keel with a weird paper calendar + PaperMate Flair system. Will reading "Four Thousand Weeks" derail me or is my approach ( https://kategace.substack.com/p/five-things )somehow compatible with the book's recommendations? I've been side-eyeing that one for a while--but wasn't sure if it would help or hurt!
Wow your system makes perfect sense to me. I've tried to implement something like this for decades. But I have this bone-deep distrust and fear of consistency. I like to invent a whole new plan every day. This means that some days are like a light bulb shining brightly and other days are just a big question mark, with lots of pacing and wishy washiness and uncertainty. I don't recommend my system.
I also want to say that I found this opener very enticing:
"1. I know some people manage to live in this world without losing their minds, but I am not naturally one of them. I have to work at it."
And I swear I had this exact thought yesterday.
I think you'll like 4000 Weeks. It's extremely well-written which is rare for these sorts of books. I'm not sure I'm inspired by the message, exactly - I prefer to live in denial some of the time, where I can pretend that I'll get to everything eventually - but I'm going to finish it and see! About halfway through now.
Thanks for sharing your system! Bringing a photocopy of your calendar with you on trips is seriously hilarious and great. Paper: underrated!!!
Heather, thank you for reading and thank you for sharing your thoughts! On the strength of your recommendation, I'm going to read 4,000 Weeks. I'll report back.
Also I'm intrigued by your "bone-deep distrust and fear of consistency"?! A column you wrote in June--"Mental Health *Is* Physical Health"--is burned onto my brain, possibly because it is literally *laminated* and taped on my whiteboard. (I find a lot of joy in office products.)
Anyway, your revelation that the physical self needs daily tending or the mind will almost surely suffer had me painting a different picture: I think I imagined you as one of those people who is wildly creative in their work but pretty systematic about certain daily routines. But I guess not! FASCINATING. People are fascinating.
https://askpolly.substack.com/p/mental-health-is-physical-health?r=dyiip&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
Something I'd particularly like to talk about is the massive plot twist (spoiler alert) ...KIMBERLY WAS RIGHT ABOUT MODDIE THE WHOLE TIME!
Inside Kim's head she thinks, "Moddie was just like that, like some kind of trust fund kid, it was so absolutely disgusting. But, she wasn't even a good trust fund kid, or she wouldn't be here in this stupid little town. If Kim were rich, she'd be better at it, live more interestingly, find a way to make something out of all her free time."
I know Kim The Insane Emailer is the character we all love to hate, but at the end of the book after the financial reveal, this is sentence I remembered the most. Like, dang Kim said the truest thing in the whole book!
Because really, what are any of these people actually doing? The actual practice of art is irrelevant compared to the the academic and reputational hamster wheel they're all running on. It's so...boring!
(I'm not saying the book was boring; it's the most hair-raising page-turner about boring lives I've ever read.)
I know Moddie's previous job was supporting people who work with disadvantaged kids, but I kept thinking that everyone in this book needs to volunteer with disadvantaged kids! Nobody is taking care of any kids or old people at all. Even more striking, everyone in this book has a job with or near the University, but nobody ever thinks about what college students might want or need. I think that's part of what makes the book so claustrophobic. Nobody has anyone or anything to care for. Not even any pets!
I thought this same thing! The book felt really self indulgent... unmarried childless people have so much room to think and feel about themselves. It's hard to do this when you have kids, you just automatically have purpose.
That said, I devoured this book. It sent me down the burnt out millennial rabbit hole... just finished Work Nights by Erica Peplin which is gay burnt out millennial... Fun! This is not a genera that I would have explored, so thanks Heather
Moddie's passive understanding of her having lost sensation in her breasts during sexual activity, but not actively understanding that meant something had gone terribly wrong to make that happen, was really validating for me. I binge-read the book too quickly so I can't recall if she even faced that head on or if it was a passing comment in her internal narration, but regardless, I related. I felt like an idiot when I realized an instance of someone crossing a sexual boundary of mine 12 years earlier had made my breasts go from a source of pleasure to a literal source of pain when touched. I always thought something else was wrong with me and just vaguely chased every other shadowy thing in my life that could have been the cause.
One peak experience I had reading this book was reading Bethany’s diatribe about how Moddie could social engineer the greatest pain for the guy who assaulted her and her former friend now dating him which ended by pivoting to “or you can just think of yourself as a benevolent godmother to their children.” My brain felt so seen and embarrassed with that depraved but shameless diatribe, it was awesome and also kind of scary and controlling but at least Bethany feels honest; the desire to be the cool girl of the small town who can help people isn’t purely superficial and she did have a fascinating mind for it. I think it could have been easy for the author to make that character the worst because she did have some power and esteem but she ended up being one of the least fraught for me.
I loved Moddie, and I also resented how involved and supportive her mom/parents were. I couldn’t help but create a narrative about of course Moddie is so shameless, her mom is still hanging on her every word and her parents have validated her every breath, but it may just be jealousy that she had endlessly gracious rich parents who want to hear her talk every day, or at least welcome it enough to be perhaps overly enmeshed. Idk, her parents seemed “cool” in a way that disgusted me and forces me to reflect on why. And that her dissociated boldness, (which I also love and celebrate and champion and steward pieces of in myself) will only balloon to cartoonish levels with this inheritance. Or maybe money will mostly buy her happiness since she’d be able to pursue her art more thoroughly. Probably both, but she’s definitely going to make at least one gigantic nonsensical purchase and I’d be curious what that would be.
** Spoiler alert: there are spoilers in this comment**
I truly loved this book. I did feel it was a personal attack on me specifically!!! but I kind of loved that!!
This summer I had a horrible close friend break up and have been tormented by a group of people/former friends who are all apart of yoouuuuu guessed it-- the art world. I am even a print maker who broke up with another artist after a ten year relationship of trying to compete for each other's attention and support. I think it's the line... "People are not secretly plotting to humiliate and harm me." When you kind of know that some of them in the story actually sort of are?? But that they don't even know truly know that??? I said "Stoppppppppp!" out loud, it hurt me physically. I would think that Butler implanted herself into my life à la Being John Malkovich but I have never lived in a small town. More importantly, one of the themes of the structure I believe is that the entire Nightmare itself is so Banal that it's an experience that lives in all of us all the time.
I mean maybe not entirely, maybe we haven't all been on the outs of a navel gazing self important community like art, maybe we haven't all tried to make people like us who we aren't even sure if we like in order to feel safe, but as a little diorama for the difficulties of, as you have said, being honest, accepting ourselves and finding a place in the world for the parts of us that are, as it turns out less cuddly when exposed to the cold, hard daylight?? It is very successful.
There's so many things I loved about the book it's hard to even talk about it or summarize it into a comment, but you asked for digressions so here goes:
Relating so heavily to a character such as Moddie is uncomfortable but it's also extremely satisfying. Struggling to embrace every facet of your messy annoying little self is a pleasure and a curse. Relating to the less funny, sadder and maybe ickier characters is also very fun. Kimberly, you sucked so much, but I draft emails to all of my friends when they are bothering me in my head all the time-- "She would tell her story, and then she would be undeniably successful, and then everybody would want, most of all, to come to HER party. That's right. MY party." It feels like my entire life has been trying to talk down the Kimberly in me, the Pam in me while supporting the Moddie in me (sometimes!) and I can never get enough of a story that lets me laugh at how sad these competing parts are while helping me kind of root for them too. I spent so long this summer basically telling myself "it's okay if this person doesn't like you, you don't exist to make everyone happy." Like, "it's okay that nobody is coming to your party". How do we become little Kimberlys except by being that parent to that inner child that is like "You have to go to this kid you hate's party because I can't tolerate having a child that is unliked." You know? It made it hard to hate Kimberly, but she was also so insensitive herself, I was like, c'mon Kim.
I loved how Butler is so sincere in not giving anyone too much slack, but I also love how she can't help but drive the knife a little deeper into the men in the story-- I dunno if anyone else noticed that? Am I projecting, lol? Like even when the men are saying what we may be thinking, I was still like, okay buddy check yourself. I can't remember Pam's boyfriend's name now, which is telling, but he was really sacrificed as the humiliation kink for us, the reader, and I didn't feel like there was any shame in that for Butler writing it. Also the character with the highest cruelty to least introspection ratio was David, the visiting artist, I loved spending time in his horrible little mind, he also made me incredibly suspicious about men my age and what the fuck they're thinking, but then, it was like... well that's just David and he sucks. I guess in essence was most comfortable dismissing the men, even when it came to Kimberly who, as previously mentioned, SUCKED.
One piece of Moddie's history that really spoke to me was her experience with adults in school as a kid. I've never really heard anyone else talk about that before. In first grade, my very first experience of school, my teacher fucking hated me for absolutely no reason. It was like baptism by fire of "Adults are fucking crazy and will project all their weird shit onto you" combined with "Why are you teaching children?" she's most definitely dead now, and I fantasize about calling the school to be like "Hey just so you know this woman was unwell and extremely cruel and you are assholes for letting her be around children". This painted a good picture of how Moddie is so sensitive to people telling her who she is, and I was honestly proud of her for putting herself out there anyway in light of everything she's been through.
I think it's interesting that we don't really have a good picture of her parents, that they are a little bit absent, but Butler tries to explain them like they're super attentive? I think this is done maybe so that Moddie is really centered as the person responsible for defending and protecting herself as an adult, and that a big theme of the story is an exploration of all of our defenses and protections, for better or worse.
Moddie needed to be protected from Nick's friends, and from her predatory art school teacher, and then eventually to some degree from her new, weird friends, the same way she needed protection as a kid. The stakes all feel equally as high, which is common for people with trauma, even though they certainly aren't. But being "powerless" (also a theme!) for moments of extreme trauma will make you hyper vigilant to pretty much everyone. Centring Moddie as her own parent figure makes it so the central conflict is Moddie growing up a little bit and filling this role herself, which is rewarding and maybe makes sense of the very, very ending, where she is "rewarded" with a ton of money, which sort of felt a little lack lustre when reading it initially.
I guess the last moment I did want to touch on was her... 5 page monologue about her college art school teacher. This was so brilliant. It was so flawlessly inserted in at maybe the exact perfect time and coming from a cohort of unprotected young, sensitive women, extremely believable. That she summoned this entity (trauma) of protection from this horrible situation, that it was so funny and sad. Again, something that I've seen explored in a couple formats, but building a world as a novel that gives your characters this much space but is written almost so you feel the need to be extremely protective of yourself while reading it, to maybe not trust people too much, even when they're showing you their worst parts, was... divine, honestly.
Thanks so much for the recommendation and thank you Halle Butler for this wonderful novel and I hope everyone gives it a chance!!!
Wow, you're so right that each character seems to represent what we're all tempted to do when we don't get what we want -- manipulate, send long emails, throw tantrums, say provocative things. I love how the visiting artist's whole empty scheme is to behave like a dismissive shit, muttering the vaguest nothingness, trying to seem out of reach, but inside he's also this cauldron of need and despair. He needs so much yet he never puts his ass on the line. I half expected him to recognize Moddie as this clumsy, life-giving force that had stumbled in at just the right time, the only person with the capacity to understand his struggles and his weaknesses. Instead he writes her off as an idiot, something we know that she is not. He only responds to fawning but he hates that, too. What a great invention, and way too real.
The parents are strange blurry figures, symbols, never involved enough to inconvenience themselves. The message always seems to be that she's entirely on her own, unless I'm forgetting something or missing something? There's something so lonely about her situation, and Butler underscores the inherent isolation and alienation so often. Even the money feels like a force that could unravel Moddie by keeping her remote from everyone around her. It's such a deux ex machina to throw money at her in the end - I couldn't make sense of it.
Does anyone have a theory on why Butler would choose that ending? It didn't really make sense to me but maybe if I read the book a second time it would add up somehow. Even though there's so much heart in the book, there's also this shadow of revenge and wrath and people wanting to have power over each other. I love how dramatic that force is in the book but I also felt that the money was a strange echo of that darkness instead of being a real happy ending/ source of redemption.
I read the whole book, and I loved even the parts of it that I hated. It made me think that if Virginia Woolf--who was also haunted by the distances between people--had been born into a later age (one with medications, effective therapy, and more books like this one) she might not have walked into a river with rocks in her pockets at age 59. She might have endured--even thrived!--for so much longer, and we might have 20+ more books from her. In other words, BANAL NIGHTMARE landed on me as one of those life preserver-type books. A lot of people--seen raw--are not that likeable. But they are lovable--and I loved Moddie.
Only Ask Polly would select such a hilariously misanthropic book as Banal Nightmare for August. A glorious anti-beach read
So the character dynamic I super-related to, personally, was Nina and Moddie's friendship. Moddie always has an absolute blast with Nina. They're "best friends" and the book does a beautiful job of capturing the hilariously deranged conversations two intelligent women can have when they're relaxed and trust each other. But even though they have a great time together, Nina is always trying to weasle out of spending too much time with Moddie. Like this scene:
"Nina had her shoes on before Tony arrived, and when he called to say he was outside, Moddie walked Nina to the door. 'I guess this is farewell," said Moddie. Nina laughed, and while they hugged, Moddie whispered, 'Should I kill Tony and wear him like a skin suit so we can hang out more?'
'Probably not,' said Nina, 'but let's hang soon. I have a doctor's appointment Tues, and I have to take my batteries to the recycling place and talk to my cousin on the phone, so maybe like in a week or something.' "
I laughed out loud when I read that last part because I AM NINA. When I have an intense friendship, I value my time with that person, but I also value time without them. I protect my distance and alone time, and yes, I will come up with all kind of insane excuses not to hang out. I always feel like people want to hang out with me way more often than I want to hang out with them, and like Nina and Moddie, I know this makes people confused, like I'm blowing hot and cold. Or that I'm holding people at arms length and they don't understand why. I mean, Nina's the one who said Moddie should move in the first place, right? But she's wary of her life becoming too enmeshed with Moddie's life. I don't really know how to explain Nina/myself except that I value my emotional independence, and if I think someone needs me more than I need them, it makes me want to keep a little time in between hangouts. I guess this is confusing to people because when I AM with them, I'm all in and very emotionally available, so they think I'm the best friend they've always wanted. But because I bring openness and availability in the moment, that means I have to ration my energy. I can't have the faucet on all day every day.
I suppose this can set up an avoidant/anxious dynamic where the stepping away from clingyness causes more clingyness and more stepping away, but I'm not really sure what to do about it. I just really hate feeling pinned down or obligated! And I really do need a lot of alone time to daydream and rest and imagine! I'm sorry, Moddie! I really do like you!
Yeah I found the friendship so relatable, too. I was Moddie when I was younger and now I feel more like Nina, although I think she's pretty heartless for disappearing after urging Moddie to move there.
I think it's good to value your emotional independence! But I also think it would be nice if some friends would just say "My ideal is to hang out once every three months" or "I would hang out every other week if I could" and then some third party could draw up a schedule and everyone could approve it or say "You know what, this is too much" or "this isn't enough" or "what do you really want here?"
The point is, friends just feel their way forward without discussing these things most of the time. I guess that makes much more sense than having a group therapy/ Google calendar session with every friend, lol.
I related to their friendship too. I appreciate your points on emotional independence and needing some space from your relationships. I saw it like Nina was in a different phase of her life, wanting more from her boyfriend Tony who seemed avoidant in his own way, and hanging out with Moddie was almost some sort of pathetic consolation. For me a lot of this book was about the transition into adulthood and how clumsy it seems to be in this day and age, and how our relationships evolve/devolve with it. It’s like Moddie is still in a place of wanting newness and fun and getting something out of life whereas the more settled friends are just that, safe and maybe content, but not willing to go after it as much or sacrifice comfort for growth. Really made me think of my relationships where my married/partnered friends all kind of gravitated towards other married friends. A single woman can be seen as kind of a powder keg in many social circles (probably mostly hetero) so that was also an interesting dynamic to see here.
So true! Though I have a real problem with married social circles that don't include any single people or divorced people or people without kids. But some people operate like independent agents no matter their circumstances and others operate like couples even once they're divorced. More to discuss on this front but have to go meet two single friends and one married friend (without her spouse) right now!
Yeah the last conversation Nina and Moddie have in the book is soooo freakin sad. :-(
It was! I really wanted their friendship to have a renaissance!
Ok, I LOVED reading this book, and I have a several thoughts about it. Maybe I will put them in different comments so that people can reply to them separately! :-)
The first thought I had is this: I don't understand how people can tolerate SO MUCH BULLSHIT in their romantic relationships?!? I know this is actually a hella realistic aspect of the book, because we also see it with our friends and loved ones and Ask Polly letters. But honestly, if someone treated me even 1/100th as shitty as Nick treats Moddie in the beginning of the book, I would instantly break up with them and they would be absolutely dead to me.
Maybe that's because I default more to avoidant attachment, but I usually think of it as just... having adequate self-esteem??? Like, my God, how do people tolerate the intolerable? If my husband or roommate is doing something that psychicly harms me, I'll just talk about it with them right away and be like, "look, this isn't working for me, let's find a plan that works for both of us." Obviously you have to pick your battles, but if a man is verbally cruel and unwilling to collaborate I don't understand why women don't just NOPE right out of there immediately.
I mean, I guess there is that moment when Moddie "felt her spirit puke out in anger. The words came out like heavenly music, as if Christ himself had reached his hand down and put his fingers in her mouth and used her as a puppet to transmit his divine decree, that she break up with him that instant." But my question is WHY DIDN'T SHE FEEL LIKE THAT YEARS AGO and WHY DOES SHE KEEP TRYING TO GET BACK TOGETHER WITH HIM FOR MONTHS AFTERWARDS? Please explain this to me because I really do not understand.
To me, the most nightmare aspect of this book is that Nick gets the last word in his horrible gold-digging love letter, and we never get to see Moddie's reaction to it.
I hear you. I think Moddie is in this very specific traumatized, numb state when she meets Nick, and as a result she puts up with his horrible behavior. My impression is that he's effusive and needy and that sort of makes him seem lovable for a while before he turns sour and cruel. I haven't dated many men like that, have always steered clear of that type, but I do understand the problem of falling for someone who seems dynamic and also a little helpless and feeling responsible for them. I had a boyfriend once who was so dependent on me he often felt like my kid. It was adorable and burdensome. He was a very nice person but if he weren't, it might've been even harder to drop him. I mean sometimes when the last thing you want is to understand or face yourself, the bigger the challenge a person presents, the more intoxicating and distracting they become. You can avoid your own desires by disappearing into theirs.
One thing I really liked about the book was that she keeps waking up to what an asshole Nick was and realizing that she wasn't aware of how bad it was until after the fact. I've definitely been through that. That said, I get it - it does seem odd that she keeps thinking he's the worst but she still wants the upper hand. There is a very strong strain of competitiveness in this narrator!
Hmmm, that's a good big-picture point, that different people want to get different emotional sensations out of a romantic relationship. Like the emotional sensation of taking care of someone, or the emotional sensation of disappearing into someone else's desires. Or even the emotional sensation of being negged and slightly shamed all the time, if that's what feels like home to you. That being said, at what point does a relationship like that turn into active self-harm, like cutting or bulimia?
Maybe you're right that Moddie needs to "win" somehow to resolve things (see: air hockey scene). And if you think about it that way, Nick's awful letter at the end COULD be Moddie's ultimate triumph, since he's now the one who's obsessed with her and wants her back.
But God, just because she's rich? And he's still negging her? Ugh, it's all so yucky!! if I think of this book as being in the horror genre, it's an absolute triumph.
I have been struggling with my friendships a lot lately. Like, grappling with whether I actually like these people and they like me or if we are just often free at the same times and willing to do activities with one another so we don’t have to go alone; what even IS a friend; am I a terrible friend because I’m fundamentally selfish or is it because I’m deeply cold and overly irritable; am I just repeating the patterns I saw my mother play out in her own friendships, etc. Sometimes I love spending time with these people and I come home feeling like my cup is full, but equally often (probably more, as of late?) I come home thinking “thank God that’s over and I don’t have to do it again for another couple of weeks.”
So listening to this audiobook was…a tricky experience. And reflecting on it, maybe the audiobook was the wrong way to go. Having this novel in my ear as I’m running errands, doing chores, taking walks… it was just like it was a constant history of “there is no such thing as friends, only people who feel they must tolerate you to varying degrees; and everyone is experiencing you as an irritating obligation to the exact same extent that you do them; and it isn’t different for ANYBODY and it will never change.” I made it about halfway, I think, and it got to the point where I was just angrily moping around the house and feeling bleak (even though I did think parts were very funny). I had to stop. But maybe I’ll try to pick it up again, this time as a physical book. I think the problem was that I use audiobooks as company, and this book is terrible company, With a physical book maybe I’ll be better able to engage with it as art. (Also I’m not the world’s best listener and this book has a very large cast of characters to track, so I had a really tough time keeping the various plots and relationships straight. They all just kind of blurred into a single person who hated their partner and couldn’t stand their friends.)
I started with the audiobook and I couldn't hang! I had to actually see the words and read them at my own pace. I also found it easier to keep track of the characters if I saw their names visually, but maybe that's just how my brain works. I think one of the points of the novel is that the characters have a lot in common, like they're all in the same little age/culture bubble. It did make people blur together at times, but perhaps the point is that the illness they suffer from is corporate not individual.
I came to say this! I love Halle Butler's other books, but this audio book was so, so hard to follow. I finished but I totally lost track of who was who. I'm going to try again with the physical book.
I can't imagine listening to this book! I love the writing but I would've completely lost the thread the second the perspective started jumping around. It also feels too dark for audio? There's more distance and more comedy when you're reading you and you can put the book down when you're not in the mood!
I read Halle Butler's two previous books after two different people recommended them to me, one because the main character hilariously described a temp assignment, and another because the main character was like a female Larry David. So, I was happy to catch up with "Banal Nightmare," and EVERY character could have written to "Ask Polly," and I'll be turning my next comment around obsessively in my head all afternoon so that I act like a distracted airhead at my dental appointment and attempt to pay Trader Joe's with my OMNY card.
Meanwhile, Kimberly is all of us who've thought, "This is gonna put me on the map" and been brought back to earth, with "Her lips went numb. She described her job" as an understated and perfect epitaph.
Kimberly slayed me, she was my favorite character
I like this book club idea very much. Could totally get involved via the comments. I may not read the book, this IS dark for me, but I will keep an eye out for the next one. Delighted to see Polly’s diving in already!
I read the book thinking it was you Heather that had actually written it!
At first I found it highly amusing and so refreshing to read about the characters, then at a certain point I was starting to feel like the awful characters were permeating my energy. I was questioning, are people really this awful?
It also made me self reflect on certain aspects of myself too that aren’t particularly pleasant.
All in all an original and great read. Thank you for the recommendation.
The characters are so terrible at times, but I love that she dares to NOT soften them or make them lovable. You can make anyone lovable - they trip and fall, they're insulted by someone they love, they wait for the ducklings to come back to their backyard pool (Tony Soprano). We see these things all the time.
I guess I saw many of her depictions as vivid imaginative portraits of how people seem from inside one confused person -- and in that way, they felt soothing to me: This is how we misunderstand each other. When you throw in all the ways that each character misreads another character, I think that heightens the effect.
I feel this portrait of extreme alienation feels reassuring somehow because it shows how easily people miss or lose or misunderstand each other. There are times when you want to tell them "Just talk to each other and tell the whole, awful truth!" The details of how you dislike the people around you are always a dramatized creation that comes from some core emotion. I'm thinking of that scene in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" where they list what they hate about each other. The details aren't even important or personal. What's important is admitting that we have extreme reactions to each other that are illogical, and when we can hear the lack of logic and laugh at it, we can grow closer.
The risk of telling the truth includes the risk of exposing your own strange, warped view of the world, which is narrow and so emotional that logic has nothing to do with it.
We're all unpleasant in the extreme at some level. That's what makes us human. Truly terrible people don't accept human flaws in themselves or anyone else, so they push their warped non-reality perfectionism onto others without seeing them clearly, or treat others as transactional helpers or obstacles to their goals.
Okay I'm sure this is obvious and I promise not to dive in with LESSONS every goddamn time!!!
Thanks for reading and for being here!
I like LESSONS :-)
There are a ton of quotes/passages from the book I want to talk about but this one was so simple and stayed with me:
“The worst parts of Chicago had followed her here, because the worst parts of Chicago had been inside of her.”
Damn. I know it’s the same sentiment as “everywhere you go, there you are” but I love the honest brutality of it. I always have these fantasies of going to a new place and reinventing myself and I think Moddie does ultimately do that in X, but it’s like coming to terms with those horrible parts and being ok with them is ultimately what helps get you through I guess? Don’t know, still working on it. I also kept picturing Hannah Einbinder playing Moddie and would be interested to see this adapted in to a mini-series though it would likely fall short of the book but could still be hilarious.
I love Hannah Einbinderrrr
Here's what I wrote about the book in my weekly blog post:
The preoccupations and angst of she and her friends were keenly observed and at times devastatingly funny, but mostly the book made me glad to be an old crone finished with striving.
I got the book too late to finish it in time to comment properly, but it's great, 2/3 done, and I love the characters. I might be back here to comment after I've finished the book. This post seems too spoilery to read right now, so there's that too.