At the Rumpus, Jean Kyoung Frazier discusses her novel, Pizza Girl, which centers around a pregnant pizza delivery girl who redefines the genre of slacker fiction. “I think when people shit on characters like [slackers] it’s because they don’t want to be reminded of those questions,” she says, “or that there’s something about watching a lost, fuck-up character who makes them uncomfortable, reminds them of the ugliness, the difficulty of life. If that character is also woman, well, there are going to be even more issues since beauty and perfection are so inherent to how we view and judge women. It feels really important to, even if it’s difficult, talk about characters that don’t live up to societal expectations, because ultimately, the way you make people feel ugly is by not having nuanced and widespread portraits of them in popular, mainstream media.”
An Ode to the Female Slacker with Jean Kyoung Frazier
Franzen the Fanboy
Every week, we read another article about what Jonathan Franzen hates, but in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, Franzen discussed his favorite books. He’s a fan of Harriet the Spy, Gone with the Wind, Childhood’s End, and The Trial.
Believers
Recommended Reading: David Means on his religious beliefs and his Hystopia, one of the most anticipated books of the year.
Reading Through Trauma
“My whole life, I had used stories, both my own and other people’s, to check out of grocery store lines and long bus trips, stints in doctors’ waiting rooms, heartache, my own depression, and finally of the tedious exhaustion of new motherhood. Now, here I was in this 15-by-20 room, where monitors and alarms were constantly beeping, and there was no way out, except the unimaginable.” Alyson Foster, author of Heart Attack Watch, writes about her son’s illness and her love of reading.
Return to Sender
“A woman I did not know called me to help her with something I have always loved to do: write. Certainly it was fate, my involvement destined to be a seed for a fairy tale ending, I thought. I was wrong,” Scott Saalman writes about the moral challenges of agreeing to help someone with their writing at The Morning News.
Wollstonecraft’s Legacy
“Inspired by her governess, the radical feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, Margaret King cast aside her immense privilege, cross-dressed as a man to go to medical school, and inspired a new generation of women to push against the rigid conventions of their era.” Meet Margaret King at Longreads.
An Absolute Must Read
David Grann in The New Yorker: “Did Texas execute an innocent man?” This is why long-form journalism matters.