Marginalia: Long Weekend Reading

All hail Noelle McCarthy! From interviewing Fran Leibowitz and Jacinda Ardern to (insert sarcastic British voice) sitting down with me at Unity Books, Noelle McCarthy is soaring. And rightfully so.

Stakes is her follow up memoir to Grand (2022), winner of the best first book of non-fiction at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards in 2023, that seamlessly carried the heavy weight of alcoholism and fraught mother-daughter dynamics. Her latest memoir goes even further, making parallels with Bram Stoker’s classic Dracula to compare all that he personifies with modern womanhood, from desire and possession to being a repository for fear and anxiety. The result is a deep, humorous and shocking take on desire, non/consensual sex, alcoholism, sobriety, motherhood and beyond. “You have to invite him in. You have to want the vampire’s badness in the house with you,” teenage Noelle explains as she leaves her window open hoping Dracula will come in and lay on her so she can “feel the hard push of his teeth against my throat”. It’s a spicy read.

She reveals a beauty in the dichotomy of evil and desire and shares secrets of her past with men that women often harbour with shame. She removes all of it, vulnerably laying it bare, making for a beautiful second memoir with a longevity to its themes that will keep it on bookshop shelves for years to come.

When a new collection of essays from the king of satire arrives you can exhale, knowing there’s 260 pages ahead of you on witty musings that traverse the quotidian to the extraordinary. When Sedaris was on stage in Auckland last year he paused to explain why he was marking his papers as he talked, and it was to pinpoint the parts we, the audience, laughed at. He could tell David Remnick how funny he was when he was editing them for The New Yorker.

This collection then is a succinct masterpiece in satire, laconic in delivery, and each tale takes you on a winding ride through the vast scale of human emotions that can be felt from who you encounter walking to the shop, arguing with your partner about your phone and Duolingo addiction, or your sister’s cancer diagnosis. Somehow he even manages to make that essay funny by the end, but the journey is a rollercoaster delivered in a deadpan, cutting tone that is somehow buffered by an endearing softness.

As Roddy Doyle says of Sedaris, we love him not only because he’s funny, but “he knits the present to the past so that they become the same thing; for him being alive has always been strange and atrocious, contradictory, unfair and hilarious”. We get a truly authentic, intellectual take on the thoughts and feelings that go through us as we simply meander and attempt to exist on this land with all these people.

Is there anything more satisfying than when a genius female artist collides with a literary icon and they produce something tantamount to literary perfection?

That’s what happened when Olivia Laing, author of The Silver Book and The Garden Against Time, was approached in 2016 by artist Chantal Joffe to sit for a portrait. They became instant friends, spending their days documenting their discussions on art, books, and their shared attempts to understand the world, and this is the product of that era.

Laing asks, “how do you catch reality, the actual minute? I wanted to see what would happen if I wrote about her while she was painting me, if we could survey each other at the same time, an act of simultaneous witnessing”. What ensues is a study of the body and mind through art and essay with a magnifying glass held up to the subjectivity of beauty. Joffe’s subject is a “shifty, wriggling person inside their hapless, gorgeous suit of flesh”, and they seem to capture a discomfort or grotesqueness (perhaps too harsh a word) about the human form, but she makes it beautiful by capturing their vulnerability.

Each painting is brought to life with commentary from Laing that offers thoughtful perspectives on the ways everyday life is and can be converted into art.

While it might be a long weekend, for some it’s going to be a long two weeks (school holidays). Here are three books for your tamariki to enjoy that mine have devoured.

First up is The Boring Drawing Book from illustrator Erica Harrison who’s behind Detective Stanley and The Green Thumbed Thief. If I hear my five year old say “I’m bored” I say, “only boring people are bored,” but now we have this boredom busting drawing book filled with over 70 vibrant drawing activities designed to keep boredom at bay. Make a field into a campsite and pitch some tents with a pencil, draw the spots on the spotless leopard, or help the spiders build their web hotel.

For something to read at night, The Truth About Max by the prolific, late-American illustrators Alice and Martin Provensen, is a real-life tale about their mischievous cat. It’s not so much the tale that we’re here for, while this cheeky explorer is adorable, it’s really the illustrations synonymous with Enchanted Lion publications. It is a work of art in itself, therefore making it a pleasure for the parents to read too.

Finally, if you’ve got a 2 year old who’s just getting into reading this miniature collection of board books from Oliver Jeffers, The Boy and the Penguin Little Library, is perfect. It’s a delectable four-book box set that will fit in the palm of your hand. Read about the little boy and his penguin and ‘things we do’, ‘how we met’, ‘places we go’ and ‘at home together’, or simply let your sweet little angel sit there and take the books in and out of the box for three minutes of time to yourself.