You see proof of it on a TJ Maxx throw pillow, or a customized bridesmaid wine Yeti on Etsy in swirly script: women often source pleasure when that desire becomes most desperate.
“Mommy just needs her juice.” The saccharine-cute motherly maxim translates easily to, “If I don’t get my glass of Chardonnay with my one ice cube, I will be torching this mini van.” Perhaps it’s a cornerstone of how I understand womanhood, that pleasure deprivation is just part of the deal.
In college, when did you leave the party? I often found myself leaving right when it got “good,” a very unscientific definition depending on how much was left in the vodka handle, how lukewarm the PBR was (instantly body temp because even when cold your hand would heat it up in 75 seconds, a very calming constant), whether my crush was there and how confident I’d have to be to casually touch his forearm.
So, roughly 11:15pm - right when things could be very great, or depressingly neutral, of hopes dashed. I’d rather leave when I could grab lofty desires by the pant leg and pull them down to earth. Maybe next time.
It’s been decades of learning of this distancing from what I’d find pleasurable. I mostly travel alone, that is what is most pleasant to me, but always is accompanied by a pleasure-leaching feeling of “This might be when I am murdered/raped/just generally die.”
There’s also an ironically nurturing quality to how I respond to pleasure that’s only compounded itself during the pandemic: that if any of my actions could lead to the death of another, I shouldn’t partake. Even while others do it without a thought, I both won’t and can’t do it.
The grocery list of my favorite activities, before so tame, now dangerous to others: square dancing of all things, trying a friend’s drink to see if I’d like to order the same, sharing a casual, situational cigarette with a man I find dreamy outside a bar (both of us agreeing with my 13 year old logic: if we share this cigarette, it means we’re basically already making out.)
It’s become a muscle memory I’ve built up lately, this evading of pleasant experiences to, like, earn points for myself? But I never cash them in, just like when you go to an arcade and forget to use all your tokens, so then you just have pockets of useless tender in the parking lot.
Sometimes, meaning often and maybe always, I need reminders that I don’t just work to live. That my paychecks aren’t just to keep up an otherwise autonomous machine. I start to splinter a bit. I blow money on hair dye, antique nightgowns, bookshelves to house all my cookbooks or my favorite, gasoline to burn by driving.
I start to come apart if I don’t just give myself the treat, but the “treat yo self”
facet of late-stage capitalism always leaves me wanting. So what is the solution here? I’m not so sure.
Last summer, I did manage to skirt my own habit of pleasure-dodging on a Hinge date of all things. We swam in the Eno River for no less than five hours (the ideal increment of time.) He, thankfully, had both antibodies and four spare Bud Light seltzers (the correct amount of BLs). I remember us awkwardly struggling to find a rock on which to place our aforementioned sun-baked Bud Light seltzers so we could share a kiss.
Later, he introduced me to his brother’s ferret (not a euphemism), and we continued making out. At one point, I spotted the released ferret in my line of sight and kindly asked my date if he could put the ferret back in its cage because I was afraid I’d smush it. My desire cup had, for one day, runneth over. I did develop river rash the next week, but I felt less deprived and no arcade tokens were wasted.
Perhaps that’s why my taste in books is what it is - I often describe my taste as “a bit deranged,” but I think I find it comforting to see unbridled characters, oftentimes women/female-identifying, not performing their desire in tandem with a buttoned-up society, just slightly out of step in the long, tiring waltz of how easy it is to delay gratification.
Here are some of those characters—I’ve also compiled them via Bookshop — just a head’s up, when you purchase books through the links below, I receive an affiliate commission.
Ghosts by Dolly Alderton (out August 3rd)
I think I’d really enjoy curling up on the corner of Dolly Alderton’s green velvet, tufted couch (the couch I imagine of people having bangs and a British passport). We’d both shit-talk as we both nurse watery Aperol spritzes, melted from talking too much and not-sipping them in a timely fashion. Her novel captures all the cultural in-jokes and ghosting-revenge-fantasies I’m so glad are finally chronicled so that my burnt-out heart can grow perhaps one size larger.
Milk Fed by Melissa Broder
Enter a not-very-brief-or-casual segue into food writing. I truly cannot examine my own femininity without bringing up food and the scarcity mindset, something that feels inextricable from expectations of modern womanhood. There’s no better book to illustrate this than Broder’s heroine Rachel, who finds herself deeply skeptical of her cravings for food, for love and for nourishment.
Supper Club by Lara Williams
Sitting at the same table as Broder’s Rachel, Roberta finds herself at odds with her ability to take up space in the world. Along with her artist friend Stevie, Roberta devises a series of elaborate “Supper Clubs” with other women who grapple with taking up space, eating, fulfilling their own desires. The Supper Club soon escalates into breaking into department stores and restaurants where they eat and wear gold leaf, their bodies expanding and becoming living canvases.
A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers
Perhaps it was a fever-dream, or maybe it was an article I read, but I believe this book was imagined as “If Julia Child and American Psycho met in a dive bar” and that’s honestly how I’ll go forth in describing my own taste. I don’t think it’s coincidence that “deprived” and “depraved” are so close in the dictionary - Dorothy herself shows how swiftly the desire for food and sex can become a corrupt obsession.
The Gastronomical Me by M.F.K Fisher
I would be remiss (REMISS!) to spite the Grandmother of Food Writing and All-Around Acidic Mid-Atlantic Bitch and not mention her on the subject of reaping pleasures. No one knows the annihilation of grief and wars and scarcity than Mary Frances, and it shows in her passion for cognac, boat and train travel, affairs, and cream sauces. This bitch, she raised me.
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
Something that will always stay with me, that honestly haunts me, is reading an interview with Cheryl Strayed and reading that, after her own mother’s passing, she needed her mother to be a part of her, and so she ate a portion of her ashes. I couldn’t shake that story, and neither will I with Zauner’s memoir, one that shows the interconnectedness of identity with our mother’s, our mother’s food, and how that loss forms a hungry void.
Nives by Sasha Naspini
I’m beginning to realize a lot of my more deranged book recommendations have a great deal of interspecies relationships (friendship or…otherwise). We’re not going to read into that, aside from how animalistic humanity can be when grieving and trying to survive, widower-meets-chicken-friendship or not.
Animal by Lisa Taddeo
I’m beginning to feel like this list is going to get me on a government watch list, but I’m too far deep so let’s go. I loved Taddeo’s previous book Three Women —it added a new encyclopedia entry on female wanting and rage and Animal is just another haunting expansion on how what you consume can consume you.
A Touch of Jen by Beth Morgan(out July 13th)
A couple finds themselves in a obsessive virtual love-triangle with the curated image of a former coworker, and it’s as deliciously demented as the lovechild of The Shame, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and Ingrid Goes West. This book lacks nothing: literal and figurative monsters, rifts in time, tongue-in-cheek takedown of social media. It’s a truly pleasant, albeit MFA-y piece of fiction.
A Special Place for Women by Laura Hankin
This is the book of my dreams - it’s equal parts Younger & The Bold Type to equal parts The Craft. A down-on-her-luck journalist goes undercover to expose the seedy underbelly of an elite women’s club, but what she finds is a darker, more mystical force at its core. It has a perfectly actualized “jumping of the shark”, fire and cloaks.
What have you been reading lately? Last week I found myself clutching my chest, slack-jawed, reading People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry. Shit was…pretty hot?!
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I have to say that I visited Scuppernong Books while day-tripping in Greensboro with my boyfriend last week, and he witnessed me freaking out as I slowly realized that every book I was drawn to contained a shelf-talker written by the same person (you). Seriously, every single one. It's so difficult to find other people with a comparable taste in books! I'm so happy to have found your website, because I'm 100% on board with any/all of your recommendations.