Not as easy as being goth...
In the end, all books are written for your friends.
--Gabriel Garcia Marquez
It's good to get reviews in newspapers and lit journals, but it's way more fun to get reviews from friends. When I saw China's review of my new book over on her live journal, it made me happy.
***
Anything Ariel Gore writes is good. You know. It's like Aaron Cometbus. I love Cometbus, a lot of people do. But he's good--that's why.
Her new novel is a happy thing to come to this world if you are ready for some fiction; storytelling of wandering and seeking. I'm not so familiar with Catholicism or Saints, so this was really interesting for me. Her theme on religion is pure, thoughtful, questioning; and Frankka's stigmata, the whole side-show story is entertainment, fraud or real?, personal mythology or what? I would go as far to say that this book could start a fad of following Saints except, uh... it's pretty hard stuff; not as easy as being a goth, for example.
Ariel, for me, is part of a new generation--my generation--of women who write themselves into the story. We are writing our own books now. Those of us who grew up loving classics of the past, reading The Hobbit at 9, and On the Road, and all these boy's adventures, but also reading My Life by Emma Goldman at 17. She's part of the 'old neighborhood' for me: Those of us who dropped out of society early, if indeed mainstream society ever even had a place we could inhabit at all; and now growing older and putting our own mark on the world. There's something very distilled in her blood (I feel it's California, her hippie upbringing and not "punk as fuck" but punk youth, our outsider status: the other America--having seen the hopes of two generations reach for transformation ebb and wane--and clean in her words; sparse never fussy, magical.
Where she writes, you should follow, and be glad you did. It's true stuff, she sets out on unpaved roads all her own, from Hip Mama to Atlas of the Human Heart now to The Traveling Death & Resurrection Show--but these are also "our" roads. Being a mama of today, being a girl-child, being on the road, wondering about the meaning of life and the religion you were raised with and what does it mean? And what happens when things fall apart? Plus she has the poetry. Ariel has heart but it's never soggy. She's one of our generation's outstanding living writers.
--Gabriel Garcia Marquez
It's good to get reviews in newspapers and lit journals, but it's way more fun to get reviews from friends. When I saw China's review of my new book over on her live journal, it made me happy.
***
Anything Ariel Gore writes is good. You know. It's like Aaron Cometbus. I love Cometbus, a lot of people do. But he's good--that's why.
Her new novel is a happy thing to come to this world if you are ready for some fiction; storytelling of wandering and seeking. I'm not so familiar with Catholicism or Saints, so this was really interesting for me. Her theme on religion is pure, thoughtful, questioning; and Frankka's stigmata, the whole side-show story is entertainment, fraud or real?, personal mythology or what? I would go as far to say that this book could start a fad of following Saints except, uh... it's pretty hard stuff; not as easy as being a goth, for example.
Ariel, for me, is part of a new generation--my generation--of women who write themselves into the story. We are writing our own books now. Those of us who grew up loving classics of the past, reading The Hobbit at 9, and On the Road, and all these boy's adventures, but also reading My Life by Emma Goldman at 17. She's part of the 'old neighborhood' for me: Those of us who dropped out of society early, if indeed mainstream society ever even had a place we could inhabit at all; and now growing older and putting our own mark on the world. There's something very distilled in her blood (I feel it's California, her hippie upbringing and not "punk as fuck" but punk youth, our outsider status: the other America--having seen the hopes of two generations reach for transformation ebb and wane--and clean in her words; sparse never fussy, magical.
Where she writes, you should follow, and be glad you did. It's true stuff, she sets out on unpaved roads all her own, from Hip Mama to Atlas of the Human Heart now to The Traveling Death & Resurrection Show--but these are also "our" roads. Being a mama of today, being a girl-child, being on the road, wondering about the meaning of life and the religion you were raised with and what does it mean? And what happens when things fall apart? Plus she has the poetry. Ariel has heart but it's never soggy. She's one of our generation's outstanding living writers.
posted by Contact at 12:40 PM
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