You Got Caught up in the ‘Don’t Worry Darling’ Nonsense

Are ready for spooky season or want a bizarre, true tale

Hi book lovers,

Hope you had a great weekend. Thanks to everyone who submitted Bingo cards! I’m still working through them and will be in touch with prize winners soon.

Like a lot of the world, I spent a portion of Thursday watching the BBC and recognizing the end of the second Elizabethan Age (I’m always astounded when I think about everything the Queen lived through and shaped). If you’re looking for a book about the Queen or the House of Windsor more generally, I wrote a list of non-fiction books about the royal family for Parade a few months back. On the fiction side, I also truly adore SJ Bennett’s Her Majesty the Queen Investigates series which imagines Queen Elizabeth as an amateur sleuth. 

And, now, what to read if…

You Fell Down the “Don’t Worry Darling” Rabbit Hole

Funny You Should Ask by Elissa Sussman

I’m not proud of it, but I got caught up in the web of drama surrounding “Don’t Worry Darling,” a psychological thriller directed by Olivia Wilde, that I have no interest in seeing yet can’t stop reading about. For those of you who missed it, Vulture has a helpful timeline. It includes a celebrity divorce, Harry Styles allegedly spitting on Chris Pine and Styles giving an interview where he said, “my favorite thing about the movie is, like, it feels like a movie.” It was a delicious morsel of nonsense that matters not at all and thus is the perfect distraction from everything else. (Because I can’t help myself: I liked these articles on whether a male director would face the same gossip swirl and this one on how internet fandoms are changing the way we consume movies.)

Cat Cardenas @catrcardenas

the chris pine/harry styles spit video is my zapruder film

If you’re itching for more Hollywood stories, grab Funny You Should Ask, a rom-com by Elissa Sussman, featuring a former leading man, Gabe Parker, hoping to make a comeback and the reporter, Chani Horowitz, who wrote an infamous profile on him a decade earlier. After ten years apart, the pair reunite for Chani to report another article in a scheme cooked up by their publicists. The book alternates between their first meeting — when the couple had an undeniable spark — and their reunion — as they both try to figure out how one article came to define their lives. 

I really love this cover.

Funny You Should Ask is a lot of fun. Sussman was inspired by a series of profiles of A-list men written by female journalists, notably Edith Zimmerman’s 2011 feature on Chris Evans. But even if those words mean nothing to you, there’s still a lot to enjoy about this book. The chemistry between the two leads is undeniable, and the novel challenges notions of masculinity and what we expect from actors playing an Avenger or super spy.

Reminder recs: Emily Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines, Act Like It by Lucy Parker and Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo are all froth Hollywood/celebrity tales. 

You Want to Get a Jumpstart on Spooky Season

The Women Could Fly by Megan Giddings*

I consider October 1st the beginning of Spooky Season — and already have a giveaway lined up to celebrate it — but if you’re looking to start early, grab a copy of Megan Giddings’s The Women Could Fly, a witchy dystopian novel.  

Since Josephine Thomas’s mother disappeared fourteen years earlier, rumors have swirled that the older woman was a witch. It’s a grave accusation in the book’s world — just like ours except for one key difference — witches are real and subject to burning. (One of my favorite world-building details: A ‘Real Housewives’-type reality show about witches doing weight-loss spells). If women aren’t married by 30, they undergo intrusive monitoring and are forced to give up their jobs, the ability to have their own money and more. As Josephine approaches her 28th birthday single and living with her female best friend, her future is unclear. When she discovers her mother’s will lays out a journey for her, she leaves immediately, hoping it might help her find a path forward.

I had the same reaction to The Women Could Fly as author Tochi Onyebuchi. In a review for The New York Times, he wrote, “It can be tempting to read ‘The Women Could Fly,’ which comes in the shadow of the recent Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, and call the book timely. But the relationship at the heart of this novel — between Jo and her mercurial mother — is much closer to timeless.” I listened to this book and narrator Angel Pean adds a rhythm to Megan Giddings’s words, making them sound like poetry.

You Need a Reminder Truth is Stranger than Fiction

Scoundrel by Sarah Weinman

In Scoundrel, Sarah Weinman documents such a bizarre tale — featuring a serial killer and William F. Buckley — that it will have you wondering ‘How is this possible?’ and ‘How have I never heard of this?’ 

In the 1960s, Edgar Smith was in prison, facing the death penalty for the murder of a teenage girl. The prisoner began an unlikely correspondence with William F. Buckley, the founder of National Review. Buckley became convinced of his new pen pal’s innocence and used his clout to help get the conviction overturned. After his release, Smith went on to kill again, and Buckley eventually denounced his former friend. 

Like she did in The Real Lolita, Weinman shows sincere empathy towards Smith’s victims, avoiding the true-crime trap of glorifying serial killers. As she writes in the intro, “It is the voices of the women, sacrificed on the altar of the literary talent of a murderer that animate the narrative of this book. The non-fiction crime genre increasingly makes greater room for the stories of women, embodying their full spectrum as human beings rather than flattening them into products of seductive killers.” 

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That’s it for me today. I’ll be back in your inboxes on Thursday with a Q&A featuring author Gretchen Anthony — and a giveaway of her new novel The Book Haters’ Book Club.

*I received a free audiobook of The Women Could Fly from Libro.fm in exchange for an honest review.

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