issue no. 9: on books
Putting things (and people) on shelves.
The premiere volume of Love and Other Rugs is presented by Backdrop.
self-help and Shakespeare.
If you are new... check out the archive. I complain about ghosting and grey sofas and exes in storage units, among other things.
The boldness of thirty-something year old men continues to amaze me.
Launching this newsletter nearly nine months ago has brought various men out of the proverbial woodwork, and last fall I found myself dating someone for the second time. Our first round occurred half a year earlier—fizzled by misaligned schedules. In improv, this act of returning from whence you came (there’s a sex joke in there somewhere) is known as a “callback”. In dating, I call it taking someone off a shelf.
Flash forward to October in Prospect Park when out of a tote bag, he pulled out a book called Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mister Good Enough. The book centers around the idea that women in their 20s have too large a list of things they need a man to have, passing up perfectly good suitors in their quest for a perfect partner. Then, single women in their 30s regret being so picky and not settling. The week prior, we got in a “fight” about how I had gone on ten first dates in one month with no second ones. Apparently, that was my fault. Maybe this was his attempt to educate me (or a bid to end up in the newsletter).
Sure, I, a woman in my 20s, have loose qualifications for the men I am seeing—all of which are seemingly egged on further by parameters I’m required to set on my dating apps. But I wasn’t ready to be told by anyone that I should be settling, and certainly my friends in their 30s scoffed at this concept. Ask me again in ten years, maybe I’ll think differently. But for now this book has no place on my shelves.
In fact, in my own home, 85% of the books are hidden—awaiting me to make a decision on how I want to display them. My built in entry shelves serve as a sort of shrine to the dead—my mother, my grandmother and grandfather. Portraits from their lives. Candles and ticket stubs of past events. Small knick-knacks, matches, perfume and some books I keep in case I skirt off to the park with no plans.
Scattered throughout the rest of my apartment are art and design books that have taken over the top of my coffee table and credenza—leaving the furniture pieces nearly useless for actual function. Relics from my dead mother and past relationships live tucked into boxes with hopes of finding a home on the floating Ikea shelves I have been eyeing.
In two of the homes I lived in with my mother—one bungalow in Los Angeles’ Silverlake neighborhood and the other my grandmother’s home in St. Louis, books grew in tall stacks nearly uncategorized—soft bound bricks that built up her mind. Organized chaos, only understandable to her eye. When she passed away in 2017, her own decidedly unshelved books would be that last thing I’d parse through when I disassembled her life.
I’ve talked about how grief feels like being on two parallel roads at one time, a life with and a life without them. She, instead of living in the current world, lived in a different one, touchable only through narrative and memories that continue to get hazy.
She became a character the day she died. Her death marking a quick shift from real blood veins to the spine of a memoir I will eventually write about her. I would keep her alive this way, every story another heartbeat, every piece of object some path back to her. This would be the opposite approach most of my extended family would take, an entire crop of Midwesterners who wouldn’t let her name near their mouths after we put her into the ground. Permanently shelving her, and letting her collect dust. Ashes to ashes, I guess.
Thinking about her this way has helped me to understand when the people of my past—men, friends, past coworkers shift from real people to characters. I imagine the moment they get handed little scripts that get acted out in my mind, becoming a rendering of themselves. When a reader is done with a book it makes its way onto a shelf. Maybe, I thought, it’s the same with people, stashed away in case you ever want to take them off and reread them.
This past winter, I went for a drink with a friend of a friend who had slid into my LinkedIn DMs. He congratulated me on starting this newsletter and then after some banter gave me his number. LinkedIn doesn’t deserve our conversations, he said. And although I have spent the last three and a half years marketing vibrators for a living, he was right that an app for business and the potential for pleasure should not mix (regardless of its compelling origin story). After more banter, we landed on a Friday evening a few weeks out. He insisted this was not a date, he was too recently out of a relationship for it to be considered such. Plus, the friend we shared was too dear to either of us for any risks to be taken.
However, after two martinis, a glass of something sparkling, and decidedly no dinner, we retreated from a mediocre downtown Brooklyn bar to his apartment a few blocks away. Do you play chess? He said. Doesn’t everybody? I lied. He poured us whisky neat. While I was losing, I began to assess his interiors: a black leather sofa (not grey, thank god), curtain-less floor-to-ceiling windows with an overpriced view of Manhattan, a mix of etched prints from a potentially famous English artist, and a sturdy wooden table. Traditional meets your standard, I'm a man who loves capital M Mid-century.
On a chrome bookcase were piles of titles that had grown like weeds—no sense of organization: spines forward and back, upright, sideways—it resembled riffled through stacks at an estate sale. An ex-girlfriend organized them by color, he said begrudgingly. Surely taking inspiration from the candy-coated shelves of The Wing-era interiors—a time of “shelfies” and “statement shelves”. Didn’t the books we read make enough of a statement?
He had tried, in his break up, to re-arrange them but time had passed. I offered, half-kidding, to do it right then and there. We had already played chess, I didn’t need more to drink, and this wasn’t as he claimed a date, so from the hours of 12am to 3am we pulled every book off the shelves and reorganized them.
There were four loose categories—business, politics, English literature, and poetry. He handed me Shakespeare’s book of sonnets. Number 79. He told me to read it. There is nothing quite like a British man who you are apparently not on a date with reciting a Shakespearean sonnet that he has committed to memory. It was the start of a bad romcom. I was Emma Stone and he was Ryan Gosling, if Ryan Gosling were British. We were miscast. But it was, as it turns out, definitely a date.
As we lined up too many books written by old white men, I reflected on my propensity to revisit and rearrange the various chapters of my life. I’ve shelved a number of men in my day, thinking maybe that in a different time or situation or with space or distance, I could pull one down from a shelf and see something I didn’t see before. New meanings, a more fully baked plot line, character development.
A book can be read again for a fresh perspective, men are almost always the same. They don’t hold the underlines or dog marked pages quite like books do. They even possess an ability, I’ve found, to erase a reader's time with them. Crisp sheets, crisp shirt, no past markings, “like new”.
Assessing this man's books made me think of the literary categories in my own library—cookbooks with bold covers and titles by female chefs, memoirs about grief, whatever fiction was popular the last 5 summers, travel guides, a collection of interior guides, and a small but growing collection of vintage porn.
We took a break from the book organizing to make out on the replica Eames chair he had centered on the view of the New York skyline. I could feel myself being absolutely swept away by this man, a perfect first date. Do you want to stay?, he asked. If I stay, I’ll probably fall in love with you, I said. I almost believed myself, so I left. For one night only, I was some version of a librarian or archivist learning about someone through their spines. When our conversation began to fizzle, I asked to see him again. We’re meant to be friends, Sullivan. Woof. Maybe trying to cross the pond was a bad idea.
He’s now back together with his ex. They always get back together with an ex. I wonder if the liquor-fueled Dewey Decimal System we created fell to ruin.
My mother’s books were not quite so easy to sort. Their owner was dead, the illegible scribbles couldn’t be decoded. Many of them had been collected from free piles at the library, many others possessing great transformative meaning for my mother’s career in academia. Others shaped how she saw herself as an artist or a mother. However, there was almost no way for me to distinguish the difference.
In this process, I realized that despite being a character in my stories, I would never be able to give her a present voice. She could never actually live beyond her life in the way I wanted. My mother could be shelfless, ever present and fluid in my day to day but ultimately trapped in the past like a bug in amber. This was unlike the myriad of men who are seemingly immortal beings, ghosts, zombies all waiting to be summoned or woken from their slumber (or run into at engagement parties and bars and college reunions).
Over a year after my mother’s death, in my grandmother’s basement, I took photos of their covers and then donated nearly the entire selection—keeping thirty of the nearly thousand books. Brutal cuts but with an awareness that in my lifetime I would never be able to read what she read, nor do I want to.
I stayed over at someone’s apartment recently. On the top of the room's single side table, four oddly partnered books. I picked one up, something self-help in nature, that’s an ex-girlfriend’s. I set it down. The next book was called She has Her Mother’s Laugh. It was a book on genetics. Topical only because it happened to be Mother’s Day. I got dressed, took a T-shirt from a pile he was giving to Goodwill and went to the cemetery. She has her mother’s laugh, I repeated to myself. I took a photo of the spine, I do.
sloppy secondhand: appointment only
Each week I’ll pick a favorite vintage spot & a local watering hole—maybe you’ll find a new-to-you sofa or a new-to-you man. All I can promise is perhaps some promiscuity and a little credit card debt. Adding the ones I can to an Instagram guides here and will update as we go.
I spent my first week of fun-employment running around Manhattan doing all the day time things I never get to do while in an office. That means lunch in the West Village, The Met, middle of the day non-weekend shopping, breakfasts and coffees—a version of tourism that feels like you are faking sick so you don’t have to go to school. Last week, in between computer time on the couch at The Marlton I made two stops at appointment only showrooms in the West Village. While over there, have some good drinks to entertain you as you people watch.
Holiday Bar—A few places in the West Village have my heart. Bar Pisellino if you can get there early enough, The Noortwyck (from ex-Eleven Madison Park team members) for wine in the world’s most beautiful wine glasses and oysters. And I recently had a drink with my friend Emily (go read her newsletter) at Holiday Bar, it's very 80s but the martinis were great and strong.
Future Perfect & Beni—Last month, I went to Casa Perfect in LA and it made me want to revisit their NYC outpost—a ridiculous townhouse on the border of West Village. Lots of inspiration there. Ten minutes away is the apartment of Beni Rugs, where you can view some of their designs and look at color swatches. I loved the tricolor checkered ones from Tom Delevan’s collection that they had on display.
5 things on my mind or in my cart.
At Domino, we had a column called 10 things where we asked cool people to curate beautiful things, places, inspirations. I’m giving you 5.
Something big and wooden—Currently my books live in this Ikea metal locker but I’ve been dreaming of something sturdier like one of these beauties from Good Behavior. In the same vein, I am pulling some serious inspo from Alex Tieghi-Walker’s recently shot NYC apt while not forgetting my roots as a recovering-Maximalist.
A GREAT t-shirt—My friend Zack Roif is one half of the genius behind Dream Baby Press and the creator of this AMAZING (and topical) shirt. If you don’t get the joke, give it a little google. Perfect for the shelf issue but also timeless, in my book.
Laid & Confused next to my midriff as god intended. A book on the (sex) recession—I am obsessed with Maria Yagoda’s new book Laid & Confused, it explores the sex recession and how bad sex has become so pervasive. She talks about how sex is choreography, brilliant.
My summer uniform—Remember the last issue when I talked about tiny tops? Well, for me, when a tiny top is present a button up shirt is not far behind. I have been living in this Asket button down, vintage ones from shopfeelsgood, and a washable silk number from Lunya.
I love when a built-in couch and a built-in shelf become one. This also makes me think I need to paint everything in a red orange. Built-ins—on the topic of book shelves, no one and I mean no one does it like my friend Jason Saft. I will continue to talk about him, because he makes homes chic and livable. THIS project blew me away.
