Chasing Beauty Standards, Pursuing Mysterious Gangsters, and a Cocktail That Is Equal Parts Trader Vic and 2010s Hipster
Plus: a family memoir about absences
On Saturday I watched night fall over London.
In the way of the modern world, I knew to watch because my best friend texted me images of the sky on fire, because of course I was too engrossed in my screen to notice what was happening outside the window.
I ran upstairs and threw my bedroom windows open, leaned out. The southwestern sky blazed with saffron and peach, then as the minutes passed, slowly cooled to rose and then lilac. (In fact, it looked quite a lot like a certain book cover.) A chevron of geese followed the Regent’s Canal west, while a distant plane, lights blinking, flew along the Thames on its final approach into Heathrow.
As I watched, I breathed deep. The air was cool and fresh, a little damp from the day’s rain, but not icy. The days of melancholy four o’clock twilight were over, banished until November.
It’s weeks until the first day of spring, months until it’ll begin to feel like spring. But I think mid-February is the moment when spring becomes possible, the pinpoint of light at the end of the cold, dark tunnel.
Recently I read and loved…
If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha
If I Had Your Face is brutal and engrossing at the same time. Through the voices of four striving women living in contemporary Seoul, we get a deep immersion into a society where raging social inequality, sexism, and obsession with appearances rule. They seek escape through pop music, through plastic surgery, even through making art, but the need to make money and the burden of male entitlement weigh them all down. The voices of all the women will totally draw you in, and the author gives incredible insight into families and workplaces that see women as only valuable for what they can give men.
The Mayor of Maxwell Street by Avery Cunningham
This is a glittering, gritty, violent piece of historical fiction set in the wealthy Black community in 1920s Chicago. If you want gangsters and socialites, speakeasies and fast cars, i.e. the whole Great Gatsby, this is your kind of book. Through two brlliantly-drawn characters, the stubborn, determined amateur journalist Nelly and the mysterious chameleon trickster Jay, we get swept up in a story about the cost of Black ambition under the long shadow of Jim Crow. I would love more recommendations for books like this one - I was totally sucked in and I learned so much from it.
Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets by Clair Wills
A subgenre of history I particularly love are histories made of missing pieces -where there aren’t any biographies or newspaper articles to work from because the subjects weren’t rich/famous/powerful enough to have their lives written down in detail. Missing Persons is a history that grows from a single seed: that the author had a cousin whom she never met, because that cousin was illegitimate and grew up in the system of mother and baby homes and industrial schools in Ireland in the 1950s and 1960s. Wills uses this one absence as an opening to explore a broader culture of respectability, conformity, and shame, and how silences and omissions persist in families. If you’re looking for a nonfiction companion to Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, I recommend this.
I also enjoyed…A Season for Scandal by Laura Wood, All Stirred Up by Brianne Moore, The Cloisters by Katy Hays
And I drank…a Bitter Mai Tai.
Despite the prose poetry up at the top of this newsletter, February in England has been generally gray and damp. My husband also got steamrollered by the flu that’s been going around, and productive coughing and nose-blowing are not the soundtrack that anyone wants for cocktail hour.
But I hadn’t mixed a drink in what felt like forever, and this Bitter Mai Tai recipe had been floating in my open tabs for weeks. Jungle Birds are a god-tier cocktail for me, and I was interested to try something else in the hipster tiki family.
A caveat: mixed according to the recipe, the Bitter Mai Tai is still-thinking-about-that-one-thing-that-b****-said-in-middle-school bitter. I added a little orgeat directly to the finished drink to get it to the sweetness level I wanted, and when I make it again, I will cut the Campari to one ounce and up the orgeat to one ounce. (I made orgeat using Richard Godwin’s method with almond milk in his terrific Substack The Spirits, but with 1:1 sugar instead of 2:1 to reflect the orgeat method in the Bitter Mai Tai.) While it needs a little tinkering, I did really enjoy it! It’s sweet and sharp, both perfumed from the mint garnish and the orgeat and a little funky from the Smith and Cross rum. Mix and sip while listening to this:
I also enjoyed…the year’s first glass of rosé with a pie and chips at Quo Vadis, Bedrock 2015 Evangelho Heritage red wine with slow-roasted shoulder of lamb, an extraordinarily refreshing plum-and-lime drink with Malaysian food at C&R Cafe, and a glass of Côtes du Rhône with a delicious prix fixe lunch at Pompette in Oxford.