“When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest.”
–Hemingway, “A Moveable Feast”
After my couple of days of art museums, opera, and a cemetery, I decided to focus on purchasing two of the main things that I love: books and paintings.
Together, my aunt and I went in search of art. I’d seen enough movies and tv shows that romanticized the Parisian art scene to make me believe that there would be a starving artist on every street corner, hawking their wares to only the truest of art lovers (I’ve seen Titanic). That is a pretty old brochure for the city of love, as I learned when I walked the streets not seeing any intrepid young painters with easels sketching in the streets.
Undeterred, we ventured up Montmartre, one of the most picturesque parts of Paris, in order to get a view of the city from the basilica on top of the hill. We didn’t find any art there, but continued on throughout the city.
No trip to Paris would be complete for an aspiring writer without making a pit stop at Cafe De Flore, an old stomping ground of Hemingway, Simone De Beauvoir, and Sartre, among others.
Despite what other people will tell you about how the cafe is stodgy, overrun with tourists, and Instagram-famous (the biggest cardinal sin) I am willing to defend it.
It is still a cute, charming French cafe with a lot of history. And, most importantly, it remains a good place to get a glass of wine.
After lunch, we walked down the street to Shakespeare & Co., an English-language bookstore that supported the likes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Joyce back in the day. It sold Hemingway’s first novel and still maintains a line out the door most days. It sits across the street from Notre Dame Cathedral right along the Seine.
Walking down the street in the late afternoon, my aunt and I found an art gallery, which is how I wound up buying a nude painting of a woman. It is an incredibly beautiful piece of art that I want to hold onto forever and pass on to my family members once I die.
It was a good day of shopping, drinking, and art purchasing. My new books are on my shelf. My painting will soon be on display in my apartment. The day left its mark.
The Tragic Queen,
Raquel
P.S.: For more ideas about what you can do in Paris, check out my previous blog post about my trip to the Musée d’Orsay and Opéra Bastille.
When I booked my ticket for Paris, there was one thing I knew that I wanted to do for sure: spend a day in the Musée d’Orsay and have lunch at the cafe inside. The Musée d’Orsay is one of the greatest art museums in the world, carved out of a hollowed-out train station that now houses some of the most famous art in the world. I have wanted to visit it since I knew it existed. Walking through it takes an entire day, so I planned on doing just about nothing else, wanting to feel like I had all of the time in the world.
My aunt and I met up and we walked the entirety of the museum. My father is the type of person who walks up to a painting, stares at it for twenty minutes, then backs away from it, and stares at it for another twenty minutes, studying every brushstroke and paint fleck. My aunt is not such a person. She could walk into a gallery, do a 360 turn, and then walk off, satisfied that she had gotten everything she needed from the paintings.
Like most people, I’m somewhere in the middle.
We made it through the museum in record time in comparison to how my father would have done it, but I still felt like I savored all of the artwork. I saw all of the paintings that I wanted to see, starting with the “Birth of Venus” by Cabanel, which my parents have a print of hanging in their house. Seeing it in person is an entirely different experience, one that also makes you want to lay naked in the middle of the ocean with knee length hair while a bunch of cherubs careen over you.
We checked out the Van Goghs, the Picassos, crossing off everything on my list except for Monet’s waterlilies (which weren’t on display and which I’d already seen). It was nothing but stunning paintings as far as the eye could see.
We stopped to have lunch in a cafe that was behind a clock face that overlooked the Seine, sipping wine and chatting about the art that we had seen so far.
After the Musée d’Orsay, I got ready to see the opera with Claire, one of my favorite people to go to the opera with. We saw Pelléas et Mélisande by Debussy, a French opera about…well, we weren’t quite sure what it was about. The show started and Claire and I promptly dozed off, taking high-priced naps at the Opéra Bastille. For me, it was jet-lag. For her, it was the rigors of being a full time law student. Either way, we were tired.
From what we did see of the performance, it was beautiful. There were loud, perfect voices ringing out towards the ceiling and actual children who could sing better than me. Nothing humbles me quite like going to the opera or ballet and seeing the talent of the stars on display, being made to look effortless.
After that, we called it a night.
Between the art museum and the opera I had the kind of day that most people expect to have when visiting Paris, one in which there is no shortage of art and culture. It was a blissful day of admiring some of the greatest artwork in the world, followed by the soothing tones of opera music.
Who can ask for a better day in Paris?
The Tragic Queen,
Raquel
P.S.: Check out how I spent my previous day in Paris
“Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow.”
–Oscar Wilde
When planning a trip to Paris, lots of ideas spring to mind for what you should do: shopping, going to cafes, visiting museums, and walking (or taking the elevator) to the top of the Eiffel Tower. Visiting a cemetery is not usually one of them.
Yet, on my second day in Paris, Claire and I ventured across the Seine to Père Lachaise, one of the world’s most famous cemeteries so that we could see the graves of some of the greatest icons to ever live. It is home to an estimated one million late citizens of the world, many of whom changed it during their time.
Père Lachaise was eerier than most cemeteries (which is saying something) with crows pecking at the moss-eaten tombstones that lined the cobblestone paths. The only thing that was missing was the thin sheet of fog descending on what was already a cool, overcast day. We made our way through the cemetery like we were window shopping, asking each other which tombstone we could see for ourselves. (“I like the headstone on that grave” “I think I would prefer one of the standing ones like that one.”)
We visited the graves of Chopin, Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison, Edith Piaf, Proust, and Balzac, all of which were littered with flowers, love letters, candles, and other esoteric objects that signified people’s enduring love for them. I stood back and admired the various legends who were buried six feet below my feet, whispering to Oscar Wilde and Balzac that I had read their works for class.
Towards the end, we found Oscar Wilde’s tombstone. It was only a tiny bit obvious which one was his, since it featured a bust of him as a sphinx (no one can say that he didn’t have style). Claire later told me that a tour guide standing nearby said that the sphinx once had a penis attached to it, but that someone stole it in the 1960s. Now his grave is encased in glass, which people have kissed while wearing lipstick.
Spending time in an iconic cemetery brings up many strange questions, like what is worth putting on your tombstone, what kinds of people would ever visit it, and what a person would have to do in order to be remembered for something centuries after their death.
These are thoughts that, much like the one million or so bodies in Père Lachaise, will fester.
From there, Claire and I went for a stroll in a park. It made for a nice relaxing end to our day, as we admired the waterfalls and flowers. It was a beautiful spring day in Paris.
Later that evening, I met up with my aunt and uncle and my uncle’s nephew (they all also ended up being in Paris at the same time as me). Together, the four of us went to see the Eiffel Tower and grab dinner at a nearby cafe.
The Eiffel Tower is one of the few landmarks in world history that is just a little bit bigger than you think it’s going to be in real life. After years of imagining what it would look like up close, it did not disappoint. It shimmers on the hour every hour for five minutes and I was able to see the glittering tower just as it changed. Child Raquel was squealing on the inside.
We didn’t go up it. We just admired it from afar.
After checking out the Eiffel Tower, we had dinner together and then we called it a night.
I scratched off several things from my Paris itinerary in a single day: the graves of beloved icons and the Eiffel Tower. I was ready to see what my next day in Paris had in store for me.
Like so many little girls growing up in the US, I always dreamt of going to Paris. It consumed my personality: I had an Eiffel Tower lamp, an Eiffel Tower statue, and a calendar of famous Parisian landmarks. I even made a painting of the Eiffel Tower once.
Anytime I saw a movie or tv show set in Paris, it seized my imagination, and I could suddenly picture myself strutting down cobblestone roads and seeing the Seine lit up with street lights late at night.
Many great American writers lived in Paris for a time, like Hemingway, Baldwin, and Stein. It made me hope that one day I would do a stint in Paris as well, reading and writing in an epicenter of art and culture.
Despite all of my dreams of visiting, I didn’t always think it was going to happen. Paris always seemed nebulously far away, more of a romantic ideal than a potential reality, but when my friend Claire returned to Paris to finish her studies at the Sorbonne, I asked if I could spend Spring Break sleeping on her couch. I was thrilled when she said yes.
Mon ami
While she went to work, I tooled around town, doing all of the touristy things that locals would never dream of doing. I waited in long lines, seeing the sights, and mumbled my way through the few French phrases that I knew (“Je suis désolé, est-ce que vous parlez anglais?” was the most popular and I left out half the words.)
The day that I arrived, we started by getting brunch at a restaurant called Jozi. We ate avocado toast and mimosas, while I fought my jet lag and lost. It was my first Parisian meal, not including the tiny bread roll that I was given on the plane, and it more than lived up to my expectations.
After that, we walked along the Seine and waited in line for the Notre Dame Cathedral. The line was so long that it zig-zagged across the plaza.
It was one of the first times in years that Notre Dame Cathedral was open to the public since the fire in 2019. The bricks of the cathedral are now a lighter color than they used to be, but you otherwise cannot tell that the church is any different. The line moved shockingly fast and before we knew it we were being ushered through the church.
We took our time milling through the cathedral, looking at the paintings, listening to the church organs, lighting candles, and buying rosaries for devout Catholic grandmothers.
The cathedral is just as beautiful as I imagined, with sunlight streaming in through the stained glass windows, dimly lit by candles, and smelling vaguely of incense. It has been perfectly restored since the fire.
Parts of it were a surprise to me, like the statues of saints that lined the front of the cathedral and how they stared down at you, almost as though they were doing it from heaven.
It’s hard to find an original thing to say about Notre Dame Cathedral, the beautiful gothic church that has captured the minds of writers, artists, and Disney execs around the world. All I can say is that it’s worth seeing if you ever find yourself in Paris (and Paris is not a bad place to find yourself).
After that, I dragged my tired ass home. I could barely keep my eyes open or feel my feet, but I had gotten my first taste of the city. I was ready to spend the next day conquering the city, dominating the public transportation system, and getting to know Paris.
I’ll keep you posted!
The Tragic Queen,
Raquel
P.S.: Check out my previous blog post about the feminist birthday party I attended a few weeks ago that raised money for nonprofits aimed at upholding women’s rights around the world.
A couple of nights ago, my friend Julia invited me out to a birthday party for her friend Synclaire. Many of you have probably seen Synclaire on Instagram where she can be found bringing facts about women’s rights and women’s health to the masses. She is a model and influencer who advocates for women’s rights.
She is one of those perfect people that you think are too good to be true: stunningly beautiful, intelligent, super sweet, and generous, as was evident when we arrived at her party.
Her party was a fundraiser for women’s causes, mainly aimed at upholding reproductive rights and providing safe abortion access. Her birthday party was being held at a venue in Chinatown called The Bench that could easily be described as my dream New York City apartment. Unassuming from the outside, spacious and fun on the inside.
The party had an unapologetically girl power playlist. Appropriately, Britney was playing when we walked in.
Julia was wearing a high ponytail and a cute going-out top, a look that she described as being “for the girls,” thus beginning the first running joke of the night. Men don’t understand the power of a high ponytail and a cute going-out top. Therefore, it is simply “for the girls.”
The party favors included condoms, lube, Plan B pills, nighttime pads, and pregnancy tests, saving us all trips to the drug store and lots and lots of hassle.
In lieu of gifts, she requested that we make a donation in her name to one of the nonprofits sponsoring her party. I decided to donate to Vow for Girls, a nonprofit aimed at ending child marriages around the world. After cake, donuts, and feminist speeches, we collected our party favors and called it a night.
“Listen to them. The children of the night. What music they make.”
–Dracula, Bela Lugosi
Every few weeks The Metropolitan Museum of Art puts on a film series called “Long Films for Long Nights,” taking place in the auditorium in the Egyptian Wing.
A couple of weeks ago the theme was “Vampires,” starting with the 1931 Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi. Before the film began there was a slideshow of gothic artwork from different cultures that The Met had on display in order to emphasize the universality of the occult and themes of darkness that exist across cultures.
Dracula has special effects that seem comically bad to us today, but definitely blew the minds of everyone who watched it at the time. A panel of film experts then discussed the different elements of the film, including how they tried to mask the film’s “homoeroticism” by trying to make Dracula be more animalistic instead of incarnate, so that it didn’t seem gay when it was implied that he put his lips on another man’s neck. Being a depression-era film, Dracula was popular in America. It showed Europeans, whom Americans blamed for the Great Depression, being bad, and harbored resentments for “the foreigner.” It also therefore spawned an interest in genre-films for the first time ever. We have this film to thank for all other horror movies.
The next film was Vamypr, a French-German expressionist film that depicted vampires as a metaphor for psychological distress and experimented with cinematography for the first time in the 30s. The film barely had sound yet did some incredibly ambitious camera work. I probably would have chosen to go for more of a film score and color instead of hazy camera work that was supposed to convey grief, but to each his own.
Nothing says “I go to art school” quite like saying that you spent an evening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art looking at a slideshow of gothic paintings of the occult across various cultures, before watching a black and white film from the 1930s, and then listening to a panel discuss the themes of homoeroticism and the Great Depression before watching another black and white, subtitled, French, German-expressionist film from the 1930s that made groundbreaking strides in cinematography and depicted vampires as a metaphor for psychological distress.
You have moments where you do something like that and then think to yourself, wow I used to be normal.
Either way, it was a fun and interesting way to spend an evening and a very different way for me to spend time in The Met. I hope that all of you get to experience the erotically-charged, depression-era film that is Dracula, as well as the experimental, German-expressionist masterpiece that is Vampyr at least once in your life.
The Tragic Queen,
Raquel
P.S.: Check out my previous blog post about Swan Lake
A few weeks ago, I hit up one of my favorite New York City pastimes: dressing up like royalty and going to see a show at Lincoln Center. Growing up, I always thought that there was something major about going to the New York City Ballet– and I am still very right about that– but I thought that it was something that only elite people got to do, that going to see the ballet meant that you were a MAJOR deal.
There’s something about taking in a show at Lincoln Center that makes me feel like “The Talented Miss Raquel,” a faux posh person in a very posh environment.
I bought ballet tickets several months ago, purchasing literal cheap seats that veered far enough to the right that I couldn’t always see the action that was happening on stage. Standing there, holding a $45 ticket that I’d purchased two months earlier, I no longer felt like The Talented Miss Raquel.
Cleaning up nicely for one night and one night only, I left my house on what wasn’t exactly a warm and cozy night, in heels that I couldn’t walk in, and attended the ballet.
I spent the evening watching Swan Lake and thinking to myself “wow this is nothing like Black Swan.” (Which is a good thing for those who’ve never seen the movie).
I know that I’ve said it before on this blog, but I am always blown away by how effortless ballet dancers make it look, standing on the tip of their toes like it’s nothing. The human body is not meant to bend that way.
I’m not sure why half the characters were dressed like court jesters and the other half were dressed like flocked pine cones, but I think it absolutely worked. It was a beautiful performance.
As many of you know, each year I do a photoshoot with my best friend Padgett. We take photos that make their way into my holiday cards and onto this blog.
It’s always so much fun coming up with how I’m going to do it. I get to pick an aesthetic, I flip through magazines to get inspired, I make a playlist, and I try to cajole my cat into taking one decent photo with me (which goes about as well as it sounds).
This is what we managed to come up with:
A classic black and white photo on a black and white tile floor:
Here’s how they stack up to the black and white photos of years past:
Processed with VSCO with kc25 preset
Here’s the best photo I was able to get of Calypso and me:
Some random photos:
Some BTS photos:
Every year, the front of the card is a royal portrait and every year the back is something fun that I did the year before. This year, I went with a photo of myself at the Golden Gate Bridge, a shot of my beloved cat, and a picture of myself on the cover.
I hope that many of you received a card in the mail, probably getting to you well after all of the holidays are completed.
Happy New Year!
The Tragic Queen,
Raquel
P.S.: Check out my post on all of the books that I read throughout the end of the year.
FCC: psst! As an Amazon Affiliate I earn money off each qualifying purchase. Embedded in the book titles are links to a place where you can purchase a book and I will get a commission. Buy yourself something pretty.
This year, my goal was to read 50 books, nearly one for each week of the year. Instead, I blew that out of the water with a whomping 62 books.
Most of the 62 books
This list is an amalgamation of what I had to read for school, New York Times Bestsellers, and whatever I purchase off the guy who sells books on the street near my apartment.
Hopefully, I won’t ruin any of your favorite novels while recommending you your new favorite one.
You kids enjoy…
Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier–This book is awesome. A pregnant 18 year old pizza delivery girl becomes fascinated by an eccentric mother who buys the same pickle-covered pizza for her son every week. It is at times melancholic, making you feel for the desperate people who were struggling in very real ways as the novel careens toward its inevitable ending.
Twisted Love by Anna Huang– Y’all need therapy. The male love interest belongs on a watch list and I would have had a restraining order against him by page 40. He spends the entire novel policing the main female character’s sexuality under the guise that he has to “look out for her because she can’t look out for herself.” He protects her from an abusive stalker by being an abusive stalker himself. He belongs in prison and that’s where he would be if he wasn’t rich or white. The female character is an absolute doormat and allows this to go on without sticking up for herself and I’m so disappointed that this depiction of women persists in so many examples of contemporary women’s narrative fiction. This novel also brings all of the melodrama. From a crafts perspective, it is poorly-written and meets the skill level of a YA novel, reading like a first draft, but no one is reading this novel “for the craft.” That would be like reading Playboy for the articles. Oh and one of the main character’s best friends is a princess.
Coco at the Ritz by Gioia Diliberto– this is an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny novel about Coco Chanel’s Nazi ties. It is a fictionalized dramatization about what Coco Chanel may have been up to during the Nazi occupation of France, which has been the subject of much speculation over the years. Meticulously researched, this novel does not stray away from investigating her sordid relationship with a known Nazi, slotting in nicely with our modern-day discussions about complicated legacies. It recognizes Coco Chanel as the creative genius who popularized the Little Black Dress, costume jewelry, sun tans, female suits, and not wearing evening gloves, all of which have changed my day-to-day life, but characterizes her Nazism far too gently in my opinion. You can enjoy it as the rompy and entertaining book that it is, or you can question the ethics of taking the spectacle of a person and relitigating history through them. It depicts Chanel as a complicated woman, but this posthumous defense is nullified by the fact that Coco Chanel was an anti-semite before, after, and during this time in her life, calling into question how much it even matters if you clear her name of Nazi-sympathies. You decide for yourself whether or not it matters.
The Margot Affair by Sanae Lemoine–I nearly closed the book on the third page when I encountered the first line of dialogue that didn’t have quotation marks. But I was the one who paid for the book, so I kept reading. I understood at times why she omitted the quotation marks, although I still disapproved. The characters kept talking, passing the narrative baton to whatever character was speaking, thereby transforming the novel briefly into an omniscient narrative that dips into everyone’s perspective. This blurs the line between a character speaking and experiencing the story that the character is describing, as the characters speak in a way that no one ever talks; every person you encounter is not going to describe a beautiful, lush scene in vivid detail, using the same linguistic style and tone of voice. I think that this is just Lemoine playing around with form and I will be forgiving, because as I have learned, this is really, really hard.
Highlands High by Victoria Okonek– My coworker self-published a YA book that she asked me to read. It is a proper teen angst book, like if Jay Asher and Laurie Halse Anderson had a love child. It was a quick read, making it a great choice for what to buy your teenage reader.
Summer Sisters by Judy Blume–If you have any strong, negative feelings about Judy Blume, keep them to yourself. This bitch helped raise me. Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret was a rite of passage for me and so many other girlies over the decades. Tiger Eyes traumatized and educated me in equal measure (I learned the word rape from this book at age ten). Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing made me feel an unnecessary amount of hurt and then there were all of the other Fudge and Sheila Tubman books, which dominated my bookshelf when I was ten. So, when I learned that a few years ago, she’d published another book that hit number one on the New York Times Bestseller’s List, I snatched it up in a heartbeat. The main character Vix experiences the biggest twist in fate when she befriends Caitlin, the most popular girl at school, setting into motion a series of events that promises to change the course of both of their lives forever. Years later, their friendship has fizzled, but they come together for a reunion. With this novel, Judy Blume did what she does best: writing a coming-of-age-novel about young girls who are waiting with bated breath for their breasts and sex lives to begin. It’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret but with teeth, as she takes a look at privilege, the different directions life can take, and the choices that befall women and girls.
No One Left to Come Looking for You by Sam Lipsyte– This falls into that genre of white suburban kid that wasn’t hugged enough as a child and no that’s not a criticism. It depicts what I imagine was a big part of life in the 90s and 2000s. I swear sometimes, all of my professors had the exact same adolescence: one where dabbling in the world of punk rock and the pseudo-politics it spouts was the height of cool.
The Ask by Sam Lipsyte– Is a novel about that time in your life when you have accepted that you will never be a great artist, despite it being what you worked toward in college and believed with every fiber of your being. Somewhat of a have and have-not story that takes a look at a crumbling marriage and the disappointments of life.
The Wildest Sun by Asha Lemmie– As you all should know, Asha is my friend from Columbia, making me super biased in my review of her sophomore novel. This book made me want to read Hemingway. It also made me want to travel to Cuba. And Paris. Anyone who reads this book will know what I’m talking about, as it is a love letter to all of the above. It is a story about a woman plotting her own course through life and has a satisfying, rewarding ending for the protagonist in which she gets her cake and eats it too.
Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls by Nina Renata Aron– This book, with its slightly clickbaity name, is actually a memoir about “women, addiction, and love” by its own description. It looks at what it means to have a partner and a family member who is an addict, the angle of which is the gendered expectation of women and girls as caregivers, priming them to be codependent. By comparing her devotion to her drug addict partner, she highlights the intersection of codependency and addiction, as she struggles to stop enabling her boyfriend’s behavior.
The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth– I don’t mind work that is deeply offensive when it is in the service of making a broader point. This novel, in which a man fantasizes that the hot woman working in the house that he is staying in is actually Anne Frank after she faked her own death, falls into the category of offensive-but-for-the-sake-of-a-good-story. It isn’t just there to make people squirm. What is the point he’s trying to make, you ask? Read it and decide for yourself.
That Time of Year by Marie N’Diaye– similar to The Castle by Kafka in the way that the story’s meandering flow makes you realize that the protagonist isn’t going to get where they need to go and neither are you, as the reader.
Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns– This novel was read for my “Elastic Realities” class, in which I had to read about the vastly different worlds we all live in. This book was no exception. Please read and let me know what you think happened to the grandmother. I have my theory.
The Ravickians by Renee Gladman–all about language and architecture and society. This book doesn’t just do world building; it is world building.
The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante– I need friends who have read this book so that I can discuss the ending with them. What was up with the ending? (not that I dislike it)
Bad Cree by Jessica Johns– If you don’t enjoy dream sequences in novels then don’t read this book. It is chock full of them. A young Cree woman wakes up with the severed head of a bird in her hand after waking up from a terrifying dream. Her dreams continue and in order to make them stop, she needs to confront her past family trauma.
Luster by Raven Leilani– I love a good messy woman story. Edi, a self-proclaimed “office slut,” embarks on an affair with her coworker in an open marriage and finds herself in the unique position to help raise his adoptive daughter who has no other Black influences in her life.
Duplex by Kathryn Davis– When reading this novel, it’s hard to find your footing. There’s an elusive narrator, an amorphous plot, and the fact that the novel never feels the need to explain itself. The novel’s robots, centaurs, fairies, and sorcerers are all treated with a “nothing to see here” attitude. On top of all of this, the novel has a strong American lilt, emphasizing the suburban setting, which lends itself to the title. This is not a skimmable book. If you zone out while reading and miss the wrong sentence, you will be lost at sea.
Elizabeth of East Hampton by Audrey Bellezza and Emily Harding–A modern day Pride & Prejudice. With sex. Lots of sex. It gets a lot of things right: the embarrassing family, Elizabeth Bennett’s confidence, Mary’s sanctimoniousness. The Pride. The Prejudice. It is extremely clever, taking place in the Hamptons.
Quietly Hostile by Samantha Irby– In this essay collection, Irby dissects the intricacies of porn, gives forensic detail analysis to the show Sex and the City, discusses the trials and tribulations of being a dog mom to an unruly dog, exposes the lack of bladder control as you approach middle age, and takes a look at overly-elaborate lingerie, all with a no-holds barred attitude. She is unyielding in her frankness. This is the first book I have ever read that made me have to pee. Do with that what you will.
Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls–A story about profound loneliness. A woman falls in love with a sea monster in what was clearly the basis for the film The Shape of Water. Oddly, this novel reminded me of Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell, in the way that it shows the unfulfilling life of a housewife, albeit in the most interesting way possible.
Love by Hanne Ørstavik– This book, with its extremely ambitious title, is a Norwegian novel about a mother-son duo. It will make you feel cold in 90 degree weather as the author describes the Norwegian winter. This novel was depressing.
Henry and June by Anais Nin–“A desire for orgies.” This comes up frequently in this memoir, which is a diary of the year that author Anais Nin spent having an affair with Henry Miller and his wife June. There is much about being a writer, being a woman, and exploring your sexuality.
Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me by Adrienne Brodeur– Having finished this book on December 30th, I was able to get it in under the wire as my final book of 2024. Brodeur was right about one thing; her relationship with her mother was “wild.” It is hard to conceive of a mother as self-absorbed as the narrator’s, as she unwittingly drags her 14 year old daughter into her extramarital affair with her husband’s best friend, making her daughter a co-conspirator in all of her life’s problems.
Usually when it’s beginning to look like Christmas, this fact brings joy. Instead, once you’re an adult– and you’re no longer waiting up at night to try and get a peek at Santa– Christmas becomes more about your dwindling bank account and the family members you still haven’t bought any gifts for.
Cats break beloved Christmas tree ornaments. Every song on the radio is either a Christmas carol from the fifties that you’ve heard a thousand times before with dated lyrics like “take a look in the five and ten” and “children will listen” or a modern pop monstrosity that is basically Silent Night with a beat behind it.
The instinct to just get through the season takes over.
The moment that it’s time to buy something for my family members, they suddenly become humble beggars who couldn’t possibly ask for anything, giving me no clue as to what I should buy them for Christmas.
In the days leading up to Christmas, I want to be cocooned in a warm house, tripping over presents in my living room and drinking out of a highball.
Instead I find myself rushing to finish work before the year ends, putting together last minute holiday cards, sniffling through a head cold, ugly crying at It’s A Wonderful Life and The Family Stone, and then wondering how I’ll ever pay down my credit card once the holidays end. I’m like a woman in a Hallmark film who needs to be taught “the reason for the season” by a guy in a flannel shirt in my hometown.
Then Christmas day comes and the whole thing is like a pregnancy: you forget about all of the agony that came with bringing it to fruition and the whole thing suddenly is a beautiful, life-affirming experience you would do all over again.
For me, it’s not Christmas until Linus explains the true meaning of Christmas to me. There’s nothing like a kids Christmas special that tackles seasonal depression and commercialism, like the Charlie Brown Christmas Special does. Even if you don’t think that that is the true meaning of Christmas, I always love at the end when Linus says “peace, goodwill towards men.”
Happy holidays to this queen who insisted on getting in my selfie
In all seriousness though, I love Christmas time and I love my family, who always make it special. I sat on my couch on Christmas morning, hemmed in by a bunch of really great gifts, because I am not a humble beggar who has any problem asking for what she wants.
So happy holidays. I hope you have peace, and goodwill towards men (and women and those outside the binary).
The Tragic Queen,
Raquel
P.S.: Check out how I kicked off the holiday season, when I went to go and see my first ever burlesque show.
The Tragic Queen 