Book review: The First Bad Man by Miranda July

To call this book, which is Miranda July's novelistic debut, an unpredictable roller-coaster would be a total understatement. I am fairly sure that I went through more emotions reading this book than possibly anything else I've ever read. During the first few chapters I felt weirded out and mildly confused, then very uncomfortable, then somewhat disgusted, then happy, and finally, at the end of the book, content. 

Cheryl is possibly the strangest character I have ever encountered in a book. To me, it's absolutely wonderful to encounter a very strange female character in a novel, as usually highly-developed or off-the-wall characters are male. I found it immensely refreshing to find a character who is bizarre, a total control freak, and FEMALE. Her voice is at first unsettling and hard to get used to, but eventually I came to love Cheryl and actually found myself identifying with her on some levels. 

We follow Cheryl on her day-to-day journeys in her mundane life as a manager at a company that makes self-defense DVDs. It's clear from the outset that Cheryl is sexually repressed and obsessive-compulsive. In particular, she is obsessed with a man she works with. However, this obsession is partially derailed when her boss's 20-year-old daughter is forced upon her and takes over her home. Clee is another unconventional female character, but even less of a breath of fresh air than Cheryl is. Clee is disgusting, has a foot odour problem, and is unemployed until she finds a crappy job at a supermarket. Clee causes Cheryl's life to spin madly out of control in the most unpredictable ways imaginable; and so the roller-coaster begins. Cheryl's OCD is triggered to the extreme by Clee's vulgarity and nonchalance. Despite being polar opposites, Clee and Cheryl find a bizarre middle ground in role-playing fights from the self-defense DVDs, and the story only gets weirder and more unpredictable from there. 

However, despite the initially unpalatable characters and plot, July's writing is meticulous, and every piece of the puzzle finds its place in the end. This book is hard to get into at first, but if you stick with it, you won't regret it. Four stars out of five.

Book review: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Publication date: 19 June, 2014

You might remember Donna Tartt from such masterpieces as The Secret History and The Little Friend. If you do, you are in for both a treat and a surprise. The Goldfinch is another masterpiece, but is written in a style quite different from her previous novels.

The Goldfinch spans the life of Theodore Decker. When the novel begins, Theodore is 13 and his mother is killed in a “terrorist attack” on a museum in New York. Theodore is one of the only survivors, but he complicates matters further for himself when he is convinced by a dying man to steal a painting – his mother's favourite. It is The Goldfinch by Fabritius, and it will haunt him forever as he risks life and limb to protect it. The novel focuses not only on Theodore's life but also the art and antique world.

After his mother's death, and Social Services' attempts to find his father go unanswered, Theodore is left with the wealthy family of a friend. Although he is grieving deeply for his mother, he has stability and is able to follow through on the dying man's wish for him to visit his business partner, Hobie. He also finds Pippa there, another survivor of the attack on the museum. Theodore falls for her but Pippa is soon sent to Texas to live with her aunt.

Eventually, Theodore's deadbeat father comes to claim him, replete with trashy, coke-snorting girlfriend. Although his friend's family had been about to adopt him legally, Theo is whisked off to Vegas and his life spins out of control. He makes one friend, Boris, and the pair binge on drugs and alcohol instead of going to school until Theodore's life takes another twist, and eventually he is hurled into the world of art crime.

Tartt crafts the narrative in such a way that every aspect, every event of Theo's life has immense repercussions later. Her language is rich, descriptive and immersive, and the novel is hard to put down as you are sucked in to Theo's hectic world.

You know, I really hate it when partners say, "I'm not responsible for your happiness."

Actually, you fucking are. Part of committing to a relationship is committing to making the other person as happy as you possibly can and if the other person isn't a dick, they'll do the same for you. I thought that was the whole fucking point of a relationship?!

Anything less is a cop out.

Idk. Maybe I'm just an idealist, and maybe boys are just assholes.

Book Review: Girl In A Band by Kim Gordon

Sonic Youth is one of my top three bands of all time, and Kim Gordon has been one of my heroes and role models since I was a teenager so needless to say, I was ecstatic when I found out she was publishing a memoir.


I was pleased to find that Girl In A Band is much more than a memoir. It's Kim's cry of independence from Thurston Moore, her ex-husband (and bit of a "fuck you" to him too); it's her saying I'm MORE than a girl in a band. Kim is an artist, a feminist, a musician, a writer, an actress and a mother.


Her style of writing is articulate, clear, frank, honest and easy to follow.


The book begins with her childhood and teenage years growing up in California with her father, emotionally distant mother and schizophrenic, bullying brother, which is in many ways the most fascinating part of the book. Kim explains that her relationship with her brother framed who she would become as a woman, a feminist and girlfriend. One of my favourite quotes of hers from the book is about how women innately feel the need to please, to be good, and how her family life really pushed that on her because of her brother.


From the outside, Kim's life may seem charmed, but learning about her brother, Keller, and her family life, you realise the opposite is true. I also hugely empathised with her when she spoke about how hard it was to be a hypersensitive person who had to constantly quash her own emotions, lest she be bullied by her brother just for having them. She explains that this is why, to many people, she comes across as "cold" or "emotionless".


Once Kim gets to the part where she moves to New York, the book moves at a much faster pace as she explains the people she meets that eventually lead her to Thurston and forming Sonic Youth. She says that she finds it hard to write about New York, because "it's hard to write about a love story when you have a broken heart", and it shows. You can see that she finds it easier to discuss her relationship with Thurston through music, so she writes each successive chapter about her favourite songs off each album Sonic Youth made. This style of writing also emphasises Kim's desire to be independent, to be viewed as herself and not just half of the ultimate rock 'n' roll dream couple.


Another one of my favourite moments was when Kim talked about Karen Carpenter. Kim, and Sonic Youth in general, have always had a fascination with Karen, and so have I, so it was great to find out exactly why Kim and the band wrote so many songs about her and covered 'Superstar'. Kim's words about how the music industry and Karen's family destroyed her are really touching and truthful about how horribly sexist the music industry is, and again comes back to Kim's earlier words about women's innate and all-consuming desire to please.


Towards the end of the book, Kim goes into more detail about Thurston's affair and how she found out about it, but she is tasteful and not hateful, never mentioning the woman's name. Kim's strength in this situation is pretty incredible - imagine a 30-year relationship with the father of your only child suddenly ending in an affair. I know I'd have a complete and utter breakdown, and maybe Kim did, but she's never appeared anything other than perfectly composed and a pillar of strength.


Even if you're not a Sonic Youth fan, you will be a Kim Gordon fan after reading this book. My only complaint about it is that it wasn't longer and more in depth, but you can tell that the book is exactly as Kim wanted it to be, it's exactly what she wanted to put out into the world, and it's great. Five stars.

Guess who's having a good morning!

Book Review: So Brilliantly Clever by Peter Graham

“Why could Mother not die? Dozens of people are dying all the time, thousands, so why not Mother?”

These chilling and immortal words of Pauline Parker at age 15 are merely the tip of the iceberg of Peter Graham's investigation into what many people consider to be the most disturbing crime ever committed in New Zealand's history. The murder of Honorah Parker in 1954 has been a constant source of fascination both nationally and internationally and Graham tells the story in great and thorough detail.

Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme seemed like normal 15-year-old girls growing up in 1950s Christchurch, which is why the apparently cold-blooded murder of Pauline's mother seemed so shocking to the entire world. However, Graham's intense and thorough study of the two girls reveals that they both suffered life-threatening illnesses and deeply lonely childhoods as a result. Graham paints such a thorough portrait of what their lives were like that it could almost be easy to see that their disturbed minds were merely a result of their childhoods and the incredibly repressive society they were growing up in, and therefore feel a little sympathy – not for the murder, but the circumstances leading to their state of mind – and it did indeed appear that their minds were one and the same.

Pauline and Juliet's childhoods were almost mirror images of each other. Pauline in hospital alone with a bone disease, Juliet sent off to the Bahamas and the Bay of Islands with life-threatening lung infections. Both suffered loneliness and lost the ability to play and interact with others as normal children would. So naturally, when they met, they had a lot to relate to each other about, and thus began a union that they were completely and utterly desperate not to have broken.

Graham covers the girls' entire lives, and through Pauline's journal entries and testimonies from people who knew them, is able to truly capture how their friendship developed and became more and more intense. Graham explores a number of reasons for their psychosis – they certainly were mentally unwell at the time of the murder, although the courts disagreed – so the reader is able to finish the book having made their own conclusions about what was at the core of the girls' motivation to murder Pauline's mother.

Graham also describes what Pauline and Juliet are like now, and reveals that it actually wasn't a condition of their release that they never meet again – they have apparently just chosen not to. Each are desperate to put their terrible crime and past lives behind them; as desperate as they once were to not be separated. Juliet Hulme is now Anne Perry, a bestselling crime author, and Pauline Parker is now Hilary Nathan, living alone on a remote island off the coast of Scotland.

Peter Graham has clearly done his research in creating this book, and it shows. The book ends with what happened to Pauline and Juliet's families and the lawyers involved in the case, showing how deeply the murder shook New Zealand and how everyone involved struggled to go on afterwards.

Sixty years on and Pauline and Juliet's crime is still an endless source of fascination to people. This book certainly provides a deep insight into their lives, their motivations and what it was like to be a girl in 1950s Christchurch, dealing with class struggles, loneliness, parental neglect, the culmination of these pressures and the chilling and sad aftermath.