September Recap: Books, Movies, the Demi Moore of It All
September was the longest month
Good morning from Houston everyone (it is somehow supposed to be 89 degrees here today so, also: HAPPY FALL). September went on F O R E V E R - I look back on September 5th and it feels like I was a girl of 34 back then, that’s how long a go it feels.
I fell a little bit off the newsletter wagon (being in meetings on zoom on average of 7.3 hours a day will make you not want to look at a laptop screen for fun) but my promise to myself and you is that all that will get better this month.
October 5th is also the 3rd anniversary of my Dad passing away (which feels equally extremely recent and something that happened to a whole other person) and so it feels only fitting to talk about books and movies (and art in general) this weekend - it was his favorite, just like mine. So, after the usual recap, make sure to make it to the bottom for a few things that he’d say you should pay attention to if he was writing this.
Anyway, before I start crying onto my keyboard (too late), here goes:
BOOKS:
I did somehow manage to read 7 books (well, 6.5) this month which feels like A MIRACLE - but there was train travel, and waiting in Dr.’s waiting rooms (the aftermath of an annual physical in your 40s is very different than in your 20s - there is A LOT of follow up visits), so lets take the wins where we can get them
Thrillers first, always:
Look In The Mirror - Catherine Steadman - I have somehow managed to read every single Catherine Steadman book since her break-through “Something in the Water”. She writes THRILLERS - not mysteries per se, just thrillers - all featuring a plucky-if-sensible heroine thrust into a weird game of sorts by a (usually familial) male, always set in a very specific georgraphic setting (the Carribbean, the shores of Dover, Hollywood, a stately Mansion in New England, and now a trick-house in BVI). I love how competent she is, and how human her characters are, and how not afraid to break structural norms of thrillers she is - and while this one isn’t my fav (I think it is still “Mr Nobody”) but still a nasty little puzzle to play with over a weekend (but maybe not inside of a minimalist AiRBNB in a warm locale)
Middle Of The Night - Riley Seger - I also read all of Riley Seger’s books, and truly - I don’t know why half the time. The best way to describe them is: great hooks, medium executions, and the hooks are always such that you can imagine Grady Hendrix, for example, doing an infinitely warpier, funner job with it (their respective Final Girls themed books a very simple apples to apples comparison here). This one is kind of a Stephen King / Goosebumps lite - about a boy who goes missing while on an outdoor sleepover at his best friend’s house next door. Three decades later, the best friend is back in the house and the mystery remains. I actually enjoyed this a little more than Seger’s usual books (references range from Burbs to Stand By Me to Dark Half etc, and I love getting references) but still didn’t *quite* stick the landing. I am sure it was/is a huge best seller though.
Two that are sort of thrillers, but really literary mini masterpieces:
Death At The Sign Of The Rook - Kate Atkinson - Kate Atkinson is back with her perfect detective Jackson Brody (now solidly on the wrong side of 60s) and his sidekick Reggie Chase (now a semi-miserable detective in the “real police”) and while this is a mystery in all the classic ways (fancy paintings get stolen, there’s a murdery mystery party at an ancient house promising its guests a “Downton experience”), Atkinson is one of the world’s greatest novelists (“Life After Life” was deservedly on the NYT Best 100 Books Of The Century list at a very respectable slot 51 ) so the writing is wry, the observations are dipped in poison, the characted development takes time in the most luxurious manner, but the pages keep steadily turning till you land at the end and are suddenly struck what a bravura performance you just witnessed. If you have not read any Jackson Brodie books yet, start with “Case Histories”, which is a true detective fiction benchmark - dark and clever and deeply human (and was turned into a TV show of the same name w/ Jason Isaac - currently streaming on Peacock). If you have - this should feel like Christmas in October.
Ordinary Human Failings - Megan Nolan - A slender little fever dream of a novel which involved me truly getting incredibly sad and angry and loving it. The setting: a not-very-well-to-do London neighorhood sometime in the early 1990s. The situation: a baby is dead and everyone think a tiny, ferocious 10 year old, belonging to a ragtag Irish clan that mostly keeps to themselves did it. A desperate journalist takes the family into a hotel to hide while the child is being questioned, plying them with liquor and promises of actually being listened to, and the story that emerges is not at all what you think, but a series of circumstances so deeply everyday they almost don’t feel book-worthy. But it is. I loved this deeply, everyone should read it, can’t wait for what Nolan does next.
And of course - standard issue literary fiction:
Exit West - Mohsin Hamid - I am trying to read at least one of the NY Times 100 Best of The Century every month till further notice, and this almost-magical realism novel (la?) - which came in at $75 was this month’s winner. Two young people fall in love in a country on the bring of a devastating civil war. They use a series of portals (stick with it) to find themselves elsewhere, but their true selves and their relationship still remain the focus. Lumious is not a word I use often when writing these mini reviews, but it is truly the only word that seems to do this book justice. I heard Riz Ahmed is working on an adaptation (produced by The Obamas), and I approve.
Tuesday Nights in 1980 - Molly Prentiss - I read this in NY while running around from meeting to meeting, and maybe it was the New-Yorkness of it all that made me just LOVE IT, BUT I LOVED IT. It was pure romance-with-a-city energy: kicking off with a NYE party in which 1970s become 1980s, we follow a group of artists, people who want to be art-adjacent, and the city itself as the new decade unravels before them. If you loved “Let The Great World Spin” but wish it was more about Basqiat and warehouse parties than prostitues and radical monks, this one is for you. The writing is ambitious and playful but somehow managed to not be annoying. One thing is for sure: I will be reading more Prentiss.
The Wedding People - Alison Espach - This is the one 1/2 book I read. It is a HUGE HIT (it certainly was all over substack in a very aggressive manner for a better part of summer) - but I didn’t like it at all? I appreciated the writing, and the Mrs. Dalloway core reference - but it was UNSPEAKABLY SAD. Just had to walk away after page 130.
Our Missing Hearts - Celeste Ng - I didn’t read this book this month, but it was my neighborhood book club pick, and with the next few weeks being what they will be - it feels timely to resurface it. “Everything I Never Told You” remains my absolute favorite Ng (and maybe one of my absolute favorites ever).
MOVIES / TV:
The movie and TV watching was more limited, but a few OTT stand-outs definitely lent themselves to what is to be known Ryan Murphy Land of Pre-Halloween Chaos.
The Substance is the big one. A glamorous, messy, self-referenital body horror it has nothing to do with Ryan Murphy, but he wishes he had. Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley - both gorgeous, game, and in-on-all-the-jokes play the flipsides of the same starlet who can spend 7 days as her younger self (as a result of using the mysterious “Substance”) as long as they stick by the rules and “remember they are one”. Needless to say, playing by the rules doesn’t come naturally to anyone involved, and the final result is a Brian De Palma (mysogyny and glamor) meets David Lynch (spiritually somehow in between Elephant Man and Mullholland Dr), with a sprinkling of “Sunset Boulevard” on top. It does all get a bit TOO TOO much, but it is a fun ride (we sat next to a gaggle of 70 something women who managed to trick themselves into going to see the new Demi Moore movie, and they drove past us in the parking lot afterwards yelling “DID YOU HATE IT? WE HATED IT” and but also giggling, so - that’s kind of all you need to know about this movie). I recommend it.
Then - I did watch the first few episodes of both “Grotesquerie” and “Monsters” (the ACTUAL Ryan Murphy offerings for the season) and they are everything that you’d expect them to be - fun, EXTREMELY uneven, exhibiting extreme gay male gaze (Nicholas Chavez reporting for duty across both with notable gameness), feature people like Niecey Nash and Chloe Sevigny, establishing camp street cred without even trying, and also, apparently Travis Kelce (have not seen any of his acting yet in Grotesquerie but definitely will do). Anyway, all in good, murder-y fun? Anything to take the mind of everything else going on?
Only Murders In The Building is back (and I somehow didn’t know about it until ep 3?) and maybe my favorite season so far? Right?
We also tried:
Bad Monkey (did quite stick), Wolfs (good but not great), Speak No Evil (the movie literally stopped playing half-way in the movie theatre, so I am excited to finish it - it was great up until that point) Golden Bachelorette (feels like it has some legs, though I find men as constestants in any Bachelor franchise deeply more boring than women as constestants) and are thrilled to get “Great British Bake-Off” underway and “Aparment 7A” is calling my name in a big way (Julia Garner! Diane Wiest! Broken Ballet Legs! Is there anything spookier than ballet, really?) :
PLUS, IF MY DAD WAS HERE, he’d suggest you stop wasting your energy on the new riff raff above and watch:
Robert Altman’s original M.A.S.H
Any Tarkovsky (Andrei Rublev especially)
and go read some Saramago
Whichever Legetic recommendation route you take - we hope you enjoy it. Anything I should be paying attention to that I am not?