Love notes from Siel is a newsletter about love, writing, and the nomad life from me, Siel.
Dear friend —
My reading habits changed when I became a nomad. At first I fell into a very go with the flow, the right book shall appear before me at the right time state of mind. Traveling across the U.S, I picked up random books from little free libraries. My reads were very hit or miss, but I did enjoy the sense of serendipity —
Once I started traveling internationally, I read books set in the countries I visited. The idea was that through the books I’d learn something about the place’s culture, history, and literary spirit! Thus I picked up Sexographies by Gabriela Wiener in Peru, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir’s Hotel Silence in Iceland —
This month though, I’m back in the U.S., and I’m using this time as an opportunity to catch up on what my American writer friends are writing and reading. Here are three books that made me feel:
Dear Nico: The Diary of Elizabeth Ellen (Nov, 2018-Feb,2020) by Elizabeth Ellen (Short Flight/Long Drive, 2022)
“Writing is really fucking stupid. It’s either like, here’s my stupid fucking life or it’s: here’s my same stupid fucking fantasy retold AGAIN in a slightly different version than before!”
In these raw diary entries, Elizabeth at one point mentions she has about 50 diehard fans who’ll buy and read any book she writes. I’m one of these 50 — which explains why I downloaded this digital book, published by Elizabeth’s own small press Short Flight/Long Drive, without even bothering to find out what it was about.
I had no idea who Nico when I started reading, but I soon found out: Nico’s a real guy with a Wikipedia page, in prison during the writing of these diaries for robbing a bunch of banks to finance his opioid addiction, developed after a stint in the army during which he was deployed to Iraq for a year and saw a lot of people get killed in gruesome ways —
While in jail, Nico published a novel — Cherry — based on these experiences. Elizabeth reads about Nico then reads Cherry — and is moved to begin an epic epistolary relationship with the author. In typical Elizabeth fashion, she quickly develops a romantic obsession with Nico, or rather, the idea of Nico, as the two have never met. She writes him letter after letter, most of which she doesn’t send, instead letting them accumulate into a sort of diary.
The writing is emotionally tumultuous and often melodramatic — even as nothing much is actually happening in Elizabeth’s real life, as she spends most of her time holed up in her home office, reading and writing. Yet so much happens while nothing is happening! There are the highs and lows of Elizabeth’s trying to navigate her literary aspirations, the relationship with her dismissive yet highly regarded New York agent, the growing emotional distance between Elizabeth and her then-husband, and of course, the anguished fluctuations of the epistolary relationship itself. This is Elizabeth at her rawest and campiest (“Woe is me!”). Pick it up for its unfiltered oversharing of what it is to live, write, and love.
Cherry by Nico Walker (Vintage, 2019)
After Elizabeth’s diaries, I of course had to pick up Nico’s work of autofiction. It was a page-turner. Though raised by nice, well-to-do parents, the protagonist grows up troubled and depressed, prone to getting high a lot, until eventually getting kicked out of college for failing to show up. Then on a sort of whim, he signs up for the army, gets sent to Iraq, and lives through some crazy violent nightmarish shit. Once he returns to the U.S., he ends up addicted to opiates and starts robbing banks to support his habit. He robs banks a lot. Weirdly, he just keeps not getting caught —
The story’s riveting, but what I really found fascinating was the acknowledgements section at the end, in which Nico details how the book came about: Matthew Johnson of indie press Tyrant Books read about Nico’s life on the internet, began a correspondence, and started sending Nico books to read, encouraging him to write. From there Matthew acted as a sort of cheerleader-writing coach-editor, nurturing Nico’s writing efforts for years and helping him hone his writing, bringing on other writers and editors to help with Nico’s novel until Nico basically has a team of people helping him out — until the manuscript, now in shipshape, gets picked up by Knopf. From there the book becomes a finalist for a Pen/Hemingway Award, gets made into a movie starring Tom Holland, etc. etc.
Now all this is a heartwarming story, but one that stands as a stark contrast to how little support and encouragement Elizabeth receives with her own writing, despite having written and published and contributed to the writing community for years. Elizabeth’s agent tells Elizabeth she stopped reading a draft part way through and won’t pick it up again until Elizabeth figures things out herself and does a big edit. The agent even tells Elizabeth she’s just “done” with a manuscript, she discourages Elizabeth from continuing to work on it and she also refuses to send it out to publishers.
Obviously Nico’s life story is very different from Elizabeth’s, but reading about their writing processes in tandem was a trip. One seems to fail up, thanks to ceaseless encouragement and attention despite not having much of a literary ambition to start, while the other struggles on mostly alone, getting dismissed and discouraged even by her own agent despite decades of sustained literary effort —
Time’s Mouth by Edan Lepucki (Counterpoint, 2023)
By coincidence, Edan’s latest novel has a character named Cherry, though her book is otherwise unrelated to the two above! Said Cherry grows up in a women’s commune of sorts, unschooled and hidden away from regular society, until she gets pregnant and runs away with a guy who was also raised at the commune but who managed to get a college education. They escape to L.A. — so if you have a nostalgia for 90s Los Angeles, you’ll love reading the descriptions of the city in this novel.
A big part of the novel, however, is time travel! I’m always impressed with how Edan tries something very new and different with each book while managing to set them all in California. Pick this one up for SoCal hippie vibes that’ll displace you in time and space.
Love,
Siel
P.S. Recommend a book in the comments!
Three links you might love
Elizabeth Ellen runs an irreverent literary site called Hobart, on which you can see some of my writing.
Here’s the original Buzzfeed article about Nico Walker that went viral
Edan Lepucki has writing tips on Italics Mine.
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