It’s Pride Month!

Sara and Emilie both come from dysfunctional families and have both been running away from something. Sara from her home at 16 after someone close to her mysteriously died. Emilie, on the other hand, has been eschewing her Creole heritage in order to pass for white. Both also find themselves in popular L.A. restaurant Yerba Buena where they experience an intense and immediate chemistry. To fully realize whatever feelings could be there, though, they must first reckon with their pasts and heal their trauma.

Book club bonus: It can be easy to establish unhealthy patterns and get trapped in them, effectively making them a part of everyday life. In what surprising ways were Emilie and Sara’s lives influenced by their familial trauma?

This collection of stories celebrates queerness in all its fun, funny, dark, and complex glory. Amongst these stories is one about how a lesbian comic artist and her girlfriend decide to have a baby and get a few surprises along the way. Another follows a trans teen who has a big following on YouTube for sharing his views on things affecting queer people. Conklin’s writing is nuanced and tender enough to cover heavy topics like child abuse and s*xual assault without making the collection too trauma-centered.

Book club bonus: The blurb of this book mentions how Conklin includes an “experience that’s not typically represented: liminal or uncertain identities.” So much of human experience lies on a spectrum and many of us understand how nuanced and complex we can be. Why then, do you think we still tend to view things as either/or? Why don’t we look more at these liminal identities?

I mentioned this in the other newsletter I write, but wanted to mention this one here as well. I mean, the cover alone lives in my head. It pays no rent, no utilities, no nothing! In the book, Luli Wei is a Chinese American girl coming up during the golden age of Hollywood looking to make it big. When faced with the limited kinds of roles offered to Asian women, she’s the kind of girl who’s rather play a monster than a stereotype. And a monster she plays. Thing is, as she learns more about the darkness that goes on behind the scenes, she may end up more than just playing a monster to become successful. Vo casts her usual spell of dreamy prose and subtle magic in this historical novel.

Book club bonus: Do the ends justify the means? Do you think Luli’s actions were justified or even understandable when everything was said and done?

This is described as “part butch memoir, part ekphrastic travel diary,” so right off the bat, we can see it’s spicy in all the right ways. With this debut essay collection, poet and educator Gutiérrez reckons with physical space and how it influences, and is influenced, by art and love. Displacement across Mexico and the Southwestern region of the U.S. is mapped, just as Gutiérrez shows the etched stories across their own body. This reminds me a bit of Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz.

Book club bonus: As someone who grew up in the U.S., I feel like physical space isn’t something that gets tied to the things Gutiérrez ties it to. It’s interesting because so much of our culture is actually space-based— like property lines, state lines, gerrymandering, etc. What do you think of the role that space plays in different aspects of our lives and why do you think we don’t talk about it much?