a book "review"

you already know

This newsletter contains talk of suicide and suicide loss. Please be soft and gentle with yourself.

Hey! You’re here. Thank you.

I’m going to tell you something that, if you read this newsletter at all, I think you already know. I don’t know how to write a book review. I’m not even fully convinced I know what a book review is. There are great minds in the literary criticism world and on the bookish internet who are constantly tackling this question and writing complex, smart, probing reviews. I am not one of those minds.

All I know how to do is tell you how a book made me feel.

That’s it.

Then, of course, I can try to investigate how an author made me feel this way and do I care and why does it matter and did the author intend that and on and on. These conversations are fun and fascinating, but what I care about most is that first, page-to-reader encounter. And it is an encounter. A meeting of my mind and the author’s words made possible through ink and paper and imagination and two tiny, churning brains.

I want to tell you about a book. I want to write a review so smart and scintillating it stops you in your tracks. I don’t know how to do that, though. All I can do is tell you how this book made me feel.

I guess this is a long way of saying there are more feelings than analysis ahead because let’s face it I don’t know any other way and I’m not totally convinced I know the difference between the two.

you already know

Three years ago, Ocean Vuong asked me to read an early draft of his new novel. Even as I type that sentence it doesn’t feel real. I lived it and it doesn’t feel real.

I showed Rebecca the message and her first response was, I think you’re being punked.

I am a bookseller at Ocean’s local bookstore here in Northampton, MA. He is generous enough to sign books through us and we ship his signed books to customers all over the world. I’ve had conversations with customers from Kansas to India who contact Broadside about ordering signed copies of Ocean’s books.

I always try to find a way to communicate that I’m just a fan too. Often there is a shared moment of understanding and awe over the crackly phone line. This is the impact of Ocean’s work. It makes people go silent on the phone with an absolute stranger because we are both at a complete loss how to articulate what it all means. So our little store acts as one small channel pushing Ocean’s work out into the world and I am, truly, just happy to be here.

happy to be here

Then October 2022, I found myself sitting on the couch, at dawn, in our old apartment, Rebecca and Yaya sleeping a room away (this was pre-Dunkin!), my hands shaking as I turned the pages of this new story.

It could end there. Already that could be enough. But what I found on the pages of that manuscript was more than I knew to imagine.

I’m not going to tell you what it is about. I’m not going to do that because by now you can look up summaries from the publisher, reviews on goodreads and storygraph etc etc…

But I don’t think you should. I turned the first page of The Emperor of Gladness knowing absolutely nothing of what lay ahead and it was the most profound reading experience of my life.

I do, though, want you to know that much of this book is about suicide. It begins with a young man on the edge of suicide. This is the foundation on which the novel is built.

I lost my big sister Anna to suicide when I was 13.

I am skeptical of suicide as a plot device or cog in the wheel of any narrative machinery.

When you’ve lost someone to suicide, as so many of us have, or experienced suicidality, as so many have, you can sniff out suicide as plot device in a second. I can tell when an author employs suicide in fiction to evoke a reaction in the reader - to use one of our great taboos to jolt the reader awake. This is not the case here. From the first page, every character in the world of this novel is treated with profound dignity, respect, and care. That is the difference.

I’m not comfortable speaking with authority on many things. That said, I read a lot of books (lol) and I can tell when an author loves their characters. I can tell when the characters are a means to an end and I can tell when characters are an end in themselves. Again, I don’t want you to know any more than you need to about this book, but be prepared to fall in love. Be prepared to hold these characters, these people, as carefully and as lovingly as their author so clearly does.

When my sister died I was reading Sandra Day O’Connor’s memoir, Lazy B.

I know that’s a strange thing to remember, but I can’t possibly forget it. I remember I was proud because it was a true, grown-up book and people might be impressed that me, a 13 year old, was reading it. My Dad said I would like it and, of course, he was right.

In the middle of reading that book, my world burned to the ground. I learned the hard way, as so many of us do, that this world’s capacity for suffering knows no ceiling or floor.

The agony of the loss was and still is beyond language. And yet I kept reading. In the days after Anna’s death, a loss I didn’t know was possible, I kept reading this dumb book about a little girl who grew up on a ranch and would grow up to be a Supreme Court Justice whose politics I would grow up to abhor.

But it wasn’t dumb. It was a story. My world had burned to the ground, but I could hold this book in my hand that somehow felt like evidence of other stories unfurling at the same time. I remember my Mom saying, I don’t understand how everyone is just walking around like everything is normal. To be honest, I still feel that way.

Books remind that, of course, most of us are pretending. Maybe on the outside we are filling up our cars with gas, and picking up dog shit, and paying our taxes, but on the inside we are scrambling to make sense of this world that burns without reason. I know this because I read. I know that I am not the only one. I know that the world has burned to dust over and over and somehow we keep going. Books, for me, are artifacts of the parts of us that keep going.

There is nothing smaller or bigger than that mysterious part of the human heart that keeps going.

The Emperor of Gladness is a novel about exactly this - people who keep going. People who are fucked up and forgotten and still, they keep going.

Since I was 13 and trying to read grown up books to impress my Dad (he is always impressed!), I’ve ready many more books that reflect this fucked up, unbearably cruel, impossibly beautiful world back to me.

I came home and cried in the car with my Mom after I realized in high school English class that The Catcher in the Rye is all about Holden Caulfield deciphering if it’s worth it to keep living.

I screamed into a pillow when Beth dies in Little Women and Jo must confront the reality that there was never anything she could do to save her sister.

I lost my breath when I read about Catherine Cho’s experience surviving postpartum psychosis in her stunning memoir, Inferno, which gave me one small window into what my sister Anna may have experienced.

I beamed for days reading about the love one woman can have for another in The Color Purple.

I lay on the ground and stared at the ceiling after reading about two boys fumbling through queer sex in a barn in rural New England, their natural desire and wonder as big as the whole world, in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

I sat on my couch, covered in dog hair, on a cold early October morning in 2022 and read a new, unpublished novel called The Emperor of Gladness. My coffee sat untouched beside me. I discovered new reasons to keep going.

Three years later and The Emperor of Gladness comes out next week and I’m still trying to find a way to explain what this book means to me. I don’t know that I will ever find the right words, but I know I will keep reading. I will keep going.

And one last thing:

My sister, Anna, would have loved this book. I know people do that when someone dies - try to bring them back by guessing what they would have thought of this world that’s unfolded without them.

I don’t know what Anna would have thought of this world. I know she is missing so much and nowhere near as much as we miss her. I know she would have loved this book. She would have loved Hai and Grazina and Sony and the HomeMarket crew. She would have snorted with laughter multiple times. Did I mention this book is funny? It’s funny.

She would have loved the story of how I came to read it. She would have laughed at my unbridled enthusiasm and earnestness. She would have been proud of me.

See what I mean? I don’t know how to write a book review. All I know how to do is tell you how I feel.

For as long as I live, I will remember reading The Emperor of Gladness for the first time. I will remember how it made me feel - like I want to keep going.

I love you.

I’m glad you’re here.

Love,

Rosamond