literary treatment prescribed by writers and lovers

it feels gluttonous, all that time and reading and life ahead

telling my mom about barbenheimer and architectural digest and the current editor-in-chief of the cut lindsay peoples—all tangents that somehow, someway found a connecting thread along the lines—led to her own spiel of dream houses and scenarios of what success she imagines for each of her children’s talents.

she has moodboards for all sorts of things, and she keeps them organized in separate tabs and folders on her work laptop. it’s definitely a system. i think she would love pinterest. she wants a big family home. somewhere for all of us to live in so everybody has their own room and we have a wooden oven and pool and miniature house in the backyard for my baby sister. zara’s house.

there, we’d become the type of family that buys a new christmas tree every year. fresh from the earth, not a hint of plastic on the leaves. there, we’d make pizza and pasta from scratch and eat it together after passing the game room and the theater room and the floor to ceiling glass window leading to the pool and outdoor fire to make smores afterwards as a treat. there, we wouldn’t just come home for the holidays, but have a permanent place to stay as adults, as we look for jobs, as we complete whatever’s next on her to-do list of expectations.

i told her that while it’s nice to come home to her, i need other spaces to call home too. i need to leave behind small pieces of myself in temporary places and alternative lives.

because i have a home in all the houses i moved to, and a home in the pop culture updates nella and i text each other, and a home in aisha’s platonic drug chainmail best day wishes, and a home in jaelle’s definitions of weird which should definitely include herself, and a home under asia’s bed so i can watch her sew and play zelda, and a home in reem’s soft-sturdy couch even though i’m allergic to her cat, and a home in fai’s childhood walls where her dad calls me bri family bri.

i need to exchange the self i leave behind with fragments of memories and people from these temporary places. wanting this is parallel to being human. because i want to be needy and longing and desperate to live—what else would i be able to write about if i don’t?

my mother’s children have an inevitable desire to move away in pursuit of our niches. without that urge, and without our travels (and her sense of knowing that this specific canon was bound to happen), we wouldn’t find the self that comes with having more homes than one. this isn’t to say that i don’t feel chained to that home, to the one my mother resides, but that’s an eldest daughter of an immigrant household canon that can be dissected another day.

my older sibling moved to oklahoma for music school, me to georgia for art school, and my little brother is pretty set on making the trek up to new york for culinary school. leaving the state we call our second home in search of a third has become our coming-of-age canon. and much like these genres of finding ourselves and genres within literature—there is a genre of a writer experiencing what it is to write, and in turn, what to write about.

the literary canon: love, sex, drugs, and the meaning of life.

“but i can’t go out with a guy who’s written eleven and half pages in three years. that kind of thing is contagious.”
― lily king, writers & lovers

king then goes on to wax sentiment (as opposed to poetry) about the particular intimacy that comes with loving a book with someone. quite frankly, i don’t like sharing my favorite books. not to just anyone. i have a ‘currently reading’ answer for friends that know about my genre and another answer prepared for the friends that don’t. not because i think my favorite books are bad or i’m trying to gatekeep or anything else. i just think people won’t get it like i do. it’s an acquired taste thing. i can’t even explain the plot or why i love it or what makes it so lovely or literary. don’t ask me to. the authors themselves personally wrote the books for me—this they confirm in their own acknowledgments in the last binding pages—and sent me a custom-made spotify playlist to enhance my reading experience. we are not the same and i’m still a liar!

there’s books i like enough to recommend to everybody (if we were villians) and books i love in a deranged kind of way that i can already tell would not be everyone’s cup of tea (the spear cuts through the water). i want to share things that are good and fun and engaging and critical and—

when it comes to books in general, for recommendation’s sake, that just might be one of my favorite past times in the world. starting (and never finishing) many books counts as a love language, right? i’m still in the love plot of my literary canon, after all.

even more than that, i think i just like to talk about books, if that wasn’t obvious.

during a short stay in the state upstairs, i went to barnes and noble with fai, a single mission on my mind: hold and feel and push the recommendation i had ready for her in my head. we were going to be surrounded by books. i was going to make my routine rounds: touch every cover i recognize, judge the shit curated collection at the booktok table, and talk extensively about the publishing drama that preceded a book finding its spot on the shelf.

fai indulged me happily. it was quite literally my turn to be the she in she talks, i listen. the thing is, fai and i have very different reading tastes. i think it’s one of the complimenting, yet still contrasting things about us. grumpy vs sunshine. star girl vs moon girl. melody and kuromi. she reads about pirates and i read tragedies. i think that makes us both lover girls. because after making my b&n touches, i immediately zero’d in on the one book i had been wanting to show her over and over and over again. (it was the adventures of amina al-sirafi).

i point out a book, talk about it at length, then hand the floor to fai so she can tell me everything about the designs. what she loves, what she hates, what she would change. we sit against the shelves and flip through the pages. we imagine us at a publishing house. how my taste for prose would influence the metaphors i make and marketing strategies i employ. how her designs would make publishers throw money and pearls and free merch at her. we’re so copywriter and art director dream team.

it’s a great love, to find the thing that makes you want to talk, to share, to—is it redundant to say love? but writing requires living and loving, and i won’t be the youngest kind of adult for long. so all the white lies i use in the opening paragraphs of articles, my promising yet reluctant career in creative nonfiction, every book i have finished and started and dnf’ed—they have little to do with the moment and everything to do with turning all my bees into honey. or whatever lily king said.