what's your favorite summer book?

Zhang Enli, The Wires (3), 2015

In Los Angeles, gardenias. In the Bay, bougainvillea and hydrangeas. Summer in San Francisco feels like the center of the world. I associate June with drain flies, coconut-scented sunscreen, tan lines from my sports bra. War and Peace is a winter book; Bonjour Tristesse and The Ravishing of Lol Stein are summer books. I noticed recently that I don’t care about Freud anymore and I no longer obsessively reread Annie Ernaux, Graham Greene, Flaubert. For many years, I would chew through bildungsromans before bed; now I exclusively read shitty fantasy. How I expect books to help me has changed. I used to hope they would explain the vagaries of my emotional life, assure me my appetites were understandable if not typical. I no longer require the same reassurance. More and more I sense that ageing is a process of gradual simplification. I am no longer bothered by complexity, and more and more I’m barely intrigued by it. What interests me is nature, physicality, how one person can move or change another. In other words: summer books.

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I follow experiences all the way to the end. I can work on the same thing for a very long time. It’s not simple for me to find something that’s a good fit, but I experience compatibility as easy, immediate and seductive. I take things hard but I bear them easily. At my best I’m amused by everything. Amusement, I see it, is the ultimate gesture of gratitude: to take something seriously is also to believe it can be seriously funny and fun.

Six years ago, I started writing consistently. I take writing seriously, but it has been both funny and fun. Part of that fun includes prolonged moments of extreme despair and hopelessness. Writing makes me feel free and often it makes me feel incredibly stuck. For me, a creative life means that there’s always something that I’m evading and something I’m running towards. It requires gradually building up my tolerance for intensity, disappointment, and repetition. It’s made me more interested in pain, and more sensitive to joy. I’ve tried to treat it as a marathon: it’s more important to keep going than to run fast.

I’m in love with writing still. More and more, all the time. It is what I hoped it would be.

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In sixth grade, over summer break, I attempted to read the classics. I’ve spent every summer since more or less the same way. Other summer books: Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, Mating by Norman Rush, Herzog by Saul Bellow, Inseparable by Simone de Beauvoir, the Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante, Blue Skies, No Candy by Gael Greene, Anais Nin’s diaries. Summer books have a heat to them.

Each year, summer feels like starting over. I go to a new country and for around eight days feel like I could be anyone I want. Then I think, like clockwork: I want to go back to my house in San Francisco and be myself. Eat a popsicle, call my mom, give my dogs a belly rub.

The more I write, the more I feel that it takes me home. My preoccupations change, but my obsessions run deep. I am drawn to similar stories about similar girls. There’s always a party on a warm evening and there’s always a boy, and the face of the boy is always a little haphazard, because his face is a representation of our narrator’s hopes and dreams. It’s a repository for memory and emotion. Love is when we assign irrational amounts of meaning to someone based on how fast they speak, the way they look at us, the color of their eyes. Like all deep magic, it’s so simple and dumb it has no choice but to be profound.

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I miss summer in Utah, hot and green, the mountains craggy against the sky. Summer in Vancouver, taking acid in Stanley Park, last month’s rain like a distant dream. In Shenzhen, it rains sometimes in the summer, and the rain that runs down the back of your neck is warm. In Tokyo I read Timothy Williamson and walked until my feet were raw and drank a cocktail out of a tiny bathtub. This year I’d like to see some more Bernini sculptures. His masterpieces focused on moments of extreme narrative tension: Pluto grabbing Persephone as she cries, Apollo catching hold of Daphne just as her skin turns into bark. I guess you could say they are summer stories.