A recommended list of books I own and read
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden by Joanne Greenberg
Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
The Silver Star by Jeannette Walls
Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs
Just Kids by Patti Smith
Fatal Flowers by Rosemary Daniell
Suicide Blonde by Darcey Steinke
The Prince of Lost Places by Kathy Hepinstall
What Remains of Me by Alison Gaylin
Never Look Back by Alison Gaylin
If I Die Tonight by Alison Gaylin
Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
I Am the Only Running Footman by Martha Grimes
The Deer Leap by Martha Grimes
The Old Contemptibles By Martha Grimes
The Anodyne Necklace by Martha Grimes
Help the Poor Struggler by Martha Grimes
And Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell
Watching You by Lisa Jewell
Invisible Girl by Lisa Jewell
The Truth about Melody Browne by Lisa Jewell
The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell
The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell
A Judgment in Stone by Ruth Rendell
A Demon in my View by Ruth Rendell
The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates
The Doll Master by Joyce Carol Oates
Night Gaunts by Joyce Carol Oates
The Female of the Species by Joyce Carol Oates
Pursuit by Joyce Carol Oates
High Lonesome by Joyce Carol Oates
I Know You Know by Gilly Macmillan
The Nanny by Gilly Macmillan
The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
Into the Water by Paula Hawkins
A Slow Fire Burning by Paula Hawkins
She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
White Oleander by Janet Fitch
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy
Over Tumbled Graves by Jess Walter
Dark Tales by Shirley Jackson
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
The Girl who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
Angels & Demons by Dan Brown
Lost Souls by Lisa Jackson
Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
All Around the Town by Mary Higgins Clark
Southern Cross by Patricia Cornwell
Dead Run by Erica Spindler
Carrie by Stephen King
The Shining by Stephen King
Bag of Bones by Stephen King
The Stand by Stephen King
The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty
The Right Hand of Evil by John Saul
A Season in Purgatory by Dominick Dunne
The Girl Before by J.P. Delaney
Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll
The Favorite Sister by Jessica Knoll
Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll
Dream Girl by Laura Lippman
Every Secret Thing by Laura Lippman
Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
A Place Called Freedom by Ken Follett
The Third Twin by Ken Follett
Vanish by Tess Gerritsen
Good Girls Lie by J.T. Ellison
When Shadows Fall by J.T. Ellison
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Villette by Charlotte Bronte
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
The Turn of the Screw & Daisy Miller by Henry James
The Good Girl by Mary Kubica
Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech
Crank by Ellen Hopkins
Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher
Go Ask Alice by Anonymous
The Gemma Doyle trilogy by Libba Bray
Coraline by Neil Gaiman
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins
Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews
Petals on the Wind by V.C. Andrews
Garden of Shadows by V.C. Andrews
My Sweet Audrina by by V.C. Andrews
The Cutler series by V.C. Andrews
The Logan series by V.C. Andrews
The Hudson series by V.C. Andrews
Ruby by V.C. Andrews
Pearl in the Mist by V.C. Andrews
The 9th Girl by Tami Hoag
The Elizas by Sara Shepard
The Lying Game by Sara Shepard
Wait for Me by Sara Shepard
Nowhere Like Home by Sara Shepard
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger
Anthem by Ayn Rand
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
A Spy in the House of Love by Anais Nin
Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
Summer by Edith Wharton
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell
Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Give Me Your Hand by Megan Abbott
The It Girl by Ruth Ware
In a Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth Ware
The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware
The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware
The Death of Mrs. Westaway by Ruth Ware
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
The Butterfly Girl by Rene Denfeld
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood
The Silent Wife by A.S.A. Harrison
Small Sacrifices by Ann Rule
If You Really Loved Me by Ann Rule
Green River, Running Red by Ann Rule
Every Breath You Take by Ann Rule
The Blooding by Joseph Wambaugh
Slenderman by Kathleen Hale
Breaking Blue by Timothy Egan
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
An Anonymous Girl by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen
You Are Not Alone by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen
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darcey and stacey and dove cameron
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about darcey and stacey--and dove cameron.
for anyone who doesn’t know (and that would probably be for the best), darcey and stacey silva are reality tv “stars” who currently have their own show on TLC. they had been trying to become store-brand kardashians for years. they filmed a pilot for a reality show called “the twin life” that was never picked up, founded a fashion brand, and languished in obscurity until darcey appeared on the first season of a 90 day fiance spin-off titled “90 day fiance: before the 90 days.” as the title would suggest, it was about couples who had not actually gone through with the k-1 visa process that would bring the foreign half to the united states. instead, it was about couples who were thinking about maybe possibly applying for a k-1 visa at some point in the future, with varying degrees of seriousness in their relationships. darcey was in a relationship with jesse, a dutch man 18 years her junior. she was one of the breakout stars of that show for her desperation to get married, her obvious plastic surgery, and her weepy histrionics. I believe in the second season we were fully introduced to her twin sister stacey, who was vaguely hinted at as being in a relationship with a younger foreigner as well. after darcey’s relationship with jesse ended in dramatic fashion, she stayed on the show with a new boyfriend, this one an english dude named tom who was only six years younger than her. the show also officially introduced stacey’s boyfriend and future husband, florian (who is 17 years younger than the twins). when TLC could no longer justify having darcey on a show about fiances without one of her own, they greenlit a spin-off aptly called “darcey and stacey” that would basically just continue their quest for (younger, european) love.
I’m not proud of watching reality shows. they are so often described as a “guilty pleasure,” and I think that phrase fits. I know how exploitative reality tv is, and yet, there is something satisfying about watching the people who agree to be on these shows because you can say to yourself, “I would never be this stupid. I would never act this way for so many people to see. things may be bad for me, but they could be worse!” when I watch anything from the ever-growing extended universe of the 90 day fiance franchise, I can feel that, while I may be working in a job that I hate, I could be coming across as the worst kind of crass american stereotype buffooning my way around a foreign country. but with “darcey and stacey” in particular, I feel this kind of mixture of superiority and pity on another level, because I think these two women exemplify so much of the problem with female socialization in this country.
the first thing that comes to mind while watching their show is the palpable desperation of the titular women--desperation to be famous, desperation to be sexy, desperation to be youthful and trendy and cool. all of the things which girls are taught from a young age to value. going on a reality show does not speak to a particularly healthy state of mind, particularly when the reality show is about dating. making something intimate and vulnerable into something public and exploitative is a fool’s errand. and to see how darcey in particular makes the same mistakes again and again, but constantly assures herself that this time it’ll be different, is pathetic. and I mean that in both the colloquial sense of it being cringeworthy and the older sense of it evoking pathos. I was struck by the irony in a recent episode where darcey was crying in her talking head about how she didn’t want to be like her mother. for context, her parents divorced when she and her sister were 11. her father, mike, remarried twice, to successively younger women, but neither of the marriages lasted. her mother, nancy, did not remarry at all, and presents as the polar opposite of her two daughters. nancy has aged naturally. she looks like a normal middle-aged woman. she wears bermuda shorts and puts her graying hair in a bun and doesn’t wear make-up. she doesn’t have a man in her life, but nothing about her behavior on the show (admittedly meager though it may be) suggests that she feels some kind of gnawing emptiness in her life. but to hear darcey talk, particularly in that talking head, her mother is deeply, agonizingly lonely, and darcey is terrified at the idea that she could end up, single and loveless, like her mother. except it really seems like darcey is just projecting. somehow, despite nancy’s seeming normality, darcey and her sister are obsessed with their looks. to the twins, being without a man beings being without value. for all their talk about empowered womanhood--and they bring it up constantly, almost to the point of parody--they are desperate for male approval. specifically, youthful male approval. it seems impossible for darcey to square the circle of her mother’s contentedness when darcey cannot handle being undesirable. and at the same time, her father’s singleness seems less upsetting to her; she did not weep in that talking head over his multiple failed marriages or his currently living as a bachelor. but to look at it from her logic, it is his right, I suppose, as the bestower of value not to see anyone worthy of that gift; but for nancy, a woman, to seemingly find value in her self, is a paradox that darcey’s mind can’t handle.
this talking head that struck me in such a particular way stemmed from a storyline on this newest season about darcey going to see a matchmaker. see, when this show started, darcey of course started dating another younger european guy--georgi, a bulgarian masseuse. that relationship spanned the first three seasons of the show, with darcey ultimately ending their engagement at the end of the third season. and this was a big to-do because she and stacey were supposed to have a big twin wedding extravaganza (even though stacey and florian had already gotten married during the height of the covid pandemic), and then darcey was no longer engaged, but stacey still wanted to go ahead with a big vow renewal for herself and florian. the twins, whether because it gives good drama or because it’s their genuine dynamic (or both), are constantly competing with each other, and the fact that stacey is married while darcey is not is a point of contention. if darcey cannot define herself as being identical to her sister because she’s not married, and if she cannot define herself as desirable to a man because she’s not married, then what is left to her? enter the matchmaker. but from the start, the matchmaking experiment was doomed to failure. the pictures darcey sent to the matchmaker were filtered within an inch of their life. it’s hard to build a dating profile when your pictures are so obviously edited. then, of course, darcey sought younger guys, even though the matchmaker pointed out that she had had no success so far with having a lasting relationship with a younger man. the matchmaker attempted to match darcey with someone around the same age (late 40s), only for the relationship to sputter after a couple of awkward dates during which darcey was constantly trying to signal her “sexy empowered womanhood.” it was as it became clear to darcey that this guy didn’t want anything to do with her that she gave that talking head about her mother. and funnily enough, if anything, she should be more worried about being like her father, given that they have both had multiple failed relationships with younger partners. but the real horror is her mother happily living alone. and even when the matchmaker pointed out that darcey, at 48, is acting immaturely and insincerely, that her shtick is at best tiresome and at worst pathetic, and that perhaps she needs to go to therapy, darcey refused to listen. and as a viewer, I could merely laugh at her. but I also want to reach through the screen and shake her, tell her, “you are a grown woman, not a teenage girl! grow up, develop some self-respect, stop worrying about what men think, get a vibrator, read a book! look to your mother as an example, not a warning” I feel like choice feminism and the conflation of empowerment with sexual desirability and all the other brain rot that gets funneled into girls from birth has dealt irrevocable damage to these women, and it continues to damage others as we speak. the brainless bimbo thing isn’t cool, nor is it feminist, nor is it fair. because the problem escalates to generalizing all or most women as being like this. the world tells girls to act this way out of one side of its mouth, then scorns them for being oversexed and overwrought out of the other. it’s a finger trap, and those caught in it need to realize it, for the sake of themselves and the sake of others.
and I have only touched on the plastic surgery addiction. I mean, the biggest storyline of the third season was their trip to turkey to get basically full body plastic surgery. they’ve already had so much plastic surgery as to make them virtually unrecognizable, and they still had to get more--to get “snatched,” as they termed it. and it looks horrible. they look swollen, stretched, strained. their breasts look both painful and comical as they swallow the entire torso. the filler in their cheeks and lips gives them a permanent duck face. they do not look beautiful. they almost do’t look human. and you don’t want to be that kind of person who springs to criticizing someone’s looks, but it is ludicrous to me to pretend like the way they look now is an improvement over the way they looked before all of the surgery. the emperor has no clothes. these over-the-top surgically modified faces and bodies look wrong, and our brains know that. and so often, what surgery has ruined, only surgery can fix. so sure, you may think that you are following the beauty trends by getting eye lifts and lip fillers and botox and breast implants. but when the insta baddie aesthetic goes out of style, and some other body type takes it place, what can you do but go under the knife again? and again for the next trend, and the next one? when do you realize that there isn’t a point to it anymore? when your nose has collapsed in on itself or you’ve lost feeling in your breasts? every effort to become more desirable only makes them more repellent. that they attract some men who are interested in their (father’s) money and reality show fame and the promise fo a woman who will do (almost) anything for love is not to their credit. to a well-adjusted person, they come across as grotesque--and given that they are on a channel that is like the modern equivalent of a freak show, whatever point they may think they’re proving to the “haters” is lost in the general disgust and ridicule they excite.
look, I know what it’s like to look in the mirror and hate what I see, and I suppose I’m lucky that some part of my brain recoils at the idea of, say, cutting into the flesh of my face, breaking my jaw, inserting some kind of plastic or filler, and then sewing it back up, even if I wish to god that I had been born with a stronger chin. I remember once lamenting the fact to my mother, who shared the same trait. really it’s a family trait from her side--round peasant face and weak chin. and she said that there were surgeries for that kind of thing, but that you couldn’t eat afterwards with some of them, because they might wire your jaw shut. and I think that idea horrified me so much because it reminded me of the pain I had felt with palate expanders and braces and wisdom tooth surgery. those, or at least the first two, had been cosmetic fixes to an extent. I got the orthodontics because I had a misalignment between my top and bottom teeth, and perhaps that would’ve caused a more serious problem down the line. the wisdom tooth surgery, though, had been necessary because I was in real pain as the wisdom teeth attempted to grow in. and afterwards, my jaw sore and tender, I had cried while trying to eat because it was agony and I was hungry. and to think that I would experience that again, except this time for reasons of sheer vanity. if I were only measuring success by marriage, then clearly weak chins had not stopped my mother or grandmother or great-grandmother or whoever else in my family from marrying. and then, too, I imagined the horror of it going wrong somehow, how much worse it would be to have disfigured yourself. and then, too, I imagined that even if it went well, what if I couldn’t recognize myself? my face was my face, the continuities obvious in the photos of my childhood. it was a face like other people in my family. it was the face I had been born with. in some ways, I think this is not a strictly healthy way for me to think either--god knows I have a tendency to hoard and a pathological aversion to change, but in this case, it’s a benefit. this is my face. this is my body. this is me. who would I be, if I changed all of that, if I threw that away when I could hardly bear to part with an old t-shirt? what worth was there in the face I had since birth?
which brings me to dove cameron. again, for anyone who doesn’t know, dove cameron is a disney tween star turned model/actress/singer/influencer. she’s best known for being the titular characters on the show “liv and maddie” (about twins, so it fits!) and one of the main characters in the “descendants” franchise. she also has a pretty clear case of severe body dysmorphia. if you google her, you’ll probably see stuff about the work she has had done, or you’ll be struck by the difference in pictures of her from a few years ago versus pictures of her now. apparently, even before she landed her roles on the disney channel, she was already getting plastic surgery to give her a more “hollywood” look. her mother actually wrote a book about how to turn your child into a “star,” with a heavy emphasis on achieving the most marketable look. so dove cameron probably went under the knife when she was a middle schooler--and then never stopped. most recently, she’s had buccal fat removal, which gives your cheeks a hollowed look. and there is something so annoying about people, especially women and girls, who will preface even the lightest criticism of her plastic surgery obsession with, “if this was her choice, I wouldn’t care! it’s her body, it’s her right, do it to make yourself feel good and sexy! if I had money, I’d do it too! but if you’re just following trends...” or “if you’re suffering from dysmorphia...” but what other reason is there for dove cameron’s plastic surgery if not to appear trendy, if not to fit the ever-shifting beauty standards, if not to make herself feel better by making herself feel consumable? what if “doing it for yourself” cannot be extricated from the wider culture in which you live? what was wrong with her face the way that it was, all the way back when she was a child? and then the counter is that everybody famous does it. well, isn’t it dystopic to think that every celebrity you see has had some kind of work, and every female celebrity especially must feel some kind of pressure to look beautiful? look at justine bateman, an actress who has recently had to defend her decision to...age. a natural process! and she has to defend a lack of action. I read internet comments that say they love the little enhancements a celebrity has gotten done, or they love the “face” they had when one plastic surgery trend was predominant. “oh, I wish kim kardashian would go back to her 2015 face, she never looked better.” am I crazy in feeling like we should only have one face? maybe I’m naive, but one face, untouched by an surgical attempts to enhance it, should be enough. imagine looking in the mirror and seeing the imprint of a surgeon staring back at you. or you see a thousand other people who have all gone under the same knife as you, and you have become like a car, only one in a line of identical models, value depreciating by the second. maybe in the end, the issue is that we think, because we may technically have the ability to “transcend” the material world, that we should as our right and our destiny. but I think an acceptance of both the possibilities of human ingenuity and the boundaries of human physicality would be more conducive to happiness. maybe the human body isn’t a problem to fix--certainly not if the idea of fixing it is just making it “sexier.”
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