In Kiley Reid’s novels, there are no real heroes or villains, just people navigating the considerable pitfalls of life and slipping up along the way. Bad judgment, yes. Bad people? That’s a little simplistic for Reid.
“For the most part, I think people are trying,” Reid says via Zoom from Ann Arbor, Mich., where she’s lived since she began teaching writing at the University of Michigan in 2022. “Sometimes their attempts make them falter a lot, and I like to replicate that with my characters.”
The best part about being a successful painter, says Weyant, is still the opportunity to paint. Her friend and portrait subject, the writer Emma Cline, remembers being at a dinner party with the artist. “She kept slipping off to the bathroom to look at photos on her phone of a painting in progress—basically so she could continue ‘painting’ in her mind while still being at the dinner.”
But at this level, there is a risk that painting will take a backseat to other duties. She describes to me the period following her Gagosian solo debut, in late 2022. “All of life felt like work,” she says. “Parties and dinners and schmoozing. I just felt like I was losing the plot of it.” The existential dread crept in. “I felt like I had crossed all these lines and goals…. And I didn’t feel any better than I did before. It was a weird feeling: This isn’t feeding me in the way I wanted. I don’t like it.” Then she got to work on her most recent show, which opened at Gagosian’s Paris outpost last fall. One painting features a stark question, painted in bubbly capital letters, suspended over a vase of flowers. “THIS IS A LIFE?” the painting wonders.
These days I often wonder how many of our stories are true, how many are imagination or misplaced longing, but I refuse to believe that my grandmothers were just ordinary women who lived, then died, forever lost to me. Somehow we are all still connected through both the toil and pleasure of kitchen labor. I’m closer to them when I cook. I become them when I cook.
The Cloud Notebook is a triumph of participatory reading. It creates a whole world and theorizes its creation at once through the reader’s encounter with the world/text. Consciousness, in the form of the reader, is echoed in the notebook’s fictionalized writer, elaborating the present as lyric subject, moving towards the totality of the world as it comes into being.
“One Wrong Word” delivers a close look on how a stray word, a bit of gossip, can be detrimental. Ryan takes the often-used phrase “words have power” to a different dimension in her 15th novel, with savvy plotting and characters that avoid cliches.