Book Girl Late Summer Reading List — Beauty News NYC — The First Online Beauty Magazine
In the last weeks of summer, before the hustle of city life beckons with work and social obligations, one of the best ways to spend the precious, waning days, whether in Mykonos or Montauk, or on a staycation, is curled up with a good book. Whether craving a juicy tale of sexual awakening, a literary thriller about a wannabe muse, or a well-researched historical account of cherished topics like women in fashion and sports, these NYC-based women writers have penned something for every taste.
Fiction
Sexual Coming-Of-Age From An East Village It Girl
“ Swanna in Love “ by Jennifer Belle, the first novel in this curation of summer reading recommendations, begins at the ultimate summer location for many young New Yorkers — upstate summer camp. This hilarious, bittersweet tale hinges on nostalgia — nostalgia for our innocence, for the days of powdered lemonade, hot dogs, and bug spray. It harkens back to a time that some may remember, before social media and smartphones, when diners served meatloaf with a veggie side and a choice of baked or mashed potato, and parents could pay for the check with an actual check. And for our innocence.
It’s the end of an eventful summer of flirtation and longing for Swanna, the precocious protagonist who’s about to embark on the most fantasized, if not fetishized, rite of passage by fans of all Judy Blume novels — her deflowering. Evocative of the female archetypes who populate Judy Blume’s pantheon of developing young girls, Swanna is a sexually curious smart-ass unaware of her vulnerability against a vortex of social, hormonal, familial, and cultural forces.
Like most of us she does her best to handle it all — and like most of us, in the folly of youth, makes a mess of it — as she’s bereft of a mother. Swanna is not an orphan, not technically, but emotionally. This wry tale of a teen’s affair with a slightly predatory and doltish older man is equally unflinching in painting a portrait of a mother-daughter dynamic we gloss over, the narcissistic mother intent on attacking and punishing a vulnerable daughter for not being her.
Given the sexual frankness of the novel which turns Nabokov’s controversial “Lolita” on its head, author Jennifer Belle faced quite a bit of difficulty finding the right publisher in an industry, if not a broader culture, in which women’s sexuality is still taboo. Contrary to many critics’ assumptions, Belle’s “Swanna in Love” is not an autobiographical account of her deflowering. With several novels under her belt (“High Maintenance” & “Seven Year Bitch”, including her debut “Going Down” which cemented her It Girl literary status in the nineties, Belle’s literary bonafides, like Swanna’s sexuality, are anything but demure.
Literary It Girl Meta-Fantasy From A Vanity Fair Editor
Before “Brat Girl Summer” was designated the official vibe of 2024, it was shaping up to be a “ Book Girl Summer .” With several universally lauded literary debuts of young memoirists barely out of high school, literary kerfuffles, scandals aplenty, and the dearth of (published) male writers churning out their attempts at the Great American novel, the zeitgeist embraced the notion that girls can be both literary and fashionable. With Eve Babitz, Flannery O’Connor, and Sylvia Plath trending on the socials, the trinity of women, fashion, and literature seemed freshly attainable and unremarkable, as if that lesson had not already been heeded by generations of young women who’ve flocked to NYC with fantasies of living at the Barbizon.
“ The Mythmakers “, a thriller that explores the depths of literary ambition as either a wunderkind writer or adored muse, is narrated by a prototypical bookish everygirl from a small town. Buoyed by dreams of becoming a fixture at the hottest readings and literary salons, Salale Cannon meets an established male writer at one such event. After a post-salon exchange, teetering between avuncular concern and flirtation, this male writer burrows his way into the protagonist’s psyche at a depth that suggests their exchange will not be a one-off.
When Salale stumbles across a short story by said writer about said encounter, the fledgling editorial assistant, reeling from her own professional scandal, exhumes that burrowed encounter to feed her literary fantasies. With a voyeurism masked by professional interest, the Manhattan everygirl insinuates herself into the life of the deceased male writer for a delicious tale of literary stalking.
More than familiar with the literary drama and It Girls of the day as a Senior Editor at Vanity Fair , Keziah Weir explains that her debut novel was born as much from her lived experience as from a desire to demystify the novelty of women writers and expand the notion of what it means to be literary.
The Novel As Immersive Crowd-Sourced Biography
If in a fever dream I wrote of a novel that fused the matter-of-fact hilarity and coming-of-age of “Swanna in Love” and the literary excavation of “The Mythmakers,” it would result in a multi-faceted narrative fever dream in its own right along the lines of “ “ In the twenty-four-hour period of her sixtieth birthday, a NYC editor chafes with overbearing, judgmental parents, an ex-husband, and ex-lovers embroiled in their own life-consuming dramas. From the pen of this well-honed prosaic stylist Lisa Gornick, the stylistic gamble of multiple narrative voices and perspectives yields a laser-sharp mosaic of NYC life and a laugh-out-loud novel that’s greater than its parts.
Non-Fiction History, but Make it Fashion
The most magical moment in Ryan Murphy’s “FEUD: Capote vs. The Swans” hinges on the most simple, almost quotidian activity — Grace Paley gazing through a shop window at a magnificent dress. So embroiled in the elegance and glamor promised by the couture gown on artful display at high fashion mecca Bergdorf Goodman, she doesn’t notice her ex-bestie, and now nemesis, Truman Capote is standing at her side the way he used to most afternoons. This innocent moment of longing and fantasy is equal parts nostalgia for their friendship as well as for the peak of retail when trail-blazing department stores on Fifth Avenue were the epicenter of luxury shopping.
Julie Satow’s “ When Women Ran Fifth Avenue: Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion” serves up endless historical tidbits about the legendary retail palaces of yore — Bonwit & Teller, Lord & Taylor, and Henri Bendel — and the women who dared to stake their claim in the business world when it wasn’t nearly as fashionable and the garments they were selling.
Many of these women are well-known and memorialized in the media as legendary New Yorkers and fashion icons. Beatrice Fox Auerbach, the real-life trailblazer on whom the writers of the Mad Men television series based Rachel Mencken, is particularly eye-opening. When Women Ran Fifth Avenue serves as much as the biography of Geraldine Stutz, the woman who single-handedly turned Henri Bendel into the most storied ultimate luxury fashion destination on Fifth Avenue.
Satow also fleshes out the lives and legacies of those who’ve been relegated to historical footnotes, regardless of how instructive and eye-opening their lessons may be. Most notably Maggie Lena Walker, the daughter of a former slave turned multi-hyphenate and serial entrepreneur at the height of Jim Crow in Virginia, emerges as an unsung heroine.
With the simple plan of providing a friendly shopping atmosphere and jobs for the black women of Richmond, Walker opened the St. Luke’s Emporium in 1905. Almost immediately, competitors and white surpremacists formed a retail association to put Maggie out of business by scaring off vendors and customers. She kept her head high and struggled, until St. Luke’s Emporium was forced to shutter in 1912. “When Women Ruled Fifth Avenue” reminds us that fashion, retail, and female entrepreneurs owe a debt to the Maggie Walkers of history.
Reporting in the Boy’s Room
If anything, the 2024 Paris Olympics marked the ascendance of women in sports. Sha’Carri Richardson , Ilona Maher, Simone Biles, and the other members of the US Gymnastics team are household names. And for good reason. These female athletes broke more records and accrued more medals and accolades that can be listed here. It’s hard to believe that just a few decades ago women and sports were viewed like oil and water — so intrinsically different that they’d never mix.
This belief was as much about sports on the field as behind the scenes. In 1977 during the epic World Series — the penultimate, yearly baseball playoff — between the Yankees and the Dodgers, Melissa Ludtke , an accredited reporter for Sports Illustrated with her press pass in tow, looked forward to filing behind the other journalists for the iconic locker room interviews hoping to get a scoop or quote. Before the first game in the historic moment had concluded, Ludtke was informed that her press pass had been revoked. It wasn’t the players who decided this, but a ruling by fiat from the Major League Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn.
Leaning into proprietary and privacy as the reasons to bar the lone female reporter from sources that were key to her professional success, Kuhn kicked off a legal case that touched on the core of equal opportunity and gender-based discrimination in employment. When he didn’t budge, Sports Illustrated’s parent company Time Inc. filed suit against Kuhn on Ludtke’s behalf.
“ Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside” by Melissa Ludtke is an account of the era-defining legal battle that ensued in the Manhattan courts, as she weathered being dragged by the media. Mocked as a lascivious young woman trying to sneak a peek under the athlete’s towels, Ludke balanced the legal proceedings with her career as a sports journalist. When the case of Ludtke vs Kuhn was ruled in the plaintiff’s favor in 1978, the civil rights victory set a precedent for women in all professions.
Happy Reading!
STAFF WRITER & SENIOR EDITOR
Not bland at all. Gesha-Marie Bland is an essayist, Vanity Fair-published film and television writer, and unrepentant beauty junkie who jumpstarted her career at NYU’s Master’s Program in Cinema Studies. In homage to her beauty icons Jeanne Moreau, Dolly Parton, and Grace Jones, she is forever in search of the perfect cat-eye liner, a killer pair of heels, and unforgettable statement accessories. Currently NYC-based, this dual American-French citizen still wears all-black and has a soft spot for clean beauty, pharmaceutical-grade actives, and most ingredients sourced from vineyards in the south of France. She loves New Wave cinema, Mary Gaitskill’s fiction, Spain, and matcha double-shots. After selling “The Ripper,” her Alexander McQueen-Issie Blow biopic to the Cannes-winning production company Maven Pictures, she remains convinced fashion and couture are the next frontiers for edgy cinematic stories.
Originally published at https://www.beautynewsnyc.com on September 2, 2024.
