20-year revival

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emilybooks:

Ruth and I made a list of the attributes we look for in an Emily Book.  A book doesn’t have to have all of these attributes, of course. But all our books have some.  We didn’t try to determine why this is what we want from a book.  I am okay with not knowing that.

After we made the list we went through it a few times with different books in mind — Inferno, Making Scenes, and Sempre Susan.   You can see the initials by the attributes: I, SS, and MS. Inferno has the most.

alcohol

AIDS

heroin

80s

90s

70s

lesbian

sexual awakening

weird sexual awakening

abused, but not victim-y

drugs in general

East Village/NYC

San Francisco

tawdry glamour

poverty

sex, described non-erotically

body horror

academia

mental illness

addiction

non-redemptive story arc

unlikeable protagonist

passes Bechdel test

passes Bechdel test with flying colors

would fail the opposite of the Bechdel test

“new narrative”/blogginess

charged female friendship/mentorship 

(bonus: with fucked-up power dynamics)

not giving a fuck

giving a fuck exactly 50% of the time

not giving a fuck about femininity

performative artistic identity

Künstlerroman

sex work

funny

identity issues

formally inventive/messy

impressionistic

performative/collaborative

(there are some other ones but they were all trying to mean something similar but hard to define about “impervious to structural conventions”)

So, yes, I do find it pretty entertaining that the 90s are experiencing their 20-year revival.  That everything I was obsessed with in my early twenties, or more bluntly, my life in my early twenties, is now the subject of some cultural interest, particularly from people ten or so years younger than me (I mean of course I’m interested in it, nothing that exciting has happened to me since).  It reminds me a little bit of the fascination me and my friends had with the East Village of the early 80s – described by Cookie Mueller and Richard Hell and even Anthony Bourdain – buying heroin out of baskets lowered from tenement windows and all the rest.