#we do what we do in the dark

[bonewreath]

i’ve pushed myself to read more sapphic literature this year, so here are some of my favs:

mistakes were made by meryl wilsner - spicy! age gap! secret relationship! this was one of the best books i read this year, i devoured it in just a few days. delicious smuttiness

sorry, bro by taleen voskuni - bi girls in love <3 super fun, lighthearted read with beautiful armenian representation.

we do what we do in the dark by michelle hart - this one is a lot heavier and, ahem, darker. another age gap and some angst but there’s a happy ending!

when katie met cassidy by camille perri - this one is about first-time sapphic revelations which i loved, really easy to read too.

one last stop by casey mcquiston - if you look past the occasional cringy millennial quip, this book is so fun and heartwarming. kinda sci-fi too?

honorable mention for the priory of the orange tree by samantha shannon - not strictly dedicated to a sapphic love story (it’s a giant fantasy novel first), but so worth a read. one of the queen’s handmaidens is an undercover sorceress sent to protect her and they fall in loooove.

[iambic-stan]

last book read + last stethoscope used, part 13

I just lost someone close to me only two days ago, and I'm trying to distract myself even though I don't love this series, this blog, or much of anything as much as I would ordinarily. I'm only beginning to learn what this kind of grief looks like. That said, I had a strong reaction to this book so that helps me write a little about it, I guess.

The stethoscope: Littmann Master Cardiology in Plum. It's got that name recognition, but Littmann still isn't my favorite brand. I guess this one is supposed to be the Muhammad Ali of Littmanns, though I think a couple of people on here have told me they prefer the Cardiology IV, which I've never tried.

The book: Michelle Hart's sort of nontraditional lesbian romance, We Do What We Do in the Dark. Not a fan of the title, as it's chosen from some really horrible/immoral dialogue spoken by a character I came to truly dislike. This is the story of college freshman Mallory, who has always felt alienated from her peers and relishes the attention she receives from a much-older, married woman she meets at the gym...who turns out to be a professor at her university. The prose here is simple at times, overwrought at others, and yet sometimes quite beautiful. I guess I could just say it's inconsistent, but the story held my attention the entire time. This is partially because I went through something similar. But I think it's universal that if the defining relationship in your youth had a vastly imbalanced power dynamic, you can't see how much it hindered you until it's years, maybe even decades, in your rear view mirror. It's a short read but it's still palpable how slowly Mallory comes to that realization that her first love was so unhealthy, and with no help whatsoever from her callous ex-lover.

[lgbtqreads]

Fave Five: Literary Fiction About College Students

The Adult by Bronwyn Fischer Sirens & Muses by Antonia Angress These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever Old Enough by Haley Jakobson We Do What We Do in the Dark by Michelle Hart Bonus: Small Joys by Elvin James Mensah is about a college dropout

[yvesdot]

I was asked to put together a little list of my favorite queer characters in books this week, and I thought some of you might be interested... here you go! Not a list of my favorite queer books (though admittedly there is a lot of overlap) and solely based on what I could reach in a hurry. Listed in publication order.

Carmilla, Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Estraven (and Ai), The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

Dr. Voth, Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg

Naberius Tern, Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir @tazmuir

Ames, Detransition Baby by Torrey Peters

Sergeant Kilroy, Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin @donwiththewind

Mallory and the woman, We Do What We Do in the Dark by Michelle Hart

Uriel/The Angel, When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb @kuttithevangu

[jennamacaroni]

The woman kissed the same way she wrote: tender and terse.  The economy of the kisses left Mallory wet with want.

Michelle Hart, “We Do What We Do in the Dark”

[kendallcantread]

perfect weather for a backyard, sapphic, read 💌

[sapphicbookoftheday]

We Do What We Do in the Dark by Michelle Hart

Today's sapphic book of the day is We Do What We Do in the Dark by Michelle Hart!

Summary: "A novel about a young woman's life-altering affair with a much older, married woman.

Mallory is a freshman in college, reeling from her mother's recent death, when she encounters the woman. She sees her for the first time at the university's gym, immediately entranced. Soon, they meet, drawn by an electric tension and shared past wounds; before long, they begin sleeping together in secret. Self-possessed, successful, brilliant, and aloof--the woman is everything Mallory wants...and wants to be. Desiring not only the woman but also the idea of who she is when they're together, Mallory retreats from the rest of the world, solidifying a sense of aloneness that has both haunted and soothed her since childhood and will continue to do so for years even after the affair ends. As an adult, Mallory must decide whether to stay safely in isolation or step fully into the world, to confront what the woman meant to her and how their relationship shaped her, for better or worse.

Mallory's life is transformed by loss and by love and by discovering who she is while enduring both. In this enthralling debut novel, the complexities of influence, obsession, and admiration reveal how desire and its consequences can alter the trajectory of someone's life."

[queenofasgardreads]

“You and I,” she said, “we do what we do in the dark and then deal with it alone.” She puckered her lips and blew onto her nails. “That’s how I know you won’t tell anyone about us. If you did, whatever this is would no longer be just yours.”

We Do What We Do In The Dark by Michelle Hart

[alexsfictionaddiction]

Review: We Do What We Do In The Dark by Michelle Hart

I had zero expectations of this debut going into it and I really think that was for the best. I ended up going on a journey that visited themes of obsession, desire and infatuation, which certainly made for some interesting discoveries.

Mallory is a college freshman. With her mother not long dead, Mallory spots the woman in the gym and is immediately drawn in. Soon after, they are sleeping together and Mallory discovers that the woman is everything that she herself wants to be -successful, independent and enigmatic. Plunging into a solitary existence that both comforts and scares her, Mallory enters adulthood unsure of whether her affair changed her for the good or not and whether she needs to track the woman down and get some closure.

Although it was obviously a conscious decision on the author’s part, I couldn’t quite work out why the woman was unnamed. Mallory is so obsessed with her and yet we never really get to know the object of her desire. Perhaps it’s because it doesn’t matter to Mallory. Maybe she doesn’t even know it. Or is it simply a way of making the woman even more aloof and distant from us? 

Mallory’s college roommate Joy offers up a rather bleak yet honest opinion on why some people sleep with people who they know to be attached. There were a few lines like this that made me stop and think, which is a definite indication of great writing. No doubt Michelle Hart has bags of talent, which is why I think this book will do well amongst reviewers.

In some ways, Mallory reminded me of a Sally Rooney heroine -self-deprecating and waif-like. Although I believed that she existed, I wasn’t terribly excited by her and I did find my attention waning in the parts where Mallory was alone and just thinking. Despite being a reader and wanting to pursue a career in literature, she only seemed to have any kind of passion when it involved the woman. I just wanted her to have more personality!

We Do What We Do In The Dark is a sexy, well-written literary novel about a young woman discovering how her past has shaped her and how that affects her adult relationships. I did enjoy it overall but I can’t really say why, which makes it a hard book to review. I think perhaps I appreciated it for its ideas and the writer’s skill but the plot and characters were pretty dull.

[flueglein]

If „We do what we do in the dark“ by Michelle Hart should ever be made into a movie, I will petition for Karin Hanczewski to play the German woman.

[ceriseloves]

I don't like using Goodreads because the site layout is very unpleasant to me, so I'll do it here.

I stumbled with this book while scrolling through Pinterest and I decided to read because I needed a book to get me into reading again. It didn't really help me with my reading but I was able to finish it in three days.

The story is about a girl that has a relationship with an older woman and this relationship has a big impact in her life. Like a really HUGE attachment. And I loved it, really.

Everything about the MC screamed "me" and I love when I can see myself in characters. And sometimes I see myself in both characters (there's this parallel about them).

Anyway, I found it very intriguing.

Please if you're seeing this, recommend a book to me, I'm dying to read new books but none intrigues me 🥲

[inkskinned]

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

[themuseoftheviolets]

who the fuck decided to change the colors on the cover of we do what we do in the dark from pink and gray to blue and yellow for the paperback edition

literally who thought this was a good idea

[frogchiro]

Also I was thinking about something slightly...darker i guess?? I'm in a very weird headspace rn and this is my therapy

cw: legal age gap, creepy Simon and generaly unsettling behavior, obsessive and possessive Ghost, he's a pushy dick in this and very much a scumbag, he kinda gets off on seeing you helpless

How about reader who got recently kicked out by her shitty parents, 'she's now an adult and needs to start acting like that', except now she's barely in her 20's with little to nothing to her name except her clothes, the little money she managed to save over the years and a job as a waitress in a small café.

Putting together the saving she manages to rent out an apartment that was almost suspiciously cheap, not to mention the shady landlord who only contacted her through the phone but she couldn't just crash at her friend's place forever.

The moment you arrived at the destination you knew why was the place so ridiculously cheap; this build was...something. An old dilapitating apartment building, four stories high with old wooden-framed windows, some of them smashed. Empty beer bottles laid smashed next to the stairs mixing with cigarette butts, graffiti covered the ground floor walls and a very sad looking patch of grass that you think was supposed to be a garden were solemnly staring back at you as if taunting 'come on, try and run'.

Imagine sleazy neighbour Simon, dishonorably discharged from the army and now living in this shithole too, who takes a deep interest in the pretty young thing that moved in recently, almost growling when he first caught your scent; fresh and kinda sweet, feminine and clean. Definitely not the smells that he's accustomed to here: stale cigarettes, the stench of alcohol and wet dirt and fuck knows what else those creepy fuckers are concocting in their holes in here.

You're clearly new to...this. Simon can almost taste it; you were probably kicked out after pa and ma decided they're done with you...But who could throw out a pretty flower like you? Soft, trembling body, wide doe eyes almost brimming with tears of fright, fuck it does things to him.

Simon sure as hell wouldn't mind the company of a soft young woman like you, and he's pretty sure you wouldn't mind being protected and taken care of by a big, strong male like himself, right?

Even if you do, it's not like you have any say in that.

[twelvelevens]

creature of the night 🌙✨

[jennamacaroni]

She had never really liked–or at least appreciated–museums, which felt so stolid to her, but strolling alone through the gallery, she was moved, remembering that art was something created in hiding that was meant to be found by others.

Michelle Hart, “We Do What We Do in the Dark”