youngadultescent - Tumblr blog

[youngadultescent]

Me, looking back at how many books i used to read: I love that bitch, she was going places.

[youngadultescent]

Edan Lepucki with Rachel Fershleiser at Books Are Magic

Allow me to set last night’s scene: Rachel was beautiful in blue and asked the best questions about Edan’s new novel, Woman No. 17. In addition to being charming and witty, Edan looked super hot in some sort of jungle jumpsuit and heels. Books Are Magic has only existed for one month and it’s already hosting my favorite book events—thank you Emma Straub!

On motherhood and writing:

Becoming a mother makes you think about your own parents and their lives before you came along. I was interested in the question of what makes a good mom, interested in people who have a history of trauma and carry that dysfunction with them.

My bad parenting days coincide with my bad writing days.

On the lit scene in Los Angeles: 

There’s a very supportive writing community, but being a novelist in LA is like being the lone physicist at an MFA party full of fiction writers. You stand out because you’re doing something different. 

The best way to find your people is to go to your local bookstore and attend their events.

The Hills are really mysterious and gross. 

Edan’s past as a performance artist:

“Teen Dance” was a parody of a performance piece. I’d strip down to a flesh-colored suit, find the shyest person in the room and scream at them, “Are you staring at my camel toe?!” 

Woman No. 17 research and inspiration:

I took a speech therapist out for coffee to research Seth’s character (Seth is mute), but that’s it. If I know too much it inhibits my imagination.

When my first child was 14 months old he hadn’t talked yet. I didn’t know enough not to freak out and wondered what it would be like if he never spoke.

On technology in contemporary fiction: 

One of my goals was to make this book as contemporary as possible and to show the ways women constantly shit on themselves. I wanted to reverse the gaze. 

But how can a writer create a mysterious plot when everything today is so find-out-able (yesss, Rachel) thanks to technology? Lots of books right now are set in the 1980s and 90s to avoid the modern technology issue. 

Everyone’s not really themselves in Woman No. 17 and Twitter is another place where we’re not ourselves.

Edan’s writing process:

I’m a methodical writer—I write scenes in the order I think they’ll be read. When I hit page 100 I stop and read the manuscript to figure out what it’s trying to say.

When I’m writing a scene, I let the characters go at it (sometimes literally). Then I go to my notebook and trace what happened in the scene, and write down what questions the scene brought up.

She probably won’t write a story collection:

I find short stories painful to write. I can’t end them; you have to stick the landing with a story. Plus they’re hard to sell.

On the inclusion of animals in the books (Jaime Green asked a great question but I couldn’t write fast enough to get it down!):

I’m interested in vulnerable creatures. [Edan also said something smart about writing purposeful echoes between animals and characters in the book, but again, I wrote too slowly. Basically, the animals in the book are important!]

Edan’s current obsessions: 

Home decorating (because she’s moving); schoolhouse electric lighting; and venerable LA writer Carolyn See because California was compared to See’s novel, Golden Days. 

Edan’s book recommendations:

All of Emma Straub’s books; Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi; The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (I always recommend it even though it’s everywhere now); Marlena by Julie Buntin

The amazing Instagram project & NYT article inspired by the novel:

Mothers Before on Instagram is a photo collection of mothers before they became mothers. 

Edan wrote a New York Times op-ed about the project: “Our Mothers as We Never Saw Them.”

[youngadultescent]

You have to read Zan Romanoff’s Grace and the Fever. It is tumblr fandom as a novel. It’s smart and funny and a little sexy, but it’s also a perfect book.  It’s about a tumblr fangirl who gets to live out her fandom fantasies with her favorite boyband, but she has a lot of difficulty reconciling the band’s Brand and their fanon with the actual people living real lives. You don’t need to be a fan of boybands or celebrities or a tv show to understand it though. Mostly the book is about Grace figuring out how to see people as they are, not just her constructions of them.  There’s flirting. There’s mystery. There’s tumblr posts from BIG NAME FANS that had me laughing out loud.  I think my favorite thing about the book is how it perfectly recreates fandom. Like, perfectly. I think it’s really easy for young fans to get overly invested in an actor or a band or celebrities, and it can be difficult to separate their public personas from their true selves. 

When I was in college, I got suuuuper into Panic at the Disco, but the drummer broke up with his girlfriend and went to rehab and the band broke up (kind of), and it broke my poor little heart. It might sound kind of silly now, but it was genuinely sad for me. I, obviously, never got to date the drummer the way Grace gets to hang out with her idols, but it took a lot to realize that the things my fandom friends and I thought were real were performative acts we let ourselves believe in. This book takes fandom seriously, and expects its readers to take fandom and girls and our ideas seriously too. It doesn’t mock fandom, but it does explore what can happen when fandom goes a little too far. It doesn’t just use fandom as a backdrop, it really explores what it means to be a fan and how to live in a culture obsessed with celebrity. Grace and the Fever is just really good. It’s really a very good book. This is the fandom book I’ve been waiting for, but it’s also, like, the best book I’ve read in a long time, and I think everyone following me on tumblr should read it too. You can preorder it here. 

[youngadultescent]

the hating game | the hopefuls | another brooklyn | how to party with an infant

[youngadultescent]

Pre-order ALL GROWN UP by @jamiatt for your #Galentine (or anyone else) and send your receipt to trademarketing@hmhco.com for your own set of pins. 

[youngadultescent]

“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.” (Toni Morrison)

Women’s March (1- 21-2017) || Global Movement 

[youngadultescent]

A platform of hate and division assumed power yesterday, but the president is not America. His cabinet is not America. Congress is not america. We are America, and we are here to stay. We march today for our families and our neighbors, for our future, for the causes we claim and the causes that claim us. We march today for the moral core of this nation against which our new president is waging a war. He would like use to forget the words “give me your tired, your poor, your huddles masses yearning to breathe free” and instead take up a credo of hate, fear and suspicion of one another. But we are gathered here, across the country and around the world today to say, Mr. Trump:

[youngadultescent]

Blink-182 Made Fun of One Direction 11 Years Before They Existed | BuzzFeed

[youngadultescent]

Hope everyone’s having a lovely end of year! Here’s what I’ve been working on for the past couple months- I illustrated/designed a planner for the December Uppercase subscription box! I’ve been into the “bullet journal” trend this year- and always a fan of books- so this was a perfect project to work on. There’s an illustrated quote for each month, a month notes page, monthly reading logs, and weekly spreads. 

I illustrated a notepad design for Uppercase earlier in the year for another box, and signed up to try the subscription then. It’s been really fun to get book mail every month. December’s pack featured Ever the Hunted by Erin Summerill and also included a book/planner clip and book planner stickers. 

If you’re interested in getting the planner… It’s only available through Uppercase. If you contact them, I believe they still have some December packs left, or you can sign up for the January box before the 1st and add it on as an extra (or any box later on until they run out). 

Anyways. Thank you Lisa for the project! I enjoyed it. 

(I’ll post the illustrations separately throughout the week so I don’t spam your feed. Gif credit to Uppercase)

[youngadultescent]

You Learn by Living, Eleanor Roosevelt FYI–this is 1 of 8 Harper Perennial Olive Editions that comprise our current giveaway. Check it out! :D

[youngadultescent]

Hot Book Recs for Your Friday

[youngadultescent]

The Hating Game by Sally Thorne This book is so much fun, omg.  Okay, so the premise is that the main character is the assistant to the CEO of a publishing company that merges with another publishing company, and she’s stuck in an office with the other CEO’s assistant. He’s very dreamy. Think, like, a serious Tyler Hoechlin. But they hate each other which fuels competition between them. They play a lot of mind games and have a lot of banter, but she can never get him to crack a smile.   The whole point of the book is that it’s a romantic comedy, so I don’t consider it a spoiler to tell you that their rivalry leads to lust. (It’s really more of a selling point, imo.) And the book gets there very quickly. And it stays deliciously tense the entire way through the book. Honestly, reading this book is probably going to be my favorite reading experience of 2016. It’s easily the filthiest thing I’ve found in the general fiction section of a bookstore, and it’s more effective than some of the enemies-to-lovers fanfiction I’ve read. I’m so sad that it’s a debut because I was really hoping to go back through Sally Thorne’s other work immediately.  If you’re going to have a stressful holiday season, do yourself a favor and pick this up. You deserve it.

[youngadultescent]

I ordered a copy of Eleanor Roosevelt’s You Learn by Living as soon as @harperperennial put them up for sale last month, mostly because I love these covers and also because I had a feeling it might help me make some decisions this year. I brought it to the airport with me yesterday because this election was heartbreaking and every new piece of news is terrifying in a different way.  Eleanor isn’t necessary writing a self-help book or a political memoir, but I definitely think there are pieces that I could use in a real practical sense. 

Some of my favorite lines:

“You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” “If it is inevitable and has to be met, you can meet it.” “Today the world faces a great challenge: on one side a government preserved by fear, on the other a government of free men. I haven’t ever believed that anything supported by fear can stand against freedom from fear. [...] We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appeared, discovering that we have the strength to stare it down.”

Obviously, this is a historical piece, written in 1960, so there will be more masculine pronouns to talk about politics. And it’s not going to directly address what’s happening in politics in 2016. But. It has helped me understand that politics is very cyclical and that there are patterns and Eleanor does give some advice on how to bring about change at the local level and some insight into how much work goes into national political life.  There’s also so much in here about Russia that feels too fresh, which makes me think about how deliberate a reprint of this work in particular must have been. (Goodreads attributes 30 different titles to Eleanor Roosevelt.) So. I think this is a book worth adding to your list. 

[youngadultescent]

this is the most important game now, sorry Oilers you’re gonna have to take one for the world

[youngadultescent]

[youngadultescent]

ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

writing adult emails is awful

its like

hi [name of person], 

this formatting is making me uncomfortable but I have to tell you something / ask you something that is vital to my career as a student. 

I re-read and edited that sentence for an hour, but you’ll probably just glance over it for half a second.

thanks! 

- [name]

[youngadultescent]

@daniellemohlman and I are back at it again with our tiny book club! We decided to read LOSING IT by Emma Rathbone. It’s about a woman in her twenties who made it out of college without sleeping with anyone, and now she’s obsessed with losing her v-card. Like, really obsessed. Like, spoilers but not really spoilers, she changes everything about her life, twice, in her quest to get it in. Which. Doesn’t feel super realistic to the lived experience of post-grad virgins, but I guess is totally possible if it turns into that much of a priority for someone.  That description probably sounds very manic pixie girl meets Angela from The Office, and that’s kinda true. But the book isn’t so much a romcom as it is a drama. Mostly the narrator feels very muted, very removed from any emotions that would make you want to root for her finding the First one. Danielle and I agreed that the experience of reading the book was almost exactly the same experience we got out of Catherine Lacey’s NOBODY IS EVER MISSING. 

LOSING IT is well-written, and it was also a super quick read. It wasn’t exactly the virginity narrative I was looking for, I would still like to see a book about a ~*~late bloomer~*~ who begins an actual relationship and what that would look like fictionally. I read this piece on SWEETBITTER, LOSING IT, and THE ASSISTANTS that explores how women are balancing (or failing to balance) their professional and romantic lives, and I agree with a lot of Sara Sligar’s analysis. Of the three, I definitely think THE ASSISTANTS was the most enjoyable and the one you should pick up if you’re looking for a more swoon-worthy boy.  I know a few other people on twitter were reading along with us! Sorry if we finished it pretty quickly, we read fast! Feel free to post whenever! Tag us in it! We’re also picking up Meredith Russo’s IF I WAS YOUR GIRL this weekend, if anyone else has it and wants to read along!