I’m writing this from my parents’ house in Massachusetts, where it is so chilly and dreary that we made a fire last night. But that doesn’t mean summer isn’t nearly upon us: It cold-rained for the entire month of July when I was 10 or 11, and that was one of the more notable school breaks of my youth. I remember being coerced, at the day camp I was attending, into doing laps in a pond during a downpour. Maybe my memory is a little exaggerated. Either way, I have a bit of an aversion to swimming now.
Despite being hatched in August in the sunny beach town of San Diego, I’m just not a summer person. I admire people who embrace the season fully, who love wearing tiny clothing and are able to lock into a hedonistic abundance mentality. It looks good on them. That’s especially true in DC, where the steamy, sticky, thick climate demands that you submit to its will.
My friend Lily Meyer, who grew up in DC and lives there now, is good at summer. She once told me that surviving the most broiling months in the city is about embracing the idea that “sweat is sexy.” If you believe that sweat is sexy — and let me just remind you of Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers if you doubt the truth of that statement — then the dampening oppression of a DC afternoon can’t hurt you. It only makes you hotter.
In addition to being a great thinker on sexiness and life in our nation’s capital, Lily is also a brilliant novelist, translator, and book critic. You may have seen me plugging her debut novel, Short War, in this newsletter, and I’ll do it again: damn good literature. You can now preorder Lily’s next book, The End of Romance, which would be a thoughtful gift for your future self. A hardworking freelancer, she also has two translations coming out: The Hidden Island by Abraham Jiménez Enoa and The Shy Assassin by Clara Usón.
In the spirit of the season — look at me go! — I asked Lily for some situation-specific summer book recommendations. She delivered with panache. This Memorial Day and beyond, as you’re making plans for the beach or local pool, consider bringing along one of these delicious books. Embrace the heat, why don’t you?
To kick things off, let’s start with a book that is spiritually aligned with your genius sweat-is-sexy philosophy:
Sweat is sexy! It is human and beautiful to be shiny and damp and maybe a little bit stinky! Confusingly, the novelist who understands this best is Deborah Levy, who lives in London, pretty much the anti-DC weather-wise. Swimming Home is her sexiest summer novel, but I also love the very un-sexily titled (or extremely sexily titled, if you're Nicole Kidman in Babygirl) Hot Milk.
Bonus rec: If you also need to feel that sweat is sexy in order to get yourself to work out, you want Nicole Cuffy's Dances. Her second novel, O Sinners!, is high on my reading list for this summer.
A book for an afternoon at the local pool, where kids are shouting and splashing and probably peeing in the water, and you decide to embrace the chaos of humanity around you:
My public pool (Upshur Street Pool in NW DC, greatest in the world) is possibly my single favorite place to read. One time I cried so hard reading Rebecca Makkai's Great Believers on a lounger there that my husband thought I was having some sort of breakdown. The Great Believers has all the right attributes for a pool book: its writing and characters are even more absorbing than the eavesdropping you could otherwise be doing, and its big world swirls around you like the pool-world does. In my personal opinion, the novelist who does this best is Zadie Smith, and if you haven't read White Teeth or NW, you need to take them to the pool this summer. If you've read all three of those books and want a new release, then you're looking for Susan Choi's Flashlight or Adam Ross's Playworld.
What you're getting from the snack shack at the local pool:
DC pools' only flaw is that they don't let you snack! But I always get an iced coffee on my walk over. Standing in the pool with a book and an iced coffee = heaven.
A birthday book for Leos like Lily and Eliza:
If it's a party birthday, Marlowe Granados's Happy Hour. If it's more of a lounging-lion birthday, then you want Nancy Lemann's Lives of the Saints, which is all about slow and dissolute glamour. (Actually, Lives of the Saints is also spiritually aligned with my summer philosophy — and Lemann is from New Orleans and lives right outside DC, so she knows from sweat.)
A book for visiting family over the summer and spending the night in your childhood bedroom, which is too hot because your mom refuses to put on the AC ("I'll turn on the attic fan"); although you are feeling peevish, you must admit that the smell of the night air outside is actually pretty nice:
In this situation, what I want is to feel both nostalgic and rebellious, and the book for that is Jackie Ess's Darryl: strange, smutty, and very, very sweet. If you try to explain to your father what it's about, you will be sorry.
A book for late summer back-to-school feelings:
Laurie Colwin's A Big Storm Knocked It Over and Goodbye Without Leaving are — can't explain this but it's true — back-to-school books for adulthood. If you want to feel like a college kid who'd really rather drop out, Bolaño's Savage Detectives is unbeatable (it's also unbeatable in general). If you want to revisit full-on high school feelings while laughing, the correct choice is my friend John Patrick McHugh's Fun and Games. It's only out in the UK and Ireland, which is rude, but Blackwell's ships to the US for free. And if you want to revisit full-on high-school feelings while being destroyed emotionally, Judith Guest's Ordinary People is the way to go. Watch the Robert Redford adaptation to be destroyed twice.
Your favorite beach:
Long Nook Beach in Truro, Cape Cod.
Your all-time favorite book for that beach:
Thank you, Lily! By the end of the summer, we will all be more beautiful and better read.
And one day it will be autumn,
Eliza