RaveVox... where Harris’s book really sings is in revealing a different sort of major Hollywood figure than the ones we’re used to seeing lionized. Too often, books about great directors focus on what made them irascible assholes, constantly stomping on anyone who got in their way in the name of making \'great art\'. This narrative of how good movies are made is so deeply ingrained in our culture that it’s been incredibly hard to displace, even in an era when we’re more predisposed to examine the toxicity inherent to this method of moviemaking...But Mike Nichols: A Life is interested, first and foremost, in Nichols as a collaborator ... Some of the best parts of Harris’s book delve into Nichols’s struggles with drug addiction, depression, and money troubles. In particular, Harris’s depiction of Nichols’s spirals throughout the 1970s and ’80s offer an empathetic view of how mental health problems can cause serious struggle even for the rich and famous. And Harris’s depiction of Nichols’s childhood, in which he narrowly escaped Nazi Germany, undergirds everything that follows ... For a nearly 600-page book (before endnotes), Mike Nichols: A Life is a bright and breezy read, full of interesting anecdotes and great observations about Nichols’s creative process and his many, many collaborations with equally talented people. Above all, it captures an iconoclast who was, nevertheless, really good at working within the showbiz system.
Torrey Peters
RaveVoxDetransition, Baby arrived with a tremendous weight of expectations on it. It lives up to them ... The squeamishness that Detransition, Baby inspired in my friend is earned. The book lays bare many of the innermost thoughts I’ve had as a trans woman, from my desires to my anxieties to fears I barely know how to name ... I can’t say that I share every single one of the characters’ preoccupations, but I shared enough of them to feel deeply seen, roughly every other page ... By running straight at this tension — and by making Ames perhaps the most intriguing character in her book — Peters tackles something I’d only trust a trans novelist to take on. Whatever anxiety I’d initially felt about the novel centering in large part on the life of a detransitioner melted away the second the character’s inner life came into view. Peters is too deft a writer to turn Ames into a political hot button. He is, instead, someone just trying to fumble his way through a life that has afforded him very few good options ... Peters has somehow channeled the lives of nearly every trans woman I know. In particular, she’s excellent at highlighting how Reese’s trans identity blinds her to the ways in which her whiteness affords her privileges she might not consider ... Peters’s dialogue sometimes clangs, and I’m not sure Katrina is as fully realized as either Ames or Reese. But Detransition, Baby is a terrific read in spite of these small flaws, one that looks at the trans experience in modern America unflinchingly, in ways that made me feel seen and made me feel horrified to feel so seen. If you are a cis person seeking to empathize with trans women, this book wouldn’t be a bad place to start. Just don’t try to talk to me about it without clearing out your calendar to give me time to vomit my every innermost anxiety in your general direction.
Becky Cooper
PositiveVoxIn some ways, Becky Cooper’s true crime book We Keep the Dead Close gives in to some of the genre’s worst impulses. Cooper spends a ton of time explaining her investigative process in lieu of just telling readers what happened, she includes seemingly irrelevant personal details about her life, she sometimes reduces the central murder victim in her story to a cipher, and she covers a crime that was solved while she was reporting on it — so anyone who gets bored can just look up \'the ending\' online ... What ultimately makes the book great is that, in Cooper’s case, all of these choices are very much intentional. We Keep the Dead Close is the rare work that functions as both a really strong example of the genre it exists in and a critique of that genre. It’s a true crime book that isn’t sure of anyone’s need for a true crime book ... becomes almost a meditation on why books like this exist in the first place. Her comparison of the Jane Britton story to a folk tale is apt: We often use stories about grisly murders as a kind of warning about the darkness at society’s core.
