Hi gay!

I’ve worked in and around marketing departments long enough to know that much Pride-related bandwagon-jumping is done by companies that don’t particularly care about the LGBTQ+ community but would love to make a buck selling their available-in-June-only rainbow-colored product line. Bleak! But since I can assure you that we here at Favorable Margins (we = me, it’s just me) are not making any bucks on anything to do with this Substack (at least until this thing blows up—then the paywall’s coming, suckers!), you’re just going to have to trust that my interest in big, beautiful, gay-as-hell books is authentic and that I read them all year round. Maybe you should, too. Happy Pride.

Cassandra at the Wedding
Dorothy Baker
1962

Everybody loves a witty but damaged lesbian who’s too smart for her own good! This one’s trying to sabotage her twin sister’s wedding, and it’s not going well.

Myra Breckinridge
Gore Vidal
1968

I saw Marc Jacobs reading Myra Breckinridge on Instagram, so I read Myra Breckinridge: it’s campy and culty and satirical and hilarious. Myra’s a trans woman at an acting academy in Hollywood and the way she loves taking down men is just delicious. (Iconic opening line: “I am Myra Breckinridge, whom no man will ever possess.”)

Less
Andrew Sean Greer
2017

A middle-aged writer goes on an increasingly elaborate literary world tour to avoid thinking about his ex-boyfriend’s upcoming wedding. (Spoiler: it doesn’t work!) Sweet and sad and happy and lovely and made me laugh out loud on basically every other page. Looks like a beach read (derogatory), actually won a Pulitzer.

Young Mungo
Douglas Stuart
2022

A heartbreaking and beautiful story about a boy in Glasgow in the ‘90s and his first love. You should also read Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, which is also heartbreaking and beautiful. (I just got a copy his latest, John of John, and I’m anticipating it being…heartbreaking and beautiful!)

Blackouts
Justin Torres
2023

Wild and dreamy and fascinating and ambiguously autobiographical, which of course makes it only more fascinating. Two men, one dying, one younger, meet again after having been institutionalized together years before, and they spend their time telling stories about their lives around a framework of the real 1941 book Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns.

The Argonauts
Maggie Nelson
2015

You may know by now that I don’t do a lot of nonfiction around here—and in fact, when I got this book from the library, I thought it was a novel. (Sometimes I request books and then immediately forget where and what I heard about them. Surprise!) Anyway: it’s actually part memoir, part academic exploration of gender and womanhood and motherhood and queerness and romantic partnerships and aging and it’s all just absolutely engrossing.

Answered Prayers
Truman Capote
1987

I have a lot to say about this one, but I’ll try to keep it brief. This was Capote’s unfinished last novel, the work he thought would be his In Search of Lost time, a book that was delayed and delayed and delayed as Capote wrestled with various substance abuses before eventually getting published in parts—which led to all his friends abandoning him for airing their thinly-veiled dirty laundry to the world. What’s gay about it, you ask? The narrator, P.B. Jones, a Capote-esque writer (shocking) and the bitchiest little queen you’ve maybe ever read. La Cote Basque was the chapter that arguably ruined Capote’s life and it’s both deeply tragic and very, very funny.

The New Life
Tom Crewe
2023

Two men in 1890s London are writing a book in defense of gay love at a time when it was punishable by imprisonment and hard labor—then Oscar Wilde gets arrested and they have to decide whether publishing their work is worth the risk to themselves, their loved ones and their families. A beautiful book.

Giovanni’s Room
James Baldwin
1956

An American man and an Italian man meet in Paris in the 50s, have an affair, and eat oysters and drink white wine—and this would all be as gorgeous and idyllic as it sounds if it wasn’t for the bi panic and tragic ending. (Related: did you know they were still using the guillotine in France in the 50s? They didn’t quit that until 1977!!)

Middlesex
Jeffrey Eugenides
2002

This book has been criticized for being written by a straight man about an intersex protagonist struggling with his gender identity. This may be fair—but still worth reading in the opinion of Favorable Margins. Cal/Calliope is a beautiful character, and the sweeping multi-generational backstory about a Greek family that eventually settles in Detroit is also so wild and great. We love a complicated (understatement) family saga.

The Safekeep
Yael van der Wouden
2024

Hot lesbian love affair with a side of post-Holocaust revenge plot. Truly, need I say more?

Carol
Patrica Highsmith
1952

I would get so many demerits from the lesbian council if I left this one off. We’re all obsessed with the Todd Haynes movie, obviously, but as a certified Patricia Highsmith fangirl I must ask you to also read this book, which was originally published with the title The Price of Salt and under the pseudonym Claire Morgan because 1952 was…not a great time to be an out lesbian. (Thank god Cate Blanchett fixed everything.)

Shop the full list here, if you like.

What did I miss? I know I missed a lot. Brokeback Mountain I left off because it’s technically a novella but if you have a New Yorker subscription or a sneaky way of getting around a paywall you can and should read it in full here. (Sob.) Share your favorites in the comments please.

June’s picks coming in a few weeks. They may or may not be gay too!

Till next time,
Emily

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I’m freshly returned from a birthday trip to Paros, Greece, where the only thing I did more of than floating in the Aegean was sitting on my little Airbnb terrace with a book and whatever the Greek version of aperitivo is. (Don’t ask me how much feta I ate.) I brought five books with me for a weeklong trip and I finished three: The Hill, The Things We Never Say, and BUtterfield 8. I apologize to whoever will get my library copies next for the sand and/or olive oil smudges. All those (and a few more May highlights), right this way.

The Hill
Harriet Clark

You know those books that leave you kind of stunned when you close them at the end? This was one of those for me. The basic premise: a young girl visits her mother every Saturday in the prison where she’s serving a life sentence for a bank robbery gone very wrong. It’s dreamy and tragic and beautiful and surprisingly funny, with this poor little girl trapped between worlds: she doesn’t belong in prison, she doesn’t belong with her grandparents, with whom she lives. She’s forever in limbo, and it’s written in a way that’s sort of childlike in that it’s both slightly detached and breathtakingly wise at the same time. (One line that I can’t stop thinking about, when our protagonist is having a conversation with her mother in the prison visiting room: “She looked at me from behind her face.” !!!)

You will like this if you’re into: complicated and wrenching family histories. Coming-of-age stories with a side of incarceration. An incredible supporting cast of old ladies (no spoilers, but the scene with grandmother’s burning wig!).

The Things We Never Say
Elizabeth Strout

We don’t deserve Elizabeth Strout. I don’t think there’s a more empathetic writer out there. Her newest book is about a middle-aged high school history teacher called Artie, but it’s really about how there’s so much we don’t know about the people we think we know. One thing that consistently blows me away about Strout is how she writes about America today; it’s amazingly delicate and unique. I’ve read plenty of fiction that touches on Trump and Covid and Israel and Palestine and the great big mess we’re all in, and it often seems like the writer is trying to make a point. I can’t fault this. There are points to be made! But Strout does something kind of remarkable, I think, where it’s not overdone or politicized (any more than it reasonably must be) but it’s still much more than just context for the daily lives of her wonderful and very human characters. It makes me very grateful that she is as prolific as she is, because I really need her to make sense of some of this shit for me.

You will like this if you’re into: tiny, beautiful stories about beautiful, ordinary people. Great teachers and sweet, clueless teenagers. Family secrets.

Continue your Strout deep dive with: This isn’t helpful, but I have to just say you should read everything, any and all of the Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton books. If you’re new to Elizabeth Strout, you should not be overwhelmed by her volume and you should not worry about reading her books in any particular order. The same characters appear in different books, and it might make the most sense to go chronologically, but every one stands alone, so you do you. (Get ready to fan out though when Olive and Lucy meet in Tell Me Everything!)

The Palm House
Gwendoline Riley

This is the first book I’ve read by Gwendoline Riley, and I’m not embarrassed to tell you that I bought it because I liked the cover and there was a feature about her in the Times’ Style section; something about Riley and her books seemed very chic. (They are, although I get that that’s a stupid word to use here! Understated is probably better.) This one’s about the longtime friendship between two magazine editors in London in a time when the media industry feels increasingly doomed.

You will like this if you’re into: cynical journalists whining about the idiots on the business side. Too many post-work drinks in old English pubs. Writing that does a lot with a little.

The Fine Art of Lying
Alexandra Andrews

An annoying confession: when there’s a Reese’s (or Oprah’s, or Jenna’s) Book Club sticker on a book, I am less likely to want to read it. It’s not that I think the book is going to be less good; it’s just that I don’t want to read a book that everyone is reading. I don’t want that marketing! I want to feel like I’ve discovered something myself—or, if I’m honest, by someone cool telling me about it, and that someone is…maybe not Reese Witherspoon? (Am I alone here?) All that said, I’m thrilled to tell you that I heard about this book NOT from Reese Witherspoon but because the author is someone I worked with many years ago and so my street cred remains intact. (Shut up, Emily.) Anyway! I ate up this book in about a day and loved every second of it: it’s twisty and turny and sexy and has art heists and affairs and evil rich people and murder. So much fun.

You will like this if you’re into: Murder mysteries that name-drop Rothko and Ruscha. The (filthy) inner workings of the fine art world. Guessing whodunit and probably being wrong!

Favorable Margins Hall of Fame:

BUtterfield 8
John O’Hara
1935

If you lived in New York in the early aughts, you’ll remember the speakeasy revival trend where you had to do silly things like go through a phone booth in the back of a hot dog shop and give someone a password to get into some impossibly hip hidden bar in the back. The problem with this (for me) always was that prohibition had at that point been over for 75 years. Drinking was legal for anyone over 21—and acceptable for some under-21s, depending on where you were drinking—and so it seemed like a lot of song and dance to do a thing that you could just…do.

This book is great for a lot of reasons, one of which is that that whole speakeasy thing actually was incredibly glamorous when it was a necessity. Our heroine is Gloria Wandrous (amazing name), and she is heroically unapologetic in her love of drinking rye and sleeping around even if it occasionally doesn’t go all that well for her (understatement). We’ve got stolen mink coats, we’ve got bad married men, we’ve got buckets of gin and we’ve got a lot of post-Great Depression messiness that’s all fun until it really, really isn’t. Read it!

Before I go: I know I don’t ever shut up about the library around here (have you heard, they just give you books for FREE!?), but I do occasionally buy books, both new and used. I recently paid a visit to Ruby’s House of Crystals near Red Hook—a story for another day—and stumbled across Freebird, a used bookstore next door that does some really excellent work categorizing their inventory (“unflattering author photos” was a particularly fun section). I am now the proud owner of a book called Remarkable Names of Real People, which actually is just a list of remarkable names of real people, including:

• Bambina Broccoli of New York City

• Cardinal Sin, Archbishop of Manila, Philippines

• Larry Derryberry of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

• Luscious Pea of New Orleans, Louisiana

• Miss Pinkey Dickey Dukes of Branchville, South Carolina

• Orange Marmalade Lemon of Wichita, Kansas

• Mrs. Tackaberry McAdoo of New York City

• Sir Cloudsley Shovel, an admiral in the Royal Navy

  

You’re welcome!

Till next time,
Emily

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I’m fundamentally opposed to the concept of a beach book the same way I’m fundamentally opposed to the concept of a beach body: they’re both just the thing…at the beach. Not a different version of the thing. Of course I can understand why you wouldn’t want to haul a 900-page hardcover in your cute little straw bag (get a Kindle, I won’t judge you!), but in my mind there’s no reason why the content of a book should be different based on where you happen to be reading it. You can disagree, but it’s my newsletter.

Now, that being said, a summer book is a distinct kind of book. A summer book has a summer vibe. It could be a 900-page hardcover or a 90-page novella, but there must be some intangible summer quality: maybe it literally takes place in the summertime, or just somewhere very hot. Maybe there’s a large body of water involved. Maybe there’s a laziness or dreaminess or lawlessness or some sense of isolation or that there-are-no-rules-it’s-vacation-what-even-is-time quality.

In honor of this beautiful, sunny New York day, here are a few of my favorites like that: a summer reading list for you, if you’d like one. This is not an assignment; no book reports will be due in September. (But if you want to talk about them, let’s!) Read them at the beach or on your fire escape or in the park or inside with the AC cranked all the way up.

Hot Milk
Deborah Levy
2016

The kind of book where everything feels a little sinister just by virtue of it being oppressively hot with no central air. It’s a mother-daughter drama in a village in Southern Spain, with oceans of codependency and guilt and resentment—but fun stuff too, like mystery illnesses and ill-advised flings and jellyfish!

We The Animals
Justin Torres
2011

A gorgeously written coming-of-age story about three young Puerto Rican-American brothers growing up in upstate New York: very few rules, very little supervision, all very wild and chaotic and tender and touching.

Outline
Rachel Cusk
2014

Not on this list just because of the beautiful conch shell on the cover (but it doesn’t hurt). Our protagonist is a novelist who’s spending the summer teaching in Greece; her conversations with the people around her are full of the kind of casually brilliant insights that make you feel a little stupider in the moment but a lot smarter for having read it.

The Swimmer
John Cheever
1964

A man at a summer pool party in his suburban neighborhood decides to make his way home by swimming through every pool between where he is now and where he’s going. This is what this story is about, but it’s also not at all what this story is about. (Spoiler alert: it’s about madness!)

The New York Trilogy
Paul Auster
1986

Three separate but interconnected detective stories that are surreal and meta and absurd and disorienting and SO, so much fun. Read it and get inspired to wander the hot streets of New York for hours looking for clues. Clues to what? Doesn’t matter!

Bonjour Tristesse
Françoise Sagan
1954

A motherless girl spends her summer in a villa on the French Riviera getting all kinds of tangled up with her father’s various mistresses. Impossible not to love a chic French tragedy written by a literal teenager.

Five-Carat Soul
James McBride
2017

Should we have some perfect short stories for reading in the park on this summer list? Let’s do it. This won’t be the last time you hear about James McBride in this newsletter—he’s brilliant and funny and weird and I once took his class at NYU which is something I will never stop bragging about! This collection is a total kick.

The Virgin Suicides
Jeffrey Eugenides
1993

As Sofia Coppola knows well, there’s absolutely nothing dreamier than a bunch of melancholic teenage blondes in ‘70s suburbia.

East of Eden
John Steinbeck
1952

This deeply Californian book is one that people assume is “serious” because it’s very long and written by a “serious” writer. Yes, it’s a biblical allegory, and yes, it’s about good and evil, and yes, it’s a literal epic, but I promise you it’s more drama-packed than a Bravo reunion show. (I feel this way about Wuthering Heights too, by the way: Real Housewives of the Moors!! But that book didn’t make this list because there’s too much rain and fog.)

The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler
1939

Sharp and sarcastic and witty as hell. Banter to die for. Cynicism that’s somehow completely charming and a hard-boiled, hard-drinking private detective in 1930s Los Angeles.

Call Me By Your Name
André Aciman
2007

I’ve gone big on Euro summer for this list, but this is in fact our first Italian moment. Yes, the scenery is beautiful—which you’ll know if you saw Timmy and Armie biking through Lombardy, eating peaches and being generally gorgeous in the movie—but the real takeaway is: young love (and/or summer love) is real love!

Consider the Oyster
M.F.K. Fisher
1941

Nonfiction! Imagine! But if summer is a very good time for many cold glasses of Chablis and many oysters on ice (the rule about only eating in oysters in months with the letter R is outdated now; thank you, modern farming and modern refrigeration!), then you should read this charming and perfect little book while you’re at it.

Shop the full list here, if you like.

Now, I need to get back to my stack of library books (May’s hits are coming to your inbox in a couple weeks). In the meantime, I’m about to spend a week on an island in Greece for my 40th birthday (!), doing nothing but floating in the ocean, eating piles of seafood in pools of olive oil and lemon juice…and reading. As always, I’d love your recs, as long as you don’t call them beach books.

Till next time,
Emily

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Welcome to the inaugural issue of Favorable Margins! If you missed my intro letter, you can find it here, but the upshot is that I love books, I hope you do too, and if I can prevent even one person from feeling that paralyzing “what should I read next?” feeling, I’ll be doing this right. I want everyone’s library holds lists to get good and long. Shall we get into this month’s picks?

Brawler
Lauren Groff

This is a book of short stories about all kinds of things, so I’m afraid my synopses are going to have to be offensively reductive. WASPy rich kid turned family fuck-up makes good (or does he?! The last page of this one made me gasp). Four female best friends reunite under tragic circumstances and actually maybe they all hate each other? A retired and depressed married lady thinks she’s taking a gardening course but is actually about to have a lesbian awakening. All that and more!

You will like this if you’re into: the satisfaction of a beginning, middle and end in the time it takes you to commute from Park Slope to Hudson Yards. Deeply dysfunctional family dynamics. Annoyingly good sentences.

Continue your Groff deep dive with: Matrix for 12th-century nuns who go rogue and think they’re god; a slow burn but absolutely nuts in the end. The Vaster Wilds if you’d be the worst survivalist ever (see Isola below). Florida for more brilliant short stories.

Isola
Allegra Goodman

A 16th-century French noblewoman on a ship to the New World gets left on an uninhabited island with basically nothing as punishment for falling in love with her guardian’s secretary. She survives. Apparently this is based on a true story! Holy shit!

You will like this if you’re into: sleeping in a bed and not a cave. (To quote Bowen Yang on a recent episode of Las Culturistas: “when the grid goes down, I’m out.”) Knowing that you will almost definitely never have to defend yourself against a bear. Hard-earned vindication. Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds.

Sisters in Yellow
Mieko Kawakami

Hana is a teenager who, essentially ignored by her mother, moves in with an older woman she idolizes but we all know from the beginning is a little off somehow. They run a bar in Tokyo. They worry about money. They start making money in ways they definitely shouldn’t and they use feng shui, color symbolism and dream interpretation instead of making responsible adult decisions. Who’s in charge here!?

You will like this if you’re into: the kind of book where you think one thing is happening but realize later an entirely different thing has actually happened. Complicated female relationships. Scammers. Getting increasingly stressed out by scammers’ schemes and realizing with some regret that you will never be a scammer!

Crook Manifesto
Colson Whitehead

Firstly I just want to say that it’s frankly annoying for Colson Whitehead to win two Pulitzer Prizes in a row for The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys (both brilliant, both will wreck you, please read both) and then decide to write a trio of 1970s Harlem-set crime capers just for kicks. Writers have no business being THAT good and having THAT much fun at the same time. It’s unfair! However, he has done exactly that: Crook Manifesto is book #2 in the trilogy, following Harlem Shuffle (read this too) and preceding Cool Machine, which comes out later this year. In this book we have a dizzying amount of corruption and bent cops and crooked politicians and arson and fraud and wads of cash in envelopes and baseball bat-wielding goons. Our protagonist, Ray Carney, is a furniture salesman and former fence (a.k.a. the middleman in a heist, the guy who buys and resells stolen goods of all kinds) trying and failing to get straight, alongside a lineup of crooks whose names made me absolutely cackle: Bumpy Johnson, Dizzy Huntley, Corky Bell, Chink Montague, Skippy Damon, Chickie James, Nicky Boots, Zippo, Pepper, I could go on! (See what I mean!? Whitehead is showing off and I’d hate him if I didn’t love him so much.)

You will like this if you’re into: New York in the ‘70s. Bad guys having fun being bad guys. Lines like “The sun was shining, the birds were singing, the ambulances were screaming, and the daylight falling on last night’s crime scenes made the blood twinkle like dew in a green heaven.”

Continue your Whitehead deep dive with: everything mentioned above. The Intuitionist, which is literally about an elevator repairman and still I couldn’t put it down. His recent essay in the New York Times about how “if you use [AI] for your art, you’re a freakin’ hack.” (THANK YOU!)

Shop them all here, if you like.

Favorable Margins Hall of Fame:

The Talented Mr. Ripley
Patricia Highsmith
1955

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve lent people this book. (My copy recently survived a close call with a friend’s bathtub; I couldn’t be more honored.) It’s another one that’s been overshadowed by the movie and TV adaptations, and while you absolutely will find me losing my mind over Gwyneth Paltrow in a leopard print pillbox hat and Philip Seymour Hoffman leaping out of a cute little red Italian sports car, you must read the book. Patricia Highsmith is a genius at anxiety-inducing psychological thrillers (see also: Strangers on a Train, The Tremor of Forgery, The Price of Salt [a.k.a. Carol, a.k.a. the book that became the gorgeous Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara movie]).

With Ripley we have obsession, murder, identity theft, forgery, increasingly tangled lies—and maybe most importantly we have all this in Italy—and even though Tom Ripley is a terrifying sociopath, you kind of end up…rooting for him? (If you really want to nerd out, let’s talk about how Highsmith was a self-hating lesbian and all her most diabolical characters are queer-coded but brilliant.) There’s actually a whole Ripley series, but for my money you should skip the sequels and just read the original 100 times like I have.

THEN watch the movie. THEN watch the show on Netflix. (I absolutely love you, Andrew Scott, and also I’m dying to discuss the wild but incredible Freddie Miles casting with someone so if you have feelings about this please make yourself known.)

Prego!

Thanks for caring, thanks for reading, support your local library (if it’s BPL’s Central Library, see you there), and send me your own book recs, please and thank you!

Till next time,
Emily

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Welcome to Favorable Margins.

This is a place where I will tell you each month what I’ve been reading, what I’ve been liking, and whether I think you might like it, too. My credentials include a perpetually long library holds list, a lot of opinions both intelligently-formed and otherwise, and many treasured memories of crushing my siblings in summer after summer of family read-a-thons. (Hot tip: if you’re competing by page count, read Gone With the Wind; it’s about 1000 pages long and I know it’s problematic but we should read problematic books too—critically!—and the truth is there is absolutely no better break-up line in history than “My dear, I don’t give a damn.” Rhett!!)

These books will almost always be fiction, because that is what I read. They will probably be “literary fiction” because I am a little bit pretentious like that but they will definitely not be like Karl Ove Knausgaard-level or anything. They will often be new (though as our hero Ann Patchett says on Instagram: if you haven’t read it, it’s new to you), but even if they’re not I’m going to throw a Favorable Margins Hall of Famer into each newsletter as a bonus—because just because Truman Capote and James Baldwin and Willa Cather and Patricia Highsmith can’t publish new books anymore doesn’t mean we all shouldn’t be reading their old ones.

My first full issue will arrive in your inbox on Friday, but as an introduction and a preview, let’s kick this whole thing off with our first Hall of Famer. (As a friend recently put it, my love for Truman Capote is basically autobiographical at this point.)

Favorable Margins Hall of Fame:

Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Truman Capote
1958

Audrey Hepburn may have looked charming in a little black dress, but that has absolutely nothing to do with this book and frankly the book deserves better. (Truman Capote famously hated the movie and thought Marilyn Monroe should have played Holly.) It is very much not a romance—it’s full of seedy creeps and social climbers and people using other people and casual crime and one Lulamae Barnes getting married at age 14, eek—although it has one of the most romantic passages about New York that I’ve ever read:

Heaven. I live there, can you believe it? I hope you do too, but even if you don’t, please read this book.

And then, if you like, continue your Capote deep dive with In Cold Blood (duh) if you’re into true crime; A House in the Heights if you live in Brooklyn; Other Voices, Other Rooms if you want Southern Gothic and semi-autobiographical (the early days); and Answered Prayers if you want semi-autobiographical (the later years) and you’re interested in how Capote alienated all his friends and died sad and alone! Then call me to talk about it because I have a lot of thoughts.

Thanks for caring, thanks for reading, support your local library, and send me your own book recs, please and thank you!

Coming Friday: some very excellent short stories, a French noblewoman marooned on an island, and a Japanese teenager in big trouble. See you then.

Till next time,
Emily

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