FIONA ALISON DUNCAN
Fiona Alison Duncan is a Canadian-American author and organizer. She is the founding host of Hard to Read, a literary social practice, and Pillow Talk, its soft spinoff. We asked her to share the books that mean the most to her.
I love The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson. It’s the story of a sweet sensitive bull who, being big and strong and caught off-guard, is mistaken for a fighter. Ferdinand sticks to his truth though and all is right in the end. I think, as a kid, I thought this book held a secret about my family. Even if you’re not an introverted type who prefers flowers over fatal battles, it’s hard not to relate to the experience of being mistaken for something you’re not simply because of how you looked in a moment.
When puberty failed to deliver the 90210 physique I had yearned for, I tried every means I could to compensate for my lack of manifest womanhood. One of my moves was to carry a copy of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov around in my back jeans pocket. I was twelve, then thirteen. It took me that long to finish the book. I kept getting bored when they went on the road trip. I’d stop reading, forget what had happened, and have to restart from the beginning. I figured this was fine, since the book wasn’t really about the narrative anyway; it was (not only) about language, perverse, ecstatic, comedic uses of language, and it did make me want to write, maybe for the first time. Lolita isn’t only about some “love affair with language,” as some defenders of the perverse have tried to claim. Have you read Nabokov’s Ava or Ardor? Lover Ava is described by the book’s boy narrator, her cousin or brother, just like Dolores/Lo/Lolita is, with loaded attention to her pubescent body and her seeming lack of self-consciousness around its potency (how would we know though? The book is from his perspective alone). The generous explanation is that we remain every age we’ve been and that books allow us to become different people, visit different ages, and so why not channel the vivid erotics, speak, memory, of youth? Or Nabokov is stuck on little girls, as so many men seem to be. (I personally never got it. As much as I’ve tried to eroticize melting candy floss pubes and nymphet slenderness, I’ve always been more into milkmaid types.) At 20, I wrote an involved essay about Lolita for a class on Sexual Surveillance. I’ve read it again since, alongside Ava or Ardor. I imagine I’ll continue to read Lolita at least once a decade, a way to track my own life. I still have the same copy I started with, my mother’s copy, in which she made an inscription I’ve yet to decipher: “economics of a nymphet: he’s half-fare.” Half-fair?
I was going to select Samuel R. Delaney’s Times Square Red Times Blue since that book—I think it’s in the second essay—explains how real estate developers actually make money (it’s not from leasing property). This information is critical for anyone who wants to counter or at least understand how cities like New York are developing, making them unaffordable for people who need them. We need queer bastions and artist communities, gathering places, and big cities, where you can be anonymous and find your people; big cities have been that place. I’ve recommended Times Square Red/Blue before though - then I remembered Returning to Reims by Didier Eribon, which offered a similar “unlocking…”
I’m very interested in leftist politics and “the failure of the left” and the failures of the framework on this political spectrum of left to right. There’s a lot that is associated with “the left” that I agree with and will continue to fight for (social and health services, equitable redistributions of wealth, intersectional solidarity..); at the same time, leftist identified people, white men especially, are often sus dominators, creeps and bores, and I’m ready to call the whole spectrum history, not to forget about it but to stop talking about it as a model to orient present and future actions and discourse around (if we need a model, “dominator” v. “partnership” culture [see Riane Eisler and bell hooks] makes more sense to me than left v right). In Returning to Reims, Didier Eribon, a Parisian intellectual, returns to his working class hometown and family of origin, reflecting on the homophobia and alienation he experienced. He’s looking into why former white working class Communists have become far-right fascists; this is in France but it was easy to make connections to my own North American context. What I remember getting from the book is that political parties will court voting demographics in whatever way they can and that “solidarity” is often been built out of exclusion and that one form such solidarity-through-exclusion took in France was white working class people seeking to better their station and connecting with Communism, socialism and leftism at one point but in a way that was only about bettering their station, threatened by difference - their solidarity was racist, misogynistic, homophobic, femmephobic, and anti-intellectual, confusing intellectuals with the rich who oppressed them, and maybe the gays too - and so of course this voting demographic could easily be swayed from “the left” to “the right” and of course “the left” remains haunted by racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, femmephobia, etc. etc. Another, similar book I would love to read, if it exists, is a history of affluent white leftists, the children of centrists and conservatives whose leftism was a rebellion from their family’s/daddy’s power-capitalism but who, without exploring further and giving themselves over to something very different, remained steeped in power as domination… I’ve met a lot of kids like this.
Cigarettes by Harry Mathews is a beautiful multigenerational puzzle. The last two pages are so well-earned. Mathews’ My Life in CIA and Singular Pleasures are also fun.
Another is Lote by Shola von Reinhold. I’m hoping to get her into conversation for an article, so I’ll be lazy and share a few excerpts of what I wrote to her to court an interview:
“In the months before I bought your book, I had noted to a few people, who had asked what I was reading, that I had been reading a lot of great things but that it all felt like witnessing. I missed the experience, which I maybe got addicted to actually, from years prior, when I was really searching in life and books would come to me as if they were spirit guides. Reading Lote felt like this at times, like I was being seen as much as I was seeing. Which is not to say that there isn’t a lot in Lote that I witnessed and was grateful to be allowed to witness. […] I found Lote to be the most contemporary book about the art world and art scenes that I’ve come upon. We are living history. […]
I love how, through humor, narrative, and character, Lote re-animates ideas that have become discourse. It’s like you’re pouring a softening agent over all these hardened, sticky, difficult realities and biases - for example, the bias against lush ornamentation and the fetish for blankness and where does this come from?—and then you’re able to manipulate them and forge what feels like fresh terrain. A direct attack wouldn’t be so effective.”