SOPHIA JUNE
Sophia June is NYLON’s Culture Writer, covering the internet, books, and niche film/tv. Previously she worked at The New York Times, and her writing has appeared in publications like Pitchfork, Vanity Fair, and her hometown paper Willamette Week. She lives in Brooklyn. You can find Sophia on Twitter at @sophianjune.
“I read The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch once every couple of years to remind myself who I am and how a book can give your soul a much-needed wringing out. For a memoir that is largely about trauma and subsequent reclamation of a body, this book always brings me back into my own. Lidia is a Portland, Oregon writer, where I’m from, and the book captures the surprisingly transcendent pull a lot of people feel from living in a place with so much extra oxygen. My ex-boyfriend recommended this book to me when we first started dating in college. He has since passed away but loved books more than anyone I’ve ever met, and this one will always mean everything to me.
“I don’t think you’re supposed to say this, but Lydia Davis would have killed it on Twitter! She is a master of economy; her prose has the effect of a gut-punch or an espresso shot (depending on which story you read). Every word in a Lydia Davis story from her Collected Stories has a purpose; yet so much of her work is absurd, her humor as dry as a martini. Mostly, Lydia Davis taught me the power of white space on a page, how you can say just as much with a lack of words.
“I’ll have two cocktails and talk your ear off about this book, which is my favorite I’ve read in the last five years. Gala and Isa, the glam, meandering best friend heroines of Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados are the personification of the motto that’s come to define this period of my life: “It’s not that serious.” Most importantly, it showed me what kind of book I hope to write: one that observes how clout-chasing and serious people can be, one that relishes in the small joy of a gin fizz or the quiet triumph of going to work while nursing a hangover. When I’m out at galleries or bars or anywhere where the embarrassment and giddiness of humanity is on display, I find myself doing what Isa and Gala do: gathering material.
“I had a writing teacher once tell me it’s not an artist’s job to talk about their work; it’s hard enough to make it. I largely avoided rock memoirs after Bob Dylan’s book, but I devoured Viv Albertine’s, the guitarist for The Slits. In Clothes Clothes Clothes Music Music Music Boys Boys Boys writes as she plays, with a ferocity, a DIY punk verve that makes her sentences feel as homespun and electric as her music. She writes about the mid-70s London punk scene, where she learned to play her instrument while on stage and when women were angry but not yet allowed to be, as well as revisits about her friendships with The Clash, The Sex Pistols, and Vivienne Westwood.
“The best books rearrange your understanding of the world, and few books have done that for me as beautifully as Dunn’s Geek Love. She came up with the premise while taking a walk in Portland, Oregon’s Rose Garden, which is filled with hundreds of genetically-modified roses that are alien in their beauty; she thought about how people could be designed like this, but instead of making them “perfect,” you could make them different. In Geek Love, there is nothing worse than being normal. But at its core, it’s a story about family, about neglect, and about radical, destructive devotion.”