Explore Books suggests three reflective reads

Each week as part of SunLit — The Sun’s literature section — we feature staff recommendations from book stores across Colorado. This week, the staff from Explore Books in Aspen recommends a difficult memoir, a novel exploring relationships and a meditation on art.

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From the publisher: For the last decade, as she’s spent countless hours in doctor’s waiting rooms searching for diagnoses, treatments, and relief, being the owner and operator of Lena Dunham’s body has felt, as she puts it, “like towing a wrecked car across town at midnight.” It’s not easy dragging a wrecked car anywhere, much less to the Met Gala while sewn into a gold lamé corset. Or to the set of the hit show that you — as a 25-year-old — are writing, directing, producing, and starring in. Or to the White House, the Golden Globes, or your publicist’s office to discuss the latest internet disaster. 

But Dunham does it — even if it means interminable hospital stays, vomiting in the bathroom when she’s meant to be meeting Oprah, or terrifying those closest to her — because she can no longer tell the difference between fighting to do what she loves and being a servant to her own ambition.All the while, she is holding out for a love that can withstand her personal and public challenges and, more than anything, yearning to feel like herself again — if only she could remember who that self was.

As Dunham takes us through her journey, tracking her rise to fame — from selling the pilot of “Girls” to the present — in three acts, it becomes clear that the spotlight casts long shadows, distorting the relationships she once held dear and isolating everyone in its glare. When an endless supply of drugs can’t protect you from pain — and begins to control your every move — being famous doesn’t stand a chance against the darker corners of the human experience.

From Katrina Nelson, manager: For someone who has made a career from being openly, even dramatically — maybe even culturally — a klutz, Dunham reminds the world that, when given the room of word count, she will not only stick the landing, but she will somehow land herself and her audience in a renewed state of grace. 

Like the best of memoirs, you can hear her voice in every sentence; like the strongest of memoirs, Dunham drives the storytelling so honestly that there is no room for excuses, only revelations for the readers, who remember the same true events from a completely different perspective (specifically, from our devices). “Famesick” is dedicated to all those famous lives who ended too early — by the end of the book, as a non-famous reader, I came to know why.

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From the publisher: Artie Dam is living a double life. He spends his days teaching history to eleventh graders, expanding their young minds, correcting their casual cruelties, and lending a kind word to those who need it most. He goes to holiday parties with his wife of three decades, makes small talk with neighbors, and, on weekends, takes his sailboat out on the beautiful Massachusetts Bay. He is, by all appearances, present and alive. But inside, Artie is plagued by feelings of isolation. He looks out at a world gone mad — at himself and the people around him — and turns a question over and over in his mind: How is it that we know so little about one another, even those closest to us?

And then, one day, Artie learns that life has been keeping a secret from him, one that threatens to upend his entire world. Once he learns it, he is forced to chart a new course, to reconsider the relationships he holds most dear — and to make peace with the mysteries at the heart of our existence.

Elizabeth Strout, as we have come to expect, delivers a moving exploration of the human condition — one that brims with compassion for each and every one of her indelible characters.

From Katrina Nelson, manager: Elizabeth Strout’s “The Things We Never Say” was bold in ways that such quick reads, by such talented writers, rarely are. What begins as a close study of the interiority of a beloved, middle-aged school teacher named Artie Dam soon climbs into the trenches of our current political climate.

It looks so directly at the discomfort and estrangement that comes with not feeling safe to talk about anything serious or true with your neighbors or co-workers, that it would be overwhelming if the narrative wasn’t in the capable hands of Strout. Instead, her novel  describes all the things we never say; it refuses to inspire or denounce hope, but defines its shape through Artie Dam. Pure artwork!

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From the publisher: Barbara Kruger once defined art as “the ability to show and tell, through a kind of eloquent shorthand, how it feels to be alive.” Testing that claim, “How It Feels to Be Alive” braids criticism with personal narrative to consider art’s intimate effects and how it might help us find clarity in an uncertain world.

When Megan O’Grady was a teenager, she saw a photograph in a museum that changed her life. At the end of an early marriage, art stoked new ways of thinking about connection and transformation. As a new parent, it guided her to confront vulnerability and shame. Whether seeking a home or contending with crises personal, political, and ecological, art was a critical lifeline, a source of beauty, solace, and provocation.

Looking closely at five artworks and the context in which each was made — often drawing on personal conversations with the artists — O’Grady examines the work’s rippling impact, implicating sometimes unexpected lineages and genres.

From Clare Pearson, book buyer: I have recently been interested in art criticism as a lens through which to view contemporary life. Somehow, I have found, art writing allows both a comfortable distance between viewer and subject while also forcing deeply personal considerations. O’Grady explores this tension through a gorgeous blend of personal writing and broad-reaching criticism. Ultimately hopeful, the book makes a case for self-discovery and interrogation through the process of looking at what surrounds us.

Type of Story: Review

An assessment or critique of a service, product, or creative endeavor such as art, literature or a performance.