rebecca

I often use the psychology of Mean Girls to understand interpersonal interactions. In fact, I wonder aloud at least a couple of times a month if we’re destined to play out Mean Girls for the rest of our lives. Based on the book Queen Bees and Wannabes by Rosalind Wiseman, Mean Girls is a darkly humorous look at what can be a painful, angst-ridden time for young women.

If you’ve ever looked at the photographs of family bliss that are slapped onto cheery holiday cards and given a knowing, slightly cynical, “hmphhh,” you may like your domestic fiction a little gritty. My guess is that you’ve already read Jonathan Franzen’s much anticipated and highly-hyped Freedom and found it to be everything you hoped for and more.

My favorite part of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love: One woman’s search for everything across Italy, India, and Indonesia, is definitely “Eat.” I love the way that Gilbert writes about feeding (literally) her soul with food that is slowly, beautifully, and artistically prepared. Love or hate the book in its entirety, Eat, Pray, Love is worth picking up if only for Gilbert’s description of her obsession with the pizza in Naples.

Disease itself doesn’t necessary qualify as a genre, but the impact that HIV/AIDS had upon the gay community in the 1980s and 1990s created a body of literature about the epidemic. Author Michael Cunningham described his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours, as a book about the AIDS crisis:

Coming out is a phrase used so ubiquitously that it can almost stand for any revelation to another person—no matter how trivial. But, coming out is anything but trivial. Wade Rouse writes in his memoir America’s Boy :