Author Alexa Yasemin Brahme’s Best Books to Read When You Don’t Know What the Hell You’re Doing
I didn’t know what the hell I was doing when I set out to write my just-released debut novel Good News, and I barely know what I’m doing now, eight years later. I’m less bewildered, sure, and the topics which I find completely all-consuming have (thankfully) evolved. But I’m still searching high and low in hopes that there’s a book out there that’s going to help me find my way. The books that have carried me through my moments of not-knowing all feature artists on their path toward self-actualization. They’re both fiction and non-fiction and explore themes of belonging and estrangement, striking out on your own and looking for a glimpse of light when you’re completely in the dark.
‘The Idiot’ by Elif Batuman
Batuman could not have more aptly named her debut novel. For all the layered philosophical, brilliant, Dostoyevskian reasons, yes. But also? To be a person is to be an idiot, especially so when you’re a freshman in college. Something I love about this novel, and Batuman’s follow-up Either/Or, is the protagonist Selin’s constant questioning. Selin is always looking at the world around her and wondering, “what the hell is going on?” And how do all her peers seem to know what to do in any given scenario, when Selin feels like she’s encountering everything like it’s her first day on earth? It’s a beautifully earnest and painful description of being young, how no one can prepare us for it and how we must fumble our way through. Who couldn’t relate when Selin says: “It can be really exasperating to look back at your past. What’s the matter with you? I want to ask her, my younger self, shaking her shoulder. If I did that, she would probably cry. Maybe I would cry, too.”
‘How Should a Person Be?’ by Sheila Heti
Another author with an aptitude for titles. This is the perennial question: How should a person be? I wish I knew. The novel’s protagonist, also called Sheila, is an aspiring playwright confronting the questions of how to be an artist, a genius, while also being a person and living a life. Again, there are no answers, only more and more questions. To her friend Margaux, Sheila muses: “How can these artists we read about—who have been married five or six times—how can they have enough time for all that life, and also make art?” The novel is far from an instructional guide but does detail enough misadventure to suggest perhaps misadventure is the point, and perhaps it’s all we have along the way to being. It’s funny and brilliant and will change how you think about good and bad art forever.
‘Tonight I’m Someone Else’ by Chelsea Hodson
This essay collection—covering subjects from toxic relationships with dangerous men to the transition from soft to hardened as a young woman encountering the world—is truly incandescent. All the words that come to mind when I think of it evoke a fire. Maybe it’s that the first essay is partly about a Mars rover, or perhaps it’s the brightness of youth that flames throughout. One of the collection’s triumphs is how Hodson creates trust with her reader. There aren’t necessarily guardrails for us to cling to, but Hodson’s work is so steady and focused that you don’t need them. You can make the leaps with her and come to an understanding by the end of each piece that is sweeter because you earned it on your own. Her meditations on youth and self helped me through my 27th year in ways I can hardly describe. Hodson writes: “I would have paid anything to become a new person.” I paid $20 for her paperback and became newer myself.
‘In Other Words’ by Jhumpa Lahiri
Every one of Lahiri’s books has helped me in my quest for being, but I’ve chosen In Other Words for this list because it’s about learning a new language in adulthood, a “what the hell am I doing?” experience if ever there was one. Feeling alienated by both languages she already spoke, English and Bengali, Lahiri goes on an intensely personal and singularly focused quest to learn Italian. There was almost no reason to become fluent in a new language in her forties when there were other pressing duties at hand—raising children, writing books, generating income. But learning Italian was central to Lahiri’s own becoming, and therefore rightfully took priority in her life. The memoir is incredibly inspiring and highlights the threat others may feel in the face of one’s own transformation. Lahiri writes, “They don’t understand why I want to take such a risk. These reactions don’t surprise me. A transformation, especially one that is deliberately sought, is often perceived as something disloyal, threatening.” The key, then, in becoming is to be fearless in the devotion to oneself.
‘Will This Make You Happy’ by Tanya Bush
Surprise! A cookbook! Well, a cookbook/memoir. Will This Make You Happy is Bush’s unsparing assessment of herself at a low point in her early twenties. The reader sees her deep in her hole, and how she then claws herself out of it bake by bake. It’s good advice, even for non-bakers, that the only way out is through. And doing something is a great way to get through. Doing something, anything, builds momentum. Sometimes you’ll have something tangible at the end, whether it’s a painting, a book or an essay. In this case, it could be a beautifully frosted cake that you made with your own two hands. Another lesson that I love in this book is that it’s okay, and in fact inevitable, to make a mess.
‘Luster’ by Raven Leilani
Leilani’s Luster feels like one of the defining novels of this “What the hell is going on?” genre. Protagonist Edie is in a job she hates, in an apartment she can hardly stand to be in and, unexpectedly, in the middle of her boss’s open marriage. Amidst the mess of all messes, Edie grapples with how the world expects her to be, how she truly is and how she wants to be. It’s a powerful exploration of self and how the white world imposes itself on young Black women. In one of my favorite quotes from the book, Leilani invokes the rawness, tenacity and occasional violence required to be oneself: “He wants me to be myself like a leopard might be herself in a city zoo. Inert, waiting to be fed. Not out in the wild, with tendon in her teeth.”
‘Discipline’ by Larissa Pham
Discipline is a book whose prose shimmers with controlled rage. On book tour herself, Pham’s protagonist Christine has written a novel about a relationship with her former professor which, as he informs her, was not how he remembered it. This book brought so many powerful feelings to the surface for me, and from a craft perspective showed me how something slow and controlled can cut as deep as something that burns fast and bright. The story is equally compelling, showing the ways we abandon ourselves and how torturous it can be to find our way back. Pham’s debut is impeccable. I could read this book again and again.
‘The Pisces’ by Melissa Broder
The Pisces is a serious book about the work of self-actualization, especially a woman’s self-actualization. With that said, it is also about a woman falling in love with a merman. Reading The Pisces taught me something I didn’t know I needed to learn, not about inter-human-mer-people relationships, but about the idea that we can reach truth through the absurd. And that it’s actually imperative that life be fun and funny and strange. Even in exploring the serious work of discovering oneself, Broder injects her writing with so much humor, wit and insanity that it’s impossible for the work not to stay with you as a reader. Writing about it now, I feel an urgency to re-read it and feel newly alive.