non-romance romance, #10: How to Be Both by Ali Smith

Study me then, you who shall lovers be at the next world

Welcome new subscribers! Thank you to Smart Bitches, Trashy Books for the recent shout-out, where I think many of you came from. The Big Duke Project will continue in September—what I thought would be a July-only project sprawled into the rest of summer because I keep wanting to gather more data points (read: read more books).

This issue is a part of my monthly series called non-romance romance where I write about something decidedly not a genre fiction romance novel, with romance as a lens. Non-romance romance is newly for paid subscribers, but past (free) examples include The Last of the Mohicans, There’s Always This Year, and War and Peace.

I have two identifiably annoying habits when it comes to how I talk about how media that I love. There are definitely more, these are just the two that I know in my bones about and can’t do anything to change. One is that I will call anything a romance novel. That annoying habit is basically this series. The other one I mostly deploy while watching films. Sometimes there'll be a movie that is so in line with my taste, the pieces of the aesthetic trappings feel so drawn out from my personal history, that I feel like I can’t be objective about it. These are not my favorite movies, necessarily. But movies that upon even first watch, I connected with the ingredients of the film. The annoying thing is that I call this concept “Emma soup.”

For whatever reason, a book rarely signals “Emma soup” to me. Maybe because quite a few of the ingredients of that reaction to a film are costuming and set dressing choices. It’s basically an aesthetic, formal distinction. But How to Be Both by Ali Smith (2014) comes as close to the experience as I’ve had.

I picked up How to Be Both basically the same way that I choose which poem or short story to start with when I read a collection: I ctrl+f’d the New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century and looked for ones where the blurbs mentioned Italy. There was The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner, which would probably be my pick for Best Book of the 21st Century (another rare Emma soup book), My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, which I read in Italian last year, and How to Be Both (2014). I’m not sure if I even actually read the blurb before I put a hold on the physical book at my library.