A liminal letter, and The Escort's Tale

Dear Reader,

Warm wishes to you in the New Year, my dear. No podcast version of this letter because my life is presently one big liminal space and frankly I can’t be arsed with recording and editing audio at the moment. More specifically, I’m in the middle of moving, already out of my old place and still waiting for the new to be ready, living out of a couple suitcases with most of my stuff in piled-high boxes.

While I was packing, I thought, “Jesus, how do I have this much stuff?” And then the moving guys showed up with an enormous truck, which my stuff didn’t even half fill, and they transported it to its current storage space, which is, oh, maybe 10 feet by 12 feet. So, now I’m not sure if I have a lot of stuff, or really not much stuff at all. I guess it just depends on how much you spread it out.

I’ve been trying to appreciate the strangeness of this in-between time for what it is: something of an enforced break, playing out the various big life choices that I’ve undertaken in the past few months. And I like to slow down and be still, when given the chance. Bustle will come back around.

I have had a few necessary errands here and there. I’ve found myself carefully harboring them, spacing them out a little to preserve that sense of yet having something on the to-do list.

Years ago, I applied for a municipal job which required a typing test. The morning of the test, the applicants all sat together in a waiting room while things were made ready, and I struck up a conversation with another woman. She was heavily sighing and making little sounds of impatience, and she said, “I hope they don’t keep us waiting much longer. I just have so much to do today!” So I asked what she had to do. And she said, “Well, after this, I have to go to the post office. And then I’m going to go home to take a nap.”

Lady, I get it now. Whether it’s a lot or a little just depends on how much you spread it out.

Photo by Raimond Klavins on Unsplash

You might think with all this time on my hands, I’d be reading more voraciously than ever. But in fact I’ve been in a bit of a lull. Which is fine: my Kindle app tells me that I read 176 titles in 2022, which probably rounds up somewhere nearer to 200 inclusive of non-Kindle ebooks and print books. Some of those were very short works, some multi-volume collections, but I’m guessing most probably fell somewhere in the verge between novella and novel. Very heavy on fiction, which supported the pace of my reading habits for the year; I’m a lot slower at nonfiction.

One of the things I’ve found in writing this letter is that I really only like to talk about books I like, and to say nice things about them. And there are plenty of books I read in the last year that I liked fine, but that I also had enough critical thoughts about that I didn’t really feel comfortable writing a review. Because as a reader, I really only care about other people’s positive recommendations anyway. At an editorial level, constructive criticism is enormously valuable; but once a book has been released into the wild, I’ve come to the view that really negative criticism is mostly self-indulgent on the part of the critic, not actually all that useful or helpful to readers.¹

One of the things I bumped into repeatedly in books I didn’t review was problematic representation. I read several books involving asexual and demisexual characters that were mostly pretty good but ultimately ran into the problem that the arc of the story sort of inadvertently undermined that identity by bypassing it with the magic perfect relationship. Same with ostensibly polyamorous characters finding their one true partner or set of partners via magic perfect relationship. Same with characters who were sex workers, where resolution of the romantic plot included the character having to reckon with their job being somehow incompatible with their magic perfect relationship. These weren’t terrible books; they just didn’t entirely do the job of really delving into the characters they were attempting to represent.

I recently finished a book similarly grappled with sex worker representation with mixed results, but was also really quite good on disability representation, which was The Escort’s Tale by MJ Edwards, a secondary pen name of Robert Winter. It’s an m/m/f romance involving a male escort and a married heterosexual couple, the husband having suffered a major spinal cord injury which has robbed him of sensation from the waist down. I have somewhat mixed feelings about the “let me take you away from all this” Cinderella story aspect inherent in the married couple being very wealthy. (Ok, not even mixed: being rich is gross.) But they kind of have to be pretty well-off in order for the husband to have the level of support and accommodation for his physical needs that allows the story to focus on the characters’ relationship. And then it ends up being a pretty interesting exploration of not just how the characters connect with each other and the husband’s bisexual awakening, but also how he rediscovers himself as sexually capable and his experience of sex in his changed body.

It’s quite an explicitly steamy book, and amusingly, my actual Kindle froze while I was reading it, on possibly the most graphic mid-threesome scene possible. And I mean froze — it wouldn’t even reset manually, holding down the power button endlessly. (I finished the book on the app instead.) So now I’m waiting until its battery runs down, and hopefully its little brain resets as well. In the meantime, if you ask to borrow my Kindle, the answer is no.

Hope you’re well and warm, wherever this finds you.

Love,

Beas

1. For most books, that is. Something touted as the next Big And Important Must-Read is sort of asking for greater critical engagement.