no thoughts head empty
Michael Sun on (Not) Reading
In the photo Dua Lipa is not reading. Dua Lipa is lying, supine, in a tricolour bikini, basking in noonday sun. The kind which inevitably invokes a chill even though it’s 28 degrees and cloudless. The kind which makes you sneeze when you step into its crisp glare, which makes people say to each other with tight-lipped smiles, oh, aren’t we so lucky, finally, blue skies, I can’t believe how bad this weather has been lately. Dua Lipa is practising sun safety, shielding herself from harsh rays with a tome the size of a skull, spine turned towards the camera, eyes turned away as if caught unawares. On its spine, the title: A Little Life / Hanya Yanagihara. I wonder what Dua Lipa is thinking about. It is May, 2020. Lockdown, maybe. International travel. Her bestselling album Future Nostalgia. Albanian-Kosovar reunification.
One thing she is not thinking about is queer misery, because she is definitely not reading A Little Life.
I am not making a moral judgement on Dua Lipa’s literary propensities—the act of reading alone carries no intrinsic virtue—but merely stating a fact. She is not reading, but she is smizing. Like Dua Lipa, I am also not reading. Unlike Dua Lipa, I do not necessarily look glamorous while doing so (though not for lack of trying).
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I share the photo with friends and acquaintances indiscriminately. I share the photo on my Instagram story. ha ha, ha ha, we type to each other, faces locked in stony, unspoken comprehension that the other, too, must have read this seminal work of it-lit, the same one that Dua Lipa has definitely not read. It doesn’t matter that at least one and potentially both of us are lying about having made it through 814 pages of increasingly agonising death, despair, anguish. What matters is that, like telepathy, we are brainwaving our own curated tastes, A Little Life little more than a semaphore in this parade of intellect. We are signalling into the void and the void is signalling back. Someone replies to my story, wait, look at this, and links a photo of the man I recognise as the chef from Queer Eye who only knows how to make guacamole wearing a t-shirt that reads Jude & JB & Willem & Malcolm. I react with a love heart and learn later, for the first time, on Google, that these are the names of Yanagihara’s tortured quartet of characters.
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Ursula Robinson-Shaw in Sydney Review of Books: Every day I open Instagram and think, it is so brave of you to post a picture of that book you haven’t read. Someone could ask you a single question about it and the whole house of cards would come down. But nobody will, because they haven’t read it either.
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Ottessa Moshfegh releases My Year of Rest and Relaxation to an eddy of fanfare in 2018. This summer’s best novel, says EW. Unofficial book of the year, says Jezebel. Writes HelloGiggles: by now, you’ve surely heard the hype. Surely. Surely! As if to say: this is the way it is now; it’s Moshfegh’s world, we’re just etc. etc.
The cover becomes instantly iconic (in the least hyperbolic sense of that word). You are picturing it now: Portrait of a Young Woman in White, the 18th century painting by Jacques-Louis David, oils flattened onto paperback, the subject gazing with a forlorn insouciance, resigned to her fate, turned away as if caught unawares. This cover makes its way across the world, peeking out from cross-body bags and held up at unnatural angles in front of faces. Sometimes it’s tilted at just the right angle for a glimpse of afternoon light from the train window to stream in and emblazon its title with blinding clarity, in the hopes that the handsome stranger across the aisle will strike up a conversation out of interest, or pity, or both.
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I move into a new sharehouse and we joke about how we all have the same books. Predictable and consistent, like a dusty bible entombed in every hotel room’s bedside drawer, except instead of John and Paul it’s Jude & JB & Willem & Malcolm. Maybe these are sacred texts too.
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By now, you’ve surely heard the hype. By now, you’ve surely encountered the unnamed narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, embedded deep within our cultural consciousness: her blonde hair and size two frame, her existential malaise, her cocktail of drugs—trazodone, Ambien, Nembutal, the fictional memory-erasing Infermiterol—lulling her into a blissed-out escape from the terrible melange of life. She is “not a narcoleptic”, she goes to great pains to confirm, but “more of a somnific. A somnophile. I’d always loved sleeping.”
Sleep offers her a respite from her responsibilities, banal as they are, and a reprieve from Reva, her only companion whose unbearable earnestness she matches with an icy detachment:
“You’ll be fine,” I told Reva when she said her mother was starting a third round of chemo.
“Don’t be a spaz,” I said when her mother’s cancer spread to her brain.
She whiles away her time watching mid-tier Whoopi Goldberg movies on VHS, the light of her TV screen casting shadows in an expensive apartment that feels completely removed from time itself. Like a casino, perhaps. A level of stimulation so constant that it dissolves into a hum, repelling all other intrusions into the waking mind. No thoughts head empty (in the least hyperbolic sense of that phrase). Wow, I think, she is literally me.
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The unnamed narrator is the urtext of hot girls and himbos everywhere. Thinking is for nerds. For Lent I’m giving up thinking. For Lent I’m giving up.
The unnamed narrator is the blueprint for Dua Lipa not-reading A Little Life. She is the prototype for Gigi and Bella Hadid’s love of (holding) literature, Camus and King respectively, in photos which spark a minor furore after they’re declared proof of that season’s hottest, newest accessory: the Book. She is the spectre that haunts Olivia and Paula, the pair of cutthroat college frenemies in The White Lotus, smirking poolside at the resort as they torment other vacationers with their dangerous taste—Fanon, Butler, Lacan—cruel and aspirational in equal measure. Are you actually reading any of these books, they’re challenged. No, they reply, they’re just props.
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There is a distinction between this type of book signalling and the kind exploited by depraved skaters who smell inexplicably like Le Labo. The narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation knows this well. On the frequenters of the gallery where she works for a spell, hating her life and her menial duties:
An “alternative” to the mainstream frat boys and premed straight and narrow guys, these scholarly, charmless, intellectual brats dominated the more creative departments. As an art history major, I couldn’t escape them “Dudes” reading Nietzsche on the subway, reading Proust, reading David Foster Wallace, jotting down their brilliant thoughts into a black Moleskin pocket notebook.
The novel is set in the year 2000 so it doesn’t explicitly use the word softboy, but that is, by all accounts, the genre of person described witheringly here, one that the narrator finds repugnant and gauche. The softboy gains his authority by actually having to read—yuck! You are picturing him now, proving his intellect via lengthy, self-aggrandising sermons to uninterested listeners on his favourite philosophers. We get it, the listener thinks, you read. Our unnamed narrator, meanwhile, has no need for communicating anything that cannot already be inferred from external presentation. The surface is where she resides. Like her successors—Dua, Gigi, Bella, Olivia, Paula—she recognises the power of pure aesthetics, as grotesque as that sounds. “I looked like an off-duty model. It was too easy to let things come easy and go nowhere.” Being seen reading is enough. Reading itself is for other people.
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I wish I was a better reader—the kind I was as a child, turning page after page at the dinner table, during long, boring Catholic masses, or on bumpy car rides (much to the chagrin of my parents). I wish I could still read for pleasure—or not even pleasure, but mere instinct, the kind which made me yell if I wasn’t taken to the library every second day after school, like a yappy little dog begging for a walk. But I am thwarted by my own attention span, so crippled, so eroded that I can hardly make it to the end of a tweet without grimacing, my eyes shifting to the next one, dramatically sighing out of boredom.
When I am not reading, I am spending most of my time thinking about the ways in which I am seen and not seen, which I guess is how most people spend most of their time, even if they won’t admit it. (I will, though, because I am brave.) When I am not reading, I am wondering whether people see me as a “reader”. Not in the softboy sense, obviously. But whether friends and (more importantly) enemies can envision me lounging in noonday sun, book in hand, coquettishly smizing as I lazily thumb through the pages and take in exactly zero words. I am aware that no-one is thinking about this at all because most people are thinking about themselves, but the image calms me at night. It helps me sleep.
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Darcie Wilder in The Outline after Kendall Jenner is spotted in a grainy pap shot reading her alt-lit (for lack of a better term) book, Literally Show Me a Healthy Person: Kendall randomly reading a book that is so specific to the online literary world is a signifier of her connection to a more imperilled creative class, one that she can learn about beside a pool in France.
Another photo of Kendall Jenner appears on Chelsea Hodson’s website, a tongue-in-cheek promo for her essay collection Tonight I’m Someone Else, wielded like a weapon by the off-duty supermodel, idling, legs folded on a yacht. Her copy is ornamented with an array of post-it notes, proving that she either reads or has an underpaid and overly enterprising book stylist.
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There is a reciprocal relationship between authors and those who elect to associate themselves with said authors. One supplies clout, the other supplies capital. Books live and die not just on the extent of their readership, but the visibility of their readership. Reese Witherspoon’s book club is the new arbiter of success (which is how I know I am living in hell). I am not Reese Witherspoon (or Kendall, or … etc. etc.), but I swindle myself into thinking I am doing my part too by buying books and leaving them on my bedside stand in the hopes that they will make suitors fall in love with my giant brain instantly. They do not.
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At a party some guy with an affected accent and a disconcertingly deep knowledge of the geography of Sydney’s wealthy north shore tells me that he is only reading “important” books because he has calculated the total number of books he can read over the course of his lifespan and his answer is “100, give or take” and he needs to “prioritise” his “consumption”. By the way he says “prioritise” and “consumption” I can tell what he is “consuming” is a book with a primary-coloured cover and the word F*CK (sic) in all-caps. I react in a way that I think resembles a laugh but ends up sounding like I have choked. Are you okay, he asks. We get it, I think, you have awful taste.
It’s not until later that I realise we are not so different after all, him and I, both grifters, really—frauds trapped in cycles of delusion. He sees himself as a reader, even if he is reading self-help aphorisms on business acumen written by men who refuse to wear shoes. I see myself as a reader, even if what I am reading is: nothing. At least he will have read 100, give or take, more books than me when he dies. Soon enough both of us will be found out.
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I am coming out as someone who does not read to get ahead of the narrative. I am coming out as someone who does not read as himbo representation. I am coming out as someone who does not read as an act of radical vulnerability. I am coming out as someone who does not read as an act of obfuscation. I am coming out as someone who does not read because I think about myself too much. I am coming out as someone who does not read because I would like to stop thinking.
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The unnamed narrator treats sleep as salve. “My hibernation was self-preservation. I thought it was going to save my life.” She wants to sleep for an entire year. This, she believes, will help her reset, slough off the corrosive pressures of existence, of performance. After many attempts with different medications, multiple Reva-adjacent interruptions, she manages to excuse herself from the world for a prolonged period and returns as if from a chrysalis. Her experiment has succeeded. Everything is different now. When she visits an art gallery:
I touched the frame of the painting. And then I placed my whole palm on the dry, rumbling surface of the canvas, simply to prove to myself that there was no God stalking my soul. Time was not immemorial. Things were just things.
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My Year of Rest and Relaxation is both instruction manual and fairytale. I cannot sleep for a year (have rent to pay, would miss my dog too much) so I decide to join a book club, which is basically the same thing if you don’t think about it too hard.
Sleep unravels the narrator’s jaded preconceptions, dissolving her glacial armour and disdain for all cultural signifiers. Maybe a book club—where reading is regimented, where my decisions are made for me, where I must carry the same book as all other members regardless of its implications on my bedside table—could do the same for me; could help me reset too. We meet every month for dinner, and we read Cusk, Ditlevsen, Ferrante. I succumb to my it-lit predilections when it’s my turn to choose so we read Detransition, Baby and have heated debate on whether it is too sparse or not sparse enough, whether its melodrama works too hard or not hard enough, whether we would let one of its characters—a complicated, mildly villainous cowboy—[redacted] our [redacted].
Sometimes I do not manage to crack open the book; other times I finish it, gulping, in a day. I am trying to read, and only somewhat because there is a rule that you must buy everyone else wine if you fail to finish the book two months in a row.
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Maybe I’ve been found out already. I tell Toby that it sounds grotesque but I am enjoying the process of consuming things again beyond props, beyond signifiers. Things are just things. Books are just books. I am becoming less cynical.
I mean, he says, I do love your iconic dilettante vibe.
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Works Cited
✷ Darcie Wilder, ‘How did Kendall Jenner Get a Copy of My Book, Literally Show Me a Healthy Person?’, The Outline, 2019.
✷ Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life (London: Picador, 2016).
✷ Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation (New York: Penguin Random House, 2018).
✷ Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby (New York: Penguin Random House, 2021).
✷ Ursula Robinson-Shaw, ‘Dissociating the Novel’, Sydney Review of Books, 2021.
Michael Sun is a writer and critic based on Gadigal land/Sydney. He currently works in features, culture, and lifestyle for Guardian Australia, where he hosts the internet culture podcast Saved for Later. His work—which revolves around the intersections between queer and pop culture, memory, and technology—has also been published in The Monthly, Sydney Review of Books, ABC Arts, Vice, The Age, and many more. @mlchaelsun